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A Congregation Of The "Never place a period where God has placed a comma." - Gracie Allen |
From August 13, 2006 Traveling by car and need to feed the family on the cheap? Here's an idea--put a foil wrapped chicken under the hood. That's what inventive mother Diane Thomas did. She even went on national television with that novel plan. Grinning into the camera, she said if you drove 70-75 miles per hour by lunchtime you could serve up a feast at some roadside picnic table. I'd be the first to give this lady a high five for her ingenuity. In all honesty, though, I think I might go vegetarian the day she offered me a mini-van-roasted sample. That said, I bet her car-cooked bird was juicy and flavorful. I'll bet it fell off the bone like nobody's business. I bet her children always licked their fingers and wiped their mouths on the backs of their sleeves so succulent and delicious was that chicken. There's something about food cooked slowly; certainly those devoted to BBQ know this. There is a delicious that food takes on that a five minute zap in the microwave cannot impart. Sometimes things just need a while. The stew pot simmers on the stove. The pork loin takes its sweet time in the oven. From time to time you wander into the kitchen and take a taste to see how things are shaping up, adding a dash more of this or a cup full of that, and then you just get out of the way while the flavors meld some more. By meal time what you've got is so rich, so tasty, so steeped in savory goodness you know that slow was the way to go. Something happened in that pot of yours, some kind of alchemy took place in the oven, and damn it turned out good! What is true with food is true for us, as well. Time is an essential ingredient; it's what gives our faith flavor and depth, dimension and subtlety. I was reminded of that this week reading Newsweek's cover story on Billy Graham, now 87 and still shining in the twilight of his life. I remember Graham from my childhood when his televised crusades pre-empted some of my favorite shows. Even now I can hear his soft drawl and the solidness of his words as he preached about Jesus and his saving way. Still every bit as committed to the Gospel as when he spoke to overflowing stadiums and kept company with Presidents, the God Graham relates to now is a God whose ways are veiled and who dwells in great mystery. "There are many things I don't understand," he says, a brave confession from a man you might expect to have all the answers. After so many years of Gospel-focused evangelizing, Graham has taken time in his retirement to savor and reconsider the old stories and lessons of the Bible. He regards scripture differently now. Not everything in the Good Book is literal; some of it is figurative; and not every jot and tittle comes straight from the Lord, he declares with the kind of clarity and authority that filled his public messages. Graham's vision of eternal salvation has been seasoned by time, as well. "It would be foolish of me to speculate on who will be in heaven and who won't. He gave his son for the whole world, and I think he loves everybody regardless of what label they have." Steeped in the love of God, steeped in his love for God, Graham's faith has cooked down into something with more depth, more dimension, something even more complex and flavorful than before. But Graham's life hasn't been one long, slow simmer on the stove of life. Graham found himself in exceedingly hot water four years ago, his darkest hour he says looking back now. His life boiled over when the public release of secret White House recordings revealed this man of God exchanging horribly anti-Semitic remarks with then-President Nixon. "If it wasn't on tape," the world-famous evangelist says now, "I wouldn't have believed it. I guess I was trying to please. I felt so badly about myself, I couldn't believe it. I went to a meeting with Jewish leaders and told them I would crawl to them to ask their forgiveness." In his recent book, The Heart of Christianity, Marcus Borg maintains that the aim of faith should be a relationship with God that transforms us over time. The true aim of faith is not right belief, says Borg. Nor is it right behavior, right action. The true aim of faith is to enter into a dynamic relationship with God, one that so connects us to God's infinite love that we are changed by it, transformed by it. When Billy Graham's taped remarks went public, he issued a statement that speaks to Borg's assertion. Graham said this: "Much of my life has been a pilgrimage--constantly learning, changing, growing, maturing. I have come to see in deeper ways some of the implications of my faith and message, not the least of which is in the area of human rights and racial and ethnic understanding." What transformational lesson came from the scalding water of Graham's mistake? That earthly power was alluring but perilous for a man of faith whose aim it was to bring God's love more fully into the world. The Graham who erred so terribly reminds me of our psalmist, whose sin is anyone's guess. He, too, found himself in over his head in trouble soup. "Out of the depths I cry to you, O Lord. Hear my voice! Let your ears be attentive to the voice of my supplications!" Whatever mess the psalmist has gotten himself caught up in, he understands that it is one he cannot escape or fix; he cannot save himself, in other words. And so he cries out, as loud and strong and urgently as Billy Graham must have when he realized the wrong he had done. Forget the pot simmering on the back burner. Forget how life ever so slowly tempers faith, how by increments it seasons the heart, mind, and soul. There are times in our lives, and you know this from experience, when the fire gets turned up fast and furious and we wonder whether we will even survive the ordeal. We don't speak in terms of transformation then. We don't speak of our lives as evolving, deepening, or becoming seasoned by experience. We speak with more finality than that. Certainly the psalmist did. The Hebrew words he used suggest that he felt he was drowning in the great, deep engulfing waters of Sheol into which the dead were known to sink. Without God's help, surely he was doomed. Whether the trouble we find ourselves in is of our own making or whether it has found us, when we're in over our heads and the pot is boiling, there's nothing left to do but cry out. And cry out loud! And yet the God whose hope for us is that we will be seasoned in faith, the God whose desire it is that we be transformed by life rarely (at least in my experience anyway) rides in on a lightning bolt and saves the day the moment we cry out. Often God responds to us as God responded to the psalmist--God has us wait. Not because God is cruel. Not because God is off somewhere tending to more urgent matters. So often God has us wait because this is a necessary part, a love-inspired part of a process that tempers us, softens us, breaks us open so that we can soak up the spiritual seasoning present in crisis or difficulty. It's a rare individual, though, who experiences this waiting as an expression of God's love, God's tender engagement. Most of us experience our waiting as a kind of cruel punishment, as a horrible absence of God, a terrible comment on who and what we have become. That waiting is probably the closest thing to time in the tomb we may ever know. But our waiting is not God's punishment. It is not God's comment on our unworthiness. God means for our waiting to be a gift. As we wait God uses that time to imbue our faith, our lives, our essence with new depth of flavor. Anyone who's ever put up cucumbers knows that time plus brine equals pickles. The time we spend waiting becomes a season of seasoning, a mystery-rich process that leads on to transformation and a whole new level of being. Each of us is on a journey, a pilgrimage as Graham calls it. One that will in quiet ways and in quaking times change us. A process our souls crave but which we so often resist. A story-poem by the mystic Rumi says this well:
God has a grand vision for us, my chickpea friends. And yet so often we misunderstand that vision because it features something we so greatly misunderstand--God's desire that we be transformed. When the pot is boiling, we imagine God is being mean by not delivering us, that God is being cruel by knocking us back into whatever it is we're trying so desperately to escape. We see who we are, my chickpea friends. But God sees the big picture, sees that something far more delicious is possible. God sees how with time and the right mix of spices and rice, the right mix of things, we can become infinitely more tasty. As Rumi so beautifully puts it, it's how we who are chickpeas take on the lovely vitality of a human being. Jesus said this same thing but in a different way. He said that to gain our lives, we must lose them. This is no morbid dream, no death wish, no cruel joke my friends. It is how God helps us discover (again and again) the well-seasoned, flavor-filled, abundant Easter lives we were born to live... and share. Amen. © Rev. Karen Winkel Some of the language related to Billy Graham is taken directly from the August 14, 2006 article in Newsweek. The Rumi poem comes from Regina Sara Ryan's book on transformational prayer, aptly entitled Praying Dangerously: Radical Reliance on God. |
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