Vocabulary Building
Sermon
Sermons On The Second Readings
Series I, Cycle C
Just like that, everything changes. Another season of growing and schooling is just about over for the year. Nowhere do the chapters change so quickly as in the raising of a family. Every new learning is a first thing -- first word, first step, first day of school, first everything.
First things pass away before our eyes. We can trust that to happen. We can trust that new things will come into being at every age. At all stages of life, some things are gone. Then the new bursts in and we strengthen our vocabulary of hope.
In the world of a dog guide, too, just as all seems to be going smoothly, the new has a way of slipping in. Dog guiding teaches the fine art of possibility, patience, and hope.
While walking at a pace commensurate with its partner's needs, a dog guide also is trained to exert a modicum of pull on its harness. This tension enables the assist dog to guide its partner around obstacles they encounter as well as to keep their course straight.
Late in Leader Dog Dolley's work life, it became necessary to make a change from working from the left side of Dee to working from the right. Upon consultation with school training staff, Dee gained assurance that even an older dog guide could adapt. In fact, the trainer said, the dog had been adjusting successfully to subtle changes in her partner for the last nine years. This transition, however, would require the dog to learn a new vocabulary for right-sided guiding.
They were to proceed slowly and with care so as not to overwhelm the dog. The adjustment worked. Eventually, she became adept at alternating the working side as needed. It was possible to move beyond the calamity of change to find the new possibility that change brings.
Dee's next dog guide would be trained using an adaptive, no-pull technique that would communicate by the dog's steadiness of pace and its proximity to its partner. Five years into the career of this second guide, additional physical changes called for the woman to find a way of holding the harness without grasping it with her hand.
Again she consulted the school. Again called upon to accommodate, she retrained this dog guide to work with a tool shaped like a shepherd's hook. She slipped her working hand into a hand splint to which had been affixed a stainless steel bar that would clutch the harness handle.
It was tricky. Were one of the team out of position, the tension would release and the shepherd's hook would slip off the handle. Leader Dog Treasure exercised an extra measure of patience. The sensitive dog had to accept first that he had done nothing wrong when the handle slipped. Then, he learned to pause mid-step whenever the hook slipped and wait for his partner to re-attach it. The adaptation worked.
Change works. God finds a way to introduce the new. God is in the business of making all things new. While God is busy re-creating possibility, you and I are busy consciously or unconsciously figuring out how we are going to meet the changes that interrupt our ease.
These changes call for finding a can-do attitude similar to that offered by Leader Dog staff. They require a letting go of what no longer works. They invite treasuring that other attachment when love turns to cherish and duty to devotion.
Even without the extraordinary adaptations a dog guide may be asked to make in its career, the bond it shares with its human partner cements early. After her first dog guide retired, the woman promised she would not let herself become as close to her next dog guide. She thought she had held back then noticed that love had turned again to cherish.
When does love become cherish? How do we keep from getting so attached?
An acquaintance whose family was moved around at the caprice of the spouse's employer had long since ceased to develop friendships of any depth. She said leaving was too painful and too frequent to grow a friendship.
Her neighbor, on the other hand, was the daughter of a career service person. She had learned early on to make good friends and to cherish them for as long as possible. Of course, she said, losing those friends was disquieting, but living within the impoverishment of a friendless person would have been more costly.
Perhaps rather than asking the impossible, that is, how we can keep from becoming so attached in the first place, other queries would be more fruitful. How do we make the right kind of attachments with those who are special to us? How do we relate to the evanescent dimensions of our lives? How do we handle the temporary? How do we wade through all the mud of disruption, leap over all the uncertainty, and trust God as true?
"[And God] said, 'See, I am making all things new.' Also he said, 'Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true' " (v. 5).
Something breaks down -- an arm or a hand, a plan or a spirit. Our path goes askew. Disquiet smudges internal rhythm until it jerks out of sync. Then some inner thrust impels us forward again.
Change is possible. Change works. Without taking the mystery out of change, a sign of God's presence lessens our fear of it. God keeps introducing new people into our lives.
When it is right, the mystery of a new relationship answers itself. When it is right, a new idea presents itself. When it is right, a new capacity and a new way of proceeding come into being.
We change. We true up our essential selves. We become a new creation.
