It is easy to focus on the right now… there is plenty of “right now†to go around! Right now we need to repair the walls. Right now we need to make room for our growing Sunday School. Right now… it’s endless. And it’s not much better at home. Right now we need to repair the car. Right now the orthodontist has sent her bill. Right now those shoes don’t fit anymore.
Jesus calls us out of the practical world of right now, into the impractical world of the Kingdom that is right now. I personally am far more like Martha than Mary! I’d have been tempted to say to Jesus “Do you want to eat? Then let me finish cooking, and send Mary in here to get the salad ready.†How do we balance the craziness of Christ’s call, to live radically, in confidence, from abundance, with the “right now†of our complicated practical in-need-of-repair lives?
Maybe we can start where I started with my children’s sermon a couple of Sundays ago. I spoke to the children about connections. With these, our youngest Sunday-Schoolers, I emphasized the literal and physical. The Sunday Times is a newspaper, yes! But it is also sunshine, and dirt, and the logger, and the logger’s breakfast, and the coffee the reporter drank, and the people who elected the leaders covered in the articles. In fact, the Sunday Times contains an infinite web of lives and resources.
I hinted, though didn’t discuss with the children, how the newspaper also pointed out moral connections. Burma tortures and kills religious leaders fighting for justice because an equally brutal regime in China serves as its shield. And we prop up that brutal Chinese regime with so many of our purchases!
What does all of this have to do with the pledge campaign? Surely you are not telling us to give to the church so we won’t buy stuff made in China! Come on Gary, get back to the walls and the Sunday School! Okay, fine… let’s go back to that newspaper.
Jesus was right. Everything is connected. The kingdom is now. The details are kind of fuzzy… we don’t always get it right, but our decisions around support of our church, around our pledge of financial resources and our time and talents, these decisions matter now. Are connected to other decisions in our lives. Are connected to walls that need repair, to space for our Sunday school, to the orthodontist and to the logger’s breakfast, to the “fair trade†coffee I purchased at the same time I purchased that copy of the Sunday Times. I can never follow every chain of connections… I can only know they are there, connecting me to others, so that my every decision can be the proverbial “butterfly flapping its wings on the far side of the world.â€
Maybe I… maybe we, should try to be a little more crazy Jesus! Maybe we should trust that radical love and trusting abundance is life in the Kingdom, that the connections matter, that we can feed love and justice and generosity into that web of connections. How can we be anything but generous? Now, having had my Mary moment, I’ll go back to fixing the dinner…
Blessings,
Gary