Prayer Pilgrimage

duty and heart

2010-10-11T21:18:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I preached a sermon on Luke 17:11-19, the Ten Lepers, and in that sermon I suggested that the major theme of the text was not about "giving thanks," as that theme is often lifted from the story. Rather, I see the import relating to difference between "the nine" and their willingness to keep their distance from Jesus: knowing his name and calling out for help, but keeping their distance; going their way, but because Jesus told them to--they were obedient, in other words, but being just obedient maintained the distance; enjoying the benefit of his mercy, but not coming close to him as the Samaritan did. The Samaritan desired intimacy with Jesus, and his praise, his kneeling, his thanking--all of that together comprised the faith that made him whole.

I think that many of us are obedient, but are content to keep our distance. We know the names, how to call out to Jesus, but have forgotten if we ever started how to praise God, to praise as loudly and as urgently as we pray. We do not come close, do not enjoy the intimacy Christ offers us.

What is true for us as individuals is true also of churches. I want my church to come close to Jesus: I want us to know how to pray AND praise, to be both obedient AND thankful. I want us to give to Jesus and this church not just a little of our time, a little of our money, a little of our attention and enthusiasm, but our HEART.

A HEART for Jesus. A HEART for our congregation. The question before us, and especially in this day, is whether we are merely cleansed and on our way, or whether we are in fact WHOLE, made WHOLE by our praise of, our approach and thanks to Jesus...

Data, Lal and Lazarus

2010-09-27T20:15:00.000-07:00

This is my opening illustration and my closing from yesterday's sermon on Luke 16:19-31:

One of my favorite TV shows ever is Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I liked the original series, too, of course, with Capt. Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy. But I really love the second series in the franchise, with Capt. Picard, Commander Riker, Mr. Worf, Dr. Crusher, Counselor Troi, Mr. Data and the rest of them.

Some of you may know that show, some may not. Production ended years ago, but for those who are willing to stay up till midnight—or who are able and will program their TiVo’s or VCR’s—there are daily opportunities to boldly go where no one has gone before.

The character named Data is an android. He is not so much a robot, but an artificial life form, a kind of living, walking computer. He does not feel, which is to say, he does not have feelings, exactly, but he wants to, is all the time trying to become more human. In one episode he decides that he wants to be a father, and so he goes into his lab and creates another android, a smaller version of himself. She is female and Data gives her the name Lal, which is Hindi for “beloved,” and he begins to teach her about… life. Eventually, sadly, Lal suffers a cascade systems failure…she dies… but before she does she enriches Data’s life, and the lives of all the others.

I tell you that because I want to recount one remarkable scene in that remarkable episode. Data takes Lal to Ten Forward. Ten Forward is like the officers club, the gathering place for the crew, a place of conversation and socializing. Sitting at the bar Data invites Lal to eat something. She does not require food—but Data has learned, and he is trying to teach her, that eating, and not just eating but eating together, is a really big part of what it means to be human.

“Order something,” he says to Lal.

“What should I order, father?” Lal replies.

“Whatever you like,” says Data.

“But how do I know what I like?” asks Lal, and Data the living computer does not know how to answer.

It is a remarkable question, I think. “How do I know what I like?”

We each and all of us might likewise ask, “How do I know what to think? How do I know what to believe? How do I know how to behave?” How do I know what it means to be not only human, but Christian? How do we learn that, for ourselves, how do we teach it to our lals, our beloved, our children? How, indeed.
...

The key to this text is at the end: they have Moses and the prophets. Let them read them. Oh, no, Father Abraham. They don’t read their Bibles, but if someone goes to them from the dead…

Just as we have the Bible. Let us read it. Together. That is how we know what we are to like, and be like. That is how we know what is just and right. That is how we know what’s wrong with this picture of Lazarus and the rich man. That is how we know there are consequences, blessed and dire consequences to our actions. That is how we know what we know, and how we believe what we believe. That is how we learn ourselves and teach our kids: we have the Bible. We should read our Bibles. Together.

Oh, no, Father Abraham. We don’t read our Bibles. But if you send us a miracle, a financial miracle, a healing miracle, then we will believe and be changed!

If we do not read the Bible that we have, if we do not study together, Father Abraham say to us that we will not be changed even if someone should rise among us from the dead.

Memie

2010-09-06T17:53:00.001-07:00

I

I have been thinking about my grandmother—we called her Memie—who lived to be 104. And one week longer.

There are lots of things I remember about her, about the days we shared, just the two of us. She raised me, more or less: my mother was one of the first working mothers in our neighborhood, and my sister had long-since started school. Dad was almost never home, and so there were many days when it was just we two.
Here is something I remember: when I did start to school, Mom and Dad saved my report cards, but Memie saved the pictures I drew—kept them in a drawer in her dresser.

But it is those days before I went to school that I have been remembering of late. Almost every mornings Memie would make me my favorite breakfast—“puppy food” (boiled eggs, bacon, buttered toast, crumbled)—and almost every day, I would write her love letters.

Our house had a den, and in the den was the TV, Dad’s recliner, Mom’s chair, and Memie’s chair and ottoman, on which she rested her legs. There was a fireplace, too, and in front of the fireplace there was a raised hearth. Daddy had this old, black, heavy manual typewriter, with round keys—I think it was a Royal or an Olivetti. Almost every day, after she had cleaned-up the breakfast dishes, Memie would park her crooked frame in her chair to do her needle work, to watch the game shows and soap operas. I would drag the typewriter out of Dad’s study, put it up on the the hearth, sit cross-legged in front of it, roll piece of paper into the thing—and that was no easy task for preschool fingers, getting the paper straight, if I ever did—and then I would clack-clack-clack until I had poured out my heart to her.

Every day that I wrote to her, I wrote her the very same message:

“Dear Memie. I love you. Do you love me?” And then I added this: “ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOP…” All the letters of the alphabet, all of them in caps, first, then again in lower case… and my numbers, too, 1,2,3 all the way to zero..
Then, scrch, scrch, scrch, as I ratcheted the paper a few lines, then clack. clack. clack: “Love, Tommy”

How long it took me to hunt-and-peck that daily missive, I have no idea. I feel sure it took a while. But when I was done I would pull it out of the typewriter, sshhrrrp!, and take it to her. I would stand at her shoulder as she read, and she always read it out loud. Then she would hug me around the shoulder and say, “This is why I love you so, because you are so sweet to me.” And I would say, “I love YOU because you are sweet to ME.”

And so it went, day after day: Memie cooking for Tommy; Tommy writing for Memie.

And whether it would occur to you or not, to wonder, it has occurred to me to wonder if my love of writing, whether e-pistles, letters to you, articles, commentary and books, isn’t somehow anchored just there in those days, there at the hearth and Memie’s chair… if all these years later, all I am doing, really, is clack-clack-clacking-out my love for you, my love for God, in hopes that you, or God, or both, will read what I write, hug me around the shoulder, tell me I am loved…
Maybe.

II

I remember another day with Memie. Just we two.

It was cold and rainy. And dark. There was no fire in the fireplace, of course, just ashes from the night before and wind whistling down the flue. There was no light on in the den at all, except for a small bulb just above Memie’s right shoulder, by which she could see to do her needlework. She had bad arthritis, and when the weather was cold and wet she suffered. Really suffered.

This one day, I remember Memie asked me to get her an extra blanket and put it on her, which I did, wrapped it up and down around her legs, tucked it in on both sides between the ottoman and chair. And then I tucked myself in next to her as close as I could get.

I don’t know whether I wrote her a letter that day or not… but there we were, and there we stayed, two of the weak ones, two of the little ones, one way or the other, held together by love and sweetness and a small cone of light from a 40-watt bulb, just enough light and warmth to keep the cold and dark and rain at bay.

III

Just a couple of little snapshots, little pictures of days long, long ago—and I had almost forgotten they were there, stuffed down in a drawer of my brain somewhere. But I am so glad I found them: they are so sweet to my memory, and poignant.

I served her in the ways I could, and she served me… we were sweet to one another, and in that sweet service we showed our love for one another.

That is what service, is, I think. A way of showing love.

And not only a way of showing love, but a way of growing in love, of doing love. Do you remember how the book of James says, “Show me your faith without your works and I will show you my faith by my works.” Surely that is true of love, as well as faith; that love without works is dead; that love, real and lasting love, is shown and grown and deepened by works, by service.

IV

For the last couple of weeks I have been preaching on Intentional Discipleship… I started with Connect—connecting with God, connecting with each other, and how we cannot be the kind of disciples Jesus called us to be or wants us, for our sakes, to be, apart from each other. Independent is not a Christian adjective.

And then Grow: growth through Study and the Means of Grace. Putting ourselves into position through worship, reading the scriptures, prayer and communion, to receive the spiritual food, the Miracle Gro, we need to become lush and fruitful disciples.

And today: Serve. Serve.

Perhaps it is appropriate that tomorrow, according to the secular calendar, is Labor Day… a day set aside by Grover Alexander and the US Congress in 1894, begun to appease, really, all the angry labor unions whose members had suffered so much during the Economic Panic of 1893, when unemployment was over 18%.

Be any or all that as it may… I have been wondering when work, or labor, becomes service. I suspect it has something to do with the question of why we do it, and for whom. It our labor is done only for ourselves, then it remains labor. But when it is offered more widely, it is service. When indeed it is offered as a sign of love… not just a means of survival, or of growing wealth, but of growing
community.

Intentional Discipleship: Connect, Grow, Serving those whom Christ loves.

Let me tell you one more Memie story. She lived to be 104, but long before that she wanted to die. Prayed to die. She suffered so much… and she asked me, “Why won’t God take me home? I am doing nobody any good; I am just a burden. Why am I still here?”

“You’re here for us,” I said. “Jesus told us to take care of the weak ones, the little ones, the ones who cannot take care of themselves. You are letting us do what Jesus told us—teaching us to serve, and serve others, like you have always done.

Sometimes when I am frustrated at the church, what it is and what it isn’t, I remember that Jesus loves the church: established it, keeps making and remaking it, and that the best gift I can give him, is to love it too, because he does. Looks upon us in mercy, all of us held together by love and sweetness and a little cone of light, as if from a window in heaven, just enough to protect us from the dark and the cold and the rain.

Connecting. Growing. Serving. Those are the ways we are clack-clack-clacking our love for him, and for each other: loving those he loves.

Meanwhile, this morning, as he does so many mornings, Jesus has once again made for us our favorite meal. And that is why we love him so, say our prayers and sing our songs, clack, clack, clack, because he is so sweet to us.

And that is why he loves us so...

Christ our Lord invites to his Table all who love him…

A Parable

2010-09-04T20:11:00.001-07:00

I was in Highlands this last week and partly to counsel a couple I will marry in October. I asked them, as a part of that conversation, what they did when they got mad. She said, "I shut down. I just get quiet."

He says, "And I cook. I figure that if I make us a good meal, whatever it is that is bothering us, we can talk about it over dinner."

She said, "And most everytime, he has made this really good meal for me, and after the first bite I cannot for the life of me remember what I was mad about."

Let all the people say, "Ding! Ding! Ding!"

May it always be for us, too, that coming to the table causes us both holy amnesia and wonderful reunion.

Paul, Paul Simon, Nixon, Augustine, Uncle Kracker

2010-08-24T13:32:00.000-07:00

I preached this sermon on Sunday, the first in four on "Intentional Discipleship," and this one was "Connection." The text is Luke 13:10-17. At the end, I read the Roman text (not in the lectionary) and invited people to move about with a prayer and a kiss of peace. It was amazing. Really, really amazing.

I

Maybe you feel like the woman in our gospel lesson for the morning—or have felt like her—this “daughter of Abraham,” Jesus calls her, who has been crippled for 18 years, unable to stand-up straight or look the world in the face. And if you don’t feel like that orthopedically, maybe you feel like that spiritually—have felt like that: bent, warped, withered in your mind and heart, deeply crippled, and maybe you would love to come to Jesus, would love for Jesus to see you and say to you that you are “freed from your ailment,” whatever your ailment may be…

But there are so many things that stand between you and Jesus, regrets, hurts, even people stopping you from connecting with Jesus and his power, and maybe even people in the synagogue itself, “church” people looking down at you for looking down, leaders in the church fussing about how you come or when you come, or where you come from.

Is that the way you have felt in the church or feel: you want is to be well, connected to God, but you have come to the sad conclusion that the church is not only not a help but even a hindrance to your faith. Lots of people feel that way, sad truth to tell—that the church does not help them connect with God, but in many ways, keeps them from connecting with God.

Easier to keep your distance, remain disconnected, even if it means you stay stooped, hobbled, alone. Have you ever felt that way? Wounded? And not least by the church itself?

Preachers feel that way, too, sometimes, have to work to keep their faith in spite of what they have experienced in the church. What their kids have experienced. What has been said to them or done. I think if we all had the right kind of glasses we might all look at each other, pastors and people, and see lots of crippled folk, lots of hurting folk, lots of folk who wish the church was always and only a place of blessing and peace…

No surprise when pastors leave the ministry, when people leave the church. Too many arguments. Too many hard feelings. Too many rules. Too many grievances, petty grievances.

II

Does anyone remember the Nixon Administration? Some of you do. I remember once hearing a kind of epitaph pronounced on Mr. Nixon’s presidency, that it was characterized by “grand vision and petty grievance.” Grand vision, and petty grievance. He went to China, virulent anti-communist though he was, and turned enemies into friends. And he went crazy, too, kind of, paranoid and self-absorbed, and turned even his friends into enemies.

Ever since I first heard that description, “grand vision and petty grievance”—and the point was that the grand vision was ultimately destroyed by the petty grievance—I have thought it sounds a lot like the church, sometimes, a lot like some Christians, who in spite of the grand vision of our faith are brought down by petty grievance. The weight of glory replaced by a chip on the shoulder.
No surprise when people stay away.

III

Sometimes, when I read this story and the part about the leader of the synagogue, who does doubt the healing Jesus did, but fusses about the way it all went down, I find myself thinking of my junior high school math teacher, who did not seem to notice that I got the problem solved, which was unusual thing, miraculous, really, and she should have been happy for me, and for her a little (the miracle occurred in her classroom, after all!); but no, she only noticed that I did not do the problem the way she had outlined it on the board, step by step, and she pointed that out in front of the whole class, humiliated me in what should have been a moment of triumph.

Shaking her head… and listen, y’all: nothing unfocuses your eyes like shaking your head. Shake your head and you may not be able to see at all…
That is the leader of the synagogue, too. Shaking his head. Unable to see what is happening before him. He is not unhappy the woman has come back to church after all these years, and yes, it is good that she got healed—but there are ways we do these things, tested and proven over time, prescribed by God, really, and proven over and over again by our ancestors. These are the ways we gather and worship, this is when and how.

I can imagine that for the synagogue leader there was power, even healing, in the structure, the stability, the consistency of Sabbath and the synagogue service, in undisturbed liturgy…

I can hear myself in the voice of the synagogue leader, have said that kind of thing, too. Lots. This is the way we read the Word. This is the way we sing our songs. This is the way say our prayers, so early in the morning. I have outlined it on the board, just like that! Follow the steps!

I have felt my own head shaking and my eyes unfocusing at experiences outside the norm.

Just like some folks shake their head at the norm, at the form. Folks who have had powerful experiences, don’t want church or religion; they want the Spirit!
Well, I want the Spirit, too, but I trust the historic forms of worship, the same forms that framed the experience of Jesus and Paul and Augustine, Martin Luther, John Wesley and my grandmother.

So what shall it be? Form or power? Power or form? Shall the twain shall meet?

IV

I find myself wondering what might have happened if the crippled woman and the leader of the synagogue had talked… shared, told their stories and asked their questions. She might have said that she needed Jesus’ touch, an immediate experience of grace to heal her body…but that she was grateful Jesus had come to the synagogue, that it was his custom to attend synagogue for prayers and the liturgy…since Jesus always went to church, she knew where to find him, and she was going to start back herself. If that is what Jesus did, that is what she wanted to do, too.

He might have said that he loved the scriptures, the prayers, the certainty of synagogue service, and especially in a world as crazy and fragmenting as the world can be; that the synagogue was his oasis, his city of refuge, his sanity in a crazy world. But he was glad too when there was energy as well as form, lest it all become dry rote, and even kind of glad that Jesus, good Jew that he was, could shake things up and straighten things up, and her not least.

If they had connected, in other words, both of them frightened, wounded, crippled souls, they might have seen that both of them needed healing, that both of them found healing, one in form, one in power, that they weren’t so different after all, both of them hungering for real worship, real connection with God, and maybe for connection with each other, too.

She had been alone for 18 years! He had be barricaded inside the rules.

If they had quit shaking their heads at each other, they might have found connection with each other in their common desire for connection with God.

See how it goes? Connecting with God, connecting with each other; connecting with each other not just in the ways a new directory or phone tree, can help us connect, a newsletter or webpage—but in deeper ways, hard as it can be.

It is hard to find connection with one another. Not least because We are so used to hiding, so practiced at keeping ourselves safe, or so we suppose, and solitary.

This week I found myself thinking about an old Paul Simon song:

They got a wall in China/It’s a thousand miles long./ To keep out the
foreigners they made it strong./ And I got a wall around me/ that you
can’t even see.

Yep. Lots of walls up in these walls. And lots of times people in here just crack-off each other like billiard balls… think of the green felt as the church, and sometimes folks drop off the table and sometimes they bounce… but rarely do they really connect.

No surprise. It’s hard. We’re hard. So why even try?

I could answer theologically: that the church is the Body of Christ, and that when we are together, together we each of us become and all of us become what God has meant us to be.

I could answer musically: maybe you remember that great line is Uncle Kracker’s song, “Smile”:

“Don’t know how I lived without you, / Cause every time that I get around
you, / I see the best of me inside your eyes…”

That is the gift of the Spirit, y’all, or can be.

God knows not always: sometimes when we get around each other we see the worst in each other, but it need not be that way.

We really can’t live without each other, because Jesus has called us together, and the Holy Spirit has given each of us gifts that are intended to be shared with the rest of us—and so it is when we are together that we any of us can find ourselves, see the best of who we are in each other's eyes, can know who we are.

If we isolate ourselves, though, keep our distance, disconnect –even though all of us have good reason at times—as long as we do that we will have this nagging sense that we are incomplete, that something is missing, that something is wrong… and it is.

God saw that it was not good Adam, or any of the rest of us, to be alone, and so God made us for connection—connection with him (remember how Augustine prayed to God, “You have made us for yourself and our hearts find no rest till they rest in you.”). And God has made us for connection with each other…

And connection with our neighbors, too, but I am going to hold that for three weeks. Just remember, connection with God; connection with each other; connection with our neighbors. That is the way God made us…for connection.

V

Connection… is the first step of intentional discipleship. Connecting with God, in worship; connecting with each other, in spiritual friendship, hard as that can be, and it is hard… and if you ask me how to do it, how to connect, that I will point to you a bicycle wheel. Consider Jesus the hub, and each of our lives one of the spokes. As we move closer to Jesus, we also move closer to one another. The farther away we move from Jesus, the more disconnected we are from each other.

Romans 16: 3-16. I invite you to look around and see who is here that is a partner with you in the gospel--that you see the best in them because of what they have been to you and your faith. And I invite you to move to that one and give them a holy kiss...

Watch Your Feet

2010-08-20T09:28:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking about feet. I am not sure why.

It may have started when I was at the doctor’s office. A woman came in wearing sandals designed to catch the eye—there was a HUGE daisy on the strap—and when I looked, I noticed that each of her toenails was painted a different color. Okay.

A bride-to-be came to discuss her wedding. She had stars tattooed on the side of her foot. “Tell me about that,” I said open-endedly, hoping to unearth a nugget of psychic ore we might smelt me in our counseling sessions with her fiancé.
“It’s pretty,” she said. “Oh,” I replied. EOD.

Last week, when my wife went to the dermatologist to have a mole examined (it was nothing, thank God), he said that the moles she (and others) really needed to keep a watch on were the moles on her feet! Who knew?

Anyway, I have been thinking about feet, remembering how, when God called Abram to leave his father and homeland and work in Ur, to start with his wife Sarai toward a land and a future and a heritage they could not possibly imagine, God said, “Go, and I will show you…”

Abram could not wait for clarity before he mustered his courage. He could find the way ahead only by taking it. Abram did as he was commanded, of course, and Sarai too, and ever since their first obedient steps tired and calloused feet have been a sign and symbol of our faith—outward and visible expressions of hope and trust and grace.

When Jesus called his disciples, whether by one’s or two’s, their feet took them away from home and family and work to traipse after him first in Galilee, then into Samaria (where few Jewish feet willfully ventured), and finally south into Judah and Jerusalem. Later, Jesus declared that with the Spirit’s help their feet would take them back to all the places they had been and to more besides—into all the world—and not just as his followers this time but as his representatives. Their thick-soled feet, as much as his ruined ones, would prove to be beautiful on account of the lengths to which they went to spread the Good News of the Gospel.

Used to, preachers would say if you want to know who you really are, as opposed to who you think you are, take a close look at your calendar and your checkbooks. In other words, look closely at how you spend your time and money. These days preachers should tell folk to check their BlackBerrys (lest they prove what many of their people already guess, that preachers and their counsel are behind the times, hopelessly obsolete).

Frederick Buechner suggests, on the other hand, that people to check their feet, not dermatologically but theologically. Want to know who you really are? What you really value? Just see where your feet take you in a day, or a week, or a lifetime.

A Decent Image

2010-07-13T11:23:00.000-07:00

I was pleased with this image, used yesterday in a funeral for Jack Covington, a long-time member of our church. I was reflecting on Matthew 11:25...this piece came well into the meditation:

I am thinking again about the text in Matthew—and maybe what first drew me to Jesus words was the part about “heavy-laden.” I have come late to this party, of course, your life in Shelby and Cleveland County and Lafayette Street. There are still so many things I have to learn. And by the time I arrived Jack was already gearing-down, as it were, idling a little on account of his eyesight.

I saw him and Frances at church, mostly, and how faithful they were. Frances told me just this past Saturday, “Now I won’t be there tomorrow, because I would cry all the way through it, but I will be there next Sunday.”

Anyway, Sunday by Sunday I would take Jack’s hand as he offered it—he was not able to find my hand, blind as he had gotten, but he extended his toward the sound of my voice. I could see his hand, of course, and so I would take it, and shake it, kind of cradle it, and chat for a moment or two.

You could find worse images, I think, for our posture before God—all of us extending our hands, perhaps feebly, unable to see who, or where, exactly, we are reaching, just offering our hands toward his Voice; but God can see us, better than we can see him, and he takes our hands and draws us unto himself, near to his heart and at the Last, into his home.

Long time no...write

2010-06-12T18:48:00.000-07:00

I have been way. Not that I have gotten a lot of "Where ARE you?"'s from people.

All I can say is that between final revisions of my new book (Shadows, Darkness and Dawn: A Lenten Journey with Jesus, Upper Room, November), and a couple of other writing assignments and the post-Easter blues, and vacation, and being a pastor... it's about all I can do to update my Facebook page (Thomas Ray Steagald) everyday or two.

Join me there, and I will try to do better with blogging.

Good Friday

2010-04-02T03:13:00.000-07:00

Each day in Holy Week I am offering these meditations on the Gospel lesson assigned for that day. They will appear in my forthcoming Shadows, Darkness and Dawn: A Lenten Journey with Jesus, to be published in November by Upper Room Books.

Isaiah 52:13-53:12
Psalm 22
Hebrews 10:16-25
John 18:1-19:42

Friday has dawned but it is still night, the darkness and the shadows growing all the deeper as the sun makes its way toward noon. After their final supper together, Jesus and eleven of his disciples had gone to dark Gethsemane where the moon and the last of the stars was extinguished by the betrayal of the other disciple. Judas had left the table, took himself freshly washed feet to meet a contingent of Roman soldiers and Temple guards. Their torches brought garish light to the garden; wild, misshapen shadows marched to where Judas said Jesus would be. There was Sacrament on Judas’ breath when he kissed Jesus —a kiss of identification, and death.

A fevered skirmish between the sleepy disciples and the High Priest’s posse, was quickly quelled by Jesus, the peacemaker, who also mended the wounded ear of Malchus. Then, Jesus had surrendered himself while the disciples fled.

Alone, except for his arrestors, Jesus was taken to Annas, the father-in-law of the High Priest Caiaphas. Peter had followed at a distance, found himself also being interrogated. As Jesus was questioned by Annas he was scrutinized by the maid. “Are you not one of them?” Others questioned him, too, three times asked Peter if he were not one of the disciples, but each time Peter said, “I am not.” The cock crowed after the third denial, but not to greet the day.

Inside, Jesus’ interrogation turned nasty when, upon answering one Annas’ questions, he was struck in the face by one of the policemen. “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong,” Jesus said. “But if I have spoken the truth, why do you strike me?” Perhaps, then as now, he was struck precisely because he does speak the truth. Jesus was bound and carted-off to Caiaphas.

After a brief visit to the High Priest himself Jesus was taken to Pilate, the Roman governor. Pilate seems pitiable, almost: an inquisitor defending himself to the Judge. It is Pilate who is on trial, not Jesus. But when Pilate found no reason to charge, must lest hold Jesus, the will of the crowd rendered Pilate powerless yet again: he could not protect Jesus. The crowd demanded Barabas’ release, and it was granted. They demanded Jesus’ death, and Pilate recused himself, acceded to their wishes. Jesus was flogged, mocked, condemned to death.

About noon, while lambs were being slaughtered at the Temple for the Passover meal, Jesus was stripped, nailed to a cross and put on hideous display for anyone passing by to see. Defying the crowds at last Pilate commissioned a sign to be hung on the cross: “The King of the Jews.” It was written in three languages, so that no one missed it. But what did Pilate mean? “This is what we do to trouble makers?” Or did he maybe believe it himself?

Soon it was over, finished. Jesus died in only three hours, but continued his earthly work even to the end. With almost his last breath he did what he always did: reordered lives and relationships: “She is now your mother,” he said of Mary to the disciple he loved. And to Mary he said in turn, “He is now your son.” That was Jesus ministry from the very start—giving his followers to each other in new ways.
It is to this precise moment that everything prior has led. And we would turn away from it, partly because we know the story so well And partly because we really haven’t the first clue as to what it all means. How does this death, this death bring life?

Many have tried to put words around it, bring sense to it or purpose out of it. Better, perhaps, to fall silent. Or turn to the Psalms. Jesus used a few of his last breaths to quote the beginning of Psalm 22, as a way to interpret his own experience of that moment—though only Matthew and Mark have the stomach to remember that he did.

Maybe we turn to another Psalm, not to interpret Jesus’ death so much as a to understand the nature of our own lives.

Lord, let me know my end,
and what is the measure of my days;
Let me know how fleeting my life is!
You have made my days a few handbreadths,
And my lifetime is as nothing in thy sight.

Surely everyone stands as a mere breath .
Surely everybody goes about like a shadow.
Surely for nothing they are in turmoil;
They heap up, and do not know who will gather.
And now, O Lord, what do I wait for?
My hope is in you…

Hear my prayer, O Lord,
And give ear to my cry.
Do not hold your peace at my tears. Psalm 39:4-6, 12a)

Prompt

How do you react to this statement: “A faith unequal to death is a faith also unequal to life”? Do you see our culture as “death-denying”? How might “knowing our end” and “dying well” be a kind of prophetic testimony to our culture?

Maundy Thursday

2010-04-01T02:47:00.000-07:00

Each day in Holy Week I am offering these meditations on the Gospel lesson assigned for that day. They will appear in my forthcoming Shadows, Darkness and Dawn: A Lenten Journey with Jesus, to be published in November by Upper Room Books.

The Footwashing

Exodus 12:1-4 (5-10) 11-14
Psalm 116:1-4, 12-19
I Corinthians 11:23-26
John 13:1-7, 31b-35

Love is a light, but reveals shadows.

God gave all things into Jesus hands, even the feet of the disciples. The story before is breathtaking: Jesus, Word of God and Voice of Creation, silently kneeling, all but naked, before his feckless disciples. "Having loved them," the Evangelist says, "he loved them till the end,” and who can even begin to imagine the logic of either clause? But in love he touches them—not just their minds or hearts but also their dusty and increasingly antsy feet, bestows this touch as one last act of love and compassion, of utter devotion and loyalty to them. And he does so in full awareness that their loyalty will fade like mist.

