On (Almost) Not Voting

Posted on October 31, 2008

United Methodist Bishop Will Willimon tempted me not to vote this year. In the latest issue of The Christian Century, he reviews Electing Not to Vote: Christian Reflections on Reasons for Not Voting. He finds the essays in this volume “biblically radical and curiously compelling.”

He concludes, though, that he will vote November 4th, but more out of habit and social pressure than any theological virtue.

When I confided to my wife, the Good Citizen, my temptation not to vote, she reminded me it’s a civic duty to go the polls (where she will volunteer all day) and asked me at least to vote on one of the propositions, if nothing else. Since she trumps Will Willimon, I shall stand in line and mark a ballot next week, a reluctant voter swayed by social pressure.

Still, the matter puzzles me. The Apostle Paul said, “Pay to all what is due to them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due.” (Romans 13.7 NRSV) I pay taxes, obey laws and honor elected leaders. Does honor require voting?

I say it doesn’t. Voting can be a good thing, but good things are not always essential. There are legitimate reasons not to vote.

Unmarked Graves

Posted on October 29, 2008

Woe to you Pharisees! For you love to have the seat of honor in the synagogues and to be greeted with respect in the marketplaces. Woe to you! For you are like unmarked graves, and people walk over them without realizing it. (Luke 11.44 NRSV)

Some commentators ascribe these statements not to Jesus but to his later followers and their deep struggles with the synagogue. These sentiments from the generations after Jesus, they say, have flowed backward into the narrative (then being written) and colored the presentation of his life and teaching. So they absolve Jesus of the sin of anti-semitism.

Although its appeal is understandable, I don’t accept this view. It’s not unreasonable to conclude that the Gospel portrayal of his tensions with the Pharisees originated in his own attitudes and actions. Jesus may well have condemned religious leaders of his time as prophets before him did.

Here he calls them ‘unmarked graves’, rendering those who touched them ritually impure. The image is startling. And it highlights people today who, though outwardly religious, inwardly are full of decay and death, such that contact with them contaminates.

Wisdom From Failure

Posted on October 28, 2008

Psalm 51 asks God for mercy, forgiveness and spiritual cleansing. It’s words and images are a staple of prayers of confession. In my prayer book it’s one of the regular morning psalms, along with 95, 100, and 63. Reciting Psalm 51 today, I noticed especially verse six, buried amid all the expressions of contrition and remorse:

For behold, you look for truth deep within me, and will make me understand wisdom secretly. (BCW)

So wisdom appears out of the soil of our moral failings, the knowledge of our own brokenness. Which is a truth experience has shown me, but I’d not seen in this psalm before.

Fall Leaves

Posted on October 27, 2008

This picture dates from two weeks ago. The changing of the leaves has continued all around. Some trees are already bare now, and others have just begun to turn. Even in the same species there are trees who throw their leaves away like wild prodigals, and others who cling to them like grim misers.

I’m tempted to admire the prodigals, so lavish in their giving, but the misers help me enjoy the season longer.

I’m a Kitty

Posted on October 26, 2008

The local CROP Hunger Walk took place today, leaving from the athletic center at a college up the street from our home. Hundreds of participants, including the freshman class at the college, registered to walk and gathered sponsors to raise money for anti-poverty and hunger programs.

They signed their names in many hues on a large bed sheet, with sheets from previous years hanging on the walls, and set out on their six mile walk just after two o’clock. Many got lost along the way and created their own routes back to the college. One walker had a large Jerusalem Cross tattooed on his left calf.

I remained behind as a volunteer. A few young children stayed at the athletic center too and walked a shorter route on the indoor track. Later they painted one another’s faces with watercolors at a table in the entryway. Six-year-old Allie and her friends Nicole and Janice painted a flower on my right cheek, and a rainbow on my left cheek.

When I asked Allie about the black spot on her nose and whiskers on her cheeks, she said, “I’m a kitty.”

