RKT2 - The Banality of Betrayal

When we think of betrayal, we usually think of something quite dramatic and sinister. But, for me, betrayal is something a little bit more mundane. It was the summer when I was 15 years old that I betrayed my father. We had packed up the car in preparation for a mini-family vacation to King’s Island, my favorite annual amusement park experience. While my spirit and my nose were dreading a two-hour car ride with my brother and his stinky feet, my heart was already thrilling with visions of rides on the Beast, the Racer and the Vortex. My father had just gone outside to pull the van from the garage into the driveway when the phone rang. I answered, “Hello?”

“Is Larry Doty there?” the voice in the receiver said.

“Who is it?” I asked.

“This is Eli Lilly,” the voice answered. My father’s work. Being a high-voltage electrician, my father was infrequently called to manage some electrical crisis at one of their several plants in Indianapolis. Simultaneously my heart sank and my mind raced. This was our family vacation, how dare they call him to work when he was supposed to be on vacation.

My father walked in the door. Should I tell them he was here, I thought to myself, and risk losing our trip? I knew my father was just as excited about the trip as I was. “He really was on vacation, which was almost like being away,” the little voice in my head said. If I say he’s gone, then we can just leave for our trip and no one has to know.

“He’s not here,” I heard myself say. Perfect.

Then from the kitchen came my dad’s voice, “Who is it, Kevin?”

“It’s your work,” I replied.

He had heard my lie. And he knew. I felt ashamed and embarrassed and vile. My father knew and he simply glanced at me as he took the receiver from my hand, saying, “This is Larry.” In that moment I had betrayed his trust and the values of honesty and hard work that he had taught me. It wasn’t the first betrayal nor the last, but it was for me the most memorable.

We are all experienced betrayers - those mundane but somehow central moments when the facades we build around ourselves suddenly come crashing down and our affinity for the enemies of our lives, enemies like selfishness, greed, ambition and pride, become painfully visible to the rest of the world and to us.

My betrayals are all too frequent and too mundane and unfortunately often they are also too true.

As we continue in this season of Lent, I have been pondering the betrayal of all of the disciples, but especially Judas. I think while our hope is that we are more like Peter, denying Christ, but ultimately being forgiven, our deepest fear is that we are each a faithless Judas. We have willing been betrayed by our own anger and succumbed to violence, been betrayed by our loneliness and sought quick passions, been betrayed by our own helplessness and anxiety and fear and covered them up with intoxicating substances or pushed them down into the deepest recesses of our spirit hoping they never return.

But the good news of the gospel, for Judas and for us, is not that we will never be betrayers or denyers or deserters of our professed faith. The good news is that its not our faith that saves us who makes us right with God. It is not faith in Jesus Christ but the faith of Jesus Christ that matters.

RKT2 - Seeing the Stranger

When I was in school, I always had mixed emotions about teachers who thought they knew who you were because they happened to know your family. My dad and especially my grandmother had unintentional hidden networks throughout the school. Twenty-three years prior, my dad had graduated from the same high school I attended, while my grandmother had worked for the school system for many years as both a custodian and as a 'lunch-lady' back when 'mashed potates' on the menu meant that they had actually peeled and diced and cooked and mashed real potatoes. Every year it seemed at least one teacher would say, 'Are you Larry's son?" or "Are you Stella's grandson?"

"Yes," I would grudgingly reply, unsure what conclusions the questioner was making about my background, my intelligence or my personality. It felt like instead of seeing me, a bright new shining face in front of them, they actually saw me only through a hazy vision of my family.

The positive side is that I'm the oldest; my little brother had to bear being compared to Grandma, Dad and me.

I've done a lot of thinking lately about hospitality and how we practice it, as a community of faith and as persons of faith. To practice hospitality means that we actually see and interact with whoever comes to us. To practice hospitality means that instead of trying to figure out what boxes or categories we can fit someone into, we meet them where they are and respond to their needs as they are. To practice hospitality means the hungry get fed, the weary get to rest, the sick get healed and those who are bound get loosed. What is radical about this hospitality, God's hospitality, is that whether we are the guest or the host, we come to the table as equals, as fellow creatures and both are blessed.

But it's more than that. Hospitality, like all true Christian practices, is such because it molds us in the ways of God. For God comes to us as one who is completely other. God comes to us as a stranger, who cannot be put in a box or category of our choosing. God comes to us as a completely free person and asks us to respond. When we practice hospitality to the human strangers before us we learn to see, hear, touch and respond to the divine stranger.

Living in a Junk Shop

"Junk" is such a harsh word. Few people think of junk as a positive description of anything. Ever drive by a junkyard? Piles of worn-out, rusty automobiles, shattered TV tubes, mounds of decomposing diapers. Not attractive. Even calling it a landfill only makes it sound slightly less appealing. We can cover it up with soil, puncture it with PVC piping and plant grass on it, but in the end its still a pile of junk.

We all create junk. Just think about your most recent meal. Mine was breakfast. As I deftly and almost mindlessly began heating the teapot and preparing my meal, I suddenly noticed that I kept moving back and forth between the counter and the trash can. One piece of trash for my empty Sweet-and-Low packet. One piece of trash for my instant oatmeal wrapper. Yet another piece of trash for my chamomile tea bag holder. Three pieces of trash, for a monastic breakfast. And I am just one person. Multiply that by three meals a day and over 280 million people in the United States alone and you begin to sense the ecological issue we face.

I grew up hearing the phrase, "God doesn't make junk," especially people. A profound theological point and certainly true in my opinion. We sang our little prepubescent hearts out for a whole week one Vacation Bible School musically making this point. Maybe its easier to remember or easier to see when you're twelve. God doesn't make junk and you've only had eight years or so to start screwing it up.

The San Francisco Chronicle carried a heart-wrenching article yesterday titled, "A homeless beauty and the beast, heroin" describing the tragic life of Rhonda Bye, a Washington state girl, her beauty confirmed by modeling jobs and her brains clear from her technical work on computers for a part-time employer. She dropped out of school, married young and tried cocaine. Cocaine led to a heroin and crack addiction. Her beauty withered. Her intelligence faded. She became yet another undesirable person under the freeway; one holding a cardboard sign emblazoned, "Dreamin of McDonalds," asking for another handout.

Looking at Rhonda's picture as a young girl, you realize that she's not any different from those other kids that were on that church stage, singing and knowing that "God doesn't make junk." Yet Rhonda chose to live as if her body was a junkyard. Take in the worn-out, rusty, shattered mounds of decomposing trash, one hit, one cube, one vial at a time.

We are no better. The trash we accept may be different, but the junkyard attitude is the same. Another order of fries, a cigarette, that third cocktail, add on the trash, just make sure we cover it all up with a little soil and some flowers. We convince ourselves that at worst we are living in a landfill and for that matter, its ours and we can do what we want with it, thank you very much.

Rhonda died of kidney failure this past Wednesday at age 39. If we're even half-listening, Rhonda wakes us up. Rhonda reminds us that we are not our own. Rhonda reminds us that we are only one or two strategic pieces of junk away from the path she trod.

How would we live if we still believe that God doesn't make junk? How would we live if we remembered that we occupy not a land fill of our own making but a temple to the LORD?