Reflections

The Sweet Tree of Good and Evil

Time for my yearly battle with house finches around a rapidly ripening peach tree.  Previous attempts (aluminum foil in the leaves, fake owl on a pole near the tree, playing catch with my son under the tree) failed to keep marauding finches away.  The season starts with a few slender birds flitting around and ends with obviously bloated finches courting type 2 diabetes as the peaches too high for my reach shrivel to the pit without the aid of time lapse photography.

This year I tried a net.  I left the ends dangling below the tree, because I ran out of net to wrap the tree from below.  Victoriously I watched a finch approach the tree, hit the net and fly away.  Maybe adversion to the ground would keep them from discovering the secret entrance to sweet peach plunder.

Yesterday I discovered an inventive finch insided the net, a gob of reddish peach flesh cliknging to its bill.  I tried to shoo it away.  It panicked and kept flying into the net opposite of wherever I was.  I felt like scaring it so badly it would never return to my tree and (better yet) never teach its sisters and brothers the secret.  Its breast heaved up and down with the pounding of its heart, beak open, ebony eyes fixed on me.  I stopped my efforts, feeling sorry for it.

Sometimes people ask me, when I teach the story of the Fall, why God didn’t just start all over.  It was only two scared people hiding behind a bush.  They must have never seen a house finch caught within the net vainly protecting your peach tree despite your best efforts.

–Don Pieper 

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Outrunning God’s Love

My wife is a relief pharmacist.  Works a little here and there.  No politics.  No Sunday shifts.  Sometimes she works long enough at a place to get invited to their Christmas party.  She’s not one to go around telling others she is “Mrs. Pastor Pieper,” so when I meet her cooworkers at a party, they say, “Oh, you’re Karen’s husband!  What do you do?”

I can only tell them two things that will make them as nervous as the truth: I’m a mortician.  I’m an IRS auditor.  But when I tell them, “I’m a Lutheran minister,” they get goofy and say, “Well, preacher, don’t expect us to come to your church, because we just don’t think the roof is strong enough–har, har, har.”  I laugh with them, because there is a kernel of truth there.

Americans believe in God.  Polls repeatedly show 93-97% of Americans believe in a God.  Americans feel God is good, loving and forgiving.  America’s mistake is thinking God forgives like you and I forgive.

Each of us has had a friend, in high school, who made us do all the work.  We made the phone calls, we made the plans.  They’d show up late, maybe not at all.  Finally we got to the point, “I could have a lot better friends with a lot less energy.”  We drifted away form that high maintenance friend.  We didn’t become their enemy, but we just weren’t close.

That’s the way some people think of God, especially my uncomfortable party guests.  They think God forgives like humans forgive, within limits.  The way they have lived (third wife, estranged children, three jobs, gambling debts), they’ve used up their quota of forgiveness.  They’ve danced the dance and will have to pay the fiddler.  Better to grab for what little goodies they can now–not too much, wouldn’t want to call down special punishment–but they should retire to Yuma for acclimitization for the next world and ask to be buried with asbestos underwear, because where they are going will be hot!

But that’s not true.  Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son shows us we cannot outrun God’s love, we cannot out-sin his grace.  He is always there, not only watching and waiting for us to return to him, but actively sending his Holy Spirit to draw us back.

“This son of mine was lost, and he is found.  He was dead and is now alive,” the father in the parable says.

Tired of trying to outrun God’s love?  Just listen to his voice and return to his home.

–Don Pieper

To read more, go to www.gvelc.com