Being at Home on the Road
October 14, 2007
Being at Home on the Road
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Luke 17:11-19
Certainly every one of us from time to time experiences bad circumstances:
• Bad health – an injury or cancer
• Bad job, or no job
• Relationship troubles
• Money troubles
We tend to put our lives on hold under these circumstances
• What til the chemo is done…
• When I get a better job… OR
• After things settle down a little….
• As soon as we work things out…
• Once I get the bills paid…
Doesn’t have to be bad circumstances – it might be conditions we regard as temporary and so we find ourselves saying things like:
• As soon as I graduate
• Once we’re married
• After the baby comes
• After the kids go to school
• Once I get my license
• After the kids go to college
• Once the kids are out of college
• Once I retire
• When I lose weight
• Once I get organized
• As soon as we have enough in savings
What are you waiting for in your life??
What we are saying here is – wait until I get back to my real life. As if our current experience is an exception.
And so we put off our real living until we get back to our real life.
And we miss being present to where we are, and we miss understanding that wherever we are, this is indeed our real life. I have read this quote before, from The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, but I believe it bears repeating:
Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no “you” apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you and you will not truly be at peace with him….First we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being “right,” we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life. (The Divine Conspiracy pp. 340-341, by Dallas Willard)
The point he is making is – where we are IS our real life. The only place God can bless us is where we actually are. We have to get our heads and hearts around our current reality, so that we can realize that God is active in our world, where we are.
In the Jeremiah passage, what the people had been dreading has now happened – this exile has occurred. Babylon has invaded Israel and shipped most of its citizens off to Babylon. What was Babylon in Jeremiah’s day, by the way, is Iraq in our day. God is telling the people of Israel – don’t put your lives on hold, waiting for when you get back home. Make this place home. Be at home in Babylon – and don’t just BE at home, LIVE there….plant gardens, build houses, get married. Have babies, and let your babies get married.
It was definitely a bad news/good news kind of message.
The bad news implicit in this message is: you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
The good news is: life can happen anyway.
What about the Luke passage?? This seems to go in an entirely different direction…doesn’t it??
Ten lepers, Jesus cures them, and off they go excited and joyful, and one of them comes back, thanking Jesus. And what does Jesus say to him?? Jesus says something really weird, he says “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” What? Wasn’t he well before?? Apparently the real healing took place after he had thanked God – the cure was not in fixing the circumstances – the cure apparently was in his response to what God had done for him.
How often do we stop at the circumstances in evaluating our lives? But apparently our response to our circumstances is an important piece of our wellness.
And how many of us are not really all that concerned with what Jesus is concerned with – the state of our hearts and life in the kingdom. Truthfully, we get hung up on the circumstances. Just like the people Jeremiah was speaking to who were stuck at the bad circumstances in their lives, and just like 9 out of 10 lepers (by the way, isn’t there a commercial in there somewhere? 9 out of 10 lepers will proceed straight to the temple…)….Anyway, just like 9 out of 10 lepers who were stuck on the good circumstances in their lives. For those of us who are happy when we’re graded on the curve – we can be comforted to know that our response to circumstances is pretty normal. And for those of us who suspect that you can’t determine truth by popular opinion – yes, both these readings tell us that there is more, that what really counts lies beyond the circumstances, and somehow, strangely within the circumstances. Jesus says, in one of my very favorite passages “Don’t be looking in the events and circumstances for the kingdom of God for the kingdom of God is among you…” which by the way can also be translated “within” as in “The kingdom of God is within you.”
Interestingly, at the time that these passages were written, people understood deities, gods, to be national. That’s part of the reason that the Bible often refers to the God of Israel. People inside and outside of Israel assumed that God took care only of God’s own people – in Israel. So exile was even more of an issue – not only were the people forced out of their homeland, they were also taken out of the reach of God. The words God speaks through Jeremiah were terribly important, asserting that even in Babylon, they were within God’s care. And praying for the good of the place that they were living was an astonishing notion – not only was it enemy territory, but it wasn’t God’s land. Why bring it to God’s attention. God is declaring to the people that he reigns in Babylon as well. It was an amazing idea.
