Retired Pastor Ruminates

As 2009 wanes I took advantage of Google Analytics to find the ten most popular posts of the year.  I learned that Retired Pastor Ruminates, which was launched on March 23, has 10,467 page-views, of which 6,928 were unique page-views, and the average time spent on the page was 3:19. They came from 53 countries, with the US being first, and all but two of its states represented. The other countries with the most visitors are in order of visits: the United Kingdom, New Zealand, Canada, Australia, Brazil, Germany, Netherlands, India, South Africa, Ireland and Singapore.

 Here are the most visited posts:

This piece of seasonal light verse comes from the keyboard of Janet Batchler, the creative gal behind the now famous Church History in Four Minutes video.  Janet's terrific blog is Quoth the Maven, one of the blogs I featured in my post Three Blogs I Like and Why I like Them.  Her poem, with only slight exaggeration  (we no longer have a dog), describes my house about now.  How about yours?

'TWAS THE DAY AFTER CHRISTMAS


‘Twas the day after Christmas, and all through the house
All the fam’ly was sleeping, yes, even my spouse.
The stockings were tossed by the chimney with flair
Some turned inside out, to make sure nothing’s there.


The children were nestled all snug in their beds,
Nintendo DSes tucked under their heads;
And I in my bathrobe, MacBook on my lap,
Was happy to know there were no gifts to wrap.


When out from the kitchen there rose such a clatter,
I sprang from the couch to see what was the matter.
I waded my way ‘cross a floor filled with trash
To a kitchen heaped high from our Christmas Eve bash.


The sun through the window, it gave quite a glow:
(Los Angeles Christmas: We never have snow),
It shone on the remains of the Christmas day cheer,
The leftover cheese ball, the dregs of the beer.
The un-put-away brownies as hard as a fossil,
And o’er on the stove, it shone down on the wassail.


I blinked as the sun blasted straight to my eye
And just in time glimpsed a brown streak passing by.
Four-footed and furry and dragging a ham,
Dodging around me and trying to scram.
And as he ran off with a peppermint cluster
I knew in a moment, it was my dog Buster.


More rapid than eagles he streaked ‘cross the floor
Buster grabbed what he wanted, and came back for more:
More cheesecake, more truffles, more bagels and lox,
More chocolate chip cookies, more scotch on the rocks.
He smashed and he scrambled, bumped into the wall,
Then dashed away, dashed away, dashed away all.


“I should have cleaned up when the guests said good-bye,”
I moaned to myself with a pretty big sigh.
After two days of feasting, the kitchen looked grubby
I scrounged in the sink, tried to dig up the scrubby--


I searched quite in vain for a halfway clean towel
When out from the living room came quite a howl.
I set down the saucepan all caked thick with goo,
The glaze for the ham which had now turned to glue.


I skipped to the living room, limber of foot
And inched past the fireplace, dripping with soot.
Unraveling ribbons clung fast to my shin
As I looked round the post-Christmas scene with chagrin.


A mountain of presents all covered the floor
They looked so appealing when bought at the store.
Now gift wrap was ripped and the tissue was crumpled,
The new shoes abandoned, the new tank tops rumpled.


I picked my way round all the presents caloric,
The baskets of chocolate to make me euphoric,
Strange foods so exotic that no one would try it
(And don’t my friends know, New Year’s Day starts the diet?)


And just then I heard from the top of the spruce
The pitiful cry of a dog on the loose
I lifted my eyes from amidst the debris --
Old Buster had climbed to the top of the tree.


The angel crashed down as the Christmas tree swayed,
The ornaments flew in a sparkling cascade--
The puppy leapt on me, I felt his claws rip,
And then right behind, the tree started to tip--


The lights all exploded as down the tree crashed--
The pine needles shredded, the presents were smashed--
And I said as I landed on top of the pup,
“Happy Christmas to all-- Someone else can clean up!”

(Janet Batchler, Quoth the Maven, December 26, 2009)

'Tis the season of top ten-ten lists, so I thought I would offer one on my favorite Christmas music. I have way more Christmas music than anybody should rightfully have, and the more stuffy side of me doesn’t quite approve of a lot of it. Nonetheless for most of my adult life I have been collecting it and playing it, changing with the technologies over the years.

The first Christmas album I really knew was Bing Crosby’s White Christmas, still one of the best selling albums of all time. I knew my mom liked Bing Crosby, so one day when I was maybe ten I cajoled my father into buying it during a grocery shopping trip to the Safeway.

That was the only Christmas album my family owned, and I can still sing every song on it from memory, including the exotic ones like “Christmas in Killarney”and “Mele Kalikimaka.” And you’ve got to love the Andrew’s Sisters!

Later my own tastes evolved more to classical, and my personal first album was Handel’s Messiah, on vinyl. The version was by the Robert Shaw Chorale, and it was just selections rather than the whole work. From a lifetime of choral singing I now know every phrase of this grand piece, and Christmas is not complete without listening to the Advent and Christmas portions of it. I have two more great recordings, an early-instrument one with John Eliot Gardner on Philips, also on vinyl, and a CD with George Solti and the Chicago Symphony on the London label with Kiri te Kanawa. I love them all.

