How Be Ye

 Need any New Year’s resolutions? Colossians has ‘em: Be kind, meek compassionate, humble, & patient.

  Be forgiving, loving, harmonious. That’s 8. Be peaceful/grateful. Be faithful, wise & praising of God.

  Uh, oh, we hit 13. I am not superstitious, but just to be safe, let’s sing Psalms, hymns and songs. Piece of cake, right?

  Pastor Clare, can I go home now and take a nap? Just reading that list aloud has left me exhausted.

 Although I’m having a bit of fun here, isn’t Colossians really advice for our personal lives? You know, individual guidance? ….. Well, no.

  The verses address the church. They’re a call for, with & by community. And only there. They are not advice for you to meditate on when home alone.

 Am I repeating myself? You bet! Why? Because we so much crave Independence. We’re rooted in the “Declaration of Independence.”

  But wait. Faith requires some human action. Think of how our Puritan and Pilgrim ancestors fled religious persecution to settle New England.

  Didn’t they teach us that God help those who help themselves? We need to take some action, no?

 How many of you think that phrase came from Benjamin Franklin? Actually, it came from the ancient Greeks around the time of Jesus. It went something like this: “When Athena moves her hand, also move yours.”

  Sixty % of the U.S. think that “God helps those who help themselves” is one of the 10 Commandments. More shocking, three out of four teens in 1997 thought it was the Bible’s central message. Yikes! Past: News flash. The message = love God & neighbor in relationship.

 God so craved relationship with us that he sent Christ. Even after we rejected relationship with God at the start: Anyone ever heard of Adam & Eve?

  We often hear that their sin is that they disobeyed God. The real sin in the Garden is our breaking relationship with God in favor of independence. If they ate of the Tree of Knowledge, they could be truly independent.

We even want independence from church. The mere fact that most of us – me, too - gather in church only once a week – or less – is clear evidence of our independence.

  Well, in the physical world, could you live on just one meal a week? Even if I prepared the most sumptuous, bountiful feast for you today, you wouldn’t last the week. Why do we think that one spiritual meal a week will sustain us?
 
  Let’s face it: God gives us free will; we freely choose independence because we confuse it with freedom. Light-years apart.

 For in accepting God fully into our heart and embracing the salvation of Jesus, we have the only real freedom that counts: Freedom to be the fully loving, healed and peaceful people of God’s creation.

  Notice I say “to be” vs. “to do.”  The expression “How Be Ye? was a Quaker greeting. We ask people “How are you doing?” Today it would be “How are you being?”

  Quakers have faith communities, but stress a direct relationship with God through Jesus. They work hard, but endorse the priesthood of all believers. As expressed in 1st Peter 2:9

“But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s only people.”

  Dietrich Bonhoffer, the Lutheran pastor who gave his life fighting the Nazis, was grounded in Christ. No true success can happen without being in God, he said. Listen to the words he spoke.

 “I am absolutely convinced that any attempt to make something of oneself without God is doomed to failure.” 1 Corinthians says it thus:

  “So that your faith might not rest on human wisdom, but on God’s power.” – 1 Corinthians 2: 5

 Yet, we constantly return to the delusion that we can self-heal. That we can be independent. We admire the self-made man and woman and devour books @ self-improvement. I was doing research online and found out that Westfield State University near me  even offers a self-help course on how to write self-help books.

 We strive to self-create, says Colorado therapist Jim Taylor.

   “To do otherwise would be to admit defeat and be labeled a loser in our aspirational culture.”

   We can only be winners when we accept that we are children of God. Then the need to serve is in our hearts, souls and blood.

  I thought of that with the school staff who gave their lives for students at Sandy Hook. Who really thinks school Principal Dawn Hochsprung had a protocol or guidelines to confront gunmen?

Her actions didn’t spring from a to-do list, but from a to-be list. She often told students.

“You’re also a citizen of the world, You’re responsible for making it a better place.” She embodied that.

  First the being/then the doing.  But not all our doings need be cosmic or heroic. The world offers us myriad opportunities. We can serve on a smaller scale.

   Bonhoffer’s reflective quote in today’s bulletin is about listening.   I learned the power of listening at a Hartford gas station two Christmases ago.  Two guys were panhandling. Ah, looking for drug $, I thought, so I cleverly bought them coffee.

 How are you guys doing, I asked?   “It’s hard.’ “We’re just cold, and hanging, but folks think we’re after drugs.”

  My face flushed hot from shame. I chatted a bit more. I don’t really recall what we talked about; I don’t even think that it was particularly important. As I was leaving, the other one shouted out his gratitude in words of humility.

 “Hey, thanks for listening AND  thnx for not treating us like dirt.”

  Hmm, thanks for not treating us like dirt? When was the last time you were grateful in that way?
 
So you see, the doing after the being can be as simple as a hot drink and a chat.

  But without God as our guide, Jesus as our soul mate and the HS as our tailwind, we falter when the wind is against us. Why? We often confuse hope with optimism.

  I used to be optimistic, but now I’m hopeful.  Don’t get me wrong: Optimism is a wonderful gift.
 It lets us see  positive outcomes in iffy situations or sunny weather ahead when the forecast says rain.
  
  But tough things happen when optimism collides with tragedy, loss or stormy weather! Then optimism can haunt us.

 We think “Why didn’t I see this coming” or try to “prevent it?” “What was I thinking?” or “How come I didn’t expect that?”

  Hope isn’t so much about focusing on a desired outcome. It’s about being open to God’s bigger plans. Hope doesn’t have a pre-determined conclusion. I call that trust.

   And when we trust, we prepare the soil of our beings to accept the seed of God’s plans.
 
  Look at what that trust did for Horatio Spafford, who wrote the hymn “When Peace, Like A River.’
 He and his wife, Anna, became missionaries later in life and founded the American Colony in Jerusalem, which was later immortalized by a Pulitzer Prize winning book called Jerusalem. I think it even became a play or a movie.

 Although they had terrible tragedy in their lives, they never forgot that they were grounded in Christ. Grateful to God, their being turned into a doing: feeding the poor, clothing the naked, nursing the sick and praising Jesus.  From their being, came their doing, despite their grief.

  It was during that period of terrible loss that Spafford penned the words to the hymn “When Peace, Like A River.” It is best remembered by the refrain “It is well, it is well, with my soul.”

 Perhaps none of us here has faced a tragedy as deep as these - or perhaps some have faced worse. That’s not the point. We all struggle, and still do, in those deep waters of grief, poor health, disappointment, lost jobs, broken relationships, anger, etc.

  I am not comparing my losses to those in Newtown, but Christmas Day 2012 was hard. I drove past places holding hard memories – including the deaths of four loved ones and the demolition of my childhood home for a  school.

  But during that drive last week, I was reflecting on Spafford’s life and his hymn. And the losses. And I said to myself: “It is well with my soul.”
 
  If we remain grounded in Christ’s love, we, too, can answer today’s Scripture call. Not as a cosmic to-do list, but as something that flows like a spring eternal out of our hope, out of our love and out of our being in relationship. It will come from our place of being.

  And with faith, hope and trust, comes purpose, value, meaning AND love. And thus the list in Colossians today won’t really seem that long or that daunting. It will be a joy and not a burden.

  So let us remember the words of today’s New Testament reading from Colossians.

 “And whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of Lord Jesus, giving thanks to God the Father thru Christ.”

 My prayer is that you, too, can say “it is well with my soul.”

Amen.