We leave today for Crystal Lake, Michigan, where we’ll be counselors at a mini-camp for children. Crystal Lake is a jewel — I love the different shades of blue on the water.
ADDED: We arrived home late Tuesday night after three days at mini-camp with a group of 17 eight-year-old girls and boys. Rain on Monday brought our games and activities indoors, but even so we had a great time.
For anyone interested, here was the final look for the Crocodile Dock set. The children gathered in front of the dock for singing at the beginning and the end of each session. We had about ninety children each day.
The set in an earlier stage is here. (The dock, shack and canvas for the trees are made from styrofoam.) Check out posts earlier this week for pictures of some of the Bible teaching props — a burning bush, an Israelite house and the Red Sea — which were a slice of the total experience for the children. They also had crafts, games, snacks, and a video Bible time for the little ones.
It’s over now. Whew!! We all had a great time. A nap is in order. This week the children learned five good things:
When my last Bible time was done, I thanked the children and told them I hoped they learned as much from the stories as I had.
I devote time each year to children’s ministry by teaching a Bible lesson for older children at our Vacation Bible School. Not having children of my own, this helps me see life from their level for a few days.
We use Group’s curriculum — it’s experiential, sensory and creative. This year the theme is Crocodile Dock, and most of the Bible stories come from Exodus.
In Friday’s story the children walk through the Red Sea on dry ground, a wall of water on their right and on their left:
It takes hard work to help children experience a Bible story. Actually, it can be exhausting, but it’s worth it to see their delighted faces.
The need children have to see and touch things reminds me of the Incarnation.
That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life. (1 John 1.1 TNIV)
To become children of God, we need to see and touch divine love ourselves and join ourselves to that love by faith.
On Wednesday children in Vacation Bible School heard the story of the Passover. They painted blood on the door frames of their houses, just as the Israelites did. The houses were card tables, and the door frames were grocery bags filled with crumpled newspapers. The ‘blood’ was red paint, which each child applied in turn.
After they crawled inside their house, each group waited for God’s angel to see the blood stains on the door and pass over them.
The Passover story was hard for me to share with children, as was Tuesday’s about the first nine plagues. These stories raise much moral discomfort. Even ancient Jewish and Christian interpreters struggled with the moral implausibility of these stories, which fueled their project of interpreting them symbolically so as not to stain God’s hands with blood. For Christians a symbolic reading of the Passover naturally leads to Jesus, the focus of Thursday’s Bible story.
Children think concretely, though, not symbolically. For them, blood means blood. Which is good in its own way. As Kathleen Norris notes, blood imagery in the Bible points our attention to the concrete reality of the Incarnation, the eternal Word made human flesh, bone and blood.
Although dogs can imitate human sounds and give owners an illusion of talking, they’re unable to use their lips and tongues well enough genuinely to talk. So says Scientific American.
But they can communicate with one another and with humans:
Despite what they may lack in the elocution department, dogs do communicate their feelings to humans as well as read our cues, thanks to domestication, Julia Riedel and colleagues of the Max Planck Institute (M.P.I.) for Evolutionary Anthropology reported in March 2008 in Animal Behavior. Dogs follow people’s pointing, body posture, the direction of their gaze, and touches for cues to find hidden food, notes Mariana Bentosela and colleagues at the University of Buenos Aires in the July 2008 Behavioural Processes. They also gaze at their trainer when they need more information to find their reward.
My dog Jazz and I communicate with one another in non-verbal ways.
What do you think Jazz is communicating here?
Lay a coarse blanket on the floor. Take larger sticks and place them in a triangle shape on the blanket. Put a tangle of smaller, brush-like sticks on top of the triangle. Intertwine two strings of white Christmas tree lights in the brush. Top it off with plastic greenery, and intertwine this with the rest. Hide the extension cord under the blanket, and plug it in out of sight behind a curtain.
Our Vacation Bible School began yesterday with 88 children, plus youth and adult volunteers. The older children heard God’s voice speaking out of this burning bush. (The voice was on CD behind the curtain.) They learned that sometimes God asks us to do hard things just like Moses, but God always promises to stay with us and help us finish the task.
The soil in our memorial garden holds the cremains of 24 church members, the latest added only last Friday. The bright flowers that grow in this rich, sacred earth make this time of year a delight.
It’s a restful place to sit and reflect…
…and listen to the sound of water.
