Rev. James Howell

New Year's Meditation

2011-12-31T05:03:00.000-08:00

"You crown the year with your bounty" (Psalm 65:11).

What is the meaning of the "year"? The earth laps the sun once more, the seasons pass: leaves gather, grow thick and luxuriant, then dazzle us with gold, red, then browner, falling to the earth. Life is not just a single arrow flying, but a circle, a web, life given, life lost, life renewed, so natural, God's constancy played out annually.

The Christian marking of time is not the fiscal year, not the calendar year. We begin, rather weirdly, just after Thanksgiving, with Advent, a little ahead of everybody else, and when the darkness is long. Every year we re-rehearse the full Bible story: Jesus is born, is baptized, tempted - and so we observe a 40 day fast during Lent. Jesus is raised, the Holy Spirit comes - and so we observe Easter and Pentecost. Every year of our lives, we rewind and re-watch the Bible's dramatic epic; we live inside the story, and discover our place on the stage - not asking Is the Bible relevant to my life? but Is my life relevant given the Bible?

In his 1980 debate with Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan asked "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" Maybe the Christian asks each year, Am I closer to God than last year? Am I serving more faithfully? Have I grown in my giving? in my prayer? in holiness? It's just one more year - but then recall how fraught with profound meaning the numbers we attach to a year can be. 1967? My grandfather died. 1986? I got married. 2001? 9-11. 2012? That was the year I got serious about my faith...

My grandfather’s tombstone shows eight numbers with a little dash in the middle: 1904-1967. Peek under any such dash and you see a year, and more years (and there never seem to be enough of them when you love the person), a moment here, an act there, a lazy afternoon, working past dusk, a trying week, a blissful month, a year of anxiety, three years of declining health, a decade on the best job you ever had. Our attention spans are short (and getting shorter all the time) - but Christians, especially at the turn of the year, take the long view, as God does: “A thousand years in Your sight are like a day” (Psalm 90:4). We stop, step back, soar up high, and gauge the broad sweep of time, in which this afternoon's situation is merely a pebble on the beach, in which my entire life is a single measure in the triumphant symphony of God’s great composition of the universe.

How many years will I have? and what would make them “full”? In faith, we look back: can you remember what God has done in your life? Rifle through the boxes of old photos in your memory and notice a hand, a smile, a circumstance, a moment, and notice what God has done to bring you to this place. There are wounds, too - and you go there, and let God’s healing mercy heal.
But like Janus, we look back, and then turn forward. Inevitably our orientation is toward the future, God’s future. Today’s agonizing sorrow, or today’s heady success, will be eclipsed. Martin Luther King, coping with terrible setbacks, said “I am no longer optimistic, but I remain hopeful.” Optimism says everything will be better tomorrow; but hope is prepared for whatever happens tomorrow. Optimism depends on you and me doing better; but hope depends on God. The year to come is in God’s hands, and I would put myself into God’s hands now, and all year long.

And so we pray that classic John Wesley prayer for the New Year: I am no longer my own, but yours. Put met to what you will, rank me with whom you will; put me to doing, put me to suffering. Let me be full, let me be empty. Let me have all things, let me have nothing. I freely and heartily yield all things to your pleasure and disposal. And now, O glorious and blessed God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, you are mine, and I am yours.

Christmas Message 2011

2011-12-21T11:40:00.000-08:00

This is not a column about Christopher Hitchens, although his death (or rather, his life) and the losses and doings of Steve Jobs, Kim Jong Il, and whomever it is you wish were here today are why I’m writing. But not really: I am writing to try to explain the Christian message to those the Church has confused, or wounded, and maybe even for satisfied Christians who’ve missed the point, as we all do from time to time.

Within minutes of the announcement of Hitchens’s death, I received multiple inquiries: is he in heaven now? How to respond? “I hope so,” or “I guess he knows now God really is great”? His book, God is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, bugged me. Religion really has poisoned lots of things – but not everything. We poison things quite well on our own without religion, and we’re the ones who poisoned religion – including Christmas. Jesus in heaven must look down and shake his head over all the froth, the frenzy of self-indulgence. Sure, we remember to toss in a little spasm of charity, a toy for some child we’ll never meet – and then we paste a “Jesus is the reason for the season” sticker on it all so we whose true religion is consumerism feel semi-righteous?

What is Christianity? It is not that God is great. Rather, God is small. What we believe is that God’s greatness is that God became small to win our hearts. Absolute power, the kind Kim Jong Il wielded, intimidates; God wants to be as unscary as possible. Who’s scared of a child? And who can’t identify with God’s self-revelation as an infant? If God became tall, witty, muscular, or rich (or even a mother or father), many of us couldn’t connect. You once were small, vulnerable, dependent, needing lots of love, like Jesus.

And you will be vulnerable and needing the love again one day. We are mortal; our truest carol phrase is “Lo, the days are hastening on.” One day you won’t be here to do Christmas any longer – and you know this, because there is somebody you couldn’t imagine living without who won’t be there Christmas morning, or ever again. I mention this, not to frighten or manipulate. Rather, it’s just reality that we are transient beings, not here for so long – but we never feel comfortable about that. We want more, we yearn for a future, for deeper meaning.

Which brings me to Steve Jobs, and his awful gadgets that require us to be somewhere we aren’t. I fume when I’m with somebody who isn’t there; he’s pecking at a screen, he’s someplace else, but not there either. And yet, this impulse to find meaning somewhere else, this urge to reach for a linkage beyond the room where I am is absolutely on target. This world isn’t enough; we are hardwired to reach beyond. Children know this: they daydream, their world is enchanted, they can believe in the unseen. The story of Christmas is that God is – and God is, even if we are tone deaf to God, even if we are mean to God like Christopher Hitchens or mean to other people like Kim Jong Il.

I suspect this is why God thought the best way to reach us was by way of a child. Big people can make you fight, defend, grab. But a child evokes tenderness. How could a child be the solution to our really large problems, like economic and political turmoil or even violence? If we could remember the little children (as Jesus said once he got bigger) we really would get our priorities straight and stop shooting, grabbing greedily, and bickering. Think Jerry Sandusky. Every one of us is mortified: no one should stand by and let a child be hurt! So God showed us God in the shape of a child, inviting us to rise up and refuse to settle for injustice; children elicit goodness in us.

Notice there is no judgmental attitude in this message. To consider the idea that God entered our world as a child isn’t harsh judgment on anybody. Jesus didn’t sit up in the manger and denounce others, or deliver a lecture entitled “We are right, everybody else is wrong!” Jesus is the affirmation of all people, including you and me. Jesus isn’t my trump card defeating you. The idea of God-down-here is something special we treasure, and it causes us to treasure you, or we’ve missed the point. Jesus is the truth that we are all indelibly noble, worth loving and protecting, and that we can’t help but love other people, and not merely with a toy in December but with food and shelter (which Jesus’ parents had a hard time finding!) all year round.

And so, let’s contemplate the wisdom and hope in God being not great but small, and discover that God really does want to get close, the child being the only hope for such wonderful things as goodness, hope and love.

A Prayer for Thanksgiving Day 2011

2011-11-23T05:56:00.000-08:00

O Give Thanks to the Lord, for He is Good (Psalm 118:1). What shall I render to the Lord for all His bounty? I will lift up the sacrifice of Thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:17).

Almighty, gracious, compassionate and faithful God, we get confused about giving You thanks, as we are more likely to bow our heads and enumerate the things we have achieved for ourselves than to realize what You have actually given, more likely to notice what distinguishes us from or vaunts us above other people than to recognize how, like a good Father, You love and bless all Your children.
So on this Thanksgiving day, we choose to “be still, and know that You are God” (Psalm 46:10), that “You have made us, not we ourselves” (Psalm 100:3). We thank You then

for Dependence, even in a culture that prizes independence, for we need You, we cannot take a breath without You; we are utterly dependent upon You, the way a flower needs rain and sunshine, the way a child needs mother’s caress – and therefore we thank You then

for Life, and not just the fact that I am still surviving, but for the fullness of life, the goodness of being able to see a face, and be seen, my heart beating, the breath I just took for granted, the wonder of rising in the morning to say “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Psalm 118:24), the calm that can weather troubles and anxieties because we cherish the simple fact of being – and therefore we thank You then

for Recollection, as the richness of life is not merely now, but the memories of those we have loved, some of whom we have lost, magical moments, words spoken, kindnesses received, and coming to understand the plot of Your goodness over many years, certainly in the days of Abraham, Moses, Mary, and Paul, and in the lives of the saints, but also in our days and years, and we gladly bear the light burden and humbled delight of gratitude as we reminisce, tell stories, gaze at old photos – which reminds us to thank You then

for the Senses, without which we could not see a smile, the harvest moon, the trees or a deer, without which we could not hear a child’s giggle or words of love, without which we could not smell a bouquet of flowers or danger from the car’s engine; without the sense we could not feel an embrace, or taste our food; and without our senses we would not be able to visualize Jesus, who was God in human form, with eyes and ears, who touched and fed, and made us then to be His eyes, ears and hands, and so we see and feel what breaks God’s heart, giving us more cause for thanks for the privilege of being the answer to somebody else’s prayer to God for help – and therefore, strangely, we thank You then

for Frustration, that inner instinct You have woven into our souls about how things ought to be, a keen awareness that the world is broken, and that things are out of sync not just with our wishes but with your will, so we know to right things, not to be complacent, and thus we thank You for the labors of justice and mercy You to which You call us – and therefore we even realize to thank You

for the Outcasts, the people nobody else wants, the despised, ostracized, or hurt, who are never invited to anything or honored by anybody, who strike us as weird or scary, and yet we know they are not weird to You, but much beloved – and so we thank You for them as they remind us of the breadth and depth of Your love, they help us to reconcile with the secret strangenesses in our own selves, and gift us with the lovely labor of hospitality – something on which was founded another cause for gratitude,

for our Nation, that like all people on God’s good earth, we take pride in our homeland, and pray for better, truer days when we live out our ideals of virtue and striving together for the common good; we might actually be grateful for who we are, and pray for our leaders more than we rage and complain, and even find the way to peace with others who love their nations – and to do so we are aided in all these endeavors by the special people You have raised up to bless us, as we thank You

for Heroes and Saints, many of whom we have known, and miss this day, many we have only read about in storybooks or the Scriptures, and yet they inspire us, and prove the nobility You have planted deeply in all of us, which we will never realize until we learn to give You thanks

for Sacrifice, increasingly undervalued and shunned in our society; yet we rejoice that sacrifice has always been at the very heart of Your way in saving us, and sacrifice remains the highest calling to which we might aspire – and the very idea of “aspiring” stirs us to give thanks to You

for Transcendence, that implacable desire to reach beyond merely what we see, or what we can achieve for ourselves, to soar beyond all we can know or manage, and reach out to You, only to discover You have been not just reaching out to but also embracing us all along when we were too foolish to notice, and that our restlessness is nothing less than You calling us home to Your own loving heart – glimpses of which You grant us constantly, as we thank You

for Beauty, not the shiny baubles we can purchase, but the wrinkled smiling face of a grandmother, the stunning hues in the clouds at sunset, the pinpricks of nighttime light that have been streaming our way for years, a wildflower, a country hillside, an old white A-frame church, a family photo, the autumn leaves, whose beauty is defined in their moment of death, whose frightening specter gives us cause for perhaps the deepest gratitude of all –

for Hope, that there is a future, even beyond what we get done in this life, a day with no sorrow, no failure of gratitude, and all will be praise, celebration, and delight, and we will cavort with saints, and sinners, outcasts and those we have lost, praising you forever and ever.

O Give Thanks to the Lord, for He is Good (Psalm 118:1). What shall I render to the Lord for all His bounty? I will lift up the sacrifice of Thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord (Psalm 116:17).

Change or Die, by Alan Deutschman

2011-10-05T07:50:00.000-07:00

Alan Deutschman opens Change or Die by citing baffling statistics that expose the brutal truth about something in our nature. Knowing change is required, we just don’t change – and sometimes we quite literally die because of it. “A relatively small percentage of the population consumes the vast majority of the health care budget for diseases that are very well known and by and large behavioral. That is, they’re sick because of how they choose to lead their lives. Around 80% of the health care budget is consumed by just five primarily behavioral issues: too much smoking, drinking, and eating, too much stress, and not enough exercise.”

Now healthy folks who exercise, don’t smoke, eat carefully and drink moderately might feel smug – but Deutschman points to health issues in order to expose something more fundamental in human nature. We all indulge in something that is self-destructive – but the point of his book is How can change happen? Mistaken notions dominate American thinking about change. Deutschman speaks of the 3 F’s: facts, fear, and force. We think If we just let people know the facts, they will change – but this is not true. We think fear motivates change, but scaring people with regard to their addictions or their deeply rooted habits only casts a cloud of trembling gloom without producing change. We think force will make change happen – but try forcing an alcoholic not to drink, or a teenager to behave, or … well, fill in the blanks.

Deutschman has studied many programs that work, and interviewed experts in psychology and behavioral dynamics, and his “mission is to replace those three misconceptions about change (facts, fear and force)” with a new threesome, the 3 R’s: Relate, Repeat, Reframe.

Relate: “You form a new, emotional relationship with a person or community that inspires and sustains hope. If you face a situation that a reasonable person would consider ‘hopeless,’ you need the influence of seemingly ‘unreasonable’ people to restore your hope – to make you believe that you can change and expect that you will chance. This is an act of persuasion – really, it’s ‘selling.’” This is why the inspirational hero, the caring mentor, and even a new community of positive folks around you will actually cause change to happen, change that can never happen without a dreamer who can believe in your future, without healthy relationships that foster growth.

Repeat: “The new relationship helps you learn, practice, and master the new habits and skills that you’ll need. It takes a lot of repetition over time before new patterns of behavior become automatic and seem natural… Change doesn’t involve just ‘selling’; it requires ‘training.’” Change takes practice, patience, something like Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours, acting as if you have changed perhaps before you’ve actually come to embrace change on the inside.

Reframe: “The new relationship helps you learn new ways of thinking about your situation and your life. Ultimately, you look at the world in a way that would have been so foreign to you that it wouldn’t have made any sense before you changed. These are the three keys to change: relate, repeat, and reframe. New hope, new skills, and new thinking.”

Deutschman points to an interesting study that compared various therapeutical approaches in counseling – and as it turns out, they all work about the same! “The common denominator, it turned out, was that going to therapy inspired a new sense of hope for the patients… The key factor was the chemistry of the emotionally charged relationship formed by the patient and the therapist or the group, not the specific theories or techniques that differentiated the particular school of therapy.”

The Delancey Street Foundation in San Francisco has an unbeatable track record when it comes to the reform of criminal and drug addicts. The secrets seem to be that inmates are given broad responsibility for the program; they are asked to lead – and from the beginning they are required to behave and dress as if they are professional people. As they begin to act in noble ways, the inner psyche catches up to the outward habits being practiced, and deep lasting change dawns.

Studying turnarounds in corporate America, Deutschman demonstrates that the 3 R’s work not just at the personal level. New thinking, new leadership, and new habits can revolutionize even disastrously dysfunctional businesses. Sometimes even past success can be a barrier to the new changes required for a new day; so change is the one constant! “When you’re locked into the mindset that helped you succeed, then it’s difficult even to think about the profound changes you’ll have to respond to. But if you practice change, if you keep up your ability to change, if you use it rather than lose it, then you’ll be ready to change whenever you have to.”

