For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

Today’s sermon is entitled “Life isn’t fair . . . but God is”.

Thanks to my ongoing computer ineptitude, the title of last week’s sermon, “Fear of Dying, Fear of Living” appears in today’s bulletin, but I’m not preaching the same sermon two weeks in a row. It was just one of those things that got into the computer and didn’t come out when it should have, a carryover from the past.

However, there may be a greater truth involved here then just the residue of last week’s bulletin appearing again this week. For it seems to me that we are continually being affected and afflicted by the leftovers of life, the unresolved disagreements, the unanswered questions, the incomplete experiences, the carryovers from the past that get into our lives and don’t come out when they should, the residue of life that forms the unfairness of life.

These are the things that we complain about when we say “that’s not fair!”.

One of the many ways that I drove my children crazy when they were growing up was that every time the would cry “that’s not fair”, I would remind them that President John Kennedy, in 1962 a year before he was shot and killed, said “Life is unfair”.

And of course, he was right.

And nowhere is that unfairness seen as much as it is in our fears of death and of life.

In today’s scripture, Jesus was asked if the death of people was a sign of their sinfulness and he said something that we all know, we all believe and we all forget when death visits, he said “Of course not! Death happens and towers fall on people and illnesses occur and it has no connection to their goodness or sinfulness, on that simple level, life is unfair.”

This week we re-experienced that with the news of the death of Mackenzie Wright, a six year old girl whose family lives in the area, a little girl who spent most of her life in medical treatment and for whom we prayed, and she died and the unfairness of life needs no further proof.

From where we sit the evidence of life’s unfairness is abundant and irrefutable.

Case closed.

Life isn’t fair.

Now, we have two choices here.

We can argue the point, we can list the things about life that have been fair, we can put a happy face on our sorrows, we can pretend that bad things don’t really happen to good people.

Or we can accept the absolute truth of that statement and stop expecting life to be fair in terms that we can see and measure and understand.

This is Lent.

We are working our way to Jesus on the cross, abandoned by the crowds who cheered for him, betrayed by friends, rejected by government and religious leaders. You can’t go to that cross and watch him die and listen to him and tell me that life is fair. It is not, not as long as we measure it only in terms of our ways of thinking and our ways of acting.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.

You see, fairness in the day to day things of life is a good thing, we should all practice it as much as possible, but we will never see complete fairness in this world no matter how hard we work at it.

Life was not fair for the exiles to whom Isaiah spoke, like us they were so caught up in their own private lives that they couldn’t see the things that God was doing on a greater scale and so they grumbled about God’s absence in their lives. That’s always been God’s greatest obstacle, not those who oppose the things of heaven, but those who are so obsessed with their own wants and needs and dreams and our thoughts and our ways that we fail to seek God’s will.

They needed to acquire a new mind, a new perspective, a way of seeing life and measuring life that didn’t depend on personal fortune or misfortune.

And so do we, and that’s not easy.

If we could keep our thoughts and ways in touch with God’s thoughts and ways, it would one thing, but it’s so hard to do that, isn’t it?

I know it is and always has been for me.

I catch myself, far too often, looking sideways instead of up, that’s when the trouble starts.

I see peers whose parents are still alive and well and I miss mine, I see my children struggling more that others seem to be and I struggle, I look at other occupations with fewer stresses and I envy them, I look at less gifted colleagues with greater honors and rewards and I seethe, whenever I look at others and compare, the joy of my life turns sour with resentment.

When I look at all of those things, I’m quick to say that life isn’t fair.

And I don’t ever notice the people who are looking at me and my life and my family and my stuff and comparing and being filled with envy and anger and resentment, I’m too busy with my own.

I keep looking sideways instead of up.

And I don’t think I’m the only one who is guilty of that, am I?

But let me tell you about a better way. Let me tell you how to get that new mind, that new perspective.

I want you to picture all that you had in life, all of the precious relationships and the wonderful experiences that you had, one year before you were born.

In other words I want you to think about the nothingness that you were 12 months before your birth.

On November 8, 1949 I did not exist.

I had no dreams, no faith, no likes or dislikes, no body, no way to experience this world and no connection to anyone, anyplace or anything in this world.

One year later, on November 8,1950, out of that sheer nothingness from which God creates, I arrived.

That’s the miracle that wipes out the petty unfairnesses that we complain about.

And here is what I have learned: to the extent that I can keep myself focused upon the wonders that God has exposed me to over the last 60 years I don’t see the need to even talk about simple fairness in life; I’ve had more that that, I’ve had abundance in my life.

And so have you, haven’t you?

I’ve had everything given to me, we like to talk about how we have earned all that we have and no one gave us anything, we had to work for it, right?

Well that’s nonsense: the love of my parents, the affection of friends, the education provided by teachers, the experiences of being a husband, a father, a grandfather; the privilege of speaking to and for God in this place, the joys of my life: the taste of salt spray in summer, the hopes of Spring Training, the smell of Christmas trees, the sounds of elephants and marching bands at football games and waves kissing the shore, the satisfaction of finding just the right words, at least once in while, to bring God’s presence into our lives, all of these things have been mine – and your list will be different but just as wonderful – all of these things have been mine only by the overwhelming and unearned gift of life that God has given us.

I haven’t deserved half of what I’ve had. Life isn’t fair: it is so much better then that!

For God is fair and then so much more generously does he bless us.

And when we realize that we are able to live as generously as God has.

I came across this story a while ago, and I’ve been saving it.

It is an old rabbinic parable about a farmer that had two sons. And when he got too old to work, the two boys took over the chores of the farm and when the father died, they had found their working together so meaningful that they decided to keep their partnership.

So each brother did his part and every harvest, they would divide equally what they had corporately produced. Over the years the older brother never married, stayed a bachelor. The younger brother did marry and had eight wonderful children.

One year when they were having a wonderful harvest, the old bachelor brother thought to himself one night, "My brother has ten mouths to feed. I only have one. He really needs more of this harvest than I do, but I know he is much too fair to renegotiate. I know what I'll do. Tonight when he is asleep, I'll take some of what I have put in my barn and I'll slip it over into his barn to help him feed his children.”

At that very moment, the younger brother was thinking to himself, "God has given me these wonderful children. My brother hasn't been so fortunate. He will really need more of this harvest for his old age than I do, but I know him. He's much too fair. He'll never renegotiate. I know what I'll do. Tonight when he's asleep, I'll take some of what I've put in my barn and slip it over into his barn." And so that night when the moon was full, those two brothers came face to face, each on a mission of generosity. The old rabbi said that there wasn't a cloud in the sky, yet a gentle rain began to fall. You know what it was? God weeping for joy because two of his children had gotten the point. Two of his children had come to realize that generosity is the deepest characteristic of the holy and because we are made in God's image, our being generous is the secret to our joy as well.

Life is not fair, thank God!

Life is not fair because it is rooted in grace and guided by God’s loving thoughts and meant to be lived in God’s generous ways. Don’t look around to compare your life to another’s, there is nothing there for you. Look up to give thanks to the God who brought you into this world, who has blessed you over and over and over again and will travel with you and will bring you home again.

We cannot understand it, we cannot explain it, we cannot direct it or demand it, we can only believe in the God whose thoughts and ways are higher and better and purer than ours, the God who swallows up all of the fears of death and life that keep us from being who we are meant to be.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, says the Lord.