Romans 8:26-39
Matthew 13:31-33, 44-52
By the time I arrived in Mr. Taylor’s classroom, the super cool one at the very end of the hall with the funky walls, the room for the supposedly smart kids, I’d passed through a tough couple of years, including a hospitalization, the death of a beloved grandmother, and abuse. We’d moved out of the city, and I was no longer the gifted child left feral in the elementary school library, but was instead just an average kid in above average classes. Of course, my seventh grade teacher knew almost none of this. He just told it like he saw it, and informed me that I was a pessimist.
I am pretty sure he was well intentioned, though I doubt telling a confused 12 year-old trauma victim they are a pessimist is in the Teacher’s Handbook. All these years later, I still think back to that conversation. He could not have been more wrong, something he might have discovered had he known what to ask or had I known what to say. I wasn’t a pessimist. I was a survivor. Socially awkward, to be sure, guarded with good reason, but tough as nails.
Today, I mock and denounce the wingnuts who believe there is a child-trafficking ring operating out of a pizza parlor to harvest fear hormones from children, am frustrated by those who fall for Q-Cult disinformation like the recent shockumentary “Sound of Freedom.”
I think Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is a dangerous man who believes crazy stuff and is an embarrassment to the family name, and that’s saying something considering Teddy and that bridge back in ’69.
But to be honest, crazy could also be used to describe my belief system, in a creation that is ultimately good, in the power of love and the potential for human thriving. Most days this whole human project looks like a slow-motion disaster, the politest term I could use. And a disaster not just for us, but for life on the planet, the only planet we currently know of where life exists.
And yet, I hope, and I fight, even on the dark days, and most of us have experienced dark days at times.
Today’s scripture texts, from Paul’s letter to the churches in Rome and from the gospel attributed to but surely not written by the disciple Matthew, risk getting into the theological weeds, predestination and justification and other silliness we’ve covered in recent weeks, though at least the selection from Paul ends with that powerful and reassuring passage that says nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ.
But there is this foundational message about the kingdom of God, and that is where I would like to focus.
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