It is for me tax time. I have my own delaying habits that make this an
intense time of recording pieces of expense and justifying "less income." I can
say to myself that loopholes should be closed for the super rich, but not for me
please. Thus the poor can be helped and I can be more happy for them. Hmm, perhaps I need to think about that.
While gathering and recording tax information I like company I can turn on
and off. So there I was looking for some sound and I found an old Masterpiece
Theater of David Copperfield and let it play. I rose this morning remembering
reading Charles Dickens as a child. First the Pickwick Papers and later David
Copperfield and of course A Christmas Carol. It dawned on me that while I was
always a naturally sympathetic child, a middle child, Dickens might have been my
first instruction in how unfair life can be. Here I was schooled not only in how
children are subject to the economic rise and fall of their parents, but are
also deeply marked by the goodness or forgetfulness of the society around them.
Perhaps that fed into my faith growth, my looking for the unconditional love of
God and joyfully tripping over it at 11 and refreshing myself in it at 19. Perhaps that is
part of what made me sensitive to the racial issues and changes of my youth, the
civil rights movement. Perhaps that is why I was attracted to a degree in
Sociology, a certification as a social worker with a concentration in services
to children. But what does this have to do with spiritual reflection?
In the lessons appointed for daily prayer in the BCP we are now reading
Deuteronomy and John. The bit from Deuteronomy is the long rehearsal by Moses
of what Israel is to remember of their encounter with God prior to entering the
Land of Promise. One is so deeply struck that the individual can only hope for
salvation, for a full experience of God's care through the community of faith.
It is the task of the whole community to hold onto the voice and teaching of God
in order that it may be lived and recalled be this generation and each one to
follow. The Promised Land and this luxuriating relationship to God belongs to
the whole community. We build it and maintain it for all.
So Moses who was
infuriated at the quick forgetfulness of the people of God and thus crushed the
first copy of the 10 commandments is called to once again ascend the mountain
and carve them again and lug a box made of acacia wood to forever protect them,
the Ark. It is this notion of community holding the faith together that shaped
the notion of a national church that is so primary to the understanding of
Anglicanism, the mother of the Episcopal Church. English history is doted by
faithful Anglicans who foment social reform by remembering the universal nature
of God's care. They prick one another's conscience to better actions.
This brings me to John 3:16-21, which too often is simply left at 3:16 "God
so loved the world..." Too often this is left as an introduction to an
individual relationship to God, a born again by my own efforts kind of American
faith. And our missionaries have carried it off to Africa and elsewhere. Of
course we come to faith or lack of faith personally, but seldom simply
individually. Such faith can too easily forget its need of the community to
clarify our encounters with the holy and the communities need for clarification
of basic values of care lived out of God toward one another.
"For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone
who believes in him may not perish but may have eternal life. Indeed, God did
not send the Son into the world to condemn the world, but in order that the
world might be saved through him...the light has come into the world... But
those who do what is true come to the light, so that it may be clearly seen that
their deeds have been done in God.'
I so need your light, the reflection of the effect of Christ in you. It
helps me shape a deeper understanding of God and God's intentions for my life and our life
as a whole. I prosper when Dickens or you shine a light into my life that sends
me deeper into wondering what now needs growth and change in me, in us. And
like it or not, you need my little light. Together we are called, like it or
not, to build in our world a society that reflects Christ's light. There is
enough darkness around us, enough forgetfulness that every reflective ray of
God's care is a tonic and a call upon the core of our beings.
I found this little poem worthy of a thought to end on. I am not sure it is my theology fully but I like its remeinder. Just remember we are called to hang with the light!!
But Men Loved Darkness rather than Light
The world’s light shines,
shine as it will,
The world will love its
darkness still.
I doubt though when the
world’s in hell,
It will not love its darkness
half so well.
