Theologic Al's Bar & Grill

Fallen, Fallen Is Babylon the Great

2006-10-16T14:09:00.000-07:00

Adam and Eve fall into separation. They hide themselves from one another; they hide from God.

Babylon falls into desolation.

What happens to our songs, when we’ve sung them. Heine imagines that they overcome separation . . . and offer consolation.

Ich wollte, meine Lieder
Das wären Blümelein:
Icht schickte sie zu reichen
Der Herzallerliebster mein.

Ich wollte, meine Lieder
Das wären Küsse fein:
Ich schickt’ sie Heimlich alle
Nach Liebchen’s Wängelein.

Ich wollte, meine Lieder
Das wären Erbsen klein:
Ich kocht’ eine Erbsensuppe,
Die sollte köstlich sein.

I wish my songs
Were little flowers.
I’d send them to be smelled
By the love of my heart.

I wish my songs
were delicate kisses.
I’d send them in secret
To my sweetheart’s cheek.

I wish my songs
Were little peas.
I’d cook them in a soup
Which would be delicious.

If they fly to the one we love, they tickle her nose or her cheek. And if they stay at home, they tickle our tongues—and fill our bellies.

Rick

Another Footnote: Song

2006-10-14T09:55:00.000-07:00

When we’re in love, we sing!

We don’t sing only when we’re in love. Though we do sing then. You lie there, smiling at the ceiling. After a while, you get up: it’s morning, and past. You go downstairs, look absently into the refrigerator. You lean out the back door, blinking into the sun. You’re humming. Your heart is full.

But all kinds of things fill our hearts. Consider: “The struggle itself . . . is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy” (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus). Maybe he’s singing Sam Cooke’s “Chain Gang”: Hoo! Ah! Hoo! Ah! Is he singing because labor is grace—the struggle itself—or because song brings grace to the labor.

But Camus? And grace? Wait a minute!

True. Camus may imagine a world without God. At least, he imagines an absurd world—without meaning. But we are separating grace and meaning (not to mention thinking about natural rather than saving grace). Besides the full heart comes from something other than “meaning.”

Whatever that means.

It means that joy happens (by grace). We don’t think about what our joy means until later. We just sing: “I cannot keep from singing.” Or, “Who put the bomp in the bomp-a-bomp-a-bomp? Who put the ram in the ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong?”

Rick

And God created singing.

2006-10-12T07:26:00.000-07:00

When we’re in love, we sing!

Amazing grace—how sweet the sound—
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear

God’s saving presence. May we think of it as grace, not in terms of revelation. May we think of it as an action of God, not a statement?

Amazing grace—how sweet the sound. Does that mean that “grace” has a sound? I take it that it does. But then, what is the nature of the sound? Is it the sound of the words “amazing grace”? Is it the sound of the song that we are singing? Or, does grace itself have a sound?

Amazing grace—how sweet the sound—
That saved this wretch from fear!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was deaf but now I hear.

If it is grace I hear, I must hear also the saving presence of God, for that is the nature of grace. Listen.

If God is omnipresent—accept that God is omnipresent just for a moment—then will God not be omnipresent for reconciliation, salvation? If we just “cock an ear,” the ear that God has touched with the sound of grace, we shall hear.

And then?

I once was lost, but now am found,
Was deaf but now I hear.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to sing

What do we do when we hear a tune, one that catches our ear? We begin to sing along with it. Our hearts also catch the song and repeat it. See—or listen to—Wordsworth’s “The Solitary Reaper,” not my favorite, but you'll get the point:

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.

No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.

Will no one tell me what she sings?—
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?

Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;—
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more.

Not that you should use Wordsworth to make a point. But, there it is.

First Footnote

2006-10-11T12:34:00.000-07:00

Grace is not a contract; it is an action, a “kiss.” [10/10]

Which is a mingling . . . and a moment.

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the Ocean,
The winds of Heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single;
All things by a law divine
In one spirit meet and mingle,
Why not I with thine?—

See the mountains kiss high Heaven
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdained its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth
And the moonbeams kiss the sea:
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?

- Percy Bysshe Shelley, “Love’s Philosophy”

Wine comes in at the mouth
and love comes in at the eye:
That’s all we shall know for truth
Before we grow old and die.
I lift the glass to my mouth,
I look at you and sigh.

- William Butler Yeats, “A Drinking Song”

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand café in the sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

- Lawrence Ferlighetti, “Recipe for Happiness Khabarovsk or Anyplace"

Or,

Rodin

Gustav Klimt

Edvard Munch

Fragonard!

My longer poem “Thursdays” describes an odd assortment of men, a newspaper editor, a priest, a classicist among them, who meet Thursday mornings to discuss theology over breakfast. The conversation wanders: Ananias and Sapphira, Adam and Eve, lying, loss, the rapture—grace not as a kiss but rape, at least according to Father Tim, who has the last word:

Father Tim bows his head, “O God of fire, of two-
edged sword and Tim La Haye: Come rape us from our cars,
our churches, hotel rooms . . .” Unbowing, says, “Instead:
imagine an apocalypse by Fragonard—
a quiet sunblent garden, God le chevalier,
polite and sly, the New Jerusalem, cheeks rouged
a delicate, and decorous, pink, her stockings, lace—
and bosom—white as snow, as wool, as sins forgiven,
yet waiting to be taken, desert her spaniel, slip
away this very afternoon, to be disrobed
and loved—whatever comes tomorrow. Hasn’t she
her reasons to believe tomorrow may not come?”

- Rick

The Grace of Starting All Over Again, Part One

2006-10-10T17:06:00.000-07:00

As Gerald Stephens, who has stood behind this bar and sat at it, serving and drinking—pitching it out there and consuming it—as Gerald knows, I have been thinking these days in circles about “natural grace.” Here, over the next several days, some of those thoughts.

Apologia pro apologia sua: I haven’t tried to organize these thoughts in any particular matter, so you’ll see the circles. I won’t try to begin at the beginning or come to an end. I won’t try to avoid repetition or loose ends. Few of the questions will be rhetorical; and even the rhetorical questions can by answered, or challenged.

The apology for the argument having been made, here it is, or one part of it.

One assumption—true or false, fair or unfair: We, meaning Reformed Protestants, tend to confuse grace and revelation. I’m going to try to separate them. Here's my assumption: Revelation, I’m going to say, has content, what is revealed. Grace does not. It is not a contract; it is an action, a “kiss.”

So revelation is known in some sense. I don’t know at this point whether that sense has to be intellectual or has to involve some sort of assent. But grace is experienced. We may or may not be able to describe the experience. Even if we can, our description is not the experience.

Even if we can. I’m tempted to believe and assert—this seems true of “primary” or “saving” grace, at any rate—that we can describe only the results of the experience. Even the contractual languages of the various atonement theories, e.g., describe only the results of the saving event—how salvation might have been present in Christ’s passion. (The theories do agree: salvation was present. I say “might have been,” because they disagree about how it was present.) In any case, we don’t—at least I don’t think we successfully—describe grace itself, because we can’t: it has no content. We describe our experience of the gift of grace.

What is the nature of that experience? If redemption finds analogy in love—let’s say it does—then we could start describe redeeming grace in terms of “being in love.” When we’re in love, we sing!

- Rick

Fire on the Mountain

2006-08-15T18:41:00.000-07:00

I was thinking about a post on the hints of fall that have appeared in the last week or so and the brevity of summer in Wyoming. There is the smell of wood smoke because probably less than 10 miles from here there is a forest fire currently out of control. The church I serve is actually just on the edge of the evacuation zone, and many people we know are in harm's way. The friends' cabin where we have spent much time this summer may already be gone. I doubt if this disaster with a small "d" will make the news much outside of Wyoming and neighboring states, so I'm including the website for the local newspaper. (http://www.casperstartribune.net/) There are some pictures and words. Keep us in your prayers. More later. Lynn

Heat Index

2006-08-03T06:27:00.000-07:00

I’m itching to take part in a conversation that gets to the core of the nature and grace debate, between what Rick calls “secondary” grace and—what?—“primary” grace? Or, a broader and better pair of antinomies might be reason and revelation. What do we know on our “own,” and what do we know only because the Bible tells us so, and what is the scale of values between one form of knowledge and the other?

Before that discussion is joined, however, I, at least, need to re-read the Karl Barth and Emil Brunner brouhaha that addressed the same issue. Barth said his famous “Nein!” to Brunner’s embrace of natural theology, and I think that the parting of their theological ways led to a breach in their friendship as well.

If I were up on the lines these two drew in the spiritual sand, I would talk about global warming today. And this is where my current prejudices would lead me, affected, I hasten to admit, for the sake of full disclosure, that the outside thermometer hit 95 today and the humidity seemed to be in the 90’s as well, making the living and breathing around here miserable. I worked for awhile in the yard, doing light chores and I sweated through my clothes immediately, before I retreated inside to write these words. And yes, I have air conditioning, but it’s set at 80 (I’d swear if I were the swearin’ type), which still feels good compared to the oven that cooks outside the door.

So, my proposed comments might just be colored by current environmental conditions. Whatever, my argument would agree that it is arrogant and presumptive of humanity to think that we, at our worst, can permanently disrupt the climate of the earth. I realize that there are huge, barely understood forces at work that bring on cycles of cooling and warming to our planet, and many of these switch on and switch off whether we want them to or not. In other words, they are bigger than us.

But I would also contend that the earth is set within a delicate network of matter and energy, between light and solid objects, between waves and particles. (I’ll spare my thousands of readers out there, for now, my take on string theory, or the theory of everything, but you’d better behave or I’ll crack open that subject, and my-oh-my, then you’ll be sorry).

Where was I? The delicate network. Its exists within a rather thin set of limits—a few degrees here and a few degrees there really make a difference. Was hurricane Katrina especially nasty because the Gulf waters were “unnaturally” warmer than they were supposed to be? Maybe, maybe not. It’s all about that Tipping Point that Malcolm Gladwell is making some major coin on these days. It is unquestionably true that humanity has kicked up a huge amount of carbon into the atmosphere over the past few centuries, and, as China and India catch up with the First World on energy consumption, a whole lot more carbon is being readied for lift off. Long and short: we’re burning too much wood, oil and coal and we’re cutting down too many trees. All that carbon blocks sunlight from making it to our planet’s surface, and, at the same time, traps what sunlight does make so that it bounces around between heaven and earth. The full effect is that we are getting darker and warmer at the same time. Again, it’s not that carbon is bad. We have to have it or we don’t live at all. It’s just that we are consuming and excreting too much of it too fast.

So, this is my untutored take on things—and I haven’t even seen Al Gore’s movie yet. We are not going to destroy the earth. The earth will take care of itself. In fact, that is precisely what it is doing right now. It’s preparing to cure itself of the human disease. It will heat up or cool down, whichever proves easier, and cast us into the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth, as St. Matthew might put it. Then, a score or two million years after that, there will barely be a trace of our existence, and the earth will be merrily chugging along, doing what it always has done. It will still be the home base in its part of the Milky Way for God’s great experiment of life. The earth will teem with plants and animals in many and various forms, ever adapting and evolving, and trying on new colors and playing new games. It’s just that there won’t be any of our descendants romping on its playgrounds.

Our species had its chance. We were appointed to be stewards of creation, commissioned to be God’s vice-regents, “ruling” nature in God’s image, which is to say lovingly and sacrificially and steadfastly and reverently. But we botched the job, or turned it down altogether. We hated the earth and our neighbors, robbed it and them, lived only for the moment, and cheapened the free grace of God into a commodity we could buy and sell and hoard for ourselves. So the whistle blew and we were ordered out of the pool. Which, at the time, we were all too happy to leave, because it warmed up so much it felt like bath water. Looked like it too, with that filthy ring of human scum on the sides.

If you happen to be a radical environmentalist, then you might want all this to happen. It’s better for the earth, though it isn’t much good for you me, our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, boy cousins and girl cousins. So if you can’t stand all those people, even the sight of them, then turn up the heat. Bring the humidity up, too. Melt them glaciers. Bake those wheat fields. Swamp the eastern seaboard. We never did like Hoboken anyway. Let’s end it now, ourselves, before al Queda, the Sadr Militia, Hamas, Hezbollah, and their kind do it for us.

Oddly enough, repentance is still possible. Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound. If the resurrection of Jesus Christ is in any way, shape, or form true, then there is hope for us and for our progeny. We can mend our ways and rediscover love and grace. We can live humble, quiet, respectful and joyful lives as we take care of the earth and of one another. We really can.

I say that not because I’m an optimist. I ain’t. I don’t think much about the human capacity to learn from its mistakes and make progress toward the life God intended for us from the beginning. But all the more strongly I do believe in the capacity to God to love and forgive, thereby to give us another chance, and help us to repent while God relents from the judgment which we brought on ourselves.

At least that is what I would say if I understood better the terms of the debate between natural and—what—supernatural? grace? No, between natural grace and the revealed grace of God. No, between the grace of creation and the grace of redemption. No, between… Oh, forget it. A feller can’t even think straight in all this heat. Check back with me after I have a refreshing, cool draft of Barth with a Brunner chaser.

As Ever,
Dee

An Inconvenient Truth

2006-07-30T21:08:00.000-07:00

What would I do without my friend Charlene, pastor of the First Congregational Church here in Casper. She has written a thoughful article for her congregation which I wanted to share here. It's not "inconvenient" for me that this is appearing as I am heading to the hills, the Black Hills, for a visit with family. Last week—well—conveniently, it's been too hot here to do anything. Lynn

An Inconvenient Truth

The Al Gore documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth presents the scientific case that global warming exists and asks the moral question: what are we going to do? As you watch: you see Mount Kilimanjaro in the process of losing its famous snows over three and a half decades, and Glacier National Park its glaciers in a similar period of time; you see an ice shelf in Antarctica (previously thought to be stable for another 100 years) breaking up within the astonishing period of 35 days; you see a healthy coral reef, juxtaposed with images of a dying coral reef that has been bleached by hotter ocean waters; you see the great inland seas of Africa and Russia dry up; you hear about polar bears being unable to find ice to rest on and drowning. I wanted to weep for “creation that has been groaning awaiting redemption” (Romans 8:12).

Gore, quoting Mark Twain, says "It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so." I believe that the church has some of those know-for-sures. We know that God gave us dominion over the earth and we are to be fruitful and multiply. Well, we have filled the earth, fulfilling that command and it is time to celebrate the completion of the task.

Then there is the inconvenient truth that we were given dominion over the earth. While people have tried to save this scripture by making it stewardship, dominion is a concept at odds with many other passages where humans are seen as sojourners, strangers, aliens on the land that belongs to God and has a independent relationship with God.

When you enter the land that I am giving you, the land shall observe a sabbath for the Lord.
Leviticus 25:2

The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine; with me you are but aliens and tenants. Throughout the land that you hold, you shall provide for the redemption of the land.
Leviticus 25:23-24

For you shall go out in joy, and be led back in peace; the mountains and the hills before you shall burst into song, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.
Isaiah 55:12

Let the heavens be glad, and let the earth rejoice; let the sea roar, and all that fills it; let the field exult, and everything in it. Then shall all the trees of the forest sing for joy before the Lord; for he is coming, for he is coming to judge the earth. He will judge the world with righteousness, and the peoples with his truth.
Psalm 96:11-13

Praise ADONAI from the earth, sea monsters and watery depths, fire and hail, snow and mist, storm-winds that obey his word, mountains and every hill, fruit trees and all cedars, wild animals and all livestock, creeping reptiles, flying birds,
Psalm 148:7-10

Humanity isn’t asked to sing for, dance for, praise for creation. Creation is capable of its own relationship and response to God. But we have used the concept of dominion to justify our extinction of 1000s of species and changing the climatic pattern of the earth. When the main element of this creation story is to tell us that God created and creation is good. If it is good why do we feel justified in polluting and killing the earth.

What would it mean for us if we accepted the inconvenient truth that God has an independent relationship with creation and that God calls upon us to redeem creation? “I was handed not just a second chance, but an obligation to pay attention to what matters.” Gore speaks briefly about the accident in April '89 when his young son was nearly killed by a speeding car. But it's a phrase or quote that I think can apply to all of us. He continues “I tell this story because it was a turning point that changed me in ways I couldn't have imagined .... I also reevaluated the nature of my public service. I questioned what it really means to serve” (pg 68).

What would it look like if we as a church began serving creation? Bill McKibben's article from the Christian Century, “Hot and Bothered” argues that churches need to respond like they did during the civil rights movement.

That is, church people in jail and arrested for protesting outside the environmental Protection Agency offices and coal-fired power plants. That is, churches demanding deep and dramatic changes from parishioners”

Can you imagine a church that takes serious a call to service; a call to live on the land as strangers, as people who have been given the earth to hold in trust for God; a call to experience creation singing with joy before God. Coming from an energy state, what would it mean to actually ask and demand that are representatives hear the cries of the earth and act to save creation?

What I Did on My Summer Vacation

2006-07-26T07:46:00.000-07:00

We went to Maine, is what we did. The three of us in our family, plus David, a travelling companion for our son, Seth. Seth just recently turned seventeen, which is quite an achievement. David has been seventeen for a good time longer.

We stayed in a old fishing shack fixed up with modern conveniences, like running water, electricity, a bathroom, kitchen, bedrooms, and quite serviceable furniture. All in all, though, it was still basic shelter. It was the location that gave it special charm. Built on stilts on the bank of a little creek that emptied quickly into the sea, the shack put us on the edge of the action. The tide’s action was the main event. At low tide, the creek was a trickle one could easily jump across; at high tide, the creek was 100 yards across in places, and gathered around the stilts that held the shack high and dry.

Across the creek, acres of salt water marsh spread lush and green. The grasses were uniform in height, according to species. One type of grass occupied the seaward edge of the marsh, another grew behind the first, taking over as a transition before giving way to the forests on higher ground. Slicing through the marsh was a channel connecting our creek’s little inlet with the full-sized bay to our north, Cape Porpoise.

Birds were everywhere, most of which we could not identify, because shore birds have never been our strong point. But we did recognize and enjoy a group of snowy egrets wading in the shallows upon jet-black legs and bright yellow feet. Breeding plumage was evident, but the breeding itself, well, that must have taken place behind closed bulrushes.

By the way, we worshipped on the second Sunday in July at St. Anne’s Episcopal Church, just south of our creek in Kennnebunkport. Not in the small but formidable church building did we worship, but outside, on a high bluff overlooking the open sea. This open air sanctuary was equipped with set of pews coated with gloss paint, facing a large stone altar. On the front row to our left sat members of the Bush family: George Herbert Walker Bush (“Poppy”) and Barbara, son Jeb Bush and his wife and children. Jeb’s sister (forgot her name) passed out bulletins to worshippers as they arrived and served as a Eucharistic minister during communion.

It was all very interesting. The summer priest was an affable sort. This was his normal post. Each season he comes up from Shreveport, Louisiana, where he is Dean of the Cathedral there. The sermon taxed neither the mind or spirit, but the liturgy was quite satisfactory. The priest, with a fine voice, supported a somewhat surprising repertoire of camp-style music, the words printed on handouts: Kum By Yah, We Are One in the Spirit, that sort of thing. Afterwards the Bushes hung around with the worshippers -- most of whom, like us, were visitors -- just like regular folk. Then they got in their secret service vehicles and left.

We were introduced to another Episcopal priest, the headmaster of St. Paul’s prep school in Concord, New Hampshire, and his wife. We talked on the church lawn under a bright and warming sun, also like regular folk. Afterwards, we bought coffee in town and had brunch back at the creek. Our host and hostess, Chris and Marcia, fixed blueberry pancakes and sausage. Later, we went out in their Boston Whaler onto the big water and sat watching harbor seals surface and play around. Again, all very interesting.

But what really captured our interest was the tide, coming in and going out, ebbing and flowing. We watched it build under a gorgeous, waxing moon, each night’s flow higher than the one before. And then we saw it lessen with the moon.

When you’re living on top of the tide like we were, when all of our actions are regulated by this planetary regulation, we learn to adjust, and in our case, very quickly. There’s a natural grace in and around the tide, the great cleansing action of the sea, the mixing of salt water with fresh, the churning of life and the estuarial genesis of life that goes on twice a day every day all over the world. The tide brings water from far way, varying places to the most local ones. It flows to possess land and air, reducing and elevating all to liquid. The stationary is set into motion, is linked with one and more of a thousand possible currents to wind up virtually anywhere before it rests. It rests just for awhile before the tide finds it and sets it once more in motion, into the swirling stream of life. It’s all about life, this grace, natural and otherwise. And this life, from the simplest to the most complex form of it, is all about grace.

As Ever,

Dee

Peace, Unity and Purity

2006-07-20T06:05:00.000-07:00

In the Burns and Burns Civil War on PBS, the recently late Shelby Foote said that one of the causes of the War Between the States was the failure of various interests within America to reach a compromise on issues like slavery and states’ rights. Americans pride themselves about being a principled, uncompromising lot, but the opposite is the case, he went on to say. The ability to compromise has been and continues to be a key American strength. But when sides hardened and stopped talking in the 1850’s, it was Johnny get your gun.

A similar dynamic played out during the days of Martin Luther. Before Luther, the Roman curia was expert at meeting reform movements with a disarming embrace. A monastic order might be established, both to give voice to the dissenting point of view and to bend it toward the overall Catholic cause. In this and other ways, the church thrived by being flexible. By the time of Luther’s 95 thesis, however, the church’s leadership had calcified into a particular pattern of positions, and there was no place in them for the ideas of this upstart Augustinian monk.

The General Assembly of the Presbyterian church approved a compromise carefully stitched together over four years by the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. And Gerald Stephens was right on in his earlier posting about the General Assembly coming to “his town.” One can detect a fresh breeze blowing through the Presbyterian Church, and it may stir up a new way of discerning and welcoming leadership for the Body of Christ. If that happens, it’s because a large, tradition bound, unwieldy bureaucracy was able to bend, to find an opening, to relax muscles of control.

Our church’s cleaving issue (in the double sense of something that holds together and splits apart) hasn’t the full weight of slavery or of salvation by grace by grace through faith. But it—the nature and practice of homosexuality—is hefty enough. Many, many years of thinking about the issue are under reconstruction. The emerging shape of such thought repulses some, while others rejoice. Whatever the outcome, the conversation has been launched, and cannot be recalled.

One senses fertile possibilities if the church can hold the compromise together long enough to let it germinate. “Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.” Paul tells us, and he wasn’t talking about Egbert and Lulaleen getting hitched. (Okay, 1st Corinthians 13 includes Lulaleen and Egbert’s relationship, so it’s acceptable to read it at a wedding, but we just need to remember that it’s aimed at the broader audience of all Christians, the whole church.) Part of the agony and the joy, the elation and the drudgery of living in faith with God and the people of God is learning how to endure “all things” together, like all kinds of personality types, divergent social and educational levels, competing political alliances, genetic and ethnic differences, theological persuasions, and various ways of expressing human sexuality. It is excruciating work, to live at this depth of intentional community. Many people, fleeing its intensity, retreat into shelters of sameness, under umbrellas of uniformity, especially in churches. But for those who stick with covenant faithfulness, through thick and thin, dividends of mercy and grace are received.

So it is like marriage. Life-long partners unwilling or unable to compromise hard won, deeply held values don’t stay married very long. Or they spend their lives in a loveless marriage, or, worst of all, an abusive one. Good marriages are marked by spouses who regularly, in big matters and small, meet each other more than half way.

This Presbyterian compromise concerning who may be ordained by whom and where will make us stronger believers in Jesus. Because both sides in the homosexuality debate had to give up something in order to build this bridge between them, lessons of humility have been taught and learned. Nobody knows all they think they know. Everyone needs to listen more and speak less. All benefit as they learn to be still, let God be God for a change, and see what new thing the Spirit will do blowing through and around a patient, open minded, grace-seeking people.

