Jitterbugging for Jesus

I’ve had a good and quiet Saturday morning with coffee over the Scriptures, with time to reflect and meditate on whatever comes to mind and in that process, it came to my mind that in the Christian life the beginnings never end.
Thomas Merton said something to the effect that we who are faithful and obedient followers of Christ will never be anything else but beginners, all our lives.
We don’t want to be beginners, he noted. But as Christians we are. If we ever think we’ve “arrived,” we need to get back on our knees and think again.
The entire Christian faith revolves around the notion of new beginnings, fresh starts, second chances–and third, and fourth, and seventy times seven beginnings and then some.
A graybeard staffer at the hospital where I do ministry as a chaplain said to me once, “Chap, I’ve done so much rotten stuff in my life that there’s no way God could ever forgive me.”
(How many times have you heard someone say this, fellow Christians and preachers and priests?)
I asked him if he’d ever murdered anybody and he laughed. “That’s about the only thing I haven’t done,” he said.
“Well, I hope you never do, but Moses murdered an Egyptian, and the great man of God David committed murder and adultery in one fell swoop. And yet God chose them to do God’s work in powerful ways in spite of their sins.”
I told him about the great Abraham, deceitfully offering his wife (poor Sarah!) to the Pharoah in order to save his own neck, and yet Abraham remained one of God’s greatest.
I pointed out that in the great parable of The Prodigal Son, the Father not only forgave his wayward and sinful son–he ran out to greet him and threw a lavish party for him because he, the Father, was EAGER to forgive him and reconcile and start over and wipe the slate clean and begin again, much to the chagrin of the other son, who was miffed because he’d been such a good boy.
Jesus, I pointed out, told the sinner on the cross next to him that he would see him in Paradise that very day, allowing him to begin life anew moments from death.
“Whatever you’ve done in your past,” I pointed out to the staffer, “is forgivable in God’s eyes.”
I am happy to report that this staffer began to see God and Christ in a new way. He began to see the Bible, which he really knew absolutely nothing about, in a new and more accurate way. To this day he’ll begin a lot of our conversations with a question about God or the Bible or faith, even though I don’t think he’s ready to kneel down and begin a whole new life in Christ anytime soon.
Still, the operative word there is “begin.” My relationship with him is now largely about beginnings, and his seeing faith in a different and new way may lead him to a new life in Christ yet.
This whole faith thing is about beginnings, about new life, about the healing power of mercy and forgiveness and reconciliation with God and others. It’s all about transformation–constantly shedding our skin in order to take on new life and new beginnings.
It’s about planting the past in a deep hole. It’s about the pledge of new life and new beginnings in the resurrection.
Amid all the gloom and doom of Jeremiah’s book of Lamentations is this word in Chapter 3:
“Because of the Lord’s great love,
we are not consumed,
for his compassions will never fail,
they are new every morning;
great is your faithfulness.
“I say to myself, ‘The Lord is my portion,
therefore I will wait for him.’”
“The Lord is good to those whose hope is in him,
to the one who seeks him.”
God’s mercies are new and tender every morning.
Every morning opens a new beginning.
“Morning has broken like the first morning.”
That popular song by Cat Stevens, who began life anew in the Muslim faith and took on a Muslim name, is actually an old hymn, one that we Methodists have in our hymnal, along with another of my personal favorite hymns, “Great is Thy Faithfulness” from Lamentations (see verse above.)
It matters not what we’ve done yesterday or how we misspent our youth or even who we’ve murdered lately with a slanderous and gossip-prone tongue. God invites us to begin again and try to do better, to grow and to seek perfection.
I’m only beginning to get this whole faith thing down myself, knowing I’ll never arrive at anything but God’s mercy.
But that, at the end of the day, is good.

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