(40) Doing What is Right

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for Doing What is Right, originally shared on August 13, 2020. It was the fortieth video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   What if 2020 were a musical? Don’t laugh. Stranger things have happened. What if it were? Would we be tapping our feet and singing the tunes? Or, would we be disgusted and demanding our money back?

   I was in a musical once. My mom, who was a wonderful singer, asked me to be in our community theatre production of The Sound of Music when I was in high school. I was Rolf Gruber. The Sound of Music is the story of the Von Trapp family singers fleeing over the mountains of Austria to avoid Nazi capture during WWII and escape.

   Are we ready to flee over the mountains, or the foothills, or the deserts, the prairies, the farms, the freeways, etc. to escape something? Are we done with it? Do we see the wearing of masks, social distancing, keeping our hands clean, not touching our face, avoiding crowds, as something evil?

   Some have taken that route. I see them all the time. They’re tired of the pandemic, so they are just acting like it isn’t there. They have decided that it’s the government, or a political party, or a conspiracy promoting fear and they won’t consider any alternative explanations. They don’t care about others. They don’t care about themselves. They’re sick of it and they just don’t care. They have fled from their responsibilities.

   It used to be said that when Jesus said, “you shall love your neighbor as yourself”, the assumption there is that a healthy person loves themselves.  But, I don’t think Jesus meant that we should put ourselves at the center of our lives. I think that he was saying that we should love others as if THEY were at the center of our lives.

   That’s why he said loving others as we love our selves was the second commandment to the first: you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your mind and with all your strength. If God is at the center of our lives, we will love our neighbors as ourselves. Matthew 22:36-40 

   It’s similar to the Golden Rule, “Do unto others as you would have them do onto you”.  Matthew 7:12  It means a life of service to others.

   Maybe people are just getting what’s been called compassion fatigue. Of course, you have to have shown compassion before you can claim fatigue. Or, as has been said, you can’t burn out until you catch on fire.

   How do we defeat despair and catch on fire? How do we receive the unextinguishable fire of the Holy Spirit?

   We are at a point in the coronavirus pandemic where the curve is bending down; it’s still high but bending down. There is generally positive news regarding the outbreak in Florida, Arizona and California. But, infections among children are up 40% in the last half of July and 100,000 children contracted the coronavirus in the last 2 weeks in U.S.

   Weekly deaths have nearly doubled in California since last spring and are setting records after being in decline at the end of June; suburban and rural areas that have been spared up until now are now seeing growing cases. 

   Things seemed to be getting better, but we saw light at the end of the tunnel and it turned out to be an oncoming freight train.

   Sure, that can be discouraging. It can be difficult to pick up and keep trying when things seem to be getting worse, not better.

   We have a lot of lizards around our house this year, or as I call them, our dragons.

   I was doing yard work yesterday and I walked by a trash container that I use to haul leaves and branches and things. I noticed movement inside and saw that a little baby lizard had fallen into the container and couldn’t get out.
   I think that a lot of people feel that way, too. Trapped.

   It’s been said that Nostalgia isn’t what it used to be.

   Once we’ve become adults we all seem to long for an idealized past. We idealize the old days, my day, or back in the day, because that was the time when we were young. When there were more days in front of us than behind, when anything seemed possible. It’s tempting to think that those days are gone when we’ve only had some discouragements, and maybe even failures.  

   Quitting the struggle to make things better when it gets confusing or hard is not an alternative. Deciding not to care, and looking out only for ourselves and our own interests is not an option for us. We are called to be people of integrity, caring for those near and far as a witness to the love of the one true living God that has reformed us from within to do what is right in God’s eyes.

   We are called to get up and follow Jesus, our hope and our strength who was so concentrated in prayer that he sweat blood the night before he was arrested, tortured and crucified. He prayed, “My Father, if it is possible, let this cup pass from me; yet not what I want but what you want.” Matthew 26:39

   Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five, Cat’s Cradle and other works of post World War II fiction had an often gruff, burned-out literary voice.

   I read several of his books in college and in one, a collection of shorter stories of his life, he tells of how he was invited to speak before a gathering of American Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters, both extremely prestigious. He had had to submit a copy of the speech in advance.

   On the day of his speech, he said, he was seasick with dread. He was seated onstage between a famous old architect and the President of the Academy. He told the architect how nervous he was.  The architect responded by telling him, in a voice that the president could hear it, that the president had read his speech and detested it.

    He remined him that he still had to deliver the detestable speech.

   The president replied that it didn’t matter, that the gathered dignitaries wouldn’t be listening to his speech anyway, that they would be looking at the way he held himself and the tone of his voice to see if he was an honest man.

   How do we live as honest people? As people of integrity? How do we keep trying when we fail, when we know we are at the same time both saint and sinner? How do we get up and do what is right?

*Galatians 6:9-10

   We don’t give up on others, because God has not given up on us.

   How do we receive the fire of the Holy Spirit? Through water. Through the norighing and transforming streams of living water that is a metaphor for the Holy Spirit in both the Old and New Testaments.

   We live victoriously

   As the Psalmist writes in Psalm 136:

*Psalm 136:1-9