Welcome

Primitive religion is not believed, it is danced!

Arthur Darby Nock

Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
And only he who sees takes off his shoes;
The rest sit round it and pluck blackberries.

Elizabeth Browning



Wednesday, August 28, 2019

Planet of Fools


Martin Luther King preached once on the passage of the rich fool.  He told this story. 
“The other day in Atlanta, the wife of a man had an automobile accident. He received a call that the accident had taken place on the expressway. The first question he asked when he received the call: "How much damage did it do to my Cadillac?" He never asked how his wife was doing. Now that man was a fool, because he had allowed an automobile to become more significant than a person. He wasn’t a fool because he had a Cadillac, he was a fool because he worshiped his Cadillac….

“Somehow in life,”  King continued, “we must know that we must seek first the kingdom of God, and then all of those other things—clothes, houses, cars—will be added unto us. But the problem is all too many people fail to put first things first...”
________________________________________

Sometimes I am a fool
I know that surprises some of you, but its true

Because sometimes
I don’t put first things first

Which of course raises the question,
“What should be first?”

Jesus was unequivocal
The Sacred should be first
In all its forms

We should build “richness towards God”
In other words we should invest in all things Sacred

The planet for example!
God’s first self incarnation
It is Sacred.  We should invest in it
Not rape it, plunder it, abuse it, for the sake of short-term profit

But devote ourselves to the nurture and enjoyment
of the self-expression of God

The Sacred as Sacred
We should invest in that reality in which we
“live and move and have our being” (Acts17)
We should wander, regularly
Into the depths of who we are, and find the Sacred Presence
That IS there
We should become awake to that presence
Nurture it
And allow it to transform us, from the inside out

The Sacred as other people
Oh, yes, God is everywhere
In everyone

In that smiling child in affluent America
In that child crying for its mother on our border
In that young urban professional
In that rural farmer, or rancher

In that young person, old person
Short person, tall person
Slight person, stout person
White person, black or brown person

It is pretty simple really
Being rich towards God is putting God first, and then people
Those beings in whom God dwells

And then?
Well then, as Jesus and Martin so aptly put it
True riches will come

Then meaning will come
Then joy will come
Then love will come

Being rich toward God
All of life will become a treasure

But if we don’t put first things first?
If we seek power first?
Or wealth first?

We see how that plays out every day,
In the greed, and injustice, and inequity…
In the fear, and cruelty that surrounds us.

If we don’t put first things first,
We are fools

No comments:

Post a Comment