A Brother's Love

Ryan looks and sounds like most eight year old boys.  His sister, Amber, does not look or sound like most eight year old girls.  Ryan and Amber are twins.  When their mother asked them to write their Christmas letters to Santa she discovered a love story that became a national sensation in the campaign against school-yard bullying.  You perhaps know the story. Ryan writes to Santa, telling Santa that he no longer wants his remote control car and helicopter. Instead, he would like Santa to end the  bullying that his sister suffered each day, mostly on the bus ride to school.  The line of the letter which caught my eye was this one:

                      “I prayed that they will stop but god is bisy and needs your help.”

Of course, God is not busy, not in the sense that we know “busy.” God isn’t bound by space or time and thus, by definition, God never has “too much to do” so that he cannot care for the “Ambers” of the world.  And (I trust you are not letting your small children read this) there is no Santa Claus to do God’s work. There is Ryan, though.

The point is that Ryan ended up doing God’s work. Ryan made a sacrifice out of sheer love for his sister.  That is what a brother’s pure love looks like: “I am not asking for my car or helicopter because it would be a better gift for me to see my sister left alone.”  This is how God chooses to be alive in this world, living in and through Ryan, and you.

Diana Butler Bass, in “Christianity After Religion” quotes poet Wendell Berry’s “The Vision”, a poem about how the world will be transformed.  It ends with the line: “This is no paradisal dream. Its hardship is its possibility.”  In thinking about the life of the spiritually-focused church, Bass concludes that “(t)he hard work is the possibility”. She sums up the role of the church today like this: “the goal is to perform the reign of God in and for the life of the world.” (p. 239)  We are the performers of God’s reign.

This is the lesson of Ryan’s message of sacrificial love for Amber: he was performing the reign of God. Amber didn’t need Santa. She had Ryan.  Live the possibility of love.