When I was a teenager, I thought that it would make me “cool” if I hung out with the troublemakers in my high school. They got a lot of attention, even if it was negative. With them, I could be an underachiever and curse and gripe about everything, and I would fit right in. And if you remember being a teenager, you know that “fitting right in” with some kind of group was extremely important! So my friends were always in trouble and often I was, too.
Then sometime in October most of my friends started stealing the hubcaps off of cars. Somehow I missed out on all of that “fun” and never got involved in it. I will never forget laughing about it when two of my best friends, who were brothers, had the police come to their home looking for the culprits. Their father answered the door and said that his boys would never do anything like that and showed them through the house. When he opened their closet door, hubcaps came falling out of the closet and rolling across the floor!
The city of Fairfield Alabama made an arrangement that these two, along with three other “friends” of mine, would continue in school during the week but had to spend every weekend in jail. They even talked about what a great time they had in jail, and I was lonely when they were gone, and even a little jealous of them, until one of them told me the truth, that it was absolutely miserable, that being in jail was not fun and certainly not “cool”. Still, my weekends were empty and boring with all of my buddies incarcerated.
One weekend something very unusual happened. It was one of the most bizarre events of my life, and I am not making this up! Three of these guys called me on Sunday afternoon after their release from their weekend in jail, saying they needed my help. Another inmate had told them that his car had been confiscated and was in the city parking lot, and it had forty gallons of moonshine whiskey in it that the police hadn’t found! He told them that they could have the moonshine if they would just get it out of his car before the police discovered it. So they had taken the illegal whiskey from his car, hidden it in the alley behind the police station, and they needed for ME to come with my old 1951 Dodge and load it up and take them around so they could sell it to somebody and “make lots of money” with it. I was thrilled at the opportunity to be involved in something so exciting, and so happy to this time be a part of what they were doing. I didn’t even hesitate.
After going several places trying to sell the “moonshine” without success, we decided to divide it up and keep it. Each of us kept ten gallons. Of course we all talked big about how we were going to drink it, but I was afraid to even taste it and I buried it in my back yard. A neighbor saw me digging the hole and called my father, who asked me about what I had buried and made me dig it up. He was very upset with me, but together we quietly poured it down the bathtub drain. In one of the stupidest moments of my young life, I actually asked him if I could just have a little of it to see what it tasted like. That’s when Dad lost his control and “hit the ceiling” as he shouted, “hell, no!”
It wasn’t long before the police somehow found out about all of this, and the newspapers got the word, too. The police were humiliated and embarassed that the stuff had been stolen from their own parking lot. It was all to come up at a specially-called town council meeting that very next night. It was the first time I ever heard the expression that “heads were going to roll!”
I will never forget what my father did the night of that town meeting. Very sternly he told me to sit in the house and to not go anywhere or talk to anybody. He said, “I’m going to the meeting. You stay here!” Later I learned that the place was full of people, and many of them were shouting questions at the mayor and the chief of police. Some were ridiculing the situation. The city decided to lock up (full time) the other boys who were involved in this incident. Then someone shouted my name, and asked what they were going to do with me. Some others then started shouting my name and asking where I was. And that’s when my father came through - big time!
He had a tenth grade education and a mild gentle manner. He certainly was no public speaker. But that night my dad was a ferocious lion as he stood up to these people and told them that if they knew what was good for them they had better leave me alone! And, amazingly, they listened, and my hide was spared.
Some people, because of some pain or disappointment in their family background, always have difficulty referring to God as “Father.” But not me. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was seeing God in my dad that night! Yes, he was disappointed in me, and hurt, and probably even angry. But the bottom line was that he loved me so much that it scared those people! No matter what I had done, he was ready and willing to protect me and defend me, not because I deserved it ( I didn’t), but because I was his child.
I don’t remember his ever teaching me about grace, and mercy, and unconditional love. But he did even better. He showed it to me in his life.
If you can’t see God in that, you must not be looking.
In college and seminary days I was taught that the Gospel of Christ was different from the “Gospel of the Kingdom”, even though this Gospel of the Kingdom of God was undeniably what Jesus himself taught. But if there are two, followers of Christ must believe both of them. I think that it is more accurate to believe that they are one and the same, with many facets for both this world and the next. Some may be surprised to know that the emphasis of Jesus was actually on the kingdom of God in this world and this life.
The Gospel is about a lot more than just getting our souls into heaven. It’s also about loving our neighbor as ourselves. It is about social justice, abolishing racism and all elitism, pride, prejudice, and any sense of “us” being in any way better than “them”. The Gospel is about feeding the hungry, sheltering the homeless, visiting the prisoners and the sick and the elderly, stopping child abuse, building loving families, and forgiving those who have hurt us. It is about treating others the way we want to be treated, paying our bills, and doing an honest day’s work.
