Serious gingerbread building going on in the church kitchen this weekend.
Extreme Makeover Gingerbread Edition
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Monthly Archives: November 2008
Silly Pastor
If you think you are wise in this age, you should become fools so that you may become wise. (1 Corinthians 3.18 NRSV)
The Bible often exhorts us, “Be wise, not foolish.” St. Paul subverts traditional wisdom and says, “Be wise by being foolish.”
At times I feel foolish for having become a pastor. I left a secure job as an engineer twenty years ago to go into ordained ministry. I used to build equipment to measure water levels in 500,000 gallon tanks — now I facilitate encounters with an invisible Something-Or-Other that we hope actually exists. At least I could see the tanks and touch them.
I love how Kathleen Norris ends Dakota. “You have only to let the place happen to you. The poverty, the loneliness, the futility, indeed the silliness of your life.” I’m far from poor or lonely, but the other two are all too real. Ministry involves a certain silliness.
Custard and Fried Apples
Songbird and her daughter made custard together in their kitchen. Dinner was going to be pizza, and they needed something for dessert.
The making, and the reflecting on the making, reminded her of a time 22 years ago when her mother was in the hospital and asked for custard.
One day I arrived and my mother told me to go home. “Take these milk cartons,” she said, “take them to your apartment and make custard. I can’t drink the milk, but custard would be good for me.”
Custard?
“Custard? I don’t know how to make it!”
“You’ll find it,” she said, “in the ‘Joy of Cooking.’”
She found the recipe, made custard and brought it to her mother the next day. Her mother was pleased.
My mother smiled at me for the first time since her operation.
I stood in our kitchen yesterday and peeled large Granny Smith apples for a casserole, where they joined sweet potatoes and cranberries. While handling apple slices, I remembered as a boy the fried apples and sausage my mother used to make on Sunday mornings.
It’s strange how food, memory and identity all mingle together inside of us.
Sylvia and the Universe
My wife and I deliver Meals on Wheels once a month. Route D, our preference, takes us through the north part of town delivering a dozen meals. Judging from the number of other drivers, there must be at least a dozen routes. Our cargo includes a cooler for paper sacks, one or two for each stop, and an insulated container for the trays with hot meals.
Sylvia, the coordinator, gives each driver a clipboard with a list of that route’s deliveries, together with maps and a purple mileage sheet. Sylvia is a wonder worker — she multiplies loaves and fishes and feeds multitudes each week.
For our deliveries last Monday she added a brown piece of paper with these words on it. The title is ‘Give Thanks’ and the author is unknown.
Count your blessings instead of your curses.
Count your gains instead of your losses.
Count your joys instead of your woes.
Count your friends instead of your foes.
Count your smiles instead of your tears.
Count your courage instead of your fears.
Count your full years instead of your lean.
Count your kind deeds instead of your mean.
Count your health instead of your wealth.
Count your God instead of yourself.
Her poem reminded me of a line from William James: “Each of us, by our ways of paying attention to things, literally creates the kind of universe we inhabit.” After showing us how to create the universe, Sylvia gave us a free lunch and wished us Happy Thanksgiving.
Multicolored Light
Bob Cornwall disputes those who claim that someone cannot be a Christian apart from adherence to the Nicene Creed. He believes love of God and neighbor alone marks the Christian faith. Love, not a creed, distinguishes the Christian. Cornwall belongs to the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a denomination with a noncreedal tradition.
My denomination, the Presbyterian Church USA, has a creedal tradition. The Nicene Creed joins other faith statements in a Book of Confessions, representing different eras of church history.
This will sound strange coming from one like me who is weary of institutional religion, but I love the Nicene Creed best of all. It’s like a stained-glass window letting in God’s multicolored light. The Nicene Creed distills centuries of early Christian reflection on the nature of God, which it presents in a story of creation, redemption and final consummation. The Creed doesn’t supplant love. Love defines the shape of a life rooted in God, whose nature scripture portrays and the Creed summarizes.
