Retired Pastor Ruminates

The year past marks the first full year of Retired Pastor Ruminates and once again I turn to Google analytics to have fun with the numbers.  The site had 14,234 visits, with 21,648 pageviews and 9,744 visitors. You came from 104 countries, in this order:  United States, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, India, Germany, Philippines, South Africa.   The US visitors came from all 50 states and two territories.

When my wife’s position fell to the sickle of the Great Recession we decided to seize the moment and go on a road trip to Arizona to see our son who is in law school there.

So we spent all of October and the first couple of weeks of November on an excellent adventure across America, receiving the hospitality of family and friends, with some nights in Best Westerns to fill in the gaps.  Every town in America worthy of the name has a Best Western and a Subway, and I imagined the archaeologists of the future deciding these were the hallmarks of American civilization in the early Twenty-First century, much as a stoa was in the Hellenistic culture of the ancient world.

Subway is important, too, because you can split a foot-long “Veggie Delite” for 5 bucks and cheaply get enough fresh vegetables to avoid scurvy.

Our trip took 43 days; we drove 7,601 miles and visited 27 different states. The sun was shining all but two days.  No car trouble.  One oil change.


Some highlights:

• The Frank Lloyd Wright house “Falling Waters” in Western PA
• A stay at Potawatomi Inn in Pokagon State Park in Indiana
• My Coe College Reunion where I sung in the alumni choir with my former director, Dr. Allan Kellar
• Seeing my first newly shot bison carcass outside Pierre, SD with “Roger from the Prairie”
• Badlands National Park in SD
• The Black Hills National Park and Mount Rushmore in SD
• Devil’s Tower in Wyoming
• A few days in a friend’s cozy cabin outside Rocky Mountain National Park in CO
• Taking the waters in Glenwood Springs, CO
• Arches National Park in Utah
• Driving through Monument Valley on the border of Utah and Arizona
• The sun on the red rocks in Sedona, AZ
• The Calexico concert at the Rialto in Tucson
• Hiking Bear Canyon outside Tucson
• Eating Texas barbecue in El Paso, TX
• Eating a chicken fried steak in Ozona, TX
• The Riverwalk in San Antonio, TX
• Seeing the Alamo after all these years since my Davy Crocket cap
• Eating the best Tex-Mex food on an outdoor patio (in November!) in San Antonio, TX
• Seeing my first bayou
• Eating blackened redfish and seafood gumbo in New Orleans, LA
• Seeing how beautiful the Old South is in the fall, with yellow leaves still on the trees.

The autumn of 2010 was a season fraught with fear and anger, with a highly divided electorate during a nasty campaign season.  We saw evidence of that on billboards.

Still, the countryside abides and rolling through the miles one is struck by its vastness and the diversity of its scenic beauty.

Here’s what I noticed about Americans:

• They don’t use their blinkers.
• The obesity epidemic is not a fiction of the media
• “Beef: It’s what’s for dinner!” is not a marketing slogan, but a way of life
• They like to drive big trucks

Here’s what I noticed about America:

• Texas is really big
• The Interstate Highway System is an impressive piece of infrastructure
• Our National Parks are stunning
• There are many sections of many towns and cities that could be anywhere in America
• You can get the same Subway sandwich made exactly the same way in all 27 states that we visited, except no provolone in Mississippi
• Many cities in the South still look prosperous (perhaps they won the Civil War after all)

Many thanks to all the wonderful folks who hosted us.

(Photos from top:  Rocky Mountain National Park, Arches National Park, Mount Rushmore, The Alamo)

The United Church of Christ’s “Let’s Get a Celebrity” Sub-Committee” in Cleveland has recently been promoting getting Ellen De Generes to come to our next General Synod, but I think Keith Richards would be a better idea, and here’s why:

I know Ellen is a big gay icon and all, and I like her as much as the next person, but Keith is a way bigger celebrity, and let’s face it, he’s hipper, too.

Sure, there are other hot celebrities right now, but their minuses outweigh their pluses.  For example, take Lil Wayne.  He’s a person of color, which is a plus. He wears a cross around his neck, and has a couple cross prison tats, which are pluses.  But he is in jail on weapons charges and might be too dangerous even for Synod.  See what I mean.

Or take Bristol Palin.  She’s young and she’s a Christian, and she been on Dancing with the Stars, which are all pluses.  But she’s not our kind of Christian and she’s too Republican, which are deal breakers.

I could go on and on, but I think it has got to be Keith. He has a new autobiography out, and he is on the cover of the current Rolling Stone, so this is definitely a Keith Richards moment.

He has some minuses it’s true.  First of all, there has been some unsavory behavior in the past, but who are we to judge, especially a big celebrity like Keith.  Secondly, there is no evidence he is a Christian.  But, hey, I haven’t heard anything about Ellen being a Christian either.  And years ago we had Carl Sagan as the keynoter for the big-church Orlando Conference.  When someone asked him if he believed in God, he said, “No.”  That wasn’t a deal breaker then, why now?  And Keith once sang in an Anglican junior choir. That's good enough for me.

So I say. Let’s get Keith Richards to Synod!

I am honored that Dick asked me to preach on this special day.  He has been my friend and colleague, mentor and frequent conversation partner for many years.  I give thanks to God for him.

Dick has been a faithful minister of the Word of God among you for over two decades and now he and you come to the end of that ministry as he retires.   I have just gone through this myself, so I speak from experience when I say it is a time fraught with meaning.  Like a trapeze artist who lets go of one trapeze but hasn’t quite grabbed a hold of the next, the transition from ministry to retirement can be at the same time exhilarating and frightening.  And I daresay the analogy holds true for a congregation saying goodbye to their pastor and wondering about the future without him.

As we give thanks for Dick’s ministry, it might be profitable for us to consider what Christian ministry is all about.  What is a minister?  A minister is, quite simply, one who acts on behalf of another.  We see this usage in European politics, where governments have a foreign minister or a minister of finance, for example.  Such ministers represent and speak on behalf of their governments.  Their authority derives from those they represent.  It is not their own.

