TRUSTING WHAT WE KNOW [W, 3-31-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

The time of corona is not a good time to trust how you feel. It is a good time to trust what you know.

When Jennie Edwards Bertrand, the pastor at Hope Church in Bloomington, IL, was trying to explain my credentials for writing about dealing with the corona virus,  she said, “He’s way over on the right end of the vulnerability spectrum.” Meaning that I am a very elderly Elder. [1] That was quite strange. I am rarely identified as being on the right end of any spectrum. [2]

Throughout my career, I was usually consigned to the left end of the line, even though I thought of myself as staunchly conservative. [“Don’t smoke, drink, or chew, or go with girls who do.”]

When Bill and I were appointed to churches in adjoining towns, I was pretty sure my place on the spectrum would be a problem to him. He was on the other end. There was no way we could avoid each other, though. We were in the two largest churches in the District, in the same county, even. At District and Conference events, we approached each other warily, like dogs on the street.

Well, as you would suspect, because that is the way this sort of story is supposed to go, we became good friends. He loved introducing me as “my liberal friend,” as though he were both surprised and pleased that he even had a liberal friend. We talked about a lot of things that he didn’t feel comfortable discussing with his conservative friends.

One day, he said, “What I appreciate about you is that you don’t let your feelings get in the way of your witness. When you don’t feel like God is there, you don’t say that. You trust what you know, not how you feel. We conservatives are big into feelings. ‘He lives within my heart.’ But sometimes my heart is dead and doubtful. That’s when we have to trust not how we feel, but what we know. ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’”

A time of upheaval, the time of a viral pandemic, is not the best time to trust our feelings. The more upset the times, the less reliable our feelings are. This is the right time to trust what we know, both in science and in religion.

We are often told, “Follow your heart.” But my heart has sometimes led me astray. Jesus did not say anything about feeling the truth.  He said, “You shall know the truth and it will make you free.” [John 8:32]

John Robert McFarland

1] Jennie and I are both Elders, despite our age disparity. “Elder” is the designation for any fully-ordained Methodist clergy person.

2] It reminds me of the time Helen and I were at a Marcus Borg conference. He was doing the ecclesial version of the Catskills resort welcome—How many are from New York? How many from Florida? How many… With Marcus it was—How many are Baptists? How many Methodists? How many Unitarians? There were only a couple of Unitarians, over against the wall. Marcus deadpanned: “Unitarians to my right; how unusual.”

“DAILY” DEVOTIONAL, 3-30-20

[I have been posting a CIW every other day. Some folks have expressed a desire for a daily devotional during this Covid19 pandemic, so on the “off” days, I’ll post a short devotional, only half the length of a CIW, and aimed specifically at spiritual awareness.]

Theda, my friend Lee’s wife, just got worse and worse. All her physical systems were going bad. They went to lots of specialists, to no avail. One day, she lost consciousness.

They lived in a small town. Lee called their doctor in the city and asked what to do. The doctor had Lee describe her symptoms.

“She’s dying, Lee. Nothing we can do now. No point in calling the ambulance; she wouldn’t get half-way to the hospital. You hold her hand, and I’ll hold yours.”

The doctor stayed on the line with Lee, not saying anything, until Lee told him that Theda had taken her last breath.

Lee told me, “I didn’t tell him right away, because I didn’t want that moment to end. I had never felt so close to God in my whole life.”

JRMcF

WAKING UP TO A SONG [Sun, 3-29-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

Len Kirkpatrick recently posted four lines from a hymn on Facebook. I know a lot of hymns, and it seemed like I should recognize them, but they were elusive. They sounded, though, like they came from a “bloody” hymn, so I guessed Wm. Cowper’s “There is a fountain filled with blood.” Len said I was right.

As we “talked” about it, he said that because of his raising, he wakes up each morning with a hymn on his mind. He was raised in Africa, mostly Rwanda, the child of missionary parents.

It’s a great thing, to wake up in the morning with a song all ready for you.

I usually wake up to a song, too, but it’s not likely to be a “bloody” hymn. That’s what they called hymns like Cowper’s when I was in seminary. “There is a fountain filled with blood, drawn from Immanuel’s veins, and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains.”

“Modern people [1960s] don’t want to hear that sort of thing,” our profs said. “Who wants to have a blood flood poured over them?”

