Children of Royalty

Dee, Thank you for your reflection this week. I feel torn between two realities. I think that indeed we celebrate the Lord’s Day and resurrection every day with joy and wonder and the pattern of the liturgical year also helps us prepare (both worshippers and worship leaders), focus and celebrate in ways that maybe we don’t every Sunday! Probably some where in the middle would benefit our worship…more attention to weekly preparation for a celebrative Sunday and less fanfare on Easter….not the same…just maybe a little closer together.

Another challenge for most contemporary Christians is that we don’t worship as a community every day. Daily prayer and communal worship allows us to pray through the nuances of life and the Gospel…both the highs and the lows. If we did this we could really then “interrupt” our daily worship and proclaim hope and resurrection in the midst of lament, sorrow, temptation, anger, contemplation. This is how it should be. In the Early Church, these faithful disciples met daily for table fellowship and talked about life and knelt to pray…but on Sunday they stood (no kneeling allowed) because they were not servants of the Sovereign, they were children of Royalty and rejoiced!

I become concerned with Praise services that only celebrate the exuberance of the resurrection without any daily worship. The message is rejoice, rejoice, rejoice! Oh, and by the way, if you’re angry, depressed or grieving and don’t feel like coming…well come back when you do. The body of Christ is fractured. So many people I know disappear when life gets tough and they need their spiritual community. And yet they don’t feel “up enough” to worship. How can we make room for all in our weekly worship? How do we welcome those who grieve, those who lament, those who are feeling abandoned and still celebrate with Easter joy?

I pray that we can encourage more daily worship within the family, little groups in the church, between friends as well as craft worship that balances both the joy of kingdom come and the reality of sorrow and suffering not done. -Julie

The Day of Days

We had a full throttle, pin your ears back, kick in the pants worship service on the first Sunday of Easter a couple of weeks back. That organ that cost us more than the GNP of an island nation was wide open from prelude to postlude. The hand bells were out there on one side of the chancel with two trumpets and two trombones on the other. The choir sang three full-length anthems, spaced within the order of worship. And, oh yeah, the Hallelluia chorus responded to the benediction.

The sermon, which had its moments, was given within a packed sanctuary. The liturgy had a special zing to it, the liturgists had voice and rhythm, and the Sacrament of Holy Communion moved people, not just to the Lord’s table, but in other ways as well. It was just a splendid thing in which to participate.

The worship on the Second Sunday of Easter had many features to commend itself, but it wasn’t like the Sunday previous. Is this a problem?

I had never thought that it might be until I heard an interview with a pastor on the radio, as part of an NPR puff piece during Holy Week. He was asked if he was going to pull out all the stops for Easter. No, he said. His church tried to avoid doing anything on Easter that wasn’t done the rest of the year. He mentioned that he didn’t want Easter visitors to come back the next Sunday and feel let down.

Now I must add that this pastor’s church has the words “worship center” in its name. He preaches with a jumbo-tron behind him, on which movie clips and other illustrating images are displayed. You know there’s a soft-rock praise band balanced by a small orchestra, opera-quality soloists on call, and high production values all over the place. So the guy’s not exactly chillin’ with the Quakers week in and week out. He’s got the rockem-sockem worship factor going on every Sunday.

But does he make a verbal point if not a lived one? Do we make too much of a liturgical deal over the Sunday celebrating the Resurrection of our Lord? Should we reclaim some of the plainly decorated style of the Puritan side of our family? Does our current practice give the lie to the fact that it’s Easter every Sunday?

From the opposite direction, perhaps we need to ramp up all the other services to match Easter’s. But would that be more about marketing than about praise?

Just wondering.

As Ever,
Dee

Traveling Underground, or Pathetic Fallacy

I came to early yesterday morning prodded out of that deepest middle sleep by the sound of rain ticking like thrown gravel against the side of the house. Or was it the gasp of stillness that comes just before a thundercrash that woke me? Then the thunder did crash, and I climbed out of bed to check the windows. Robin climbed out to check the windows behind me, to see that I’d shut them correctly. It turns out I had not. I had shut the windows; I hadn’t raised the screens, shut the storms, lowered the screens, then shut the windows. Satisfied, she went back to sleep. I lay in bed looking through the dark at the ceiling and listening to the rain all around, on the roof, blown against the side of the house, scratching at the closed bedroom windows.

A rain like that—starting even before the clocks started on Saturday morning—reminds me, oddly, of baseball. In the house I grew up in, the television was early dismissed—by a piano—to the basement. That made it almost inaccessible in the winter, as the basement wasn’t heated. There was a fireplace; and my dad and I used to build a fire once a week in the winter months to watch the Saturday hockey games. In the summer though, the basement was some days the only cool place in the house. That didn’t mean I watched much: we were almost always outside in summer, dawn to way past dusk, as I remember. But I would go down on Saturdays—sometimes with my dad, more often by myself—to watch Pee Wee Reese and Dizzy Dean call “The Game of the Week.”

And I remember more than once emerging from that sealed space, blinking from the brightness of the sunshine at Forbes Field or Comiskey Park to discover that it was pouring down rain. I’d been so enmeshed in the ball game, I’d come to believe somehow that it was as sunny in Blacksburg, Virginia as it was in Pittsburgh or Chicago. Similarly, if it’s a rainy night in Georgia, it must be raining all over the world. It feels like it.

