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Second Sunday of Advent – The Gospel in the Wilderness – Church of St. Michael & St. George

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Saint-John-the-Baptist-web

(A sermon preached by Jordan Hylden, candidate for ordination in the diocese of North Dakota)

I have my own list, and you almost certainly have yours. It is the list of things without which it cannot really be Christmas. Right at the top for me is Bing Crosby, Nat King Cole and the first Amy Grant Christmas album, not the second derivative one but the first authentic one. Of course there must be a tree, an Advent wreath, and an Advent calendar with little doors you can open every morning. There must be hot apple cider, gingerbread cookies, an enormous tin of three different kinds of popcorn, and for me there must be lefse, which is delicious and Norwegian and reminds me of home and my grandmother. There really ought to be snow, although since moving south I have allowed that Christmas can go on in its absence. There must be a viewing of A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, as well as It’s A Wonderful Life on Christmas Day itself. I do not have to watch all of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, but if I catch a few minutes of the wood-mation Burl Ives snowman and the elf who wants to be a dentist, it’ll do. At some point I must read The Gift of the Magi, by O. Henry. And on Christmas Eve, someone must read the second chapter of Luke in the King James Version, and there must be a candlelight lessons and carols, and one of the carols must always be Silent Night.

You have your own list, I am sure. It is hard to say why each of these things must be there, but I think it has something to do with the old doors they open in the corridors of memory, the way these things have of collapsing time so that it is not simply now or ten, twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, but all of these times at once. They call up all of these memories, often of dear ones and times now lost to us, and place them alongside one of the church’s oldest and dearest memories, that of the birth of Christ, Immanuel, the God of grace who came to us in the midst of our many remembered loves and hopes, fears and sorrows and regrets: O Come, O Come Immanuel, and ransom captive Israel!

In the middle of all of our memories, Christ comes to us at Christmas. But the church does not allow us to remember the birth of our Lord without also wheeling out another, perhaps less welcome figure: John the Baptist. John the Baptist is probably not on your list of things without which it cannot be Christmas, but he is at the top of the church’s list. It is not hard to imagine why this has not exactly caught on. John the Baptist just does not seem to catch the Christmas spirit like Rudolph and Bing Crosby do. John-the-Baptist-mas would not make for a very popular holiday. But the church insists on him, so here he is all the same, last in the line of the Old Testament prophets, coming in from the wilderness to crash our Christmas parties, wild-eyed and bearded like a deranged Santa Claus, pointing his long and bony finger at us like the Ghost of Christmas Future and telling us to think on our sins, to repent, to prepare the way of the Lord.

Why is he here? Listen to what the Gospel of Luke says: in the reign of the Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene, during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness. Listen to what Luke is saying: the word of God did not come to anyone in Caesar’s palace or Herod’s court or Caiaphas’s temple, but instead to this strange nobody from nowhere called John, in the last place anyone would think to look. It did not come to the centers of power and success. It did not even come to the temple, to the place of holiness and righteousness. It came instead to the wilderness, to a man who had nothing and depended entirely upon God, and who preached a strange gospel that reminded us of everything we wanted to forget: of our faults, our shortcomings, our regrets and evasions, of the chains of vice we have forged for ourselves throughout life like Jacob Marley from Dickens’ Christmas Carol, of the chains we inherited from those who came before us, more chains than we have strength to carry any longer, dragging us down to the grave. What kind of gospel is this? Why is this man here to spoil our Christmas spirit? Why not just turn up the Bing Crosby to shut him out!? Why not cover up his bony, accusing finger with tinsel and send him away, back out into the wilderness where he came from? That’s what we tend to do with him, isn’t it? Christmas is a flood of memories, some of which we would rather not have, and at no other time of the year does the gap between our hopes and our reality become so stark. And so we throw up the holly, turn up the sappy old songs, tell ourselves sentimental old stories, cover over our losses and fears and regrets with garlands and wrapping paper and tinsel, or bury them under great big tins of sickly sweet popcorn and cookies. There can be bravery in this, like Auntie Mame facing down financial ruin by deciding that we need a little Christmas, right this very minute. But it is finally an attempt to avoid John the Baptist, to escape the wilderness. And none of us can escape the wilderness forever.