They convinced me. In my fifty years of choosing hymns for public worship, I’m sure I never chose “Fountain,” or any other “bloody” hymn, even once.

Part of that was my seminary education, part of it was my theology—which generally accepted substitutionary atonement but didn’t think blood images were helpful--and part of it was my own squeamishness—I don’t much like dealing with blood, mine or anybody else’s.

I’m not as bad as Helen’s Uncle Fred. When he was a schoolboy, he fainted even at the word “blood.” That happened in class one day. It was a small school, with no nurse, so as usual, his older sister, Georgia Heltzel, who became Georgia Karr, Helen’s mother, was called to deal with him, as she always was when one of her younger brothers acted out. She had just gotten him revived when the principal showed up, incredulous. “Fred, don’t tell me you faint just because of the word blood?” Bonk! There went Fred again. Then poor Georgia—and teen age girls are mortified at everything, especially things their little brothers do—was mad not only at Fred but the principal, too.

But it’s neat to wake up with a song in your heart. I suggest getting one ready as you go to bed. Choose a good one and sing it over--to yourself if you don’t want to bother others in the household with it--and it will probably be there for you in the morning. If you’re not a church hymn person, you can choose what I call a secular hymn—Over the Rainbow, Oh, What a Beautiful Morning, You Light Up My Life, Wind Beneath My Wings, etc.

Be careful about what you watch on TV before you go to bed, though. I watched Ken Burns’ country music documentary last night and woke up this morning to “Hey, Good Lookin’.”

John Robert McFarland

ANOTHER LOST DECADE? [F, 3-27-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

My father lost his eyesight in an industrial accident, when he was 35, and I was five. He lived over 60 more years. Every once in a while, he would misplace a decade. It was sort of like living with Rip Van Winkle.

After the eye accident, we moved back to his home area so he could farm, the way his parents farmed when he was a boy. We got a horse and wagon and cow and pig and chickens. But this was after WWII. In the decade since he and Mother married, the decade of WWII, farming had changed. Everybody else farmed with tractors instead of horses. They didn’t put up loose hay, the way we did; they had balers. They didn’t plant and pick and shell corn by hand; they had mechanized planters and pickers and shellers. They didn’t carry their water in from a well. They didn’t use an outhouse.

With no eyesight, Daddy socially distanced. He did not feel comfortable in crowds. He might walk into someone. Even individual contacts were difficult. What if an old friend spoke to him and he didn’t recognize them? Batter just to be self-quarantined.

He was a very smart man, but he could not see. Not just physical blindness, but change blindness. He self-quarantined a whole decade. He never quite understood.

When farming on his own became financially impossible, he got jobs on dairy farms. He could do the barn work very well. He did it for a decade. Dairy barns are 24-365 jobs. Those cows have to be milked twice a day, regardless. He never left the farms where he worked. Until one day he needed a new pocket knife. Helen thought it would be nice for him to pick it out himself. He took an afternoon off. They went to every store in the county. Every time, he said, “That’s too much. We can get one cheaper.” A decade of inflation had gone by, and he missed it. He never did buy a knife. Just couldn’t understand how prices could be like that.

I think about that now, as I wonder about how long our pandemic will last, wonder how many people will lose a decade. It’s not just that we have to adjust to a new reality right now. That will pass, probably not as quickly as any of us wishes, but some day the corona virus will be gone. Our time of “social distancing” will be over.  But on the other side will be a very different world, where we don’t recognize the different horses and the different prices.

Right now, understandably, we just want to try to survive. But in the process, will we keep our eyes open well enough to see the changes, so that we can live successfully in the brave new world that follows? Will we be able to drive a tractor? Will we even be able to buy a pocket knife? Stay home, but stay alert.

John Robert McFarland

HOLY HABITS-A Different Kind Of Lenten Fast [W, 3-24-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter

We’re supposed to give up something for Lent, make a sacrifice, to remind us that Jesus sacrificed for us. I gave up going to church.

I’m not sure it really counts as a sacrifice, since the governor required me to, and all the other church-goers had to do the same thing, and since watching streaming church on my computer while I drink coffee and eat cookies isn’t exactly sacrificial.

On the other hand, I actually doubled-down on Sunday worship, because just about every church is online now. So I’ve been attending not only St. Mark’s of The Empty Chairs, in Bloomington, IN, but also Hope Church Above the Drive-Thru Bank [literally] in Bloomington, IL.

