God Never Fails Us

3EpiphanyB, Sullivan Park Care Center, January 25, 2015 by Sr Annette Fricke, OP

                The end of a poem titled, “I’ll be happy in the future” goes like this: What if I could be happy, right here, right now, even though my life isn’t perfect and never will be? What if I could be happy with my aches and irritations and concerns and duties? I am happy just to breathe. I am alive. I am happy just to have food, water, shelter, clothing and love. I am grateful. I am happy just to hug and play with my beautiful little girl. I am happy just to be her mama. I am happy just to trust and respect my partner. I am loved and loving. I am happy like the songbirds, even when it’s raining. I am happy like the lilies in bloom, even knowing I will wither and pass away sooner or later. I am happiest when I am like water, when I let go and go with the flow. When will you be happy?

What’s stopping you from being happy, just where you are, right now, today?[1]

The lives of the disciples of Jesus have at least one thing in common with us: They were not perfect.  Despite our wanting to call some people saints, designating their superiority to us, even the most ardent and faithful among us have their ups and downs.  There are times when we also fail miserably.  The pattern is unmistakable: we are all excited and gung-ho, then we realize just how difficult it is to remain that way.  It doesn’t mean that we have in any way fallen out of favor with God, it just means that without God, we are truly weak.  We can clearly walk away from God, yet God is always there to reel us in, like catching a big fish that swallowed us whole and getting it to spew us back out.  We think we should go one way, only to discover it was a bad decision. We are children of God.  We don’t belong imprisoned in a fish, thinking that we have somehow escaped and don’t need to deal with God.  But that’s not where we belong. We belong to God who made the heavens and the earth and gave us a commission to go out into the world and be the love of God to all people and our environment.  Some have explained it like this, when we are young, we are very accepting and trusting of others but when we get older, we start becoming distrustful and judgmental. We become alienated from each other.  We sense that others are not following the same rules as we are and we begin to second guess what we should be doing.  We become seekers of our own self-interest and become selfish.  We become trapped in our own pity system, unable to get out without outside help.  Our self-sufficiency is our downfall. It is our place of unhappiness because we are never truly happy until we rest in God’s gracious love. In Psalm 62, from our psalm for the day, also a passage that inspired St Augustine, “For God alone, my soul waits in silence, for my hope is from him.” St Augustine said it more like this, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”  If we look closely to the words of Psalm 62, over and over, the psalmist affirms that trusting in God is our only hope.

That is clearly one of the major points of the story of Jonah.  God alone is our rock and our salvation, our fortress; we shall not be shaken. But, we can decide to walk away from God and God’s call to us, to be tossed about by the seas of chance and our own decisions.  We can choose to merely float along or be subject to the wind that pushes us further and further away from God and God’s desire for us.  To be close to God’s bosom is not restrictive or weakness as we might imagine at times, but is actually our security and strength.  It doesn’t mean that nothing bad will ever happen to us, but it does mean that God will give us the strength to endure.  We may become depressed, angry and bitter, but God will always be there to help us.  On God rests our deliverance and our honor; our mighty rock, our refuge is in God.  In the words of the popular hymn, “A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.”  Though we may fail God many times over, God never fails us.

Because God never fails us, we should trust in him at all times.  We should pour out our hearts before him.  God seeks an intimate relationship with us through prayer.  God alone is worth our trust.  That does not mean that we cannot trust other people, just that God is to be most trusted and is to be trusted above everything and everyone else, even our best friends.  Even our best friends are capable of becoming disloyal and deceptive. When our experiences of the world are ever spinning in different directions, God is the one who always stands waiting for us.  God wants to give us peace and can give us peace like no one on earth.  God’s peace has more power and hope than all of our lifetime troubles and distresses combined. God’s persistence in bringing us that hope will never end, no matter how much or how often we chase after vain desires.  It doesn’t matter if we are wealthy or poor; we are always a child of God.  It is God’s nature to seek us out and to seek our welfare.  It is God’s nature to show mercy.  It is God’s nature to love all of us, even those of us we find to be difficult or unreasonable.  We may be just as unreasonable or difficult in their eyes.

