Shalom

"Just Kill the Dumb Duck: Rebuke, Repentance and the Love of God

There is a saying in my immediate family.  A saying that is repeated solemnly anytime a story is told of serious damage incurred from an attempt to do a small, but ill-advised, good deed.  It is a proverb of unintended and unpredictable consequences.  It communicates a strong sense of imbalance between the bitter cost incurred and the small good we hoped to accomplish.  The saying is simple if, initially, a little cryptic: “Just kill the dumb duck. “   

The story begins like this.  About 20 years ago my dad was driving his 1982 black and red Ford F-150 pick up truck to town one spring Sunday morning for doughnuts and a Sunday paper.  The sky was clear and the morning crisp.  A thin layer of dew coated everything causing the grass to glitter and giving the blacktop a dark sheen. 

On the six miles of blacktop between my childhood home and town was a small subdivision of 15 homes, each on a one or two acre lot.  The southern most home had a small pond, constructed by the erection of an earthen dam across a gully with a rather steep grade that continued down to the road.  As dad approached the dip in the road where it intersected with the gully, he noticed a solitary duck begin to ascend from the right side ditch onto the blacktop immediately before him.  According to my father's report he barely touched the brake pedal, just enough to break his own momentum and give the duck a chance of crossing the road unharmed. 

When he touched the brake, however, the truck began to spin and after one or two revolutions it flipped onto the driver's side, on which the truck continued to spin until it came to rest in a freshly plowed field.  The owner of the pond was drinking his morning coffee in his yard and witnessed the crash and, after asking his wife to call for an ambulance, ran out to the crash scene.  After watching a rattled, beaten up man pull himself out of the passenger side window he asked, “Are you alright?”  Dad looked around and watched a lone mallard finish its ascent of the earthen dam to the well manicured pond beyond.  Dad looked at the man and said, “I should have killed the dumb duck.”

The ancient Hebrews had a different proverb, “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.”¹ When we read the proverb in English there is a tendency to emphasize the tragedy of hidden love but I'm increasingly convinced that we should place the emphasis on the expression of love which is an honest rebuke.  The thrust of the proverb, as I interpret it, is not that hidden love is even worse than open rebuke but that open rebuke reveals love.  Better is open rebuke in the community of faith than a love so hidden that it allows a brother or sister to continue unabated on a course of sin.   

The love of God is a complex and often unpredictable thing.  If anyone claims to be able to control God, to manipulate his love in such a way as to guarantee a result, whether to guarantee healing or wealth or success, they are not representing the God of Abraham, Moses and Jesus.  The God revealed to prophets and disciples is a God who will not be controlled like a machine or manipulated like a rag doll.  God loves us but he is not our servant.  God's love is beyond our imagination so it refuses to be constrained by it.  “Better is open rebuke than hidden love.”  Sometimes the love of God or the love of a friend is displayed in the act of an honest rebuke even when it does not feel like love at the exact moment.  True love, whether it springs from the divine or a friend, seeks what is best for the beloved, even if it risks alienating the beloved and sometimes we need to be rebuked. 

Rebuke, whether it comes from God or a friend, is a terrifying thing.  It pays no respect to age, honor, accomplishment or wealth.  It can come as a pang of conscience and it can come in the tumbling of empires. It can be dislocating, confusing, and can dismantle that which we worked hard to accomplish.  But when it is spoken in truth and grants opportunity for correction, it is an act of love.  If we are walking on a path of destruction, however we are knocked off of that path is an act of love. Even if we are embarrassed or humbled for a time, that is a small price to pay to be turned toward truth.   Rebuke, when needed, is always better than the alternative.

I want to try to be clear; there is no doubt that we witness the love of God in every good thing that we experience in life from the provision of our daily bread to the joy of the natural world and of our children.  But the truth is always one of those good things. Even when embracing it requires admitting that we were wrong in the past.   

Jesus cared for the Samaritan woman but he did not flatter her.  He did not attempt to charm her into accepting him as Messiah.  He did not seek to avoid truth because it might offend.  He merely spoke truthfully and the truth always comes with hope.  He is offering her the opportunity to change from an unfulfilling path to the truly liberating call to the discipleship of grace.  By the manner of his speaking and the knowledge that he displayed he won her to faith. She did not deny her life's trajectory or take offense at the master's audacity of talking about.  She understood the experience as a sign that the promise of God had come and that what she was being offered was true freedom. 

All too often I think we feel locked into poor choices by a trick of the brain that economists call the “Psychology of Previous Investment.”  The idea is simply that as human beings we have a tendency to continue to support stocks or business plans even after there are many rational and compelling reasons to reject them.  We do this because we have become invested them financially but more importantly, emotionally.  The more emotionally invested we become the more difficult it is to see any other options but continuing on the path of destruction.   

