Bane or blessing

I’m sitting in the dealership, having brought my car in for their “Fall Service Special.” They opened at seven this morning, and I felt very virtuous about getting my car serviced in advance of the winter season. When the service person summoned me, I assumed it was for what my husband terms the “visiting the patient;” that part of the oil change where I am made to examine my dirty air filter and- if I care about my car and have any human decency- agree to pay for a new one.

“Your battery is dead,” the service guy informed me in low tones. I looked at him blankly. “When we tried to take it back to the service area, we had to jump it to get it back there, and now it tests at 0%.” Huh? “Are you sure you’re talking about my car? I haven’t had any battery problems.” I ended up going out to the service area and trying to start my car, simply to see for myself that it really was dead. To be fair, the battery is over 4 years old, and it had taken a little longer to crank a couple of times. I had never, though, wondered if it was going to get going. Now it is dead in the dealership, beyond any hope of life support. Or so they tell me.

As I sit here while my new battery is installed, I have a couple of choices. It could be that I have just had the wool pulled over my eyes, something I fear in general when getting my car serviced. (“You say that my floozefluffer is misaligned . . .uhhh, sure, better repair it, whatever the cost . . .”) If that is the situation, I could snarl out of here angry about the %^&* crooks at this dealership, which I would start naming all over cyberspace.

Or I could tell myself, “Wow. There are so many awful times and places to be stuck with a dead battery. How wonderful it is that it was actually sitting in the shop when it died.” That mindset transforms me from someone who was ripped off into someone who was blessed. I think I prefer to start my week off blessed.

So, today I am blessed. If my floozlefluffer goes out anytime soon, though, I may have to rethink this position . . . Nah, even then, I’ll still be blessed. It turns out that blessing- the real kind- has absolutely nothing to do with circumstance and everything to do with God. I am blessed.

Asking for Trouble

In worship this weekend, I encouraged people to be singleminded in loving God with all of their minds, and I urged them to read the Bible daily. In fact, I offered specific suggestions of online resources to assist them in the habit of daily Bible reading, including one which takes you through the entire Bible in the course of the year. (Bibleplan.org.)

In one of those God-chuckling moments, I opened my email yesterday to read the daily Scripture. I found myself enmeshed in one of those crazy, is-that-really-in-the-Bible stories. 1 Kings 13 tells of a prophet that follows God’s command to travels great distances and speak harsh words to an evil king. The prophet is successful in his efforts and, mission accomplished, heads home. After all of that work and travel, however, prophet is under a command of God to not eat, drink, or follow the same path home. A false prophet lies to him, “God told me to tell you to come back to my house for supper.” As a result of being lied to by this false prophet, the first prophet ends up killed by a lion on the road. The false prophet then, in mourning, collects the body to bury in a tomb that they will one day share. The end. Uh, the word of the Lord thanks be to God? I pondered what to make of this story. Clergy may work their hearts out and still get chewed up while on the journey? Watch out for colleagues who will mess you up? Someone suggested that the point of this story is as simple as it sounds- don’t get led astray. That might be, but I think it’ll take a better preacher than I to unravel it fully.

The thing of it is, anyone who took my sermon seriously and took action (and I hope there were some) had the same story delivered to their email inbox yesterday morning. Asking people to read the Bible all the way through is asking for trouble, because they will encounter messy stories that have teachings that are oblique at best. The Bible is neither as blandly spiritual nor as clearly logical as most of us have been led to believe. Encountering the entire thing is going to expose us to things that mystify and confuse and maybe even worry us. Which sounds like what life does to us each day.

Maybe it will be okay for people to see what all is contained in the Bible. It’s not a simple book to read, but, then again, life’s not always simple, either.

Miracles

In the morning paper today, I read about a miracle. A communion wafer fell on the floor in Sokolka, Poland, and when it was picked up, it had a black spot on it. The wafer is now housed in a reliquary for people to see. At the risk of sounding cynical, in my world I would consider that a sign of bad housekeeping more than a miracle of God. Don’t misunderstand me. I believe that God is at work in our world, both within and at times beyond the natural order of things.

If God were trying to speak to me through dropped communion elements, I would be out of luck. One of my favorite choir members uses an assistance dog, and I process in behind Ginger and her master weekly during the final service of the weekend. Ginger is a canine vacuum cleaner, and she pauses as we go up the steps into the chancel to clean up any stray bread crumbs. (I’ve always considered that a value-added service that she provides us.) If there were any miracles to be found in the pieces of crumbs, Ginger would scoop them up long before any crowds had a chance to gather.

And yet. A canine enables a human to do things that she would be unable to do otherwise. A miracle occurs before my eyes each week, if I’m not too blind to notice.