Each Day a Grace (Proper 20A Epistle)

  

 

Each Day a Grace

(Proper 20A Epistle)

10:30 a.m. Sung Mass

20 September 2026

Mission Church of St. Paul the Apostle, Crescent City CA
Jonah 3:10-4:11 Psalm 145:1-8 Philippians 1:21-30 Matthew 20:1-16

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

Friends, Will and I are so happy to be with you here again in Crescent City!  This happiness at being with you is mixed with sadness, however, at the news of the terrible accident that happened a few days ago to Katie, your parish office clerk and all-purpose den-mother, who I hear remains comatose in an ICU in Redding.  Yikes.  Life is so good, yet so fragile.  It is sweet, but at times bitter.  We see God’s providence, yet at times life seems so random. 

So instead of preaching the gospel reading today as I usually do, I thought I’d talk to you about the Epistle reading and then tell you of a personal experience of mine that has made me think a lot about our sweet life and the randomness we sometimes see, about God looking out for us, and what seems to be at times God not looking out for us. 

First, the reading.  Here is how I translate it.  Paul is writing to Christians he has converted in the city Philippi, many people think near the end of his life:  

²¹For to me, Christ means life itself, and so dying at times [so I can be with him] seems something to be desired. ²²Yet if I go on living in the flesh, that only means more time for productive work got me.  If I had to choose between the two, sometimes I just don’t know which I’d choose! ²³I am caught between the two. I want to leave this life so I can be with Christ: that seems prefereable! ²⁴But it would be better for your sake for me to remain alive here. ²⁵I know this all too well: as long as I continue to be with all of you, it’s so I can help you progress and find greater joy in the faith, ²⁶so you can take overflowing pride more and more in Christ Jesus that I will see when I come to visit you again. ²⁷You just have to remember to conduct your common life the way the way gospel demands.  That way, whether I come and see you or not, I’ll hear this news of you: that you are standing firm in complete unity, showing exactly how good the Gospel is!” (Phil 1:21-27, adapted from The Ashland Bible)

Paul, who has seen a bad stuff in his life, is tired, and is ready to go and be with Jesus.  But he still wants to live, since he wants to help those he loves, and life and love is so sweet.

Elsewhere he writes this (again, my own translation):  

¹For we know that if this body, this this earthly thing we dwell in, as flimsy as a tent, is destroyed, we will then find ourselves living in a proper house, one built by God, not by human beings, that lasts forever in heaven. ²For in this tent we groan, because it just doesn’t provide that much covering, at least not as much as that heavenly house of ours.    ³And we don’t want to run around naked now, do we?  ⁴For while we’re in this tent we can only groan, afraid of being stark naked wanting more clothing.  I’m talking here about wanting to be fully alive, not half dead like we are here.  ⁵And that’s precisely what God has already prepared for us, and given us a foretaste of it, God’s active presence in our day to day lives.  ⁶That’s why can be so happy here and now.  We know that God is there for us, even in the absence from God that we suffer by being in this mortal body of ours. ⁷After all, that’s what faith is all about isn’t it, not completely knowing but still believing.  (2 Cor 5:1-7, adapted from The Ashland Bible)

My story is actually very appropriate this week, the 25^th anniversary of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Here goes:

In 2001, I was working at the U.S. Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland. 

 I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three weeks to prepare for and carry out a program. At that time, Narita Airport in Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place and I wanted to avoid it at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an early, early morning flight on September 11 out of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul.

Less that a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my dear wife Elena about—what else?—money and family finances. We had two kids in college and one just about to start and it was a sore topic. We both emotionally kind of shut down, and Elena stopped talking much to me.

Knowing I was about to leave for three weeks, and that my schedule required me to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife. And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not on speaking terms.

So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so Elena and I could wake up and have breakfast together before I left.

The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul. Not good, but I wanted that time at home.

The morning of my flight, I got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast with Elena. We had started to talk again, knowing it was important to reconnect before I flew off.

A cab picked me up at 9:15 a.m. for the noon flight from National. We headed down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C.