God desires to hear of our longings, I have no doubt. But do we desire to know his? The story of Jacob wrestling with the angel is a story of engagement with the divine, but is it Jacob that initiates the contact? This would be the Jacob that is trying his darnedest to avoid contact with his own brother. Moreover, the primal story is, as Duns Scotus Eriugena reminds us, one of retreat. God goes walking in paradise, asking, Adam, ubi es? Adam, where are you? “This is the voice of the creator rebuking human nature,” John the Scot says. “It is as if He said: Where are you now after your transgression? For I do not find you there where I know that I created you, nor in that dignity in which I made you in My image and likeness, but I rebuke you as a deserter from happiness, a fugitive from the true light, hiding yourself in the secret places of your bad conscience . . . .” (Periphyseon, trans. John J. O’Meara and I.P. Sheldon-Williams, 4:232-233, quoted in Darrin McMahon, Happiness: A History, more about which another time).

Most of us like to think of ourselves as adventurous—I do. We may not seek out danger, but we want to believe that we have open minds: we want to know the truth, hang the cost. But we don’t. We want to be assured that our version of the truth is the correct one. God may well have created us with a deep longing for the truth, but paradoxically when we ate from the tree of knowledge, we began to lose that longing. We became fugitives from the light of truth. We began to avoid uncomfortable encounters. We sought out more comfortable places than in God’s presence—much more—and we found them. We began to wish we didn’t have to talk with our brothers. So, we didn’t.

We did hide in the secret places of our own bad consciences, “bad” not in the sense of guilty but in the sense of shoddy or limited. We decided we could live in the basement, where we could imagine that all the rest of the world looked as we saw it.
And I came to the end of my blog—two days late—hoping that I’d find a way out. But as we drove north out of rainy Virginia, we found that it was also raining in West Virginia, and it was raining in western Pennsylvania. All across Ohio, it was raining. In Michigan it is raining. It’s cold, too.

- Rick

Dare We Ask?

God has created us with deep longing….its part of the package; part of our design. Dee reminds us of Jacob’s wrestling…longing for encounter for meaning, for a blessing. He will not let go or give up. While it is true that God is all mystery and cannot be contained or quantified, I believe the intimacy of covenant gives us permission to turn into our longing and wrestle or wait for the Holy to meet us. This is not a “quid pro quo” relationship, but it is part of the covenant of our baptism. It is the gift of being engrafted onto the True Vine of Jesus and Israel’s covenant. It is our inheritance.

In life, in ministry, in prayer, I believe the essence often times if some sort of longing. Much of our work is to discern honestly what that is and bring it into the light of God’s love as offering, gratitude, confession, intercession for others or the desire for mercy.

So what if the Risen Jesus came to you today and asked,
“What are you longing for?”
How would you answer?

I have to sift down past the Miss America answer of “world peace” and past the three wishes from the genie in the lamp and see what is at the heart of my desire, anger and attachments. What is it that I long for? What is it that you long for?

And then, trusting the covenant,
I hope to have the courage to ask, listen and wait…
“God, what is it that you long for?”

-Julie

Happy Hour of Prayer

If a theme has emerged from all our time goofing off at (theologic) Al’s Bar and Grill, when we should be working on the next sermon, visiting people in the hospital, or at home with the family, then it seems to be prayer. Julie and Lynn wrest the conversation away from the topics of sports and sex so favored by the boys, by saying, after clearing their throats, “Let us pray.”

Not that they are more pious than the rest of us. They just seem to have an intuitive (or is that preternatural) understanding that there are things more important than the current NASCAR standings.

Then there was Gerald’s powerful rant against “the media” from a refreshingly leftist point of view, which we couldn’t have said better ourselves. He referenced that recent scientific study concerning the medical effectiveness of intercessory prayer. In a comment, I referenced back a New York Times Op-Ed piece by an Episcopal Priest and hospital chaplain.

And, because a couple of people in my church had asked what I thought about that study, I made it the topic of our most recent newsletter. I won't bore you with the whole essay, but the gist of it is that I agreed with the Priest’s point of view. I was glad with the results of the study. Because the idea of empirically detecting the presence of God and measuring the value God’s work is just plain ridiculous.

That got me to thinking about the mind-snagging story of Jacob wrestling with the man/angel/God in Genesis 32. In that story, Jacob the trickster puts up a mighty effort, and seems to be an even match for his antagonist, until his “hip” is put out of joint. The angel seeks to know Jacob’s name; Jacob wants to know the angel’s. “Now who are you? Haven’t we met?” One can almost see the two standing up straight on the river bank and digging out calling cards from their wallets, making sure they are dry. “Wait a minute; my email address has changed. Got a pen?” Networking at the intersection of heaven and earth.

As it turns out, the angel gets to re-name Jacob “Israel,” that struggler with God. But the celestial being does not give up his or her own name. Jacob must be content with the blessing he is given before the Other rejoins the heavenly host.

There’s something about the name. Naming is a god-like activity. See Genesis 2. But mixed up in all the sin that oozes from the next chapter is the perversion of the privilege. The more we know about life on earth, the more we destroy it. Instead of knowledge leading to wonder and gratitude, it leads to the exploitation of nature and profit of the few over the impoverishment of the many. Like the 18 wheel truckers used to say, and may still say, a name is a “handle” for grabbing onto a person. The easier to hold you down and give you a shake, my dear.

No wonder God protects the divine name. Once it’s given (Exodus 3) as YHWH, it has so many possible meanings that it will keep us scratching our heads for centuries. Next thing we know, the speaking of it is all but prohibited (Ex. 20), because the wise old Hebrews understood that it’s all but impossible for human beings to pronounce God’s name purely, with no accent of a self-justification. So from then on, only nicknames for God seem safe for biblical people: Lord, the God of Abraham, the Almighty One, God of grace, etc.

I said I was not going to treat you (or was it bore you) with my church newsletter article. I lied. Sort of. Here’s a paragraph or five.

