SerSM26nv17.doc Life s Biggest Challenge -1- November 26, 2017 Lection: Matthew 25:31-46 Today I would like to invite you to consider a simple question that I hope might stimulate a little thought and a great deal of conversation after you leave here this morning. It is a deceptively simple question, but one that I believe hunts deep into the forest of what it means to be human. The question is: What is life s biggest challenge? And since I knew I would be asking it today with you in San Miguel, I did a little advanced research, while we were in Colorado, casually asking several people over the last month or two how they would answer. Two people answered that for them, life s biggest challenge is avoiding worry. One man said that his biggest challenge was stress at his job. Another said that her biggest challenge was that her paycheck was always a little shorter than the month in which she was living. One person suggested that aging gracefully was the biggest challenge. I had responses that suggested staying on a diet, or getting enough exercise, or eating to live and not just living to eat were big challenges. A newlywed offered the quip that putting up with his new mother-inlaw was looming as a big life challenge. Several mentioned things like feeding the hungry and world peace and the crisis of the Dreamers in the states and hurricanes and the current leadership in Washington. Several added that they felt frustrated and powerless about how they 1
could impact any of those things in meaningful ways. One person thought for a few minutes, offered an answer, and then called me up three hours later and said, Forget what I told you before, life s biggest challenge is definitely raising three kids. Two folks offered that the biggest challenge in their lives was accepting themselves and learning to be their own best friend. Several answers clustered around relationships family and marriage and friendships and not a few believed that life s biggest challenge involved finding the confidence to take one day at a time and trust enough in God to believe that things in this rough old world of ours would somehow work out for the best. What do you believe life s greatest challenge to be? To begin with, let me just say that none of the answers I received to my question were really bad answers, with the possible exception of the one about the new mother-in-law and even that one hinted at the complex nature of our human interactions. All the answers I received were good answers and all of them reflected well measured human wisdom, but I want to probe just a little deeper with you for a bit. I have an idea and the idea is this: There is one divine quality present in every book of the Bible. It s in the stories the Gospel writers tell about Jesus. It s the essence of our gospel reading for today, as Jesus tells the parable of the sheep and the goats. It s in the way Jesus loved and served and reached out to heal and care. It s there in his call to us to do the same. I see it in the way he found to accept 2
everyone wherever they happened to be on their journey. I sense it in the Psalms when I feel the presence of the Good Shepherd walking with us through the valleys. I hear it when the Psalmist asks us to look to the mountaintops and reminds that we re never alone. I see it in the stories of Patriarchs and Matriarchs who left home and old gods and found blessing on the journey. It s woven like a golden thread through the words of the prophets who call for justice and it sounds through the words of the wisdom teachers who begged us to number our days and to seek the way of peace. What is that quality? That divine quality is mindfulness. Mindfulness! Every once in a while someone will ask me what God is like. What is God like? God is love, God is light; God is the first cause of all that is. God is the unseen force holding every whirring atom of the creation together in the infinite reaches of the universe. God is that which is just beyond and deeply within my fear in the middle of the night reminding me that I need never be afraid. God is the fear not on the wings on an angel. God is the smile of a child who feels loved. God is a ninety year old woman holding her great-great grandchild on her lap. God is a refugee. God is a homeless person. God is the patience it takes to accept another person for who they are. God is one person forgiving another. God is a box of cereal for a hungry child. God is the person who takes the time to give or to feed the hungry or 3
to visit the sick and care for those who are hurting. God takes flesh in the least of these and in us when we care. God is people protesting against injustice. God is people who think and learn and struggle to grow. God is the one who attempts to live gently on this earth. God is the memory that we have borrowed the future from our children. All of that is true but most of all and all in all, God is the one who is mindful and when we are mindful, we embrace the essence of the Holy. I don t suppose that my words today can really be clear enough to explain all that my heart understands about mindfulness, but let me try. Every day if you are like me, you miss things. You say things that you probably should not say. You offend someone or you feel that you do. You get distracted and you miss the sunrise. You pass up a chance to care, because you are too worried about your own problems. You hesitate to probe past the noise of the news to seek the truth. You miss the laughter of a child because you are too upset about what the dog did on the rug to notice. You get yourself so worked up about some negative that you trample possibilities for the positive. Long time ago, I took a personality test and the person scoring the test commented that it revealed that I was a person so busy pulling the weeds in my garden that I rarely took time to smell the flowers. Well, God takes the time God always takes the time, because God is mindful. 4
