We had a good time at the beach this year, but come to think of it we have a good time at the beach every year.  I have never had a bad day at the beach.  Well, actually I have.  We went to Navarre Beach in 1984 and all got really sick with a virus.  My mom went along on the trip to help out with Eric who was a two year old handful and Dianna was pregnant with what would turn out to be Emily.  We all got this bad bug, and my mom and I spent the night in the Ft. Walton Beach hospital ER getting IV fluids, while the hospital personnel watched Eric who was fine by this time.  Dianna faired even worse than mom and I, as she was admitted as an inpatient for three days for being dehydrated while pregnant.   The Physician, Dr. Louisville (no joke that was his real name, must be a story there) was afraid that the baby might be in danger, and the best we can tell the only long lasting repercussions from the whole ordeal was that Emily was born interested in politics.  So maybe the damage was limited to that, although that is serious enough.  And while that was not the best beach trip ever, I made several important discoveries about beach vacations.  Number one: Never rent a place without an elevator, because if you have been throwing up for three days a flight of stairs looks like Mt. Everest.  Number two: never rent a place without a phone or TV.  We were too sick to do anything but lay around, and in that day (brace yourselves young people) there were no cell phones, so I could not check on Dianna in the hospital and I was too sick to drive the 17 miles to go see her.  Pebble Beach has its famous 17 mile drive, and now the 17 miles between Navarre and Ft. Walton are just as famous, or should I say infamous at my house.

            So instead of the usual books and magazines to read, we always make sure we also have a TV in case moving our eyeballs makes us too sick to read because on this trip for three or four days we could not move off the couch.  Number three:  always get a place with a view of the ocean, so if you are incapacitated at the beach at least you can see the darn beach.  And every trip since we have had a phone, TV, and marvelous beach front view.

Fortunately on this recent trip all was well– even with Dianna’s aged parents did very well.  We did have a TV, but I still took four books to read. Since someone in this very erudite congregation will ask, I took Johnny Cash: and the Great American Contradiction, Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation, by Rodney Clapp; God’s Politics by Jim Wallis; Brother Astronomer: Adventures of a Vatican Astronomer by Guy Consolmagno; and  Grisham’s  A Painted House.  I will have to confess that I didn’t end up reading hardly a page in any of them, as I learned on this trip that the forces of A.D.D. are too easily influenced by the rhythm of the sea.  I have to be busy to get reading done; I am incapable of such discipline when I am chillin’.   My brain was stuck in neutral for a week, and I have had to get jumper cables to get it going again.  But if you want to know what I am currently reading, that is it.  I will get through the Cash book, as the book club I belong to will keep me in tow, and the others, heck I got them for less than 50 cents on Amazon.com.

            I always have a hard time trying to decide what I want to read when I finally do finish a book, as my taste in books is very eclectic.  I recently have had one book recommended to me and I have had a number of people say that they are reading it, and they are very enthusiastic about it, and it is called The Shack, by William P. Young.  It has been described as a modern day Pilgrim’s Progress, and everyone I know seems to be reading it.  Amazon dot com describes the book in these words:

Mackenzie Allen Philips’ youngest daughter, Missy, has been abducted during a family vacation and evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Four years later in the midst of his Great Sadness, Mack receives a suspicious note, apparently from God, (OK, yeah, when I get a mysterious note or card I assume its from God too) inviting him back to that shack for a weekend. Against his better judgment he arrives at the shack on a wintry afternoon and walks back into his darkest nightmare. What he finds there will change Mack’s world forever. In a world where religion seems to grow increasingly irrelevant “The Shack” wrestles with the timeless question, “Where is God in a world so filled with unspeakable pain?” The answers Mack gets will astound you and perhaps transform you as much as it did him. You’ll want everyone you know to read this book!

