Category: Focus Columns

“Stronger Than Dirt”

By:  James L. Brewer-Calvert

February 26, 2016

 

 “Create in me a clean heart, O God,

and put a new and right spirit within me.” 

– Psalm 51: 10

 

When I was a kid a neighbor passed on to us a cat with no tail and no manners. The Calvert family has a long history of tending strays and adopting wildlife.  However, this cat in particular strained our capacity for unconditional love of God’s creation.  My brothers named the cat Ajax because Ajax the Cat was “stronger than dirt.”  No amount of soap, perfume, or beauty cleansers eased its all-powerful aroma.   We can testify that no training sank in.   Clearly Ajax believed that the word housebroken was meant to be taken literally, as in “What in this house can I break next?” Indeed, Ajax proved to be stronger than dirt.

We like to be clean.  We invest great amounts of precious resources to look nice, to smell nice, to be appealing and pleasing to one another.   We even apologize if we break into a sweat.   Two female college classmates argued over whether one of them was sweating while studying for a tough exam.  One said to the other, “I don’t sweat; I glow.”

Throughout the liturgical Season of Lent we explore and tap into the cleansing power of God in Christ.   As much as we scrub, swipe and swab on the outside, what we truly crave is to be clean within.  We pray and pray for God to help us attain that most precious of gifts: to be healed, washed, purified, sanctified, renewed, and forgiven on the inside.  We recite Psalm 51: 10 with all our might:  “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit within me.” While both Ajax the cleanser and Ajax the Cat may be stronger than dirt, the Good News that Psalm 51 proclaims is that nothing in the world is greater than the cleansing power of God.  God cleanses us from the inside out.

Often it is our past that is in need of being cleansed and forgiven.  Some folks are blessed with short memories.  They’ve learned the discipline to move on from painful past experiences.  Football coaches tell cornerbacks who get burned on a deep ball to have a short memory, saying, “Shake it off and get ready for the next play, the next pass.”   This week baseball players reported for spring training, and a common piece of advice for relief pitchers is to have a short memory.   Ball coaches say, “As sure as dawn follows the night, you will get shelled in a game, and you’ll saddled with the loss; learn from it, shake it off, forget it, and get ready for the next ballgame.”   Shake it off.   Singer songwriter Taylor Swift has made a career from transforming past pains into one chart-topping record after another.  Swift writes:

My ex-man brought his new girlfriend
She’s like “Oh, my god!” but I’m just gonna shake.
And to the fella over there with the hella good hair
Won’t you come on over, baby? We can shake, shake, shake

Shake it off. Let it go.  Move on. Don’t look back.  Don’t hold grudges.  Be kind to yourself.  Give yourself permission to forgive others as well as to be forgiven.

Okay, let’s be real, my friends.  This is so much easier said than done.  We have long memories, so it’s no wonder forgiveness does not come easily.  We are so busy looking backward into our histories that we lose track, ignore, dismiss, and even miss what God is saying to us today, in the present.  And often we nurse grudges, bitterness and resentments. We nurse our past hurts and harms and hates, tending and nursing them, giving them a special place in our hearts and minds, letting them keep us from sleep and slumber, allowing them to distract us from current events.   When you have a painful past that needs to be dealt with, the gift of forgiveness is given to yourself as much as to anyone else.   Where there is no forgiveness there is no life.

Be kind to one another because you may not know the burdens other people bear.  The odd part is that the soul you most help may be your own.   Anthony De Mello said, “An unwillingness to forgive others for the real or imaginary wrongs they have done is a poison that affects our health – physical, emotional and spiritual – sometimes very deeply.  You commonly hear people say, ‘I can forgive, but I cannot forget!’ or ‘I want to forgive but cannot.’  What they really mean is they do not want to forgive.”

Forgiveness is stronger than dirt, cleansing the forgiver as well as the forgiven.   A story is told of a grocery owner who passed away quite unexpectedly.  Many costumers had purchased food on credit.  After he died customers refused to pay their debts to his widow and children.  In vain the family tried to get reimbursed.  Finally one evening the mother called her children into their backyard.  She placed the outstanding bills in a pile on the barbecue grill and set them on fire.   Even though the family needed the funds the bills represented, she understood that what the family needed even more was peace of mind.

Jesus said, “When you forgive the sins of any they are forgiven.”  We have the God-given power to forgive and move on.   What burdens do you need to place at the base of the Cross?  Give them to God.  Leave them behind.  Then walk away.  Move forward.  Let Christ, who places within you a clean heart and a new and right spirit, be your strength.