God will not be manipulated. God is not our personal shopper, our errand boy, our girl Friday. We need to remember that when we engage in the spiritual discipline of prayer. Prayer is conversation. Expressed relationship. There are no bodily postures or verbal formulae which we might use to guarantee that God will intervene for us and change an outcome. The Lord of the Universe cares for us personally and corporately, but that doesn't mean that God rescues us from every danger -- in the way we expect a rescue and when we expect it.

I’m glad that this study was not able to capture God and force God to give up the goods on which intercessions are “effective,” complete with percentages. Think how such a finding might further commercialize religion, accelerating the church’s slide into becoming just another service-providing industry. Every little girl and boy who prayed for a pony and didn’t get one could register a complaint with the PCC -- the Prayer-based Communications Commission. Churches would find new ways to compete with one another, publishing prayer success rates on electronic signboards in front of their buildings, or scrolling them across the bottom of the television set during annual screenings of “The Robe” at Easter and “It’s a Wonderful Life” at Christmas.

Then I quoted the aforementioned Op-Ed piece (11 April 2006), written by Raymond Lawrence:

“Doctors in particular should be pleased that the study demonstrated no benefit from intercessory prayer by strangers. Recently, a colleague told me about a devout, well-educated woman who accused a doctor of malpractice in his treatment of her husband. During her husband’s dying days, she charged, the doctor had failed to pray for him. If prayer could be scientifically shown to help, every doctor would be obligated to to pray with patients, or at least provide such service, and those who declined to do so would properly be subject to charges of malpractice.”

Science is interested in cures. Cure rates, measurable progress. That’s the way it should be. But faith is interested in healing. Shalom, in the sense of well-being, is what faith seeks, the kind of peace that the world, with its arrangements of domination and power, of competition between privilege and deprivation, cannot give. A healthy soul is known by growing relationships with God, with other people, and within the self. You can’t measure that.

Prayer is as vital to our well-being as breathing. It is not a mere technique for getting what we want. The healthy soul’s most sincere desire is found in the heart of the prayer our Savior taught us: “thy kingdom come, thy will be done (not mine), on earth (today, here) as it it is in heaven.” Amen.

Dee

Seeing Green

Christ is risen! Alleluia!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia

Easter Monday. 9:45 a.m. Mountain Daylight Time. A beautiful day in Casper, WY

According to an article in this morning’s paper, Sunset Magazine located Yellowstone in Montana. It’s a plot by the Montana tourism people to confuse you. Yellowstone National Park is in Wyoming. Don’t believe everything you read.

I’m breaking my Lenten fast with a black and tan—in this case a white and milk chocolate double breve. Look that up in your Funk and Wagnall.

My thoughts on this Easter Monday are random, as befitting someone who has spent way too much time in church in the past week. It was literally every day (but Saturday) with a brief and refreshing foray Wednesday into the local temple for the Passover Seder.

RANDOM THOUGHT ONE: Fourth Use of the Law

Not to be outdone by the biblical archeologists who have received so much publicity after the “discovery” of the Gospel of Judas (can Dan Brown be far behind?), theologians announced—just in time for Easter—the discovery of a fourth use of the law.

The discovery was made in last week’s TV listings. Following Wife Swap at 8 p.m. was at 9 p.m. The Ten Commandments. National Geographic plans a TV special soon.

RANDOM THOUGHT TWO: Seeing Green

About a year ago, I came to Casper for the second time (the first time had been a month before in March). I “candidated” as they say, and we bought the house. This year, I remarked to the chair of the PNC that the drought must really be over because everything was so much greener now than it was when we were here a year ago.

“It isn’t any greener this year than it was last year,” he said. “Your eyes are just more used to seeing brown now. When you come from Kentucky, it looks brown here. When you live in Wyoming you can really see green.”

After the brown of the Lenten wilderness, I celebrate the Easter green.

Christ is risen! Alleluia!
The Lord is risen indeed! Alleluia!
Lynn

“Bad Friday” Thoughts

I’m beginning to think there really are two kinds of people in the world: those who are discomforted by the misfortunes of others, and those who are comforted by them.

I don’t know that there are a larger number of the latter, but they seem to talk to me more often. They are feeling bad or blue or completely bollixed; then they read or hear about someone who is in even worse shape or bluer or more confused; and they perk right up. “When I think of how awful it is for her,” they tell me, “I realize how fortunate I really am.”

Good Friday must be a real holiday for these folks, if they’re religious. All the day long, they can contemplate the crucified Christ. How fortunate they are that they’re not hanging there—battered, beaten, bruised, blue, and more than completely—utterly!—bollixed.

Does that sound judgmental? I suspect it does, but I’m not entirely sure I mean it to be, though I do belong myself to the discomforted group. But how much better is that? Every time you read or hear bad news—and how much good news do you get on NPR or in the Washington Post or New York Times?—you feel the weight of the world a little heavier. The mood of your sadness becomes a deeper wallow.

And how do you “celebrate” Good Friday? Chances are you’re out—intentionally or not—you’re out to oujesus Jesus. He’s just hanging there, but you’re feeling his pain, in addition to your own, not to mention Sudan’s, Chad’s, Thailand’s, and Iran’s.

If there are only two kinds of people, which was Jesus? If he was this day some 1,970 years ago taking onto himself the sins of the world, he must have been one of the discomforted. Like me! On the other hand, he could always have been thinking, “It could be worse. Bursting open, guts everywhere: poor old Judas!” (See Acts 1:17.)

Of course, that was before Judas got his publishing deal. National Geographic must be paying him big time.