In much the same way our ministry belongs to Jesus Christ and we represent him as his ministers.  Our ministry isn’t a possession that belongs to us, but a call we obey, a service we carry out for another.  It is easy to forget this, especially when one has been around as long as Dick and I have been. In our weaker moments we pastors can take on a King Louis XIV sense of self-importance. Recall how Louis said, “Après moi, le deluge: After me, the flood.” I shared with Dick some advice that your former area Minister Richard Sparrow gave me one time when I was worrying about what would happen after I left my pastorate of 22 years.    He said, “Rick, it was Christ’s church when you got there, and it will be Christ’s church after you leave.”   Which was to remind me that ministry always builds on the work of others.  As Paul told the Corinthians, “I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”

Paul was addressing divisions in the Corinthian church.  Although the Greek word for “divisions” is schismata, from which we get our English word “schism,” schismata does not really mean factions or parties.  More precisely it means a “tear” as in a fabric, or like a run in a stocking.  It seems the Corinthians have broken into quarrelling factions around their various leaders.

Paul admonishes them to overcome their differences and become united.  The Greek word translated as “united” means literally to be “knit together,” the very same word found in Mark’s Gospel (1:19) when he is describing the mending of fishing nets.  So we have a vivid image here that we miss in translation, the image of the church as a torn fabric that needs to be mended.

But the disunity of the Corinthian church is more the symptom of the disease rather than the disease itself.  The actual disease is their false understanding of what the church is, and what the ministry is.

Paul gets a little sarcastic toward these followers of different leaders: “Has Christ been divided?”  He asks them.  “Was Paul crucified for you?  Or were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

You see the problem?  Have you ever known people who join a minister rather than a congregation?  It happens!  People join a minister because the minister is a spellbinding preacher or a compassionate pastor or an attractive personality.  The problem is that when the minister in time shows the inevitable feet of clay they become disenchanted.  Or when the minister moves on or retires their ties to the church are flimsy, because they have joined the leader and not the church.

That is what has happened in Corinth.  Some have joined Apollos, a teacher who came after Paul in Corinth.  Some have joined Peter.  Some even regard Christ as their leader, as if he were just another human leader.

Some Corinthians have a magical understanding of their baptism, so that they have come to believe that the minister performing their baptism bestows more or less power depending how wise and spiritual he is.  It is like someone here in Acton saying “I was baptized by Dick and not by Gail, so my baptism is better (or worse).”  Or even more absurdly, somehow by baptism they would say, “I belong to Dick.”  So Paul asks sarcastically, “Were you baptized in the name of Paul?”

And what is it that the Corinthians believe makes one leader better then another?  The criterion seems to be the capacity to speak “eloquent words of wisdom.”   Paul founded the church in Corinth by preaching the simple good news of God's love and mercy in Jesus Christ, the message of the cross, the message of the forgiveness of sins.  Paul's message was not Paul himself, nor was it Paul's wisdom or Paul's rhetorical eloquence.  His message was Jesus Christ and him crucified.

But the Corinthians have mistaken their leaders for the traveling sages of the time who were known for the beauty and cleverness of their speech.  Paul wants to distance himself from these wise men, and he wants the Corinthians to know, by contrast, who he is, which is a minister of Jesus Christ.

“I am merely a messenger,” he says.  “Don't mistake the messenger for the message.”  Don’t look to Paul's eloquence or Paul's wisdom, but to the Gospel.  For the power of the cross is a power made perfect in weakness, a power that might be obscured by eloquence and human wisdom, but one that is brought to light by the miracle of being shown as powerful even in the weakness of the messenger, just as God displayed his awesome power in the weakness of the crucified one, who died on the cross for us.

There are still all manner of attractive and eloquent purveyors of religion and philosophy around.  You only need a TV remote to find good examples.  And truth to tell, even in the church we are tempted to run after the wisdom of the age.

But if the church of Jesus Christ is to have vitality, integrity, and unity it will come out of its own life, not from the wisdom of the age, but from the power of the message God has given to us.  And you and I and others like us in local congregations, in all our weakness, will be the bearers of that message and the living embodiment of its power.  That is what a congregation is, for better or worse, the living embodiment of the Gospel.

Many people, perhaps all of us on some level, come to church to be taken care of, to be told what to do:  by the Bible or the bishop or the pope or the newest book, somebody.  If only the right leader would come along.  But we see in the scriptures today that even the Apostle Paul struggled to get it across that it isn't the messenger– it is the message, and it isn't the leader– it is the church, the body of Christ, where the power of God resides through grace and the gifts of the Spirit.  Paul had every right to be proud of the Corinthian church.  After all he was the founding pastor.  When he says, “I planted,” he means just that.  But that is not all he says.  He says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but it is God who gives the growth.”  He knew the power was God’s power through the Gospel and not Paul’s power through personality, talents or training.

That has been one of the gifts you have been given in Dick Olmsted, a gifted leader who has never forgot for a minute that it isn’t his Yale Ph.D. or his keen intelligence or any other human attributes or endowments that have made him a good minister of the Word of God.

As today’s political consultants would say, he has stayed on message.  And Dick is well aware that the message applies to him as well as to you.  To understand means to “stand under”, and Dick had stood under the Word of God, and preached to you as one forgiven sinner to another.  He never forgot the great Reformation insight that we are at the same time sinners and justified before God, which is why he ministered to each and all of you without fear or favor.  Because he knows that he is a minister, one who represents another, and a messenger, one who brings good news, and a witness, one who is always pointing beyond himself.

In 1995 my family and I traveled to Colmar, France to see Matthias Grünwald’s painting of the crucifixion in the famous Isenheim altarpiece triptych.  A reproduction of this masterpiece hung over Karl Barth’s desk as he wrote his Church Dogmatics. One hangs over my desk, and one hangs over Dick’s desk.  I chose it as the cover of my little book on the cross and atonement.  It is not a pretty picture, but it is a powerful one.