There are powerful barriers, always, to change. Denial: “When we find ourselves in seemingly intolerable situations and feel overwhelmed by tension, anxiety, and a sense of powerlessness, or when the harsh realities of our lives threaten to crush our self-esteem, our minds unconsciously activate a number of powerful, built-in, automatic psychological strategies to help us cope. We shield ourselves from the threatening and humiliating facts. We banish the bad news from our conscious awareness. And who among us hasn’t been guilty, now and then, of Projection – blaming other people for our own faults? And does a day not go by before every one of us engages in Rationalization? But while our defense mechanisms are helpful in the short run – getting us through the day or the week – they block us from solving our persistent problems.”

Figuring out how to grapple with our past, and even pronounce our past a failure, can be paradoxically a self-defeating battle. Change “demands new explanations for a past that’s now cast in a darker light. The New Self has to come to terms with the Old Self. If it turns out that you can live as a sober, responsible, peaceful, and productive member of society, then why didn’t you live that way in the first place? One of the reasons we resist change, unconsciously at least, is that it invalidates years of earlier behavior.”

To make any progress, we need to recognize how essential it is to celebrate Short-term Wins: in corporations, in recovery programs, in marriages, in politics, “when organizations of all kinds try to change the habitual ways their members think, feel, and act, they need victories that nourish faith in the change effort, emotionally reward the hard workers, keep the critics at bay, and build momentum. Without sufficient wins that are visible, timely, unambiguous, and meaningful to others, change efforts invariably run into serious problems.”

And yet sometimes radical, big change must occur, given the complexities of small changes. Sometimes radical, sweeping, comprehensive changes “are sometimes easier for people than small, incremental ones. People who make moderate changes in their diets get the worst of both worlds: They feel deprived and hungry because they aren’t eating everything they want, but they aren’t making big enough changes to see an improvement in how they feel, or in measurements such as weight, blood pressure, and cholesterol.”

Then there is the principle that we change when we help others change. Studies have shown that therapy is “astonishingly therapeutic for the therapist…" At Delancey the convicts could develop self-respect from helping one another, even though their own knowledge and skills were limited.

All this syncs well with what we believe within Christianity about change. Jesus never mailed out a bunch of scary facts and threatened people into change - although Jesus' churches have tried such tactics. It's about relationships, and a stunningly marvelous vision, empowerment, trust - and yes, practice, developing new habits over time as we begin to become holy, children of God, followers of Christ.

10 Years after 9-11

2011-09-09T04:48:00.000-07:00

   By noon on 9/11, a steady stream of people with a crazed mix of emotions, numb, panicky, teary, enraged, and confused, not knowing what else to do, showed up at churches like mine, even though it was a Tuesday. Much was said that week about God, sanctuaries were packed on Friday and again on Sunday – and now ten years have elapsed.

I try to think of all that has transpired, what has changed, how we are different. We might have hoped America would rise up like a phoenix from the ashes into a grand new epoch of greatness. But the overwhelming emotion I read in my gut is simple, deep sadness. Let me reflect on the sadness, the acknowledgment of which might be the best way to rediscover hope.

   I know precisely where I heard the news, with whom I watched the unfolding horror, and the absolute urgency of needing to speak with and hug those I love but took for granted earlier that morning. A friend’s brother was in one of the towers: he phoned, said he was helping others to get out, and not to worry; we never heard from him again.

We all felt helpless, watching the utter and devastating helplessness of the unrescuable; I wonder about the long-term paralyzing effects of these harrowing images etched in our souls.

   I could not sleep that week, and spent the wee hours in my children’s rooms, watching them sleep, grieving that they would grow up in such a violent world, praying for children I did not know by name whose parents had died in the attacks, or in efforts to rescue others.

   Ten years ago, national pride swelled, and some vow as made to rid the world of evil. Ten years later, the economy is in shambles, and we are still mired in an unwinnable war (launched on the basis of dicey suspicions that proved to be wrong). Saddam and Osama are dead, but evil and violence still stalk the earth. The troubles of the world are so overwhelming we feel impotent, and don’t trust anybody any more. And perhaps we are less willing than ever to ask hard moral questions about the way we pursue security. We may be meaner than we were ten years ago; but if we are, it is because we are scared.

   I’m a bit embarrassed we've proven to be shallow people.  A decade ago this week, there was much talk about our unity as a nation, and that a great spiritual revival would sweep over our people. That marvelous feeling of unity lasted less than a month. Now the rage we should reserve for enemies in distant places is heaped on one another. We have seen the enemy, and the enemy is us; politics is an embarrassment, and we have become a bitter, angry people.

   The hypothetical spiritual revival was even more short-lived. Attendance in worship boomed – for about a week. Now, if anything, religion has been discredited. Wasn’t it a crazed, twisted faith that motivated the killers? And who looks more foolish? Those who say God orchestrated the events to judge us? or those who’d naively believed God would always protect us?

   Where is the blessing from 9/11? If there’s a God, this deity isn’t a genie who shelters us but not others. If there’s a God, it must be a God who cares about all people, all countries, and until we think about a good God in all places, and the way that goodness in God can and should manifest itself through all religions, we will shrivel into permanently frightened, angry victims.

   As a country, we now know what all other countries have experienced through history. Perhaps knowing, we can sympathize, and not intimidate so much as befriend, and maybe move toward the forgiveness and reconciliation that are at the heart of our faiths. We’ve learned that the immense power we wield (as our military still dwarfs all other militaries combined) cannot insulate us from harm; perhaps we can learn to ask how our bigness might foster understanding and peace. Perhaps we renew our claim to the moral high ground.

   Where should 9/11 rank among the days? To me, 9/11 is like 12/7/41, or the day my grandfather died, or the day a tornado touched down and killed a friend, or a shooter rampaged through Virginia Tech – tragic days, solidly and thankfully in the past. Evil probably loves so much attention being lavished on such a dark, violent day.

More crucial, and hopeful world-changing days in the past for us Americans might be not 9/11 but 7/4, when the good of independence was declared, or 1/1/1863, when the unjustly enslaved were emancipated. My children’s birthdates merit pomp and circumstance, for they are days that celebrate life, not death. Is Ground Zero sacred ground – a place where evil pumped its fist? Or is it the labor & delivery room? Or our sanctuaries where we pray and hope? or the classroom where a student gets a bold idea?

What dates changed history? Christians point to Easter, Jews to the Passover liberation from bondage in Egypt; other traditions have their sacred, life-giving days as well. A graduation? A wedding? These are days with a future, with hope and joyful optimism. After a decade of grieving, fear and anger, might our next decade become one of a revival of courage and hope? Can we shake off the numbness and come back to life, to be the people who’ve been knocked down but get back up, unified not by rage but by hope, the kinds of people envisioned by those who signed on 7/4, the noble who celebrate Easter, Passover, birthdays, weddings or graduations? We reached out for meaning and help, love and hope, on 9/11. Might the best memorial be a new reaching out, and forward? Perhaps we may hope this 9/11 that there is such a God who can open a new window of hope, and the phoenix of goodness does finally rise from the ashes.

Mental Illness and Great Leadership

2011-08-31T20:51:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I enjoy the Colbert report far more than most sermons I hear (including my own). In a recent episode, I giggled as Stephen Colbert interviewed an author – and I promptly ordered the book: A First-Rate Madness: Uncovering the Links Between Leadership and Mental Illness. This poor author, Nassir Ghaemi, not surprisingly was bested by Colbert (and gently criticized in The New York Times), but the book is wonderfully thought-provoking, and perhaps could prompt some intriguing discussion among religious professionals.

Himself a psychiatrist (and specialist in mood disorders) who teaches at Tufts, Ghaemi explains with great clarity various dimensions of depression, mania, hyperthermia, neuroticism, and other mood disorders, and then assesses the way some of our most brilliant leaders – especially during times of crisis – have suffered from these at-times debilitating illnesses. We may be familiar with Churchill’s “black dog,” or the intense darkness into which Lincoln would plunge, the overwhelming depression of Martin Luther King, Jr., or the near-suicidal bouts of agony endured by Gandhi, the scary symptoms exhibited by Gen. William Sherman, or the frantic mania of media mogul Ted Turner – not to mention the self-evident insanity of tyrants like Adolf Hitler.

What we are unfamiliar with is Ghaemi’s best insight into the function of the suffering. It is not that these titans overcame their illness, or managed to achieve much despite their illness. Ghaemi persuasively illustrates the way depression fosters not just sympathy but realistic assessments, the way the manic can be energetic and creative when others are sunk in despair, the way survivors of inner torment develop a kind of resilience, without which leadership breaks down during times of duress. The sane, men like Neville Chamberlain or George W. Bush, simply do not have the stuff during a crisis; they do fine when all is running smoothly; but in times of peril and national distress, they simply cannot rise up and lead heroically, having never suffered much themselves. For those who combat mental illness, darkness is not a strange land; horror is not an unfamiliar terrain.

Can you say “theology of the cross”? How many of the great saints, theologians and heroes through Church history might Ghaemi analyze and discern to be laden with mental illness? Luther, surely; Francis, no doubt; Teresa of Avila, beyond question; and all those freakish ascetics like Simeon Stylies (squatting on a pillar for a few decades? Are you kidding?). And what might this mean for ministry, and even for clergy evaluations (on which I wrote last month)? Can we imagine a search committee pleased that a prospective pastor suffers bouts of depression? Can we conceive of a day when a minister’s self-reported manic-depression would be cause for the people to think “Now we are on the verge of stellar leadership”? Don’t we hide our darkness? and at best seek ultra-confidential support if something is awry in our heads? We all know we all struggle internally, but isn’t there a game of pretend or obtuse optimism that, even if everybody else wages dreaded combat against mental issues, it is the clergy person who should be immune – or long since healed?

Eugene Rogers (After the Spirit) wrote that the Spirit has so arranged things that our limitations are intended for our benefit. Could it be that our darkness, our craziness, is not merely a burden to be overcome, but an actual gift of the Spirit to the Church? and not merely to those individuals among the Body who battle darkness, but actually the Church as the endangered institution that is is? If the Church is indeed in its own “dark night” (as Elaine Heath wisely claims in The Mystic Way of Evangelism), don’t we need the unstable, those who have barely hung on by a thread, women and men who’ve been to the abyss to lead, for the unromanticized and terrifying but yet peculiarly hopeful gifts of inner pain to be used for the benefit of God’s Church?

Knowledge, Learning and God

2011-08-17T18:49:00.000-07:00

     Knowledge is underrated these days – in at least three ways, and all three are of profound important for the Christian enterprise.
     We hear all the time that what you know doesn’t matter so much as what you do. But how is action driven by knowledge, or perspective, or viewpoint? Isn’t knowledge the springboard, the impetus for behavior? If we had more solid thought, wouldn’t our action be more purposeful, and anchored in something meaningful, instead of mere frenetic busy-ness (even in the name of God)?

     In our society, knowledge is reduced to a the lowly status of a means to an end. We get an education – but why? To get a good job, to make money, to get ahead. But once upon a time, knowledge was simply good. To know a fact from history wasn’t potentially valuable; it was itself of great value. If we know something, our minds are then close to God, for God knows history, all that has happened; God knows science, how things work and why they are as they are (since, after all, God made all things); God is the ultimate mind, and when we know, we are close to God.

     Who gave you your brain? God gave us minds whose potential we barely tap. I think God wants us to learn, to know, to be aware, to believe truth matters, to sift through the garbage of chatter and get to the marrow of things. God wants us not to think as the political cranks wish for us to think, all ideology and no fact; God wants us to think deeply, factually, but with wisdom, and perspective – to see what God sees, to understand as God understands.

     Some foolishly think knowledge is at odds with God - that faith is somehow anti-intellectual, or the abandonment of thinking. God is puzzled, and saddened by this misconception. God wants more knowledge, always, for truth is at the very heart of God.

     We can’t say I’m too old, or I already know what I need to know. We learn all the time; it may be news of heat in the Midwest, or that a FB friend’s kitten did something cute (with photos supplied); it may be a new conviction you’ve come to after listening to a pundit, or politician, or perhaps Steven Colbert. What am I learning? And from whom? Whom do I trust as teacher? Political ideologues? Novels? My neighbor, or coworker (after a few cocktails)? Jesus invites us to be attentive to what we know, what we focus upon, what we soak up, and why what matters actually matters to us – and if any of what we know brings us closer to God, or makes us wiser.

     Finally, knowledge changes things. Dictators and muckrackers want to shelter us from facts; they prefer we buy into their ideological hysteria. When we know, we understand; when we know, we cut through the nonsense that becomes idolatry and misleads us into bogus behavior and prejudicial judgment. If we know others, we know their foibles, but we also see the image of God in the other person; social psychologists teach us that “familiarity breeds liking” (not contempt). When we know the hard facts, we are motivated to act, to demand things not stay the way they are. We wake up, we now know.

     Jesus didn’t call do-gooders or piety specialists. He called “disciples,” and the word means “students.” Jesus as the teacher, and we are the students, and not just in Sunday School when we are seven years old. Lifelong learning, a quest to plumb the depths of the very soul of God, to think God’s thoughts ever more clearly, to adopt the divine perspective on whatever we perceive in our lives and in the world.

     Nothing is more important for you, for me, and for the future of humanity, than learning. And so we sign up, we embrace some curriculum, not because it is perfect, but because it is there, it is our best chance at knowledge, at mimicking the mind of Christ.

     Our Church, like many churches, offers the marvelous, intriguing, informative set of programs under the banner of Disciple. But we have much more – and even the stuff we put online, emails, YouTubes, and much more, are trustworthy projects to help all of us, together, to know God, and to know what God knows, and to value what God values.

Reason for Education?

2011-08-14T13:20:00.000-07:00

     My son Noah and I have been visiting colleges, touring the likes of Jefferson's University of Virginia and the new surprise near the top of his list, the University of Richmond, schools with teams I've cheered against for years (University of Georgia? and will I really pay a nickel for him to set foot in Chapel Hill?), schools I attended (Duke, University of South Carolina)... and while we're enjoying making the rounds, we're getting a bit bored, as the information sessions led by some admissions staffer, and the campus tours, led by an enthusiastic student, all sound alike. Everybody has special groups for freshmen, flexibility in choosing your major, no rush until 2nd semester, rapid response from campus security, meal cards and stellar food, accessible professors, intramural sports, countless clubs (and you can start your own if you'd like!), and every students has tremendous fun... blah blah blah. Good stuff, but I may lead the next tour, on some campus I've never even seen before. I really could do it.

     What is most startling is the hype, the braggadocio - and not just the sales pitch, but what the presenters know will sell. All this may strike you as obvious - which is why I'm writing this blog. Every school touts their business school, great jobs on the back side of graduation, internships, contacts in the business world, and rankings, rankings, rankings. Every school is #3 or #11 in business, or earnings for their grads, or in med school admissions. When they ask, Are there any questions? I find myself wanting to say Tell me 4 things this school does poorly...

     Actually, I'm more curious about what happened to old-timey notions of what education was for. Aristotle, and most deep thinkers until the past century, would have said the purpose of learning is something like Wisdom. Eleanor Roosevelt said the purpose of education was to become a good citizen. For centuries, knowledge was precious in and of itself, like gold - not because it would earn you some gold, but because it was itself the treasure.
     Knowledge is good - but wait, that was the motto of Faber College in Animal House, where Bluto, Otter and the other Deltas party raucously - but then, even though they made a mockery of their education, most became grand successes in the world post-Faber.