- Rick

Enduring the Moment

God, give us grace to accept with serenity
the things that cannot be changed,
courage to change the things
which should be changed,
and the wisdom to distinguish
the one from the other.
Living one day at a time,
enjoying one moment at a time,
accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
taking, as Jesus did,
this sinful world as it is,
not as I would have it,
trusting that You will make all things right,
if I surrender to Your will,
so that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
and supremely happy with You forever in the next.
Amen.

- Reinhold Niebuhr

When I lived in the Congo and worked among Africans and some Europeans, few people felt compelled to approach me with unsolicited suggestions of how better to accomplish what I was trying to do. If anything, during my first months in Africa, on several occasions I was told quite politely that my unsolicited advice to others wasn’t always the most valued aspect of my presence.

During my re-entry into American culture (about eighteen months ago), the thing that struck me most wasn’t what I’d expected it to be: the rampant wastefulness among us Americans (e.g., mindlessly pitching into a McDonald’s trashcan a Styrofoam coffee cup that might be used another fifty times). What struck me most was the way we Americans (with all good intentions….maybe) incessantly try to show our neighbors how they might better live their lives. “Here, lemme help you with that….” “Well, you know, here’s what you shoulda done….” I even noticed it on evening newscasts where, going to commercial, an anchor might say something like, “Having trouble feeling secure in your home at night? We’ll show you how—after this break….”

Ruminating this, I grasp that America is the world capital of the modern era. And a great modern mantra is: the human mind, if given enough data and enough time, can solve any problem. America has embraced this with rabid fervor, displaying a gold rush mentality about problem-solving. Seeing a problem, we scramble frantically, fast-forwarding time and sucking up data, determined we can solve the problem at hand.

All this has led me to an experiment that I frequently administer at cocktail and dinner parties. You, too, can do this. But timing is important. So pay attention. Inevitably, at such a social gathering, someone will elevate a conundrum, a problem that is vexing him/her—maybe one of global proportions, maybe personal. You’ll note that quite quickly almost everyone will jump in with theoretical solutions. Let these problem solvers have a go for a while. Now, your task is to speak up and suggest that perhaps there is NO solution, that maybe the problem simply must be endured.

Watch what happens. For a few seconds, you’ll be the recipient of incredulous, silent stares—expressions that seem to say, “NO solution? How can any problem have NO solution? Have you lost your mind?” Then, dismissing you as a fleeting phantasm, they’ll all go back to their “here’s-what-you-ought-to-do’s.”

Okay, I’ll acknowledge that America’s “can-do” attitude isn’t all bad and has led to remarkable advancements in science, technology, and other realms. Many seemingly insurmountable challenges have, in fact, been overcome by American ingenuity. That’s a good thing.

But lately, I’ve wondered if the ledger isn’t tipping toward the negative. This idea that every problem is solvable has set us about such tasks as solving the Middle East’s problems while securing bountiful oil supplies for ourselves. How’s that going for us? And listen to the debates raging now. The arguments turn on who has the real solution to the problem.

Maybe from the get-go, there was NO solution and we should’ve kept our nose out of it. Seems to me that increasingly our neighbors in the world are saying to us what the Congolese politely said to me: your unsolicited advice (and meddling) isn’t always the most valued aspect of your presence.

Lately, I’ve brought this home to a more personal level. Right now, I have a boatload of problems. And there rails in my skull an annoying voice that insists that each of my problems has a solution somewhere. This, of course, lays a leaden burden over the top of all the other problems: why the hell can’t I find solutions to my problems. What’s wrong with me? Where are my solutions?

But what if I were to seriously entertain the notion that for at least some of my problems, there are no solutions?

I remember my uncle who suffered an unspeakable tragedy in his family when he was 38 years old. Months later, as he shared with my mother the burdens of his soul, she, a very emotional person, asked tearfully, “How are you going to manage?” He said, “Sis, sometimes there are no solutions. Sometimes all you can do is endure the moment.”

Picture this: Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, his sweat becoming like great drops of blood falling on the ground, lifting his voice to God: “Father, if you are willing, remove this cup from me; yet not my will but yours be done.” And, at that very moment, there emerges from the thicket, an American, saying, “Hold on, partner! Don’t be such a fatalist. There’s got to be a solution here—we’ll keep you away from that cross!”

Jesus showed us the great, redeeming power of enduring the moment. The older I grow, the more I think that faith never takes root and grows by way of brilliant solutions. Only when one is enduring the moment does faith grow like kudzu.

And perhaps this more than any other reason is why I miss Africa—Africa, where there live amazing people who glorify God, who cast themselves into the arms of God, as they endure the moment.

Ger

Gathering at Table

How wonderful that Passover and Maundy Thursday overlap this year. Last night I was at the Sedar table--the table of Freedom. Tonight, I will sit at Christ's table--the table of Redemption. This year, I think I will hear the words of Christ's invitation with the echo of Passover.

So…

May we live as free people…reclining at table on pillows remembering…

May we ask and wonder, “Why is this night different from other nights?”

May we remember the tears of the slaves of Egypt and the tears of Jesus in the garden…God heard their cries.

May we recall the bitterness of the betrayal and crucifixion to come and the faithfulness of that One who will bear it all for us.

May we remember the broken matzot, broken bread, broken dreams, broken body of Jesus.

May we shout, “Diaynew!”—(It would have been enough…) and think about all the ways that God has provided for us as a people throughout history and all the ways God has provided for us in our own lives….it would have been enough and yet Jesus became enough through the ultimate act of love.

May we remember as we walk these days that there is indeed a “scary middle” on Saturday…a dark day of waiting…and yet hope is coming.

As we sit this night at the table of freedom and redemption, may this be the beginning of our own liberation from the ways we are held captive by unhealthy patterns, the grip of sin and the curse of death.

May we remember, re-appropriate and receive the gifts that our ours…all at the table tonight.

