Messages

I think perhaps it is the suffering of God that helps us as we struggle to respond to all of the world’s suffering. Because in parenthood, in deep friendship, we have a feeling that taking on the sorrow with the joy is part of what it means to be the person we’re called to be, and to become; that there is purpose in accompanying another through suffering. And to really make our peace with the role of accompaniment, we have to make our peace with the fact that we cannot heal or cure most suffering, and therefore, our response has to be the willingness to weep with those who are weeping—and then turn the healing, the redemption, over to God.

The people of Italy and France and England knew that it was coming to them, and it didn’t take them by surprise. They had a year or two years to find out news about how it was traveling across Europe, and to see and to imitate all the things that were being done to try to hold it off, prayers which involved confession and penitence and self flagellation, and walking pilgrimages on your knees. All these things were being done to hold it off, and yet inexorably it kept on progressing across Europe. Nothing stopped it, nothing quenched it, and in that regard it was for the people of Europe of that time an experience of a partial end of the world. When we say that it was apocalyptic, it was apocalyptic. It was the end of the world. And you read about it—I read about it, at least—and wonder how anyone kept their faith in God when they believed that God was responsible for this plague, and that God was bringing it to the world so that people would repent of their sins. But no matter how much repentance there was, the plague kept moving toward them.

Because my own life—and yours, too, for that matter—seems so immensely and irreplaceably valuable to me. And this thing, my life, with so great and yet so finite a value, I am not willing to sacrifice for another part of the creation, if that really draws the whole enterprise of me to a close. If that sacrificial act really is the end of my consciousness within the universe, the end of my ideas, my experiences, my thoughts, my stories, my acts of love—of everything that makes me feel, for better and oh-so-much-more for worse, the person—the creation—that I am: if that sacrificial act really is the end of my consciousness, I am not willing to risk it. To use a story from last week, I cling to the I key on my keyboard. I don’t mean to type it five times when once will do. But I am not willing to get rid of it, either as an expression of who I am, or as a significant portion of the lives of my family, my friends, my community. But. I could take that risk if death were not the end.

What exactly is it that this servant is supposed to be doing while he awaits the master’s return? That answer, however it touches you most deeply, is the reason why Jesus followers lined up along the streets with their palm branches to proclaim the coming king and the realm of God. To announce their own citizenship in that kingdom. But this week when I think about it, I go back not to any particular acts of mercy or kindness, but to the servant’s willingness to accept the responsibility, to bear the master’s yoke. To take on the task assigned to the king: kindness, mercy, goodness, equity, justice—in little things or in large.

Christ promises in the gospel of John: “In the world you will face persecution. But take courage, because I have conquered the world!” It helps me to have faith in that promise when I consider the long arc of the moral universe. Reading those words, I’m reminded of a message Chuck Fager has given to several Yearly Meetings, calling on Friends to embark on a hundred year Lamb’s war for peace. We need a long range vision, he said. Instead, we keep ourselves distracted by believing that every blip in the news is a major battle. The shorter the vision, the larger the obstacles seem; the longer the vision, the clearer the perspective. If I look for peace in an arc, if I see my own actions as some very small part of a Hundred Years campaign for the common good, maybe the courage that requires of me doesn’t have to be so extreme.