I have quite of lot of early and Reniassance Christmas music, with lots of Gabrielli horn concerti.  I have American folk Christmas albums and German Christmas albums.

J.S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio is right up there in the pantheon, and I have a terrific vinyl version on Angel with the King’s College Choir, St Martin’s in the Fields, with Philip Ledger, conducting and a stellar lineup of soloists: Elling Ameling, Janet Baker, Robert Tear, and Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. That one gets a seasonal hearing, too.

A little later in my ministry I started collecting more popular seasonal music. First there was George Winston's December for solo piano.  Then, we were given the original A Winter’s Solstice from Windham Hill by good friends, and that was the beginning of a long collection of pretty much everything Windham Hill has come out with, including the haunting Celtic Christmas series. This was also about when I started putting together atmospheric compilations to listen to while sitting by the fire.

But I enjoy choral music as well. I have the normal anglophile’s love for the sound of choristers, and this makes me nostalgic for my time in Oxford and Cambridge. So the choir of King’s College has to be on the list, although St John’s at Cambridge, and the choirs of the colleges at Christ Church, New College and Magdalen at Oxford would do just as well.

So here is my somewhat arbitrary top ten albums and top ten singles:

My Top Ten Albums (in no particular order)

• Yo Yo Ma, Songs of Joy and Peace 
• Handel’s Messiah 
• J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio
• Sara McLaughlin, Wintersong
• Chris Botti, December
• Emmy Lou Harris, Light of the Stable
• James Taylor at Christmas
• Diane Krall, Christmas Songs
• Choir of King’s College Cambridge, O Come all ye Faithful (This is under-volumned, sadly)
• Bing Crosby, White Christmas

“Some say that ever 'gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit dares stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time.”

“Welcome, all wonders in one sight!
Eternity shut in a span;
Summer in winter; day in night;
Heaven in earth, and God in man.
Great little one, whose all-embracing birth
Lifts earth to heaven, stoops heav'n to earth.”

(From “In the Holy Nativity of our Lord” Richard Crashaw (1612-1649)
(Photo: R. L. Floyd)

He came to earth that winter night
  to share our human frame.
A choir of angels took to flight
  to glorify his name.

Some shepherds in a field nearby
  were summoned to his birth,
And heard the angels raise the cry
  of peace upon the earth.

They went to where the babe did lay,
  and found a manger bare.
Some sheep and oxen in the hay,
  and Mary, Joseph, there.

O mysteries no eye has seen,
  no human ear has heard,
That God should come to such a scene,
  and we should call him Lord.
The world's vast empires rise and fall,
  great Caesar lost his claim,
But Mary's babe is all in all,
  and Jesus is his name.

© 2001 Richard L. Floyd

(Photo:  “Adoration of the Shepherds” by Gerard van Honthorst)

 “To be quite frank, we do not at all like the idea of a "chosen people." Democrats by birth and education, we should prefer to think that all nations and individuals start level in the search for God, or even that all religions are equally true. It must be admitted at once that Christianity makes no concessions to this point of view. It does not tell of a human search for God at all, but of something done by God for, to, and about Man. And the way in which it is done is selective, undemocratic, to the highest degree. After the knowledge of God had been universally lost or obscured, one man from the whole earth (Abraham) is picked out. He is separated (miserably enough, we may suppose) from his natural surroundings, sent into a strange country, and made the ancestor of a nation who are to carry the knowledge of the true God. Within this nation there is further selection: some die in the desert, some remain behind in Babylon. There is further selection still. The process grows narrower and narrower, sharpens at last into one small bright point like the head of a spear. It is a Jewish girl at her prayers. All humanity (so far as concerns its redemption) has narrowed to that.” (From Miracles, Chapter 14)

The simplest fact of the Christmas story is that Jesus had a mother. Mary is the guarantee of the true humanity of Jesus Christ. That Jesus had a mother indicates that he doesn’t merely resemble us; he is the same as us.

In the Creed Jesus’ human life is bracketed by two people: “He was born of the Virgin Mary, and he suffered under Pontius Pilate.”

“Born of the Virgin Mary.” Jesus begins his life, as we all do, with his mother. I was born in the former Women’s Hospital in New York City, now part of the great St Luke’s complex. The tired Floyd family joke was that as a male I came to be born in a women’s hospital, “because I wanted to be with my mother.”

But if in his human nature he is just the same as us, he is at the same time truly divine, and this is where the paradox of the virgin birth helps communicate the mystery of the incarnation. Mary herself carries some of the paradoxes of the story. Historian Jaroslav Pelikan calls her “Our Lady of the Paradoxes: Virgin but Mother, Human Mother but Mother of God.”

