Meandering
Commentary
Object:
Wanderers meander. This haunting term comes from the Meander River of eastern Turkey, which, from ancient times, was a visual metaphor for how to take the longest path between two points. The Meander River convolutes its way through a long alluvial plane, turning this way and that till all directions seem ambiguous.
So it is with the people of our lectionary readings today. When David loses his heart for God, he meanders into behaviors that compromise his identity until he can't even see himself in Nathan's moral parable mirror. Without the clear connection between Christ and his people, meandering becomes the way of life in a darkened world, as Paul notes in his letter to the Ephesians. John, in his gospel, reminds us that those who meander after Jesus need to find the way, the truth, and the life before they can even find themselves.
2 Samuel 11:26--12:13a
The demise of David's reign is tied to a fascinating story that seems to be constantly repeated in political annals: an extramarital affair. Why would David do such a thing? Not just the romantic encounter itself, but the deliberately planned murder (engaging others of his trusted subordinates as willing or unwilling accomplices), the massive deceptions, the elaborate cover-ups, and even the personal delusions that kept him from seeing his own guilt.
Part of the answer has to be found in the very first verse of 2 Samuel 11 -- "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army… but David stayed in Jerusalem." This hints at several things. First, the time of the year lent itself to surging hormones and amorous thoughts. After the months of terrestrial hibernation, the world around David was beginning to bloom, the days were getting warmer (Jerusalem sometimes gets snow in winter), animals and plants were exercising their mating rituals and along with them the human crowd in the palace and the capital city were showing signs of "frisky" behavior. There is good reason to celebrate Valentine's Day in the spring, and David himself was a muscular male whose own body welcomed the virus of libido.
Second, David's life was a runaway success. His early contestants to the throne of Israel had all been killed, defeated, or swept aside. David was at the top of the corporate ladder, with no immediate challengers in sight. His kingdom was consolidated, his enemies vanquished, his market share a supreme monopoly, his income substantial and rising, his palatial mansion finished, and his goals achieved. David was at the place in his career where "can't" and "defeat" were no longer part of his vocabulary. What he wanted, he got. What he desired, he took. What he planned, happened. No questions asked. Winning a new territory or another heart were essentially the same: get the idea and make it so.
Third, David had begun to isolate himself from the masses. He had the disease of wealthy insulation, where immediate consequences of actions cannot and need not be felt. The armies went off to war, but David stayed in Jerusalem. The workers buzzed about in their daily rituals, but he sat on the roof of his palace and surveyed the scene. Regular folks had to labor for a wage, but there was no schedule David had to keep. He could sleep, sneak, sulk, skulk, sidle, or stroll at will. Adultery was at one time mainly the prerogative of the rich simply because only they had the time and means. Today mass transportation, suburban domestic isolation and a culture of leisure dispensed it liberally to all classes of society. However, David lived in one of those eras when "fooling around" was a natural correlation to being rich and powerful.
These things come through in Nathan's ingenious invective against his friend and lord. Telling a story of the difference in lifestyle between the uncaring and presumptive rich man and the tenderhearted poor fellow aggravated David, as it should have. But his self-deception was so great that he did not see himself in the mirror until Nathan bashed it against his psyche.
The outcome of David's devious treachery would be family squabbles, and the disruption of the monarchy for the rest of David's life. David and Bathsheba's first child would die, followed by the tragic demise of several other children. David himself would limp from the throne in his old age, barely keeping the restive kingdom alive.
With the establishment of the monarchy, the history of Israel angles in a new and decisive direction. From this time forward the national identity will be bound up, once again, in a regenerating cycle of point person human leaders who will coalesce the religious, moral, and political vision of the nation. While Solomon will take that mandate to the expansive heights expected by Yahweh in the world-changing mission imparted originally to Abraham, the journey of jubilation will soon turn into a trail of tears as subsequent kings mostly make a mockery of the whole business. Only when David's last kingly scion, Jesus of Nazareth, appears, will the divine mission and the royal line converge again in a new and unprecedented way.
Ephesians 4:1-16
Some years ago a major research firm conducted a survey to determine what people would be willing to do for $10 million. The results were astounding. Three percent would put their children up for adoption. Seven percent would kill a stranger. Ten percent would lie in court to set a murderer free. Sixteen percent would divorce their spouses. Twenty-three percent said they would become prostitutes for a week or longer.
