By Lucia Lloyd, St. Stephen's Episcopal Church, Heathsville, VA
My Cup Overflows...
Luke 21:5-19, Isaiah 65:17-25
Teachings about heaven can certainly be presented in ways that are cheap or manipulative. For example, heaven can be presented as a bribe to try to make people behave the way you want them to, or it can be presented as a way to try to persuade people that because injustice doesn’t exist in heaven they should tolerate injustice on earth. That idea has never really made any sense to me. I think the opposite is true, that Jesus’ teachings about heaven enable us to glimpse the existence of the goal, so that we don’t get bogged down in the suffering and we can keep working toward it. Maybe what Jesus is telling us is, “we’ll have some suffering today, and some of it’s going to be a downer for a while, but bear with me; it gets better in the end. As Jesus puts it, “by your endurance you will gain your souls.”
God offers us a future in which we do not have to continue our conflicts anymore. God offers us a future in which all the things that separate us and make relationships difficult can be a distant memory. As today’s reading from Isaiah describes it, “The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox.”
That vision may be hard to hold onto in the middle of the suffering of the moment. There is a lot of truth in the saying that old age is not for sissies. In the endurance of the sufferings and losses that add up over the years, God has gifts for us. The novelist Frederich Buechner has written an autobiography entitled Now and Then in which he reflects on the title character of a novel he has written called Godric. Buechner writes,
“As the years go by, Godric outlives, or is left behind by, virtually everybody he has ever loved—his sister Burcwen, his shipmate Roger Mouse, the two snakes, Tune and Fairweather, who for years were his constant companions, and the beautiful maid, Gillian…But, although not without anguish, he is able to let them all go finally and to survive their going. His humanity and wit survive. His faith survives. He prays. He sins. He dreams. And one day not long before his death—bathing in the icy waters of the river Wear as for years he has bathed there, summer and winter, to chasten his flesh—he feels his arms and legs go numb, his pulse all but stop, and speaks these words both for himself and also for me: “Praise, praise!” I croak. Praise God for all that’s holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death.”
As Buechner approaches old age himself, he reflects on the things he is still unsure of. Then he says, “And yet there are some things I would be willing to bet maybe even my life on. That life is grace, for instance—the givenness of it, the fathomlessness of it, the endless possibilities of its becoming transparent to something extraordinary beyond itself. That—as I picked up somewhere in Jung and whittled into the ash stick I use for tramping around through the woods sometimes, vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit, which I take to mean that in the long run, whether you call on him or don’t call on him, God will be present with you. That if we really had our eyes open, we would see that all moments are key moments. That he who does not love remains in death. That Jesus is the Word made flesh who dwells among us full of grace and truth. On good days I might add a few more to the list. On bad days it’s possible there might be a few less. Beyond that, all I can do with real assurance is once more to echo my old teacher Paul Tillich to the effect that here and there even in our world and now and then even in ourselves, we catch glimpses of a New Creation, which, fleeting as those glimpses are apt to be, give us hope both for this life and for whatever life may await us later on. “What’s lost is nothing to what’s found,” as Godric says, “and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.”
11/20/10
Note: If you are still confused about how a gay Christian can feel they are 'right' with God I encourage you to read the section of the web site entitled "Gay and Christian? YES!"