|
Dear friends,
You may remember the Tuesday night seminar we advertised with retired Presbyterian minister and friend Tom Walker and Rabbi Rachel Bregman discussing "hope" from the Jewish and Christian scriptures. I attended the meeting this Tuesday at Temple Beth Teflon in Brunswick, actually the first one after last week's cancelation due to the storms. It was encouraging to gather with 25 people of faith from different religions and nationalities and share our version of Godly hope and where to find it. It struck me how hopeful it is that, as Americans, we can gather like this, respectfully listening to our teachers and each other while responding from our own faith traditions.
Rabbi Rachel pointed out that one source of hope is our freedom to choose how we respond to catastrophes and suffering. Pointing to the evil imposed in the Holocaust, followed by survivor Victor Frankl's famous book "Man's Search for Meaning," she shared how many of those who survived did so by creating ways to find meaning and even hope in that terrible place. Her point was that as human beings created in the image of God, we have the freedom to choose how we will respond, even in the darkest and most evil circumstances. Turns out, it's the space between the stimulus……. and before we respond where our freedom is found and what makes us humans paradoxically most Godlike.
Say someone cuts us off in traffic, or we just received word of a troubling health issue, or we find ourselves in a heated conversation about politics... how we choose to respond determines how much "Godlike" freedom we choose to practice. If it's anger or vengeance we give into, we forfeit that freedom. But suppose we choose to live into this Godly space before reacting, like giving the driver the benefit of the doubt or not immediately falling into catastrophic spasms with troubling news. In that case, we practice our freedom to respond in hope.
For me, at least, the power to respond in this Godlike hope comes when I strive to stay connected to God through prayer, worship, and practicing the fruits of the Spirit from Galatians 5: 22-23: "love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." The more I "try" to practice these virtues, the more free I become to respond like a child of God. St. Paul said our other choice to practice the fruits of the Spirit is living by "the flesh." He defined it as practicing and producing "enmity, strife, jealousy, anger, dissensions, quarrels, envy, drunkenness, and "things like these." Does this sound like what our world is like these days?
The freedom to choose our response reminds me of the words in Deuteronomy 30:19-20. Just before the Israelites cross over the Jordan River to enter into the promised land, Moses gathers them together and declares that they are called to practice and obey the laws of God and to remember, "I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the LORD your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the LORD swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob.
The Bible is clear. If more Christians and Jews "choose" "life and not death" by practicing the law of love and the fruits of the Spirit even under threat, there would be less hopelessness and violence in our world and in our lives.
As Emily Dickinson penned,
"Hope is
the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul
And sings the tune
Without the words
And never
stops at all."
In Christ,
Steve
| 