     Certainly I want my son to get a degree so he can get a job. And I want him to have great fun, and make lifelong friends during college. But shouldn't college be the time you explore the deepest questions, and gain a fair amount of depth yourself? Shouldn't college be a time to learn, not to get some loot when we're done, but simply to know, and to cherish that we have a grasp of history, science, philosophy, literature, the arts, old rocks, simply because human civilization is nothing less than all the accumulation of such knowledge gathered together? Shouldn't education help us to be good? and thus good citizens? and people with insight? Might it be that as we go deep into knowledge and wisdom we might wind up earning less money, and find ourselves ranked not at the top of a Forbes survey, but in some lowly place with humble or needy people?

Harry Potter - It All Ends for Parents Too

2011-07-15T06:52:00.000-07:00

The other day, my children and I walked past a Harry Potter movie poster that said, assuming we’d know the film title and history, simply “It All Ends 7/15.” My son observed that he had, quite literally, grown up with Harry Potter, and so he has. From the first film, during which I had to carry him from the theater, so terrified was he by the chess scene, to the last, when he was old enough to drive himself to a midnight showing, Harry, Dumbledore, Voldemort and company have been prominent figures in our lives. I offered to go, in costume, with him and his friends. He laughed, I laughed – and felt some curious mix of silliness, rich memory, and maudlin sadness.

With Harry, we got a head start on many people. Friends from Great Britain had a copy of Harry Potter & the Philosopher’s Stone, with its pricetag listed as 2£ - and recommended it enthusiastically. I read it aloud to my daughters (the last book we would ever read out loud together!), and then purchased one of the first copies of the American hardback, with its oddly changed title, Sorcerer’s Stone.

Harry Potter landed in my sermons. The duly famous “Mirror of Erised” scene: in the inner recesses of Hogwarts, Harry discovers a mysterious mirror, featuring the words, Erised stra ehru oyt ube cafru oyt on wohsi, which is quite simply I show not your face but your heart’s desire backwards. Dumbledore explains that this mirror shows us, not what we want, but “nothing more or less than the deepest and most desperate desire of our hearts.” I placed a lovely wooden floor length mirror at the front of the nave, positioned so that when worshippers came up for Holy Communion they would catch a glimpse of themselves being handed a piece of bread.

My deepest desire probably would have been for J.K. Rowling to stop writing books, and for no more movies to be made, and for my children to stay young, in those glorious moments when parents and children share the sound of stories, having climbed into a bed together, and when children, when frightened, bury their heads on their father’s shoulder. I lost track of Harry Potter after the third book, and have seen some but not all the films. My children began reading them, and going to movies, on their own, or with friends.

This is, of course, the way of the earth, and I am happy they have grown up with tales of good versus evil, where children make mistakes and yet have magical powers and understand the battle for the good, and exhibit considerable courage. A minister friend, of a very different denomination, went public with his rage against Harry Potter. I tried to talk with him, and he shouted that the popular books and films were creating wizards and sorcerers. I explained to him that my children loved Harry Potter but, try as they might, they could never get a broom to respond to the command, “Up!”

But my children though have grown Up!
That mirror of Erised doesn’t predict the future, but it does give a bit of a glimpse into the past. Harry sees his deceased parents – and as I gaze into it, now that “It All Ends,” I think of the ending of a childhood, or three actually, and wonder if, when all is said and done, I might be the man Dumbledore described: “The happiest man on earth would look into the mirror and see only himself, exactly how he is." Or perhaps see himself, with his children, their ages a bit blurry now, the desire a grand memory to be cherished, and never forgotten.

Memorial Day and Sunday morning

2011-05-31T14:22:00.000-07:00

So, after receiving hundreds of emails and Facebook posts in response to my conversation-starter about how to think about Memorial Day on a Sunday morning in worship, I came up with this sermon - and it seems to me that after 30 years of dancing around or oversimplifying things, this is a fair, theologically robust approach. I'd love for you to watch/listen (click here), and let me know what you think.

Disturbing Attendance Trends

2011-05-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

When denominational authorities toss out the word “metrics,” I get very nervous, and I detect a morale crusher for clergy serving faithfully in daunting parishes. But I do find myself caring about numbers. The fact that we count bugs a few folks, but I like to say I would far rather than 1,483 instead of 1,482 in worship, because it’s the one, who counts.

Here is the most disturbing numerical trend I’ve noticed over the past decade. But first, a couple of good numbers to establish context. I believe a reasonable measure of a congregation’s health is attendance at high holy, non-Sunday worship moments. A major goal of mine in the four parishes I’ve served has been heightening the importance of Ash Wednesday, Maundy Thursday, and Good Friday. In the parish where I serve, attendance at these has quadruped over the past decade. I hate braggadocio attached to such numbers – but as these are sorrowful, penitential days, there’s no real triumphalism in this claim. People have gotten more interested in the Theology of the Cross, and I’d count that as a positive metric.

During this same decade, our membership is higher, and attendance at Easter (when even Donald Trump attends Church wherever he is) has climbed upward more than 50%. So here’s the distressing, deeply troubling numbers. The so-called “low Sundays” (the Sunday after Easter, the Sunday after Christmas, the Sunday after school lets out) have seen, during this decade of growth, astonishing shrinkage. Our Sunday after Christmas attendance has shriveled, gradually, by about 60% over the past 10 years. July and early August numbers are drifting downwards, and noticeably.

What about Mother’s Day? When I first entered the ministry 30 years ago, Mother’s Day rivaled Easter: packed houses, immense enthusiasm. But here we crossed an intriguing threshold six years ago: Mother’s Day, for the past 6 years, has had fewer in attendance than either the first or third Sundays in May.

I wonder if other clergy can corroborate such utterly unscientific but accurate enough metrics. What does it mean when the genuinely optional Sundays (as opposed to Easter, which is mandatory even for pagans) create a yawn, or a fishing or golf junket? What does it mean when Mother’s Day, when Church once was simply part and parcel of honoring Mother, becomes a seizable opportunity to relax by the pool or head to the coast? What if summer, for increasing numbers of our folks, becomes a vacation from worship? Even an uptick on Ash Wednesday or Good Friday: this self-evident measure of spiritual progress might be an illusion – as those coming might be seeking a kind of temporary fix, getting into the “experience” of Holy Week, which is a far cry from actually making constant worship as basic to life as breathing.

I know wiser people than I counter, saying people may not attend so much, but it doesn’t mean they don’t care. I know people are downloading sermons on their iPods. But if a growing Church, which can corral big crowds some of the time, witnesses a lackluster commitment over the long haul, what does this mean for the ongoing life of the Church? I have no good answers for these questions, but quite a few gloomy ones.

Conducting Beethoven's 6th

2011-05-15T20:04:00.000-07:00

What a treat: today we drove to hear the marvelous Winston-Salem Symphony perform Beethoven's 6th symphony. I'm positive no one in the room enjoyed it nearly as much as I did. When I was a little boy, for some reason, we owned an album of the lovely "Pastoral" symphony, and I listened to it (why?) over and over, until I knew every note. I would stand in my basement, put the needle to the vinyl, and begin conducting my imaginary orchestra, small flicks of the wrist for the soft moments, grand gestures for the booming crescendos.

When I saw the brilliant maestro, Robert Moody, guiding the orchestra, I could have sworn he had to have been peeping through a window in my childhood home. What a thrill it was seeing and hearing, live! for the very first time, this music I have loved for nearly five decades. I saw the violins, and the crucial woodwinds, and noticed the crowd thrilling to the music.

Music imprints something profound on the soul, resurrecting memories, pointing us toward the sublime, instilling gratitude and a swelling of hope. I wish I had words to explain the joy, the emotion - but this would be like summarizing the meaning of a poem in a single sentence, or explaining a painting. It's a symphony, one that has stood the test of time, and this one even passed the notoriously daunting kid test: a child fell in love, and remembered, and finally saw.

Homosexuality and Ordination

2011-05-12T12:08:00.000-07:00

Like everyone with a pulse, I've been interested to read what the Presbyterians are doing with respect to ordination and homosexuality - and am getting peppered with questions about us Methodists. The polity differs in an interesting way: a Presbytery can say Gays can be ordained, but Presbyterian congregations choose their own pastors. In Methodism, if we ordain anyone, that person might become the minister of any Church. So Methodists, predictably, are... more nervous? about such decisions.

We also have debated this every 4 years, and will again next year; the usual outcome is a majority wish to uphold the traditional stance of not accepting homosexuality as a blessed lifestyle, and not ordaining homosexuals. When we did this in 2008, I tried to guide through what I thought was a productive way out of the impasse: to declare that we quite simply disagree on the matter. This was defeated by a 54-46% margin - which left us in the peculiar position of, by a small majority, saying we don't disagree??

Here is my odd thought, and I don't know of anyone else who has made this case: the issue of ordination is totally different from the question of whether we accept homosexuality in general - and I certainly don't mean we might accept homosexuality in general but not ordain. To me, ordination is about God calling someone into holy vocation - so who are we to say God can't call, or hasn't called, or will not call, anybody into ministry? Ordination is the recognition of God's claim on someone for a holy vocation, which isn't about a preference of partners or a lifestyle. To debate lifestyle choices seems like something we ought to do. But to question whom God might call into ministry?

In the Bible, God seems to use all sorts of people, because God quite simply wants to use them. Who am I to say God didn't call someone into this ministerial vocation?
If any of you reading have any thoughts on this notion of the separation of the question of ordination from that of sexual preference in general, I'd love to continue the conversation.

cheering bin Laden's fall?

2011-05-02T04:59:00.000-07:00

I was a minute from falling asleep when Lisa said “Osama bin Laden is dead.” My mind raced to process this. Was he found dead in some remote place? We switched on the news, and the details began to reveal a stunning story. Some swirl of emotions were touched off in me. Finally!

But I (perhaps alone…) was a little bit puzzled, and then mortified, to see my fellow citizens swiftly taking to the streets, shouting, waving flags, pumping fists… and I wanted to text each one of them to say “No, no, stay home, be quiet.” I think, like everyone else, I am disturbed, and frankly a bit fearful, when I see news video from other countries, and a rabid throng is shouting approval for some terrorist act, for the downfall of some American citizen/soldier. Somehow I want us to be different, not to match evil cheer for cheer, but to be humble in the face of death.

Yet I do not yet know what to think. Maybe the wise take a few days to let the news settle in, to reflect, and only then to respond. Yes, evil must be kept in check if at all possible; brave Navy SEALS apprehended a criminal - which had to be done. After 9/11, I agreed with those who said it isn’t so much a war on some vague “terror” out there; rather we are faced with criminal activity which must be dealt with. And we have also seen the face of sin, revolt against God, who is not pleased with terrorism.

I noticed a quick Facebook post just minutes after the news broke. Lots of people were typing in various Bible verses about victory over evil – but this post quoted Proverbs 24:17: “Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice.” Is that right? I think of the old rabbi who was asked if the angels in heaven celebrated the drowning of Pharaoh and his chariots in the sea when Israel escaped, and he said No, they wept.

Christians, and frankly all sane people, have no cause to be sympathetic with Osama bin Laden. But the wave of glee seems a bit out of kilter for followers of Jesus, just not the right mood somehow. Good: justice was done – but I’m feeling quiet, humbled, grieving if anything over the past decades of so much anger and loss of life across this planet associated with bin Laden. I guess I’m realizing the craziness of the world, the tense rage that afflicts this planet that gave rise to Osama bin Laden, is still out there.

So I wish we could just be still, and pray, and wait for wisdom. Heroic soldiers did their duty; but it’s not a sporting event, it’s a moment of the specter of death in a chilling history of human sorrow. I can’t see cheering, but maybe that’s just my weirdness, and after a few days of tossing these events around, I’ll wave a flag and holler for a while.

Do Christians and Muslims Worship the Same God?

2011-03-16T10:46:00.000-07:00

How wonderful of Miroslav Volf, a native of Croatia, distinguished author and professor of theology at Yale, and friend of Christian and Muslim thinkers around the world, to write such a thoughtful, helpful book: Allah: A Chri stian Response. Understanding from personal experience and astute observation all that is at stake in the conversation between Islam and Christianity, and grasping why it breaks down most of the time, Volf declares that his book “is about the extraordinary promise contained in the proper Christian response to the God of Muslims for easing animosities and overcoming conflicts.”

Acknowledging what many in the public may not realize – that “most conflicts between Muslims and Christians are not of a strictly religious nature,” that much of the violence is about oil, politics, rage, economics, and race – Volf notes that religion does play an important role in what’s tense in our world. Holy sites pose problems, as do evangelistic efforts by both parties, and legal and moral issues in places where Muslims and Christians live side by side.

DO WE WORSHIP THE SAME GOD?
Volf’s primary question is: “Do Christians and Muslims worship the same God?” His firm, and brilliantly fathomed answer, is Yes. And he isn’t a simplistic pundit blandly declaring that all paths to God are valid, or that all religions are really the same. He writes as one of Christianity’s wisest, most faithful theologians, who embraces classical, orthodox expressions of the faith. He also doesn’t allow that extremist versions of Islam or of Christianity speak for the faiths as a whole. Let me restate some of his argument with some block quotations:

“Christians and Muslims worship one and the same God, the only God… What the Qur’an denies about God as the Holy Trinity has been denied by every great teacher of the church in the past and ought to be denied by every orthodox Christian today… Both Muslims and Christians, in their normative traditions, describe God as loving and just… The God Muslims worship and the God Christians worship – the one and only God – commands that we love our neighbors… Christians and Muslims have a sufficiently robust moral framework to pursue the common good together… Christians should see Muslims, who give ultimate allegiance to God as the supreme good, as allies in resisting the tendency in contemporary culture to see mere pleasure, rather than justice and love, as the hallmark of the good life… What matters is whether you love God with all your heart.”

Some common distinctions observers make between Islam and Christianity turn out to be off the mark. The idea of Christianity as “reasonable” and Islam are “pure will” is faulty. Islam’s God, Allah, has many names, none of which permit a capricious, sheer violence; Allah’s names include the Merciful, the Just, the Seeing, the Hearing, the Knowing, the Loving, and the Gentle. We see in Islam “the self-binding of God to mercy, justice, truth, and reason.”

Volf muses on the two greatest commandments as Jesus Christ formulated them in the Gospels. Muslims need some convincing that Christians believe in just one God; Christians need some convincing that Islam is about love of God and neighbor. He strives to explain the true unity in the often-misunderstood doctrine of the Trinity, and in the divinity of Jesus. Regarding Islamic love, Volf reminds his readers the “only a minuscule fraction of 1.6 billion Muslims are suicide terrorists and only a small minority of Muslims approve of their acts… Normative Islam condemns suicide as well as the killing of innocent.” Citing the Qur’an and many Islamic theologians, Volf concludes: “Like Christianity, Islam is a religion of love. Indeed, many Muslims might even argue that in practice Islam is much more a religion of love than Christianity because, over the course of its history, they believe, it has been less violent than Christianity… When some Christians, for instance, insist that Muslims worship a violent deity bent on war whereas they worship the God of love, this may be true with regard to a specific group of Muslims (say, the takfiris and the jihadists). But this is not true with regard to the God of the Qur’an as interpreted by the great Muslim teachers throughout history.”

As a footnote to his lengthy case that Islam is a religion of love, Volf does allow a slight distinction: “Christians affirm unequivocally that God commands people to love even their enemies. As God loves the ungodly, we should love our enemies. Though Muslims insist that we should be kind to all, including those who do us harm, most reject the idea that the love of neighbor includes the love of enemy.”

COMMONALITIES WE SHARE
So do we believe in the same God? Obviously what we believe about God has similarities, and yet differences. Volf points out that “we don’t need to subscribe to identical descriptions of God to be referring to the same object.” Quite obviously, “Muslim and Christian descriptions of God are clearly not “completely identical.” But Volf, probing whether we focus on differences or similarities, asks where our hearts are: “Those who take the ‘differences’ approach are a bit like those who rejoice in wrongdoing. Those who take the ‘commonalities’ approach are a bit like those who rejoice in the truth.”

