What Are You Building With Your Life?
What we build shows what we love.
What are you building with your life?
Let me explain why I’m asking that question:
- I’m asking for myself, as I consider what I am building
- I’m asking for you, because I want to give you a moment to reflect on an important but neglected question today
- I’m asking as a way for us to reflect together on Psalm 8, and on St Francis of Assisi, whose feast day was recently celebrated.
Christians around the world have just concluded celebrating the Season of Creation, a part of the church calendar that runs from September 1st to October 4th, the Feast day of St Francis of Assisi.
It’s a time of year set aside to consider, as the psalmist does, how every part of creation reflects the glory of God.
It concludes with St Francis’ day because he is considered the “patron saint of ecology.”
Who was Francis and why should anyone care?
Francis was from a wealthy family, but at some point he became disenchanted by the economy that divided the world into the clean and productive on the one hand, and the dirty and useless on the other.
Francis wound up abandoning his family business and giving up the pursuit of wealth and power.
We are told that he rebuilt an abandoned church; founded a religious order devoted to poverty, chastity, and love; embraced a leper he met on the road; wondered at the beauty of the small creatures that others thought of as weeds or pests or predators; and, in the midst of the Fifth Crusade, he traveled to Egypt to seek out and speak to Muslim leaders not as enemies but as siblings worthy of his life and love and conversation.
He did things that seemed unproductive and unprofitable, he gave his attention to the outsiders and the unclean, and he was considered reckless and foolish long before he was considered a saint.
So when I ask “what are you building with your life?” I am partly thinking of Francis.
We Show What We Believe By What We Build
I’m also thinking about the connection between what we build and what we believe.
If you want to know what someone believes don’t ask them what they believe.
Instead, ask them what they are building.
It’s easy to say you believe something, but when resources are scarce and push comes to shove, we show our deepest beliefs in what we build, in the devotion of our time and money and energy.
Love, and Fear, and the Divine
And I think all of us find ourselves struggling with the twin influences of love and fear on those deepest beliefs.
Maybe you’ve heard people say you should “fear God”? It shows up in a few places in scriptures.
Lately I’ve been wondering, though. What if the fear of the Lord was only meant ironically?
After all, when Jesus was asked about the greatest commandments, he spoke not of fear but of love: Love God, love your neighbor, love one another. And we are reminded elsewhere that love at its best drives out all fear.
In Psalm 8, the psalmist says: God, you’re amazing! Check out all this cool stuff you made! Stars! Fish! Birds! Wow! And even people! You made us almost angelic! The psalm can sound stodgy and lofty but I like to imagine it as the words of a child, sayting something like “Mom! Check out what you made for dinner! This is so good!” And Mom is like, yes, sweetie. I know. I’m glad you like it. (This is worship, and thanksgiving, all in one.)
So I’m wondering if maybe when prophets say “fear God” they’re really saying “hey, c’mon. If you’re going to let fear drive you, have you considered ‘fearing’ God?”
By which they mean “Have you seen this wonderful world that God made, and the way it is full of love?”
Some Fear Is Reasonable…
Of course, if you read or watch the news, you might think that’s a silly thing to say. The world is full of things to fear!
- When we hear world news, we fear what might happen to us and those we love if our enemies prevail.
- We fear that our neighbors might turn out to be awful people.
- Financial fears weigh on us all because we fear that others won’t be there for us when we need them.
- We fear not getting grades, or jobs, because the economy seems like a rigged game.
And those fears are reasonable! (How many locks and passwords are there in the world, after all?)
…And Some Love is Wonderfully Reckless
So I don’t mean to dismiss that fear, but only invite you for a season to be a little reckless with wonder and awe at creation, and to see what it does to your imagination.
The imagination is powerful, and if we imagine monsters, they become real in our hearts and minds.
What Are You Imagining?
So what might we see if we imagined a world that made us say “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth!”
What if our energy and attention and worship and devotion were directed towards the love that creates and sustains and, when things go wrong, renews and redeems and restores?
Instead of worshiping the worst we can imagine, what if we were to imagine the best, and to prepare ourselves to welcome it?
“Lepers” and Other People I Don’t Want to Hug
Recently I was in another city and a dirty man came up to me on the sidewalk and mumbled something I could not understand. I asked him to repeat himself and I still could not understand.
I asked a third time with similar results.
Then he looked me in the eye and said, “Will you hug me?”
In that moment I thought of the story of St Francis hugging the leper. Lepers were to be feared because touching them made one unclean, it was thought.
It is so easy to look at someone who has not washed for a long time, in ragged clothes and wild hair, unbrushed teeth and unwashed hands, and to think: I’m gonna need some Purell.
It is so much harder to think: “Sure, you look like you could use a hug!”
What If that Stranger is an Angel in Disguise?