Julie

Reading Palms

We celebrated Palm Sunday evening with dinner and a reading by David Sedaris, and a great time was had by all. You know Sedaris—he’s the author of Me Speak Pretty Someday and Dress Your Children in Corduroy and Denim and a couple of more recent books. His distinctive voice is also heard on NPR’s “This American Life” quite often.

He read several of his stories. Most were previously published, one was a working draft of a commencement address he is set to deliver in June at Princeton University. Sedaris is a master of the personal essay literary form, in particular the comedy division and romp-through-daily-minutia sub-division of the form. He knows how to set up a story. He knows how to steer the reader/listener into surprising territory without using verbal blindfolds, or resorting to other such trickery. We know that something is coming up ahead, we just don’t know what, and we are pretty confident that it will be worth the ride. He has a great eye for detail and an equally perceptive ear for the way things are said. And he is funny. Not uproarious, side-splitting funny, and not overly sophisticated, for-intellectuals-only funny, but genuine funny, carried over a sustained stream of sentences marked by sharp images and tight, interesting twists and turns.

He’s an artist who is hitting his stride after years of an apprenticeship stringing words and ideas and vignettes together. It must be quite rewarding for him to be able to experience his work bear fruit. So many artists like him experience only the labor pains and never the beautiful child.

And he is one gracious individual. His late mother and still present father raised him right. He was very patient with the audience during the Q and A part of his presentation, a couple of whom asked loony tune questions (note to everybody: don’t be caught dead raising your hand in such a setting; resist the temptation; think about something else). At the book signing after the reading, we watched him take all the time his fans wanted from him. It clogged up the line a great deal, but no one seemed to mind.

As it turned out, a member of my church, through a friend of her son’s, knew Sedaris and had been a guest in his home. As he was walking to the book-signing table, he noticed her in all that crowd, and stopped his modest little entourage long enough to talk to her and ask about her and her family. In my quite limited experience, real artists who are not real head cases are not all that common.

I should leave it there. But there’s a but coming, and you knew it, didn’t you? Actually there are two. The butt siblings, Seymour and Gargantua.

After the reading, I thought back to one of the first such events my wife and I attended. Eudora Welty came to our neighborhood in the late seventies. Or maybe it was in the early eighties. No matter. We saw her in the auditorium at the UK College of Agriculture. She read one story, “Why I Live at the P.O.,” but it was enough. I can still hear her pronounce, in soft Mississippi tones and through her overbite, the name of the sister of the narrator: Stella-Rondo.

I compared experiences. Eudora (what a name: “Good Gift”) read in a much smaller venue. The price for admission to the Ag Auditorium was zero. Zilch. For Sedaris, who was in the midst of a 35 city tour in 36 days, our seats cost forty bucks. Each. At one, I heard personal essays, which, as I have said, were of A-1, Top O’ the Line quality. At the other, I heard fiction, in the shorter format.

The content of both readings was funny, in that sustained way described above. Both saw us leaving with smiles on our faces. But for me anyway, the smile by Eudora was deeper and longer lasting. That’s because I believe that fiction is a deeper, more resilient artistic expression. This from one who spends not a little time messing around with personal essays of his own. Fiction, I believe, requires more from the writer, and maybe from the reader, and therefore the rewards are that much greater.

“Why I Live at the P.O.” is written in the first person singular. But it is not about Eudora. It is about a young woman who just got fed up with her family one day -- especially the spoiled and conniving Stella-Rondo -- and decided to spend both her nights and her days at the next-to-smallest P.O. in the state of Mississippi, where she happens to be Postmistress. When I heard then, or today read that story, I don’t think much about Eudora at all. It’s the story and the people who populate it. When I hear a personal essay, its the story-teller who is featured, and who rarely gets down in front so that I can see what it is he or she is trying to tell me.

And the best thing that Sedaris did was his opening story, which was pure fiction, and also written in the first person singular, but it was not about him. It was about a crow who one day flew down to visit and share conversation with a mother sheep soon after she gave birth to a lamb. Maybe it’s like this. When the author gets out of himself or herself a little bit, putting some distance between what happened and who’s telling about it, then I can go farther, or deeper or more satisfyingly with him. Or her. I relate better as the author decreases so that the story can increase (John 3:30 anyone?).

I have similar feelings about preaching and churching and following Jesus in general. Though how I carry those feelings out I am less confident.

The other butt sibling came in a comment that Sedaris made during the Q and A. The question was about the factual basis of his stories. He seemed to be on his way to making a point with which I sincerely, undyingly agree: sometimes there fiction holds a truth that non-fiction cannot touch. But then he got side-tracked. He made a reference that that guy’s memoir about his life as a drug addict that turned out to be mostly false. “A Million Little Pieces” or some such title. The author doesn’t interest me enough to look up his name. From there he switched to Frank McCourt’s marvelous memoir, Angela’s Ashes. He said that it wouldn’t make any difference if McCourt turned out to be a rich man living in Dublin and whose mother had it easy all her days. It wouldn’t ruin the story.

It would for me. If it’s a memoir, that means that its main contents took place in history and in space. It’s not just true, and it’s not just factual. It’s both. Allowances are made for exaggeration and for fuzzy memories. But when the spine of the story is strictly a product of the mind, then it ceases to be a memoir. It’s fiction. Call it that. Let it be what it is. There’s more art there anyway. More imagination and more discipline are required. Who cares if sales for fiction are plummeting these days? To move one’s genre a couple of notches just to capture the market betrays the writer’s trust. Besides, the market is fickle. The moment one tries to go where she or he thinks it is might be the very moment the market decides to return to home base for the writer.