Many followers of Jesus do not adhere to creeds. Saying the Nicene Creed does not magically make one a Christian. Still, when ‘God from God, Light from Light’ rises from a congregation at worship, it makes me smile.
Socrates at Prayer
When I lie in bed in the mornings before rising, I take a moment to breathe in divine love and visualize divine light enfolding me. I thank God for the day to come. I also move my right arm slightly, creating a V-shape between arm and body. As if on cue, my gray and white cat Socrates jumps up and plants himself in the V, with paws on my shoulder and body on the bed, and begins to purr with great contentment. It’s an important daily routine for both of us. I orient myself to the ground of being, and he orients himself to his — which is me.
Schizophrenic Advent
Advent begins soon, and the liturgical year will start anew. The word derives from the Latin adventus, meaning arrival or approach. In the church year Advent offers a time to anticipate the coming of the Lord, and lectionary readings from the prophets are already looking toward this theme.
The prophets warn us this coming is not a light matter:
But who can endure the day of his coming, and who can stand when he appears? For his is like a refiner’s fire and like fullers’ soap. (Malachi 3.2 NRSV)
Fire purges impurities out of precious metals, and soap cleans away dirt. The prophet later identifies idolatry, injustice and inadequate worship among the things to be removed at the Lord’s coming.
Which explains why I usually walk through Advent in a schizophrenic haze. The culture pushes colored lights and sugar cookies, but scripture tells me it’s about fire and soap. I can’t reconcile the two approaches.
Tom Bandy In Nirvanaland
Eight people from my church attended a seminar yesterday by Tom Bandy, a church consultant and organizational theorist. He urged us to abandon committees and programs and create ministry teams engaged in more spontaneous forms of mission. “Move from the solid to the liquid,” he said.
Organizational speakers like Bandy pull back the curtain and help us imagine how things might be. What they describe is idealistic, though, which is why one participant at our event called it “Nirvanaland.”
I appreciated his three elements of a leader’s healthy spirituality:
- Humilitas — deep humility before God.
- Conversatio — a radical, ongoing conversation with God and the world.
- Humanitas — compassion and gentleness.
(Things always sound impressive in Latin.)
And he said this: “The fastest growing demographic is the spiritually hungry and institutionally alienated.” I belong to this demographic myself, which puts me at odds since I live in the world of institutional religion.
Sunday Morning Rituals
I was at the donut shop last Sunday morning, getting a quota of sugar and caffeine to perk up for church. A man ahead in line ordered a large cup of coffee. He told the cashier he was headed to the gym for basketball, a pick-up game he’s played in for fifteen years. It didn’t look like he was going to wash up and head to church afterward. There wouldn’t have been time anyway.
Everyone has Sunday morning rituals — some read The New York Times, and others play basketball. Many luxuriate in their one morning to sleep in. My rituals include worship at church (and typically a Sunday afternoon nap). I wonder, though, what it would be like not to be a religious person, not to attend a formal church service. Would I go if my job didn’t require it?
After Barbara Brown Taylor flamed out of the Episcopal priesthood, her Sunday morning rituals included sitting on the porch, drinking hot tea and worshipping with the birds.
A Short Review of The Shack
A parishioner asked me to read The Shack and offer an opinion on it.
This book is strange, beautiful and hard to categorize. It’s like the Catholic mystics meet CSI. The plot is simple: a vision of God heals a man’s soul and relationships after the death of his daughter. The story follows a classic threefold path of purgation, illumination and union — along the way tackling weighty topics like the nature of God and the problem of evil. I sense the author has wrestled with these matters, and this book offers his discoveries.
At times the book is a little preachy, and its view of religion is more negative than mine, but all in all it was satisfying to read. It may help someone who struggles with guilt, grief and an authoritarian God.