It calls to mind the picture of the original garden:
The land produced vegetation: plants bearing seed according to their kinds and trees bearing fruit with seed in it according to their kinds. And God saw that it was good. (Gen. 1.12 TNIV)
If your church doesn’t have a memorial garden, make plans to start one. It continues the old practice of the churchyard — believers buried where they worshipped God.
I hope my ashes will rest in a place of such beauty and tranquility.
Last night the Adrian Symphony presented a tribute to the Andrews Sisters. Three women sang a medley of their hits in the 30s and 40s, with the orchestra behind them and a thousand toe tapping listeners in the audience.
For two hours the spirits of LaVerne, Maxene and Patty Andrews appeared in the refurbished Dawson Auditorium on the Adrian College campus.
I didn’t know the Andrew Sisters had more hits than Elvis or the Beatles. We heard many — Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree, Bei Mir Bist Du Schön and Rum and Coca-Cola (a favorite with the troops overseas). They also performed other songs from female artists, like Doris Day’s Sentimental Journey. My wife said the best part was hearing hundreds of listeners catch their breath and say “Ahhh” as songs began.
The complexity of the music struck me — all three women last night were accomplished vocalists, and they needed those skills to pull off a credible Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy.
I saw only a smattering of people under fifty at the concert. (At 91, Patty is the only remaining sister.) I hope the music of the Andrews Sisters lives on after their generation passes. I trust it will — fine art lingers.
A man I never knew helped change my life. John Stek, NIV Bible translator, died on June 6th at 84.
In 1979 my family moved to Carson City, Nevada. At sixteen I was looking to find my way in the world and hungry to read the Bible for myself. I had an old red covered RSV, but the language felt archaic. I wanted to pray to a ‘you’ not a ‘thou’. The New International Version became my Bible. The pastors at the First Presbyterian Church read from it.
From then on the rich brown hardcover NIV stayed by my bedside. In college I lugged it around campus in my backpack, like Christian in Pilgrim’s Progress making his way book in hand.
At seminary ten years later I dutifully began to use the New RSV, the version my professors favored. But it was always a step-Bible. The NIV has continued to hold my affection. It finds the balance, I think, between faithfulness to the thought of the biblical writers and faithfulness to common English. I still use the NIV for my devotional reading — given changes in English usage, the TNIV is more suitable now for public worship.
The NIV has taken criticism from fans of the NRSV on the left, and the ESV and NASB on the right. That puts it more or less in the middle. It’s the closest thing to a mainstream Protestant Bible.
Translations and their acronyms must confuse people. I wonder what it was like in England in the sixteenth century when the Bishop’s Bible and the Geneva Bible contested with one another for people’s affection and loyalty.
I doubt there’s a best translation. These things come down to taste, sentiment and life experience. All I know is during my formative years the NIV fed my soul. John Stek helped that happen — he was on the translation committee from the beginning.
So thanks, John Stek. May he rest in peace. ‘To live is Christ and to die is gain.’
The presbytery’s Committee on Preparation for Ministry met Wednesday. Though working in a United Methodist congregation, I remain ordained in the Presbyterian Church USA. I serve on this committee as part of my service to the denomination.
Three candidates appeared before us, each on a different segment of the path to ordination.
One began seminary last summer with an intensive Hebrew course, a year’s worth of grammar squeezed into seven weeks. (Biblical languages are required for Presbyterians.) She barely passed, and unfortunately this left her poorly prepared for Old Testament courses. Her GPA sank, and she lost her full scholarship. Many thousands of dollars gone. Now she’s scrambling to fund her education. And the dominoes started falling with the Hebrew requirement.
Her situation reminded me of a poem by Robert Frost, On a Tree Fallen Across the Road:
The tree the tempest with a crash of wood
Throws down in front of us is not bar
Our passage to our journey’s end for good,
But just to ask us who we think we areInsisting always on our own way so.
She likes to halt us in our runner tracks,
And make us get down in a foot of snow
Debating what to do without an ax.And yet she knows obstruction is in vain:
We will not be put off the final goal
We have it hidden in us to attain,
Not though we have to seize earth by the poleAnd, tired of aimless circling in one place,
Steer straight off after something into space.
This student is persistent. I trust she ‘will not be put off the final goal’ but will find resources to continue her journey.
I took a year of Hebrew in seminary. Afterward it evaporated. Although it’s essential to scholarship, I question its necessity for parish ministry. If denominations require future ministers to study Hebrew, how much more should they insist on courses in finance or web design? At any rate, putting incoming students in an intensive summer language course seems unwise.