The disciples and the promises they made in the gathering dark—to stay with Jesus, even fight and die with him if it came to that—will disappear into the shadows of Gethsemane, evaporate at the first glint of Roman steel in Temple torchlight. On freshlywashed feet they will abandon him. With his Body and Blood still on their tongue they will betray him. His most vocal supporter will deny him, if with a terrible, truthful word: "I do not know the man." Never did, really.

Will he? Ever? Any of them? Any of us? Ever? Someday?

Jesus the Lord, loves and serves his friends in this almost-too-much-to-take-in way. And then Jesus gives them this almost-too-much-to-give-out commandment, a new commandment and mandate (and thus, maundus, Latin for command, and Maundy Thursday)—that they love one another just as he has loved them. Not only the way he has just loved them, but in all the ways Jesus had loved and them and did, from the beginning to the end. One could spend life, a ministry, an academic career trying to plumb the content and ethical implications of Jesus’ last command.
God gave all things into Jesus hands, even the feet of the disciples. And he left this word: “I have given you an example: If you know these things, you are blessed if you do them.”

Primitive Baptists and the Brethren practice footwashing as a Sacrament. We might wish the rest of us would. The practice meets the requirements, after all: it was instituted by Jesus, and it does convey grace.

Still, the grace footwashing conveys can be overwhelming—too much grace, if there is such a thing. Light can blind eyes accustomed to the shadows.

And so it comes as no surprise when footwashing services are poorly attended, when even the most faithful say, with their words or absence, “You shall never touch my feet.”

It is no surprise when even the faithful keep their distance, keep their feet, their hands, their hearts and minds mostly to themselves, hide in the shadows of resistance. Putting ourselves in Jesus’ hands changes things, changes us. Easier to be who we are, even if it is in the dark.

“If I do not wash your feet, you have not part in me,” Jesus says, and we know at once that distance is not an option in discipleship. We have to come close, have to let him have his way with us, have to let him bathe us, and not only our feet.

Prompt

How is the love of Jesus, and of the church, uncomfortable for you? Do you wish for such intimacy, with Jesus and others, as Jesus desires? How would that look day-to-day?

Wednesday in Holy Week

2010-03-31T02:46:00.000-07:00

Each day in Holy Week I am offering these meditations on the Gospel lesson assigned for that day. They will appear in my forthcoming Shadows, Darkness and Dawn: A Lenten Journey with Jesus, to be published in November by Upper Room Books.

Scandalous Devotion

Isaiah 50:4-9a
Psalm 70
Hebrews 12:1-3
John 13:21-32 (12:1-11)

Lazarus had been dead, but was alive and eating dinner once again in Bethany where his sisters were giving a party in honor of Jesus. Martha served, as she always seems to do. And Mary was at Jesus’ feet—again—where she always seemed to be. This time, though, she was not his student but his embalmer.

Jesus was alive, still, of course, but not for much longer, if only he and maybe Mary seemed to know or sense it. Or perhaps it was with her gift that night the way it sometimes is with ours: we give what we give and we think it means one thing, but when the gift is received it signifies something else again. It is hard to know, sometimes, about things.

It is hard to know about people, too, and Judas, not least. He was the treasurer, John says, and also a thief. Maybe it was all just as simple as that: that Judas cared only about money, was as cold and heartless as we have been catechized. But here and there are hints, whispers, that maybe there was another side to him.

The Last Supper, for instance: the disciples wondered if, in honor of the feast, Jesus has told him to go and give something to poor. Which is to say, maybe even the disciples knew of his sympathy for the less-fortunate, knew that Jesus would trust him with such a task, that this was not the first time Judas had done such a thing or made such provision.

There is also this moment in Bethany, when with Lazarus eating and Martha serving, Mary embarrassed herself for love of the man who had raised her brother from the dead. Judas was scandalized, of course. But is that a sign of his hypocrisy, or of devotion?

No one spoke when Mary took her place at his feet, in company. But no self- or tradition-respecting woman would do such a thing. In front of her sister, maybe. Maybe. But in full view of the neighbors? Never.

Taking her hair down in public? No one speaks again, though the air is getting thick. A woman took her hair down only in private, and then only as a sign of deep intimacy—a sign that she “found her man.” Which is to say, for Mary to anoint Jesus’ feet in this way was as scandalous an act as Jesus’ washing his disciples feet a couple of nights later—and perhaps she gave him the idea.

The perfume? Pure nard. Expensive. Used for embalming. In a costly jar which Mary broke as regretlessly as she offered the rest of her scandalous devotion, her heart full to breaking with love and thanks and, also, I suspect, fear—the sense, if not the knowledge exactly, of what was coming.

And Judas could no longer hold his tongue. “This perfume should have been sold,” he said, “and the proceeds given to the poor.” The Evangelist cries foul, of course, and maybe Judas’ statement is simply disingenuous. But what if he had overheard, and taken to heart, the word of Jesus to the rich young man? What if Judas considered those words to be the Rabbi’s plain command: that if you have a treasure, you sell it and give it to the poor (Luke 18:22). That is the way to be perfect, Jesus had said.

And so Judas may indeed have seen Mary’s act not only as waste, but also as disobedient disrespect of their honored guest’s teaching.

More patiently than he might have, he told Judas to hold his peace, to be still. “There is a time for devotion,” he said, just as there is a time for sacrifice. There is a time for scandalous devotion, even, which is a different kind of selfless gift.

If anything, Jesus’ heart was fuller than Mary’s. His heart, too, would soon be broken for love of his friends, as Mary had broken the alabaster jar for love of him, his grace pouring out onto those he loved. The sweet aroma of his sacrifice still fills the world.

A broken jar; a broken heart; a broken body—each in their own ways scandalous acts of unaccountable love and devotion.

But what of Judas? There is the disquieting comfort in the story from a couple of nights later, at another supper, just Jesus and his closest followers. When he says, “One of you will betray me,” none of them seem to know who he means, at least not at first. They do not immediately think of Judas but rather ask in turn, “Lord, am I the one?”

It is easy to blame Judas, of course. And maybe he was just as cold and heartless as we have been taught to believe. What is harder is to ask whether we, each of us, might be the one. Hard to make that confession.

Prompt

Have you ever demonstrated “scandalous devotion”? Have you ever prayed, “Lord, am I the one?” How have such experiences changed your spiritual journey?

Tuesday in Holy Week

2010-03-30T02:45:00.000-07:00

Each day in Holy Week I am offering these meditations on the Gospel lesson assigned for that day. They will appear in my forthcoming Shadows, Darkness and Dawn: A Lenten Journey with Jesus, to be published in November by Upper Room Books.

Oblivion

Isaiah 49:1-7
Psalm 71:1-14
I Corinthians 1:18-31
John 12:20-36

There were essentially “three crowds” casting their shadows around Jesus during Holy Week. The first crowd were the users, those who just wanted something from Jesus, whether a personal miracle or political transformation—consider theirs the shadow of selfishness. These hailed him outside the city on Palm Sunday, wanted him to seize power and, when he achieved it, spread the wealth. Even some of Jesus’ own disciples were in this crowd at one time or the other: James and John had said, "Lord, grant us to sit, one at your right hand and one at the left, when you come into your kingdom."

It could be that the Greeks in today’s gospel reading, Gentile God-fearers, perhaps, were themselves seeking audience for that very same reason: to ask something of Jesus, some sign or service. Whatever it was they were asking, Philip’s reporting of it told Jesus that the time had come.

Just as the arrival of the Gentile Magi signals that the one born King of the Jews was also Savior of the world, these Greeks’ request reveals that the one to be crucified as a threat to peace is actually its Prince.

A second crowd around Jesus comprised the abusers. Theirs is the shadow of malevolence. They hated Jesus and his message, wanted him gone and good riddance. Some of them—and perhaps Judas is to be accounted here—may have been believers at the first, following Jesus and welcoming his teaching. By Holy Week, though, they have rejected him, whether for his peaceful, turn-the-other cheek kind of gospel they considered too docile in the face of Roman occupation, or for his uncompromising God-first platform that seemed too radical a message for the current climate and a danger to the political détente. In either case, as the cheers of the Palm Sunday crowd faded, these malevolent voices amped-up and won the day.

The third and by far largest of the crowds were those who were…unaware. Dwelling in the shadow of oblivion they did not attend the parade on Sunday. They were not at the Temple for the “cleansing” or the debates. They were just too busy with life, with children, with work, with stuff, with whatever it was they were busy with to take much notice at all of anything going on.

A friend concluded his Holy Week sermon by citing the last line of O Sacred Head Now Wounded: “O let me never, never outlive my love for Thee." He confessed that the phrase had haunted him his "conscious spiritual life," wondering what the hymn-writer might have meant, exactly, by that phrase. Was he thinking about death, praying that God would not let him live so long as to grow cold in his religious affections? Or was he acknowledging his place in that third shadow, in that third crowd where most of us find ourselves—so busy with life and its stuff that we are in danger of "outliving" our love to Jesus?

Prompt

In which crowd do you find yourself? In what way does that shadow darken your spiritual path?

Monday in Holy Week

2010-03-29T08:15:00.000-07:00

Each day in Holy Week I am offering these meditations on the Gospel lesson assigned for that day. They will appear in my forthcoming Shadows, Darkness and Dawn: A Lenten Journey with Jesus, to be published in November by Upper Room Books.

Spring Cleaning

Isaiah 42:1-9
Psalm 36:5-11
Hebrews 9:11-15
John 2:13-22 (John 12:1-11)

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the navel of the universe, said some, while others said it was just as turned-in on itself, a little hole full of filth and intrigue, graft and grime.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who murders the prophets—and the one hailed as the prophet from Nazareth will be only the latest.

Jerusalem, Jerusalem, who knows not the things that make for peace. Who does not realize the time of her visitation when Jesus comes to her, humbly and riding on a donkey or two.

When Jesus arrived in the Holy City, full as it was of unholy alliances, to Matthew’s memory it was the first time, and also the last, that Jesus had or would visit the Jerusalem. Luke recounts two visits: when Jesus was circumcised, and when he amazed the teachers at age twelve. John’s recollection, however, is that, like most observant Jews, Jesus had been a more or less regular visitor to the city and also to the Temple. Jesus had taught there, healed there, too, and more than once. He was familiar with the place and its particulars.

In Jesus’ time, the Temple represented both God’s bountiful provision and the also the Romans’ stifling occupation. The archetypal symbol of Jewish freedom, the Temple had gradually become emblematic of the parasitic complicity between the Romans and the Temple authorities. The Romans demanded tribute—protection money. Taxes collected at the Temple were a chief source of the revenue.

The complicity was compounded with idolatry: the money intended for YHWH, King of the Universe, blessed be He, wound-up in the coffers of Tiberius, self-proclaimed god of all the world. Meanwhile, the religious leaders, concerned above all else to protect the Temple itself, acceded as the increasingly oppressive purpose of the Temple was monetized.

Money changing was perfectly legal, of course—and a real service, it could always be argued, for those who traveled long distances to worship. But profit had had overtaken prayer as the Temple’s primary enterprise. Business had subsumed the sacred. And on that Monday, Jesus tore up the place. He cleaned, as it were, God’s House.

His actions that day recall other reformers in Jewish history, Kings Hezekiah and Josiah, especially. During each of their reigns the Temple had become cluttered with stuff—booths, people, furniture and behaviors that did not belong in God’s sanctuary. These “things” were signs of syncretism and idolatry. And though God had commanded that the faithful “have no other gods” before God nor make room for any “graven image” to stand in God’s place, gradually the people had cluttered the Temple with unholy things.

We are likewise guilty, of course. The churches we attend, the temple of our hearts, the architecture of our souls–spaces are carved, built or emptied, to provide a proper venue, a meeting place, for us to experience God: a space for God alone to fill. Gradually, though, we begin to fill in the emptiness with stuff. The stuff may or may not have religious or historic value, sacramental or sacred worth. In any case such “things” come between us and God, are “before God,” shielding us from the terrible and wonderful intimacy that engenders true epiphanies.

Church “work” is one of those buffers. Behind the wall of her kitchen in Bethany Martha is busy doing making dinner for Jesus. Her work for him keeps her safely away from him. Similarly, there is a danger that for those who are busiest for God, many times their busyness is "before" God—not just in terms of priority but also proximity. Our works can be an effective shield against religious experiences, places to hide, self-styled protection against the terror and wonder of real prayer and worship.

On that long-ago Monday, Jesus’ actions in the Temple were directed against the priests and the “work” of the Temple, the religious professionals and their helpers, who like contemporary preachers and their people may do their religious work as a kind of self-care. Imagining, perhaps vainly, that we are serving God, we may find that, in truth, we are in seeking only protection, whether to from our creditors or our Creator.

Prompt

What stands “before” God in your spiritual life, not so much as idol, though it could be, but perhaps as a wall, a buffer, a shield against genuine religious experience?

Lent--The Awkward Season

2010-03-17T07:16:00.000-07:00

A new book published by Upper Room has a most intriguing title: The Awkward Season.

The book concerns Lent, the period of fasting and prayer that many Christians and congregations observe this time of year. Think of it as a form of spiritual spring cleaning—getting rid of some of the old stuff to make more room for God.

That said, Lent is an awkward season, even for those who observe it. Trying to explain it to those who don’t observe Lent proves just how awkward.

Lent begins on a Wednesday and ends on a Thursday. Its 40 days are spread over parts of seven weeks, but you don’t count Sundays.

Sundays are always reminders of the resurrection (since it was early on “the first day of the week” that the women discovered the tomb was empty). That is the reason we say, the Fourth Sunday in Lent as opposed to the Fourth Sunday of Lent. Awkward.

That is also the reason that, for example, if you have given-up chocolate for Lent, you can eat a Hershey bar on Sunday. Since our Lord is not dead but alive and with us, and since Jesus himself said that his disciples cannot fast when the Bridegroom is with them, we don’t, you know, fast on Sundays. (From personal experience, though, I must tell you that going against the vow on Sunday makes things harder on Monday.)

So Sunday’s are not a part of Lent. Still, we preachers drape our sanctuaries in purple and offer somber sermons. Every Sunday in Lent we pray long prayers full of deep confession and contrition, invite our people to lament and bewail their manifold sins and wickedness. Except on the Fourth Sunday in Lent, when, as we do on the Third Sunday of Advent, we take a little break from our gloom and fasting (assuming we have started to fast), to rejoice in our (costly) redemption. Oh, and this time it was Girl Scout Sunday, too! Really awkward.

But then we are back at the lamentation stuff for a couple of more weeks until, on the last little Easter before Big Easter, we wave palm branches at the first of the service only to shift gears and read the entire crucifixion narrative before leaving the service in silence. Awkward.

The weather doesn’t help, either. Outside there are buds and blossoms, green on the trees, but inside, in our sacred places, we try to keep our attentions onto a barren cross, dead wood, lashed, a reminder not of new life but an old death. Awkward.

There is yet one more awkwardness—most of the rest of the year, preachers expend considerable energy telling their people not to think so much about themselves. In Lent, though, we encourage people to think about themselves—their own sins and shortcomings and no one else’s. That we are mostly unable to do the former means we are mostly ineffective at the latter. That makes Lent very awkward indeed.

Old Hymns...

2010-02-18T14:17:00.001-08:00

When I was a child, growing up in the Radnor Baptist Church in Nashville, TN, I learned to sing my faith before saying it. One of the hymns of discipleship featured this lyric:

"Let others see Jesus in you; let others see Jesus in you./
"Keep telling the Story, be faithful and true:
"let others see Jesus in you."

We do not practice our piety in order to be seen by them, but there is no way faithful disciples escape notice.

Still, I am thinking that if I were to rewrite that old hymn--and I cannot do such a thing, as I am not much of a lyricist or poet--I would want it to say something like this: Let me see Jesus in others.

Let me see Jesus in others--the kid who cuts me off in traffic, the condescending preacher or priest, the woman who works against my ministry, the family member who dismisses my life and calling. Let me see Jesus in them just the same.

Perhaps I will give up "expectation" for Lent, meaning I will not expect any of these or anyone else any reaction that I deem appropriate. I will not expect any particular courtesy, or respect, or standing. I will not expect anyone to defer to my age, my education, my "wisdom" (would that I HAD some to which people might defer). I will not expect anything of others--only of myself: that others may see Jesus in me: his compassion, his mercy, his long-suffering and patience, his self-sacrifice.

May God grant me to fulfill this Lenten vow, and even beyond Lent.

Icons, St. Bernard, and Wounded Healers

2010-02-08T10:31:00.000-08:00

At one corner of my desk, downstairs in my study, I keep a most-prized possession—this three-paneled icon written in burgundy and gold: an “authentic copy,” the certificate reads: in other words, a “genuine imitation” of a Byzantine altar piece. In the middle panel is the Virgin Mary, Mother of our Lord, cheek to holy cheek with the Christ-child and both of them looking peaceful, serene, and perhaps because in either side panel the archangels Michael and Gabriel stand guard, Michael with a sword and Gabriel with… something I cannot quite make it out. It does not look like a weapon, but I would not care to test him and find out otherwise.

I look at that icon on my desk every day, and when I do I remember that somewhere, in one of the many Greek Orthodox churches around the world, hanging above that church’s Altar is the real thing, from which my genuine imitation is authentically copied. I know, too, that at that church, whenever it is time for worship, the icon is reverently unfolded, unshuttered, if you please, as if to open a window between earth and heaven—to let the prayers of those worshipers out, to let heaven itself look in and keep vigil over those faithful prayers.

An icon is just a picture, really, but with a purpose. You have seen Sunday School classes where, on the wall, there is a picture of Jesus, or a cross. Maybe you have been to churches, or hospitals, where in each room is hung a crucifix. The picture or cross hangs there to mark the room as holy space, and to call you back to the moment should your mind wander. The picture itself, somehow, reminds you of why you are there.

Indeed, believers have long believed that by pondering pictures of Jesus we are drawn closer to him somehow, and he to us. By filling our mind more and more with images of Christ, we find ourselves more and more filled up with Christ’s presence and purpose and, I think, his peace.

Thank God for all the various pictures of our Lord—on the wall, on the desk; thank God for the Bible, too, which gives us so many pictures, so many stories, to help us focus our thinking, to aid our understanding, to quicken our prayers.

Today’s gospel lesson is such a story, such a picture. Considering what we see here, praying what we find, may give voice to many of our most urgent confessions and hopes, may help us pray our best prayers.

You remember, don’t you? One day Jesus is standing by the lake of Genessaret—the Sea of Galilee—and a crowd gathers around him, the folks at the back pushing to get closer so they can hear and the folk at the front crowding Jesus so that he is about to fall in the lake. He sees two boats, there in the shallows, empty, because the fishermen had left the boats, were already washing their nets…ding, ding, ding—washing their nets: they have already given-up, have quit fishing, have called it a day.

Jesus gets into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, and he asks Simon to put out a little way from shore. Jesus sat down in the boat, partly because that is what you do, usually, when you are on a boat. But sitting is also a rabbi’s customary posture for teaching. Jesus teaches, from the boat—what, we don’t know, but soon, he is finished. He turns to Simon and says, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.”

“Master,” Peter says, and note that well: “Master.” Not rabbi, nor teacher. Not Lord, not yet. Just Master. A master is someone you obey, and so Simon obeys, but not without objection: “Master, we fished all night and we caught nothing… “
Of course they caught nothing! They never catch anything! In spite of the fact that at least four of Jesus’ disciples are professional fishermen, there is not a single instance in all the gospels, nary a one, when they ever catch even a single fish—unless Jesus is there, in the boat, on the shore, directing them, helping them.

“Master, we fished all night and we caught nothing, yet if you say so I will let down the nets.“ He obeys and now there are so many fish in the nets he cannot haul them in, so many fish in the nets that he has to call his friends, has to call the other boat—so many fish that the nets are breaking and both boats are sinking…

Simon falls at Jesus’ knees and pleads with him, “Go away from me, Lord”—not Master this time, but Lord—“for I am a sinful man.” Jesus does go away—but not without Simon and the others, too: “Do not be afraid: from now on you will be catching people,” Jesus said, and when the boats had gotten back to shore, Simon and James and John left everything—their boats, their nets, all those fish, too, I guess, and how long had they been hoping for such a catch as that…but they left it there, lying there on the sand, with the rest of their stuff, and off they go. For if a Master is one you must obey, the Lord is one you have follow. He is the Big One you can’t let get away.

Maybe you know what it feels like to be give-out and still empty. Just washing your nets with what little strength you have left. You have worked so hard and have so little to show for it. And who would not hope and pray that after the long night of our futility and failure, if we are just obedient, obedient enough in little things, Jesus will reward us in abundance, so much abundance that we will need help getting it all in the bank.

Yes, we know we are sinners, but we do not want to be afraid anymore. We know we are weak, but we want him to be strong. Strong, for us, when we have no strength left. If he is the Lord of all things, will he not steer us past the superficialities of this word to deeper things, tell us where to drop our nets, and give us far more abundantly than we know how to ask or receive? Who would not pray that God is able and ready to lavish on us all we might want or need: victory, prosperity, health, answers, glory?

A Theology of Glory—that is what frames this picture from Luke and that is what many of us pray for most, for ourselves and our friends: glory, prosperity, healing, victory in Jesus. That is why churches like ours put an empty cross on the wall: to show that Jesus has overcome death and the grave. And that is what we pray for ourselves, that we will also overcome…

But what about when we are overcome? When there is no prosperity, or glory, or victory?

Have any of you ever heard of St. Bernard? Not the dog… St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who died 850 years ago, now, thereabouts. I have been thinking of him this week. Bernard was a monk, a person of deep prayer and faith, and when others came to him, asking him to teach them how to pray, he would sometimes tell them to get in their mind a picture of Jesus’ wounds—the nail prints in his hands and his side. He believed that meditating on the wounds in Jesus’ hands and feet could give believers a deep picture of Jesus’ love and mercy, that if one pondered the wound in Jesus side, the very heart of Jesus would become visible, his Sacred Heart, the very love of God.

Take any of that how you will, but the phrase is fetching, at least, to me: “meditating on the wounds of Jesus.” This week I have been doing that—but I have been thinking not so much of Jesus’ physical body, but of his Body, the Church. I have been meditating on the wounds I have seen just this week in Christ’s church.

I am thinking of the woman who has been married to her husband for three decades, and both of them Christians, active in church, anyway. She confided to me this week that she does not talk to her husband anymore because she is afraid he will get mad, and when he is mad she fears for her life. She is deathly afraid of her Christian husband.

I am thinking about a congregation I know where on Thursday of this week 28 people met secretly, and they tried to recruit others, in an effort to oust the pastor. They are losing power—the church is no longer looks or sounds like it used to, and they are terrified. So they are lying, gossiping, doing all sorts of evil—for “the good of the church,” they say, but how can evil ever serve the good?

I am thinking of good friends, here and other places, whose loved ones are sick, or sick again, dying—and there may be no victory, no healing, at least not the kind they have hoped and prayed for anyway—at the Last, yes, we believe, but for now it is grief and anger and questions and helplessness.

I am considering the wounds to Christ’s Body, the Church, and many more than this, of course—hypocrisy, judgmentalism, partisanship, apathy—and maybe you too have been wounded by some wound in the Body of Christ, and how are we to pray in such situations?

Maybe Bernard would tell us to look again at Jesus’ heart…broken and ever-breaking for love of his stained and struggling Bride. Maybe he would tell us to come to this Table in the confession that we too are broken, all of us, but in the knowledge that here, He, too, is broken, for us. In the cup is his blood, his heart, the depth of his love.

He is wounded with our transgressions; and we too are wounded, by our own sins and the sins of others; but perhaps as we give our wounds to him, here we find that by stripes we are healed: he gives his wounds also to us, and here, we find healing.

In his novel, The Blood of the Lamb, Peter deVries tells of a man, a single father, who loses his 12-year old daughter to leukemia. After her death he says this:

“How I hate this world. I would like to tear it apart with my own two hands if I could. I would like to dismantle the universe star by star, like a trefful of rotten fruit. (I am) inconsolable, thanks to that eternal "Why?" when there is not Why, that question mark twisted like a fishhook into (my) heart."

But then the man’s bitterness gives way to something else, and the book ends this way…

“Time heals nothing, which should make us the better able to minister (to each other)> Blessed are they that comfort, for they too have mourned...the throb of compassion rather than the breath of consolation: the recognition of how long, how long is the mourners' bench on which we sit, arms linked in undeluded friendship, all of us brief links, ourselves, in the eternal pity."

Strength. Abundance. Victory. Those are pictures to ponder and pray, but not the only ones worth our attentions and hopes.

The Church, and we ourselves, broken but joined in compassion. Mercy. Comfort. Friendship—all of us both wounded, and healers; just like Christ our Lord, who invites to his Table all who love him…

Jeremiah Writ Small

2010-01-31T10:09:00.000-08:00

It is Sunday afternoon, a few minutes past 12. I have just returned from the church where I went to confirm to my own mind, yet once again, that we did the right thing in canceling worship on account of the snow and ice that have turned our parking lot into a "slip-n-slide."

We did, but it is a strange thing, is it not, that phrase: "canceling worship." And of course we did not do that, could not, at least not in any ultimate sense. The worship of God that commenced at the dawn of creation, when "the morning stars sang together and the sons of God shouted for joy," has continued, unbroken, ever since. And even today, in places here and there and everywhere, the Song continues, the praise and prayer.

It is a comforting thought--that when we are unable to do our little part, others fill in the gap. And truly there are times when, for a Sunday or a season or even a lifetime, we "pray for others," those who for one reason or the other cannot or do not.

I am reminded of that moment, each Sunday, when we do the Creed, Apostles' or Nicene. People sometimes ask me why we do that every Sunday, and why always at the end. I always say something like this: whether you liked the hymns or not, whether the sermon spoke to you or not, whether the choir moved you or you were able to pray with heart as well as voice, this is what we believe. This is who we are. We go out together with these affirmations on our lips, these same faith-statements by which people have ordered their lives and faced their deaths for lo, these many centuries.

People sometimes ask me, too, why I use the hymnal every time. "Surely, you know these words!" they say. Well, yes, I do...most of the time. But familiarity can breed, if not contempt, then distraction in the moment and there have been a few occasions when I have flubbed the words and led the congregation astray. A parable, that: preachers must be good stewards of the words they have been given so that their folk are not confused along the way. Accordingly, when I lead the Creeds, I always use a hymnal, to be sure I keep us together. When I am in the pew as a worshiper I never use the hymnal, sure that if I flub-up, there is someone behind me or beside me who can, by their good memory and faithfulness, rein me back in. Together, our profession of faith continues unimpeded.

Praise, too. Today, we have had to rely on others to continue the song. And they have. Next week we will pick-it-up again, God willing. We canceled our little piece of God's worship today, but Worship never ceases.

And still it was odd. Being at LSUMC on a day and at a time when we normally are there. I was reminded of Lamentations 1:1-- where Jeremiah looks over Jerusalem after its destruction by the Babylonians and the deportment of the Jews, many of them to Babylon. He writes, "How deserted lies the city, once so full of people!"

For him, of course, the lament was greater, unsure as he was as to when the people would return, when there would be songs and celebration, whether he would be there to see and hear it. For us, and for me, the odd sadness of a quiet sanctuary is tempered by the hope and knowledge that we will gather again in just a matter of days.

My prayer is that next Sunday we ring our beautiful rafters with song. That we make glad the place of our worship, rejoice to be together once again and give the Morning Stars a run for their money.

JAMs

2010-01-19T11:13:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking…which is always a problematic affair…but I may be on to something here. When I went to the Y last week to do my walking, I saw a sign-up for men’s Church League basketball. I felt my heart do a between-the-legs dribble.

See, I used to play basketball. I am the first to admit I was not very good. I was slow, but I couldn’t jump either. Or shoot very well. I had no real knowledge of the game and almost no court awareness—my peripheral vision has always been suspect. I could not run the floor, had poor ball-handling skills and had trouble remembering which way to cut on set plays. I could not run backwards at all and I had no stamina. Maybe I could have made up for most or all of those deficiencies with hard work and enthusiasm, but laziness is my constant companion, has always dulled the edge of my little gung-ho. And still, I was on the school team for a short while—second- string B-team at MBA, a small, all-boys prep school in Nashville.