It’s a mater of proportion. Fact-checking the Bible, in a strong majority of cases, gets us nowhere. Who cares if the mustard seed is not the smallest of seeds? The meaning of the saying is the same. The prodigal son, the good Samaritan, and the man who wanted to give a big marriage feast are characters, not real people. But they illustrate truth nonetheless.

On the other side of the equation, things are different. If, say, the Exodus in the Old Testament and the resurrection accounts in the New Testament are but figments of someone’s imagination, or merely metaphors, or human projections onto an empty divine screen, then who needs them? They might be interesting cultural artefacts, but certainly not something to build a life around. If the resurrection has only a “spiritual” meaning, then I don’t think the celebration of it is worth hiring trumpet players for Easter morning. It would be a whole lot better to sleep in that and every Sunday and for non-eastering preachers to admit that they had been hoodwinked and go out and do some honest work for a change.

- Dee

Ride on Home, Jesus

Palm Sunday Week, 2006.

I have been thinking this week, in my parents’ house on Center Drive in Mt. Pleasant, Michigan, about the nature of “home.” For this week I have come home to a place that is not home. It is true that my parents are here, and the furnishings of the house they have lived in for twenty-five years are familiar; they include some I grew up with. This town they have lived in now for almost 40 years is also familiar. Moreover, the people here (a few anyway) know me; they recognize me; they are not only kind to me for my parents’ sake, they even think I belong here somehow. But I do not. I have never lived here; this is not home.

I’m not even sure this is home for my parents, though they have lived here for . . . 37 years. I think they still think of northern New York State, where they grew up, where they met, where their parents are buried, as home. But I may be projecting. And at the same time, I’m wondering, “Is there home?”

In Saul Bellow’s The Dean’s December, Dean Albert Corde does come home, if we mean by “home” the place he grew up in, where his parents are buried. Dean Corde comes home to Chicago, but it is not the Chicago he grew up in. Of course, it isn’t. He’s not surprised; he’s an intelligent man; he’s read Thomas Wolfe. The dean knows that he can’t return to the Chicago of his childhood. Nor can he find the Chicago he hopes for. Chicago cannot go in the direction he would have it: it is too big, too complicated, and too hellbent in its own direction and on its own destruction.

This December, the dean is looking at Chicago from afar. His wife Minna (the astronomer) has taken him to her home, Bucharest, to attend with her the illness, the death, and the funeral of her mother. In the cold, gray still-communist Rumanian capital, they stay in the cold, gray flat that Minna grew up in. They sleep in her little bedroom—which is little changed.

The city itself has not changed at all. But Minna is so lost in it that she hardly survives her visit. She wouldn’t have survived without her mother’s friends. Even with them, she cannot come home, and this is true even though she has carefully kept the road home clear. For example, she has never given up and declares she will never give up her Rumanian citizenship for U.S. citizenship as her childhood friend Vlada has.

On the other hand, neither Vlada nor Minna were ever truly Rumanian, though both lived their entire young lives in Bucharest (speaking Rumanian). Vlada’s family was Serbian. Minna’s family is Macedonian.

I grew up in southwest Virginia, and I still think of that at least as where I’m from, though my family is, as I’ve said, from northern New York State. Still, when people ask me where home is, that’s what I say, “I grew up in southwest Virginia.” And in many ways I’m at home there still, as if I could breathe best at 2500 feet among oaks and dogwoods and people who use the word “tar” to refer not only to the surface of a road but to a wheel on an automobile. On the other hand, I have no one there, in the town I grew up in. We’ve all grown up and gone away. And we’ve all read Thomas Wolfe.

Jesus hadn’t though, unless sometime in his pre-existence (and Wolfe’s). So, this week he starts home. That’s what I’m thinking anyway, this Palm Sunday week. He was born in Bethlehem, true. There was a time in Egypt. The boyhood in Galilee. Still, Jerusalem is home. That’s where his father’s house is (Luke 2:49; Mark 11:17). So on Palm Sunday, he is coming home.

Except he can’t.

Rick

The Media

“Bashing the media” is a popular sport down here in my neck of the wood—especially of late, as the national news pipelines have become high-pressure water cannons blasting away at Republicans, from the president on down to congressmen and cabinet members. This being a state redder than crimson, most folks here are nervous and on edge, and so they bash the media with extraordinary energy. “Aw, that’s just the media. None of that stuff’s true!” “The media hates the president because he’s a godly man!” [In my state we think “media” is singular and “license” is plural: “Didcha get your license?” “Yep, got ‘em yesterday.”]

My own politics being diametrically opposed to most in my state, I used to feel sympathy for the media. Sometimes, on finding myself in the middle of a media bash, especially if I’d had a beer or two, I would snatch the ball and run it with crazy, mad sarcasm. Someone might’ve just said, “The media NEVER gives us the GOOD news from Iraq!” And I would steal the ball and bark, “That’s right! You know, don’t you, that the war is actually over. We won! The troops are all home. But the media is making us think it’s still going on and we’re losing!” Usually, this would bring the game to a shuddering halt—a sudden silence, many eyes looking quizzically at me, until someone said, “Don’t be a smart ass.”

In the recent past, however, I’ve resigned my position as defenseman, owing largely to the religiously-themed crap that the media has been bringing front and center. How ‘bout this Michael Baigent character with his book The Jesus Papers: Exposing the Greatest Cover-Up in History? I’ve got less problem with the author—who has a right to write an inane book and engage a publisher and publicist—than I do with networks who park their first-string anchors across from Baingent and nod and blink with gravitas as the guy explains how Jesus conspired with authorities to fake his death and eventually slip away to Provence with Mary Magdalene. (And, turns out, this book is a re-hashing of another he co-wrote in 1982.)