If someone continues to buy stock in a company, even as it spirals into bankruptcy we say, “They are throwing good money after bad.”  If they continue repeating the same personal mistakes of the past we might say, “They are repeating the same behavior expecting another result.”  Either way the psychology of previous investment is at work.  Unfortunately, it is easier to see in others than in ourselves.  When the love of God is at work in a rebuke, it draws our attention to the matter and grants us the opportunity to see what we were otherwise unable to see.  Rebuke breaks the cycle of the psychology of previous investment and forces us to evaluate our actions more objectively.

It is not necessary to travel too far into adulthood before we realize that everyone makes mistakes and sometimes they are doozies. If we do not sometimes hear the rebuke of God then it is only because we are not listening.  All too often we do hear but we do not respond.  God's love is not only evident in our joys and celebrations.  The love of God is evident anytime we are wrong and confronted with truth that illuminates our own mistake.  It is, under the circumstances, the only way that God's love could be manifest. If there were no rebuke then we would have to assume that either God does not love us enough to draw us away from our error or that his love is so hidden that it will not come out from its hiding place in order to correct us.

Confession and repentance are not sad times or a time to be wasted beating ourselves up but times for rejoicing.  It is a time for rejoicing, because it is during those times that the love of God, made manifest in the speaking of truth, is embraced.  Accepting correction results in a strengthening of our discipleship and that is always a good thing.  Let me emphasize: it matters little by what detour we came to that greater understanding and more faithful practice but it is in greater understanding and Christian practice that we experience the freedom that God grants through truth.   

What should be mourned are those rebukes which go unheeded, when our guilt is revealed to us but we find a way to ignore it, brush it aside or discount it.  A failure to heed a righteous rebuke may be an act of pride or a result of the power of previous investment or it can be rooted in fear.  Fear that the grace of God will not be extended or that the love of friends is not deep enough to forgive. I know that the fear that God's grace is incapable of reaching us is false and can only say that the love of true friends extends much farther in our time of need than we give it credit for when we are afraid. 

Now I like ducks, they are very cute.  It is relaxing to watch them paddle around a pond or walk across a grassy plain.  I also like to be liked and if people have a good opinion of me, so much the better. Maintaining that standing before others, however, is not worth ignoring truth and protecting it is not worth departing from the path of discipleship.  It would be like my trashing my truck and sending myself to the hospital in order to save a duck. 

After dad’s accident, I remember sitting in the emergency waiting room and hearing my mom yell, “Joe?  Joe?  This is not funny.” After which I heard a “SLAP” as she tried to revive him when he inexplicably fell unconscious.  Dad recovered quickly.  He was out of the hospital the next day and everyone had a good laugh at the welt across his cheek and the story of the sacrifice he made for the dumb duck of Rose Township.  I like ducks, but not enough to risk a human life to save one, not enough to trade my dad for one.  I like my reputation but not enough to risk departing from the path of discipleship for it.

The topic this third Sunday of Lent is the love of God, a love that is present not only in our successes and our triumphs over sin or injustice but also in our repentance; which is, truth be told, just another kind of victory over sin and injustice.  Now if anyone here is faced with a pained conscience or a need for repentance and change, I am ignorant of it.  I only know that none of us is perfect and all of us, everyone of you and I myself, will be confronted with the call to change at some point.  I know that experience can be difficult and the time spent there can feel dark and lonely but it is out of these dark moments that the love of God shines most clearly and the warmth it brings to our soul shines most vibrantly.  The love of God brings the rebuke that we may know the truth and thereby be set free.

After Lent comes Easter.  After Good Friday comes resurrection. After confession comes the rejoicing of a million angels and a more fulfilling walk with our Savior and King.  So when you are faced with an honest rebuke I have only one piece of advice, “Just kill the dumb duck” because, "Better is open rebuke, than hidden love."

Peace of Christ to you 

1 Proverbs 27:5

Damage and Healing

In our passages this morning we read about humanity's relationship to the rest of God's creation.  I want to draw our attention to, and spend our time this morning, on what, at first glance, may appear to be a contradiction.  In the first passage humanity is described as the master of creation.  We are to dominate it, fill it and rule over it as God's viceroy.  It would be hard to argue against the assertion, it is just what humanity has done.  There is hardly a corner of creation that is habitable that we have not inhabited.  With over 6 billion human beings and more being added every day, one could be forgiven if they thought that the earth had been filled.  If it is possible to add more human beings to the world community, we might ask if we should, given the stresses on our ecosystem wrought by humanity's drive for resources and space.  More than filling the earth, we are able to alter it according to our own needs and desires.  We can drain wetlands or clear jungles.  We can take the tops off of mountains or strip away the earth for the tar sand beneath.  We can, at least for a time, change the course of rivers and drain the reservoirs of lakes and alter the biology of seas.