A knowledge of Hebrew will enrich a pastor’s teaching and preaching. But the absence of such knowledge will not inhibit ministry (and may leave extra room in the brain for other knowledge).
In this student’s case, too, making the language a requirement can all too easily make it a costly hardship, a great tree fallen across the road.
Ten years ago I attended a training session for incoming presidents of local Rotary clubs. The leaders put blue folders at each place around the table. On each folder lay a white sheet of paper with these words in large black letters: Money Is the Root of All Good.
This sentence has stayed in my mind ever since that day. Religion is often suspicious of money, but Rotary taught me how money can do great good around the world — build a water system in Africa or combat polio in India.
I shared this sentence once with other clergy, and their cynical response startled me. It seems they were so accustomed to criticizing money — and its handmaids commerce and capitalism — they could envision nothing positive about it. At best it was in their minds a necessary evil far from the pure ways of Jesus.
So it was refreshing to find a theologian offer a balanced view of money:
Money and wealth are not evil in themselves. The Bible presents numerous images of wealth as ordinary and morally neutral, even as symbols on which to hang parts of the good news. God wants us all to have abundant life, and the Bible’s constant concern for the poor suggests that a lack of access to money and wealth is evil. We’re called to be prudent with our money, to give generously and to help people become self-sufficient.
True, wealth can morph into an idol. Anything can become an idol — money, a nation, the economy, the international community. Even ideals can grow into idols. The worthiest cause can become a god.
Money poses dangers. It can seduce and deceive, which may be why Jesus urged detachment from it. But money can accomplish much good if used in a sensible way. Financial guru Dave Ramsey says money is like a red brick; it can build a school or murder a neighbor. The use makes the difference.
Steve Woolley frets about the declining fortunes of the Episcopal Church. The growing scarcity in his denomination worries him, as does the defensiveness and complacency it produces. He’s not alone. Many in mainline churches fear their denominations are dying. Demographic trends do not look promising.
Woolley looks to a new generation of leaders, Joshuas to succeed the aging Moseses, to lead the elder churches out of the wilderness into a new land.
At the heart of it all, though, he loves his church. The core is solid, and that core is Christ mediated through tradition and sacrament:
We are a part of the greater Body of Christ that treasures an expression of liturgical tradition anchored deep in the earliest practices of the Church. We treasure our tradition of a continuing conversation with centuries of theologians and spiritual guides in a fearless engagement with scripture that is not hemmed in by a literalist fence. We treasure the apostolic succession of ministry, but above all, we treasure the sacraments and none more than the Eucharist, the very presence of God in Christ in the bread and wine of Holy Communion. Without that we cease to be Episcopalians.
I read those words, particularly the repetition of the word treasure, and I wondered, “What would it be like to hold that degree of devotion to a church, to a particular expression of Christian community?”
I’ve worshiped in many ways and settings — high church liturgy to loose Pentecostal praise — such that each one seems limited and incomplete to me now, each a slice of a larger pie. It’s hard to lift up any one as the norm.
I treasure the encounter with God itself, whatever rituals help facilitate it. And it’s hard to grow excited about the antiquity of a 2000 year old Christian tradition when each day my very bones are warmed by a four billion year old sun. Nature — creation — is to me the facilitator of an ongoing encounter with the living God.
I resonate with a song by Bob Bennett:
I’ve sung in mountain cathedrals
with steeples rising high
and altars made of evergreen
and windows made of sky
and windows made of sky
As the Eucharist brings Christ to Steve Woolley, so nature conveys Christ to me. Every leaf, rock and lake is a sacrament — for as the living word of God, Christ’s presence permeates all created things.
Christ also comes to me though scripture, which is the other avenue to God, a more particular one. Christ speaks through the whole undulating story of the Bible. Together nature and scripture mediate to me ‘the very presence of God in Christ.’ I’m a natura et scriptura Christian.
So the potential demise of the church doesn’t trouble me. Sure, I want my church to thrive, and I labor each day to that end. My parishioners tell me how important church is to them, and I understand this. But if my particular brand of the church disappeared from the earth, my faith would emerge intact. And like Ezekiel’s skeleton, the Spirit can reconstitute the church at any time.
My theological identity doesn’t center itself on a particular tradition or ritual, like the Eucharist. Wherever and however people gather to seek Christ, there the church appears.
All of which is to say, theological loaves need not sit in one basket. The bread of heaven is everywhere.
