Slack (Proper 16C)

 

Slack (Proper 16C)

Homily Delivered 24 August 2025

9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Emmanuel Episcopal Church, Coos Bay (Oregon)

The Rev. Dr. Anthony Hutchinson

Isaiah 58:9b-14; Psalm 103:1-8; Hebrews 12:18-29; Luke 13:10-17

 

God, give us hearts to love and feel,

Take away our hearts of stone and give us hearts of flesh.  Amen

 

A few years ago, I went on a cruise in the waters of Alaska and British Columbia, during which time I saw some of the great cliff-bound inlets of the Inner Passage.  One of these is called Ford’s Terror.  It is named after one Harry L. Ford, a crew member of the US. Coast and Geodetic Survey Vessel Carlisle P. Patterson.   One day in 1889, Ford, doing a survey of the area, took a small rowboat into the steep glacier-bound fjord alone.  The water in the narrow inlet as he entered was calm and relaxed, what sailors call “slack water.”  After a short time looking at the icebergs, harbor seals, and high cliffs, he rowed back to the inlet to go back to Endicott Arm and his ship.  But the tide had turned.  What had been calm, peaceful, and still turquoise water was now a raging torrent of white with a wall of curling surf taller than his boat was long.  For the next twelve hours, cold and hungry, he waited in terror, fearing that perhaps the calm water would not return before he died.  But at the next low tide, during the short interval between the tide going out and coming in, the water went slack again, and he was able to row out again, grateful and with a story of terror that would immortalize his name in maps and Gazetteers.  

 

 

“Slack”—the term draws up images of calm and peaceful water, but, for wind sailors at least, also risks water that is too relaxed, without enough wind above it to drive a sail-boat.    Slack sails are useless.  The word thus also means the lack of tension and tautness necessary to accomplish things.  My father always told me as a boy to “give it some slack” when I was fishing so that the line would let the baited hook drift naturally in the deep water.    Later, as a teenager, I came to feel he was perhaps a little too attentive to my life. His “Give it some slack,” became my “Cut me some slack, will you?”    Even later, one of the worse epithets my children hurled at each other when they might not be pulling their own weight was “you slacker!” 

 

Today’s Hebrew Scripture asks us to cut each other some slack, give each other a break.  Remove the yoke from among you.  Don’t exploit each other.  Remove the pointing of the finger, speaking ill of others. Don’t reduce others to objects to be evaluated and judged, ridiculed, made fun of, or maligned.  Give food to the hungry and satisfy the needs of the afflicted.  Stand with the downtrodden.  Help and don’t judge.  Give them a break because they need it, not because they deserve it.  When we give such slack and rest, God says, he will “build up your ancient ruins.”  That means “make you nation great again.”  So to make our nation great, we need to remove the pointing finger, break off the yokes of oppression we have placed on others, not blame others all the more and make their lives more miserable. 

 

This last week saw the death of James Dobson, the evangelical psychologist found of Focus on the Family, who did a lot of finger-pointing in his life.  I like to think that as he is ushered through the pearly gates, he is greeted by a choral rendition of “Born this Way” sung by the Heavenly Gay Mens’ Choir, composed of those who died AIDS and of having been kicked out of their homes at 17 years of age by “loving” parents following Dobson’s advice.  Then Matthew Shepherd leads him into to be judged by Jesus for what he did in his life.  Since “we believe he will come to be our judge” is not a gleeful expression “bad guys will get what’s coming to them” but rather an expression of hope for that divine judgment will be gentle, forgiving Jesus, I hope that even James Dobson is cut some slack. 

 

The Isaiah passage also asks us to cut ourselves some slack.   It ties these social justice issues to the Sabbath.  We shouldn’t place a heavy yoke upon us ourselves, even if we think this serves our purposes.   We shouldn’t belittle ourselves, or think ourselves slackers when we take needed rest.  We need to find time to rest each week, and make this a priority.  We need to not consider this shameful, or slacking off, but rather honorable:

 

If you refrain from trampling the sabbath,

from pursuing your own interests on my holy day;

if you call the sabbath a delight

and the holy day of the Noble One honorable;

if you honor it, not going your own ways,

serving your own interests, or pursuing your own affairs;

then you shall take delight in the Noble One….

 

To be sure, the Sabbath is not just a call for regular down time.  “Remember the seventh day by keeping it holy.”  This means, as the Prayer Book puts it, a duty “to set aside regular times for worship, prayer, and the study of God’s ways” (p. 847).  

