Are We Healed Yet?



Mark 5.21-43
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat to the other side, a great crowd gathered round him; and he was by the lake. Then one of the leaders of the synagogue named Jairus came and, when he saw him, fell at his feet and begged him repeatedly, ‘My little daughter is at the point of death. Come and lay your hands on her, so that she may be made well, and live.’ So he went with him.
And a large crowd followed him and pressed in on him. Now there was a woman who had been suffering from haemorrhages for twelve years. She had endured much under many physicians, and had spent all that she had; and she was no better, but rather grew worse. She had heard about Jesus, and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, for she said, ‘If I but touch his clothes, I will be made well.’ Immediately her haemorrhage stopped; and she felt in her body that she was healed of her disease. Immediately aware that power had gone forth from him, Jesus turned about in the crowd and said, ‘Who touched my clothes?’ And his disciples said to him, ‘You see the crowd pressing in on you; how can you say, “Who touched me?” ’ He looked all round to see who had done it. But the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came in fear and trembling, fell down before him, and told him the whole truth. He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.’
While he was still speaking, some people came from the leader’s house to say, ‘Your daughter is dead. Why trouble the teacher any further?’ But overhearing what they said, Jesus said to the leader of the synagogue, ‘Do not fear, only believe.’ He allowed no one to follow him except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James. When they came to the house of the leader of the synagogue, he saw a commotion, people weeping and wailing loudly. When he had entered, he said to them, ‘Why do you make a commotion and weep? The child is not dead but sleeping.’ And they laughed at him. Then he put them all outside, and took the child’s father and mother and those who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, ‘Talitha cum’, which means, ‘Little girl, get up!’ And immediately the girl got up and began to walk about (she was twelve years of age). At this they were overcome with amazement. He strictly ordered them that no one should know this, and told them to give her something to eat.

What do you make of stories like this one in the Bible? Do you believe they are true? Do you think they’re false? These are two of the more unbelievable stories of the gospels. In fact, they’ve caused Christians, and especially biblical scholars, fits over the years. Some scholars say that because they defy the laws of nature, they can’t possibly be true. Others insist that they are true, and the evidence of their truth is that they defy the laws of nature, showing that Jesus was someone completely different from other great religious figures.

What do you think about these stories and about Jesus’ miracles in general? Did they really occur? Were they lies written by people with a religious agenda? Were they misunderstandings of what really happened? Were they just something of Jesus’ day? What you believe about them actually may determine, to a great extent, what kind of miracles are possible in your life. It’s not that if you don’t believe in the possibility of miracles that God punishes you by withholding miracles from your life. It’s more basic than that. God doesn’t withhold miracles from our lives. We withhold them. The possibility may be all around us, but our lack of belief turns us off to them.

I think it’s much like having a cell phone. Do you own a cell phone? If you do, are you able to receive phone calls on it? Unless there’s a problem with the phone the answer is yes. Now, what if you owned a cell phone and refused to believe it could receive phone calls, and so left it off? And what if others continually told you that you could receive calls, but you disbelieved and never turned on the phone? From your experience you would be convinced that you were right because you’d never receive a call. But that doesn’t make you right. It just makes you closed to possibility. God’s miracles are much like the miracle of the cell phone. Radio waves carrying phone calls move through the air all around us, but if we don’t have phones to receive them, or if we refuse to ever turn them on because we don’t believe in them, we become like people who refuse to believe in the possibility of miracles. What we believe determines what we experience.

The story of our passage, of Jairus’ daughter and the woman with a hemorrhage, shows this. Both stories are stories of people who perhaps shouldn’t have believed, but because they did they had healing experiences. Take the woman with the hemorrhage. We don’t appreciate what this woman went through. She had gone through twelve years of having a constant period. Imagine that today. What would it be like for you as a woman to bleed constantly for twelve years? While this illness would have been terrible for any woman today, for this woman it was many times worse. You see, back in Jesus’ day, women were considered unclean during their period. During that time they were not allowed to prepare food, touch their husbands, children, or anyone else. They were not allowed to be in close contact with others. They were set apart. Imagine being set apart and shunned for twelve straight years. That’s twelve straight years of never hugging touching your husband, child, parents, brothers and sisters, friends, and more. How do you maintain a marriage, raise children, and have friends under those conditions? It meant eating by herself for twelve straight years. It meant never being able to shop in the market place for fear of touching someone else. It meant twelve years of being ostracized for something she couldn’t help.