Then, there’s the “Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer” (mentioned below by Lynn) published last week in the American Heart Journal. Again, my beef isn’t really with the document itself so much as with how the media set it on the hook and then bob and weave and tease with it. This study is among a multitude of similar studies conducted over the past two decades which—if tallied altogether—would reflect mixed results. But less than three weeks before Easter, it splashes across front pages and leads at least one evening network newscast.

Finally, tonight, I flip on CNN (will I ever learn?) where Wolf Blitzer, going to commercial, teases me with the promise of an upcoming report on the Gospel of Judas Iscariot, a new document that, says Wolf, may shock the Christian world. I’ve had enough. I switch off the TV. Two months ago, I had seen this thing in a tiny recess on the internet: The document, possibly 1,600 years old, may provoke a substantial dialogue among serious Christian scholars. Again, my gripe isn’t with the document itself; it’s that our friends the media (the big media) have sat on the story until right before Easter. It’s not about the news; it’s about the effect.

It dawned on me not long ago who the media really is. He’s a salesman. I used to think he was a newsman—a person whose mission was to bring me the news, the truth of “what’s happenin’ now.” Now I see he’s a salesman, whether he knocks on my door as Fox News, CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, etc., his primary mission is not to bring me the news; it’s to sell product to me. He will package his “news” so that it best sells me whatever products he’s peddling (advertising). And don’t start with that NPR mantra; they’re panderers, too.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not completely cynical. Having lived in a dictator-led nation, I see benefits to journalism here in a relatively free society. But I’ve lost my faith in “the media” as a reliable source.

I’ve thought a lot about that word “media.” Is this not an agent that, by definition, must “mediate” something? I think so. The media gather up stuff, all kinds of stuff, and then they mediate (mold it, fold it, squeeze it) and pitch it toward you and me. Thus we live in an extremely mediated world.

What would be an alternative to a mediated world? Might it be an “immediate” world? And there’s the rub—for me, at least—everywhere I turn, it seems we’re so taken by the mediated world, that we’ve lost touch with the immediate one. In our churches, in our denominations, in our casual conversations, our view is primarily a result of a reality described by the media.

I’m beginning to think there’s an immediate world all around us that we’re not noticing.

Will you help me find it?
Ger

Prayer and Preparation

Last week, I had the honor and privilege of participating in a Women’s Sedar—Miriam Cup—held at the Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. This is my second women’s Sedar and each year it becomes more powerful for me.

We gathered as women- not to do the Passover Sedar, but a preparation Sedar celebrating Miriam. We omitted some of prayers that would only be appropriate on Passover, but submitted powerful stories and prayers of the struggle of justice and liberation for Jewish women.

The evening began:

We have come here together to build something holy.
A Makom Kadosh, separate and apart.
We have come to rest, to sing, and tell stories.
We have come to learn, to teach, and to grow.
We bless this time with our presence.
We welcome G-d’s Presence into our midst.

Then after the traditional blessing of the light and lighting the Shabbat candles we proceeded with the “burning of the chametz”. Chametz is the Hebrew word for “leven.”

The Torah requires that chametz neither be eaten, nor seen, not even located in one’s house during Pesach/Passover (Exodus 13:3, 7,15). All yeast-based baked goods must be removed from the premise (Exodus 12:5) The burning of the chametz marks the symbolic division between chametz and matza, winter and spring, the evil inclination and the desire for purity.

The rabbi talked to us not only about physical leven, but other ways in which we are “puffed up” or living beyond our limitations…those things we need to rid ourselves of, relinquish, let go of, so that we might celebrate a kosher Pesach---or perhaps for us Christians—a holy Holy Week.

In what ways do you and I need to prepare for the journey to Jerusalem? How do we separate ourselves from our daily spiritual journey, Lenten journey into this holiest of weeks? What must we let go of and how can we be open to what God would do in us as we open to God’s amazing work?

We wrote down those things on a piece of paper along with leftover chametz. As the smoke rose we recited the ancient Hebrew prayer of preparation..

All chametz in my possession, whether I have seen it or
not and whether I removed it or not, shall be nullified
and be ownerless as the dust of the earth.

Let us use this week to prayerfully prepare. To clean our homes, our schedules and our hearts that we might enter next week ready to receive the mitzahs—blessings that G-d wishes to give us.

Julie

Just Another Day

Today is Tuesday, the Fourth of April, 2006, the day the weather cleared after a lot of wind and rain came our way Sunday night and Monday morning. No one we know was hurt, but trees are down in many places, and some of our people are still without electrical power. The cold front the storms brought in their wake has cleared as well, and the sweater needed this morning became oppressive by noon. The sky is a soft and inviting blue, untouched by the hint of a cloud, horizon to horizon.

The public part of the day began as is usual for Tuesdays, with a lectionary group meeting at somebody else's church. There was a turn out of three - half our full enrollment. But it allows more time for those present to talk. One of us is preaching on the first half of the Palm Sunday/Passion Sunday continuum, another prefers Passion, and the third will languidly preside over a worship service designed around Walter Wangerin's "Cry of the Whole Congregation." No room for preaching there.

Ann, the person doing the Passion Sunday sermon, plans to follow an ambitious and creative curve in the scripture. (Since Lynn Williamson left our group of lecto-maniacs, Ann is the smartest of our lot. In my world, since the seventh grade, it's always been a girl. I'm getting used to it by now.) She's comparing the woman who pours an expensive jar of nard on Jesus' head at the beginning of Mark's passion account with Pontius Pilate toward the end. The woman seems to get Jesus; Pilate obviously does not. The woman's act is bold, risky, costly, and not a politically correct thing to do in 21st Century terms. Pilate's behavior is as gutless as it is calculating. "Hi. My name is Pontius, and I'm a suck-up, minor league bureaucrat." "Hello, Pontius."

