It's Not Personal

             I confess that there are few things that confuse me more than the word personal.  It’s like when someone says “It’s not personal” immediately after saying something incredibly hurtful and often malicious, and then excuses it all by saying, “It’s not personal.”  It sure feels personal to me.

            The word personal can mean something about me or not.  It can mean a possession, as in “my personal hair dryer.”  It can mean compact, as in a “personal computer.”  It can mean something shared on an intimate level, as in “that’s personal information.”  It can denote something related to one’s body, as in “personal hygiene.”  It can refer to human interest, as in the “personal column” of a newspaper.  It can mean a living being rather than an abstraction, as in a personal god.  That’s where we get into theology.

            The last understanding is particularly curious to me as a Christian.  I grew up in the South and it was drilled into my head that salvation depended on accepting Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior.  I think they meant in the sense of a living being, but it sure sounded a lot to me like a personal possession.  And those who were trying to teach me that often acted accordingly. 

            This is the startling thing I’ve learned.  When it comes to God in a Christian sense, it really isn’t personal.  It is relational.  The important point is not really so much that God is, although that’s not insignificant.  The important point is that God is inherently relational.  God makes no sense at all except in the sense of the act of loving.  After all, “We have known and believe the love that God has for us. God is love, and those who abide in love abide in God, and God abides in them” (1 Jn. 4:16, which was one of the Sunday readings just a few weeks ago).  It’s all about relationship.  All.  God is, but without relationship, God is not, or at least irrelevant.

            I know that sounds like a heretical thing to say, and it wouldn’t be the first time.  It is the whole point, though, of Trinity Sunday, the only Sunday in the church year devoted to a doctrine rather than an event or a story.  The Trinity is a uniquely Christian doctrine and what it means is that God exists foundationally in relationship, the community of Father, Son, and Spirit, each linked to the others by love.  The three together in relationship are God.  Together.  The fullness of God can only be experienced in relationship.  And that relationship we call love.

            It is no accident that Trinity Sunday comes after Pentecost.  If it didn’t, it would be all to easy to understand the point as being something personal, particularly the Son or the Spirit, that Jesus is my personal Lord and Savior.  That’s not what Christianity teaches.  The Father, the Son, the Holy Spirit.  Separately they are personal.  Together they are God. 

                                                                                                Agape,

                                                                                                +Stacy

                                                                        Bishop Stacy Sauls

                                                                                                Founder and President

Who’s Doing the Groaning?

“We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies” (Rom. 8:22-23).   I now realize I’ve been mistaken about just who was doing the groaning about the adoption.    

 Up until today, I had thought it was the one waiting to be adopted, the adoptee, and I will admit that is what Paul seems to say.  I don’t think that makes much sense, though.  Groaning, as Paul notes, is a consequence of labor pains, the act of giving birth.  The groaning is not done by the one being born.  It must be the same with adoption.  The groaning is done by the prospective adoptive parents, not by the child to be adopted, at least within the limits of the metaphor. 

 Having adopted two sons, adoption is something I know a little bit about.  And now that I think about it, those months before the adoption were filled with groaning, not groaning in the sense of a response to pain, but groaning in the sense of anxiousness and excitement.  That I remember distinctly.

 I remember distinctly Ginger coming to tell me after her final appointment with our social worker that a baby boy in Korea had been placed with us.  I met that news, much to my surprise, with uncontrollable tears of joy.  I couldn’t make them stop no matter what I did.  I’d start to get myself under control, but when I would try to talk, the tears came flooding back.  It was my way of groaning. 

 I remember distinctly when we left to go pick up our son in Seoul.  It was just about a week after a horrible air disaster in which a Korean Airlines Flight 007, flying from the United States, was shot down by a Russian fighter jet.  Ginger, who is nervous about flying under the most tranquil circumstances, was more than a little concerned about this flight.  But going to get a baby was a pretty big deal.  So she went, but her anxiety response was to go to sleep the minute she boarded the plane.  Immediately.  She woke up in Seoul.  It was a form of groaning while waiting for adoption.  My groaning came from being consequently blocked from getting to the aisle. 