Imagine what she would have had to do just to touch Jesus’ cloak. She would have had to crawl on the ground so that no one would see her, all the time trying her best not to touch anyone else and make her or him unclean. She would have had to stretch around the feet of the disciples, who were acting like bodyguards, protecting Jesus’ back. There was a tremendous amount of indignity that she would have had to overcome to touch Jesus’ hem as she crawled through the dirt and grimy feet. Yet she believed. She reached out and touched Jesus’ cloak, and Jesus said, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace, and be healed of your disease.”

Jairus also had to overcome disbelief. Jairus was the ruler of the synagogue, which means that he had the most important position in the synagogue. He was not the rabbi, who was responsible for teaching and preaching. The synagogue ruler was responsible for organizing everything from picking the rabbi, to choosing the music, to orchestrating the rituals, to leading the congregation in decision-making. Everyone looked to him for leadership. For him to ask Jesus to heal his daughter, despite Jesus’ reputation for being a law-breaker because of his healing on the Sabbath, would have certainly stirred the gossip and threatened Jairus’ leadership. Jairus had every reason to doubt and shun Jesus. But he didn’t. He might have had doubts, but he overcame them and begged Jesus to heal his daughter. According to scripture, Jesus didn’t heal her, but when she died Jesus raised her from the dead. He, his daughter, and the hemorrhaging woman experienced miracles because they believed.

So what gets in the way of our praying for miracles? Even when we believe, what keeps us from praying for healing, for changes in our lives, and great things to take place? I think that a major part of it is that too many of us have a realistic view of life. Wait,… shouldn’t we have a realistic view of life? What I mean is that we have a view of life rooted in what humans see as “realistic.” This view is based on conventional human thinking, perhaps based on science and philosophy, but a kind of thinking that denies the possibility of anything that isn’t humanly “realistic.”

What the Bible teaches us is a spiritual view of life. This is a view that is open to possibility, that’s open to healing, and that’s open to miracles. It’s also my view, and not just because the Bible says so. I tend to be much more skeptical than that. I believe because of my experiences. The Bible opened me to the possibility of having those experiences, but it was my experiences that sealed my belief.

I had some experiences before I came to Calvin Church. My first experience of personal healing came in 1990, when I was an associate pastor. Some members of our youth group and I had been talking about healing, and I kept thinking about the power of healing and whether it was a possibility. Then one very cold, snowy winter night I woke up with a completely stuffed nose. I realized that I had no decongestants or nasal sprays in my apartment, but I didn’t want to get out of my nice, warm bed. What to do? I remembered our conversations about healing and decided to try healing prayer. So I held out my hand and asked God to fill it with healing power. Then I touched my nose and prayed for God to open it. An amazing thing happened. My nasal passages cleared within seconds. If that had happened to you, what would your reaction have been? Mine was that I immediately became afraid. Isn’t that odd? I had a healing experience, and it scared me. I think that sometimes direct experiences of God are scary. It’s one thing to believe in God who seems distant. It’s another to experience God first-hand doing something miraculous. My whole body got the shakes, and pretty soon my nose started to clog up again. I then got out of bed, got into my car, and went to a 7/11 to get some nasal spray. But the experience stayed with me. It’s one of the reasons I really believe in the power of healing prayer.

I have been further convinced of the power of healing prayer through members of this church. For instance, I spoke about Jo Jones several weeks ago in a sermon, talking about how strong her faith was. That faith extended to her prayer life. When I first met her in 1996, she had cancerous tumors in her neck. I had asked her what her treatment was. She said that she was combining alternative medicine, radiation treatments, and prayer. She used to walk around with a jug of green juices—pear, apple, grape, and others—that she would drink at regular intervals. She also prayed diligently every day. She was about to undergo radiation treatments, and was told that if they were successful her tumors would slowly start to shrink within six weeks. She started the treatments, and after two weeks they were discontinued because her tumors had shrunk completely. Over the ensuing years she was diagnosed with brain tumors. She combined prayer with here regular medical treatments, and in all cases her tumors were killed. She ended up dying from the tumors, but only because the dead matter put pressure on her brain, causing her body to slowly atrophy. Still, prayer definitely had an impact on her illness. Perhaps you can look at her death as proof that miracles don’t happen, but I don’t think that would be fair. Eventually we all die, but she managed to eke out extra years through prayer that might not have been otherwise possible.

