Midweek Message

Midweek Message

Midweek Message 

Midweek Message

What On Earth Can We Do? The crew of Artemis II, which slung around the dark side of the moon and safely returned to Earth a couple of weeks ago, took this beautiful photo of our home planet. I “shutter” to think that they snapped several other photos of our planet on their journey, including a stunning “Earthset” over the moon and a crescent photo where the Earth was mostly in the moon’s shadow. Today, April 22, is Earth Day, which has been observed annually since 1970. Over 20 million Americans participated in campus and community rallies across the nation at that first event, and it has since expanded to over 200 countries including an estimated one billion people today. Earth Day is credited with propelling the environmental movement that has seen the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency and the passage of legislation like the Clean Air Act. Care and concern for the Earth as our home, however, goes much further back than 1970. The psalmist declares, “The earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world, and those who live in it; for he has founded it on the seas, and established it on the rivers” (Psalm 24:1-2). The Bible makes it clear that the Earth is not our own, to do with whatever we want; rather, the Earth belongs to God, and we are but tenants, trustees, caretakers. When God created the Earth and everything in it, God gave us our role and our responsibility. It was our very first job. We are to “have dominion”—stewardship, supervision, oversight—“over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Genesis 1:28). Seeing photos like the ones Artemis II took reminds us how precious and fragile this Earth is, and how immense our responsibility to take as good care of it as we possibly can. It is a responsibility that we neglect at our own spiritual and existential peril. On this Earth Day, what are some things you can do—not just one day a year, but every day—to fulfill our God-given responsibility to care for the Earth which is the Lord’s. Maybe you can recycle more. Maybe you can try composting. Maybe you can plant a tree or a pollinator garden. Maybe you can use your vehicle less and walk or ride your bicycle or take public transportation more. Maybe you can learn to identify some wildflowers or bird songs. Maybe you can take a hike on one of the trails on this magnificent mountain on which we live, and fall in love with the Earth all over again.

Last summer during our visit to Paris where Wesley was studying abroad, we visited a number of famous churches—Notre-Dame, of course, which was being refurbished after the 2019 fire, and Saint-Eustache, and Sacre-Coeur atop Montmartre. But an unexpected delight came when we visited the Church of St. Sulpice. This church is the second largest church in Paris, after Notre-Dame, and it’s famous for a few things: its magnificent pipe organ (one of the largest in the world), its rich frescoes by Eugene Delacroix, its meridian line that is featured in Dan Brown’s novel The DaVinci Code, and its lopsided towers. But what captured my attention was an 1868 sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Clevinger in one of the church’s side chapels. It's a pieta, from the Italian word for pity, mercy, compassion. In religious art, it refers to the depiction of Jesus’ mother Mary holding her son after he’s been taken down from the cross. Having by this point in our trip already visited several churches, we had already seen a few pietas! But this one stood out in a couple of ways. One was it included Mary Magdalene at Mary’s feet, kneeling beside Jesus, her head leaning next to his. The other was it included two angels off to the sides. One angel, the one on the right, is looking up at Jesus, Mary, and Mary Magdalene in awe and devotion. The other, the one on the right, is looking down and away from the central scene and instead at the twisted crown of thorns in his right hand, and he has a furrowed brow. It was the angel’s furrowed brow that captivated me. What was the meaning of that furrowed brow? What was the sculptor trying to convey by showing us this frowning angel? Perhaps it was the angel’s confusion at the scene beside him, the many questions on the angel’s mind about what he had witnessed: Why did this man Jesus, the Son of God, have to die? Why did he have to die in such a horrible way? Why didn’t he call upon the angels to rescue him from the cross? Why did they give him such a cruel crown to wear? Why? And what now? I admit that while I would love to always wear the awestruck gaze of the one angel, I probably have more often worn the furrowed brow of the other one. Maybe you have, too. But we also know that the pieta isn’t the end of the story of Jesus. Eventually his body is taken from his mother’s embrace and laid in a tomb. But then, a couple mornings later, as the Gospel of John tells us, Mary Magdalene makes her way to the tomb, and she finds the stone rolled away. She eventually steps inside the tomb, and who should she see there but two angels in white, one on one side of the tomb and the other on the other. I wonder if it’s the same two angels. And I wonder if the one’s brow is still furrowed.