A Simple Way to Pray

Posted on October 25, 2008

In today’s Gospel reading from Luke 11.1-13, the disciples watch Jesus praying and afterward ask him to teach them to pray. He gives them a model prayer, which has come down in different versions as the Lord’s Prayer, and he uses simple illustrations to encourage their persistence in prayer and to assure them of God’s generosity.

What’s striking, though, is how simple Jesus’ teaching on prayer is — it’s not a complicated thing to him.

I use the Daily Prayer book from the Book of Common Worship, focusing on prayer in the morning and at close of day. The outline is a simple one used in many faith traditions:

Opening Sentence
Psalm
Scripture Reading
Thanksgiving and Intercession
Lord’s Prayer

Saying prayers takes only five to ten minutes, but it sets an important tone for the beginning and ending of the day. It acts as a frame for the day.

A Faith For the Latter Half of Life

Posted on October 24, 2008

I need a new faith for the latter half of life because the faith that supported me in the first half has broken down, or at least become insufficient. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present,” says Abraham Lincoln. To this end, I’ve been nibbling Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology, Vol. I a few pages a day. It’s becoming a form of spiritual reading, lectio divina, for he is a very spiritual writer. My denomination emphasizes Barth, so Tillich has been a surprising and now promising discovery.

One insight so far: he says theology arises out of sources, flows through a medium, and stands under a norm, by which it is judged. For him, the sources are the biblical message and the history of religion and culture; the medium is experience; and the norm is the Pauline idea of a new creation. Already, though, I can see how useful and adaptable this approach is. For me, the sources of theology are nature and scripture, the medium is experience in community, and the norm is love of God and neighbor.

Age Spots

Posted on October 23, 2008

I led an evening worship service at a retirement center yesterday. We sang Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise, which includes the line, ‘We blossom and flourish as leaves on the tree, and wither and perish, but nought changeth thee.’ The imagery of dying leaves caught my attention, given that most of the worshipers are in the last years of life.

Later at dinner one of the residents watched a friend tottering back to her room and said, “It’s the hardest thing, seeing people you love lose it.” I nodded, ate my ham and potatoes, and noticed new age spots on the backs of my hands.

Last Sunday’s Sermon

Posted on October 21, 2008

Image created on Wordle.net.

Number Envy

Posted on October 21, 2008

Tom Steagald, a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina, wonders if his small church ministry is enough:

Just today I read about a 27-year-old pastor who started a church two years ago and now has 4,000 per Sunday. Critics fume, but I suspect they are mostly envious. I had 125 in my service Sunday. By any standard, he has a great work. I have a small work that, at its best, 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, and honored to serve Holy Communion and call people by their names as I do so. But I often feel on the margins of the kingdom’s work.

He accepts his setting as a ‘garden-variety pastor’ out of respect for God’s providence, and he loves the initimacy he experiences with his parishioners. But there is a wistfulness in his words, a yearning for a larger field of action.

Pastors measure their work in numbers — membership, attendance, size of budget — and they provide statistics to higher judicatories. When two pastors meet for the first time, they compare numbers. Numbers are inevitable.

Small church pastors can feel inferior because our culture applauds large numbers. It’s tempting to move to the other extreme and discount numbers, but they’re not unimportant. Numbers in an organization measure vitality and fruitfulness.

Too much can be made of numbers, and too little.

The Moral Understanding of a Bean

Posted on October 19, 2008

Our dog Jazz, whom we also call ‘Bean’, once scrounged for her food on the streets of New Orleans. Picked up after Hurrican Katrina, she came to us from an animal shelter as a rescue dog. Her scrounging habits remain, though, and she regards any trash can as her ‘All You Can Eat’ buffet. Frequently we’ll come home and find evidence of her foraging strewn all over the carpet. When scolded, she trots to her kennel, which has as much cushioning as a couch. As far as we can tell, Bean has no moral compass — right and wrong depend only on whether she gets caught or not, much like the moral sense of small children. After another episode today, we laughed and admitted that she has the Moral Understanding of a Bean.

