The participants form small groups to reflect together on the various topics of faith development that are presented. And they make up a name for themselves. One group, this weekend, got stuck on finding a specific name that appealed to them all, and so they called themselves by the initials of their first names—MGCSK! And since none of them were Polish, they worked out an acronym – My God Can Save Kindness. Now, I may have been susceptible to sleep deprivation and jetlag, having just flown back from England, but the name, and the prophetic statement behind it, intentional or not, blew me away!
My God can save kindness—a commodity in increasing short supply, it would seem, these days. And please note that we were cocooned during the weekend, and not fully aware of the hurricane hanging over the Bahamas or of the shooting sprees in Odessa, Texas.
We were inviting these young people to shape their identity and commit their life’s meaning and purpose on the person of Jesus Christ, and to explore what it is to follow Him at this time in history and in their lives. We presented words as seeds, which we pray will bear fruit in their time. But the endeavor shifted something in me—though probably not for the first time, but certainly as if for the first time, to use a phrase from Marcus Borg.
While the second most ferocious storm was hanging off the coast of Florida, a different one was coming together within me. On Sunday morning I took time away from the group downstairs at St. Paul’s, Council Bluffs and presided over their weekly Eucharist. The Hebrew Scripture from Jeremiah proclaimed that the people of God had forsaken God, “the fountain of living water, and dug out cisterns for themselves, cracked cisterns that can hold no water” (Jer 2:13). The spiritual revolutionary self of my teen years had seized on this sentence of Scripture more than fifty years ago and let it drive me, all the way back then, in calling for institutional reform, especially in the Church. Suddenly it had burst into flame once more, only this time it seized me through the eyes of this generation’s teens.
How do young people shape identity in the world we are creating? To whom do they turn for role models? We have built a system of cisterns that are cracked, including in the Church—created for power, control, self-preservation, and self-aggrandizement, and tailored to make sure we remain ahead of the game while the devil can take those lagging behind. In such a world kindness is a strong impulse, and a rare one. It gives itself away; it exposes itself to be vulnerable; it walks with the prisoners and tortured as if in prison (and tortured) ourselves ( as the writer to the Hebrews reminded us this very same weekend). The Way of Love cannot be a sentimental, feel-good hashtag for our life and faith. It has to have sacrifice—self-offering—behind it, because it comes to us proclaimed in the hard form of the Cross. Jesus died in love with us all, not just as Love. And such love’s source flows from a fountain of living water. It is not stored in broken cisterns. If we are not giving ourselves away, we are drying up. And one powerful sign of our bankruptcy is when kindness strikes us as the thing my God can save.
Our convention theme this year is “Finding the Simple Way.” It’s a call to imagine our faith as if for the first time, to forsake broken cisterns that do not fulfil God’s life-giving purpose, and to recover the fountain of living water, the Spirit to whom we are connected in Christ at baptism. It’s what the war-torn and poverty stricken migrant culture of our world is demanding. It’s what the incessant pounding of destructive hurricanes and other as yet unseen impacts of our breaking, fragile home of a planet is demanding. It’s what the tragic consequences of our idolatrous loyalties to ourselves apart from others is demanding. It’s what the endless stream of new generations seeking nurture, direction and their becoming is demanding. And it is what my God (who) can save kindness is demanding.
In the peace and love of Christ,
+Alan
The Rt. Rev. Alan Scarfe, Bishop of Iowa