In the painting John the Baptist points at the crucified Christ.  Now this is not realism or historical accuracy, as we know that John had lost his head long before Good Friday.  But Grünwald is trying to convey a deeper truth than the facts.  He is depicting John as the witness to Jesus Christ. John’s pointing finger is strangely elongated, to draw your eyes to it and then to where it points.

Grünwald shows John as the representative Christian, the one who always points beyond himself or herself to Christ. And the Christ he points to is not Christ the teacher, Christ the prophet, or Christ the moral example, but the crucified Christ.  For whatever else we might say about Jesus Christ, the one thing we must say is that he was crucified for us, and was raised on the third day as a divine vindication of the power of his weakness.  Christ’s atoning death does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, freeing us from sin and death. To be a witness to the crucified Christ is to insist that God’s love is stronger than human hate, and God’s grace is greater than human sin.   That truth remains a scandal now as it was then, because it challenges the wisdom of this age as to what constitutes real power and authority.

Because in the topsy-turvy values of the Gospel the first shall be last and the last first, the exalted will be humbled, and the humble exalted, the poor will be filled and the rich sent empty away.  In God’s economy power is made perfect in weakness, and for all our accomplishments, in the end we have nothing to offer to God but our sins.  These are not the values of Donald Trump’s Apprentice, to say the least.  And neither is it the wisdom of the age, but it is the message of the gospel, the message that a minister of the Word of God is called to deliver.

So you can see that this ministry of witness to Christ can be very frustrating in human terms.  Which is why I took up cooking years ago as a hobby, because when you cook you see results right away.  The meal either comes out or it doesn’t.  When people enjoy it you feel satisfaction and you get compliments. But being a minister of the Word of God isn’t like this.  This pointing to Christ doesn’t usually manifest in immediate results.  It’s more like being a gardener, a matter of planting and watering, and letting God use what you have done for his purposes, which remain mysterious.  For you never know what seeds you sow, or who is ready to hear what word and when, a word that might even change their life.

In Stephen Ministry we teach that ministry is process oriented and not results oriented, and at first this really frustrates the Stephen ministers. Because we Americans are not good at waiting for God to give the growth.  We want dominion and power and control.  We want to force our will on things.  The wisdom of this age demands results, and even ministers give up and give in and talk about our congregation’s attendance, or our budgets, or our additions, or our programs, or our new members.  And don’t get me wrong, I am always grateful for any visible signs of vitality in Christ’s church.

But the truth about the church is that we can have the most beautiful building, and the biggest endowment, and the most eloquent preacher with a string of degrees after his name, and we can be so friendly we will melt the snow right off the roof, but if the message of Jesus Christ and him crucified, the message that God loves and forgives us, isn't preached and heard and lived it all counts for nothing.  “For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”

And in each generation, God raises up witnesses, messengers, ministers, like Dick Olmsted, for which we give thanks.  Some will plant, others will water, but it is God who gives the growth.  Amen.

(The Reverend Dr. Richard L. Floyd, Pastor Emeritus of First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Congregational, Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on June 19, 2005 at the Acton Congregational Church, on the occasion of the retirement of the Reverend Dr. Richard Olmsted.)

In an article in today’s New York Times, “Basic Religion Test Stumps Many Americans,” Laurie Goodstein reports that Americans scored poorly in a test of basic knowledge about religion, according to a new Pew poll.  This will not be news to any clergy, although she writes, “Clergy members who are concerned that their congregants know little about the essentials of their own faith will no doubt be appalled by some of these findings:

• Fifty-three percent of Protestants could not identify Martin Luther as the man who started the Protestant Reformation.
• Forty-five percent of Catholics did not know that their church teaches that the consecrated bread and wine in holy communion are not merely symbols, but actually become the body and blood of Christ.
• Forty-three percent of Jews did not know that Maimonides, one of the foremost rabbinical authorities and philosophers, was Jewish.”

Appalled, yes, surprised, no!  I can’t imagine any members of the clergy who aren’t well aware of the ignorance of most people about religion. One of the biggest perennial tasks of local religious leaders is teaching their congregants about the basic tenets of their own faith, not even to mention other's.

And preachers are well aware that they have to fill in a great deal of background for their listeners to have a context to understand even the most well-known biblical stories.

This lack of knowledge is not just a feature of the uneducated. I have known very intelligent professional people with Ivy League educations who were biblically and theologically illiterate.

Make me, O Lord, thy Spining Wheele compleate.
       Thy Holy Worde my Distaff make for mee.
Make mine Affections thy Swift Flyers neate
       And make my Soule thy holy Spoole to bee.
       My Conversation make to be thy Reele
       And reele the yarn thereon spun of thy Wheele.

Make me thy Loome then, knit therein this Twine:
       And make thy Holy Spirit, Lord, winde quills:
Then weave the Web thyselfe. The yarn is fine.
       Thine Ordinances make my Fulling Mills.
       Then dy the same in Heavenly Colours Choice,
       All pinkt with Varnisht Flowers of Paradise.

Then cloath therewith mine Understanding, Will,
       Affections, Judgment, Conscience, Memory
My Words, and Actions, that their shine may fill
       My wayes with glory and thee glorify.
       Then mine apparell shall display before yee
       That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.

(Edward Taylor, 1642-1729, was a New England Puritan pastor and poet.  He was the pastor and teacher at the Church in Westfield, Massachusetts and wrote poetry as part of his personal spiritual discipline, leaving instructions to his heirs that they were not for publication.  They were all but forgotten for two hundred years.  Thomas Johnson discovered a 400-page quarto of the poems in 1937 in the Yale Library, and published some of them in the New England Quarterly, which established Taylor as a singular American poet of his time.  This poem, “Huswifery,” is probably his best known.)

