Retired Pastor Ruminates

Monday, October 5, 2009

Where I Ruminate on Faith as Following

For me the big one was the bad bike accident, but it could have been any number of other events. Because I think most of us have had at some point the disconcerting realization that our life is not under our control. As a pastor for thirty years I spent a lot of time with people after they had this realization.

A spot shows up on our X-Ray. Our business goes bankrupt. Someone we love gets sick and dies. Someone breaks into our house. Suddenly, we become acutely aware that the world with all its possibilities for beauty and happiness and meaning is also fraught with unexpected shocks, temptations and difficulties.

That is where faith comes in. It seems to me that faith is not primarily belief but trust. Faith is the recognition that we are not in control of our lives, and we can not foresee all the places where our journey will go, but we trust God to lead us and to be with us wherever it goes.

So faith is not self-reliance (that American idol) but God-reliance. It is trusting that the journey has meaning and purpose even when we can not see what it might be. Kierkegaard rightly wrote that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

Faith, then, is not a possession or a quality we have in and of ourselves. Faith is a trusting relationship we have with the one who does control our lives and who knows where our journey will lead. Barbara Brown Taylor says that faith is “a dangling modifier.” It needs an object to complete it. Faith is always in something or somebody.

So faith looks to God in trust. Abraham is a model for such faith, because he left his comfortable home and went where God led him. He followed the promise even when he couldn't see the outcome. He trusted the promise-maker to be a promise-keeper. His journey in faith led to him being the father of a great nation, and the one from whose family the redeemer of the world would someday be born. Abraham couldn't know this, of course, couldn't see ahead into the future, but still he followed. He trusted God to lead and he would follow.

Likewise the followers of Jesus didn't know where their lives' journeys would take them, only that it would take them with him. And when it led to his cross they could see no future, but later came to know that his future and theirs were on the other side of the cross, against all expectations.

So faith follows. We come to God in need with empty hands. The great theologians of the Reformation saw clearly that we are not saved by our virtue or our good works, not by any righteousness we may have, but only by faith. “Faith is the humility of obedience,” says Karl Barth. Faith knows that we are not in control, that we do not know where we are going, that by ourselves we are lost and afraid. When my children were small and we were in a crowded place, they would instinctively reach for my hand. They knew I could be trusted to lead them and keep them safe.

So faith trusts God to lead us, not necessarily to comfort and to happiness, for the life of faith is not insulated from life's pains. On the contrary, we may be led to suffering we might otherwise avoid. But to follow in faith is the only true way to find life's path, and reach journey's end as we are meant to do.

Barbara Brown Taylor employs the image of a rope bridge to speak about the journey of faith (I imagine it as one of those scary ones from the Indiana Jones' movies):

“Faith is not a well–fluffed nest, or a well-defended castle high on a hill. It is more like a rope bridge over a scenic gorge, sturdy but swinging back and forth, with plenty of light and plenty of air but precious little to hang on to except the stories you have heard: that it is the best and only way across, that it is possible, that it will bear your weight. All you have to do is believe in the bridge more than you believe in the gorge, but fortunately you do not have to believe all by yourself. There are others to believe it with you, and even some to believe it for you when your own belief wears thin. They have crossed the bridge ahead of you and are waiting on the other side. You can talk to them if you like, as you step into the air, putting one foot ahead of the other.” (The Preaching Life, p. 94)

I take comfort that we don't take that walk alone over the gorge. Abraham is undoubtedly there on the other side. And Sarah, and Peter and James and John, and Mary Magdalene, and St. Francis and Julian of Norwich. I picture Calvin and Luther and Pope John XXIII, Dorothy Day and Mother Theresa. And many others, some of whom I have known myself, that history will never recall. They weren't perfect, just ordinary men and women who trusted in God and followed him into their future together.

“It takes a lot of courage to be a human being, but if Jesus was who he said he was, the bridge will hold. Believing in him will not put us in charge, or get us what we want or even save us from all harm, but believing in him, we may gradually lose our fear of our lives.” (Taylor, p. 94)

We will no longer fear, even though we know we are not in control of our lives, even though our journey is going to unknown, unseen places. Because he can be trusted with our lives we needn't fear, only follow.

Saturday, October 3, 2009

Funny Video: Church History in Four Minutes

For those of us who slogged through Church History for several semesters in seminary, who knew that there might be another way? My thanks to one of my church history professors, Glenn Miller of Bangor Theological Seminary, for sharing this with me.

As the creator of this video, Janet Batchler put it: “Mark Brewer took 21 weeks to cover church history-1 week per century. But I thought he could have done it all in four minutes. We made a video to show him how:”

With apologies to Billy Joel.

Addendum: Janet recently posted the words to the song. Here they are!