The church is wise to insist that it cannot be Christmas without John the Baptist. We need him to show us what we do not want to see, to bring us to where we do not want to go, to remind us of what we try so hard to forget, much like Ebenezer Scrooge needed the ghosts of Christmas past and Christmas future. But here is why Luke tells us that John the Baptist preaches good news. It is here, in the wilderness, that the word of God comes to John. It is right here, in the rooms of our memory we try so hard to keep closed, that we receive the promise of the forgiveness of sins and the gift of new life. We discover here in the wilderness that we do not have to hide these rooms from God, or from ourselves. In Christ, he comes to us here and shows us that we are loved by God and marked as his own forever. He comes to us as Lord of all creation lying in a manger, and tells us that none of our fears and losses are too small for his care. Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth, and all flesh shall see the salvation of God. He who began a good work among you will carry it to completion on the day of Christ Jesus. Take off the garment of your sorrow and affliction, and put on forever the beauty of the glory from God. Put on the robe of the righteousness that comes from God, for God will give you evermore the name, ‘Righteous Peace, Godly Glory.’

Before Christmas this year, spend some time first in the wilderness. It is only there that we learn how deep the joy of Christmas really is. Amen.

 

photo credit: http://orthodoxynwa.blogspot.com/2011/01/synaxis-of-st-john-baptist.html

First Sunday of Advent – Waiting – Church of St. Michael and St. George

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In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.

(silence/staring right back at the congregation for 10 seconds)

Ten seconds of silence.  But how long did the wait seem to you?  And how did it feel to sit through it?  Did you start to wonder if something was wrong?  Perhaps I realized that my notes weren’t on the pulpit, or maybe I suddenly felt ill, or got stage fright after doing this without too much trouble the last few months.  After a few seconds—how quickly our minds move from one line of thought to the next!—you lost interest in this strange, quiet woman standing in front of you and moved on to planning your grocery list or trying to recall which doctors’ appointments were this week, or whether you’d written that Christmas card already.

Last week, picking up a friend from the airport, I wondered, as I often do in that situation, what we did before we had cell phones.  I have never picked someone up from the airport without a cell phone to aid me in timing my car’s arrival.  I vaguely recall being with my mother, driving around and around in circles, searching for our guest, or even further back in my memory, being allowed to idle in our car by the baggage claim curb.  Our technology has eliminated our need to really sit and wait for someone—three-year-olds who are being potty-trained, excepted.  Even in such a situation when we happen to be sitting in a restaurant, waiting for our lunch companion, or standing outside a theater, waiting for our date to park the car, we pull out our phones and check to see whether we might be more interested in what’s happening somewhere else—a sports game or a war in the East or, until a few weeks ago, the newest political gaff.

At a party a few weeks ago, six or ten of us sat around a coffee table, waiting for the guest of honor to arrive.  Almost instinctively, many of us pulled out our phones and then glanced down to occupy us while we waited.  Immediately, Rob Lehman roared at us—I don’t know if you’ve ever had a red-haired man over six feet tall roar at you, but it’s something fearsome to behold, and let me tell you, it makes you listen!  He said, “What are you doing?!  Be here!  Be present!  Put those things away!”

This (evening/morning), Jeremiah doesn’t have to say that to the people he’s addressing.  They’ve got nothing to put away, they’ve got nothing to occupy their minds or mouths—many of the people Jeremiah’s talking to have lost their homes and their land and their livelihoods.  They’ve been carried off into exile—and I imagine they’re remembering, with a lump in their throats, the stories their ancestors had told them about another exile, centuries spent in Egypt.  Perhaps they had that feeling of foreboding that they had pushed the envelope (?) just a little too far.  They’d meant only to get to the brink of disaster, and then pull themselves back before the real consequences set in.  Then they lost their balance, and mighty Babylon came in and erased their lives from the face of the earth, sweeping the people along back to Babylon.

These people sat in their shantytowns, figuratively listening to Jeremiah on the radio.  He told them that God hadn’t forgotten them, and far from being abandoned, God would still fulfill his promise to them, saving them from their distress and bringing them to a safe and secure existence again.  What a relief!  Imagine the pit in their stomachs shriveling up, their breath coming a little easier, their shoulders drooping a little as the stress of the unknown left their bodies.

