ASH WEDNESDAY QUESTIONS [Sat, 2-29-20]

St. Mark’s Above Best Buy had two Ash Wednesday services. Being old people, we went to the noon service, because we had been out late—6 pm-- the night before at the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper, in the same venue, and could not go to the 7 p.m. Ash Wednesday service since we cannot be out late two nights in a row.

The noon service was especially nice and meaningful. About 20 of our fellow oldsters, comfortable and intimate, low-key, thoughtful leading by Jimmy Moore, beautiful organ music by Heather Orvek, and a quick answer from Helen McFarland.

Jimmy normally preaches a Sunday Homily, but on Ash Wednesday it was a Hundai Homily. He posted earlier in the morning that he was at the Hundai dealership to get his oil changed and work on his homily. If I were still preaching, I would go there to work on my sermons, because it’s obviously a productive atmosphere.

The preaching series at St. Mark’s for all of Lent is the questions we do ask and need to ask about faith. In the Hundai Homily, Jimmy asked what group of people gets asked questions the most.

Helen immediately replied, “Mothers.” She was, of course, right.

Old people often stop asking questions. We think we’ve been around so long we already know all the answers. That’s why we get old. We stay young by asking questions, the way the little ones do of mothers.

One question I had was: would Jimmy have grease on his fingers from the oil change and thus our forehead ashes would be harder to wash off. Like most of the other questions we ask at Lent, we have to be patient and wait for the answer…

John Robert McFarland

GRACE AT THE END [T, 2-25-20]

Teri Moren, the highly successful IU women’s basketball coach, does not huddle with her players at the end of the game, when one play can win or lose the game, because that is when tactics are required, not strategy.

Teri is the strategy coach. She watches the whole game unfold, watching to see if her team is sticking to the game plan, watching what the other coach is doing to counter her game plan, making adjustments accordingly. At the end of the game, she does not need strategy, she needs tactics. She doesn’t need a plan for the whole game, she needs one play, for “the end game.”

That’s where assistant coach Rhet Wiersma enters the picture. He’s been watching the game not with strategy in mind, but tactics. When it comes down to the last minute, and one play will win or lose the game, what will the winning play be? Can they take advantage of # 4, because she always hedges to the right? Or is it # 12, because she is poor with her left hand? Is # 8 slow to respond to a drive on her right side?

At that point in the game, Coach Moren isn’t even in the huddle. She stands outside as the players crowd in around Coach Wiersma as he draws up a play on the white board.

Before that happens, though, Rhet has asked his head coach one thing: Who do you want to have the ball?

Coach Moren told us how this whole scenario unfolded in a game last week. She told Coach Wiersma, “Put the ball in Grace’s hands.” In that particular situation, that was counter-indicated. Grace Berger was not having a good game, even an average game. She couldn’t “hit the side of the barn,” as we said back in my days, when the goal was literally mounted on the barn side. But Teri had a feeling. So Rhet drew up a play where Grace would be free to take the shot that won or lost the game. She made it.

It’s an interesting division of labor. Teri makes the big decisions. Her assistants figure out how to execute them.

I think I have learned from listening to those coaches. Now that I’m at my “end game,” I want the ball in the hands of Grace.

John Robert McFarland

BLACK HISTORY-THE DOORKEEPERS [Sun, 2-23-20]

I suspect that many of the most successful efforts by black people to get white people to accept a multi-racial society have been by one black person educating one white person.

All I remember about a particular one black person who educated me was that she was pretty. I suspect that’s the reason I went to church with her that Sunday night. I was a college student, working in a settlement house in the Pilsen neighborhood of Chicago. It’s almost all Hispanic now, but when I worked there, it had the remains of the huge Czech population that had originally settled it, before most of them moved to Berwyn, plus inroads of Puerto Ricans and Mexicans, who did not like each other much, some Appalachian whites, and Negroes from the South. The neighborhood was still up for grabs, and everyone was grabbing. [1]

I think that’s how I met the pretty Negro girl. She must have been involved in some summer church program, too.