I recommend the most recent issue of Presbyterian Outlook in its entirety. It has the very un-Outlook cover of a couple walking in a grassy field under a huge, inviting sky. (By the way: how ‘bout that new editor, Jack Haberer, friends and cousins? That ol’ boy is doing ‘em a good job!). I particularly commend the article by Frances Taylor Gench, who, besides teaching at the “other Union Seminary,” the one in Virginia, was a member of the Theological Task Force on the Peace, Unity, and Purity of the Church. It’s a beautiful exposition of John 17, the “High Priestly Prayer” of Jesus. She writes:

“Now unity with God in Christ is one thing. The hardest thing, I think, to overhear is Jesus’ prayer for our unity with each other, for there may be no doubt of what it consists. For all those who believe in Jesus as the One sent from God—God’s own Son who binds God to us and binds us to God and to each other as God’s own children—that that unity consists in one thing above all else: love. The language of love is the primary language by which Jesus in John speaks of the life of the believing community. The one commandment, the only ethical injunction he gives us in John: love one another… the unity believers share lies in something beyond doctrinal agreement… It lies in our experienced love of God in Christ, which keeps us together in spite of our differences and links us with disciples past, present, and future. Mutual love is at the heart of John’s vision of the Christian life -- the identifying characteristic of the community that continues to exist in the world in Jesus’ name. “By this everyone will know that you are my disciples,” Jesus said, “if you have love for one another.”

You want true believers, look at the Middle East. Uncompromising people make great fundamentalists, and when mixed with small doses of political fervor and technological sophistication, fundamentalism, like its offspring, war, is unhealthy for children and other living things (remember that one?). Uncompromising people do not forgive others as they have been forgiven and neither do they love their enemies. Fundamentalists we have known have not impressed us with their understanding of the Sermon on the Mount, so recently the background text for these postings. They seem unwilling to bless those who persecute them, and unable to turn expose a left cheek after an assailant strikes the right. Not that any of us find those practices easy.

Though we were born a few years too late, we remember the days of the anti-war movement well, and marched in some of its demonstrations (It’s Your War, Too!, IT’S YOUR WAR, TOO!) Some of us even wrote letters to the editor expressing our disgust with the Christmas bombing of Hanoi in 1972 and the mining of Haiphong harbor. Our sociopolitical consciousness, such as it was, owed gratitude to the earlier civil rights movement and to the feminist movement which grew from the culture of peace-mongers. We’re not saying that we joined the Black Panthers exactly, and burning bras was all right with us because we kinda liked the resulting look. But with the misty-eyed and murky-minded conviction of a college sophomore, we pledged ourselves to be staunch supporters of the cause. “Compromise” was a dirty word, and no decent person with whom we associated would ever give an inch (Didn’t Janis Joplin sing a song about that, or was it Joan Baez?). Ah, those were the days.

And here we are this day praising compromise as a wonderful, life-giving thing. Maybe our praise is a sign of wisdom, or just of old age. Maybe it’s the easy way out for militant moderates like us, who still get all choked up over the idea of reconciliation of sworn enemies and who hold ever so tightly to the dream of the beloved community, made up of every breed of human beings imaginable, and their dogs and chickens, their cats and horses, too.

Or perhaps—just perhaps—through the sifting, thesis/anti-thesis/synthesis, dialectical doors of compromise lies the realm of maturity, of spiritual purpose, of which Jesus speaks, again, in the Sermon on the Mount. “Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48).

As Ever,
Dee

Combining Ignorances

2006-07-17T19:40:00.000-07:00

I have this penchant, it seems, for sitting down to write about things about which I know nothing—natural grace, Germany, the religious temperament—and tonight in one crashing attempt to combine my various ignorances, Goethe.

I’m particularly interested, this time, in the poem Gesang der Geister über den Wassern. Here it is:

Des Menschen Seele
Gleicht dem Wasser:
Vom Himmel Kommt es,
Zum Himmel steigt es,
Und wieder nieder
Zur Erde muss es,
Ewig wechselnd.

Strömt von der hohen,
Steilen Felswand
Der reine Strahl,
Dann stäubt er lieblich
In wolken wellen
Zum glatten fels,
Und leicht empfangen
Wallt er verschleiernd,
Leisrauschend
Zur Tiefe nieder.

Ragen Klippen
Dem Sturz entgegen,
Schäumt er unmutig
Stufenweise
Zum Abgrund.

Im flachen Bette
Schleicht er das Wiesental hin,
Und in dem glatten See
Weiden ihr Antlitz
Alle Gestirne.

Wind ist der Welle
Lieblicher Buhler;
Wind mischt vom Grund aus
Schäumende Wogen.

Seele des Menschen,
Wie gleichst du dem Wasser!
Schicksal des Menschen,
Wie gleichst du dem Wind!

And here’s a very bad translation or, more accurately, an English paraphrase:

The human soul—
It’s like water:
From heaven descending,
To heaven returning,
And down again,
Drawn to the earth,
Back and forth—always, back and forth.

Pouring from a high,
Steep wall of rock,
A pure stream
Breaks into mist,
Into waves of clouds
On the smooth rock below.
Then lightly
It simmers, like lace.
Quietly it whispers
Into the deep.

Where cliffs rise up,
It plunges down,
Mad with foam
Downward, down, down
Into the depths.

In a shallow streambed,
It slips through a meadow.
The stars see
Their reflections
In a polished lake.

The wind is the wave’s
Sweet, sweet lover,
Stirring swells
Deep within.

The human soul—
How like water!
Human fate—
How like the wind!

I have the utmost respect for translators, but I wouldn’t want to be one. It’s too hard to try to capture both sound and sense and avoid going off on your own tangent. Anyway, by the time I’m done—even with a job so bad, or wandering, I can't call it a translation—I don’t have energy for much more than one or two or three questions, some with (very) tentative answers.

The religious temperament—is it likely to be allegorical? If so—and it seems to me it is—to what extent?

Is this the way natural grace “works,” that is, we read into nature what we hope to see there? I think it is, at least in the Protestant tradition: it’s a matter of faith finding understanding and not the other way around. Not ever.

Finally, is water like the soul and wind like fate? Or conversely, is fate like the wind? It does tend to blow where it wills and sometimes gently and sometimes a gale; so sometimes we do hear the sound of it, but sometimes we don’t.

Is the soul like water? I’m not even sure I know what that question means, but it is the more arresting image. For example, if it were, the soul would take the shape of its container. Which is what, the body? Or, perhaps, the deeds that shape it? It would take the shape of its container. It would also run downhill. It would freeze at a certain temperature and float on itself; it would boil at another temperature and float away. As Goethe says, it would go up into the heavens; and then it would come back down. And it could come, though he doesn’t say so, as snow or sleet or hail as well as rain.

Fallling on the just and the unjust alike.

Rick

Consequences

2006-07-11T21:05:00.000-07:00

Dan and I went to see An Inconvenient Truth on Monday. As Al Gore says at one point about some of his illustrating video footage, “It’s like a nature walk through the book of Revelation.” There wasn’t anything in the nearly two-hour presentation about global warming that I didn’t know (except how funny Al Gore can be!). That’s what made the movie so compelling. It is time to stop knowing and start doing.

As the movie credits began to role to the background of an original song by Melissa Ethridge, I turned to Dan and asked, “Are we going off the grid now?” Dan said nothing. We’ve been moving that way for awhile anyway. Interspersed with the credits were suggestions for “simple” things to do. We’re doing most of them, and I had a picture of either using the poop from our three dogs (plus one visiting—Ziggy, of last week’s post) and the four cats or of finding a way for them to run on some kind of wheel and generate a little electricity.

We stood up to leave. I turned to Dan and said, “There are going to be consequences, aren’t there?” He said nothing. We got out of the theater. I suggested going to get a beer (walking of course) and talking about the movie. He smiled and said, “Let’s ride bikes.” See, I knew that there would be consequences.

Sometime last fall, Dan got a great deal on three yellow Hummers, which I think is a funny name for a bicycle. We gave one to Charlene’s 10-year-old son, who had outgrown his bike, and kept the other two. Dan has been riding his to work since the weather turned warm. Mine was been sitting in the living room, in the hall, and finally in the shed until the 4th of July when I finally agreed to ride it.

I went to K-Mart, got a helmet, and for the first time in thirty years, I got on a bicycle. I hadn’t forgotten how to ride a bicycle. I rode a bicycle—a blue Schwinn—all over town when I was a kid. I rode with no hands and no helmet. I had just never ridden one with brakes in the handle bars and gears to shift that can’t be shifted unless you are also pedaling. We went to an empty parking lot. As long as I was going up hill I was fine because I was going slow. It was coasting down hill that shook me up.

Monday night, I got on again, whined for awhile, and then for just a few minutes let go and enjoyed the ride. Don’t look for me in the Tour de anything. But who knows, I might ride to work or at least downtown to the movie theaters.

I’ve been working on a sermon on the Mark story about the beheading of John the Baptist. Since the reading from the Hebrew Scripture is the story of David bringing the ark of the covenant into Jerusalem, I’ve been playing with the metaphor of dancing, particularly Herod’s dancing around the truth of John and Jesus like a prize fighter.

I, however, am more likely to approach the dance with the truth of the Gospel just like I ride a bicycle, by paying too much to my feet—or in the case of the bicycle, just holding on so tightly that it’s not my butt or legs that hurt when I am finished. It is my shoulders. What I say every Sunday is that “God loves us. Let’s act like it.” That is as good a summary of the Gospel truth as I can come up. God’s love—which is often an inconvenient truth when I want to live my life by my own terms—has consequences. Good consequences. Good consequences when I am able to let go of myself and enjoy the ride—or Rick—the nap.

More Dogs Join the Hunt

2006-07-11T06:29:00.000-07:00

We were talking about the religious temperament, or I was, trying to decide what to believe: Are we religious by choice? By the grace of God? (To paraphrase Lady Brett to Jake Barnes at the end of The Sun Also Rises, “Yes, wouldn’t it be nice to think that?”) Or, are we religious by nature? It’s in our genes; and some of us are and some of us aren’t.

I don’t know what to think about this, so I take, if not the usual, a frequent refuge of fools. I start reading randomly. First, this old appreciation of El Greco I found recently among a friend’s cast-offs. “Take El Greco,” I say, as if that’s a step toward an answer.

Take El Greco, who began apparently as a painter of icons. That wouldn’t require a religious temperament, I don’t suppose, but it might be helpful to have one. And by all accounts El Greco did. That, or he had astigmatism.

That’s one alternative explanation for the increasingly elongated figures in the later paintings—not only elongated but disproportionate: astigmatism. But how to account for the fact that in the sculptures, the figures retain their natural dimensions?

So a religious explanation for the paintings seems more likely. The late El Greco wasn’t trying to paint reality. He was painting a vision, or his reaction to a vision—he was trying to paint the faith that was absorbing him. So, as Dale Brown (The World of Velázquez) points out, even when El Greco depicts the infant Christ’s adoration by the shepherds, “an event that particularly lends itself to realistic portrayal,” he avoids simple representation. Instead, while the shepherds are “recognizably human . . . as they realize that they have come upon the Christ Child, they writhe and assume fantastic postures. In distorting them,” Brown concludes, El Greco “conveys his own sense of awe in the presence of the divine.” He is not describing shepherds before the Virgin and child; he is portraying his own feeling of being twisted by the mystery of God.

Excursus: El Greco comes from Venice and Rome to . . . Toledo. Contrast Velázquez, who can’t wait to get out of Seville if it’s only as far as Madrid. He might have remained; there were more than enough religious commissions in the Andalusian city to keep him till death did them part. But Velázquez departed for the capital, because “his bent was clearly for the secular rather than the spiritual” (Brown again, though my italics). So off to Madrid and the Hapsburg court—poets and politicians, lords and ladies, lap dogs and dwarfs. O, brave new world . . . .

Huxley’s novel. I don’t want to go into why I was reading that recently—or rereading it—because then I’d have to admit that I wasn’t reading it; I was listening to it on two long car trips to Michigan and back. But Michael York was reading it. That must count for something in terms of cultural points.

At the end of the fifth chapter, odd little Bernard Marx is on his way to Solidarity Service to “achieve atonement” with his group of twelve. “Twelve of them ready to be made one, waiting to come together, to be fused, to lose their twelve separate identities to a larger being.” It works for eleven of them, but not for poor Bernard, who is distracted by Morgana Rothschild’s eyebrows. But if it hadn’t been that, it would have been something else.

Bernard simply lacks the temperament for faith. That’s the sad, the frightening end of it: he lacks not just a religious temperament; he lacks the temperament for faith.

Dogs and Dogma

2006-07-09T12:32:00.000-07:00

Why every boy should have a dog. To learn that it’s okay to go around in circles before you sleep. And it’s okay to sleep more than once a day. Especially on weekends.

Sunday afternoon.

I’ve preached and prayed and sung. I’ve led a congregational meeting—the usual five minutes’ worth, in this case to bring one of our less important congregational practices into conformity with our denominational Book of Order.

I’ve eaten lunch—the usual wait at The Depot; the food is okay, better than okay, but the service is the slowest in Staunton if not the entire Shenandoah Valley. But The Depot is where we go, this group I eat with one or two Sundays a month.

I’ve come back to my office to write, but I’m readier to take a nap.

I like naps, but I don’t have a lot of confidence in them. The chances you’ll wake up from one feeling better instead of worse are, in my experience, fifty-fifty. Or, the chances I will wake up feeling better, or worse, are fifty-fifty. It’s a matter of temperament, I’m told. Some temperaments thrive on naps; some don’t. And some, it must be, are in between.

So much, it seems, is a matter of temperament. Even, some say, religion. It’s in our genes that we are religious, or, at least disposed toward religion, whatever that means. I’ll have to lean back in my chair to think about that one.

And I wake up feeling no better but no worse. This, given my natural pessimism, is a good result, because if it was fifty-fifty, chances are I was going to wake up feeling worse.

What does it mean, though, to have a disposition toward religion? Does it mean a (natural) interest in mystery or in metaphysics—which may have room for mystery or may not? Does it suggest an openness to the future or a dependence on the past? Is the religious temperament prophetic or priestly?

I have no idea. I do know that one trouble with a nap—even if I wake up without a hangover—is that I can wake up with a different matter on my mind than the matter I decided to sleep on.

This morning, after I’d climbed out of bed, put on my Sunday clothes, and walked down to the church, after I’d rewritten my sermon, and gone into the sanctuary to preach it through (and listen to it in that great, empty hall), and rewritten it again, after I’d gotten the prayers ready and the hand-out for the congregational meeting, as I was between buildings—in the alleyway between the Frazer Building (1920) and the sanctuary (1872)—on my way to pray with the choir, it hits me: “Is church just anachronistic?”

I say that’s a different matter, because it doesn’t to me, at first blush, have to do with religion, which I’m deciding this Sunday afternoon does have to do with both mystery and metaphysics . . . and openness, though it also has to do with singing—and I’m on my way to the choir—and praying—I’m on my way there to pray; so maybe the question is a religious question, after all.

Except: it’s also an institutional question. Here’s the derivation: the verb, institute, comes from the Latin institutus, the past participle of instituere “to set up,” which in turn is made up of in- “in” + statuere “to establish,” or, more literally, “to cause to stand.” And statuere is clearly related to statute, which has to do with law: getting into conformity with the Book of Order, closing loopholes.

Law, and not religion, because they're completely different “beasts.” Or is it a question: Law and not religion? Because they're two heads of the same beast. And, thank God, it’s time for another nap.

Rick

Rabbits and the Church

2006-07-06T07:50:00.000-07:00

Late this week. Nothing last week. Two weddings, a funeral, and I am now in a continuing education seminar. What I offer today, with her permission, are some reflections by my friend and colleague Charlene Hinckley, pastor of the First United Church of Christ here in Casper. Note: Ziggy is a dog and my dog Ursa's best friend.

Lynn

I was out walking Ziggy the other day, enjoying the cool breeze while watching Ziggy running without dying from the heat. Ziggy was off after a bird when I came upon a rabbit. Somehow Ziggy had completely missed the rabbit. The last time she had spotted one she ran after it so fast I thought, "Great she will never come back," but luckily the rabbit was quick enough to get under the shed before she could reach it.

I was trying to decide what to do about what I realized was probably a dead, sick or injured rabbit. I wandered how to keep Ziggy away while moving it so no other dog tried to have a meal. Just when I had decided to get the plastic bags out of the car, the rabbit springs up and shoots across the field heading for shelter under the building. Ziggy was oblivious to the whole event.

While I had thought the rabbit was dead, the rabbit was playing dead awaiting its chance to make a break and get away from Ziggy, so that it could live another day. That rabbit was full of life, it had just been waiting for the right moment, the right time to spring up full of the life pouring through its veins.

I wonder sometimes if the church is like that rabbit. Are we so fearful that we are playing dead? Are we afraid of what it will mean to love and serve God with our whole hearts? Are we afraid that new people will be different from us? Are we afraid that there will never be enough money, people, time, energy? What is we are afraid of that keep us dead?

The fear keeps us paralyzed. Lost and trapped in the fear we are too paralyzed to run home, to run toward life, to run toward God, to run toward ministry. We are to afraid to run into the breath and fire of the Holy Spirit poured down upon us to give us the strength and courage to be the church, to be God’s hands and feet caring for this world, this community, this people we have been entrusted with.

A Modest Proposal – Briefly Made

2006-07-01T19:12:00.000-07:00

Dear Dee,

I take it you are in almost complete agreement with Alan Dershowitz, who is now arguing that while torture is never really acceptable, it is a reality. It has been used and presumably will be used, perhaps even should be used when “it is felt that by torturing an obviously guilty [terrorism suspect], the lives of multiple innocent people could be saved.” (The italics are mine.)

Dershowitz said this on NPR’s Morning Edition this past Monday, and he said it quite emphatically even though he acknowledges that there is no real empirical evidence that torture does work—and so save lives. (Note that I am continuing to make a practical argument against assassination as well as a theological one. Not only is it wrong, but there is no evidence that it works. Remember: history cannot supply evidence.)

But you’ll agree, I’m sure, that torture is a reality. It has been used; it will be used. Indeed, while it is never really acceptable, it ought to be a choice, when, as Dershowitz puts it, “the lives of . . . innocent people could be saved.”

Where you’ll disagree with Dershowitz, I take it, is in his contention that in a civil society it should be regulated so that may only be ordered by a duly elected official, who is in turn responsible to the electorate for its use. You would allow it as well for a group of conspirators.

Providing, of course, that at least one of the conspirators was a theologian.

Just making sure I’ve got this right,

Rick

Give Trust a Chance

2006-06-29T20:44:00.000-07:00

Ha, ha! what a fool Honesty is!
and Trust, his sworn brother, a very simple gentleman!
---Shakespeare, Winter’s Tale. IV, iv, 605

In mid-June the 217th General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church (USA), my denomination, came into Birmingham, AL, my town. Not exactly on little cat’s feet did it come; nor did it arrive as a pair of ragged claws scuttling across the floors of silent seas. Gee-AY, as we like to call it, came into town more like Barnum and Bailey—that is, an act that, a few decades ago, drew serious, big-time attention, but today, though not completely ignored, pales in comparison to, say, Cirque du Soleil (read: the productions of Joel Osteen, James Dobson, T. D. Jakes, etc.).

Thankfully, though, the G.A.’s task isn’t so much to splash big as it is to emulate Christ. So how well did it acquit itself over the course of its eight-day performance in my town? Probably, it’s too early to tell.

Perhaps you’ve heard of some its actions, the most controversial of which was a decision to trust the church’s various ordaining bodies [congregations in the ordaining of elders and deacons; presbyteries in the ordaining of ministers] to discern, on a case-by-case basis, which ordination standards are essential, and which may be “scrupled” or overlooked.

Truth be known, this sort of selectivity has been a Presbyterian practice for decades. For example, in the case of ministerial candidates who, gosh-darnit, just can’t seem to wrap their heads around Greek or Hebrew or—as in several cases in Mississippi with which I’m familiar—just never quite got that college degree, presbyteries have for years found ways to overlook these “deficiencies.”

Well, this General Assembly decided that, even in the case of candidates whose sexual orientation and/or practice don’t sync perfectly with “chastity in singleness” and “fidelity in marriage” [between a man and a woman, we may presume], the ordaining body may adjudicate whether this standard—and others, for that matter—is essential to ordination.

Of course, the media—that amoral booger-bear—across the country trumpeted headlines and news leads like “Presbyterians Give Leeway to Gay Ordination.” I understand how they got it that way. But, frankly, I don’t see it quite the same.

For me, a better headline may have been “Presbyterians Give Trust a Chance.” For it seems that the Assembly made a decision to relinquish centralized control and, instead, trust those more likely to really know ordination candidates—i.e., the locals who will be doing the ordaining—to discern God’s will in the matter.

If there can be such thing as a subtle sea change, this may be it. For nearly half a decade, my denomination, like my nation, ventured further and further from an ethos of mutual trust to one of suspicion and mistrust. As a result, our rule book, the Book of Order, which was once the thickness of The Old Man and the Sea began to approach the size of the Cincinnati Yellow Pages. We were reaching our Pharisaical rhythm: we trusted nobody; we yearned for a centralized rule for everything.

Then, this Assembly came into my town and said, “Enough! What do we, the Assembly, know about who should and shouldn’t be ordained?” This Assembly's commissioners looked around at the Sessions and the Presbyteries throughout the denomination and said, “You’ve got faith, you’ve got brains, and furthermore, you’re living among those who come to you for ordination. YOU decide!”

Look for the Pharisees to raise hell in the aftermath of this decision. They’ll carp about biblical standards, about moral imperatives and such. I don’t know. Maybe those are their real concerns. But I think what most plagues them is their inability to trust, their inability to accept that, in some situations, others are better equipped than they to make decisions.

As I said, it’s too early to tell how well or poorly this Assembly emulated Christ. But insofar as he drove the Pharisees nuts and had an annoying knack for reducing their 600-plus rules to two or fewer, I’m thinking this Assembly didn’t do so bad.

Gerald Stephens Jr.

Pacifism by the Rules

2006-06-27T17:26:00.000-07:00

Dear Rick,

I know we’re playing by playground rules and all, but I gotta ask for a little mercy here. I’m slow. Remember, I’m from Kentucky. Can you help a brother out?

If there are no rules—playground or otherwise—can we even have a conversation? I meant rule in the sense of a standard, a yardstick, a general definition, a canon. As regards pacifism, I mean that to be the rule of non violence. You don’t kill someone on purpose. Maybe by accident, but not by design. If you kill someone by raising your hand in anger, then you are not a pacifist. That’s the rule that the conspiracy against Hitler may “prove,” or it may “break.”

According to Larry Rasmussen, in Dietrich Bonhoeffer: Reality and Resistance, some people argue that going to war and killing the tyrant that leads you into war are too very different things. That Bonhoeffer’s form of pacifism was so broad that it could include killing Hitler. “With the kind of rule by the dictator in the 1940’s, the time of necessita had arrived; thus the ‘Christian pacifist’ reached the terrible, highly unlikely, but very real point of approving the death of the tyrant by violent means. This is the theory held by some of Bonhoeffer’s friends, reflected in the comment of one of them: ‘To understand the extremes which pacifism went in Nazi Germany, you have to understand the degrees of hell in that land.’” (p. 117)

But Rasmussen is not so convinced. He thinks that Bonhoeffer moved from the pacifism of his great Cost of Discipleship to an “agonized participation” in the plot against Hitler. He cites the letter Dietrich wrote to his friend Eberhard Bethge on July 21, 1944, one day after the bombing attack against Hitler failed to kill him, though some in his party were fatally wounded, as an example of Bonhoeffer’s change of heart. Bonhoeffer knew of this failed attempt, and he also knew that it meant that his cover as a co-conspirator would probably be discovered and therefore death was imminent for him. The second paragraph reminds me of some of the argument in your last posting.

“I remember a conversation that I had in America thirteen years ago with a young French pastor. We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives. He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it is quite likely that he did become one). At the time, I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith. For a long time I didn’t realize the depth of the contrast. I thought I could acquire faith by trying to live a holy life, or something like it. I suppose I wrote The Cost of Discipleship as the end of that path. Today I can see the dangers of the book, though I still stand by what I wrote.

“I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith. One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one. By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities. In so doing, we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane. That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia; and that is how one becomes a man and a Christian (cf Jer. 454-5!). How can success make us arrogant, or failure lead us astray, when we share in God’s sufferings through a life of this kind?

“I think you see what I mean, even though I put it so briefly. I’m glad to have been able to learn this, and I know I’ve been able to do so only along the road I’ve traveled. So I’m grateful for the past and the present, and content with them.”