Our greatest sin can be summarized in this: we choose to follow our own thoughts and feelings rather than putting our trust in God.  That is it in a nutshell and we find so many different ways throughout our lives to go away from God and God’s way.  From a lecture on the book of Isaiah, “The uterus and womb of God is the divine Word, by which we are fashioned and borne, as Paul says to the Galatians, ‘My little children, with whom I am again in childbirth until Christ be formed in you!’…It is an outstanding and very firm comfort for the godly that God cares for us.  Therefore we must strive with a single heart that we abide in the Word.  The Lord will reject no one, however weak, if only we cling to the Word, the womb of God.  Thus then, who will care for us with supreme devotion and will never reject us… [?]  These are supreme consolations.  They should be written in golden letters.  Let us just cling to the Word alone, and we shall have God as a mother who feeds us and carries us and frees us from all evils.[2]

And may we, like the people of Ninevah, repent. From John Wesley, “Forgive them all, O Lord: our sins of omission and our sins of commission; the sins of our youth and the sins of our riper years; the sins of our souls and the sins of our bodies; our secret and our more open sins; our sins of ignorance and surprise, and our more deliberate and presumptuous sins; the sins we have done to please ourselves and the sins we have done to please others; the sins we know and remember, and the sins we have forgotten; the sins we have striven to hide from others and the sins by which we have made others offend; forgive them, O Lord, forgive them all for his sake, who died for our sins and rose for our justification, and now stands at thy right hand to make intercession for us, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

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[1] Michelle Margaret Fajkus

[2] Martin Luther, Lectures on Isaiah

Child of God

SecondSundayAftertheEpiphanyB, Sullivan Park Care Center, January 18, 2015 by Sr Annette Fricke, OP

            You are a child of God created in God’s image.  You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, your entire mind, all your soul, and all your strength and your neighbor as yourself.  This is the basic formula.  Follow this, and you will have life.  The reason is simple: God created you and all that exists.  God gave you a brain, legs, arms, hands and muscles.  God gave you resources in your physical environment as well as in other people.  God gave you what you need to learn to love as God has loved you.  You can be more and do more, even to the end of your lives when you realize how profoundly God loves you.  Some of the sweetest words of encouragement have come from those no longer able to move on their own.  I remember so clearly the poetry recited from memory of a 103 year old.

Consider God to be likened to a baker. Your average baker will likely use the same recipe multiple times because it almost guarantees good results each time it is made.  The baker will measure out each item in the recipe accurately, being careful to follow the instructions printed below the ingredients.  The baker will not follow advice that is out of context from another recipe such as, “to make really good, moist banana bread, add an extra banana from what the recipe calls for…”  Likewise, think of God as one who wishes to crochet an afghan: it is wise to follow carefully, even the minutest instructions to assure that the afghan will turn out as planned and that it will indeed resemble that which was intended.  This method is basic and is predictive of success for both baking and making specific items.  If you have ever watched the Chef Ramsay shows for cooking, you know that if you don’t follow a recipe, there are still standards for a proper product. A rejected product would be bland or undercooked, for example. God has made each of us with specificity in mind and yet also with variations.  All of it is good and we all have the potential to discover and use the gifts God has given each one of us.

            The Jewish laws according to the book of Leviticus are similar to this.  They are an attempt to answer the age-old question of how to live out what it means to be a child of God. They were focused on what actions are to be performed in order to be made right with God.  This had to be followed precisely.  For example, Leviticus, chapter 23 states, “The Lord spoke to Moses: Speak to the people of Israel and say to them: When you enter the land that I am giving you and you reap its harvest, you shall bring the sheaf of the first fruits of your harvest to the priest.  He shall raise the sheaf before the Lord, that you may find acceptance; on the day after the Sabbath the priest shall raise it.”  The Israelites of old were a worshipping community who lived in covenant with God.  Part of that covenant-keeping was to observe all that God or God’s agents commanded.  In this case, Moses was acting on behalf of God. And as close as Moses was to God, even Moses was not to see God’s face.  Attempts to get close to God involved building altars, sacrificing, and going to the mountaintops. 

Today, we try to reach God by meditation or prayer.  People talk of going on a retreat in which great focus is placed on listening for God’s presence, God’s voice. People continue to seek those mountaintop experiences.  The one thing that distinguishes the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob who is the God of the Jews as well as Christians is this: God is both transcendent as well as intimate.  You can’t get any more intimate than becoming human and living with us, dying our death.

