In One Ear & Out the Other!

The Rochester Post-Bulletin is the local daily newspaper in our area. It arrives in the afternoon, so for over twenty years now we’ve had to forgo that delicious experience of perusing the paper over a cup of coffee and a piece of toast in the morning. I suppose we could just save the P/B until the next morning, but with the internet by the time the paper reaches our home it already seems like old news. They’re constantly changing it too, making it smaller and condensing much of the material into the shorter “bullets” that appear necessary in order to hold our attention today.
One of their recent changes was to begin including a joke on the inside of the front page of its weekday edition. Generally they’re the type that, when I tell them, my wife rolls her eyes and groans. A month or so ago their joke was about three men - a preacher, a doctor, and an undertaker - who were out deer hunting (a timely subject in our area). It happened that all three saw a large buck and fired at the same time, and it went down. As you might imagine they began arguing amongst themselves over who’s shot had taken the buck, and they were still engaged in heated disagreement when a DNR officer arrived on the scene. After learning of their dilemma he offered to check the deer over to see if he could learn who’s shot had felled it. When he was through he reported back that the minister had shot it. When the other two asked how he had come to that conclusion, the official said he could tell because the slug had gone in one ear and out the other.
That joke reminds me of a conversation my mother-in-law once had with our oldest son when he was only about four years old or so. She was up visiting us from Texas shortly after we had moved to our first appointment, a three-point United Methodist circuit, and she was asking him about our church next door. When he informed her that was his church she asked him if his dad also went there. He replied in the affirmative, and she pressed further to see if he understood that I was the church’s pastor. “What does your dad do there?” she asked. And with the certainty that sometimes accompanies childhood he said “Oh, he stands up in front and talks to himself.”
To tell you the truth, I feel that way sometimes (for that matter, I felt that way quite a bit while raising that aforementioned son ;-)). I feel that way when I repeat Jesus’ words on the need to forgive and still find people nursing grudges like a tall, cool drink. I feel that way when I lift up Jesus’ admonition about laying up our treasures in heaven and then see folks drooling over new cars, lavish houses, and large salaries. I feel that way when we study Jesus’ answer to the lawyer, that the greatest commandments are to love God with all that we have and love our neighbor as ourselves, and then hear folks rationalize that their neighbor really doesn’t deserve help because, after all, he got himself in this predicament in the first place. I feel that way when I talk about really trusting God and then watch us trust pretty much everything and anything else first. And I feel that way when we study Jesus’ passionate model for prayer and then we run off and pray just enough to coat what are really our decisions and our plans with a thin veneer of religiosity.
In one ear and out the other. Maybe words are a little like taking a set of darts out to the garage and randomly throwing them at things. We’d likely find that they would only stick in the softer items. Perhaps some words can only stick in a heart and mind prepared by the Holy Spirit. If that’s so, may ours be softened this Christmas season.