Yet rest is still at the heart of the commandment.  In the catechism of the Roman Catholic Church, we read, “"[The Sabbath] is a day of protest against the servitude of work and the worship of money" (Catechism of the Catholic Church, para. 2172). 

 

In the Gospel reading today, Jesus gives a woman a break, and cuts her some slack.  She has been bound down by muscle tension, here personified as a demonic spirit, that held her doubled over for years.   He simply lays his hands on her, unbinds her, relaxes her, and restores her slack, natural posture.   She rejoices, thanking God. 

 

But a community religious leader nearby is not pleased.  He sees Jesus as a competitor calling for people to be lax in following the Law, slack in their religious duties.  He doesn’t want that particular yoke removed, and he points his finger:  “Your business appears to be faith healing and here you are, doing business on the Sabbath! Jesus, you slacker!”

 

Most rabbinic treatments of the Sabbath allow the saving of a life, even if the effort otherwise looks like work.  When Jesus is criticized for breaking the Sabbath by healing in John, what is at issue seems to be not the healing itself, but the means he uses:  he mixes his saliva with dirt to make a kind of eye ointment.  Mixing mortar for building or clay for potting were defined as work forbidden on Sabbath. 

 

In today’s story, being bent over clearly does not rate as a life-threatening condition.  “There are six other days of the week on which you could have done this,” says Jesus’ opponent.   His list of things forbidden or allowed on Sabbath has become taut and inflexible, the opposite of the restful slack Sabbath intends.   

 

Jesus points this out by noting that his critic fails to see the joy of the woman.  Pulling animals out of the mire was allowed on Sabbath in rigorous interpretations, even if their lives were not immediately threatened.  This woman was more important than an animal!  Her taut binding, bent over in pain for years, was worse than the suffering of a beast caught in the mud!  So couldn’t an a fortiori case be made to allow healing her? 

 

We are seeing here a Galilean legal flexibility running headlong against Judean legal rigor:  rural slackness versus urban tautness.  

 

Generally a critic of rigorists, Jesus himself could have his moments of tightness:  it is almost certain that the Historical Jesus forbade any taking of oaths or swearing on things, and the casual repudiation of one’s dependent spouse that was the divorce of his day.  

 

Second Isaiah had said, “if you honor [the Sabbath], … then you shall take delight in the LORD” (Isa 59:12-13).  The woman who has been set free from her bonds here is rejoicing in the Lord, and so, thinks Jesus, how can we possibly have violated the Sabbath?   A good tree yields sweet fruit, a bad tree, bitter.  What possible criticism is there when such obvious good has been wrought? 

 

Knowing when to cut ourselves and each other slack, and when to keep taut the line that ties us to the Good and the Right, and gets things done, is a trick.  Using a set of external rules to tell us this will, invariably, lead to a tight, inflexible rule that itself must be broken.  It leads to the pointing finger, the heavy yoke.  This art cannot be mastered without an open heart and open hands, without trust in God, and benevolence or good will for all.  It is rooted the principle that Jesus taught: forgive others that we may be forgiven; treat others as we ourselves would want to be treated.   This complex of ideas is covered by what Buddhists call detachment, compassion, and doing no harm. 

 

When Harry Ford was caught in what is now called Ford’s Terror, he almost certainly prayed for slack water.  We all pray for slack at times and we all must be able to give it. We are all in this together, and proper humility demands that we have solidarity with all our other creatures.  It demands that we be gentle. 

 

Remove the yoke, take away the pointing finger. The rule of thumb that Jesus uses here in this story is good—look at how our actions affect ourselves and others.  Regardless of fingers pointing at us or the yokes laid upon us, we must give the line slack or pull it taut as necessary to advance human dignity, love, and freedom.  

 

Jesus said his mission was to announce the Year of the Lord’s Favor, to break the bonds, to set the captive loose.  He announced the coming of God’s Reign in full power, and acted in ways that show he saw himself as the Year of Jubilee when all debts were forgiven, as the Sabbath of Lord, when all could rest and rejoice. 

 

He wants to cut us slack; we should let him do that.  He calls us to cut ourselves and each other slack.  This is how the pointing finger will be removed, and yokes broken.  Let go.  Cut someone some slack.  Give them a break. And let’s give ourselves a break as well. 