Again, my main thesis. Pacifism ought to be (is!) the Christian’s first move, his or her first impulse. But there are times when resistance to evil, or the evil doer, becomes the responsible action of a Christian, who, with Christ, bears the sin and guilt of the world. Most of the time resistance is passive. But in a few, very sad, unfortunate cases, the resistance can only be violent. The violence is always sinful. But the sermon on the mount is not being disregarded. It is still stands seriously over and against the Christian.

Pacifism as a principle is, however, violated. A line has been crossed. A rule has been broken, though maybe (and this is where I’m trying to give you some light, my friend) the rule is thereby tested and proven. Unless there are no rules at all, including the rule of pacifism. In which case, what are we talking about?

Faithfully, Your Dee

Why You Can't Tell Me Why

2006-06-25T13:26:00.000-07:00

Oh, my friend, my friend,

If I can get around Hitler, the Final Solution, and World War Two, then I’ll be a pacifist. But they are the great exception that proves the rule, unless it breaks it.

What rule?

The Latin is, you’re right: “the exception tests the rule,” if it does not break it as well. But you go wrong as soon as you suggest that there is a rule, as if we had run a controlled experiment, tested the various possibilities. Only there is no experiment, only experience, and no various possibilities, only what happened.

What happened is World War II, which our experience sees this way—often as if it were the only way: World War II “succeeded”; so it must have been “true.” At least, it was right.

Was it?

How do we know?

We do not, because we don’t have any control by which to measure. We only have a result, which we cannot change. Thus, we don’t know, nor can we know, that a different, perhaps even better, result might have been achieved—without violence.

We cannot know that prayer—or some other form of nonviolence—might not have worked as well in the circumstances, better. We don’t know, because we didn’t try it. Indeed, we’ve never tried it—in any circumstance. We’ve only tried violence, but not because it produces the best results. We don’t know any other results.

So, we try it again and again, and we justify the results. What else can we do? We don’t have anything else in the bag. Or we do, but we're unwilling—face it: we're afraid—to try it.

So, I say: give it another 40 years, and there will be no reason to think that you won’t be claiming that the Vietnam War wasn’t as successful as World War II. (We’re already well into the process of rehabilitating it.)

It would be nice to say that this isn’t a theological mistake, only a historical mistake, thinking of history as a scientific experiment whose results we can measure. But in a tradition where theology has to do with history, because God is God of history as well as creation (and weeping over both), it is a theological mistake as well, not to mention a logical one—of the first order!

Let’s look at it one more way, in case you’re not yet convinced. Oddly, at the same time you are trying to appeal to experience—I cannot be a pacifist because of this instance—at that same time, you admit that Hitler was unique, the ultimate evildoer or something like that. But if he is unique, then he can’t be an example, can he? You’re right: the exception does break the rule.

Or it would, if there were a rule. But we can't make one.

In its absence, I'm willing to bet—knowing that horse races are also unique, as are spins of the wheel—that Jesus knew what he was talking about in the Sermon on the Mount. On this one, I'm still over here with my anabaptist friends.

Yours,

Rick

In the Boat

2006-06-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

My name is Lynn. I am a General Assembly –aholic

Hi, Lynn.

Now that I realize it is Thursday, and my day to post is Wednesday, I ask myself what happened to yesterday. I could make excuses. I am preparing for two weddings and now a funeral next week. Two of my colleagues here are in the process of losing their jobs and one’s wife is dying.

The real reason is that I have been obsessed with watching the meetings of the General Assembly via live, streaming video on the Internet. After each afternoon’s “bender,” (I’ve been watching since Monday), I emerge tired and cranky even though most everything I wanted to be approved was approved. I can’t imagine what it must be like to be a commissioner, except commissioners have all the information before them so they probably know what’s going on. I watch and try to guess.

Having been a pastor now for more than 18 years and almost as many General Assemblies, I know enough to wonder what the fallout from this Assembly will be. The brief articles in the paper here on the Trinity statement and the so-called definitive guidance from the PUP report have generated a bit of comment, but so far, no rancor. My guess is that the waves will be a bit higher in another part of the church. As I heard one commissioner ask the Office of the General Assembly after the PUP recommendations were accepted, “Are you prepared for the financial implications of this?” Nothing like a little blackmail and hostage-taking to spice things up!

Scrambling to find a sermon for Sunday, I found in the file folders numerous sermons on Sunday’s text, Mark’s account of Jesus stilling the storm. In several of those sermons, I make reference to recent actions of a General Assembly. The references are not specific, and I have been too busy watching this General Assembly to do any research. What has become clear to me is that the text paints a picture of the church in the midst of chaos. Even in the first centuries, there was controversy and difficulty. Yet Jesus invites the disciples into the boat, Jesus is in the boat with them, and Jesus commands the wind and the waves to “be still.” Jesus overcomes that which threatens to overcome the disciples.

That will “preach” although I doubt that I will make much reference to the General Assembly. There are two weddings and a funeral and two colleagues in the process of losing their jobs and one whose wife is dying. There are enough storms, not to still, for that is not in my power. I am powerless. God is not. And God is in the boat.

Lynn (who does not have a dog in the fight between Rick and Dee)

I’ll Tell You Why

2006-06-20T07:15:00.000-07:00

Dear Rick,

You’re on, big boy. We’ve finally got something going here: engagement. As long as playground rules are in effect, I’m proud to participate.

We are not pacifists because of Adolph Hitler, Nazism, and World War II. That was a “Christian” war; Christians started it, and Christians needed to finish it. Okay; cultural Christians. But Hitler was baptized, was he not? As were his minions.

It’s the whole “never again” thing. It is a sin to kill another human being. Always has been; ever shall be. And (not “but” this time: and) if one has the ability and opportunity, then it is a sin to stand by and take no effective action or support no effective action—action that includes everything up and to raising one’s hand in anger—while an entire people are being slaughtered. Either way it’s a sin, and life makes you choose, and you don’t get an indulgence slip first. You just act, one way or the other, without a guarantee, and you throw yourself on the mercy of God. Like off the high dive backwards blindfolded and there might be water in the pool and then again there might not be, neither.

It’s sin boldly time but believe more boldly still. Sin: you don’t have to; you just can’t help it (Faulkner and Guthrie). The grace of God is not to be presumed upon; it can only be received as a free gift each time it is inevitably and inexorably given.

Or maybe it’s one way to answer the old ordination question so popular, legend has it, among Southern Presbyterians: are you willing to suffer the tortures of hell for the glory of God?

If you decide to shoot that paper hangin’ son of a bitch, then you are not a pacifist. If they kill you for trying to kill him, then you might or you might be a martyr to a holy cause, but you will not be a pacifist. Maybe you can plead temporary heterodoxy, but that frees you only in the doctrinal eyes of the law. The Spirit of the thing convicts you. Because you’ve crossed a line. A clear one. You have resisted the evil doer in an ultimate way. At least relative to his life, the only one he’ll ever get. You’ve taken him out, and pacifists do a lot of wonderful things, but they don’t do that.

So. If you can get around Hitler, Nazism, the Final Solution, and World War Two, then you’ll be a pacifist, my son. But not before. Hitler, et alia are the great exception. But does it prove the rule? Or break it? You tell me.

As Ever,

Dee

And Why Not?

2006-06-17T16:44:00.000-07:00

Dee,

Let’s start an argument. Not a discussion, certainly not a debate—that suggests rules, fair play. No, let’s start an argument; that way I won’t have to fight fair.

We’re not pacifists. But we ought to be. Even now. Shirley Guthrie once said that the problem with the radical wing of the Reformation, the Mennonites, the Brethren, the Quakers—the peace churches—was that they took the gospel seriously. Do we?

We do swim, I agree, quite happily in the stream of Bonhoeffer, Niebuhr, and Barth, and who am I to argue that they didn’t take the gospel seriously? But I can wonder if they didn’t take western culture more seriously still. There is no doubt, from the point of view of western culture, that we live in a sin-soaked world. But is that the truth of the world? “Maybe not the final truth,” you may want to say, “but it is the truth now.” Is it?

We do not, I agree again, take Matthew 5:39 literally, nor Matthew 5:44, or 45 or 46, for that matter, or much of the Sermon on the Mount at all. (We leave that to our radical wing.) But do we even take them seriously? I also preached the Sunday after 9-11, and after that, I moderated a “town meeting” at Chapel in the Pine in Birmingham. And I listened to the doves, and then—because they waited, because they knew they were right; you’ll agree: they were—I listened to those who said, “Sure, sure. We can pray all we want for our enemies, but sooner or later, we’re going to have to do something,” meaning something military, something violent, because this enemy needs killin’, as you put it. Prayer is all well and good, but by itself it doesn’t work in these kinds of situations. And I wondered (and I wonder): How do we know? Have we ever tried it?

In other words—your words—have we ever had the guts to stick to our “first impulse,” which is peace. Here is where I’m going to ask you about “instinct.” Sometimes, you say, and last week you cited Bonhoeffer as an example: “Sometimes the body has to act instinctively . . . outside the boundaries set by the mind. Sometimes feelings, both intuitive and visceral, must take the lead.” But if our “first impulse” is peace, why would our instinct lead us to violence? In fact, we don’t wage war “outside the boundaries set by the mind,” not at all; the reasons we give for war are always of the utmost ingenuity. What we do instead: we act outside the boundaries set by the heart.

I have been thinking more than a little about patriotism these days, partly because in a weak moment I agreed to preach in the July 4th service (July 2nd) in the park. I say I agreed at a weak moment, but I’m not sure that’s entirely truthful. I believe our nationalities are, or at least can be, instances of secondary grace. We can love wholeheartedly—and still not idolatrously—the place we are born to, or that we choose to come to. But you are right, we cannot impose these secondary things we love on others that are born to or come to a different place. That is a form of idolatry.

And we can’t countenance striking another’s cheek first, even if we can’t quite turn our own. You’re right about pre-emptive war as well. But then . . . here is where, I think, the heirs of Barth and Niebuhr and Bonhoeffer fall victim to culture . . . then you say, “If we thought a war were just and necessary, then we would gladly join in and send our sons and daughters . . . .” And I will ask, “What would make—what could possibly make—a war ‘just’ or ‘necessary’?” I know you have answers to that question, and they come from the tradition we swim in; we have contributed significantly to that conversation. But do they come from the gospel?

Peace to you, too. I mean that.
Rick

We Are Not Pacifists

2006-06-16T13:44:00.000-07:00

Not purely so. But we ought to be close, and grow closer and closer to the sacred principle of “love your enemy” with every breath of the Spirit.

We are not pacifists. Bonhoeffer and Niebuhr and Barth, in whose intellectually faithful stream we happily swim, will not let us be, though they and we wish for a world a little less sin-soaked and suicidal so that the pacific way might become both right and possible for us to live. For now, we have to admit that violence, or its threat, is sometimes helpful for living, as in stopping a rapist with whatever force is necessary, or calling the police when one sees a neighbor under attack.

We are not pacifists. We have to admit that the taking up of arms to halt the advance of genocide or murderous aggression or naked totalitarianism may be the faithful choice, though in recent history, only World War II, the fight against Hitler's Nazism, impresses us as a just war. We’ve already let the Rwanda tragedy pass us by. But the situation in Darfur may yet become a proper cause for even Jesus-followers to take violent action in order that people may live who otherwise wouldn’t. But we don’t know that yet.

We are not pacifists. We do not take Matthew 5:39 literally—But I (Jesus) say to you, Do not resist an evil doer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also—literally. Neither do we take the even more problematic Matthew 5:44 literally: But I (guess Who again) say to you, Love your enemy and pray for those who persecute you. We do not take these commands from the Lord of our lives literally, but we do take them seriously. If an enemy needs killin’ (and who needed killing more than Adolph Hitler?), then one has to meditate night and day on the proposition that in some cases, killing an enemy is an act of loving the enemy (putting Hitler out of the misery his soul must have been writhing in?) and, beyond that, an act of prayer. It is to act in ways literally contrary to the expressed will of the Son of God, and, nonetheless, throwing oneself wholly upon God’s mercy.

We are not pacifists. But pacifism is the first impulse of Christians—that is, those who follow Jesus—when it comes to issues related to war and peace. Pacifism is the general rule for sincere Jesus students. Every now and then, there are exceptions to the rule. But the rule still holds.

We are not pacifists. It is nice to have principles and nicer to live by them. But, just as the weapons of war change at rates faster than the tactics of fighting a war can adjust to, and just as our technology is usually ahead of our ethics, principles have effectual limits. We can only live the truths of peacemaking and peaceableness. We cannot state them in ways that genuinely satisfy, that cover every extremity. Sometimes the body has to act (instinctively? Can we still call it that?) outside the boundaries set by the mind. Sometimes feelings, both intuitive and visceral, must take the lead. Maybe this is the clearest illustration of a lived dialectic. The truth is dynamic, living, active, growing, moving, developing, revealing itself in new and ever changing ways. It has a heart beat. To try to make it lie there, confined to paper, is to practice another form of violence. We tend to kill what we want to nail down. Ossify what we first admired as lively. Right wing politicos and doctrinophiles call this relativism, but they are idiots. Blithering idiots, I meant to say.

We are not pacifists. But we are patriots. As patriots, we work for the improvement of our country, and part of that responsibility is to call a bad war when we see one. We oppose wars fought for political purposes, that is, ones waged in order to impose a political system, even a good one like democracy, upon a nation. Those wars can’t work. Won’t never work nowhere nohow. They aren’t worth killing people over. We can’t even make our children behave. What makes us think we can make people from a culture that varies widely from ours sit up and act right?

We are not pacifists. But we don’t like “preemptive” wars the least little bit. Followers of Jesus understand that sometimes we might need to finish a war here and there. But we are not the kind of people who start wars. The only kind of war worth fighting, worth all the physical and spiritual risks every war (even “good” ones) involve, is a war forced on us, a war that we cannot avoid and would never choose.

We are not pacifists. But we haven’t seen a war we “like,” as in support, for a long, long time. If we thought a war were just and necessary, then we would gladly join it and/or send our sons and daughters into it and advise others to do likewise because it is a matter of life and death. But no such war exists. This is not just our opinion. We believe that God is tired of all this unnecessary killing, too. We believe that peace occupies the heart of Jesus, and that Jesus’ peaceful center reveals the heart of God.

We are not pacifists. But someday—and we hope that day arrives soon—when the kingdom of God comes, when God’s will is freely done, not just in heaven, but on earth, we shall become as God desires, transformed into the likeness of Christ. We shall become pacifists. Peacemakers. Cheek turners. Enemy lovers. Prayer warriors for the people who hate us. People whose most deadly weapon is kindness. Those who live peaceably with all. And if we truly mean all, and if we trust that God can make that happen, then what hinders us from getting started a little personal peace process now?

Pax vobiscum,
Dee

No Humidity and No Bugs

2006-06-14T16:25:00.000-07:00

It’s been hot here for two weeks. What was green is now quickly browning. Since my husband believes that watering grass in a desert is 1) wasteful of resources, 2) silly, and 3) “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” (I say that’s what Jesus wants us to do), lawn mowing season was as brief as the three-week spring.

Since this is where I came in a year ago, I know a little about Wyoming summers. The sun is intense, but there is almost no humidity, so the heat isn’t too bad. It cools off late in the afternoon. And there are—relative to Kentucky anyway—very few bugs. The thunderstorms are spectacular in this thin air—lots of lightning and brief, hard rain. Tomorrow night, we’ll carry our folding chairs to a nearby park for the weekly municipal band concert. Last week, we missed the opening of the concert series because we were visiting friends who live on a ranch on the Oregon Trail and listening to live bluegrass.

For some reason the meeting of the General Assembly has been on my mind. I’ve followed the issues a little more closely than I have in years, possibly because for the first time since 1992, I am far away from the “ground zero” of Louisville and the headlines that appeared regularly before, during, and after the Assembly meeting. I’m waiting to see if the Saturday religion page in the Casper Star Tribune will feature any news from Birmingham. Among the notices about church activities, there is usually each Saturday one religion feature. Last Saturday it was about the Episcopalians and not about Episcopalians and gay priests and bishops. There was a article in the July/August issue of the Atlantic Monthly that claimed that the Republican agenda of “gays, guns, and God” that plays well in the South does not play well here in what the article called the mountain inter-west. That has been my experience here in Wyoming, brief as it has been. It’s live and let live.

Far away as I am from the heat and humidity of the Birmingham summer and the intensity of all those Presbyterians at work discerning Christ’s will, I feel a bit ambivalent about the region and the church of my birth. I think it’s in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom that Quentin Compson, away from Mississippi at Harvard says, “I don’t hate the South. I don’t.” I understand what he means now.

Lynn

The Daughters’ Propositions Revisited

2006-06-10T07:32:00.000-07:00

i
“The church is up to its steeple in politics.” Either way. We take a stand by speaking out, or we fail to take a stand by remaining silent. Or we may fast and pray. See also vi – ix below.

ii
“What would Jesus do?” We may disdain such simplemindedness, but . . . . There is a “but”; and it is legitimate. If Jesus is our Lord—that is, the one by which we would be ruled—then asking after his expectations is a reasonable thing to do. Asking must recognize, however, that his expectations of his followers may not be the same as his expectations of himself. He does not, for example, ask us to take up his cross; he asks us to take up our own.

iii
What about Jesus? What were his stands on the issues of the day? It’s a rhetorical question, of course. The answer is clear.

iv
We don’t know. We may pretend to know. But if we do, we are doing just that—we are pretending.

v
So how can we—any of us!—have any true confidence with regard to his stands on the issues of our day. We can’t, but that does not mean that we don’t ask, as Bonhoeffer did: What stand do I take, as a follower of Jesus?

vi
. . . we do have to live in our day. We can escape geography—to an extent—move from Biloxi to Buenos Aires, Bergen, Beirut, or Bombay—but we cannot escape chronology. Whatever the mystics may say, even when we fast and pray, we do not escape chronology. We may, however, take a stand over and against the age.

vii
And we live, wherever we live (within reason), after the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. We live after the Great War, and the Second World War, and the Vietnam War. We live with automobiles and airplanes. We live with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons. We live with cell phones (which Jesus clearly abhors).

vii-a
(What, though, if we don’t live within reason?) What if we live a life of fasting and prayer? In particular, what if we fast not from food or drink but from chronology? I am not sure how we go about doing that. I am not, for example, advocating a movement “back to the land” with the nineteenth century overtones that has. Oh, life was simpler then. I doubt it. But we could live not only more simply now; we could live against the age. We don’t have to be reasonable. Indeed, we shouldn’t hope to be, or plan to be, reasonable. Instead we may be patient, for example, as Bonhoeffer advises in The Cost of the Discipleship. (See below.)

ix
We also live—as we always have—with wealth and poverty, both gentle wealth and genteel poverty and obscene wealth and grinding poverty. We live as always with power and weakness, both power used for good and power used for ill, power used to help the weak and power used to destroy them. So how we act foolishly . . . again, I am not sure. And I’m not sure that Bonhoeffer’s work or life offers us considerable help, though that does not mean I don’t think it worth studying. . . closely! as we live in and among, entangled with the powers and principalities . . . What are the choices? We can live in “patient endurance”; or we can participate in plots that will inevitably fail. (What, precisely, is the practical difference?) We live in and among, entangled with the powers and principalities, because the principalities and powers live in us.

x
Even if we seek to live in Christ.

xi
Because we fail. We do sin as much in the best of our acts as in the worst of them.

xii
But our failure is not the last word.

xii
“Behold, the days are coming,” saith the LORD . . . (Jeremiah 23:5-6). Perhaps I should have quoted these verses in full, or at least provided a link. Here’s the rest of it (from the old KJV behind the bar, the one I got for Christmas in 1959 “from Mom & Dad”): “Behold, the days come . . . that I will raise unto David a righteous Branch, and A king shall reign and prosper, and shall execute judgment and justice in the earth. In his days Judah shall be saved and Israel shall dwell safely; and this is his name whereby he shall be called, THE LORD OUR RIGHTEOUSNESS.”

Dee knows much more about Bonhoeffer than I do, but I’m not convinced that his (Bonhoeffer’s) heart is changed by “incarnational wisdom.” I’m inclined to believe that it is changed by a changing vision of the future, and particularly what may or may not be possible in it. The Bonhoeffer that calls for patient endurance and believes that patient endurance will draw evil’s sting is moved by a vision like that of Jeremiah—though not a national one (“ the Church is not to be a national community like the old Israel, but a community of believers without political and national ties. . .”). Still, that Bonhoeffer has a hope both visionary and real that people will someday dwell in safety under a righteous and just “judge.” But the Hitler regime continues. Where is the end of it? Bonhoeffer and others can see none unless . . . . Let’s put it bluntly: If divine love is to be victorious over the powers of evil (and the possibilities the prophet mentions are to come to pass), it’s going to need some help.

Fortunately, the failure of the help is not the last word either. We know that already.

And not yet.

—Rick

Back to Bonhoeffer

2006-06-08T14:38:00.001-07:00

Speaking of political theology, as we were, the question of courage must be addressed. We are wondering if we have any. If we have the kind of courage it takes to bring our faith into the world of politics. We aren’t talking about electoral politics of course, but the more fundamental issue. How does our faith as Christians affect the way we live as citizens?

We recently read an article in a current New Yorker by Margaret Talbot about Oriana Fallaci, the Italian journalist famous for taking off her chador while interviewing the late Ayatollah Khomeini to make a point about freedom. Fallaci is a woman with opinions. She doesn’t like Islamic radicals one bit, and she is particularly perturbed about the invasion—as she puts it—of Europe by immigrants from Islamic countries who have no intention of assimilating into European culture. This atheist (from the Christian tradition, she hastens to point out) helped the Italian resistance against Mussolini’s Fascists when she was a little girl. “Islamism is the new Nazi-Fascism,” she insists. “With Nazi-Fascisim, no compromise is possible. No hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are feeding the suicide of the West.”

We mention her because she has some thoughts on courage. Although she has been quite critical of American policies, such as during the Vietnam War, she does seem to compliment Americans for what she perceives as their “physical” courage. “Those who have physical courage also have moral courage,“ she says. “Physical courage is a great test.”

A group within our congregation has just begun a summer study of Dietrich Bonhoeffer and the Sermon on the Mount. In preparing for that course, we are impressed with how incarnational Bonhoeffer’s theological life was. He demonstrated a particularly vigorous form of physical courage, of flesh-and-blood courage. He put his body, his welfare, and the natural loves of his life on the line for a principle, a cause, his Lord and Savior. He did not whine about it or try to bargain for a better deal. He just responded to the call of Jesus to take up his (Bonhoeffer’s) cross and follow Jesus into controversy. Into prison. Into death. Into hell. As he famously said “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.”

Bonhoeffer broke out of the gate from doctoral studies at Berlin University and quickly moved to the front of the pack among theologians of his day. He was brilliant. The pattern of his thought has been poured over and scrutinized and debated more, perhaps, than any modern thinker. That’s because he left behind a relatively small body of written work—though a heap more than most of us publish before we turn 39, which was his age when the Nazis hung him for treason on April 9, 1945.

In the mid 1930’s, Bonhoeffer seemed to be the purest pacifist that a Lutheran could be. His The Cost of Discipleship comments on Matthew 5:38-42, a passage which contains the electric phrase: Resist not him who is evil. “This saying of Christ moves the Church from the sphere of politics and law. The Church is not to be a national community like the old Israel, but a community of believers without political and national ties… The only way to overcome evil is to let it run itself to a standstill because it does not find the resistance it is looking for. Resistance merely creates further evil and adds to the flames. But when evil meets no opposition and encounters no obstacle but only patient endurance, its sting is drawn, and at last it meets an opponent which is more than its match… Violence stands condemned by its failure to evoke counter violence.”

Though a page or two later he reminds us that he is not an Anabaptist: “If we took the precept of non-resistance as an ethical blueprint for general application, we should indeed be indulging in idealistic dreams… of a utopia with laws which the world would never obey. To make nonresistance a principle for secular life is to deny God, by undermining his gracious ordinance for the preservation of the world.”

“But Jesus is a no draughtsman of political blueprints,” Bonhoeffer says. “The passion of Christ is the victory of divine love over the powers of evil, and therefore it is the only supportable basis for Christian obedience. Once again, Jesus calls those who follow him to share his passion. How can we convince the world by our preaching of the passion if we shrink form that passion in our own lives?” (The Cost of Discipleship, MacMillan, 1963, pp. 156ff.).

