ANGELS [M, 12-8-25]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life From the Years of Winter—ANGELS [M, 12-8-25]

 

Angels. There is a lot of talk about them, but not by me. There has been much thought about them and songs and sermons and stories, but not by me. [1]

I don’t know anything about them. I haven’t experienced them. There is a lot of talk about them in the Bible and in the history of the church, but to me it is just talk. It’s been easier for me simply to ignore them. I can’t recall anyone every complaining, ever saying, “Why don’t you preach about angels?”

It is only now, when I am far beyond any possibility of mounting a pulpit, that it occurs to me that I really should have tried to say something useful about angels along the way. After all, there is all that talk about them in the Bible. I’m not sure that a preacher should be allowed to get away with simply ignoring a topic like angels.

Especially in the Christmas season, when angels play a rather important part in the Christmas pageant.

I always tried to preach the whole gospel, not just my favorite topics. That’s the point of the lectionary—the listing of different scriptures for each Sunday of the church year. We preach the lections designated, rather than picking out our own, to keep us from being Johnny One Note.

In using the lectionary, I have always preached first on the Gospel reading. We are Christians, after all. We need first to hear the story of Christ.

If for some reason I felt the Gospel reading for the day was inappropriate, maybe too shop-worn, I next chose whichever of the readings was hardest for me to understand and apply. I figured if it were hard for me, it probably was hard for the rest of the congregation, too, so I should spend time on it. Most of the time the Gospel lesson was hard enough to understand that it qualified for sermon status on both counts.

There may have been lectionary readings about angels, but I don’t recall any. Sure, they appear in plenty of readings, like Christmas, where they tell the shepherds about Jesus. But they aren’t the main characters. That’s Jesus, and I was always ready to preach about Jesus.

So what now, when “I ain’t gonna need this house no longer?” One of the lines in that great Sturt Hamblen song is “I see an angel peeking through a broken window pane.”

The idea seems to be that we’re going to have to deal with angels when we die. So I’d better apologize for ignoring them all these years, both to my congregations and to the angels. I don’t want angels harping at me for eternity.

John Robert McFarland

1] I actually did write a book about angels, called “The Out of Place Angel,” about the little angel, Miranda, who was supposed to go with the heavenly host to proclaim the birth of Jesus, but she missed the flight, since she was always out of place. She went on her own to try to catch up with the heavenly host, but couldn’t remember where they were going. So she just went all over the world, proclaiming the birth of Christ wherever she saw a baby being born. It was beautifully illustrated by the late, great Shelly Rasche, but we never found a publisher for it. You can find Shelly's art on line.

SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR [F, 12-5-25]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Rememberer—SLEEPING ON THE FLOOR [F, 12-5-25]

 

Christmas is a time when we travel long distances to stay in a hotel in the town where we are visiting family. Now. Not when I was a kid.

When I was a kid, when my family visited relatives, or they visited us, there were never enough beds, so we kids slept on the floor. Sometimes the grown-ups did, too, according to how many folks had crowded into the modest homes most of us lived in. Often the hosts gave up their bed to the visiting grown-ups [not the kids!] and slept on the floor with us.

We didn’t think of it as a hardship, even Aunt Ginny [Virginia], who was no spring chicken even when she married the older bachelor farmer, George Redinbo, and less so when she gave birth to Bobby and then Ronnie.

Sleeping on the floor was an adventure, and worth it to be part of a big extended family that would not have been able to get together if we’d had to pay somebody to put us up…and put up with us.

When morning came, we gathered up the sheets and blankets and pillows and put them aside for the next night, and we helped fix breakfast, and we started planning the day together.

Even now, in this modern time, when people have larger houses but less room for guests, and we have more money and more hotels, when we were still able to travel, Helen and I sometimes spent the night with friends, and vice versa. We are blessed with good friends. They are good hosts.

It’s still a special time, even though none of us sleep on the floor. [In part, because once down, we would not be able to get up again.]

The problem with Christians today is that so few of us are willing to sleep on the floor. When you sleep on the floor in order to be together with others in the family or friendship community, you are sharing the hosting, and Christians are called to be hosts, not just guests, in the world.

Hosting is a shared responsibility. We don’t say, “Oh, you poor worldly misfits, we’ll give you a place to sleep.” We say, “We’ll share the floor with you.” That is what good hosts do.

And, if you can’t get with the floor-sleeping metaphor, whatever you think hosting is, the bottom line is that Christians are called to be hosts in the world. Jesus said, “I am among you as one who serves.” [Luke 22:27.]

John Robert McFarland

 

 

HE LAST PLACE ON EARTH [T, 12-2-25]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE LAST PLACE ON EARTH [T, 12-2-25]

It’s not surprising that God threw Adam and Eve out of The Garden of Eden. After all, God had created A&E because God was lonely, and then A&E went and acted like they had created themselves and had no need of God. [Genesis 1:26-28]

When A&E were thrown out of Eden, they were homeless. No, not just unhoused. “Unhoused” means you don’t have a house. Homeless means you don’t have a home.