            Well, even though it violates my policy of avoiding and denying all things tragic, maybe I will read this book, the reviews are all so good and it also promises to do something that no other book or no one else in Christendom has been able to do, and that is provide an answer to the problem of evil.  Not a theory I have been told, but an answer.  If that is the case, then Mr. Young is the greatest philosopher of all time and maybe the greatest theologian too. Because no issue is a bigger problem for the proponents of faith (at least those of us to tend to believe in an all powerful, all knowing, all loving God).  It is a question that we cannot help but struggle with and while it is easy to come up with religious sounding answers, these seem trite in light of the real pain and suffering that is part of the human predicament.  And recently we have been reminded afresh of this pain in our own community.

            You know doubt have heard about all the violence in Little Rock the past couple of weeks, and as one who works in a major hospital I can tell you that you have not heard about all of it as there were others who suffered brutality and you will never hear about some of them on the evening news.  The Anne Presley tragedy has caught all of our attention because she was so high profile, and her story shook us all.  Why?  I mean most of us didn’t know her personally.  Well, maybe it was because she was celebrity and she entered our living rooms on a regular basis on the morning show on channel seven.  We have some sort of transference with her; she became a part of our regular routine.   But there is more:  She was young, beautiful and talented with a career on the move.  She was the age of my children, and she lived in a safe neighborhood, both factors that destroy the illusion of our own safety and security.  In Anne’s death we come face to face with our own mortality and vulnerability when something this senseless and random happens because we are all victimized on some level.  You see, this should not have happened to her in our minds, but it did.

            There were other stories that moved us as well– the young mother who was shot to death in her shower in front of her kids, and the death of two students at UCA where every one in my family has been to college.  Conway was a sleepy college town in a dry county back when I went to school there, now Conway is a big city with big city problems. 

So how do we process these horrific events in our community? The truth is we look at the mom in the shower and say, well tragic as it was, that was a domestic issue, poor soul, so it makes sense to us on a level we can understand. We look at UCA and immediately think, well those boys were into something, maybe gang activity, and that lets our psyches off the hook because we are not going to be so victimized being decent law abiding citizens who stay out of the wrong parts of town.  But Anne Pressly was different, she was a high profile white girl who may have just been at the wrong place at the wrong time and that gets to us as it tells us that it could happen to us and ours as well.  It hits close to home, it happened on the streets where we live.

            So how are we to make sense of such things?  It is difficult to say, and theology has historically stumbled and sputtered and has not looked very good when dealing with such weighty issues.  We mostly default to basic faith assertions that the unbelieving will not accept or understand, such as hanging on the hope that there is some justice in the world or that Pressly and the others are truly better off in heaven.  And I suppose that concept is relevant today and should be in our minds as this is the Sunday that we celebrate All Saints Day (which was yesterday), the day where we as Protestants remember all those who were influential on our faith and spiritual development who have gone on before us.  Catholics, Orthodox, and some Anglicans of course see it as a day to celebrate, venerate, and pray to those officially designated as saints by the church.  But for us it is a time to reflect and give thanks for those who have died whose Christian lives have had a profound impact on our own spiritual development.  And I have been able to recall several dearly departed ones whose impact on my life was monumental.  They were truly saints in the best sense of the word.

            I was reminded of such as I was trying to explain Halloween as Friday night we had Dasa and Klara (two chaplain residents from Slovakia) over for dinner. They had the opportunity on All Hallow’s Eve to see our custom of trick or treating.  I carved an evil looking Jack-o-Lantern (I have no artistic talent, but for some reason I do evil carving well), and we watched a little Michael Myer’s on the tube.  Dianna would say, “Turn that off your scaring the girls,” which after all was the point!  They thought it all strange, which it is; so we eventually decided to watch some home movies of the Wilson’s trip to California in 1998.  I was looking for the Utah trip where I hiked to the bottom of Bryce Canyon, but could only find the California tape.  We were amazed all over again at the stunning beauty of Yosemite and other western treasures that we recorded for prosperity.  And then the scene on the tape changed, and all of a sudden we were watching Christmas 1998 and it was a hoot.  Grandma looked young at only 93, and Emily was a gangly looking talkative kid with more metal in her mouth than Richard Kiehl (AKA “Jaws”) had in Moonraker.  Eric was 16 years old and looked nothing like a future attorney, I had less gray hair and actually was heavier, and Dianna looked the same as she does now, no joke.  The woman has not aged as much as she should have living with me.  And we were so funny opening our presents!  Dasa and Klara laughed so hard that they couldn’t breathe.  The Wilson Christmas at my house was really funny, as it was so loud with everyone talking at once. 