Much like the idea that God would care for lepers – the people who were castoff within Israel – and especially Samaritans. All throughout the Bible, God keeps reaching beyond the boundaries that people had set for him.
In our time, it’s not so strange to think that God is caring for people who are far away – in some respects it’s harder for some of us to get our heads around the idea that God is deeply involved with our own lives, our own experiences, our own hearts. We may be more comfortable with the idea of God as an abstract deity than as the force of love who is near and even within us.
But the entire witness of the Bible tells us that our faith is a matter of the heart, and that our hearts determine how we act, and how we will look at the world. Our faithfulness is always a RESPONSE to what God has done, and this begins with noticing what God is doing. I was so touched once by hearing that the Hebew way of telling time, beginning each day at the sunset beforehand. So when we wake up, we are not starting a new day – we are joining our efforts to God’s who has already been working. This, by the way, is what stewardship is about, ideally – we give in response to our gratitude for God’s good gifts to us, and to join our efforts to God’s. A heart full of gratitude come when we begin to understand that God is indeed giving good gifts – even during hard times. When we approach each day with the assumption that God is in it and active and at work we can be thankful in all circumstances. A member of our congregation shared with me a card that she had received. It said: Attitude is everything. There was a woman who had only three hairs on her head. She said, “I think I’ll braid my hair today” and she did, and she had a lovely day. The next day when she got up, she found she had only two hairs and so she said, “I think I’ll part my hair down the middle today” and she did, and had a lovely day. The next day she got up and found she had only one hair. “I think I’ll wear my hair in a ponytail today” she said, and she did and had a lovely day. The next day, she got up and found she had no hair. “Yippee!” she said, “I don’t have to fix my hair today!” Attitude is everything. We all have that choice available.
William Bausch says, in his book The Yellow Brick Road, “Learning to see is the key, for you see what you are. The Talmud says: "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are."” Christianity is not just what we believe, it’s in who we are and how we look at the world. When we look at the world, do we see God’s hand at work? Or do we see merely the circumstances resulting from human activity?
Robert Barron writes, “Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian life flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christians see differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, the action, their whole way of being in the world, has a distinctive accent and flavor. What unites figures as diverse as James Joyce, Caravaggio, John Milton, the architect of Chartres, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoffer, and the later Bob Dylan is a peculiar and distinctive take on things, a style, a way, which flows finally from Jesus of Nazareth.
“Origen of Alexandria once remarked that holiness is seeing with the eyes of Christ. Teilhard de Chardin said with great passion that his mission as a Christian thinker was to help people see, and Thomas Aquinas said that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is a "beatific vision,"
an act of seeing.” We want to develop “kingdom eyes” – we want to see other people as Jesus sees them, children of God, gifted and called by the creator. We want to see circumstances as God sees them: full of possibilities, no matter how limited the possibilities may seem from our perspective.
Although we may not personally witness lepers being healed on a regular basis, miracles may be more prevalent in our lives than we may realize. The New York Review (3/25/04) makes mention of Littlewood’s Law of Miracles. Littlewood, who was a noted mathematician, estimated that, on average, people have a miracle happen in their lives about once a month. According to his calculations, a miracle occurs in about one out of every million events. And he surmises that on a typical day, a person has approximately 30,000 distinct events take place, adding up to about one million each month. Have you noticed the miracles in your life recently??
Jesus says, the kingdom of God is right here, right now. Are we going to choose to ignore it and buy into the cynical view of the culture?? Or, perhaps our own temperament is less resilient, and we find ourselves unable to look beyond our circumstances – what do we do?
We rely on God’s word, and we pray. At the heart of faithful prayer, we are not asking God to change the world, we are opening ourselves to God with a willingness that we would be changed. God’s favorite working material is the human heart. And we also do our part by training our own mind, by choosing an attitude of gratitude that will help train us to notice what God is doing. No matter what is going wrong in our lives, we can find things to be thankful for. The more we choose to actively look for those things and thank God for them, the more we will be developing our God-sight, so that we might be more attuned to God’s work in our lives.