Hope is a radically inclusive church, pastored by Jennie Edwards Bertrand, whom I pastored when she was in high school. Almost all of Jennie’s congregants are young people who are new not just to Hope church, but to church and Christianity in general. Jennie “went out to the highways and the byways and compelled them to come in.” [Lk 14:23] They don’t know church-speak, so Jennie has to do more explaining as she preaches. Like Lent.

It’s quite interesting to hear someone explain that Lent is a time set aside for trying to deepen “the holy habits” of the faith, to people who think that practicing holy habits means darning socks. [1]

We old folks have been around long enough to have an idea about holy habits, and polymath Charlie Matson, of St. Mark’s, in response to my CIW post of 3-17-20, “Old Folks vs Viruses,” suggested an 8^th point to add to the seven I listed for what old folks can do now to combat the virus: Feed Your Soul.

An excellent idea. We are in an enforced and lengthened Lent this year, more opportunity than usual to deepen faith by practicing the holy habits.

Here are Charlie’s suggestions for using this lengthened Lent for spiritual growth:

SILENT CONTEMPLATION: He is going to try ten minutes twice a week. I’m going to say that ten seconds is the new ten minutes, because every time I try to contemplate I get an idea for a new poem or post.

STREAM A MOVIE YOU’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SEE BUT HAVEN’T. He and Katie, his trophy wife, watched “Like Water for Chocolate.” I’d like to see “And Everybody Stayed Home,” but I don’t think it’s been made yet. It’s a silent film.

LISTEN TO A GREAT PIECE OF MUSIC WITHOUT OTHER DISTRACTIONS: He suggests Brahms’ “A German Requiem.” I was thinking “If You’ve Got the Money, Honey, I’ve Got the Time,” because I do have lots of time right now, and not much money, but maybe not what he has in mind.

READ A WORTHY NOVEL: Myriam Woods suggests Richard Powers “The Overstory.” I have not read that one, but I started reading Powers when our daughters were both grad students at U of IL and he was teaching there. He is definitely a master writer. You need to set aside a month, though, to read one of his works. I think I’ll go back and read Marilynne Robinson’s “Gilead,” though. [Watch for it in a coming CIW.]

DO SOMETHING CREATIVE, “…like making an original greeting card to send to a grandchild or old friend.” Would texting with grandchildren count? Mine are at that age. They don’t know how to go to what I call a mail box.

PRACTICE SOCIAL DISTANCING by putting lots of spaces between sentences.    Oh, wait, that’s not part of Charlie’s holy habits list.

Frankly, I’ve never been very good at holy habits. I know that people say if you don’t pray regularly, it won’t be there when you need it, but I find that when something bad happens, I’m right back to “help me, help me, help me” without missing a beat. I wish I could be methodistic about the holy habits, but that just doesn’t work for me. I meditate, and pray, and read the Bible, and help little old ladies across the street [well, one, anyway], but it just seems right to me to do those things when the occasion demands, rather than on a schedule. We non-habituals call it “following the leading of the spirit,” which sounds better than “being sort of holy whenever I get around to it.”

I believe in the efficacy of the holy habits, I really do. I just have a hard time being habitual about them. My approach is, “Be holy all the time, and you won’t have to worry about doing the habits.” But as Helen always says, “How’s that workin’ out for ya?”

I hope you are better at practicing holy habits, but if you’re not, at least you now know you’re not alone. Oh, confession is one of the holy habits of Lent. Maybe I’m not so bad after all. I practice that one all the time.

Or, the easy way to holy habits, as the Mills Brothers might sing, “I’m gonna buy…”

John Robert McFarland

1] Right, like anyone under age 70 knows about darning socks.

CORONA’S CHOICE: Death in the Time of Virus [M, 3-23-20]

Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter [1]

CORONA’S CHOICE: Death in the Time of Virus    [M, 3-23-20]

I always wondered how I would die in a time of crisis. I hoped I could be like Bonhoeffer, defying the Nazis, or singing on my way to the guillotine, still witnessing for justice, or going out in a blaze of glory in a gunfight with the federales!

Instead, it looks like I’ll be on one bed in the Covid19 unit, with some stranger on the bed beside me, and the doctor saying, “We have only one respirator; to whom should I give it?”