The title for Mary, “Mother of God,” comes from the story of the Visitation in Luke, which many Christians will be hearing this week in the Gospel lesson for the Fourth Sunday of Advent. It is her cousin Elizabeth who is the first person to recognize Mary’s unique role in the drama of salvation. She says, “Who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?”

As the Mother of God, or the “God bearer,” as the Eastern Orthodox put it, Mary is instrumental to the story. An ordinary humble young women who find herself in an extraordinary situation, Mary, like John the Baptist, points beyond herself to Christ. Since her role is to insure the humanity of Jesus, all attempts to turn her into something more than a human mother undermine her proper place in the story. It is helpful to keep in mind St. Ambrose’s dictum, that “Mary was the temple of God, not the God of the Temple.”

A week ago I posted one of my favorite quotes from Annie Dillard.  My friend and former Baptist colleague (former colleague, not former Baptist) Ashley Smith commented (on my Facebook Page): “Dillard is one of my favorites as well; I've read Holy the Firm over and over, and used these quotes more than once in preaching and writing.”

It's from the essay “An Expedition to the Pole” in Dillard's volume Teaching a Stone to Talk:

“On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest 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 on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies' straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews. For the sleeping god may wake someday and take offense, or the waking god may draw us out to where we can never return.”  (Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stonene to Talk. Harper and Row, 1982)

Thomas Merton and Karl Barth died on this day in 1968, Barth in Basel at the age of 82, and Merton in Bangok, Thailand at the age of 53. They couldn’t have been more different, but they both were powerful influences on me.

I was a sophomore in college when they died, and I doubt that I had ever heard of either one of them. It must have been a year or two later, during a time of great personal soul-searching, that I first read Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. It was at the height of the Vietnam war, and I had recently resigned from Air Force ROTC, left college to work in New York, and was applying for Conscientious Objector status.

I was also seeking authentic voices about God, and Merton, along with others such as Dorothy Day, Abraham Heschel, and Daniel Berrigan, spoke powerfully to me.

William James speaks about the natural mysticism of adolescence, and I suppose I was no different. I didn’t just want to read about God, I wanted to know God.  Merton's popular autobiography The Seven Story Mountain portrays a troubled young man who finds peace with God through contemplation and ends up happy in a Trappist monastery.

There was a deep romantic mysticism in Merton’s writing that resonated with my own search for God. Much like poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, another convert to Roman Catholicism, Merton sensed God all around him in the natural world. I wouldn’t have known it then, but reading this passage from Merton today I hear echoes of Hopkins (“The world is charged with the grandeur of God”):

“By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet.”

December 10, 1968 was a day of loss for the church of Jesus Christ, as two of her intellectual giants, Karl Barth and Thomas Merton, died within hours of each other.

On this eve of the forty-first anniversary of their deaths I offer this poem by the late British writer and poet Jack Clemo (1916-1994). Clemo, who was from Cornwall, became deaf as a young man and blind around the age of forty. His poem is entitled:

Another of my favorite writers is Annie Dillard, whose wonderful  Tinker at Pilgrim Creek earned her the Pulitzer Prize at age 27. That book features vivid descriptions of a closely-watched natural world, the kind of thing Gerard Manley Hopkins might have written had he been an essayist.

Like Hopkins, Dillard became a convert to Roman Catholicism, a move she once admitted in a interview had an inevitability about it.  She has a rare appreciation for the mysteries that surround us every day, and the gift of words to bring them alive on the page.

In a later book, Holy the Firm, she demonstrates that she also observes the inside world of the human soul as well as the outside world of Tinker Creek. Here is an excerpt:

“I know only enough of God to want to worship him, by any means ready to hand. There is an anomalous specificity to all our experience in space, a scandal of particularity, by which God burgeons up or showers down into the shabbiest of occasions, and leaves his creation’s dealings with him in the hands of purblind and clumsy amateurs. This is all we are and all we ever were; God kann nicht anders. This process in time is history; in space, at such shocking random, it is mystery.

A blur of romance clings to our notions of “publicans,” “sinners,” “the poor,” “the people in the marketplace,” “our neighbors,” as though of course God should reveal himself, if at all, to these simple people, these Sunday school watercolor figures, who are so purely themselves in their tattered robes, who are single in themselves, while we now are various, complex, and full at heart. We are busy. So, I see now, were they. Who shall ascend into the hill of the Lord? Or who shall stand in his holy place? There is no one but us. There is no one to send, nor a clean hand, nor a pure heart on the face of the earth, nor in the earth, but only us, a generation comforting ourselves with the notion that we have come at an awkward time, that our innocent fathers are all dead—as if innocence had ever been—and our children busy and troubled, and we ourselves unfit, not yet ready, having each of us chosen wrongly, made a false start, failed, yielded to impulse and the tangled comfort of pleasures, and grown exhausted, unable to seek the thread, weak, and involved. But there is none but us. There never has been. There have been generations which remembered and generations which forgot; there has never been a generation of whole men and women who lived well for even one day. Yet some have imagined well, with honesty and art, the detail of such a life, and have described it with such grace, that we mistake vision for history, dream for description, and fancy that life has devolved. So. You learn this studying any history at all, especially the lives of artists and visionaries; you learn it from Emerson, who noticed that the meanness of our days is itself worth our thought; and you learn it, fitful in your pew, at church.” (Holy the Firm, Harper and Row, 1977)