 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.

 

Count the Stars (Proper 14C)

 

Count the Stars
Homily delivered the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

(Proper 14; Year C RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
10 August 2025; 9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Emmanuel Parish Church, Coos Bay (Oregon)
Readings:  Gen 15:1-6,  Psa 33:12-22, Heb 11:1-3, 8-16, Luke 12:32-40

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh.

 

During the summer when I was 16 years old, I worked as a life guard at the local public pool.  In my off hours, I read a lot that summer, including the autobiographies of Malcolm X and of Mohandas K. Gandhi.  They made me think a lot about faith, justice, and morals.   I also worked through an introductory college text book on logic, to help me prepare for the upcoming high school debate season.  I was seized by the idea of parsimony in explanations championed by William of Occam: the shortest and simplest explanation that takes into account all the facts is probably the best.  I began wielding “Occam’s Razor” to cut back the superfluous and tendentious when simpler explanations sufficed.   One day, out in the summer heat on a life-guard high chair looking out over the swimmers, it occurred to me:  I could understand the world without any recourse to the idea of “God.”  I had been raised in a religious family, and was full of stories from Scripture that saw the world with God in charge.  Though increasingly at school I noticed the conflicting accounts of science and religion on the origin of life, various historical events, and even morality and sexuality, it had never occurred to me to question these stories told me by those I loved.  But as I sat there, I wondered if “God talk” were just a randomly extraneous explanation of things better and more elegantly described without recourse to stories seeming to me more and more like ancient myths.  Looking up at the sun, I saw merely a ball of superheated gas, not a celestial sign of God’s power and love.  The sky around it was an immense sea of atmosphere before empty space, reflecting and defusing the sun’s light to reveal the exquisite blue.  In that moment, I was freed from the burden that religion, swallowed whole and without question, had imposed on me.  A couple years later, when the song came out, I recognized the deep emotional roots of John Lennon’s call:  “Imagine there’s no heaven, It’s easy if you try.  No hell below us, Above us, only sky.  Imagine all the people living for today...  You may say that I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one. I hope one day you’ll join us, And the world shall live as one.”  

 

But by that time, I had run into the despair and fear of meaninglessness that my atheism allowed to grow, and had let those non-Christian autobiographies start me on a journey that led me back to trust in God more deeply, albeit with less certitude.  What I had shaved off with Occam’s Razor—the supernaturalist theistic explanations of how the universe works—never grew back.  But in its stead had grown a sense not of how but of why.  Those God-talk stories seemed to tell “why?” better and more parsimoniously than most secular tales.   And this, not with a God “out there” somewhere who might break into nature if we did something to impress him, but rather, a mystery of love in whom we live, and move, and have our being. 

 

Today’s scripture lessons are all about faith.  Here is my translation of the opening of today’s epistle reading from Hebrews: 

 

“Trusting in God, faith, is what undergirds whatever hope we have; it is what makes things otherwise unseen clear to our view.   It was, after all, by their trust that our ancestors gained special distinction.  And it is trusting that gives us the ability to truly understand what it means to say that God’s speech called the universe into existence: things visible created by the invisible” (Heb 11:1-3).  

 

The Greek word normally translated by “faith,” is in most cases better translated by “trust.”  Such trust—whether quiet or loud—is what lies beneath all hope.  It is what helps us see truth otherwise invisible.  That’s because meaning grows primarily out of an orientation of the heart, not the opinions of the mind.  We call such an orientation of the heart “faith,” or “trust,” openness coupled with confidence. 

 

The lesson from Genesis tells us the story of Abram.  In Rabbinic lore, Abram came from a family who for a living made idols, symbols for all the various competing things at work—fearsome or attractive—in the world about us.  The One God calls him out of this life of pursuing things before his eyes, and move from his ancestral home.  Today’s epistle says he responds by following the call, “not knowing where he was going.”  God promises him a new home, and legacy of family.  But Abram’s eyes tell him that none of that is possible: he and his wife are sterile and well beyond child-bearing years.  God takes Abram out under the night sky, tells him to look up, and “Count the stars.  That’s how many descendants you’ll have.”  The text says Abram trusted God’s promise, despite it all, and “God booked this trust as Uprightness.” 