Let me be clear about this – I am not talking about some starry-eyed optimism that says if we only have enough faith, circumstances will work out the way we hope. I am exactly NOT saying that. After all, look at the text – the Hebrew people were in exile in Babylon, the Jerusalem temple had been destroyed. This was profoundly most NOT their heart’s desire.
What I am saying is that we can choose to trust in God’s word and to depend on God’s promises, and to choose to live out of the assumption that God is able and that God intends to bless us in whatever circumstances come our way. God is able to bless us, God intends to bless us. Our task is to receive the blessing, and to receive it, we need to believe that it exists.
• WHILE the chemo is going on…
• When I’m still stuck in a job I don’t like…
• In the midst of the craziness, because things may never settle down ….
• Before we work things out…
• While I’m working on paying the bills …
• In exile, in Babylon, in our new home, there will be blessings. God is here.
Many people of faith in Scripture, in church history, and in our own lives did not have circumstances go the way they wanted. The Good News this morning is that there is ALWAYS Good News, no matter how challenging the circumstances. We may need to make ourselves at home in circumstances we would not choose – we may need to accept that our life is not what we would want, but we can accept that confidently knowing that God intends good for us and God is able to bless us in any and every circumstance.
This is not starry-eyed optimism; this is open-eyed faithful realism that chooses to believe that God keeps the promises God makes. Our part is to respond in faith to the action of God in our lives, and to be always on the lookout for the miracles, knowing that God is good, and that God loves us, that there is always much to be thankful for, and that the kingdom is not out there but among us and within us, even now. Thanks be to God! Amen.
Rev. Susan Gilbert Zencka
Frame Memorial Presbyterian Church
Texts: Jeremiah 29:1, 4-7; Luke 17:11-19
Certainly every one of us from time to time experiences bad circumstances:
• Bad health – an injury or cancer
• Bad job, or no job
• Relationship troubles
• Money troubles
We tend to put our lives on hold under these circumstances
• What til the chemo is done…
• When I get a better job… OR
• After things settle down a little….
• As soon as we work things out…
• Once I get the bills paid…
Doesn’t have to be bad circumstances – it might be conditions we regard as temporary and so we find ourselves saying things like:
• As soon as I graduate
• Once we’re married
• After the baby comes
• After the kids go to school
• Once I get my license
• After the kids go to college
• Once the kids are out of college
• Once I retire
• When I lose weight
• Once I get organized
• As soon as we have enough in savings
What are you waiting for in your life??
What we are saying here is – wait until I get back to my real life. As if our current experience is an exception.
And so we put off our real living until we get back to our real life.
And we miss being present to where we are, and we miss understanding that wherever we are, this is indeed our real life. I have read this quote before, from The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard, but I believe it bears repeating:
Your life is not something from which you can stand aside and consider what it would have been like had you had a different one. There is no “you” apart from your actual life. You are not separate from your life, and in that life you must find the goodness of God. Otherwise, you will not believe that he has done well by you and you will not truly be at peace with him….First we must accept the circumstances we constantly find ourselves in as the place of God’s kingdom and blessing. God has yet to bless anyone except where they actually are, and if we faithlessly discard situation after situation, moment after moment, as not being “right,” we will simply have no place to receive his kingdom into our life. For those situations and moments are our life. (The Divine Conspiracy pp. 340-341, by Dallas Willard)
The point he is making is – where we are IS our real life. The only place God can bless us is where we actually are. We have to get our heads and hearts around our current reality, so that we can realize that God is active in our world, where we are.
In the Jeremiah passage, what the people had been dreading has now happened – this exile has occurred. Babylon has invaded Israel and shipped most of its citizens off to Babylon. What was Babylon in Jeremiah’s day, by the way, is Iraq in our day. God is telling the people of Israel – don’t put your lives on hold, waiting for when you get back home. Make this place home. Be at home in Babylon – and don’t just BE at home, LIVE there….plant gardens, build houses, get married. Have babies, and let your babies get married.
It was definitely a bad news/good news kind of message.