Those are clearly and strongly expressed words. But something happened to Bonhoeffer in his thinking—or maybe in his following of Jesus. Maybe in his understanding of the incarnational spiritual life. He took a turn. By the early 1940’s he was fully engaged in a conspiracy to kill Adolph Hitler. He was seeking to resist the evil doer of all evil doers by any means possible. A bomb might do the trick. Bonhoeffer remained a Christian—that is, a follower of Jesus—while doing so, obviously. He renounced not his deep and abiding faith.

The problem was that he couldn’t write about this transformation openly. He was theologically undercover, and wanted to hide his motives to increase the chances that his work and that of his host of co-conspirators would succeed. So we don’t get to read his thoughts as they evolve from that of a near-pacifist to a member of a hit-squad.

Books are published on the subject, of course, and we’ve already over-written our welcome. But in that last Bonhoeffer quote, we might look at his word “supportable.” Rationally supportable; grammatically supportable; biblically supportable; theologically supportable; intellectually supportable—these might be shades of meaning for Bonhoeffer’s word in context. So here’s one thought. One tiny burp of a thought, probably unworthy of the blog-space it requires:

Maybe sometimes in life, one can go as far as the intellect can go, as far as sound doctrine and rational argument can take a person, and still not be where one needs to be. One may still not have hit the bull’s eye of the truth, so to speak. In those extreme cases, does one trust his or her body to take the next necessary step, recognizing that there is wisdom in the body just as there is wisdom in the mind? And then the body is allowed to act on what it knows, on what it feels maybe, and like a doctor cutting out a malignant tumor on the human gut, this fully embodied person who is following Jesus attempts to cut out a malignancy on the human community, in this case a blood-thirsty tyrant. Could we call this incarnational wisdom? And would this action be God-blessed as well as God-forgiven?

If so—if our little trickle of a thought has any merit, then the gift of physical courage would greatly aid our being little incarnations of the Incarnate One. The discipline of the mind would still be necessary—working out its pathways of reason, intuition and received insight from the past—and would help the whole of the person follow Jesus as an integrated reality. But the body’s strength should be honored too, and trusted to support actions that the mind cannot.

Another blow is struck against the gnostics. The physical world is part of the arena that God loves. God loves the body. God is the body in Jesus Christ, as material and as contingent as humanity can be. But the body, and the created world of the senses, are not only redeemable by God. They are also agents of God’s redemption.

Courage: not the absence of fear, but bold action in spite of fear. Shrink not from the passion of Christ. Lift up your hearts, where courage resides. “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”

—Dee

Lott’s Daughters – and other propositions, numbering a baker’s dozen

2006-06-03T13:25:00.000-07:00

i
“The church is up to its steeple in politics.” Either way. We take a stand by speaking out, or we fail to take a stand by remaining silent.

ii
“What would Jesus do?” We may disdain such simplemindedness, but . . . .

iii
What about Jesus? What were his stands on the issues of the day?

iv
We may pretend to know. If we do, we are doing just that—we are pretending.

v
So how can we—any of us!—have any true confidence with regard to Jesus' stands on the issues of our day.

vi
Nevertheless: we do have to live in our day. We can escape geography—to an extent—move from Biloxi to Buenos Aires, Bergen, Beirut, or Bombay—but we cannot escape chronology.

vii
And we live, wherever we live (within reason), after the Industrial Revolution, the Russian Revolution, and the Technological Revolution. We live after the Great War, and the Second World War, and the Vietnam War. We live with automobiles and airplanes. We live with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons.

vii-a
What though if we don’t live (within reason)?

ix
We also live—as we always have—with wealth and poverty, both gentle wealth and genteel poverty and obscene wealth and grinding poverty. We live as always with power and weakness, both power used for good and power used for ill, power used to help the weak and power used to destroy them. We live in and among, entangled with the powers and principalities, because the principalities and powers live in us.

x
Even if we seek to live in Christ.

xi
Because we fail. We do sin as much in the best of our acts as in the worst of them.

xii
But our failure is not the last word.

xiii
“Behold, the days are coming,” saith the LORD . . . (Jeremiah 23:5-6).

- Rick

Trent’s Lot

2006-06-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

It was an offhand comment made by a church member while giving a report about a mission trip to the Gulf Coast. She named a nationally known political figure affected by hurricane Katrina and described what was left of his house which overlooked the Gulf: nothing but a slab eight months out. Then she said that even she felt sorry for the Republican Senator from Mississippi who used to be Majority Leader. People laughed freely.

She went on, sharing how she felt as she witnessed Katrina’s wrath, so much of it still evident. She grew up in Jackson, and had spent summers on those narrow Mississippi beaches, traveling out to Ship Island and other barrier islands where the swimming was great. Now it was changed forever. She talked about the work our little mission team did, helping a couple of families restore some order to their houses and their lives. She was very well received.

Let me add that this mission team report was part of one of those over-stuffed but lively worship services we get to do every now and then. One sensed the Spirit; we had Church that day. There was a baptism in which the grandfather of the baby, a minister from Fairfax County, Virginia, performed the central rite. The sermon wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The children's’ choir joined the adult choir to sing a full bore rendition of “Let There Be Peace on Earth.” (I know, but it was really good).

During the “nice service, Dee” portion of the day, as people were filing out the door, a woman stopped traffic to lead a discussion about the quality of the worship. She is the grandmother of a stand-out children’s choir member, and a sweetheart, exuding the spiritual gift of encouragement. “Thank you, thank you,” she said. Others joined the chorus. Smiles all around; no one seemed to notice that the clock was dangerously close to twelve-thirty.

Then the bubble burst. Another member of the happy circle came up on my blind side and said, “But I’m going to say something mean.” She is not a mean person, so I said, “As if you could.” Her eyes told me she could darn well do as she pleased. “It’s politics that split the church,” she said, “and politics will split it again.” She registered a deeply felt and sharply worded complaint about the Trent Lott crack by her fellow church member from the pulpit. She didn’t like it one bit, was the jist of her remarks. It was a quite public remonstration; confused looks came from people who were sidestepping this bottleneck between them and Sunday dinner.

My parishioner finally rested her case and scooted out the vestibule and down the sun-splashed church steps. I could hardly comprehend what the remaining line of church members said to me. Afterwards, I made an uncustomary move toward mental health by sharing my hurt with my wife and a couple of other trustworthy women over lunch. That helped, but the complainer’s comments still stung. For those of us with tippy little egos, one negative word can wipe out a hundred positive ones. We are too easily controlled by disaffection.

By bedtime that night, after an afternoon and evening spent obsessing over a two minute tirade, I decided that the woman was right, though not for the reasons she might think. The church is too much of the world. We are entirely too enmeshed with the principalities and powers, and are all too willing to serve as their mouthpiece whenever asked. This not-usually-mean member of my church reminded me that political causes often as not divide the body of Christ, though we are quick to blame our political opponents with causing all the trouble.

To wit: when the American church supported slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries, it compromised the church’s ability to proclaim the good news of Jesus Christ. Later, when the American church defended the Jim Crow-style racism of the 20th century, whether by silence or by argument, the heart of the Gospel was broken. The European church’s cowardice before Adolph Hitler’s National Socialism dishonored our Lord because, among other horrors, it materially aided the killing of millions of our Lord’s people in the Holocaust. Twenty, thirty years later, when the American church supported the war in Vietnam, not only the Sermon on the Mount but also much of the Hebrew prophetic tradition were gutted. Other political entanglements with power strained the church’s integrity, as it fought against women’s equality, economic justice for the poor, care for the creation, and the like.

Will D. Campbell and the late James Y. Holloway were right. We are “up to our steeples in politics.” Maybe that comes with the territory. Did not Jesus send us into the world just as he was sent into it (John 17:18)? It might improve our discourse if we could be honest about the natural tension between politics and theology, and worry less about offhand partisan comments, even from the pulpit, especially when they come from someone who has just returned from doing acts of mercy with God’s people in need. Perhaps we should also worry less about the political motivation behind a nice-enough person who complains, however sharply, about politics in the church.

- Dee

Coming Down

2006-05-31T15:09:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow at sundown our Jewish brothers and sisters will celebrate Shavuot. This festival falls exactly seven weeks after Passover. Shavuot actually means “weeks.” The festival celebrates many things: the harvest, celebrating the first fruits and celebrating the giving of the Ten Commandments.

In Exodus 34:18-36, we can read about the giving of the Law. Shavout or Zeman Matan Toratenu, the Season of the Giving of Our Law, commemorates the receiving of the Ten Commandments at Mount Sinai. If you have never been to synagogue on Shavout—go tomorrow night. It is one of my favorite services—honoring Torah, dancing with Torah, praising G-d for giving us the gift of how to live! It is beautiful.

One tradition around Shavuot is to join together in a reading vigil. One rabbi writes,

According to tradition the Israelites actually overslept on the morning of G-d's visit. To compensate for this negligence, Jews hold a vigil on the eve of Shavuot. They stay awake from dusk to dawn, keeping themselves busy with the readings of the Torah and the Talmud. A digest of readings has evolved called Tikkun Leil Shavuot, the "Restoration of Shavuot Eve," which includes selections from the Torah, the Prophets, the Talmud, and the Zohar.

Oh, that we Protestants who claim that Bible to be so important would adopt such a joyful ceremony. Think of it…all night readings, dramatizations and interpretations. Allowing the Word to speak through the word. Sometimes this holiday is also called Pentecost.

G-d gave the Law and Moses came down to the people who were prepared to receive… God gave the Spirit and it came down upon the people who were prepared to receive…

I do not believe the Spirit replaces the Word of God—moreover the Spirit is given to illumine the Word that has been given. Those of us who become too rigid and worship the text or certain passages in the text would do well to remember the freedom and power of the Spirit. Those of us who are free in the Spirit would do well to remember the freedom and power of the Word. Somehow the timing is not just coincidental to me.

God is the great giver of gifts providing us all that we need: manna, water, word, the Word and the Holy Spirit. Indeed Jesus was the first fruit of God. May we celebrate with dancing and tongues of fire. Lest we be caught sleeping, may we keep vigil and prepare to receive the Spirit anew. May we embody the Word come down from above empowered by the Spirit come down from above. May we go out with singing sharing our joy!

Shavuot and Pentecost Blessings! Julie

Unscheduled

2006-05-31T10:31:00.000-07:00

The Al's are on a brief break. Stay tuned! In the meantime, catch up on the conversation so far. See the links, "Last Week in Brief" and "Catch Up on the Conversation" to your right.

Mixed Messages

2006-05-22T17:43:00.000-07:00

As the storm clouds literally gather, promising 1) that there will be rain (always welcomed here); 2) that the heat and humidity will break and that there will be cooler, drier air; and 3) that there will be some spectacular lightning in this thinner air, I ponder at least two of Rick’s “fifteen propositions reduced to twelve.” I have particularly pondered the first and second propositions, that “Grace is unreserved; and joy is pure. …. It’s never not grace. Grace is never absent, and it is never adulterated” (I don’t like admitting in writing that Dee is right) and that “Joy is pure, always only itself—never mixed. There are not shades of joy.”

A couple of weeks ago, Sister Helen Prejean of “Dead Man Walking” fame passed through Casper. Casper College was putting on a student production of “Dead Man.” (Did you know that "Dead Man Walking" is now a book, a movie, a play, and an opera?). She participated in a panel discussion, made a speech, and then after the play, helped “de-brief” the cast and audience. Her arguments against the death penalty are powerful. That was no surprise. Dee would like her. She is tough and funny and direct with a wonderful N’orleans accent. That was no surprise. She told some great stories about Susan Sarandon. The best was that it was Sarandon would put the line in the movie and the play: Sr. Helen’s mother asked her what has led her to get involved with the murderers on death row. Her answer is that she is not so much “led as caught.” I liked that. It rang true with me. No surprise.

The surprise was what she said about art. The play is being produced at high schools and colleges because she said, and I am paraphrasing. She said that propaganda, on either side, speaks to the head. Art opens up the heart to all sides. She said it before the play and she said it after the play. And it was true.

At the end of the same week, the Tamburitzans of Dusquesne University (http://www.tamburitzans.duq.edu) passed through. For 70 years, students have performed eastern European music and dance. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that Wyoming has no ‘culture.” The show was spectacular. And the art did as Sr. Helen said it would. It opened my heart to other places, other times, to the drama of human life caught in song and dance.

Yesterday at church, the choir sang Vivaldi’s Gloria with a small orchestra. I sang, too, probably the fifth or sixth time I’ve sung the work. It was quite good for a choir of 35 and a church of 350. People from other churches came to hear it—all with no advertising. People want to experience art because it opens their hearts to all sides.

You see, I think that while grace is unreserved and undeserved, joy is mixed. It is not always pure. Wasn’t it Frost who said that nothing gold can stay?

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Joy, I think, is like what Sr. Helen said about art. Joy opens our hearts. And with open hearts, we also become “caught” in a world that is less than perfect or pure, where nothing gold can stay, where we are given the grace to love and be loved by creatures who will die. The psalmist says that weeping lasts for the night, but joy comes in the morning. Joy, however, doesn’t replace the weeping.

My thoughts in a Wyoming thunderstorm.

Lynn

Fifteen Propositions Reduced to Twelve

2006-05-19T18:51:00.000-07:00

Grace is unreserved; and joy is pure. Dee is right: “It’s all grace all the time.” It’s never not grace. Grace is never absent, and it is never adulterated.

ii

Nor is joy. Joy is pure, always only itself—never mixed. There are not shades of joy.

iii

There are shades of happiness. This may lead us to believe that we have some control over our happiness, though we must relinquish joy and grace to God.

iv

Unfortunately our strategies for happiness are almost always—if not always—self-defeating. For example:

v

We like to think of ourselves as complicated, because if we don’t we can’t tell others, “You just don’t understand me.” (Or think of others, “They just don’t understand me.”)

vi

As complicated people, we’re embarrassed by simple pleasures.

vii

But complicated pleasures don’t bring happiness.

viii

Here’s a poem by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “Recipe for Happiness, Kharabovsk or Anyplace”:

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand café in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

ix

Happiness is not Paris. (It is Kharabovsk, or anyplace.) It is not fine wine. (It is coffee in very small cups.) It is not beauty.

x

It is not next year in Jerusalem. We may get to Jerusalem—or anyplace else (not “Kharabovsk or anyplace” )—by being restless. But it won’t make us happy.

xi

Even when we get there: we’ll still be restless.

xii

Our hearts are restless. Until they rest.

- Rick

Fear not?

2006-05-17T21:23:00.000-07:00

I grew up in a world of fear. Eight- and nine-years-old were especially tough. The Cuban missile crisis threatened to incinerate my city and necessitated bomb drills in which our school’s siren would wail like the hound of hell, and we children would dash home with paper squares pinned to our shirts onto which our mothers would write the exact time we arrived—this, to help the school decide, in case of real attack, who of us had time to go home and die with Mom. Also, around this time, my city tumbled into violent chaos wrought by the civil rights movement. On one Sunday four girls died in a bomb attack on a church; less remembered but on the same day: a young black boy was shot dead on his bicycle five miles from my house. Also in that stretch, I watched my grandfather lose a painful battle with cancer and my President be gunned down in Dallas. In the next few years, more shootings of public officials; also, the Vietnam War, a dark dragon in the East to which young men from my neighborhood were sent, some of whom never returned; of those who did, few came back healthy. To my young mind, draft cards meant the dragon was waiting for me to turn 18.

When I reached teen years, I understood that the world was a dark and fearsome place. I felt as if my whole life had been spent in the face of fear. That was tough enough, but worse: somewhere along the way, I was convinced it was possible to escape fear. In church I heard the biblical words from God, from the prophets, from angels, from Jesus himself: “Fear not!” I always heard them with that exclamation point, as a stern commandment: “Don’t you dare be afraid! It’s just not Christian.”

So, when I became frightened, which was much of the time, I admonished myself “Fear not!” But oddly, this served only to increase my fear: “Oh my gosh, I’m not s’posed to be scared, but I am! A sin! I’m ticking off God!” which scared me all the more. Years later, in a London subway station, I was reminded of this on seeing a large advertisement reading “DO NOT SING THIS: I see a little silhouett-o of a man / Scaramouche, scaramouche will you do the fandango.” Being the catchy line from a rock hit familiar to my generation, it was impossible to obey the command. In fact, the rest of the day, the words and tune ricocheted in my mind. This was the problem I had (and still have to some degree) with “Fear not!”

Lately, though, I’ve begun to figure out something. My error is in believing that fear can be escaped, in believing that a faithful person can actually resist fear. Having heretofore believed that, I’ve always tried to resist or to run from fear, and this avoidance response has served only to heighten my fear. What’s more, even with a childhood full of violence, death and doubt, I was slow to learn that no matter where you run, fear lives there, too—even (perhaps especially) INSIDE the church.

During Holy Week, I was deeply convicted by Luke’s account of Jesus praying in the garden on the night of his arrest (Luke 22:41-43). Jesus is frightened, the sweat falling from him like great drops of blood. He asks permission to resist, to run from fear. But wordlessly the Father tells him that he must face and absorb the fear that presses on him. This, he does. And we see that only hours later, by the time he appears before the Council and Pilate, something profound has happened. Fear has lost its sting. Jesus has walked into fear; he has absorbed it; it no longer controls him. And, as a result, his faith has turned even stronger. Had he tried to escape, his fear would’ve weakened him

I’m reminded of an early summer morning when I was eight or nine years old. In my swim trunks, I’m standing at the edge of a pool. A breeze, still full of night chill, sweeps across my naked torso. I wrap my arms around me, my teeth chattering, my legs vibrating. The water will be shockingly cold, this daunts me. But I know that if I’ll just jump in, my body will adjust, the icy sting will fade. The water which once daunted me, will soon soothe me. Four-plus decades later, I’ll begin to see that my fears must be understood in much the same way.

Walking toward, jumping into fear—these are the only situations in which faith can really grow. Running from fear, buying that nonsense that a faithful person does not fear, this actually weakens faith.

Contrary to what I was taught, fear is not the enemy of faith. Fear is faith’s partner. That’s easy to say, though it’s not been an easy lesson to learn. And the toughest part: living it out.

Ger

One and At The Same Time

2006-05-17T09:53:00.000-07:00

I do believe you are right Rick, we must claim the joy that is ours. If not we may be simply walking around with a “claim check” hoping the coat (joy) checker will find us. Whether we are found, or whether we claim joy, it is all grace.

So then, what do we say to this world living in despair? How do we speak of this joy? How do we witness to a different way of being without being discounted or called “poly-anna” or out of touch with the world? I don’t believe any of you are advocating simply singing in the streets, “I’ve got that joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart….”

What do we say to the grieving mother who’s child has just been killed by a drunk driver? How do we respond when we walk the 9th ward in New Orleans and see total destruction and another hurricane season coming? What do we do when our only black parishioner’s nephew is on trial for rape? Yes, we run from easy answers. We lament that happiness may be nowhere to be found, but how do we respond?

Sometimes I must confess that I am overwhelmed by the suffering of my immediate community and the tragedy of the world. I pray, yes. But I do spiral into despair—even though I know that joy is mine (and theirs) for the claiming. I do not believe there is a shortage or limited amount of joy, but the fatigue of discouragement and death squelch my joy.

I am praying that God will transform me and enlarge my heart so that I can at once hold sorrow and joy. I am praying God will increase my faith so that in the midst of despair, I can see and share light even though the dangers of night are all around me. I want to be authentic in acknowledging my pain and accompanying those who suffer and at the same time be buoyed up by the grace of inexplicable joy. I know it may be gift then. But I can I be about the practice of this now? I can I help others in my community practice authentically “putting on joy?” What spiritual discipline will help shape me in this desire? Lord, hear my prayer.

- Julie

Beyond God the Mother

2006-05-17T06:15:00.000-07:00

As I write this it is just 24 plus hours ago that we passed through Mother’s Day, my least favorite creation of Hallmark, Inc. “M is for the million cards they market; O means only that its growing old…” My dissent can be traced directly to the fact that our mother died at forty three, when I was not quite five. At school and at church thereafter, I learned quickly to dread the second Sunday of May, especially when we were forced to make something cute or meaningful for our mothers, and when they gave prizes to the youngest mother (they don’t do that one anymore) and to the oldest mother and to the mother with the most begats under her, well, belt. I cringed inwardly when recitations of the irreplaceable importance of mothers were read. I wanted to be absent that day.

As far as my brother, sister, and I were concerned, our Aunt, our Father’s sister, slid almost seamlessly into the mothering role, though she wisely insisted that we address her by her proper familial relationship, and not as Mother. When I tried to turn those Mother’s Day pretties into Aunt’s Day pretties, I was met with looks of reproof or pity or both. It never seemed quite right.

I had been named for our Aunt, as it turns out, even though I was a boy-child. Rebellion ensued when that fact first dawned on me, but it lasted about a minute. Now I wouldn’t have it any other way.

My life with Aunt Dee was positive. She was a solid source of support, a great teacher, and a trusted confidant. My late mother, by all accounts, including my rather sketchy, barely remembered one, was a fine woman, multi-layered, and self-assured.

I cannot find the reference, but one of Wm. Faulkner’s characters, speaking way before women were ordained by anybody anywhere to any office of the church, says something like, “A minister is a kind of a woman.” I’m not too offended by that. In another place Faulkner observes that “A mare is more like a man than a woman.” In most respects those are unrelated comments, except that they both make a lot of sense.

Later this very week, the DaVinci Code comes to the big screen. I don’t think it’s much of a book, but it is the largest selling novel of all time, so what do I know? And the idea of the “Sacred Feminine” figures within its labyrinthine mixture of legend, foolishness, and just plain foolishness.

In seminary, I read Mary Daly’s shockschrift Beyond God the Father. I agreed with her that there are problems with the father language, especially when the image is built from our human experience of fatherhood, which can be problematic at best and abusively terrifying at worst. The light should be projected not from us to God, but the other way round. I understood all that, but thought the issue unresolved when she turned toward the feminine principle. God the Mother presents at least as much difficulty as imagery more masculine. An earthly father can be distant or violent. An earthly mother can be as mean as a snake or as cold as ice.

The primary punch that gives the Trinity its vitality is relationship. Father-Son-Spirit share relationship in spades. Always have, always will. Mother-Son-Spirit (or Mother-Daughter-Spirit for that matter) would tote that load too. So would Parent-Child-Spirit, though the abstract parent might not satisfy as much as the specific Mother or Father, and likewise, children only come in son or daughter varieties (okay, leaving aside real hermaphroditic cases). Abstractions counter revelation; they don't deepen the mystery, they just cloud pictures and obscure thoughts.

Like what I’m doing with this unfortunate burst of verbiage. It started with a rant against Mother’s Day, and all of a sudden we're back at Nicea pretending to unravel the core, trinitarian truth of our faith, and trying to take down the book that has made Dan Brown richer than Croesus while we’re at it. I’m not sure where I’m headed, except to say that sometimes Mother’s Day excesses began to look like Mother-worship. Father’s Day could go off that same cliff if it weren’t for the fact that no one takes fathers that seriously these days. Maybe that would allow new meaning to come to the word, this time from God’s side.

Relationship is all. Over job descriptions and modes and shifting states of being. Over one gender or the other or both merged. The Greek in us wants an elegant argument that leads to clarity. The Hebrew in us opens all windows on life, on messy, complicated, aromatic, boisterous, beautiful life. God is love, yes. God is life, too. And life is a dance, right? Perichoresis!

Happy Relationship Day. Happy Dance of God with God and with God Day. Swing your partner at the ball. It’s all right if it’s your Mom. Buy her a corsage if it pleases. Doesy-doe.

- Uncle Dee

"Be Joyful Though You Have Considered All the Facts"

2006-05-15T17:18:00.000-07:00

The title of this post is a line from--you guessed it--a poem by Wendell Berry. He is certainly someone I miss seeing now that I am in Wyoming. I still have his poetry which I cherish even more now.

Anyway, I was going to write about something else until these last two glorious days. I'm sure some of you are tired of my weather reports. Bear with me as I discover this new place. May may have come in like February. Now, mid month, everything is blooming. I have lilacs outside my back door. The green is creeping up the mountain side toward the snow that still sits at the peak. The sky is deep blue and cloudless. It will be a brief greening and flowering. I know that, for I have been here two weeks short of a year.

In short, Rick and Julie, I am claiming joy. For there is no other word to describe this day and this place and my place in it.