I assumed that I would have the grace to say, “Give it to that younger person there [or even that older person who is in better health than I]. I have lived my life. I’ve had a good time. I’m ready to go. Let this younger person live.”

Now I’m not so sure. What if that person in the other bed is an evangelical white nationalist “Christian,” who believed the White House and Fox News when they said the virus was just false news the Democrats thought up to embarrass Trump, and it wasn’t any worse than the flu, so we didn’t really have to be good neighbors by washing our hands and staying to ourselves?

Or believed Paula White, Trump’s “spiritual advisor,” when she said on her TV program that her ministry is a prayer hospital against the virus so if you want to defeat the virus you should send her money.

Of course, we all know that this is God’s vengeance upon the US for allowing gays to exist, and that we don’t have to pay attention to physical distancing because Jesus is coming soon, anyway, and will rapture up the straight people.

All of that stuff that is being said in the patriotic and evangelical fundamentalist blogosphere right now.

So, what if the person who is going to live while I die is one who believed that stuff and so got the virus because they refused to wash their hands or stay at home? I’m a good boy; why should I have to die so a selfish ignoramus can live? Paul said you might give your life for a good person, but… someone like that? [He didn’t add that last part exactly. Check out Romans 5:7]

Well, you never know. Maybe that person who lives because I died gets a second chance at being a better human being. But maybe it doesn’t even matter. Jesus raised Lazarus from the dead, and nothing is said about Laz living a better life after that. And we say that Jesus gave his own life, the divine life, for every last one of us, not just the saints but the reprobates, too.

I hope it will be a child clutching a stuffed dog, or a young mother who needs to care for her family, or a nurse who caught the God-damned virus while trying to save others… I hope that will be the person who gets to live in my place. But when the time comes--and I’d better be ready, because these days things change pretty durn fast—I’ll just say, “Let somebody else take the respirator… but I would like to have a cookie…”

John Robert McFarland

1] I started writing CIW when we lived in Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where March is just February under an assumed name, and where winter is 13 months long. I called it Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life from a Place of Winter for the Years of Winter. I no longer live in that place of winter, but it seems that we are all now in a place of perpetual winter, hunkered down alone against a different kind of blizzard, so I’m restoring the original title.

IT’S IN THE BIBLE: The Story of the Man Born Blind [Sat, 3-21-20]

Christ In Winter: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

[You don’t have to read the CIW for March 19 to understand this one, but it would help. You can just scroll down to it.]

I had gone to Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship in the first place because I had lost my mind over Phyllis and just wanted to be near her. I would have gone to Sikh or Wicca meetings if she were there.  She was kind to me but understood that we were not a match and so steered me into the arms of Uree, so smoothly I didn’t even notice. Uree was a passionate and devoted IVCF girl, and so I continued to go to the IVCF meetings. Little by little, though, I began to feel uncomfortable.

My discomfort came to a boil one night when the only guy I have ever known by the name of Lionel was leading the Bible study and pronounced that God did not hear the prayers of sinners.

“Well, who does God hear, then?” I asked. “Isn’t it sinners who need to talk to God most? And aren’t we all sinners?”

Turns out apparently that not everybody there was a sinner. In fact, it began to look like there was only one, and everybody else knew who it was, because they assured me they would put me on their prayer list.

I was confused. This didn’t make any sense, I protested. That was my problem, they assured me. I was trying to make sense, use my brain, be rational. Instead we were just to trust God. God moved in mysterious ways. The best Christians were those who believed the least believable stuff. That’s how we proved our faith.

I went back to my dorm in a sort of daze. Then I began to get mad. Surely the Bible didn’t say that!

Remember, I was only 20. Even though I had been preaching for a year, I had no theological education. The only Bible education I had came from Sunday School and reading from a box of Harry Emerson Fosdick sermons that my District Superintendent had given me. But I remembered that Lionel said this statement was in the New Testament. I at least knew where the New Testament was, so I started reading.

God does not make things easy. No, it wasn’t in Matthew or Mark or Luke. Not until the 9^th chapter of John, in the story of the man born blind, the one Jesus healed. In an attempt to discredit Jesus, his foes said, “God does not hear the prayers of sinners,” meaning Jesus himself was the unheard sinner and so had no business healing people.

It was midnight, but I called Lionel. “Yes, that phrase is in the Bible,” I said, “but it means the exact opposite. They’re calling Jesus a sinner…” and I went on in that rational argument.