MBA was the “model” for Dead Poet’s Society (if any of you remember that movie). I attended there for one terrible, horrible, no good very bad year, and like Alexander (if any of you remember that book), there were many days I wanted to mail myself to Australia. Part of my misery was that some sort of athletic endeavor was required for all freshmen, and for me it came down to basketball or cross country. I chose the former, thinking the latter would be even more embarrassing.

I lasted a month, until the afternoon when the first-string varsity was running their offense against the second-string B-team defense (we were supposed to represent, however vaguely, the next opponent, and why in the world they put me on point in the one-three-one zone, I have no idea). A whistle started the play and next thing I know I had been sandwiched by a upperclassman’s screen and my knee cap had come to rest at the back of leg somewhere. A few weeks later I had the first of my seven knee surgeries.

After rehab and a change of schools I began attending a church that had a pretty good church league team. I had kind of gotten the bug, in spite of my failure and injury, and so I played church league ball for several years –even played on the graduate school team while I was in seminary. But after a surgery here and a surgery there I finally had to give it up in hopes of preserving what little orthopedic integrity I had left.

Injuries were not the only reason I put the ball in the rack and threw my sneaks to the back of the closet. With age I grew increasingly tired of fellows playing as if there were scouts for the Knicks in the stands (or the Yankees—you see this kind of behavior in softball, too, guys who seem to imagine they still have a shot at the bigs). They are WAY too wired considering the reality of the situation. A professor friend used to say that academic battles are so intense because there is so little at stake. Little league parents, too, some of them. I personally know of one such parent who had a heart attack and died after arguing, and all the way to the parking lot, a third strike call at his youngest son’s game.

Anyway, the other day at the Y, staring at the announcement for church-league sign-ups, I was thinking, remembering, wishing I could play a little more church league basketball, knowing, though, that there is really no place much, even on the bench, for a fifty-five year old who has had two separate replacements of the same knee. Then it hit me…

What we need is a league just FOR old guys and their prosthetics! We could call it Shelby JAMs (Men with Artificial Joints, JAMs being a backward acronym). Fifty and older, with no illusions that we are going to impress anyone, and least of all ourselves. I can see it now: old guys who don’t look so great in shorts, hobbling up and down the court only fast enough to get our heart rates up and break a sweat. We would take it easy each other, and laugh a lot. We would cheer each other on, even the guys on the other team, and pick each other up when we fall down on the “fast break,” and maybe keep score, you know, but no one really would much care about that part of it. We would just be thankful to be alive and breathing, to be able to still move at all.

It would not have to be a church league, but it could be, because big parts of it—we all are injured; we have no illusions about ourselves or each other; we are not trying to impress each other, just help each other; picking each other up when we fall down; cheering each other on—all of that sounds a lot like what the faith, and church, ought to be, and not just when we are playing ball.

Pray for Haiti

2010-01-14T14:32:00.000-08:00

And DO NOT give in to the temptation that seduced Pat Robertson. He is JUST LIKE the disciples in John 9, who stand there looking at the man born blind and begin discussing the causes of his circumstance. I see them nodding, pursing their lips, rubbing their beards as they ponder the existential dimensions of original or actual sin...

Jesus says only that the man's blindness is a chance for him to do the works of light. He kneels, begins making the balm of healing, the good earth and his holy spit, and spreads it on the man's eyes.

If we can blame the victims for what has happened to them we need not be so bothered. A pact with the devil? Hundreds of years ago? Neither these poor unfortunates nor their parents sinned in such a way, or even if they did God is wise enough to see past such foolishness. The question is not why...the imperative is now: let us do the works of light while there is light.

God does not send earthquakes; but God's people send aid, as God sent aid to us in Jesus. In that way God is glorified in even horrible moments such as this.

Pray. Do not blame.

Romans 8:28

2010-01-09T19:41:00.000-08:00

I think most people reading and hearing this text are drawn to the first part... that God is working in all things for good, or God works good of all things--however one translates it there is comfort: the notion that nothing is coincidence for those who love God, that there is a plan, that nothing bad is ultimate, etc.

But tonight, in an otherwise unremarkable reading of that text, I heard the last part again: "...and are called according to HIS PURPOSES." Perhaps what struck me had to do with the recent and terribly unfortunate situation on the Hill, which is to say, at the University of Tennessee, Rocky Top, Go Big Orange!

I am a sidewalk alumnus, a devout and faithful follower, a cut-me-and-I-bleed-Orange sort of fan, and FOUR NUMBSKULL BASKETBALL PLAYERS were, on New Year's Day (which is the church calendar is the Holy Name of Jesus) pulled over for speeding. During the traffic stop two handguns were discovered, one with the serial number filed off, and also a baggie of weed in a backpack bearing the name of one of the players.

What WERE they thinking?

Anyway, one of them, a couple of days later, tweeted about the strength he was drawing from his strong faith, that "God will not put you in a situation without providing a way to deal with it." Something like that.

On one of the message boards I follow a guy posted, "God had NOTHING to do with putting you in this situation, dude. This is your doing." Indeed.

It is one thing to believe that those who are engaged in God's purposes find a deeper good even in difficult times. It is quite another to say that difficulties of our own making either interest God or obligate God to work good in and through it.

Should God do so, we can be thankful for such grace. But grace is a gift, not a given.

January 6

2010-01-06T06:05:00.000-08:00

January 6: Epiphany of the Lord. He who is born King of the Jews is also Savior of the World. Oh, that he would rend the heavens and come down! Even so, come quickly Lord Jesus.

But until Then, the revisions on my new piece for Upper Room Books continue. Today I am trying to help Jesus get Lazarus out of the tomb today... reminding me of the first line of my first real book when I posed this, and to my mind, GREAT question..."Did anyone ask Lazarus that day in Bethany whether he WANTED to be raised from the dead?"

Feast of the Holy Innocents

2009-12-28T09:42:00.001-08:00

Almost everyone has heard of the Twelve Days of Christmas, if only by means of the song most of us learned in grammar school (I don’t think K-5/6 is called “grammar school” any more, but that’s okay, because many of them don't teach grammar any more).In any case, the term “Twelve Days” refers to the season of Christmas which stretches between The Nativity of our Lord (December 25, and commonly called Christmas day) and Epiphany, or Three Kings Day, on January 6. The Twelve Days boast another six or seven feasts, or celebrations—most of them related to various saints.

Now, we Protestants (and United Methodists are lumped-in there, though with some qualifiers) do not observe all the festivals and celebrations that our Roman Catholic or Orthodox friends do. While we do observe the temporal cycle, the basic seasons of the Christian year—Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, Pentecost—we do not, as a rule, observe the sanctoral cycle (the “saints’ days”).

We observe the temporal cycle because it helps tell the story of Jesus, the times of his life—from the promise of his coming (Advent) to his birth (Christmas) as both King of the Jews and Savior of the world (Epiphany); to be King and Savior means he will suffer and die (Lent) but God will vindicate Jesus (Easter) and pour out the Holy Spirit on those who receive him (Pentecost).

The sanctoral cycle, though…well, let’s just say there are good reasons to bypass most of those days (though we do observe All Saints on November 1). That said, taking the detour we sometimes miss good stuff, important pieces of our history and lessons the saints and their days might teach.

I have found myself, this year, particularly interested in the feast days that fall immediately after the Nativity.

--December 26 is the Feast of St. Stephen (“Good king Wenceslaus looked out…”). St. Stephen was the first Christian martyr. He was stoned to death outside Jerusalem for his witness to Christ.

--December 27 is the Feast of St. John, Apostle and Evangelist. He is, by tradition, the only one of Jesus’ originals not to have died a violent death.

--December 28 is the Feast of the Holy Innocents. The church remembers those children (and their weeping mothers) who died at the hand of murderous Herod who would stop at nothing to retain his power. He reminds us of all the “powers” in our own day who sacrifice their nation’s children for their own purposes, while the Innocents themselves remind us of those whose lives are taken on account the world’s idolatries and power-lust.

Notice: in the first “four days” of the Christmas season, the church’s celebrations alternate between light and darkness, life and death: Nativity, Stephen; John, the Holy Innocents. It is almost as if the church is saying, “This Child’s birth is not all sweetness and light; it is a matter of life and death.”

Hard to put a bathrobe or cardboard crown on some of these stories, which is not a bad thing to remember as we begin the new calendar year.

Still, if the sometimes and recurring word is dark and dreadful, the ever-answering and final word is always of light and joy. In spite of all, Joy to the World. JOY to the WORLD. Amen.

Mary is but the first...

2009-12-23T10:44:00.000-08:00

of the theotokoi (God-bearers). Jesus said, "Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and my sister and my mother."

Whenever we are faithful in the fallen world, our godless age--which really is a god-filled age, only the gods are not gods--we give birth to Jesus again. Perhaps this year we are every bit as uncomfortable as Mary in her ninth month, but something wondrous is about to happen!

Merry Christmas, and blessings to all.

Sanctity and Self-Righteousness

2009-12-20T05:07:00.000-08:00

I wonder if the sign of true sanctity is this: others seeing virtue in us that we do not see in ourselves. Pride and self-delusion, conversely, is seeing in ourselves virtue others cannot.

I have been thinking about that old saw, the one where the fellow asks another, "Are you a Christian?" The asked man answers, "I am not sure. I believe in Jesus, but as to whether I am actually a Christian...you will need to ask my banker, my business partner, my neighbor, my children, my enemy. They can tell you."

I suspect that pride and self-delusion are at the heart of many of the church's ills...we see in ourselves what others cannot. We imagine ourselves to be humble, loving, serving, when that is not others' experience of us. True sanctity would be the opposite. That is, we would see only our failings, not our "successes"; we would counfess only our sins, not our righteousness (at least we believe in Jesus!). It would be left to others to say whether or not we are actually Christians, which is what Jesus said: They will know you are Christians...

Whoops!

2009-12-18T14:57:00.000-08:00

Be nice if I included the link!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UF2mikICUAo

Joel Osteen and the Former Archbishop of South Africa

2009-12-17T18:36:00.001-08:00

Gotta tell you, this video almost...almost...makes me rethink my opinion of Joel, his megawatt smile, crocodile shoes and unhappy traveler of a wife.

No, it really doesn't.

BUT...this is a GREAT video. Would love to lead a service like this once in my life.

The man at the 2:40 mark of the video (or so) looks for all the world like Desmond Tutu.

Surely not. You think?

I Facebook...Therefore I Am

2009-12-08T12:16:00.000-08:00

In this strange new era of connective technology--which is not to be confused with anything approaching the theological category of Incarnation (more like the gnostic ether, in fact)--I have finally gotten in line behind the other 350 million or so who have already crossed the cyberborder into the pleroma of Facebook.

Thomas Ray Steagald is my name in those precincts, but I am at a loss as to how to do much there. Don't know the language or landscape. But immersion is the key--this from a former Baptist--and so I will try to learn as I go.

Follow me there if you wish.

Descarte, forgive us.

Oh, and yes, I twitter too...sounds like too much information... but not often. Yes, Robin, I will try to do better.

I Have Been Away Too Long

2009-12-02T19:47:00.001-08:00

Since I last posted I have had a) a brush with death, b) administrative overload, c)deadlines, d) mental fatigue along with abiding grief and e) really bad back pain.

No excuses; just letting you know I have not been lazy.

That said, I find that when I am really, really overloaded I go catatonic. Muscle relaxers aid my retreat.

Still, I have been thinking that every Christian virtue has a kind of "evil twin," if not a vice, exactly, then an anti-matter version: an anti-virtue. Of particular concern to me right now is the virtue of detachment and its dark side.

Detachment is the humble acknowledgment that nothing depends, finally, on me. I can decrease while God increases. I am not indispensable, irreplaceable or that important. Things go on without me and part of what I need to do is get out of the way. Detachment is a corollary to the doctrine of divine sovereignty, I think, the basis of patience and serenity.

At the same time there is a kind of detachment that is not virtuous at all, but is rather a kind of bloodless passivity. Maybe even a kind of cowardice. I am referring to indifference in the sense of apathy. Not caring.

Detachment cares, but realizes the limitations of self regarding the unfolding of the divine plan. Indifference cares not.

The geography of both detachment and indifference is nearly the same: somewhere off-center, at the edges or nearly so. For the former the place is chosen; for the latter no choice is necessary.

I am thinking too that detachment is an active stance and requires real courage and trust. Indifference may be a kind of cowardice, a safe place to huddle and removed from any action, but born of a deep fear that one is not equal to the kind of engagement that a more engaged posture might summon from us.

Similarly, I have been thinking that early in my ministry I had an overabundant sense of my own adequacy, leading to impatience with others who did not honor or share my perspectives and strategies. These days I am burdened with an terrible sense of my own inadequacy--I am not hip enough, savvy enough, technologically proficient enough, smart or wise enough, winsome enough, handsome enough, funny and fetching enough, to minister to this generation. But that self-assessment may be more akin to self-loathing and itself both dishonest, cowardly and lazy.

Then again, it may be a humble confession that my inadequacy is reason to glory in those who are all those things--Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, the new monastics--to detach myself from the panic of translating the gospel to a new generation, content that quite apart from me the Kingdom will do quite well, thank you very much.

How to be detached without being apathetic--now THAT is the question.

In The Presence of Two Witnesses

2009-10-23T12:50:00.000-07:00

Paul writes in II Corinthians 13:1 that “Any charge must be sustained by the evidence of two or three witnesses.” This principle of Jewish law—that there must be at least two witnesses in all criminal prosecutions—stretches back to Deuteronomy (see 17:6 and 19:15, among other verses). For me, this precedent Paul and Moses established for unhappy circumstances has been an aid for spiritual growth.

That is, I have found through the years that I do well to pay attention when “two witnesses” testify to me about spiritual things. When different voices speak to me at the same time about the same thing, I consider that God is “doubling” the lesson he is trying to teach me so that, dull as I often am, I might clearly see. Or begin to.

It has happened again in the last couple of weeks. One “witness” was something I read in a new book on congregational life by Gil Rendle, former senior consultant at the Alban Institute. The other was a blog entry by Will Willimon, bishop of the North Alabama Conference.

Dr. Rendle writes,

“One of my favorite bromides says, ‘If the only tool you have is a hammer, everything you see looks like a nail.’ Similarly, if the only available tool that leaders have is the basic problem-solving process that most of us employ, then the only way we can view (congregational) discomfort is as a problem. A critical challenge congregational leaders face is the need to preserve and protect the discomfort of differences among the people as an opportunity for learning rather than to seek quick solutions that will make winners comfortable and losers disappear.”

He goes on to suggest that a healthy congregation (which is not always a comfortable congregation) is one that 1) receives new members (who admittedly come in bringing with them new ideas and expectations); 2)passes on the faith from one generation to the other; and 3) is in earnest dialogue about what is important. He quotes Dorothy Bass: “When a tradition is ‘living,’ its members are engaged in a vibrant, embodied ‘argument,’ stretching across time and space, about what the fullest participation in its particular goods would entail.” Such ‘argument’ need not be acrimonious; indeed, it must be robust but kind, energized but respectful, truthful but loving.

So what does it mean to be a UM Christian in these days? How can we foster a four-fold mission of teaching/learning, fellowship, worship and prayer? In sum, how can we make healthy congregations so that we can offer a joyful and vibrant invitation, to existing and prospective members, to join together in the glad work of the gospel? How can we become excited again about our faith and faithfulness?

Some have suggested that, in my congregation, it might be hard to do all that—and hard especially to get people excited and joyful again. They say there is still too much distrust, much of it born of unpleasant conversations about unhappy topics. They say that for the last little while we have been kind of turned in on ourselves, occupied with some hurtful and in some cases disrupting matters. Many feelings have been hurt, I am told. Many hearts are still heavy. Some are trying to get over it but still find themselves struggling, going through he motions but still carrying too much weight from the past to face the future nimble and glad.

I am doing my best not to extinguish or ignore those very real feelings. I do not know how deep or widespread they are—as Dr. Rendle says, sometimes those kinds of feelings and the people who have them just disappear. I do not want that to happen here. What I do want to happen is this: that we all of us learn from them.

One of the particular geniuses of Jesus is that he was able to keep together people who had every reason to part company. Natural enemies and competitors together became disciples. Slow as they often were, they each and all realized that being with Jesus was reason enough to stay together. They still had arguments and disagreements, God knows. Jesus never did resolve all of their differences. But forced to live together as a spiritual family, they learned to get along even when their “stuff” collided.

With that already in mind I heard the second voice, received testimony from the second witness. Please take time to read this post:
http://www.northalabamaumc.org/bishop_column_detail.asp?TableName=oBishop_Sermons_Speeches_PWLDXP&PKValue=257.

I am wondering how we can keep everyone together, talking and learning from each other? I do not think I am focusing on negatives or anything like that; I am not trying to make too much of the “trouble;” instead I am suggesting that our hope for these days and the days to come have, as a part of its foundation, a commitment to listen and learn from each other. Dr. Rendle says, “When a system does not know what went wrong, it will determine who went wrong, and quickly.” Blame, one way or the other, is always easier than confession. Speaking is always easier than listening.

I am suggesting our in our place that we do as James counsels us, that we each be “quick to listen, slow to speak, slow to anger.” That, as Hebrews commands, we “lay aside every weight and the sin which clings so closely, and run with perseverance the race that is set before us, looking to Jesus…”

I want us to look to Jesus, remembering that in spite of it all he has called us together, is working to keep us together here, to make us learn and grow in faith and hope and love. I hope we can have the kinds of healthy, if sometimes “uncomfortable” conversations, we might still need to have about what it means to be a part of our family of faith right now. I am suggesting we be open to receive each other’s different experiences and perceptions. I am not suggesting a forum; only that we all of us be alert, ready to listen, to learn, to converse, to confess, to forgive—so that we can help one another lay aside the weight, bear one another’s burdens, and thus fulfill the law of Christ. And thus find our joy!

RIP, John Wesley Winchester

2009-10-09T10:50:00.001-07:00

2000-2009

Praying all dogs go to heaven, in the sure and certain hope that God loves what his children love.

West-Flowing Praise

2009-10-07T09:13:00.001-07:00

This is a piece of my sermon for World Communion Sunday. If you would like a full copy, leave me an email address in the comments and I will forward it to you.

Already this day, in all times zones east, Christians have gathered in humble thanks, in genuine praise for the grace that is ours as evidenced in this meal.

Even now, right this very moment, all around us in Shelby and Cleveland County, in the Gastonia District and the Western North Carolina Conference, in the North Carolina Conference and the Southeast Jurisidiction—and that’s just United Methodists—all sorts of churches, all up and down the entire Eastern Seaboard, from the Atlantic to the Appalachians; in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, Ontario and Quebec; in the Caribbean and South America, in Brazil—in Rio de Janeiro, too: happy as they are about the coming Olympics, there is greater, more lasting praise yet, for the wonder of God’s grace as evidenced, as experienced and expressed, in bread and cup on this World Communion Sunday.

Soon, now, we will hand off the unending hymn to those west of us, and they to those west of them, and again and again till it comes back round to us again, where in monasteries and convents, in closets and in school rooms, in hospital rooms and funeral homes, in traffic jams and every other place imaginable people will pray. People will worship.

Indeed, there is a worldwide communion of faith and worship and prayer every day—but tell the truth: some days our own world seems so small. If we are honest we will confess that our sphere of concerns is so insular, our awareness so narrow, and we can imagine that we believe or pray alone, that it’s “me and Jesus,” you know?

Thank God for a day like today when we gather around the Table and purpose to remember that it’s “we and Jesus,” that we are joined with and joined to Christians the world over. That together we offer one unbroken, unending hymn of praise, in different rhythms and keys, in various verses and chorus, in stanzas and descants—praise for creation, for recreation, for Christ, for the grace and unity we know most and best here at this Table.

Have you watched any of Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan’s new documentary, The National Parks: America’s Best Idea?

In one of the episodes there is a quote from a Robert Frost poem, entitled West-Running Brook:

'What does it think it’s doing running west
When all the other country brooks flow east
To reach the ocean? It must be the brook
Can trust itself to go by contraries…'

What a great line: 'it must trust itself to go by contraries…'

The Communion Table is a contrary: it disagrees with the unsettled world. It disagrees with the enmity and division by which we often organize our living and thinking. It runs against the currents of hatred and exclusion, of class and color. It flows opposite our narrow concerns and in that way carries us into the great wide ocean of God’s mercy and grace. Like our praise it runs west, cutting a path through ancient sediments of animosity, crystalline deposits of indifference.

Frost’s poem continues:

'It must be that the brook can trust itself to go by contraries,
The way I can with you -- and you with me --
Because we're -- we're -- I don't know what we are.
What are we?'
Young or new?'
We must be something.'

Indeed we are something—and what we are is the church. Here at the Table we ourselves, you and I, like Frost’s West Running Brook, trust ourselves to go by contraries… and thereby find unity in the Table.

Unity in the Body of Christ. A table set for us in the wilderness, till al the wilderness shall become the Promised Land at last.

The Times Takes on Prayer

2009-09-24T12:29:00.000-07:00

Please go to www.theolog.org and read my new post there. Steve Thorngate, theolog's editor, asked me to weigh-on on an article in The New York Times Magazine by Zeb Chafets on prayer. Be interested to know what you think.

Prayers and Preachers

2009-09-23T19:36:00.000-07:00

It was something of a schizophrenic experience, these last couple of days. I was at St. Mary's Retreat Center in Sewannee, TN, a large meeting place on the grounds of the Convent of the Community of St. Mary, one of the ten remaining convents of Episcopal nuns in the United States.

There are eight nuns left at St. Mary's, and four of them recent transplants--the last remnants of an Episcopal convent and order, the Episcopal Sisters of Charity, which had known the West Virginia mountains as home. Each morning at seven they gather for Mass, at noon for prayer, at five for Evening Plainsong and at seven for Compline. It is sad, in a way, to see these women, all of them older and two of them much older, gathering in a small semi-circle around the Altar to pray, and especially because there no novices among them or any on the horizon. In another way it is thrilling, and humbling, to know that these have given themselves to this place, this life, this prayer and particular service.

The convent chapel is lovely if small, and worshipers look out over the Altar to see the bluff and valleys of the Tennessee hills. On the two mornings I was there I was invited to share Holy Eucharist and breakfast. The hospitality of the Host is also evidenced in these hostesses. Monday was the feast of St. Matthew the Evangelist. Tuesday was the lesser feast of Philander Chase. I had never heard of the latter, but will never forget, I think, that he was the fifteenth of fifteen children, a missionary to the Oneida and Mohawk and, later, an Episcopal bishop.

There is a small cemetery near the entrance to the retreat center, where the dead far outnumber the convent's quick, and I could not help but think that those who come here to live know they have come here also to die, that each of them will lie in that very and very sacred place when the last breath they any of them have for prayer will have passed their lips and wafted like incense toward heaven. Nuns, convents, part-time prayers like me may come adn go, but prayer remains for ever, and the life of prayer will finally claim us all.

I found myself at St. Mary's not only for prayer, however. I was also on hand for a kind of homiletical retreat with eight Baptist pastors, all of them men, from Nashville. They had come to consider their Advent preaching, most of them still struggling to make sense of the lectionary, the worth and rhythm of the Christian year, or if not that, exactly, then at least how to preach the lectionary in their Baptist congregations back home. At the invitation of my old Greek teacher, in the company of a couple of old friends, I was there as a resource for their discussion--God help them and me--but the irony was delicious. I was moving back and forth between two worlds I have inhabited for parts of my life, two ways of thinking and believing that I understand only a little, and both of them my heritage in a way (I was raised Baptist; I am now Methodist, heir to the English reformation).

I have never felt completely at ease nor yet completely un-home in either. I fumble through the Book of Common Prayer (and, more regularly and nearer to home, the Benedictine liturgies at Belmont Abbey) and stumble at the often-unintended parochialism of Baptist life. I love preaching revivals and shudder at the often uncritical veneration of Mary.

It is the story of my life, this narrative of being between ports, and sometimes in a storm. This week there was no storm, only lots of rain, but these last two days I sailed back and forth, trekked as it were back and forth from cathedral to camp meeting, from the Sacrament of bread and wine to the distinctly southern sacramental of preaching.

My friend Bill has been pastor of his semi-rural Baptist congregation for 27 years, more than half his life. How monastic is that? I have been in my current appointment for three months; how itinerant is that?

The word of God, and the challenge of preaching it; the prayers of the people, and the challenge of perpetuating it; the giving of oneself to the life of prayer and the life of proclamation...they are the same challenge, I guess, so whether man or woman, young or old, Episcopalian or Baptist (or even Methodist), living or dead, Christ is and will be all in all, the once and final integration we need for all our various multiple personalities and professions.

Revival on The Way Home from Revival

2009-09-18T19:16:00.000-07:00

I have been pondering something I heard on Wednesday night as I returned from preaching the last of four revival sermons at Maggie Valley UMC. I was, as I often do, scanning my radio dial listening for a) oldies rock and roll--the kind I used to play years in ago in a handful of garage bands; or b) a good radio preacher. The former is easier to find than the latter, to be sure, and some of the preaching that you can find is, shall we say (and especially in view of the balance of this email), less than wonderfully edifying.

Anyway, I stumbled by grace onto a station carrying a preacher by name of Alistair Begg, of whom I had never heard, from Parkway Church near Cleveland, with which I am unfamiliar. In a beautiful Scottish brogue (he came to the US with his family in 1983 to serve the Parkway church), he was teaching/preaching on The Epistle of James. To conclude the sermon he quoted an Episcopal priest of the 19th century, Charles Simeon, who is considered by many to be the father of the evangelical movement in England (Wesleyans might disagree!). The link to the sermon in its entirety is below.

What I most want to share, though, is the quote from Simeon--for it has occupied much of my thinking yesterday and today. It is rather stately, typical of British prose, and you may have to chew on it a bit (especially number 3, which I think I heard correctly), but the truth is simple enough: that slander, what I have called "bad gossip," is a sin the Bible takes very seriously. The sin proceeds from the "vain imagination" by which we presume to have knowledge enough and right to judge another's actions or motives. Anyway, according to Mr. Begg, Simeon was writing to a colleague in the ministry when he penned these words:

"The longer I live the more I feel the importance of adhering to the rules which I have laid-out for myself, which are as follows: 1) To hear as little as possible what is to the prejudice of others; 2) To believe nothing of the kind until absolutely forced to; 3) Never to drink into the spirit of one to circulate an ill report; 4) Always to moderate as far as I can the unkindness which is expressed towards others; and 5) Always to believe, that if the other side were heard, a very different account would be given of the matter."

Mr. Begg concluded by saying that Charles Simeon often said to his friends, "Let us sit upon the seat of love instead of the seat of judgment."

I find those "rules" fit not just for an English divine, but meet and right for me, too, day to day. If I can adopt such a posture in all my conversations, it will be evidence of the Peace of Christ--both in and through me. Which is to say, Christ, the Prince of Peace, has given us his Peace, that we ourselves might be peacemakers.

http://apps.truthforlife.org/tfl-pop-up.php?mp3=September-16-2009Broadcast.mp3&title=Only+One+Judge&series=Faith+That+Works%2C+Vol.+3&image=14188.jpg&buy_single=https%3A%2F%2Fstore.truthforlife.org%2Findex.php%3Fmain_page%3Dproduct_music_info%26model_no%3D2594DL&buy_series=https%3A%2F%2Fstore.truthforlife.org%2Findex.php%3Fmain_page%3Dproduct_music_info%26model_no%3D15903CD

New Post on Theolog

2009-09-03T16:56:00.000-07:00

I have written a new piece for www.theolog.org, reflections on the funeral Mass for Edward Kennedy. I hope you will check it out.

Faith and Sight

2009-09-02T11:51:00.000-07:00

I visited with Robin today. She is dying of metastasized breast cancer. She is a nurse, and so knows at a clinical level, at head level, what is happening to her. She has seen it all more than once. But she is also, now, the patient, and at heart level wants to believe that this time, in her case, it may be, could be, will be different.

She is dual-relational with herself, in other words, trying to find hope, which is to say, remain hopeful, in spite of the terminal evidence she knows all too well. She quotes the percentages on the new prescriptions, the statistics on the next set of treatments, tries to find some comfort in the facts. The recitation rings hollow even to her.