 

“Count the stars”: more descendants than the stars in the heavens!  But this is more than an extravagant simile.  “Count the stars”: after all the glorious visions we have been treated to in the last few years from the space telescopes, we know that this is a call to ponder overwhelming, beautiful, and deep mystery.  God here calls Abram to look at one part of the world before him, calls him to visit a thin place, and contemplate the awe-inspiring night sky. The awe leads Abram to trust. 

 

But note:  it is impossible literally to count all the stars.  Or, if those space telescope photos are to be trusted, even count the galaxies, each with billions of stars.  There are just too many. You can’t count the stars.  But you can try.  And in trying you realize that you just can’t do it. 

 

“Count the stars—that’s how my promise will be!”   Things impossible now will become accessible.  Things invisible now become visible to a trusting heart.      

 

Faith and trust are not the opposite of disbelief and distrust.  They are not locked in a life and death struggle.  Rather, they are in dialogue.  Faith is trusting, despite all the reasons you have NOT to trust.  Faith cannot bring the invisible to light without working daily with the fears, frustrations, and doubt brought by the darkness about. 

 

Galileo Galilei famously defended himself against the Inquisition by referring to the continuity of faith and reason, belief and doubt: “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.”

 

And just as faith grows in the midst of doubt, the fact that we doubt at all is evidence of what we have faith in. 

 

J.R.R. Tolkien once wrote to his youngest son Christopher, “I imagine the fish out of water is the only fish to have an inkling of water.”  His point was that we are generally unaware of the framework of our lives—we take it for granted, and do not question it much.  A fish in water is unaware of the water about it: that is just how its world is.  It knows nothing of wetness, though wetness is all about it, because it can’t even conceive of dryness.  But take it out of the water, and it becomes acutely aware that something—something important and necessary for life—is missing.  Tolkien’s friend C.S. Lewis later wrote,  

 

 “My [adolescent] argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A [person] does not call a line crooked unless [they have] some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? If the whole show was bad and senseless from A to Z, so to speak, why did I, who was supposed to be part of the show, find myself in such violent reaction against it?  A man feels wet when he falls into water, because man is not a water animal: a fish would not feel wet...  [A]theism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning: just as, if there were no light in the universe and therefore no creatures with eyes, we should never know it was dark. Dark would be a word without meaning” (from Mere Christianity).   “[Look at how w]e are so little reconciled to time that we are even astonished at it. ‘How he’s grown!’ we exclaim, ‘How time flies!’ as though the universal form of our experience were again and again a novelty. It is as strange as if a fish were repeatedly surprised at the wetness of water. And that would be strange indeed; unless of course the fish were destined to become, one day, a land animal” (from Reflections on the Psalms.)

Trust is a matter of the heart.  Where we put our efforts is where our hearts wind up.  If you at times just cannot muster trust in God, seek out moments of awe, count the stars.  But then act as if you already have that trust, and it will come. 

 

Like Abram counting the stars, be honest about fears and doubts, but set out anyway, even though we don’t know exactly where we’re going.

 

Count the stars.  Look honestly at our reasons for doubting God, for not trusting in the Love behind all things.  God knows the world we live in is full of evidence of a lack of love.  But the very fact that we find this wrong, that it makes us uncomfortable, tells us that this is not all there is.  The glimpses of love and beauty and blessing we show and see from time to time actually reveal the true heart of things, the invisible heart of the world that faith makes visible.  As beautiful and sweet as this world is, it at times makes us gasp for air, like a fish out of water.  That’s because we are not made for this world alone, and the imprint of the Creator’s love is in our hard-wiring.    It turns us away from despair and back to the Creator whose image we bear.  Count the stars.  And know you are beloved.  

In the name of God,  Amen. 

 

 

The Point of Pointlessness (Proper 13C)

 

The Point in Pointlessness
Homily delivered the Eighth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 13; Year C RCL)

The Rev. Fr. Anthony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.
3 August 2025 9:00 a.m. Sung Mass
Parish Church of St. Luke the Evangelist, Grants Pass (Oregon)
Readings:  Ecclesiastes 1:2, 12-14; 2:18-23; Psalm 49:1-11; Colossians 3:1-11; Luke 12:13-21

 

God, take away our hearts of stone
 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.   