This past Friday, Tracy and I were in Nashville visiting our son Noah, and while we were there, we watched the Vanderbilt men’s tennis team take on the #3 team in the US, the University of Texas. It was exciting to see such hard-hitting, fast-moving play. The camaraderie among the teammates and the encouragement of the coaches brought to mind memories of my years of playing on the tennis team in both high school and college. Last August, the Atlantic magazine published an article that claimed tennis is the healthiest sport, especially in terms of longevity. It’s a sport you can play all your life long. In fact, I’ve gotten my old rackets out again and am playing in one of the city’s men’s leagues. But tennis is not only good for your physical health; it can also be good for your spiritual health as well. Just think of the words we use when we play tennis. Love. There’s an old saying: “In tennis, love means nothing.” Love is where every game starts, with the scores at zero, or love. Love is the beginning point of the game. It all starts with love. That’s true in our faith as well, isn’t it? “God so loved…” (John 3:16). Serve. The game gets going when someone serves the ball to the other player. Nothing happens until someone serves. This is also true in our faith. “The Son of Man came not to be served, but to serve” (Mark 10:45). Who knew Jesus played tennis? Fault. This happens when a serve misses the target box either going wide or deep. This is like sin. The Greek word for sin in the New Testament is hamartia, which comes from the sport of archery and means “missing the mark.” We miss the mark in many ways in our lives, and much of the time it is our own fault. But the good news is that we get another chance. Second serve. If we miss our first chance to serve, we are given a second chance to serve the ball into the box. This is grace. Thank God we serve a God of second chances! Advantage. When the score in a game arrives at deuce, which is essentially three points each, whoever wins the next point but then needs to win one more point to win the game, has the “advantage.” Most of the tennis players I’ve ever met have a lot of advantages in life. But one of the great questions in life is what are we going to do with the advantages, the opportunities, the privileges we have been given? I’m reminded of something Jesus said: “From whom much has been given, much will be required” (Luke 12:48). And what is required of us is that we use the advantages we have been given in this life to love and to serve others, especially those who are disadvantaged in some way. I imagine that if we live our lives in light of these terms from both tennis and Jesus, we’ll be “set.”

Have you ever wanted to grow in your spiritual life but wanted to know how to get started? Dave suggested that I might tell you a little more about our Tuesday Spiritual Group. You wouldn’t be attending church if you didn’t love God and recognize that Jesus’ life and death show God’s love for you. Most of us know that we aren’t serving God as well as we could. The challenge in our busy, challenging lives is finding a way to feel God’s joy, and doing a better job of loving God by serving others isn’t easy. There are many writers, some current, some from the past, who have found ways toward “spiritual transformation” that we study and learn from, some as recent as Richard Rohr, Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen, but others as far back as John Wesley and the Desert Fathers and Mothers from the fourth century. They all tell us that they didn’t lead perfect lives, but the effort leads to fuller, more productive lives. We know that God desires a close relationship with us and that the Holy Spirit helps us communicate with Him. We believe that God knows each of us by name and endows each of us with unique talents and expects each of us to share and serve the world in our own way. The question is how to get closer to God’s will. A closer relationship with God helps us to know God’s will for our life. I think the members of our group would agree that our time together has helped lead us to a closer relationship with God through the Holy Spirit. It can also be a source of inner strength for life’s challenges. It certainly was for me. Our practice builds on four principles: The Bible is essential and we explore deeper ways to ask the Bible to speak to us, rather than “studying” or asking an expert to explain it to us. The practice of spiritual reading is called Lectio Divina. Prayer is also essential and we put more focus on listening for God’s message to us personally than asking God to grant us our needs. The practice is sometimes called Centering Prayer. The presence of a community is essential. As Paul was spreading the gospel through the pagan world, he formed communities. We study together, pray together and share our thoughts. This is one of the most valuable parts of the experience. And, if we learn to pay attention we can see God’s presence in our everyday lives. In John’s gospel we hear Jesus’ words, “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy be in you, and that your joy may be full. (John 15:11) Come join us! We meet Tuesday evenings at 6 pm in the church library. Dr. B.W. Ruffner

If you could go back in time and offer some advice to your younger self, what would it be? Recently, I have gone back and read through my journal from 1995. By that time, I had been keeping a daily journal for ten years (I started January 1, 1985 – one of my few New Year’s resolutions that actually stuck). It was the year I graduated from college. My dad had just died the previous December from cancer. And I was still figuring out what exactly to do with my life. Reading through my journal from those days, I feel a welling-up of compassion for that young man. I realize now that I was more anxious about the future than I wanted to be, I was more deeply entrenched in grief than I was aware at the time, I was disappointed that my post-graduation plans weren’t materializing like I’d expected, and I was more opinionated than I thought I was. So what would I say now to that young man then? When I posed this question at our HeBrews men’s coffee group on Tuesday morning about what advice would you give to your younger self, one of the guys chipped in immediately with “relax!” I think my advice would be similar. I would want to tell my younger self to relax and to lighten up. To lighten up on myself, and on others, and to trust that I would eventually find my way, and that healing would come. To trust more in the words of a passage of scripture I was beginning to be drawn to even then, that “we know that God works all things together for good for those who love God, who are called according to his purpose” (Romans 8:28). Because in the thirty plus years since then, that promise has proven to be true. So what would you want to say to your younger self? And if you could project yourself out another thirty years from now, what do you imagine your future self telling your present self?