"Grace from the Garbage"--October 4, 2019
"So let us not grow weary in doing what is right, for we will reap at harvest time, if we do not give up. So then, whenever we have an opportunity, let us work for the good of all, and especially for those of the family of faith." [Galatians 6:9-10]
Twice a year, the Holy Spirit leads on me on a pilgrimage of sorts to get my soul re-centered and my head put back on straight. I just came back from my fall retreat last night--about an hour after it began. And once again, it reminded me what I am here for... like what I am here on earth for. And all I needed were some extra-large garbage bags and leather work gloves.
All right, let me cut through the mystery and game-playing: every year in the fall and the spring, we have our church-sponsored highway trash pick-up outing. And consistently, I find it is just about the most clarifying spiritual experience I get in my life on a regular basis--especially if it ends up that I take a stretch of highway without a partner on the other side of the road. It becomes a sort of spiritual exercise and a discipline for my soul to remind me who I am and how to love.
If you've never had the chance to do a shift of Adopt-a-Highway trash clean-up, here's what happens. We get some signs put up at either end of our two-mile-ish stretch of road, divide our crew of volunteers to cover the territory, and then, armed with only work gloves, contractor-style trash bags, and classy disposable orange vests from the Department of Transportation, we pick up whatever trash is laying in the margins and just over the edges of the rails. We get beer cans, sandwich wrappers, fast food bags, shopping bags, soda bottles, cigarette boxes, and other, even-less-pleasant refuse. And we carry it along while we walk along the highway, leaving the filled bags for the Department of Transportation to collect on another day... and quite often, just as we have finished, we watch someone driving along just roll down a window and throw a wad of paper or pitch a bottle right out the window again. And we do it all over again the next time around.
After enough years of doing this, Highway Trash Pick-Up day has become a sort of lesser festival of the liturgical year for me, right up there with the Palm Sunday procession with palms (where we sort of do the opposite by re-enacting the littering of the Jerusalem streets with palm branches and cloaks) or the washing of feet on Maundy Thursday. And the reason I have come to cherish this semi-annual job--or at least, even when I don't like doing this job, I need it--is that it retrains my spiritual muscles for everything else we do as God's people. It makes clear and concrete what goes unspoken in every hospital visit, every one-on-one counseling conversation, every committee meeting, and every service project. And this is what the Spirit makes me to remember: first, that love is about showing up and getting your hands dirty, not syrupy feelings and flowery words. Anybody can have a warm, fuzzy feeling over a fancy dinner and candlelight, but that's hardly love--that's just the distraction of a restaurant with atmosphere. Real love is evident in ugly places, tedious moments, and sweaty labor for others, more than anywhere else. That's because genuine love is less about whether I am having a nice time and more about seeking the good of someone else--even when it stinks.... and even when I stink at the end of it (literally).
We Christians talk a great game about love, but in all honesty, I think we often would rather have a photo-op than actually doing something sweaty when no one is watching. We want to get the news story in the local paper when we do our service projects, so that others will see what good little boys and girls we are. Or we talk about "loving all people" and how "everybody is welcome," but the moment a new face comes in the door who doesn't fit our expectations, we start to squirm. We pray for the homeless, but don't want to get to know any actually homeless families or eat at table with them. We need to be reminded that love is so much more than words or the photo in the paper. And the Spirit teaches me that every time I climb over a guardrail to gather one more crushed Pabst Blue Ribbon and put it in my bag. I need that, because I keep wanting to fall back into some lesser version of love--the photo-op, the social-media-friendly "right words" that have no action, the empty talk. And when I am sweating through my ball cap picking up garbage, I am reminded that the world has plenty of talk, and a lack of love-made-flesh.
The second thing the Spirit keeps teaching me on these twice-a-year spiritual retreats with roadside garbage is that the followers of Jesus are called to love people who don't know what we are doing, won't say thank you, and may well actively be causing the problems we are there to help remedy. This is the humbling but necessary truth about highway trash pick-up--we do this as a service to the very community of people who are throwing this stuff on their own roads. And we do it knowing full well there will be new trash tomorrow, so this is never a completed project. Loving people never is. Instead, I have come to see this whole endeavor as rather like the Buddhist monks who make those ornate and beautiful mandala designs out of colored sand, taking hours of focused labor to make intricate patterns with grains of sand, and then, when it is all done, sweep it all away. The beauty is there for a moment, and they know it is short-lived, but they do it anyway, because it is worth creating beauty for just that moment, even if it is gone with a blink of an eye. I think God is teaching me the same when we pick up trash and then see someone fling more garbage as soon as we thought we were done. The work is worth doing--because love is worth giving--even if it feels like it is undone in the very next moment.
Love is always worth the effort, even if it looks like a waste at first blush. And love is worth giving, even to people who do not appreciate what you are giving, or who are actively opposed to your work of compassion. It turns out, I don't have to "like" the people who are throwing half-empty beer cans (or at least, boy do I hope that is beer they have left in the can) out their car and truck windows as they speed around a curve in order to love them. Love isn't an endorsement of their selfishness or thoughtlessness. Love means I am willing to do good precisely for folks whose actions strain my patience and make me want to cuss more than a preacher should. Love is worth giving because the neighbors for whom we do this small act are beloved of God--and God's kind of love doesn't ask whether the beloved is "worthy." It just says, "You are beloved--therefore, I seek your good and well-being." In a graceless time like ours is--one that is so hell-bent on "deals" and how to leverage others to get better deals out of them--the followers of Jesus insist on practicing love that is not rooted in "what I will get in return," because we are convinced that is not how God loves us. And when I am most tempted to just give in to all those loud voices around me, the Spirit sends me trash-picking to be re-centered in love that doesn't care about the supposed worthiness or gratitude of the recipients, or even about how long our efforts will last. Any goodness we are able to bring to the world is worth offering, for however long we are able to bring it. Any love is worth giving, regardless of whether it is understood.
And all of this brings me back to these words from Galatians--these closing words from one of Paul's earlier letters. They show me that the Scriptures have been saying all along what the Spirit has to keep reminding me of every time I make the pilgrimage along Route 403 to pick up litter: that in every opportunity we have, it is worth it to do good. In the big moments of life, and in the terribly ordinary Wednesday evenings before dusk with a handful of church folk down a stretch of back road. And we do good, as Paul insists, not only for other church folks (although, of course, especially for another because we belong to each other in Christ), but as Paul insists, for all. Not just for fellow church members. Not just for people like me. Not just for my fellow citizens, or people who speak the same language as me or worship the same God as me. Not just for people who voted like me or people whose skin has the same amount of melanin as mine. But the Scriptures insist our calling as Christians is always--and let me be clear that always means always--to seek the good of all.
That is how grace works, after all. Someone as dense as me just has to be reminded of it by lugging garbage on my back for a while.
Seeing Christ in the ordinary means acknowledging that God will choose to use us in unglamorous moments for unglorious work, often getting ourselves sweaty and smelly for folks who won't know, don't care, or laugh to watch us fight against the futility. But that is how our witness works--how else will the world know that ours is the God who doesn't just drop in for a photo-op or beam down a press-release, but who loves us with skin on all the way to the smelly streets of ancient Galilee and the suffering of a rough-hewn Roman cross?
If you ever find yourself in need of a reminder of who we are and how we love, let me suggest you start again here in Galatians 6:9-10, and then maybe to get yourself some trash bags. The Spirit will lead you and remind you who you are in Christ from there.
See you out at the roadside--I have a feeling I'll need the Spirit to send me back out there again before long
Lord Jesus, remind us who we are so that we can love as fully and deeply as you love us, in the ordinary messiness of life.
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