What do we have in common? Many things, as it turns out. “The oneness of God (tawhid) is the principle at the very heart of Islam – and Christianity, once we grasp the essence of the Trinity. God is good in God’s own being and beneficent toward creatures. As it turns out, Christians and Muslims agree on this. God commands that we love our neighbors as ourselves. “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you” (Matt. 7:12). In the Hadith (authentic sayings of Muhammad): “None of you has faith until you love for your neighbor what you love for yourself.”

We begin to notice “quite a few things on which we agree: 1. There is only one God, the one and only divine being, 2. God created everything that is not God, 3. God is radically different from everything that is not god, 4. God is good, 5. God commands that we love God with our whole being, 6. God commands that we love our neighbors as ourselves.”

What about language? “Should Christians reject ‘Allah’ as a term for God?...They should not. ‘Allah’ is simply Arabic for ‘God’… Thus all Arabic Christian Bible translations of John 3:16 say, ‘For Allah so loved the world…”

Volf tries to answer common Muslim objections to Christianity – such as the idea that God might “beget” a son. “The issue here is the meaning of the word ‘begotten,’ not the substance of our understanding of God. Christians do not think of ‘begetting’ when applied to God as a physical act…. The divine is neither male nor female (for how could such a thing be contemplated in divinity)? Moreover, ‘begetting’ in God does not result in an offspring spatially distinct or in any way independent from God, a godlike being or another god. ‘Begetting’ is a metaphor used to express the idea that the Word, which was from eternity with God, is neither a creature nor some sort of lesser divinity...” “Christians reject worshipping Christ or anyone else in place of God… The Christian creeds and the great Christian teachers reject dividing the divine essence no less adamantly than do Muslims and Jews… The beliefs of some Christians can be contrary to what Christian creeds and the great Christian teachers advocate… In statements that address the doctrine of the Trinity, the Qur’an may well be targeting the beliefs of such Christians, for what the Qur’an rejects in this regard, Christians ought to reject as well.”
Volf urges Muslims, and Christians, to remember “how different God is from any creature, how profoundly mysterious God is…but also beyond numbers. ‘One’ and ‘three’ do not apply to God the way they apply to human beings or to any other thing in the world… God’s oneness is not such that God is one more in any numerable series whatever. God is not one thing among many other things in the universe…”

In all these matters, Volf makes a careful distinction between the God in which we believe and the way we understand, describe, or worship that God. We do not often reflect on Christianity and Judaism when thinking of Christianity and Islam – but Volf correctly reminds us that “the New Testament writers, mostly Jews, assumed consistently that the God of the Hebrew scriptures and the God of their fellow Jews was the very same God they worshipped… The debate with Jews was about how to describe God properly…and how to worship God truly… The debate with Jews was never whether Jews and Christians worshipped the same God.”

Within Christianity, there has been and is intense disagreement about how to speak of God. Volf roams through the annals of history, assessing Sabellius’s God, Arius’s God, Athanasius’s God, Luther’s God… all of whom differ even in crucial respects, yet we never have thought they were describing different Gods, or even an idol or a false God. “The debates were not about which god was the true God, but which description of the one true God was correct. I suggest that we understand the debates between Muslims and Christians about the nature of God in a similar way. They are about how to describe truthfully the one God in whom both believe.”

POLITICAL PLURALISM
Volf’s largest interest is in us learning to coexist peacefully on this planet. He calmly suggests that “if Christians and Muslims (along with other religions) are to live under the same roof, it is important for them to affirm political pluralism and not just democracy… The world God created is one as well, the defenders of monotheism rightly insist… A single unifying truth binds all human beings, and the same demands of justice apply equally to all.”

Volf believes we can be passionate about our own faith, even downright evangelical about it, and still coexist peacefully with those of another faith who also are passionate and evangelical. “Some Muslims and Christians are committed religious pluralists. Most of them, however, are religious exclusivists… Can religions exclusivists be political pluralists, however?... I mean the view that all religions, though not considered to be equally true by those who embrace them, are equally welcome in a given nation or state. A state like Britain, for instance, where Christianity is an established religion, may prefer one religion to all others for historical or practical reasons and yet give full freedom to others and seek to be impartial toward them within these constraints. From my perspective, such a state would count as politically pluralistic… It is an uncontested fact that many Christian and Muslim religious exclusivists endorse the impartiality of the state toward all religions and the right of each to engage in public debates… Nahdatul Ulama, the largest Muslim socioreligious organization (with over 40 million members)… avowedly pro-democracy and pro-pluralism.”

There is a message Christians need to hear: “The church is not the church of any nation or people. For both Christians and Muslims, God is not a tribal deity; since God is one, God is never ‘our’ God as opposed to ‘their’ God. If possessive pronouns are appropriate at all, ‘our’ God is as much ‘theirs’ as ‘ours.’ Both Muslims and Christians agree that their common God is just and merciful and requires human beings to be just and merciful in all their dealings.
Volf even speculates about the way to discourage extremism – in Islam or Christianity. “Extremism thrives where reasoned debate about important issues of public concern is absent… Religious truth claims, like any other truth claims, invite counterclaims and encourage public debate. Respectful debate about the truth claims of religious groups is one of the best antidotes against religiously motivated or legitimized violence. Acknowledgment of a common God: For Muslims and Christians each to worship a different God would mean that one group is made up of idolaters while the other worships the true God… Adherence to the command to love neighbors… a stand against prejudice: Prejudice and demonization are forms of falsehood… We don’t need to agree with the views of Muslims; we just need to be civil rather than mean-spirited as we disagree.”

Volf's deft negotiation of unity and difference, otherness and sameness, is consistent with his earlier work for which he has become duly famous. In this case, his generous but rigorous assessment of the connections and differences between Christianity and Islam help us know ourselves and others better, and might stand a chance at bringing a little peace...

Love Your Enemies and being reasonable??

2011-03-02T05:49:00.000-08:00

New blog on my other blog site on how "Love Your Enemies" need not be tossed aside simply because of what we think are hard questions... Click here!

15 days - Revival2011!

2011-01-10T06:26:00.000-08:00

So you can watch my video message (and the life journey reflections of others) – but then follow for the full 15 days with these daily times of quiet, a short Bible passage, some thoughts, a prayer, and a song! And if you have intellectual or emotional questions about God, or life, of following Christ, look at our Q&A page or just email me (james@mpumc.org). Share with me your thoughts, quandaries, and new insights as we move along!

Revival2011 is here! View NOW!

2011-01-07T15:33:00.000-08:00

Revival2011 is here! It’s 7pm on January 9 as this goes online! Read, view the linked videos below, think and pray - and email me when you're done: I want to hear from you! After lots of preparation (on our part, and hopefully yours too!) we begin what we’ve jokingly called “not-your-grandmother’s-revival.” Some of that is about style, as we are using modern media platforms like Facebook, Twit ter, email and blogs, and also because we aren’t asking for you one big emotional moment. Yes, there is a big decision every person needs to make – and you may actually need to make that big decision a few times, many times in life.

But there are a host of little decisions that make or break the big decision. Revival, or conversion, or a serious faith in Christ, isn’t any one single thought or settling accounts with God: it’s a whole new life, manifested in a deep sense of joy, new habits, a steel strength in the soul to weather tough times, becoming physical instruments of Christ in the real world. That doesn’t happen overnight.

So we begin 15 days with a big event tonight. Those showing up in our building this evening find their seats, singing informally together as others gather. Then we begin with an amazing little intro video: “In the beginning was the Word” (you can watch this on YouTube and imagine you are there!). Then some fun, raucous singing along with Jimmy Jones: “Over my head, I hear music in the air! There must be a God somewhere…”

With images (some of which you see here!), dance, and a couple of dramatic readings, the crowd is drawn into my main message – and you can get that message right now: I sat down in front of a camera a couple of weeks ago, and got the substance of it in just 11 minutes. I hope you will watch this, now, and perhaps forward this to friends or family. It seems to me like it’s the most important thing, ever, not because I’m saying it, but because people over the centuries have found hope and life in this message – and in making a positive commitment to this message.

We also will watch pretty moving video clips of some of our Church members, people just like you, telling how they came to know, trust, and delight in Christ: you will want to watch and listen, now!

My message, and theirs, is an invitation to believe in Christ, to make a serious commitment, to feel the joy, to take a giant step closer to God, and to the life you crave. But no 11 minute message is enough. That’s where the 15 days come in. Starting tomorrow, you will get an email each day (or find all of them online now), with an image to reflect on, a Bible verse to read and weigh, some thoughts I think are essential, and even a link to a song (if that’s the kind of thing that stirs you). Stick with this 15 day program! Give it some time; don’t rush; we even ask you to be silent for a little bit of time each day.

During this time, if you have questions (of course you do!) about God, or the Bible, or other religions, or your life, come to the “ask anything!” sessions I’m offering, or check out this Q&A page – or email me (james@mpumc.org). It makes my day when we explore questions together; and I believe questions are good – and at the same time, questions can insulate us against taking steps we need to take to follow Christ. You can love without having every question answered, can’t you? And maybe we can resolve some questions and get unstuck.

Then on January 23 we’ll ask (again, but more definitively) for a commitment, a decision, a big decision that will embrace a thousand little decisions). Give us 15 days. Give yourself 15 days. Give God 15 days (or at least 15 minutes each of those 15 days).

12 year old wishes God HAPPY NEW YEAR!

2011-01-04T04:34:00.000-08:00

This morning I heard from a mom whose 12 year old was saying her prayers on New Year’s night: She started her prayers like she usually does, “Dear God, thank you for this day…” And then she said, “Oh! And Happy New Year to you!” She went on to thank God for many things of 2010, and prayed for 2011. Later on she asked me if it was weird to wish God a Happy New Year. I thought about it and told her that I thought God appreciated it – that she would take the time to tell Him that. But what was really neat is that we talked about what would make for a “happy new year” for God. That is, what would make God’s 2011 really happy, and what could we do about it?

She went on to share what I seemed to notice this year: we say “Happy New Year,” and it’s a simple seasonally-appropriate greeting, not much more. We don’t exactly commit ourselves to helping the receiver actually have a Happy New Year. But the mother-daughter conversation raises a lovely question: what would it mean for us to commit to help 2011 be a “happy” year for God?

It’s easy to say Oh, it’s God, God is infinite, omniscient, ineffable, cradling the entire universe in omnipotent care: does it make sense to think we might make God “happy” or “unhappy”? Yet the Bible’s best insight, one shared by Christians for 2000 years, is that God is all heart, God feels even more than we do, and it’s quite personal with each one of us: we have the capacity to delight God’s soul, or to break God’s heart. This delight or heartbreak happens when we make big decisions, or small decisions, when something just happens to us or we think we are in control of things.

The fascinating quirk in this is: when we break God’s heart, our own hearts feel hollow, or thin, or even vaguely sad; and when we delight God’s soul, when we make God happy, then – and only then! – we discover that we really are happy, or even joyful.

2011 is here: Happy New Year – to you, O God? Here’s a New Year’s resolution: I will pray, and try hard, and trust beyond what I’m capable of, that 2011 is a year in which my thoughts, words, deeds, lifestyle and big and little decisions bring happiness to the heart of God.

Revival2011 is upon us. January 9, 7pm, kicks off 15 days of what I dream of being a significant beginning to us making God – and ourselves – happy in 2011, and beyond.

The Work of Christmas: Revival2011!

2010-12-30T05:19:00.000-08:00

If you’ve listened to sermons or paid attention to some of the cards and posters I’ve noticed over the years, you may be familiar with Howard Thurman’s marvelous words that help us imagine a Christmas that does not end, but begins:

When the song of the angels is stilled,
When the star in the sky is gone,
When the kings and the princes are home,
When the shepherds are back with their flocks,
The work of Christmas begins:
To find the lost,
To heal the broken,
To feed the hungry,
To release the prisoner,
To rebuild the nations,
To bring peace among people,
To make music in the heart.

On my street we see who is the fastest to get their Christmas tree undecorated and out to the curb. This year, one appeared, felled, on Christmas morning! The dumpsters and recycling bins are overflowing, the round of visits conclude and we are back to work, back to school – we’re back to normal.

And yet the normalcy of the time when the song of the angels is stilled is peculiar. We wear a new sweater. We are sporting a few new pounds – so we redouble our resolve to exercise and eat oatmeal instead of Moravian sugarcake. Maybe we make New Year’s resolutions, although I suspect this custom is going out of style – as we are a cynical people, or at least we recall previous years’ resolutions and how they never came to fruition.

And yet maybe, just maybe, the turn in the calendar feels like a new chapter, a new beginning, getting out of bed onto what just might be a new day, that 2011 might be the year we get there, somewhere over some rainbow, and things calm down, we calm down, we find new love, we become fit or finally find work or eventually discover why we exist. Methodists for decades got people to come to worship on New Year’s Eve, and make pretty courageous commitments to become prayerful, holy, to find the lost, feed the hungry, bring peace and make music in the heart.

I believe God told me, when I was in Utah back in August, to make 2011 a year that won’t be just another year, but the year you and I and others get serious about God and the life of faith, when we stop poking around the edges, or play-acting, or dabbling in spirituality, and become joyful, dogged, happy, committed followers of Christ. Revival2011 is this simple thing, and you can think of it as the Work of Christmas: give me 15 days, and I deeply believe that nothing will ever be the same. It’s hard in our skeptical culture to say such a thing – but I really believe this.

On January 9, at 7 pm, we are having a revival, not old-timey in its form (we’ll have cool music, video, dance…), but hopefully compelling in its invitation to make a big decision. But all big decisions live or die by a whole series of little decisions – and over the following 2 weeks I’ll walk us through those little decisions that are big! By January 23, if you’ve given us 15 days, I believe you’ll be glad you invested the energy, to give Jesus and a serious, joyful faith a chance.

It's not about becoming perfect: forget that! It's not about knowing everything; you may well harbor nagging questions - intellectual questions, or profoundly emotional, personal questions - that keep you at some distance from God. I will offer myself entirely to you in person or online to try to wrestle with you on these - and to help us see we don't have to have every answer before we can follow. Every relationship has its questions and uncertanties - but we still love.

And Why Jesus? Spirituality takes countless forms, so why bother with a guy who lived 2000 years ago, and is much derided in bestselling books and movies these days? I will try to share primarily my own personal story of why I care about Jesus, why my whole life is about at least trying to follow Jesus - why I love Jesus. I'm just asking you to hang with me, be open, grow, grapple, dig, reflect, take the time to do Revival2011 with me.

It’s the Work of Christmas, and now it begins. It will be some work, for you to come, or catch our online versions! – and the result will be that music in the heart you might have been missing all these Christmases and New Years.

The Christmas Train

2010-12-22T05:37:00.000-08:00

Somehow, through the seemingly prehistoric technology of "slides" (later scanned into digital), I have a photo of me, five years old, on Christmas morning 1960, with my prized Lionel train. Like many children, I loved that train, added a few cars and signal crossings for a few years, then forgot about it. But that train made a stunning reappearance, one that brought a healing Santa never had in mind when it was first delivered.

Eleven years ago I was pecking at my computer keyboard, in the throes of trying to devise a sermon for the Sunday prior to Christmas. My week was slipping by, nothing was happening amid the sprawl of books and much grimacing. My five-year old son, Noah, kept playing in the room, showing me toys, grabbing at my arm, making bizarre noises.

