SPOILER ALERT [12-30-20]

Reflections on Faith & Life for the Years of Winter

SPOILER ALERT   [12-30-20]   

 

A friend of daughter Mary Beth recently sent her a photo of a nativity scene. It depicted the baby Jesus, surrounded as usual with parents and farm animals and shepherds and magi. It was in a European/American style barn, which is historically inaccurate, but Christmasly truthy. On the barn was a crucifix. Mary Beth’s friend had circled the crucifix and written in beside it, “Spoiler alert.” [1]

It’s really quite funny, but not accurate. The Christmas story is not the beginning of the crucifixion story, but the beginning of the resurrection story. So a crucifix in the nativity scene doesn’t require a spoiler alert. An empty tomb would.

The only reason we focus on the crucifixion of Jesus, have a whole theology about it, is because it’s so much easier to wear a cross around your neck instead of an empty tomb.

Symbols don’t grow out of theology or politics or economics. Those philosophies grow out of the symbols. Notice how the true believers of American patriotism focus not on defending democracy but upon protecting the flag. It’s all about honoring the flag, the symbol, not about assuring democracy, the reality.

The theology of substitutionary atonement developed because the early theologians said, “We need to explain why all these people are wearing crosses around their necks!” Well, not really. It came first out of the Hebrew sacrificial system and then the Roman legal system.

The Hebrews, like most ancient peoples, believed you had to propitiate God in order to get along with Him. He would smite you if you displeased Him. The God of the Hebrew scriptures is not very nice at all, and rather capricious.

Along came Jesus, who said, “No, God is loving and merciful. You don’t need to sacrifice something to get something back. Just ask for forgiveness. Ask and you will receive.”

As more gentiles became Christians, the old Hebrew assumption of sacrifice faded, but gentiles were part of the Roman legalistic philosophy. Every crime required a punishment. So, since people sinned—as told in the story of Garden of Eden—someone had to be punished. Jesus took the punishment on behalf of all of us. The Roman legal system was satisfied, even though it obviated the whole point of God’s mercy, that God forgives us “just as I am, without one plea.” [Our hymns have always tussled with one another about grace and law. We just sing the ones with the best tunes and don’t think about the contradictions.]

A young man in a church I pastored started going with a girl from another church, so he began attending there. He got saved. He came to see me, to explain that I, and the other folks in our church, were going to hell because we did not believe in the substitutionary atonement. Note that the problem was “believing” in it; in other words, we are saved by believing, in the correct theology, or in the terms of Marcus Borg, we are “saved by syllables.”

According to my young friend, anyone who did not believe in the substitutionary atonement was going to hell. “What about Kathy? I asked. She was a part of our church. About 28 years old then, but with the mentality of a four-year-old. She would always be like that. She loved coming to church, saying the Lord’s Prayer and singing the hymns, even though she was usually on a different line from everyone else. “She can’t even say substitutionary atonement, yet alone believe in it. Is she going to hell?” He was somewhat reluctant to send Kathy to hell, but, yes, he said, that’s where she would have to go.

So, spoiler alert: Crucifixion is about legalistic debt paying. Christmas and resurrection are about new beginnings. It is resurrection that fulfills the Christmas story, not crucifixion.

John Robert McFarland

If the substitutionary atonement is important to you, don’t worry. I’ll probably go to hell for this column, anyway.

1] “Spoiler alert” is a fairly new term. According to the Miriam-Webster dictionary, it was used first in 1982.

 

A DIFFERENT FRANCHISE—a poem [M, 12-28-20]

 

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

Yes, we’re UPS

the woman said

the phone pressed hard

against her twice-

pierced ear

 

As we stood there

our package hopeful

waiting to be weighed

and measured

and tested for depression

before allowed to go

 

Where the wild dog waits

because it hates that big

brown truck that brings

the packages that never

contain a treat

 

But I don’t know the answer

she said on

for we’re a different franchise

 

Such an easy out, isn’t it?