I’ve also seen the same kind of impact on prayer on other members of our church. LaRue Craig, who died two years ago, told me that whenever she visited the doctor she would chant and pray on the way while driving. She was convinced that the combination dramatically reduced her blood pressure. Betty Alexander, who died this past year, also believed in healing prayer, and it led her to be a cancer survivor from breast and bone cancer for over twenty years.

Also, back in March of 2005 I told the church in a sermon about Judy Kerkovich’s experiences. Here’s what I said, “One of our members, Judy Kerkovich, has experienced God’s healing. Judy was diagnosed with lymphoma six years ago. The doctor had told her that the lymphoma was a slow-moving one, but that it would get progressively worse. The cancer would grow, and in three years she would experience the symptoms of the cancer as it progressed. She had a choice of whether to start chemotherapy right away, in the hopes that it would slow the progression, or wait for three years and have chemotherapy then. Either way it was her choice. Judy decided to wait. But she also decided to make prayer part of her treatment. She prayed for herself, and regularly has met with our prayer ministers. Here we are six years later and Judy still isn’t on chemotherapy. She has met regularly with her doctor, and the doctor has told her that he has no explanation for what is going on, but that she should keep doing what she is doing. At one point he told her, ‘Whatever church you are going to, keep going.’” Judy still prays with one of our prayer ministers once a week, and her lymphoma still hasn’t progressed. It has stumped her doctors, but not me. I know that God is a big part of her health.

Even though I believe in the connection between healing and prayer, I also believe in more than this. I believe that if we are willing to bring prayer into every part of life, we can experience miracles big and small helping us throughout our days. For instance, I believe that in our work lives, family lives, and lives in general God is willing to help us if we are willing to pray.

Let me give you an example of this in an experience my daughter, Shea, and I had last week. It was her birthday, and for a present we got her and her sister, Erin, new bicycles. Erin’s bicycle turned out to be okay, but Shea’s was just too heavy, and when we rode she couldn’t keep up. So we went back to the store to trade it in for another one. The problem was that Shea couldn’t decide between two bikes. One was a boy’s bike in blue, her favorite color, that was light. But it also had skull stickers on it,… not the kind of symbols you want as a girl. The other bike was a girl’s bike, but it was not as light. She couldn’t figure out which bike to get, and was paralyzed by her indecision.

I told her what I often do when I can’t decide. I told her that when I can’t decide I ask God to guide me, and that whenever I do God always seems to answer. I could tell that she wasn’t buying what I said, so I continued: “Shea, you don’t have to say it out loud. All you have to do is to ask God to tell you which bike is the better one for you.” She got very quiet. Then, before she could say a word, the manager came around the corner and said, “The blue bike is much lighter and would probably be a better fit.” Her prayer was answered. But what to do about those skull stickers? We had an answer. We went do Dick’s Sporting Goods and found Steelers stickers, which we stuck over the skulls. Now she has a wonderful blue, Steelers bike.

I believe that if you pray, God answers. You may not always get the answer you want, but with prayer there’s always the possibility of miracles great and small. If you pray for healing, is there a guarantee that you’ll be healed? Nothing is guaranteed. God works as God works. Sometimes when we pray for physical healing, God gives us spiritual, mental, or relational healing. Sometimes God gives us physical healing. What we have to remember is that God has God’s own purposes, and at some point even death fits that purpose.

Ultimately this is the point: miracles do happen, but we have to be open to them to experience them. The question for you to reflect on is this: how open are you?

Amen.
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Can You See What's Truly Great?