Pentecost, Palestine, barbarians, Paul gets a sign

Neglected widows, martyred Stephen, Gentile vs. Jew

New Testament, getting tribal, Gnostic gospels, Holy Bible

Jamnia, Revelation, word of God is true

Martyrs, Diocletian, Polycarp, Domitian

Church learns, Nero burns, Christians underground

Chi-Rho, basilica, Vita Evangelica

Nicea, Who was Jesus, Christians start to rebound

CHORUS: We didn’t start the fire

It’s been always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

Though we didn’t light it

And we cannot fight it

St. Patrick, Monastery, Visigoths are pretty scary

Pope Leo, St. Jerome, forgetting how to read

Mohammed writes the Koran, Convert or die to Islam

Hard to cope, Where's the Pope, the Venerable Bede

Dark ages, knights and pages, east and west will split in stages

Monks’ skuills, cathedrals, Charlemagne starts to reign,

Methodias, Constantinople, Peasants, clergy, serfs and nobles

Augustine, Irene, everything goes Byzantine

CHORUS: We didn’t start the fire

It’s been always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

Though we didn’t light it

And we cannot fight it

Cluny, bubonic plague, Vikings, Saracens invade

William conquers, priests and monks, and Jerusalem gets sacked

Flying buttress, St. Clare, celibacy, worship Mary

Knights Templar, stained glass, Sultan Saladin gets whacked

Mendicants, Avignon, Albertus Magnus, Genghis Khan

Aquinas, Maimonides, Gentle Francis of Assisi

Summa bono , Faith and reason, say God bless you when you’re sneezin’

Just War, Crusades galore, but who are we fighting for?

CHORUS: We didn’t start the fire

It’s been always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

Though we didn’t light it

And we cannot fight it

Competing popes, not much hope, Joan of Arc makes her mark

John Wycliff, Thomas Kempis, Canterbury Tales

Michelangelo, Siena, Leonardo and Vienna

Reformation, printing press, Guttenberg prevails

John Calvin, Ulrich Zwingle, indulgences for the kingly

Martin Luther pounds the door, Here I stand, I’ll do no more

CHORUS: We didn’t start the fire

It’s been always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

Though we didn’t light it

And we cannot fight it

King James Bible, John Locke, Galileo, J.S. Bachj

Anabaptists, Guy Fawkes, Blaise Pascal, John Knox

Puritans preach denial, Salem witches go on trial

Enlightenment or transcendance, we declare our independence

Whitfield makes us all Awaken, Pentecostals get us shakin’

Darwin teaches evolution, Marx preaches revolution

Jesus freaks, immigration, nuclear annihilation

Overwhelmed by information, Who will save this generation?

CHORUS: We didn’t start the fire

It’s been always burning

Since the world’s been turning

We didn’t start the fire

But when we are gone

It will still go on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.....

Friday, October 2, 2009

Gerard Manley Hopkins: Poet of A Vast Incarnation

British poet and Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) is once again a subject of interest, prompted by the recent full-dress and somewhat controversial biography by Paul Mariani (Gerard Manley Hopkins: A Life, Viking 2008).

Hopkins is one of my favorites. When I was at Oxford in 1989 there was a display of his original poems and notes for poems at Christchurch College where I was taking a lecture. I loved to go and look at these strange and wondrous scribblings with Hopkins' own unique pointing and punctuation. Hopkins' verse often discerns the grandeur of God in the commonplace. Here is one of my (many) favorites:

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundly wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell’s

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves—goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying What I do is for me: for that I came.

I say more: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: that keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God’s eye what in God’s eye he is—

Christ. For Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men’s faces.

Tuesday, September 29, 2009

Don’t be Afraid of Mussels

I write in defense of mussels, the stepchild of the shellfish world. I am not talking about the dreaded freshwater zebra mussels that are threatening our lakes here in the Berkshires, but the delectable marine blue mussel.

The French love them. You can’t walk a block in Paris without seeing a bistro with a “Moules” sign. For some reason though, Americans, who will happily pound down their weight in steamers and Littlenecks have been slow to warm to these succulent little morsels.

Many years ago I had a wonderful congregant, Gladys Brigham, whose father had been a Congregationalist missionary to the Middle East in the nineteenth century. He had gone to Bangor Theological Seminary, and the family still had a summer cottage on Isleboro, one of Maine’s most charming islands. When my children were still children Gladys invited us all to spend a few days there and she joined us for a couple of them. At low tide there were more mussels than you could shake a stick at, so I harvested a batch, cleaned and de-bearded them, and steamed them with a little garlic and white wine. “These are delicious,” opined Gladys, who was close to ninety, and had been coming to this very spot for the better part of the Twentieth Century. “I’ve never had a mussel before.” I was dumbfounded: “Why not?” “People here don’t eat them.”