I must have said something about never being to a Negro church. She must have seen that as an opportunity to educate me, for I was awkward and ordinary and skinny, not a propitious “date” or romantic prospect, not worth the opprobrium she might suffer, both from Negroes and whites, for being out in public with a white boy. For whatever reason, she invited me to go to a Negro church with her.

I couldn’t go on a Sunday morning because I was preaching at the Bohemian Wycliffe Methodist Church in Pilsen, its first English-speaking preacher, where the congregation was down to a dozen or so leftover old people, and later in the morning at the famous Halstead Street Institutional Church, a combination church and settlement house, with a beautiful Gothic sanctuary that seated 500, and a swimming pool, and a gymnasium, etc. It had been cut off from its neighborhood, and people in general, by the new interstate right through the heart of Chicago, and so had only 20 or so folks who were able to come to worship on Sunday morning. I suspect I was the last preacher both of those churches had before they closed.

Most churches in the 1950s still had Sunday evening services. It wasn’t “her” church we went to, but one my girl friend picked, I assume, for being characteristic of all Negro churches.

I was used to preaching in small, white, anything-can-happen country churches. I still was not prepared for that black church.

What I remember most were the ushers and the offering. The ushers were very large women in a uniform of white nurse-style dress with blue Sam Brown style sash across their ample bosoms. I learned later that they were not “ushers.” Only men could be ushers. These were the “doorkeepers.” Once the service started, they stood in front of the exit doors, their ample arms crossed over their ample bosoms. It was clear that no one was to leave before the benediction.

Well, more importantly, before the offering. There were no offering plates passed. We were required to march up to the front and pass in front of a table where the church officers sat and put our offering onto the table top, where they could see it.

Our first pass—although I had no idea it was going to be our first—I got out a dollar, which was what… maybe like $10 now? My “date” hissed at me, “Don’t put that much down.” I thought she was just being cheap, so I laid it down in front of the officers, feeling quite satisfied with myself, since most folks were putting down only change.

Which was not enough. Apparently there was an unspoken goal, and we had not matched it. We were all required to march by the table… it seems like several times, but probably only two more times. I do remember that the last time, I was down to a nickel.

Black History month is almost over, for this year. Its purpose is to educate all of us about our obliterated and ignored history of race relations. As I reflect on my own black history education, I realize that the best education probably does not take place on TV or in classrooms, but just through one black person taking the trouble to show one white person what her life and culture are like.

We all have the same problems; we just deal with them in different ways.

John Robert McFarland

1] Negro was the respectful designation then. As “black” became popular, many Negroes resisted using it more than white folks did. “Black” had always been associated with “bad,” like “a black heart.” I’ve always tried to stay up to date on the correct name for any group, but sometimes it’s difficult, especially if there are different ideas among the members of that group about what is correct.

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter…

THE REFUGE TRUCK   [F, 2-21-20]

There has been an ad in the employment classifieds in our local newspaper for several days: “Deliver locally manufactured refuge trucks.”

I thought about answering the ad, but I don’t want just to deliver refuge trucks; I want to drive a refuge truck route.

I know, of course, that it’s just a typo, but wouldn’t that be neat, driving around the city in the refuge truck?

It would be the modern equivalent of “the Gospel train:” Get on board, little children, there’s room for many a’more.

John Robert McFarland

THE MUSIC OF THE HILLS… [W, 2-19-20]

You can take the boy out of the stories, but you can’t take the stories out of the boy.

The usual saying is, “You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the boy.” In my day, we country boys were called hillbillies, so I say, “You can take the boy out of the hills, but you can’t take the hills out of the boy.”

I did not want to be a hillbilly, and I assumed that if I liked hillbilly music, that meant I was a hillbilly. I had to listen to quite a bit of it, though, from age ten on, because it was my father’s favorite, and he had control of the radio, which before TV was like having control of the remote.