But then, they looked around, and remembered that they were still stuck in Babylon for God-knows-how-long.  The severity of the situation caused them to redouble their resolve, knowing that it probably would not be within their own lifetime that God’s promise would be fulfilled.  Still, God had promised to deliver them, and again—just like in Egypt, he had made good on his promises before.

What were their options, anyway?  There was no food in the storehouse to fall back on; there were few family or communal networks intact to provide support.  God was their only fallback, God was their only support.  They had no personal property to distract them from the waiting, nor had they prosperous, rewarding occupations, as they may have had in Israel.  All possible diversions had been stripped away—it was just the people, sitting in a foreign land with few comforts, staring into the heavens, waiting for God.

How strange they must have seemed in the midst of this thriving, bustling world capital, those rural Israelites who thought that their God was more powerful than Babylon.  Didn’t they know that they Babylonians’ ancestors had almost built a tower to Heaven?  These people they now lived with were truly the most impressive people on earth.

Believing in and waiting on God’s promises looks strange, especially in lands which boast much of the world’s power.  It’s weird to get up at 5 a.m. on Sunday mornings and drive to a shady part of town to make toast and drink coffee with people who don’t look like you do.  It’s puzzling why kids would fill shoeboxes with gifts they’d really love to see under their own Christmas tree and ship them off to other continents.  It’s strange for busy moms to leave their families on a school night and make a Christmas meal together to give to another set of moms who happen to be in their teens.

This first Sunday of Advent marks a change in time for us Christians.  It the Church’s new year, and it’s no coincidence that our first season in it is a season of waiting.  Like the Season after Pentecost, which we just left, and like Christmas and Epiphany, which are coming up, Advent encourages us to focus on a particular aspect of our lives as Jesus’ disciples.

Waiting on Jesus looks strange in our culture, but it’s absolutely necessary for us if we want to grow as disciples.  We take advantage of the story that God gave us of Mary and Joseph and the Israelites waiting for Jesus to model our own waiting on him.  For myself, I struggle with waiting—not only the kind we’ve been talking about this morning, distracting ourselves so that we forget that we’re waiting at all, but the kind when you jump the gun.  Fr. Jed is a great bread maker—he’s got his monastery cookbook, and he churns out artisan loaves with flair.  Your Mtr. Emily is not a great bread baker.  I can never tell when I’ve waited long enough on the yeast, and for some reason, there are always phantom drafts in my kitchen that do not make it a friendly environment for the growth of yeast.  My breads end up low, and often tough—I am not at all gifted in judging the readiness of yeast, and I go on strike against yeast every few months, and the jar of it languishes in my fridge.  I think we’re often like this about Advent.  We’re not good at waiting, so we give up and give into the busyness and the distraction.  But Jesus, and Advent, are always there waiting for us—they haven’t given up on us, so why don’t we give the waiting another try?

Amen.

Thanksgiving Sermon

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Earlier this week, trying to put my godson to bed, I asked what else he needed to go to sleep.  In an unfamiliar bed in an unfamiliar house, though his mom and dad were just down the hall, this very serious three-year-old was thoughtful.  “Well, first, I was very scared because it was dark, and then my mom left the door open, but I was very scared that Ben the dog would come in.  But then, I got brave.  Now, I’m not scared anymore, but I just can’t get to sleep.”  We snuggled, and we sang, and eventually, he fell asleep.

 

I had forgotten how vividly the dark, and big, shadowy animals could play on kids’ imaginations.  Thinking this week about fear, it struck me that my big dog, Ben, has the exact opposite effect on Philip and me.  Ben strikes fear in Philip’s heart—for no particular reason than that he’s twice the size and weight of a three-year-old—and for me, on nights when I’m alone at home, I count on my dog’s ears and sharp bark to avoid the exact same feeling of fear.  Philip worries about Ben and worries about the dark, while Ben provides comfort for me, and dark winter nights have a calming, soporific effect on me.

 

But Philip doesn’t know Ben the way I do, and he hasn’t experienced nighttime as much as I have; he hasn’t yet come to know that the setting of the sun can be a welcome blanket of rest.  What is it that we don’t know the way God does, and haven’t experienced as much or as fully as God has?

 

God, in Jesus Christ his Son, tells us, “do not worry about your life.”  Just like Philip with the dark and with Ben, we think to ourselves, “well, thanks, God, that’s a lot easier said than done!”