Twenty-five minutes later, as we emerged from the Park onto the broad bottom-lands of the Potomac near then then thriving Kennedy Center, my Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river and heard a lot of sirens. It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that couldn’t be.

Just as we took the turn onto the 14th Street Bridge to cross the Potomac, a Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as they shut down all traffic across the bridges.

“Please officer, can you let us get over? One last car? Otherwise, I’ll be late for my flight at Reagan.”

“You won’t be flying anywhere today, sir. The FAA just shut down all air traffic in the continental U.S. Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the nation’s under attack. The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just minutes ago.”

I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated, told the driver to take me back to my home. It took 25 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back. Cell phones were not working. The traffic of the city quickly slowed to full gridlock.

Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details started coming out. I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me time for breakfast with my wife.

It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into the Pentagon.

Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with my wife, I would have been on that plane.

When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be alive.

Our youngest son Charlie hugged us as well. He already knew then that the father of one of his best friends at school, a gay man who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing. His remains were never found or identified.

I told this story to a friend in Beijing 10 years after 9-11, a Mennonite minister in charge of food aid to the starving in North Korea. Canada was still a close ally of the U.S.  He asked, “So what did you learn from this? What is the take-away?”

I had often thought about this in the ten years after the attacks.

I answered him this way: I guess the easy meaning is that God looked after me and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me from dying that day). There are many, many examples in scripture where God turns bad things into good.

But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were not saved from taking that flight. I think I heard once that the wife of Ted Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last minute. She died on the flight together with everyone else.

A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many additional years of sweet, wonderful life. God gives us way more than we deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come. But again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared.

I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for intervening and keeping me from harm that day. Because despite the apparent randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me like God was looking out over me and my family that day.

But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn deeply those not spared, and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists. I would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died didn’t deserve to be saved.

I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the statistics of victims of terrorism, the random victims of natural disasters, or in the great amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all. I still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father.

The fact that Jesus ended up on a cross is no proof that his faith and hope were empty wishes. The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be the norm of most human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have never yet seen. This is what I told my friend in 2011, and they remain my feelings to this day.

This has become all the clearer to me in the last few years, with our nation's turn from its feeble efforts to pursue its better values and its embrace of a hateful, lying, and at time insane leadership that mistakes national greatness for brutality, coercion, and bullying. The rise of such a loathsome cabal as Donald Trump and his Republican Congress and Supreme Court enablers to me is not a sign that there is no God or Providence. Rather, the fact that most people in the country and the world, even increasingly people formerly hoodwinked by this con-man, see this as so evil and abnormal is evidence that there is indeed Good at the heart of the world.

Twenty-five years on from 9-11, I feel that each day in my life since then has been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God. The most important work I did at State Department, much of it now undone by that cabal, came after the attacks. I finished my Ph.D. in Biblical studies.  My calling as a priest came about 5 years after I was granted this extra time. So did the ten years of helping as principal caregiver my beloved Elena through her suffering and death from Parkinson's disease. As did my retirement from State and subsequent work as an Episcopal Priest, first full-time and now retired, in Southern Oregon, Hawaii, and now Northern California. I've seen my kids struggle and thrive as adults, and now seen my grandchildren growing into adulthood.  And I fell in love and married Will, and found joy as an out gay man. I am making great progress on my work on the Ashland Bible. All of this is a blessing, a grace.

And maybe that is the point: all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. And this despite the pain we feel at times, like that at Katie’s accident and current state.  We must cherish the time we are granted to enjoy and help those we love. 

No--We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see, and know in our hearts that God loves us all.  After all, that’s what faith is all about, not knowing, but still believing.  

Thanks be to God. 

 

My 9-11 Story Twenty-five Years On

 

My 9-11 Story Twenty-five Years On

In 2001, I was working at the Department of State in the Public Diplomacy regional office of the East Asian and Pacific Bureau, living in North Chevy Chase, Maryland. 

