Sermon

"DON'T PREACH TO ME!" means "Don't bore me to death with your offensive platitudes!" Respectable verbs don't get into that kind of trouble entirely by accident.

Sermons are like jokes; even the best ones are hard to remember. In both cases that may be just as well. Ideally the thing to remember is not the preachers' eloquence but the lump in your throat or leap of your heart or the thorn in your flesh that appeared as much in spite of what they said as because of it.

Paul said, "Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!" (1 Corinthians 9:16). Jesus said, "If any of you put a stumbling block before one of these little ones who believe in me, it would be better for you if a great millstone were fastened around your neck and you were drowned in the depth of the sea" (Matthew 18:6). People who preach sermons without realizing that they're heading straight for Scylla and Charybdis ought to try a safer and more productive line of work.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words  

Senses

TASTE AN APPLE. Taste salt.

See the sunlight on the wall, the deer track in the snow.

Hear the luffing of the sail.

Smell the rose, the dead mouse behind the wainscoting, the child's hair.

Touch the hand that is touching your hand.

Although we have been taught better, it is easier to assume that nothing that lies beyond the reach of our five senses is entirely real than to acknowledge that what we know about reality through the five senses is roughly the equivalent of what an ant crawling across the front page of the New York Times knows about the state of the world.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words 

Secrets

WE TEND TO THINK RIGHT AWAY of dark secrets—things we did or failed to do that we have never managed to forgive ourselves for; fierce hungers that we have difficulty admitting even to ourselves; things that happened to us long ago too painful to speak of; doubts about our own worth as human beings, doubts about the people closest to us, about God if we believe in God; and fear—the fear of death, the fear of life.

But there are also happy secrets, the secrets we keep like treasure less because we don't want to share them with the world for fear of somehow tarnishing them than because they are so precious we have no way of sharing them adequately. The love we feel for certain people, some of them people we scarcely know, some of them people who do not suspect our love and wouldn't know how to respond to it if they did. The way our hearts leap at certain things that the chances are wouldn't make anybody else so much as turn a hair—the sound of a particular voice on the telephone, a dogeared book we read as children, the first snow, the sight of an old man smoking his pipe on the porch as we drive by.

We are our secrets. They are the essence of what makes us ourselves. They are the rich loam out of which, for better or worse, grow the selves by which the world knows us. If we are ever to be free and whole, we must be free from their darkness and have their spell over us broken. If we are ever to see each other as we fully are, we must see by their light.

"Search me, O God, and know my heart!" cries out the great Psalm 139, which is all about the hiding and baring of secrets. "Try me and know my thoughts... for darkness is as light to thee." Even our darkness.

It is the secret prayer of us all.

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words 

Second Coming

JUST BEFORE THE FINAL BENEDICTION, the New Testament ends with the prayer, "Come, Lord Jesus!" (Revelation 22:20). When he came the first time, he came so unobtrusively that except for Mary and Joseph and a handful of shepherds, nobody much knew or cared. But he says he will come a second time.

Who knows how he will come, or when, or where. He says himself, "Of that day and hour no one knows, not even the angels of heaven, nor the Son, but the Father only" (Matthew 24:36). People who in search of a timetable try to crack the book of Revelation like a code are on a wild goose chase. People who claim that all who join their sect will be saved and all others lost are wrong. The ones who will be saved, Jesus says, are the ones who feed the hungry, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, and visit the sick and the prisoners (Matthew 25:31-46). If you love, in other words, you're in. If you don't, you're out. It doesn't seem to matter to him whether you're a Jehovah's Witness, a Jesuit, or a Jew.

In one of the more outlandish of his outlandish images, he says he will come like a thief in the night (Matthew 24:42-43). We must be ready at all times therefore. We can never be sure when he will break into the world as into a house, when he will break into our lives.

No one can say just what will happen when that day comes, but that it will be a day to remember there is no doubt. The dead will be raised. The Last Judgment will take place. The present age will end and the new age begin. In Dante's vision, the redeemed will shine like a great white rose unfolding petal by petal in the light of glory. In John's, the new Jerusalem will come down out of heaven like a bride.

"My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness," the risen Christ said to his servant Paul (2 Corinthians 12:9). It is in that hope only that we dare say "Amen" to the prayer that brings all Scripture to a close. 

-Originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Science

SCIENCE IS THE INVESTIGATION of the physical universe and its ways, and consists largely of weighing, measuring, and putting things in test tubes. To assume that this kind of investigation can unearth solutions to all our problems is a form of religious faith whose bankruptcy has only in recent years started to become apparent. 

There is a tendency in many people to suspect that anything that can't be weighed, measured, or put in a test tube is either not real or not worth talking about. That is like a blind person's suspecting that anything that can't be smelled, tasted, touched, or heard is probably a figment of the imagination.

A scientist's views on such subjects as God, morality, and life after death are apt to be about as enlightening as a theologian's views on the structure of the atom or the cause and cure of the common cold.

The conflict between science and religion, which reached its peak toward the end of the nineteenth century, is like the conflict between a podiatrist and a poet. One says that Susie Smith has fallen arches. The other says she walks in beauty like the night. In his own way each is speaking the truth. What is at issue is the kind of truth you're after. 

-Originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words