They tried renting. They found a new place to dwell. Turned out to be down at the end of Lonely Street. Definitely no Garden.

They had no choice but to keep looking for some homeless shelter that would take them in. Sure, they thought about sneaking back into Eden while God wasn’t looking, but no, they could not get back in. There was a flaming sword at the eastern gate. They’d get chopped up if they tried to go back. They were the first to day, “You can’t go home again.”

They wandered for eons, east of Eden, throughout the world, from Africa to Europe and Asia and the Americas, “from earth’s wide bounds to ocean’s farthest coasts,” looking for another Eden.

When they had tried every decent place on earth, they were finally so weary, so footworn, they were willing to take anything, even the last place on earth. That turned out to be a woebegone town called Bethlehem. Our of options, A&E had found a new home.

In Advent, preachers and theologians talk about readiness. Not just using Advent to get ready for Christmas, which is the appearance of God in the world in human form, Emmanuel. We say that Christ did not appear until the time was right, when all was in readiness.

In worship, we reenact the history of the relationship between God and the creation, from the big bang to resurrection. First we acknowledge that “…it is God who has created us and not we ourselves.” [Psalm 100:3] Then we confess that we act, though, like A&E, like we really did create ourselves, that we have no need of God. [That’s called sinning.] Then we acknowledge that God has made a new creation in Jesus Christ, and, finally, we commit ourselves to live as part of that new creation.

In Advent worship, we are essentially reenacting the history of the world from the Garden of Eden up to the birth in Bethlehem, from the time of “the fall” up to the new creation.

What does it mean to say that the time was right, that finally the world was ready for Christ?

Karl Jung says that there is a “collective unconscious,” an unconscious consciousness that all humans share. We are all Adam and Eve. In Bethlehem, A&E finally learned that they could not go back to Eden, but that they could go back to God, that the lonely God was still hoping for companionship, still looking for love, so much so that God was waiting for A&E, in that stable in Bethlehem.

That happens when all is in readiness, not when God is ready, but when we are ready. That’s often when we’ve tried everything but God first. That’s okay with God. God is always ready.

John Robert McFarland

To get a picture to accompany this column, I Googled “Last place on earth.” Google says it’s Duluth, Minnesota!

 

THE IMPORTANCE OF DEAD ENDS [Sun, 11-30-25]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—THE IMPORTANCE OF DEAD ENDS [Sun, 11-30-25]

 

Some of the most important events of my life were dead ends. Maybe yours, too.

I wanted to be an inner-city preacher. In college, I was fascinated by the work of William Stringfellow and others in New York’s East Harlem Protestant Parish. They were serious Christians, trying to live out the Jesus lifestyle in a radical way. I thought that since I had grown up in poverty, I could pastor well others who were caught in that plight. But a summer of social work [Howell Neighborhood House] and preaching in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago [the Wycliffe & Halstead Street Churches] taught me that rural poverty and urban poverty are very different. I did not fit in the city. I had no idea what to do next, but I knew my life would not be in the inner city. That was a dead end.

As I began to think that I was a good preacher, I decided I should be a seminary professor of preaching. So, in addition to my three-year seminary degree, I did another three years of graduate school to get the necessary union card—an academic doctorate. But all that work so that I could stand at a podium convinced me that my call was to stand in a pulpit. I learned that my call had been to preach, not to teach. All that academic work was a dead end.

As a parish pastor, I thought it would be neat to be sought after as a pastoral counselor. My seminary counseling professor was Carroll Wise, who had joined Anton Boisen in initiating the pastoral counseling movement, “human help for human hurt,” as he used to say. I liked the idea of sitting in a big chair in my study and listening to people tell me their problems and then giving them solutions. With congregational preaching, you never knew if anything you said was helpful. In one-to-one counseling, it was easier to measure your success. Either she gave up drinking or she didn’t. Either they decided to stay in their marriage or they didn’t. Either he cheered up or he didn’t. [Psychologist joke: He said he was depressed, so I told him to cheer up.]

So I took courses on psychology ad counseling, and read books about psych and counseling, and went to psychology seminars about counseling. But I was a useless therapist. Another dead end.

It turned out that I was a terrible counselor but a pretty good pastor.

Pastors walk the walk, not just talk the talk. They go through stuff with people, whether the stuff be good or bad. I could do that. Counselors do not help folks by giving solutions, the way a physician writes a prescription on a pad. That doesn’t work. But I did not have the patience to counsel. I’m a problem solver. If someone presented a problem to me, I wanted a solution. Now.

When I gave up sitting in the big chair and sagely nodding and providing a prescription after 45 minutes, and started walking through the morass with folks without telling them where to step, I became a useful pastor. 

But my dead ends were not wasted. First, of course, they taught me where I really belonged. They also taught me about my limitations. Knowing your limits is as important as knowing your skills. And what I learned as I went down those dead-end roads was useful to me, both personally and professionally.

So, even though we’re past the one day a year that is designated for giving thanks, I give thanks for my dead ends. They cost me a lot of time, but they were important in helping me be who I was really called to be.

