Saturday, November 30, 2024
Feast of Saint Andrew, Apostle
Last day in Ordinary Time, 2024
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Confession
If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, then you will be saved.
And what is this confession, what is this belief, what is this being saved? I would like to ask Paul in the flesh why he made things sound so simple. He lived his life with endless passion and commitment, first to the way of the Pharisee and then and forever to the Jesus Way.
Paul knew that no one, not many, knew. They needed to be told, so they could believe and confess with their mouths.
How can they call on him whom they have not believed? How can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? How can they hear without someone to preach? And how can people preach unless they are sent?
Lincoln’s Bible Institute, whose later iterations have played giant parts in the lives of the Sandel family, was founded in 1944 by Earl Hargrove, who must have been awakened at 3 am by echoes of these words from Romans in his ears. He got up, began to raise money and raise a building, and in a relative instant was indeed sending out the preachers. “The preachers are coming,” he shouted across the prairie. And tiny Christian churches sprang up all over Illinois and Indiana, those preachers sent by Earl and his faithful followers, and those churches still standing, doors open, ready to give and give. St. Paul, along with Professor Hargrove, surely is proud.
How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news! Their voice has gone forth to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world.
My friend Sam, after spending three years in a Lutheran monastery in Michigan, is flying out of Detroit west across the sea to India today, where he will visit religious spaces, pray, meditate, look and listen patiently for Jesus. There is a particular cave beside the Ganges River where he will sit and be still, where he will wait and see.
Yesterday was the birthday of C.S. Lewis, who after his dog Jacksie was killed by a car refused to be called by any other name. Jacksie, later abbreviated to Jack, reserved expression of his emotions but allowed his splendid intellect to light the world. “An obligation to feel can freeze feelings,” he said. But he wrote The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Space Trilogy and The Great Divorce, merely Christian books with characters who while feeling their way toward heaven, didn’t say too much about their feelings.
And on Thanksgiving Day our Sandel and Comstock and Covey family sat together will full plates, appreciating our first world blessings. Everyone got along. The Bears lost their sixth straight game in awkward but splendid fashion. We went to watch the new Oz movie Wicked, and in our recliner seats felt a rocking of our world. I thought, so many folks left out, so many. Around our feast we did not feel that we were among those lost, but as so often happens in a movie, I wondered for the thousandth time about me, my own lost-ness, and wept and wept for all of us, whatever color our skin might be, however unhappily we were born. In that identification I feel obliged to disregard the rumors of others’ evil doings, whether that gets me into trouble with the powers of this dark world, or not. All have sinned and all fall short, but God’s glory never wanes.
Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men. And then at once they left their nets and followed him.
Like Andrew, Simon Peter’s thoughtful brother, I yearn to be a watchman looking for truth, goodness and beauty along the edges of what so many see and believe, confess, and hence are saved. Is it harder to be saved when you feel your way out toward the edge like that?
No, God doesn’t see it that way, I’m sure. Over and over God commands us all to notice, respect and care for others, who like us in their own way are left out. All of us, every one – the rich white rulers, suburban housewives, undocumented immigrants, indigenous tribes, Liberian kings captured and made slaves in America, men and women living on the edges of gender confusion, the poor the poor the poor. We are all one family brothers and sisters, so hungry whether we feel full or not, starving for the endless love of God.
Your words, Lord, are more precious than gold, than a heap of purest gold, sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb.
And tomorrow, praise you Loving God, we begin the welcoming prayer of Advent. O see what wondrous things the Lord has done.
(Romans 10, Psalm 19, Matthew 4)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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