Hope does not come from facts or statistics, I think, but from the ineffable. Still, humans beings what they are, we try to find our way through the darkness by narration, in the accurate reporting of the news. Our counselors tell us that freedom, even control--or a bit of control, anyway (if even that proves ultimately illusory)--is achieved when we can say in no uncertain terms what ails us. Real comfort, though, and real hope, comes not from expositing the obvious but in the telling of what saves us. Such testimony is dappled with fear and trembling--the grammar of salvation, is no certain or "factual" language--but may ring truer than chemistry or calculus.

I read Robin Psalm 27: The Lord is my light and my salvation;/ whom shall I fear?/ The Lord is the stronghold of my life;/ of whom shall I be afraid?// When evildoers assail me,/ to devour my flesh,/ my adversaries and foes/ shall stumble and fall.//

"That is deep," she said.

It is the same Psalm I read my friend Karen, about whom I wrote in Praying for Dear Life, as she lay dying of lymphoma. I told Robin that I really think I really do believe what I always say to folk: "Because God is God, and because we are God's children, all is well." I really believe I really believe that, all appearances to the contrary, despite the ways things appear and what we are forced to experience and feel--that "though heaven and earth, the Dow Jones and most relationships, and life itself pass away--all really is well."

It is my prayer that I really have such confidence, which means, I guess, that I am dual-relational with myself--uncertain whether my ministrations will finally minister also to me. In other words, I cannot know whether I truly have the kind of faith I encourage in others till I myself lay dying.

At that point I will know whether the hope I have proclaimed as refuge for Robin and others is refuge for me, an undimmed light in that present darkness. And sometime after that, whether my faith will indeed be sight.

Texts and Contexts

2009-08-28T19:18:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Morris drilled us in the multiplication tables, morning after morning, one hour per day, right after spelling. I hated it but I have never forgotten them either, at least not up through the tens. For me, it seems, rote is often the most effective form of instruction.

And so I remember, too, how my college and seminary professors were incessant in one particular insistence: “there are texts, and there are contexts.” It is a lesson I teach my own students in turn. Why? A Bible verse, or episode, ripped from its context may seem to teach one thing when, in returned to its nest, it presents a different meaning altogether.

Remember that time the disciples were in the boat? Matthew tells us that they are far from shore. A squall erupts. The boat is getting swamped. They are terrified. Then Jesus comes to them, walking on the water. “Do not be afraid,” he says. “It is I.” Simon Peter says, “Lord, if it is you, let me come to you.” Most sermons I have ever read or heard dealing with this story use Peter’s leaving the boat as an example of unsustained faith: he started out well but lost it. “Give me a church full of damp Christians!” I heard one preacher say. Uh, no.

“If it is you…”? If? Jesus has just given them a word of command and comfort: “Do not be afraid. It is I.” Peter, in effect, says, “Prove it. Prove it by a miracle. Prove who you are and prove it by me.” There is no faith there at all. In fact, in the greater context of Matthew, Peter sounds very much like the Tempter in chapter four: “If you are the Son of God, prove it: command these stones to be made bread.” Context reinterprets our thinking.

Likewise Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me.” A guy I know keeps a poster with that verse in his garage, just above his free weights. It helps him, he says, when he is trying to push himself to lift more or do more reps. It is a strong verse, he says, and taken out of context he is exactly right. No surprise then when Christians remind themselves one way or the other that they are to be strong, victorious, “overcomers.”

Indeed there are many “strong” images in the Bible. Christian schools love to take them as nicknames: Lions, Eagles, Crusaders, even (though that is not properly biblical). But remember the greater context! For every strong image there are other images: “dove” and “lamb” come to mind. Does any school take those for athletic inspiration? “Go Lambs! Go Doves!”

Even that “victorious” image on my friend’s poster, in context, is as much about weakness as strength, as much about losing as winning. Paul is writing from prison, after all, and says just one verse before, “I know what it is to be in need, and I know what it is to have plenty. I have learned the secret of being content in any and every situation, whether well fed or hungry, whether living in plenty or in want, I can do all things through him who strengthens me.”

Winning or losing, in strength or weakness, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health—I can do all those things in the context of Christ’s strength.

Is it too late, at 54...

2009-08-17T20:36:00.001-07:00

to learn something significant about one's self?

Last week I wrote about the dread diagnosis we received, the awful prognosis for our English Bulldog, Chester. The whole thing has hooked me very deeply, more than I might have imagined. In the last couple of days I think I have stumbled onto why--which is to say, why beyond the obvious.

Of course people get attached to their pets--and Chester has been a singular joy for us. Of course people grieve when their pets suffer or die--they are, in very real ways, members of the family. And at a metaphorical level, some of our love for pets may come from the ways in which our pets counter all the the shearing forces, the atomizing and centrifugal effects, of economics and class and race. Even the powers and principalities cannot sabotage unqualified and unmerited love. We love our dogs, and they love us, and that whether we are rich or educated or whatever.

But for me I think it is something even more. Or less.

I began thinking about it this way: next week I am to be a resource person for young ministers in the North Georgia Conference of the United Methodist Church. They are using one of my books, Every Disciples Journey, as a foundation for their discussion of vocation and the ministerial life. The book attempts to plot the life of Jesus according to the seasons of the Christian Year (sometimes known as the Temporal Cycle), and also the seasons of our own life and ministry as we see them interpreted in and by the life of Jesus. One of the questions the facilitators are going to ask is this: in what season of the Christian Year are you most at home?

My own answer is "Lent." I answer without thinking. But in reflecting on that I realize that Lent is the season of impending death. Shadows gather and death is a certainty: only the timing is in question.

And then I remember: Dad had his first bad heart attack when I was seven. The certainty of death came to live with us after that, sat in the corner of every room--like a grouchy old uncle who did not speak and did not have to: his disapproval was evident and it was only a matter of time. I came of age learning how to live in the valley of the shadow of death, learned to walk and talk under the glare of that grouchy old uncle.

I wonder if I have not created situations in my life to replicate that reality--the prospect of demise, whether of marriage or ministry--so that I would know what to do. Maybe I need that certainty to know how to go about a day, or a life. I do not know what it is like to live apart from death--it is a kind of mistress in my every relationship, personal and professional, demanding more and more attention, more and more energy, more and more of my resources, until she will have me at last.

Chester's death is certain. As is the death of any of the rest of us. He may yet outlive me, of course, but probably not. But the point is this: I think that this particular valley, the shadow of his death, has helped me to see my life in a different light, so to speak. It is not a pleasant place to be--and especially when folk think I am being silly, me a grown man and all, blubbering about my sick dog--but it is familiar. Age has little to do with anything, given that the only real difference between me at 54 and me at 7 is years.

And I suspect Chester's sickness has given me, or will give me, a bit of tonic as I try, keep trying, to understand my own various emotional malignancies, and what I might do to try to begin to get a little bit stronger, a little bit better.

Chester and Me

2009-08-14T20:54:00.001-07:00

On Wednesday we found out that our beloved bulldog, Chester, has a very bad bladder cancer. The doctor is saying he has six months at most, which is to say that we have six months at most to enjoy and celebrate him. He has been a most wonderful pet, an important member of our family, a singular joy to us in so many ways. Some days he was all we could agree on. He has tended us when we were sick, brightened our darkest days, and we will do our best to return the grace.

We are all very, very sad. Jacob, our son, had to hear the news alone.

Those of you who have had "sp's," significant pets, know how heart-rending such news and loss is.

The good news is that Chester does not act right now as if he feels all that bad. We are giving him all the Bojangle's biscuits he wants, and plan to keep on doing so for as long as he will eat them.

It is a grace to love something so much that it hurts so much to lose it. It is hell all the same to know that we will soon be without him.

The Sounds of Salvation

2009-07-31T08:11:00.001-07:00

I do not know what water “standing in a heap” sounds like.

Maybe there is turbulent, insulted groaning as the captured chaos chafes at its restraints: a dread warning and that, free, there will be wave after wave of loss, grief, tears. When the surly water is unleashed, in tsunami and flood, violently scaling its suddenly impotent banks, indeed there is wailing and weeping and gnashing of teeth.

Now and then, however, I am inclined to think that captured waters sing—that the deeps, sometimes, like the hills, are alive with the sound of powerful music.

What did the Israelites hear when God and Moses told them to go forward into the Sea? And the Sea was parted and the Children passed through the heaped-up waters? They may have been too frightened to hear anything at all besides their own panicked hearts, the whimpers of the children and aged. Perhaps their ears had room to hear nothing else.

When Joshua and the next generation crossed the Jordan? The waters stopped far above them, at Adam—the city that is beside Zarethan—and so maybe they did not hear anything either. But there must have been music, just as there was the other time, even if the people did not hear it, for God’s redemption is always accompanied by God’s singing, of course, a song sung by God for joy and love over people who have come home.

God is a warrior, the prophet Zephaniah says, whose victory is accompanied by rejoicing and gladness. God’s love is deliverance. It redeems, renews, and at such salvation God too bursts forth, busts a lung singing like a sailor over the redeemed. God jubilates, exults, exhilarates with “loud singing as on a day of festival “(3:17).

God is ever fighting to bring wayward and lost and exiled children home; and God is as happy about it as they when they finally arrive.

Waters heaped up, joining in the song. An image for Baptism, it would seem.

Here is another: in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, as a result of passing, barely, the first test of the Triwizard Tournament—he outwits the Hungarian Horntailed dragon—Harry takes possession of a golden egg holding a clue for the next contest. He opens the egg, only to hear deafening and terrible screeching and squalling. The mystery is unfathomable, as it were, until he immerses the egg, opens the egg under water. The water filters the awful screech, allows the merpeople’s singing to be heard for what it is: guidance and direction.

Just so, baptism is given to us to filter the world’s screech. It lets us hear God’s singing over his children come home. In the water, heaped-up into a shell or a hand, there is unrestrained music, the song of salvation.

+ + +

My first Sunday at my new church, I wept as the organist began to play. She masters a powerful instrument, and does so masterfully. “Surely this is the sound of heaped-up waters,” I said to myself. “Surely this is the sound of deliverance, of redemption, of salvation.”

Left Over Illustration

2009-07-20T19:56:00.000-07:00

Please read the post below this one. This little bit is but an illustration I could not could not easily fit into the larger piece and still honor theolog.org's word count. It is too good to abandon, though, so here it is:

I remember Frederick Buechner saying that, about 10 or 15 years after he was ordained, his Presbytery wrote him a letter requesting that he "justify" his orders. He had not at that time served as any congregation's pastor, nor has he since--likening that work, witheringly, to a ringmaster's presiding over the pandemonium that is a circus. But he had written books. He had given many lectures and preached many sermons. He had been chaplain, too, at a prestigious prep school--any or all of which might have assuaged the austere Elders. All he could think, though, was "How does one justify one's ordination?"

Saved by WHAT alone?

2009-07-20T10:10:00.000-07:00

Most Christian congregations confess, theologically, that the faithful—and, we should hope, even the unfaithful—are saved by “grace alone.” In point of fact, however, and much like the foolish Galatians, we have turned to a different gospel. Individually and corporately, spiritually and pastorally, vocationally and ecclesiologically, what we really believe is that salvation (read “success”) is the result of “work alone.” Or if not work alone, then work mostly, which, unlike grace and faith, produces measurable results and therefore testify one way or the other to the effectiveness of a minister or the vitality of a congregation.

One practical consequence of this theological eclipse is easy to observe: how many of the mailings crossing a pastor’s desk or filling the inbox of Christian Educators are selling technique? The latest products for programming? Some new skill set that will increase attendance, engender enthusiasm, generate giving?

Eugene Peterson has long-lamented and often written of the temptation and tendency pastors have to substitute technique for spirituality. One result of this dire exchange is impatience: We have to get busy! Another is fear: If we don’t do this and now the church down the road will and we will get, as it were, left behind! Yet a third is the kind of frustrated and, often, quixotic jumps pastors make from church to church when the physical plant, the staff, the program or pulpit/platform is seen as more amenable to the pastor’s goals for his/her ministry. These idolatries and self-deceptions, among others, prompt Peterson to encourage pastors to cultivate a spirituality of both place and incarnational patience.

Now, before readers dismiss this observation as mere curmudgeonliness on my part—frustration born of the jaundiced regard of my superiors—I have to disclose that I recently received a nice “promotion” and partly, it seems, because the quantifiable and observable evidence is that I was “successful” in my last appointment. Looking back, I am not at all convinced—but that is for another blog, when I have more time to reflect on the joys and regrets and many mixed feelings of pastoral transitions.

Still, in this new place—where I am exceedingly thankful to be and thrilled to pitch my tent—I have been trying to locate (so as to avoid if I can) the traps set for all ministers, and especially at the beginning. One of them is this: even well-meaning congregations often believe they will be saved not just by work, but by the work of the pastor—her preaching and personality, his pastoral care and visitation, the winsomeness, marketing and programming that will change the old First Church from “inglory” into glory.

We in the trade are prone to lament our congregations’ unrealistic, unyielding and even idolatrous expectations—but I suspect that secretly we are flattered by it all. In fact, for all our protestations, the most dangerous trap is one that we set for ourselves: many of us desperately want our people to be dependent on us; want the flock to turn to us in every little crisis, to solve their every little problem and sign-off on every little decision. Such regard can, for the moment, assuage a pastor’s insecurities. It can, or so the pastor supposes, validate the call and reward the sacrifice. But John Baillie identified this pastoral neurosis for what it was when he confessed that his "care of others" was often, simply, a "refined" form of self-care.

As I start this new work I am thinking of the Baptizer’s benediction: “I must decrease and He must increase.” But what does salvation by grace alone look like in the local church? I have insufficient experience to say.

Packing and Unpacking

2009-07-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

Life among the boxes...that is how it has been for a couple of months now. It is maddening, in a way: that thing I need now, whatever it is--and of late it has been a) my cuff-links and collar tabs; b) the charger for my electric screwdriver; c) my worship planner, and I remember putting it/them in a box just right there at the last minute, one I knew I would unload and see and open immediately--gets lost because the box I packed and loaded there at the last is indistinguishable from all the boxes we packed and loaded at the first, and all of them forming a small mountain range of corrugated peaks and cliffs in one or the other of several rooms.

Remember The Truman Show? It was not a great movie, but it had a great lobby poster. A visual artist had taken hundreds of photos, stills from the movie, and had arranged them in such a way that from a distance, Jim Carrey's face appeared much as it would in a studio portrait. Up close it was a bunch of little pictures, various moments in Truman's life.

I think of that when I look at our boxes. From a distance they are one picture of our entire life, in pasteboard cubes that taken together represent just about everything we are. Up close, though, each box contains only atoms, molecules, cells of our existence.

It is hard to pack up our lives every few years. It is harder to keep track of all the stuff that for one reason or the other we want to hold onto. Gandhi had everything he owned in a canvass pouch. Chances are his pouch is with my cuff-links in one of our boxes, along with the kids' crib toys, their rocking horses and grammar school artwork, their prom dress/prom tux and all Jo's bridesmaids gowns. Of course, I only carry several hundreds of books I have neither read nor will.

My back is aching. My legs are tired. My brain has turned to clay--all from hauling our lives down I-85 about 30 miles. How do snails do it all day, everyday, their whole life long?

Anyone mind if I just retire from here?

Invitations or Insults

2009-06-26T12:03:00.001-07:00

I think I have determined a quick and easy litmus test for spiritual maturity: when the challenge is issued--to prayer, to stewardship, to retreat, to service--the question is this: do we hear the challenge as an invitation or an insult? If the latter, our pride says, "What? You think I don't already pray enough? Give enough? Serve enough? You think I am less of a Christian because I don't go on retreat?"

If the former, our humility says, "How blessed to hear a call to more depth and devotion. How wonderful to be given the opportunity to give. How sweet to spend more time with Jesus, to be the flesh of God's Word among others."

Of course, the spiritually immature will hear even this assessment as an insult.

endings and beginnings

2009-06-20T18:42:00.000-07:00

I remember that Seneca said something to the effect that "every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end." I am not waxing philosophical, exactly, but here on the Saturday evening before my last preaching Sunday at FUMC, I am experiencing a deep place, a tranquil and at the same time restless moment.

I wonder what it is about me that I make such a "difference," and by that I mean that people to whom I minister for the most part either love me or hate me, or if not love then really, really appreciate and if not hate, then really, really resent. I would like, vaingloriously, to imagine that in the latter case it is because my teaching and preaching unearth the unclean spirits resting comfortably in a place (ala Jesus in the synagogue in Capernaum), but I am not at all sure that is true. Maybe a little, or some.

I would take some comfort in that "if they have hated me they will hate you" text, if I had any sense at all that it is on account of the gospel that I experience people's irritation and dismission (if not outright animosity). The word of God may indeed be a two-edged sword, but who's to say, finally, that I am not grinding my own axe and that the gospel is ill-served by my little attempts at prophetic critique.

At the same time, people who don't know me up close find me entirely forgetable... my name being difficult and my face being average, and my charisma being set to low. My cynicism, too, plays a part in all of that.

I am 54. I am moving again. Yes, I have had some notable successes,even here, but there is a good chance the Family Life Center will be mostly empty tomorrow. This last week the UMW did not invite me to their annual picnic, when it would have been a natural time to say farewell. The minutes of the last Church Council meeting did not, except in my own report, say ANYTHING about my leaving, or the church's thanks, or anyone's sadness at my departing. I have gotten all of TWO cards from folk. It is a really strange feeling. I really do think the most of the people here have appreciated, as much as they have experienced, my work. But the only real "vibe" I am getting is negative. So, so strange.

And yes, this is a perfectly dysfunctional congregation.

Still, it is odd... I wonder how Jesus views my ministry. Maybe I do not have enough joy; that is, the news is good, but not good enough in my mind to make me cheerful. That melancholy and dysthemia comes across as condescension and anger... people feel I am never satisfied with them. And perhaps that is true.

In any case, I am on my way to dinner. My sermon, such as it is, is finished. One to go.

Quarters, Minnows and Little Embers

2009-06-18T09:27:00.000-07:00

Craddock's story is about the $1000 bill that is the life of everyone going into ministry, the $1000 each is called called to pay and, of a truth, is willing to pay, and all at once, right now, for the joy of following after Christ's summons and example. Christ bids us come and die, as Bonhoeffer said, and we most of us, at least at the start, are ready to lay our life down, give the $1000, for Christ's sake.

Problem is, Craddock says, the reality of ministry is far different than that romantic image. We wind up giving ourselves a quarter at the time. Little pieces of self dying in service to Christ, little pieces of personal dignity and self-esteem paid-out in ministry to and among our people.

Sometimes, being a pastor means eating shrimp cocktail and bar-b-q (usually not at the same meal, though in North Carolina it has been known to happen). Sometimes, being a pastor means eating a plate full of...well...other stuff.

William Self had an image much like Craddock's, only he put it this way: he did not mind the call to be eaten by sharks; to give one's life in such a way was ennobling, after all, like Jesus dying on the cross. But what he actually experienced, in years of pastoral ministry, was more on the lines of being nibbled to death by minnows. That kind of struggle slowly eviscerates, withers a minister and the ministry.

I find myself today thinking about the "burning coals on their heads" Paul mentioned: how loving those who hate us and doing good to those who despise us, accomplishes that humanly satisfying if, on the face of it, spiritually suspect end. Why do I help you? Long-term, To damage you!

Initial motives aside, however, such behavior at least has forensic support in scripture--and the point may be that by loving your enemies in such real ways they eventually can start to cease to be real enemies. Perhaps such a gesture, beginning as it does for spite, can by grace open a door to reconciliation, may even prove to be mutually ennobling in the End.

Withholding a gesture is more like heaping cooling embers, small indignities, on the heart. An invitation to the annual picnic not sent to the pastor, for most recent instance, though the picnickers are a church organization and the pastor is moving in two weeks. After four years of faithful (not to mention, though less importantly, quantitatively and architecturally successful) service, the pastor is despised by the leader of the organization. She feels the pastor has tried to rob her of her power and role; he feels her need for power is at the heart of the congregation's pathology. Such estrangement might seem all the more reason for the organization, a "mission society" no less, to obey Paul's dictum: make nice and heap coals on his head! For him to accept the invitation, likewise!

As it turns out the leader and her group eschewed such eschatological strategy, did not evidence so much as common courtesy, much less Christian charity. What may have been a gracious and ultimately (at least partially) reconciling gesture was withheld--and all the more appalling as the departing pastor's wife wife used to be a member of the organization and the pastor himself has done many things over the years to help the group raise money. The pastor had no opportunity to respond in kind.

Everybody loses in such a moment, even if everyone does not realize it. Every spirit is chilled.

With burning coals there remains at least a chance of folks eventually warming up.

Trinity, Up and the Sacraments

2009-06-07T06:50:00.000-07:00

Jo and I were worn out from preparing for our Yard Sale. We needed a little break, too, from packing and loading boxes, from cleaning the parsonage and making ready for Annual Conference. Jo and I love movies, and so one afternoon this week we just dropped everything and went to Franklin Square to see “Up!” the new movie by Pixar and Disney.

A retired balloon salesman, a curmudgeonly old man—and he was cranky because he was old and broken-hearted, alone really--rigs thousands of helium balloons to his house and floats away, trying to leave his heartbreak behind. By a series of accidents he is joined in his adventure by a little boy who is just as sad as the old man, and just as alone. The boy’s father had left the family, had gotten himself a new girlfriend, had promised the boy over and over he would take him fishing or to the game, whatever, but he never did.

The absent father kept promising the little boy big things, big trips, big adventures—but what the little boy remembered best from when his dad was still home, and what he longed for most in his father’s absence, was the other stuff, the “boring” stuff, he called it. Sitting on the curb with his dad in front of the ice cream store, him eating a cone of vanilla while his dad ate butter brickle, counting the red cars one of them and the blue cars the other of them, and who would count the most cars before the ice cream was gone. That’s what he missed: the little stuff.

The boring stuff. The routine stuff, which is not really little at all, or boring at all, or even routine as much as it is the threads of our living, sacred moments woven together in love to make a family, to make life.

I think of that today, this Trinity Sunday, when we celebrate a big message but do it in these little ways. Here we are again at the font, at the Table. We do this stuff all the time, thank God—I sometime think about those lonely and broken-hearted folk, young and old, who would give anything, not just to have communion, at home, wherever they count home, but to be in communion, here at this place, at the curb of Jesus’ gracious promise, to know again the love he has lavished upon us when we gather here.

We can see it if we have eyes enough, can feel it if we have heart enough—that when we come together in faith at the water, when we come with receptive hearts to the bread and cup, Jesus gives his grace to us anew in the memory and presence and peace.

This is our daily bread. This is our customary bath and remembrance. Little stuff, maybe, to some eyes. Boring to others. Routine even to us.

Ordinary—that is what Wesley called the Sacraments: the ordinary means of grace, and by ordinary he did not mean mediocre or characterless; he just meant “customary.” God can come to us anytime, in any way, but God has promised to be here in this way, every time we come to the Font and Table—customarily, ordinarily, routinely God comes to us in these Sacraments.

They are the churches abiding witnesses. Preachers come and go. Congregations are born and die. Traditions grow up and wither away. Experiences fade with time and age into the shadow of forgetfulness. But these witnesses abide. They remain. They alone can heal broken hearts and help us find our true spiritual family.

Holidays and Holy Days

2009-06-05T06:26:00.001-07:00

We are in the middle of the Hallmark Cycle, when clichés are accounted as testimony and smarmy marketing passes for a summons to doxology. It is deeply ironic, and not a little troubling, when traditions and congregations that eschew the Temporal or Sanctoral Cycle nonetheless bedeck their sanctuary furniture and walls in red, white and blue; or recognize the congregations youngest mother (a dicey exercise these days), or use the third Sunday in June to score points for certain kinds of theological language.

Do you remember how Scrooge skewered Christmas as a “false and commercial festival, devoutly to be avoided”? He hadn’t seen Mother’s Day yet.

My prejudice against the Hallmark Cycle is based on the observation that, for the most part, these occasions are valentines to ourselves. We pat each other on the back and sing, “For we are jolly good…” whatever it is we happen to be celebrating that particular feast day. Our praise is offered in the “reflexive mood,” as it were, for are we not the Greatest Generation? The best mothers and fathers ever in all the world? The creators and protectors and guarantors both of our world and way of life?

Okay, so maybe I am a curmudgeon, theological, liturgical and otherwise. And, truth to tell, my feelings on this matter have sometimes made for difficult pastoral conversations—if only because otherwise devout church members fail to discern the danger of self-congratulations in the guise of worship. I will not burden you with the true story of a parishioner who came to me with the request that I observe Submarine Day (the ship, not the sandwich) and hope that the choir might learn the Navy Hymn for the offertory? “Want me to preach on Jonah?” I asked. He was not amused.

Or the lady who was livid, furious, apoplectic that I did not give the morning service over to the Boy Scouts on “their nationally recognized” day. Nationally recognized or not, I countered, the second Sunday in February belongs to no one save God and the Christ; we do not give our worship or worship time to institutions and organizations.

The Prayer of Confession at the heart of most liturgies tells a truth far deeper than the pentameters of greeting card poets, but I try to remember that, as Fr. John Shea has written, all humans are wired with the need to celebrate special people, visit special places and celebrate special times. All of us transcribe our individual stories in terms of ancestors, locations and determinative occasions.

Saints, sites, seasons: all humans need them, and in fact the faith we proclaim is full of all of those special, sacred things. What is at issue for the church, however, is the power of lesser narratives to shear believers away from the distinctive Story that constitutes us as a people. If, by our worship, we “exchange the glory of the immortal God for images resembling human beings,” if we trade “the truth about God for a lie and worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator,” then that is of more than passing concern. To have “no other Gods before God” is a command both constitutive and prophetic.

That is what I tried to tell the woman who was upset that I did not observe the National Day of Prayer. “We pray three times a week already,” I told her. “We do not need Caesar to remind us about such things. Does the name Nebuchadnezzar ring a bell?”

She huffed, “Well, I think it is the most important day there is.”

Wow, What a Resume!

2009-05-28T11:42:00.000-07:00

Sarah Wilke is the new World Editor and Publisher of Upper Room. This announcement is of more than passing interest to me as I, too, had applied for the position. I really did not think I had much of a chance, but found as the weeks went by and my name didn't (meaning, I stayed in the hunt for a good while), I let myself believe that I might get the job, might could do the job, might be just the guy they were looking for.

I made the final eight, as I am given to understand, but was not in the final three--or, obviously, the last one standing. I was okay with it pretty much right away. Again, did not really think I had a shot. That I made it as far as I did after a national search was, in its own way, gratifying.

Now that I read Ms. Wilke's resume, I have no questions as to why I was unchosen. Man, what a resume!

(This is at least the second time I have gotten close to a substantive change in career, only to have lost to a WAY more qualified candidate. No brainer for the institution in question, of course; no less hurtful for me to know they made the right choice!)

Salvation may come by grace, not works--though we act as if it is by "works alone"--but these kinds of positions come by resumes, or at least partly/mostly so. I am a work-a-day pastor who happens to write a little (though my books have been called "laborious," and that benediction from a dear friend!). I am no veteran of publishing.

I would like to have offices in both Nashville and Johannesburg--that said, I don't enjoy traveling all that much. I would like to lead a staff of 81--that said, my management style is more "The Office" than anything else. I would like to be an Associate General Secretary of the General Board of Discipleship--that said, I am not a "company" person at all. The honor would have been great, but the Ring really is beyond my reach.

So here's a prayer for Ms. Wilke, and for the Upper Room, and for all those who hold down significant posts in the Kingdom. Those of us manning lesser duty are no less part of the work, we believe. Or hope.

Pistol-Packing Preachers

2009-05-19T12:58:00.000-07:00

When I was in college I served a small Baptist congregation a good little ways out from Nashville, TN--in Winchester, of all places.

Get the picture, dear reader. Every Sunday morning, clad in a double-knit suit with piping on the lapels, I climbed into my '73 Monte Carlo with the half-vinyl roof and 8-track tape player and set my tinted glasses and mustached face east, began the hour-long interstate pilgrimage, and through pretty uninhabited precincts, I must say, to bring the good news of the Gospel to a few saintly souls (including "Granny Sherrill," who always, but never sincerely, invited me home with her after church "for a tater," and who "never allowed a deck of cards under (her) roof!")

A fellow named Andy, Andy...something... also went to that church; in fact, he was a general contractor who built the place and threatened another member, who questioned the no-bid arrangement, to a fight: "If he doesn't quit saying I'm not the best Christian in this church, he is going to be missing some teeth! Like my new Cadillac?" (I promise I am not making that up.)