 I needed to go to Seoul Korea for three weeks to prepare for and carry out a program. At that time, Narita Airport in Tokyo was a grim, unpleasant place to spend more than 1 hour on transit. (This has since changed—I now LOVE going through Narita on 12-14 hour trans-Pacific flights, if only for the shower/shave/nap in the hour-rate hotel in the terminal and the great sushi opposite Gate 33 in the International Terminal). At any rate, I wanted to avoid Narita at all costs, and booked a flight accordingly—an early, early morning flight on September 11 out of Dulles airport through Los Angeles, on direct to Seoul.

About a week before my departure, I had a very pointed argument with my dear wife Elena about—what else?—money and family finances. We had two kids in college and one just about to start and it was a sore topic. We both emotionally kind of shut down, and Elena stopped talking much to me.

Knowing I was about to leave for three weeks, and that my schedule required me to get up at three a.m. to meet an airport shuttle, I knew that I was going to leave that morning unable to have a breakfast or chat of any kind with my wife. And I did not want to go off for three weeks on opposite sides of the world not on speaking terms.

So I asked my secretary to change the booking for later in the morning, so Elena and I could wake up and have breakfast together before I left.

The booking that came up was a noon flight out of Reagan National through San Francisco, then Narita, then Seoul. Not good, but I wanted that time at home.

The morning of my flight, I got up at our regular time, and had a nice breakfast with Elena. We had started to talk again. Both of us knew it was important to connect before a separation of three weeks.

I had a cab pick me up at 9:15 a.m for the 12 noon flight from Reagan/ National. We headed down Rock Creek Parkway, that gem of an urban park that looks like the wild woods down the middle of metropolitan Washington D.C.

Twenty or thirty minutes later, as we emerged from the Park onto the broad bottom-lands of the Potomac near the Kennedy Center and Georgetown, my Pakistani driver and I noticed a lot of smoke coming from across the river, in Arlington. It looked like the Pentagon was on fire, but that couldn’t be. There were lots of sirens too.

Just as we took the turn onto the 14th Street Bridge across the Potomac, a Park Police car cut in front of us and stopped us, the first car stopped as they shut down all traffic across the bridges.

“Please officer, can you let us get over? One last car? Otherwise I’ll be late for my flight at Reagan.”

“You won’t be flying anywhere today. The FAA just shut down all air traffic in the continental U.S. Haven’t you been listening the radio?” he added, suspiciously eyeing my distinctly Middle-Eastern-looking cabbie, “the nation’s under attack. The Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon just minutes ago.”

I thought for a moment that I needed to have the driver take me to the State Department, but realizing that major federal buildings were being evacuated, told the driver to take me back to my home. It took 30 minutes to come down from there, but five hours to get back. Cell phones were not working. The traffic of the city quickly slowed to full gridlock.

Listening to the radio in the car now, I felt a terrible chill when the details started coming out. I checked my travel papers in my briefcase, which still had the original booking listed, the one that my secretary had canceled to give me time for breakfast with my wife.

It was AA 77, flying Dulles – Los Angeles, the plane that had been crashed into the Pentagon.

Had I not wanted a few extra minutes to repair things with my wife, I would have been on that plane.

When I finally got home, we hugged a long time, grateful to be together, to be alive.

Our son Charlie hugged us as well. He already knew then that the father of one of his best friends at school, a father who worked in WTC Tower One, was missing. His remains were never found or identified.

I told this story to a friend in Beijing 10 years after 9-11, a Canadian Mennonite minister who coordinated relief work in East Asia and was strongly involved in aiding the hungry in North Korea. He asked, “So what did you learn from this? What is the take-away?”

I had often thought about this in the ten years after the attacks.

I answered him this way: I guess the easy meaning is that God looked after me and took a bad thing (our argument) and turned it into a good thing (keeping me from dying that day). There are many, many examples in scripture where God turns bad things into good.

But that is a little dissatisfying, especially since there were people who were not saved from taking that flight. I think I heard once that the wife of Ted Olsen, George W. Bush’s Solicitor General, had been booked on AA77 at the last minute. She died on the flight together with everyone else.

A simple take-away is that I wanted just a few more minutes with my wife before I took off for three weeks, and the actual result was the blessing of many additional years of sweet, wonderful life. God gives us way more than we deserve, and God’s blessings are ridiculously overabundant when they come. But again, there remains the mystery of suffering, the puzzle of those not spared.