And so, Wendell Berry:

Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When they want you to buy something
they will call you. When they want you
to die for profit they will let you know.
So, friends, every day do something
that won't compute. Love the Lord.
Love the world. Work for nothing.
Take all that you have and be poor.
Love someone who does not deserve it.
Denounce the government and embrace
the flag. Hope to live in that free
republic for which it stands.
Give your approval to all you cannot
understand. Praise ignorance, for what man
has not encountered he has not destroyed.
Ask the questions that have no answers.
Invest in the millenium. Plant sequoias.
Say that your main crop is the forest
that you did not plant,
that you will not live to harvest.
Say that the leaves are harvested
when they have rotted into the mold.
Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.
Put your faith in the two inches of humus
that will build under the trees
every thousand years.
Listen to carrion - put your ear
close, and hear the faint chattering
of the songs that are to come.
Expect the end of the world. Laugh.
Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyful
though you have considered all the facts.
So long as women do not go cheap
for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: Will this satisfy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Will this disturb the sleep
of a woman near to giving birth?
Go with your love to the fields.
Lie down in the shade. Rest your head
in her lap. Swear allegiance
to what is nighest your thoughts.
As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front" from The Country of Marriage, copyright © 1973 by Wendell Berry, reprinted by permission of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Lynn

My Way

2006-05-13T07:01:00.000-07:00

I wrote last Friday that I was going to think this Friday about happiness and joy. I also wrote that while I didn’t think they were the same, I wasn’t convinced that one was qualitatively better than the other.

Since then, Julie has written about “wearing joy” for Eastertide. And she has drawn this distinction: Happiness has to do with feelings or emotions. Joy is deeper. So, “we can know joy even when we are unhappy . . . .” Joy is also a gift, “not something we can acquire or even aim for.” Indeed, it may well come, by God’s grace, when we are looking the other way. Thus, we are “surprised by joy!”

Moreover, joy lasts. The gift of it, which is from God, is “abiding.” Paraphrasing Romans 8, Julie says, “Nothing can separate us from joy,” though we need to pay attention—even when we are looking the other way—in order to discern the constant “joy and presence of God” with us.

Wendy Farley also distinguishes joy and happiness—or, at least, joy and pleasure—though she doesn’t think our “problem” with regard to joy is only inattentiveness. (This is in The Wounding and Healing of Desire.) Farley thinks we resist joy, because it is not easy; it may even be dangerous. At least, we perceive it to be. “Pleasure is easy. We do not have to dedicate much energy to the capacity for pleasure. We do not have to do anything special to taste the deliciousness of chocolate cake. We only have to put it in our mouth. But joy moves into the deepest parts of us. It is like a ferocious, tender lover who adores us so intensely that it will not be satisfied until every corner of our body and soul has been drenched with delight. Joy requires the strength to receive joy.”

But is God a ferocious, tender lover? The phrase reminds me of the first line of Emily Dickinson’s poem

God is a distant—stately Lover—
Woos, as He states us—by His Son—
Verily, a Vicarious Courtship—
“Miles”, and “Priscilla", ”were such an One—

But, lest the Soul—like fair “Priscilla”
Choose the Envoy—and spurn the Groom—
Vouches, with hyperbolic archness
“Miles”, and “John Alden" ”were Synonym—

Here’s what I think—just to start an argument. I think Julie is right, but. I almost have to say she is right, because she says (very well) what I have always heard—and believed—particularly that joy like grace is a gift from God, and so it abides. We persevere in it, not by our own perseverance, but because as a gift of God, it can’t be taken away from us. Joy claims us.

But, we also claim joy. By that I mean we tend to pay attention to joy, to talk about it, precisely when we are unhappy, because we’re unhappy and we know we oughtn’t to be. If we truly believe what we say we believe—that God so loves us that in Christ he has redeemed us for all time—then we have no reason to be unhappy. Any of the time. (So why are we?)

Still for the sake of argument: Wendy Farley is wrong on several counts. First, she undersells pleasure, though I agree with her about chocolate cake, it’s no more than frisson. But apparently, she hasn’t been drinking good wine; she hasn’t been reading Emily Dickinson; she hasn’t been listening to Stan Getz; she hasn’t been looking out my fogged-up bathroom window across the roofs of the Deaf School and into the Blue Ridge.

So, she suggests that God must be ferocious to bring joy. It’s an interesting image, joy as ravisher. It’s an effective image as well, if we’re not happy. God comes to dispel—to rip away—not only the clouds of unknowing—as if that weren’t enough—but also the fog of our self-absorbed woe, so he may rapture us.

Does he? I’m not so sure. I find God incredibly patient with human self-absorption and unhappiness, our melodramatic melancholy, that stupid certainty we have most days that you-know-this-is-just-a-pretty-crappy-life-a-good-Merlot-Emily-Dickinson-Stan-Getz-and-the-Blue-Ridge-Mountains-not-to-mention-the-whole-salvation-and-eternal-life-thing-notwithstanding. But that’s my experience.

And it’s only my experience. There’s no reason God couldn’t also be ferociously, kick-butt impatient. Or, in other circumstances, a “distant—stately Lover—“ albeit with a trick up his sleeve. (Or maybe two: don’t forget the Spirit.)

Frankly, I don’t know why we’re unhappy, but I suspect that sometimes it’s because we are unable—or unwilling—to experience a full range of pleasure. We write our own experience large; then, we become trapped in it. We become so convinced that God works in certain ways, our ways, that we cannot see—or hear or taste or touch or smell—that he’s working in others as well.

- Rick

Arms wide open, I've run a twisted line

2006-05-11T21:03:00.000-07:00

It’s been more difficult than I had anticipated to depart American culture (and our version of the church) for three years and then to leap back in and pretend as if I’d simply stepped out for a smoke.

Trying to get back in the groove, I’ve done things that eager, post-modern Americans do. I’ve sought to sponge up life via the internet. I got satellite radio so that I might pass my driving time choosing from the gamut of options—Howard Sterne, C-SPAN radio, the BBC, the O’Reilly Factor on FOX, NPR, Canadian Broadcasting French language service, numerous sports channels, and 100 music formats.

This morning, driving to work and punching around on the radio, I settled on NPR’s Fresh Air with host, Terry Gross, who was interviewing Douglas Brinkley—friend of celebrities, Tulane professor, author, and, oh yeah, historian. Brinkley’s written a new one—published only two weeks ago—titled The Great Deluge : Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans, and the Mississippi Gulf Coast.

Toward the end of the interview, Doug mentioned that while writing this book he found himself listening to certain pieces of music that inspired him. Terry, a music buff, couldn’t let that pass—asked him, “What music?” Brinkley mentioned a couple of Dylan tunes, a few others, and then said, “and Willie Nelson’s recording of ‘The Maker.’” He paused a moment and said, “I encourage everyone listening right now to go listen to Willie Nelson’s version of this song.”

I’m not a Willie Nelson fan. I’m not a Douglas Brinkley fan. But something about the passion in the latter’s voice when he urged all listeners to listen to this tune…. When I got to the office I jammed my laptop into the docking station, jacked up my speakers, logged onto “MusicMatch” (to which I pay about $13 a month in order to hear any of 1,000,000 songs I might choose) and tracked down “The Maker” by Willie Nelson.

Actually, I didn’t expect much (being neither a Willie Nelson nor a Douglas Brinkley fan). Then, the song came like a flaming arrow, expertly aimed at a deftly guarded place in my soul. In a way I can’t completely describe, it spoke to my own sense of alienation. My own sense of lost-ness in this world in which I’m neither an African nor an American nor a….what? To me it spoke a word of trace, a word of sacred connection...

It’s written by native Quebecois Daniel Lanois. Here are the words. Go listen to Willie sing them. Don’t listen with your head. Listen with your whole being….

Oh, oh deep water, black and cold like the night
I stand with arms wide open,I've run a twisted line
I'm a stranger in the eyes of the Maker

I could not see for the fog in my eyes
I could not feel for the fear in my life
And across the great divide,
In the distance I saw a light
Saw Jean Baptiste walking to me with the Maker

My body is bent and broken by long and dangerous sleep
I can't work the fields of Abraham and turn my head away
I'm not a stranger in the hands of the Maker

Brother John, have you seen the homeless daughters
Standing there with broken wings
I have seen the flaming swords
there over east of Eden

Burning in the eyes of the Maker
Burning in the eyes of the Maker
Burning in the eyes of the Maker...

Oh, river rise from your sleep...

Ger

More than Liquid Soap!

2006-05-11T15:56:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite little quirks is to write down and list how US advertisers are co-opting Christian language, theology and music to sell products! The other day, I wasn’t looking at the television, but heard the tune, “Tis a gift to be simple, ‘tis a gift to be free…” I started whistling it and when I walked in the room to see what was on TV, the box was trying to sell me a luxury car! I think our Shaker friends might disagree. You too can play this game with me. We can buy: Hope perfume, Love bug VWs and Joy dishwashing liquid!

In this season of resurrection, joy is the feature of the day. We sing, “Joy to the World, the Lord has come,” at Christmas and at Easter we belt out “Celebrate with Joy and Singing!” We teach our children that the liturgical color is white...(maybe it has something to do with the cleaning effect of dishwashing liquid). We wear joy(white) for baptism, for funerals and ordination.

I’ve been thinking about “wearing joy” this Eastertide. We are marked with ashes on Ash Wednesday…how can we wear joy or put on joy in our daily discipleship?

I agree with Rick, joy is different from happiness. Happiness, for believers at least, is something akin to “feelings” or “emotions." Today I don’t feel happy, even though its Easter. Joy is deeper. We can know joy even when we are unhappy, despairing and desolate. In the gospel of John (John 15), Jesus says, “I have said these things to you, so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete!” Joy is a gift of our loving God and the goal and fruit of the Christian life. Its not something we can acquire or even aim for. We live faithfully, looking towards Christ in the midst of happy and sad times and the grace—the by product—is joy. As C.S. Lewis writes, we are “surprised by joy!”

Nothing can steal the joy that God gives us. I liken this to the promise of Romans 8 “Nothing can separate us from the love of God…” Nothing can separate us from joy…because wherever God is, there is joy. Thus, through Christ, we now abide with God forever and are given this beautiful, deep, and abiding gift. Our part is to “notice” or “discern” the joy and presence of God in our lives…not just when we feel happy, but each day and in every way. Let us see the holy garment of joy and wear it…so that others may see it and be curious about the giver and creator of the joy we wear.

- Julie

Snow in May?!

2006-05-08T13:20:00.000-07:00

This is what I woke up to on the morning of May 4, after having returned from a week’s trip to Kentucky the night before. I’ve seen snow, and I have seen blossoms on a crab apple tree. I have never in my 50 years seen snow on blossoms on a crab apple tree. Nor have I ever seen snow in May. It snowed last year at the end of April when I was visiting my sister in Michigan.

It may seem a cruel joke of whoever does weather. It was full-blown spring in Kentucky—heat, humidity, severe thunderstorms, and rain. Twelve hours later, I meet up with full-blown spring time in the Rockies: six inches of snow. According to reports on the Weather Channel, Casper had more snow May 4 than Alaska did. You know what? I didn’t care about the snow. In fact, I thought it was rather beautiful. I was just so happy to be out of freakin Kentucky that I would have walked barefooted through a blizzard to get out of there and back here.

Note to my friends and colleagues in Kentucky who read this blog: I miss you. I love you. I will visit. Thomas Wolfe said “you can’t go home again” and I don’t want to. Wyoming is home now. Come see us.

Part—a large part, actually—of the difficulty of returning to Kentucky after an absence of nearly a year has to do with remembered pain. The body has a memory. So just feeling the heat and humidity and smelling the fecund spring earth, and seeing the subdivisions and mega-drugstores (we don’t have much of those things in Wyoming) opened up old wounds not yet fully healed. I did not want to leave ministry in Kentucky. I did not want to know that church members--some also friends--and colleagues can hurt and betray and tear down in months what had taken years to build. I did not want to leave dear friends. I did not want to go so far away from family or from the South.

When I came here to Wyoming, I considered it an exile, of sorts. By the rivers of the North Platte, I wondered if I could sing the Lord’s song. ( I know, I’ve messed up the context and the text of Psalm 137. Forgive me.). The sight of snow on crab apple blossoms in the first week of May—more snow than Alaska—set my heart to singing.

Forgive, too, please this old preacher’s story about a child who watched as a butterfly struggled to break free from its cocoon. After watching the struggle for hours, the child decided to help by cutting open the cocoon. Free, the butterfly tried to fly. It could not. It needed the struggle of breaking free to strengthen its wings.

I thought of that story today when the director of the pre-school here at the church showed me the chrysalis (more than one but what’s the plural) from which butterflies will soon emerge. The children are watching and waiting, and so am I.

Thanks be to God for struggles and butterflies-to-be and snow on crab apple blossoms in May.

All Over the Map

2006-05-05T17:32:00.000-07:00

I sat down last Friday and began to write: “I’m still reading Darrin McMahon’s Happiness: a History, out of which I hope to get several essays. I thought I had one for this week—a learned disquisition on the distinctions between happiness and pleasure. Granted the learning was largely McMahon’s, not mine. But, when I looked back through my notes, I found neither of us had much of anything to say on the matter. (Yet! The threat remains.)

“I’m still interested in the topic, because I think (again, and often) that there are two kinds of people, those who tend to equate happiness and pleasure—these include John Locke, who is on record: “Happiness . . . in its full extent is the utmost Pleasure we are capable of” (Essay Concerning Human Understanding)—and those who tend to distrust pleasure altogether.

“I’m about to step on dangerous ground. Watch me. Watch out for me. Pray for me, too. I’m going to say that the guys that wrote the New Testament are in that camp. As our president might say, 'They're distrusters.'”

There I stopped. Before I knew it I was back on the road from Staunton, VA to Ann Arbor, MI. In case you ever have to make the trip, the best way to go is this. Take I-81 north to Winchester. Pick up US-522 there, through Berkley Springs, WV. When it runs into I-70, take that, west toward Pittsburgh. Get on the Pennsy Turnpike. Get off the Pennsy Turnpike. Get on the Ohio Turnpike. (Make sure you have about $15.00 for tolls.) Get off the Ohio Pike at Toledo. Take I-75 North to I-475 to US-23. That’ll take you right to Ann Arbor. It’s 565 miles. You can do it in just over 9 hours, if you make minimal (very minimal) stops and you push the speed limit to its very edge.

It isn’t a particularly pleasurable drive, though western Pennsylvania is lovely almost any time of year, and there are several nice river crossings, including the Potomac and the Ohio. It isn’t a pleasurable drive, especially if you’re in a hurry; but it is satisfying to have completed it.

I didn’t pick up where I stopped writing, because I didn’t have the tools I needed: I’m thinking especially of a Greek New Testament; Bauer, Arndt, and Gingrich; Moulton and Geden—that kind of stuff. Nor do I have them now, though I’m back from Michigan. It’s 11 hours and a little more from Mt. Pleasant. You take US-127 south to Lansing, where you pick up I-96 east toward Detroit. You run into US-23 some way north of Ann Arbor, at Brighton. Get on it and go backwards. You’ll need $18 for the tolls this way, and you’ll have to figure out how to finesse the construction in and around Toledo. I suggest swallowing your pride and following the signs Ohio DOT has put up for you.

I’m back from Michigan, but I’m now in Charlotte, NC. From Staunton, get back on I-81. Head south through some of the worst truck traffic in the country. Take I-79 south. It’s Virginia exit 81 on I-81. And keep going. You’ll know when you get there. It’s a big place.

I’m in Charlotte for my younger son’s graduation. It’s been a long time coming, so we’re excited about it. My older son has flown up from Mexico. We brought the dog. Tomorrow, instead of the graduation ceremonies, we’re going to the park. Nat is going to make a speech. And we’re going to cheer. Then we’re going to gather up some of his friends and go out to dinner.

In the meantime, I’m going to continue to think about happiness and pleasure and how they’re related. I’m also going to think about happiness and satisfaction. I’m going to think about happiness and excitement. Finally, I’m going to try to think about happiness and joy, which are not the same I don’t think (right this minute); but neither do I think (right this minute) that one is qualitatively better than the other. My consultants will include, besides Darrin McMahon: Aldous Huxley, the apple tree in my parents front yard (laden with blossoms when I left it), Arthur Koestler, the apostle Paul—and those are just the A’s.

If you’re not interested in this stuff, you can skip next Friday at Al’s and go fishing. I wish you good fortune. But whether good fortune will make you happy, I don’t know.

Rick

Reduction in Force

2006-05-02T18:37:00.000-07:00

The national offices of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) “RIFed” -- the better term is “laid off” and best is “fired” -- seventy five individuals from the Presbyterian Center, located in My Old Kentucky Home of Louisville. Another 55 will lose jobs overseas. Some of those affected will be employed until October 1 of 2006. All of them will receive severance pay for eight months.

It’s a bitch to work for a denomination that’s losing 30,000+ members a year for decades. But what is a denomination these days? We used to know the answer to that question. And none of us likes seeing friends fired, and no one likes to do the firing. How do you make such a process “Christian?” Who would Jesus lay off? What therapeutically correct HR principles would he use?

So. If we ruled the church world, and if we could ameliorate the personal financial problems suffered by the people whose professional lives have been given to it, we would make the whole thing go away. Send everyone home and pay them for sixteen months. It’s not that they are deficient as individuals, workers, or servants of Christ; in fact, those we know who labor at 100 Witherspoon Street are most proficient and devoted. They’re great people, to a person. It’s just that benching everyone seems the fairest way to call for a do-over.

During this dormant period, we might discover what it was that our churches missed. After sifting through their lamentations until we discerned what we couldn’t possibly live without, we’d rebuild the denomination, piece by piece. From below, at the parish level, it would be rebuilt, as well as from above, at the ever-moving plane of the Holy Spirit. Scripture would be indispensable to a fresh set of blueprints, with lesser roles for the Book of Confessions and the Book of Order.

This clear cutting technique would include Presbyteries and Synods, too, leaving only congregations and Sessions in the Presbyterian forest. These last would make decisions to join with other Sessions and congregations for the purpose of doing things they couldn’t do on their own. The joining congregations and church boards may not have to be Presbyterian. Just partners in the mission of being the body of Christ in and for the world.

When a group of congregations grew too large for knowing the people, the ministries, and the geographical settings of each other -- say 25 local churches -- then that group would split in half. Groups (we could call them presbyteries if it pleased) might link up into something like synods to carry their mission further. A super-regional, even national body would follow from this pattern. If we were careful, and God were merciful, we’d get what we need, and, we pray, not much more than that.

From a practical as well as a theological point of view, what can a denomination do that congregations, presbyteries, and synods can’t? Are they really necessary? Before we go through another reduction in the force of our national staff, we ought to think about such things, honestly, deliberately, and calmly. In doing so, it might be helpful to remember the old formula for a denomination’s purpose: global missions, educational material, and a pension program. Let’s concentrate on the middle one.

We were talking with a friend who works (still does!) at the Presbyterian Center about this very issue not too long ago. We suggested that that the church could jettison Sunday School curricula, Vacation Bible School packets, Women’s Bible studies, and the like. Fewer and fewer Presbyterian churches buy it anyway, and decent stuff is produced by the Lutherans, the Methodists, and an increasing number of independent publishers. We could wade through their literature and find courses for children, youth, and adults that might suit us just fine. Larger churches, and smaller ones for that matter, could write their own curricula and find it quite beneficial.

But my lunch companion had an alternative view. Educational material such as curricula are systematic statements of identity, he said. They transmit a living tradition. It should be offered to our churches for free, he said. It is the one thing we can do that will help them define themselves and produce some old fashioned, much needed loyalty among God’s people whose heritage is traced along Protestant, Reformed, and Presbyterian lines.

He makes a good point. Our best feature has long been our emphasis on Christian education, on a well-tutored spiritual formation. If we do nothing else, we do honor the life of the mind in service to God and to neighbor. Besides, the denomination hasn’t made any money off church school curricula for years. What would we lose if we gave it away? By trusting the Spirit and the people that profoundly, we might get our old zip back.

For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake and for the sake of the gospel will save it (Luke 8:35).

As Ever, Dee

Where in . . . ?

2006-05-02T18:28:00.000-07:00

Lynn is off this week. Rick is back in Michigan. Gerald was recently misplaced. But we all hope to be back next time ‘round: Gerald on Thursday, Rick on Friday, Lynn next Monday. In the meantime, thank God for Dee (coming right up!) and Julie.

Children of Royalty

2006-04-27T15:52:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-23T18:06:00.000-07:00

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?

2006-04-19T22:14:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-19T10:40:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-17T09:28:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-14T10:27:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-13T20:32:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-13T06:16:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-07T11:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-06T20:06:00.000-07:00

“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

2006-04-05T17:47:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-05T06:04:00.000-07:00

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

2006-04-03T15:30:00.000-07:00

"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

More Snakes

2006-03-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

I was talking the other day with one of my older and wiser friends, who has admitted he’s not sure he believes in God. In fact, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t. It’s the way it’s come to be. For a long time he did; then he did a little while longer out of habit. Then he wasn’t sure, and then he didn’t. He’d like to get it back, his faith; but it isn’t as easy as you might think, he tells me. It’s not like you can go out into the garden and pick faith like you pick strawberries. He’s right about that. He’s right about a lot of things.

I suspect, though, that while he says he’d like to get his faith back, he’s not desperate about the loss of it. If it came, he’d welcome it; but he’s not going out to look for it. I tell him that: “You can’t pick strawberries either, if you don’t go out into the garden.” I don’t know exactly what I mean by that—as we’ve already established that faith and strawberries are two different sorts of things. But I say it anyway, because it sounds good: “You can’t pick strawberries if you don’t go out into the garden.” I’m aware as soon as I say it that I’m ignoring not only that there is a difference between faith and strawberries, but that my friend still shows up in church almost every Sunday.

I’m not quite sure what he’s doing there, so I’m surprised when he tells me that he doesn’t think the church ought to . . . in this case, ordain gays and lesbians. “Of course, I’m in the minority on that here.” He means in his house. It’s something of a joke: his children are grown; there are only he and his wife. So, he smiles when he says it, though its being a joke doesn’t make it not true; and he and I both know that.

I’m not sure why I’m surprised when he says he thinks the church ought not to ordain gays and lesbians. But I am, so I don’t ask him why he thinks that. Instead, I start talking about something else, though not—apologies to Monty Python—“something completely different.” I start telling him about an editorial I’ve seen recently. It’s by Daniel Henninger of The Wall Street Journal. Henninger is concerned first (in this essay) about dishonesty, which he thinks is becoming—Jack Abramoff, James Frey, Barry Bonds, Andrew Fastow—practically epidemic, so dangerously so that our “common understanding of what’s right and what’s wrong” may be dying.

In that case, what to do? “The efficient path to an ethical revival would be to call upon religious institutions and the schools to teach morality.” But, uh-oh, both schools and religion have been completely captured by the culture wars, which have become all about one thing: sex.

Henninger’s modest counterproposal is that we remove sex from the equation. “Maybe it’s time for the sex obsessives on the left and right to take their fights over abortion and gay rights into a corner somewhere and give the rest of society space” to talk about things that are, finally, more important—and about which we can largely agree: Thou shalt not kill; thou shalt not steal; thou shalt not bear false witness. Indeed, to be distracted from these things has had a “corrosive effect,” breeding “too many little Bonds and little Fastows” and their associates.

I ask my friend what he thinks about that. He still thinks the church shouldn’t ordain gays and lesbians, he says. But that didn’t mean he wanted to argue about it. He just wanted me to know.

Rick

Snake Handling

2006-03-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

It’s a corner of the calendar I occupy frequently. Either I’m a week late or three years early, relative to the New Revised Common Lectionary. The First Scripture Lesson for the 4th Sunday of Lent was (and will be again in 2009, under the condition of James 4:15) Numbers 21:4-9:

From Mount Hor (cue the guffaw of the inner 7th grader) they set out by the way of the Red Sea, to go around the land of Edom; but the people became impatient on the way. The people spoke against God and against Moses, “Why have you brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? For there is no food and no water, and we detest this miserable food. Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents (KJV is probably better here with “fiery serpents”) among the people, and they bit the people, so that many Israelites died. The people came to Moses and said, “We have sinned by speaking against the Lord and against you; pray to the Lord to take away the serpents from us.” So Moses prayed for the people. And the Lord said to Moses, “Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole, and everyone who is bitten shall looks at it and live.” So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it on a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live.