Among all the historic disagreements and discussions on the meaning of Jesus Christ's atoning death, a pivotal issue is whether the “work of Christ” is a finished work, or whether some level of human participation is necessary to complete it.  One of the theological sins of certain brands of evangelicalism is more of an emphasis on what we do (a conversion, a decision, being born again, etc.) than on what God has already done for us (and for all.)

Scott Carson at An Examined Life laments the return of the right to intellectual darkness in his insightful post The Rightward Turn.

Pastor John Castricum shares the recipe for his award-winning clam chowder  at Reflections of a Reformed Pastor.

Halden Doerge over at Inhabitatio Dei gets a lively discussion going on the question: Is there a postliberal theological project?

For those word nerds among you who actually know what a clerihew is, Kim Fabricius has a funny post at Faith and Theology called Poetic Graffiti: clerihews on ten modern Christian poets.

The quick-changing world of information technology is highlighted in a post at Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab about how the magazine Foreign Policy is e-publishing (through Amazon) a book about Afganhistan by war journalist Anna Badkhen, comprised of her daily dispatches.

A thoughtful piece appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on the Pope Benedict XVI’s beatification of John Henry Newman. They quote my friend Gabe Fackre, “The heart of ecumenism [or interfaith work] is when each tradition brings its own gifts to the other.” Newman, Fackre argues, was known for the idea that theological ideas have a “trajectory” in which “you don’t abandon the teachings but let them flower – the ordination of women might be an example. It is a very supple concept of doctrine that is a long way from Benedict, who seems to rigidify doctrine.”

You know the signs. First you notice that a favored blog on your blogroll hasn’t had a post in 5 months. That is often the end, but sometimes there is a preliminary stage, akin to Elizabeth Kubler Ross’ stage of denial. The blogger appears and posts an apology for slackness. “I’ve been . . .

1. Sick
2. New child
3. Writing my dissertation
4. Rereading the Church Dogmatics in German
5. Working too hard
6. Leveling my blood elf ret pally
7. Moving
8. Despairing of life itself

Do not be fooled by this desperate act of repentance or by the pledge to lead a new and upright blogging life. Chances are this blog is going to die and soon.

Our internet presence gives us the illusion of both transcendence and permanence, but it is an illusion. Both our blogs and our selves are finite and destined to die. I have already outlived one blog, where I posted for years. When the Webmaster of the site changed programs the archives disappeared, with all my posts. Many I had saved as a Word document, but some were written on the blog, and so lost forever. There is one I wrote when Bard Childs died about a gracious personal encounter I had with him that I wish I had. Oh well, sic transit gloria mundi, sigh.

Our blogs exist as fragile lines of HTML code. They can vanish like the morning dew. Yet, it is also possible they can outlive us. I was on Linked-In the other day, and they suggested people I might know and one of them was a dear friend of mine who died way too young two years ago.

Either way, both our blogs and we are going to die, so “teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” (Psalm 90:12)


To replace some of the dead blogs I have added some new ones to my blogroll that I like:  Cathedral Bells,  Chrisendom,  and Intersections.  Enjoy them while they last.

Some days I will bounce around the blogosphere, connecting to interesting posts I see on the Blogrolls of people on my Blogroll (and they say the internet is a time waster!)   I find that there are a lot of interesting blogs by young Christians.  This often makes me feel somewhat fogeyish, but it is also refreshing to get a glimpse into their world and the situations and issues with which they are grappling.

One of the more intriguing posts I have run across recently was by a young Christian on the ominous sounding site Reflections of a Broken Man. He describes how he was playing the popular MMORPG game World of Warcraft and struck up a (typed) conversation with another player.

In the midst of this conversation it comes out that she is having some life scuffles, and he admits he is a Christian. She seems interested and the next thing he knows is he’s witnessing to his Christian faith.

So much of what passes for Evangelism these days is pretty ham-handed and insensitive (“taking prisoners for Christ”), but I was touched by the genuineness and grace of this encounter, as well as the incongruity of it taking place in Moonglade by some guy behind a dopey Night Elf toon (at least that is what it looked like in the picture (above) he posted.)

For the whole post go here.

I am a long-time reader of the New York Times, and of its Opinion Pages, and lately I’ve been noticing that I know pretty much what each of the contributors is going to say about any particular subject even before I read their pieces.

To get to this point I have had to spend thousands of hours of my time and untold amounts of my money. So as a public service to the rest of you I offer this template that you can use to know what each one will say before they say it:


David Brooks: We rely too much on government and not enough on ourselves because our values stink.

Paul Krugman: If you would listen to me the economy wouldn’t stink.

Tom Friedman: The rest of the world is increasingly beating us at our own game because, although we didn’t used to stink, now we do.

Nicholas Kristof: There are a lot of stinking things going on in the world, and we stink for not doing enough to stop them.

Frank Rich: Republicans are evil, and those who don’t oppose them vigorously enough stink.

Maureen Dowd: Everybody stinks, and I get paid to judge them for it! Cool!

One of the hottest topics in the church right now is clergy burnout. Everyone is in agreement that it is a problem, but when it comes to the solution, not so much. There are a lot of wise, commonsense admonishments about self-care and spiritual disciplines. They should be heeded, but they tend to address the symptoms without asking why burnout is so widespread. And I have yet to see much in the way of an insightful theological analysis.

While it is true that a person in any profession can experience burnout,  I am convinced that there are unique features to the current epidemic of clergy burnout.   And I have been ruminating lately whether clergy burnout is so widespread not merely because of the stresses and demands of the job, which have to some extent always accompanied ministerial vocations, but because of an identity crisis in the mainline church, and a vocational crisis among its ministers.

(I preached this sermon on the Sunday after the 9/11 attacks.  In it I said: “Let us not dignify this event with the term ‘war.’  These terrorists are not soldiers, but criminals and murderers and should be dealt with as such by the constitutional processes of sovereign states and international law.  What we need here is not revenge, but justice.”  I wonder what the world would look like today if our leaders had not thought of it as a war?)