Mystic Forces
Donn Ring walked along the Pacific coast, photographing rock formations amid the surf, and had a mystical experience:
In the assaulting storm and surge of tide I felt nature’s blunt bone and blood reality, the ebb and flow of tangled life, the powerful pulse of the planet thundering in my ears… I felt mystic forces beyond my control… I was moved to silence and humility, and I wondered, “Who am I?”
I have sensed the mystic forces too — standing in the middle of a forest or staring up at the light of a full moon. There is a power, a mystery, a presence behind things that knocks me off center, so to speak, and shows me I was never a center to begin with.
If ‘the fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,’ then a subset of that fear must be this experience of being ‘moved to silence and humility’ before the universe, its vastness, its beauty, its fierceness, and in the end, its indifference to us.
GM and Darwin
General Motors looks to go bankrupt soon, apart from a government loan, and other Detroit automakers are limping not far behind. Outside Michigan there is hostility to an intervention. An Alabama senator scorned the loan — foreign auto plants in his state will gain from GM’s fall. Darwin saw life as a ‘struggle for existence,’ and GM is poised to lose that fight.
It’s a scary time to live in Michigan. I’m scared. I don’t understand all the economics, but I know it’s a bad thing. It will hurt people I care about and a state I love. I’m also worried for the health of my church, as well as my own security. I worry one day the church budget will no longer afford me.
Why do we expect companies to live forever? For that matter, why do we expect churches to live forever? Given current trends, the old Protestant denominations will go out of business in my lifetime. No one would have foreseen that fifty years ago, back when families flocked to our churches and Detroit sat at the center of the manufacturing world.
Qoheleth spoke of the vanity of things:
Vanity of vanities, says the Teacher,
vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
What do people gain from all the toil
at which they toil under the sun?
A generation goes, and a generation comes,
but the earth remains forever. (Ecc. 1.1-4 NRSV)
The transitoriness of life is meant to teach me to put my trust solely in what ‘remains forever.’ If only I could trust it to pay the mortgage. My life is a struggle for existence too.
The Side Door
Wealth and Its Discontents
The Parable of the Dishonest Manager ends with this admonition from Jesus:
And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal homes. (Luke 16.9 NRSV)
The manager in the parable, who anticipates being fired, has manipulated the accounts of his master’s debtors to gain their favor before he loses his job.
The meaning of this parable is obscure. It may refer to the Jewish practice of almsgiving. In the next life the poor will be blessed — giving alms makes friends with them in this life, guaranteeing one a welcome in the next. (Later in this chapter, the rich man will fail to ‘make friends’ with Lazarus in this way.)
The phrase ‘dishonest wealth’ brought to mind a commentator on National Public Radio. The steep drop in home prices he blamed on purchasing houses not to live in but to make money, a practice that inflates their value. He hoped the economic woes would force people to return to the old ways of buying a home to live in for the duration of the mortgage.
A few years ago the city was about to tear down a dilapidated house across the street from us, but a young couple from outside the community bought it, had it refurbished and later sold it. They ‘flipped’ the house and certainly made a profit on it. I wonder if their profit qualified as ‘dishonest wealth.’
I wonder too what honest wealth looks like. In the Gospels Jesus disparages wealth and advocates detachment from it, but at the end a rich man provides his grave. Wealth is inevitable.
Perhaps generosity protects us from wealth’s harmful effects, making almsgiving a critical spiritual practice.
Geese and Sharks
I watched a flock of geese in a loose V-formation fly over the church at dusk, heading for warmer climates, like the ‘snowbirds’ in my congregation who leave Michigan for the winter months. And I read of a gathering of sharks discovered halfway between California and Hawaii — scientists speculate they meet to eat dinner and socialize. More or less a Shark Applebees.
Which is better to say: that their lives resemble ours, or ours resemble theirs?
Farting In the Sanctuary
I took the confirmation students on a tour of the church building yesterday. We walked through the Memorial Garden and noted the bronze plaques on the wall listing those whose ashes are buried there. Their eyes grew wide when they realized it was a cemetery as well as a garden.
