I’ve been reading a lot about Benjamin Franklin recently.  He is such an interesting and accomplished person that you always find out something new about him- not always something good.  But this time I found out that he led a militia in the French and Indian War.  He was in his 50’s, and he paid to equip and outfit the militia himself.  They were largely successful do to Franklin’s leadership.  In fact, Franklin’s French and Indian war record compares favorably to Washington’s.  I also found out that when he was 22 years old he composed for himself a series of prayers he intended to use as a basis for his regular devotions.  They are quite moving, and I wanted to share a few with you in this space.  The following are taken from a document titled “Articles of Belief and Acts of Religion,” dated November 20, 1728.

                                                                                                - Barry Bryson

Prayers

That I may be preserved from Atheism and Infidelity, Impiety and Profaneness, and in my Address to Thee carefully avoid Irreverence and Ostentation, Formality and Hypocrisy.  Help Me, O Father.

That I may be sincere in Friendship, faithful in Trust, impartial in Judgement, watchful against Pride, and against Anger.  Help Me, O Father.

That I may have Tenderness for the Weak, reverent respect for the Old; that I may be Kind to my Neighbors, good-natured to my Companions, and hospitable to Strangers.  Help Me, O Father.

That I may be honest and openhearted, gentle, merciful and good, cheerful in Spirit, rejoicing in the good of others.  Help Me, O Father.

That I may possess perfect Innocence, and a good Conscience, and at length become Truly Virtuous and Magnanimous.  Help Me Good God.  Help Me, O Father.

Thanksgivings

For Peace and Liberty, for Food and Raiment, for Corn and Milk and every kind of healthful nourishment, Good God I thank Thee.

For the Common Benefits of Air and Light, for useful Fire, and delicious Water, Good God I thank Thee.

For Knowledge and Literature and every useful Art; for my Friends and their Prosperity, and for the fewness of my adversaries, Good God I thank Thee.

For all thy innumerable Benefits; For Life and Reason, and the use of Speech, for Health and Joy and every pleasant hour, Good God, My God I thank Thee.

Benjamin Franklin

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 1728

 I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you. Hebrews 13.5

            The morning of May 18, 1927 was sunny and fresh in Bath Township, Michigan.  The school children were looking forward to summer vacation as they prepared for school that day. The Bath Township School was brand new. It consolidated several one and two-roomed schoolhouses into one central, modern, gleaming location.  Revenue for the new schoolhouse was collected by raising property taxes.  Most folks were proud of the new school, and were accepting of the increased tax rates on property as necessary. Some, to be sure, were disgruntled.

            None more so than Bath Township School Board treasurer, Andrew Kehoe.  His farm had been foreclosed on.  He had made a string of bad choices, and investments – but blamed the new property taxes for his financial ruin.  And so, after bludgeoning his wife to death and leaving her corpse in a wheel-barrow, he planted a series of bombs intended to completely destroy the new school and kill as many school-children as possible. 

            He was not entirely successful. One group of bombs he planted failed to ignite, and only half the school was destroyed.  A suicide car bomb he drove into the middle of rescue efforts did explode, killing himself, and injuring many others.  It was the most deadly, devastating act of domestic terrorism in the United States until the explosion at the Murrah building in Oklahoma City years later. 47 eventually died from the blasts that day.  38 of them were children.  Hundreds were injured, scores permanently so.

            That very year, M.J. Ellsworth, long-time resident of Bath Township and neighbor of Kehoe put together a history of the event.  I have a facsimile edition of his book, published in 2001.  It is an altogether unique and eerie document.  He has photos of the school before the disaster, and after. He has photos of Kehoe’s farmhouse, and the implements that, if sold, would have paid off the debt that so enraged Kehoe.  He has a photo of the wheel-barrow bearing the corpse of Kehoe’s wife.  He has a photo of the bombs Kehoe was building in his chicken coop.  The most memorable photographs, however, are of the victims.

            Ellsworth has included school, and family photos of every child killed in the disaster, with oral memories of them, offered by family and friends, as well as the location where each victim is buried. 