This is the third time I have been called upon to speak this week, to try to put into words what we are thinking and feeling in response to the extraordinary events of last Tuesday. We had an ecumenical service Tuesday evening at First Baptist Church sponsored by the Pittsfield Area Council of Churches, and on Friday we had a service of prayer and mourning at noon here at First Church in response to President Bush's declaration of that day as a national day of remembrance.  I will say today what I have said on both those occasions, that it is good you are here!  It is good to be together with our neighbors and fellow citizens at a time like this, and it is good to be quite intentionally in the presence of God in public worship.

To be together in community and before God is a healthy response.  Abraham Lincoln once spoke of the “better angels of our nature.”  I think being together before God is responding to the better angels of our nature, and it is my fervent prayer that we Americans will continue to respond to what is best in us, as opposed to what is worst.

We have seen extraordinary acts of courage and heroism in these days.  But we have also seen acts of cowardice and mean–spiritedness. Since Tuesday New York City firefighters and police have responded to over ninety false alarms and bomb scares a day in contrast to the typical seven.  Throughout our country mosques have been stoned and vandalized.  Our Arab–American neighbors fear for their security and safety.

It is often true in history that evil begets evil, and I worry about that now.  Hate can spawn more hate.  A time such as this is a critical time for us all, individually and as a nation.  It is, among other things, a holy time, in that it is a time when we can be in touch with what is deepest and most abiding in our lives.  We are at a tipping point that can determine both the path and the direction we will go.  Billy Graham at the service on Friday at the National Cathedral said that we can either implode as a nation our show strength.  I think that is the choice.  And I trust as people of faith we will have the resources that can help us choose the good and not the evil, and to be on the side of life and not death.

We have looked evil in the face this week.  We have seen the slaughter of innocents in the thousands.  As Mayor Guiliani said on Tuesday night, when the death toll is finally counted “it will be more than we can bear.”   It is hard to take in the damage that this act of terrorism has caused, and hard as well, to accept the impetus behind it.  It is hard to accept that there are people out there who hate us and want to kill us.

I don't know about you, but I found it difficult to get much done this week.  I found myself in a daze.  I kept returning again and again to the TV.  I was both repulsed and transfixed by the unfolding events.  I couldn't take my eyes off it.  How many times have we seen the pictures of that second plane crashing into the World Trade Center?  There have been times when I find myself suddenly choked up, or silently weeping.  Wednesday night on TV I saw the changing of the guard a Buckingham Palace, and the British military band was playing the Star Spangled Banner.  I completely lost it.

So before we do much else, we all have to somehow take in this act of terror, and acknowledge it and the feelings that go with it.  It will require some time, but unless we do take time to absorb the shock of it, we will not be able to do what we are called to do next, whatever that is.

Nancy Taylor, our new Conference Minister and President of the Massachusetts Conference, wrote to all the clergy on Tuesday.  Among her reassuring words were these: “I encourage you to pause in the face of the enormity of what our country and our world is just now trying to comprehend.  Take time to talk to each other about your feelings; to share how you will address the events of this day with your children; and to allow yourself to cry, pray, and cling to each other and to the God whose heart was the first to break when the first airplane crashed into the World Trade Center in New York City . . . and whose heart is breaking still.”

Take time, she says, and she is wise in saying this.  I want to tell you how much her new ministry has meant to me this week.  I have never met her, but within hours of the first crash, I had from her a thoughtful pastoral letter, with scripture and prayer.  She has been a parish minister and brings those good pastoral instincts to her new position.  So I share with you what she shared with me, the admonition to take the time to really face what has happened, and to do it in the context of faith, with scripture and prayer as resources.  The scripture Nancy Taylor sent me was the 46th Psalm, which I had already been reading.  It is one of my favorites.

“God is our refuge and strength,” it begins, and then it goes on to say, that because God is our refuge and our strength, “we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea.”    Well, the earth has changed, the strong towers have fallen, the nations are in an uproar . . . but WE WILL NOT FEAR!

How can we say that?  Only faith can say, “We will not fear.”  This is not wooly–headed optimism, or denial of harsh reality, but faith.  The reality is that the world is a dangerous place, bad things not only do but have happened to innocent people, the ordinary rhythms of life have been shattered by an extraordinary act of evil, and it is not over.  So fear is the sane, natural and honest response to such earth–shattering and life–changing events, and we have known fear, and we have felt fear, felt it in our gut along with anger, sadness, and pain.

So how can faith say, “we will not fear?”  We can only say “we will not fear,” if we can say “God is our refuge and our strength”  Therefore! We will not fear.  The setting of Psalm 46 is a world turned upside down:

“Therefore we will not fear though the earth should change,
though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea;
though its waters roar and foam,
though the mountains tremble with its tumult.”

This is not just trouble, this is TROUBLE with a capital T.  The language of the psalm is the language of cosmic upheaval. The waters are the waters of the firmament above and beneath the earth; they are the primordial waters, the symbol of chaos, the tohu wabohu of nothingness.  And the mountains that shake into the heart of the sea are not just any mountains, but the thresholds and foundations that hold up the world.  In the psalm's vision the waters above and the waters below, the waters that God pushed back on the third day of creation, threaten to flood back in.  The roaring and foaming waters are more than a storm, they are chaos, a sign of all that threatens God's order.

Many Biblical scholars think Psalm 46 may have been written when the Assyrian King Sennacherib came to conquer Jerusalem in 701, but it hardly matters what the original catastrophe was, the psalm speaks to every catastrophe which is earth-shattering and fear–inducing.  The mythologized cosmic TROUBLE  of the Psalm is of a kind with all the trouble we see, whether it is Sennacherib at your gates with his whole army or terrorists flying jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Trouble is often where faith is born. We find faith in a God who is our refuge and strength, because only in trouble do we need a God who is our refuge and strength. Frequently it is only when we have our confidence knocked out from under us, that we are we ready for the Word of God.