 

How can I persuade a child who doesn’t know how gentle and sincere my big monster of a dog is unless he experiences the dog enough himself to trust that the big teeth and strong tail are just window dressing on a loving, licking machine?

How do children learn to trust their parents’ word, that it’s safe to go to sleep because there aren’t monsters lurking in the dark or under the bed?

 

Despite these things that Philip and children do not understand and are still working to learn, there is a way that Philip is right on the money—though his imagination gets the best of him when those shadowy, dark animals creep around the corners of his mind, he at least recognizes that there’s a lot more to life than what he can see when the lights are on.

 

As we grow up, our fears shift, and often, we come to think that there isn’t much more to life than what we can see.  We start worrying about paychecks and tuition bills, we worry about the health of our children and our parents and ourselves, we are concerned about what could happen if  dot-dot-dot.  We continue to be afraid of those things we can’t see—layoffs and price hikes and illness—but we forget that God is part of what we can’t see, too.

 

Trust and rest lie in the fact that God is more powerful than money or disease.  In the prequel to today’s Gospel passage, Jesus says, “No one can serve two masters.  You cannot serve God and wealth.  THEREFORE, do not worry about your life.”  Money and vitamins and health insurance cannot tell us truthfully that we need not worry.  Only God can tell us that.

 

Like Philip, our struggle is to trust that our heavenly Father is telling the truth, that there is no monster under our bed, or in a doctor’s file, or on a bill-collector’s desk, (no monster) that can overtake us.  We need not worry, because our parent is the most powerful force in the world, who promises through his son, Jesus, that he will be next to us whenever uncontrollable situations enter our lives.

 

There’s more to life than what meets the eye, and I’m thankful that that’s Jesus.

 

Amen.

 

You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel

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Preached 17 October, 2010, Christ Episcopal Church, Cooperstown, New York.

28Then the man* said, ‘You shall no longer be called Jacob, but Israel,* for you have striven with God and with humans,* and have prevailed.’

Names today aren’t quite as socially important as names were in Old Testaments times, but we understand how meaningful it is to name a child after a loved one or to carry a name that holds a particular weight.  My middle name is “Rose,” which is also the name of my great-grandmother, who is one of the people most dear to my mother—my great-grandma Rose is still alive, so I take it as good luck that I, too, carry her name.  In today’s Old Testament lesson, Jacob’s name is changed after a great struggle.

When Jacob was born, hanging on the heel of his older twin brother Esau, he was named as “the one carried on the heel” which was a figure of speech in ancient times for “supplanter” or “deceiver.”  Jacob sure lived up to this name, stealing the blessing meant for the first-born son from his brother by tricking their father, and later, stealthily building up his flocks out of his father-in-law Laban’s animals, agreeing to be paid only in livestock.  In ancient literature, and even in some stories today, there’s a character role that Jacob is fulfilling in Genesis—he’s the “trickster.”  This sort of character shows up in Greek and Roman myths, in Native American myths, and even in children’s stories.  The “trickster” is a rule-breaker, but he does it purposely, to get ahead of the game.  A trickster doesn’t have a black-and-white conception of right-and-wrong, but instead tends to judge situations based upon his personal interest at the time.  In stories about animals, the fox and the wolf are often cast as tricksters, like in Little Red Riding Hood, where the wolf pretends to be the girl’s sick grandmother.  Jacob is part of this family of trickster characters, which makes his name especially appropriate, and which makes his re-naming in our lesson so important.  After Jacob outsmarts his father and brother in obtaining the special blessing, he leaves town.  That’s the last time he sees his brother before the meeting talked about in the passage this morning.

No wonder Jacob was so nervous.  He’d grown up enough in the interim, having been tricked himself by his father-in-law, to understand the import of what he had done to his brother as a young man.  Unlike most tricksters in ancient literature, though, Jacob exposes that he has a sense of right and wrong.  This is one way that shows how the stories in Genesis are different from classic ancient literature—our trickster has a heart, and struggles with himself.  The Bible’s famous trickster isn’t like other tricksters; while this was a story that would have been familiar to ancient people, they would have been able to identify Jacob as the trickster immediately by his behavior, if not just his name, they also would have seen that this wasn’t the way a trickster was supposed to act.  A trickster doesn’t ever grow a conscience—the point of being a trickster is to always be a bit of an outsider, albeit a financially successful and very clever one.  In this story, we see as we do many times in these patriarch narratives that God uses deeply faulted people—real people.  We know that God uses people like us, God uses US, to enact His will in this world.