After our worship yesterday, five of us scooted over to Ogden Church for their 10:45 service. Ogden is a non-denominational, evangelical church that meets in a new facility east of town. (For years they met as a buildingless congregation, worshipping at the Croswell theater downtown.)
We slipped in more or less as spies. But benevolent spies, there to watch, listen and learn. I benefit when I see how other people worship God, or rather, when I worship with them in their space and manner.
Here’s what struck me about their worship:
1. Environment. We sat on cushioned chairs in a temperature controlled environment. Even on the hot days of July and August, we’d still have been comfortable. (But the amount of standing might have been hard for elder members.)
2. Vital preaching. A guest preacher brought the message and spoke with conviction, clarity and energy. His theology differed from mine, but good preaching can flourish in different theological worlds.
3. Excellent music. The praise band performed with enthusiasm and joyful faith. They believed what they were sang, and they inspired us in our singing. (The tech work was smooth too.)
4. Pastor-congregation relationship. They were saying good-bye to their senior pastor as he moves on to a new church. Their love for him shined, as did his for them. This bond matters.
5. Bulletin. The bulletin contained no printed order of worship, only information on programs and ways to get involved. (Nothing against printed liturgies, of course, but there are other ways to worship.)
6. Vision of God. In the music and message they celebrated God. They thrilled at God’s presence and activity in their lives.
Apart from the technology in Nos. 1 and 3, these things don’t cost much money. The critical one, in my view, is No. 6. Be Thou my vision, O Lord of my heart. All of them matter regardless of the style of worship.
Judging from the congregation, many youth and young families attend this church. We’re planning a couple more excursions this summer, gleaning ideas for the praise service at our own church.
What have you learned when you’ve visited other churches?
Michael Ruffin is a moderate in theology and on social issues. He worries he’ll be so open minded his brain may one day fall out, but he also believes standing in the middle is the best place to be — it gives one the clearest view of the whole landscape and the shortest distance to travel in finding the right position. He admires the passion and tenacity of those on the right and the left, but in the end he thinks their minds are set in concrete. He favors a flexible approach.
Along the way, he gives a description of how a moderate mind works:
Thus, a true Moderate will look at an issue or a problem or a biblical text from every available and reasonable angle and then will (and I put it like this because I’m speaking of Christian Moderates since that’s what I am), under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, with submission to Holy Scripture, through the lens of the life and teachings of Jesus Christ, and by means of the best tools of research and reason available, make up his or her mind, reserving the right to change that mind if clearer guidance and more precise understanding is awarded, with such guidance and understanding always sought and always welcomed.
I like the connecting words: under… with… through… by means.
Ruffin expresses himself in terms of Christian theology, but his moderate approach also hearkens back to the classical world — the aurea mediocritas (golden mean) of Horace and the ethics of Aristotle, who saw virtue as a mean between two extremes. The virtue of courage, for example, is midway between cowardice on the one side and foolhardiness on the other.
I think the presence of moderates is critical in life. They lend a necessary stability to an organization or to society. Moderates don’t push agendas, but they decide policies — when a matter is put to a vote, moderates swing it one way or the other.
So blessed are the moderates, the meek souls in the center, for they shall inherit the earth.
Economist Paul McDonnold asks the question, Is capitalism fatally flawed? His answer in brief is no, provided the system in question resembles Adam Smith’s original vision of ‘decentralized firms’ driven not by ‘blind greed but a healthy interest in improving one’s own lot by helping others.’ Sensible regulations, he argues, promote the decentralization capitalism needs to flourish.
He concludes:
Marx and Smith each saw a piece of the truth – two different sides of the coin of capitalism. Capitalism itself is not fatally flawed. But a hyperconservative approach to it is. Regulations that promote decentralized competition on a human scale are regulations that conserve Smith’s side of capitalism. These regulations should not be the enemy of conservatives; they should be our aim.
Many conservatives will want to stick to the dogmatic ideological line of deregulation. But the capitalism produced by blind support of deregulation is one of bureaucratic corporations, greed-fueled booms, and fear-riddled busts. If conservatives do not embrace regulations that preserve Smith’s capitalism, we might just wake up one day to see it gone and socialism in its place, just as Marx predicted.
McDonnold’s comments on the dangers of centralization in the banking industry reminded me of the ‘industry’ I work for — institutional religion. During its heyday in the mid-twentieth century, mainline Protestantism engaged in mergers and structuring to create larger and larger denominational entities with more and more centralization.
