SOURCE: "Remarks at Morning Prayers" by Michael Zuckerman. http://www.centerforpublicleadership.org/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=740
KEYWORDS: friendship, support, community, communion
SCRIPTURE: Ecclesiastes 4:9–10
The story is my own story, and it begins with a 13-year-old kid who's
pretty angry at the world, who's lost his father just a year before and
who has started spending his time outside of school in less than
productive ways. Actually, you'd have to call them criminal ways.
And eventually, without getting into any of the details here in a
place of worship, it leads to this 13-year-old kid having to do
community service after school. And this kid is still pretty angry at
the world, he's not so optimistic about the future, he feels knocked
down and he feels knocked out.
But this kid has a friend—actually he has a few friends. Thanks to
one of the friends—and the friend's mom—he gets set up with this
terrific community service partnership between two local organizations, a
program that's going to have him doing art projects and mentoring every
week with homeless children who live in the strip motels on Route 1
outside Trenton, NJ.
And another friend—who didn't get in trouble and didn't have to do
the community service in the first place—tells him, completely
unprompted, that he's going to start volunteering alongside him, that
he's going to accompany him every week, to spend hours with these
younger kids on these art projects, just so he doesn't have to go it
alone.
And that's what the friend does, and every week they meet up and walk
into town together, where they're doing the art projects with the
homeless children, and before long it's the highlight of the week and
something they find themselves looking forward to.
And actually those friends are in the pews this morning—Eddie, whose
mom helped found the community service program, and Dimitri who
volunteered alongside every week—and that experience ends up being such a
transformational one for everyone involved—including the 13-year-old
kid, who I can now start referring to as myself, because this is the
point in the story where I start to fully recognize him again—that it
lifted all of us up. It lifted me up, lifted my friend up, hopefully
lifted the kids living in the motels up, and lifted us all up, I think,
to be helping lift each other up.
And what this story has to do with faith is simply this:
That one of the great mysteries of faith—one of the great joys of
faith for many of us here who love the life of the mind—is the effort to
try to conceive of the inconceivable, to try to comprehend the
incomprehensible, to try to summon up the unsummonable, which is the
majesty of God Almighty.
And although we know that we, in this City of Man, are still
restricted to seeing only through a glass darkly, for my money, when we
think of what God is, of what it is we can do to be most like God, it's
not to try to seize the commanding heights of societal power and
influence, or to try to decipher the formulas of the cosmos, or to try
to engineer the scientific mechanisms of life and death.
In all those things, we are pretty poor imitators of the God who made
this universe with its crashing waves and roaring winds and animals
that graze the fields and man himself, whom God is so mindful of (Psalm
8:4) for reasons that pass understanding.
For my money, it is these simple acts of friendship, this walking
alongside one another that we hear of in Ecclesiastes, in which we most
approach the true majesty of God, in which we come closest to being
vessels of His grace...
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