God is always mindful. This was what Jesus was trying to tell us when he reminded us that the very hairs on our head are numbered no matter how few or how many we happen to have. Jesus reminds us that the birds and the flowers are taken care of in God s amazing love and that even more powerfully, God is mindful of us, our worries, our fears, our hopes and our dreams all of them are gathered up in the mindfulness of God. Now I am not one of those people who believe that God messes directly in the processes of nature. I don t care how faithful you are, if you carelessly step off one of San Miguel s perilous curb stones in front of a taxi, your faith will not prevent an accident. I do not believe the laws of gravity are suspended because you or I happen to believe in Jesus. I have seen miracles and I believe that miracles happen every day but I have also seen and you have seen times when we have prayed for a miracle and that miracle did not happen the way we wanted it to. Was God out to lunch did God stop caring did we do something wrong and was the answer we didn t like, a punishment? No bad things happen to good people, because we live in a universe where there are accidents and hurricanes and disease and the aging process and human greed and insensitivity, that all conspire to tempt us to forget the one quality of God that I believe invites us to abundant life and that is the mindfulness of God. 5
When you or I hurt, God is mindful. When you or I are in pain and worrying ourselves sick, God is mindful of what we are feeling. When the earth is polluted by people more interested in short term profit than long term survival, God is mindful. God holds this earth in hands of love and God sheds more than one tear over the costly messes God s human children create for themselves. And through it all, there is this wonderful invitation which was offered by the prophets and the priests and by Jesus himself to join God in becoming mindful. What is life s greatest challenge? I believe life s greatest challenge is to be mindful. To be mindful is to look at the people around us everyday and see them not as problems, but as the siblings who bear the image of God that sometimes becomes clouded by the same fears and frustrations which distract us and help us forget who we really are. To be mindful is to remember that each day is a gift, that each breath is an opportunity to show some caring. To be mindful is to remember that none of us really knows the pain another is bearing to be mindful is to treat one another with patience and love when our most natural reaction is to run away or to get angry. Mindfulness helps us look at this beautiful world with eyes alive not to all the things that are so obviously wrong but to the possibilities we have to join God in the task of creation. The parable Jesus told about the sheep and the goats is a challenge to become the mindful co-creators with God of an alternative reality. To feed the 6
hungry, to visit the sick, to comfort those who are hurting is to be mindful as God is mindful. To be mindful is to tell ourselves again and again that we need to tread gently on the earth and consider that our children s children will be here seeking to love long after we are gone. To be mindful is to live the compassion of God in our public lives it is to demand and to seek leaders who in their serving reflect a mindfulness of God s love. To be mindful is to place our fears and our frustrations in the context of the eternal love of God it is to remember that the things which get us down and frustrate us can never touch the essential center of our selves as the precious ones of God. To be mindful is to take whatever comes to us in life whether it is bad or good with a sense that we can trust the one who brought Jesus back to life from the grave. Are you afraid of death? I am it is the most human thing to be but I am struggling to become mindful of the fact that the final word is never spoken over any life by fear. The final word is the love of God and God is mindful and present and active and the living spirit who will take my hand and lead me home, no matter how long or how painful the journey. One more thing: If you and I practice mindfulness we become by definition people who are thankful. I asked a friend this week what we do after we say we are thankful and she said: At our house, we eat! 7
There s nothing wrong with that feasting and celebrating and being together with the people we love as we did a few days ago, is truly a divine activity but let s do it with mindfulness. Mindful of the gifts we have received; mindful of the love we can share; mindful that as God s children we can serve and care and grow. On this life s journey, we are never alone. Let s be mindful of the one whose love will never let us go! Amen. 8