And so it is that the therefore that comes before “we will not fear” refers to God our refuge and strength.  Our lack of fear is conditional; it is trust in God alone, rather than some easy calm of our own devising.  It is not the false security of walls or weapons.  No missile shield defense system can give us this kind of confidence.

This confidence in God is captured in Martin Luther's hymn based on Psalm 46: “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” which was then put into English by Thomas Carlyle as “A safe stronghold our God is still” and, better known in America, as “A Mighty Fortress is our God” by Frederick Hedge.  In any version of the hymn, God the fortress stands in contrast to all strongholds built with human hands.  Listen to this: “And though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us.  We will not fear, for God has willed His truth to triumph through us.  The prince of darkness grim, We tremble not for him, His rage we can endure, For lo! his doom is sure, One little word shall fell him.”

We see in Psalm 46 another vivid contrast, that between the roaring, tumultuous waters of chaos and the “river whose streams make glad the city of God.”  Where before God restrains the water, here God sends the water for a life–giving purpose.  God tames the waters of chaos and makes them bring forth life and peace.

What is the alternative vision to chaos, disruption and desolation?  Listen with me: “There is a river whose streams make glad the city of God, the holy habitation of the Most High.  God is in the midst of the city; it shall not be moved.”  How like John the Divine's vision of the river of life describes it as flowing from the throne of God  and the Lamb.  “Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city.” (Revelation  22:1, 2a)

Nancy Taylor writes, “It seems to me that we Christians, above all other people, are equipped to face the evil and the terror that have befallen us, because we know that there is another world beyond this world, where all weeping and pain shall cease, where evil does not reign, and where we will find ourselves in the warm embrace of our God.”

But God does not ignore evil.  At the center of our faith is the symbol of the cross.   How significant that our most important Christian symbol is not the scales of justice, nor the tablets of the law, but the cross on which we human beings crucified the Lord of Glory.  And it is at the foot of the cross that we can best understand this evil act, for the cross addresses human beings not at our best but at our worst.  There, at the cross human evil collided with divine love.  There, Jesus stretched out his arms and died, with forgiveness on his lips, that the whole world might come into his loving embrace.

And there, at the cross of Christ, is the power that created and sustains the universe.  A power more powerful than evil and hate.   Evil and hate killed Jesus, but he didn't stay dead!  Osama bin Laden is a formidable adversary, a rich powerful man bent on evil, but as Luther said of the evil one, “we tremble not for him,” nor for any other terrorist.

Let us be clear about what happened on Tuesday.  Terrorists committed mass murder on innocent civilians.  There is a lot of talk about war, and it feels like war, and the pictures from the devastation look like war, and it may take the resolve of war to address terrorism. But if this is a war it is only a war in the metaphorical sense of say, the war on poverty or the war on drugs.  Let us not dignify this event with the term “war.”  These terrorists are not soldiers, but criminals and murderers and should be dealt with as such by the constitutional processes of sovereign states and international law.  What we need here is not revenge, but justice.

Their intention was to create terror, to destroy our way of life.  And their act of evil can only threaten our way of life, our free institutions, our capacity to travel and meet, and go about our business without fear, if we let them!  If we let them make us hate and fear they win.  But we will not let them.  Because “God is in the midst of the city, it shall not be moved.”  God is with the innocent victims in New York and Washington, God is with the relief workers, and God is with us, right here, right now, with you and me in our broken-heartedness, as we face a world forever changed.  But we can face it, and we will face it, with character and courage and faith, for God is in the midst of us, our refuge and strength; therefore we will not fear.”   Amen.

A sermon preached at the First Church of Christ in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on September 16, 2001.  This sermon was also published in “He Comes, the Broken Heart to Bind:” Reflections on September 11, 2001. Edited by Frederick R. Trost, Confessing Christ. 2001.

In the days before the Internet and the 24/7 new cycle the announcement by an obscure Florida pastor that his church would be burning copies of the Koran might have attracted a column inch in the back pages of The Gainesville Daily Register, or get picked up as a nutty bit of ephemera by Paul Harvey.

No longer. Terry Jones (wait, wasn’t he with the Pythons?) has had his 15 days of celebrity, outraged pretty much everybody, and been addressed by the President of the United States, among other dignitaries.

Jones has also managed to convince inflammatory Republicans that there actually can be a fire too far. That anybody or anything could even momentarily unite the gladiators on both sides of the culture wars is worthy of note.

I will spare you the obvious pieties about this sad affair. For a thoughtful post on it I refer you to Debra Dean Murphy (who I just discovered and have added to my blogroll) .

What particularly interests me is how new technologies reshape the way Christian faith is perceived. For example, in eighteenth century New England, itinerant evangelists like George Whitefield and Gilbert Tenant changed the face of Puritanism by staging huge public revivals. This shifted the authority away from the settled pastors in local communities to the popular evangelists. Harry Stout has called Whitefield the first “rock star.” Better roads allowed people to travel greater distances, and printing and high literacy facilitated communications about the revivals.

Likewise, the locus for Christian authority in America away from the mainline to conservative evangelicals in the Twentieth century is still a story that remains to be written, but once again it was about the democratization (and vulgarization) of Christianity away from elites, and it was facilitated (once again) by new technologies. For example, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell used television to collect large audiences to promote their particular brand of conservative faith.

So now we are watching in real time the power of social networking (Jones got the kerfuffle started on Facebook) and other media to quickly gather eyeballs if not hearts and minds.

I would like to dismiss “events” such as Jones’ provocation as mere ephemera (just as I mistakenly did with the rise of the Christian right for too many years) but when people’s lives become at stake and the President of the United States feels the need to engage the subject it becomes hard to dismiss.

The rise of instant internet communication has been widely praised for its democratizing tendencies (such as last year’s Iranian “Twitter revolution”), but I wonder if we are now seeing clearly the darker side of instant communication?

Does the quickness and brevity of the new media inevitably shape the message? (see Halden Doerge’s insightful post on patience and blogging. He is speaking only about blogging, but many of the same issues obtain).

