A Better Place

 

A number of years ago, I was part of a discussion group that met at a local diner on Fridays mornings at 6:30. 

I would don my winter layers in a dark house.  

The dog was still asleep, and I was out there scraping ice off the car!  

The light began to break as I headed over the canal and up over the ridge.  I’ve heard such hours called “ungodly” – and maybe so, for not many souls were about. 

  Although, I will protest that no hour that beautiful should be said to lack God’s refining touch!

 

The group itself was quirky.  

The purpose, for one thing, was uncertain.  

We occasionally agreed to read something, but the book du jour often lay neglected beside the condiments as our conversations rambled down tantalizing digressions.  The membership was small, but not because we were exclusive.  We all went to the same church, that was true, but even so, we were a self-selecting crew – the only folks crazy enough to rise before the sun and brave the northern hinterlands for the sake of a bad cup of coffee and some conversation. 

           On the morning I remember here, Wayne read to us a snippet from a book he’d come across.  

In the story, a new widow was sitting in a church, and a stern clergyman was decrying: “look not to this world for your comfort!”  Hard on the heels of this declaration, a hapless congregant assured the widow that her dead husband was now “in a better place” – an opinion that sent the bereft woman into a tizzy.

         “I hate that kind of platitude,” I said, sympathizing with the irate widow.

         “Yes, but what is one to say?” asked Jean.

           And we were off.  

For the rest of the meeting, we discussed the problem of what to say when nothing can be said.  

None of us had any difficulty finding examples of the kind of cruel and senseless deaths that gave the lie to canned phrases like “it was God’s will” or “now he’s in a better place.”  

           I often find myself confronted by examples, rising from the stir of contemporary culture, of clergy (real and imagined) who enthusiastically declare ideas about God that just I can’t abide. The “he’s in a better place” saying is an example.  

But it’s not because I deny the existence of a “better place” out there.

I don’t know if there is, or there isn’t – but I occasionally allow myself to hope that there is.  

I am uncomfortable with the “he’s in a better place” thing, because it is a quick answer.  It is the kind of saying that lets you off the hook.  It says “don’t worry” to you, when, in fact, the thing you really need to be doing is worrying.

You don’t overcome grief by not worrying about it.  Grief is not something that you can “just get over.”  It wants to knock you down and kick you around, and you have to let it.  You have to let it teach you a thing or two. 

If you don’t, you won’t learn a thing from it.

And grief is one of the best teachers out there.  If you want to know what it means to be human, there is no tutor like a season of grief.

And there’s another thing.

If we accept, without question, the idea that we will be “in a better place” when we die, it takes the focus off the here and puts it on the hereafter.

Some speculation about the hereafter is fine, but that is what it should be – speculation.  We can’t know anything definitive about it, so placing all our hopes on it is dangerous, especially if it distracts us from the urgent needs of the world that we actually live in. 

“It’s convenient,” I said, “that these conventional responses to death all put the emphasis ‘over there.’”  I gestured toward the far side of the diner.  “What about right here?”

Sharon came around and refilled our coffee.

  “You know,” I said, “there was a time, back when mom was really declining, and she was in the hospital, and I found myself in an  awkward position because my best friend from childhood was getting married down in Philadelphia and he wanted me to be his best man.  How could I let him down?  But I couldn’t very well abandon my mother either.  She was going to be discharged from the hospital, but  if we, (my wife and I) were to make it to the wedding on time, we’d have to leave town before mom was being discharged!  I felt stuck. Then Cary said: call Pam!  Pam was our friend from church.  And of course, Pam said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll take care of it,’ – which of course she did.  After we left, she went down to the hospital and fetched my mom right when she was supposed to, and brought her home.

Great!  

But that wasn’t the whole story.

The morning after the wedding, I gave Pam a call.  “Everything turned out fine” she said… “but an amazing thing happened!” 

Apparently, it wasn’t easy for Pam to get Mom out of the car, she was so rickety, you know.  Well, it seems that-Pam almost lost her balance, and in that instant, it seemed like both she and my mom might fall down right there, in the driveway.  But Pam told me that at exactly the moment when it seemed like they might fall, Kay, our neighbor, appeared, as if from nowhere, and grabbed Mom’s other arm.”

  There was a moment quiet as my friends around the table took in the story.  You could hear the clattering of dishes from somewhere in the kitchen, the low chatter of other people in the diner.