And now it makes sense to me.  It is wrong to think of the one to be adopted doing the

groaning.  It isn’t like the baby is anxious to be adopted.  The baby is blissfully indifferent.  Older children may be different, but the principle is the same.  It isn’t the child being adopted who is redeemed; it is the parents.  The groaning of adopting our boys belonged to Ginger and me.   That’s why there were tears of joy.  That’s what makes someone afraid of flying have what it takes to get on a plane despite what is perceived as grave danger.  

Sure, a child ended up with a home, and that’s certainly good, but adoption is not some altruistic action to solve a social problem.  The point is not that we did a good deed.  It’s that we were given a family. 

And that’s why I think it’s important to think of these verses from Romans differently than I have up until now.  We are the adoptee, not the adopter.  God is the adopter through creation.  God does the groaning, not because redemption is some altruistic action God does to help us out.  God is doing the groaning because the adoption gives an object for God’s love.  We are that object, and as such, we are the very completion of God’s love.  The groaning comes from God’s heart, God’s yearning to love us.  That’s what adoption is. 

                                                                        Agape,

                                                                        Bishop Stacy Sauls

                                                                        Founder and President

Love Must Act

Peek When You Pray

This picture of my granddaughter Sophie says something important about prayer to me.  It is this.  Never forget to peek.

Now, granted, Sophie is just learning to pray.  She does know the grace they say at her preschool and always ends it with an enthusiastic amen.  So far, I haven’t been able to understand the rest of the words she rattles off in sing-song.  She does not yet know the Lord’s Prayer, but she likes to follow along in the Prayer Book.  She cannot yet read the words and has no idea about the meaning of most of what is being said around her, but I suspect she has some intuitive sense of awe and gratitude.  But when it comes to hands clasped, heads down, eyes closed prayer, she peeks. I’m glad she does.  Somehow she knows that Jesus may have been taken from our sight, but that doesn’t mean he is not present among us in so many ways.  Or it may be she is just curious.  Curious has a lot to with experiencing God around us, I think. 

Sophie calls to mind for me the ending of this week’s lesson from Acts (1:1-11).  After some final words, Jesus ascended, or as Luke puts it,  “When he had said this, as they were watching, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight” (v. 9).  Not surprisingly, the disciples fixed their eyes on the sky, the heavens.

Then comes a wonderful question with implications for prayer that my granddaughter gets. 

While he was going and they were gazing up toward heaven, suddenly two men in white robes stood by them.  They said, ‘Men of Galilee, why do you stand looking up toward heaven? This Jesus, who has been taken up from you into heaven, will come in the same way as you saw him go into heaven’ (vv. 10-11).

I’m not sure this is exactly what Sophie has in mind, but her prayer posture reminds me that prayer has every bit as much to do with what is around me as with what is above me, probably more.  I cannot pray to God in heaven without remembering the girls massacred at their school in Afghanistan or the Russian children killed also killed at school, or the many American children who have been the victims of senseless gun violence when they ought to have been safe to grow up.  I cannot lift my eyes to heaven to avert my gaze from the violence engulfing Jerusalem, not far from the place where Jesus ascended into heaven, and Gaza, where Love Must Act helps operate a nurse training program.  I cannot believe God is nowhere to be found when children in Africa, where Love Must Act operates a primary school, have so little compared to how much Sophie and I have.  I cannot help but see Sophie peeking and think she would agree.

Why indeed do we fix our gaze heavenward to the exclusion of God’s presence in the needs all around us?  If we seek Jesus, I’m pretty sure that is the place to look around us.  We will never see God, it seems to me unless we at least peek.  And then act.  That, after all, is how Jesus came and, I believe, will come again.  Why on earth do we stand looking toward heaven without helping to make it real in the world?

