Frederick Buechner's Blog, page 38

To Love God

To be commanded to love God at all, let alone in the wilderness, is like being commanded to be well when we are sick, to sing for joy when we are dying of thirst, to run when our legs are broken. Even in the wilderness - especially in the wilderness - you shall love him.  

-Originally published in A Room Called Remember

Walter Brueggemann Interviews Frederick Buechner

Click here to view the Frederick Buechner interview by Walter Brueggemann.

Weekly Sermon Illustration: Sharing Your Faith

In our blog post every Monday we select a reading from the for the upcoming Sunday, and pair it with a Frederick Buechner reading on the same topic.

On September 4, 2016 we will celebrate the Sixteenth Sunday after Pentecost.  Here is this weeks reading from the book of Philemon:

Philemon 1:6
I pray that the sharing of your faith may become effective when you perceive all the good that we may do for Christ.

Below is the final paragraph in Buechners classic book about sharing your faith through preaching: .

Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in that silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel, which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depths of his absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and to such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job and Lear and Henry Ward Beecher and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it that catch of the breath, that beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.

Weekly Sermon Illustration: Anger

 In our blog post every Monday we select a reading from the for the upcoming Sunday, and pair it with a Frederick Buechner reading on the same topic.

On October 2, 2016 we will celebrate the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost.  Here is this weeks reading from Psalm 37:

Psalm 37:7-9
Be still before the LORD, and wait patiently for him; do not fret over those who prosper in their way, over those who carry out evil devices. Refrain from anger, and forsake wrath. Do not fret--it leads only to evil. For the wicked shall be cut off, but those who wait for the LORD shall inherit the land.

Here is Buechners note on Anger originally published in Wishful Thinking and later again in Beyond Words:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back--in many ways it is a feast fit for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

God's Business

Stop trying to protect, to rescue, to judge, to manage the lives around you . . . remember that the lives of others are not your business. They are their business. They are Gods business . . . even your own life is not your business. It also is God's business. Leave it to God. It is an astonishing thought. It can become a life-transforming thought . . . unclench the fists of your spirit and take it easy . . . What deadens us most to Gods presence within us, I think, is the inner dialogue that we are continuously engaged in with ourselves, the endless chatter of human thought. I suspect that there is nothing more crucial to true spiritual comfort . . . than being able from time to time to stop that chatter . . .

- originally published in Telling Secrets

 

Fear No Evil

"Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil." The psalm does not pretend that evil and death do not exist. Terrible things happen, and they happen to good people as well as to bad people. Even the paths of righteousness lead through the valley of the shadow. Death lies ahead for all of us, saints and sinners alike, and for all the ones we love.  The psalmist doesn't try to explain evil. He doesn't try to minimize evil. He simply says he will not fear evil. For all the power that evil has, it doesn't have the power to make him afraid.

And why? Here at the very center of the psalm comes the very center of the psalmist's faith.Suddenly he stops speaking about God as "he," because you don't speak that way when the person is right there with you. Suddenly he speaks to God instead of about him, and he speaks to him as "thou." "I will fear no evil," he says, "for thou art with me." That is the center of faith.Thou. That is where faith comes from.

 

- from Secrets in the Dark

 

International Day of Peace

In recognition of the International Day of Peace, here is an article originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words.

Peace has come to mean the time when there aren't any wars or even when there aren't any major wars. Beggars can't be choosers; we'd most of us settle for that. But in Hebrew peace,shalom, means fullness, means having everything you need to be wholly and happily yourself.

One of the titles by which Jesus is known is Prince of Peace, and he used the word himself in what seem at first glance to be two radically contradictory utterances. On one occasion he said to the disciples, "Do not think that I have come to bring peace on earth; I have not come to bring peace, but a sword" (Matthew 10:34). And later on, the last time they ate together, he said to them, "Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you" (John 14:27).

The contradiction is resolved when you realize that, for Jesus, peace seems to have meant not the absence of struggle, but the presence of love.