I was ten years old when we moved 135 mile south, from the laboring lower class near east side of Indianapolis, to a hardscrabble farm near Oakland City. It was definitely a step down socially and economically.

In Indianapolis we did not have a car, but we could walk or ride the street car [a bus on rails in the middle of the street] to any place we wanted to go. We had a furnace in the basement, and a gas stove, and an indoor toilet. On the farm, we had none of these things. We barely had electricity, and that only in the house, not the barn or the other out-buildings. We didn’t have a car, so we didn’t go any place, except for hitching the horse up to the wagon to go into town to have feed ground. It was a hillbilly existence. I did not want to be a hillbilly, so I did not like their music.

It wasn’t just that I wanted to be a city guy with a car and indoor plumbing. Hillbilly music just banged off my ear drums. It was twangy and nasal and ungrammatical. I had not lived long enough to understand that the twangs and the “ain’ts” were the necessary way to tell the stories of those songs. I had not lived enough stories yet to realize that the best songs always tell a story, a real one, an honest one, a true one.

All this comes to mind because we watched the excellent Ken Burns documentary on PBS about country music.

In Indianapolis I had liked folk songs that I learned at Lucretia Mott Public School # 3, on Rural Street. My sister and I sang them as we did the dishes—Down In the Valley, Darling Clementine, I’ve Been Workin’ On The Railroad, etc. I didn’t understand that folk and hillbilly came out of the same stories.

In high school, there were plenty of hillbilly kids, kids who liked hillbilly music. I wanted to run with the cool kids, though, the ones who listened to Frank Sinatra and Doris Day, not Hank Williams and Kitty Wells, the ones who danced to Benny Goodman and Count Basie, not to Bill Monroe and Bob Wills. I wanted the musical stories that came from Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, not from Jimmy Rodgers and Minnie Pearl.

But “story” became the motif of my life. That’s all I’ve ever been—a story listener, a story teller, a story preacher, a story sharer. So country music became a part of my life, too, because of the stories, so much so that in my latter years I have gladly referred to myself as “a hillbilly.”

I usually add “liberal,” as in “hillbilly liberal,” so folks will know I like Meredith Willson as well as Tom T. Hall, but I’m my father’s son, even though there was a time he didn’t think so. I know he’s my father, because I like hillbilly music.

John Robert McFarland

KNOWING WHICH SIDE YOU’RE ON [M, 2-17-20]

What do you do when you’re too old or feeble or out of it to “do” Christianity?

St. Mark’s is really into doing faith. We volunteer for every good cause. We host every good cause. We support every good cause. We visit the sick and those in prison. We feed people who are hungry. We house people who are homeless. We give coffee to people who are… well, that one may not be in the sermon on the mount. [Mt 5-7] We are the perfect model of what a church should be. And I feel left out. Like I don’t belong. Because I’m too “puny and feeble” to do faith.

“Puny and feeble” was what the membership secretary wrote beside the names of certain people in the Solsberry Methodist membership book, when I was a nineteen-year-old pastor, so that I would know not to expect those folks to do Christian stuff, like serve on committees.

Now, I’m on the “puny and feeble” list. I’ll bet Jesus would have been, too, had he gotten as old as I am.

Remember, Jesus was only 32 or so when he was saying all that stuff about doing faith. What if he’d lived another 50 years? Or 60?

Well, a lot of that stuff he’d still be saying. You can turn the other cheek, turn away from anger and revenge, at any age. [Mt 5:38-39] You can put your faith in God instead of bigger barns at any age. [Luke 12:18-21]

It’s a lot harder, though, to take that guy on the Jericho road to the hospital when you’re too old even to get out on the road, especially if you have to guide that donkey at night. [Lk 10:25-37] And you can’t dig a hole in the roof of the hospital to let a friend down to where the healing happens because you can’t climb ladders anymore. [Mark 2:3-4]

As I mentioned in the Christ In Winter for Feb. 15, I wanted to address this issue when I preached my final sermon, at St. Mark’s, almost exactly a year ago now. I was going to tell about Uncle Jesse. But I had to leave that story out because we ran short on time.