                                                                        Agape,

Bishop Stacy Sauls

                                                                         Founder and President

                                                                         Love Must Act

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I Have Called You Friends

This is one of the most remarkable things Jesus said, I think.  It comes up in the gospel for the sixth Sunday of Easter.  “I do not call you servants any longer because the servant does not know what the master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (Jn. 15:15).  It’s even a little more extraordinary.  The word John used is not really servants.  It is slaves.  In Jesus, we have gone from slaves to friends, and not just anyone’s friends.  God’s friends.

I lost a dear friend this week, Jon Bruno.  I knew him first as the Bishop of Los Angeles.  He and I came to be bishops the same year, now over 20 years ago.  Over the years, our friendship went beyond being bishops.  Greatly.  Much of what I know about friendship, especially friendship with God, I learned from Jon.

Jon was also a great friend of Love Must Act and is largely responsible for getting us funded in the very beginning.  He has continued to be a supporter over the years, and when we feared what effect the pandemic might have on efforts to keep Holy Cross School in South Africa funded last year, once again, Jon was there. 

I want to share some of what I learned from Jon about being friends with God.  Someone told a story at Jon’s funeral on Saturday about one of many harrowing rides with Jon driving.  On this particular ride, Jon did a sudden U-turn, which was not unusual.  He was under a bridge, many of which in Los Angeles being homeless campsites. It seems Jon had seen someone he knew. He jumped out of the car without explanation to his passengers, called a name, and embraced the friend who responded.  And he left something for the friend to make things at least a little better (there were innumerable stories told involving that commonality).  That is most certainly what it is to be God’s friend.  In fact, the poorer your friend, the closer to God you get.  Jon knew that. 

And Jon didn’t much care who might not like it.  Not everyone was always happy to hear from Jon.  It is because Jon never let his bishop friends forget about being God’s friend in all its uncomfortable reality.  Maybe that’s why the Church, which he loved deeply, did not always respond the same way.  It mattered not in Jon’s Ignatian spirituality whether he was loved.  What mattered was that he loved.  And he most certainly did.

Love is everything.  The gospel for this week uses the word at least nine times (I may have lost count).  The reading from the First Letter of John appointed for this week uses it another five times.  Love is obviously a big theme, really the main one, of the New Testament.  Jon most certainly knew that.  That’s why I’m sure, if God ever had a friend, it was Jon Bruno.  He revealed what the master is doing as well as anyone I ever knew. 

I’m betting Jon made enough other friends for God that, in the end, all will indeed be well.  At least I’m going to try and be one.

                                                                        Agape,

Bishop Stacy Sauls

                                                                         Founder and President

                                                                         Love Must Act

Scuppernongs

My grandparents lived on a farm.  I visited often, which was always a treat.  Farm or not, I really don’t get agricultural metaphors very well.  While the farming roots run deep in my family, I’m afraid they skipped right over me, being from the city as I was.  I’m afraid I’m glad they did.  I do worry that I may not be understanding gospel passages like this week’s, in which Jesus spoke, as he so often did, of farming.  This week’s gospel (Jn. 15:1-8) involves the vine, the branches, and the fruit.  I’m not sure I understand.    

I do remember my grandparents and their farm, though.  Now they didn’t grow grapes or make wine (to my knowledge!), but they did have two large scuppernong trees, more like giant bushes really.  They were huge.  The driveway went in a circle around one, so it was really the first sign that you were at Grandmother and Granddaddy’s.  The other was beyond the driveway, sort of an entrance to the back yard.  Grandmother kept a step-like shelf next to it.  She put potted plants in need of particular care on it.  Not surprisingly I don’t remember what plants they were.  Just not interested.