Finally (and it is embarrassing to tell you what happened next) in exasperation I said, “Son, you just have to get out of here; dad has so much work to do.” Noah responded very calmly, but with words that worked some violence in my soul: “Okay, daddy, I’ll leave. I don’t mean to annoy you.” As I turned to see him walking out, I saw myself walking away from that same spot, but 39 years earlier.

I shut off the computer and my foolish busy-ness, went into the attic, and pulled out two grey “Red Ball” moving boxes. Inside were wads of newspaper – the Philadelphia Inquirer, dated October 14, 1964. A huge photo of Nikita Kruschev, a box score with Johnny Unitas’s stats, an ad for a Rambler. Nestled in the crumbling paper were chunks of metal track, then a caboose, an engine, a cattlecar – the Lionel train set that had rested untouched in various storage rooms and attics for some sad number of years.

Midway through connecting some of the track, Noah ambled into the room. His eyes flew wide open: “Daddy, what is this?” “This was my train, when I was a little boy, like you – and now it’s our train, together.” He was duly impressed, and after a few minutes, he exclaimed, “This is the coolest toy ever. I bet this train cost a hundred dollars!” I was tempted for 1.3 seconds to calculate the value of those Lionel cars at auction – but instead I told the truth: “Oh no, son. It didn’t cost a hundred dollars. It was free.”

Like my son walking away, we “mourn in lonely exile here until the Son of God appears.” Thank God that God is never busy, never annoyed. And what he gives us costs light years more than a hundred dollars. What he gives us costs so much that it really is free. God gives us no “thing.” God gives himself, on the floor with children of all ages, those who are nice and those who are naughty and those who are a messy but beautiful mix of both. God pokes us with a little finger, with a cry. And the wonder of it was described once by Barbara Brown Taylor:

“His name is Emmanuel – the God who is with us – who is made out of the same stuff we are and who is made out of the same stuff God is and who will not let either of us go.”

CLOSE TO SANTA? OR CHRIST?

2010-12-15T06:09:00.000-08:00

Closeness. We crave closeness, emotionally and spiritually – but not always. Somebody I don’t know that well gets in my personal space, and I edge back. But the one I love? the one I want to be loved by? I want to get as close as possible.

I think Christmas is nothing more or less than God’s desire to be close to me, to you, to us. We can fairly easily conceive of God as some kind of distant power that made the universe happen. Or – sadly – we harbor a Santa Claus view of God, a jolly guy far far away who does show up once in a great while to give us things we’ve wanted (or need), but then he doesn’t stay, he zooms back to the North Pole. In fact, Christmas (ironically!) may be to blame for our bland, convenient, un-close view of God.

This must grieve God’s heart: we believe in God, but we’ve never let God get close. Somehow I have this funny photo of my mother taking me to Santa when I’m one year old – and I’m terrified; the Santa in question does seem a bit grim... I like this, though, because we should be quite terrified at the prospect of God-as-Santa, that we’re on our own until we think up a request, and then we pray (letter to Santa…) and hope God delivers.

If God merely delivered – even if God always delivered everything on our list! – how tragic would it be? You might be satisfied with a big pile of things, and making your life happen on your own – but I find a hollow place in me nothing in this world can fill. I find my mind stretching beyond the visible. I find my heart yearning for more love than all those who love me can muster. I know I must be part of something larger than me or even the best life I can arrange. I know that whenever I die it won’t have been long enough. God has planted in me a tangle of confused feelings that all add up to a need to be close to God – even if I forget that and get tricked into thinking one more gadget, one more achievement, one more relationship will be enough.

We’re planning this modern day Revival2011 – and what it’s really about is getting close to God, asking God to stay, to stick close, to love, and be loved. Skeptics get puzzled by Christianity, but I would think we might quite naturally gravitate to the love we desperately want. God wanted to get close.

How close? God stepped down, and became quite small, and vulnerable – and stepped down into a young mother’s arms. What is more beautiful, or tender, than a mother cradling her newborn? She hold him strongly but gently; she sings audibly but not loud enough to awaken him; time stands still, and all the wonder of the universe is concentrated in that very small spherical space of her arms around the small boy. All is calm, all is bright.

That is how close God wants to be to you. Can you take a big step toward God in Christ? Can you become small, humble, and let yourself be held, in the quiet calm? Don’t you cherish the possibility of such love from a God you really hope will stay?

Not Embarrassed to Talk about God

2010-12-07T10:32:00.001-08:00

A while back I posted a blog about Dorothy Day - but didn't mention one of her most intriguing thoughts: "If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because I have not been embarrassed to talk about God."

Christians talk about lots of things, and even express their admiration for their church or a mission activity (or occasionally even the preacher!) quite readily. But do we say much about God?

In yet another blog a while back, I shared my jittery concern with the state and future of faith, echoing the sentiments of Kenda Creasy Dean (Almost Christian) who says we aren't against God at all, but our faith is not very robust - and God rarely is thought of or mentioned. She says that for the life of faith to be vital, we need to talk, and listen, and listen and talk, about God with others.

Can we begin a few conversations about God? The fear, I know, is we will embarrass ourselves, or somebody else; I don't have a scintillating story, or Frankly I'm confused about God, or I know a little about the Bible but not much - or conversely we might turn the volume up too high, with I had a vision of heaven, or Jesus spoke to me just a few minutes ago, or I've learned to pray constantly even during tedious business meetings.

Maybe our God talk is like children's coloring: there may be lines but they don't really matter, and all drawings are lovely. We say something about our sense of God, our wonderments, the shadows and the light - and it gives someone else permission to share, and we hear ourselves and others saying something about God. Say you're confused; I'll guarantee you your listener is too. Say something positive you've felt or known; your listener probably needs a glimmer of hope. Probably, what God wants most is quite simply to be spoken of, to be noticed, to be a topic of some importance.

At our Church we're planning a modern day Revival early in January (watch for details): one goal will be to free us up to say something about God, and to listen to others, to grow together.

Maybe we practice over dinner, or on the phone, or in an email... Dorothy Day, after all, achieved a fair amount simply because she was never embarrassed to speak of God.

TIME and the EVERYDAYNESS

2010-11-30T04:46:00.000-08:00

I’m already tired, and December doesn’t really begin until tomorrow. In Sunday’s sermon, I tried to talk about time – and how it’s like some rambling freight train picking up too much speed… and it’s full of just everydayness, which winds up not feeling very… full. Groceries to be bought, stuck in traffic, folding laundry, picking up a prescription, a dull meeting, scurrying off to a party you feel like you need to go to, vaccuming – and you look up and 5 days, or 5 weeks, or 5 years have just whooshed by.

We need more, we want something richer, more profound, some real love, a purpose – and we think that until we get out of that everydayness, that dull routine, we’ll never find what we’re looking for. Maybe we go online, check Facebook, listen for the ding of a text message, and we look, maybe out of habit, maybe hoping that what we really are needing but haven’t gotten just yet might just be in there somewhere.

The presents are coming! as are the guests, the parties, even the sweet Church activities. But will it be enough? Empty nesters miss their children, and the grieving miss their spouses, as do heartbroken, ditched lovers – and what we miss really isn’t something so profound or fantastic, but the everydayness, just sitting on the couch, washing the dishes, that kiss goodnight, hollering “Can you roll the recycling out?” – and maybe we can realize that life is the everydayness, that the love and meaning are in that everydayness or nowhere.

No grand journey around the world or to a resort, no perfect party with fantastic people, no sizzling gift, climbing Mt. Everest, nothing actually is sufficient to provide the fullness we seek. Partly, God wired us this way, so it might dawn on us that we crave something beyond, that we aren’t just cockroaches or squirrels; but also that we might learn, mysteriously, to find God in the everydayness.

The best thought in my sermon I stole from George Ragsdale’s sermon earlier in the morning – but turned out he’d stolen it from another preacher… Once upon a time we clergy spent Saturday nights running bulletins on mimeograph machines, which were maddeningly difficult to use, and you couldn’t avoid an hour of retyping, or the telltale ink all over your hands and shirtsleeves. One older minister recalled one exasperating effort, and in his chagrin hollered at God, “You called me into the ministry to do this???” Then he noticed that the maddening mimeograph machine was perched on top of the church’s old, no longer used Communion table. Carved into the wood were these words: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

The everydayness. Can we notice what it’s resting on? Can we let a little voice whisper into our ear, every time we’re fumbling with a to-do list or hauling out the garbage or running late in the carpool or picking up a neighbor’s mail or … whatever we might be doing – “Do this in remembrance of me”? Maybe that’s the coming of Christ during Advent. Mary, after all, had to sweep the floor, she had to stack little bits of wood for a fire to cook supper, she rocked her baby and wipe his brow when he had a fever, her arms ached as she squeezed out the laundry – and she probably forgot from time to time that she was doing it for Christ. Advent is the season to remember, and to notice, or else the gale force wind of the month will leave us frazzled and for yet one more year it will end and we will have missed it.

REMEMBERING MY GRANDPARENTS

2010-11-05T19:41:00.000-07:00

I’m encouraging readers to remember special people who have made life lovely, who made us feel loved, who taught us to love and give us good reason to love God. My mind gravitates to my grandparents, Mama and Papa Howell. I can announce with total objectivity that they were the finest, most loving and wonderful grandparents any child has ever had. If you want to contend with me on behalf of your own, I should warn you that I will never concede – and simultaneously suggest that instead of arguing with me you should simply fall on your knees and give thanks to God.

There is a profound theological meaning in people like grandparents or your parent’s home town, if you are blessed to know such loveliness. I spent most summers (all summer! – what could they have been thinking when they took me and my sister in?) and Christmases in Oakboro, a little town with one traffic light (with the colors upside down) you reach by driving through Locust, hang a right at Frog Pond, bear left at Big Lick, and you are there. My grandparents were poor, uneducated people, yet dignified, devout in the best possible way, solid, admired citizens – but none of that really matters. They loved me.

When I would be deposited on their step, they would rejoice, and sweep me up in loving arms. When I would leave, they appeared to be sad. My grandfather had this little liturgy of departure: we would be stashed in the car, my dad would back out of the driveway, and begin to accelerate toward that lone traffic light down the road. As if suddenly remembering what he’d forgotten, Papa Howell would hurry toward the car, imploring us to stop. I would roll down the window, he would reach in his pocket, and press into my palm a 50¢ piece. In those days, my monthly allowance was 50¢, so I needed a little money – but I never ever spent a single one of those precious gems. To this day, when I stand in a line and a priest presses a piece of bread into my hand, I recall the gift of Papa Howell. He was giving me money, in a way – but really he was giving himself, he wanted me to be able to clutch a piece of him with me when I was far from him. Jesus must have had the same idea in mind when he thought up little pieces of bread that are really just bread, and yet they become for us the Body of Christ, and we are healed, and renewed.

I learned the meaning of theological vocation from him, although no one used hifalutin terms like “theological” or “vocation.” He was a rural mail carrier, and he let me ride with him from time to time. He was put on earth to deliver the mail, as if on a mission from God, dispensing kindness with the mail, handing out chewing gum and crackers to children, delivering medicine and groceries along with postal packages, stopping at times to pray with persons along the way. He could perhaps have landed a better job somewhere else; but he had a keen sense of his crucial place in the functioning of his small hometown.

Now I have his desk, his mail pouch, a few 50¢ pieces, and his Bible – just things, but they carry him with me through life decades after his passing. How did he pass, you ask? The night is still clear in my mind: the telephone rang – one of those “burglar alarms of the heart,” as John Irving aptly described such calls. My dad, or perhaps my mother, shook us out of bed. Hurry! Now! – he’s very ill. We piled into the car and drove hard for hours, silently, along the road we had traversed so many times filled with joyful anticipation. Not long after dawn, we finally pulled up in front of the house. We just sat, as if paralyzed, as my father turned off the car, opened the door, and somberly walked up to his brothers and sisters, who were standing under the giant oak tree where we had all played and churned ice cream a hundred times. My sister and I could not hear what was said, but we saw my dad and his siblings fall on each other’s shoulders, and they cried out loud.

In that moment we children learned that life is precious, that love is intense, that a life could matter so much. There is a beauty hidden in grief. Love unfailingly plunges you into excruciating agony, but we would not think for a moment of loving any less. By analogy we could say “God’s love is like that,” and so it is. God’s love costs God and costs us everything, and tears are shed. But the Gospel is not merely illustrated by this moment of my grandfather’s death. God was under those trees and in my gut, as God is always palpable when God’s children suffer but manage to stand and take another breath. In a grown man’s sobbing we overhear God’s own lament. In a child’s stricken agony we are enveloped by the heart of God.

Mama Howell lived a few sad years past his death, through days of illness, pain, and I think much loneliness despite the tender care of family. Papa and Mama Howell live in me; they are the grace of God rippling through my vascular system, populating my head with happy thoughts, girding me to believe in myself. Recollection of grace can do that to you. Under that same old oak tree where my father and his brothers wept, we used to churn ice cream in the gathering afternoon shade. Mama Howell would prepare her milk, peach, chocolate, sugar concoction, my sister would carefully shimmy chunks of ice down into the perimeter of the churn, lacing the ice with salt, and Papa Howell would sit on a little wooden chair and turn the crank. Filled with expectation, I was surprised, eager, a little hesitant, when Papa Howell summoned me to the task: “Whew, I’m getting’ a little tired… James, come over here and help me.” He hoisted me over his knee and into his lap, and I cockily grasped the handle, and pushed with all my might. His hand rested on mine, strongly, helping in that gentle way that you don’t notice until you’re grown, turning, turning, turning again, the voice of praise right in my ear, “Good job, good job.”

Seminary taught me formal prayers to unfurl in a hospital room, but my grandfather taught me how to be a faith healer. When I would get the hiccups, my aunts, uncles, and cousins would ply me with foolish remedies until he arrived home. “Hiccups? I know just the thing.” He would lift me up, and situate me on his lap, facing forward, straddling his legs – and then he commenced with a voodoo of taps and bumps from his fingers and fists up and down my back, a pattern of here, there, harder, softer… and the cure worked every time. His cure worked, I now know, because I had faith in the healer. Somewhat hilariously, I found myself years later, knowing precisely what to do when my own children complained of their inevitable hiccups. A spoonful of sugar? Holding your breath? Sipping water upside down from a glass? I waved off such ineffectual antidotes, and confidently placed my children on my lap, back toward me, and began the patterned thumps. Hiccups cured! – and I would tell them I learned this medicine from Papa Howell. If my children have their own children one day, I trust they will know what to do.

Laughter regularly rang through the house – and out of doors. Papa Howell took his young son-in-law Johnny hunting. Some doves flew overhead, Papa Howell aimed, and shot – and the doves kept flying, prompting him to announce to Johnny, “Did you see that miracle? Those dead doves I killed just flew away!” We missed some of his funniest material, since in attempting to tell something humorous he would laugh so hard we couldn't understand him.

Mama Howell was holy in her own different way. She hummed and occasionally whistled old hymns as she cooked, swept, knitted or rocked. Although they were poor, she dressed every day, and took great pride in her jewelry, hats, and shoes. And yet when my sister and I would get into her closet and dress up, she never seemed to mind. Her room was adorned with Degas prints: those pretty, elegant ballet dancers. She knew and appreciated beauty, although she could not afford many beautiful things. Her real treasures, we at least believed, were her grandchildren.