On my second Sunday there, the choir sang a special (or, as they said it, "spatial") in my honor. It had to do with the old Circuit Riders (and most of them Methodist, of course) who, as they made their pilgrim way through the new wildernesses of America to preach the old-time gospel, carried their Bible in one hand and (with sincere apologies to Karl Barth), a Colt .45 in the other (and I mean, of course, the gun, not the drink, though there may have been cold nights when they would have traded the former for the latter). ANYWAY, the choir's song was a kind of valentine to me, and romantic in its own way: "The Pistol-Packing Preacher."

(As an aside: my friend David is a world-traveling, trophy-taking hunter who believes I really, really need a hobby. He knows hunting ain't it on account of the pro-Bambi plank in my personal platform, and finds my deep squeamishness with firearms and boar-blades and killing wild game wildly entertaining. He would absolutely collapse, I mean collapse, to imagine any choir anywhere so clueless as to offer that particular Sunday-morning benediction my way. "Him?" he would say. "Him? A Pistol-Packing Preacher? Bwaa-ha-ha-ha." Whatever.)

I thought about that little church today as I sat in a group of ministers who are about to move. We Methodists still ride, as it were, the circuits of our geographical barriers, and all of us are about to get on our horses, if you please, and "Away!" We were discussing the dynamics of leaving, of serving, of ministry--and there was just so much pain around the table. So many beat-up preachers. Peace-makers, so called, who might wish for the blessing of a Peacemaker to return fire, so to speak, but can't. We have to pray for those who abuse us. We have to love those who betray us and work against us. We have to turn the other cheek...if not the exact cheek we would most like to turn to our congregations, some of us, as we ride into the west or north or south or east.

Anyway, some of these folks were talking about the power struggles, the turf battles, the control issues, the neuroses and character flaws of their congregants (and some of us confessed our own junk, too) that had chewed them up. More than one told about "this one person" or "that one family," and I was reminded of a parable told me by a therapist friend when, in such a time in my own ministry, I lamented having to take on the "bad guys" alone, with little in the way of back-up or support, congregational, institutional, collegial or otherwise.

Of course, he said. It is like the Old West, all the movies you have ever seen. The gentle Townsfolk are held hostage in their own streets and homes, paralyzed with fear of the one old man or the one outlaw family. Every time a new sheriff comes to town, the good people know a showdown is inevitable: High Noon; the Gunfight at the UMC Corral.

The Townsfolk hope and pray that the new sheriff will win the gunfight. They really want to be free. They are really, really tired of being afraid, of being held hostage in their own town.

But then the clock strikes twelve. The man (or woman) in the white hat appears at the one end of the street, sweaty hands trembling--if sometimes, truth to tell, spoiling for a fight, cocky and arrogant, sometimes just as self-important and crazy for control as the Old Man (or Woman) who terrorizes the town. The Man (or Woman) in the black hat appears at the other end of the street, cold, calm and practiced. And at that defining moment, what do all the gentle Townsfolk do? They go inside, close their doors and pull down the window shades.

They do not pick up their own rifles. They do not stand with the sheriff. They pretend not to notice. Yes, they really want the sheriff to win. Still, they have been through all of this before and if the sheriff gets plugged, if they have to plant a new body on Boot Hill, well, the Townsfolk can always find another sheriff. Maybe someday the battle will go the other way. Till then, well, they have to live in the same town with the bad guys, the bullying family, the folks in the black hats.

Lots of sheriffs out there, fearful or pugnacious. Lots of bullies,too, with all sorts of weapons. It ain't the Kingdom of God, Lord knows, but it sure is the church. At least sometimes.

Makes me believe those old Circuit Riders may have been onto something.

Midrash on Moving

2009-05-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

Tabloids love the celebrity break-up: Jennifer, Brad and Angelina, say. The bottom-feeders of the journalistic world offer us “candid” photos, breathless “reporting” of all the latest rumors and “expert” commentary on the speculation and gossip. How long the rags will run with this already exhausted story depends, I suspect, on sales.

It would be too easy to blame the tabloids, specifically, and the media more generally, for the atmosphere of acrimony and divisiveness we are forced to breathe on even the simplest trip to the grocery or drugstore. Oh, to buy a bag of frozen limas, or get a bottle of aspirin, without the bombardment of banner headlines announcing another custody battle or war of words between former lovers or spouses or members of the boy band! (“Make that two bottles of Tylenol, please.”)

I am disgusted by such stuff; but I am also complicit. I do not inhale, but I scan the headlines. There is something deep in me—and my only excuse is that there seems also to be something deep in the race—that loves a good catfight. We may not like to be in conflict ourselves but we seem to delight in it otherwise.

And what is it in us that needs this kind of contentiousness? What is it in us that tolerates this stuff, even in the church?

I have been thinking in recent days about poor Corinth. There were big problems in that little congregation—lots of cliques and clatter—and some of the worst related to the preachers who have served them. One group likes Paul, another likes Peter, yet another prefers Apollos (and at least a few of the folk say they don’t need preachers at all because they have Jesus!). One group or the other is so glad when this preacher arrives or that one leaves—but that is commentary only on them because Paul and Peter and Apollos (not to mention Jesus) have no enmity between or among themselves. They don’t double-date, of course. And they have been known to disagree about this or that. Still, they would each and all offer an “Amen” when Paul’s writes, “Is Christ divided? Who then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted. Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.”

The work of Christ is not a competition. There should be no fodder for the tabloids among us—and especially not among United Methodists, who advocate a connectional polity.

We Methodists believe that ministry is both unified and ongoing. Preachers pledge to go where they are sent; congregations pledge to receive those who are sent to them. Preachers do their best to build on what has gone before and help their successors to continue the work. Congregations do their best to bless each minister as they come and go, grateful for whatever gifts and graces God conveyed through them. Whether plowing, planting, watering, weeding, harvesting, all those aspects are of a piece, just parts of God’s constant and continuing work.

Who then is Mike? Or JC? Or Patricia? Or Bob? Or Larry? Or Frank? Or Tom? Or Noel? We are servants, through whom you believed or will, as the Lord assigned to each.

Hope YOU have a happy Mother's Day

2009-05-09T12:30:00.000-07:00

Hope your mom saw the strengths you could not and nurtured them.

If she did not aggravate your weaknesses, you are doubly-blessed.

Sadly, there are many out there who are still crippled from their mother's ability to engender self-doubt, to paralyze with guilt, to eviscerate with shame.To this day many question their judgment because they can hear a mother's voice doing exactly the same thing. About everything.

I think those messages, all the moving targets, the withholding of approval and affirmation--"Quit crying! You're not hurt!" Well, I thought I was hurt, I mean I am bleeding--leave folk prone to all sorts of bad decisions, if only because they are unsure as to what constitutes a good decision.

Not to say mothers, or parents, are to blame for all bad decisions...not at all. Only that, unsure as we are as to what constitutes virtue, we can fall victim to all sorts of vice.

Hallmark cards do not give voice to those kinds of benedictions.

Analgesics and Curatives

2009-04-24T12:51:00.000-07:00

Facts do not automatically (or even often) soothe the ragged edges of astonishment. Nor do explanations cure betrayal's deep lacerations. To know why something happened as it did, the how's and when's, the where's and to what extent's, may scab the wound--but if what happened should not have happened at all, terrible hurt remains.

Thick applications of explanation, squeezed from a tube of secrecy--and especially if the tube was purposely hidden behind mirrored doors among cosmetic pledges and atomized assurances
--are temporary palliatives, if that.

Time. Mercy. Confession--on the part of the betrayer and betrayed--repentance, all around: that is the recipe, or should I say, "prescription," the only prescription, which can begin real healing.

One of the Sad Psalms

2009-04-22T10:31:00.001-07:00

I have been thinking about betrayals--big ones and little ones. From something as small as a broken promise, which feels huge at the time (a friend recovering from surgery laments the fact that friends promised to bring dinner and visit, and have not), to something as colossal as renouncing in fact or in act a marriage vow (which victims may never get over)--there is no dish served colder than betrayal... not even revenge. I have betrayed folk to be sure, in little and big ways. I have been betrayed likewise. All my considerations regarding the second reality are tempered by acknowledgment and confession in the first.

Betrayal is a wicked wound, each and every time, jagged and infected immediately with virulent emotional and relational pathogens: anger, resentment, pride, astonishment, deep deep hurt.

I am reminded of Psalm 41:9, one of the sadder verses in a sad Psalm.

On the face of it, the Psalm as a whole exudes a certain confidence, that God will "protect the poor" and "keep them safe" in the face of their enemies. Even when one lies sick, "The Lord sustains them on their sickbeds." God "heals all their infirmities in their illness." But it is clear that the days in which the Psalmist writes are dark, and darkest of all his considerations is this: "Even my bosom friend in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, has lifted his heel against me..."

The lyricist will go on to ask God to "be gracious to me, and raise me up," apparently because God is his only ally. Apparently because his desire for recovery is, at least in part, hope for an opportunity for recompense and revenge: "That I may repay them."

A natural desire, with many forms--but vindication against one's enemies, and especially those who were friends when the offense occurred, is the heart of it. For Christians, of course, our vindication comes by means of forgiveness. Forgiveness is harder than revenge; it takes more strength to forgive than to curse. It is also less satisfying, at least in the short term, when what you want to do is twist the knife.

Betrayal, like the desire for vindication, comes in many shapes--but the phrase in verse nine is interesting: "lifted his heel against." Perhaps the Psalmist has in mind the kind of heel-lifting that is requisite to the betrayer's stomping the face of his downed former friend. Or perhaps he means what a betrayer has to do to move his feet in another direction, away from the friend, when his friend has need of that foot, and the person wearing it, back over this way. When Jesus' disciples fled the garden, they in fact lifted their heels against Jesus; but so did others, in many other ways, and so too do we.

Going to secret meetings, cutting secret deals, all the while avoiding the "open road," those paths and steps that would take a heel toward confession and repentance...

Walking to the other side of the road, beyond the pale of a promise, and then cooling one's heels till it is "discovered"...

I am just ruminating.

My friend is recovering from surgery and cannot understand why her "sisters" have not come with food and friendly conversation. I am sure there are reasons, and chances are almost none of them have anything to do with her. I know that after a couple of recent major surgeries a complex of issues kept people mostly away from the house. Some feared to see me in pain, and not because it was me--more because it was pain. My own sister and a good friend cannot stand to see anyone hurt. Some think they are doing you a favor by staying out of the way--"s/he needs to heal," they say, "and s/he does not need me intruding into that. S/he does not need to worry about the house. The family has more important things to do than entertain us..."

It does not make the betrayed--or the unvisited--feel any better when that stuff is in play. A call to explain, which is to say, confession, would help a lot, but confession is so hard for most people--even those who are in the business of calling for it from others Sunday by Sunday. And so it is no surprise, really, that on both ends of the equation people spend a lot of time alone: unvisited, unvisiting. Lots of recovering patients are more or less alone in their recovery, but just knowing that, professionally, did not help me, experientially, escape the kind of loneliness that is so common in such circumstances. Recuperation can be a lonely thing for friends and patients alike. Don't I know it.

And in point of fact one of the coldest, and saddest consequences of betrayals, big or little, is the isolation they cause. The silence: what do we say now? The bewilderment: how do we begin again? If we can muster the faith, hope and love to forgive, how do we begin to build back the bridges of friendship? How do we mend the broken places? How do we heal the broken hearts?

Maybe by eating of each other's bread--a little meal that reminds us of the Big Meal to which we have all been invited, betrayed and betrayer alike, which we each and all of us are. As the 41st Psalmist says, "Heal me for I have sinned against you." But we believe and proclaim that God is gracious, does not lift-up his heel against us, but instead his Son was lifted-up for us. In that forgiveness, in that grace which is greater than our sin, we find there the source to once again begin to be gracious and forgiving ourselves.

Interim Ethics

2009-04-20T13:42:00.000-07:00

I am in between times, right now: by definition, I am living an interim life.

Which is not to say the "present" is not full unto bursting with blessings and challenges, opportunities and aggravations. It is just that I am well aware, and somewhat painfully, that I am, as it were, in the wilderness. Not there or there. Only "here," but here is not a place, really, as much as a gap. Between there and there.

When Israel had Egypt in the rear view mirror, the Promised Land was still a long ways off. They were not there or there. And how do you live--what are the ethics--of the in-between places, of the wilderness times?

A metaphor: here we are, barely into Easter's Great Fifty Days, and I am trying to finish Advent essays for a preaching journal. Maybe that is always the case for preachers--our planning carries us away from a given moment toward another moment altogether. A crisis, an emergency, the drudgery or routine of any given day may call us back for a while to this day. Indeed there are some days when we must obey Jesus command, are forced by circumstance to "take no thought for the morrow, for sufficient to each day is the evil thereof."

And still it seems to be a truism that we live, move and have our being in the next season after this, or two seasons, find it hard to stay where we actually are. Budget and calendar, sermon and worship-planning--many days we have to take thought of tomorrow, its demands and deadlines.

Sometimes that same dynamic is evident in preachers who look at their present place of service as a kind of stepping stone, find their energies distracted by imaginations of ministry to come. One way or the other, most preachers--if I am any indication--will find that most of their "out of season" ruminations concern the future. That said, for one preacher I know--actually two--no, make that three--that "other time" is in the past.

One of the guys is getting ready to retire. In most every conversation he is revisiting his places of service and the services he planned or implemented in those places--and the people there among and with whom he did his work.

One fellow is recovering, incrementally, from a traumatic brain injury. On leave for ten years, he drifts back to his days, and his work, before his accident. Like another buddy, who suffers from OCD and crippling depression and was (more or less) recently forced-out of his pulpit, the trips down memory lane are self-defense, I think: a way to manage the loss with the memory. Hope dims, but memory shimmers... like Grizabella, all alone in the moonlight, as the withered leaves collect at their feet, they can smile at the old days--they were beautiful then.

Indeed they were. And in God's eyes, still are, though their lives each in their own way are frayed and stained.

I cannot smile at the old days. Not all of them, anyway. Some handful of them cast me into a time of exile, and after that into a long season of recovery and rehabilitation. I have never since entirely regained my career footing or standing. I am, by my calculations, 20 years behind. Still, my vocational sensibilities have never been clearer.

And so I wait. I journey. I wait. I write. I wait. I pray. I look, and I look ahead. I try to forget what lies behind and strain forward. I press on toward the goal I will never reach, but which indeed has already reached me, has reached for me and taken me. Indeed, Christ Jesus has made me his own. What I cannot achieve by work, and never will; what I cannot regain by repentance and remorse, is given me by grace alone.

Faithfulness--that is the ethics of this and every other interim. Memory and Hope, yes, those are brackets. But faithfulness: that is the heart of the in-between days.

Good Friday

2009-04-10T08:11:00.000-07:00

Across the street from our place of worship, another congregation is in the midst of a fund-raiser: bar-b-q pork. On Good Friday.

A block down, the Volunteer Fire Department's sign announces that they are sponsoring a big yard sale on tomorrow.

One the many Pentecostal churches in town is having a "Hallelujah Service" tomorrow night at 6:00. They have such a shindig every month; at first I was annoyed that they would schedule it for the night before Easter, but then thought, "Maybe that is their version of the Easter Vigil."

I have already today walked the path along which I will lead a few of the faithful at noon--if any there are who brave the chilly breeze and the threat of storms. I did not take out my hearing aids, as I usually do when I walk in town, and so I heard the noise of Good Friday: the truck mechanics changing a tire that was bigger than the the fellow rolling it; a couple of punks in a pick-up truck making lots of gear-shifting, engine-revving noise as they headed, way too slowly for such a commotion but still way too fast, down a side street.

Traffic. Business as usual. Nobody much--even in the churches--taking making much that today God's Son was horribly and ironically enthroned on the cross.

Business as usual that first Good Friday, too.

A Break with Tradition

2009-04-09T07:04:00.000-07:00

Annually since 1987, with one exception (in the spring of 1996 when I was on leave from active ministry), every Maundy Thursday I have scheduled a Footwashing. I find it one of the most moving stories and services in our faith and worship: Jesus, Word of God and Voice of Creation, silently kneeling, all but naked, before his feckless disciples and washing their dusty and increasingly antsy feet. In the same way he gives his Body and Blood, he bestows this touch as one last act of love and compassion, of utter devotion to them--and he does it in full awareness of their mercurial loyalties.

Their courage will fade like mist. The disciples and the promises they made in the gathering dark--to stay with Jesus, to fight with him, to die with him even--will scurry away at the first glint of Roman steel in Temple torchlight. On freshly-washed feet they will abandon him. With the Sacrament still on their tongue they will betray him. His most vocal supporter will deny him, if with a terrible, truthful word: "I do not know the man." Never did, really. Any of them. Maybe will. All of us. Some Day.

Anyway, the story in John 13 is full of drama and pathos, Jesus the Lord, serving his friends. "Having loved them," the Evangelist says, "he loved them till the end." Who can begin to imagine the rationale behind either clause? And then he gives them the new commandment, a new mandate (thus, maundus, Latin for command, and Maundy Thursday)--that they love each and another just as he has loved them--not just in this kind of moment, either, but from the beginning and to the end.

One could spend an entire evening, an academic career, a ministry, a life, trying to plumb the content and ethical implications of that command.

In the past, on the Thursday before Easter, I have scheduled such a service and gathered those who came in a circle of chairs. I would take a bowl full of warm water and kneel before my parishioners, to bathe one of their feet and dry it with a towel. As I did, I spoke to each of the mystery of God's grace, the cleansing that God's mercy affords. I would sometimes recount some particular struggle they had endured since last we met in this particular way, always with the assurance that wherever they went from this circle, God and we were going with them. The water on their feet signified it.

It is a powerful intimacy. I am aware that, in all likelihood, I am the first one since that person's mother to wash, maybe even to touch, their feet. Tears come. One said it was like baptism, or baptismal renewal.

The Primitive Baptists and the Brethren practice Footwashing as a Sacrament. I believe the rest of us should, too--it is clearly instituted by Jesus. It conveys grace. Alas. Not everyone does. But I do. Many I have served loved it. One family had a "footwashing bowl" thrown for me at a local potter's. Another, after one of my many knee surgeries, gave me a small garden cart to push myself around on it, to ease the burden on my legs.

One of my adversaries in a former church contended that the Footwashing was about me and not Jesus. She said I just did it for attention, for association, for self-aggrandizement. Perhaps she was right. Or right in part--false or theatrical humility can be a powerful sacramental of pride. Still, I have scheduled these services. Tried to exorcise the pride by doing the service. By teaching others to love one another in this particular way--just as Jesus did and commanded that we do--so that we might let the circle of love and service begin to broaden the scope of our love for one another.

Not this year. My people here have let me know they are "uncomfortable" with such intimacy, and increasingly so--nor only with words, either. This is the only church I have ever served where attendance at the Footwashing has dropped during my tenure--and precipitously so. Last year, my mother, sister, wife, and three other people were the only ones to bring their feet to the circle. There 30 empty chairs.

Sometimes grace and compassion means letting people walk or scurry away, or never show at all. Sometimes trying to love as Jesus does means dying, as he did, to expectation or preference.
And so I am not doing it this year. I do not want to be irritated with those who do not come. I do not want to be unloving by asking folk to do what, for one reason or the other, they can't do. If I rise from the floor, as I did last year, with angry and hardened heart I prove my adversary right, and I do not want it to be about me. I want it to be about Jesus. About his love. About our loving one another.

That said, tonight will not be the same. At least for me.

A Prayer for Tuesday in Holy Week

2009-04-07T16:23:00.000-07:00

O God, make us mindful of our brokenness, that we might be more mindful of your healing.

Make us mindful of our sin, that we might be more mindful of your forgiveness.

Make us mindful of our death, that we might be more mindful of your promised life.

Make us see the Cross, that we might be more able to see the Empty Tomb.

Remind us that we are dust, that we might be the more mindful of your Spirit.

Empty us, to fill us.

Judge us, to save us.

Weaken us, to strengthen us.

Silence us, to enable us to speak His praise alone,

Who suffered such hostility against himself that we might receive all the blessings of Heaven,

And in whose blessed Name these my prayers are said. Amen.

Psalms and Laments

2009-04-06T13:40:00.000-07:00

The psalter reading for Monday in Holy Week is Psalm 36:5-10, a kind of midrash on the First Song of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah 42:1-9. In my prayer book, however, A Guide to Prayer for Ministers and Other Servants, the Psalm for today is the Twenty-third.

How often I have read these words in hospitals, at funeral homes and funeral services--how often, indeed, have I sung the Scottish setting, a capella, to the tune of Amazing Grace--for the comfort the Psalm mysteriously conveys. The comfort is mysterious: we are most of us long-removed from the kind of pastoral or agrarian context from which the images spring. Still, as I have often heard, there is something about the words.

And yet...often as I have read them for comfort, rarely have I felt the comfort they seem to afford to others. Which is to say, I am seldom without "want." Deep down somewhere I know that what I want is to want God, but most days I am aware of other, lesser desires. I am not in green pastures, but rather in a rocky little field that vexes my spirit and tires my back. The waters near me and beyond in the great wide world are not "still," but troubled and ever more so--if perhaps with the final thrashings of a doomed era.

Which is to say my soul needs refreshing, but it is not refreshed yet. Oh, that God would lead me in righteous paths, not so much for the benefit it might afford me personally (though I would not begrudge it) but so that I might show a more peaceful way, be a light or reflection of light, in the dark lostness of these days--which is to say, I wish God would lead me but for the validation and vindication and sake of his own Name and his Son's Gospel.

This Holy Week, as we walk in the valley of the shadow of Golgotha, may I fear only the evil in me that would kill this man, using rod and staff to torture and splay him. He prepared a Table for his friends, then and now, in the presence of his enemies--and I am too often one of them, anointing his head with his own blood. The cup of his suffering overflows on account of us who fall away time and again.

And still, goodness and mercy follow us. Flow from him and follow us, all the days of our lives. His goodness and mercy seek to save us, to bring us to his Table, to give us what we cannot attain.

Judgment and mercy meet in this Psalm, as do lamentation and aspiration. At least those are the voices I hear.

Terrible Synchronicity

2009-04-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

On Saturday evening, while Fast and Furious was setting box-office records, members of our local Emmaus Community gathered for dinner and worship at Pleasant Hills Presbyterian Church on Highway 49 near Lake Wylie, SC.

A forty-five year old woman, on her way to our service--she was both an English professor at Winthrop University and the music director at Plesant Hill--and her three-year-old daughter, were killed by a street racer doing over 100 mph in his Mitsubishi. Broadsided her Mercedes, and no side-impact rating can protect you from that kind of velocity. Later, another kid, a 13-year-old passenger in the Mitsubishi, died.

Four girls in a Camaro, which had been racing the Mitsubishi, fled the scene. Another passenger clings to life.

Glad the movie did so well.

Wait for it... Wait for it...

2009-04-01T11:04:00.001-07:00

Over the weekend the family and I went to see I Love You, Man. The reviews were good and there was a bit of buzz, so we went. I laughed hard in places. I was more than a little uncomfortable in other places. Some of the discussions were spot-on, and some were just, well, just talk. The obverting of the "formula" for buddy pictures, with the resultant tensions and jealousies, was interesting, more or less.

And for someone who is as unskilled at "guy friendships" as real estate salesman and hopeful developer Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd), it was more than a little embarrassing for me to watch.

One of the funnier scenes involves the open house where Peter first meets Sydney (Jason Segel), the successful yet emotionally-arrested financial adviser who will become Peter's "friend interest" in the movie. Lou Ferigno has listed his Hollywood mansion with Peter; Sydney has dropped in for the hors d'oeuvres and finger food he knows these kinds of shindigs feature. As they talk, Sydney coaches Peter, helps him recognize a "poser" who is there only to impress his new or would-be girlfriend (at the last the guy says, "The house is nice, but too small." Yeah, right). In the middle of Sydney's tutorial he tells Peter to "wait for it...wait for it..." I will not, for propriety's sake, identify what he wants Peter to wait for... but sure enough, soon enough, it happens.

The phrase is crucial: "Wait for it... wait for it...", and indeed there are many things for which we have to wait. But what I am thinking about today is how hard it is for any of us to do that. And even or perhaps especially for us Christians. It could be that we have been taught that, since we live in the in-between times, in the middle between promise and fulfillment, we ought always be looking ahead. But as Yoda fussed at Luke for never attending to where he was at the moment, for always looking to the future, I think Jesus and Paul would scold us similarly.

"Aspire to live quietly, (and) mind your own affairs...," Paul counsels, and many other places and times the biblical writers instruct us to stay in the present. We are children of the past, to be sure, and our commonwealth is in heaven...but in the meantime, in this mean time, we are to keep our heads and our hearts down, I think. And wait for it.

The phrase has special meaning for me in Lent. I just came from a service where the first hymn we sang was "He Lives," and I am not crazy about the hymn anyway. You ask me how I know he lives? He lives in the Word, in the liturgy of the Table, in the service we render to others, in the fellowship and prayers of the gathered. "In my heart," is the very least of it. Still, why sing that in Lent?

Well, because we already know the End of the Story, I guess. Yeah, well. And because we are "Easter people," as it were. Okay, sure. And because every Sunday is a "little Easter". Maybe not--it could be that Easter is just a Big Sunday, but that is for another essay. I am just saying, it would be nice if we could stay in the present for the present, if we could Wait for It a few more weeks, it meaning Easter. It would be nice, as well as liturgically significant, if we could make ourselves stay put in the season of suffering, not jump ahead of ourselves and instead learn what Lent wants to teach us.

Last year, and you will think I am making this up but I am not--I went to a Good Friday service where we sang, you guessed it, "He Lives." At that same church on EASTER Sunday we sang "The Old Rugged Cross." Our proclamation had been nailed to the chiasm!

Wait for it. Wait for it.

The Day will come, but it is not that Day yet. Till then, Wait. That is the message of Lent.

Following the Directions at Panera

2009-03-28T10:47:00.000-07:00

I know I am a curmudgeon. I wish I were more tolerant and serene, less judgmental and way less prone to agitation. Not likely, given my schematics.

I pray as I do mostly in hopes of re-wiring, pleading with the Good Electrician to remodel me. My wife assures me she has, over the years, noticed real change in me...I think she means for the better (as in, more light, less heat), but maybe she is pulling my leg as I often pull hers (which is to say, I am a better actor than pray-er, a dimmed and low-watt bulb).

Anyway, yesterday, after about five hours of study at Panera, I packed my stuff and waited in sure and certain hope for Jacob, my son, to collect me after he got off work. It was raining. Nasty--nothing like the poor folk in Fargo were experiencing (I needed no sand bags), but it was really wet and damp.

Computer case and briefcase slung over my shoulder, and conscious, as I always am, of trying to stay out of people's way, I took my interim stand just outside the front entrance. For about ten minutes I played doorman, opened the glass doors for people scurrying in, head-down against the elements, also for people covering their heads, bracing themselves to bolt for their cars. I could not help but see the traffic jam inside.

A sign that greets everyone entering Panera, with an arrow and words, indicates that the line for ordering forms to the left. Beside it is one of those movable floor posts, made for theatres, airports and such, with nylon strapping at the top that uncoils, stretches and attaches to another post a little further on--to make a lane. At my Panera, the strap cuts the lobby in two: the left side is the pastry display, the free samples and the cash registers. The right side creates a path for exit. Also, the coffee is there.

For the 10 minutes or so I watched, everyone entering the lobby went to the right--against the sign's counsel--and formed the ordering line there: the Great (pedestrian) Wall of Panera. It kept people from the coffee. It created problems for people trying to leave. More than once I heard "Ex-cuse me, please!" from frustrated folk as they tried to make for the exit. Several irritated stares were exchanged: Hey! I am in line here! Yeah, well, you and the line are in the wrong place!

Vicariously, Pharisaically, I was irritated too, even though I had no dog, really, in the fight. I was already outside. But more than once I thought to go in, to tell the people in line, "Get over to the other side of the strap. Read the dadgum sign! Can't you see you are clogging things up? What is wrong with you?"

Yeah, boy, I have changed a whole lot. The prayers of a righteous man may avail much, but much prayer has not availed to make me the least bit righteous.

