Isaiah 65: 17, 21-24; Luke 21: 5,6

Is the ordinary really ordinary?

Dear friends,

Ordinary time the lectionary calls it.  Ordinary time.  Our time is ordinary. And we are about to leave ordinary time for advent.  That’s odd.  Everybody’s is trying to be extraordinary like the movie star.  But so often the role stars long to play is that of the ordinary person.

I have some old books of my father’s my book case at home and I noticed the poems of Robert Burns were upside down.  I leafed through them. I found Burns addressing the ordinary.  Here are some of his lines calling us to soberness:” Hope not sunshine every hour, fear not clouds will always lour. Happiness is but a name, make content and ease thy aim, ambition is a meteor-gleam, fame an idle restless dream, peace the tenderest flower of spring; pleasures insects on the wing; those that sip the dew alone, make the butterflies they own.”

It the sixties there was a singer called Lou Reed who started a band called the Velvet Underground.  He wasn’t that popular because Lou Reed didn’t really care what people thought.  People were frightened of his message. Reed was all about exposing what life was really like, not about escaping it or making it look more pleasant. One of his more famous songs exposed the life of a heroin addict.  This is what he wrote: “I don’t know just where I’m going/ But I’m goin’ to try for the kingdom if I can/ ’cause it makes me feel like I’m a man When I put a spike into my vein/Then I tell you things aren’t quite the same/ When I’m rushing on my run And I feel just like Jesus’ son/And I guess I just don’t know/ And I guess that I just don’t know/ I have made very big decision/ I’m goin’ to try to nullify my life/ /Wow, that heroin is in my blood/ And the blood is in my head Yeah, the god’s good as dead/ Ooohhh, God that I’m not aware/ I just don’t care. Lou Reed was digging into the experience of the drug addict, giving us a clue about why addicts stay in a miserable state. He was exposing life  in a haunting and frightening way. That is behavior often left much to be desired didn’t help.

Dear friends, both Robert Burns and Lou Reed make the ordinary extraordinary.  They enter it, accept it and then find the pain and the beauty in it.  Isaiah also names the suffering the people are accustomed to: the injustices and disappointment  of life.  He says: things will not be the same rejoice.  The artist makes us look at the ordinary and help us see something new. The prophet can actually make us see the way out.  Jesus approaches the ordinary in a different way: “be forewarned, things will not be the same.” The most common thing and the most solid thing you know: the stones of the temple will no longer be there. Which of the two messages speaks to you at any moment, will depend on the condition you will find yourself in, whether life happens to be good for you or not.

People in the Philippines have found that the ordinary can be gone just like that: the market stall where  they bought carrots and lime and papaya, that’s all gone.  The pharmacy where they got their flu medicine, gone.  But worse the smiles of the people they took for granted, so many of them gone. What they would give to have it back. The world as they knew it wiped out. How they are going to find new meaning no one knows yet.

A missionary couple working South East Asia were in an accident in LA last week.  Their car flipped over and caught fire. The wife broke her back.  This is what he writes in the newsletter he sent me: “The miracle is that she can expect full healing.  There is no injury to her spinal cord.  The down side is that she has to wear a body brace, like a suit of armor, or a turtle shell, for 12 weeks.  In three seconds our life was changed.  Farsijana (ed. His wife) (ed.who loves turtles) says she is a Mama turtle.

Farsijana is an expert on finding meaning.  In the mythology of native peoples, the world rests on the back of a turtle.  Her spine is broken so that she can have a turtle shell and carry the world on her back.  She also likes ducks.  When she first went to Holland in February 1996, Farsijana thought she would die of the cold.  How can you live in a refrigerator?  But ducks, swooping through the air on a snowy, birthday morning convinced her that if God blessed ducks to have fun in the ice, so could she.  She took off her shoes and danced in the snow. Last month in New Mexico, Farsijana bought a Navajo blanket with the Chief Joseph design.  Chief Joseph was a brilliant warrior who endured incredible hardship leading his people to find a land where he could live in peace (ed. Much like the people of Israel) .  His courage and longing for peace touched even his enemies.  He said, “It is cold and we have no blankets.  The little children are freezing to death… my heart is sick and sad.  From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever.”  Farsijana clutches her Chief Joseph blanket wherever she went.  By a cold river she saw ducks playing.  She reached into the water and pulled out a yellow stone.  On it she saw the image of two ducks:  her image of survival in hardship.” Friends, the woman found meaning in the old ordinary. Now she is learning to find meaning in the new ordinary. She inspires us.

Dear friends, The ordinary is not ordinary. The ordinary is extraordinary. The ordinary is a gift from God. The ordinary is infused with promise, with meaning. Treasure it, absord it. Focus on it. Pay attention. Thanks be to God.