One day my sister and I had a little contest in that room with the Degas prints. We climbed onto her old sewing machine, the kind with a flat pedal that operated the needle, to see who could make it go up and down the fastest. Jann went first, and pedaled rapidly, the needle whirring away. My turn came, and I pressed even harder, the needle a mere blur. Not to be outdone, she shoved me off the bench and began bicycling the thing herself even more recklessly – and then we heard the piercing of an unanticipated voice behind us: “Children?” We turned, mortified. If your parents catch you doing such things, you ar e scolded and punished. But it was Mama Howell, and she knew precisely what to do with such hoodlums: “Children? I just pulled some peach cobbler out of the oven; don’t you want to come get some?” And there was always room at her small table for one more – a passerby who happened to be in the yard around mealtime, a cousin at loose ends, a laborer with time on his hands.

And there were others in Oakboro: my great grandmother who was spry and funny into her late 90’s, my Down syndrome cousin Sharon who was always seemed to be the happiest of us all in that she was content with a few shiny coins in a cheap purse, my Uncle Famon who raised cows, pigs and chickens, and my Aunt Zonia. I suppose my grandparents wearied of me at times, so I would get farmed out to others in town, and I loved staying with my great Aunt Zonia. I’m unsure how an orthopedist would diagnose my aunt, but her hands were gnarled, underdeveloped somehow, fairly useless, awkward. You would think, “Oh, those are not good hands, they must be a problem.” One night, a stiff fever and awful nausea laid me low. In my misery, Aunt Zonia stayed with me all night long, and with her twisted fingers she took a cold cloth and wiped my brow. She could have held back, thinking “Oh, my hands are bad hands, I wish I had soft, supple fingers instead of these cramped digits.” But she took my small hands in her hands as best she could, and she didn’t let go.

As a little boy, I discovered another hidden beauty in her hands. Returning home from the grocery store, she couldn’t carry the bags into the house. She really needed me. No pretending: I was important at Aunt Zonia’s house. I had a skill that made a difference. An odd quartet of hands the two of us shared: I could serve this woman who had served me. Years passed, and she phoned me from the hospital. I found her in intensive care, where she lay with a brain tumor, not expected to live long at all. Proud that I had grown up to be a man of the cloth, she asked “Will you preach my funeral? and will you pray for me?” I took her hands, or perhaps it was she who took mine, and we prayed. We offered her up to God.

When I think back on the meaning of my life with my grandparents, and in that unbeatably glorious town of Oakboro (which might not strike you as much at all), I am grateful to God beyond all measure for Papa Howell, and for Mama Howell. Have I idealized them? Probably – but what’s wrong with that? And how many lovely moments have I forgotten? And I do believe this, which I have written in a book coming out soon: “If you are lucky like me, you have fond memories of summertime junkets to the home of your grandparents. For me, it was a house that is factually small now when I drive by as a grownup – but as a child it was large, large in love, large in special treats, large in cousins and fun, another home, one without problems or homework or chores, a special place of a more unconditional kind of love. Does God give us such places in our memory so that we will learn to desire the home for which God destines us when this life is over?”

And if the God I believe in, the same one Mama and Papa Howell believed in, is to be trusted, then we will all be together again, in that home that will be better than any idealized dream we might fathom.

ALMOST CHRISTIAN - OUCH!

2010-10-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

There are only a small handful of people on this planet I love more than I love my books. And I adore even the difficult ones, those described by Mark Helprin as “hard to read, that could devastate and remake one’s soul, and that, when they were finished, had a kick like a mule.” But the worst kick I’ve received from any book in quite a long time came from Kenda Creasy Dean’s Almost Christian – depressing, alarming, with the feel of what it must be like when the doctor says “It’s malignant and there’s little chance of a cure,” and you knew it all along but had let yourself fantasize that everything would really turn out to be okay.

Dean teaches at Princeton, and is smiling in all her photos; but she's not making me smile. Her book runs 250 pages, but the diagnosis could be captured in something as short as a blog. On the very first page the bell tolls: “American young people are, theoretically, fine with religious faith – but it does not concern them very much, and it is not durable enough to survive long after they graduate from high school. One more thing: we’re responsible.”

I knew that, but kept deceiving myself that maybe teenagers have a robust faith they just don’t put on display, sort of the way they don’t tell you about the inner workings of their minds, and don’t reveal the complexities of their relationships. But Dean has done the research, and I’ve followed up by asking a few teenagers myself, and it’s plain as day: teenagers aren’t against religion at all. But when asked to give an account of what Christianity is, they fumble, stumble… and the basic sense they have of the rich treasure that is the Scripture and two millennia of rich theological tradition and practice is that Christianity is about being nice, feeling good about yourself, and perhaps being able to call upon God for assistance in the occasional emergencies of life.

That’s pathetically thin – and yet Dean says this is what parents either believe themselves, or it’s the most parents have been able in their shyness to put on exhibit for their children; and she claims this is what the churches have trumpeted as well, through a long diet of vapid sermons, youth group programs about hip topics like “friendship,” and a hollow round of Church activities that are more about being nicely busy than about anything courageous or radical. We are close, but only “almost Christian.”

Dean’s studies have turned up a paltry few – perhaps as high as 8% of all teenagers – who have a lively faith, pray regularly, read a Bible and have a sustainable spirituality. But for the rest, God, holiness, prayerfulness, and the Bible simply are not on the radar screen. Partly they have lived with screens: they are wired, connected, on Facebook and texting, with ever attenuated attention spans and no exposure to the quiet of contemplation or the absorption in the printed Word of God. Partly they simply have witnessed the most superficial faith imaginable in churches and their homes.

The gloomy failure of a generation of parents and their churches to do better is exasperating. I suspect we thought that by some mysterious osmosis kids would soak up faith, or be sharper at the life of faith than we are (the way they are more internet savvy than we). Or we imagined that if we simply deposited them in a Sunday School room on the Sundays we happened to be in town, and sent them to youth group, and on the occasional mission trip, all would be well.
What teenagers have no clue about is the kind of thick, deeply meaningful life of faith that understands the curious strangeness of God’s way that doesn’t sit well with our culture, or the delights of being still and contemplating the wisdom of life, or living close to the heart of God in a way that can bring comfort and hope during crises or more chronic agonies, or the vision of who we are as creatures fashioned in the image of God and what that means for our identity and how we interact with others.

This makes me brutally sad, and I simply have to stop looking at Almost Christian, and writing this blog, or driving by the local high school – where I feel I should stop and co-opt that loud speaker system and issue a grievous apology for the failure of the church to do better. We have left our beloved children empty-handed, sending them out into the world with quick brains but hollow souls. We need to apologize to ourselves: no wonder we are so weary, so confused, so angry. We’re “almost Christian,” and therefore miss the real thing.

I try to remind myself that Dean’s title, Almost Christian, comes from a sermon John Wesley preached. He was discouraged but not at all defeated. His whole purpose in preaching the thing was to persuade people to get busy about the endeavor to become “altogether Christian, not an “almost Christian.” Perhaps there is still hope – but we had better get active, right now, with our own reading and prayer, not thinking we will out-entertain the entertainment culture, but offer a vital if bizarre alternative, and decide we will be the kind of people Wesley described – those who can cry out, “My God, my All!”

Wesley’s questions are daunting: “Do you desire nothing but God? Are you happy in God? Is he your glory, your delight, your crown of rejoicing? Do you love your neighbor as yourself? Do you love every man, even your enemies, even the enemies of God, as your own soul? As Christ loved you?” Until we can answer these questions, we have to knuckle under in shame to the doctor’s sad diagnosis: it’s malignant, and the way we are going we have no hope. But “with God nothing is impossible” – so even in this funk Dean has put me in, I believe in miracles. I wonder if we can tackle this – or be seized by the sorry truth of where we are – and let today become the beginning of something new and vital? It's not too late for the younger children, is it? and God can really redeem any of us, teens, parents, churches?

THE BEST BOOK FOR LEADERS

2010-10-09T06:41:00.000-07:00

With the avalanche of books, blogs, and webinars on leadership, why read one more offering by a rabbi/family therapist who’s been dead for 14 years? Because even in its cobbled together state (the author died before finishing it!), Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix is wise and peculiar, hopeful and iconoclastic, and you can learn not only about leading but also about your personal life as an unanticipated benefit. If thinking about your psychic place in your family of origin and the impact of this on how you lead seems intriguing, and if contemplating your own inner balance versus the demands of the moment is appealing to you, if you think emotional maturity might help you get "imaginatively unstuck," then read on.

Friedman, the author of the much- and rightly-beloved Generation to Generation: Family Process in Church and Synagogue, was a genius at applying family systems theory to the life of institutions. Late in life he decided to write about leadership “in a society so reactive that it cannot choose leaders who might calm its anxiety.” We are an anxious people in a stressed culture that demands quick fixes. But leaders miss their opportunities and true calling by “trying harder and harder without obtaining significantly new results.” Indeed, “there exists throughout America today a rampant sabotaging of leaders who try to stand tall amid the raging anxiety-storms of our time. It is a highly reactive atmosphere pervading all the institutions of our society – a regressive mood that contaminates the decision-making processes. It is my perception that this leadership-toxic climate runs the danger of squandering a natural resource far more vital to the continued evolution of our civilization than any part of the environment.”

What might this natural resource be? It is the leader herself, or himself: “The way out requires shifting our orientation to the way we think about relationships from one that focuses on techniques that motivate others to one that focuses on the leader’s own presence and being.” Friedman can talk about the “maturity” or personal wisdom of the leader as a person, not as a leader: “Children rarely succeed in rising above the maturity level of their parents and this principle applies to all mentoring, healing, or administrative relationships.”

The leader is the one who must recognize the emotional forces at play, not only in a given company, but in society at large: “Sabotage comes with the territory of leading, whether in a family or an organization.” The leader’s “capacity to recognize sabotage for what it is – that is, a systemic phenomenon connected to the shifting balances in the emotional processes of a relationship system and not to the institution’s specific issues, makeup, or goals – is the key to the kingdom. Contemporary leadership dilemmas have less to do with the specificity of given problems, the nature of a particular technique, or the makeup of a given group than with the way everyone is framing the issues.”

The issues that make or break us are not technical or even corporate, but inner, and emotional. Like addictive families, we tend to be driven by problems and the dysfunctional. We are all familiar with the way “the most dependent members of any organization set the agendas… thus leveraging power to the recalcitrant, the passive-aggressive, and the most anxious members of an institution rather than toward the energetic, the visionary, the imaginative, and the motivated.” What we fail to attend to is the process of “individuation,” personal growth, especially in leaders, who typically “rely more on expertise than on their own capacity to be decisive.” Not surprisingly, we have an “obsession with data and technique that has become a form of addiction and turns professionals into data-junkies and their information into data junkyards,” and so we misconstrue the “relational nature of processes.”

Friedman seeks the “well-differentiated leader,” one who can “focus first on their own integrity and on the nature of their own presence rather than through techniques for manipulating or motivating others. By well-differentiated leader I do not mean an autocrat…although any leader who defines himself or herself clearly may be perceived that way by those who are not taking responsibility for their own emotional being and destiny. Rather, I mean someone who has clarity about his or her own life goals, and therefore, someone who is less likely to become lost in the anxious emotional processes swirling about. I mean someone who can be separate while still remaining connected, and therefore can maintain a modifying, non-anxious, and sometimes challenging presence. I mean someone who can manage his or her own reactivity to the automatic reactivity of others.”

Staying above this emotional swirl sounds a bit lonely, and it is: “A leader needs the capacity not only to accept the solitariness that comes with the territory, but also to come to love it.” But it isn’t real loneliness; in fact it is all about where you are connected emotionally, and how. Friedman, as a family therapist, understands that “to the extent leaders are successful in their differentiating efforts in their own family of origin, there is immediate carry-over to their functioning in the organizations (or families) which they lead.” I cannot recall reading anything in any leadership book or blog about self-differentiation in one’s family of origin! Indeed, Friedman noted that “it certainly has not been my experience in working with imaginatively stuck marriages, families, corporations, or other institutions that an increase in information will necessarily enable a system to get unstuck. And the risk-averse are rarely emboldened by data…Imagination and indeed even curiosity are at root emotional, not cognitive, phenomena. In order to imagine the unimaginable, people must be able to separate themselves from surrounding emotional processes before they can even begin to see (or hear) things differently.”

Leaders do not wish to be “imaginatively stuck”! Breaking out into new life isn’t about more information or better technique. Rather, hope is all about better questions, uncertainty – and long, hard labor. “The treadmill of trying harder is driven by the assumption that failure is due to the fact that one did not try hard enough, use the right technique, or get enough information. Perseverance can also perpetuate a fix. In the search for the solution to any problem, questions are always more important than answers because the way one frames the question, or the problem, already predetermines the range of answers one can conceive in response. The great lesson here for all imaginatively gridlocked systems is that the acceptance and even cherishing of uncertainty is critical to keeping the human mind from voyaging into the delusion of omniscience. When families get fixed on their symptoms – abuse, alcoholism, delinquency, marital conflict, or chronic physical illness – rather than on the emotional processes that keep those symptoms chronic, they will recycle their problems perpetually. The same is the case when an entire society stays focused on the acute symptoms of its chronic anxiety. For there is no way out of a chronic condition unless one is willing to go through an acute, temporarily more painful phase.”

Indeed, for leaders who are “led hither and yon from crisis to crisis” but wish to lead differently, “there is no quick fix for avoiding a quick fix.” To begin, the leader must forget about the prized virtue of “empathy.” “It has rarely been my experience that being sensitive to others will enable those others to be more self-aware, that being more understanding of others causes them to mature, or that appreciating the plight of others will make them more responsible for their being. Ultimately, societies, families, and organizations are able to evolve out of a state of regression not because their leaders ‘feel’ for or ‘understand’ their followers, but because their leaders are able, by their well-defined presence, to regulate the systemic anxiety in the relationship system they are leading.”

Friedman devotes space to the well-known problem of emotional triangles – and surprisingly, they are not all bad for the leader: “Emotional triangles thus have both negative and positive effects on leaders. Their negative aspect is that they perpetuate treadmills, reduce clarity, distort perceptions, inhibit decisiveness, and transmit stress. But their positive aspect is that when a leader can begin to think in terms of emotional triangles and map out in his or her mind (or even better, on paper) diagrams of the family or organization, such analysis can help explain alliances and the difficulties being encountered in motivation or learning. This in turn can help the leader get unstuck by changing emotional processes and becoming more objective about what is happening. Identifying triangles is also useful in evaluating the maturity of family members or coworkers.”

All such changes are hard, and require the calm, differentiated self of the leader: “As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. Self-differentiation always triggers sabotage. The important thing to remember about the phenomenon of sabotage is that it is a systemic part of leadership. It is only after having first brought about a change and then subsequently endured the resultant sabotage that the leader can feel truly successful.”

The shift Friedman envisions is away from “old world superstitions” (such as ‘The key to successful leadership is understanding the needs of their followers,’ ‘Communication depends on one’s choice of words and how one articulates them,’ ‘Consensus is best achieved by striving for consensus,’ ‘Hierarchy is about power’) to a “new world orientation,” in which a leader’s major effect on his or her followers has to do with the way his or her presence (emotional being) affects the emotional processes in the relationship system; a leader’s major job is to understand his or her self; communication depends on emotional variable such as direction, distance, and anxiety; stress is due to becoming responsible for the relationships of others; hierarchy is a natural systems phenomenon rooted in the nature of protoplasm.”