Okay, so maybe the folks came in all wet and bothered and did not see the sign. Or maybe it is not all that big a deal where they stand while they wait and on a rainy afternoon we all need to cut each other some slack. Or maybe it is just that people look at other people quicker than they read written guidance...and if someone is standing over there, that must be where the line forms and so I will fall in behind them and stand there too. Of course, I then become a reason for those arriving after me to stand in the wrong place, and all of this congestion and irritation could have been avoided if the first folk had read the sign and done what it said, or if the next person in line or the folk after them had read the sign and stood in the right place so that the folk coming after them would have followed their example and been in the right place and things would not be so unpleasant inside as the rain falls outside...

And why is it that we look to each other first, always look first to what everyone else is doing instead of following the directions that someone wise and experienced has written for our instruction and comfort?

Best of Times, Worst of Times

2009-03-24T12:46:00.001-07:00

I am always glad to hear when someone has read something I have written and found it to be helpful or meaningful. Doesn't happen too often--either because I have so few readers or have written such unhelpful and unmeaningful stuff or both. Today, though, I had such a moment...

In my study group, one of our older members told of another group in which he takes part, a kind of mentoring and support group (ours is a lectionary study group), and that one fellow in that group has been going through a terrible time. He seems to have been charged with or accused of some impropriety and has been away from ministry for a while, though now he has finished a time of counseling and renewal and may be preparing to re-enter the fray. Anyway, my friend told me this morning that in a recent meeting the damaged pastor confided to him that he had discovered a book that really helped him: Praying for Dear Life, by yours truly.

Tears came to my eyes immediately, both remembering my own prodigality--some 15 years ago now--and knowing that the book the fellow read was born out of similar tragedy and hope.

I lost so much. I gave up so much, really. In truth, I threw so much away. But the horrible aftermath of that debacle was so intertwined with hope as to conceive the book I wrote some years later. Tragedy and hope, like egg and sperm, joining and gestating in the darkness of exile, birthed and raised in the wilderness between liberation and promise.

It is my baby, that book, and I am proud of it as parents are proud of their kids. When no one can see how special my baby is, I grieve--for the book and myself. But on those rare occasions when others seem to appreciate it as I do, a least a little, it makes my day. The best of times.

I said more or less all that to my friend.

He got a funny look on his face and said, "Well, now, I will have to unmake your day." And he proceeded to tell me that the damaged fellow had no idea who I was or that I was a colleague of his only one district removed. In other words, we are in the same conference of ministers, attend the same meetings, are supervised and superintended by many of the same people, and yet he had no idea who I was or where I serve or anything.

I thought of that logion of Jesus: prophets are not without honor except in their own home, but of course I am no prophet, or the son of a prophet. I am just a "herdsman," a "dresser of sycamore trees," which is to say, I am a garden-variety pastor, one of the little guys, and so no surprise that though he pitches his tent only a little ways over from me, he does not know who I am.

What is a surprise is that he has read me (when many, even of my friends, haven't). What is a grace, and the profoundest of joys, is that what he has read, apparently, has spoken to his heart --my spirit bearing witness to his spirit that we are both children of tragedy, children of hope, children of God.

I have already decided

2009-03-16T13:12:00.001-07:00

that next year I am going to give up the Internet and my cell phone for Lent. This, after reading in Kathleen Norris' Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life that "broadcast and Internet news media have emerged as acedia's perfect vehicles, demanding that we care, all at once, about a suicide bombing, a celebrity divorce, and the latest developments in nanotechnology. Advertisements direct our attention to automobiles; medications to combat high blood pressure, hemorrhoids, and insomnia; the Red Cross; a new household cleaner. When the "news" returns, there are appalling segues, such as the one I witnessed recently, the screen going from "Child Sex Offender Search" to "Gas Prices Rise." It all comes at us on the same level, and an innocent from another world might assume we consider these matters of equal importance. We may want to believe that we are still concerned, as our eyes drift from a news anchor announcing the latest atrocity to the NBA scores and stock market quotes streaming at the bottom of the screen. But the ceaseless bombardment of image and verbiage makes us impervious to caring. As Thomas Merton predicted, our world has been flattened, and we've been had." (128-129)

Faith, Hope and Haste

2009-03-16T10:03:00.000-07:00

I do not have to understand it all right now.

I do not have to understand it all right now.

I do not have to understand it all right now.

I keep telling myself all that, but I get so frustrated sometimes, trying to put it all together and immediately. I am reading Brian McLaren (Finding our Way Again), Kathleen Norris (Acedia and Me), Phyllis Tickle (The Great Emergence), Eugene Peterson (The Contemplative Pastor) and the lections for Palm Sunday. I am still thinking about Dr. Gil Rendle and his comments about adaptive leadership, positions vs. interests, and the challenges facing the "bi-modal" church.

All of these great thinkers and writers are, it seems to me, writing from very different positions (except perhaps Tickle and McLaren), but diagnosing the Christian past, the present ethos and the days ahead in remarkably similar terms. Peterson's book can only be described as prescient, as he wrote it 20 years ago or more, while the other titles are very recent.

I wonder, reading this stuff, whether I have either the skill set or the insight to do any more than chaplain the dying mainline. I know they say that prayer, listening, attention--all of those things more than problem-solving activity; which is to say, faith and grace more than works--are called for in these unsettled and unsettling days. And yet, as Norris writes, "it is always easier for us to busy ourselves" than to be.

Law and Gospel, Or, Only in Paul's Dreams

2009-03-10T10:18:00.000-07:00

This week's lectionary texts are among the richest in Holy Scripture. We have the first of three accounts of the "10 Commandments" in Exodus/Deuteronomy, the "noting but Christ and him crucified" in I Corinthians, the so-called natural revelation/special revelation in Psalm 19, and everybody's fave, Jesus' cleansing of the Temple in John 2.

Interestingly, in the other gospel accounts, the episode of Jesus' zealotry for the purity of Temple worship comes late, at the beginning of Holy Week, and serves as one of the primary motives for Jesus' enemies to move against him in a final, murderous way. In John, the story is early, just after his first sign (turning water to wine), as if the second clause to the preamble of ministry's agenda (miraculous grace, withering judgment).

There are many, many points of convergence in these stories. Right now I am interested in the fact that God's command to have no other Gods "before me" might be suggestive of the clutter we put in between ourselves and God. For fear or comfort, the human tendency is to mask the divine, to carve it into manageable shape, to render it in lifeless stone, to turn to mediators both human and inanimate (priests, horoscopes, tarot cards, formulas and periodic tables) who/that can interpret the mystery and make it less frightening).

Churches, Temples--created to carve out essentially empty space for God to fill and for us to experience God--are gradually filled with stuff (related to faith or not) but in every case the result is that we shield ourselves from the terrible and wonderful intimacy that is crucial to true epiphanies or real experiences.

Later in the Exodus text the people of Israel--already terrified by the signs they see of God's presence on Sinai, fire and smoke and the thunder of God's voice--put Moses "before God": you go talk to him and tell us what he says (vs. 19). Moses tells them not to be afraid, but they are anyway. And so we remain. Half-disbelieving, half-afraid. And so we protect ourselves either from disappointment or Reality with the "stuff" we put as buffer between ourselves and the Almighty. If no one can see God and live, no one can really live who has not caught at least a glimpse of God, but as Willimon and others have suggested, pastors spend a good bit of their time and energy protecting their people from God--and so pastors and their people are often mostly dead.

The Temple is filled with idols and junk during the time of Hezekiah and Josiah...cluttering the space with things that apparently were meaningful or important or pleasant to the people (feel free to make your own joke here), but were between the people and God. I think, too, of the walls in Martha's kitchen... she is doing stuff for Jesus but that keeps her from being with Jesus. Those who give themselves to the business and busyness of the church are doing things for God, but many times these things are "before" God, not just in terms of priority but also proximity: a shield, a buffer, in between us and God.

Interestingly, the critique of John 2 is addressed to the priests...the preachers. Those of us who are so busy about the stuff that we protect ourselves and our people for the terror and wonder of worship.

We proclaim nothing but Christ and him Crucified? Only in Paul's dreams!

Water Torture

2009-03-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

Yesterday, as I do the first Friday of almost every month (and would to God it were more often), I went to Belmont Abbey to pray with the Benedictine brothers there. Before the hour of mid-day prayer, I met with three friends to discuss "The Great Divorce," C.S. Lewis’ powerful meditation on the afterlife. He attempts to evoke, not heaven itself, but the "valley of decision" between what is either purgatory or hell, and the Mountain.

In a vast gray shadowland there is a train station. Ghostly residents of these precincts board a vehicle for passage to the valley. The ride is unpleasant as the vehicle (and the people) grow larger (though they remain unfinished, "man-shaped smudges") and the stakes are incredibly high: whatever the ghosts ultimately decide in the valley interprets the shadowland "backwards." That is, the lonely, gray expanse will be seen in retrospect to have been either a place of purgation (and therefore preparation for the Mountain), or of retrenchment (thereby effecting ultimate and indeed eternal separation from the Mountain and its inhabitants). Those who choose "reality"--who leave the shadows and start for the mountain--soon "thicken," come to see glory only redeemed eyes can begin to comprehend.

Over and over again the task is clear: to become all that we are created to be, all that God would ultimately make us, the only thing we have to do is lay aside our lives as we have made them, our idols as we have formed them, our lesser desires as we habitually choose them. Over and over again, however, the ghosts (those who have arrived on the bus), most of them, anyway--are unable to do those things. They refuse the entreaties of the Spirits, will not believe the promise, refuse to take their journey to the Mountain. They consider the Spirits untrustworthy, the promise a lie, and for those reasons regularly and even hastily choose to return to the shadows, even under the threat of coming Night.

To live, all we have to do is die--give up what we think makes us who we are so that God can remake us into what only God can. We set aside pride, rights, exclusive devotion to less than God; we begin to want, just begin to desire God for God's sake (and not God for others' sake; we do not, for example, desire heaven to be reunited with Aunt Minerva, but to be reunited with God. Then, but only then, do we find that Aunt Minerva is there with us). That seed of loving God at the expense of ourselves, at the expense of other, lesser things--Lewis says our desires are not too strong but too weak—begins the transformation.

Lewis says it is a choice made many times each day. God says to us, "Thy will be done," and we reply either, "Yes, my will be done," or "No, THY will be done." In every moment, we are turning either toward God or away from God, toward joy or away from it toward something far less substantial, even unreal. It is in fact the reality of the valley of decision that is so off-putting for so many.

Then it was time to pray with the monks. As we entered the basilica, near the rear doors to the nave, there was a small bowl, hewn from rock, with holy water in it ("How do you make Holy Water?" the old joke begins. "Boil the hell out of it."). I dip my fingers in and mark my forehead with the sign of the cross, remembering my baptism and being thankful for spiritual friends and good books and a place to pray and men who have given their lives to this place and this kind of praying that a poor Methodist preacher might find a place in the choir.

I sit in the cool of the loft, preparing myself for prayer, praying to be able to pray, when suddenly I am aware of the cross on my forehead. There is moisture there, still, and it begins to feel strange...which is to say it begins to, well, burn on my forehead. It may be the breeze of the entering monks and others, the the cool of the river stone that forms the chancel, but something has caught the last bit of unevaporated water on my forehead and it irritates, annoys, begins to drive me crazy.

I think to reach up, wipe it off, as some say they have to remove the ashes on Ash Wednesday because they “make my head itch”--but I determine to let the water and the breeze do their full work on me, making me mad if they will, but I will not try to remove them… Conversely, I think of the man in The Great Divorce with the lizard on his shoulder, the lust in his heart, the touch and fire that would remove them but he fears the pain.

We begin mid-day Prayer. There is plaintive chant. There are Psalms. There is a reading from Jeremiah: "Then I will gather the remnant of my flock out of all the countries where I have driven them, and I will bring them back to their fold, and they shall be fruitful and multiply. I will set shepherds over them who will care for them, and they shall fear no more, nor be dismayed, neither shall any be missing, says the Lord."

The cross burns me as if branding my skull. I want to shout in the silence. "O My God, make haste to help me…O God, be not far from me"—but his presence is indeed a refining fire and I seem unable to endure this least evidence of his mercies or judgments. If I cannot endure this little water torture, this cruciform touch, this gift of water and the spirit, how shall I see him face to face? How shall I endure his appearing?

I have no source, no plea, no hope but in God himself. Let me hear what the Spirit says. Let the water and the blood do their horrible, wonderful, painful, healing work. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.

Amen and amen.

Lenten Synchronicities

2009-03-05T11:51:00.000-08:00

I am working on a new book. I have been thinking about the two primary gestures of Lent: giving up and taking on. The first gesture is referred to as mortification, and while the second does not have a traditional name that I know, it is easily identified as a means of "bearing one another's burdens, thus fulfilling the law of Christ." Self-denial and other-love. Something like that.

As I have been working through some of these general issues, I have also been reading Kathleen Norris' new book: Acedia and Me: A Marriage, Monks, and A Writer's Life. Unpromising title behind--possessing descriptively what it lacks evocatively--the book is a treasure and not least because it talks about the theological dimensions of commitment to place, to people, to vocation. This emphasis corresponds nicely with similar sentiments I have seen in Eugene Peterson, particularly in his Under the Unpredictable Plant: A Study in Vocational Holiness. In that book, Peterson suggests that ministers, poisoned by the culture in which we serve, toxically imagine that movement and mobility are the hallmarks of "success," whereas faithfulness requires an almost monastic devotion to a particular place, a particular people, and a particular role among them. Additional thoughts to this effect are in The Contemplative Pastor.

In any case, Norris has helped me this week to see that marriage, of all places, is a locus in which both of the classic gestures of Lent find more than seasonal expression. Her husband, a poet afflicted with deep and "well-defended neuroses," and terrible physical ailments besides, helped her learn this truth. She writes, "I did not yet comprehend marriage itself as a form of asceticism and was slow to grasp what it would require of me" (102).

Earlier she had said this: "Imagine for a moment that the people you encounter at home, work, or school, are the very people (my emphasis) God has given you to pray with, eat with, and play with for the rest of your life. And you are supposed to thank God for this, every day, several times a day. This is what monastic people take on. And what they've learned from this particular form of asceticism, in attempting to live in peace with themselves and others, may constitute their greatest gift to us. How radical to think that we can best know ourselves by embracing commitment, not rejecting it; by relating to others, of callously relegating them to the devilishly convenient category of 'other."

In Marley and Me--the movie version--after the first baby as come and Jennifer Anniston's character is trying to do her work and be a mom, she is increasingly frustrated, says something to the effect that she is "losing what used to make me me." Of course. It is hard giving up dearly beloved parts of oneself for greater love of vowed commitment to others. It is if anything harder to take on the burdens of others, some of whom never think or know how to thank you, and in that way fulfill the law and evidence the sacrificial love of Christ.

One need not mention the occasion of divorce in the sitcom, Two and a Half Men: Mommy left because Mommy has a right to be happy. As Norris says, "There are situations, as in the case of abusive relationships, where seeking a change is the right course of action. But often it is acedia that urges us, for no good reason, to fantasize and brood over circumstances in which we will be affirmed and admired by more stimulating companions. Whatever the place of our commitment--a monastic cell, a faith community, a job, a marriage--well, we are better off just walking away" (25). Lord knows, many do.

But loving one another, and not just when it is easy--which it almost never is--is a place to learn something more of the love of God and of how to be more godly. Whether it is Hosea learning from wayward Gomer, or the many for whom the problem is polar opposite--it is in marriage, I think, and family life (and in church life, too, if Luther is to be believed) where both gestures of Lent have their sharpest daily definition, work to chisel our souls, and not just seasonally, into something more like the selflessness and embrace that is the heart of Christian and real marital love.

The color of passion--not just attraction but steadfast devotion and even suffering--is purple, after all, and that is the color of Lent. But purple paves the way to white, to victory, to purity of heart, even as Lent prepares us for Easter.

+ + +

In Bible Study last night, my friend Buddy Smith suggested that in rereading I Corinthians 13 we substitute Paul's descriptions of love (kind, not jealous, etc) for the word "love" itself in that chapter. For example, Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not (kindness, gentleness, boastlessness, etc), I am a noisy gong..." What a great way to repreach that text!

Diminishing and Enriching

2009-02-24T20:52:00.001-08:00

Tonight in Bible study, as we were all-but-snoozing through Acts 11--this because we had just had an incredible Fat Tuesday feast of pancakes, bacon, country ham, sausage, scrambled eggs, ham, biscuits--I noticed something that I had never seen before.

Acts 11 basically reiterates Acts 10. That is, the experience of Peter in Joppa, preaching to Gentiles of Cornelius' house. The results are swift and dramatic: the Holy Spirit falls on them. Peter, amazed that these Gentiles have been granted the Spirit just as he and his fellow Jewish believers have, orders them baptized. What is crucial is that the Jewish Christians who are with Peter and observe the phenomena are "astounded."

Meanwhile, the Jewish Christians back in Jerusalem who, as chapter 11 begins, hear about the Gentiles' conversion are outraged and, when Peter returns home, demand an explanation. How dare you, they say, go among the Gentiles? Peter recounts the story of Acts 10, and at the end of his testimony the angry Jewish Christians are mollified, are amazed that God is in fact doing what was promised in Joel (pouring-out the Holy Spirit on all flesh).

Here is what occurred to me. The fact that the disciples in Jerusalem accepted his testimony enriched both Peter and his inquisitors. Had they not, both Peter and the Jerusalem Christians would have been diminished, impoverished, belittled.

Likewise, when we are able to trust and accept the testimony of our brothers and sisters, we are enriched by their experience, broadened in our perspective, ennobled. When we reject the testimony of our spiritual friends,we are correspondingly diminished.

At the Bottom of the Mountain

2009-02-23T08:17:00.000-08:00

Yesterday was Transfiguration, the Last Sunday after the Epiphany and the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. We remember that strange story of Jesus going up the mountain with Peter, James and John, where he was changed in some way--not so much that the disciples could not tell who he was but enough that the fishermen were both terrified and elated. Not knowing what to say or do they offered to build chapels for Jesus, and for Elijah and Moses, too, who were there on the mountaintop with them for a while.

Our focus is always on that part of the story, on those four characters (or six, counting the Law-giving Liberator and the Prophet; seven, counting the Voice). This week, though, as I have brought my own recent experiences to the reading of the text and the preparation of my sermon, I have been thinking about the other disciples, the ones still down the mountain, those on the outer edge of the inner circle, the ones who for one reason or the other were not invited to go along and therefore were not a part of the experience. Did not have the vision. Did not hear the Voice. Did not share the mountaintop moment.

I'm hip.

I wonder if they wondered why Jesus favored some and not all? Why a few got to see and the rest had to hear. Why one of the three, at least, was always getting it wrong and still got the invite while other, somewhat more steady if not always more faithful of the group did not. I have to say I wonder all of that even if they didn't. About them. About us.

Soon Jesus and the others will come down from the mountaintop and find the rest of the disciples in an argument. A man had brought his sick son for healing, and healing him is something that the disciples had authority to do, ought to have been able to do, tried to do--but failed. Not surprisingly, their sense of failure, prompting a sense of inadequacy, resulted in defensiveness and controversy--a parable of church life, I think. Jesus is annoyed with the whole scene, it seems: with his feckless disciples, with the illness of the child, with the doubt of the man, who by the time Jesus returns has seen so much of the disciples' inabilities he questions Jesus' abilities. Jesus is even irritated with the man: "If I am able?!" he barks at the man's plea, as if to say, "Just whom do you think you are talking to? Of course I am able." Jesus, after all, is the one who really believes.

And the disciples just stand there, in the middle of the battle in a way and as unarmed they can be. Worse: they know they should be armed, should be able, but are not. Maybe if they had been on the mountain and seen a vision. Maybe if they were blessed to be on the inside of the inner circle. Maybe if Jesus had blessed them the way he blessed the others and not left them alone down at the bottom of the hill to do this work that only he seems able to do.

Why is it that some are favored and some are not? I do not know that, but it can be painful to be among the left behind, as it were. I am among the chosen and called. I do believe that. I am not, however, one of the favored chosen or called. I know that all too well. I sometimes think if I knew why all that were true I could do something about it, could earn more favor or blessing--but that is not the nature of "favor" or "blessing," is it? Those dispensations are products of grace, not of works, lest anyone should boast.

Like others waiting at the bottom of the mountain, I have been called. All of us have been commissioned, and Jesus will return to us to finish what we have been unable, in truth, to start. He may chide us for our insufficiencies, but he will love us nonetheless.

If I did not believe that I could not go on.

The Sweet Smell of Fish Vomit

2009-02-18T13:37:00.000-08:00

The irony is that while I was having my D.Min. students read Eugene Peterson's Under the Unpredictable Plant, I was learning again what fish vomit smells like. See, I thought I was on my way to Tarshish, to a place and a job that seemed an amazing gold ring for my carousel and roller coaster career (to mix a couple of midway machines if not actual metaphors). Once again I am bound for Ninevah, there to preach whatever little message God has given me to preach. I am covered with fish vomit, but that is not a bad thing all in all. It means it matters to God where I am, where I am going, how I am going to work-out this call with which God called so long ago.

I will not bore you with details. There is little comfort in knowing that I was almost but not quite the person "they" were looking for. In any case, it reminded me of a terrible moment in my professional life some seven or eight years ago when I was one of two finalists for a position at the seminary and, to my mind, a shoo-in, when at the eleventh hour and forty-fifth minute another guy emerged and got the job. It was a no-brainer for the school--he was clearly the superior candidate. I know that.

I just didn't feel that. Still, I tried to distinguish between being rejected and being unchosen. They are different things, of course, though each leaves your emotions similarly raw and your knees similarly jellied. And in some ways being unchosen is actually worse, if only because Election, God's choosing, and Covenant are so crucial to our faith history and identity. It is good to publish books and articles...but if no one chooses to read them; it is good to be the finalist or near-that for a glossy job...but if you never get it; it is good to be a husband, a father, a friend...but if others do not choose you every now and then over against some other need or purpose or history, it is pretty disheartening.

So maybe I need to regard fish vomit as the smell of my election and call--which is to say, being one of the often and essentially unchosen by people and institutions, maybe I can smell this harsh detour back to my original destination (as a work-a-day pastor) as a kind of incense and blessing,

In any case, I am not going to Tarshish. Come June I am on the way to Ninevah, though I do not know where that will be precisely. My prayer is that wherever I am on July 1, that will be the place God has given me to serve and, I pray, thrive. If I bloom where I am planted it will be because even the fish vomit was a kind of fertilizer.

These Scotch Presbyterians!

2009-02-09T10:00:00.000-08:00

Dr. Samuel Johnson, famously, was incredulous as to whether even "one book of any value on a religious subject" had ever been penned by a member of the Scottish clergy.

It may be unseemly to disagree with Dr. Johnson, but I must. My mentor in prayer is John Baillie, whose A Diary of Private Prayer saved my life. And day by day I am blessed by a little book edited by John Birkbeck, A Private Devotional Diary, which has snippets of sermons and writings from Scottish men and women--clergy, gentry, royals and others.

The entry for this past Friday, from a sermon written by James Henderson (1787-1858), Minister at Galashiels, reads:

"Jesus will never forsake them that truly love him. Though their love be but a feeble spark, he will not suffer it to be quenched amid the trials and troubles of this life, but will watch over it and fan it into a flame. Though their faith be weak, he will give growing distinctness to its views and confidence in the promises it embraces, and make them strong in its exercise, giving glory to God. Though hope may now struggle feebly with doubt and fear, it shall yet fix its anchor firmly within the veil, and comfort the soul that is tossed with tempest, with the sure prospect of an entrance into the desired haven."

I think if Dr. Johnson had read that, or Dr. Baillie's books, he might not have been so dubious. For my part, Wesleyan that I am, I am almost invariably strengthened in my prayers by these Calvinists and their convictions as to the sovereign grace of God.

My heart whispers...

2009-02-06T11:43:00.000-08:00

For those who don't pray, and for those whose prayers serve to make them arrogant.

For those who do not read their Bibles, and for those who read to sharpen their "swords" against the imagined enemy.

For those who see no intercourse between the Bible and daily life, and for those who imagine the challenge of scripture can be condensed into a red or blue platform.

For those who are afraid of God, and those who are too chummy with God.

For those who have never experienced the Holy Spirit and because of withered hearts have prevented others from drawing near; and for those who have experienced the Holy Spirit and because of self-righteousness have prevented others from drawing near.

Let our prayers today, O God, make us meek, humble, lowly of heart, ready to serve and to see you in those we serve.

Benediction

2009-02-02T09:14:00.001-08:00

From Carlo Carretto, The God Who Comes.

How baffling you are, oh Church, and yet how I love you!

How you have made me suffer, and yet how much I owe you!

I should like to see you destroyed, and yet I need your presence.

You have given me so much scandal and yet you have made me understand sanctity.

I have seen nothing in the world more devoted to obscurity, more compromised, more false, and I have touched nothing more pure, more generous, more beautiful. How often I have wanted to shut the doors of my soul in your face, and how often I have prayed to die in the safety of your arms.

No, I cannot free myself from you, because I am you, although not completely.

And where should I go?

Where, indeed?

Vintage Cars and Historic Theology

2009-01-31T11:22:00.000-08:00

I will say at the start that I do not think Gran Torino is Clint Eastwood's best film. It is not even the best of the ones I have seen, and I have not seen all of them. His turn in The Outlaw Josie Wales is a favorite of mine, but Unforgiven is, I believe, his most profound work--a midrash on the doctrines of justice, sin (original and actual), redemption, even the communion of the saints.

That said, I found Gran Torino both compelling and theologically interesting. Eastwood's character is Walt Kowalski, a Korean war vet and Ford Motor Company retiree who in many way is still fighting those wars (he hates his Hmong neighbors; he loathes his son's affiliation with Toyota). He is "not at peace," as the tiny Hmong shaman rightly observes. Walt's regard for the foreign priest is as jaundiced, if more bemused, as his attitude toward the Church. If Walt ever had more than nominal regard for matters of faith he has long since given-up even that. His wife's funeral, which opens the movie, finds him a stranger in a strange land, alone in the midst, as estranged from his own sons and their rude and presumptuous children as he is from any of the few church members who have gathered. He is especially contemptuous of Father Janovich (Christopher Carley), growling at the young priest, “I think you're an overeducated 27-year-old virgin who likes to hold the hands of superstitious old ladies and promise them everlasting life.”

The test of wills between the young priest (who promised Walt's wife he would check-in on Walt and try to get Walt to go to confession) and the grizzled old man that Kowalski has become comprises one major sub-plot in the movie. Another is the silent and in that way hilarious stand-off between Walt and the old Hmong woman who lives next door; each disdainfully eyes the other porch-to-porch. If by the end, the young father has learned from Walt something about death, for his part Walt turns to the priest for something like friendship and for absolution. That unforeseen eventuality is as surprising as Walt's learning from his heretofore-hated neighbors that life does not consist in mowing the grass, fixing things, drinking beer and waxing the Gran Torino that he helped build while he was still on the assembly line ("I mounted the drive shaft in that car").

Everyone wants Walt's car--his unappreciative granddaughter, who has no use for Walt himself but brazenly asks for the car when he, "you know, die(s)"; a Hmong gang; his young neighbor Thao. The fate of the car will mirror Walt's own.

The Gran Torino is Walt's "immortality symbol"--a kind of religious relic, a symbol and sacrament of a former time when, to Walt's mind, life obviously made more sense. All the homes in his neighborhood save his, where people like him used to live, are run-down and inhabited by folks "he used to kill and stack like wood." Only later does he realize that the Hmong were actually allies of American forces. The old Hmong woman wonders why he, like his kind, doesn't just move. She seems not to understand that his home, where he made what passed for a good life with his wife and sons, is his castle, his fortress. Maintaining this property, like maintaining his car, is his last defense against change. He will not, it turns out, be saved by his work--at least not this kind of work.

Walt is sick, and unto death it seems--another parable.

Begrudgingly and unwillingly, Walt becomes guardian angel to his neighbors. At first he is simply, and literally, defending his own "turf." He remains an old soldier almost to the end, still lighting cigarettes with a First Calvary lighter he "got back in 51," taking up his rifle when he can and wielding a pipe wrench or his fists and boot when the rifle is not available. His most ominous threat, however, comes in the form of his finger! It is strength and weaponry that has saved him thus far; the salvation he ultimately both experiences and provides is effected by laying all his weapons down--except perhaps that of prayer. With his last breath he begins to recite the Rosary.