I argue that it is the humans who use the communications media who shoulder the moral responsibility for the messages they put out. It is too simplistic to blame the media (although there is a long history of blaming any new media for the decline of civilization, religion, civility, etc.)  The medium is not the message (or not the whole message, at least.)

Christians believe we live in a fallen world, and that everything in creation can be used for ill as well as for good. Should the new media be any exception?

So how should we use the new media?  Perhaps that is a subject that could benefit from some discussion in congregations and Sunday Schools. New media arrive with a false sheen of authority.  Remember when something had authority just because it was “seen on TV?” And remember when early e-mail users forwarded every stupid hoax and rumor as if it were true just because someone had sent it to them? In time the wise learn how to use and not use these tools.

Some choose to forgo the new technologies altogether, and that is a choice one is free to make, but I personally find enough of value in them to want to use them wisely.

Which leads me to ponder whether one of the spiritual disciplines for Christians (and others) in our time might be a healthy skepticism about any information we take in from any source. And ancient habits of silence, meditation, and thoughtful reflection might help us decide what is worthy of our precious God-given time and attention.

Theologian Donald Bloesch died a week ago at the age of 82. His friend and colleague Gabriel Fackre paid tribute to him in Christianity Today and commented that he was “underappreciated in his lifetime.”

His denomination (and mine), the United Church of Christ, certainly never paid him much heed. Fackre said, “Don was never given the recognition due to him in the UCC because he was a feisty critic of the liberal establishment. We both were doing our best in the United Church of Christ to call it back to its original ecumenical vision.”

But whether he got the recognition he deserved or not in the United Church of Christ, he never left it, and in doing so he embodied a steadfast commitment to church that reflected his own deep catholicity. In this regard he was an evangelical catholic in the best sense of the word, but he defied easy labels. He himself used such dialectical phrases as “progressive evangelical,” and “Ecumenical orthodox” to describe himself.

He called himself an evangelical theologian and he was on the board of Christianity Today to prove it, but he was never at home with the obscurantism and anti-intellectualism that so often attached itself to the label evangelical.

He came by the term honestly, since he was actually a big E evangelical, being born into the Evangelical Church, where his father and both his grandfathers were ordained ministers. The current minister of the First Evangelical Church in Bremen Indiana found his baptismal records. The records state: Donald George Bloesch, born, May 3, 1928, baptized, June 24, 1928. His father Herbert Bloesch was pastor there at the time.

The Evangelical Church (which joined with the German Reformed in 1934 to form the Evangelical and Reformed Church) was a German immigrant church with a lively combination of theological rigor and deep piety that clearly shaped Bloesch’s own approach to his theological projects.

In 1957 the E and R joined with the Congregational Christian Churches to form the United Church of Christ and that became Bloesch’s church until he died.

Bloesch was actively involved in theological renewal movements in the United Church of Christ, and wrote the Dubuque Declaration, which became the statement of faith of the Biblical Witness Fellowship.

I think of Bloesch as an accessible interpreter of large theological ideas. He introduced many evangelicals to the thought of Karl Barth, a figure often viewed with suspicion in their camp, and to P.T. Forsyth, the great British pastor theologian of the cross. Bloesch brought fresh readings to these and other figures. His writing is easy to read and infused with a warm-hearted piety. Like Barth and Forsyth he wrote primarily for the church, not the academy, and he knew that fruitful theology grows best in the rich soil of active church life and personal piety (what today we, but not he, would call “spirituality.”)

Another corrective Bloesch’s theology offers to his evangelical brothers and sisters is an appreciation of the length and breadth of the church, that is, tradition and ecumenism. Fackre notes in the CT article that scholars as diverse as Roman Catholic Cardinal Avery Dulles and Reformed theologian T.F. Torrance paid tribute to Bloesch in the 1999 festschrift volume Evangelical Theology in Transition.

I am proud that he was a theologian in my denomination, and grateful for his contribution to the great church which he loved.

Clergy burnout is a hot topic now. My two most popular posts of late have been been Pastors in Peril, and the snarky satirical Ten Highly Efficient Strategies for Crushing Your Pastors Morale.

And when the New York Times notices religion at all it is usually some aspect of it that is aberrant or weird, but, lo, there have been a couple of articles this month on clergy burnout. For a compendium of recent articles on burnout in the media and blogosphere you can go here to Jason Goroncy’s ever-dependable site Per Crucem ad Lucem, where he is doing a series on clergy burnout.

It is a vast topic to cover, but here is one of my small ruminations:

Americans are justly proud of our freedoms, and near the top of the list is freedom of religion. The first amendment to the Constitution prohibits the government from making any law “respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise therof.” Article VI prohibits religious tests for public office. A rich diversity of religious faiths, unprecedented in human history, have lived together in our land and shared a vision of America as a safe social space for the free practice of religion.

That is the dominant national narrative, but it is only half the story. If you look at the history of our country closely you can’t help but notice a counter-narrative, one in which religious bigotry is as American as apple pie. For example, the “nativist’ movement which arose in the 1840’s in response to an influx of Roman Catholic immigrants from Europe. It culminated in the (aptly named) “Know-Nothing Party,” who ran the former President Millard Fillmore for President (he lost.)

The result of this climate of fear was a disgraceful period that saw periodic mob violence, churches burned down, and some Catholics killed. The rhetoric was alarmingly similar to some of what you hear today about immigrants, that they threaten the culture of the country, and about Muslims, that their religious beliefs are incompatible with the American way of life.

In the 1920’s the anti-Catholics, including the Ku Klux Klan, claimed that Catholicism was incompatible with democracy. At that time, the response of the Catholic Church was that the nativists didn’t represent American values as much as they did, since the Catholics believed in freedom of religion. They had a point.