            Floyd E. Burnett was a great baseball player, and always good to get his chores done around the farm.  He was eleven years old when the blast killed him, and he is buried in Bath Cemetery beside his mother. Cleo Clayton was an eight year old second grader when he was killed by the car bomb. A large bolt that Kehoe had used for shrapnel tore through Cleo’s stomach and severed his spine.  He is buried in Diamondale, Michigan.  Thelma Irene McDonald was Preacher and Mrs. McDonald’s eight year old daughter.  She was already in third grade.  Thelma had cried to go to school from the age of three.  She loved school and intended to be a school teacher one day. She is buried in Springport, Michigan….. and on and on for every victim.

            There are so many faces of smiling, happy children, so many descriptions of punctured organs and severed limbs, so many questions for God, and so few explanations given.

            In fact I can think of no explanation. Ellsworth certainly doesn’t offer any. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one. God never explained to Job why he suffered – but we know. Jesus never explained to Mary and Martha why he lingered while Lazarus died – but we know. We know some other things.  We know that God is not evil, and tempts no one to do evil (James 1.13). We know that evil is in the world because humans introduced it. We know the innocent are with the Lord.  We know that some explanations will be beyond our comprehension. We know that we are never promised explanations.

            Ellsworth ends his collection, The Bath School Disaster, with a short piece written by ninth grader Martha Hintz.  Escaping injury herself, she was taken with other classmates to a nearby home for safety. She gives a harrowing account of all she saw. After it seemed safe to leave, she and her brother headed home.  She (and the book) ends with these words:

As we made our way homeward the well-known passage came and lo, how true it was, “He will never forsake thee.”

            This we know to be true, and so, this is how I will end as well.

            Southern Living, Better Homes and Gardens, and other ladies’ magazines all purport to offer the secret to gracious living.  Just the right colors, fabrics, and finishes can make your home a place where family and friends can rest and recharge.  Historically, hospitality and gracious living have been synonymous with what it means to be a Southerner.  Those characteristics also describe how we should live as Christians. (I Peter 4:9-10) Yet gracious living is not always as easy as it might sound.  Every day, the trials of life test the limits of our patience and have the potential to deplete our personal reservoir of grace.  The Bible encourages us to be people of grace.  Gracious living means that we overlook wrongs we have suffered.  We don’t walk around with a chip on our shoulder because of the color of our skin, a criticism uttered by a spouse, or a wrong suffered at the hands of a harsh boss.  We endure all and forgive all without keeping a record of wrongs done to us. (I Cor. 13:5)

            So why is it so hard to live graciously?  The answer is simple: we selfishly demand justice.  Perhaps it is because of the nation in which we live, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal and deserve to be treated justly.  Yet the Bible has never promised us justice in this life.  Justice is the purview of God alone and we are commanded only to do the best we can in whatever situation we find ourselves. (I Cor. 7:17-24) As our brother Barry Bryson has often reminded us, God is God and we are not.  And because of our sins he owes us nothing, neither are we entitled to an explanation for whatever bad things may happen to us. (Lamentations 3:39) Besides, how many of us really want justice?  Do we really want to stand before God Almighty on Judgment Day and receive what we are due for the sins we have committed?

            We also fail to live graciously because we fail to understand the true nature of sin as well as the true purpose of the church.  We like to categorize and quantify sins, thus, we tend to see some sins as heinous while others are fairly benevolent.  Surely the darkest recesses of Hell are reserved for the Jeffery Dahmers and Ted Bundys of the world, and not for the person who might tell a “little white lie” or occasionally break the speed limit.  Yet to God, a sin is a sin, and the person who tells the “little white lie” is just as guilty in God’s eyes as a murderer.  Some of us have a difficult time wrapping our minds around that Biblical truth.  All sin separates us from God, thus we all stand in need of God’s grace to put us back into a right relationship with him. (Rom. 3:23-24) Because we stand in need of God’s grace, believers repent, confess the name of Christ, submit to baptism, and are added to his church.  And the church we are added to is not a place for the good.  Jesus himself said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick.  I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners.” (Mark 2:17) Again, this is a tough concept for many of us to grasp, but until we do, we will probably not look forward to being in heaven with our brother Jeffery Dahmer, and we may end up missing out on God’s grace altogether.