These structures are now in process of collapsing (like the slow collapse of an old barn). I wonder if this demise, painful as it is, will enable the emergence of new decentralized forms of religion that will help it to flourish.
Pastor Bob Cornwall writes at the DisciplesWorld blog about why he blogs. As these ‘why I write’ posts go, this is a pretty good one. Blogging allows Cornwall to publish freely and reach a larger audience than hears him on a typical Sunday morning.
There was also a refreshing honesty in his remarks:
My practice is to blog daily, except when I’m simply unable to get to a computer with internet access! Part of my reasoning for blogging daily might have something to do with vanity. I want to attract readers. With that in mind, early on I had read a blog post by Scot McKnight, author of the Jesus Creed blog, which said that if you want to attract and keep a readership, you have to blog daily. I took up the challenge, and have tried to keep up the pace ever since – and my readership has grown as a result.
I think vanity is a motive not only for writing daily in a blog but for writing at all. Whether it’s ten readers or ten thousand, to have readers at all touches our vanity and sense of self-importance.
His comment brought to mind Ben Franklin’s Autobiography. After covering several reasons for him to write his autobiography, Franklin gives a final reason why he writes:
And lastly, (I may as well confess it, since my Denial of it will be believ’d by no body) perhaps I shall a good deal gratify my own Vanity… Most people dislike Vanity in others whatever Share they have of it themselves, but I give it fair Quarter whenever I meet with it, being persuaded that it is often productive of Good to the Possessor & to others that are within his Sphere of Action.
Writers publish for many reasons. To create, to connect, to educate, to opine. But surely hidden beneath the surface is plain vanity — the hope one will be heard. Listen to me! I have a thought! It’s not the only ingredient certainly, but it’s in the stew.
Self-interest lies behind many actions. It’s healthy at times to admit this.
Scenery for our upcoming Vacation Bible School is taking shape in fellowship hall. T minus 12 days and counting. A bayou backdrop, a shack (but not ‘the shack’) and a dock have appeared, the creations of gifted artists in the congregation. Crocodiles and a boat are on the way, I’m told. All for Crocodile Dock, this year’s VBS curriculum from Group publishing.
Here’s a close-up on the trees:
A hundred children from three churches will descend on our fellowship hall for an opening time of singing and then disperse for Bible teaching, games, videos, crafts and snacks. I’ll lead the Bible time for the older children, four lessons from Exodus and one from Matthew. The whole effort benefits from the labors of dozens of youth and adult volunteers, with overall leadership from two phenomenal women who love children.
All these children in church make for a measure of chaos during the five days of VBS. It’s like an unstable uranium atom. I know now how Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, must have felt in the New Mexico desert day after day waiting for the big boom. Fortunately, though, we’ve had no explosions yet. Only lots of fun. And life-changing learning. Honestly, I must learn as much as the kids do from these Bible stories.
I remember sitting one day in my high school history class. On top of my notebook was a copy of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking, a yellow highlighter clipped to the cover.
A girl in the row to my right asked, “Is that a good book?”
“Yes,” I said. “It’s really interesting.”
(Later that year I took her on a date to see Stephen King’s The Shining, a film with no positive thinking at all and a pretty bad date movie.)
I remembered Peale, though, after reading The Law of Attraction, by Michael Losier, a book a parishioner suggested I read. The themes are similar — our inner thought world influences and determines our outer reality. The more we learn to think positive thoughts, the more positive things will happen to us.
Losier says there’s a ‘bubble’ around us composed of positive or negative energy, and our thoughts and emotions fuel that bubble in one way or another. If our bubble is made up of negative energy, it will attract negative experiences — if positive, positive things will flow to us.
Losier outlines a psychological approach centered on three steps:
He offers practices for all three steps. I liked his strategy of saying “I am in the process of…” as a way of affirming one’s desire and moving toward it.
Peale, as I recall, rooted his approach in specific biblical passages:
Whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is gracious, if there is any excellence, if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things. (Phil. 4.8 RSV)
What Peale and Losier have in common is in making it all sound so simple. Like many people, my experience here has not been simple. It’s easy to be skeptical about this. Too easy.
Yet there is more than a fragment of truth to what they say. I have known people trapped in negative thinking, who radiate negativism. And in my life, negative thoughts have at times sabotaged my happiness. I’ve seen firsthand the power of negative thinking. (Another book a parishioner recommended to me, How Full Is Your Bucket, highlights the power of negative comments we make to one another.)