Roman Catholics today are in the mainstream of American life, and constitute the largest Christian denomination in the country by far. It is hard for young people to imagine the rancor created by the presidential campaign of Al Smith, a Roman Catholic, in 1928, or of John F. Kennedy in 1960. In the dominant narrative those ugly nativist impulses in our national psyche have been put behind us.

Sadly, this seems not to be so. The perfect storm of a national immigration crisis and a recession have rekindled atavistic tendencies to fear and hate the Other. In the case of immigration this is not generally cast today in primarily religious terms, as many immigrants are Catholic.

But the raging debate over the proposed Islamic Center in New York shows that religious bigotry lives on. Is every one who opposes the building of this center a bigot? Certainly not. But the conversation is salted with enough starkly anti-Muslim rhetoric to disturb anyone who believes that freedom of religion is a cherished feature of our national identity.

In American life we do not have to like all religions, or believe that they are all true, but we do have to allow them the same freedoms we have to their beliefs and worship practices. The current debate, cravenly inflamed for political purposes, is really about which narrative will be found to be true about us. Are we peaceful, tolerant and generous, or are we fearful, hateful and selfish? Will we be American patriots, touched by “the better angels of our nature?” Or will we be “Know Nothings?” These questions hang in the air.

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Against all the facts, 25 % of Americans believe that President Obama is a Muslim, according to a new poll. It is hard for me to find the words to express how discouraging that piece of information is.

I have it on good authority from reliable personal contacts that President Obama and his family were members and regular attenders at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, which happens to be the largest congregation in my denomination, the United Church of Christ.  Yes, that is a Christian Church.  The members of such churches are Christians.

The Obamas would probably still be members there if Jeremiah Wright, the former pastor, hadn’t got off his talking points and scared many of the electorate during the campaign.

That the Obamas have not found a church home in Washington, D.C. may be a result of the painful memories of the Wright incident, when the 24/7 news media scoured Wright’s sermons for evidence against the candidate. That some of the phrases they took out of context sounded very much like the kind of thing that many of us preachers have often said from the pulpit made them sound no less scary when played back on Fox “News” (sic).

Like Supreme Court nominees who do best to have no record to derail their nomination it may be prudent for a president of the Untied States to detach himself from church membership to avoid defending every jot and tiddle spoken from the pulpit of his church.

The irony now is that the Obama campaign nearly got derailed when the media portrayed his Christian pastor as being a loose cannon, but apparently a good 25% percent of the electorate never even heard about it. Or maybe they forgot, which is even more discouraging. So I don't know, I must conclude that one in four Americans is just not paying attention.

But one thing I do know for sure, the right wing demagogues, and the benighted citizens who pay attention to them can’t have it both ways. President Obama can’t be BOTH a Christian with a dangerously unstable former pastor and be a Muslim. He just can’t.

1. The chief purpose of long interim ministries is to provide a regular supply of jobs for ministers who are unwilling or unable to take a settled pastorate.  This is not a good thing.  Although a good interim minister can be a gift to a congregation, he or she is no substitute for a settled pastor.  Interims work to contract, they often don't live in the communities they serve, and they are not going to stay.  It is a different kind of ministry, and the longer a church has an interim minister the longer it is deprived of the covenantal relationship that comes with having a called and settled minister.

2. During my 30 years in the ministry the length of interim ministries has expanded from a few months to two or three years (or more.) Meanwhile settled ministries are getting shorter, so the only difference seems to be less accountability on the part of the interim minister. Many seem to prefer it that way.

3. Interim ministers were once typically retired experienced pastors who preached, did pastoral care, and kept a light hand on the organization while the congregation sought a new settled pastor.

4. Today, interim ministers lead elaborate congregational self-studies, change the structures, rewrite the by-laws, and generally move the furniture around in ways that were once considered to be the job of a settled leader.

5. The reason that the extended length and the frenetic re-shuffling of interim ministry is justified as necessary is because the leave-taking of a pastor is considered to be such a trauma that only expert interim leadership can help the congregation heal from it and prepare for new leadership. It is true that there are such traumatic situations, such as the death of a pastor, cases of clergy abuse or misconduct, or where there has been profound conflict. These situations may well call for extended interims. But the new model for interim ministry assumes that every transition needs such a long and intense interim. They do not. Why then are all interims expected to be so long? See #1.

6. The model for much interim ministry is a family system model where congregations are seen as dysfunctional systems and the former pastor (actually called the BFP “beloved former pastor” in some interim training) is seen as the problem. Sometimes this is true. Usually it is not, but the one-size-fits all template is demeaning to former pastors who have served faithfully. One must wonder if it can be possible that every pastor’s predecessor was incompetent, lazy, controlling or evil.

7. Long interims frequently dissipate the momentum of many church programs, make the congregation feel adrift, lose the allegiance of many long-term members, and often leave the new settled pastor with a much-diminished congregation. This scorched-earth policy allows for little continuity between pastorates, and means the new pastor often must “re-invent the wheel” in a new setting.

8. Interim ministers have their own networks, and often work outside the existing judicatory processes. They can and often do function as a free-floating class of paladins for hire that raises fundamental questions about the meaning of ordination and the accountability of the ordained.  Ordaining someone to interim ministry is a (new) practice that needs serious scrutiny.

9. Because the models of interim ministry are derived largely from psycho-social systems theory and/or corporate management models they have little regard for the church’s own grammar of how to be church. These interim models are very thin on the ground when it comes to theology. This mirrors a general trend in ministry toward professional identity over the ancient churchly arts of soul-craft and ministry of the Word of God.

10. Lay persons in leadership during a time of pastoral transition are well-advised to carefully query potential interim ministers about their model of interim ministry. Question the assumption that every church needs a two or three year interim. Maybe you do, but ask why? Ask if the interim is planning on doing a lot of restructuring, and if so, why? The congregation should decide what it needs from an interim, and not hire an interim to tell it what it needs from him or her. An interim is just that, an interim who gets you through a period to allow the “search and call” process to take place. The rule of an interim should be like a doctor: “Do no harm.” A good interim will leave a small footprint.