God has shown us the way to be intimate with others in Jesus.  The story about Nathaniel is a great example of God’s knowledge of us and for some confirms that Jesus must be God.  Our psalm for today is another description of how well God knows us inside and out, yet many of us hesitate to share our lives with others.  My co-worker gives the excuse that her generation does not talk to other generations like its some rule set in stone.  Another co-worker of mine, when asked a personal question would make something up. Sometimes it is because we have something to hide or what we say might be misconstrued or misinterpreted.  Sometimes we simply do not want to feel vulnerable with others or we fear their judgment. I recently had a job interview in which I was asked to share some personal information about my hobbies and what I do to reduce stress in my life.  This is typical of a mental health job interview, but I fail to see the relevance, so I shared little.  These are people I will probably never see again.  I know there is no weight to these answers, but it doesn’t make it any easier to just tell the whole of my life before other people.  It is a normal human defense to want to protect ourselves emotionally.

At the same time, we long to connect with others, to share our lives.  We long to have others know us and to be known by them.  We seek to understand and to be understood.  We also become confused as to where God begins and ends because everything we describe about us is inextricably tied up in our identity as God’s children, made in God’s image.  However, that is the very point of this portion of Psalm 139.  God is without beginning or ending and God is so intimately involved with us that making distinctions is not something we should engage ourselves in.  Does it really matter deciding what is human and what is divine?  Maybe it really is as Thomas Aquinas suggests: God is like a stained glass window and we are the shattered pieces of God.  God may be more like us than we can conceive or imagine, even though God is in the expansiveness of the entire universe and beyond.

Remember this, you are a child of God and so is your neighbor.  In the words of Frederick Buechner, “WHEN YOU REMEMBER me, it means that you have carried something of who I am with you, that I have left some mark of who I am on who you are. It means that you can summon me back to your mind even though countless years and miles may stand between us. It means that if we meet again, you will know me. It means that even after I die, you can still see my face and hear my voice and speak to me in your heart.

For as long as you remember me, I am never entirely lost. When I'm feeling most ghost-like, it's your remembering me that helps remind me that I actually exist. When I'm feeling sad, it's my consolation. When I'm feeling happy, it's part of why I feel that way.

If you forget me, one of the ways I remember who I am will be gone. If you forget me, part of who I am will be gone.”

As the thief beside Jesus hanging on the cross uttered those poignant words, we also should be pleading, “Jesus, remember me.”  Remember me now and when I come into your kingdom.

The Dove of Peace

BaptismoftheLordB, January 11, 2015, Sullivan Park Care Center, by Sr. Annette Fricke, OP

            Prepare, all of you, the way of the Lord.  That is what baptism is all about.  It is about preparing each day and each time we gather for worship.  What is the way of the Lord and how am I to follow Jesus?  Luther’s defense, whenever he felt the wiles of the devil nipping at his heels, was simply this, “I am baptized.”  What does your baptism mean to you?  Do you know on what day you were baptized?  If so, do you celebrate it?  How do you celebrate it or does the meaning of your baptism escape you?

            I must say that I find it very odd that the gospel text assigned for today has a lot more to say about John the Baptist than Jesus.  The Gospel of Mark goes on and on about the attire and diet of John and what he says about Jesus, but little about Jesus.  Jesus is from Nazareth of Galilee.  It’s as though those sorts of details about Jesus are not important.  The focus is on John, although John appears to be keenly aware of Jesus being greater than he is.  He proclaims that Jesus will baptize with the Holy Spirit.  Wow!  The New Testament goes on to further explain that some were baptized with John’s baptism, but had not yet received the Holy Spirit. Acts indicates that the Holy Spirit was received by those baptized in the name of Jesus when Paul laid his hands on them.  This is one of the earliest practices of laying on of hands associated with such rites as Confirmation or Baptism or even just a blessing not associated with rites or sacraments.  Baptism with the Holy Spirit was very important for the early Christians because without it, one could not participate fully as a member of the Christian community.  It was considered to be central to Christian discipleship.  Thought to be passed on from the original disciples of Jesus himself, baptism was of supreme importance.

            Baptism is not a onetime thing.  It is not something that happened one day a long time ago.  It is God’s way of reclaiming us as God’s own.  It is our anchor in life.  Baptism is of God and comes from God for our benefit. Luther saw it as a ship, that if we fall off, we must swim back to it, clinging onto it until we are strong enough to get back on deck.  With it, we are enabled to sail forward, where we should be: close to God.  Luther goes on to say that baptism “defeats and puts away sin, daily strengthens the new person in us, keeps functioning, remains with us until we leave our present troubles to enter glory everlasting.”[1]

            Jesus is our model throughout our lives.  He is the one toward which John points.  Even when we look back at the Old Testament’s strong figures in the faith, we see through the eyes of our baptismal understanding who God is and what God expects of us.  Tevye, in “Fiddler on the Roof” said it quite well.  Our identity is with God. The material representations and physical ceremonies of the Jewish faith are also to remind them of their commitment to God.  Circumcision, like baptism takes place only once, but both remain a reminder of our relationship to and covenant with God. God invites us into fellowship with God and others.

