Midlife Meditation

Even at 2, I didn't know how to smile for a camera--unlike my 6-month-old little brother. If the concept of an "autism spectrum" had existed in 1961, I would've been tagged with it then. Wait a minute--weren't you born in 1961? Why yes, I was. And from the beginning, I was different. To be clear, there are plenty of baby pictures of me smiling, even laughing. Although first-born child photography of the 1960s was limited by the cost of buying and processing film, there are still plenty of stills, slides, and even some 8mm movies of my tender years. It's what young parents do. And there are occasional candid smiles coming from my little face. In posed pictures, though, from the moment I became aware that cameras existed, my teeth stopped showing. The corners of my mouth might turn up a bit, but that was it. More significant were the silent tears. When I was hurt, frustrated, angry, sad, I wouldn't wail. Tears would roll down my cheeks...

Martin Luther King, Jr., Memorial, Washington, D.C. Look at the facts of the world. You see a continual and progressive triumph of the right. I do not pretend to understand the moral universe, the arc is a long one, my eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the figure by the experience of sight; I can divine it by conscience. But from what I see I am sure it bends towards justice.  Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Jefferson trembled when he thought of slavery and remembered that God is just. Ere long all America will tremble. These words come from a sermon by Theodore Parker, a Unitarian Minister, Transcendentalist, and Abolitionist. They first saw print in a collection of sermons published in 1853, and, quoted by essayists, preachers, and politicians, were ultimately boiled down to this aphorism: "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." In that form, the quote found its way into the sermons of many a pr...

On February 26, 2012, in a gated community in Sanford, Florida, a 17-year-old named Trayvon Martin got in a scuffle with a 28-year-old neighborhood watch member named George Zimmerman. A single shot was fired, and the teenager died. The circumstances of the shooting--the apparent racial profiling of a teenager who was visiting relatives in the mostly-white community, the "stand your ground" aspects of the incident, Zimmerman's pursuit of Martin, and the Sanford police department's initial decision to release Zimmerman without charges--turned it into a national news story. Zimmerman was ultimately charged with and, last week, acquitted of second degree murder in the shooting. In the wake of that decision, there have been demonstrations across the United States. Some have rightly wondered why this story continues to be special when Martin was just one of 85 children killed by firearms every day in 2012. Others have complained that his skin color gave him some kind of sp...

13 At that very time there were some present who told him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. 2 He asked them, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way they were worse sinners than all other Galileans? 3 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish as they did. 4 Or those eighteen who were killed when the tower of Siloam fell on them—do you think that they were worse offenders than all the others living in Jerusalem? 5 No, I tell you; but unless you repent, you will all perish just as they did.” (Luke 13:1-5, NRSV) I was taught in seminary that every sermon should boil down to a single sentence. It's a principle that always worked well for me, especially as I consider the number of overly complicated three-or-more point sermons I've heard and promptly forgotten. Simplicity is far more effective as a preaching tool. I used to like to embellish the idea of the sermon sentence by adding, "and ...