This is the very type of troubling text that we should study precisely because it is so bothersome, puzzling, even offensive at several details. We learn best from a passage of Scripture we don’t like, or so it seems to me. Instead of following this principle, however, I ducked the text entirely. I could see nothing edifying, much less meaningful, coming from it.

Ann, one of our lectionary partners, said that this was the kind of text she wants to ask God about someday in that land beyond time. That set me to thinking. What would that conversation sound like? I posed one of my own. In my imagination, I arranged for a two-way ticket into the heavenly precincts with a tourist visa and a press pass. As it turned out, I didn't get to interview God, which would have been more than I could have handled. But I did get to interview one of God’s secretaries, a fully if formerly human fellow named Stanley who has access to the heavenly court as well as to earthly events. After a few niceties exchanged in his spare and handsome office, we quickly got down to business.

ME: So, what’s up with Numbers 21: 4 and following?

STAN: You mean about the snakes?

ME: Yes. The way it’s written implies that God is showing signs of extreme stress. The people whine, which is what people do when they travel. Ever been in a mini van with a couple of kids on a twelve hour drive to Disney World?

STAN: Disney World and mini vans are after my time.

ME: Okay; wrong example. But it seems disproportionate. The people kvetch and God sends poisonous snakes to kill them? Is God just tired, or is this indicative of God’s nature? Or -- as I suspect -- does this passage contain a heap more human opinion than Divine Word?

STAN: Look at it this way. The people, not God, are tired. They’ve been camping out on rough ground for some time now. They naturally whine, murmur, whatever. They come upon some territory that is overrun with snakes. Viper heaven. Some people get bitten; some of those die. Their collective wisdom sees cause and effect. The person -- some aide to Moses, let’s say -- who’s in charge of the wilderness wandering daily log book, records this note: Then the Lord sent poisonous serpents… That note gets picked up in the final edit of the Book of Numbers, and it becomes embedded in the way that part of the story is told.

ME: My point exactly! It’s human opinion; I can’t imagine the God of grace and love I know in Jesus Christ killing men, women, and children, just because they get a little cranky during a long and difficult trip.

STAN: Slow down there, Professor Von Rad. It’s not just human opinion. Remember who these people were, and the times and places in which they lived. They are ex-slaves. Uneducated and unaccustomed to looking at anything beyond what was right before their noses. They were not given to transcendent thinking. They lived and breathed superstition. They were impressed by magicians. They world they inhabited was thickly populated with gods and semi-gods, angels and demons, spirits of benevolence, spirits of evil, and spirits of mischief.

Then, all of a sudden, they were coming to learn that there is but One God in the whole universe (which, for them, was Egypt plus the Sinai Peninsula plus this unseen but promised land toward which they traveled). Moses told them that there were not many equally significant gods competing with each other, but One. One without peer. Spiritual beings still existed, and maybe along with those gods they used to know, though with greatly lowered status. But they all worked for the One God. All creation was made through the agency of the One God, including every other creature on the earth, whether creeping, crawling, walking, swimming, or flying. So God -- the same One who engineered their escape from Egyptian oppression -- must be responsible for the snakes, too.

ME: By the way, did you read the front page lead article in the New York Times that happened to appear the 4th Sunday in Lent, 26 March 2006?

STAN: Yes, as a matter of fact, but you’re getting ahead of yourself again. You’ve got to understand that Monotheism is self-evident only to monotheists. For everyone else, its a long, slow process. Before monotheism was revealed to these folks, they might have attributed the snakes to some heretofore unknown deity, or that the snakes were gods or devils themselves. But with monotheism, they might make the leap directly to the notion that absolute sovereignty equates to infinite control over every detail. The idea of a free, undetermined world or of neutrally charged events would be nigh impossible to these people to have comprehended. They were not that complex.

ME: So over time, we developed the capacity to stop attributing everything to God’s will, just because it happened, like my mother dying of a blood clot when she was 43, or the parking spot that opened for me yesterday right in front of the restaurant.

STAN: Something like that, unless you’re thinking that you and your kind are smarter than those slaves. They possessed an intelligence as sharp as anyone’s, just otherwise focused.

ME: So verse 6 of Numbers 21 contains the Word of God for those people?

STAN: Yes it does. And for you too, if you hear it right. You can understand it this way: if it helped the people to understand that they were God’s and God was theirs, then God wouldn’t care to be blamed for the business with the snakes, even if the snakes were a random occurrence. Besides, you’ll notice that deliverance from the snakes comes at the mere suggestion of relief from the people through Moses. God comes out on the side of life as this snippet of Scripture ends.

ME: And then the sympathetic magic thing going on with the bronze serpent set on a pole shouldn’t bother us?

STAN: Be bothered if it suits you. Chase your discomfort and you might be led into a whole new discovery of who you are and who God is. But remember, God is determined to be in relationship with human beings. So much so as to communicate in the linguistic and cultural idiom of whomever God is dealing with.

ME: So that article in the Times. Can we talk about it now?

STAN: Sure.

ME: It was about the Guinea worm, and how hard it is to eradicate this pestilence in parts of Africa. The parasites enter the body through drinking water contaminated with water fleas containing Guinea worm larvae in their gut. There they emerge and grow until they mature and then they work their way out, normally through the legs or feet, but sometimes through the chest or even the eye socket. By this time they are thread thin but a yard long. They emit an acid that burns a tunnel through muscle and skin. Victims feel like they are on fire as these worms take days and weeks to come all the way out.

STAN: And you noticed the line which said that Guinea worms have been found in Egyptian mummies and are thought to be the “fiery serpents” described in the Old Testament, torturing the Israelites in the desert.

ME: I did. And I noticed that some Nigerian villagers felt that the Guinea worm was a curse sent them from their ancestors, and had nothing to do with dirty drinking water. That’s when something clicked in my mind, though I’m not entirely certain what it was.

STAN: Cause and effect thinking is hard to break, whether associated with revered ancestors or with the One true God.

ME: I have an odd appreciation for that way of thinking, though. The line between the spiritual and the physical, the past and the present, between this world and the world to come, is tissue paper thin. It is a thoroughly relational, organic, and wholistic way to live. Tilted in the right direction, it is alive with the presence of God.

STAN: But you recognize the dangers, too.

ME: I think so. I recognize the dangers in the superstitious resistance to intervention that can rid the world from pests like the Guinea worm by insuring that drinking water be clean. Neither our ancestors -- the saints with whom we enjoy communion -- nor God would want people to suffer unnecessarily from parasites that are easily preventable.

STAN: Maybe you see another illustration that the Word of God is living and active, not just squiggles on a page. God’s Word, hidden in Numbers 21, is being spoken by the work of the Jimmy Carter Center Guinea Worm Eradication Program as described in that article. Their workers have sharply reduced the incidence of this dreadful disease, though it’s taken them twice as long as they thought, and they still have a way to go. And we are also noticing that down in your part of the earth, there is that program called Living Waters for the World, which helps people find technologically appropriate solutions to the problem of poor drinking water. God’s word is spoken through that work, too.

ME: I was going to mention that. Perhaps that’s what clicked in my mind while I read the newspaper. The more I tried to ignore this troubling text of Scripture, the more it wormed it way (sorry) into my consciousness. It brought me to a deeper understanding of how complaint can lead to cure, bitching to balm, murmuring to salvation. On some level or another, God took responsibility for the pestilence of the fiery/poisonous snakes. That can lead us to take responsibility for the pestilence of our place and time, and do something about them. And maybe God doesn’t care whether passages like Numbers 21 make God look good in our whiney little eyes or not. As long as people are helped. As long as more and more people drink cleaner and cleaner water.

STAN: It’s not magic; it’s not a bronze snake. But from fresh and living water, people are freed from the fiery serpent. They live. And that makes my boss and your boss very happy.

ME: One more thing. Can you check to see if the coincidence of the 4th Sunday of Lent with the publishing of the NY Times article was just that -- a coincidence? Or was the hint of providence involved?

STAN: Don’t push your luck, cowboy. All I can say is that she who has eyes to see may see, and that he who has ears to hear may hear.

ME: I hate it when you people talk like that.

STAN: But that’s about the best I can do.

ME: Yes. Sorry. You and your staff have been very helpful. Thank you.

STAN: That’s what we’re here for.

ME: Thanks again. I’ll see you later.

STAN: Probably sooner than you think.

ME: Say again?

Dee

Child's Play

2006-03-29T15:27:00.000-08:00

I wonder how many books and articles have been written on prayer? Scripture is full of references to prayer. Some are comforting, some seem unrealistic, some even make me angry. The more I read about prayer, the more questions I have. The more I live into prayer, the more mysterious it seems.

I have attended workshops on numerous types of prayer and written theological papers on the efficacy of prayer. I have listened to “so called” experts in prayer. This is what I’ve learned… my best teachers are children.

It is my great joy to sit on the floor most Sundays with 2-5 year olds who worship God through a wonderful ministry called, “Godly Play.” One Sunday, Will and I were playing in the Desert box. We had just heard a story about Moses and murmurings of the Israelites. Will walked over and brought back the wooden figure of Jesus and placed it next to the wooden figure of Moses. Will said that Moses was sad and tired and that Jesus could help him.

“Will, do you pray?” I asked.
“Sure.”
“Why do you pray?” I inquired.
“God and I have lots to talk about,” Will said.
“Does God answer your prayers?”
“Not always, but mommy doesn’t give me everything I want either. God loves me and knows what I need and how to help the world,” Will said with confidence.
After playing some more I said,
“What happens when your prayer doesn’t work?”
“What do you mean? My prayers can’t break and don’t need batteries.”
I smiled. “Sometimes I just get sad and confused.”
“I know,” said Will, “me too.”
“You know what?”
“What?” I said.
“God misses you when you don’t pray.”
“Really?” I wondered.
“Sure….Julie, don’t think so much.” Will patted my arm.

So, I try to practice prayer. I still read and wonder. I still go to workshops and conferences. But, my consistent prayer remains, “Lord, teach me to pray…like your child.”

Julie

Prayer: A Question

2006-03-27T09:59:00.000-08:00

Have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if there were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet

Here is the question I have been living with acutely for more than six weeks although I’m not sure I’ve lived with it long enough to articulate it well. My question has something to do with prayer—how it works, if it works, why it works. My relationship with prayer these days is an uneasy one. Through a regular practice of contemplative prayer, I thought I had moved from the “Help me” and “Thank you” prayers of Anne LaMotte fame (nothing wrong with the thank you prayers, I probably don’t pray those enough), to an understanding of prayer as relationship with God. I really pray a lot more than I used to pray, sitting in silence each day, opening my life to God’s presence and action. It’s been good for me.

Then about six weeks ago, I got a call early on Sunday morning that a member of my congregation—former presbytery moderator and current council chair, beloved by me and by many in the church, the city, the state--had gone into full cardiac arrest and was in ICU. I went to see her husband, sat with him in the waiting room, prayed with him, got in the car, started driving to church, and as if from nowhere came to question—will it work? Will prayer work and Betty get better? I fumbled through a sermon on Namaan the leper and healing. And with the congregation, I commended Betty to God and asked for her healing.

More than six weeks have passed. Betty is on her way to a rehab facility, completely debilitated by a “virus” (because the disease did not respond to antibiotics) which attacked every system in her body. She is alive and perhaps will get well. Did God answer prayer? If she died then or dies now, did God answer prayer?

I continue my prayers for Betty, at her bedside, with her family as they have made difficult decisions, with the congregation, and I suppose in my daily practice of prayer since I open my heart to God and Betty is on my heart. I am not nor I guess will I ever be a so-called prayer warrior, one who practices intercessory prayer vigorously and regularly. If I pray at all with words, I use the Lord’s Prayer or the Serenity Prayer. In terms of the 11th of the 12 steps, I seek “through prayer and meditation to improve [my] conscious contact with God …., praying only for knowledge of [God’s] will for me and the power to carry that out.”

Betty’s husband and daughters and my friend Charlotte whose child is an addict and now a runaway tell me that they have been given strength and comfort by the power of others’ prayers for them. How does that happen? Is it like God telling Moses to put the serpent on the pole—the story in yesterday’s reading? Does knowing we are prayed for lift out eyes beyond the snakes at our ankles to a power higher than ourselves? Does prayer lift our eyes beyond our own ability to anything? Does prayer remind us that we are surrounded by a loving, caring community?

Those are the questions I am living today.

Lynn

Fun with Iambs (and one anapest)

2006-03-24T08:03:00.000-08:00

The preacher read from memory and said:
The Gospel of Saint John, and chapter three—

As Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness,
so he is lifted up, the son of man,
that all believing not just in but into him
will have eternal life.

For God so loved the world he gave his one, his only, son
(again:) that all believing into him will have
eternal life, not die, not ever die.
God didn’t send his son into the world
that he condemn the world,
but that the world be saved through him.

So if a man, a woman, if you believe in him,
you won’t be judged—condemned! But if—
if you do not believe, you are already judged—
condemned; for you did not believe into his name,
the one and only son of God. My friends,
we don’t believe just on the name of Christ (just sitting there)
but into it—we run toward him. Unless we run away:

This is the condemnation, John goes on: the light
is coming in the world—no, no, into—
that word again: it moves, this time toward us.
And do we turn and run away?—because we love the dark,
because our deeds are dark, we hate the light,
for in it we are seen, exposed to God and everyone.

We hate the light—unless we live by truth.
For anyone who lives by truth comes out into the light.

So you, my friends, come out
and let your deeds be plainly seen by God.
He sent his one, his only, son into the world for you.

Swinging with the Temptations - Side B

2006-03-23T10:58:00.000-08:00

Julie’s blog The Temptations (just below) tags me. First, because I’ve sworn off for Lent things baked—bread, cake, cookies, crusts, croutons, cereals and all that might fall under the rubric “breadstuff”.

I came to this un-Gerald-like decision the Monday before Ash Wednesday while wrestling with Luke’s account of Jesus in the wilderness. I was especially convicted by the opening exchange between Big D and Jesus. In my mind I could see a stone, the size of a little-league football; it was ugly, clumpy, dirt- and sand-flecked. Then, astounded, I watched it transform into perfectly shaped, unblemished fresh-baked bread, blondish and puffy, steaming hot, the sort of loaf my grandmother would slice and butter shortly after taking it from the oven. What’s more, I could smell it—moist and sweet. My stomach began to plead. Then came the voice of Jesus quoting Deuteronomy with (for some reason) Gene Peterson’s translation: “It takes more than bread to really live.” I wanted to say, “Maybe, but bread’ll getcha half-way there!”

I didn’t say that, though. Because I sensed—honest to God, I really sensed—that I was being asked by Jesus to let go of bread. At first I had no response. I just pondered it all. Then, confirming Calvin’s hunch that all human thoughts and deeds in this life are imbued with sin, I felt a surge of attraction, “Man, I bet I could drop some serious weight, maybe become svelte, better-looking!” But, in the end, cumulative spiritual voices from my past were reprised to remind me that giving up bread for Lent would put me in a continual state of temptation, and thus provide me an entrée into the heart of my Savior—a “gateway to finding God” as Diogenes Allen has put it. So I made the pledge—as I said, a very un-Gerald-like decision.

Now I dream a lot about cake—red velvet, German chocolate, pound. (I am not making this up.) Usually, I eat the whole cake and immediately begin to suffer a bloated guilt and sadness because, in one fell swoop, I've completely regressed from a hard-earned, considerable advancement and have fallen a long way from the real fulfillment of my desire, the one I sense that only God can fill.

Eventually, though, I awake to the joyous (and yes, it always feels joyous) realization that my regimen is still intact, I am still advancing in the pilgrimage. But, then, pursued by my dreams, I spend a goodly portion of the day pondering temptation.

And Julie tagged me a second time in this wonderful line: “So in Lent we journey with Jesus and his (temptations) in the wilderness, and he journeys with us in the jungle of our own temptations.” For me, that perfectly frames Lent. Yet it has begun to beg a deeper question, a personal quandary that has to do with discernment. I’ll try to explain.

I do not always find it easy to distinguish God’s beckoning of me, on the one hand, from the temptations that are not of God, on the other. Sure, we all know the very obvious temptations, those exposed by the Ten Commandments: temptations to kill (or be in someway life-taking), to steal, to commit adultery, to lie, to covet what a neighbor has, etc. But to use Julie’s analogy, there is a part of my jungle where the flora grows very thick and complicated and the fauna beckon me in myriad directions. While I can usually recognize the serpents as sinful allures, there are other manifestations whose source and meaning are not so recognizable. Jesus doesn’t always come to me as he appears in the Sunday School lithograph posters. In my jungle, a cacophony of voices urges me, “Let go of that vine and come this way!” And more often than not, I’m likely to regard all allures as evil temptation. I prefer my present vine, thank you very much. Didn’t my Savior say, “I am the vine, you are the branches; cut off from me, you can do nothing”? Yes, but my Savior said other things as well. And he wasn’t fond of his disciples sticking around in one place for long.

This week’s gospel lection, John 3:14-22, includes a portion of Nicodemus’ under-cover-of-darkness visit with Jesus. Looking from Nicodemus’ perspective, we could say he’s being painfully tempted by Jesus. Theretofore well grounded in a Pharisaic worldview (rooted in Scripture, I might add) that supplied his moral compass, Nicodemus now feels the uncomfortable tug toward a heretic rabbi from Galilee. The rabbi tells him of a Spirit that takes hold of people and blows them where it will (wild vine-to-vine swinging?). Nicodemus will struggle against the temptation to open his heart to that Spirit, to let go of the jungle-vine he now hangs on, and to grab hold of another that will necessitate more grabbing and swinging—a kind of Tarzan pilgrimage? We know not exactly where Nicodemus arrived in his struggle against temptation, but portions of John 7 and 19 indicate that incrementally he succumbed to the allure.

So here I am, drawn toward places that many, perhaps most of my well-intentioned family, friends and colleagues may call “wrong places,” if not sinful temptations. But are they? All of them? Can conventional Christian wisdom easily distinguish all temptation from all divine beckoning? When Nicodemus asked that Jesus be given a fair hearing, his colleagues retorted, “Surely you’re not also from Galilee, are you? Look at the Scriptures and you’ll see that we’re right and you’re wrong!” They represented the prevailing wisdom of God’s people. They represented resistance to temptation. And they missed the point.

Julie says that paying attention to her cravings and temptations has helped her to see her emptiness and longing differently. I’m having the same experience. She says, “My prayer has been to ask God to fill those cravings not with whatever glitters and gleams…” Me, too.

But so often I struggle mightily to distinguish the chute to hell from the gateway to God.

God help me to know the Temptations from the Four Tops.

Ger

The Temptations

2006-03-22T14:58:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I was out to lunch with a friend and we were talking about Lent and the temptations that Jesus faced in the wilderness. It was a lively conversation and a bit humorous since we were talking about the first temptation, “Human beings cannot live by bread alone,” in the middle of a bustling café.

It became obvious that the server had overheard our conversation as she served us our lunch. She blurted out enthusiastically, “Oh, I just love the Temptations too! We need more like the Temptations.” Basically, most people when the hear the word “temptations” are usually talking about a music group or how “tempting” that dessert was.

I’ve been meditating on the temptations of Jesus during this Lenten season with the help of Diogenes Allen’s recent book entitled, Temptations. I believe Lent offers us an invitation to look at those things that we cling to more tightly than Christ. Yes, many think this a drag, but I have actually found it quite liberating. Liberating because Jesus promises to lead us through our temptations, “For he (Jesus) himself has suffered and has been tempted, he is able to help those who are tempted.” –Hebrews 2:18

So in Lent we journey with Jesus and his in the wilderness and he journeys with us in the jungle of our own temptations. We are in this together. In fact our temptations can teach us. Allen writes, “We shall live by listening to all God tells us. So attend to that craving in yourself that only God’s words can fulfill.”

This is a new concept for me. Usually, I pray to avoid temptations or ask for forgiveness when I succumb to temptation. But to practice…paying attention to my cravings and temptations has helped me to see my emptiness and longing differently. My prayer has been to ask God to fill those cravings not with whatever glitters and gleams…even if it first presents as a “good thing” as Martha Stewart says.

In the beginning and in the end, only God can satisfy us completely. You might remember how Faust was tempted by the devil and gave in to taste all things and experience everything imaginable. But, do you remember how that turned out? He became bored. Only God can satisfy. So you and I need to pay attention to where we feel unsatisfied and restless. This will be a clue for us about God’s wisdom and invitation.

We live in a world created by God where evil is part of the human reality. We may wish it weren’t so, but it is. Again Allen is helpful,

Here we see that one of the conditions God sets
without any say on our part is that we are
exposed to evil. Whatever its ultimate source
may be, whatever our responsibility for it may
be, we presently are in the midst of evil and
the gateway to finding God is placed at a point,
where we are tempted by evil. We must face up
to it and renounce it, or we do not find
the gateway to God.” (emphasis mine)

God is always making a way and inviting us into deeper relationship. When we find ourselves lead into temptation or in the midst of temptation, let us pray that we pay attention to our deepest longings and watch for the gateway to the Holy. Then… with the singing Temptations, “Get Ready!” -Julie

Contested Shots

2006-03-22T10:43:00.000-08:00

My bracket is busted all the way to the Bad Place. How’s yours? I know I brought it up, but can we talk about something else?

I also brought up Kris Kristofferson’s name last time I was pouring liquor. Between then and now a friend bought me a copy of his new CD, This Old Road, first in forever. He is my new point of fascination. I can’t help wondering if the current political line-up, which choose to start the war in Iraq, flushed Kristofferson out of retirement. Neil Young is also back, belting out fine anti- war tunes. Good to see ya, boys. Just in the nick.

For his part, Kris returns in all his glory, singing in that whiskey-strained voice of his, funny, pissed-off, wise, self-aware and mortality-aware. And there’s oodles of theological reflection. Some is in a song called "Pilgrim’s Progress" that includes:

Am I young enough to believe in revolution
Am I strong enough to get down on my knees and pray
Am I high enough on the chain of evolution
To respect myself, and my brother and my sister
And perfect myself in my own peculiar way

I get lazy, and forget my obligations
I’d go crazy if I paid attention all the time
And I want justice, but I’ll settle for some mercy
On this Holy Road through the Universal Mind

I think the man is a believer. The kind you admire, that you’d like to know personally. I’ve been re-discovering John Prine lately, too. He shares some qualities with Kris Kristofferson. Both are story tellers, with an intelligent lyric, an appreciation for irony and all that. I like Prine considerably, but I feel he’s still in the skeptical phase. It’s a sophisticated, worthy skepticism, certainly witty. But Kris has grown past that phase it seems, to embrace faith in spite of all the reasons one has to be doubtful. From "In the News:"

Broken babies, broken homes
Broken-hearted people dying everyday
How’d this happen, what went wrong
Don’t blame God, I swear to God I heard him say

"Not in my name, not on my ground
I want nothing but the ending of the war
No more killing, or its over
And the mystery won’t matter anymore"

If I’m right about Kristofferson’s belief and Prine’s skepticism (and I may not be; I’m not on the speed dial of either of them), then the two pose an interesting way of talking about faith and doubt. I’m of the opinion that a strong faith emerges when it has weathered honest misgivings. It’s tougher, grizzlier, more real. Many of our people--but not all--appreciate hearing that we too have wrestled with doubt. God knows there are plenty of buffoons in the zoological garden of the church that cause thinking people to save themselves by running away from their squirrelly image of Jesus. We understand if they can’t believe in the church, but hope that they can believe in one God, and that the real Jesus can make a proper introduction.

Do we also hope that they can one day return to the church, with their skepticism fuelling a richer, more resonate faith? We put up a big banner in our church front yard announcing the time of our Palm/Passion Sunday and Easter Sunday services. Deborah, my long-suffering wife, asked if it was because we need more people to fill the sanctuary. No, I answered, and I think without defensiveness, we hung the banner because the passers-by need to be in our sanctuary. Upon reflection, I would say that passers-by need to be in our sanctuary (or any half-way decent sanctuary) on days like those during days like these.

We sometimes say that Christianity is impossible to practice all alone. That it takes a community. Does that mean, then, that, as Catholics and some reformers say, that there is no salvation without the church?

