HOW ABOUT A BEER?

“I’ll be back in a moment!” I shouted to Karen as I rushed out the front door to hand over a check to the lawn maintenance service that had just arrived at our home.  Following an early dinner with my spouse and after watching the evening news together, I began moving toward my study to work on the book I was writing when I spied them through the window.   

 “Here you go!” I told Xavier as I thrust the check in his hand, even as his sons unloaded their mowing equipment on our front lawn.  “How about a beer?” Xavier asked me.  I hemmed and hawed and politely refused.

This wasn't the first time he had asked. “Come on! You’ve never had a beer with me!” A wave of guilt coursed through my soul, and I said, “Sure!” So out came a cold Corona and thus began a cultural exchange like none I'd ever had before. With his thick accent, I listened carefully to Xavier's saga of a young man crossing the Mexican border decades ago. I heard the story of how he strived to attain the American Dream. I heard a love story about a thirty-year marriage and six children who had all become hard-working, productive US citizens. I laughed. I teared up. I felt emotions I had never felt before.  I felt the presence of God.

Of course, there was no way we could get it all said with only one beer. "Here, have another one!" Xavier insisted. “No!" I replied, "I’m a lightweight!” But he insisted and it seemed downright unneighborly to refuse. So, I took a deep breath and sipped on another Corona. This was a sacramental moment. In a strange and marvelous way, those beers became an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace.

At one point during our hour and a half visit I ran back in the house for a moment and Karen asked me, “What are you doing out there?” “Drinking beer with Xavier and his son.” “How cool!” she responded.

 “The world is my parish,” declared John Wesley, the founder of my Methodist spiritual tradition.  "The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the world," announced Jesus at the outset of his own ministry.

I love the church, I really do, but we must move beyond our "institutionalized, over-organized, de-spiritualized" religious boxes so that we might better encounter the world Jesus loved, even if it means drinking a couple of beers with a friend and putting off our book-writing until another time. 

 Truth be known, life itself is a sermon. If we weren't blind as bats, we could see it.