And it is harder still to think: “God made this man only a little lower than the angels. Wow!” (If you click that link, look at verse 5 and you’ll see what I’m talking about.)
So in thinking about St Francis I found myself wondering:
What if this person before me is a work of art by the best of artists, charged with divinity, still marked by indelible fingerprints of creative love?
What if he is even an angel in disguise?
The Risk of Love
One of the prophets tells us that “Some of you have entertained angels unawares” when we took strangers in with kindness and gave them what they needed.
The thought of hugging a dirty beggar seemed foolish and dangerous; the thought of turning aside the chance to embrace an angel seemed irreverent. Which should I choose? So much depends on what informs my imagination. Fear? Or love?
The Good News is Hard
Of course this is hard. The good news is hard.
After all, despite what some will say, the good news is not a tool of personal gain, and it is not a tool for reinforcing walls of fear.
It is a tool for demolishing those walls, and for building something better, something that will be called foolish, that will be called an impediment or a stumbling block to all that is “clean and productive.”
The good news is not a static piece of data to be learned for a test. It is something to be proclaimed and practiced over a lifetime of love.
As Thomas Merton says, the good news comes not as an insult to our intelligence, but as a challenge to our intelligence, to all the wisdom that tells us what to fear.
If You Love Strangers, You Might Be Called a Fool
If you start to embrace the dirty, the unclean, the unproductive — there’s a good chance you’ll be mocked as a fool.
We show what we believe by what we build, and if you replace your non-native grass lawn with native prairie plants, you’ll be told you’re building a bed of weeds.
If you open your arms to hug the leper, you’ll be told you’re building an unclean layer of pathogens on your skin.
If you build a place where anyone can be welcome, you’ll be reminded that it’s safer to live in a gated community and to dine at the country club with friends.
Building good things along the lines of the good news will be hard. But it is good.
The End of One Season, and the Beginning of Another
Here is one way to get started: consider Saint Francis, the patron saint of ecology.
The season of creation has just ended but, as with any season, its fruit can be stored up for the seasons that follow.
All seasons are a building up of something else, like rich compost added to garden soil, building up a diverse community of plants and animals and bacteria that give sustenance to all who need it.
As we sit here, dust is rising behind combines and round bales are being bound and lined up for winter. The harvest is upon us. But that is not the end of summer’s abundant season of creation; it is only the end of flowering.
We know there may be cold days ahead. There may be days when the love we say we have for our neighbors is put to the fiery test. As the farmer stores up hay and silage and grain, let us store up wonder and imagination of love, not fear.
Let us dare to be called wishful dreamers and fools.
Let us dare to admire the soil that feeds us and supports our weight, and to know it not as dirt or an economic tool but as God’s creation, out of which grain grows that becomes communion bread and food for the hungry.
Let us build wealth and grain bins not out of fear but out of the reckless hope that we might have enough to share with others.
It is a conceit of our age — and maybe of every age — that there is sin so bad that it cannot be redeemed, enemies so unthinkable that no grace can make them worthy of love. This is fear, not love, and it is a failure of imagination. And it is a false god, an idol. The name of that idol is our own fear.
And perfect love drives out fear.
This includes rest. To hell with productivity if it comes at the cost of rest. If you’re finding rest, then share that with others and urge them to lay down their work for a little while as well. Invite them to taste and see. This is an act of love, and it might not seem like it’s building anything, but it is.
As the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han says, when we lose the sense of seasons and of time, and when we lose the rituals that ebb and flow with the seasons, then every day becomes a part of what he calls “the hell of the same.”
I just want to remind you that there are some wonderful heavenly things out there right now.
Every person you meet is possibly a heavenly angel in disguise. Every weed and pest you find is the handiwork of the heavenly divine. Every season with its changes is part of something truly amazing, a foretaste, my imagination says, of something even greater.
And it’s okay to slow down, wherever you are, and to consider the creation that is right there in front of you, and to marvel at how, as St Francis believed, this person, this dry prairie plant, this bit of the cosmos, is a place wherein God resides, and can be glimpsed. Today’s psalm tells us that every little animal, every star, every fish in the sea is the work of divine hands, work in which we see glory.
And one big part of that glory is this: you and everyone else you meet is “just a little lower than the angels.” Imagine that!
So What Are You Building?
So let me return to this question: what are you building? What are you making with your life, and how much of that is built on a wild and reckless and foolish imagination that “all nature sings and round me rings the music of the spheres”? Are you considering the lilies and sparrows, none of which escapes divine notice? Are you “considering the heavens” rather than fearing the hells?
Whatever you might be building, let me urge you to build with love and wonder, “fearing” God rather than all the other things that we are tempted to fear and that don’t merit our love.
(This was originally given as a talk at Augustana University’s chapel, on October 9, 2024.)
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