We got our first blanket of snow the other day here in the Berkshires, so it was time to make some comfort food. Cold weather always gets me thinking about stews and braises, and one of my favorites is beef short ribs, which are the ends cut off the prime rib. They’re relatively cheap to buy and really easy to make. I don’t have the recipe my mother used to make them with, but I know it involved painting them with ketchup, and it may have had dried onion soup mix (remember that?) in the braising liquid. Whatever was in them they were a treat.

Here’s my version:

3 lbs meaty beef short ribs
2 tbs olive oil
1 good-sized yellow onion, coarsely chopped
1 carrot, coarsely chopped
1 stalk of celery, coarsely chopped
¼ tsp dried thyme
2 bay leaves
1 cup beef stock
½ cup hearty dry red wine
Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 350 degree F. Salt and pepper the ribs.  In a Dutch oven or oven-proof pot with a cover heat the oil over medium high heat and brown the meat on all sides, being careful not to burn it. Do this in batches and don’t overcrowd the pot. Also, dry the ribs with paper towels so they will brown properly.
When they are nice and brown, remove the ribs to a plate, turn down the heat to medium and add the chopped vegetables, stirring until they take on some color.

Add the stock and wine and bring to a boil, stirring to get any browned bits from the bottom of the pot. Add the thyme and bay leaves and return the ribs to the pot. Cover the pot and put it in the oven for two hours. The meat should be tender and almost falling off the bone. Remove the ribs to a plate and cover with foil to keep warm. Put the pot back on the top of the stove, and reduce liquid over medium high heat until it thickens a little bit to a syrupy consistency (you may not need to do this.)

I like to put a rib on each plate over mashed potatoes with a few spoonfuls of the rich braising liquid, but this is nice to over polenta or rice.  Some green beans (or a salad) and some crusty bread and you have a simple and comforting meal.

For a wine pairing I suggest any hearty dry red. This is humble dish and needs a sturdy humble wine. I served our current Italian house red with this, Masciarelli Motepulciano d’Abruzzu, which is also the wine in the braising liquid. Enjoy.

One of my regular ruminations is about how new communications technologies help shape us. Another one is how the middle has fallen out of so much of our discourse in society, as shown by the new levels of partisanship in politics and the rise of popular wing nuts on both the left and the right. And certainly we witness this in the church, where one is either considered a liberal or a fundamentalist. So I was intrigued when I received this post from my old college friend Bill Graff from his home in Taipei, where he suggests that the binary nature of our new communication technologies may be exacerbating the trend toward the extremes:

“When you and I were kids/young adults, our parents always accused us of being too impatient. If you recall, oodles of printer's ink were given to the first ‘television generation,’ and what seemed to ‘old farts’ the desire of their children to have the world fixed in the same time frame as a sitcom, about 30 minutes.

Now, however, technology has provided for something even quicker and faster than the old-fashioned ‘glass teat:’ instant digital communications (and it's logical outcome, social networking). I have nothing but praise for the minds who created this artificial nervous system.

But one (of many) of the unintended consequences seems to be the loss of ‘middle ground.’ Digital systems know ‘1’ or ‘0,’ true or false, black or white, saturation and cutoff, and can evaluate multiple functions and terms in fractional microseconds.

Analog systems tend to create a lot of ‘well maybe. . .’ which is incompatible with expectations of many contemporary young folks. This tendency to react rather than think shall create many new challenges. It will continue to be important to keep ‘the middle’ (moderating, middle class, middle earth, middlefish pond, etc.)” (William Graff, personal post)

A few years ago, when my son was at Pomona College in California, I flew out there for a parents’ weekend, and one day I was driving around in the LA sprawl and spotted an enormous Christian bookstore, so I stopped and parked and went in. And I had the strangest experience there, because I am both a Christian and one of the most bookish people on earth, and yet I didn’t see a single author I recognized in the store. Not one. There were Bibles there, of course, but not the black leather-bound ones I have, but ones in denim and calico, and with names like The Soccer Mom’s Bible and The Disgruntled Teen Bible (I made that up, but it wasn't a stretch from what I saw there.)

I wasn’t really expecting to find a lot of Karl Barth or P.T. Forsyth, but there wasn’t even any C. S. Lewis, Madeleine L’Engle, Philip Yancey, Tony Campolo, Eugene Peterson, or John Stott, card-carrying evangelicals all.

And it dawned on me that certain Christians live in a parallel intellectual universe to the one I live in. These were “Christian” books, and it got me to ruminating on whether the whole idea of a Christian book is a good one.

