the things I had found there. So on the morning of the twenty-fifth, my father had the privilege of opening a gift of a piece of black and green drainpipe glued to a flat gray rock with little white stones resting on the inside of it.
A masterpiece, to say the least.
The reason I remember this is because I visited my dad at his office a few days ago, and while I waited for him to finish his meeting, I wandered around looking at the pictures on his walls and the papers on his desk and the things on his shelves. On one of his shelves sat the drainpipe and rock sculpture, thirty years later.
He still has it.
He brought it home with him and put it in his office in 1977 and hasn’t gotten rid of it.
We know why he kept it. How you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the creator.
When a human being is mistreated, objectified, or neglected, when they are treated as less than human, these actions are actions against God. Because how you treat the creation reflects how you feel about the Creator.
To be a Christian is to work for the new humanity. Jesus commands his followers to feed and clothe and visit and take care of those who need it. They’re fellow image-bearers, they’re just like us, and when we love them, we’re loving God.
A church exists to be a display of the new humanity. A community of people who honor and respect the poor and rich and educated and uneducated and Jew and Gentile and black and white and old and young and powerful and helpless as fully human, created in the image of God.
These bonds we have with each other are why, for many, there is so much power in the Eucharist, also called Mass or the Lord’s Supper or communion. We take the bread and dip it in the cup to remind ourselves of Jesus’s body and blood.19 To reflect on the truth that we’re all in this together, one body, and that his body being broken and blood being spilled are for our union.
It isn’t just about our relationship to God as individuals. Often communion is seen as a time to reflect on God’s love for us in Jesus’s dying on the cross. Which it is. But it was originally just as much about my desperate need to be reminded of your humanity and the humanity of all the people around us.
When I respect the image of God in others, I protect the image of God in me. When Jesus speaks of loving our neighbor, it isn’t just for our neighbor’s sake.20 If we don’t love our neighbor, something happens to us.
And in trying to protect the image of God in them, we just might be protecting the image of God in ourselves in the process. Because with every decision, conversation, gesture, comment, action, and attitude, we’re inviting heaven or hell to earth.
I have a new hero. Her name is Lil, and I would guess she’s in her late fifties. I met her earlier this year when she introduced me to her daughter, whom she was pushing in a wheelchair. Early in their marriage, Lil and her husband21 decided that they would adopt two children. As they became familiar with the family services system, they learned that there were kids in the system nobody wanted. So they went to the local adoption agency and asked for the kids with the most pronounced disabilities, the most traumatic histories, and the most hopeless futures. They asked if they could have the kids nobody wanted. Over the past thirty or so years, they have raised well over twenty children, raising their biological children alongside their adopted children.
When Lil got to this point in her story, she reached down and patted her daughter and said, “This is Crystal. She’s twenty-seven years old but will be about six months old developmentally for the rest of her life. She can’t talk or walk or move or feed herself or do anything on her own. She will be like this, totally dependent on us, until the day she dies. And I love her so much. My family and I, we can’t imagine life without her. She makes everything so much better.”
What is Lil doing?
She’s bringing heaven to earth.
She gives us a glimpse into another realm. Into a better way. The way of God.
She and her family have taken kids who were discarded because of their perceived lack of worth and said, “No, you are not to be rejected and turned away. We are going to love you as an equal, as a human, as one of us.”
They show us how God loves us.
They reflect the image. And when you see it lived out like this, you’re seeing heaven crash into earth.
Instead of seeing labels like “handicapped,” “reject,” or “invalid,” Lil and her husband and her kids see only one label: “human.”22
And so they have only one response: love.
And it makes all the difference in heaven and earth.
Which takes us back to something that happened during Colonel Gonin’s stay at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp:
It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don’t know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the postmortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
Because sometimes, the difference between heaven and hell may be a bit of lipstick.
CHAPTER TWO Sexy on the Inside
Last year I was in Canada for a couple of days, staying in downtown Ottawa. When I got to my hotel, I noticed that there was a buzz about the lobby. Lots of people with cameras and lots of British accents.
I got my key and took the elevator to my floor, and as I walked down the hall, the door of the room next to mine opened and a woman stepped out wearing a shirt with four words on it: “Mick, Keith, Ronnie, Charlie.”
Ah, yes, the Rolling Stones.
With great passion, she told me that they were staying in this very hotel and that the concert was tomorrow night, only a mile from here.
The next night, I went to the stadium and bought a single ticket from a man standing at the main gate. I found my seat and began talking with the couple next to me. At one point they asked what I do for a living. I told them that I’m a pastor.
They looked at each other, stunned. They told me that they weren’t very religious or part of a church or anything like that, but on the way to the concert, they both had this unusual sense that there would be some sort of significance to whoever they ended up sitting next to that night.
We discussed politics and the environment and literature and nuclear energy and music and family—all during the opening band. At one point the woman asked why the world was so broken and why people have such difficulty getting along. The question seemed to come from years of reflection. And it wasn’t just an intellectual issue; this was something that deeply troubled her soul. She pointed to the forty thousand people seated around us in the stadium and asked, “Why is it so hard for us to get along? Why do we have to fight with each other and go to war and hurt each other and sue each other and say horrible things about each other?”
As she was saying this, I realized that what she was saying was less a series of questions and more of a lament. A grieving.
We’re disconnected from each other, and we know it. It’s not