So Friedman is all about a new kind of self in the leader, an inner strength that is hardly dependent on technique, information, or even the particular challenges of the company being led. Interestingly, in a Democracy, and certainly in religious institutions, there is a wariness of the strong personality. Jim Collins (Good to Great) suggests that corporate vitality does not hinge on the charisma and personal greatness of the leader; in fact, he and others suspect that the strong personality might prove to be counter-productive. Friedman could not disagree more. He certainly would eschew a sick personality that only appears to be ‘big’ on the outside. But the healthiest, strongest personality possible is the leader’s best gift to the organization. “The expression of self in a leader is what makes the evolution of a community possible.” Institutional problems “are not the result of an overly strong self in the leader, but of a weak or no self. Democratic institutions have far more to fear from lack of self in their leaders and the license this gives to factionalism (which is not the same as dissent) than from too much strength in the executive power.”

This is my summary of Friedman’s very wise, if disjointed, book – disjointed because others had to weave together notes and unedited pages into the final whole. But the unusual approach, and deep wisdom, of A Failure of Nerve is hopeful, I believe.

Blogs, Blogs and Books

2010-09-29T16:58:00.000-07:00

The term "blog" makes me giggle, or run through rhymes in my head (fog, frog, smog, bog, dog, flog, hog, slog...), and I would never dub myself a "blogger." But this is a blog, and I have others. Sometimes I write for Duke's Faith & Leadership - and they went "live" (that's the cool blog jargon, I believe) with one today on Inability and Leadership (my specialty); I love the very unleaderly title - "We do not know what to do..."

I also am running a non-blog blog - on heroes of the faith. Our Church is studying great heroes, and I send out emails raising questions and issues from their lives - so I use this other blog for a basic bio and some pix. Schweitzer, Bonhoeffer, Julian of Norwich, Gandhi, and Francis so far. Fun.

My favorite thing, actually has been on this blog, but probably nobody has noticed. I read - and most onlookers add "a lot..." My book budget is absurdly high and will force me to work 5 to 8 extra years at the end of my career to make up for the money lost. When I read something long or difficult, or a bit obscure, I write up little summaries - for some of you who might not get these books read. They are listed over there on the left - Hamlet's Blackberry (a wise reflection on technology), a new biography of Francis Asbury, a review of Bart Ehrman lamely speaking of evil, a Christian commentary on Leviticus (think about it...), a book on serpent imagery, one on women disciples of Jesus, etc. I hope you'll browse some of these and find them beneficial.

The other night one of my children laughed when I knew all the answers to my teenager's study sheet for medieval and Renaissance history. "Oh, daddy, you know so much useless information." And I do. And I would protest the notion that information must be useful. What a waste of a lovely fact or a delightful tidbit from history or art or literature or math - that it should be pressed into some use or another? It's just fun to know.

Or better: I like to think God appreciates it when we know things. God gave me, and you, a brain. Can I glorify God simply by using my brain, by thinking, knowing, remembering, reflecting, accumulating little facts and ruminating on truths that have no function except that they are intriguing, and must reside not only in my mind but even more clearly in the mind of God?

HAMLET'S BLACKBERRY AND REACHABILITY

2010-08-01T19:19:00.000-07:00

The greatest peril to the life of faith is not skepticism, or secularism, or intellectual doubt or the confusion of options. My gravest worry is precisely what you are looking at right now: the wired screen. We are wired, constantly. For decades I could drive to another city alone, but now if I forget my cell I feel panicky; regularly I check email, and Facebook, receive and send texts… but never ask what it all means for how my brain is being reshaped, or how society is shifting inexorably in – well, in what direction?

I went to Brazil and left lots of contact options for people staying here – but why? “I’ve got to be reachable!” God must sigh, and say “Indeed, you’ve got to be reachable” – but if we are constantly peppered with titillating little Facebook posts or texts or emails or blogs or YouTubes or Netflixes (Netflices?), I suspect we flat out aren’t reachable by God. We can’t be with one another: we sit at dinner with a friend but reach for the screen in our pockets… If we can’t be with each other, how can we be with God?

Mandatory reading for any person who is wired, for any person who wants to connect with God, for anyone who harbors a sneaky suspicion we may be rambling rapidly downhill and out of control, is Williams Powers’s Hamlet’s Blackberry. Oddly I read this while I was reading Margaret Atwood’s ominous novel, Handmaid’s Tale, which imagines a society where selfhood is repressed, where freedom is no more… and it occurred to me that Powers is right in his analysis of all we are losing in our technologically-dominated way of life, unexamined, ever more wired and “reachable” – and hence unreachable by all that really matters.

Powers, like me, loves technology, and understands its many benefits; I’m in close contact with lots of people, and can find information quickly. But who are we becoming as a civilization? Powers’s analysis is accessible, funny, and profound. Free time is consumed by relating to dozens, maybe thousands of people via the screens we possess. But the price? “The more connected we are, the more we depend on the world outside ourselves to tell us how to think and live… We don’t turn inward.” What we lose is – depth.

Depth is what makes life fulfilling, and meaningful, but we become increasingly superficial. Home once was a safe haven, a refuge from the busy, frantic world – but now home is even more frantic, for at home we are never alone, and we are never just with our family or friends. We vanish into texts or Facebook, and do not sit and reflect, reminisce, or simply be with one another.

The costs in the workplace are estimated into tens of billions of dollars, as employees flit from email to email, lose focus, and frankly use work time answering personal emails and texts, and surfing sites. The greatest cost is to our sense of self. Powers suggests that our only philosophy now is “It’s good to be connected, it is bad to be disconnected.” “Out there” trumps “in here” every time, and most sadly, our sense of worth is now hinged to whether we receive communications – or not. “The digital medium is a source of constant confirmation that, yes, you do exist and you do matter. However, the external validation provided by incoming messages… is not as trustworthy or stable as the kind that comes from inside. We are forced to go back and ask, ‘Who’s read my post? Who’s paying attention to me now?’”

Powers calls this “needy outwardness,” a far cry from our ancestors’ ability to be alone, to enjoy solitude, to reflect, to become wise, to love, to be present to those with whom we really are present, and who ultimately matter. Do we prefer screens to real people? How might we be people of faith or goodness in such a wired world where we have to “check Facebook,” or can be interrupted by a mere phone vibration?

Powers rifles through history to excavate some ancient wisdom, from Socrates taking a walk outside the city walls (our need for some space, some distance, some down time away), to Seneca’s counsel that we find seclusion even in a crowd, from the advent or printing with Gutenberg and the virtues of private rumination, to Shakespeare’s feelings about little erasable tablets that were all the rage (and the virtues nowadays of jotting down our own thoughts instead of merely absorbing those of others). The chapter on Thoreau is stellar: Thoreau went into the woods to avoid “quiet desperation” in a world that just discovered the telegraph and train. He noted how “we become tools of our tools,” and the way that “when our inward life fails, we go more constantly to the post office” – to look hopefully for a telegraph message! How prophetic of our digital age! Thoreau wrote, by Walden pond, “The man who goes desperately back to the post office over and over to check for a telegraph message is a man who hasn’t heard from himself in a long while.”

Hamlet’s Blackberry includes some simple suggestions: observe an Internet Sabbath, an unconnected day each week. If you are with someone and they reach for their iPhone, simply say “Would you put it aside? I want to be with you.” Work with your hands out of doors; write – on paper, with a pen; cook, commit to two disconnected hours daily, go out and look up at the stars. Trust yourself; go deeply into yourself, or a great book – or the beautiful silence of the world.

I would say read a Bible, close your eyes and pray. The question God asks is, Are you reachable? By being perpetually reachable, we are unreachable – at least by what genuinely matters. The alternative is to wind up like the sorry citizens of Gilead in Handmaid’s Tale, our freedom and joy sacrificed on the altar of a thoughtless conformity to the digital wave.

CLERGY WHO HAVE LOST THEIR FAITH

2010-07-17T07:38:00.000-07:00

While I can feel sympathy for clergy who have lost their faith, I do have a few questions for them, more for their professors in seminary, a handful for Daniel Dennett, and a couple of very basic ones for Solange de Santis. It was the journalist, de Santis, who has just now covered the publication of “Preachers Who Are Not Believers” in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, co-authored by Dennett. Five clergy are studied, and a high percentage of them silently carry an awful secret that would destroy their careers or families. Privately they nurse a shocking disbelief that causes them immense agony and loneliness. To one, God is a poetic human invention. For another, seminary “blew apart” his faith, when he realized there were diverse viewpoints about God. One discovered that what he learned about the historical origins of the Bible doesn’t fit what was taught in Sunday School. Another read a little, and stumbled upon the fact that there are variations in the ancient copies of the Bible, and he wonders if they picked the right one.

I know the loneliness and pain of the clergy, and hard questions that riddle the life of the soul. But I am totally puzzled by this report of de Santis, and these five clergy. Who trained these clergy in seminary? and have they done any reading since seminary? The questions they raise are old, and wisely reflected upon, and profoundly handled by our best (and even our middling) theologians. The Church has always known, for 2000 years, that there has always been diversity within Christianity – which is its beauty: God’s work isn’t a straitjacket, but God is flexible, and doesn’t mind being apprehended a bit differently by me and my neighbor, much less a Terra del Fuegian or a Russian Orthodox priest.

Sunday School has never done a brilliant job of probing historical origins; but Christianity has always known its historical origins, and its mixed heritage of beauty and embarrassment. We have always known there are variations in the earliest manuscripts we possess. But this is true of everything in history: we have divergent versions of the Gettysburg address, and Shakespeare’s plays; encounters between Julius Caesar and Cleopatra are notoriously difficult to specify with historical accuracy – but they certainly were tight. I have personally looked over hundreds of textual differences among early manuscripts, and can’t find a single one that raises the slightest question about the heart of what we believe Jesus said or did.

Bart Ehrman, who has sold more books in this zone than anybody else, acts as if historical questions and textual uncertainties have just been discovered, or that the Church has locked these truths away in secret vaults in order to prop up a bogus institution. But every great theologian in every century has known about, grappled with, and understood what these five clergy somehow missed in their education and reading. I feel for their ache, but I could have recommended a couple of books that could have resolved their intellectual dilemmas.

I’m a bit startled by the superficiality of de Santis’s review of Dennett. De Santis works for The Religion News Service, and their web site claims they are “devoted to unbiased coverage” of things religious. Were I reporter on any other subject, I would ask a question like “Who is this Daniel Dennett who has conducted this research?” or “Is five a decent sampling of clergy?” Five is admittedly a small number of people to interview, but you see immediately that the low number implies masses: we asked five, and Whoa! look what we found! What if we’d interviewed hundreds?

Dennett is indeed a social scientist, but if you simply Google him, you will discover he’s a social scientist with a pointed, hostile agenda when it comes to faith. He has written often, blasting faith, and hardly in the “just the facts, ma’am” vein. I never buy conspiracy theories. But Dennett is one of quite a few authors who have jumped on a runaway bandwagon, and now they feed off one another’s popularity. I stumbled upon de Santis’s article in my local paper’s “Faith” page; clearly the “faith” story we gobble up nowadays is the loss of faith. In a country where candidates for office pander to the religious sensitivities of voters, the bestselling books in America are Sam Harris’s The End of Faith, Dennett’s own Breaking the Spell, Christopher Hitchens’s God is not Great, and above all else, Dan Brown’s The DaVinci Code, in which the eminently learned Leigh Teabing unveils long hidden truths about the manufacture of the Bible, political maneuvering on the divinity of Christ, and a hush campaign about the sexuality of Jesus. The problem is The DaVinci Code is fiction, and much of what Teabing claims in the novel and movie is simply, historically, and verifiably (even to atheist historians) false (read more here!). And what is true in what these authors write is, as we have noted, old, utterly familiar to undergraduate religion students, regurgitated knowledge but cast in a sensationalist spin.

To me, de Santis might have done a bit of interviewing to understand Dennett’s sampling of five – not to find five others who would declare “I really do believe!” or “Profound theology is identical with Sunday School!” or “Doubting is evil,” but to inquire into Dennett’s agenda, and methods. Did the five clergy at some point miss something, and so instead of the implied deduction, that if even our clergy are hiding disbelief, why would those who rely upon them as guides believe? so how could there be a God? De Santis might have noticed the way texts and history and science are regarded as great friends of the vast majority of us in Christianity, not perilous foes to be feared and silenced.

Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Ehrman are wrestling with a straw man, a simplistic, twisted version of Christianity only fools would believe. David Bentley Hart (whose Atheist Delusions humorously dismantles the absurdities of Dennett, Harris, Hitchens and Ehrman) wishes Christianity’s detractors “had the good manners to despise Christianity for what it actually is” instead of a silly, trivialized, watered down version no one has ever espoused – and so do I. We do not mind hard questions, or sharp critique, or even disbelief – but at least make your assault on whom we really are, and refuse to believe in the Christianity that has withstood the test of centuries, for we want to know more, to have any and all illusions dispelled.

Being disillusioned about God or what we may have been mistaught in Sunday School is always a good thing, for to be dis-illusioned is to shed illusions. Most critics of Christianity point to the problem of suffering, and conclude “If God is good, how can there be suffering?” But we have always known about suffering, and the Church has not only caused our share of it, but we have also shared with those who suffer: we see them up close, in hospitals and in shelters we operate, on the mission field and in orphanages, and we would not have anyone labor under the illusion that God fashions some sort of protective bubble around us, or is a rapidly functioning magical salve when something hurts. Our story is about a God who actually suffered, and suffers, and we miss the true God then if we never figure out how to pair up God and suffering, for they are very close, and that is our comfort and redemption.

Or the critics point to the great harm Christianity has done in history. Indeed, we are ready to confess every sin; but have atheists ushered in peace? Hitler loathed Christianity, and Stalin wasn’t exactly a pious man. Are the mockers of a made up Christianity getting organized around this world to alleviate human suffering?

I just returned from a mission trip to Brazil, where I spent time with someone Dennett didn’t interview, and would never understand. Marion Way grew up in South Carolina, and his childhood heroes were Methodist missionaries. He learned Portuguese and offered to try to help hurting people in Angola. A civil war erupted, and he was thrown in jail and beaten within an inch of his life. When they finally let him go, instead of scurrying to safety back in the United States, he asked “Where else do they speak Portuguese?” So he and his wife Anita went to Rio de Janeiro, to live in the poorest favella in the city – in 1962. They are still there, 48 years later, humble, working, feeding children, providing medical care and job training, and all because they believe in God.

But they would not even say much about their faith. This is the real issue: the five clergy Dennett listened to spoke of “my faith.” Have I lost my faith? Does my faith work? Marion Way would be a bit mystified by this thought. He is a person of deep faith, but for him the real reality is God. It is God who saves, God who is always there, God who motivates and loves, God who survives faith or unfaith or doubt or piety or viciousness or any other turn in the history of the world.

Marion Way would know what to do with these five clergy, and even with Dennett, Harris, Ehrman, Brown, and de Santis: he would do what he does with the Brazillian children. He would smile, and hug them, and offer them a bite to eat, and say a prayer for them.

JESUS AND JULY 4

2010-07-03T08:47:00.000-07:00

My mood sours every July 4 - because the day set aside to recall the founding of our country is absurdly debased, and also because Jesus gets pinned on to the ugliest versions of patriotism. I just feel ill.

When our extended family is together on July 4, I attempt my annual reading aloud of the Declaration of Independence (something American families did for decades) - and even though my family is on the high end of an appreciation of history and tradition, this elicits impatient groans... It appears to me that July 4 is pretty much a day 1. to be off work (which won't work for the clergy this year!), 2. to drink much beer (sales set records on this day!), and 3. wave flags and expostulate upon vapid caricatures of what America was actually created for.

The flag? The U.S. flag code stipulates that the flag is not to be worn, should not be draped over a car or truck, or used on any disposable items. Bikinis and beer mugs just don't seem very respectful to me...