Let’s look more closely at the re-naming piece now.  In verses 22 through 30, Jacob is wrestling.  We find out at the end that he’s wrestling with God.  This trickster doesn’t want to continue in that life-path, but it’s hard to derail years of clever circumventing of the rules.  Jacob is wrestling with getting off that train, so to speak, and setting a new course for the rest of his life, starting with facing his brother again.  This intimate look at Jacob’s rough night give us a window into our own struggles—just as Jacob wrestled with God over his knee-jerk tendency to promote himself at other’s expense, we have inner struggles.  We tend to have short tempers or tell lies much faster than the truth, or struggle with addiction or faithfulness to our spouses—those habits that we try to hide from others.  These trappings of faulted human life are the sort of thing that we might wrestle with God about at night, like Jacob.

In the morning, we see, Jacob is given hope—God not only blesses him, but changes his name.  What a startling and freeing step for Jacob—to no longer hear “deceiver” any time his name is spoken, but instead to be reminded that “God strives” each time he’s called.  In verse 28, “the man” blesses and re-names him, dubbing him “the one who strives with God.”  The newly-minted “fighter” fords the river to face up to his brother, knowing that God has blessed him.

In chapter 33 of Genesis, directly following this story, Esau and Israel come face-to-face.  For a moment, let’s think about what Esau must have felt, having been warned the day before that his younger brother was approaching.  They hadn’t spoken since decades earlier when wily Jacob had taken Esau’s rightful older-brother-blessing.  Indeed, Esau’s last recorded words, in chapter 27 of Genesis, verse 41, were “Now Esau hated Jacob because of the blessing with which his father had blessed him, and Esau said to himself, ‘The days of mourning for my father are approaching; then I will kill my brother Jacob.””  Of course, their mother intervened and Jacob survived and fled, but that had been the tenor of their last interaction.  As they approached each other, Esau knew nothing of the night before, he didn’t know that Jacob’s name was no longer “deceiver,” but “the one who strives with God”—the one who, by God’s grace, becomes a man of character.

In chapter 33 of Genesis, verse 4, “Esau ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept.”  Esau, though he had known his brother better than anyone as children, knew that during their time apart, Jacob may have changed.  Esau let go of his violent, rightly-placed anger during the intervening decades and gave Jacob space to be a new person when they met again.  Esau knew that God could change Jacob, just as Esau surely had been changed, and so, when they met again, instead of continuing with the plan he’d had years ago, Esau didn’t assume that he knew Jacob and could predict the way he would behave based on their past.  Esau looked to the future and was open to be blessed by the new family member that Jacob, now Israel had become.

Israel teaches us that no one is stuck being a trickster for his entire life, and Esau teaches us that the greatest blessing among friends and family is being given the space to develop from being a trickster to becoming one who reminds us that God strives. Amen.

Nineteenth Sunday After Pentecost – Hard Heartedness – the Church of St. Michael and St. George