Most astonishing was the category at the top of the list. One fourth of all surveyed said that they would leave their families for $10 million.
Everyone has a selling price at which he or she will step over a line of conduct and allow someone else to dictate the terms of behavior. It might be $10 million or it might only be one more bottle of wine. It might be a night in the spotlight or a night in bed. In Shusaku Endo's powerful novel Silence, the missionary priest Rodriguez steps over the line when torture exceeds what his soul can bear, and he desecrates an image of Jesus. We all have our selling price.
Our selling price is linked to our identity. The stronger our sense of who we are, the higher our selling price and the deeper our character. There are, however, several identities that each of us wears.
The first is the identity we receive from others. We get our looks and temperament from our parents. We garner our tastes and styles from our culture. There is even something mystical about us that we receive as a gift from God, unique to our personalities.
Poet John Masefield understood that when he reflected on how it was that he started writing and rhyming. One day he picked up a volume of Geoffrey Chaucer's works and was gripped by the art of the lines. Masefield couldn't put the book down. That night he read until a whole new world opened for him. By the time morning broke, said Masefield, he had finished the entire book, set it down, looked at the dawning day and quietly said, "I too am a poet." And so he was.
A second identity we have in life is the one we make. In the drama The Rainmaker the main character is a con artist who calls himself Starbuck. He travels from town to town during the Dirty '30s scheming to get people to pay him to bring the rains for their parched fields.
Young Lizzie Curry catches his eye and they spar with building passion. But Lizzie is no fool and she challenges him to come clean with her about his true name. It can't really be Starbuck, she knows.
Starbuck admits that he was born a "Smith," but asks, "What kind of name is that for a fellow like me? I needed a name that had the whole sky in it! And the power of a man! Starbuck! Now there's a name -- and it's mine!"
Lizzie tries to contradict him, telling him he has no right choosing his own name and giving up his family heritage. Yet he will not capitulate quickly. "You're wrong, Lizzie," he says. "The name you choose for yourself is more your own name than the name you were born with!"
Starbuck is on to something. Much of what we see in people around us has to do with what they have made of themselves. When an English nobleman named Roberts was having his portrait painted the artist asked him if he would like the lines and creases in his face smoothed over.
"Certainly not!" he objected. "Make sure you put them all in. I earned every single wrinkle on my face!"
He was a man who knew the identity he had made.
There is also a third and deeper human identity. It is the identity that transforms us from what we were to what we are becoming. The poet saw a friend clearly when he wrote:
And there were three men went down the road
As down the road went he:
The man they saw, the man he was,
And the man he wanted to be.
The person we each want to be when we find our truest selves in God is larger than either the identity we have received from others or the one we try to create. This is the thought Paul hopes to encourage in his wonderful metaphor of our connection with Christ. Anything that sullies us by trying to define us on terms less than God's grace limits our best self.
Someone has suggested a powerfully illuminating analogy. When a ship is built, he said, each part has a little voice of its own. As seamen walk the passageways on her maiden voyage they can hear the creaking whispers of separate identities: "I'm a rivet!" "I'm a sheet of steel!" "I'm a propeller!" "I'm a beam!" For a while these little voices sing their individual songs, proudly independent and fiercely self-protective.
Then a storm blows in on the high seas and the waves toss, the gales hurl, and the rain beat. If the parts of the ship try to withstand the pummeling independent from one another each would be lost. On the bridge, however, stands the captain. He issues orders that take all of the little voices and bring them together for a larger purpose. By the time the vessel has weathered the storm sailors hear a new and deeper song echoing from stem to stern: "I am a ship!"
It is the captain's call that creates the deeper identity. So too in our lives, according to Paul. Minor stars in a world of glamour try to sing siren songs pulling bits and pieces of us from the voyage of our lives. Those who hear the captain's call are able to sail true and straight.
John 6:24-35
I was sitting at a cafeteria table at a large university. Crowds of hungry people swept by, none that I knew or ought to have known. But then a face. Hadn't I seen that face before? And that smile. She knows me. But how? From when? Who is she?
And then her voice as she greeted me. Sure, I knew her! It was Lynn. Exactly one decade earlier she was a member of a mission team for which I had served as leader. We chatted excitedly. It's hard to catch up on ten years in ten minutes. What are you doing here? Are you married? Children? Career? Ever see any of the "old" team members?
