Television reporter and personality Charles Kuralt died in 1997 at 62 years of age. He is best remembered for his CBS “On the Road” series in which he explored back roads and small towns, chronicling the lives of ordinary Americans. He did pieces on a school for unicyclists, horse-trading and a gas station/poetry factory. He interviewed professional wrestlers, a 104-year-old entertainer who performed in nursing homes, lumberjacks, whittlers and farmers. One of his observations, should be played as an introduction to every news cast and that was; “The everyday kindness of the back roads more than makes up for the acts of greed in the headlines.” And his writing became poetry as he reported that: “The sparrows are preparing for winter, each one dressed in a plain brown coat and singing a cheerful song.” And “This is a place where you can hear fall coming for miles.”
One time, he and his small crew did a story about an artist in Kansas whose canvases were eighty acre fields. The best way to view this unusual art work was from a plane, so when Kuralt and his photographer spotted an old J 2 Piper Cub parked in a barnyard, they asked the old farmer if he would fly them. "Sure, I'll take you up," he said. "We need to take the door off so I can take pictures," the photographer told him. "Fine!" he said.
Flying at 2000 feet the photographer asked the old pilot, how long ago he got his pilot's license.” "I don't have any pilot's license," the old farmer told them. "I just found this thing wrecked out here and patched it up and taught myself how to fly it." 1
In this world where we find it difficult to make a move without having the proper insurance coverage, where we justify waging a war of aggression on the premise that a nation might possess weapons of mass destruction that they might use against us if they had them and then continue that aggression calling them terrorists; where we continue to execute criminals, dismissing the occasional death of an innocent person as an acceptable risk; we ironically justify doing these things as our attempt to keep ourselves safe by reducing or eliminating risk from our own lives. Yet risk is a necessary part of life.
Life without risk would become stagnant because all progress would come to a halt. If we never took a risk, we would never have learned to walk, to ride a bike or drive a car. Flying in an airplane is taking a risk, even though it is statistically safer than driving a car. I don’t like to fly because I don’t get to control the plane, so I need to trust someone else to fly it. It takes some trust to let others have control, make the decisions or do the job. But again, we have to trust someone and something. What we are or are not willing to risk; and who we are or are not willing to trust says a lot about our faith.
Abraham was applauded by Old and New Testament authors for putting his trust in Yahweh. God promised him the world, new land, offspring enough to populate a great nation; that his name would be blessed and would eventually be a blessing. So Abram left his country, his relatives, even his inheritance, to go to a country he knew little about. He was a wealthy man, but his name would have died with him because he was seventy five years old and had yet to father a child.
God called Abraham to move beyond three very human and deep-seated fears—fear of the unknown that we cannot control, fear of others who are different from us, and fear of personal powerlessness in the face of “who knows what.” God called Abram to leave everything that was familiar; his country, his people and his father's household and go to the land I will show you. Trust me, God told him.
To do what he did, Abram had to leave behind his narrow-minded, small-minded, parochial vision, the tendency in all of us to exclude the strange and the stranger. 2 As the apostle Paul puts it, he put his trust in the god who brings the dead to life and who created the world out of nothing. Crossing the line that was his national boundary was a leap of faith, but all faith is a leap. It isn't easy for anyone to leave home. It is never easy to leave the security of the familiar or to risk new ideas or to trust different people.
Sometimes the scriptures slip a message in so casually that we are likely to miss it. According to the story, Abram arrived in the Promised Land and he built an altar between Ai and Bethel. I have learned to be suspicious of Hebrew names. Ai translates literally, “a heap of ruins” and Bethel, means “the house of God.” They were both in the Promised Land. Even the recipients of God’s promise experience the tension between success and failure. It is not enough to just have an association with the church or it will become a heap of ruins. We must live our faith for the church to become the house of God.
Did you know that more than 75% of Americans think nurses, grade school teachers, and pharmacists have high ethical standards. Less than 10% think that is true of lobbyists, car salesmen, advertisers, or congressmen. The tax collector of Jesus day would have been rated at the bottom. He was not only hated as one who could to take their money, but was also viewed as a traitor to the faith and the nation. Jesus invited the tax collector to be one of his disciples.
Jesus ate with sinners, and when the Pharisees condemned his behavior, he justified it by telling them that "It is not the healthy who need the doctor, but the sick. I did not come to call the upright, but sinners." Yet when the president of the synagogue came to him seeking help for his daughter, Jesus didn’t hesitate to go with him. After all, self righteous people are people too. And when he was touched by the unclean woman, he applauded her faith.
To be sure, we expect some return for our faith. Abraham sought honor and old age security. The president of the synagogue wanted his daughter's life back. The unclean woman wanted to be touched and held again. Matthew wanted to belong and be accepted. Jesus offers us, not what we want, but what we need. What we all need is a place to belong, a place where we can love and be loved and make a difference. We want to help make a world where God is present and all is well.
But we can’t do that without risking going out into the world and living our faith. Brother Theophane tells us that as soon as he passed the gate and entered the monastery, he felt surrounded by God. “It wasn't as if He was in heaven, or in church, or even in my heart. He was all around me.
That's the way it was all day long. And then all night long, and the next day. I didn't have to do anything. God was just there.
I had come expecting to spend a lot of time praying and reading, but I found myself just chatting with people, and scrubbing floors, and strolling around. God was always there.
On the sixth day a little kid fixed it for good. "Hi, Sonny," I said to him. "I'm so happy here I feel like a kid myself."
His reply was! "I know how it is. Why don't you try to escape?" 3
1. A Life on the Road. Charles Kuralt. New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1990, pp. 177 178.
2. http://www.journeywithjesus.net/Essays/20050530JJ.shtml
3. Brother Theophane, Tales of a Magic Monastery, Crossroads, New York, 1988, p. 38.