The Two Stories

But thanks be to God, who in Christ always leads us in triumph, and through us spreads the fragrance of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are the aroma of Christ to God among those who are being saved and among those who are perishing, to one a fragrance from death to death, to the other a fragrance from life to life. Who is suf­ficient for these things? For we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ.

-2 Corinthians 2:14-17

A few months ago I received a letter inviting me to speak to a group of min­isters on the subject of storytelling. It was a good letter and posed a number of thoughtful questions such as: How do you use stories effectively in ser­mons? How do you use a story to put a point across? To what degree do you make the point of your story clear to your listeners instead of leaving them to work it out for themselves? And so on. They were all perfectly reason­able questions to which I think useful answers can be given, but the more I thought about them, the more I found that something about them gave me pause. The trouble was that they were all questions that had to do with how to tell a story instead of what stories to tell and to what end; and the kind of stories they rightly or wrongly suggested to me were stories as anecdotes, as attention-getters, as illustrations, stories to hang on sermons like lights on a Christmas tree. Maybe I did the letter writer an injustice, and that isn't what he had in mind at all, but if so, all I can say is that that's the kind of stories I have often heard in church myself. And why not? They have their place. They can help make the medicine go down. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that even if I believed I could give some helpful literary advice along those lines, that was not what basically interested me.

And yet what the letter reminded me of is that yes, storytelling is it­self immensely interesting and immensely important. Not just for preachers and preachers-to-be, but for Christians in general. Storytelling matters enor­mously because it is a story, of course, that stands at the heart of our faith and that more perhaps than any other form of discourse speaks to our hearts and illumines our own stories. It is related to what Paul is writing about, I think, in this passage from Corinthians. "We are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word," he says, and the image is a rich and painfully telling one.

Peddlers are people with packs on their backs full of things they want to sell, and the things they try to sell hardest are the things they think will sell best. Peddlers are less concerned with what the world needs than with what the world wants or can be made to settle for. Peddlers are salespeople who are interested less in the quality of what they're selling than in the suc­cess of their sale. So if the peddlers of God's word happen to be preachers, it's preaching as an end in itself that they're apt to concentrate on. They do their best to be effective, eloquent, original. They choose the stories that will go over best and be remembered to their credit longest. Or if we hap­pen not to be preachers, then when it comes to just speaking of and out of our faith in a general way we, like them, tend to stick to the salesmanship of it and to speak of it whatever is easiest to speak and whatever we think will go down most easily.

We speak of books we've read and ideas we've had. We speak of great questions like abortion and conservation and the dangers of nuclear power, and of what we take to be the Christian answers to such questions. If we get more personal about it, we speak of problems we've hadproblems with children and old age, problems with sex and marriage, ethical problems­ and of Christian solutions to those problems or at least of Christian ways of viewing them. And if, in the process, we decide to tell stories, then, like the preacher as peddler, we may tell stories about ourselves as well as about other people, but not, for the most part, our real stories, not stories about what lies beneath all our other problems, which is the problem of being human, the problem of trying to hold fast somehow to Christ when much of the time, both in ourselves and in our world, it is as if Christ had never existed. Because all peddlers of God's word have that in common, I think: they tell what costs them least to tell and what will gain them most; and to tell the story of who we really are and of the battle between light and dark, between belief and unbelief, between sin and grace that is waged within us all costs plenty and may not gain us anything, we're afraid, but an uneasy silence and a fishy stare.

So one way or another we are all of us peddlers of God's word, and those of us in the ministry are more apt to be peddlers than most because as professionals we're continually being sought out to display our wares. We're invited to give commencement addresses and to speak about storytelling to people who travel miles to learn the trick. And so it's to all of us that Paul speaks. "We are not," he says (meaning we should not be, must not be, had bloody well better not be), "we are not, like so many, peddlers of God's word; but as men of sincerity, as commissioned by God, in the sight of God we speak in Christ." That's the whole point of it, he says: to speak in Christ, which means among other things, I assume, to speak of Christ. And when it comes to storytelling, that is of course the crux of it. If we are to speak, as he says, with sincerityspeak as we have been commissioned by God to speak, and with our hearts as well as our lipsthen this is the one story above all others that we have in us to tell, you and I. It is his story.