It is so good to be back here at St. Luke with you! I am feeling particularly blessed.  Three years ago, when I last preached these texts, I was just coming out of a long period of mourning in which I had emotionally shut down.  This year, Will and I have been traveling regularly, gardening, and working out. I am teaching and weekly find joy in seeing my students, who started two years ago without even knowing the Hebrew alphabet, reading and interpreting the Bible in Hebrew. I have had the blessing of getting to know the folks at Emmanuel Episcopal in Coos Bay, doing supply for them while their rector is on sabbatical. So I am feeling pretty good about the world. 

And so what do I get from the Lectionary to preach on this first day in a while back with you?  The most pessimistic verse of the whole Bible!  

 הֲבֵ֤ל הֲבָלִים֙ אָמַ֣ר קֹהֶ֔לֶת הֲבֵ֥ל הֲבָלִ֖ים הַכֹּ֥ל הָֽבֶל׃

Haveyl havalim ,’amar Qohelet,  Havel havalim, hakkol havel.

“‘Zero of Zeroes,’ says the Gatherer [of Sayings], ‘Zero of Zeroes, it’s all a big Zero.’”  

 

These grim intonations begin the book of Qohelet, or, as it is called in Greek, Ecclesiastes.  There a jaded old man condemns all human effort, whether frivolous and sinful or even serious and responsible.  They all are, in the words of the King James Bible, “vanity of vanities” (totally pointless). They are “chasing after the wind.”

 

The Psalm picks up the theme: “We cannot pay the price for our life, the price of not dying and escaping the grave, because it costs more than any of us can afford.  Even the prudent and wise end up dying just as the foolish and stupid.  Their legacy is the place they rot, like wild animals.”   Another passage in Qohelet puts it this way: “What difference does it make whether we love or hate?  Both are equally pointless, because we all share the same end, whether just or wicked, good or bad, clean or unclean, religious or irreligious.  As it is for the good person, so it is for the sinner; as it is for those who take their oaths seriously and those who violate them.  Among all the things under the sun, this is the worst: that the same end awaits us all.  This fact fills our minds with evil, our hearts with madness as long as we live: for in the end, we all end up dead… and a dog alive is better off than a lion dead” (Eccl 9:1-5).

 

These words speak deeply to us because it does seem at times that life is pointless.  But isn’t God’s word supposed to tell us of hope and meaning, say that love will overcome hate, and we should keep hope rather than pursue nihilist pleasure? “Eat, drink, and be merry; we’re all going to tomorrow!” says Qohelet.  “And this too is pointless.”  

 

The Bible is not a single book that teaches a single message.  It is field notes of a whole lot of people over a 2,000 years.  They disagree with each other.  Many ideas and teachings included in the Bible express a partial truth on the way to fuller revelation.  Some are there, I think, simply by way of bad example: the Deuteronomist says that God commanded genocide against idolatrous peoples; Ezra says God commanded men to abandon their wives and children because they were the wrong ethnicity and religion.  The Psalmist prays that soldiers will bash in the heads of his enemies’ babies… 

 

This is the Bible we’re talking about here!  “Say it ain’t so, Joe!” 

 

So even though many other biblical passages condemn such a pessimistic take on the world, it still hurts when we read such blatant cynicism there.   

 

Within the whole arc of scripture, admission of the pointlessness of life apart from God is in fact the first step to meaningfulness, something pointed out in today’s epistle.  In light of Jesus’ resurrection, we know that in death life is not ended, but rather changed.  All will be right in the end, and if things are not all right, then it is not yet the end. 

 

But in this life, we walk by faith and not by sight, and Qohelet’s specter of pointlessness still haunts us.

 

In today’s Gospel, Jesus himself is pretty pessimistic: he says, with Robby Burns, that the best-laid plans of mice and men are useless  In an exquisite little parable, a man who is a model of responsibility and prudence finds his efforts are pointless.  A wealthy farmer plans carefully to insure his security, only to be caught unawares that very night by unexpected death.  He talks to himself: “Self of mine, you have many good things stored up for years to come. So take it easy; eat, drink, and enjoy it to the max!”  He is quoting Qohelet’s line without realizing that “this too is pointless.”  He talks to himself as if to a stranger.  Such chasing the wind means alienation from self. 

 

That is because it reflects alienation from God, who replies, “You idiot!  This very night your life will end!  Now who’s going to get all that stuff?” 

 

 “You idiot!”  The reference is to Psalm 14:1, “The idiot says in his heart, there is no God.”  The rich farmer has bought into the lie that “God helps those who help themselves.” He has acted for all intents and purposes as if there were no God.  He is an atheist in practice.  His praiseworthy prudence has distracted him from the truth that in this life, nothing apart from God is truly secure.  Nothing can be taken for granted; all things should be the occasion of gratitude.