The Other Side

Posted on October 18, 2008

Is not Ephraim my dear son,
the child in whom I delight?
Though I often speak against him,
I still remember him.
Therefore my heart yearns for him;
I have great compassion for him,
declares the LORD. (Jeremiah 31.20 TNIV)

Earlier this journal struggled with the picture of divine anger in the prophets, but here the other side emerges — compassion, yearning, delight. What cause is there to accept the one without the other? It may be that both emotions flow from solicitude, from God’s deep engagement with the world and its well-being, which the prophets present in sometimes shocking terms.

If I blithely set aside the anger, do I not lose the mercy as well? This schizophrenic God rubs me raw with anger and then kindness, but in a strange way the two sides compliment and depend on one another. Each flows from the same energy.

Looking For a Sign

Posted on October 17, 2008

I performed a wedding today at a local golf course. Bride, groom and I stood on a bridge at edge of the 16th green. The congregation sat in golf carts before us, and a stand of trees rose behind us. The weather was ideal, clear and cool, with the leaves a mix of green, yellow, red. Nature’s beauty makes the best backdrop for these things. I took a red maple leaf home and pressed it in a book for a momento.

At the dinner afterward, I struck up a conversation with the head caterer. As strangers to the feast, we shared a common situation. She’s been catering for 25 years. Our meal included fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, green beans and salad. She said three years ago she was looking to expand her business but didn’t know if God wanted her to or not. One day she drove past the Methodist church in her town, and its sign in front said, “Go out on a limb — that’s where the fruit is.” She took that as her sign from God and went forward with her plans. She hasn’t regretted it.

Sun and Moon

Posted on October 16, 2008

This morning when I looked east there was the rising sun, and to the west the fading full moon. I can’t remember what I last saw the sun and moon in the sky at the same time. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention.

“God made two great lights — the greater light to rule the day, and the lesser light to rule the night.” (Gen 1.16 NRSV) So day and night overlapped for a time this morning.

Anxiety

Posted on October 16, 2008

A phone call came yesterday, telling us an elder member had died early in the morning. She rose, put on her slippers and slumped over in her bed. A peaceful death — we should all be so fortunate. Her death makes me sad for she was a dear friend.

The funeral home asked if we could provide a luncheon after the service, but our ability to perform this service has shriveled in recent years. Finally, by evening, we were able to locate someone to coordinate the luncheon, a big task even for a small number of people. Much of the day, in addition to the sadness of loss, I felt anxious — vulnerable to events, opinions and schedules beyond my control.

“So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Today’s trouble is enough for today.” (Matthew 6.34 NRSV) Interesting how Jesus didn’t prohibit worry about today. But today and tomorrow meld together in my mind, which can easily grow fearful and anxious.

Alien Terrain

Posted on October 15, 2008

“And I will make them eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and all shall eat the flesh of their neighbors in the siege, and in the distress with which their enemies and those who seek their life afflict them.” (Jeremiah 19.9 NRSV)

Through the prophet Jeremiah, God here speaks and decrees that the inhabitants of Jerusalem will be reduced to cannibalism during the siege of their city by foreign powers. This won’t simply happen of its own course, though; God, according to the prophet, will make this happen as an expression of judgment on the people for their sins. This is a most troubling aspect of the Bible, the portrayal of an angry God whose emotions are the moving force behind human suffering.

I once accepted the notion of God’s wrath without question, but as I’ve grown older this teaching troubles me more. I once saw wrath as a legitimate aspect of the divine character revealed in scripture. Now I see this more as a rationale ancient peoples used to interpret the events of their time — favorable events flowed from divine benevolence, and tragic events grew out of divine anger.

The theme of divine love grows more prominent in the New Testament writings, but even there wrath doesn’t disappear. It’s only delayed. Much of the New Testament was written out of a prophetic framework that saw a coming ‘Day of the Lord,’ a day of wrath and judgment.