My mother’s brothers were all tall and handsome men, but Jesse, third of the four boys--the one my father said was most like the grandfather I never knew, because he was killed in a coal mine cave-in before I was born--stood out even in that group. Curly hair, great smile, Navy pilot… but no athlete.

Ted, his oldest brother, had been a high school basketball star. Likewise, Claude and Johnny. In small town Indiana, that was the ticket to acceptance. Jesse was on the team, because the school was so small, but he was so bad the coach never put him into a game.

Until the inevitable happened. Seven boys on the team. One fouled out. In went the sixth man. Then another fouled out. Only Jesse was left. Tie score. Less than a minute to go. And only Jesse was left.

“Go in,” the coach told him, “but just stand there. Don’t touch the ball.”

Jesse did as he was told. But the inevitable happened again. The ball came right at him. He put up his hands to protect himself, and the ball stayed there. He knew he wasn’t supposed to touch the ball, so he threw it up into the air to get rid of it. Of course, the ball came down, right through the basket. Two points. For the other team. The only basket he ever scored was for the wrong team, and cost his team the game.

When the McFarlands get together they tell funny stories. The Ponds don’t get together anymore, not enough left. But they used to. Lots of them then. Their idea of humor was to tease people unmercifully. So every time Uncle Jesse was there, they told the story of his basketball misadventure.

I was a high school basketball player myself then, and I was mortified. “How can you stand hearing that story?” I asked Uncle Jesse once. He just smiled that wonderful smile of his and said, “I always knew which side I was on.”

John Robert McFarland

THE IMPORTANCE OF FINISHING ON TIME  [Sat, 2-15-20]

When I preached my final sermon, almost a year ago now, I left out one part I planned to preach, because time ran short. It was an important point, about how to be a Christian when you are too old or decrepit to “do” Christianity. But there just wasn’t time.

I started preaching in little country churches in southern Indiana. You never knew what might happen. Someone might jump up to “give a testimony.” Someone else might call for another favorite hymn. An announcement about the quarterly “settlement day” might spark a discussion about the organization of the denomination. Once a woman ran to the altar rail and started confessing her sins right in the middle of the service. Occasionally Wayne and Mae would start dancing in the aisle together during a lively hymn and just keep going when the hymn was over. Wanda would have to “doodle” on the organ until they finished up.

As the preacher, it was important to be prepared, to know what I was going to say, but also important to be prepared to be flexible, to cut the sermon, sometimes drastically, to get the service over “on time.” The preacher himself had to get out on time, too, because with three congregations, I couldn’t run overtime. The schedule was tight. The churches were not very close geographically, and the roads between were curvy and hilly and usually not even on the map. The folks at the next church on the circuit were waiting, sometimes impatiently, already on the second hymn when I arrived.

When it was the last church that morning, the cooks were waiting, the women who had stayed home from church that day, against my expressed wishes, to cook huge amounts of food because they were hosting the preacher for “lunch.” They had the food hot and ready. Eating on time was much more important than getting the last point of the sermon in.

When Helen and I married, she looked forward to those big meals. They were like her mother made, and also a meal she didn’t have to cook. [There was no thought that a husband would do any cooking in those days.] She had ridden the circuit with me a few times before we married and so knew what those meals were like. And we really needed a free meal.

But after we married, no one ever signed up on the sheet on the bulletin board, the one to host the preacher for lunch. The women had learned that Helen was a Home Ec major, and they were afraid to cook for her.

