"OUR LENS OF CHOICE" By The Rev. Gary Miller John 12:20-33 Please pray with me. Gracious and loving God, as we enter this time of meditation, may you take the imperfect words of my mouth, the meditations of each of our hearts, directing them to a perfect understanding of your love, your care and your presence with us. We pray this all in Christ’s name, Amen. Grace and peace be to each, to all, from God our Creator and the Lord Jesus Christ. My dear friends… I cannot document exactly when my fight for clear vision began, but I know it was early in my life journey. I remember as an elementary school student being not only teased about my hair, which was bright, fiery red and curly, nor only about my freckles which were multiple and intense come summer, but I remember being called “four eyes” early on. My struggle for vision since then has progressed through contact lenses, so that sports could be played more effectively and then, finally, from one power vision to bi-focal vision and now tri-focal vision. It has been literally a lifelong pursuit to have a sense of clear vision. Now that I am equipped with trifocals, my most pertinent concern seems always to be, “How do I keep those suckers clean?” For some reason, my glasses never get a little bit dirty. They get to be wax paper intensity before I discover, feeling my way to the kitchen, that my glasses need to be cleaned, that my vision and my lens to the world needs to be restored. That is the message of the Lenten journey…oh, not in a literal way, but in a figurative way. How do we restore our vision and which lens do we choose to look through? I have a colleague who treasures his sabbatical time. Every three years he gets three months of sabbatical time. After those three months of sabbatical, he says, “I’m closer to God. My vision has been restored. I see things more clearly now.” I have never taken a sabbatical in my life. My sabbatical tends to be those few moments I have in the car, alone. My sabbatical tends to be those moments following a funeral or memorial service. My sabbatical tends to be that moment when I watch a young man and a young woman walk down the center aisle of this church. My sabbatical tends to come to me in spurts and bursts. Yet there are people who make a great case for extended sabbaticals. There are other persons who talk about going away on religious retreat every few months or so, having the opportunity to go to reflect, to meditate, to clear the lenses for their life’s journey. Well, let’s be realistic here. We clergy, and we folks gathered here are, in some ways, privileged beyond compare. For most of the people of our world, a three-month sabbatical is not a possibility, unless it’s called unemployment. For most of the people of our parish, most of the persons we serve a retreat away to clear the lenses is not a possibility. Indeed, for many of the young parents in this congregation, sabbatical and retreat time are the moments when the children board the bus until they, the parents, are expected at work. It would be great if all of us could choose to take voluntary disengagement to clear the lenses of our journey. Unfortunately, or fortunately, for most of us, we clean the lenses for our journey while enroute. We choose the lenses for our journey when we are involuntarily disengaged. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve been in the home of a parishioner, or when a parishioner has been in my office after a diagnosis for a life-threatening illness, or after some serious surgery, and how they say to me, “You know, I see the world so much differently now, when I understood the perspective of the cross I was being asked to carry.” Ken Fedor was the dean of the business school at the University of Miami … a great friend. Ken Fedor was a health fanatic. Ken walked every morning and then played 18 holes of golf before he went to work. He was a shining light at the University of Miami, one of their resident and rising scholars. His skin was tanned just right. His waist, his hair was just right. The clothes he wore looked as if they had been fitted to his body. And then one day Ken Fedor began to cough. Ken Fedor, a non-smoker, thought he had some kind of virus. Ken went to the doctor, and the doctor’s diagnosis was that he was suffering from lung cancer. And it was to such a degree that he needed surgery immediately. He was admitted to the hospital … this perfect looking specimen, this apparently perfect living specimen. And when Ken Fedor came home from the hospital, following surgery, he was a different man. He would sit in a chair just off his patio, take notes and write in his journal regarding the sunrise for that morning, the sunset for that evening. He would write poetry about the ripples on the pool. He would wax eloquently about the quality of the green that was in the grass. The lens through which Ken Fedor looked at life had changed, never to be the same again. Why is it that so many of us must be involuntarily disengaged from our journey before we begin to clean our lenses and take a fresh look at what God requires of us on this journey through life? Why can’t we pull this silly stuff out every morning and voluntarily look at what is really important to us and to the world in which we live. You remember the man came to Jesus in the gospel story. “We want to see Jesus,” and they discovered that the way they could most clearly see Jesus was to confront Jesus, his death and the cross. So the lens through which we look, in the season of Lent, is the cross of Jesus. And we are involuntarily disengaged. My dear friends, in this journey we call the Christian faith, let us struggle mightily to voluntarily disengage ourselves to consider what God has in store for our lives, knowing that perhaps it’s only when we are involuntarily disengaged that we really will consider what God needs us to do and be. What is our lens of our choice? What is our struggle to see? For what
vision do we search as we break the bread of life? Together! |
|
|
