CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…
It’s not surprising that the postal service is in such big trouble, judging from my own situation. They obviously have lost my invitation to the upcoming royal wedding. Some think that it is Kate’s fault, that she put the wrong amount of postage on my invitation. Translating pounds into dollars and then calculating the distance from England to the Upper Peninsula can be a daunting task. Maybe for a commoner, but surely not for a St. Andrew’s University student.
That’s why I’m sure I’m on the guest list, the St. Andrew’s connection. Prince William and Kate Middleton met there. I went there, too, although before they were born, and only for a summer, as part of my doctoral work, but St. Andy connections are strong, regardless of time and distance.
One of my professors that summer was the then-famous biblical scholar, William Barclay. One evening at a stand-up canapés and beverages reception, I saw my wife and teen-aged daughters across the room, in animated and clearly contentious toe-to-toe discussion with the most renowned biblical commentator in the English-speaking world. Thankfully, I was engaged in a conversation that kept me from going over there and admitting I was related to them. After we were back in our rooms, though, I asked what in St. Andrew’s had been going on.
Apparently “Willie” had made a remark that the worst thing that had ever happened in the Church of Scotland was the time they let a woman preach. If the church had stopped at that, it would have been only ONE of the worst things ever in the C of S, but she was pregnant at the time, which made it the very worst thing ever. My wife and daughters had set my professor straight. [1]
The next day in chapel, Dr. Barclay prayed hard and long in the pastoral prayer for those with closed minds to remember that our Lord commanded us to love God with all our mind, [2] which meant they had to be open to new ideas. Helen is not sure of this, but I’m quite convinced that he was praying for himself, that because he wanted to love God with all of his mind, as evidenced by so much excellent Bible research, he had also heard God speak to him through an American home ec teacher and a couple of teen-aged girls.
I have a love-frustration relationship with the United Methodist Church, but the UMC slogan is definitely on the love side: Open Doors, Open Hearts, Open Minds. Like most slogans, it is more of a hope than a reality. But it says who we want to be, those who love God with all our minds as well as all our soul and all our strength, because that’s what Jesus told us to do. There are other churches with open minds, even if they don’t sloganeer about it. Unfortunately, there also seem to be more and more churches and Christians who think that an open mind is a sin, that the Bible is a closed book, that the work of the Holy Spirit was to get the words onto the page and into the book rather than off the page and into our lives.
Old people are often accused of having closed minds, not open to new ways. I think that’s a bum rap. Yes, we old folks often don’t adopt new technologies, just because the old stuff is still working for us and we have other things we want to do with our time than learn how they’ve hidden the dad-burn buttons on the phone this time. That’s just good time management, not closed mindedness. Where openness really counts—openness to new life, to other people, to the ways of God—young and old alike can be closed. There’s no age requirement for a closed mind. There’s none for an open one, either.
I’m old, but I can still think, and I still believe it is true that “Jesus came to take away your sins, not your mind.”
JRMcF
1] And Helen complains that I once embarrassed HER! [Actually, she says it was quite a bit more often than once.]
2] Jesus said, “Love God with all your strength, all your soul, and all your mind.” [Matthew 22:37]
The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!
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{I also write the fictional “Periwinkle Chronicles” blog. One needs a rather strange sense of humor to enjoy it, but occasionally it is slightly funny. It is at http://periwinklechronicles.blogspot.com/}
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