Remember the old joke that said: “Military justice is to justice what military music is to music.” Is it possible that “Christian books are to books what military music is to music?” I admit that I am a literary snob, and a theological one, too, but isn't there some standard of aesthetics that faithfulness requires of our art and literature, even if we disagree on just what that standard is?

I once got into an argument about music in church in which I argued that Christian worship demands good music, and my interlocutor said there is no such thing as bad or good music, just personal preference. I couldn’t disagree more. And it is not like I am wedded to one kind of music. I enjoy lots of kinds of music, but it has to be good music. Likewise I like all kinds of literature, but it has to be good.

I know I will probably get hate mail for saying this, but I didn’t like the Jan Karon “Mitford Series” because it seemed too preachy and contrived. My beloved Aunt Tia (now deceased so I can say this) was always pushing these books at me because they were “so Christian.” “You’ll like them,” she said, “because they describe a clergyman and his life with his congregation.”  I guess it never occurred to her that being a pastor for thirty years I may have known all that I wanted to know about a clergyman and his congregation.  And the clergyman in these books, while charming, seemed too good to be true, which is a bad thing in art and literature which demands, above all, truthfulness.

So I wonder if there can be such a thing as a Christian writer? There are writers who are Christian, and even deal in Christian themes, but I read them because they are good writers. I am thinking of Annie Dillard, Marilyne Robinson, and John Updike, to name but a few.  And there are books that have Christian themes like John Irving's A Prayer for Owen Meany and Graham Green's The Power and the Glory, although I have never heard either of the authors described as a Christian writer.  Frederick Buechner writes luminous non-fiction devotional and theological books, but his novels, like The Book of Bebb, are never preachy or contrived.

What all these writers share is that they tell a story, and you don't feel like you are reading a religious tract.  In their novels the themes of religion are woven into the fabric of life, as religion is itself in our lives; it's not a separate thing.

Advent is an expectant season when we are poised for what Frederick Buechner calls “the extraordinary moment.”  He employs, among others, the image of an orchestra conductor at the moment before the first notes are played.  I have in my mind's eye Leonard Bernstein, who was a regular visitor to Tanglewood, where the Boston Symphony Orchestra has their summer home just down the road from here.  I recall how he would stride out of the wings (even at the end of his life when he needed oxygen between pieces) to thunderous applause.   Before he dropped the baton he would gather the full attention of both the players and the audience.  There was that moment before the extraordinary moment that Buechner describes:

“The house lights go off and the footlights come on. Even the chattiest stop chattering as they wait in darkness for the curtain to rise. In the orchestra pit, the violin bows are poised. The conductor has raised his baton. In the silence of a midwinter dusk, there is far off in the deeps of it somewhere a sound so faint that for all you can tell it may be only the sound of the silence itself. You hold your breath to listen. You walk up the steps to the front door. The empty windows at either side of it tell you nothing, or almost nothing. For a second you catch a whiff of some fragrance that reminds you of a place you’ve never been and a time you have no words for. You are aware of the beating of your heart . . .  The extraordinary thing that is about to happen is matched only by the extraordinary moment just before it happens. Advent is the name of that moment.” (Frederick Buechner, Whistling in the Dark, pp. 2-3)

December caught me by surprise today. We left last Tuesday to go to my brother’s in Maine for Thanksgiving, with a stop in Boston on the way back to see Martha’s folks and pick up our son at Logan Airport as he returned from London. We got back late Sunday night.

It was all good, but exhausting, and yesterday I just zoned out. I stayed up late last night to watch the Pats get a whuppin’ from the Saints (that’s American football for my international friends.)

This morning I woke up to see the first snow of the season, and thought, well, it’s the last day of November so that’s about right. I blogged on being ill-prepared in Advent, but still didn’t realize I’d lost a day until I posted and noticed the blogpost indexed in DECEMBER!

I recall all those crazy years in local church ministry when the First Sunday of Advent fell in November, and came hard after Thanksgiving. Now I can’t even keep track of the date

The snow on the ground this morning reminded me of a line from the James Taylor song Sweet Baby James:

“Now the First of December was covered with snow
And so was the Turnpike from Stockbridge to Boston
Lord, the Berkshires seemed dream-like on account of that frostin'”

Whenever James Taylor comes to Tanglewood and sings that song (and he always does) a big roar comes out of the crowd when he gets to that line about the Berkshires.  We even have some dear friends who named their baby James after that song.  I have many warm memories of all the James Taylor concerts we heard and saw over the years camped out on the lawn at Tanglewood when our children and the neighbor's children were all growing up together.  One of those children is all grown up and the mother of baby James.

And now it is the first of December after all.  The snow has stopped, and is melting, but for a time the Berkshires did indeed “seem dream-like on account of that frosting.”

Over the years I have had several dreams in which I was ill–prepared for something important. These were anxious dreams, much like the kind that actors have about not remembering their lines. The most vivid of these dreams for me was one in which I was in the chancel of some church at a large formal church service of some kind. It wasn't the church where I was serving, and it was in a way too, in the manner of dreams.