1 Samuel 15:34-16:13

Then Samuel went to Ramah; and Saul went up to his house in Gibeah of Saul. Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord was sorry that he had made Saul king over Israel.
The Lord said to Samuel, ‘How long will you grieve over Saul? I have rejected him from being king over Israel. Fill your horn with oil and set out; I will send you to Jesse the Bethlehemite, for I have provided for myself a king among his sons.’ Samuel said, ‘How can I go? If Saul hears of it, he will kill me.’ And the Lord said, ‘Take a heifer with you, and say, “I have come to sacrifice to the Lord.” Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I will show you what you shall do; and you shall anoint for me the one whom I name to you.’ Samuel did what the Lord commanded, and came to Bethlehem. The elders of the city came to meet him trembling, and said, ‘Do you come peaceably?’ He said, ‘Peaceably; I have come to sacrifice to the Lord; sanctify yourselves and come with me to the sacrifice.’ And he sanctified Jesse and his sons and invited them to the sacrifice.
When they came, he looked on Eliab and thought, ‘Surely the Lord’s anointed is now before the Lord.’ But the Lord said to Samuel, ‘Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.’ Then Jesse called Abinadab, and made him pass before Samuel. He said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ Then Jesse made Shammah pass by. And he said, ‘Neither has the Lord chosen this one.’ Jesse made seven of his sons pass before Samuel, and Samuel said to Jesse, ‘The Lord has not chosen any of these.’ Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Are all your sons here?’ And he said, ‘There remains yet the youngest, but he is keeping the sheep.’ And Samuel said to Jesse, ‘Send and bring him; for we will not sit down until he comes here.’ He sent and brought him in. Now he was ruddy, and had beautiful eyes, and was handsome. The Lord said, ‘Rise and anoint him; for this is the one.’ Then Samuel took the horn of oil, and anointed him in the presence of his brothers; and the spirit of the Lord came mightily upon David from that day forward. Samuel then set out and went to Ramah.

As I read our passage for this week, I kept thinking about an experience Erin and Shea, my daughters, and I had about a year ago. We had been visiting my parents in Sewickley, where I grew up, and after visiting I realized that I hadn’t thawed anything for dinner. Many of you who have families where both parents work go through this a lot. You forget to pull something out of the freezer to thaw in the morning, and so five o’clock rolls around and you don’t know what to do for dinner. That happens to us frequently.

On this particular evening we decided to drop into a small fish and poultry store in Sewickley on the way home to get some salmon. As I was chatting with the shop owner, a man walked in behind us and stood waiting in line. He was a bit taller than me, perhaps 6’4”, and he waited patiently. He even smiled at the antics of my 9 year-old twins as they shoved each other back and forth, and generally ignored my commands to settle down. The girls were oblivious to him as they made enough ruckus that I had to eventually separate them and make each one stand in a different part of the store.

The owner of the shop gave me my salmon, said good-bye, and out we walked. I then looked at the girls and said, “Man, you guys were so busy playing that you didn’t even see who was behind you.” “What?” they said. “Who was it? Was it someone famous?” I said, “Yeah, pretty famous. That guy behind you was Mario Lemieux.” “No!” they said. “Can we go back in and look at him?” I said to them, “No, but you can go back in and buy some chips for a snack, but you aren’t allowed to stare or bother him.” So back in we went to buy some chips and to let nine year-old twins snatch furtive glances at Mario Lemieux.

You know, the funny thing is that Erin and Shea probably should have recognized him. I’ve shown him to them on television a number of times. I’ve had them watch bits of specials about him, so they know what he looks like. And for our family, recognizing hockey players is part of our DNA. You wouldn’t know this, but my father was one of the original owners of the Penguins back in 1967. He also was a part owner in the early 1970s. We grew up with hockey, and I played it all through junior and senior high school. For Standishes in general, hockey is part of our collective DNA.

So, why couldn’t the girls recognize him face-to-face? Simply put, they weren’t looking for greatness. They were looking to play. Sometimes greatness is in our midst, and we miss it because we just aren’t paying attention.

About thirteen years ago I had different experience with greatness. I was visiting my cousins in Concord, Massachusetts, and my cousin, Peter, asked if I wanted to ride a bike around Concord to see the sights. So we tooled around the town, seeing the interesting buildings, graveyards, and the river. And then he asked if I wanted to ride down to Walden Pond. “Really?” I said. “We can ride there? Is far?” “No, only about two miles outside of town.”

