What Matters

You are the salt of the earth;

But if salt has lost its taste, how can its saltiness be restored?

It is no longer good for anything, but is thrown out and trampled underfoot.

-Jesus of Nazareth, Matthew 5:13 (from the Sermon on the Mount)

This has been one of those meaningful but difficult days that following Jesus sometimes throws at you, or at least it should.  The first thing on my agenda was the usual Friday walk with the dog around the lake.  I wasn't sure I was going to fit it in, because this Friday was going to be anything but a day off as per usual. I knew I needed it though, like Jesus needed to go off by himself and pray sometimes.

The next thing on my agenda was conducting a funeral for a two month old baby boy, who I was supposed to baptize last Sunday.  I know, I'm sorry, that's kind of a gut punch and I didn't give you much warning.  It feels that way to me too.  His name was Keith Takha Akaragwe, the son of one of the Cameroonian families that have recently become a part of our congregation.  He was healthy and happy and then last Saturday night his mother put him to bed, in the usual way.  An hour later she went to check on him and he was in distress, paramedics came, the hospital tried, but his fragile little life could not be saved. And so instead of celebrating a baptism with all the usual joy, we have spent the week mourning.

In my nearly fifteen years of ordained ministry, this is the first time I have had to do a memorial for a baby.  If it weren't for one dramatic outlier (involving children being killed by their father), this would have been the most difficult one to date.  The large majority of people I have had to memorialize had at least had a fighting chance at life.  When older people die there is a certain way you can deal with it, you can remember funny things about them, you can make a well timed joke (yes at funerals). I think the trick is to memorialize them the way they were and not the way sappy bereavement cards do it. You tread a very fine line along edge of irreverence, it cuts the through the maudlin feelings and brings reality in as sort of bracing balm against despair.

You have no room, and no material to work with in the case of a two month old baby.  Reality doesn't need to be brought in, it is raging and in your face.  It is a wailing mother watching them put a tiny little casket in the ground, it is songs of lament sung in a tongue you don't understand but somehow you know every word they say.  I have never felt so ill-equipped to offer comfort in my life.

This is where my intellectual ability and even my theological perspective fails me.  This is where I fall back on the basics, the understanding of the sacraments as actions of God's grace, the familiar words of Psalm 23, the Lord's Prayer, the simple affirmation that, no matter what, we are in God's hands.  It is not elegant or well thought out, sometimes it seems naive, but I don't know how else to stand in front of a tiny little casket and try to construct some sort of meaning that isn't pure brutality.

The faith of that moment is pure salt, it has to be built into the spiritual chemistry of my heart, because I can't fake my way through it, I can't come up with enough eloquence to somehow say that two months on this earth is enough.  It is the one funeral I have ever done where I didn't even think about using Ecclesiastes 3, because damn it, there should never be a time for tiny little caskets.

Then it was done, tetelestai, and I had more to do.

The afternoon was spent cooking chili for the nearly forty people who are experiencing homelessness, who are being given a home in our church this week.  The program is called Safe Nights, and tonight I was part of the dinner team, and now I'm spending the night here at church in case a circuit breaker trips or they need some help with something related to the building.  I spent the afternoon dealing with spices, salt, pepper, chili, adobo, paprika, a little of this, a little of that, making a pot of chili that was decidedly larger than what I normally make.  One of the young men in the Safe Nights program told me, "that chili was on point!" So I did it right.  I wish I had the same assurance about this morning.

Normally, I sit here in my office on my night watch during Safe Nights feeling pretty good about what we're up to as a church.  And I suppose there's a little of that, but this year there are so many little ones here, and a larger than average number of grown ups.  We barely have enough room for all of them in the inn, and that reminds me of the fact that charity does not adequately make up for lack of justice.  There are a few of these folks that we see year after year, the regulars, they know the routine, they are pretty settled into the homeless routine, that's one thing.  As Jesus said, "we will always have the poor," yes I suppose that is true, there are some people who will always find themselves at the margins of society, and that is why we we always need to act charitably towards "the least of these."  Good and fine, we can run Safe Nights from now until the second coming if we have to, but we are seeing a growing number of people in this program, who, if the system were fair and just, would be able to make it on their own.  There are people here who have jobs, people who, with a bit of a boost, would be able to become actual assets to their communities rather than having to sleep on cots in crowded church basements.

After we fed the crowd, I withdrew to my office and got around to reading the paper, in which I found this opinion piece the New York Times, by David Brooks.  I commend the whole thing to your attention, but I would like to share the following:

Freedom without covenant becomes selfishness. And that's what we see at the top of society, in our politics and the financial crisis.  Freedom without connection becomes alienation.  And that's what we see at the bottom of society - frayed communities, broken families, opiate addiction.

His main point is that for people to live and thrive in a free society they must be formed into people who can handle freedom.  This is a solid biblical principal.  The Israelites wandered in the wilderness for forty years, not because they were lost in a relatively small area, but because they were not ready to inherit the promised land.  The slave mind had to die out and the free mind had to rise in order for them to be ready.  Jesus' disciples were a case study in incompetence and blindness until they were trained, commissioned and empowered by the Holy Spirit.
What I did this morning was a product of years of formation and walking in faith, and I know that it is, in its turn, only one more step in the journey. As is every pot of chili I make for Safe Nights or each outstretched hand I take.  What I hope I am growing into is a person who can enter into the joy of my God in all circumstances, in other words, someone who is ready for the freedom that comes in and only in union with Christ.
It breaks my heart that sometimes it takes a tiny casket to remind me of that reality, that in life, and in death, the only truth is in Jesus the Christ, if we lose that we lose our saltiness and we're good for nothing.