But we do similar things, I've noticed, ducking this confrontation, ignoring that conflict, dodging this issue, congratulating ourselves that we pick our battles wisely, that we want to live to fight another day. Are church pastors doomed to be people pleasers? It seems legitimate that we want to touch peoples' lives and be touched by them, which requires sustained relationship, a degree of intimacy, and shared affection - appropriately expressed, of course. Prophets have the luxury of pissing people off and then going on to the next town. Pastors can't. We clean up other peoples' messes; we're not supposed to make them.

Even with this danger dogging our days, though, being a local church pastor is a wonderful vocation. We speak truth from another angle. We know not just the Gospel and its trajectory toward peace and justice; we also know the people in our care who, like us, try to hit that mark, but usually miss. Sometimes by a mile. And in our business, to know is to love. Perhaps to understand. Always to forgive.

When I got back to my church after the lectionary group meeting, getting out of my car, a happily noisy bird captured my attention. It was perched about ten feet high in a plumped up for spring, budding weed of a tree that was wildly over named by some jokester as a Tree of Heaven. The bird was some kind of sparrow, I think; reddish-brown on top, unmarked grey breast, with a stripe around its eye. It was not the White-Throated; but because a bright sun was behind the little fellow, I couldn't see it clearly. I'll have to look it up when I get home.

It's song was splendid. It consisted of four, sometimes three sets of paired notes. The first a trilled dree, the second a higher pitched eet. "Dree eet, dree eet, dree eet, dree eet!" the bird broadcast, obviously taken with himself. Between dree eet's he pruned himself busily and kept an eye on me with nervous twitches of his head. Over in the patch of woods behind the church, another bird promptly answered each measure of music: "Dree eet, dree eet, dree eet, dree eet." I had no idea what, exactly, their notes were proposing, but it sounded like a lot of fun.

This perfectly blue, re-warming spring day is also the anniversary of the assassination of the Reverend Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968. He was thirty nine years old. Same age as Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when he died, also in April,but on the 9th, not the 4th, in 1945. Now there are two pastors who could ruffle some feathers while being admired, even adored. I appreciate the fact that their situations differ greatly from ours, but still. They make me think.

I pulled down a yellowed copy of Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, by Dr. King. At the bottom of page 193 he writes:

American Negroes must come to the point where they can say to their white brothers, paraphrasing Gandhi: We will match your capacity to inflict suffering with our capacity to endure suffering. We will meet your physical force with soul force. We will not hate you, but we cannot, in good conscience, obey your unjust laws. Do to us what you will and we will still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children; send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our communities and drag us out on some wayside road, beating us and leaving us half dead, and we will still love you. But we will soon wear you down by our capacity to suffer. And in winning our freedom we will so appeal to your heart and conscience that we will win you in the process.

A few pages later, he finishes his 1958 book this way:

In a day when Sputniks and Explorers dash through outer space and guided ballistic missiles are carving highways of death through the stratosphere, nobody can win a war. Today the choice is no longer between violence and nonviolence. It is either nonviolence or non-existence. The Negro may be God's appeal to this age - an age drifting rapidly to its doom. The eternal appeal takes the form of a warning: "All who take the sword will die by the sword."

"Our capacity to suffer." Just in time for Good Friday.

Anybody here, seen my old friend Martin?
Can you tell me where he's gone?
He freed a blot of people,
But the good, seems they die young.
I looked around, and he was gone.

Dee

DST’ED

"It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something."– Franklin D. Roosevelt

My friend Betty died Friday about noon. Just that very morning in the newspaper there was an AP story, datelined New York and headlined “Study: Prayer may not help seriously ill.” The article summarized the results of a $2.4 million study that followed 1,800 patients at six medical centers. The study’s results will appear in the American Heart Journal on April 4, 2006.

According to the story,

In the largest scientific test of its kind, heart surgery patients showed no benefit when strangers prayed for their recovery.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a slightly higher rate of complications. The researchers could only guess why.

The researchers emphasized that [they]…could not address whether God exists or answers prayers made on anothers behalf. The study could look only for effects from the specific prayers offered as part of the research, they said.

The highly anticipated study “did not move us forward or backward” in understanding the effect of prayer, said Dr. Charles Bethea, a co-author and cardiologist at the Integris Baptist Medical Center in Oklahoma City. “Intercessory prayer under our restricted format had a neutral effect.”

My friend Betty died Friday about noon. Her doctors were devastated not only by her death but also by their inability to know what caused her sudden illness or how to cure it. Her daughter was devastated because the natural therapies failed to save her. After one of Betty’s several rallies over the course of her seven-week hospitalization, another daughter said, “The doctors say it’s the steroids; my sister thinks it’s the vitamins and minerals; I think it is prayer.” Betty’s pastor—that would be me (I?)—grieves not only for the loss of a fine woman, talented artist, a dedicated church woman, and a faithful and generous disciple; I grieve also—in the word “grieves” root meaning—that I have been robbed at least one understanding of prayer. I generally put little stock in God research. Certainly, given my own experience, I’m not surprised.

So, taking the advice of FDR, I am trying something. I am trying the approach of a song in current play on country radio here in Casper.


Jesus take the wheel/Take it from my hands/ Cause I can't do this all on my own/ I'm letting go/ So give me one more chance/ To save me from this road I'm on /Jesus take the wheel

I’ve worked too much recently, I’m grieving and seeking to be a pastor to those who are also grieving, and I got the Daylight Savings Time spring forward, I lost an hour blues. Jesus take the wheel.

Lynn