“Damn lucky!” said Leo.

“Was it?” I asked.

“A miracle?…” suggested Jean.

“Was it?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said, a little bit irked, “isn’t that the point of the story?”

**

Did you notice that the two scripture lessons for today are both pieces of advice about how to live in community?  One comes to us from the mouth of Jesus, as reported in the gospel of Matthew, and the other is from a letter that Paul wrote to the early church in Rome.

In the passage from Matthew, Jesus, in a rather out-of-character moment gives his followers some practical advice on how to proceed “If your brother or sister sins against you.”

All things being equal, the advice that Jesus gives is not terribly earth shaking as advice goes.  Jesus recommends that the person who has been wronged should try and work it out with the offender privately, and if the person still does listen to reason, then the dispute is to be taken to the church where “every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses…”  If the trouble maker stubbornly persists in their folly, then, well that’s it for them – Jesus says, just let them go: “let such a one, he says,  be to you as a gentile and a tax collector.“ 

If we acted this way in church today, it wouldn’t be long before there wouldn’t be anyone left in the pews.

Also – what if the “offender” is actually speaking truth to power?  The “offender,” in these situations, is not always in the wrong.  Christ’s advice assumes that the majority is in the right.  This, as we have seen in too many cases than I care to count – is not a safe assumption. 

From our vantage, in America in 2023, Paul’s advice feels a little more sound to me – though I see red flags there too. 

It sounds good when Paul says “Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law.”   An ethics board, though, would probably ask Paul to be a little more specific about what he means by “love.”  Hard experience has taught us that a person with religious authority can do a great deal of damage if he or she allows their expression of “love” to align too conveniently with their desires.  

Enough said.

But all this nit-picking is kind of a waste of time, because there is no way either Jesus or Paul could have anticipated the litigious culture that we live in today.  The thing that interests me is that they bothered to address these practical concerns at all.

That they did, shows us that Jesus and Paul – like you and I – were wrestling with the difficult realities presented by living in community.   

For both Jesus and Paul, the great majority of their teaching was about spiritual matters – ideas that did not have to do with the practical considerations of daily life (enough people were worrying about those things), but about “ultimate” concerns – things that have to do with life and death.

But these “ultimate” concerns do not exist in a vacuum – they are critically related to “everyday” concerns.  The “everyday” really is the place where the ultimate plays out.  If the ultimate does not play out in the everyday – it’s not ultimate, it is irrelevant.

The early church was sensitive to this truth.

The “over there” – whatever you want to call it – God, Heaven, salvation… is not really “over there.”  Its “right here,” and our job, as Christians, is to figure out how the two can come together and form an ethical life.

***

So what about that story about my mom and Pam and Kay…

What was it that happened there?

Was it luck, as my friend Leo stated?

Or was it a miracle, as my friend Jean thought?

 

What do you think?

I struggle with this.

I don’t like the idea of the puppet-master God who has us all on strings.  This is the God who saw my mother and Pam about to fall, and yanked Kay’s string so that she would be in the right spot at the right moment to save the day.

If this is the way we think about God, then where is that God when the oncoming car hits you head-on?  Where is that God when a beloved child commits suicide, or a tornado destroys your house?

The puppet master God is a nice God to have around when things go right, and a bad one to have around when things go awfully wrong.

The puppet master God also begins to look a lot like a person – a compassionate or vengeful person.  We ask this God questions like – what have I done to deserve this?  Why have you done this to me?  And then we conclude that we are bad.

If I had my druthers, I’d let go of the puppet-master God.  That judgmental God has done us all a lot of harm.

I like to think that we live in a universe that leans toward goodness – that is my faith.  I have faith that we live in a world in which my neighbor Kay looked out her window and thought… “that lady looks like she needs some help…” and headed over.

To say “Thank God she arrived just in time” is not to thank a puppet master, but to thank a goodness that somehow, mysteriously, influences the way our souls work.

If this is the case – then places like this – places like church, are places – theoretically at least – where we can try to discover ways to get the “over there” to be real – to relate in meaningful ways, to the “right here.” 

Jesus knew that we needed to do this together.  We can’t do it alone.  

We can’t do it alone, because it’s not easy – we need support.  We need to learn a wisdom that moves beyond self, into community – because this is the wisdom of love.

Who knows, maybe if we learn about love together, maybe we can make this place a better place.

Amen