Advent 10: Death and Life
Advent 10: Death and Life
I saw it as a pastor. I really see it as a farmer. The everyday non-stop cycle of life and death. Or maybe more appropriately death and life.
A chicken dies over here. Lambs are being born over there. An old dying cow. A new baby pig. Dead leaves silently falling from oak trees onto already dead Bermuda grass—yet rows of tiny winter grass blades are taking hold all throughout the pastures.
For Susan and I, ideas for buying new pastureland for the steers out by the highway have gone by the wayside, but closer by, ideas of a farm store with meats, eggs, herbs, and teas as well as a bed and breakfast have presented themselves and become an almost-reality.
Just this week one of our team members lost his nine year old dog and another is saying goodbye to a beloved grandmother. Yet his wife is also pregnant.
My mother died on December 23, 2011 and yet that is the same week that a man I know got sober. It will be his ten year anniversary this year. Life and death. Death and life.
One day, some city folks went and stood out in pastures to hear what a wilderness man named John had to say. He taught for a good long while about what needed to die and what needed to be born but he saved the most important for the end. He said that to prepare for Jesus, self-righteousness needed to die. Serving others needed to be born.
I get a lot of time out in the pastures and I can hear my self-righteous thoughts about someone else’s farming/driving/politics/religion/life about every fifty yards. Maybe the best antidote is to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes?
In our culture that is self-indulgent with self-righteousness, we’ve heard that the answer to resolving our differences is more listening to one another, more conversations with another, coming to the same table. As a pastor I participated in as many of those types of “conversations” as there are lights on your Christmas tree. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure they ever amounted to much. Maybe what’s needed is some old-school John-in-the-wilderness service to each other.
I know a man who tried this as part of his sobriety. He disliked a particular religion so he volunteered to clean their house of worship. He looked down on street people so he went and served meals at a homeless shelter. He judged his sister harshly and so he went and built her a new tool shed and started babysitting her children.
He is that same man who got sober 10 years ago. He reports that service to others has not only helped keep him sober but radically changed his relationship with those he so harshly judged. He now is one of the most selfless (and most free) persons I know.
When self-righteousness dies and service to others is born, Christmas is on the way.
