Mother Teresa   

I must be willing to give whatever it takes not to harm other and people and, in fact, to do good to them. This requires that I be wiling to give until it hurts. Otherwise, there is no true love in me and I bring injustice, not peace, to those around me. 

 

There are such diversities in the world, such terrible and passionate divisions between men, but prayer and fellowship among the great universe of God’s believers are the beginning of understanding and reconciliation. They remind us of the great, over-arching things that really unite us.

 

Our problems in America today are primarily problems of the heart. The soul of our nation is the sum of our individual characters. Yes, we must balance the federal budget and there are a lot of other things we need to do at the Federal level, but unless we change our hearts we will still have a deficit of the soul.

 

The first and greatest commandment is to love the Lord you God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and all your mind and the second is to love others as yourself. And we know, too, that Jesus said, “I do not call you servants, I call you friends.”

 

What unites us is so much greater than what divides us. The work that needs to be done for the people we in government serve will best be done if we understand that we are blessed, not only to be citizens of the same beloved country, but children of the same awesome God.

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I remember how my mother would bring us to chapel on Sundays… and my father used to wait outside.  One of the things that I picked up from my father and my mother was the sense that religion often gets in the way of God. For me, at least, it got in the way.  Seeing what religious people, in the name of God, did to my native land… and in this country, seeing God’s second-hand car salesmen on the cable TV channels, offering indulgences for cash… in fact, all over the world, seeing the self-righteousness roll down like a mighty stream from certain corners of the religious establishment…

 

 

So Jesus challenges him an, in so doing, he challenges all of us here.  “You are a teacher, and yet you do not understand,” He says to Nicodemus.  And so He says to all of us here—opinion leaders, military people, doctors, lawyers, elected officials, teachers, all: You do not understand the mysterious power of the spirit.

 

 

Aren’t there irreconcilable contradictions between your spiritual and scientific worldviews?  No.  Not at all.  As long as one uses a thoughtful approach to interpretation of the meaning of Scripture in light of what science has allowed us to learn about the universe – as St. Augustine compellingly articulated 1600 years ago -- I can’t identify a single conflict between what I know as a rigorous scientist and what I know as a believer.   

 

Solzhenitsyn said that disaster is defined by two things:  magnitude and distance.  So a small disaster close to home or a huge disaster faraway, results in what he describes as “bearable disasters of bearable proportions.” We’ve become too good at “bearing.”  Our hearts should be broken by the things that break the heart of God.