There is much plot I have not mentioned, many levels of meaning to be discerned. What finally interests me is how Catholic the movie is--and not just in its context and trappings. I will say that his eventual confession to Fr. Janovich (where he confesses three sins: a stolen kiss in 1968, not paying taxes on a boat and motor he sold ("just as good as theft") and not being close to his boys) is beautifully linked, both temporally and visually, to the "confession" Walt makes to Thao after he locks Thao in the basement to keep him safe. Even more is the way in which the movies maintains that life, real life, comes only through sacrifice and death. All the resurrection we see--whether in the Hmong community, in Thao and his family, or in Walt himself--is occasioned by surrender. Even before Walt dies cruciform in a Hmong yard, he has sacrificed much in the way of prejudice, habit and behavior. His self-surrender for a few becomes efficacious for the many as by his willing death he takes on, and defeats, the "principalities and powers" at work in the neighborhood--and especially in the form of the gang.

If you have a "Faith and Film" series during Lent, this is a good one--if you can deal with the harsh language that is absolutely crucial to setting the table of Walt's (and others') prejudice.

UNBELIEVABLE!!

2009-01-26T08:40:00.000-08:00

I promise I am not making this up...

My daughter, taking a break from her pursuit of a graduate degree, is a server at the Chili's a few miles down from our house. Like many others her age she is already pretty critical of the church and its obvious hypocrisies. Her cynicism, that to say, is neither atypcial nor incomprehensible. Nor does this kind of thing help--her or others.

A group of six church-goers came in last night after their evening services and sat down, not in her area but in another server's. When the girl came to greet them and take their drink order, one of them said, "We want to tell you up front that we will not be tipping you tonight because..."

Are you ready?

"...we do not believe in people working on Sunday."

The girl was taken full-aback, stammered out something that sounded like "I wouldn't have to work on Sunday if so many church people didn't come in," or some such. She was furious. So was the manager of the restaurant whom she summoned to deal with them. I think he should have tossed the people out on their...uh...Bibles. To his credit, and demonstrating something like agape all around, he did say to them, "Well, we don't believe in making our people work for nothing, so I will be serving you tonight." And he did. God bless him.

No one is consistent. I am clear on that. But better to confess your own sin in such a situation than presume to see it in another who is just doing the best they can. No wonder Jesus had such animosity toward Pharisees who "lay (heavy burdens) on the shoulders of others; but they themselves are unwilling to lift a finger to move them" (Matthew 23:4). No wonder an entire generation of would-be believers has such animosity toward the church.

As George MacDonald wrote long ago, "Had you given yourself to understanding his word that you might do it, and not the quarrying from it of material wherewith to buttress your systems, in many a heart by this time would the name of the Lord be loved where now it remains unknown..."

For my part--and I am a Pharisee myself, even saying this, but I cite my practice not with pride but with confession--I pray for the forgiveness of God and verbally ask the forgiveness of the Hardee's drive-through lady each Sunday as I buy coffee on my way to church. I know I am complicit: on the one hand I do wish, with my head and heart, that all people had Sunday free; that said, I do nothing, nothing to lift a finger to make that happen by even so little a fast or act of self-sacrifice as making my own coffee on a busy Sunday morning--much less by not eating a Sunday lunch or dinner at one of the sit-down places in town.

I am a truly happy man...

2008-12-11T10:53:00.000-08:00

My wife and I watched the Clive Donner "Christmas Carol" the other night, starring George C. Scott in a role, I believe, he was born to play. I love this particular production of the classic, but what struck me as so powerful this time was the moment at the Cratchet's, when Scrooge and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come arrive and it is revealed that Tiny Tim has died. Bob comes in late, having stopped by the cemetery, and after a few moments, tears in his eyes, he tells his broken-circle of a family that he is indeed a "truly happy man."

Sentimentality? Only a scrooge would think it so.

Instead, it is a powerful spiritual truth Bob Cratchet voices, one that is evident in scripture and Church History...and not least in the story of Martin Rinkart hymn "Now Thank We All Our God," or "It Is Well With My Soul" by Horatio G. Spafford. In the latter, famously, Spafford wrote the lyric in the face of terrible personal sadness, his family having been lost at sea. During his own subsequent transatlantic voyage, when his ship crossed the same general location where his family's ship had gone down, he enacted with that poem a kind of "in spite of" thanksgiving and experienced, if the lyric indeed by true, a kind of assurance, the peace that passes understanding.

In the case of Rinkart, the Thirty-Year's War had brought Black Death to Bavaria where he worked as a parish pastor. He was performing, by some accounts, as many as fifty funeral a day. In that ethos of sickness and death he wrote, "Now Thank We All Our God, with heart and hand and voices, who wondrous things hath done, in Whom this world rejoices!"

Praise is a choice in the face of grief. No one knows it better than the Psalmists. Thanks is an act of hope in the face of contrary data. No one speaks it better than Rinkart and Spafford. The people of God, and individual believers, have the blessed opportunity and even the sacred obligation to embrace and enact joy irrespective of circumstance. Doxology in the darkest moments of tragedy and fear and grief is neither sentimental hogwash or idiocy--but faith.

This Advent season, like others in years past, I am keenly aware of my many losses. I am quite in touch with my grief and dysthemia--and yet I proclaim, for this Gaudete Sunday and beyond, that I am a truly happy man.

I have work. I have children who talk to me (just today my son called to tell me nothing other than that he had seen a huge hawk, brown and beautiful, on a trashcan beside the road as he made his way to his biology final at his nearby college). I have a wife engaged in ministry and enough writing assignments (and a book deal besides) to keep me busy till July. I have a congregation that vexes me at times, but I know what it is like to be without a place to serve and consequently am so very thankful even for the aggravations (if it lets me stand with God's people at the most important moments of their lives). Besides, I have the prospect of another place of service come July.

Like Bob Cratchet, if I am "a little down"--dysthemics stay in mostly shallow valleys--there are yet those, as Fred Hollywell said to Bob, who have told me they are "heartily sorry." They hear my lament and try their best to understand. They embrace my sense of loss with their own. They do doubt or disdain, and for the most part do not grow impatient with the blues I am given to sing. That, too, is a huge blessing.

And so, this Advent--and not like other years--I look at all my broken circles, the pieces of my life and work, and find myself able to say, indeed choose to say, "I am a happy man. I am a truly happy man."

King David, meet Thomas Jefferson

2008-12-09T13:04:00.000-08:00

A friend used to say, “Whenever you see a church named ‘New Hope,’ there is an old hope out there somewhere. I was reminded of that truism recently when I noticed that we have a new congregation in town, a shaky little fellowship called “Solid Rock Baptist Church.” As I understand it, there was a power struggle at another, larger fellowship nearby and the losers, along with the larger congregation’s now “former” pastor, constituted themselves as a new people, determined to build their worship and practice on the Bible alone, just like Jesus said (and not, you know, like some other folk).

Solid Rock is meeting in a storefront recently abandoned by a group of Pentecostals: the World Evangelism and Outreach Center. In fairness, the church does broadcast its services across the planet via short wave radio. The congregation had outgrown their small strip mall headquarters and Day Care Center/Christian Academy; there were about 80 who began worshiping in a small brick-front metal building constructed in part by their pastor, a second-career fire-baptized holiness preacher who, before his conversion, was a contractor.

Nice man. Intense, though. He has the Bible nearly memorized. His Post-Millenial interpretation of Revelation about got him kicked out of the Assemblies on a heresy charge. He resigned his credentials shortly before the trial was to convene and began his own work. Some like-minded men, members of his former congregation, ordained him, but two of them left WEOC along with their families during the recent construction. There was serious disagreement as to the slope of the parking lot and whether it would properly drain.

Meanwhile, near the “old church” where here my wife serves (planted on a then-all-but-trafficless, now bustling state highway way back in the seventies), no less than three new and exciting fellowships are promised to passersby on big signs here and there along the corridor. Already fifteen denominational and post-denominational congregations flank the road, all of them trying to “reach” and “minister to” the huge and relatively long-lived influx of what used to be called yuppies. With the collapse of the economy, however, as many are moving away, and more, as not so long ago were moving in. The disposable income which was to kindle all this new spiritual fire has mostly disappeared.

“Coming Soon!” signs may soon be replaced by “For Sale” signs, and what does such come and go come and go say of Christ’s Body, the church, or testify regarding the given and abiding Word?

All of this ecclesiastical busyness seems deviantly “sacramental”—which is to say, an outward and visible sign of an inward and unspiritual malady. Frederica Mathewes-Green has summarized the dysfunction in The Illumined Heart. Reflecting on the aftermath of the Reformation she says,

“…the once universal idea that there existed a common deposit of faith had been lost.
The hope of returning to a simple, Bible-based faith was now complicated by the need for
someone to explain what that faith was. Soon many gifted leaders were offering differing
interpretations, and followers aligned with one or another as they found them most
convincing.”

If that dynamic was also true in, say, Corinth, the full consequences were not. She continues,

“The next step was that, if each person can decide for himself whom to follow, each person
can decide for himself what the faith is. The splintering was complete. And since the
current generation is always the one making these decisions, it seemed that the most
innovative, up-to-date ideas were the correct ones…”

The positive side of this reality is that intractable institutions really are intractable and “exodus” may be the only way of freeing its slaves. Additionally, growing up Protestant, and Baptist, in fact, the rending and forming (or reforming!) of congregations never seemed strange to me. At the denominational seminary I attended, students used to say that every congregation we knew or served either had split, was splitting, or dividing up sides and getting ready to. Still, we spun that reality positively: splits aided evangelism, opened doors in otherwise closed situations. Even preachers getting fired, their belongings left on the front lawn and parsonage locks changed, had an upside: persecutions of all sorts had always advanced the kingdom. Blood of the martyrs and all that.

Still, there is something nefarious at work here, I believe. A rejection of tradition, and especially in favor of novelty, may not be an issue of mere “style,” but more nearly of “substance”… a form of idolatry as addictive as any narcotic. Eugene Peterson has noted that when the human heart’s proclivity to idol-making (ala Calvin) is combined with North American consumerism, the sad result is the very kind of soul-numbing market-based smorgasbord that impels people to jump from paten to paten, as it were, that compels religious leaders to do their best and most serious study in terms of what “works” in attracting new folk.

I have noticed another disturbing aspect of the same tendency—this time in my own United Methodist Hymnal. I have long been annoyed that our Psalter is incomplete. There are whole Psalms and sections of Psalms left out (Thomas Jefferson, meet King David. King David, meet President Jefferson). Since most of what has been excised are imprecatories, curses and the like, I assumed some beatnik editor or pacifist professor had demanded the cuts in light of our more "evolved" sensibilities, which are unwittingly literalist and unforgiving of metaphor--forgetting, for example, that in the hymn, "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war," the most important word in that verse is as. And so I was surprised to learn that the evisceration of these hymns of their (sometimes most interesting) parts were a result of John Wesley's own sense that "certain of the Psalms and large portions of others are unfit for Christian lips."

Oh, really?

They were okay for Jesus to say, but not for us? So much for the “whole counsel of God.” So much for the “faith once delivered to the saints.”

Of course, Wesley who also left “descended into hell” out of the creed because he did not personally think there was sufficient scriptural warrant to justify its inclusion. Wonder if he would have had an opinion about the paving at that church?

Hey! I am just kidding! Really! Sort of.

Our Last Best Hope

2008-12-08T10:03:00.000-08:00

Does everyone know where they were 67 years ago this Sunday morning?

Some of you were still in the heart of God, of course, not yet a twinkle in your mother’s eyes. Some of your mothers were not born by then either, did not themselves have eyes to twinkle. But there are a few of you in here who know what I am asking. You remember where you were.

For some of you the memory is as clear as the day the Twin Towers fell. You know where you were standing when you got the news, just as well as you know where you were when you heard about the assassinations in Dallas and in Memphis. You remember FDR’s famous line on the Monday following, “December 7, 1941—a date which will live in infamy.”

About the time church let out on the east coast, a couple of hours later, word began crackling through Philcos of the nation that something was happening, had happened, in the jewel of the Pacific: how at a deep-water harbor named Pearl, the rising of the sun had brought wave upon wave of planes, like bats out of hell, with darkness and death in their wings.

It was 67 years ago today, of course, that Japanese planes and midget subs attacked the US Navy’s unsuspecting and completely unprepared Pacific fleet, our ships and sailors both enjoying another Sunday morning in paradise, snoozing row by row. Ninety minutes later we had been dragged, burned and bleeding and humiliated, into the Second World War.

I did a little research this week, to see if I could find what preachers had been preaching on that morning as the attack got underway. I did not have much success. And so I looked instead at the assigned scriptures for that Sunday, December 7, 1941, in the lectionaries of the day. I didn’t have much luck with that either.

What I do know is last September, when I was inthe mountains reading and praying and outlining sermons for the coming year, when I looked at the the epistle reading assigned for this, the second Sunday of Advent, for this day and date, I found this, from II Peter 3, verse 10:

the heavens will pass away with a loud noise, and the elements will be dissolved with

fire…

And suddenly to my mind came a picture of the USS Arizona, its main tower tilted to starboard and enveloped by billows of black smoke, its might guns useless to defend the ship or its crew or its harbor or its nation, sinking slowly into the sea.

With loud noises, the myth of peace and isolation, of neutrality and national security, dissolved with fire—along with the Missouri and West Virginia, the Oklahoma and USS Tennessee, and 2345 military personnel besides.

III

Why dredge up that painful past on such a day as this? And especially since, these days, Japan is an ally and friend?

Only to remind ourselves that the things in which we often put our trust—whether the military, political leaders, portfolios, our own youth and health and strength…all of those things pass away. Sometimes suddenly, sometimes gradually, sometimes with a loud bang, and sometimes with a whimper. Sometimes there is raging fire; sometimes hot embers grow cold. In any case, the season of Advent continually reminds us of our idolatries and presumption, and that a kind of reckoning is coming.

The season of Advent, beautiful as it can be, is a dark season, really—a reminder that try as we might we cannot save ourselves, that things will not naturally get better, that neither optimism nor denial are appropriate preparations for the coming of Jesus.

Advent always looks back, even before it looks ahead. It proclaims the provision of God, of course, but it names the presumptions of God’s people, we who day by day do not put our first, best hopes in God. The season of Advent confesses the sin of God’s chosen, and then God’s grace to choose them again. Advent always calls us to ask ourselves: How did we get into such a mess?

The season of Advent answers, over and over again, that we get into this mess, that mess, most every mess, by placing our faith in other than God. The season of Advent calls us to confess that sin—Advent, until lately, has been considered a penitential season—and to repent, to begin again to put our trust only in those things that last…the Purposes of God, the Presence of Christ, the Guidance of the Holy Spirit.

Advent calls us to sad remembrance and honest confession and humble repentance, to resolute recommitment to build only on the firm foundation of God’s eternity…because all else is fleeting. Passing. Impermanent.

Money. Power. Beauty. Health. Life as we imagine it, or craft it for ourselves. How quickly it can all pass away.

And so Peter says, “Since all these things are to be dissolved in this way, what sort of persons ought you to be in leading lives of holiness and godliness, waiting for and hastening the coming of the day of God?”

Indeed, what kind of persons ought we to be?

Hopeful…waiting for new heavens and a new earth…

Peaceful and obedient… striving to be found by him at peace, without spot or blemish.

Patient… regarding the patience of our Lord as salvation.

After that Sunday, I am sure all sorts of people were saying all sorts of things… pundits and politicians, hawks and doves, saber-rattlers and doom-sayers, and preachers among the lot.

But the Psalmist has a word for us as we remember—a word that is set for today but is applicable every day—“Let me hear what the Lord will speak, for he will speak peace to the people.”

Indeed. It is a prayer worthy of Advent. Let us hear what the Lord will speak, for the Lord’s word will stand for ever.

all saints

2008-11-01T10:22:00.000-07:00

I have been trying to think of a definition of “saint,” or if not a definition, then a characteristic, anyway…and I have about decided that saints are those who come to the place where they welcome, are eager, even, for God’s judgment. They do not fear eternal fire or annihilation, but long for purgation, for cleansing, for the completion and healing that can only come by God’s ferocious grace and fierce mercy.

Pax Christi...

2008-10-21T07:59:00.000-07:00

I interrupt my prayer time to scribble this thought, preceded by a memory...

A few weeks ago, one of the little boys in our congregation--and all of his family more or less new believers--just after I announced the sharing of the Pax Christi among us, turned to his mother and said, "What am I supposed to do with a 'piece of Christ'?"

The phrase haunts me. You do not have to affirm Transubstantiation to believe that in the bread and wine we each of us are given a "piece of Christ" as well as the peace of Christ. But the phrase is polyvalent, for it reminds me not only of Eucharist but also of St. Paul's reminder that while we (together) "are the Body of Christ," we are individually "members of it." Which is to say we each of us are "pieces of Christ."

And so I am thinking of both discipleship and ministry. It may be that the first step, the first and on-going practice of discipleship is the imitation of Christ--going as Jesus goes, learning to see as Jesus sees, to love as Jesus loves and speak as Jesus speaks; to die as Jesus dies if it comes to that, in hopes of rising as Jesus was raised (Frederica Mathewes-Green has suggested--though these are not her exact words--that Christians are those of whom it is a compliment to say, "They never have an original thought"). But the imitation of Jesus, and also of Stephen, Paul and the saints who lived cruciform lives--all of them live with Christ's words on their lips, die with his forgiveness on their tongues--is toward this end: the imago Christi. The imitation of Christ forms us into the image of Christ

We imitate Christ until we become him--a piece of him anyway. Evangelicals have long said words to this effect: Christ has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet; we may be the only Jesus a stranger or neighbor sees today. We are a piece of Christ, sharing the peace of Christ.

Perhaps in their own way Sacramentalists say the same thing--that the pieces of Christ received become a part of us so that we become a part of Christ, a piece of Christ's peace in the world.

The Politicos and Their Coins

2008-10-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

I have a new insight about the very familiar story concerning Jesus and the Herodians and Pharisees' attempt to "entrap" him, which is to say their desire to confine him, marginalize him, isolate him from at least half of those who are following him.

The story is simple. The Pharisees, who were religious, and the Herodians, who most probably were not, conspired together to ask Jesus a "hot-button" political question--whether or not to pay taxes to Caesar--and to our ears the question sounds more practical than political, a matter of degree rather than of conflicting allegiances. But for the Jews of Jesus' time, especially the religious and political, it was an incendiary as questions of homosexual unions or abortion. And whichever way Jesus answers, if he answers either "yes" or "no," he will offend one side or the other among the debaters. The Pharisees and Herodians know that--in fact, they are counting on it.

That Jesus answers differently and better is clear.

But here is the thing. It occurred to me today that whereas our attentions naturally go to the answers, and especially to the more comprehensive, spiritual answer Jesus gives--and most of our preaching deals with those things--it escapes our attention that adversaries and enemies do much the same thing in our own day. That is, they pose questions for us--should gays be ordained? are you in favor of abortion? can one be a Christian and a member of the armed services?--not because they are interested in answers themselves, but because they are trying to divide (in order to marginalize) believers. Either way we answer we offend someone; we are drawn into political squabbles; we find ourselves isolated.

Joseph Bottum has recently argued that the Mainline died when it was irretrievably politicized. It is a cliff Jesus avoided in this text, a ledge to which our enemies try to lead us over and over again, in the name of the "common good" or lip-service to faith's role in the court of public opinion. But beneath the innocent query there can be a diabolical agenda, and divide and conquer tactic that would be worth many coins both to Caesar and to religion's self-important detractors.

Never mind...

2008-10-07T10:47:00.000-07:00

Remember Emily Litella, the Gilda Radner character who constantly misheard things and blasted away about what she thought was at issue ("Why all the uproar about violins on TV? Violins are lovely instruments!"), until Jane Curtain set her straight, often impatiently. Emily would respond, "Never mind."

Sometimes she said another thing, too.

All that to say, about a week after my last lament about being dropped, apparently, from Amazon, I was told by a friend that he had seen my post, went to Amazon, and found my books sitting there as always. I followed suit, and sure enough... they were gone for a while, buried deep in a new grave and a stone rolled over them, but they have risen from the dead.

Okay, so that is a little over-dramatic. But they are there all the same and I am pleased.

In other words, Never mind.

Literary Life: The Underbelly

2008-09-22T12:14:00.000-07:00

"The book of my enemy has been remaindered
And I am pleased.
In vast quantities it has been remaindered
Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized
And sits in piles in a police warehouse,
My enemy's much-prized effort sits in piles
In the kind of bookshop where remaindering occurs.
Great, square stacks of rejected books and, between them, aisles
One passes down reflecting on life's vanities,
Pausing to remember all those thoughtful reviews
Lavished to no avail upon one's enemy's book --
For behold, here is that book
Among these ranks and banks of duds,
These ponderous and seeminly irreducible cairns
Of complete stiffs."

The poem is by Clive James. Perhaps I should know about whom he is licking his sweet lips, feasting on the failure of a competitor or adversary. I know not. I was just reminded of it when I realized that Amazon, AMAZON!, no longer has copies of either of my books.

So I jumped to the NavPress website, thinking to contact someone about this outrage—after all, the second book, Every Disciple’s Journey, has been out only 13 months—there to find that my first book, Praying for Dear Life, is on the clearance shelf.

Clearanced. Remaindered. What is the difference?

Stephen Donaldson once said something to the effect that the only way to hurt someone who has lost everything is to give him part of it back, but broken.

I am not overly depressed about it—just about usual—and I guess I knew that soon I would hear from the publisher that neither book has sold well enough to warrant a reprint or new addition or whatever and so I if I wanted I could order multiple copies and a fraction of the cost. I will do that when the letter comes.

Still, that AMAZON is no longer carrying them, new ones, used ones, otherwise. I do not even have the honor of my books in great unsold stacks as Clive James’ enemy’s. Nope. My just seem to have disappeared into the ether or otherwise.

Being a writer is such a wonderful dream and a reality. But having nobody read what you write is almost worse than never having published at all. Almost.

Letterman and Me

2008-09-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

“It seems unlikely that now, after years and years of trying under a wide variety of circumstances and advantages and disadvantages, that suddenly I’m going to prevail,” Mr. Letterman said. “You can’t go through life fooling yourself. You have to be honest with the situation. That’s fine.”

The above quote was, and I trust the editors will forgive me, from the New York Times, summarizing an interview David Letterman gave to Rolling Stone. You have to be a big shot for the Times to do a story about an interview you gave to another publication. Anyway, he is talking about his realization that he will never catch and/or pass Jay Leno in the late-night race for viewers.

It struck me as terribly poignant, somehow. Comes a time when he, when I, when we any of us have to face the reality...and in my case, at least, the reality is that many things I once thought would happen are never going to happen. That is no slam on God's providence or God's people--just the awareness that some are blessed to succeed in ways that I am not. I am not to be a part of the greater work of the Kingdom. I serve, but not on the front lines. More like chaplain to the rear guard.

Just today I read about a young pastor, 27, who started a church two years ago and now has 4,000 per Sunday. Critics fume--but I suspect they are mostly envious. He does not do things as I do, but I had 125 in my service Sunday. He does not do weddings or baptisms or funeral, does not visit folk in the hospital. Neither did Paul, or Jesus for that matter. I do do those things, and there are good reasons to think pastors should. But I cannot do what he does. He maybe could, but does not do what I do. He has a great work. I have this little work that affords me time to stand with people in the most important and most dire and most celebratory moments of their lives. I am pleased to do that, am honored to give Holy Communion to folk and call their names as I do so.

I do not discount what I do. I choose to believe Jesus is present in the 125 as much as in the 4,000--in the Upper Room as much as on the hillside, as it were. But I had long imagined for myself something in between the one and the other. Maybe even on the high side of in between. But as Mr. Letterman has said, I have to be honest with my situation.

'Maybe you should teach," someone said. Maybe you should do this or that. Yeah, well, I am soon to be 54. No time to enter into academics. I am running out of time in other ways, too. Meaning, there are only a few days left for starting over or moving on. Either way I am kind of stuck where I am, in a rocky little garden with a mostly dull and rusted hoe. I am not saying I do not see a sprig here and there, a verdant shoot of spirit and life. But one blogger, Mark Crumpler, called me a "garden-variety" pastor. Yep. I have to be honest with my situation.

It is not what I would have expected. I think I could do a bit more for the Kingdom or, absent that, the Church. Instead, I just do what I can. And try to choose, try to work, against bitterness.

My dad died bitter, mostly because his life and marriage and kids did not turn out the way he expected, wanted or would have chosen. When I die I pray that I will die at peace--that if my life was not what I expected or would have chosen, it is what I wanted: to give it as I could for the sake of Jesus.

Wesley prayed, "Let me be employed for you, let me be put aside for you." Which is to say, Let me do a great work for you, or let me do a little work and thank God for those better able and suited to do the greater works. And let me not fool myself into thinking I know better who or what I am than God.

Tables and Turtles

2008-09-07T12:04:00.000-07:00

You know what I saw this week?

I was on my way to a meeting in Gastonia--to consider, along with a number of my colleagues, what do to in the face of a brother-in-ministry's unconfessed and unrepented sin (and I have been on the other side of that table, long years ago now, but I still have not lost the metallic taste in my mouth and that I am now on this side of the seems a terrible and acknowledged irony)--and there was this poor box turtle trying to cross the Dallas highway. I feel bad when I see turtles on the road. My first impulse, often answered, is to pull over, dodge the traffic and rescue the poor creature. This time I could not find a place to pull over.

Not to worry… one, two, now three cars slowed down and drove carefully around, and I thought the turtle would make it, only then somebody in a champagne colored GMC truck sped up and veered to the right to hit the turtle. Killed him on purpose. Got pleasure, I guess, from that turtle's plight and death.

And all I could think, apart from the demonstration of our perversity, insensitivity and actual sin, is that that is exactly what we do to each other sometimes when we repeat a rumor, or pick up the phone to spread the gossip--or meet at the table . That is just what we do when we turn a deaf ear or a cold shoulder to a brother or sister.

Today we gathered again at the Table, not for judgment but for grace. Not to consider the sins of a brother or sister but only our own. We gather to confess our own sin, we who have no defense other than God's grace and mercy--that is our only plea. We gather as a family, and as a family we realize that when one of us suffers, all of us suffer. When one of us rejoices, all of us rejoice. When one’s heart hardens, it is hard for all of us. Hurt people, don’t you know, hurt people. Hurt people hurt people. When one of us gives or receives a cold shoulder, all of us are chilled. When one sins, we all bear the consequences. But when one forgives…

Shame on me!

2008-07-29T09:54:00.000-07:00

I realized this morning that the only thing that surprised me about the terrible tragedy in Knoxville on yesterday--when a jobless man went on a rampage in a local church killed some people and meant to kill more, apparently on account of their liberal views and his own situation--was that the youth were doing a version of "Annie" when it happened.

I mean, I understand that these were Unitarian Universalists, but what does it say about me and my acculturation that I am not surprised by rage, shotguns, shootings in churches, only that churches are doing "Annie" on a Sunday morning?

Of Two Minds

2008-07-10T10:03:00.001-07:00

In my United Methodist tradition, at least in these latter days, there is a phrase bouncing around when serious debate is engaged: "of two minds." We seem to be a denomination cloven or, more charitably, ambivalent. The joke is that we are the "untied Methodist church," no longer blessedly bound, at least not as Charles Wesley rhapsodized.

Our official, "united" stands are achieved democratically, by vote of our quadrennial General Conference, but among the delegates, in the agencies, out in the pews, we are possessed of "two minds" (at least) about many of the salient issues before us.

For example, while we are a "peace" church we have many hawks among us--and a bunch in between the pacifists and the militarists who deep in their gut are convinced that while we are against war, of course, there may be a just time to fight one (we are by far mostly agreed that the present one was not). We are an integrated denomination but one of my own congregants ceremoniously walked away from our fellowship when I did not denounce Jeremiah Wright's thunderations (when in fact some of what Dr. Wright said and, later, did could hardly be called prophetic preaching or prophetic symbolism; it was more like hate-mongering and derogating gesture), but instead allowed as to how I myself and, I imagined, many of those who worship with us had heard at least as bad from white preachers through the years (and for my own part, one of them my dad, though not so much his sermons as in his conversation and attitudes). In point of fact, I said, we had most of us heard much worse.