Since there’s power in negative thinking, there must be corresponding power in positive thinking. Positive habits of mind may well attract things to us that wouldn’t ordinarily have happened. And it certainly makes us a lot more pleasant to be around.
In The Universe Next Door, James Sire explores eight worldviews, each a set of first principles or presuppositions people hold about their life in the world. Is there a God? What is the universe? Who am I? Where am I going? What are right and wrong? Does life have purpose?
In a sense there are far more than eight worldviews, given the unique way each person will answer the fundamental questions of life. But Sire believes at bottom, all worldviews fall into categories that share common characteristics. There are more than the eight he outlines, he admits, but not many more.
He begins with Christian theism, to which he gives a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins: A universe charged with the grandeur of God. Paste together the main points and they form a paragraph summarizing this worldview:
God is infinite and personal (triune), transcendent and immanent, omniscient, sovereign and good. God created the cosmos ex nihilo to operate with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system. Human beings are created in the image of God and thus possess personality, self-transcendence, intelligence, morality, gregariousness and creativity. Human beings can know both the world around them and God himself because God has built into them the capacity to do so and because he takes an active role in communicating with them. Human beings were created good, but through the Fall the image of God became defaced, though not so ruined as not to be incapable of restoration; through the work of Christ, God redeemed humanity and began the process of restoring people to goodness, though any given person may choose to reject that redemption. For each person death is either the gate to life with God and his people or the gate to eternal separation from the only thing that will ultimately fulfill human aspirations. Ethics is transcendent and is based on the character of God as good (holy and loving). History is linear, a meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for humanity.
Sire is a Christian theist, but he gives a fair hearing to the other worldviews:
There were surprises along the way for me, as when Sire puts modern theology in with existentialism (theistic existentialism). This book has been around in different editions for over thirty years. Reading it has helped me sort the different voices heard in church and society — all these worldviews are bubbling in the pot.
Naturalism is the dominant worldview today, forming the background of the sciences, public education and the mass media. Sire believes naturalism inevitably leads to nihilism, to which existentialism is a response. One of the strengths to the book is his tracing out the links like this between worldviews. In this tracing, though, Eastern Pantheistic Monism and New Age seem out of place, like a giant parenthesis until we get to Postmodernism, which Sire sees only as the latest stage in Modernism.
Reflecting Sire’s longstanding love of literature, the title for the book comes from a poem by e.e. cummings. An earlier post on Sire’s concept of worldview itself is here.
Tom Steagald, a United Methodist pastor in North Carolina, dislikes what he calls the ‘Hallmark Cycle,’ secular holidays and themes that insert themselves into the church’s worship. Lately we’re moving through the Mother’s Day, Memorial Day and Father’s Day part of the cycle.
I’m against the Hallmark Cycle because I feel 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, for are we not the Greatest Generation? The best mothers and fathers ever? The creators and protectors and guarantors of our world and way of life?
They act as forms of self-congratulation at best, idolatry at worst. ‘Valentines to ourselves,’ he calls them. His views have made for tense discussions with parishioners. It’s clear he resents how these ‘lesser narratives’ displace the biblical story told each year through the church’s liturgical calendar.
I wonder then how Steagald would respond to our Graduation Sunday last week when we honored graduates during worship, or Teacher Appreciation Sunday this week when we will offer gratitude to the teachers in our church’s education program. Are these more valentines to ourselves?
I think not, or at least not necessarily. Charges of false worship go back at least to the prophet Amos. But I’m reticent to condemn anyone’s way of worshiping, so long as it’s not causing actual harm. Who am I to judge someone else’s servant? (Rom. 14.4)
I do resonate with Steagald’s concern that secular themes can invade and preempt Christian worship — witness the way Thanksgiving erases the first Sunday of Advent. I also think there’s a positive way of looking at the issue he raises. Recognizing Father’s Day in church, for example, need not be yet another way of celebrating ourselves — it can be conceived as an offering to God. We offer fathers and father figures to God and ask for a divine blessing on their lives.
Bread and wine serve many purposes outside the church walls, but inside they are put so sacred use. So also when these secular holidays creep into church, they are changed in the experience. We offer to God our mothers, our country, our fathers, our graduates, our teachers and so forth.
I see this not as celebrating ourselves but as offering things we care about to the God who cares for us all.
What do you think? Should we observe Father’s Day and other days in the ‘Hallmark Cycle’ in church?
