Jack Hardaway
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We grow up slowly.
Human life, the human soul, we are a slowly maturing fruit.
We are always coming of age.
My 16th, 17th, and 18th birthdays were these long slow coming of age events.
I was given a Remington 12-gauge semi-automatic shotgun for my 16th birthday. The power, the responsibility, the accountability of taking life, and the temptations of violence.
The next year I was given a leather-bound Holy Bible, The New King James Version, the words of Christ in Red. The gift of holiness and the temptation of using God to hurt others.
When I turned 18 my dad and I hiked up Table Rock, he brought some beer, and gave me a set of very nice binoculars. It was the year of Haley’s Comet, he hoped it would help me see. I still remember watching through those lenses the old Ravens slowly flying around the top of the mountain, their black and grey feathers looking close enough to touch. The gift of seeing the stars, and a world teeming with life, and the temptation of missing what was close by, right next to me.
I’m still learning about all those things. I feel like I have only just begun. The fruit is still so green.
Those three gifts all led me to the same place, in three different ways, reverence for life.
The holiness of the gift of life and the giver and creator of life. Reverence and worship of the Holy One and the image of the Holy One in humanity.
Without that reverence guns become demonic, the Bible becomes an idolatrous tool of control and violence, and binoculars become an escape from the contingency and painfulness of real life and real love.
The shot gun and the binoculars were lost years ago in the shuffling around of my life. But,I still have that old leather-bound Bible. It is always near at hand. The fruit of all three still slowly ripens.
John the Baptist tells us today to bear the fruit worthy of repentance, and in Luke’s Gospel we are given a brief glimpse of what that looks like to John the Baptist. The other Gospels don’t tell us.
Live a life that belongs to God.
Share, a lot, more than a tithe, half of everything. Be super-duper generous.
Don’t prey upon the vulnerable. To have authority over another life, is to raise them up.
It is an ethic of reverence for life.
The holiness of the gift of life and the giver and creator of life. Reverence and worship of the Holy One and the image of the Holy One in humanity.
Come of age.
Grow up into that.
Bear the fruit of a life that belongs to God.
Reverence for life, the great gift.
The Holy One is coming near.
The fruit is almost ripe.