I like mature skeptics who finally yield to faith. That’s what I want to say. The late M. Scott Peck, despite his outsized ego, said it better. Karl Barth, though, adds a cautionary tone. He describes two kinds of doubt, one probing, sharpening faith, recognizing that all theological shots should be contested, for nothing can be taken for granted in such an important field of knowledge. But there’s another form of doubt, which he names as dangerous, as a swaying and staggering between Yes and No, a fixed uncertainty, a perpetual "perhaps this, perhaps not."

This form of doubt is "…altogether a pernicious companion which has its origin not in the good creation of God but in the Nihil -- the power of destruction… There is certainly justification for the doubter, but there is no justification for the doubt itself (and I wish someone would whisper that in Paul Tillich’s ear). No one, therefore, should account himself particularly truthful, deep, fine, and elegant because of his doubt" (Evangelical Theology, Eerdmans, 1963, p. 131).

So I am warned. I guess I’ll say that as long as skepticism (is that the same thing as doubt?) circles back to faith, it improves faith, or maybe it improves the faithful person, gives him or her an edge, a texture, some substance he or she wouldn’t otherwise have. I heard Jim Logan say one time that we minister types should preach our convictions and teach our doubts. Maybe there is something to that.

And maybe there’s something to this verse, again from Kris K.

The truth is a highway
Leading to freedom
All is forgiven
Love is to blame

Ain’t that good?

Dee

Equinox

2006-03-20T08:19:00.000-08:00

Today is the spring equinox. Since once again, it is snowing here, I take the date’s significance to be that winter days are limited. I also heard on the radio this morning that three years ago today, the war on Iraq began. Has it been just three years? It seems much longer.

All of that—the beginning of spring, the war, an article I read in Christian Century about the delegate to the World Council of Churches from the United Church of Christ who joined with other delegates to make public amends for their part in the war—as well as the posts last week, reminded me of this poem by Wendell Berry. It is my offering this week:

A Purification

Wendell Berry, Collected Poems, p. 201-02

At start of spring I open a trench
in the ground. I put into it
the winter’s accumulation of paper,
pages I do not want to read
again, useless words, fragments,
errors. And I put into it
the contents of the outhouse:
light of the sun, growth of the ground,
finished with one of their journeys.
To the sky, to the wind, then,
and to the faithful trees, I confess
my sins; that I have not been happy
enough, considering my good luck;
have listened too much to noise;
have been inattentive to wonders;
have lusted after praise.
And then upon the gathered refuse
of mind and body, I close the trench,
folding shut again the dark,
the deathless earth. Beneath that seal
the old escapes into the new.

Happy Equinox,

Lynn

Saviors, Books, and Kings Starting with S

2006-03-17T11:18:00.000-08:00

I have an uneasy relationship with Jesus, though I do have to say that when he calls me into his office, he’s as patient as he is disappointed. He is as Gerald depicted him. I sit down across the desk. And he looks at me for a minute—a long minute—then he begins shaking his head and saying my name, over and over again, “Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick, Rick. What am I going to do with you?” And I shrug. And he shakes his head again. “Oh, boy!” he sighs. And he lets me go.

I have an uneasy relationship with books. Perhaps it’s the result of their shape; they’re much more angular than Jesus, and angrier. They call down from their shelves, “Hey! You! Hey!” A cacophony of voices: shrill, gruff, sharp, whinging. The ones I haven’t read want to be read. The ones I have read want to be read again. This isn’t a metaphor. To get away from the noise I have to leave my office and go for a walk.

“Uneasy is the head that wears a crown.” That’s Henry IV, Part 2 (Act III, Scene 1). Henry is in his bedchamber, talking to himself. How is it that his subjects are asleep, and he cannot sleep? Even, a ship-boy sleeps, in the middle of the roughest storm. What’s the story? Can repose bring sleep

To the wet sea-boy in an hour so rude,
And in the calmest and most stillest night,
With all appliances and means to boot,
Deny it to a king? Then happy low, lie down!

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

I’m start thinking on my walk about crowns, because I’m trying to think about power. And I’m trying to think about power, because I’m trying to make sense of the epistle lesson for Sunday. It’s First Corinthians 1, where Paul argues—louder than any book—that the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God more powerful (v. 25).

And for some reason I think about Jack Levine’s “portrait” of King David. It’s in one of my books, a reproduction, somewhere. Not that I can find it when I get back. But I do find Levine’s depiction of King Saul (from 1952). I also bump into Konrad Witz’s painting of Solomon and Sheba (1435). Both kings wear uneasy crowns.

Saul’s is a turban with a golden dome. (I’m sorry I can’t find a link to this; or I can but it doesn’t link. If you do, let me know.) And it sits not so much uneasy as ignored. Also ignored is the curved sword at Saul’s belt. It isn’t as if the king, worn and bleary-eyed—sleeping no better than Henry—it isn’t as if Saul has forgotten he’s king, but he wishes he could, staring past the viewer into some middle distance. But he can’t see far enough to remember before, his rambunctious beginnings, the innocent energy of his young manhood, so he can’t see either past his troubles, now longstanding. But soon they’ll be over. Let David have the @#%*&@ throne.

David hovers over Saul’s present and future; he looms over Solomon’s past and present. At least, that’s the way I read Witz’s dual portrait of the young king receiving Sheba. We don’t know much about the Swiss painter of this quick-frozen scene, but can see that he was a master of texture: the king’s robe is a richly embroidered green; the queen’s is plainer but substantial, and her white head-dress wraps elegantly about her fine-featured face. Oh, but his grand red hat is . . . well, rather too grand. It makes his small, smooth face seem even smaller. Under it Solomon is not wise at all but a small boy in his father’s fedora, falling down over his ears.

God’s weakness, I’m inclined to believe, doesn’t have to be too powerful to be stronger than men, for even the strongest of us are frail of body, faint of heart, and feeble of spirit, beaten down by the past, laid low by our futures. Except,

Except, Paul says, we are not perishing, for we have that weakness—and the foolishness—of God.

Let’s hope.

Rick

Answering to Jesus

2006-03-16T20:22:00.000-08:00

Conversations last week with three long-time friends have set me to thinking about my own accountability before Jesus.

Oklahoma native Thad Meachum, whose pastoral pilgrimage has bounced him around Tennessee and now Louisiana, met me for coffee and told me of a congregation where members recently arranged the sudden, summary dismissal of their pastor because she did not immediately and unquestioningly acquiesce to a request to baptize an infant whose parents were neither members of the congregation nor residents of the community, but whose grandparents were influential church members. That the pastor paused to weigh the theological implications, that she dared to ask questions about the parents’ faith was seen by several as an unforgivable insult. The juggernaut was unleashed; the presbytery was called in; and when the thing had run its course, the pastor was given her severance and a few hollow well-wishes.

“They treated her brutally,” said Thad, “and then acted as if nothing had happened.” So, a couple of weeks ago, when Thad—on invitation from that congregation—preached Sunday’s sermon, he unloaded both barrels. You can’t treat people like *%@! and expect God to simply look the other way, he said in so many unminced words. He opened with an illustration taken from the TV sitcom “Scrubs” in which a doctor, after having mercilessly berated a young intern, stepped to the nurses’ station and said to the head nurse, “I’m sorry you had to hear that.” To which the nurse replied, “You don’t have to apologize to me, but you will have to answer to Jesus!”

Answering to Jesus. Sheepishly, I confess: I haven’t spent much time thinking about that. Having grown up in a bible-belt church whose theology was more belt than Bible, I was plied with ample doses of “God’s gonna getcha if you make a wrong move!” Some years later, when I learned of the God of grace and was overwhelmed by a great joy in knowing that nothing can or will separate me from God’s love,I may have, in my elation, fumbled the truth that God’s amazing grace does not mean that I’m no longer accountable to God, not only for my actions but even for my most private thoughts. Right now, as I think of this, I am rather shaken, realizing that, much like the aforementioned congregation, I have done some pretty God-displeasing things and then quickly shrugged them off with a sigh and an “oh well.”

My second long-time-friend conversation was a phone chat with Rick Dietrich (founder and chief proprietor of Theologic Al’s Bar & Grill). Reflecting on our nearly twenty years of friendship, I see that he’s always had a stronger (than my own) sense that God is paying close attention to how we treat one another. So I phoned him and put all of this before him. When I shared the illustration Thad had used to open his sermon, Rick challenged me to imagine what would happen next. Say Jesus is the hospital administrator, Rick suggested, and he calls the doctor into his office. What does he say to her, what’s the confrontation like? We agreed it would be one in which Jesus expressed deep disappointment. “Joan, Joan! What were you thinking? What the hell were you doing?”

Yet the hospital administrator would need to be more than simply an authority. Disappointing an authority means little to me if it doesn’t threaten my job. But deeply disappointing someone I love, someone whose love for me is vital to my existence—that’s a terribly painful, if not devastating, prospect.

My third long-time-friend conversation was another phone chat—with David Berry, native Michigander whose pastoral pilgrimage has bounced him around the Midwest and now has him in Indianapolis as associate pastor for missions at Second Pres. As seminarians, Dave and I wrote our senior faith statement together while camping at Brown County State Park in Indiana—a process that necessitated our throwing empty beer cans at post-midnight raccoons who persistently tried to break into the cooler that sat just outside our tent….but that’s another story for another day.

David was telling me of a recent mission trip to Gautier, MS, to aid in recovery from Hurricane Katrina. His crew spent a week ripping out moldy, water-logged wallboard and cabinetry from houses that were ravaged by the storm. Then, they replaced the contaminated stuff with fresh, new stuff. “It dawned on me that all around us was this amazing metaphor for Lent,” said Dave. He mentioned how many of these inland houses didn’t look so bad from the outside. But inside, they were diseased with mold, and disordered by the storm-surge. “Really a mess,” as he put it. “That’s us before God,” he said. That’s us, trying our best to look good on the outside, but inside we’re a mess. Lent is about looking realistically at our interiors, about opening our hearts to the Holy Spirit who will aid us with a recovery crew, to clear the house of disease and disorder.

Inspired by this, I tried to tell Dave’s story in Wednesday night vespers worship. I did my best to point out that, in this sense, the hurricane is not a whim that comes upon us, but—for the sake of our metaphor—the hurricane is our own doing, the pursuit of our own whims without regard for consequences. To accentuate this, I cobbled a power point slide show of images of hurricane devastation--especially indoor devastation--and of the forlorn people who suffered it, all shown while minor-keyed music played.

I must have overdone it, because the collective response was not one of confession and repentance, but rather of sadness and desire to aid those poor, pitiful people seen in the slides.

I thought I had failed in my worship strategy, until…. I saw that the slides had evoked something more than I had planned for. The sadness that all us viewers felt for the folks in those slides, the impulse to move in and restore purity and order into those houses, is but a miniscule percentage of the mega-impulse that Jesus feels for us when he sees our own interiors so disordered, so diseased. And yet, if we can trust scripture and personal experience, he does more than simply feel moved. He does move. He comes with a recovery crew to restore order to our disorderedness. “Do you want to get well?” he asked the man beside the Bethesda pool [John 5:6]. I suppose he asks us the same. If we know we’re accountable, we’ll know the answer is “yes!” If we ignore our accountability, we don’t even hear the question.

I think this is how the administrator questions the doctor when he calls her into his office. This is how he questions you and me.

Everybody gotta answer to Jesus.
--Gerald

Welcome to Bracketville

2006-03-15T12:16:00.000-08:00

Can UK beat UConn, provided the Cats can get past that dangerous UAB bunch? And how ‘bout that Hansborough kid from UNC? Who can beat Redick and Duke? I’ve got to quit stewing over the NC2A basketball draw for the 2006 tournament or I’ll never get to working on that sermon for the third Sunday in Lent. One good thing about the preaching business is that you get to take another shot at it next week. There’s always another Sunday morning comin’ down (can you believe that Kris Kristofferson is 70 years old? Is that possible? Did I hear that right?)

Anyway, I defended the vulnerable God theme Lord’s Day last with a trapping man coverage, and it wasn't as bad as it could have been. There is no love without suffering and no suffering without love. That was one of my most effective moves. I couldn’t stop two particular problems, however. They proved tougher than scouting reports indicated.

The first asks if the God whose power is expressed in weakness has the sufficient strength to save us. If God is with us in our pain, is that enough? Is solidarity the same thing as salvation? I appreciate the fact that God has compassion for me because I couldn’t hit the front end of a one-and-one during crunch time. But can God get me out of this hole I’ve put myself in?

I was fortunate that my opponent (not Satan, but a mid-major demon) did not take advantage of this gaping hole in my sermonic attack. Could have driven a truck through it.

In the cool light of Monday morning, however, I would compare the problem with the effect of non-violent resistance against the violent intransigence of cultural forces. Jesus enters into the pain and suffering of our world and fights the powers of oppression and death not by might but by moral strength. He doesn’t return evil with evil. In the words of a John Bell Iona song, he doesn't give back the sin of the world, he takes it away. Into death, into hell. So that he can lead us into heaven.

Those who follow Jesus into this singular path take a chance on getting beaten up every so often. Here’s a Reinhold Niebuhr quote from The Nature and Destiny of Man (vol 2, pp. 72 & 290) and cited in William Placher’s Narratives of a Vulnerable God. It took my breath away when I read it on Sunday afternoon, several hours before the Selection Sunday program on CBS, and several hours too late for it to do my morning sermon any good: “The perfect disinterestedness of the divine love can have a counterpart in history only in a life which ends tragically,” since “the power of sin makes a simple triumph of love impossible.”

That may be a little strong, but isn’t it right most of the time, and shouldn’t our people hear it in order that the radical call of Jesus be understood, even if the particular cross they pick up probably won’t lead them to a tragic end? If you follow Jesus closely enough, you may die, but it is worth it, we believe, because murderous injustice needs to be exposed for what it is, but the cycle of violence needs to be broken. Pacifism good, passivism bad.

The second offensive set that breezed through my vulnerable God theme has to do with freedom. Freedom and cross-bearing, to be precise. It first showed its slippery moves in Rick’s blog offering from last week. He cited the Mark passage that includes the verse, If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. Ah, our friend says, quoting loosely. Their cross? Our cross? That’s a relief. It’s still under our control, right?

I leaned toward saying it was our choice, that the cross is not Jesus’ cross. That cross has already been born. Our cross is tailor made for us, according to our gifts, our strengths. The cross we bear is not something that life throws our way willy nilly, a painful situation that just comes with being alive -- like your mother-in-law moving in with you or contracting a worrisome disease. Unless the particular way you deal with mom-in-law or deal with your disease is a statement of your faith in Jesus, then it’s not the cross that same Jesus was talking about. It is picked up, chosen, volunteered as a consciously selected act of discipleship. That’s what I thought and pretty much how I said it.

But then there’s this, from Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship (Macmillan, 1963). He references Luke 9:57-62, the passage in which Jesus relates to three would-be disciples. The first has no idea what he is getting into. The second two answer affirmatively, but with provisions. One wants to bury his father and the other wants to say good-bye to his family. Then they will follow Jesus.

Or so they say. Jesus is on his way to the cross, and "his whole life is summed up in the Apostle’s Creed by the word 'suffered.' No man can choose such a life for himself. No man can call himself to such a destiny, says Jesus, and his word stays unanswered. The gulf between a voluntary offer to follow and genuine discipleship is clear… Only Christ can speak in this fashion. He alone has the last word… this call, this grace is irresistible" (p. 64f).

Thrust upon Bonhoeffer by life and history, and not of his choosing, were the conditions in Germany in the 1930’s on. In one way, he had to act as he did; in another way, he could have answered the call differently. And what about us? Nazism may not be going on, but other things certainly are. These other things --warfare, greed, prejudice, exploitation of the weak, overly rough play under the basket, and the jump stop --picked us. They are our cross, perhaps, and maybe if we would be disciples, we have to pick one of them up. We have to resist the evil let loose in our world. We’re not free to live in another world, or to pretend this one doesn’t exist.

Maybe we are only free when we follow the unique way of Christ. Maybe giving
up latte is only symbolic for divesting ourselves of whatever stands between us and Jesus, between us and our best, most God-sculpted selves. Maybe it’s not what we give up for Lent but what we take on.

How miserably I have failed to to pick up and to put down. How miserably I have failed the test of freedom, and even the explication of it, from Sunday to Sunday. But there’s always another practice, the next game, a new chance to get it right, to play better, even to score a point or two. Its never one and done until the last preaching appearance in this present world comes, and the trumpet will sound and all that other stuff happens.

For that I am glad. I look up from my brackets and rejoice. I look up to the little hills in my neighborhood and wonder if a brother can get a little help down here. Is it conceivable that a number twelve seed Utah State can beat a number 5 seed Washington? Can God help me overcome my native bias so that I can gladly accept another Blue Devil championship? Or --UK vs UConn playing out to its expected result --dare I hope that this will be rag-tag Gonzaga’s year after all?

Dee

Today's Reality

2006-03-13T09:08:00.000-08:00

The picture is yesterday’s reality: cloudy and snowy all day. Today’s reality is, of course, different (everywhere is I ever lived, the saying has always been, “if you don’t like the weather, wait.”). Anyway, there is still about six inches of snow on the ground; the North Platte River is still frozen; it was minus 3 when I woke up this morning. However, the sky is blue and the mountain to the south is glistening in the sun. And there is no wind—yet. If the wind does come up, I’ll try to get a picture for you of a ground blizzard.

I am in the coffee shop, thinking about what my bar mates have posted. I am also drinking a double non fat wet cappuccino, having just broken my Lenten fast. I had given up the expensive coffee drinks for forty days with the $4/day going into my fish bank for One Great Hour of Sharing. By coming into the coffee shop, I led myself into temptation. My name is Lynn and I’m a sinner in need of God’s grace. Hi, Lynn, glad you’re here.

Have any of you ever been to a 12-step meeting? Every one I have ever attended ends with everyone holding hands in a circle and praying together the Lord’s Prayer, even though AA and Al-Anon welcome people of all religious affiliations or of none. If a person is struggling with his or her powerlessness over a substance or the effect of said substance on a loved one or friend, then “lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil” is a real and heart felt prayer. And it is the very admission of the “temptation” and the “evil” that becomes the invitation to growth in a relationship with one’s Higher Power.

I led myself into this temptation (and while I’m here, I think I’ll have another.) And here in the wilderness of the coffee shop on a cold and sunny Monday morning with a posting due (check out Doonesbury today[http://www.doonesbury.com/strip/dailydose/]—maybe I should have gone to Daylight Donuts—they don’t have a cappuccino machine), I hear an invitation once again to turn my life and my will over to God.

It is the invitation in the koan contained in the text Rick mentioned: Jesus said, “If any want to become my followers, let them deny themselves and take up their cross and follow me. For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it. For what will it profit them to gain the whole world and forfeit their life? Indeed, what can they give in return for their life? (Mark 8:334-37)

I had heard that “Lead Kindly Light,” words by John Henry Newman, was Gandhi’s favorite Christian hymn. I looked up the words. There appropriate to my journey today. Here they are:

Lead, kindly Light, amid th'encircling gloom, lead thou me on!
The night is dark, and I am far from home; lead thou me on!
Keep thou my feet; I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me.

I was not ever thus, nor prayed that thou shouldst lead me on;
I loved to choose and see my path; but now lead thou me on!
I loved the garish day, and, spite of fears, pride ruled my will: remember not past years!

So long thy power hath blessed me, sure it still will lead me on.
O'er moor and fen, o'er crag and torrent, till the night is gone,
And with the morn those angel faces smile, which I have loved long since, and lost awhile!

Lynn

“My name is Rick, and I’m a bureaucrat.”

2006-03-10T08:33:00.000-08:00

“Hi, Rick.”

For thirteen years! I’m not saying that makes me uniquely qualified to explain how Peter became the first pope—from fisherman to bureaucrat in ten easy steps. In fact, I’ll argue that I’m hardly unique. But, how Peter did it, and it didn’t take ten steps; it didn’t take even one: he had it in him all along.

We like to think of Peter as slightly, endearingly unstable, almost out of control. But like every good bureaucrat—and the good bureaucrat in each of us—he is, on the contrary, not out of control but controlling. That’s part of—a big part of—what this coming Sunday’s gospel lesson is about (Mark 8:27 – 9:1, to set its proper limits), Peter’s desire to define the terms—actually to set them and define them. (What I’m saying here is nothing new, no inspiration of mine: the commentaries are full of it.)

Peter makes his grand confession, that Jesus is the Christ (8:29). Then, in Mark, after telling his disciples to let that go, to say nothing about it, Jesus goes on to another matter. We’re not sure quite why he asked the question, “Who are people saying I am?” He’s already on to other things: “This is the way I see what’s going to happen next.” The Spirit that drove him into the wilderness is leading him toward Jerusalem. The Son of man—this is what Jesus calls himself, not the Christ (or Messiah)—the Son of man is going there, even though it’s going to be a mess. A bloody mess.

“Oh, no,” Peter says, catching at Jesus’ sleeve. Peter has the bureaucrat’s fear of mess, and messiness. And he has the bureaucrat’s concern, as I’ve suggested, that terms be properly defined. “Oh, no. You are the Christ!” Don’t you know what that means? Let me explain.

The right thing to do at this point in the story, the right thing for the reader to do—I suppose this is right; the commentaries seem to agree—is to fall out of sympathy with Peter. I’d like to do that, but as I indicated, “My name is Rick, and I’m a bureaucrat.” (“Hi, Rick.”) None of us wants to let go of his most cherished ideas of Jesus—or hers. Actually, that’s an understatement. None of us wants to let go of his or her most cherished ideas for Jesus’. (Note the possessive.) Here’s an example.

In the January 20 New York Times, Charles Marsh takes on his fellow evangelicals with regard to their support of the war in Iraq (“Wayward Christian Soldiers”). “Recently, I took a few days to re-read the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. . . . Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president’s war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine,” so that the “single common theme among [these] sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God’s will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply.”

Marsh winces and wonders how American evangelicals could have gotten so far from the Lausanne Covenant of 1974 that “affirmed the global character of the church of Jesus Christ and the belief that ‘the church is the community of God’s people rather than an institution’”—a bureaucratic institution, or can an institution be other than bureaucratic?—“belief that ‘the church is the community of God’s people . . . and must not be identified with any particular culture, social or political system, or human ideology’” (italics mine).

The commentators on Mark 8 suggest that we are supposed to see Peter’s mistake and somehow avoid it. But the forces of the world-we-live-in and the ideas that we gather from living in that world—and especially the way we frame those ideas to define our world and make it livable—are so strong and so obviously right that we just don’t escape them, no matter what the commentators say. At least I don’t see how. Not today.

“Take up your cross,” Jesus says, and I grasp at the word your. Thank God for it. It’s my cross, then, right? I get to say what it means.

Right?

Rick

Bureaucracy? No Koan Do!

2006-03-08T21:17:00.000-08:00

Forgive me if my alter-ego Ocie Dee refuses to let me relinquish my fixation on Russ Moore’s tirade against the World Council of Churches. But….

What if, at its most recent assembly, instead of recognizing the Holy Spirit in other religions, the WCC had claimed to recognize the Holy Spirit in decision-making bureaucracies composed of religious people?

I think Russ would have had far greater reason to rail. And I might’ve railed alongside him. And maybe you would forgive me, because….

My denomination’s General Assembly is coming to my house this year. This means that Birmingham, AL, will sponge up several thousand sojourning Presbyterians (for every voting commissioner there’ll doubtless be five to ten persuaders) dead set on moving the church toward correct (read “moral” or “righteous”) decisions. Decisions about what, you ask.

About subjects spooned from the smorgasbord of controversies that are advanced, exploited and, if I my coin a word, hysterified by high-powered advertisers who call themselves CNN, FOX, CBS, NBC, ABC, etc.

Sexual orientation, Palestinian-Israeli relations, abortion, and others will be among the main courses. In all cases, there'll be strong beliefs that a decision (usually a once-and-for-all decision) MUST be made.

Thousands will come to Birmingham, believing that the Holy Spirit means for decisions to be made. Most of them will claim to know the nature of those Holy-Spirit decisions. A great many, perhaps most, will believe that this is how we recognize the Holy Spirit—by making big decisions. (“Yep, the Holy Spirit was there 'cause we got ‘er done!”)

Few will recognize that this is a very western way of seeing things—this notion that God’s got some kind of strategic solution that, if we’ll just seize it, will erase all our troubles. And so—to give witness to the Holy Spirit—we’ll sharpen our swords and fight to seize that righteous decision.