The story of Christ is where we all started from, though we've come so far since then that there are times when you'd hardly know it to listen to us and when we hardly know it ourselves. The story of Christ is what once, somehow and somewhere, we came to Christ through. Maybe it happened little by little-a face coming slowly into focus that we'd been looking at for a long time without really seeing it, a voice gradually making itself heard among many other voices and in such a way that we couldn't help listening after a while, couldn't help trying somehow, in some unsatisfactory way, to answer. Or maybe there was more drama to it than thata sudden catch of the breath at the sound of his name on somebody's lips at a moment we weren't expecting it, a sudden welling up of tears out of a place where we didn't think any tears were. Each of us has a tale to tell if we would only tell it. But however it happened, it comes to seem a long time ago and a long way away, and so many things have happened sinceso many books read, so many sermons heard or preached, so much life livedthat to be re­minded at this stage of the game of the story of Christ, where we all started, is like being suddenly called by your childhood name when you have all but forgotten your childhood name and maybe your childhood too.

The Jehovah's Witness appears on the doorstep, or somebody who's got­ten religious corners you at a party, and embarrassing questions are asked in an embarrassing language. Have you been born again? Have you accepted Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior? And yes, yes, you want to sayhalf humiliated, half appalled and irritated, torn in a dozen direc­tions at once by the directness and corn of it, tongue-tied. You wouldn't be caught dead maybe using such language yourself, but oh Jesus, yes, in some sense your answer is and has to be yes, though to be asked it out of the blue that way, by a stranger you'd never have opened the door to if you'd known what he was after, makes the blood run cold. To be reminded that way or any way of the story of Jesus, where you came from, is like having somebody suddenly produce a picture of home in all its homelinessthe barn that needs cleaning, the sagging porch steps, the face in the dusty windowwhen you've traveled a thousand miles and a thousand years from home and are involved in a thousand new and different things. But the story of Jesus is home nonethelessthe barn, the steps, the face. You belong to it. It belongs to you. It is where you came from. God grant it is also where you are heading for. So that is the story to remember. That is the story beyond all stories to tell.

The story of Jesus is full of darkness as well as of light. It is a story that hides more than it reveals. It is the story of a mystery we must never assume we understand and that comes to us breathless and broken with unspeak­able beauty at the heart of it, yet is by no means a pretty story, though that is the way we're apt to peddle it much of the time. We sand down the rough edges. We play down the obscurities and contradictions. What we can't ex­plain, we explain away. We set Jesus forth as clear-eyed and noble-browed, whereas the chances are he can't have been anything but old before his time once the world started working him over, and once the world was through, his clear eyes were swollen shut and his noble brow as much of a shambles as the rest of him. We're apt to tell his story when we tell it at all, to sell his story, for the poetry and panacea of it. "But we are the aroma of Christ," Paul says, and the story we are given to tell is a story that smells of his life in all its aliveness, and our commission is to tell it in a way that makes it come alive as a story in all its aliveness and to make those who hear it come alive and God knows to make ourselves come alive too.

He was born, the story beginsthe barn that needs cleaning, the sagging steps, the dusty faceand there are times when we have to forget all about the angels and shepherds and star of it, I think, and just let the birth as a birth be wonder enough, which heaven help us it is, this won­der of all wonders. Into a world that has never been famous for taking special care of the naked and helpless, he was born in the same old way to the same old end and in all likelihood howled bloody murder with the rest of us when they got the breath going in him and he sensed more or less what he was in for. An old man in the Temple predicted great things for him but terrible things for the mother who loved him in what seem to have been all the wrong ways. He got lost in the city and worried his parents sick. John baptized him in the river and wondered afterwards if he'd chosen the right man. It wasn't just Satan who tempted him then because for the rest of his life just about everybody tempted himhis best friend, his disciples, his mother and brothers, his enemies. They all of them tempted him one way or another not to go off the deep end but to stay on the bearable surface of thingsto work miracles you could see with your eyes, to feed hungers you could feel in your belly, to heal the sickness of the flesh you could touch, to be a power among powers and to avoid the powerless, the sinful, the deadbeats like the plague in favor of the outwardly righteous, the publicly pious.