The bad news implicit in this message is: you’re not going anywhere anytime soon.
The good news is: life can happen anyway.
What about the Luke passage?? This seems to go in an entirely different direction…doesn’t it??
Ten lepers, Jesus cures them, and off they go excited and joyful, and one of them comes back, thanking Jesus. And what does Jesus say to him?? Jesus says something really weird, he says “Get up and go on your way; your faith has made you well.” What? Wasn’t he well before?? Apparently the real healing took place after he had thanked God – the cure was not in fixing the circumstances – the cure apparently was in his response to what God had done for him.
How often do we stop at the circumstances in evaluating our lives? But apparently our response to our circumstances is an important piece of our wellness.
And how many of us are not really all that concerned with what Jesus is concerned with – the state of our hearts and life in the kingdom. Truthfully, we get hung up on the circumstances. Just like the people Jeremiah was speaking to who were stuck at the bad circumstances in their lives, and just like 9 out of 10 lepers (by the way, isn’t there a commercial in there somewhere? 9 out of 10 lepers will proceed straight to the temple…)….Anyway, just like 9 out of 10 lepers who were stuck on the good circumstances in their lives. For those of us who are happy when we’re graded on the curve – we can be comforted to know that our response to circumstances is pretty normal. And for those of us who suspect that you can’t determine truth by popular opinion – yes, both these readings tell us that there is more, that what really counts lies beyond the circumstances, and somehow, strangely within the circumstances. Jesus says, in one of my very favorite passages “Don’t be looking in the events and circumstances for the kingdom of God for the kingdom of God is among you…” which by the way can also be translated “within” as in “The kingdom of God is within you.”
Interestingly, at the time that these passages were written, people understood deities, gods, to be national. That’s part of the reason that the Bible often refers to the God of Israel. People inside and outside of Israel assumed that God took care only of God’s own people – in Israel. So exile was even more of an issue – not only were the people forced out of their homeland, they were also taken out of the reach of God. The words God speaks through Jeremiah were terribly important, asserting that even in Babylon, they were within God’s care. And praying for the good of the place that they were living was an astonishing notion – not only was it enemy territory, but it wasn’t God’s land. Why bring it to God’s attention. God is declaring to the people that he reigns in Babylon as well. It was an amazing idea.
Much like the idea that God would care for lepers – the people who were castoff within Israel – and especially Samaritans. All throughout the Bible, God keeps reaching beyond the boundaries that people had set for him.
In our time, it’s not so strange to think that God is caring for people who are far away – in some respects it’s harder for some of us to get our heads around the idea that God is deeply involved with our own lives, our own experiences, our own hearts. We may be more comfortable with the idea of God as an abstract deity than as the force of love who is near and even within us.
But the entire witness of the Bible tells us that our faith is a matter of the heart, and that our hearts determine how we act, and how we will look at the world. Our faithfulness is always a RESPONSE to what God has done, and this begins with noticing what God is doing. I was so touched once by hearing that the Hebew way of telling time, beginning each day at the sunset beforehand. So when we wake up, we are not starting a new day – we are joining our efforts to God’s who has already been working. This, by the way, is what stewardship is about, ideally – we give in response to our gratitude for God’s good gifts to us, and to join our efforts to God’s. A heart full of gratitude come when we begin to understand that God is indeed giving good gifts – even during hard times. When we approach each day with the assumption that God is in it and active and at work we can be thankful in all circumstances. A member of our congregation shared with me a card that she had received. It said: Attitude is everything. There was a woman who had only three hairs on her head. She said, “I think I’ll braid my hair today” and she did, and she had a lovely day. The next day when she got up, she found she had only two hairs and so she said, “I think I’ll part my hair down the middle today” and she did, and had a lovely day. The next day she got up and found she had only one hair. “I think I’ll wear my hair in a ponytail today” she said, and she did and had a lovely day. The next day, she got up and found she had no hair. “Yippee!” she said, “I don’t have to fix my hair today!” Attitude is everything. We all have that choice available.