I have a theory about this. First, mussels are subject to Red Tide (dinoflagellates), which is harmless to the mussel but contains toxins that can harm humans with paralytic shellfish poisoning. If back in the day Uncle Wendell got wicked sick from eating a mussel it might have put everybody off their feed for awhile. Today governments strictly monitor for toxins at fishing sites, so that is no longer a problem. And besides, clams are subject to Red Tide, too, so I don’t get it.

The other bad rap mussels get is that they are hard to clean, and it is true that if you harvest them yourself it is a bit of a chore to scrub them up, de-beard them, and scrape the barnacles off them. And if you are not careful, there will always be a closed one that is, in fact, just a shell full of mud and it will muddy your broth.

But the last few years I have been able to buy beautiful mussels from Prince Edward Island in the grocery store. These are fresh, clean, scrubbed and de-bearded, and need minimal handling. Just make sure that they are alive, discarding any whose shells have opened or are cracked. Give them a good rinse in cold water. I put them in a bowl and leave them in the sink with the water gently running for a while.

So get yourself some mussels. This is the best time of year for them, as the claim is that the best months to eat them end in “–ber,” and here we are in September with two more “–ber” months to go. And the best thing of all is that, although their flavor resembles that of the treasured lobster, they are cheap. My PEI mussels come in two pound mesh bags, and are often available for $2.49 a pound. I got some last week for $1.99 on sale. The lobsters in that tank nearby were $11.99. Tough decision? No.

There are many ways to treat a mussel, but I like them done with as little fanfare as possible (except when I make them Chinese style with garlic and fermented black beans, but that is another post for another day). Mussels contain a lot of water, so you don’t need to drown them when you cook them. Here’s a simple recipe similar to what the French call Moules Marinieres (they would use butter, reduce the broth, and add more butter at the end, but I like it this way):

2 lbs mussels, cleaned and de-bearded

4 tbs extra virgin olive oil

½ yellow onion, chopped

2 tbs garlic, peeled and finely chopped

½ tsp crushed red pepper (optional)

½ cup dry white wine.

¼ cup chopped fresh parsley

Drain the rinsed mussels in a colander. You’ll want a wide pan with a tight lid. Heat the oil over medium heat, and cook the onion until soft. Toss in the garlic, crushed red pepper, and parsley. Then gently add the mussels (the shells will break if you’re hard on them.) Gently stir to mix, add the white wine and cover. Give the pan a gentle shake from time to time and start checking the mussels after about five minutes. If they are not opening turn the heat up a bit and cover again. They should all be open after ten minutes. You can serve them now, but I prefer to remove the mussels to a platter with a slotted spoon, and strain the broth through a sieve covered with cheesecloth to catch any sand. You can pour the broth over the mussels or serve it on the side (as I do). Enjoy.

Wine pairings: The French might drink Muscadet with them, and they wouldn't be wrong. A crisp Sauvignon Blanc is always nice. When we were with our daughter in Provence I ordered mussels (albeit Provencal style with tomato) and she said “Try the Rose.” I did, and it was very good, so a dry Rose from the South of France works just fine. But don't break the bank on cheap eats, any good dry white will do.

(Photo by R.L. FLoyd)

Monday, September 28, 2009

To Friend or not to Friend, that is the Question?

If you've read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point, and who hasn’t, you may recall running across Oxford Professor Robin Dunbar’s famous “Social Brain Hypothesis,” in which he posits that 150 is the average size of a group that is manageable for the human brain.

Dunbar and his researchers found numerous examples of social groups of about 150, where that was the ideal managable size, including church congregations, sustainable military units, and guild members in some on-line video games.

As someone who spent my entire vocational life serving as a leader in congregations this has the ring of truth about it.

Relationships in a congregation are pretty complex, but it is clear to me that each member has a different set of layered friendships. This fits with Dunbar’s findings. His team found a pattern where each person has five intimate friends, 15 close friends, around fifty in the next layer, and finally the 150 of the whole group.

This got me ruminating about Facebook, the popular social networking utility. Founded in 2003 at Harvard, Facebook expanded to other colleges in the Boston area, then to Ivy League Colleges and Stanford, and finally opened up to anybody over 13.

My tribe, the Baby Boomers, have discovered it with a vengeance. This has caused ticklish situations for the kids who still think of it as their space, and leave pictures of bongs, beer pong competitions, and their classy Cinco de Mayo tequila shot contest posted on their Facebook wall for Mom and Dad (not to mention prospective employers) to view.

Facebook now has over 300 million members world-wide and is growing, which means you may get “friended” any minute by people from High School that you haven’t seen in four decades. I joined a few months ago, and have already just broken the 200 friends mark, which according to Dunbar’s hypothesis, is too many for my brain to manage (and my brain is injured, which makes it even tougher.)