I would be a pathetically ungrateful person if I did not thank God for intervening and keeping me from harm that day. Because despite the apparent randomness of my changing that ticket booking, it really felt to me like God was looking out over me and my family that day.

But I would be a pathetically selfish and obtuse person if I did not mourn deeply those not spared, and wonder at the mystery of a loving almighty and all-good God in a world where true evil and seemingly random horror exists. I would be a total jerk to feel that I somehow deserved saving and those who died didn’t deserve to be saved.

I do not believe that randomness and horror—whether it is in the statistics of victims of terrorism, the random victims of natural disasters, or in the great amount of waste found in natural selection and the evolution of species—is evidence that there is no loving, almighty, all-good God and Maker of us all. I still believe in providence and in the loving God that Jesus called Father.

The fact that Jesus ended up on a cross is no proof that his faith and hope were empty wishes. The very fact that he could continue to declare his trust in God while on the cross (read the rest of the psalm beginning “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me” that he recited while hanging there, Psalm 22), the very fact that in the midst of all the randomness and horror that seem to be the norm of most human life, our hearts simply will not accept this as right and normal, this to me is evidence that we are not created for this world alone, and that in fact we are children destined for another home which we have never yet seen. This is what I told my friend in 2011, and they remain my feelings to this day.

This has become all the clearer to me in the last few years, with my nation's turn from its feeble efforts to pursue its better values and its embrace of a hateful, lying, insane, and downright stupid leadership that mistakes national greatness for brutality, coercion, and bullying. The rise of such a loathsome cabal as Donald Trump, his Republican Congress, and Supreme Court to me is not a sign that there is no God or Providence. Rather, the fact that most people in the country and the world , even increasingly people formerly hoodwinked by such craven criminals, see this as so evil and abnormal is evidence that there is indeed Good at the heart of the world.

Twenty-five years on from 9-11, I feel that each day in my life since then has been a grace, an added plus, a blessing from God. The most important work I did at State Department, much of it now undone by that cabal, came after the attacks. My calling as a priest came about 5 years after I was granted this extra time. So did the ten years of helping as principal caregiver my beloved Elena through her suffering and death from Parkinson's disease. As did my retirement from State and subsequent work as an Episcopal Priest, full-time and retired, in Southern Oregon, Hawaii, and Northern California. I've seen my kids struggle and thrive as adults. And I fell in love and married Will, and found joy as an out gay man. I am making great progress on my work on the Ashland Bible. All of this is a blessing, a grace.

And maybe that is the point: all our times and all our days—of each and every one of us—are graces. We must be thankful for each day, and all the blessings we see, and know in our hearts that God loves us all, though we do not understand how the world's brokenness can continue and even sometimes seem to triumph in the presence of such love.

Thanks be to God. 

 

Love's Tourettes (Proper 18A)

  

      Love’s Tourettes
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost (Proper 18 Year A RCL)
6 September 2026--9:00 a.m. Sung Mass

Parish Church of St. Luke, Grants Pass (Oregon)

Readings: Ezekiel 33:7-11; Psalm 119:33-40; Romans 13:8-14; Matthew 18:15-20

 

God, give us hearts to feel and love,

take away our hearts of stone

 and give us hearts of flesh. Amen.

 

 

There was a rock band in Beijing when I lived there before moving to Ashland.  One of its members was a senior U.S. Embassy official, the person charged with most of the financial rules negotiations between the U.S. and China.  This band had the best name for a Rock and Roll Band I have ever heard: Love’s Tourettes.   Yes, that’s right.  It was named after the neurological disorder known as Tourette Syndrome, marked by severe stammering, inability to get one’s words out, and occasional uncontrollable bursts of deeply obscene and offensive language.  Almost none of us needed anyone to explain the joke:  sometimes in love we are so nervous and fearful that words escape us and, as glib as we might be at other times, we find ourselves grasping for words, unable to express the simplest of ideas.  Sometime in love, especially when it goes bad or runs into conflict, we are prone to rage, and the vilest of language just comes out, usually loudly. 