But "like a root out of dry ground," he came, Isaiah says (53:2), and it was down at the roots of things that he moved all his life like a moledown at the undetected sickness fiercer than flesh, the buried sin, the hidden ho­liness. "Cleave the wood, I am there," he says in the apocryphal Gospel of Thomas. "Lift the stone, and you will find me there" (77), and it is always far beneath that he is to be found and deep within that his most shattering miracles happen. He made precious few friends and a mob of enemies. He taught in a way that almost nobody either understood or wanted to risk understanding, least of all the ones who were closest to him. And in the end they got him. And forget all the grim paraphernalia of his death, because the obscenity and horror have long since been ritualized out of it. They got him, that's all. He wasn't spared a damned thing. It was awful beyond tell­ing, god-awful. And then it happened.

However we try to explain it, however we try at all costs to avoid hav­ing to explain it because it was so long ago and seems so wild and crazy and because so many other more plausible, manageable things have happened since; whatever words we can find for telling the story or for watering it downwhat happened was that he wasn't dead anymore. He wasn't dead. Anymore. He was not a ghost. By comparison, it's we who are the ghosts. The worst we know of darkness, any of us, was split in two like an atom. The explosion shook history to its roots, shook even us once to our roots, though it's sometimes hard to remember. The fallout continues to this dayfalls imperceptibly, without a sound, like snow or ash, like light. Only it is not death-dealing. It is life-dealing. You and I are here in this place now because of what little life it dealt us. Because of this story of Jesus, each of our own stories is in countless ways different from what it would have been otherwise, and that is why in speaking about him we must speak also about ourselves and about ourselves with him and without him too because that, of course, is the other story we have in us to remember and tell. Our own story.

We are men and women of sincerity, Paul says, and God help us if we're not because that's what we're cracked up to be, and sincerity you'd like to think would be the least of it. We are commissioned by God to speak in Christ, and to speak in Christ is to speak truth; and there is no story whose truth we are closer to than our own, than the story of what it's like to live inside ourselves. The trouble is that, like Christ's story, this too is apt to be the last we tell, partly because we are uncomfortable with it and afraid of sincerity and partly because we have half forgotten it. But tell it we must and, before we tell it to anybody else, tell it first of all to ourselves and keep on telling it, because unless we do, unless we live with, and out of, the story of who we are inside ourselves, we lose track of who we are. We live so much on the outer surface and seeming of our lives and our faith that we lose touch with the deep places that they both come from.

We have the story of our own baptism, for oneif not by water, in a river, then by fire God knows where, because there isn't one of us whose life hasn't flamed up into moments when a door opened somewhere that let the future in, moments when we moved through that door as Jesus moved out of Jordan, not perfectly cleansed but cleansed enough, with the past behind us, we hoped, and a new sense of what at its most out­landish and holiest the future might become. And God knows we have all had our wilderness and our temptations toonot the temptation to work evil probably, because by grace or luck we don't have what it takes for more than momentary longings in that direction, but the temptation to settle for the lesser good, which is evil enough and maybe a worse one ­to settle for niceness and usefulness and busyness instead of for holiness; to settle for plausibility and eloquence instead of for truth. And miracles too are part of our story as well as of his, blind though we are to them most of the time and leery as we are of acknowledging them, because to acknowledge a miracle is to have to act on it somehowto become some kind of miracles ourselvesand that's why they scare us to death. The miracle of our own births when the odds were millions to one against them. The miracle of every right turn we ever took and every healing word we ever spoke. The miracle of loving sometimes even the unlovely, and out of our own unlove­liness. And the half-forgotten miracles by which we've turned up here now, such as we are, who might never have made it here at all when you consider all the hazards along the way.