But Genesis reveals another side of our relationship to creation. Humanity is called the caretaker of that which God has created.  A more literal translation would be to say that humanity is the servant of the garden.  To say that we tend the garden is to use the same Hebrew language as would be used to describe how a servant cares for, or tends to the needs of, his master.  The relationship as described in Genesis chapter 2 appears, at first, to be in opposition to the reading in chapter one.  But there is no contradiction between the two statements.  This dual identity of dominator and servant is very much describes the world in which we live.

While it was hailed as a great achievement when it was built the Aswan High Dam that filled Lake Nasser and made possible the electrification of Egyptian villages and the industrialization of cotton agriculture in Egypt is proving itself that we cannot escape our servitude to the process that govern the earth.  In the absence of the annual flooding of the Nile basin greater fertilization has been necessary.  Due to the irrigation of the fields, salt that normally would have been washed out to the Mediterranean, is now accumulating in the soil, reducing yields.  This is not a lone example.  Shrinking inland seas, decreasing soil fertility, water tables that go lower every year, they all speak to the abiding nature of limits regardless of how much power we come to wield or how invincible we think our ingenuity to be..   

We have it in our power to do great and powerful things, both as nations and in this age of the internal combustion engine, as private land owners.  Yet we cannot escape the fact that we are prisoners to the natural world and to the natural processes by which it operates.  We have great power but it is a power to change the shape and influence the plants and animals that fill the earth, we remain servants to the God created processes  at work throughout creation.  We attempt to transgress the limitations that they enforce at our own peril.

A wonderful example of this is related by the author Wendell Berry in his essay titled, simply, “Damage.”

I

I have a steep wooded hillside that I wanted to be able to pasture occasionally, but it had no permanent water supply.

About halfway to the top of the slope there is a narrow bench, on which I thought I could make a small pond.  I hired a man with a bulldozer to dig one.  He cleared away the trees and then formed the pond, cutting into the hill on the upper side, piling the loosened dirt in a curving earthwork on the lower.

The pond appeared to be a success.  Before the bulldozer quit work, water had already begun to seep in.  Soon there was enough to support a few head of stock.  To heal the exposed ground, I fertilized it and sowed it with grass and clover.

We had an extremely wet fall and winter, with the usual freezing and thawing.  The ground grew heavy with water, and soft.  The earthwork slumped; a large slice of the woods floor on the upper side slipped down into the pond.

The trouble was a familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.  The fault was mine.

I was careful to get expert advice.  But this only exemplifies what I already knew.  No expert knows everything about any place.  If one's knowledge of one's whereabouts is insufficient, if one's judgment is unsound, then expert advice is of little use.

II

In general, I have used my farm carefully.  It could be said, I think, that I have improved it more than I have damaged it.

My aim has been to go against its history and to repair the damage of other people.  But now a part of its damage is my own.

The pond was a modest piece of work, and so the damage is not extensive.  In the course of time and nature, it will heal.

And yet it is damage-to my place, and to me.  I have carried out, before my own eyes and against my intention, a part of the modern tragedy: I have made a lasting flaw in the face of the earth, for no lasting good.¹

There are two points I want us to take with us this morning, the first is ecological.  It deals primarily with our relationship with our environment.  We are both its masters and its servants.  We have the power to change the environment, to heal it or to damage it. Sometimes our best intentions go wrong and the power we intended for good, leaves a scar.  We can change the shape and the content of our environment but we cannot change the process which govern them.  We have dominion but that dominion does not extend so far as to abrogate the God ordained laws which govern it.  We must learn to limit ourselves or those processes will enact their own limits.  The author of Genesis realized this, and so should we. 

But this experience of being at the same time servant and master applies to more than our interaction with hillsides, soil, air and fire.   It applies to our interactions with people.  We have the ability to influence people in an amazing fashion but there are limits to that influence.  Mother Theresa had a great positive impact way beyond the sphere of her physical life and service through the way she inspired millions.  Who would have thought that a simple Albanian girl could have such an impact?  We can also use our power to harm one another.  Every demeaning remark can cause harm.  Every broken relationship a scar of something that went wrong.  If anything it is easier to cause harm than to heal.  We need to be conscious of our calling to be a people of healing and use the power we have been given to that end. 

