September 2011
September 28, 2011
So much of church life is about being grateful. Not just grateful to God, but to one another as well. Because so much of my life revolves around church work, I see most everything that happens around here and I'm grateful to folk for the things they do almost as if they were doing it for me, and not, as I know, for God. Although, scarily enough (for me and any other pastor), when we grow up in church, we tend to think of God in terms of the attitude and personality of the minister we knew best. Which is normal, though we shouldn't stop there. So many times I've met someone or talked to them and been puzzled by their reactions to me as a minister, as if I licked all the red off their candy! And that, by the way, gives me something else to be grateful for. I'm grateful for those ministers who did their jobs well, who spoke to children by name, who were patient with difficult people, who well represented a loving God, because I see how that carries over through the generations, and I benefit from the picture of “pastor” they created in the minds and hearts of those they served.
All that to say this: thanks to those of you who work hard at church, often without being asked. Thanks to Hank Mills, and Charlie and Debbie Williams, for their work on the church hedges and shrubs. Thanks (BIG THANKS) to Hal and Myra Beasley for heading up the Friends and Family celebration last week. That's a big job, and it's not over when you eat your last drumstick and head home for a nap. Hal and Myra and a few helpers were still here, cleaning up and straightening up. Thanks to Greg Hunt for fixing an upstairs leak under a sink and replacing the parlor sink entirely, and Gary Bixler, for many lighting fixture and neon ballast replacements. The remarkable skills of bothe of these guys have saved us a lot of money on plumbers and electrician's bills. Thanks to Bubba Woodfin, who without fail lets the Daytrippers use his personal SUV or a van from the Chapel. Thanks to Judy Brookshire, who picks up and keeps track of our donations to the RuCo Food Bank. And thanks to Robert Hopson, who goes all the way to Nashville every month to pick up the food supplement bags for volunteers here to deliver to ACTS clients. Thanks to Carolyn Wilson, and Carty Roberts, and Debbie Williams and others, for hosting potlucks every Wednesday night, and always leaving the kitchen better than they found it! These, and many others, RITI volunteers, Domestic Violence Program volunteers, CWF shut-in visitors, are people who serve and serve and don't stop serving just because they get tired. People you can count on, people who've learned it's more blessed to give than to receive, people who say 'We are unworthy servants; we have only done what was our duty.'
September 27, 2011
The American Constitution is a remarkable and powerful document and one that would repay study by every American, Even cursory glances and awareness of its purpose would be salutary. Edward Erler teaches Political Science at Cal State, and has an article in Hillsdale College's Imprimis journal on the constitution and limited government. In examining two cases that are making their ponderous way to the Supreme Court, the federal government's challenge to Arizona's immigration enforcement law, and several (more than half, actually) states challenge of the legality of the new Healthcare law, Erler touches on important issues of limited government, enumerated powers, the prior sovereignty of the people over the government, etc. All that is by the way, though you can read more at http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp.
As I said, the constitution repays study, but what it got me thinking about was how little we know it, and how similar that situation is to our acquaintance with the Bible, a document I would make so bold to argue is even more important than the constitution. Fred Craddock, a retired Disciples seminary professor, told a story one time about preaching in a large church in Atlanta as a guest and sharing with his hearers the story of an occasion when he was in grad school in Nashville and stopped in an old diner for a bite to eat late at night. While he was eating at the counter, an old black man came in and stood at the counter. It was late, and Fred was the only other customer there. The short order cook ignored the old black man for several minutes, and when he finally finished whatever minor tasks he was working on, grabbed a paper towel, spatulaed a couple of overdone hamburger patties that had been sitting at the back of the grill a few hours, and in exchange for a few quarters, thrust them at the old man with a “Here. Eat 'em outside.” Fred said he watched this exchange, watched the old man sit out on the sidewalk and eat his burnt hamburger patties from a paper towel, and then finished his late night dinner and coffee, paid his tab, and asked the counterman, “Who's that?” “Him? Ah, that's just old Joe.” Not knowing what else to say, or do, Fred left, walked past old Joe, and walked up the hill back to his apartment. As he ended the story in his sermon, he said, “As I went up the hill, I heard a cock crow.” And that's where the sermon ended.