In these lines from his song poem, "Moonless,"1 C. "Howie" Howard, a young poet, composer, and "folkrok" musician studying at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, snatches a piece of the energy of this new creation:
I'm so glad I found this beat again
The music dances to my soul
You raise your hands and stamp your feet again and
Make me whole.
God is always making all things new: new creation, the capacity to heal in body and spirit, the renewal we gain after a time of re-creation, the expectant sense of nothing in history being finished but always campaigning for improvement, a natural world that practices re-creating itself each spring. Some things are gone and then there is the new.
God is continually creating. God is not a stagnant God. Neither is God satisfied with the old or the status quo when it needs to change. In the book of Revelation, the word "new" appears six times: "A new name" (2:17), "a new Jerusalem" (3:12, 21:2), "a new song" (5:9, 13:3), "a new heaven" (v. 1), "a new earth" (v. 1), and "I am making all things new" (v. 5). If you are counting, "life" wins in Revelation. The word appears twenty times.
All the little bits and pieces of change point to the final change. We call it final, yet perhaps it is only another change. Think about an Uncle Buford, recently diagnosed with bone cancer and consider the time line for what lies ahead. Think about a woman named Serena, in her third year of surviving bone cancer and able to focus again on something other than her discomfort, even forgetting, almost, that she lives with a chronic disease.
Think about another friend, Ronald, who was making a delivery and found himself off the highway with a shovel during a snowstorm and only seconds to reflect before his heart gave out and he was gone at age 64. Think about Bruce, whose brain disorder makes it impossible for him to concentrate long-term at anything.
Somehow, it takes most of us a lifetime to become comfortable with the reality that our being here will change. We may die from a cancer or a coronary, or we might live through it. However it plays out, the important thing is to find time to cherish what is for us to cherish, to look with our eyes, to hear and listen, to savor moments of intimacy, and to waste as little time as possible on letting go of what no longer works.
This cherishing does not need clock time. Learning to cherish enables us to put time into its proper perspective and become fascinated with a new, strangely timeless journey. As we grieve for the losses that change brings our way, may we also find peace within what we find.
"See, the home of God is among mortals. [God] will dwell with them; they will be [God's] peoples, and God himself will be with them; [God] will wipe every tear from their eyes" (vv. 3-4). Just like that, everything is made new.
------------------------
1. Shared by permission. Copyright Christopher L. Howard, 2001.
First things pass away before our eyes. We can trust that to happen. We can trust that new things will come into being at every age. At all stages of life, some things are gone. Then the new bursts in and we strengthen our vocabulary of hope.
In the world of a dog guide, too, just as all seems to be going smoothly, the new has a way of slipping in. Dog guiding teaches the fine art of possibility, patience, and hope.
While walking at a pace commensurate with its partner's needs, a dog guide also is trained to exert a modicum of pull on its harness. This tension enables the assist dog to guide its partner around obstacles they encounter as well as to keep their course straight.
Late in Leader Dog Dolley's work life, it became necessary to make a change from working from the left side of Dee to working from the right. Upon consultation with school training staff, Dee gained assurance that even an older dog guide could adapt. In fact, the trainer said, the dog had been adjusting successfully to subtle changes in her partner for the last nine years. This transition, however, would require the dog to learn a new vocabulary for right-sided guiding.
They were to proceed slowly and with care so as not to overwhelm the dog. The adjustment worked. Eventually, she became adept at alternating the working side as needed. It was possible to move beyond the calamity of change to find the new possibility that change brings.
Dee's next dog guide would be trained using an adaptive, no-pull technique that would communicate by the dog's steadiness of pace and its proximity to its partner. Five years into the career of this second guide, additional physical changes called for the woman to find a way of holding the harness without grasping it with her hand.
Again she consulted the school. Again called upon to accommodate, she retrained this dog guide to work with a tool shaped like a shepherd's hook. She slipped her working hand into a hand splint to which had been affixed a stainless steel bar that would clutch the harness handle.
It was tricky. Were one of the team out of position, the tension would release and the shepherd's hook would slip off the handle. Leader Dog Treasure exercised an extra measure of patience. The sensitive dog had to accept first that he had done nothing wrong when the handle slipped. Then, he learned to pause mid-step whenever the hook slipped and wait for his partner to re-attach it. The adaptation worked.
Change works. God finds a way to introduce the new. God is in the business of making all things new. While God is busy re-creating possibility, you and I are busy consciously or unconsciously figuring out how we are going to meet the changes that interrupt our ease.
