When The Problem Is Bigger Than The Solution
Yesterday during the Syracuse / Pittsburgh game a commercial came up on the screen that caught my attention. It featured a customer standing at a service counter and a parts manager singing an upbeat country western jingle called “Napa know how.”
There’s an ebullient innocence to the commercial that’s charming, as if by just coming into a Napa parts store, “Napa know how” can somehow solve your problem and lift your spirit at the same time. If only life solutions were as easy and convenient to come by as a visit to a village auto parts store or repair shop, right around the corner.
The truth is much of life doesn’t lend itself to easy solutions. Many of life’s problems are hard to control or deal with, indeed, they just may not admit any solutions. An inoperable disease. A sudden death. An irrevocable divorce. A regional disaster. Where is our help to come from when life crashes and burns at a level insurance doesn’t cover? Where do we go when “Napa know how” doesn’t have the inventory to fix the problem?
Psalm 121 this morning points us toward the answer.
I lift up my eyes to the hills — from where will my help come? My help comes from the lord, who made heaven and earth.
In biblical times, villagers from all over ancient Israel would sing this hymn on their way to the holy temple in Jerusalem. Kind of like the medieval Canterbury pilgrimage except instead of going down onto the lowlands of Kent, England the ancient Jews went up into the Judean Mountains of Israel. With songs on their lips, prayers of thanksgiving and adoration in their hearts, our spiritual forbears traveled the pilgrim’s way, living and breathing a faith that celebrated their god, the god of Israel, the lord our God who was with them, always and in all ways, even, especially, when wrestling with God in the deepest dark of night as Jacob did in this morning's Old Testament reading.
Today Americans don’t do pilgrimages per se. We travel all over the world with something else in mind. Vacation. Business. Recreation. The idea of stepping out of our life habits and doing something spiritual, something out of the ordinary, doing something profoundly meaningful yet purposed in the inexplicable, just doesn’t occur to the modern mind. We’re poorer for this, really. It’s something the human soul needs to do: to give thanks to God with our whole body without reservation, to express gratitude and return thanks to God “who made heaven and earth” wholeheartedly for the gift and opportunities of life.
This afternoon the parish is hosting the annual Greater Cazenovia Area CROP Walk. It’s not a pilgrimage in the traditional sense, not like Christians walking across northern Spain on the way to Santiago de Compostela. I invite us nevertheless this morning to think of the CROP Hunger Walk as a modern pilgrimage, our way of reaching up to God in thanks for all the blessings in our life by reaching out to others in need that they too may be blest and enjoy life.
In measurable terms, this reaching up to God by reaching out to others means: each year over 2,000 communities across the United States join in more than 1,600 CROP Hunger Walks, with this year alone almost $4 million dollars being raised for food banks, pantries, community gardens, and other local efforts across the U. S. A quarter of the money raised this afternoon in Cazenovia will go to CazCares. The goal is $10,000. (N. B. By day's end we raised $10,135, nearly doubling the money raised in 2009 and all time record for Cazenovia CROP Walks, achieved in part because of a new strategy including corporate sponsors and online donations.)
We give thanks this morning for the faithful leadership by St. James’ Church here in the village this past several years on behalf of the CROP Walk. We also take pride in our own parishioners, especially Paul Terwilliger and Anne Fontana and the rest of their team who are now overseeing the annual Church World Service CROP mission in this local area.
We’re living in a culture and society that promotes self-interest and the individual, and we all know times are hard at home, yet this annual CROP Walk celebrates a greater truth, that sometimes it really needs to be about the needs of others. Christianity knows this basic economy better even than capitalism. In God’s economy the basis of capital exchange is mercy, namely we give from what we have in abundance that others may receive what they have not in need, and we do it gladly and readily.
The unjust judge in today’s gospel didn’t get this principle and value of mercy. He only understood private money and privilege and power, very human motivations. The Gospel message today conversely celebrates our divine nature which is more than self-interest, comfort and convenience. We care about others because God cares. We feel the needs of others because God feels our needs. We want to make things better not only for us but for others also because this is God's desire. In a word, we have within us the desire “to be the passionate presence of Christ for one another and the world we are called to serve.”
You can’t fulfill this desire with “Napa know how” alone. It helps, being able to get down into the problems of life with technology, but there’s more to life than solving problems with Napa or Nasa parts. Sometimes there’s no solution and then what we need is love, great, great love. Love goes beyond the limits of human need and competence because love is willing and able to live with an intractable problem, to endure and persevere, until God alone, maker of heaven and earth, breaks forth the light of God’s truth and a whole new reality is come to life, and humanity can finally live as one.