He was not swayed. “It’s in the Bible,” he kept saying, like the Bible was a bucket of unrelated maxims and you could just reach in and pull any one of them out at random and it had as much credibility as any of the others, regardless of its context.

I knew I didn’t believe that, couldn’t believe that. I didn’t know this phrase then, but I knew its truth: “Christ died to take away our sins, not our minds.” I came to understand that I was a Word Christian, not a words Christian, a story Christian, because you have to hear the words and Word in context, a Christ Christian, not a Bible Christian. I rejoice in the Bible, not because it is the Word of God, but because through it we come to know the Word of God.

Strangely, IVCF gave me a great gift. I learned that I wasn’t just a heart, soul, and strength Christian. I was a mind Christian, too. [Mark 12:30] I got to the place I felt pretty good about that.

John Robert McFarland

THE GIRL WHO MADE ME LOSE MY MIND, AND START USING IT [R, 3-19-20]

[It’s difficult to think about anything but the Corona virus and its effects. All the more reason to try to think about “normal” things. So I have gone back to listening to [reading] the lectionary Bible readings for each week. That’s how this started, anyway…]

Jon Stroble emailed this week. It’s always so much fun to hear from him. We met in our first week at IU, walking back and forth from Linden Hall, where we were in The Residence Scholarship Program--for kids with ambition but no money, who were willing to work their way through college--to the Rogers Center [graduate students] dining hall, where we had been assigned as bus boys. We’ve been friends for 65 years. Jon probably doesn’t remember, though, the night that started me using my mind to serve God, even though he was there.

In the spring of our sophomore year, we went together to a mid-week worship service at Fairview Methodist, on the west side of town. I was a twenty-year-old IU sophomore preacher at three little Methodist churches in Greene County, and I had gotten a letter from the District Superintendent to all the pastors in the district, saying that students from an IU religious organization were speaking at Fairview, and we should go to be supportive. I did not know you could disobey the DS, and I had not been to many district meetings, and didn’t know what to expect, and didn’t want to go alone, so I got Jon to go with me.

 I definitely did not know before we went that one of the speakers would be the prettiest girl I had ever seen. [I didn’t meet Helen until a year later.] As Phyllis Krider stood there in the pulpit, I was suddenly, immediately, and completely in love. In addition to beautiful, she was so composed, and articulate, and sincere. Everything a good Christian boy could want in a girl. Everything a preacher boy could want in a wife.

She was already an RN and at IU working on a BSN. Most importantly, she belonged to an open group where I could just show up and see her again and she would have no idea that I was secretly planning how we would do morning devotions once we were married.

The kids speaking that night were from IVCF, Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship, a group I’d never heard of but which I immediately decided to join. This IVCF outfit had to be the best thing that ever happened to a Christian boy if it had girls like this. Well, specifically, it had her.

I could hardly wait until the next Wednesday night to go to the basement of The Reformed Presbyterian Church, where IVCF had its weekly gatherings. And there she was. To make a long story a little more palatable, she was kind to me, and went out with me a few times, even accompanied me to my little churches where I went to preach. But Phyllis was a mature woman, intent on a life as a missionary nurse, and I was just a moon-struck boy. She let me down so easily I didn’t know it had happened until I realized she had steered me right into the arms of Uree, another IVCF girl, as Phyllis herself quietly slipped out of my peripheral vision, but Uree is another story. [1]

I started this column because of the lectionary Gospel reading for this coming Sunday, the one in John 9 about Jesus healing the man born blind. Something happened in Bible study at IVCF that set me on a life of using my mind to serve God, as well as using my heart and soul and strength. [Luke 10:27] Learning to use my mind for God is probably the second-best thing that ever happened to me, and I owe the start of that to Phyllis. She caused me to lose my mind, over her, and to use my mind, for God.

But the story of the IVCF Bible study of John 9 will have to wait until next column, because, having lots of time on my hands in these “quarantine” days, thinking about this caused me to research Phyllis online.

I learned that Phyllis died when she was only 27, just a few years after she caused me to lose my mind. All that commitment and beauty, lost so soon. But not quite. According to his 2019 obituary, her death was the occasion of her brother, Robert, becoming a Christian, leaving his job, entering Bible college, and becoming a pastor. She would have been so pleased by that—in a composed, articulate, beautiful way.