These changes call for finding a can-do attitude similar to that offered by Leader Dog staff. They require a letting go of what no longer works. They invite treasuring that other attachment when love turns to cherish and duty to devotion.
Even without the extraordinary adaptations a dog guide may be asked to make in its career, the bond it shares with its human partner cements early. After her first dog guide retired, the woman promised she would not let herself become as close to her next dog guide. She thought she had held back then noticed that love had turned again to cherish.
When does love become cherish? How do we keep from getting so attached?
An acquaintance whose family was moved around at the caprice of the spouse's employer had long since ceased to develop friendships of any depth. She said leaving was too painful and too frequent to grow a friendship.
Her neighbor, on the other hand, was the daughter of a career service person. She had learned early on to make good friends and to cherish them for as long as possible. Of course, she said, losing those friends was disquieting, but living within the impoverishment of a friendless person would have been more costly.
Perhaps rather than asking the impossible, that is, how we can keep from becoming so attached in the first place, other queries would be more fruitful. How do we make the right kind of attachments with those who are special to us? How do we relate to the evanescent dimensions of our lives? How do we handle the temporary? How do we wade through all the mud of disruption, leap over all the uncertainty, and trust God as true?
"[And God] said, 'See, I am making all things new.' Also he said, 'Write this, for these words are trustworthy and true' " (v. 5).
Something breaks down -- an arm or a hand, a plan or a spirit. Our path goes askew. Disquiet smudges internal rhythm until it jerks out of sync. Then some inner thrust impels us forward again.
Change is possible. Change works. Without taking the mystery out of change, a sign of God's presence lessens our fear of it. God keeps introducing new people into our lives.
When it is right, the mystery of a new relationship answers itself. When it is right, a new idea presents itself. When it is right, a new capacity and a new way of proceeding come into being.
We change. We true up our essential selves. We become a new creation.
In these lines from his song poem, "Moonless,"1 C. "Howie" Howard, a young poet, composer, and "folkrok" musician studying at Doane College in Crete, Nebraska, snatches a piece of the energy of this new creation:
I'm so glad I found this beat again
The music dances to my soul
You raise your hands and stamp your feet again and
Make me whole.
God is always making all things new: new creation, the capacity to heal in body and spirit, the renewal we gain after a time of re-creation, the expectant sense of nothing in history being finished but always campaigning for improvement, a natural world that practices re-creating itself each spring. Some things are gone and then there is the new.
God is continually creating. God is not a stagnant God. Neither is God satisfied with the old or the status quo when it needs to change. In the book of Revelation, the word "new" appears six times: "A new name" (2:17), "a new Jerusalem" (3:12, 21:2), "a new song" (5:9, 13:3), "a new heaven" (v. 1), "a new earth" (v. 1), and "I am making all things new" (v. 5). If you are counting, "life" wins in Revelation. The word appears twenty times.
All the little bits and pieces of change point to the final change. We call it final, yet perhaps it is only another change. Think about an Uncle Buford, recently diagnosed with bone cancer and consider the time line for what lies ahead. Think about a woman named Serena, in her third year of surviving bone cancer and able to focus again on something other than her discomfort, even forgetting, almost, that she lives with a chronic disease.
Think about another friend, Ronald, who was making a delivery and found himself off the highway with a shovel during a snowstorm and only seconds to reflect before his heart gave out and he was gone at age 64. Think about Bruce, whose brain disorder makes it impossible for him to concentrate long-term at anything.
Somehow, it takes most of us a lifetime to become comfortable with the reality that our being here will change. We may die from a cancer or a coronary, or we might live through it. However it plays out, the important thing is to find time to cherish what is for us to cherish, to look with our eyes, to hear and listen, to savor moments of intimacy, and to waste as little time as possible on letting go of what no longer works.
This cherishing does not need clock time. Learning to cherish enables us to put time into its proper perspective and become fascinated with a new, strangely timeless journey. As we grieve for the losses that change brings our way, may we also find peace within what we find.
"See, the home of God is among mortals. [God] will dwell with them; they will be [God's] peoples, and God himself will be with them; [God] will wipe every tear from their eyes" (vv. 3-4). Just like that, everything is made new.
------------------------
1. Shared by permission. Copyright Christopher L. Howard, 2001.