Lynn's eyes were bright, but her spirit was much more guarded than it had been a decade before. When I knew her, she had recently made public profession of faith, and life before her was an open door of Christian service. She had goals ("college") and plans ("work with disadvantaged children, maybe") and enthusiasm ("Who knows where God might lead me?"). If any one of the mission team members was going to make a difference in the world for Christ, it would have been Lynn.
Somehow it didn't all work out the way she planned. A whirlwind relationship with a guy others had cautioned her against, pregnancy, forced marriage, verbal and physical abuse, substance dependence, withdrawal from the church, divorce, shame, and pain. How did it happen, Lynn? To you, of all people?! "That's just it… I don't really know. I wanted to experience life like others did. One thing led to the next. There was never any real turning point or decision to drop my faith. It just happened."
It just happened….
A mother calls me about two daughters. Neither denies the faith, but they have drifted into other lifestyles, and the church really isn't that important anymore. It just happened….
A businessman succeeds while others fail. He doesn't really need the church or God, although he would be the last to deny their validity. But that's not where he's at. It just happened….
Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge writes about what he calls a "religionless Christianity." "It's not a matter that they've done a serious examination of the faith and decided it doesn't make intellectual sense," he says. "The biggest problem is just one of apathy." People drift through the circumstances of life and along the way become simply somewhat indifferent.
Like Lynn. Like a host of people we know. And like the people who followed Jesus around the Sea of Galilee in today's lectionary passage. Jesus says as much. "I am the bread of life," he reminds them, even as he challenges them about only being interested in titillating experiences and free food.
Somehow other things have stolen their heart and their religion. Maybe it's the sense of frustration that religion doesn't make a difference in most people's lives. Maybe it's a lack of spiritual integrity on the part of those around us. Maybe it's just the silence of God. But the drift of life swirls so many of us into a current of doubt, apathy, and indifference: "religionless churchianity."
Then grace enters. Jesus comes reminding us what really matters. Lynn tells me she asked her church council if she could stand and apologize to the congregation where she once stood to make public profession of faith. Drifters find a new current and hearts regain strength. Why?
Perhaps because life in the other currents isn't as satisfying as the travel brochures promise. Perhaps because rude circumstances wake us up to deeper needs. Perhaps the food on the world's menu doesn't really satisfy. But perhaps, most of all, because God never lets us go.
When you're drifting along in the river of life, a snag can be an annoying thing. But if the water is pulling you toward Niagara Falls, the snag may be the most refreshing sense of grace you could ever imagine. That's why Jesus calls on us to taste the food of heaven. Maybe then we will remember what really matters.
Application
Do you remember the song, "Delta Dawn," that Helen Reddy made popular years ago? It tells the story of a 41-year-old woman who lives in Brownsville, Texas. She spends her days wandering around the downtown streets, carrying a suitcase and waiting for "a mysterious dark-haired man" who loved her once and promised to return to make her his bride. I can see her, in my mind's eye, wearing a rumpled wedding dress, a crazy glint in her stare, muttering to herself, peering into the faces of the men she meets, looking for her lost love. But he never comes.
The crowds on the streets of Brownsville stop and shake their heads. They laugh a little, and they raise that sad, sad chorus:
Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meetin' you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
It's a sad song, ominous in its overtones. The part that scares me, though, is this: Sometimes that song seems to be a picture of what the church looks like in this society -- a half-crazed bride pledged to a no-show husband, wandering around muttering to herself while the world shakes its head in disbelief.
Stories like David's affair with Bathsheba, the potential wanderers of the Ephesian congregations who sometimes lose their connection to Christ, or the crowds that meander around the Sea of Galilee looking for experiential spirituality without religious commitment remind us that we need mirrors. Do we see ourselves as others see us? And do we care?
Alternative Application
Ephesians 4:1-16. Paul's letters from prison addressed a couple of specific issues -- the nature of a relationship between master and slave, for instance, when both were Christians (Philemon), and a proper response to the false teaching that was being promulgated at Colossae. But mostly they paint, in vibrant colors, the character of moral choices in a world that is compromised and broken. Darkness and light are the key metaphors. Evil has wrapped a blanket of pain and harm around all that takes place in the human arena.
