Tuesday, September 1, 2020             (today’s lectionary)
Home improvement
Just like on the show, except our next door neighbor showed her whole self, not just the top of her head. Yesterday morning we talked awhile across the fence and then went about our business. Gerry is a wonderful, unusual neighbor who grew up in Flushing and Manhattan, became a librarian and landscape artist, rented the brick house next door twenty years or so ago, and probably will never leave.
Her live-in friend George takes care of our chickens when we leave for the night or week. George and I talk too, over the fence, usually early in the morning, a word or two about the weather. He laughs and goes about his business. This summer he’s taken on mowing all his relative’s grass, and plenty of other grass too. Everybody chipped in and bought a beautiful Cub mower, the one with the padded seat and steering handles, and a trailer to pull it around, and he’s been true to the task he set himself.
Today, out of character, Gerry complained. “For the last week we’ve been without phone, internet and TV.” Their cable broke, and no one has yet come out to fix it.
The Lord is gracious and merciful (unlike the cable company)
Slow to anger (unlike this cable customer) and of great kindness.
“All those repairmen, and none of them have time for us.” She sat on her front stoop for a couple of days waiting, and they made three trips to the store, and hopefully they will come today. Hopefully.
The Spirit scrutinizes everything.
Who knows what pertains to a man except his spirit that is within?
I said, “You can always read.” She said, “I only read in bed, not while I’m sitting outside.” That surprised me, because reading, as she said, “is in her blood.”
The interesting thing was with George, who doesn’t read much at all. “He put on his glasses and sat down and started reading articles he liked out of my pile of New Yorkers. He read for a couple of days out of at least a dozen magazines. As Gerry said, “All my life that magazine has pushed my thinking around, sometimes where it does not want to go, but for years getting the magazine has been the highlight of my week.” She has no cell phone.
“Never needed it,” she said. She also doesn’t drive. But she reads.
Can we understand the things freely given us by God?
Not with words of human wisdom but with words taught by the Spirit.
We describe spiritual realities in spiritual terms.
In the morning she looks at magazines and newspapers online, and she listed them all (I can’t remember, the list was longer than this): “Guardian, Atlantic, Slate, Huffington Post, Politicio, New Yorker … and that takes me up to noon.”
Or did. She’s been without for a week, and still no cell phone.
She doesn’t enjoy the New Yorker cartoons like she did years ago. Her culture has passed on, and when the younger artists poke fun at their own culture and habits, “it’s just not funny to me.” She knows that’s her problem, not theirs.
The one who is spiritual can make judgments that are not subject to the judgments of others.
For we have the mind of Christ.
One thing that bothers Gerry: “I don’t notice compassion in many places.” Of course, neither do I. She said, “So many of us are caught in our basest instincts.” She sighed, her face fell, and I think her eyes teared up.
The Lord is faithful in all his words and holy in his works.
The Lord lifts up all who are falling
And raises up all who are bowed down.
I thought at first she had said “basic instincts.” And that got me started on the “original blessing,” deeper by far than the “original sin.” And Teilhard de Chardin’s insistence that evolution is proceeding toward heaven, not away from it, as Bishop Curry said at Prince Harry’s and Meghan’s wedding (go to 10:15 at the link). And C. S. Lewis’ comment that, because our encounter with God is inevitable, “the business of life is to learn to like it.” And even the family Bonhoeffer dinnertime tradition, “Don’t speak unless you can improve the silence.” (Bonhoeffer, Metaxas, p. 14)
Well, that last one doesn’t have much to do with compassion, but it does speak to a fine way to live.
Let all your works give you thanks, O Lord.
Let them discourse of the glory of your Kingdom.
Gerry told me her uncle, who lived with his mom and her mom and Gerry while Gerry’s dad was in WWII, wouldn’t attend his own Lutheran ordination because he changed his mind at the very last minute. He went back to school and became a mechanical engineer instead. Dinner conversations during that decision-making time must have been interesting.
On the sabbath, Jesus taught in Capernaum, not Nazareth.
They there were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority.
Gerry’s parents found a church they liked whenever they moved – Lutheran, Baptist, Pentecostal, non-denominational. A lot of what she heard stuck, whether she liked it or not. These days Gerry likes to discuss religion with me (across the fence, of course), but she has long ago left the church.
I wonder if she spends her Sunday mornings in bed, reading … Gerry’s act of worship … and then later outside walking with her cane, sitting on her front stoop facing Lincoln Avenue, admiring the proliferating blossoms that surround her house … her act of worship … all the time probing for decency in the culture she lives in, reads about and sometimes grieves over, searching out compassion, intelligence, hope … yes, her act of worship.
They were all amazed and said to one another, “What is there about his word?”
And news of Jesus spread out everywhere.
       (1 Corinthians 2, Psalm 145, Luke 7, Luke 4)
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