And crucifixion is part of our stories too, because we too are men and women of sorrow and acquainted with grief. Maybe our crucifixion is in knowing that for all we'd like to believe to the contrary, we don't have the stomach for even such few, half-baked chances to give up something pre­cious for him as come our way, let alone for giving up, in any sense that re­ally matters, our selves for him. Yet we're raised up nonetheless. We're raised up, and we have that to tell of too, that part of our story. In spite of every reason to give the whole show up, we're here still just able to hope; in spite of all the griefs and failures we've known, we're here still just able to rejoice; in spite of the darkness we all of us flirt with, we are here still just a little, at least, in love with light. By miracle we survive even our own shabbiness, and for the time being maybe that is resurrection enough.

Two stories thenour own story and Jesus's story, and in the end, per­haps, they are the same story. "Cleave the wood, I am there. Lift up the stone, and you will find me there." To cleave the truth of our own lives, to live and look beneath our own stories, is to see glimmers at least of his life, of his life struggling to come alive in our lives, his story whispering like a song through the babble and drone of ours. "Where he is strong, we are weak, God knows. Where he is faithful, we are what we are. Where he opens him­self to the worst the world can do for the sake of the best the world can be, we arm ourselves against the world with the world's hard armor for our own sweet sakes. Our stories are at best a parody of his story, and if, as Paul says, we are the fragrance of Christ, then it is like the fragrance of the sea from ten miles inland when the wind is in the right direction, like the fragrance of a rose from the other side of the street with all the world between.

Yet they meet as well as diverge, our stories and his, and even when they diverge, it is his they diverge from, so that by his absence as well as by his pres­ence in our lives we know who he is and who we are and who we are not.

We have it in us to be Christs to each other and maybe in some un­imaginable way to God too- that's what we have to tell finally. We have it in us to work miracles of love and healing as well as to have them worked upon us. We have it in us to bless with him and forgive with him and heal with him and once in a while maybe even to grieve with some measure of his grief at another's pain and to rejoice with some measure of his rejoic­ing at another's joy almost as if it were our own. And who knows but that in the end, by God's mercy, the two stories will converge for good and all, and though we would never have had the courage or the faith or the wit to die for him any more than we have ever managed to live for him very well either, his story will come true in us at last. And in the meantime, this side of Paradise, it is our business (not, like so many, peddlers of God's word, but as men and women of sincerity) to speak with our hearts (which is what sincerity means) and to bear witness to, and live out of, and live toward, and live by the true word of his holy story as it seeks to stammer itself forth through the holy stories of us all. 

Weekly Sermon Illustration: Righteousness

In our blog post every Monday we select a reading from the for the upcoming Sunday, and pair it with a Frederick Buechner reading on the same topic.

On September 25, 2016 we will celebrate the Nineteenth Sunday after Pentecost.  Here is this weeks reading from the book of 1 Timothy:

1 Timothy 6:6-12
Of course, there is great gain in godliness combined with contentment; for we brought nothing into the world, so that we can take nothing out of it; but if we have food and clothing, we will be content with these. But those who want to be rich fall into temptation and are trapped by many senseless and harmful desires that plunge people into ruin and destruction. For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil, and in their eagerness to be rich some have wandered away from the faith and pierced themselves with many pains. But as for you, man of God, shun all this; pursue righteousness, godliness, faith, love, endurance, gentleness. Fight the good fight of the faith; take hold of the eternal life, to which you were called and for which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.

Here is Buechners note Righteousness originally published in Wishful Thinking and later again in Beyond Words:

"You haven't got it right!" says the exasperated piano teacher. Junior is holding his hands the way he's been told. His fingering is unexceptionable. He has memorized the piece perfectly. He has hit all the proper notes with deadly accuracy. But his heart's not in it, only his fingers. What he's playing is a sort of music but nothing that will start voices singing or feet tapping. He has succeeded in boring everybody to death including himself.

Jesus said to his disciples, ""Unless your righteousness exceeds that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never enter the kingdom of Heaven."" (Matthew 5:20) The scribes and Pharisees were playing it by the Book. They didn't slip up on a single do or don't. But they were getting it all wrong.