We United Methodists are of two minds, like most everybody else, regarding homosexual couples and marriage, and ordination. Of course, on either flank of our ranks are folk who aren't ambivalent at all. Those in between them, most of us, choose to believe that the folk advocating for clergy ordination and marriage for gays do so from pastoral, theological and relational foundations: they read Holy Scripture through the lens of agape love and social justice, and what they see leads them to this position, advocating as best they understand it for those long on the margins, the disenfranchised, the ignored.

At the same time we believe that those who defend the historic position of the church in these matters--that homosexual practices (though not orientations) are disqualifications for the ordained ministry because they are and incompatible with Christian teaching--do so from pastoral, theological and relational foundations. They read the Holy Scriptures through the lens of inspiration and authority and their best understanding leads them to conclude that, in C.S. Lewis's words, tolerance is not the same thing as love, that not every opinion, experience or behavior is bless-able, even when those seeking the blessing are themselves professing Christians. "Test the spirits," they say, "to see if they are from God."

"Exactly!" say the folk calling for change. "See if this is not a fresh movement of the Spirit."

I myself am of two minds on the subject, which is to say I can argue, in rudimentary form, both sides of the debate. I am, as the book of James describes it, "dipsuchos aner," a "double-minded man," and yes, sometimes unstable and tossed as if at sea when fouls winds gust from one direction or the other (James 1:6-8). The good news, though, is that Jesus did not talk much about these topics and so I feel some freedom to follow his example. I am sure there are circumstances that would make me take a more urgent approach, one way or the other. But for now, like many--perhaps most--United Methodists, and like the denomination itself, I am of two minds. Which is to say that while my "official position," should anyone ever ask, conforms to the "vote" of our General Conference (nor can I even begin to imagine Wesley himself thinking any differently on the matter), for good or ill I do not lose a lot of sleep over it.

I DO lose sleep, though, over another--and to my thinking more fundamental--issue, one that strikes at the foundations of our theological house, and not just United Methodism either. At issue is what might be called the "current" church's anthropology and ecclesiology. What is the Christian understanding of persons, of individuals, but also of the community of persons we call the church. What we believe about those doctrines has implications for soteriology, too--our view of salvation--and also for ethics. I am concerned that we have a deep "double mindedness" about who we each of us are and what we all of us are all about.

What brought the crisis to a head, or at least to the forefront of my thinking, was a vinyl sign I recently saw posted in an empty lot announcing plans for the construction of a new congregation near here. "The Champion Christian Center," is going to be built next door to an existing Lutheran congregation, "Christ the King." It is possible, of course, that a passerby might see the new construction as an extension of the existing church's ministry: Christ the King's new Family Life Center or Educational Wing, the place where Champion Christians are formed.

Careful observers, however, will see at the bottom of the sign a different web address than Christ the King and also this phrase: "Expect to Win." On the sign itself is a picture of a young man with fists raised high in the air, and the message is unmistakable--come here to be a winner!

On the steeple of Christ the King is a cross, of course. The cross is a sign of failure. Of weakness. Of suffering. Jesus' hands were not fisted, except perhaps around the nails. His arms were not raised high but stretched out. As Terry Holmes has put it, "How can we serve a Lord, the symbol of whose failure is above our altars, on top of our churches, on our stationary and around our necks, and claim to be strangers to failure?" He recounts, ironically, the story of a candidate for bishop who was asked, "How do you handle failure." His answer was, "I don't recall ever having failed."

Sitting there side by side, each in their own way--with steeple or sign--what these two churches sentinel in historic terms is the contrast between theologia crucis, "the theology of the cross" and theologia gloria, the "theology of glory." The debate between proponents of these various interpretations of the gospel has been long and intense. Those who advocate the former see the suffering of Jesus as both expiation and example, and so the crosses above the altars of their churches still suspend Jesus between heaven and earth, his blood-streaked face contorted in perpetual agony. Those who worship with an empty cross on their back wall, or no cross at all, often see the resurrection as, in effect, canceling the death and suffering of Jesus--and ours, too, as we live by the power of Easter's glory.

The church is of two minds about Jesus death and resurrection--and about discipleship. Perhaps Paul's letter to the Romans, his counsel to "rejoice with those who rejoice and weep with those who weep" signals along with everything else the fact that the argument was already joined.

Whether or no, it seems that the debate is especially relevant today--though we are mostly talking about other things. Are we to take up the cross to follow Jesus with weeping, or lay it down (or wear it only as jewelry) and follow with rejoicing. If the theologia crucis in its extreme forms may be interpreted, superficially or rightly, and therefore dismissed as a masochistic vestige of medievalism with a resulting emphasis on suffering, poverty and guilt, the theologia gloria may likewise be construed as a happier, feel-good, be a winner with Jesus gospel, a sign of these times when prosperity, atomistic individualism and winning at all costs and are the highest orders of the day.

While folk on either flank are unambivalent about the choice, perhaps those of us in the middle see a need for both theologies, held in responsible tension, for reasons theological, pastoral and relational--not superficially interpreted in any way but deeply rendered. That to say we need to do away with both the cross as invitation to masochism and the cross as strategy for acquisition.

Instead, the aged, the sick and dying, need the theology of the cross to remind them that our faithful suffering and even death is of value and abiding importance--what a prophetic word for a world that craves health and vitality along with other prosperities. And in a world where failure and the abdication of personal responsibility is often given therapeutic absolution,the young need the theology of glory and its call to courageous faith and joyous daring.

Or should it be the other way around?

I am of two minds about it.

Prayer, Place and the Poor

2008-06-26T08:59:00.001-07:00

In the newest Christian Century (July 1, 2008) there is a wonderful article by Sarah Coakley--a professor at Cambridge after having taught at Harvard, and an associate rector in Anglican parishes in Massachusetts and Littlemore, Oxfordshire--called "The Vicar at Prayer." It is directed primarily to English Anglican priests--"pastors to the nation"--but there is much ecumenical wisdom and urgency as regards "the disciplined long-haul life of prayer, of ongoing personal and often painful transformation."

Coakley contends that while prayer is the work of all God's people, the pastor must lead in this work, "the clergy putting this task first in their hierarchy of 'business.'" She quotes Evenlyn Underhill, a letter to Archbishop Lang on the eve of the 1930 Lambeth Conference, that "the greatest and most necessary work (Lambeth) could do at the present time for the spiritual renewal of the Anglican Church would be to call the clergy as a whole, solemnly and insistently, to a greater interiority and cultivation of the personal life of prayer...God is the interesting thing about religion and people are hungry for God. But only a priest whose life is soaked in prayer, sacrifice and love can, by his own spirit of adoring worship, help us to apprehend him."

Without the "daily public witness of a clergy engaged, manifestly and accountably, alongside their people" in this work, "the church at large runs the danger of losing its fundamental direction and meaning." In sum, "The loss of disciplined clerical prayer in a busy age is fatal: for the priest herself, for her people, for ecumenical relations and even for national life. Its absence is--quietly but corrosively--devastating."

It is in prayer, Coakley says, we truly discover who the poor are--and not as a theoretical discernment from the position of privilege. And through prayer we are invested--in that we invest ourselves and, I suppose, God invests us--in our various places of service. The North American penchant to mobility (evidenced not only in parishioners but also in clergy, either by self-promotion or as a result of systemic expectation) deadens our commitment to our places of service and the people who dwell there. There is a deep truth there I think that needs to be sounded: that only prayer unites us to a place. Only prayer unites us to a people. Not program, not stuff, but prayer, and that because prayer unites us to the One who is creator of every place and God of every heart.

These are dark days for me in many ways. But even this week I have seen the clouds part a little, by the grace of disciplined prayer. God's well is deep, but I have too much in my hands to take up my bucket and draw. For long months now I have been parched of spirit and have turned only to the dried and rusty taps of institution and old aggrievement. Prayer, manifest and accountable, is the uncorroded bucket which allows me to come again to the fountain of living water instead of to a mere memory of moisture in the broken cisterns of my own spirit.

God, grant me the grace, the zeal and faith, to pray with my people in this place. Nothing but this "greatest and most necessary work" has power to at the present time to renew the spirit of the United Methodist Church and its clergy, or at least let me say this United Methodist church and its clergy.

Memory and Hope

2008-06-19T11:48:00.000-07:00

I forget who it was that said it--maybe Ken Callahan--that in a church memory and hope are both crucial, and the greater of the two is hope.

I can understand, I think, what he is saying. It is important to look back, to remember who and whose you are. It is paramount to recall "the rock from whence we are hewn" and to see ourselves as chips out of that old block. But all the more important to look ahead, to anticipate (without applying restrictions) who we are called to be and will be, by God, which is to say by God's grace and activity. Where there is no vision, the people perish, and vision is a by-product of hope.

I would assume that the same might be said for ministry. But what if one has lost hope? Or is losing hope?

Today I stood in a place thick with memory. Painful memory. The wounding was some thirty years ago and still it felt fresh today, a jagged knife to my heart, a spurt of anger and a flood of grief, a raw and irregular gash in my spirit. Tiger played with a double stress fracture over five days; over three decades I have been limping with double-breaks to my heart and torn ligaments in my spirit. I ache, still, I groan for old injury. Some days I can barely get off the couch.

The person I was with is privy to the story, said, "I keep hoping God will wipe your memory of those things..." I said, in words I have never used before, "All God seems to have wiped away is my hope." Which is not to say I am completely hopeless; just hopeless about many things and most of them related to the church. To my church. To my feckless and faltering ministry.

And what shape does ministry take if the minister has lost hope, despairs about whether sermons or lessons or buildings or activities have the power to effect transformation? What if nothing seems to matter, that all hearts remain hard and unresponsive, if all heads remain unconverted, and the preacher's least of all? What if preaching becomes a burden instead of a joy, the desire for new members a kind of artificial buttress against the inevitable.

Wesley said something to the effect that he never worried about whether the Methodist church would cease to exist, either in Europe or America, but he was very worried that Methodism would exist "only as a dead sect, having the form of religion without the power." His fears may be founded, after all, and what's more: many Methodist ministers, I fear, have form and no power, which is to say they have memory and no real hope, no real conviction, nothing much other than despair.

Another friend says I seem to be more "serene" than I used to be. More resigned is more nearly the truth. Unwilling and, more to the point, less interested to kick against the goads of my situation.

Terry Holmes once observed the irony of current Christianity--that we want to be "winners," successful, etc (and just today I saw a sign for a new church, a church, whose motto proclaims, "Prepare to be a CHAMPION!"), when we follow one who was an abject failure, the symbol of whose failure graces the top of most every steeple. But we have taken the failure and turned it into strategy for success... idolatry is like that, I think.

On the cross Jesus lost hope. Right now I need to remember that crucial lesson.

A Vow of Silence

2008-06-12T09:19:00.001-07:00

I am thinking of taking one... a vow of silence, that is. This because I am told over and over again, in one way or the other, to keep my thoughts to myself.

My kids, of course, never want me to say anything to them other than, "Sure you can have some more money." The silence I am vowing in this instance has more to do with the fact that I have no more money than anything else.

My church members sometimes want me to speak only "smooth things," as it were, and if platitudes are all I might offer, moralisms masking as the gospel, little ditties on this and that, then I ought to take a vow of silence.

More to the point today however is this:

Various editors have rejected me enough now that I have to conclude that I have nothing very interesting to say. Which has left me to examine myself to see whether I write because I think I do have something to say or only because I like the idea of seeing my words and name in print. Maybe I should just shut up till those ambiguities are cleared up.

Recently, I wrote a piece that I rather liked. I sent it to about twenty of my "friends" in the "business," some of whom had in various times and ways commended my work, asking for their opinions and suggestions as I tried to ready the piece for submission to a journal I have written for once and perpetualy long to write for again. The only response I got--the only response I got--was from the most arrogant, self-important (and, damnably, successful) scholar I have ever had the duty to endure. Or maybe he is only that way to me. To others he is, apparently, a resource and a blessing. He neither likes nor respects me, however; I disappointed him both scholastically and morally, and for thirty years now I have been chilled by his Texas shoulder with most every chance meeting or conversation.

Note to my former professor: I am SORRY already. Can you in your Barthian sensibilities find it in your head or heart to forgive me? To treat me with a little hospitality?

So why did I even bother to send my stuff to this guy? Only, I guess, because I really do respect his knowledge, his expertise, his success, and like a starved child hoping for the least attentions of his distant father, I keep hoping that one of these days something I do or write will garner a blessing ("have you no blessing for me, Father?" I guess not). Ironically, his wife read one of my recent books and liked it. He has refused to read it. Excuse me, has not yet had time.

His email regarding the piece excoriated me, suggested that the "good editors" at this particular magazine would "laugh me to scorn" over such an offering--as much as he he had already done, I suppose. I prayed so hard over those next nervous weeks, unseemly prayers, I guess, for a measure of vindication, that the piece would be published just to give me a bit of satisfaction over my old foe.

Alas.

But it was close. The rejection I got was a "good one," if you could call it that. The piece got a serious reading but the editors "finally passed." I forwarded a copy to the guy, swallowing one last gulp of bitter, humble pie, and I am sure he gloated at what amounted to a confession (no, that is too strong; he most probably did not smile gleefully but frowned, shook his head with a "how typical" kind of "duh," this being one more evidence to him of my fecklessness and culpable ignorance (could you not see that this was unworthy?!) and confirmed not only in his eyes either but also by both the email from the editor and, I guess, the silence of the others to whom I sent the piece).

So I am thinking of putting away my pencils and parchment. I do not need to do this to myself time after time. I already know I am a joke.

But every time in the past I have done so, made this same kind of vow, determined neither to write nor to submit anything ever again--and certainly not to share anything in advance--there comes after a while this urge, like an obsession, like a demand that I try it all again, put something down on paper, string together a couple of thoughts with a strand of metaphor and hope.

A fool for Christ? Just a fool? Who knows for sure.

How I wish I could inhabit in my own sensibilities that remarkable verse from Paul in his second letter to the Corinthians: "It is indeed the smallest of things to me to be judged by you or by any human court. Indeed I do not even judge myself."

Well, okay. Good for him. For my part, I am just the opposite.

eerie...

2008-05-24T10:05:00.000-07:00

Late on Tuesday night, as the votes were counted from Kentucky to Oregon, we finally got some clarity on this thing… The pundits were proven wrong, some of them, but the voters had the power, not the media, and they made their choices.

As far as I am concerned this whole process has lasted way too long: the heated rhetoric, the disrespect back and forth, the confusion as to whether all the votes got cast and counted. There were conspiracy theories, behind-the-scenes dramas, advisers forced out of various camps because of their indefensible shenanigans, pretenders falling by the wayside one by one then trashing or endorsing their former competitors.

But finally it seems to be over, at least for this election cycle. I am talking, of course, not about the Democratic Party’s attempt to nominate a candidate before their national convention in August—not about the battle between Hillary and Obama—but about the battle between the Davids, Archuleta and Cook. I am describing the soap opera and spectacle known as “American Idol.”

Call it what you will, a big old-fashioned talent show, repackaged and promoted as something revolutionary and new—but it is not new at all: anyone remember Ed McMahon and “Star Search”? Same premise, but not nearly the same phenomena.

Even with this year’s ratings down somewhat, the national singing bee still grips the popular imagination, dominates water cooler conversations, overwhelms the entertainment media each spring. And, I must confess, the idolatry even seeped into parsonage. We would gather around the TV as if it were the Oracle of Delphi and we were awaiting the divine word.

I was pulling for Brooke White, the seemingly sweet and really leggy blonde who one night, memorably, forgot the lyrics to her song. “She’s a human!” I said. “Not a robot!” Jo was pulling for the younger David…Archuleta.

Jacob said it was a no-brainer the older David…Cook…would win. On Tuesday night over 97 million votes were cast, tying up phone lines and air waves from east to west. David Cook did in fact win, by 12 million votes, 56% to 44%—Jo and I called Jacob in Atlanta to offer our embittered congratulations—and if it had been a real election the national press would have been screaming, “Landslide! Mandate!”

That American Idol has played itself out against the backdrop of the parties’ nomination process—or has it been the other way around?—has seemed eerie to me in a way, a commentary on art as life and life as art, everyone smiling for the camera and hoping for the blessing of strangers, all the principals hoping one way or the other to be America’s Idols…

The Question

2008-05-20T14:29:00.000-07:00

A couple of Saturday nights ago I heard a preacher put the question this way (and I am increasingly convinced it is in fact the question for all of us in United Methodism): When did we stop expecting transformation in our lives? When did we quit preaching for and expecting conversions? When did we give up the quest for holiness of heart and life?

I do not know when it was, quite frankly, but I think he is right. We have long-since abandoned that notion that church—which is to say worship, prayer, Bible study—is a means of personal and societal transformation. We have instead prayed to the “lesser” gods of therapy, education medicine and even Oprah to work the miracle. Despite the inarguable benefits of each (except maybe Oprah), all have proven woefully unequal to the task of real transformation. Meanwhile in the church we have ceased expecting anything like personal or (on account of it) societal transformation, perhaps because we do not see or feel in ourselves any need to repent (we sometimes see that others need to!), so that confession and testimony are lost languages among us, as much a relic as Mayan.

He said one evidence that we have lost our expectation for transformation is that we have no joy in our faith. Joy comes from knowing we are saved. Salvation accompanies the knowledge that we are indeed forgiven. But to know that we are forgiven suggests a prior knowledge: that we are sinners, that we are not what God wants us to be, that we fail to do what God wants us to do and instead often do what God prohibits. But somewhere along the line someone convinced us that we were not sinners at all—that we do not need change but instead only understanding, acceptance and affirmation. After all, “God loves us just as we are.” No wonder we have lost our expectation of transformation, our joy, our ability to speak of sin and salvation.

John Wesley would be aghast. He began his renewal movement in the conviction that the Church of England of his day was spiritually dead. One of his lay preachers put the matter succinctly: “In their services and prayers, members of the Church of England make ample use of the word “faith.” It is just that no one seems to know what the word means.”

Wesley called his people from a dead faith to a vital piety and social holiness—holiness of heart and life—and not one without the other. His followers met weekly for Bible study, for prayer and accountability. The goal was simple: transformation. The theological word is sanctification, which means the work of the Holy Spirit to make us more and better than we are—in short, to make us over into the image of Jesus.

That is to say, God may love us just as we are but God loves us too much to leave us there. “Just as I am,” may be the place we begin journey of faith but it is not where we are to end.

Caesar and Ascension

2008-04-28T07:58:00.000-07:00

Perhaps I am the only one annoyed by the National Day of Prayer. Don't get me wrong: I am all in favor of prayer. It is just that I don't need Caesar telling me when to do it... and maybe Caesar isn't in fact telling me to do it on Thursday, but it feels that way and so I feel caught in this web, this this unholy cross hairs of God and Country, syncretism and civil religion. One of my constituents is really, really bent with me that I am not having a special NDP service, etc.

Meanwhile, Thursday May 1 is also Ascension Day and I would bet (if our tradition allowed betting) that if my people take note of either "celebration" it will be the NDP and not AD. What is wrong with this picture?

I am thinking of setting up the distinction between the secular "holidays" and the liturgical "Holy Days" on Sunday. It is Eucharist for us, a time when we taste and see that the Lord is good, and as an appetizer the truth that the secular calendar is a celebration of "us" one way or the other while the liturgical calendar celebrates God. This may seem patently obvious, but I cannot iterate how many times I have been fussed at over the years for not giving due justice to the scouts, the veterans, even--and I am not making this up--the submarine crews who fought in WW II--but I do not know that I have ever been scolded for giving short shrift to Ascension Day or the Feast of St. Stephen.

This year the intersecting of "rival" calendars may be too much for me to ignore! I do not want to pick a fight or appear Quixotic...but it seems something fundamental is before us, something crucial about identity and spiritual politics. Every people needs its special places, its special persons, its special times (call them shrines, saints and holy days); what is sad is that in evangelical America we seem to know more of our national shrines, saints and holy days than we do our faith's.

TV!!

2008-04-18T09:44:00.000-07:00

Should you be interested, and I cannot imagine why you would be, check out www.harvest-tv.com, go to the show info tab, click on guests, find the show for April 1 (either ironically or appropriately enough) and hit "watch." Thirty-four minutes in, after an interview with a fellow discussing Mid-eastern politics and the end of the world (Oh, brother!), former Miss America Deborah Maffet (1983) interviews me concerning Every Disciple's Journey, my recent book from NavPress.

I would be interested in your feedback.

Thomas, redux

2008-04-09T11:32:00.000-07:00

I am still thinking about Thomas, called "the twin," according to John, and my twin indeed though we are inversely related. By that I mean, Thomas demanded to touch Jesus ruined hands before he would believe that the Crucified had been raised; he said he would not accept the testimony of his friends unless he could put his hand in the wound in Jesus's side. He needed to see for himself, thank you very much, before he would believe.

So we know what Thomas thought of the other disciples--that they were untrustworthy.

I am wondering, though, what the other disciples thought of Thomas. I mean, have you ever found yourself in a situation when someone who should have did not trust you? You tell them this or that and they do not blink, do not smile, say, "Well, I will have to see for myself," or "You may believe that baloney, but not I." When I share good news with people, which I often do, when I tell them about my deepest beliefs and commitments and they do not trust me... I can feel my breathing get a bit shallow, feel my hands beginning to make a fist (not that I would ever use them; I am much too much a coward for that), feel my heart hardening. Thomas may be the twin of all skeptics, but in the Upper Room on the evening of Easter week I am one of the unbelieved apostles.

And so I need Jesus to touch my hands, to unfist them. I need Jesus to reach into my chest and massage, soften, my hard heart. If I am going to keep sahring this good news with folk, and if they are going to continue dissing me, not trusting me, humoring me or just ignoring me...it is going to take a touch of Jesus for me to keep at it.

And that is the gospel truth.

Oprah and Me

2008-04-08T18:30:00.000-07:00

Harpo was one of the Marx brothers, right? Harpo is also the name of Oprah’s production company. Gotta be a connection.

I admit that I have never gotten it, meaning Oprah herself or her show or her celebrity. I will say that at one time I had hoped she would choose one of my books to feature on her book club. Not anymore. Not since she decided to become our new instructor in matters of the spirit, the guru/dean of a new on-air seminary featuring as faculty the current crop of Shirley MacLaine wannabes: Mariannne Williamson, for one, and Eckhart Tolle, the latest and greatest.

Oprah and Eckhart are all the rage on the internet, offering a “webinar” about how dumb—excuse me, unenlightened—the rest of us are who still cling to “belief.”. Quoth Oprah: If God for you is a “believing experience, it is not really God” because God is a “feeling experience.” Jesus came to show us Christ-consciousness, because we are all capable of being Christ. The “real” God is not restricted to any religious expression, nor is God a jealous God. Oprah dates her break with her own Christian roots to a sermon wherein the preacher described God as “a jealous God,” a perfectly biblical view, of course, meaning that God wants us for himself and does not want us worshiping other, lesser things—like, for instance, new age ideas for God (which are old age as they can be: early Christians called these same notions Gnosticism, meaning, God as an idea. Against them Christian have quoted John, “(God) became flesh…”)

Anyway, people are up in arms. There is a revolt going on, a “reject Oprah, boycott her magazine” kind of thing.

I just find myself wondering whether all the people who are mad at what Oprah is teaching right now are in a Bible study themselves, learning why this silliness she and Eckhart are spouting is neither new nor even very interesting. The Secret, The Prayer of Jabez, Your Best Life Now—all of these books espouse demonstrable idolatries, and yet even Christian people often do not recognize them as such because they have so little in the way of biblical foundation to serve as lens by which to see them for what they are. “Try the spirits to see if they are from God,” John counsels, but many can’t. No surprise then when the unsuspecting are trapped in Oprah’s “web.”

It is left to the Church continually and urgently to offer the faith once-delivered to the saints: the historical, particular, incarnation of “the real” Christ, crucified, dead and risen—alive among us and unbound by any lesser ideas of his redemptive purpose—that whoever believes in him might have eternal life.

Easter II

2008-03-30T12:49:00.000-07:00

My old sermon--I do not preach old ones often--held up pretty well this morning and there is, I think, a significant thought therein. The Gospel text for the day was the appearance of Jesus to the disciples sans Judas, and Thomas' demand to touch the hands of Jesus and put his hand in Jesus' side.

I mentioned that Thomas was our twin, when we demand proof but do not show up where proof might be found. And that Thomas is my twin, in many ways, but that he and I are inversely related...in that I need Jesus to touch my hands, to unfist them and make a tear in the flesh of them so that generosity might pour out; that I needed Jesus to place his hand in my side to massage my hard heart so that it was not so cold and hard.

Even so, come quickly, Lord Jesus.

aaurgh!

2008-03-07T12:40:00.000-08:00

I really do try to get my formatting correct--indentions, paragraphing, etc. Sometimes it will not show-up in the actual post, despite multiple attempts. Sorry. And if you can advise me, please do!

Here, O My Lord, I See... (A Communion Meditation)

2008-03-07T12:06:00.000-08:00

There is a eucharistic hymn in the United Methodist Hymnal, and perhaps in others too, whose first line is: Here, O my Lord, I see Thee face to face..."

And in truth, our faith since Easter afternoon when Cleopas and his friend took the very first Walk to Emmaus is that just as they did, all subsequent pilgrims have "recognized him (Jesus) in the breaking of bread." Which is to say, in the breaking of bread, the sharing of the cup, we recognize his grace--that, "having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them--just as he loves us--to the end."

In the breaking of the bread we recognize his fealty, his loyalty, his faithfulness to the purposes of God, no matter the cost of that fidelity.

We recognize his ability to take ordinary things and make them extraordinary: whether bread and wine into his own body and blood; or men and women, into saints and servants, the flesh of his Word, themselves means of his grace and beacons of his Kingdom.

We recognize Jesus in the Holy Meal. That is the good news.

The bad news is that Here, in this Meal, we also recognize ourselves, or may. We see in the dark mirror of this broken bread and blood-red wine the truth of our own lives and condition. For "it was on the night he was betrayed" that Jesus instituted this meal.

"Yes, my own familiar friend, in whom I trusted, who ate of my bread, hath lifted up his heel against me." These words, from the forty-ninth Psalm, have often been used as a lens to implicate Judas, but in truth the betrayal of Jesus is not limited to him, or even to Peter. In fact, all of his familiar friends, in whom he trusted, who ate of this bread, fell away. Despite pledges of faithfulness, loyalty and loving devotion, they all of them betrayed him.

Jesus' enemies can refuse him, or accuse him. They can accost him, or arrest him. They can lie, then try him. They can convict and condemn him. They can berate and beat him. They can scourge him and spit on him. They can crucify him, kill him, bury him deep in a hole...but they cannot betray him.

That special privilege is reserved for us. For only those who love him can turn on him. Only those who know him can say they never did. Only those who have pledged faith can recant that faith, only those who sit at the Table can get up and leave the Table, to go into the night, to do what they are going to do quickly or otherwise.

Only those who are close enough to kiss Jesus can give him the kiss of death.

And only those who are on the receiving side of Christ's extraordinary gift-making can render those extraordinary gifts ordinary. Trivial. Meaningless.

In the breaking of bread, here, O my Lord, I see Thee face-to-face.

And here, O my God, I see myself so as to hide my face.

According to Mark's account of Jesus' last night, after he had announced that "one of you," one of his familiar friends, one of his disciples would betray him, they each of them asked in turn, "Lord, am I the one?"

The answer to that question is...yes. We are all of us the ones.

III

Jesus feeds them anyway. Knowing all of them so well, knowing so well all of what was coming, he fed them anyway. Washed their feet. It was on freshly washed feet that Judas went to the High Priest. When Simon denied him--said, and of a truth, that he did not know the man--it was with sacrament on his tongue that he did it.

Jesus fed them.

Jesus feeds us.

He gives this meal even when we fail to discern the fullness of its meaning, even when we fail to receive.

He shows himself to us in the Meal, shows us who we are, too, knowing that we do not fully recognize either, but in hopes that when we see ourselves as we are we will see all the more clearly who he is.

And so may God grant us grace, as he did to Cleopas and his friend on that Easter afternoon long ago, that the scales may fall from our eyes and we may recognize him, recognize ourselves, see all he would grant us to see, in the breaking of this bread.

Amen.