 

We’re a different franchise

 

My mother once tried to board

that big brown truck

the dogs all hate

for it rumbled and tilted

like the rural transit bus

Mother was a different franchise

 

I’m part of the poetry

franchise. We do not

have answers.

We have more questions

 

What is beyond the farthest limit?

What happens when it all ends?

Why did it all start in the first place?

 

Don’t bother to call us.

We’re a different franchise

 

John Robert McFarland

 

NOTHING IS AS OVER AS CHRISTMAS [SA, 12-26-20]

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

 

[The title is a repeat, but the column is new.]

Along about two o’clock on Christmas day, Georgia Karr, the world’ best mother-in-law, would sink into an easy chair in the living room and sigh, “Nothing is as over as Christmas.

It was understandable. She had spent two weeks, maybe two months, getting ready for that one half-day: cleaning, ordering, listing, buying, wrapping, decorating, cooking, everything from scratch--noodles and peppermint bark and fudge and cookies and pies and turkeys and mashed potatoes and ham and cranberry salad and stuffing and sweet potatoes and gravy and roast beast.

After all that work, in a few hours of ripping and opening and gorging, it was all over.

My mother had a very different approach to Christmas. She liked the memories of Christmas in her childhood, but mostly she tried to ignore it, which was the way she dealt with most things she had trouble dealing with.

She did not like gifts at all, I suppose because she felt indebted to the giver, and she didn’t like that. She often refused gifts. “Take that away,” she would cry, when she saw us carrying a wrapped package. In her last years, Helen would sneak decorations and gifts into her house. It was my job, and my father’s, to distract Mother at those times. One day, Helen was walking sideways, trying to keep things out of Mother’s sightlines. “What is that you have?” Mother asked. “Stuff,” Helen replied. My father, usually willing to push Mother’s buttons, said, “Don’t you recognize stuff when you see it?”  

As she aged, and she became arthritic, we bought her all sorts of helps, like electric can openers. She refused to open the boxes or to use the items. She liked to do things her way. She could not whap a package of whap biscuits hard enough to get it open—those packages you “whap” on the edge of a counter to open, and thus their popular name—so she would leave it on a high metal stool in the kitchen, where the sun could shine on it, and go watch TV. Eventually it would heat up enough to explode and she would go back to the kitchen to bake them.

I suppose that is why my favorite book as a child was Lois Lensky’s Mother Makes Christmas.

This year was a very different Christmas. Some mothers had to make Christmas when already locked into the house with kids for months. Some didn’t get to be with children or grandchildren at all. So many could not even get gifts for their children because they had lost their jobs and had a difficult enough time even feeding the kids. My guess is that all of the mothers who tried to make Christmas this year are giving a sigh of relief. “Thank goodness it’s over.”

The good news is two-fold: Christ comes, even if Santa doesn’t. And he’ll do it again next year. Real Christmas is never really over.

John Robert McFarland

 

SANTA AND GRANDPA [An annual repeat] [W, 12-23-20]

SANTA AND GRANDPA [An annual repeat]    [W, 12-23-20]

 

As Christmas approached when our granddaughter, Brigid, was four years old, she said to her mother: “You know, Santa and Grandpa are a lot alike. Santa has a bald head, and Grandpa has a bald head. Santa has a white beard, and Grandpa has a white beard. Santa brings you toys, and Grandpa brings toys. But Grandpa is better, because he stays and plays.”

Yes, I tell this story every Christmas, for it is, I think, the best explanation of Christmas that I know. God is not just some Santa, rushing from one place to another, making a brief stop on the roof of the world to throw down a few goodies. In Jesus, the Christ, God stays and plays.

Merry Christmas!