Righteousness is getting it all right. If you play it the way it's supposed to be played, there shouldn't be a still foot in the house.

Growing Up

And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying, Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto myself. Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my cov­enant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people; for all the earth is mine; and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation. These are the words which thou shalt speak unto the children of Israel.

-Exodus 19:3-6, KJV

So put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander. Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord. You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light.

-1 Peter 2:1-3, 9

"Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief, doctor, lawyer, merchant chief," or "Indian chief" sometimes if that is how you happened to be feeling that day. That was how the rhyme went in my time anyway, and you used it when you were counting the cherry pits on your plate or the petals on a daisy or the buttons on your shirt or blouse. The one you ended up counting was, of course, the one you ended up being. Rich? Poor? Stand­ing on a street corner with a tin cup in your hand? Or maybe a career in organized crime?

What in the world, what in heaven's name, were you going to be when you grew up? It was not just another question. It was the great question. In fact everything I want to say here is based on the belief that it is the great question still. What are you going to be? What am I going to be? I have been in more or less the same trade now for some thirty years and contem­plate no immediate change, but I like to think of it still as a question that is wide open. For God's sake, what do you suppose we are going to be, you and I? When we grow up.

Something in us rears back in indignation, of course. We are not chil­dren anymore, most of us. Surely we have our growing up behind us. We have come many a long mile and thought many a long thought. We have taken on serious responsibilities, made hard decisions, weathered many a crisis. Surely the question is, rather, what are we now and how well are we doing at it? If not doctors, lawyers, merchant chiefs, we are whatever we arecomputer analysts, businesswomen, schoolteachers, artists, ecologists, ministers even. We like to think that one way or another we have already made our mark on the world. So isn't the question not "What are we go­ing to be?" but "What are we now?" We don't have to count cherry pits to find out what we are going to do with our lives because, for better or worse, those dice have already been cast. Now we simply get on with the game, whatever is left of it for us. That is what life is all about from here on out.

But then. Then maybe we have to listenlisten back farther than the rhymes of our childhood even, thousands of years farther back than that. A thick cloud gathers on the mountain as the book of Exodus describes it. There are flickers of lightning, jagged and dangerous. A clap of thunder shakes the earth and sets the leaves of the trees trembling, sets even you and me trembling a little if we have our wits about us. Suddenly the great shophar sounds, the ram's horna long-drawn, pulsing note louder than thunder, more dangerous than lightningand out of the darkness, out of the mystery, out of some cavernous part of who we are, a voice calls: "Now therefore, if ye will obey my voice indeed, and keep my covenant, then ye shall be a peculiar treasure unto me above all people"my segullah the Hebrew word is, my precious ones, my darlings"and ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation."

Then, thousands of years later but still thousands of years ago, there is another voice to listen to. It is the voice of an old man dictating a letter. There is reason to believe that he may actually have been the one who up till almost the end was the best friend that Jesus had: Peter himself "So put away all malice and all guile and insincerity and envy and all slander," he says. "Like newborn babes, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up to salvation; for you have tasted the kindness of the Lord." And then he echoes the great cry out of the thunderclouds with a cry of his own. "You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people," he says, "that you may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called you out of darkness into his marvelous light."

What are we going to be when we grow up? Not what are we going to do, what profession are we going to follow or keep on following, what niche are we going to occupy in the order of things. But what are we go­ing to beinside ourselves and among ourselves? That is the question that God answers with the Torah at Sinai. That is the question that the old saint answers in his letter from Rome.

Holy. That is what we are going to be if God gets his way with us. It is wildly unreasonable because it makes a shambles out of all our reasonable ambitions to be this or to be that. It is not really a human possibility at all because holiness is Godness and only God makes holiness possible. But being holy is what growing up in the full sense means, Peter suggests. No matter how old we are or how much we have achieved or dream of achiev­ing still, we are not truly grown up until this extraordinary thing happens. Holiness is what is to happen. Out of darkness we are called into "his mar­velous light," Peter writes, who knew more about darkness than most of us, if you stop to think about it, and had looked into the very face itself of Light. We are called to have faces like thatto be filled with light so that we can be bearers of light. I have seen a few such faces in my day, and so have you, unless I miss my guess. Are we going to be rich, poor, beggars, thieves, or in the case of most of us a little of each? Who knows? In the long run, who even cares? Only one thing is worth really caring about, and it is this: "Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, and an holy nation."