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“But Jesus said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart, he wrote this commandment for you.’”
During the storms early last week, Jordan and I found ourselves in the Schnuck’s parking lot.  In the driving rain, I had turned the wrong way down one of the lanes, accidentally.  Unfortunately, it was not one of those mistakes that was going to go unnoticed.  A minivan raced up the lane, going the correct direction, and as I stopped my car, having just completed the wrong turn, the driver of the other vehicle began gesturing, flailing her arms, glaring at me.  I was stuck—she hadn’t left enough space for me to inch past her, there was significant cross traffic behind me, and she desperately desired the parking space I was inadvertently blocking with my car.
The logistics might be confusing, but the heart of the matter is this: in poor driving conditions, I’d made a traffic mistake, and as driving blunders go, it was a very small one; but this woman in the minivan was not going to let it slide.  She seemly jumped at the chance to ream me out from the safety of her car, reveling in my vulnerable position.
This, I turned and told my husband, is why I do not understand your mother.
No, no, not like that.  Really, the reason I thought of her is that she has developed a different knee-jerk reaction to strangers than the one that I have.  I tend to assume that people are always out to get me.  I generally expect to be berated in a grocery store parking lot, yelled by a passerby if I forget a plastic bag when I take my dog outside to go to the bathroom at 6 a.m., and raked over the coals for not being ready to order the moment I reach the front of a queue at a café.
Unlike me, my mother in law operates out of the assumption that everyone around her has a soft, generous, fleshy heart.  Though sometimes she may be wrong and someone with a hard heart may snap at her, her experience of life is much more like what God had in mind for us humans and for our relationships when he created the world—people walking around, forgiving, and being generous, being gentle with each other and being open with one another.  Jesus appeals to God’s original plan for human relationships in the Gospel text today as he responds to questions about the distance between the ideal what the law requires.
By pointing to the very beginning of time, Jesus is drawing attention to the norm that God established, which is human relationships that cultivate character and grow love and provide support for the weak.  This passage is about much more than divorce; it is about understanding the way that God sees the world and learning what God desires for each of us.
Jesus explains that though there are allowances that holy men, like Moses, have made for people throughout the ages, God never meant for our relationships to be bogged down with selfishness and violence.  Humans naturally carry around hard hearts—we’re prone to selfishness and to following the easiest, least invasive course of action.
For example, in Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Home, a wayward son returns as his father, a Presbyterian minister, nears death.  Instead of mirroring the famous parable, however, this story focuses on the father’s struggle to forgive his child.  Though the Reverend tries to welcome his son home with joy and a feast, it soon becomes clear that his acceptance was a veneer, all is not quite yet forgiven.  In the course of the novel, as the two try to reach out to each other in their sincere but imperfect ways, the relationship continues to deteriorate; their last conversation as the son packs up to leave again ends with a refused handshake and a father’s gruff words, “Tired of it!”  At different points in the story, each man was hard-hearted, but in the end, the father refused to forgive before he understood why his son had become what he was, and that hard-heartedness remained until his death.
God’s soft heart continually has mercy for us as we continually sin against him.  A soft heart is one that loves so deeply and fully that it does not hold a grudge and it gives generously to anyone who is in need.  This is why Jesus takes children into his arms near the end of the passage—he says, “the kingdom of God belongs to people like these children.”  Jesus holds up the kids and says, “be dependent on God like these ones are dependent.”  Allowing control of your life, its direction and its provision, to be handed over to someone else— that kind of openness is a soft heart.  God makes himself open to us because he knows in his infinite wisdom that openness is the only way to deep love and true relationship.
Jesus jumps at the change that the Pharisees gave him, using divorce as an example of how we humans harden our hearts with each other and with God.  As fallen people, sometimes we do damage to each other that cannot be repaired in this world, but we know that God can heal the hard parts of our hearts at any time, if we make ourselves open to him.
Walking around our in our society with a soft heart is a recipe for scandal.  People who are willing to be open with another are the exception, and so they look strange and do strange things.  Jesus isn’t new to this—people in his time and place thought he was doing strange things, too.  To be Christian is to align ourselves with something against the grain of our culture, to stick out like a sore thumb among the people who snap at each other, yell in parking lots, and avert their gaze on the street.  We are people who forgive because we know that we are greatly loved.  We are people who give freely of our time—helping the neighbor who can’t rake her yard because she’s sick; we give freely of our money—knowing that we have more than enough and that God’s presence in this place is something to affirm with our whole selves; we give freely of our resources, our talents—singing and teaching and cooking and visiting others, because God has gifted each of us uniquely to join in his work of building the kingdom.
God sent Jesus to live a softhearted life, to show us that it is possible to respond with generosity and forgiveness even when you are surrounded by stony hearts.  Our own hearts can only be made soft by God himself—we depend on God to transform us, and he sent Jesus to lead us back to him, that we could be made open to God and to each other.
This week, I read a story that captures the difference between a hard heart and a soft heart: At the end of his trial, a serial killer sat with his legal counsel in a courtroom.  After being sentenced to life in prison without parole, the families of his 50-some female victims were lined up at a microphone and invited to address him.  Spouses, parents, and siblings of the victims hurled at him the worst words they could think of; they told him he would end up in hell, they said that he was an animal, they wished on him a “long, suffering, cruel death.”  Finally, the father of a victim took the podium, and haltingly, he said, “Mr. Ridgeway, um… there are people here that hate you…  I’m not one of ‘em.  You’ve made it difficult to live up to what I believe, and that is what God says to do.  And that’s to forgive.  You are forgiven, Sir.”
Amen.