 

Love’s Tourettes:  we become tongue tied for fear of repelling the beloved, or fear of losing the beloved.  We are reduced to rage and blue streaks when things are going wrong and we fear the same thing.  It is the very intimacy and vulnerability we establish in deep relationship that makes such relationships so painful at times. 

 

Today’s Gospel has a set of rules for dealing with conflict within the Church, within the beloved community.  They seek to help us cure Love’s Tourettes we might have when relationships go wrong among those who walk the way with Jesus.  The rules are based on the idea that over time, we are influenced by those we spend our time with, for good or for ill.  If we’re with someone who makes us a better person, that’s good.  If it’s a case of a bad apple spoling the bushel of apples, that’s bad.  You know the basic outline:  first talk to the one who has offended in private.  If that doesn’t resolve it, then go with two other people who can witness the exchange and bring some objectivity to it, and if necessary, assist each party to listen to the other and improve their communication.  Finally, if that doesn’t work and the offender persists, “they shall be to you as a pagan and a tax collector.”    Well, what does that mean? 

 

A common reading is this:  this is gradual escalation.  Try out a one-one-one talk where public grandstanding can be avoided.  If that’s no good, call in witnesses so they can help you brow beat the offender into submission, as Methodists used to say and Baptists still say, “labor with the brother.”   And if that is no good, then kick his sorry behind out of the community altogether.  To me, this understanding is basically, a polite form of Love’s Tourettes.  I may not swear at you, but I am reduced to inarticulate silence when I say, “I wash my hands of you.” 

 

I wonder if that’s a right reading.  We know Jesus said “If someone sins against you seven times in a day..., keep on forgiving them seven times" (Luke 17:3-4) and that one form of the saying corrects any misunderstanding we might have by adding, "don’t just forgive seven times, but seventy-seven,” that is, never stop forgiving.  This is probably the original form of the saying from the historical Jesus, using a striking and memorable turn of the phrase, and its emendation to just seven times and by adding the words “if they say they’re sorry,” is clearly the creation of the later church trying to make rules out of the legacy of Jesus' sayings.  

 

The saying in today’s Gospel, with its law-like procedural character and concern for rules to run a community, is almost certainly a creation of the author of the St. Matthew Gospel.  It was written in Syrian Antioch for a mixed Jewish-pagan church, one with lots of conflicts and intercultural strife.  It is trying to create a Standard Operating Procedure for managing church conflict.   But remember this:  Matthew, also called Levi, the disciple of Jesus that this Gospel was always associated with, was originally a tax-collector.  And a major part of the church it is written to are gentiles, or less politely, pagans. 

 

So when it says, “let them be for you a tax-collector or a pagan” I think it is not necessarily saying this is the last straw and you have got to break of relations with the person.  Rather, it is saying that communication has broken down.  Community has gone by the boards.  The relationship between the offender and the offended had turned out to be a non-relationship, or an antagonistic one, like the relationships of Matthew’s Jewish readers with tax-collectors or pagans.  It is not saying give up on that nasty person because you couldn’t use friendly persuasion or browbeat them into conformity.  It is saying face up to the face that your relationship is bad.  Your communication is non-existent. 

 

Why did Jesus teach “never stop forgiving”?  Why did he teach, “don’t give up on someone?   Why did he keep on forgiving, even the worst things? 

 

There is a hint in today’s Hebrew Scripture lesson: “As I live, says Yahweh God, I take no pleasure when a wicked person dies, but rather when they turn from their ways and live.”   This passage is the scriptural warrant for the Church’s doctrine of the universal salvific will of God, that God wants everyone to be saved, for everyone to come out alright.  It comes from Jesus’ basic description of God as a loving parent, who gives good gifts to all his children.  It is the principal scriptural problem with John Calvin’s doctrine of a double predestination, one to salvation and heaven, and one to damnation and hell.   

 

The fact that God wishes good for all is the reason in this passage from Ezekiel for the prophets to warn people—it gives them a chance to turn back from the things that will destroy them.  

