Fourth Sunday of Lent, March 10, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
A few words, and no more
In Killers of the Flower Moon, King Hale instructs his newly-returned-from-the-Great War nephew Ernest in the ways of the Osage Indians, who live all around them.
The Osage are sharp. They don’t talk much, so that might make you feel like you’ve got to run your mouth to fill the space, especially you been drinking. Better you be quiet if you don’t got nothing smart to say. Don’t get caught on that. It’s what they call, “blackbird talk.” And just because they’re not talking, don’t mean they don’t know everything about everything. Yeah, Osages are the finest and most beautiful people on God’s earth.
These wisdoms do not prevent Mr. Hale from conspiring to kill off an entire family and inherit their seemingly endless oil wealth. Mr. Hale, King Hale, who began his life as a cowboy, became a philanthropist and king-maker, finally to receive a life sentence for murder(s), be paroled and die in an Arizona nursing home at age 87 … Mr. Hale killed people.
He could have used a lesson in finding purpose, or discovering vocation, or listening to God. Take your pick.
Our friend Henri Nouwen, renowned Harvard and Yale professor, spent the last ten years of his life with profoundly disabled men and women at L’Arche in Toronto, then died suddenly in 1996 at age 64. Henri learned his lessons, and he learned to speak to us, his readers and friends, with peace and humility. The strength he found in God always seems to shine through:
I deeply know that I have a home in Jesus, just as Jesus has a home in God. I know, too, that when I abide in Jesus I abide with him in God. “Those who love me,” Jesus says, “will be loved by my Father” (John 14:21). My true spiritual work is to let myself be loved, fully and completely, and to trust that in that love I will come to the fulfillment of my vocation. In the meantime, I keep trying to bring my wandering, restless, anxious self back home, so that I can rest there in the embrace of love.
Mr. Nouwen found his home in Jesus.
What does Jesus say to Nicodemus?
For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whoever should believe in him will have everlasting life.
And Paul echoing his Savior?
By grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God. It is not from works, so that none of us may boast. We are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works that God has prepared for us in advance, that we might live in them.
It is true, as Jesus also said, that
People prefer darkness to light, because their works were evil.
But this is hardly the end of things. It is never the end of things. For because of this …
The light came into the world.
Jesus is my home.
Will I choose to believe that? Will you?
Where else is there for us to go?
(2 Chronicles 36, Psalm 137, Ephesians 2, John 3)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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