As always, First Christian Church of Decatur, I am delighted to be your pastor.  Shalom, James

God’s Family Values

January 25, 20916

By:  James L. Brewer-Calvert

Singer songwriter Graham Nash was moved by a photograph taken by Diane Arbus that she entitled Child with Toy Hand Grenade in Central Park, New York City (1962).  Nash recognized a spiritual correlation between Diana Arbus’ photo of a child playing with a violent toy and Nash’s own hope that parents become mindful of the values we model.

Inspired, Graham Nash wrote a song called “Teach Your Children” that serves as a contemporary spiritual psalm for passing on ethical values.  His song is a prayer for peaceful means and ends; it’s an affirmation that our dreams are to be shared with the next generation down as well as up.   Nash recognized that parents have a social responsibility to emulate, instruct and inform young people what it means to be love incarnate.  Nash wrote these timeless words that resonate from Berkeley to Baltimore to Baghdad:

            You, who are on the road must have a code that you can live by.

            And so become yourself because the past is just a good bye.

            Teach your children well, their father’s hell did slowly go by,

            And feed them on your dreams, the one they fix, the one you’ll know by.

            Don’t you ever ask them why, if they told you, you would cry,

            So just look at them and sigh and know they love you.

The Apostle Paul speaks of what is to be valued and embodied in families, in church, in the wider community.  At the center of all that we do and hold dear and are called to become is love.  He writes in Colossians 3: 12-14, “As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience.  Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.”

Clothe yourself with love.  Be bound to everything and everyone in every land in perfect harmony.  Sounds like a Coca-Cola jingle from the early 1970s, yet in fact there is much truth here. The love of Christ has already broken down the walls that divide and the sin that separates and the darkness that stymies our vision.  Love has already won the day.  All that is left is for us to live into our true calling to practice God’s family values.  We can do this; we can be this.  May our story be transformed into God’s story.

One Sunday morning elder Yolanda Lewellyn prayed at the Communion Table for the Bread.   Yolanda Lewellyn said – and here I paraphrase: “God, help us to love one another. Remind us that we don’t get to pick and choose the individuals or groups that we love.”   The Good News of the Gospel is and should be infuriating!  Jesus teaches his children that the greatest family value is to love one another, to love our enemies, to love even those people and groups whom we don’t pick and choose to love.

A buddy shared a story about way back when his son was a rebellious teenager.  He wanted to give his boy a piece of his mind, and was on the way to do so when he bumped into a wise mother in his church.   She listened to him rant and rave as he got heated up for the confrontation.   Then she said, “I wonder what God is trying to teach you through your son.”  Her wisdom and prayerful pondering gave him reason to pause and reflect.   He prayed for God to show him a lesson he needed to learn, rather than trying to teach his son a lesson.  Today the father reflects and recognizes how much he and his son are alike.  He knows now that Jesus opened his mind to see how sometimes the folks whom we perceive to be the most difficult to deal with might actually be very much just like us.

He admits today what he could not in the heat of the moment:  sometimes we react so strongly to particular people because deep down inside we can see in them the ugly side of our self, the side we ignore and keep in the shadow places.  I wonder if this is what keeps us from loving our enemies, from loving those individuals and groups whom we might not pick and choose to love.  I wonder if we fear that they might be more like us than we care to admit or recognize or confess.   And what happens when we ask ourselves the wise mother’s question, the woman who was clothed in love, who gently pondered, “I wonder what God is trying to teach you through your relationship.”

During premarital counseling I go over core family values that enhance marriages and relationships, values that can only take root through the discipline of practice.  For example:

            Go out at least one evening a month.  

            Pick your battles. 

            Hold doors open for other people. 

            Don’t let the sun set on your anger. 

            Work with whomever God sends. 

            Pick up the tab for men and women in uniform. 

            Connect with a cause greater than yourself.  

            Don’t pull up the drawbridge after you are across (in other words, look around and help those who get left behind or left out).  

            In all circumstances, give God thanks. 

When I was in high school I returned home with a story to share.  My mother started to spread fresh sheets on a bed while I prattled on. When I finally paused to take a breath she said, “James, there are three kinds of men. One will make the bed himself.  The second will make the bed with his spouse. The third will watch while someone else makes the bed. Which one do you want to be?”   I got the hint and pitched in.  Family values like pitching in, working as a team, not airing one’s dirty laundry in the street or on social media, have shaped us, hopefully for the better.

I imagine that you have stories of teachable moments and life lessons that altered daily behaviors and roads you travelled.  Odds are high that we could (and should) sit around and share a story or two about how we learned the code we live by, thanks to God and the tough love and tender mercies of those who helped form us.  Family values that have depth and breadth, that resonate with meaning and purpose, that share an ethical core and practical application, share one thing in common:  love.

As always, First Christian Church of Decatur, I am delighted to be your pastor.  Shalom, James