But I was interested in the scuppernongs.  For one thing, they were delicious.  They have a more important focus for me, though.  We grandchildren spent hours playing among the limbs and nibbling on scuppernongs.  The important things about scuppernongs have little to do with agricultural details as far as I’m concerned.  They have to do with two things.  One is the welcome they gave to arriving at Grandmother and Grandaddy’s house.  The other is the bond they created between my cousins and me.  They were fundamentally about relationship and family in my experience.

It might help to understand Jesus better if I knew more about their growth and taking care of them and what to do with the fruit.  Maybe there’s something I should get about the vines, the branches, and the fruit, how they’re connected and how they come to be unconnected.  Maybe I would understand better if I knew more pruning and raking up.  But maybe not.  After all, Jesus had grandparents, too.  Somehow I think that may reveal all that one needs to understand.

                                                                                    Agape,

                                                                                                Bishop Stacy Sauls

                                                                                                Founder and President

                                                                                                Love Must Act

Happy May Day

Happy May Day Play Day—The Day the World Changed

The first Saturday in May is Derby Day in Kentucky where I was bishop.  When I was a student at Furman University in Greenville, South Carolina, it was called May Day Play Day, kind of an end-of-the-year celebration of friendships formed through Furman’s volunteer student service program, Service Corps.  The Furman campus, renowned for being beautiful, was transformed for a day into a playground with games and rides and entertainment and dancing and pontoon rides on the lake for hundreds of visitors.      

 May Day Play Day is where I met Diane.  We never saw each other again.  Nor did we ever once communicate with words (at least not mutually).  Diane had a mental disability that kept her from being able say a word to me. 

 Diane and I were about the same age when we met, I think.  I was a sophomore at an academically rigorous university.  She lived at a place called Whitten Village, a large state institution for people with disabilities like hers.  She entered my life because Ginger, now my wife and also a Furman student at the time, knew Diane through her weekly visits to Whitten Village as a Service Corps volunteer.  Ginger was bringing a group of Whitten residents to May Day Play Day and asked me to escort Diane, who needed one-on-one supervision, for the day.  Now Ginger was someone I happened to be trying to impress.  I reluctantly agreed. 

 During our day together we did not discuss any of the great ideas I had come to think were so very important to leading a good life.  These were things of words, books I had read or that some professor was telling me about.  I was learning in college, a church college in fact, that it was words that mattered most, that words were about the life of the mind and the life of the mind was at the core of being human, and perhaps most importantly, that words were the key to success.  The message was both explicit and implicit.  The entrance to the college library was under the giant seal of the university with its motto:  Cristo et Doctrinae.  The message was unmistakable:  Christ, learning, books, words, mostly the written words of dead people. 

 Diane and I did not discuss anything at all, let alone any great ideas from a book.  Words were not part of how Diane communicated.  What we did do was hold hands and walk around the lake.

 I remember lunch by the Furman Bell Tower most vividly.  I remember it vividly because of Diane and her bologna sandwich.  A lack of words notwithstanding, Diane came up with some interesting things to do with a bologna sandwich other than eat it.  In all my sophomoric sophistication, I was totally grossed out.  At the end of lunch, which seemed to go on forever, I put my hand back in Diane’s now slobbery hand, and off we went, which goes to show you just how much I was trying to impress Ginger.

 I don’t know if this was Ginger’s purpose, although I suspect it might have been, but Diane had a bigger impact on my life than teaching me some new things to do with a bologna sandwich.  Much bigger.   

 Diane called words themselves into question.  I thought she and I were different when we met.  We were not.  Either I had been right that the meaning of life had to do with words, in which case Diane did not have much value at all, or I had been getting things very badly wrong.  It was, of course, the latter. 

 What was happening, although it took me some time to realize it, was the Word had become flesh and was dwelling near me.  That’s what I learned from Diane.  It is no doubt for that reason that I proposed to Ginger at the site of the bologna sandwich lunch on May Day Play Day two years later.

 Thank you, Diane.  And Happy May Day Play Day.

Agape,

Bishop Stacy Sauls

Founder and President