The Taliban is on the run; President Bush and Russian President Putin are getting along and agreeing to reduce nuclear arsenals; the relief workers have been rescued; and an Airport Security accord has been reached. Are we feeling better yet?

Perhaps a little better. But in the words of a postal worker at the Brentwood postal center, now taking medication to prevent anthrax, "Things have changed. Our lives have changed." Many are saying that our lives will never be the same after these tragic events this fall. A member of one of the Life Review groups said, "My spirituality has changed a lot in the last month."

In a peer group of colleagues that I’ve been meeting with for the past fifteen years, we found ourselves talking about how all of this raises questions about our concepts of progress and those worldviews which see things getting better and better over time.

One in the group, who knows and remembers his church history better than the rest of us, called our attention to Augustine’s The City of God, where Augustine reminds us that from the beginning in our lives we are moving ceaselessly towards death. Well, this was sobering, if not uplifting, to a group of guys in their sixties and seventies whose talk over the years has shifted more and more toward our aches and pains and health concerns.

And, I have to admit that in my counseling office I have a painting of an old overgrown graveyard and gravestones. Clients only notice it as they’re leaving. When they ask me about it, I say that it’s to remind us that life is short and we’re all going to die someday. So, we’d better deal with things and get on with living more fulfilling and meaningful lives.

I think some things have changed after September 11^th and the subsequent air crash last Monday, even for those of us who didn’t experience personal tragedy. Certainly we’re more in touch with our mortality. Some things we see more clearly, like what is most precious, as well as what is left undone in our world. And some things we can see less clearly than what we previously may have thought, like what it’s really all about and what we can really count on and know for sure. Are things really getting better and better? I’d like to think so. My father-in-law, 86 and a World War II veteran, thinks things have changed for the better. There was a time when the KKK marched down Pennsylvania Avenue carrying on its side a huge American flag that the crowds threw money onto.

Robin Meyers, a UCC pastor from Oklahoma City, who knows about tragedy, speaks about such events suggesting that the very same events both challenge our faith and deepen it. He speaks of how suffering and death call our attention to what really matters, but can also call everything into question.

The other day I heard Bob Edwards on NPR interviewing Studs Terkel, a writer who has spent a long career interviewing and recording the voices of ordinary people. Terkel is 89, going on 90, and following the death of his wife has come out with a new book titled,

Will the Circle Be Unbroken: Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith.

Terkel says that when he asked people for their thoughts about death, they really ended up talking about life and what is really important to them. They also expressed general doubts that the big questions have any plausible answers. Although in asking for their thoughts about immortality, one young man commented that after reading in one of Terkel’s previous books called Working, about the humiliations one woman experienced in being a waitress, it so touched and influenced him that he knew he would never again treat a waitress badly. This is what matters and lives on.

Living with the challenges, with ambiguity and uncertainty, may not be such a bad thing.

Seeking to live in circumstances where no further questions can be asked, or where all answers are imposed, is a flight from freedom. It’s a place where the individual is suppressed and where fanaticism and violence emerge. We’ve seen again and again the fruits of such an insistence on having it only one way.

We’ve also experienced the deepening of faith of which Robin Meyers speaks. Living in these times and through these events our lives can be enriched as we move beyond the trivial into a deeper sense of connection and appreciation for friends and loved ones and enjoying each day more fully. We find our senses taking things in more deeply, like the vividness of this autumn’s colors and the feeling of being in touch with the deeper currents of life and nature, and being more able to just accept the mystery of it all.

And, somehow, in spite of our fears, our ability to meet the future more courageously seems to have grown. And perhaps so has our knowledge that it’s the quality of our life that counts, and along with that the awareness that we’re part of something larger than ourselves and our particular worldview. There’s a larger and very diverse world out there that we need to get better acquainted with. But we are a part of it all. We have a place in this family of things. This is affirming and can lead us into a deeper sense of faith that our life counts for something. We’re part of a continuous process – world without end.