I don’t know if Walden Pond holds much significance for you, but it does for me. Henry David Thoreau wrote about it in his masterpiece book, Walden. His book was heavily influential to Americans back in the mid-nineteenth Century. He wrote in the book about how, in 1845, he had decided that civilization was corrupting his soul. He wanted to get back to living a simple life in nature so that he could “suck the marrow” out of life. He saw a life in nature as a vital life. And so he decided to spend a year living on the shores of Walden Pond, a mystical place surrounded by nature. In his book, he wrote about his experiences there and how they transformed him.

I read the book in my twenties and resonated with it. So, you can imagine that the idea of riding out to that great, mystical place stirred my soul. My imagination was firing on all cylinders. I was expecting to find some pristine mountain lake, much like what we might find in Alaska. What I found instead was a medium-sized pond where hundreds of people were swimming, walking, and milling about. I was really surprised. I was disappointed because I expected to find something else, but I was also disappointed because I realized that even in Thoreau’s time it was never as pristine as he let on. The pond is barely outside of the town of Concord, taking maybe twenty to thirty minutes to walk. His hut was right next to a walking path that went between Concord and the next town. In other words, he wasn’t living away from civilization. Civilization walked right by his door many times a day. When I told my cousin how disappointed I was, he said, “And I’ve also heard that his mother used to walk by all the time and bring him lunch and dinner. She lived only a little ways away.”

I had expected Walden Pond to be such a great spiritual place. It turned out to be only okay.

How do you tell if something or someone is really great? So often greatness is in our midst, but we miss it. Perhaps we miss it because we are too busy doing other things. Perhaps we miss it because what we think of as truly great really isn’t. Or perhaps we miss it because we think greatness is captured by worldly abilities, and miss the spiritual nature of true greatness.

As great as he was, the prophet Samuel struggled with finding greatness in the story from scripture this morning. He was sent by God to find a new king for Israel. Saul, the first king, had disappointed God. God had called Saul to be a king for all the people. Instead, Saul was becoming more and more a king for himself. He was amassing and abusing power. So God went looking for another to be king.

Samuel was sent to Bethlehem to find a man named Jesse, for one of his sons was ordained to be the next king of Israel. Samuel invited Jesse and his sons to a sacrifice and a meal, and there he began to test Jesse’s sons to see which one of them was the new king. He started with the one who was the most obvious candidate: Eliab. This young man was strong, brave, and clearly a man ready to be king. Standing before Eliab, God said, “Do not look on his appearance or on the height of his stature, because I have rejected him; for the Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” So, Samuel went onto the next candidate, Abinadab. He was a fine candidate, but he wasn’t the king, either. Eight more times Samuel surveyed Jesse’s sons, but none had the greatness God was looking for. You can imagine Samuel’s frustration. He had been sent to find the new king, and all the candidates were rejected by God. Why would God send him here to fail? In frustration, Samuel asks Jesse, “Are all your sons here?” Jesse says that he has another, but surely this young boy of perhaps 12 couldn’t be the new king. He was the runt of the litter. He was so small and insignificant that Jesse didn’t even bother to include him in the meal with Samuel. This runt was David. David was brought before Samuel, and God said, “this is my king, anoint him with oil.”

Even after David was anointed king, he didn’t seem great. Sure, he killed Goliath, which truly was great since all the supposedly great Jewish warriors were too afraid to fight Goliath. But after that act of greatness, Saul became jealous and wanted to kill David. So David was forced to live for twelve years as an outlaw in the desert, living in caves along with a band of followers. Yet David remained spiritually great throughout it all, which one particular incident reminds us.

There was a point at which Saul went with an army to track down and kill David in the desert. One night, Saul was asleep in his encampment in a cave. David snuck in, and standing over Saul with a spear, plunged the spear into the dirt beside Saul’s body. It was a message: “I could have killed you, but I followed God’s will instead, and I remain God’s and your servant.” David’s greatness was measured through his heart and soul, which led him to acts of faith and mercy. When he became king, he became revered because he ruled based on God’s will, not his own. And even when he strayed, he saw the error of his ways, confessed, repented, and went back to serving God. Psalm 51, a psalm of confession, is evidence of that, since it was written in response to his sin regarding Bathsheba and Uriah. Even in his sin, David maintained a sense of true greatness.