            But there is a surprise to Jesus’ baptism; something I bet didn't happen at yours.  “…he saw the heavens torn apart and the Spirit descending like a dove on him.”  This is something more than just different.  When I think of that image, I see a purposeful action of God.  It is like the description of creation when there is only darkness and a formless void.  Then, suddenly God chooses to create light, making possible a cycle of days defined by light and dark. The contrast is unmistakable and immediate. I have childhood memories of going to the fabric store with my mom and older sister.  I remember watching as the clerk snipped, and then suddenly ripping the fabric at or near the exact measurement of our order.  It’s quite frightening when you are not expecting it and you see and hear it for the first time.

            Baptism, for us, is like adding light to a dark world.  It is common in baptismal liturgies to give either the baptized or the baptized sponsors a lit candle.  The lit candle is given with the admonition to, “Let your light so shine before others that they may see your good works and glorify your Father in heaven.”  It is a celebration of your connection with God and God’s connection with you, but it’s also a commitment to live into God’s grace as you go about living your life.  It means being a humble servant before God and others.  It means taking care of the earth, a living resource that sustains us in our physical needs.

            Jesus is the one who made all of this possible.  Jesus opened the door of salvation for all.  There are no more barriers between God and us because of God’s saving grace in Jesus.  God broke through the heavens and came to us in Jesus, a form difficult for us to comprehend.  How can Jesus be both human and divine?  How is that possible?  To this day, it stands as an article of faith and a mystery.

            And Jesus saw the Spirit descending like a dove.  It is important to know that this is an accurate translation of the Greek text.  It is like a dove, not a dove.  If you look at the symbolism of the dove in the Old Testament, the dove is a bird of salvation (as in sacrifice); a bird of hope (as in the story of Noah) and a bird of mourning (due to its mournful call - in psalms and prophets. If you recall, the dove was used as a proper sacrifice to God for poor people.  The dove was sent out to tell Noah whether or not there was dry land, an indication that the water was receding.  A mourning dove is symbolic of what we naturally do when someone we know and love dies.  Lament serves an important function in that respect.  The whole book of Lamentations is about the Lord remaining absent and silent throughout, with no suggestion of the restoration of Jerusalem or its Temple.  God is with us in times of sacrifice, when times are tough for us financially or emotionally.  God is also the bringer of hope despite our ups and downs in life.  God, in many times can seem quite distant from us.  Sometimes we can see that God has been with us only in retrospect.  We are not told what this “like a dove” is representing, but my notion is that it is a dove of peace.  It seems to represent the peace between God and humanity.  God restores the peace that was meant to be from the beginning, the same peace of the Spirit of God passing over the waters just before creating the light of day.  We can see it as the person of Jesus who came to us, disobedient children that we are, in order to make things right once again for us each and every day.  Though we stumble and fall many times, may we always allow God to pick us back up, embracing us with loving arms and say, “Welcome home, good and faithful servant.”

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[1] For All the Saints, Vol. 1, pp. 217-218.

What is the Point?

2ChristmasB, January 4, 2015, Sullivan Park Care Center, by Sr Annette Fricke, OP

                The view from the dining room where I currently work is quite different from that here.  Your view from this dining room is that of a patio where flowers and plants are tended and grow.  My view is that of another building—or I should say a building in progress.  There is a man on our floor who holds onto the hope that when that building is finished, he will take his place a couple of floors up in it, the fifth floor.  Despite the fact that he knows his life is hanging on a thin thread due to his earlier brush with asbestos to his lungs, this is the dream that keeps him alive.  There are other indicators that the correct placement for him is our floor in assisted living, but his hopes help keep him optimistic.  After all, he could have died like many others, of Mesothelioma, that disease that is advertised frequently in the wee hours of the night to offer settlement.  What is it that keeps hope alive?  That sense that there has to be more and that hope alone is a superior motivator. We may not know the details of what it is we hope for, but we will be confident and steadfast that what we are hoping for is more than just an illusion. I still hold out hope that I will someday return to a better job, something that I actually studied for, hoping to help people with the knowledge and skill from actually practicing in the field. Here, you may hope that the next meal is better than the last one or that your loved ones will bring in a treat that tastes better because it is from someone with whom you have a loving connection.  You may also hope, along with other Christians, that Christmas is real, that Jesus really was born into this world and really does make it possible to leave this world in the hope of resurrection for all.