We have a tradition at my house where we start with the youngest and proceed in order to the oldest as each person opens all their presents in succession.  My nieces and nephews were still babies in ‘98, and shoot, we all looked a lot better– and then it happened.  I really hadn’t thought about the fact that she would be there, but all of a sudden it was her turn.  There was my mom, who as you know died four years ago.  She was healthy in 1998, and it was vintage mom.  She got not one but three, count ‘em three pairs of black pants from my unimaginative brother and sisters and I, but she acted excited over every single one of them.  The things she did and said were classic Janice Wilson.  It was an unexpected surprise to see her sitting in my living room opening presents as she had on many a Christmas. I treasured that 15 minutes of footage of her, I have not thought about it until Friday that I must have many pictures and videos of her somewhere.  Pictures are great, but the home videos really bring her back for a few moments.   

I also thought about how now our Christmases’, holidays, and family times are forever different because of the death of my family’s matriarch.  What a surprise that was timely and appropriate on All Hallow’s Eve, as the saint who influenced me the most as a child reentered my memory for 15 minutes.  It totally caught me off guard, but it was a nice surprise, a joyous surprise.  It made me want to scour my extensive home video collection for more times with mom.  It seems that life passes by so fast.  How do we ever bear such a loss?  How do we find consolation and comfort, how do we get over it and find our new normal?

Perhaps part of the answer comes this morning. On this All Saints Day I take comfort in knowing my mom lives on in heaven.  Now I have long had trouble with being a pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by kind of Christian.   You have heard my skeptical self preach many times from this pulpit that we had better find out what the Kingdom of God means in the here-and-now, and not just simply view our faith as something totally future. I don’t relate to the hereafter very well, it makes my brain hurt. I cannot fathom the imagery of heaven (particularly the materialistic and the militaristic images that are so popular) or the concept of eternity at all. It all sounds a little boring to me. And to make matters worse, I detest those Christians who only have fire insurance. I am frustrated when they don’t even try to let their faith make a difference in our lives and world on any day but Sunday. They often give up on making a difference in this world because they have a holy pass to the time where God solves all their and the world’s problems. Friends, if your faith doesn’t rock your world and the world around you right now, then forget about heaven, you probably won’t like it anyway.

I do believe that Jesus Christ should impact our lives now, that eternal life is now, that His Kingdom is indeed at hand, now. That we had better change now and be about the business of the radical transformation of our world right now. I believe this so strongly that if the heaven part were not true, I would still believe and give my energy to making it so. I find it tough to relate to the hereafter. Faith for me is a present tense verb.

But the truth is, I am slapped around “the now” as well, and I am so slapped on a regular basis. I am because in my other job (as a hospital chaplain).  I cannot escape the inevitable I see it everyday. The hereafter keeps interfering with my here and now. Life is constantly being slain by death, I see it everyday. And that fact brings me full circle. I often feel like a child of death rather than part of the children of the resurrection.

But even in the midst of such brazen reality, I do believe something else: that the right here and now is not enough of a reason to believe either, it does not in and of itself motivate me to faith.  The truth is that I can save the world just as effectively working from some other paradigm; especially since we Christians aren’t doing so well at it anyway given the sheer numbers of us and all our massive assets.  Faith has to be more, it has to offer more, it has to be about something else, somewhere else, something better, something more fair, something more perfect, or we are wasting our considerable time and resources on church.