At its heart, the Gospel is good news that reaches most powerfully to those who know that they are sinful and fallen and need to be redeemed. Most of all we need to keep reminding ourselves that we too, as much as anyone else, are fallen, flawed and sinful, and undeserving of God’s love. Yet we are the glad recipients of that incredible love, through no accomplishment of our own. It is our glad and joyful privilege to tell ourselves, even as we tell others, that we are accepted by grace- that our infinite number of sins have been forgiven by an infinitely benevolent God.
Our unworthiness and our unrighteousness is not the last word, because we have been made worthy and righteous by a judicial act of God the ultimate judge. He has declared that we are justified, simply because He said so. There is nothing that we can add to that to make us more worthy. But to limit the Gospel to being ready to go to heaven when we die is a huge misrepresentation of the message.
When I was growing up I heard of people who were “so heavenly minded they are no earthly good.” I think now that it was an accurate criticism of the way many people became - including me. It was easy to take the Bible and point the way to heaven. But to strive to accomplish the will of God on earth as well was a much more formidable task.
I repent.
Looking back at what has happened, I can laugh now, but just a little bit. Sometimes when the joke is on me, it is not that funny! I should have remembered the old adage, “we make our plans, and God laughs.”
I knew that I was going to have some down-time after my surgery, and that there would be a few weeks when I couldn’t get out much. In planning for it I wrote, “I just don’t want to waste this time without hearing something from God.” So when I got home from the hospital I had a stack of books beside my bed. Deeply spiritual, intellectually challenging, cutting-edge authors from our current generation, and classics from long ago - they were all going to speak to me, and I was going to emerge from this as a deeper more spiritual man. (Here is where I now can hear the laughter.) I had this all set up with God, and it was just going to be wonderful!
Exactly what happened next was exactly what I didn’t count on. Lying in my bed as I began to read, I read for five minutes and became so dizzy and nauseous that I couldn’t continue. When I plowed on in my reading, none of it seemed to make much sense. No explosions went off in my spirit. The bells just didn’t ring. My favorite authors had all lost their punch. I found it an absolute drudgery to read. All I could think of was how weak I was, how sick I felt, how tired I was of sleepless nights, how uncomfortable and annoying and painful it was to just try to get through the day. When I prayed, it was much the same way. I could pray short prayers like “please help me” but could not seem to pray for more than a minute. My mind wandered back to my overwhelmingly sick feelings.
After a couple of weeks I realized that my noble plan to go into the depths had fallen flat. My studies and prayers, instead of being deeper, had become even more shallow than before. I had gone backwards! I was so disillusioned. I half-thought and half-dreamed a prayer that assessed blame. “God, I thought you were going to come through for me and teach me some great stuff, and you didn’t do it!” Then I thought maybe it was my fault. “God I am sorry I have let you down. I know we had a plan for me to learn some really profound truth, and I have disappointed both of us!”
Feeling tired, sick, and frustrated, I finally felt a little nudge, and seemed to hear a gentle inner voice trying to speak to me. The message was totally unexpected, and did not address my complaints at all. The voice simply said, “Talk to your daddy, Jimmy!”
I wondered why that was being said to me. My father has been gone for 25 years. But as I lay in the bed, my thoughts went to my beloved father who had spent the last year of his life in a losing battle with terminal cancer, enduring the ravages of surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation, until mercifully He was taken home by angels. When he was sick I had tried to be there for him, had prayed for him and with him, and told him how much he had meant to me. But I had a busy life and family, and a lot of other things were going on. I had work to do and places to go and people to see. Yes, I often came to visit, but what he really needed from me was missing.
“Talk to your daddy, Jimmy!” It was the name my dad had always called me. “Jimmy.”
My tears flowed as I let go of some of my rational restraints. “Daddy, I am so sorry that I wasn’t able to be there for you in the way you needed when you were so very sick! I didn’t have a clue how bad it was! Now I know a little of what you went through - how sick and nauseous you were, how discouraging and terrifying it was, and the loneliness and abandonment you felt. Daddy I can now understand how you can feel so much pain that all you live for is a moment’s relief. Daddy, I want you to know that NOW I really can feel it with you, I KNOW how hard it was! I miss you and I love you! Please forgive me, daddy, I just didn’t understand!”
Of course, all of this conversation and confession was really not for my father, but for me. Even with my stack of books , the lesson I needed to learn was not of the head, but of the heart. Compassion comes when we have experienced the same kind of pain that others are now feeling.
Most of the books are still stacked by the bed. That is okay. But I deeply hope that sometime and somewhere along the way a person who is suffering will notice something within me that will tell them that I really do care, because I have been there. Obviously this was not in my plan, but it was in His.
Sometimes lessons of the heart don’t come from books, even good ones. Now I know.