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Do not ask for whom the bell tolls...Sunday, March 18, 2001
Luke 13:1-9 Mike Krzyzewski of Duke University, the most successful basketball coach in the United States, became good friends with Jim Valvano, another famous coach, while he was dying in a Duke hospital in 1993. John Feinstein writes about the morning of Jim's death: Mike cried, not just for Valvano but for his friend's family and for himself. He and Valvano had become friends only near the end and yet they had become achingly close. Why, he wondered, had this happened to Jim? It could just as easily have happened to him. It was like a giant lottery, nothing more than luck of the draw. Valvano had drawn the short life straw - 47 years. Although one breathed and the other did not, in this moment the two men were together. These are the best and brightest moments. Our fires are lit by another, another's pain, another's praise, another's prayer. Like the rest of God's created ones, we are not meant to be alone. This is just as true of us in our sinfulness. In the world that God created (but Satan usurped), we are each entitled to a confessor. And we thrive in the atmosphere of mutual confession...it's another reason why 12 step programs work so well. Step 5 permits me to..."admit to myself, to God, and to at least one other person the exact nature of my wrongs." "Why did this awful thing happen to me?" The question pushes my thinking off the mark. This question sets me up alone in a cosmos where I'm not alone. It implies that God sets me apart when he doesn't at all. John Donne's poem about the big bell ends, "...it tolls for thee." My friend spent his weekend playing in a band a thousand miles from home. Girls were thrilled to be with him, and one wanted sex. He went outside for a breath of fresh air. When he came back later to his hotel room the girl was with another guy. He has decided to live differently now. He was very glad he had turned away from her. But these were his friends, and he felt confused and angry at the way they lived their lives. We are together. What I do touches my brothers and sisters, makes us all more clean or more dirty. Only my self-centeredness keeps me from seeing that clearly. Finally I remember something God said to Solomon the king of Israel one morning: If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven and will forgive their sin and will heal their land. Thank you for the friction, Lord, for smoothing off my rough edges. Let me fit into the place you have made only for me, and be my part in your whole earth picture. |
I believe God sees me as part of his family, part of a community, that he creates us to be connected, spurring one another on, lifting each other up, admonishing one another, holding each other accountable, praying for one another. But when it comes to justice and mercy, I go straight back to thinking of myself as a separate soul.