Israel herself was never much good at it, God knows. That is what most of the Old Testament is mostly about. Israel did not want to be a holy nation. Israel wanted to be a nation like all the other nations, a nation like Egypt, like Syria. She wanted clout. She wanted security. She wanted a place in the sun. It was her own way she wanted, not God's way; and when the prophets got after her for it, she got rid of the prophets, and when God's demands seemed too exorbitant, God's promises too remote, she took up with all the other gods who still get our votes and our money and our nine­-to-five energies, because they are gods who could not care less whether we are holy or not and promise absolutely everything we really want and abso­lutely nothing we really need.

We cannot very well blame Israel because of course we are Israel. Who wants to be holy? The very word has fallen into disrepute-holier-than ­thou, holy Joe, holy mess. And "saint" comes to mean plaster saint, some­body of such stifling moral perfection that we would run screaming in the other direction if our paths ever crossed. We are such children, you and I, the way we do such terrible things with such wonderful words. We are such babes in the woods the way we keep getting lost.

And yet we have our moments. Every once in a while, I think, we actually long to be what out of darkness and mystery we are called to be; when we hunger for holiness even so, even if we would never dream of using the word. There come moments, I think, even in the midst of all our cynicism and worldliness and childishness, maybe especially then, when there is something about the saints of the earth that bowls us over a little. I mean real saints. I mean saints as men and women who are made not out of plaster and platitude and moral perfection but out of human flesh. I mean saints who have their rough edges and their blind spots like everybody else but whose lives are transparent to something so extraor­dinary that every so often it stops us dead in our tracks. Light-bearers. Life-bearers.

I remember once going to see the movie Gandhi when it first came out, for instance. We were the usual kind of noisy, restless Saturday night crowd as we sat there waiting for the lights to dim with our popcorn and soda pop, girlfriends and boyfriends, legs draped over the backs of the empty seats in front of us. But by the time the movie came to a close with the flames of Gandhi's funeral pyre filling the entire wide screen, there was not a sound or a movement in that whole theater, and we filed out of thereteenagers and senior citizens, blacks and whites, swingers and squaresin as deep and telling a silence as I have ever been part of

"You have tasted of the kindness of the Lord," Peter wrote. We had tasted it. In the life of that little bandy-legged, bespectacled man with his spinning wheel and his bare feet and whatever he had in the way of selfless passion for peace and passionate opposition to every form of violence, we had all of us tasted something that at least for a few moments that Saturday night made every other kind of life seem empty, something that at least for the moment I think every last one of us yearned for the way in a far country you yearn for home.

"Ye shall be unto me a kingdom of priests, an holy nation." Can a nation be holy? It is hard to imagine it. Some element of a nation maybe, some remnant or root''A shoot coming forth from the stump of Jesse," as Isaiah put it, "that with righteousness shall judge the poor and decide with equity for the meek of the earth" (11:1,4). The eighteenth-century men and women who founded this nation dreamed just such a high and holy dream for us too and gave their first settlements over here names to match. New Haven, New Hope, they called themnames that almost bring tears to your eyes if you listen to what they are saying, or once said. Providence. Concord. Salem, which is shalom, the peace of God. Dreams like that die hard, and please God there is still some echo of them in the air around us. But for years now, the meek of the earth have been scared stiff at the power we have to blow the earth to smithereens a thousand times over and at our failure year after year to work out with our enemies a way of significantly limiting that hideous power. In this richest of all nations, the poor go to bed hungry, if they are lucky enough to have a bed, because after the staggering amounts we continue to spend on defending ourselves, there is not enough left over to feed the ones we are defending, to help give them decent roofs over their heads, decent schools for their children, decent care when they are sick and old.