So, we must preserve and enhance life for our children and our children’s children. There’s so much in the world that needs attention so that others may also achieve richer lives.

Our faith and our scriptures remind us that this is the very same world God made and declared to be good – a world of so many good things, so many things to enjoy, cherish and celebrate. But it’s also one of oppression, destruction, sadness and death.

Today’s scriptures from Isaiah and the Psalm reflect a time after the Israelites 70 years of exile. They have returned to their homeland longing for a return to the grandeur of the nation of their grandparents. But this has not been realized. So, these passages reflect the lofty vision of a yet to be realized new age, not a return to the past. It’s the vision of a world transformed to what God intended – long life, peaceful harvests, old enemies co-existing. But its realization will require the pursuit of social justice and mercy.

The purpose of this prophetic vision is to inspire hope and the people to faithfully work to make it real.

The gospel lesson reflects the difficult times of the early church in the 1^st century under the oppression of the Romans. Earthquakes have occurred in Greece and Asia Minor, and Vesuvius has erupted in Italy. So, it was a time when apocalyptic ideas were widespread. Luke writes of Jesus and his different focus on things, and on the importance of keeping the faith in times like these. Luke’s intent is also to discredit those who claim to know the future, and their calculations about the end of time. The message is that it’s important to endure and remain faithful to God’s continuing work of creation – wise words for our own time as well.

So, how do we respond in times like these and find hope. Isn’t it sort of ironic, but also timely that in the aftermath of all that’s happened, this is thanksgiving week? That time each year when we in this country pause to remember and give thanks for the countless gifts of life and love and the fruits of all creation. Pausing in this way and reflecting on the blessings we’ve known, can bring us back into our hopes for the future, even in the midst of such times as these.

In both Life Review groups recently, as people were reflecting on their lives, again and again they spoke of the gratitude they feel, the blessings they’ve experienced, and the people who have touched their lives and helped them come to new places in their journeys.

So, perhaps even more profoundly this year we will find ourselves giving thanks for the blessings of this nation and for the land on which it stands; for the precious gift of freedom of expression and our democratic process; for those who came before us and established this nation; and for all those heroic citizens who have worked and given their lives to preserve these things. We give thanks for blessings of our human community and for the way our lives are woven together with our fellow beings on this earth, reminding us that even in times like these when the focus is so much on defense and security, it’s not a distraction or unpatriotic to continue to express our concerns for such things as the environment, education, election reform, civil liberties and due process, and health care.

To ignore such things is shortsighted, magnifies the losses we’ve experienced, and neglects those things that insure a better and hopeful future.

We also give thanks today for this loving and caring community where the self is not lost, and where we are reminded of what’s good and right and necessary in this world. This is a place each week that helps bring us back to our senses and renews our faith that there’s a loving and creative spirit at work in us and in creation. It’s here that we continue to discover God in the power and work of love, which heals, restores and transforms. And it’s through the work of love that we make God tangible and present. In that love we find courage even in the midst of our anxieties and fears.

Yvonne Delk, the former head of our Office for Church in Society, now retired, speaks of growing up in the racial turmoil of the South. But each morning before sending them off to school and to what they might have to face, her parents would call each child out by name and telling them that they were loved. You see, love helps rescue us from our fears.

So, here we find those needed signs of hope in gathering and being with one another, through births and baptisms, in newfound love and marriage, and yes in the blessing of same-sex unions, in breaking bread together, and in illness and death and in remembering those who have blessed our lives. I think of all of these as sacraments, gifts of God, means of grace.

We are living through days that have changed our lives and refocused our values.

Focusing on what is beautiful in our lives, that is what stays. So, let us live and move and breathe and find hope in that! And, as we sang today, "For the good we all inherit…for the wonders that astound us, (and even) for the truths that confound us, (but) most of all that love has found us, thanks be to God." Amen

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