            But far from being a source of hope, many other residents see the new building as an eye sore.  When the man across the hall died, the man on the other side of the hall immediately asked to move into his room.  Who wants to watch all that construction going on for at least two years?  The view is gone and residents, like him, remember what it looked like before with its resident parking garages, the employee parking lot, and the so-called cottages as they line the area making a small, but significant village of people.  Construction and destruction amongst both buildings and people are a constant.  Buildings have their life span, acted upon both from within and without and so do people.  Both people and buildings go through expansion and contraction, soaring to success and coming down in defeat and all the regular ups and downs of life.  Every so often, we are reminded of the tendency of the elevators to quit working.  Most of us know someone who has gotten stuck in an elevator.  It’s something we can laugh about, but at the time, it’s anything but funny.  Just the irregular sounds the elevator makes creates a not too small bit of terror in those who have firsthand experience in an elevator that won’t move.

            Our culture tells us that despite the continued sales on everything imaginable, Christmas is over--- at least until about October.  But Christmas is not over.  The twelve days of Christmas just aren't celebrated as they once were.  If you asked people on the street, “When is the Feast of Stephen?” and sing the song about a king helping a poor man directly with his page, few would actually know what you are talking about.  I listen to the song sung during an advertisement for abandoned and abused animals and note that only the first, rather sad verse is sung.  They don’t sing the hopeful verse.  They don’t sing the verse that goes like this, “Our God, heaven cannot hold him,  nor earth sustain; heaven and earth shall flee away when he comes to reign: in the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed the Lord God incarnate, Jesus Christ.”  They only sing about the cold and the snow on snow in the deep mid-winter.  Of course they are banking on your not knowing the rest of the song because they are only interested in placement for these animals.  In the Sound of Music, they also do not finish with the rest of the verse.  The nun says to the von Trapp family, “I lift my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help.”  The impression is that the help comes from the hills and that the von Trapp family should head for the hills to escape.  Bravo!  But that is not what the actual scripture says or means. “I lift my eyes to the hills, from whence cometh my help?  My help comes from the Lord, who made the heavens and the earth.”  The hills are the immediate hope for escape from the Nazis, but our true help comes from God.

            Lest we forget or somehow misconstrue, in the beginning was God.  God did not begin with the birth of Jesus Christ, but Jesus was there with God from the beginning.  This is an important distinction from the other gospel writers.  John’s gospel begins not with Jesus’ birth, but with Jesus’ identity as God.  Jesus was there before being born on earth, being born of a woman.  There is no more appropriate scripture to study during the season of Christmas than this gospel which makes a valiant effort at trying to explain how God can be both divine and human at the same time.

            During this week in my reading and my watching of PBS, people have done more research into the historicity of what the Bible says about Jesus.  A friend of mine sent a model of the nativity scene, pointing out that a lot of it probably never happened or happened at a different timing that what the nativity scene implies.  For example, the kings are probably not kings and probably did not come to see Jesus until a couple years after his birth.  Not to mention that the “visiting Magi” are not even found in the Bible.  Another discovery is that Jesus was probably an urban dweller and well-educated, knowing Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek, not a country bumpkin and son of a carpenter.  To this entire sort of thing, one of my friends writes, “Sigh. I always find things like this disheartening. The nativity scene is an image that offers one opportunity to ponder the Incarnation. It's not any different than other religious images that give one a like opportunity to reflect on faith in God. Our postmodern fascination with debunking -- deflate, quash, discredit, disprove, contradict, controvert, invalidate, negate; challenge, call into question, poke holes in, etc. -- all things religious rips from each of us the great mystery of our faith. I'll gladly put out my nativity scene each and every year accepting that it isn't a factual representation of Holy Scripture. It is for me, however, an image that offers opportunity to joyfully celebrate the Incarnation and the astounding love of God for me, a sinner.” 

            It doesn't matter—any of those things that point to Jesus as God made man.  None of it matters.  What really matters is God’s love for us in Jesus.  That is the point, the whole point, and nothing but the point.  God loves us.