It was a little bit of my church, other churches I have served, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine (where I was baptized), and for good measure probably several English Cathedrals and college chapels as well. In this dream there are a number of dignitaries there from a wide variety of churches. There is a Roman Catholic cardinal and an Orthodox primate, and a bunch of bishops and leaders of other churches.

And I seem to be in charge of this service. But the cause of my great anxiety is that I can't remember, or perhaps never knew, why we are there, and I don't know what the order of service is or what I am suppose to say and when. People are milling around and things are supposed to start, but I am unprepared. It is the kind of dream you wake from in a sweat and are relieved to know that is was just a dream.

My dream serves as a parable for the coming of God. It is a big event, a wonderful occurrence, and yet it also occasions a personal crisis for us because we know that we are all ill–prepared for it.

That is what the prophets are saying to us in Advent, that when God comes, we stand in a crisis. Because the advent of God is never merely an event in time and history. It doesn't just happen in some vague future, it happens in my future, in your future. The season of Advent is really about this expectation, and preparation for the coming of God into our lives now, more than it is a mere remembrance of Christ's birth and preparing for Christmas as it has become widely understood.

Or to put it another way, what if the event we celebrate at Christmas was suddenly and dramatically fulfilled? What if suddenly there was peace on earth, goodwill among people? What if all the visions of the prophets happened in a instant, swords beaten into ploughshares, the lion and lamb dwelling together, enemies reconciled? What might have to change about our world for us to be prepared for that?

What would have to change about our lives, our way of doing things, our laws and institutions, our morality and ethics, our commerce and industry, our politics and international relations?

People who wouldn't dream of driving without a tool kit in the car, or of cooking without a fire extinguisher in the kitchen, never consider what preparations might be necessary for their souls, their communities and their society before the coming of God and his kingdom. Might we find ourselves as ill–prepared for the kingdom as a fish is ill–prepared to live out of water?

If the kingdom of God of which the prophets spoke suddenly dawned, how many of us would be prepared for it? The world will be turned upside down, says Isaiah. “Every valley shall be lifted up, and every mountain and hill be made low; the uneven ground shall become level, and the rough places a plain.” The blind shall see, the lame shall walk, the downcast shall smile and laugh, the poor shall be filled with good things, and the rich shall go away empty. The first shall be last and the last first on the great and terrible day of the Lord.

In the same way Jesus told parables to warn his hearers that they were ill–prepared for the kingdom. He said the kingdom is like a wedding feast to which those who are invited didn't come, so those who were not invited are welcomed.

He said the kingdom is like when the foolish maidens neglected to keep their lamps full of oil and had to go to replenish them, so that they were locked out of the house when the bridegroom arrived.

He said the kingdom is like when the master goes on a trip and puts you in charge and unexpectedly returns to discover that you've been partying, drinking his single malt scotch, and listening to his Pink Floyd albums on vinyl instead of looking after the property.

I know I am ill-prepared in Advent.

(Picture:  “John the Baptist” by Domenico Ghirlandaio)

In such sad times we look ahead
to futures yet unknown.
We pray amid the fear and dread:
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

We know you in our daily round,
at work and play and home.
Such advents come without a sound.
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

You meet us when we gather here
for Word and meal and song.
Your presence hallows every prayer:
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

The tasks we take on in your name
to let your will be done,
Apart from you are done in vain.
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

And at the end when life is past
and time itself is done;
We'll meet you face to face at last.
O come, Lord Jesus, come!

© 2001 Richard Lawrence Floyd

I wrote this hymn for my local church in the Advent following the 9/11 attacks.

In a conversation with my daughter (who is in divinity school) I was trying to explain to her the distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity, in the context of my letter about the baptismal formula.

Those of us who have drunk deeply from the well of Karl Barth's theology are sometimes accused of taking things too seriously.  There is a quite mistaken but still lingering reputation that his theology is lacking in humor.  But just because Barth's theology is deadly serious doesn't make it deadly, and I often find passages that are downright playful.  So I was delighted to see this mention of Barth's humor in a 1986 editorial in Theology Today by Daniel L. Migliore:

“It is well to be reminded, therefore, that for Barth theology was not primarily a heavy burden but a joyful activity. While it is certainly correct to speak of his theology as Christ-centered, to say that it was rooted in a life-long, uninterrupted conversation with the Bible, and to note how important prayer was in his life and theology, all such characterizations of Barth's work would still miss something essential if they overlooked his remarkable freedom and playfulness. Laughter was deeply etched in Barth's theology and spirituality. He was a theologian with a rare sense of humor.

Humor often arises from the experienced discrepancy between reality and appearance, from the distance between what we pretend we are and what others know us to be, or between what others imagine us to be and what we know of ourselves. Humor thrives on incongruity, disproportion, the sometimes bizarre disparity between assumptions and facts, protocol and performance, the imagined past and the real past, the awaited future and the experienced present. The quality of humor-whether it is harsh or gentle, destructive or humanizing-depends on whether these contradictions and incongruities are held to be eternal and inescapable or provisional and redeemable.