 

God wants us all to come out okay, and thus we need to help warn people who are going to where things will not be okay.  But this general desire to help and to show love by engaging others can have a distorted form:  where we try to remake all others in our own image.    This is why a desire for the brotherhood and sisterhood of the human family is often corrupted at best by a proselytizing urge and at worst an urge to holy war. 

 

Recognizing a break down in relationship, recognizing that someone has become a stranger to us, an alien, a pagan, or a tax-collector does not mean giving up on them.  Quite the opposite:  it means never giving up on them, never stopping to the engage and try to communicate, even when they have walked away from us.   

 

Never give up.  Don’t cave into Love’s Tourettes:  This has to do with not just the nature of God, all-loving, ever able, desiring life and health and prosperity for all.   It has to do with the nature human beings: always eager to turn things into an us and them game, always ready to confuse the line between good and evil that runs down the middle of each and every human heart with a line between one group of people and another or even one person and another. 

 

This applies not to life in the church, but also life in any community.  In our currently bitterly divided country, it seems we often simply will not talk religion or politics, or anything else of importance, with anyone who differs from us.  This is unfortunate, since it makes it impossible for anyone on either side to change.  We mustn’t let our grievance against anyone, no matter how justified, make us simply cut them out of our life.  I’d like to give one example from my own life, when I was working for the Department of State at US Embassies overseas, one that involves President Richard Nixon. 

    

 

50 years after he made the statement that we won’t have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore, both democrats and republicans indeed love to vilify him. His criminal acts that drove him from the White House, his at times truculent and suspicious personality, are just too easy a target. 

 

But you know, the Chinese love Richard Nixon, because “only Nixon could go to China.”  And I have a fond place in my heart for him, despite his flaws.   In the fall of 1989 in Beijing, he did something for me, my family, and my colleagues at the U.S. Embassy.  Despite private efforts by President George Herbert Walker Bush to repair relations with the Chinese regime after the Tian'anmen Massacre, relations were getting worse and worse.   The Chinese leadership, besieged and isolated, had focused its anger on dissidents and supporters of democracy.  The U.S. Embassy had granted refuge to the leading two Chinese dissidents in the scary days right after the Massacre, and as a result, the leadership sent in scores of military troops wearing police insignia to surround the Embassy compounds to provide what they called “security.”  They were a dangerous and harassing presence, stationed every 2 meters of so, facing in toward the compounds with riot helmets on and AK-47 machine guns drawn.  As things got worse over weeks, they clearly got the order to specifically target for harassment the children of the Embassy officers through whom the dissidents had sought refuge and in whose office complex they had been housed.  My eleven-year-old son was stopped, screamed at, and had an AK-47 dry-fired in his face:  shooting without ammunition, to make the target think he was being shot.  This also happened to the eleven-year-old daughter of a close colleague.  There was a sense that if things kept going in the way they were, relations would have to be broken and Embassy staff withdrawn.  Into this came former President Nixon.  He was invited by the Chinese government to come and help repair things.  He was briefed as soon as he arrived, and immediately sent a message to the staff of Chinese supreme leader Deng Xiaoping, whom he was to meet the next day.  He said that he had been told of the situation.  “If the extra guards are still present around the Embassy when I get up tomorrow, I will go directly to the airport and return to the U.S.  I will not meet with you with this harassment going on.”    The next morning came, and all the military had been withdrawn.  Our families could again live in confidence that we were not going to be harassed or worse.  A couple years later, Nixon returned, and in an Embassy gathering to meet him, I was able to privately give my personal thanks for what he had done, and say how much it had mattered for us.  He teared up, smiled, and said, “Thank you for telling me that, you know, it’s not often these days that anyone tells me I’ve done something good!” 

 

Richard Nixon, who has become for many such a caricature of evil, himself still cared about being told he had done a good thing. Like all of us, the line between good and evil was down the middle of his heart, and God still enticed him to follow his better angels.  All of us are thus enticed by God to do good, because God loves us all.  That’s why we should never give up on people.  That’s why we should never succumb to Love’s Tourettes. 

 

In the name of Christ, Amen.