Where am I going with all this? Well, Julie’s words (“Holy Contradiction, Batman,” see below), prompted my little tirade. As Julie points out so well, following Jesus means living in paradox, living in contradiction. “Living in holy contradiction comes only after deep wrestling and concluding the truth of two truths and with Shirley Guthrie saying, ‘All truth is God’s truth,’” she writes.

As I reflect on this, I see that, usually, religious bureaucracies, however unwittingly, prevent faith from deepening because they view the holy contradiction as a mortal enemy. “A decision MUST be made! We can’t come all this way and not make a BIG decision!” What the bureaucracy doesn’t (can’t?) see is that its obsession with solving the problem is not unlike a mad junky’s craving for crack—with the results being equally self-devastating.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not opposed to decisions. And here’s one I wish to advocate: that people of faith and of varying views decide to live together in holy contradiction, that they say no to crack, say no to the rush to decision-making, and instead open themselves to the Holy Spirit, by pondering together the koans of our faith—e.g., that we worship a God who leads us into temptation and one who taught us to pray saying, “lead us not into temptation’’; one who said that those born of the Spirit are blown willy-nilly by the Spirit wind, and yet who also said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

Julie’s got it: it’s in the koans that we find God’s gracious Spirit, not in the decisions.

Gerald Stephens Jr.

"Holy Contradition, Batman!"

2006-03-08T12:47:00.000-08:00

The longer I live the Christian life, the more I see the paradoxical nature and love of God. Two truth things can be true at the same time: The Spirit of God blows where it will and Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. I do not believe that it is a ‘cop-out’ to live in holy contradiction. In many cases it takes more faith. It’s not as cut and dry as some of my more conservative sisters and brothers believe. When I talk about “living in the mystery” they often think that it’s my lame excuse for avoiding hard theological wrestling, and intense biblical study,or an unwillingness to commit myself and ‘take a stand.’ But for me, living in holy contradiction comes only after deep wrestling and concluding the truth of two truths and with Shirley Guthrie saying, “All truth is God’s truth.”

By example, may I offer two seemingly paradoxical statements from Scripture:

“Jesus, full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan and
was led by the Spirit into the wilderness…” Luke 4:1
(emphasis mine)

“forgive us our sins, for we ourselves forgive everyone who is indebted to us; and lead us not into temptation…" Luke 11:4

So, here are my questions, bar mates…Does the Spirit of God sometimes lead us into temptation like Jesus was led into the wilderness? Or as God’s own, and since we pray the Lord’s prayer (though not magical) and say, “lead us not into temptation,” does God prevent us from being tempted? Is temptation the result of the human condition, fallen nature and sin (but what about the first temptation in Genesis) or is it holy invitation? And finally, where does grace meet us (read you) when you find yourself in the wilderness of temptation?
I will offer that for me, grace abounds in the midst of temptation—when I succumb and sin and when by grace I don’t. It’s all grace. But as to the author? I want to wrestle more with you about this before I say, ‘it’s all a mystery.”

Wilderness Blessings,
Julie

The Way, the Truth, and the Life

2006-03-07T06:21:00.000-08:00

If you all want, I'll drive east a few miles to the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and see if Russell D. Moore wants to come out and play. We might need him, in fact, because I sense that we regulars at Theologic Al's are all rooting for the same team. We're fans of The Lone, Wild Fowl in Lofty Flight. Our buddy Russ is into The Lone, Tame Parrot in a Low- Flying Holding Pattern over the Baptist Faith and Message. He could help us sharpen our language on the issue at hand, which, it seems to me, is about the sovereign freedom of God to go where God wants to go and speak through whomever God is pleased to speak. And, while God is visiting over in the next county, God can elect for salvation and service whomever God wants to elect. Thank God, we're not even registered to vote in that election.

Certainly the Holy Spirit, blowing where it will, can work through and be present in Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, etc. If God can speak through Balaam’s ass, then God might even be able slip a word every now and then through the Dean of Theology at Southern Baptist Seminary.

These guys have got themselves into some kind of logical knot. Who was that Nobel Peace Prize candidate a few years back who covered a microphone with his slobber as he shouted that God doesn’t hear the prayer of a Jew since they don’t pray in the name of our most gracious Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ, Amen. Not only is that the worst kind of formulaic literalism, on par with Old World, Vatican I Catholics worried overmuch about getting the Latin right at the altar or that hocus pocus thing wouldn’t kick in with the bread and the wine. It's also just plain wrong.

Leaving out Jesus his own self, what about all those OT types, Abraham, Moses, to name two? They had a communication block with God? We beg Russ's pardon. "All truth is God's truth," Shirley Guthrie liked to say. And truth that is transcendent is always true, no matter the time or the circumstances. (We avoid the phrase "absolutely true," because Russ and his crowd are into absolutism, and we don't want to mess with their stuff). Since that is the case, then God still hears the prayer of a Jew and God's grace, always connected to God's Unpredictable Spirit, can show up in the words and actions of Gerald's friends Ahmed, Gupta, Chang, and Finkelstein.

I be sure of two things. We have absolutely (oops) nothing to do with our salvation. It's all grace all the time. Not a song we can sing, a feeling we can feel, a doctrine we can affirm, a church we can join, nor a cause we can support has anything to do with it. It's not circumcision or uncircumcision, drinking bourbon whiskey or not drinking bourbon whiskey, or being a social activist or not. What matters is the new creation. God's gift it is.

The other thing I'm sure of is that Jesus is the way, the truth, and the life. God spoke a word in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ that opens the way to wholeness and purpose and meaning to all people. Now comes the hard part: That openness exists whether individuals or groups of individuals name the name of Christ or not. Is that universalism? And is that a bad thing? Does it lead to moral laxity? (As if all the world's moral strenuousness has taken us to great places).

Rick, your translation of the German's poem comes as a shaft of light. And the way you set it up helped me read it. It's the very kind of writing that makes this nature boy's heart soar like a hawk. At first blush, it is the same question, about whether or not people we know and love lead us to God. Flawed human nature sometimes points the way. The perfect point, so to speak, lies beyond both human nature and nature nature. But a nice sunset or a surprising display of early spring wildflowers can open a portal to Christ's heart, too. And Christ leads us home. Like disciples hoofing it to Emmaus, sometimes you recognize Christ, and sometimes you don't. Jesus saves, though, not the act of recognition. No matter what Russ says.

Julie, your questions about Paradise Regained intrigue; I too have spent a lot of time wondering what it would look like. I don’t know if death itself is excluded from a restored creation, but it might have more meaning, or a more beautiful reality than our current take on mortality. Now a new creation, that may have nothing to do with images of Eden; since it is "new," we have even less of a preview. Familiar analogies may have no currency in that world at all. But maybe death in a restored creation looks like your regulars at the country club bar, bringing gifts to someone on the way out while they can still look someone in the eye and express simple, humble, unmanipulative love.

Dee Hamilton Wade

A Bit Windy

2006-03-05T17:46:00.000-08:00

Hi, guys. Sorry I’m a little late getting here. Everything takes a little longer when you’re in Wyoming, where we gearing up for our own little culture war subtitled “Will Brokeback Mountain win an Oscar and are we really as dumb as the movie makes us out to be? “ Obviously, some of the people asking the questions have not lived in the South. Or were the folks in Kentucky just lucky that the Dukes of Hazzard barely missed that nomination? And by the way, if you saw the movie, (Brokeback Mountain, that is) it really is that beautiful here, even if the movie was filmed in Canada. Above is a photograph of Wyoming, taken by my friend LaRon Coleman.

Yesterday, I spent part of the day at a workshop on labyrinth walking. I had tried walking a labyrinth once before and didn’t “get it.” So when the Episcopal church next door to mine—with their very own labyrinth—offered a free workshop on Saturday—but not too early on Saturday—I thought why not try this labyrinth thing again.

The workshop consisted for a few prayers and introductory words on the history of the labyrinth and then the instructions to go and do, reflect, eat your lunch, and come back at 2 to share. [If you want more information and a picture, go to http://www.lessons4living.com/labyrinth.htm] We had our choice of labyrinths: one in the fellowship hall, a portable labyrinth painted on canvass and the one outside, painted on concrete.

I went outside. After all, it was a beautiful Wyoming day—clear, bright, warm, and windy. I’d say sustained winds of 40 mph with gusts to 50 mph, what is called in Florida “tropical force winds” and what is called in Wyoming “breezy.” This labyrinth, painted on the concrete, was probably about 40 feet in diameter; the winding path into the center is narrow, maybe 2 feet wide. I had to start over about four times because the wind would blow me from the “right” path, into the “wrong” path, and often into the path of a fellow traveler on the labyrinth. There was something of a wisdom psalm in the experience, you know “right paths and wrong paths,” the path of the wicked, the paths of righteousness. Out here, we have to say the wind reminds us of the Spirit; otherwise the wind makes us crazy and we go into bars and grills and do more than shoot the breeze. So here I am, being blown off the right path onto the wrong path by the wind which is supposed to be like the Holy Spirit, blowing where it may.

Finally, I figured out that when the wind in blowing where it will and I am trying to make a journey, even around a circle painted on concrete, I had to do two things. I had to lean into that wind. And I had to watch my feet. On this day, on this journey, there would be no “lifting mine eyes to the hills” because God would let my foot be moved if I wasn’t careful. Instead I had to watch myself put one foot in front of the other until at last (10 minutes later) I made it to the center, for a quick glance up and around, and then back out again.

I tried walking the portable labyrinth in the fellowship hall. But it was too crowded, which is what they say about the wind here: it keeps the population down. So I ate my lunch, took a meditative nap in the easy chair in the corner, and went to the grocery store. By the way, have you ever tried pushing a grocery cart full of white plastic bags head on into a 40 mile an hour wind? I’ll save that for another day.

I have decided that whenever I think I have things figured out—things like God, the universe, grace, prayer, the Spirit, other religions, Southern Baptists—I’m going to go next door and walk the labyrinth in the wind. The life of faith, I think, ain’t always a dance. Most of the time it’s one foot in front of the other, leaning into the wind. You’ve got to pay attention and watch where you’re going.

I still hope Brokeback Mountain wins some Oscars. Otherwise, all we’ll have to talk about here in Wyoming is the wind.

Lynn Williamson

Monk-y Business

2006-03-03T11:13:00.000-08:00

Gerald: You’re sure that’s Russ Moore . . . and not Adrian Monk? Monk, everyone knows, is TV’s latest cute obsessive-compulsive, replacing Felix Unger. And he’s trying his best to keep the world in order or, at least, keep his world in order with closets filled with sharply creased trousers, perfectly pressed jackets, and purely white shirts, which he’ll button all the way to the collar; with gallons of bottled water and hand sanitizer. Let’s hope Jesus, dusty and smelly from the road, doesn’t come to his door and knock. Or a neighborhood kid hit a baseball through the window and the Spirit rush in with the outside air.

Monk likes Genesis 1. If only that were all he had. Here’s God taking the mess of nothing and making it good by putting everything in order. God puts time in order, darkness and light, day and night. And God puts vertical space in order, the sky above and the sea below. It’s good.

God puts horizontal space in order, the sea and the dry land. That’s good, too. The rest is fine-tuning—days become seasons become years; and the sea and the dry land are populated. But fine-tuning is important, if you’re going to have true order. So, this is also good.

Finally, God makes humankind, “man” according to the old King James Version I have beside me here. (Do we need to get something newer to keep behind the bar? It’s good enough for me, but . . . I’m a not-new kind of guy): So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them (1:27).

This is especially pleasing to Monk, because of what he knows from what he’s read so far about God: God is one who takes a mess and puts it into order. Human beings created in the image of God are then homo ordens, makers of order, keepers of control.

Yes, but. We know—Monk himself is acutely aware—that our ability to control the world, even our own little “worlds,” is minimal. We know that without recourse to theology (even to the story of the fall that follows in Genesis 2: remember Monk hasn’t read that yet). That we cannot control the natural world is painfully obvious. Julie asked if there’d be tsunamis in paradise. I don’t know; I suppose it depends on whose paradise, ours or the tsunamis’. But there are tsunamis here and tornadoes and hurricanes in, it seems, increasing numbers. We have no control over any of these. (I’ll add, at the risk of making our greener customers flush, that I think any notion that we can do anything measurable about global warning is obsessive-compulsive, not to mention arrogant. We just don't have enough bottled water and hand sanitizer.)

But our painfully obvious lack of control over creation doesn’t prevent our trying to control the Creator. Note that I’m not whipping Monk over this without throwing a few lashes at myself as well. As Saul Bellow said somewhere, “I have a similar weakness for setting things straight,” though he added that he knew “how futile it is to work at it continually.” So, I stop here and offer a short prayer for systematic theologians or, as they prefer to be known these days—will someone tell me why?—constructive theologians. Let them work at setting things straight continually.

Where was I? We try to control God—at least, in part, I think—because if a natural world out of control is frightening, how much more frightening if the “ruler of all nature” is out of control?

Thus, Monk’s least favorite passage if he ever gets to it will be the third chapter of John, where Nicodemus comes at night, thanking God he’s separated it from the day: man needs a time to sneak around in, and ask a few questions. But Nicodemus can’t like the answers. Monk won’t. It doesn’t sound like Russ Moore does.

Particularly disturbing is the way Jesus treats the hole the baseball has created in Monk’s window. From in the old King James again: The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit [John 3:8].

David Brooks has some unkind things to say about rhetoric in his column in yesterday’s New York Times. He also has some kind things to say about Reinhold Niebuhr. And mostly he’s right—given his definition of rhetoric—about both. But without some knowledge of rhetoric, how arguments are put together (my definition), it’s difficult to appreciate how surprising—and frightening!—this statement by Jesus is.

I don’t need to remind you that the word for “wind” and “spirit” is the same here, so that one rhetorical device Jesus is using is paronomasia—that’s the six-dollar word for punning. Of more interest is the way he sets up his analogy (using the pun) and then forswears it. “The wind blows where it wishes,” he says, “and we don’t know where that’s going to be. So it is,” and we expect him to go on: “So it is with the Spirit,” because that’s what the wind is like. The wind is like the spirit, and the spirit is like the wind. They’re the same word.

That’s not what Jesus says, however. “The wind blows you don’t know where. So it is with everyone that is born of the Spirit.”

One thing I like about this old King James I got in the fourth grade is the zipper. Not only can you shut it up, you can zip it up. Because the Spirit, don’t you know, escapes from the edges of the pages if they’re not confined. I wouldn’t mind that if it just blew around, but if it starts blowing me around willy-nilly, that’s another matter.

Rick

Russ Lassos the Holy Spirit

2006-03-02T05:02:00.000-08:00

“The World Council of Churches has long been a boutique of paganism in Christian garb.” So says Russell D. Moore, senior vice president for academic administration and dean of the school of theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, KY.

Whoa, Russ, what did the WCC ever do to you?

Well, most recently, at its Feb. 14-23 assembly in Porto Alegre, Brazil, the council recognized “’the Holy Spirit’ [as] working in non-Christian world religions.” Mimicking Sheldon Leonard’s memorable role as Nick the bartender in It’s a Wonderful Life, Russell D. Moore bellows at the WCC: “That's it! Out you pixies go - through the door, or out the window!” [Clearly, not as gracious a bartender as Julie; see below.]

Actually what Russ said: “Regenerate believers across the world, whatever their denomination or communion, recognize the World Council for what it is: the spirit of antichrist.” He booms onward: “No one listens to the World Council of Churches anymore, and for that we should be thankful to God.” All this in a Baptist Press three-page story about recent proclamations issuing from the entity to which no one listens anymore.

I’m not a real theologian (but I play one on this blog); however, for the sake of argument, let’s say that when the WCC claims it recognizes the presence of the Holy Spirit in other religions, it means it sees manifestations of God’s grace in at least some of the activities of, for example, Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims, Jews.

Now, my question for Russ and all the rest of you: can God’s grace be manifest apart from God’s Holy Spirit? Personally, I think not. Julie spoke eloquently about the out-pouring of grace she received from heathen Sunday golfers at the country-club men’s grill (a “boutique of paganism” that had not even the decency to garb itself as “Christian”). Some may say, “Well, that was just garden variety grace; that wasn’t God’s grace.” Sounded amazingly like God’s grace to me, especially those gestures that spirited Julie forward along her pilgrimage.

My wife Bonnie and I still marvel the time we spent in the presence of a Muslim woman who taught us French in Burkina Faso. Madame Habibu Campaore was among the most Christ-like people we’ve known. When Bonnie fell very ill during our first month in Africa, Madame Campaore’s compassion was essential to her return to good health. Bonnie recognized the Holy Spirit in Madame Campaore. I don’t want to be there when Russ tells Bonnie she’s got it all wrong.

Russ’s problem: like George Bailey (forgive the It’s a Wonderful Life analogies) who wanted to lasso the moon, Russ wants to lasso the Holy Spirit, wants to lasso God’s grace. “Hey, dammit, that’s ours! You can’t have it, Ahmed—you neither, Gupta, nor you, Chang. Okay, Finkelstein, you can borrow it, but I want it back by Saturday afternoon.”

Why do we weave theologies that assert exclusive rights to God’s Spirit, God's grace? Rick said—rightly, I think—that we are granted God’s grace by God’s grace through our Lord Jesus Christ. This Jesus, who mysteriously said: “I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd” [John 10:16].

If I clamor for the one shepherd to be exclusively MY shepherd, I think it’s because I’m still running from my own fallen-ness. Sure, I’ll give lip-service to my fallen nature. I will even assert the truth of it---so long as there are those more fallen than I. But when you suggest that the shepherd extends grace to foreign folds with equal energy as he showers it on me and mine, when you suggest that foreign-fold sheep not only perceive and act on the shepherd’s grace, but share it, then my own fallen-ness is so sharply focused that it pierces me to the heart.

That very piercing of my heart, that sudden awareness that God loves me not because my dogma and doctrine are on straight, or my lifestyle is exemplary, but rather because…because...because… why?

Maybe we truly begin to fathom God’s grace when we’ve no longer any words to follow “because.”

Gerald Stephens Jr.

What'll Ya Have?

2006-03-01T09:00:00.000-08:00

Glad to be serving here at Al's. I actually have experience as a bartender. I worked in a men's grill at a Country Club in my hometown of Indianapolis before I went to seminary. I'm not even much of a drinker so it was fun. The guys would come out of the locker room and on the way out to play 9 holes would order a sandwich and beer. Mostly guys at that time ordered drinks that had the recipe in the title: gin and tonic, whiskey sour, or rum and coke.

Interestingly, Rick's invitation to share a grace prompted this memory. It was here at this bar where I received both grace and a lesson on grace. The lesson...sometimes we receive grace in the most unlikely places! Who would have thought that I would been more supported and encouraged by these guys who had sworn off church (after all they were on the greens on Sunday), than in my previous two summer experiences working in the church. These guys became my biggest fans and believed in me. Yeah, it is true people talk to bartenders and we did have great talks across the bar.

The week before I left to go to Princeton, the guys gave me words of advice and gifts. They tipped me big. My colleague hand-tooled a beautiful new Bible cover that I still have. One afternoon, a shy guy came up to the bar and tossed a wrapped gift to me. When I opened it and found a concordance, he said, "What is it? They said you'd need one." I was overwhelmed and smiled tenderly at this guy. I was flooded with God's grace. Where the churches had been critical, they guys believed in me. I thanked the shy guy and whispered a prayer of gratitude. God's grace in unexpected places.

On this Ash Wednesday, I send you my prayers as we set our face towards Jerusalem with Jesus. It's God's grace that even enables us to make the journey. On this day, we will hear.."ashes to ashes, dust to dust." It so reminds me that we toil the earth and die because "paradise is lost." Would there have been (will there be) no more toil, no more death, no more ashes or dust when paradise is 're-found' (when paradise is restored)?

Rick, I think it is true that many believe so much in the power of nature to heal. I'm thinking though that the natural world is also fallen-- therefore the power of creation to heal cannot be equal to the power of Christ to heal. Christ is in all, above all and through all. God through Christ is restoring ALL things. I had never thought about this until Rick's comment... maybe even creation--the natural world--is fallen too. Creation itself is wounded. Often we say that human beings wound creation and that because of the sin of human beings creation is wounded. This is true, but could it also be true theologically speaking that creation in itself is wounded because of the Fall? In Romans 8, we read 19 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the children of God; 20 for the creation was subjected to futility, not of its own will but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and will obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning in labor pains until now; 23 and not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly while we wait for adoption, the redemption of our bodies.

So, I've been pondering...if the natural world is fallen, is there such a thing as a tsunami in paradise? We also claim that these, "acts of God" are just the way that the natural world is constructed...shifting techtonic plates causing waves--"natural events." But what if it is the result--consequence--of the falleness of the natural world? Can we imagine a created order, a natural world, that is constructed in a way where there is no more dying? It's hard isn't it? We say...it's the natural course of events...and I believe that...leaves die and fall off the trees. But isn't is intersting to ponder, maybe this isn't the "natural way". What will happen when there is a new heaven and a new EARTH? What will happen when nature/creation is restored, not just beause of our sin, but because of paradise lost? What will paradise found-restored look like?

Indeed there will be no more Ash Wednesday...
and perhaps no more ashes to ashes-- dust to dust.

What do you think?
Julie

Welcome. Can we say grace?

2006-02-24T12:26:00.000-08:00

Yes. Draw up a stool. Welcome to Theologic Al’s, where the bartenders talk about theology, sometimes at the expense of making sense—even if talking theology is supposed to be a way of making sense of the world. For example:

How in the world are we granted God’s grace? By God’s grace, of course, through our Lord Jesus Christ. But do we come by God’s grace only through Christ? It depends, I suppose, on what you mean by that, but I’m going to contend here that while we are saved by the grace we receive from God in Christ Jesus, there are other, secondary ways we experience God’s goodness to us—God’s grace.

Right? Did you make it through that paragraph, stuffed with theological language? If you did, you’ll make it through the rest of this. I can’t make theology any more complicated than other bartenders you’ve talked to make NFL football.

But forget football altogether, and ice dancing. Think instead of your own experiences of God’s goodness. Particularly, think about one of those times you were staring out the back window, when suddenly you thought, “My God, this is good,” and you found almost without realizing you had spoken a prayer of thanksgiving for part of the world God has made.

It is the continuing contention of the writer of the first chapter of Genesis that God made the world and made it good. About the various “stages” of the enterprise, he writes:

“God saw how good it was.” – v. 12
“God saw how good it was.” – v. 18
“God saw how good it was.” – v. 25
“God looked at everything God had made and found it very good.” – v. 31

Of course, that was before we screwed it up. Eve takes the apple, and she hands it to Adam, and he takes a bite, too, and the next thing you know, they’re out of the garden in a patch of thorns and thistles (KJV) they have made for themselves. At least, this is how Milton sees it in Paradise Lost. Eve puts forth “her rash hand,” plucks and eats. And

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat
Sighing through all her works gave signs of woe,
That all was lost.

But is that right? Is that what we make of the world we live in, gazing out the window? Is all lost? That’s a pretty extreme Protestant position, and I doubt any of us hold it in more than a technical sense—because we’re Presbyterians, perhaps, and think we ought to.

So, what do we hold? I think we do experience, at least, a sense that our being cast out of the garden—whether we think of that historically or metaphorically—has changed our relationship with the creation; so it also changes our ability to see through creation—to see through nature—to God. But I don’t think we really believe in our bones—in our own nature—that the natural world is fallen as we are. I think we reckon either that it isn’t fallen at all; in fact, it has a power to heal us almost equal to Christ’s. Or, that it’s fallen only a little and it can still, if we pay attention or lose focus, staring out the back window, lose focus on ourselves—nature can still lead us in the right direction (back toward Eden). Something like this:

It was as if heaven kissed earth,
so earth now dreamed of heaven.
You could see it in the still
shimmer of the flowers.

Feel it in the breeze through the fields,
the grain softly waving,
the forests gently rustling—
the star-clarity of the night.

And your soul spanned
wide its wings,
and found itself flying
through the stillness—home.

That’s my (very) rough translation of Josef Freiherr von Eichendorf’s "Moonlight” (Mondnacht).

We sing it here sometimes, at Al’s, though I suspect it’s heresy to do so. Maybe we should stick to German beer but lay off German poets. What do you think?

- Rick Dietrich

It's quarter to three. There's no one in the place.

2006-02-08T03:48:00.000-08:00

Draw up a stool, and welcome!