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
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
posted by Rick at 6:04 AM
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