Our lectionary reading from Paul's letter to the Ephesians is the beginning of a lengthy comparison between the darkness of this world and the brightness of life in Christ. It is essentially an ethical treatise on what it means to have one's values and behaviors shaped either by the evil moral soup in which our globe swims or otherwise by the energizing ether of Christ's scintillating ozone.
George MacDonald wrote a story about this called "The Day Boy and the Night Girl." The girl had been raised in a dark cave by a witch and never was allowed to see the light of day. The boy, on the other hand, was raised to live and breathe and romp during the daylight. Never was he allowed to sleep during the day. Never was he put in dark spaces. He went to bed before the sun went down, and his room was brightly lit by candles and torches.
So, says MacDonald, these two roamed their separate worlds. The Night Girl managed to find her way out of the cave but only during nocturnal darkness. And the Day Boy spread his flights of fancy further abroad, always making sure to be home before sunset.
Of course, destiny draws this pair together. On one day's hunt, the Day Boy strays too far and is too late to avoid the onset of twilight. Falling asleep in bewilderment at the growing gloom, he's later awakened by the Night Girl, who is searching for friends.
"You are a creature of the darkness and love the night," he told her reproachfully.
"I may be a creature of the darkness," she replied. "But I do not love the night. I love the day -- with all my heart...."
But she has never had a guide to the light, nor he a teacher of the night. So they become fast friends, playing out the same youthful delight on either side of dawn and dusk. When they come to marry, this is the Day Boy's prayer: "She has got to teach me to be a brave man in the dark, and I have got to look after her until she can bear the heat of the sun and help her to see, instead of blinding her."
Perhaps the marriage of heaven and earth is something like that. It certainly is a major theme of Paul as he writes about the place of Christians in a darkened world.
Jesus is the brilliant light of God, penetrating earth's atmosphere with grace and reconciliation. Because of Jesus' physical departure at the ascension, his followers now must step in and become ten thousand points of light, restoring relationships and renewing meaning. Jesus is great, and because of our connection with him, we can be too. Not for our own sakes, of course, but in the eschatological hope that we already participate in the world of tomorrow today. That is why Christianity is the religion of the dawn.
So it is with the people of our lectionary readings today. When David loses his heart for God, he meanders into behaviors that compromise his identity until he can't even see himself in Nathan's moral parable mirror. Without the clear connection between Christ and his people, meandering becomes the way of life in a darkened world, as Paul notes in his letter to the Ephesians. John, in his gospel, reminds us that those who meander after Jesus need to find the way, the truth, and the life before they can even find themselves.
2 Samuel 11:26--12:13a
The demise of David's reign is tied to a fascinating story that seems to be constantly repeated in political annals: an extramarital affair. Why would David do such a thing? Not just the romantic encounter itself, but the deliberately planned murder (engaging others of his trusted subordinates as willing or unwilling accomplices), the massive deceptions, the elaborate cover-ups, and even the personal delusions that kept him from seeing his own guilt.
Part of the answer has to be found in the very first verse of 2 Samuel 11 -- "In the spring, at the time when kings go off to war, David sent Joab out with the king's men and the whole Israelite army… but David stayed in Jerusalem." This hints at several things. First, the time of the year lent itself to surging hormones and amorous thoughts. After the months of terrestrial hibernation, the world around David was beginning to bloom, the days were getting warmer (Jerusalem sometimes gets snow in winter), animals and plants were exercising their mating rituals and along with them the human crowd in the palace and the capital city were showing signs of "frisky" behavior. There is good reason to celebrate Valentine's Day in the spring, and David himself was a muscular male whose own body welcomed the virus of libido.
Second, David's life was a runaway success. His early contestants to the throne of Israel had all been killed, defeated, or swept aside. David was at the top of the corporate ladder, with no immediate challengers in sight. His kingdom was consolidated, his enemies vanquished, his market share a supreme monopoly, his income substantial and rising, his palatial mansion finished, and his goals achieved. David was at the place in his career where "can't" and "defeat" were no longer part of his vocabulary. What he wanted, he got. What he desired, he took. What he planned, happened. No questions asked. Winning a new territory or another heart were essentially the same: get the idea and make it so.