The nation that once dreamed of being a new hope, a new haven, for the world has become the number one bully of the world, blundering and blustering and bombing its way, convinced that it is right and that everyone who disagrees with it is wrong. Maybe that is the way it inevitably is with nations. They are so huge and complex. By definition they are so exclusively concerned with their own self-interest conceived in the narrowest terms that they have no eye for holiness, of all things, no ears to hear the great command to be saints, no heart to break at the thought of what this world could be-the friends we could be as nations if we could learn to listen to each other instead of just shouting at each other, the common problems we could help each other solve, all the human anguish we could join together to heal.

You and I are the eyes and ears. You and I are the heart. It is to us that Peter's Letter is addressed. "So put away all malice and all guile and insincer­ity and envy and all slander," he says. No shophar sounds or has to sound. It is as quiet as the scratching of a pen, as familiar as the sight of our own faces in the mirror. We have always known what was wrong with us. The malice in us even at our most civilized. Our insincerity, the masks we do our real business behind. The envy, the way other people's luck can sting like wasps. And all slander, making such caricatures of each other that we treat each other like caricatures, even when we love each other. All this infantile nonsense and ugliness. "Put it away!" Peter says. "Grow up to salvation!" For Christ's sake, grow up.

Grow up? For old people isn't it a little too late? For young people isn't it a little too early? I do not think so. Never too late, never too early to grow up, to be holy. We have already tasted it after all-tasted the kindness of the Lord, Peter says. That is a haunting thought. I believe you can see it in our eyes sometimes. Just the way you can see something more than animal in animals' eyes, I think you can sometimes see something more than human in human eyes, even yours and mine. I think we belong to holiness even when we cannot believe it exists anywhere, let alone in ourselves. That is why everybody left that crowded shopping-mall theater in such unearthly silence. It is why it is hard not to be haunted by that famous photograph of the only things that Gandhi owned at the time of his death: his glasses and his watch, his sandals, a bowl and spoon, a book of songs. What does any of us own to match such riches as that?

Children that we are, even you and I, who have given up so little, know in our hearts not only that it is more blessed to give than to receive, but that it is also more funthe kind of holy fun that wells up like tears in the eyes of saints, the kind of blessed fun in which we lose ourselves and at the same time begin to find ourselves, to grow up into the selves we were created to become.

When Henry James, of all people, was saying good-bye once to his young nephew Billy, his brother William's son, he said something that the boy never forgot. And of all the labyrinthine and impenetrably subtle things that that most labyrinthine and impenetrable old romancer could have said, what he did say was this: "There are three things that are important in hu­man life. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. The third is to be kind."

Be kind because although kindness is not by a long shot the same thing as holiness, kindness is one of the doors that holiness enters the world through, enters us throughnot just gently kind but sometimes fiercely kind.

Be kind enough to yourselves not just to play it safe with your lives for your own sakes, but to spend at least part of your lives like drunken sailorsfor God's sake, if you believe in God, for the world's sake, if you believe in the worldand thus to come alive truly.

Be kind enough to others to listen, beneath all the words they speak, for that usually unspoken hunger for holiness that I believe is part of even the unlikeliest of us because by listening to it and cherishing it maybe we can help bring it to birth both in them and in ourselves.

Be kind to this nation of ours by remembering that New Haven, New Hope, Shalom are the names not just of our oldest towns but of our holiest dreams, which most of the time are threatened by the madness of no enemy without as dangerously as they are threatened by our own madness within.

"You have tasted of the kindness of the Lord," Peter wrote in his Letter, and ultimately that, of course, is the kindness, the holiness, the sainthood and sanity we are all of us called to. So that by God's grace we may "grow up to salvation" at last.

The way the light falls through the windows. The sounds our silence makes when we come together like this. The sense we have of each other's presence. The feeling in the air that one way or another we are all of us here to give each other our love, and to give God our love. This kind moment itself is a door that holiness enters through. May it enter you. May it enter me. To the world's saving.