John Robert McFarland

1] It’s in my book, The Strange Calling.

OLD FOLKS VS VIRUSES [Old Folks at Home] [T, 3-17-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I “went” to church in Bloomington, IL last Sunday, even though I was in Bloomington, IN. Well, that was one of the places I worshipped. What with “streaming,” and the miracle of time zones, one can be a lot of places in a short span of time.

Jennie Edwards Bertrand, the pastor at Hope Church in the IL Bloomington, referenced something I wrote about social-distancing, and in trying to explain my credentials noted that I am, myself, in the highly vulnerable category for Covid19.

That’s always such a shock to me, to learn that I am no longer one of the cool, healthy young people. Being on the end of the vulnerability spectrum got me to thinking: How can an old person, someone who is vulnerable himherself, be helpful in this Corona virus crisis? We are not just vulnerable victims. We can be part of the solution. We really need to do our part to help. Here’s how:

1.] STAY HEALTHY. In all ways. Yes, make sure you do all that is necessary to avoid the virus—washing hands, disinfecting, wiping down, staying home--but don’t get sick at all. I realize we don’t have total control of that, but we have quite a bit. The less we require of the medical system—in doctors, nurses, facilities, supplies, etc—the more doctors and nurses and beds and supplies are available for people who do get infected with the virus. First, stay healthy.

2] BE FRUGAL. Don’t waste stuff. If we waste food and other supplies, someone has to bring those things to us, replace them for us, and those delivery people—family or friends or store employees--get exposed in the process. Make do. Use work-arounds.

3] STAY HOME. They call it “self-quarantining” these days. This is mostly a follow-up on # 1, but it’s worth a category by itself. If we just stay home, we are putting less pressure on ourselves and everybody else.

We are fortunate to live in an age that is remarkably adapted for staying home. Read on Kindle, do virtual museum tours on line, use Netflix and streaming for entertainment, Skype with family and friends, listen to music via YouTube and iPads and CDs. There are DVDs for movies. You get the idea. It’s not all that boring to stay home.

You don’t have to keep standing appointments. Yes, I know that you get your hair done every week or every month at the same time and you’ll look like a shaggy dog unless you do, but looking nice in your coffin is not really necessary. Besides, shaggy dogs are cute.

4] DON’T USE THE MEDICAL SYSTEM IN PERSON [unless you have to]. We can access our doctor in a Skype kind of way. We’ve never done it, but she gave us an instruction thing that tells us how, and we know how to read. Meeting her electronically keeps us out of places where viruses congregate and keeps her clear, too. She can even look at the gash on your head electronically and say, “No, I don’t think your wife did that accidentally while you slept.” Anytime you can keep in touch without touching, do it. And don’t be a hypochondriac.

5] SHARE WHAT YOU HAVE. Yes, we are mostly on the receiving end at a time like this, but if you have extra toilet paper or hand sanitizer or large print books or cat food, share it with a neighbor. Just leave it on the doorstep. [Unless it’s toilet paper and it’s raining… Oh, that’s a good song title, “Toilet Paper in the Rain…”] It will save someone having to get out into the virosphere to deliver.

6] "BE AS WISE AS SERPENTS AND GENTLE AS DOVES" Mt 10:16. DON’T FALL FOR SCAMS. There is no magic potion or chrome snifter or anything else that will hold off or cure the Corona virus, regardless of what someone on TV or on the telephone tells you. The old warning is accurate: if it’s too good to be true, it’s neither good nor true.

Scam artists believe that old people are stupid and easy to manipulate. Don’t let them prove it. Hang up. Turn ‘em off.

“The devil is a fraud and a con man.” God is not. Christ will go through this with us, but he won’t charge anything.

7] “PRAISE THE LORD & PASS THE AMMUNITION.” Pray. But don’t stop there. Prayer is not the only tool God gives us in this world. Jesus said we are to love God “with all your heart and soul and strength and mind.” [The Jesus quadrilateral. Luke 10:27]

Recently I saw a post that said, “Pray like Jesus but wash your hands like Pilate.” Good advice, except Pilate probably didn’t hum “Jesus Loves Me,” to time his washing, the way I do. [“Vulnerable old people to him belong, they are weak but he is strong.”]

Be well! And may the peace of Christ, and the piece of soap, be with you.

