Saturday, October 22, 2022
           (click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Goo goo ga joob
Brothers and sisters, grace was given to each of us according to the measure of Christ’s gift … some as Apostles, others as prophets, evangelists, pastors, teachers for building up the Body of Christ, living the truth in love.
Here and in Romans, Paul lists eleven gifts of the Spirit. In Isaiah 11, there are seven more: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord. These tasks and attitudes blend beautifully with Paul’s fruit of the Spirit, which he describes at least three times, in Galatians 5: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control, and in Ephesians 4: humility, gentleness, patience, forbearance, love, peace, hope and unity, and finally in Colossians 3: compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience.
Here then is a mighty list of attributes and gifts. Sometimes I catch myself striving for them, grasping at them, but at better times I stop, look, listen, and wait, watching for what God puts into my hands.
And the gifts don’t come when I want them to, but when God knows I am ready. Jesus seems to understand God’s patience, allowing the “gardener” to protect us:
There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard, and when he came in search of fruit he found none.
“For three years now I have come looking for fruit, and still there is none.” So, he said to the gardener, “Cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?”
But the gardener said, “Sir, leave it for one more year, and I shall cultivate the ground and fertilize it. It may bear fruit in the future. If not, then you can cut it down.”
I think God also sees gifts where we do not. Yesterday I caught the tail of a Beatles’ song … “Come Together.” Its lyric is not poetic or divine or spiritual. But it drives home the differences of people and their vastly different worlds, alongside our call to compassion and acceptance in every case.
John Shea once wrote of these different folks:
After two thousand years people still journey to Jesus. They bring a vaunting ego and last year’s scar, one unruly hope and several debilitating fears, and unwarranted joy and a hesitant heart—and ask Jesus what to make of it … the heavenly banquet table is open to anyone who is ready to sit down with everyone.
The Beatles used baby’s language (joo jo, goo goo ga joob) twice in songs that called for our unity of spirit with other humans utterly unlike us. They missed the part about the Holy Spirit. But still, how do like this lyric from “Come Together”?
Here come old flat top
He come grooving up slowly
He got joo jo eyeball
He one holy roller
He got hair down to his knee
Got to be a joker he just do what he please … Come together, right now, over me
And it just gets better!
He got monkey finger
He shoot Coca-Cola
He say I know you, you know me
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free
 The second song, “I Am the Walrus,” invites me into the not-so-make-believe world of walrus-eat-penguin, and then asks me to forbear, hold off, eat plants or something instead of fellow creatures, even while everyone around me is eating each other:
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly
I’m crying …
I am the walrus
Goo goo ga joob
 The devil gets a mention, and God gets a martyr’s mention, though not the Christian Jesus:
Expert, texpert choking smokers
Don’t you think the joker laughs at you
See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snide
I’m crying …
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe …
Maybe the goo goo was not a baby’s voice? In the Inuit language, words something like this mean “Living is easy with eyes closed.”
OK … enough helter skelter, acid rain, fifty-five year old quotations. For me these songs open my mind and quiet my soul, as they remind me how many ways there are to say, “God loves you and God loves me. And that will never change.”
(Ephesians 4, Psalm 122, Ezekiel 33, Luke 13)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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