I no longer know what to do with images of an angry, vengeful God. They remind me of pictures of the landscape of Mars. A strange, alien world. Part of the universe, but not part of my vicinity. Terra Aliena.

In a Bible study yesterday, we came across these lines from Psalm 103:

The Lord is merciful and gracious,
slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he keep his anger for ever.
He does not deal with us according to our sins,
nor repay us according to our iniquities.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so great is his steadfast love towards those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far he removes our transgressions from us. (8-12 NRSV)

I wondered if these words were a corrective to the angry God imagery in the prophets, an example of how scripture is a collection of voices that argue with one another.

At the Edge of the Village

Posted on October 13, 2008

Chad Hall at Out of Ur advocates a middle way between left and right. He notes its problems: middle grounders open themselves up to criticism from both sides, they may create new ‘dysfunctional systems’ themselves, and their hungers may be prey to book publishers seeking new markets.

He’s willing to accept these pitfalls in view of new possibilities ‘third way thinking’ opens up:

Third way thinking also holds promise in helping us move beyond stalemates… Some of us just want to get on with living the faith regardless of the categories. Believers who’ve stopped using the left/right compass are finding new directions.

The examples Hall gives of third way people are Rick Warren and N.T. Wright. They are honorable Christian leaders, but I don’t see anything breathtakingly new in them. They’re evangelicals who have embraced elements of a liberal social agenda, in the style of William Wilberforce. They’ve moved to the edge of the village — they don’t live in a magical ‘third way’ camp between the villages.

The idea of third way thinking appeals to me. I often see fragments of truth on both sides of an issue. But I wonder if the third way is an illusion, like water on the road that disappears the closer you come. Third way thinking does offer freedom from categories and labels. But its chief problem is that I know more of what I am not than what I am. It doesn’t answer the ‘who am I?” question.

Stumbling On

Posted on October 12, 2008

A local minister’s wife left him last year. He recently resigned his small country church, moved to another state and left behind his library — which implies he’s left the ministry too. His books ended up at a religious bookstore, where I found them, and this is how a fifty-year-old copy of Paul Tillich’s classic Dynamics of Faith ended up in my possession. In an odd way, I’ve benefited from another man’s crisis of faith.

Which is strangely appropriate since I have my own on and off crisis of faith. Perhaps crisis is too dramatic a word. Call it a low-grade fever. God is remote, even absent. I was at a park last week, sitting at a picnic shelter and whining about these things to the Absent One, when a thought came into mind to read Tillich’s book. (I read a few of his sermons years ago but nothing since.)

Reading Dynamics of Faith has given me no dynamic breakthrough, but it has helped in a few ways. Tillich says doubt and uncertainty are built into the structure of faith — since faith apprehends the ultimate, and the human person having faith is anything but ultimate. This is useful. As is his discussion of the different types of faith: sacramental, mystical, and moral. And this is a good quote: “One is ultimately concerned only about something to which one essentially belongs and from which one is existentially separated.” Existential separation — that’s an apt diagnosis for God’s absence.

The absence isn’t continual, of course. There are days when the mist lies low on the ground, and every leaf is lit up with the goodness of God. I joy in those days and remember them with the fever returns.

Tillich is a seminal thinker, but his thinking feels too abstract to me. It troubled me when he reduced religion to myth and symbol, mere clothing for the ultimate. When Jesus said ‘something greater than the temple is here,’ he was claiming to be more than a symbol. So this book doesn’t provide what I’m seeking, but it does offer a window into Protestant liberalism in the middle of the last century.

So I continue stumbling on, walking along in my own little ‘cloud of unknowing.’ Maybe in the end that’s what it means to ‘walk by faith, not by sight.’

Abstract Expressionism

Posted on October 9, 2008

This reminds me of the abstract expressionist paintings in art museums.

Plain Donuts and Toast