John Robert McFarland

WHEN JESUS MET CORONA [Sun, 3-15-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

I saw our doctor this week—just a regular visit. I knew she would question me about whether I am being sociable, since younger people are scared to death that an old person might have a solitary moment. [“You must stay active or something awful will happen, like you might have to sit quietly and think!”] So, I tried to forestall this encounter by telling Nurse Megan, before even seeing Dr. V, that I am not isolated. I really enjoy being an anti-social curmudgeon. It is my way of being in touch.

Nurse Megan was just walking out the door when she said that her husband was sort of like me, too. So, I said, “Tell him I didn’t say ‘hello.’”

When Helen was in later in the week for her own regular visit, Megan told her that she and her husband had been laughing about that all week. “I think your husband is secretly sociable,” she said.

I thought about this as I read the Gospel lection for today, in the midst of hearing so much about keeping away from others because of the corona virus. John 4:5-42 is the story of “the woman at the well.” As I read it, I was struck once again by how Jesus consistently undermined the practice of social distancing.

His world, and much of our current world, was/is very much into “social distancing.” He was not supposed to be sociable with a woman, nor with a Samaritan. Wasn’t even supposed to talk to a Samaritan woman. But he did not socially distance himself from her. Indeed, he was quite willing to give her “living water,” the same as anybody else.

We keep our social distance from people who are different—the poor, the handicapped, the socially awkward, the sexually different, the ethnics, those who cheer for the wrong team—be it athletic or political or financial or religious, those who worship God on the wrong mountain.

Now we are being told that keeping social distance is a good thing. It will prevent the spread of disease. But isn’t that what social distancing is always about? I am dis-eased when I have to deal with people who are different from me, so I keep my distance.

But it’s just the touch that’s the problem, isn’t it? That’s how we spread germs. Notice in this story that Jesus broke down all the social distance barriers, but he never touched the woman. In the pictures of their encounter, they are maintaining the recommended six-foot gap. Maintaining physical distancing, while at the same time breaking down social distancing.

There are many stories coming out now about how people are helping one another—delivering groceries, feeding children, paying for tests—people beyond the pale, people with whom they would not normally associate, because this corona virus is making us into one community, not many.

Social distancing and touching distancing are not the same thing. You can be out of touch and still be in touch.

John Robert McFarland

AGAINST [Sat, 3-14-20]

When Bob Butts and I discuss college football each week in the fall, we are just deciding which teams we are against. He’s always FOR one team, MSU [the one in Mississippi] and I’m always FOR one team, IU. Beyond that, we look at each upcoming game not in terms of which team we want to win, but which team we want to lose. He’s especially in favor of Notre Dame and Louisiana State losing, and I’m especially in favor of Michigan and Ohio State losing. But we don’t stop there; we can pick a preferred loser for every game that week.

There is something intriguing about being “against.” That’s the appeal of the political/religious right, I think. They are defined by what they are against.

They, of course, will tell you they are defined by what they are for. “We are for making America great against.” But their great America is identified by all the things they are against—foreigners, non-Christians, socialists, and… especially… science.

They would probably not name science as their main bugaboo, but as I try to come up with one category that explains all their againsts, it is science.

I had a conversation with a neighbor about climate change. It wasn’t a long conversation, because he was sure of the final truth of his pronouncement that climate change is a hoax, and even if it is real, human activity has nothing to do with it. Since we live in a university community, I thought it was reasonable to appeal to science, which says the opposite of what he believes about climate change.

He replied, “As an engineer, I’m well aware of the limits of science.”

That is not a totally stupid statement. Science does have limits, and it doesn’t take an engineer to recognize them.

On the other hand, it’s a ludicrous statement, to think that an engineer knows more about climate change than climate scientists do.

And it’s clear that the political/religious right is willing to accept the benefits of science. They like automobiles and computers and TVs… oh, but wait. Those are not from science, they are the results of engineering.

To the right, political or religious or both together, there is a great difference between science and engineering.

Of course, all engineering, from Galileo and Ford and Edison on, all inventions, are based on science, on Euclid and Newton and their ilk. But to the right, science is different.

Scientists are the ones who deny God because they believe in quantum fields and evolution and big bangs. They are the ones who believe in human equality, who think people who are not Americans or Christians or white or capitalists are just as good because we all come from the same original gene pool. [You’d think Christians would have no problem with that one, because of the Garden of Eden story, but scientists claim our common ancestor was black, so…] They’re the ones who believe in stem cell research. They’re the ones who don’t accept “it’s the will of God” each time something bad happens.

