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Palm
Pilots and Eternity Walking down the street, Palm Pilot in hand, I checked all the things I had planned to do that day. I deleted each one that had been completed. I then looked at those that remained and transferred them, some to the next day, some to a day in the following week. Finally I had a blank screen. My day was done. I had no more specific tasks or responsibilities calling me. Then I looked at the next day, got a mental picture of how I would be spending my time, removed a few items to a future date so that I wouldn’t have more to do than felt do-able, and I was finished. The rest of the evening and all of tomorrow were predicable, known, and manageable. I felt at peace and in control. I closed the Palm Pilot. Thinking, “God is in His Heaven and all is right with the world,” I misspoke and said to Melinda who was at my side, “Well, that’s done. God’s back in His corner.” On reflection, I realized that I meant both. I meant that God was in His Heaven and God was in His corner. The first meant that everything was okay and the second, that God was in His corner, meant that I was in control of my life. If God were in control I might not know what was going to happen next. If God were in control something might happen that I didn’t want to happen. So I want God in His corner and me in the middle of the ring, running my life. Illusion. We need the illusion that life is predictable and controllable. It is neither. If we live in the middle of a hurricane or a school gymnasium overtaken by terrorists, we cannot long retain any sense of order or security. The same is true, though not so dramatically, if we just live in this life. We seek the perception of order because we need it to live productive lives. We need it to live in growing relationships. So we lean for comfort on routine, familiar events, people and places. We lean on Palm Pilot-like planning and organization. We seek the reassurance of words and pictures of remembered loved ones. The Rabbis say, “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” Sooner or later most of us come face-to-face with chaos, with loss of control over our lives, with death or disease or fire or financial disaster. A seminary professor told me, “Life drives us to our knees.” It does, and when it does, we come to end of ourselves as a resource. After years of thinking, knowing that we can handle whatever comes, something comes that drives us to our knees. Life driving us to our knees means that something bad has happened and no matter what we do, we cannot change it or reverse it or avoid the pain of it. We have run out of personal resources with which to manage a bad time. A theologian would say, “At the end of me, there is the beginning of God.” Meaning, now that I cannot think of anything that I can do to get me out of this horrible place in the road, I am forced to call on God for help. It is part of our human nature to prefer to take care of ourselves, rather than to turn to others for assistance, even God. When we are forced to turn to others or to God, there is the beginning of humility. Have you ever trained a puppy? The instruction books tell us that we need to imitate the puppy’s mother when pup gets too frisky, frantic, out of control. They tell us to turn the puppy on its back and place our hand over the chest, and press the puppy until it calms down. When you turn a puppy over on its back, it will fight you as hard as it can. It was claw, bite and scratch. When a puppy is on its back it feels insecure, powerless, vulnerable. It will struggle mightily to get right side up. But if you persist, the puppy will eventually be still and listen to what you have to say. The puppy may not like it but will listen. That’s what life does to us. Most of us simply will not listen to certain wisdom until we have tried our own way over and over. Only when our way leads us to stone walls and bloody emotions, only when the brokenness of life outweighs our illusions of success and immortality, only then do we stop and listen. Until then we rant and rage against bad turns and misfortune; we struggle and perhaps seem to overcome, but eventually the hand of God prevails, and we have to be still and know who the boss is. We have to yield to whatever we believe in --- God, or life, or the fates – whatever we call it. Life is in charge. Change is in charge. Time is in charge. Sooner or later, if we learn anything from living, we learn the wisdom of humility. What does it mean to have humility? Well, it means to move away from everyday arrogance, of which we are all possessed. When arrogance is replaced by humility, life changes. It is a mysterious process. It might be explained by Christ’s words in 2nd Corinthians: “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” He is saying that He can exercise His power in my life IF I am willing and able to admit my own powerlessness. My arrogance is His roadblock to changing me for the better. Let me tell you a story about arrogance. A very true story. When I was in my mid-twenties I was an insurance salesman in Richmond. I had a wife and three children. I used to work all day and come home in the late afternoon or early evening and have just enough time at home to have supper and change to a fresh white shirt. One day as I opened my front door, there on the couch sat an Episcopal priest from nearby St. Stephen’s Church, talking to my wife. My first thought was to wonder if supper was ready. The priest, John Owens, explained that he had wanted to meet the parents of those three nice children who had started showing up at Sunday School week after week, without any visible parents or other grownups. You see, I was not a church member at that time; in fact, I had not been baptized. I would get up on Sunday morning and in my bathrobe take my children in the car and let them out at the Church driveway. Then it was home for breakfast, after which I would pick the kids up. The joke about this practice that I remember hearing back then, after I became involved in the life of the Church, was that Clergy could meet more prospective members in the Sunday School driveway than at the front door of the Church. Well, here I was, home for only a short time and expecting supper, but of course I had to talk to the priest at least for a few minutes, so I did. That first discussion led, months later, to my baptism and that of my three children at the same time, in a private ceremony on a quiet Sunday afternoon. But I remember, as clearly as if it were yesterday, that first conversation with Jack Owens. He said something to me about our need for God, and I said almost these exact words in response: “All that I am and all that I have, I have done myself and I don’t need anybody or anything.” When I look back on that moment I see that as the low point of my life, or, to put it in a more positive light, the beginning of my life. Another example of arrogance might be if the 99 sheep in today’s Gospel reading, seeing that the one sheep has gone astray, and, jealous that the shepherd is spending all his time searching for what they see as the one misguided and immoral brother of theirs, decide that they are better than he is and snicker among themselves about what a poor example of sheepdom the lost one is. The arrogance and the irony, of course, lies in the fact that those 99 sheep do not even exist. All of those 99 would sooner or later go astray. We are all the one sheep, we all go astray. But it takes humility to admit that we are all in the same boat, as far as our need for the shepherd is concerned. So what does it mean to have humility, as opposed to arrogance? Well, it means many things. Among them it means to finally realize that the world does not revolve around us. It means that we finally realize that everyone, everyone, has something to say that is worth hearing. It means learning to live as if we are going to die, living in the present, prizing love over ambition and accumulation of possessions. Humility means listening deeply and in a focused way to others. It is to discover as an experiential reality that love is a series of actions rather than a reciting of words. Humility means the capacity to know that we are imperfect, to be able to admit our shortcomings and to be willing to work to improve how we affect the lives of others. Humility means accepting others where they are, instead of trying to remake others in our own image. And what is the difference in life if we live with humility? Power. Our lives have more power. By power I mean that we find our lives richer, our emotions fuller and our ability to nurture others more pronounced. Our lives have more power because we allow the better angels of our nature to run our lives instead of the more selfish devils within us to be in charge. We experience the fullness of heart that comes with experiencing some selflessness in our love for others. In his book Mere Christianity, a book that Time Magazine said has converted more people than any other book in the history of Christianity except the Bible, the great lay theologian C. S. Lewis says that the sin of pride is much worse than sins of the flesh, because the sin of pride--which is the sin of arrogance of spirit--makes all the other sins possible. It is understandable and even necessary to want to feel that we have some control over our lives. But to think that we are totally self-sufficient and have no need for the love and company of others and of God is arrogance. God calls us to let our hearts be melted, and life gives us many painful opportunities to do that. God calls us to grow in humility and to let Him truly be the God, the Lord, the boss of our lives. We can hear God calling to us in love to walk towards Him. We need only to listen. Amen. Copyright 2004 The Rev. William A. Kolb Gospel:
Luke 15:1-10 |
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