William Bausch says, in his book The Yellow Brick Road, “Learning to see is the key, for you see what you are. The Talmud says: "We do not see things as they are. We see things as we are."” Christianity is not just what we believe, it’s in who we are and how we look at the world. When we look at the world, do we see God’s hand at work? Or do we see merely the circumstances resulting from human activity?
Robert Barron writes, “Christianity is, above all, a way of seeing. Everything else in Christian life flows from and circles around the transformation of vision. Christians see differently, and that is why their prayer, their worship, the action, their whole way of being in the world, has a distinctive accent and flavor. What unites figures as diverse as James Joyce, Caravaggio, John Milton, the architect of Chartres, Dorothy Day, Dietrich Bonhoffer, and the later Bob Dylan is a peculiar and distinctive take on things, a style, a way, which flows finally from Jesus of Nazareth.
“Origen of Alexandria once remarked that holiness is seeing with the eyes of Christ. Teilhard de Chardin said with great passion that his mission as a Christian thinker was to help people see, and Thomas Aquinas said that the ultimate goal of the Christian life is a "beatific vision,"
an act of seeing.” We want to develop “kingdom eyes” – we want to see other people as Jesus sees them, children of God, gifted and called by the creator. We want to see circumstances as God sees them: full of possibilities, no matter how limited the possibilities may seem from our perspective.
Although we may not personally witness lepers being healed on a regular basis, miracles may be more prevalent in our lives than we may realize. The New York Review (3/25/04) makes mention of Littlewood’s Law of Miracles. Littlewood, who was a noted mathematician, estimated that, on average, people have a miracle happen in their lives about once a month. According to his calculations, a miracle occurs in about one out of every million events. And he surmises that on a typical day, a person has approximately 30,000 distinct events take place, adding up to about one million each month. Have you noticed the miracles in your life recently??
Jesus says, the kingdom of God is right here, right now. Are we going to choose to ignore it and buy into the cynical view of the culture?? Or, perhaps our own temperament is less resilient, and we find ourselves unable to look beyond our circumstances – what do we do?
We rely on God’s word, and we pray. At the heart of faithful prayer, we are not asking God to change the world, we are opening ourselves to God with a willingness that we would be changed. God’s favorite working material is the human heart. And we also do our part by training our own mind, by choosing an attitude of gratitude that will help train us to notice what God is doing. No matter what is going wrong in our lives, we can find things to be thankful for. The more we choose to actively look for those things and thank God for them, the more we will be developing our God-sight, so that we might be more attuned to God’s work in our lives.
Let me be clear about this – I am not talking about some starry-eyed optimism that says if we only have enough faith, circumstances will work out the way we hope. I am exactly NOT saying that. After all, look at the text – the Hebrew people were in exile in Babylon, the Jerusalem temple had been destroyed. This was profoundly most NOT their heart’s desire.
What I am saying is that we can choose to trust in God’s word and to depend on God’s promises, and to choose to live out of the assumption that God is able and that God intends to bless us in whatever circumstances come our way. God is able to bless us, God intends to bless us. Our task is to receive the blessing, and to receive it, we need to believe that it exists.
• WHILE the chemo is going on…
• When I’m still stuck in a job I don’t like…
• In the midst of the craziness, because things may never settle down ….
• Before we work things out…
• While I’m working on paying the bills …
• In exile, in Babylon, in our new home, there will be blessings. God is here.
Many people of faith in Scripture, in church history, and in our own lives did not have circumstances go the way they wanted. The Good News this morning is that there is ALWAYS Good News, no matter how challenging the circumstances. We may need to make ourselves at home in circumstances we would not choose – we may need to accept that our life is not what we would want, but we can accept that confidently knowing that God intends good for us and God is able to bless us in any and every circumstance.
This is not starry-eyed optimism; this is open-eyed faithful realism that chooses to believe that God keeps the promises God makes. Our part is to respond in faith to the action of God in our lives, and to be always on the lookout for the miracles, knowing that God is good, and that God loves us, that there is always much to be thankful for, and that the kingdom is not out there but among us and within us, even now. Thanks be to God! Amen.