You know, the funny thing about true greatness is that it isn’t necessarily measured in great feats, as wonderful as they can be. True greatness is always measured in heart and soul. For example, I really admire the athletic greatness of Mario Lemieux, Sidney Crosby, Evgeni Malkin, Marc-Andre Fluery, Ben Rothlesberger, Hines Ward, Troy Palomalu, Hines Ward, and so many others. But I also recognize that their greatness is in the material world. I have no idea how well their greatness translates into the spiritual world, nor do I know if their spiritual ability matches their athletic accomplishments, yet I do know that it is in the spiritual realm that true greatness is measured.

I’ve love reading great inspiring books like Walden, but I also know that many of the books that we consider great may not be considered great from a spiritual perspective. It’s from that perspective that real greatness is measured. Real greatness is based on entirely different criteria. Real greatness is measured by God’s criteria

Karen Cramer, one of our members who was on the nominating committee that brought me to Calvin Church, once said to me that no one famous ever came from Zelienople. I got her point, which is that Zelienople is a great place to live, but it’s not the kind of place that produces great athletes, actors, musicians, politicians, or celebrities. Unfortunately, I beg to differ with her, and I think she’d agree with my differing. What I disagree with is that since I’ve been here at Calvin Church I’ve met many famous people from Zelienople. It’s just that they were famous in God’s realm, not ours.

I can name a number of people whom I truly believe were well-known and great in God’s realm while they were alive, but who may not have been well-known or considered great in the earthly realm. I’m thinking about people like Jo Jones, who was one of our members when I first came to Calvin Church. Jo was a bright, shining star. She was a woman who helped get the Zelienople Nursery School started, and eventually brought it here to Calvin Church. She was a woman of deep prayer and love, and nothing demonstrates that more than one of my last experiences with her.

About a month before she died, I visited her at home. She had suffered from cancerous tumors in her neck and brain for a number of years, always managing, thought a combination of conventional medicine, alternative medicine, and prayer, to become free of cancer. Eventually a tumor grew along the side of her brain. Radiation killed the tumor, but the pressure of the tumor eventually compromised the ability of her brain to function normally. In my last visit with her, Jo really couldn’t speak, and I’m not sure she even knew who I was, although she sensed that she knew me. I was sitting with her, and she motioned me to give my hands to her. She took my hands, picked up some hand lotion beside her, squirted a big glob into my hand, and then started rubbing lotion into both of my hands. I knew immediately what she was doing. She could barely think or communicate, but that didn’t mean she couldn’t love. If the only way to show love was to rub lotion into my hands, well that was what she was going to do. Her greatness was her love of God and others, and nothing was going to stop her ability to love. That’s true greatness.

I’ve met other spiritually famous people since I’ve been here—people such as Bill Uhl, John McMillen, Corrine Henderson, Dick Anderson (my predecessor as pastor here), LaRue Craig, Betty Alexander, and so many, many more. I still see great and famous people here in this church every Sunday, and it’s a privilege to be in their midst.

So how is true fame and greatness measured? Our passage gives a great example in David. Let me just share three qualities that I think are part of true greatness. First there is humility, which doesn’t mean being weak-kneed and easily pushed around. Humility is a spiritual virtue, which literally means having a willingness to be unimportant and to do what’s necessary for God. Humility means having the strength to say yes to God no matter what, and no to anything else that gets in the way of God’s will.

Second, there is commitment to God no matter what. David had this kind of commitment. It allowed him to patiently wait for God’s will to work throughout his life. It’s what caused him to stay his hand in killing Saul, even though doing so would have made his life and his rule easier. David knew who and what mattered, and he stayed committed to it, even in the face of pressures to take shortcuts.

Finally, David had courage. Courage is different from bravery. Courage is spiritual. It literally means to act out of the heart, which is the seat of the soul. To have courage means to be willing to do what God wants, even in the face of fear, anxiety, and uncertainty. For instance, it means that if you are in school, having the courage to stand up for someone who is being picked on and bullied, even if it might make you picked on and bullied. In the workplace it means doing what’s ethical, even if it might get you fired. In the world it means being loving and caring and generous, even in the face of pressures to be selfish, self-focused, and self-protective.

Each and every one of us is called to greatness, and to a different kind of greatness from each other. The question is, will we strive to live in this kind of greatness?

Amen.
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