Freedom of religion was a cardinal principle for the Founding Fathers - and no matter how much we try to rewrite history, the simple facts are that some of them were quite pious, and others took snide views of Christianity, Church and the clergy. But how loony is freedom of religion when it is trivialized into I will worship God any way I want to! - but how would God wish to be worshipped? Or freedom of religion becomes I'll just stay home and go swimming or sleep in or drive to the beach on a Sunday: just check the Church attendance registers for Sunday morning, July 4... Pathetic attendance, and many of the no-shows are the very people who trumpet the piety of the Founding Fathers and wistfully yearn for the day when America was "one nation under God," when Christianity reigned.

And the co-opting of Jesus onto Americana: the curiously popular painting of John McNaughton, depicting Jesus in the thick of American heroes (including some whose faith would be quite questionable...) illustrates the way we would cram Jesus into a little U.S.A. flag box and make him our own, when the real Jesus came for everybody, everywhere, and his mission didn't seem to be the spread of capitalism or the security of America or the heightening of a single country's prestige, but to lift up the downtrodden, to be a light to the nations (including America!); Jesus is more appalled than I am at the mean-spirited, divisive, absurdly angry emails that fly around, those that spew venom and feed on fear and our darkest side. I don't think the New Testament has Jesus declare "I came that you might get mad, that American might be great, and so that people who aren't doing so well might just try harder and get over it or go away."

When did the beautiful nation the Founding Fathers, who were highly educated, philosophically wise, and respectful people, conceived become a battleground of ideologies, ignorance in constant combat with ignorance, where the loudest, shrillest rancor wins the day? When did patriotism get whittled down to nothing more than anger, heady feelings about wars and weapons, and an edgy bias against people who are different? When did apathy become our true mood? and because we don't study and care only about me and mine, little tasty sound-bytes suit and become the substitute for real political, social, and religious exploration and conversation?

I've been accused of being insufficiently patriotic by quite a few Christians - and this rankles me. I was born on an Air Force base, my father flew in World War II, family vacations - when I was a child, and as I've raised my own children - have been to Washington, Boston, Valley Forge... and I am a voracious reader of American history. Not long after we returned from a trip that included a walk of the Freedom Trail in Boston, some raging conservative said "Never question the President, and if you do you aren't a patriot." Curious - for in Boston, colonists rose up against those who said you could never question authority. And not surprisingly, the conservatives who said "never question the President" are questioning the President constantly now that it's a Democrat in the White House. They should! but they should also notice their own hypocrisy - and we all should recognize and appreciate the goodness of diverse viewpoints within a country where you can disagree without having to shoot one another.

Jesus - not the one swiped by liberals and conservatives in America, but the one who lived in Palestine among the poorest and mortified the powers that were - suggested we love our enemies, and touch the untouchables, and exhibit immense mercy, and live holy lives, not a cocky, prideful, prejudicial existence that feels superior only by criticizing somebody, anybody, blaming somebody, the President, anybody, waving flags while never bothering to get engaged in the real work of citizenship and community-building...

But I am rambling now. July 4 should be a lovely day of memory, history, recalling exalted ideals, and finding happy coincidences between what America was designed to be and what the Church might dream of achieving. July 4 might even be a day to show up at Church and worship God... what a radical notion!

CRASH HELMETS & INCLUSIVITY

2010-06-27T11:11:00.000-07:00

So our sanctuary is undergoing 6 weeks of renovations - and I could only laugh out loud when I noticed all the warning signs posted at the entryways: "Danger: Hard Hat Area." Naturally I thought of Annie Dillard's often-quoted thought from Teaching a Stone to Talk: "I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, to be sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have any idea what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers... and lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense..."

We had to bring in scaffolding, circular saws, and scarily heavy . equipment to render our beautiful sanctuary risky. "Oh, it's dangerous now? How long before it's safe to go back in?" I noticed the subheading on the Danger: Hard Hat Area sign - which adds Authorized Personnel Only. "Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?" Psalm 24 inquires - and the reply, if authoritative for us today, would keep us all out permanently: "He who has clean hands and a pure heart."

And yet, at our denominational annual conference, we had a motion tabled - one about inclusivity. Nobody wants to talk about it: we are weary of the debate on how much inclusiveness is too much. Bizarre to me: it is precisely the necessity of clean hands and a pure heart that requires us to be utterly and uncompromisingly inclusive. Mine aren't clean or pure, and neither are yours - or anybody else's. Inside the building, the chemicals that catalyze the explosion are grace and mercy, which you never find outside a Church. So we realize what God requires, we realize we've whiffed embarrassingly - and that is precisely why we enter, trembling, hoping for mercy, needing nothing less than a transformative explosion of unseen power.

How inclusive then should we be? My small wisdom is this: if any one of us isn't welcome in Church, ever, for any reason, then none of us is ever welcome. God may wake up one day and be grossly offended we ever thought otherwise; God has already noticed, and is grieved - and wishes to strip the place, and us, down to the foundations and start over with us. Danger: Hard Hat Area.

2010-06-19T12:04:00.000-07:00

ORDINATIONS AND LEADERSHIP
This is my year for out of the ordinary ordinations. I flew to Haiti to preach at the ordination of a young man in the community where our Church has a school, granary, and clinic. I think I actually ordained him (with no ecclesiastical authority whatsoever…): after intense questioning in Creole, to which the candidate responded “oui” to every hard question, I was asked to lay my hand on his head and pray. I said “I’m not a bishop,” but in this out of the way place it turned out I was probably the closest thing.

I flew to Liberia to preach at their conference’s ordination service. Ninety ordinands, and a higher number of degrees on the thermometer: immense zeal and a palpable humility on every face, and I felt a bit ashamed of the rock star status they seemed to afford me, whose annual salary may well exceed that of the entire bunch of 90.

I flew to Urbana, Illinois, to a Wesleyan district service where my colleague Kevin Wright was being ordained – and a couple of days later, I looked on my own denomination’s lining up of dozens at a time.

Surely I have some wise reflections from these diverse experiences, but I do not. I am simply in awe of the brute fact that one after another, in this milieu of cynicism and anti-institutional bias, people still put on heavy robes in the heat and line up to get hands laid on them. Each one of these people, in a moment of profound faith or quirky delusion, said Yes to what they thought was a call from God. Not one of them sized up the market, assessed their test results, and thought This is a clever way to prosper in today’s world. To inexplicable impulses skeptics would ridicule, they responded, underwent education and interrogation, and then got sent to places not as famous as Timbuktu to struggle, to try to pray and teach, to lay hands on the sick who quite often die despite the prayers, to people who yawn, who can be petty, who believe fitfully if at all – and then you get old and die doing this?

I am also struck of how little consonance there is between what I have witnessed and the kinds of things we talk about on when we think of the clergy profession nowadays - clergy "leadership" that is. Leadership is a thriving cottage industry, and I’m constantly invited to something or another where we can be sharper, smoother, more successful, to grow the Church, to glisten with administrative acumen, to raise endowments and corral postmodern people into church buildings equipped with snazzy technology.

But this kind of leadership mentality runs on a very different track from the real ecclesiastical processes, and the way people actually answer that mystical call within. When I said Yes, I will give pastoring a try, no one had spoken to me about Good to Great, and I would have laughed if someone had. I was swept up in a frenzy of faith, and wanted nothing more than to go be with some hurting people and pray for them, and to have the privilege of standing up and talking about amazing things I’d read in the Bible. At ordination, none – none! – of the questions are about leadership, or entrepeneurship, or visionary strategies.

I do not yet know what this dissonance means. I do recall an evaluation session of my congregation’s personnel committee. They were weighing my work, and that of my fellow clergy on staff. Rising to what they felt the denominational forms demanded of them, they were laboring over the “needs improvement in…” box; and it is never hard for laity to hatch such a list. In the thick of that endeavor, one woman felt a bit ruffled by this, and objected; in trying to affirm me and my colleagues, she said “Look, these people could have done most anything else for a living, and had an easier life, and made more money. Ministry, to me, looks really hard. I think we should simply consider the fact that God called them, and they said Yes, and we should thank them for doing so, and for being here with us.”

Now, that is no substitute for the real, necessary work of evaluation and professional improvement. But in Haiti, and Liberia, and Urbana, and Lake Junaluska, I watched people of all shapes, sizes, ages, backgrounds, walk slowly forward, kneel, have hands laid on their heads, and rise with smiles, or tears, with family beaming in curious pride, trudging away into the most uncertain future imagineable. Do they know the craft of leadership? Will they master Heifetz or Crouch or Maxwell or Peterson or the bloggers at faithandleadership.com and become wizards of ministry? I find myself uninterested in the answer to that question. I’m in some awe. A bunch of people whose faces I saw, and on whose heads I laid my feeble hands, had said “Oui” to whatever questions were asked of them – by the Church, but more importantly by God. I think all that is left to me is to thank them, or to thank God.

PREPARING TO SPEAK OF BEAUTY AND GOD

2010-05-30T11:20:00.000-07:00

I've been preparing for a talk I’m giving on Monday, June 7, 7pm (to be repeated Wednesday, June 9, 11am) called Talking with God Using Beauty, our Brains, and the Bible. We will look at how Darwin, Monet, Mozart, Michelangelo, Einstein, Charlie Brown, Chopin, and Jewel help us to know God. It’s “multimedia,” meaning I’ve got power point images, and there will also be live music.

For a long time I’ve been reflecting on how we connect with God, and I mean beyond the usual suspects (like the Bible, praying, and worship). What about using our brains (and I don’t mean getting into the old reason vs. faith argument, but simply what we know, or what really smart people know…)? and what about beauty? I’ve written a book on preaching that will come out in a few months called The Beauty of the Word – and it seems to me that we do not think enough about beauty.

Is human achievement, and especially human creativity a gift of God’s Spirit? and if so how does that play out? and how do we wriggle our minds around the wonders of science, art, architecture and music and thereby grow closer to God? What is beauty, anyhow? Why is it so different from cute, sexy, handsome, pretty or "hot"? Rilke said "Beauty is the beginning of terror"... and there is something deep, profound, risky, life-giving about beauty.

If God is Beauty, if Psalm 27 says “One thing I will seek, to behold the beauty of the Lord,” and if even cynics about religion, Bible, prayer and God are moved by beauty, then beauty might be our hope, the only future to faith. What we have in Christianity truly is beautiful, and perhaps we can trust that? instead of striving so hard to be “relevant,” or to prop up traditional norms like the authority of Scripture or the grandeur of our institutions?

What strikes me as I prepare is recalling how awed I have been throughout my life by the things brilliant people who don’t believe in God have helped me understand about God! Darwin gets trashed by Christians, but his life work opened up new vistas, and far deeper explorations of God’s good creation; or I think about Michelangelo, who thought an artist needed to be holy – and yet Caravaggio, not noted for a squeaky clean character, kept up with Michelangelo. I think about the Peter Shaffer play (and the movie) Amadeus, where Salieri is incensed over the way Mozart seems to overhear the very voice of God, and Salieri is comparatively tone-deaf (despite his avowals of holiness). Can God co-opt people who aren’t believers, who aren’t interested in God at all, and use their genius to inspire and impress the rest of us?

How does God feel about music and art that are not “sacred”? Does God really prefer religious music? or religious books? I think of Karl Barth’s quip: what do the angels sing when they come before God’s throne to praise him? Bach, of course. But what do the angels sing when they are off by themselves? Mozart. Does God dig “secular” novels and movies? Might some of the religious pablum be dull even to God? Chopin doesn’t cheer my soul; instead he breaks my heart – but the sorrow his music taps helps me toward God.

These and other questions will occupy me this week in preparation, and on Monday (and Thursday) when I actually present. Let me know any thoughts or questions you might have…

heavens and honey - thoughts on Psalm 19

2010-05-26T16:36:00.000-07:00

C.S. Lewis called Psalm 19 “the greatest poem in the Psalter and one of the greatest lyrics in the world.” At first blush, it looks like two Psalms jammed together, one extolling the wonders of creation, the other a surprisingly cheerful view of the Law. But the two are one, God’s wise plan in making the world and us in it, and God’s will, God’s holy requirements that are wired into the very marrow of all God has made.

Musicians have risen to the words of Psalm 19, most famously in Haydn’s The Heavens are Telling. Others may fall silent or be too busy to sing hymns or to utter thanks and praise to God, but the world around us is never mute. Even scientists who don’t believe in God put the marvelous grandeur of God on display: when Charles Darwin reported what he saw on his voyage on The Beagle (cuttlefish, musical frogs, waterhogs, jaguar, flying spider, tortoises, ostriches), he was unwittingly chronicling God’s glory. Clouds, stars, badgers and barnacles together form a wordless, eloquent trumpeting of all that burst from the mind of God.

In ancient times, the sun was thought to be a deity: Shamash, the Mesopotamian sun-god, Aten, the Egyptian divinity… but the massive fireball of the sun is a small toy, a delicate instrument in the true God’s powerful hand. From that holy hand we receive God’s laws – etched into the fabric of creation, handed to Moses on Mt. Sinai, proclaimed by the prophets, taught by Jesus, penned by Paul, explicated by the Church. God has a will, a way, rules and guidelines – and it is fascinating to hear how this Psalmist literally adored and treasured God’s laws. In a crescendo of praise for the law, the Psalmist trembles, perhaps holding a scroll, and moves from “it’s perfect,” to “this gives me wisdom and salvation,” then on to “rejoicing, joy, a sense of being clean” – and then with poetic boldness, the Psalmist employs sensual images: “the law is more precious than gold, sweeter than honey.” Honey has an alluring taste, and savory consistency in the mouth, and it is through the mouth that the Law was read, recited, and obeyed.

The goal in adhering to the Law, the rich benefit of living in sync with what God has revealed, is to please God – and what could be a higher objective? “Let the words of my mouth, and the thoughts of my heart, be pleasing to You, O Lord” (verse 14). In an earlier email series I explored this idea that our talk (or our not talking!) matters to God – as do our thoughts! Of course they do, since God made our mouths, and our brains, and the sun, moon, rabbits and snails, and the commandments and teachings of the Bible. How can we live one more minute without knowing them? And letting them become our agenda for the day?

Here is the entire 19th Psalm, for you to read, ponder, and even pray:

Psalm 19
[1] The heavens are telling the glory of God;
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
[2] Day to day pours forth speech,
and night to night declares knowledge.
[3] There is no speech, nor are there words;
their voice is not heard;
[4] yet their voice goes out through all the earth,
and their words to the end of the world.
In them he has set a tent for the sun,
[5] which comes forth like a bridegroom leaving his chamber,
and like a strong man runs its course with joy.
[6] Its rising is from the end of the heavens,
and its circuit to the end of them;
and there is nothing hid from its heat.
[7] The law of the LORD is perfect,
reviving the soul;
the testimony of the LORD is sure,
making wise the simple;
[8] the precepts of the LORD are right,
rejoicing the heart;
the commandment of the LORD is pure,
enlightening the eyes;
[9] the fear of the LORD is clean,
enduring for ever;
the ordinances of the LORD are true,
and righteous altogether.
[10] More to be desired are they than gold,
even much fine gold;
sweeter also than honey
and drippings of the honeycomb.
[11] Moreover by them is thy servant warned;
in keeping them there is great reward.
[12] But who can discern his errors?
Clear thou me from hidden faults.
[13] Keep back thy servant also from presumptuous sins;
let them not have dominion over me!
Then I shall be blameless,
and innocent of great transgression.
[14] Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
be acceptable in thy sight,
O LORD, my rock and my redeemer.

The complete ePsalms series is archived on our web site.