I was sent an email this week from a friend who is close to some of the leadership of Channel Seven; the email she forwarded which was probably forwarded from someone else was purportedly from Matt Mosler, a TV personality on Channel Four who is the founder of the Christian Media Fellowship here in Little Rock.  Here are Matt’s words:

I knew of Anne Pressly before I met her.  Heck, everyone knew of Anne. She’d only been on the air in Little Rock for a few years but she owned this town just like she owned every room into which she walked.  It didn’t hurt that she was 6 feet tall and stunningly beautiful.  But it wasn’t her size that made her larger than life it was her light and her zest for life.  Everyone could see it.  I mean, that’s why she could walk onto a movie set to do a story and get offered a role in that movie before she left! Anne was special that way.  She had a sparkle about her.  I’ve heard from other anchors and reporters in this market that they were a bit jealous of Anne.  Not so much jealous of her talent or beauty but her spirit.  “I wish I could be more like her,” I’ve heard them say.  I wish I were more like her, too.  Sure, we are all unique but it seemed to me that Anne lived her “uniqueness” out loud.  She held nothing back.  She was wide open.  She was the personification of the abundant life that Jesus promised.  (Jn. 10:10)

Why then did someone so young, so talented, so beautiful, and so full of life have to be taken out the way that she did?  By now many of you have heard of the horrific way in which Anne was attacked in her own home. Her injuries were so severe doctors said it would be years before she would make a full recovery.  Where was God in those early morning hours? Why didn’t he intervene?  Couldn’t he have stopped the attack?  Why did he allow this to happen to someone with so much to offer? You know it’s funny; those same questions are the central theme in what had become Anne’s favorite book, The Shack.  Earlier this year Anne received a copy of the book from the author who spoke at the first ever meeting of the Little Rock Media Fellowship.  We started the LRMF in January as an evangelical outreach to all the on-air media personalities in town.  Anne attended nearly every one of the meetings including the first one where she
met Paul Young.  In his book Young tells the tale of Mack who lost his daughter, Missy, in a particularly brutal manner.  Mack had a hard time dealing with the loss and how a loving God could have allowed it to happen. “He doesn’t stop a lot of things that cause Him pain,” Mack is told.  “Your world is severely broken. You demanded your independence, and now you are angry with the one who loved you enough to give it to you. Right now your world is lost in darkness and chaos, and horrible things happen to those he is especially fond of.”

“Then why doesn’t he do something about it?” Mack asks and is told in reference to Jesus and the cross, “He already has.” (The Shack, pg. 165-166)  Later in the book Jesus himself tells Mack, “I don’t think you want to know all the details.  I’m sure they won’t help you.  But I can tell you there was not a moment that we were not with her.  She knew my peace, and you would have been proud of her.  She was so brave!” (pg. 175) I can’t believe it was a coincidence this book came into her life when it did.

The wisest man on earth once wrote, “The day of one’s death is better than the day of one’s birth.” (Eccl. 7:1)  I’m not sure what that means other than Anne is now seeing God face to beautiful face and her ordeal is not even a distant memory.  But maybe it also means that while our birth is out of our control the way we live our life is not.  Our death will reveal that legacy.  Anne’s legacy is more than just images on film and videotape. Those things will fade.  But the impact she made in the lives of others through her life and her death will continue throughout eternity.

Well, a maybe Mr. Mosler’s explanation is as good as anyone’s, I certainly found his words comforting if not convincing.  Who knows why things happen as they do, or why evil exists in the world, we will never know or figure it out, never.  But somehow in the wake of a very violent week in Little Rock, and on the day when we remember our loved ones who have gone on before us, I can think of no other words or no better words than those of the writer of the Apocalypse, our lectionary text this morning:

After this I looked, and there was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, robed in white, with palm branches in their hands. ¹⁰They cried out in a loud voice, saying, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!” ¹¹And all the angels stood around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God, ¹²singing, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”  ¹³Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, robed in white, and where have they come from?” ¹⁴I said to him, “Sir, you are the one that knows.” Then he said to me, “These are they who have come out of the great ordeal; they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb. ¹⁵For this reason they are before the throne of God, and worship him day and night within his temple, and the one who is seated on the throne will shelter them. ¹⁶They will hunger no more, and thirst no more; the sun will not strike them, nor any scorching heat; ¹⁷for the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of the water of life, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.”  (Rev. 7:9-17 NRSV)

This is the Word of the Lord! Thanks be to God! Amen.