My son and my father

My father is spending this Father’s Day in the hospital. His situation reminds me that all of us live in the reality of a “soon, but not yet” existence.

What we thought a week ago was to be an overnight stay because of some recent falls turned out to be more complicated. By mid-week, geographically distant family members became concerned enough to make plans to come to northern Indiana, thinking his time might be “soon.”  In the last few days, the reality of “not yet” is more on our minds.  Dad’s newly acquired disabilities may require a new approach to living and a new level of care. It means that God has work for each of us as family members as we care for each other and thereby advance God’s purposes for our family.

In our world as a whole, we live with the same “soon, but not yet” reality. Scientists tell us of climate changes and hint that we are already seeing some of the first of ever more drastic effects in the floods, droughts, earthquakes, and storms that our world has experienced. Economists warn about the collapse of the world financial system, with the current recession being a mild foretaste.  Preachers talk about Armageddon and the tribulation and some even set dates for the end. Thus, it is not surprising that many of us are thinking “soon” about a world in decline and disintegration. Some even long to “go home” and escape from it all.

Disabilities have a way of bringing the reality of a finite, fallen, and decaying world even closer to home. This is particularly the case when disabiities are newly revealed or newly acquired. The wonderfully good and glorious world created for us, and assumed to be the dominant reality in our lives, is tempered and disrupted and called into question. It feels like an end that is coming soon. How can we survive all of the troubles and trials and challenges?

Yet the greater reality is that each end leads to a new beginning.  “Soon, but not yet” gives us the bigger picture. Rather than sitting around and waiting or ceaselessly talking about the end, we are called to recognize the “not yet” reality. Until the end comes, we have a purpose and a mission to work with God, in line with God’s purposes.  We are called to a new level of caring for each other.

While we may mourn the passing of the old, we can also anticipate the new heaven and new earth with increasing joy. That comes as we focus on that future we want to see and find new ways of moving into the new world of wholeness, compassion, and peace that we long for. Then we will discover that in the end is a new beginning!

Jesus encouraged his followers to think of God as a Heavenly Father.  May you experience a blessed Father’s Day!

On this day that Christians call “Good Friday” I am reflecting on why Jesus had to die.  In some devotional readings this past week, I have been struck by how our sinful human condition produces a world in which something or someone has to die in order for life to continue for others.  W. Phillip Keller in A Layman Looks at the Lamb of God sees this dynamic even in the shame resulting from the first sin in the Garden of Eden.  In order to deal with the consequences of the nakedness of Adam and Eve, the life of animals had to be taken to provide them with clothing.

Ancient peoples were thus led to expect that blood sacrifices were the way to respond to sin and evil around them.  Yet, consider how God responded to this spiral of death that was unleashed:

• Cain’s murder of Abel was the first sin recorded of one human being against another. God moved quickly to stem what would have otherwise been a continual spiral of more violence for violence by protecting Cain from being killed.
• The cultures of the Ancient Middle East sacrificed their first-born child on the altar in atonement for their sins. God showed Abraham that what was important was Abraham’s own attitude of and trust and obedience. In that context, an animal sacrifice was acceptable. The result was the sacrificial system in the Mosaic Law.
• Early Christian believers, in turn, saw animal sacrifice pointing toward Jesus as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the whole world. God did for us what we couldn’t do ourselves.

All of our human attempts to take power for ourselves over other people, and ultimately over God, simply result in this cycle of violence and death. It is only God’s direct intervention that offers the grace of a way out of this downward spiral. By latching onto God’s own model for responding to evil, a model already hinted at in the Hebrew scriptures but filled in Jesus, we participate in God’s redemptive purposes to “overcome evil with good.”

Persons with disabilities tend to be the victims of the conventional wisdom of the downward spiral of evil. Our human tendency is to say that if some have to die so that others can live, the law of the “survival of the fittest” should reign. The weakest should be sacrificed to allow the strong, the rich, and the powerful to survive. Yet, God’s intervention for human salvation demonstrates just the opposite.  Salvation for humanity happens only as the strong offer their resources, their abilities, indeed, their very lives as a sacrifice for the disabilities, the pain, the weakness, and the sin in all of us.