Third, David had begun to isolate himself from the masses. He had the disease of wealthy insulation, where immediate consequences of actions cannot and need not be felt. The armies went off to war, but David stayed in Jerusalem. The workers buzzed about in their daily rituals, but he sat on the roof of his palace and surveyed the scene. Regular folks had to labor for a wage, but there was no schedule David had to keep. He could sleep, sneak, sulk, skulk, sidle, or stroll at will. Adultery was at one time mainly the prerogative of the rich simply because only they had the time and means. Today mass transportation, suburban domestic isolation and a culture of leisure dispensed it liberally to all classes of society. However, David lived in one of those eras when "fooling around" was a natural correlation to being rich and powerful.
These things come through in Nathan's ingenious invective against his friend and lord. Telling a story of the difference in lifestyle between the uncaring and presumptive rich man and the tenderhearted poor fellow aggravated David, as it should have. But his self-deception was so great that he did not see himself in the mirror until Nathan bashed it against his psyche.
The outcome of David's devious treachery would be family squabbles, and the disruption of the monarchy for the rest of David's life. David and Bathsheba's first child would die, followed by the tragic demise of several other children. David himself would limp from the throne in his old age, barely keeping the restive kingdom alive.
With the establishment of the monarchy, the history of Israel angles in a new and decisive direction. From this time forward the national identity will be bound up, once again, in a regenerating cycle of point person human leaders who will coalesce the religious, moral, and political vision of the nation. While Solomon will take that mandate to the expansive heights expected by Yahweh in the world-changing mission imparted originally to Abraham, the journey of jubilation will soon turn into a trail of tears as subsequent kings mostly make a mockery of the whole business. Only when David's last kingly scion, Jesus of Nazareth, appears, will the divine mission and the royal line converge again in a new and unprecedented way.
Ephesians 4:1-16
Some years ago a major research firm conducted a survey to determine what people would be willing to do for $10 million. The results were astounding. Three percent would put their children up for adoption. Seven percent would kill a stranger. Ten percent would lie in court to set a murderer free. Sixteen percent would divorce their spouses. Twenty-three percent said they would become prostitutes for a week or longer.
Most astonishing was the category at the top of the list. One fourth of all surveyed said that they would leave their families for $10 million.
Everyone has a selling price at which he or she will step over a line of conduct and allow someone else to dictate the terms of behavior. It might be $10 million or it might only be one more bottle of wine. It might be a night in the spotlight or a night in bed. In Shusaku Endo's powerful novel Silence, the missionary priest Rodriguez steps over the line when torture exceeds what his soul can bear, and he desecrates an image of Jesus. We all have our selling price.
Our selling price is linked to our identity. The stronger our sense of who we are, the higher our selling price and the deeper our character. There are, however, several identities that each of us wears.
The first is the identity we receive from others. We get our looks and temperament from our parents. We garner our tastes and styles from our culture. There is even something mystical about us that we receive as a gift from God, unique to our personalities.
Poet John Masefield understood that when he reflected on how it was that he started writing and rhyming. One day he picked up a volume of Geoffrey Chaucer's works and was gripped by the art of the lines. Masefield couldn't put the book down. That night he read until a whole new world opened for him. By the time morning broke, said Masefield, he had finished the entire book, set it down, looked at the dawning day and quietly said, "I too am a poet." And so he was.
A second identity we have in life is the one we make. In the drama The Rainmaker the main character is a con artist who calls himself Starbuck. He travels from town to town during the Dirty '30s scheming to get people to pay him to bring the rains for their parched fields.
Young Lizzie Curry catches his eye and they spar with building passion. But Lizzie is no fool and she challenges him to come clean with her about his true name. It can't really be Starbuck, she knows.
Starbuck admits that he was born a "Smith," but asks, "What kind of name is that for a fellow like me? I needed a name that had the whole sky in it! And the power of a man! Starbuck! Now there's a name -- and it's mine!"
Lizzie tries to contradict him, telling him he has no right choosing his own name and giving up his family heritage. Yet he will not capitulate quickly. "You're wrong, Lizzie," he says. "The name you choose for yourself is more your own name than the name you were born with!"
Starbuck is on to something. Much of what we see in people around us has to do with what they have made of themselves. When an English nobleman named Roberts was having his portrait painted the artist asked him if he would like the lines and creases in his face smoothed over.
"Certainly not!" he objected. "Make sure you put them all in. I earned every single wrinkle on my face!"
