The Bungee Cord

Hello,

Today, being Monday, is the day that my driving partner and I deliver Meals on Wheels to the 14 clients on our list. I’ve been delivering Meals on Wheels on Mondays for the past couple of years, and I find it a grounding and eye-opening experience. I was telling my delivery partner today, that I think it should be mandatory of every elected official to deliver Meals on Wheels at least once before they are elected. As I have been invited into the lives and homes of these folks on my route, I find myself reminded of how hard life is for some people and how resilient those same people are.

Anyway, as we started off today, we rounded one of the turns on our route and we came upon something that I had not seen before. There, sitting on a split rail fence was the largest gathering of turkey vultures that I have ever seen. There must have been twenty-five of them, posted on a couple of sections of split rail fence. It is not unusual to see a half-dozen turkey vultures doing their work of scavenging from a roadkill, but in this case, there was no dead animal around. It was as if they were gathering awaiting a dispatcher to call them, like firefighters in a fire station. I wondered, “Do they know something that I don’t know?”

Although our modern world does a pretty good job of hiding the reality of death from us, there are those moments when the truth of our limited mortality slips through the cracks. As was the case when I crashed the party of turkey vultures this morning. Martin Luther was to have said that even the blowing of an autumnal leaf across the ground whispers death’s truth to us. Death is powerful. Death is relentless. Death is determined. It is not hard to believe in death. Even Jesus believed in death.

What is more difficult to believe is that there is something more powerful than death, but that thing is the essence of the Christian faith, and it is love, specifically God’s love. The Bible tells us about the presence and truth of this ultimate power over and over again, “For God so loved….”, “God is love….”, “No greater love is this that a man should lay down his life….”, and “God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.” Further, God proved the power of his love when an Easter tomb erupted with life and the very one whom death thought it had pinned did a reversal and walked out of that tomb, full of life. And Paul, who encountered that one on a Damacus road was compelled to pen this, “No, in all these things we are more than victorious through him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor rulers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor anything else in all creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

In Jesus we see that God’s love is more powerful than death….it is more relentless than death…..and it is more determined than death. As we gather week after week under the cross of Christ which blares out God’s love, around the Baptismal font which embraces us in God’s love, and at the altar that unites us with God’s love, we are the counter in this world to a bunch of vultures. So, when people come around the bend on Sunday morning and see our red roofed church and cars in the parking lot, maybe they will think, “Do these people know something I don’t know?”

And we do….God’s love and its power!

Have a great week.

God’s grace and peace, (ggap)

Pastor Jerry Nuernberger

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