If disproportion and incongruity are the stuff of humor, the life of faith and the work of theology are fields ripe for the harvest, a fact that seems to have been more readily apparent to the children of the world than to theologians. Witness Woody Allen's description of God as an underachiever; or the prayer of Tevye, the poor milkman in Fiddler on the Roof asking God kindly to bestow the undeniably high honor of election for once on some other people than the Jews; or the unlikely defense of God by Yossarian's lady friend in Catch 22 who, although herself an atheist, is so shaken by Yossarian's devilish indictment of God's ineptness or malevolence that she breaks into tears and retorts: "I don't believe in God, but the God I don't believe in is a good God."

As theologians go, Barth was uncommonly appreciative of the rightful place of humor in human life in general and in Christian life in particular. He wondered why the modern apologists for the uniqueness of humanity, who had forgotten the meaning of the creation of men and women in the image of God, had never even mentioned the fact that apparently human beings are the only creatures who laugh. For Barth, humor was a symptom of being human, and it frequently found expression in his conversations and actions.

As a preacher, Barth could acknowledge that some of his sermons were real clinkers, like the one on the sinking of the Titanic which he later noted was as great a disaster as the original event. In the midst of the German church struggle, indeed in the midst of his trial for refusing to practice the Nazi salute at the beginning of his classes, Barth suggested to the court that like Socrates many centuries earlier he actually deserved a reward rather than a punishment from his fellow-citizens. The gesture was of course a complete failure, as one might have expected in the dreadfully humorless world of Nazism.

Barth was also able to laugh about his work as a theologian, recognizing that every theology is a human endeavor with all the limitations and need of continuous revision which this implies. He remarked that when he got to heaven, he would want to have a long conversation about theological method with Schleiermacher-say, for a couple of centuries. He imagined that the angels giggled among themselves when they saw old Karl pushing his cart-load of Church Dogmatics.

Recalling Barth's humor is not a human interest ploy or a curiosity of merely biographical significance. It is certainly not intended to obscure or trivialize the thunderous prophetic criticism which Barth often directed against both church and society in the name of the Word of God. The point is that Barth had not only a sense of humor but a theology of humor, and it was of a piece with his whole theology and practice of Christian freedom in response to the grace of God. His theology of humor can be briefly summarized as follows. First, humor for Barth is often and perhaps primarily self-directed. "Humor is the opposite of all self-admiration and self-praise" (CD III/4, p. 665). There is, in other words, such a thing as Christian freedom to laugh at ourselves, to recognize the incongruity and disproportion between the sinners we still are and the saints we prematurely claim to be, and thus to recognize ever and again the miracle of our being graciously accepted, valued, and honored by God. When one can laugh at oneself, then one can also rightly laugh at others-never bitterly or cynically, never in the superficial spirit of carnival or the poisoned laughter that expresses hatred for, or superiority over, another.

Second, for Barth true humor, far from being an escape from the realities of suffering and evil in the world, is "laughter amid tears." True humor "presupposes rather than excludes the knowledge of suffering" (Ethics, 511). As the child of suffering, humor takes suffering seriously but refuses to give it the last word. It is remarkable, Barth observed, how fundamentally humorless the rich and powerful and self-satisfied of this world are, and how, by contrast, genuine humor often flourishes among the poor. The refusal to become resigned to the reign of suffering and death in the world has enormous personal and political significance.

Third, and most decisively for Barth, humor is grounded in the grace, faithfulness, and promise of God. Humor is part of the freedom which is ours to exercise, thanks to the grace of God in Jesus Christ. It is a sign of liberation and release rather than bondage and resignation. Grace creates "liberated laughter," laughter made possible by the memory of God's faithfulness, the present foretaste of God's new creation, and the hope in the fulfillment of God's promises. To put this another way, humor for Barth is rooted in the glory and beauty of God and is an expression of the delight and pleasure which the God of the gospel evokes in human life. The grace of God in Jesus Christ is beautiful, and it radiates joy and awakens humor (II/1, p. 655).

Of course, it is necessary to distinguish between the time of humor and the time of unambiguous joy. Joy is experienced now, but not continuously or totally. "Joy is anticipatory," it has an "eschatological character" (III/4, p. 377). Humor, like art and human play generally, is oriented to God's future, and can only be properly understood in that context. In Jesus Christ, God's mighty Yes to us has been spoken, and this event signals the beginning of the end of the contradictions of Yes and No, of life and death, of friendship and enmity. Barth's humor points beyond irony or satire, and certainly far beyond ridicule or gallows humor, to the free laughter of children and friends in God's new creation.