But she was a Home Ec major who had never cooked a meal when we married. The IU Home Ec Dept was a research institution. Helen could tell you which foods eaten together would poison you, but she had no experience actually cooking those foods. She knew well the family relations and child development and fashion design and clothing construction and home management and architecture areas of Home Ec, but the folks in that department just didn’t cook. She became a consummate cook on her own, but the church ladies didn’t understand, so we ate a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches after our last worship service on the early Sundays of our marriage.

Oops, I’ve run over. Our “agreement” is that these meditations won’t run over 500 words, and 500 is in the rear view mirror. I’ll tell you the story I left out of my final sermon next time.

John Robert McFarland

MY SAUCER RUNNETH OVER [W, 2-12-20]

At church Sunday, I asked someone [Mrs. Calabrese, was that you?] how she was, and she quoted a friend of hers by saying, “My saucer runneth over.” Her cup was so full that even her saucer was running over. How neat!

John Robert McFarland

WORKING FOR THE 2ND YEAR, FOR 30 YEARS [2-5-20]

Thirty years ago today they took me into the operating room at midnight and removed a tumor and a 1/3 of my colon. My first oncologist said “a year or two.” Two years sounded like so much more than one. I desperately wanted that second year, so I worked for it. Not everyone who works for a second year gets it; that’s not how life is. But I think in the process of working for it, regardless of the outcome, we all learn the same things:

The purpose of life is to have a good time. [1]

The opposite of a good time is not a bad time but a false good time.

Family comes first, but the family that comes first may not be your first family.

Intercessory prayer always works, even when it doesn’t.

You must live within your limits but not be limited by them.

Love is the only rational act. [2]

We are not bodies that have a soul. We are souls that have a body. [3]

Death does not end love.

John Robert McFarland

The full account of this is in my book, Now That I Have Cancer I Am Whole: Reflections on Faith and Life for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them, published by AndrewsMcMeel.

1] John 10:10. Jesus says, “I’m here; let’s party.”

2] Morrie Schwrtz, quoting “a wise man named Levine,” in Tuesdays With Morrie.

3] C.S. Lewis

ODE TO A SUNNY DAY IN WINTER [M, 2-3-20]

Last night I could not sleep a wink

and so they took me to the shrink

He crossed his eyes and pulled his beard

and said, “Oh, my, you’re really weird.

Your days are nights and your nights are days

You shuffle along like in a haze

When the time comes you are not ready

and your gait and gaze are from steady

You dress in plaids that number four

if you could you’d wear some more

You laugh hysterically with glee

but when you slap you miss your knee

You say strange things in public places

creating red embarrassed faces

Your downs are up and your ups are down

You can never seem to find a noun

The names of your children you forget

while remembering those you’ve never met

You think that any word’s sublime

as long as you can make it rhyme

You seem to think you are just tired

but everyone says you’ve come unwired

The cat scan shows your brain’s on meth

odism which is close to death

It may just be my painful molar

but the evidence shows you are bi-polar.”

As I left I said to the shrink

“This, old friend, is what I think…

You might believe that I’m bi-polar

but in winter it’s just that I’m powered by solar.”

John Robert McFarland

A HAPHAZARD MIND IS A JOY FOREVER [2-1-20]

A thought to start February…

A haphazard mind is a joy forever

More fun than a barrel of monkeys

Ideas falling over one another in gay profusion

A clown car full of red noses and big shoes

A cat chasing its own tail

Keystone cops running from a Model T

An organ grinder with a dancing bear

Bigfoot pursuing beef jerky jerks

Dumb and Dumber in their prime

Corrigan running the wrong way

Ducklings in the rain with umbrellas and boots

A chicken with its head cut off

A chicken trying to lay an egg on an escalator

A chicken crossing the road

A chicken arguing with an egg about primogeniture

Why are there so many chickens?

Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to drink

Quoth the raven, Nevermore

Globetrotters and Sweet Georgia Brown

Flo from Progressive… enough said

A Chinese fire drill

Yes, that’s racist,

but that’s what haphazard minds are like

Think it and they will come

John Robert McFarland