 

In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus points to birds and wildflowers as signs of God’s love.  If God feeds and clothes his lowly creatures so well, there is no need for worry, no need to strive for more: “Your Heavenly Father knows all that you need… So work first for God’s Reign and the justice it demands, and God will make sure you get what you need” (Matt. 6:19-33).  The point is gratitude and the compassion that comes from it, not being “righteous.”  “God sends the blessings of Sun and Rain both on the Godly and the Ungodly alike” Jesus says.  “We cannot enter God’s Reign unless we become helpless like little children.” 

 

 “Being rich for God” or “storing up treasures in heaven” for Jesus is not another struggle, a way of bribing love out of a supposedly unloving God, or of showing how much better we are than others.  All that, too, is pointless chasing after the wind. 

Jesus says, “My yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”  Criticized regularly for being too lax in his expectations of his followers, he throws parties and regularly says to rejoice and be thankful (that’s why “hallowed be thy name” leads in the Lord’s Prayer). On Jesus’ lips, “eat, drink, and be merry” is not a cry of isolating despair, but of welcoming gratitude. 

 

Acting as if God were not taking care of us, were not a good and loving Parent, as if we thought that God did not exist, or that God were not unconditional Love itself—this is foolishness, idiocy, “totally pointless.” 

 

Our eyes must see God at work in the world about us, and our heart must be thankful, set on God the giver of every good gift. In this world that appears so forlorn of love, so seemingly pointless, there is no room for illusion or fantasy.  No room for self-alienation, seeing yourself as a stranger.  No room for alienating others, identifying them as enemies or competitors, or scapegoating and blaming them for our own failings.  No room for letting our fears, anxieties, and guilt run rampant and blot out the table of plenty already set before us.   Acceptance, thanksgiving, and openness are the right posture of any soul that would enter the heart of God. Greed—whether for money, security, pleasure, power, prestige, beauty, knowledge, sanctity, or perfect domesticity—greed is baggage that simply cannot fit through the narrow door.   

 

And that, I think, is the ultimate point in life’s apparent pointlessness. As William Sloane Coffin said, “The world is too dangerous for anything but truth and too small for anything but love.”

If we're not quite there, that's OK.  Remember Jesus said our heart will follow where we place our treasure.  We can act as if we had faith, and faith will come. Fake it ‘till you make it.   This is not hypocrisy:  hypocrisy is pretending to be something you’re not so you can continue being the way you are.   Faking it ‘till you make is so you can actually change. And it works.  

Jesus here is not telling us to forgo any thought of modest retirement accounts or prudent savings.  Elsewhere he tells us to be harmless as doves but smart as snakes.  He expects street smarts, and part of this is putting aside chasing after wind, being idiots.  

 

In Flannery O’Conner’s troubling story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find” a serial murderer called the Misfit abducts a family in the rural South.  A grandmother tries to talk him out of killing her by repeating tired banalities about prayer, the Church, and Jesus.  The Misfit answers:

“Jesus… [has] thrown everything off balance.  If He did what he said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.  No pleasure but meanness.”

 

This Misfit takes the cynicism of Ecclesiastes to a very sick logical conclusion.  O’Conner once wrote that “The story is a duel of sorts between the grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt involvement with Christ’s action, which set the world off balance for him.”  O’Conner’s point is that there’s no use in saying you believe in Jesus or God unless that changes your life and affects your view of everything: “Redemption is meaningless unless there is a cause for it in the actual life we live. ... I see from the standpoint of classical Christian orthodoxy.  This means that for me the meaning of life is centered in our redemption by Christ and what I see in the world I see in its relation to that.” 

 

Practical atheism is not an option.  We mustn’t tart up our greed and say it is prudence.  We mustn’t justify our desire to be in control by saying this is our right.  We mustn’t act as if our lust for pleasure is anything other than pointless distraction.  Our trust in God must show fruits in our life, in how we use our time and resources.  Jesus does not call us all to be spiritual supermen, or ascetics.  He calls us all simply to take up his easy yoke, his light burden: trust and love God, be honest, and act with the compassion for others that grows from this.  In a word:  Work justice, do kindness, and walk humbly with our God.  

 

In the name of God,  Amen.