So understood, humor is different from, though intimately related to, joy. Joy arises out of the partial presence of the promised Kingdom which has erupted in Christ and in the work of his Spirit. Humor arises out of the still partial presence of this Kingdom, leaving the undeniable incongruity and disproportion between what we and the world still are and what God's grace in Jesus Christ promises that we and the world shall yet become. Joy will find its fulfillment in God's new heaven and new earth; humor belongs to a world between the times. (Daniel L. Migliore, “Reappraising Barth’s Theology,” Editorial, Theology Today, April 1986)

If you have ever bought something on-line from Amazon.com, and you werern’t quite on the ball enough to check the box indicating that you don’t want them sending you e-mails giving you their personal recommendations of other books (or whatever ) that you might like to buy, then like me your in-box is jammed with these recommendations.

I don’t know if it is a human being that makes these picks or a computer (I would guess that latter) but sometimes they are amusing. As you may know I am an atonement scholar and buy most of the significant books (and some insignificant ones) about the atonement that come out to keep up with the field. So I get lots of recommendations about the atonement. Which is fine. But I buy even the atonement books from the people I don’t agree with, and they write other books which I also don't agree with, and so these other books are often picked for me too.

Also, the picker can’t seem to distinguish between fiction and non-fiction so Ian McEwan’s Booker Prize-winning novel Atonement is often one my picks.

I also have friends who are writers and I try to buy their books. So, for example, I bought Gretchen Legler’s engaging memoir of her time in Antartica On the Ice, and now my picks contain many polar explorer books, which are kind of fun to consider.

But the funniest pick ever came in my e-mail yesterday. This is going to be a bit of an inside joke for theologians and biblical scholars, but if the rest of you stay with me I think I can explain how weird it is.

I recently bought from Amazon.com my friend (and former teacher) George Hunsinger’s fine book from Cambridge Press The Eucharist and Ecumenism, a book I hope to say more about on this blog as I get deeper into it.

Just kidding. More likely The Onion will make you laugh, but that isn’t nearly as cool a title for a blogpost.  Looking over this month's posts got me wondering if I might be taking myself just a tad too seriously, so here's some comic relief.  My apologies to my international readers who may not find all of the American references quite as funny as I do.

So what is The Onion?  It began humbly enough as a satiric newspaper with only local distribution in Madison, Wisconsin. Founded in 1988 by two University of Wisconsin students, it was distributed free and had cut-out coupons for local Madison eateries.  From the beginning its genius was the send-up of the rich, famous and powerful with stories that were so funny that they were to good to be true, and, in fact they weren't true.  Think Jonathan Swift, Punch, early SNL, or the Colbert Report.

I know that in a recent post I quoted Marilynne's Robinson's displeasure at people getting their news from comics like Leno and Limbaugh, but the Onion is more than the arbiter of attitude about which she was speaking.  The Onion uses humor to deflate big egos, point out injustices, and generally humble the exalted.

Not that The Onion isn't cool. It is way cool, and that is why it spread beyond Madison.  From the beginning it had a near cult following on college campuses, and its availability quickly widened to other university cities, mostly in the Midwest.  Eventually it had a national distribution. The print addition is still distributed free in Madison and several other major cities, and is available by subscription and sold in bookstores.

The Onion added a website in 1996 and now has monster of a site that mimics such real news sites as CNN, ESPN, and C-Span with it ersatz replicas, namely ONN, O-Span, and OSN.

The Onion News Network (ONN) has video clips that look like real news stories.  They have actors playing politicians in solemn assemblies. They have down the look and sound of some of the more soul-deadening congressional debates. Take a look at this send-up of Congress in the clip “Breaking News: Bat Loose in Congress.”

Or this one, in which a Congressional hearing has the girlfriends of America arguing the economic benefits of cohabitation: “Nations Girlfriends Unveil New economic Plan: “Let’s Move in TOGETHER.””

Or my favorite, the Food and Drug Administrations first approved depressant drug for the chronically upbeat: “FDA Approves Depressant Drug for the Annoyingly Cheerful.”

ONN also has a regularly scheduled show called Today Now that is a send-up of vacuous morning talk shows.  It has two attractive, clueless hosts, John Haggerty (played by Brad Holbrook) and Tracy Gill.  Brad Holbrook was actually a real anchorman on one of our local Albany TV stations for several years which gives Today Now an eerie believability.  He's definitely better at The Onion.

Check out the episode:  “Facebook, Twitter Revolutionizing How Parents Stalk Their College-Aged Kids”  where a mom talks about stalking her son on-line.

Back in October I posted one of my favorite poems by British poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889).  Here is another:

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
  dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
  Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,       
  As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
  Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion       
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

In the Autumn of 1994 there was a large gathering of United Church of Christ clergy at a church in the Metropolitan Boston Association of the Massachusetts Conference to discuss the use of inclusive language in liturgy, and especially in the sacrament of baptism. The United Church of Christ's Book of Worship had retained the baptismal formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” but there was increasing pressure for changing this usage, and indeed, a show of hands among the gathered clergy indicated that the vast majority of those gathered were already using alternatives on an ad hoc basis.  The most popular form was “Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer,” but other ones were used as well.