BLOG. 9/9/13: “WHEN LIFE DEALS YOU CARDS YOU’D RATHER NOT PLAY …”
I think it was Johnny Cash who used to sing about life dealing us cards we’d rather not play. That dilemma seems particularly relevant today. I’m certain that our president and many world leaders with any kind of ethical standard feel that way about the crisis in Syria. Life seems to come replete with quandaries for which there seems no satisfactory solution. This is not only true on the larger world scale, as with so much in the Middle East, but it is also true in our daily lives, in the school system, on the economic scene, in differences with our neighbors and close friends.
The much loved devotional writer of the last century, Oswald Chambers, made the comment that has found a lodging in my memory which is that “the basis of our human experience is the tragic,” or in other words, that the whole fall of the human race into a rebellion against its creator at the beginning, has created a situation where God’s intended shalom seems abnormal. Broken relations, estrangement, moral and ethical dilemmas, unexpected tragedies and untended misunderstandings become so much the norm … unless one leads an abnormally isolated life.
And, all too often, church communities can attempt to be an escape from these realities. I think, for instance, of the Sabbath hymn I grew up with: “ … rapt awhile from earth away, … have a foretaste inly given how they worship thee in heaven.” It really was a good hymn, by the way, but the truth is that our worship of God, whose world this is, should thereby be radically this worldly.
Say you’re a guy who takes his neighbors seriously, keeps up with the news, agonizes over moral wrongs on the public stage (not to mention the evidences of cultural darkness), hangs out in coffee shops where communities often meet and communicate, cares about his/her working associates … and you go to a ‘worship service’ where you can find no connection between what is taking place there in that service with those realities from which you have come and to which you will return when you leave that ‘worship service.’
Why is that? What has been the purpose of it all? “This is my Father’s world, and let me ne’er forget that though the wrong seems oft so strong, God is the ruler yet,” goes the hymn. God has called us to be his ambassadors, his agents of reconciliation in a very real world, which is his world, after all.
Yes, and in that world our role is not always simple, but rather complex. Our “love your neighbor” calling can be dicey. Our presence in corporate life with those who operate with a different set of values, or worships cultural idols, can be ever so complicated. Yet it is there, right in the midst of all the ‘stink and stuff’ that we are to be salt and light, to be the sons and daughters of the Light. All we have to do is to read the scriptures to realize that the context in which the most of those Biblical documents was one of very undesirable and troublesome social, political, economic, ethical, and personal realities.
Johnny Cash (or whoever) had it right: “ … life deals us cards we’d rather not play,” but that’s so often where we find ourselves. Our Refuge and Strength is present with us right there! It is right there that we are to be the light of the world.