In the sanctuary the organist turned on the lights where the pipes and chimes ordinarily hide behind a screen. As she played, the students could see the mechanisms move and connect this movement with the sounds. Then we walked around the room and examined eight stained glass windows, each with symbols depicting a different stage in the life of Christ.
Walking between windows four and five, one of the boys farted. The other boys — being boys — laughed until they cried, while the girls rolled their eyes and shook their heads. I smiled. Farting isn’t something I’d want them always to do in the sanctuary, but I see little difference between sneezing and farting in the sanctuary (apart from the smell). Each is a normal action of our bodies — only social custom makes one more taboo than the other.
If their young minds now connect humor (even coarse humor) with the holy, then something good has happened.
Iron Out the Wrinkles
I ironed out wrinkles on a blue sweater this morning. It had sat in a drawer since last winter. Our orange kitten Jane eyed the ironing board but didn’t jump on it. Perhaps she’s finally developing a sense of danger.
As I handled the sweater, I remembered a pep talk the Rotary district president gave us new club presidents once, telling us to ‘iron out one wrinkle’ in our club’s programming in the coming year. If only the wrinkles in an organization (or a relationship) disappeared as quickly as the wrinkles on a garment.
At our Bible study yesterday we looked at the psalms of lament, which comprise up to a third of the book. Our study guide noted comments by biblical scholar Walter Brueggemann, that lament moves from a past orientation through a period of disorientation into a new orientation, a new perspective on God and our place in God’s world. The DVD included a plainchant version of Psalm 22, with images of a solitary man in the wilderness. “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (v. 1 NRSV)
I wondered if singing a lament helps iron out wrinkles in life, but events that lead to lament leave more than wrinkles.
Flying
A sadness has settled in on me. I know too many who are suffering ‘in mind, body and estate.’ Their pain, struggles and discouragement seep into me.
There was one sign of hope today. A stained-glass wall hanging at the hospital chapel — a white bird flying over the sea. An invisible force keeps it aloft and prevents it from sinking into the waters.
On a Quest
In today’s Gospel reading large crowds are following Jesus, but he attempts to discourage them from becoming disciples. They must give up family claims, he says, and even a claim to life itself. To impress the point he uses images of a builder and a king, each weighing carefully the cost of a course of action before beginning. The passage ends
So therefore, none of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions. (Luke 14.33 NRSV)
What do these words mean for us now? Do we give up our families and our lives to follow Jesus? Do we give up our possessions, as some believers still do? Or were his warnings peculiar to his context? He was, after all, in his time literally calling people away from their families and possessions to follow him on the road. And how do we fit this call with the life setting of others in the Gospel, such as Mary and Martha, who retain their home and possessions but nonetheless are portrayed as genuine disciples of Jesus? I don’t know the answers to these questions, which crop up whenever I come across passages like this one.
Ready for a change from theology, I set down Paul Tillich in favor of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. At the start, Frodo gives up his home and possessions and sets out on a quest (as in the Gospel), only for him the goal is not to gain a treasure but to lose one, a precious ring he must destroy. Perhaps this story will bring light on the Gospel story.
Clara’s Bicycle
Clara bought a bicycle for $30 in 1937, paying 50 cents a week on a payment plan. She rode it to her job at a locksmith’s shop on Michigan Street from 1942 to 1946 because her family didn’t own a car. Riding during the winter months must have been difficult, and because rubber was rationed during the war she had trouble getting new tires for it.
Today’s paper has a picture of Clara standing with her bicycle. Red, white and blue ribbons adorn the handlebars. It’s part of an exhibit at our local museum on stories from the homefront during World War II.
In 1942 no one would have imagined her bicycle in a museum. Its purpose has changed from utility to memory. Then it served a need for transportation — now it acts as a symbol of an earlier era.