Engineers can provide us with flush toilets and aerosol hair spray without believing in evolution.

Engineering is capitalism. Science is an equalizer.

That’s why the religious right has sold its soul so completely to the political right. It can have the benefits of engineering and still be against science. It can even use engineering to deny science.

Elections are like football games. We don’t vote for someone to win, we vote for someone to lose. I know who I’m against in 2020…

John Robert McFarland

CORONA MAY NOT BE ALL BAD [R, 3-12-20]

They tell me I am in the highest risk category for death from the Covid19 virus—over 80 and “an underlying health problem.”

I’m rather proud of that. At my age, you don’t get to be in the top category very often.

If it gets me, I want it to be soon, like before the colonoscopy my doctor has ordered for me. I don’t want to go through that for nothing.

John Robert McFarland

THE FIRST PRAYER [M, 3-9-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

The first prayer of the morning

Should graze the horizon

With acceptance

Acknowledgement

This is the day

That the Lord has made

Holy, holy, holy

The first prayer of the morning

Should not stumble

In the darkness

Fleeing in fear

From the dream of loss

Helpme, helpme, helpme

In your mercy, Lord,

Hear our prayers…

John Robert McFarland

WITH GLADNESS FOR THE MORNING COLD-poem [F, 3-6-20]

I lie here in this downy nest

created by my real true love

For her soft and warm

are forms of art

as shades of blue

were soft and warm

for Van Gogh

in his starry night

My starry night is gone

The dark day shivers

as it waits for me

I think how sweet all day the day

if I could simply stay

in this nest of warm and soft

Then I recall

that this shall one day be

With gladness

for the morning cold

I arise

John Robert McFarland

EVERYBODY’S BEST FRIEND      [M, 3-2-20]

I pastored several churches as a part-time interim in my retirement years. I enjoyed and appreciated them all, learned from each, but the one that was the easiest, the smoothest, was Tampico, IL. It was full of good people.

I knew of Tampico long before I was appointed there. Ron Wetzell, one of our Wesley Foundation [campus ministry] students at ILSU, was from Tampico. He is a good friend even after all these years. He made a point of coming all the way from Minneapolis to be there the first Sunday I preached in his home church, 35 years after we first met. [Of course, he was coming to visit his mother and other relatives, too, but he timed the trip to be there for my first Sunday. I appreciated that.]

Before that first Sunday, though, I had a funeral. Monifa Wetzell died that week. She was distantly related to Ron; there were thousands of Wetzells in that town of 600. She was distantly related to everybody.

The church organist, Betsy Hoover, told me later that she worried all week. “Monifa was so important to this town. Had been forever. And your predecessor was a nice man, but a terrible preacher. He was especially bad at funerals. And Monifa deserved something special.”

I had been worried, too. It’s hard to give a good woman the funeral she deserves if you don’t know her. So, I talked with people, to try to understand Monifa, and as I did, one thing happened over and over again. Every woman I talked to, of every age, said, “Monifa was my best friend.”

Recently, on line, I discovered an old black and white photograph of the Woman’s Society of Christian Service, the Methodist forerunner of the United Methodist Church’s United Methodist Women organization, at Tampico. It’s from the late 1940s. A caption underneath gives the names of the 20 or so women. They are outside the church. All are frowning a little bit, as though the sun is in their eyes. They range in age from mid-thirties to mid-sixties. They look alike, though, because they are all wearing similar “house dresses,” what women wore all the time then except for Sunday morning and formal occasions.

Monifa is one of the younger women, thirty-something, her house dress like all the others, but her face is set in more of a wistful look than frowning, as she gazes in a slightly different direction. She is standing almost alone, off to the side of where the other women are grouped together.

Apparently like the photo, in life she stood far enough alone and away to be the best friend of each of the other women, perhaps because she had no one who was a best friend to her. Perhaps it was her name, Mon`-i-faye. It was different from all the other names in that picture, or any place else in my life. I have never known another woman with that name, but I wish I had known her.

But maybe Monifa and I were enough alike that I did know her, anyway, for each of her best friends told me later that they were pleased that she got the funeral she deserved.

John Robert McFarland