He was a man who knew the identity he had made.
There is also a third and deeper human identity. It is the identity that transforms us from what we were to what we are becoming. The poet saw a friend clearly when he wrote:
And there were three men went down the road
As down the road went he:
The man they saw, the man he was,
And the man he wanted to be.
The person we each want to be when we find our truest selves in God is larger than either the identity we have received from others or the one we try to create. This is the thought Paul hopes to encourage in his wonderful metaphor of our connection with Christ. Anything that sullies us by trying to define us on terms less than God's grace limits our best self.
Someone has suggested a powerfully illuminating analogy. When a ship is built, he said, each part has a little voice of its own. As seamen walk the passageways on her maiden voyage they can hear the creaking whispers of separate identities: "I'm a rivet!" "I'm a sheet of steel!" "I'm a propeller!" "I'm a beam!" For a while these little voices sing their individual songs, proudly independent and fiercely self-protective.
Then a storm blows in on the high seas and the waves toss, the gales hurl, and the rain beat. If the parts of the ship try to withstand the pummeling independent from one another each would be lost. On the bridge, however, stands the captain. He issues orders that take all of the little voices and bring them together for a larger purpose. By the time the vessel has weathered the storm sailors hear a new and deeper song echoing from stem to stern: "I am a ship!"
It is the captain's call that creates the deeper identity. So too in our lives, according to Paul. Minor stars in a world of glamour try to sing siren songs pulling bits and pieces of us from the voyage of our lives. Those who hear the captain's call are able to sail true and straight.
John 6:24-35
I was sitting at a cafeteria table at a large university. Crowds of hungry people swept by, none that I knew or ought to have known. But then a face. Hadn't I seen that face before? And that smile. She knows me. But how? From when? Who is she?
And then her voice as she greeted me. Sure, I knew her! It was Lynn. Exactly one decade earlier she was a member of a mission team for which I had served as leader. We chatted excitedly. It's hard to catch up on ten years in ten minutes. What are you doing here? Are you married? Children? Career? Ever see any of the "old" team members?
Lynn's eyes were bright, but her spirit was much more guarded than it had been a decade before. When I knew her, she had recently made public profession of faith, and life before her was an open door of Christian service. She had goals ("college") and plans ("work with disadvantaged children, maybe") and enthusiasm ("Who knows where God might lead me?"). If any one of the mission team members was going to make a difference in the world for Christ, it would have been Lynn.
Somehow it didn't all work out the way she planned. A whirlwind relationship with a guy others had cautioned her against, pregnancy, forced marriage, verbal and physical abuse, substance dependence, withdrawal from the church, divorce, shame, and pain. How did it happen, Lynn? To you, of all people?! "That's just it… I don't really know. I wanted to experience life like others did. One thing led to the next. There was never any real turning point or decision to drop my faith. It just happened."
It just happened….
A mother calls me about two daughters. Neither denies the faith, but they have drifted into other lifestyles, and the church really isn't that important anymore. It just happened….
A businessman succeeds while others fail. He doesn't really need the church or God, although he would be the last to deny their validity. But that's not where he's at. It just happened….
Reginald Bibby of the University of Lethbridge writes about what he calls a "religionless Christianity." "It's not a matter that they've done a serious examination of the faith and decided it doesn't make intellectual sense," he says. "The biggest problem is just one of apathy." People drift through the circumstances of life and along the way become simply somewhat indifferent.
Like Lynn. Like a host of people we know. And like the people who followed Jesus around the Sea of Galilee in today's lectionary passage. Jesus says as much. "I am the bread of life," he reminds them, even as he challenges them about only being interested in titillating experiences and free food.
Somehow other things have stolen their heart and their religion. Maybe it's the sense of frustration that religion doesn't make a difference in most people's lives. Maybe it's a lack of spiritual integrity on the part of those around us. Maybe it's just the silence of God. But the drift of life swirls so many of us into a current of doubt, apathy, and indifference: "religionless churchianity."
Then grace enters. Jesus comes reminding us what really matters. Lynn tells me she asked her church council if she could stand and apologize to the congregation where she once stood to make public profession of faith. Drifters find a new current and hearts regain strength. Why?