Meeting people.  Engaging people.  Getting to know the real person behind the work-a-day mask.  Power, when combined with understanding and love becomes the power to heal.  Once we learn to read the scars left on the land we are able to see the harm inflicted in the past. Hopefully we can also see the healing that has been been accomplished.  Whatever the lay of the soul we get to know we should engage that soul in the hope not of getting more work out of them or conforming them to the type of person we want them to be but healing what was created by God and called “good.”  Using what power we do have to heal and nurture that which has been scared by sin.

For the people in our lives I hope that we can have the same attitude as Wendell Berry to his farm.  To leave the person more healed than when we found them.  If it is our goal we do not need more power, to accomplish it.  The fact is that  we do not have the knowledge or the wisdom to use the power we do have effectively.  Learning how people work, how they are influenced, these are the skills we need to help direct the healing processes of the human soul.  They are not technical abilities to be mastered but wisdom to be learned. 

Whether the damage inflicted is ecological or personal it is often intended as good.  The trade off for rural electrification in Egypt was the damage done to the Nile basin.  The efficiency and fast pace of life we live today is achieved at the cost of social stability.  We do not need to pray for more power, neither in our relationship to the earth nor in our relationships with one another.  What we need to seek is more love.  Love to motivate us, a greater understanding of the world and people around us to inform us and a greater appreciation for limits to keep us from doing harm when we intend to heal. 

Love is the ability to reach out to the other, especially when you do not have to.  To love it to put no limit on the grace of God, to love and forgive the anonymous individual and the infamous criminal as well as the trusted friend.  To love creation is to seek to live within its limits, even if it appears that they can be abrogated for a few decades.  I do not say that it is easy.  Like non-violence it entails a commitment that holds out the very real prospect of sacrifice.  I am saying that it is the way of God with the living and it is to be our way.  We do not need more power, but more love.

Understanding that the world around us is complex we need to learn to look at our environment and the people around us with a sophisticated eye that seeks reconciliation between people and between our aspirations and the limits of earth's natural processes.  What I mean is that we have, or at the very least I have, a tendency to seek simplistic answers to complex problems.  It may be as personal as believing someone a jerk when they cut me off on the freeway as if he were the sole cause of my frustration or that the stresses of life were not at work on him also.  We also seek simple answers as a culture such as the assumption that world hunger could be solved by boosting yields without regard for sustainability of farming practices or confronting the problem of overpopulation.  The problems we face are not simple.  The answers will be complex.

Finally, we must learn to find the faithful path in a world of limits.  We like large engineering projects like the Aswan High and the Three Gorges Dams.  We feel smart.  We feel powerful, even if they are built by another nation we like what they have to say about the human race.  But what about the terraced agriculture of the Nepalese.  They fed themselves for centuries in a hard and unforgiving land while maintaining the health of the soil.  An accomplishment we do not recognize only because we have not reflected upon it.  There's is not an accomplishment of power but wisdom.

Mother Theresa did not eliminate huger or find a cure to any disease. But she did make the lives of those suffering more humane.  She spent her life doing good in a once forgotten corner of the world. Hers' is an example of accepting limits while continuing to love and care for those most deeply effected by the damage evident on the globe.  Her understanding of love did not require more power but love and dedication. 

No one needs to tell us that we have power.  We have brought nearly every available acre of the globe under cultivation and more than a few that should not have been.  We can fly across continents and oceans in hours.  We have harnessed the power of the Nile.  When damage is done by this power it is rarely because anyone intends evil but results from the use of too much power and not enough wisdom, love or understanding. 

What is needed is an ethic of patient service, both to our ecology and one another.  We know we can destroy with power at our disposal, what we truly need is the wisdom, understanding and love to heal. Some problems cannot be solved with more power but require the application of the wisdom to use the power that we do have constructively.  The universe already has its Messiah and none of us are him.  Creation yearns for redemption, humanity will not bring it. Both of those depend upon the sovereign action of the Lord: the God who comes.  The world has many who desire to dominate it, often to ill effect.  What the world needs, and what we are called to be, are servants.  It is a role that we can learn and a practice that we can employ in all area of our lives, if we are willing to learn. 

1Wendell Berry, “Damage,” What Are People For? (New York: North Point Press, 1990), 5-6.

On Choosing the source of our hope (and our suffering)

I preached this past Sunday on 1 Peter 3:8-17

Suffering is a part of being human.  Some of it is avoidable; some of it is not.  When we make choices about our hope we are opening ourselves to certain kinds of suffering.  Are we choosing to suffer for what is good or what is evil?

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During the time of our sojourn

This is going to be my first attempt at podcasting a sermon.  Let me know what you think.  The text is 1 Peter 1:13-19

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