            Fact is, none of us is “good enough” to go to heaven and without God’s grace purchased by the blood of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ none of us will ever get there.  Thus, it is incumbent upon us to learn what it means to live as persons of grace.  Gracious living means treating people better than they deserve to be treated.  We do this because that is what God did for us when he sent his Son to earth, so that “while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Rom. 5:8) We also do this because we know that “with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” (Matt. 7:2) Like Melanie Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, we should always try to see the best in those around us.  We should answer kindly when insulted or challenged, and not always feel a need to “get in the last word.”  Rather than leaving a wound to fester, we should reconcile quickly whenever we find that relations between us and a brother or sister are strained. (Matt. 18:15-35) We should humble ourselves and take a genuine interest in what those around us are doing.  The world doesn’t revolve around us and we should come to see others as better than ourselves and worthy of our attention. (Phil. 2:2-5) Above all else, we should be gracious by praying for those with whom we may have differences. (Matt. 5:44-46) Adopting a servant heart, praying for others, thinking of others as more important than ourselves, and accepting the opinions and ideas of others as worthy of our consideration, will ultimately help us realize how little we really know and how much we need Jesus and our brothers and sisters in Christ.  In time, we will find our greatest satisfaction and deepest joy in service to others, and truly come to understand what it means to enjoy gracious living. 

Now faith is the substance of things of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Hebrews 11.1 KJV

For we walk by faith not by sight. II Corinthians 5.7 ESV

            Over the years I have written several pieces about starlings. I really dislike starlings.  They don’t belong here.  They were imported into Central Park, NYC, to eat insects back in the 1880’s and became as populous (more so), and as destructive as rats.  That’s what starlings are – ratbirds.  My real objection to starlings is that they are so ugly.  That is shallow I know, but still – is there an uglier bird in North America?  They look like they bathe regularly in Quaker State motor oil.  That’s how I see them.  Other birds, however, see them as having the most colorful plumage in North America.  It’s just that their reds and blues are on part of the color spectrum the human eye cannot see – and so they look to us like an oil-leak puddle.  Starlings are actually among the most colorful birds in the world.  Just because humans can’t see that starlings are colorful, doesn’t mean they aren’t.

            How many dimensions are there in our Universe?  We experience three – four if you include time, but physicists and cosmologists tell us that there must be many more – there is no other way to explain the universe.  Just because humans can only experience 3 dimensions doesn’t mean there aren’t more.  I am reminded of that great scene in E. A. Abbot’s Flatland, where a two-dimensional square realizes through his friendship with a sphere that there is a third dimension.  The way the square experiences this sphere passing through his world is as a dot that becomes an increasing large circle, then and increasingly smaller one until it is a dot again.  The square can’t really see the sphere, but can imagine it based upon the phenomenon he does see, and becomes convinced that there is, indeed a third dimension.

            My point is that our ability to perceive and understand is finite.  The limits of our perception do not alter reality.  We can’t see quarks, but they exist apart from our perception.  We, however, have at least two tools that help us transcend the limits of our perception: reason and imagination.  We can do the math, and we can dream beyond.  The answers we achieve from reason and imagination have to be believed to be accepted, because they cannot be perceived through our senses.  Our acceptance of them requires faith, because they are beyond experience.  The existence of 7, 8, or 10 dimensions is an example of this.  A Biblical example of this is the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice Isaac in Genesis 22.  There is no way to justify this action based upon the revealed will of God, or the promises of God about Isaac.  Yet God said to do it, and Abraham used his reason and imagination to conclude that God could raise Isaac from the dead (Hebrews 11.19).  Human resurrection was beyond the experience of Abraham, but he was able to calculate and consider this possible outcome.  Reason and imagination led to faith, and faith permitted obedience.

            Faith then accommodates our lack of perception and experience – not a lack of evidence, not a lack of truth.  We “walk by faith, not by sight” because our sight is limited, not because our way is imaginary.

            This, of course, is the point of Hebrews 11.1.  Faith is the “substance” of things hoped for (i.e. beyond our experience).  Faith is the “evidence” of things not seen (i.e. beyond our perception).  Faith makes up for what is lacking in us – not for a lack of evidence.

            But we often talk about faith like it is some sort of alternative to reason and evidence.  Or perhaps was compartmentalize faith and reason into different boxes like they need to be quarantined from each other lest there be cross-contamination.  This all manifests a lack of faith in Faith as a tool to transcend.  The whole panorama of Hebrews 11 proves the connection between faith and obedience.  If we don’t have faith in Faith, we will not obey.  Without faith in Faith we will never be pleasing to God (Hebrews 11.6).

            Let us have faith in Faith.  Let us have confidence in the ability of Faith to transcend the limits of our human eyes, our finite brains, and our few experiences so that we may know, so that we may obey.