John Robert McFarland

A SLIGHTLY OBSCURE THANKSGIVING POEM [F, 11-27-25]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—A SLIGHTLY OBSCURE THANKSGIVING POEM [F, 11-27-25]

 

On this day of requisitioned Thanks

I am glad my life

is drawing to a close

 

Don’t get me wrong; I love

memories and puppies

and trees that weather

storms

 

But we can give thanks

in prose and prayer

only a finite number

before the infinite appears

to beckon with new

 

memories and puppies and trees

to weather storms

 

John Robert McFarland

EMOTIONAL TRUST [M, 11-24-25]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter--EMOTIONAL TRUST [M, 11-24-25]

 

We were visiting a daughter. She had been invited to a gathering of friends and didn’t want to miss it so she took us along, even though we were old and Methodist, and not likely to fit in with a bunch of Roman Catholics in their thirties and forties.

It was a pleasant occasion, back yard cookout on an evening of good weather. We were the oldest people there. Our daughter’s friends were being very careful around us, in a respectful way, for they were all Catholics, and they knew that I was a Methodist preacher. The host had gone to the university where I did my doctoral work, so he even introduced me to everyone as a theologian, not just as a preacher.

At one point I was sitting in a circle of 7 or 8 women. They sort of forgot about me, except for the woman beside me, who seemed especially uneasy as the subject turned to abortion. Everyone had an opinion, an uninformed opinion, an anecdotal opinion, different from every other opinion. They were all quite adamant that their opinion was best because it was backed up by a story they had heard from the friend of a cousin whose brother had been a priest. The woman beside me whispered, “Shouldn’t you say something about this?”

“I’m just a theologian,” I replied. She thought for a moment, then looked a bit sad as she said, “Oh, yeah…”

In this age of internet and social media, we not only ignore the educated, the informed, the specialists, but we don’t trust them. Their opinions count for less than those of the uneducated, uninformed, friends of cousins, and anonymous posters on the web.

Trust is now upside down. We now trust people who are ignorant or even people who are known liars. We mistrust people who are educated about a subject, people who rely on facts.

Trust now is based not on reality but on emotion. Trust is equated with emotional comfort.

It’s all Garrison Keillor’s fault. In his Lake Wobegon, all the children were above average. Those children are grown up now. They’ve accepted for so long that they are above average that they don’t need experts or specialists.

They are those whose gravestones will read, “I did my own research.”

Like the first emotional task of a baby, the last emotional task of an old person is learning to trust. A baby has to learn to trust parents and other care givers, who are stand-ins for God. An old person has to trust some care givers, yes, but they aren’t stand-ins for God. We are faced directly now with God. Shall we trust God for what is real and true, or shall we trust what we get from the internet, or a cousin’s friend?

You can tell the difference between true trust, trust in God and false trust by the way it makes you feel. False trust makes you feel comfortable. Trust in God makes you feel real.

John Robert McFarland

VALUABLE ILLUSIONS [Sat, 11-22-25]

 

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter—VALUABLE ILLUSIONS [Sat, 11-22-25]

 

Illusions are good. Delusions not so much.

An illusion is when you pretend to be Meadowlark Lemon while you’re shooting hoops in the barnyard. A delusion is when you think you are Meadowlark Lemon. Or Christ. Or God, when you’re only the president.

Don Lemkau was the Minister of Visitation at Charleston [IL] Wesley UMC when I became Directing Minister there. I was 42. He was 72.

“The problem with middle-aged people,” he said to me, “is that they think they’ll never get old. But everybody gets old.”

I believed him. I knew I would get old. Now, though, now that I’m older than he was then, a whole lot older, I don’t just believe, I understand. I’m still sort of mad at him, though.

I mean, why did he bust my bubble, take away my illusion of eternal youth?

I’ve never understood the people who want to disillusion younger people about what will happen to them when they get older. I am especially irritated at older people who tell children how bad it will be “in the real world.” Okay, they’re correct, but why destroy the present with fear of the future? The real world is whatever your world is now. That’s where you have to live. And being able to live in the present real world sometimes requires some illusions.

As Jesus said, “Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof.” [Mt 6:34]

No, I’m not talking about lies, like saying “It’s okay” when you know it’s not okay, or the lies of omission, like refusing to tell someone that the doctor has said they’re going to die.

I’m talking about illusions like the one I told Kim Wagler, my first cancer nurse, during my first week of chemo. “I’m just not the kind of guy who gets side effects,” I said. It wasn’t a lie. I really believed it. And even though I was spectacularly wrong, it kept me going in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.

Old people do a lot of denying. We think the time will never come when we can’t walk, or drive, or eat. But reality says all those unpleasant things are very close to a time when they can happen.

Especially dying. Lots of denying there. We can’t imagine a world without us. We all assume we’ll live forever, that this “one person-one death” scheme will be suspended in our case.

I am beyond denial. I have made my peace with death. I intend to go out in a blaze of glory, facing down the terrorists who have invaded the hall where I am receiving the Nobel Prize for the advances I have made in both narrative theology and quantum field theory. If you don’t think that’s an illusion, keep it to yourself.

John Robert McFarland