Perhaps because life in the other currents isn't as satisfying as the travel brochures promise. Perhaps because rude circumstances wake us up to deeper needs. Perhaps the food on the world's menu doesn't really satisfy. But perhaps, most of all, because God never lets us go.
When you're drifting along in the river of life, a snag can be an annoying thing. But if the water is pulling you toward Niagara Falls, the snag may be the most refreshing sense of grace you could ever imagine. That's why Jesus calls on us to taste the food of heaven. Maybe then we will remember what really matters.
Application
Do you remember the song, "Delta Dawn," that Helen Reddy made popular years ago? It tells the story of a 41-year-old woman who lives in Brownsville, Texas. She spends her days wandering around the downtown streets, carrying a suitcase and waiting for "a mysterious dark-haired man" who loved her once and promised to return to make her his bride. I can see her, in my mind's eye, wearing a rumpled wedding dress, a crazy glint in her stare, muttering to herself, peering into the faces of the men she meets, looking for her lost love. But he never comes.
The crowds on the streets of Brownsville stop and shake their heads. They laugh a little, and they raise that sad, sad chorus:
Delta Dawn, what's that flower you have on?
Could it be a faded rose from days gone by?
And did I hear you say he was a-meetin' you here today
To take you to his mansion in the sky?
It's a sad song, ominous in its overtones. The part that scares me, though, is this: Sometimes that song seems to be a picture of what the church looks like in this society -- a half-crazed bride pledged to a no-show husband, wandering around muttering to herself while the world shakes its head in disbelief.
Stories like David's affair with Bathsheba, the potential wanderers of the Ephesian congregations who sometimes lose their connection to Christ, or the crowds that meander around the Sea of Galilee looking for experiential spirituality without religious commitment remind us that we need mirrors. Do we see ourselves as others see us? And do we care?
Alternative Application
Ephesians 4:1-16. Paul's letters from prison addressed a couple of specific issues -- the nature of a relationship between master and slave, for instance, when both were Christians (Philemon), and a proper response to the false teaching that was being promulgated at Colossae. But mostly they paint, in vibrant colors, the character of moral choices in a world that is compromised and broken. Darkness and light are the key metaphors. Evil has wrapped a blanket of pain and harm around all that takes place in the human arena.
Our lectionary reading from Paul's letter to the Ephesians is the beginning of a lengthy comparison between the darkness of this world and the brightness of life in Christ. It is essentially an ethical treatise on what it means to have one's values and behaviors shaped either by the evil moral soup in which our globe swims or otherwise by the energizing ether of Christ's scintillating ozone.
George MacDonald wrote a story about this called "The Day Boy and the Night Girl." The girl had been raised in a dark cave by a witch and never was allowed to see the light of day. The boy, on the other hand, was raised to live and breathe and romp during the daylight. Never was he allowed to sleep during the day. Never was he put in dark spaces. He went to bed before the sun went down, and his room was brightly lit by candles and torches.
So, says MacDonald, these two roamed their separate worlds. The Night Girl managed to find her way out of the cave but only during nocturnal darkness. And the Day Boy spread his flights of fancy further abroad, always making sure to be home before sunset.
Of course, destiny draws this pair together. On one day's hunt, the Day Boy strays too far and is too late to avoid the onset of twilight. Falling asleep in bewilderment at the growing gloom, he's later awakened by the Night Girl, who is searching for friends.
"You are a creature of the darkness and love the night," he told her reproachfully.
"I may be a creature of the darkness," she replied. "But I do not love the night. I love the day -- with all my heart...."
But she has never had a guide to the light, nor he a teacher of the night. So they become fast friends, playing out the same youthful delight on either side of dawn and dusk. When they come to marry, this is the Day Boy's prayer: "She has got to teach me to be a brave man in the dark, and I have got to look after her until she can bear the heat of the sun and help her to see, instead of blinding her."
Perhaps the marriage of heaven and earth is something like that. It certainly is a major theme of Paul as he writes about the place of Christians in a darkened world.
Jesus is the brilliant light of God, penetrating earth's atmosphere with grace and reconciliation. Because of Jesus' physical departure at the ascension, his followers now must step in and become ten thousand points of light, restoring relationships and renewing meaning. Jesus is great, and because of our connection with him, we can be too. Not for our own sakes, of course, but in the eschatological hope that we already participate in the world of tomorrow today. That is why Christianity is the religion of the dawn.