After church, people were greeting Fred the guest preacher at the door, and one young man in his twenties was very enthusiastic about Fred's sermon and complimented him several times, and then said, “But what was all that about a rooster at the end?”
Fred's point to his present day hearers, we preachers who were learning from him at a seminar, was that even church people don't always know the Bible well enough to understand biblical references with a sermon. If you talk about Saul and Paul in the same sermon, people can get confused. If you talk about Saul of Tarsus and his relation to King Saul of Israel, people can get confused. A sermon filled with biblical allusions and passing references that give it depth and profundity for the knowing hearer, just frustrates someone who doesn't know the Bible well, and while they're puzzling over an unfamiliar allusion, the sermon moves on and they're distracted and missing out on your next point or points.
The church is not a seminary. The church is not a Bible college. The purpose of the church is to bear witness in word and deed to the coming kingdom of God proclaimed by Jesus, and by so doing love God and neighbor as Jesus did. But. But, if we don't know God's word, if we are not living in God's word, we cannot share the gospel. We can't help inquisitive friends and family understand that the Bible is not a club or a weapon, but a gracious, life and civilization transforming word that accomplishes God's purpose. If we don't know the scriptures well enough to let them make us different persons, to make us the living sign pointing to a new hope, we cannot fulfill God's purpose for his children, his servants, which we are.
Build into your life, using whatever tools are to hand, a way to be in the scriptures every day. When you're puzzled or discomfited or dismayed by what you read, write me, call me, email me, and we'll figure it out. There's nothing I'd rather do than talk about the Bible with you.
September 21, 2011
by, R.R. Reno
Never forget, we've heard, over and over and over. The memorial and ceremony reflected the universal, private meaning of this urgent imperative, its determined effort to overcome death by a supreme personal act of perpetual memory. I’ve said it myself, or at least something very like it, at gravesides as I’ve watched caskets descend into holes as seemingly bottomless as the central shafts into which the water descends in the reflecting pools at Ground Zero.
But very few Americans have a particular friend or loved one to grieve over at the 9/11 memorial. And even for those of us who do (three of my college classmates died that day, Tom Glasser, Doug Gardner, and Calvin Gooding), to go there and remember will involve complex patriotic emotions. As a college classmate who blogged a few days ago put it, they died in a “national tragedy.”
She’s right, which is why the 9/11 memorial will be for most an occasion to re-experience the anguish we felt over the attack on our country that day in 2001, as well as our national solidarity. Although intensely and subjectively felt, these emotions are public in character, not private. Unfortunately, our civic culture, at least as reflected in the design of the memorial and ceremony, seems unable to give firm civic meaning these inevitably public emotions.
I’ll wager that the ceremony put an accent on private loss because the public dimension augurs controversy, which came to the fore soon after the Bush administration set upon a course of vigorous military response.
So we have, as Wilfred McClay perceptively argued in a fine analysis of the ceremony, a divided public culture. One side wants to affirm the national significance of 9/11; the other thinks we’ve been exploited and led astray by a false patriotism. Thus the default to a memorial park atmosphere and the realm of private memory. As McClay puts it, “Given the lack of any generally agreed-upon public meaning of September 11, we have naturally found it hard to arrive at a means of commemorating the date properly. The least controversial way to do it is to individualize the commemoration.”
But this approach is an evasion, one that does a disservice to our country. The neglect of public memory can undermine our civic unity. It’s foolish to take patriotism for granted. We need occasions to see and feel ourselves as one nation.
But perhaps more importantly, we need to experience our solidarity under the disciplining influence of a humane symbolism, one that gives effective, just, and lasting shape to our civic instincts and emotions. After all, we’re social animals, and if we neglect public memory it won’t go away. Instead it will find covert expression and tempt us to toward ersatz and perhaps dangerous forms of solidarity. Brown shirts, blue shirts, black shirts...(read more)