Friday, October 17, 2025
Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Antioch, Bishop and Martyr
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
Devotion
So many people were crowding together that they were trampling one another underfoot.
Paul knew “a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows.” We too know men and women who, though they might not share stories of being caught up to heaven, have plenty of wonderful tales to tell.
I tell you, my friends,
do not be afraid of those who kill the body
but after that can do no more.
Our friend Nancy gets donuts for our Illinois church family early Sunday morning, cuts them in half and lays out the display before any or many of the rest of us get there to eat them. Sometimes she is a greeter-at-the-door, but on Sundays when she’s not a greeter she makes it a point to get there fifteen minutes before the greeters are scheduled so she can welcome anyone who comes early. She wants everyone who enters the sanctuary on Sunday morning to be helloed and hugged before they go in to pray and sing.
Where then is boasting? It is excluded.
These efforts would be praiseworthy from anyone, and all the more so from Nancy, who finds it difficult to climb stairs without a special walker and is partially disabled when it comes to walking or standing for long. She’s a hero in my eyes.
There is no difference between us,
for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,
and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption
that came by Christ Jesus.
Then there’s my friend John, who has lately been in home hospice but failed to die, so now we get together, two oldish hippies in their late 70’s, and share stories of our shenanigans 50 years ago. John has spent his life loving his wife and loving Jesus. He remembers his first time getting high on hallucinogens. A college student with friends, he drove them home from Champaign while his three companions in the car, his 1960 Ford Falcon, got an hour ahead of him on what was generally expected to be a 24 hour “trip.”
There is nothing concealed that will not be revealed,
nor secret that will not be known.
Therefore whatever you have said in the darkness
will be heard in the light,
and what you have whispered behind closed doors
will be proclaimed on the housetops.
Getting back to his apartment and being somewhat lonely back there an hour behind his friends on this first trip, he decided to take a solitary ride in his car. A few minutes into his journey he drove into and through a T-intersection in his college town into twenty or so yards of a ploughed field, which he bumped his way through, then up a mildly sloped levee to a set of train tracks. The front set of wheels crossed the tracks, but the back wheels couldn’t quite make it, so his car straddled the tracks and wouldn’t move. He sat there puzzled.
What to do?
John saw house lights behind him, walked down the embankment and knocked on a couple of doors, until he found someone who consented to call the police to come and help. The police had to put him in jail, of course, but the night magistrate heard his tale of woe and released him on recognizance, while a tow truck rescued his car, before a freight train could come by and tear  things up.
So many years later we laughed and laughed. John didn’t pretend to be any kind of hero with that story, but what I know of his spiritual and financial generosity with family and friends, and about his heartfelt grief when his wife died, surround him.
John fell recently and blackened one of his eyes, now six weeks later bruises still discolor part of his face. Wisely, he took a selfie that day and shared it with me. We spent a few minutes bemoaning our aches and pains.
But not for long. Too many stories to tell. We talked of cabbages and kings, and he was struck by a Beatles’ lyric. In the day John was a theater major, then the singer in a fine rock band, and he could really belt it out. Lately his voice has been weak, but he belted it out in his living room with me – just that one line. So beautiful his voice was.
And in the end, the love you take … is equal to the love you make.
Paul McCartney was looking for “something Shakespeare” to end that last song on Abbey Road. Paul certainly knew the Golden Rule, and in the decades since his life too has been a model of generosity. When I saw the fake news in August about Paul visiting Willie Nelson in the hospital along with Steven Tyler, lead singer with Aerosmith, I believed it immediately. And really I still do. Fake news sometimes carries a blessing rather than a curse.
Paul and Ringo, both in their 80s, might as well have been together with John and me on that recent autumn afternoon. They lived through their own shenanigans – just watch the Abbey Road video link above. It’s wonderful for us to be alive even now, when the shenanigans have mostly ceased, sharing the stories we remember, whether or not they are fit to print.
Are not five sparrows sold for two small coins?
Yet not one of them has escaped the notice of God.
Even the hairs of your head have all been counted.
Do not be afraid.
You are worth more than many sparrows.
 (Romans 4, Psalm 32, Psalm 33, Luke 12)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
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