Facebook cross references your connections and suggests friends for you, and you soon realize that you know a lot of people. But are they really your friends? Do you want them in your life, even your on-line one? So to friend or not to friend, that is the question?

As a public service to my readers I offer you these guidelines:

Accept all friend requests if you actually know the person. This may sound obvious, but you'd be surprised how many people accept a friend request, and their first communication is “Do I know you?” Awkward!
Don’t drink and friend. My son taught me this one, so now when I’ve been dipping into the single malt late at night I refrain from making friending decisions. This eliminates next day friending remorse.
Don't over-reach. Some people like to friend everybody they can find in the world who shares their name, which might be OK if your name is Melchior Kwitkor, but unruly if it’s John Smith. Best to avoid this one.
Don't pad your friends list by friending or “fanning” a lot of celebrities and groups. If you love Van Morrison (I do) fine, become his friend (bad example, he probably doesn't have one), but don't become friends with the Sons of Lithuania unless you are actually Lithuanian.
Don’t friend your kids’ friends unless you are actually friends with them. Otherwise, it’s just sketchy.
Ask yourself, “If I actually saw this person “in person,” would we have anything to say to each other?”
Ask yourself, “Would I want to have lunch with this person?”
Ask yourself, “If I still sent out Christmas cards, would this person be on my list?”
Don’t friend old girlfriends or boyfriends. It’s just not a good idea. (See “Don't Drink and Friend,” above)
Don’t friend people you really don’t like. My kids call these “frenemies,” a distinction lost on me.
Don’t get all competitive about collecting friends. You’ll end up with way too many and you will begin to hate your Facebook page.

How many is too many? About 150.

Friday, September 25, 2009

More Ruminations on Prayer

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine article “Is There a Right Way to Pray?” (by Zev Chafets) stresses the dizzying diversity of practices among different religious traditions. But even within all this diversity there seems to be a common felt need.

This raises the question of whether the impulse to pray is a universal human experience, an example of what my tradition calls “common grace.” Could it be that we are “hard-wired” to speak our deepest needs, hopes and fears to the Other who transcends us.

Author Frederick Buechner suggests as much when he writes: “Everybody prays whether you think of it as praying or not. The odd silence you fall into when something very beautiful is happening or something very good or very bad. The ah-h-h-h! that sometimes floats up out of you as out of a Fourth of July crowd when the sky-rocket bursts over the water. The stammer of pain at somebody else’s pain. The stammer of joy at somebody else’s joy. Whatever words or sounds you use for sighing with over your own life. These are all prayers in their way.”

These are all prayers because in some sense they are addressed not merely to oneself but to an(other.) To use the language of Martin Buber, prayer in any form is an “I-Thou” relationship, where our address, even when it starts as interior monologue, finds the unseen conversation partner. The “I” finds a “Thou.”

My friend and former colleague Rabbi Dennis Ross and I used to talk about this from the perspectives of our respective traditions. He uses this language of “I-Thou” from Buber to explore all our relationships, including the primal relationship with God, in his fine and accessible book God in Our Relationships. Like Beuchner, Rabbi Ross (who is also a social worker) finds prayer not by looking inward to special spiritual states, but by paying attention to one’s relationships. It is here, in the shared quotidian activities of ordinary life that God may be discerned and known. Rabbi Ross says, “The I-Thou relationship comes easily and often, over breakfast or at work, in the classroom or at the gym as well as in turning points of life.”

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

“Gimme! Thanks! Oops! And Wow!”

I always thought I had a simple explanation for the types of prayer. In innumerable sermons, children’s messages, confirmation classes, and adult education sessions I told people there are four kinds of prayer: Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, and Supplication.

To quote from my own A Course in Basic Christianity: “Many prayers begin with Adoration, which is a prayer that asks for nothing but simply praises God and expresses our love for God.

Often such prayer brings us to a realization of God's majesty and power and our humbleness in relationship to it and we are drawn to Confession, which is prayer that expresses to God the things for which we are sorry and need forgiveness.

Thanksgiving is prayer that expresses gratitude to God for all the blessings we have received at God's hands.

Supplication is prayer that asks God for something to be accomplished, whether for ourselves, which is called Petition, or for others, which is called Intercession. If you take the first letter of each type of prayer, Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving and Supplication, you get the word ‘acts.’”

Pretty neat and simple. But in Sunday’s NYT Magazine in an article by Zef Chafets asking “Is There a Right Way to Pray,” Rabbi Marc Gellman does it even better when he is quoted as saying, “But really, when it comes right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! And Wow!” Now that is simple.

Does it fit my template? Well. let's see: Gimme is Supplication (Gimme for me is Petition, Gimme for them is Intercession); Thanks is Thanksgiving, obviously; Oops is Confession; and Wow is Adoration. There you have it. Wow!