John Robert McFarland

 

 

I HEARD THE TRUTH ON CHRISTMAS DAY [12-22-20]

[This is a repeat, because Christmas stories always seem to want a repeat, and it’s twice as long as the 500 words I try to hold at, so be warned…]

I HEARD THE TRUTH ON CHRISTMAS DAY  [12-22-20]

It’s Christmas, almost, and I miss my friend, Phyllis, for it was at Christmas time that I first met her, when we were both ten years old. I miss her especially when I hear “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”

My family had moved from the working-class near-east side of Indianapolis to the country near Oakland City in March. Phyllis and I were both in fifth grade, but I didn’t meet her until Christmas time. I was in 5-A, kids who started school in January, and she was 5-B, kids who started in Sept. She lived in town and I rode a school bus. And we went to different churches.

I went to Forsythe, an open-country Methodist church. Phyllis’ father, Jimmy Graham, was the pastor at Oak Grove General Baptist Church, a mile down the gravel road from Forsythe, as well as attending Oakland City College. Those churches held different theologies, but we shared a common culture, and so we also shared a common VBS and Christmas program. It was at that shared Christmas program in 1947 that I met Phyllis.

After the little children had “said their pieces,” and the older ones had sung a carol in a rag-tag choir, there was an excited stirring, especially among the Methodists, who were not used to excitement in church, at least not of the Baptist kind. Everyone looked to the back of the church. Striding confidently forward, holding an accordion almost as large as she, came this skinny little girl. She stepped up onto the platform, worked the bellows, and began to sing, with the deepest, fullest voice I had ever heard. Her song was “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day,” Longfellow’s 1863 poem, written in the midst of the Civil War, later set to John Calkin’s music.

I had never before heard a song like that, or a voice like that. It seemed like I was in the presence of royalty, or perhaps twelve-year old Elizabeth Taylor in “National Velvet,” or Margaret O’Brien in “Meet Me in St. Louis.”

I say that I met Phyllis then, but she didn’t meet me. Because of different grades and buses and churches, we didn’t really meet until we were freshmen in high school. We met then because I was in the girls’ biology class.

I was a mid-year student, and worked on the school newspaper and sang in the choir. In a small school, with limited class offerings, that meant a confused class schedule. As a freshman, I had the second semester of “Commercial Arithmetic,” without benefit of the first semester, with mostly junior girls, and since I was otherwise scheduled during the boys’ biology class, I was placed in the girls’ class, taught by Iva Jane McCrary, the “old maid” Home Ec teacher. Phyllis and I sat across a big sewing table from each other. Phyllis was quite pretty and very smart, which meant that I could look at her or her test paper and expect erudition in either case.

The high point of freshman biology was learning about “human reproduction,” which took two whole days. When those two days came, though, Sammy Kell and I, Sammy being the only other boy with a class schedule as eccentric as mine, were sent off to sit in the principal’s outer office during biology class, since we did not have the right mind-set, or equipment, presumably, to learn about human reproduction with the girls.

When I returned to class, I asked Phyllis about what I had missed. “I think you’ll still be able to have children,” she said.

In our sophomore year, Phyllis’ father graduated from college and took a church in Tennessee. I did not see her again until I was the new Methodist campus minister at Indiana State University and Rose Polytechnic in Terre Haute, just graduated from Garrett Theological Seminary, and she was a new professor of mathematics at Indiana State, having just received a PhD from Indiana University. Typically of Phyllis, she had done graduate work in math because she felt it was her weakest subject, thus the one in which she needed extra work to be a truly educated person.

Phyllis was pleased that I had indeed been able to have children, two darling little girls. She became a member of our family, a special aunt to Mary Beth and Katie, sharing meals and picnics and friends. 

The Wesley Foundation did not have its own worship services, and as the new campus minister, I got to preach only once a semester at Centenary Church. By the time those rare Sundays came around, I had a lot of ideas and passion stored up. Those were Sundays when Phyllis became a Methodist. After one of those sermons, she waited until everyone else had filed past me at the door, then reached up and grabbed me by the top of my robe and pulled me down to her face and said, “You don’t know it yet, but when you’re in that pulpit, you’re something special. People will believe what you say just because of the way you say it. So you make damn sure you say the truth.”

So, in memory of my friend, whom I miss especially at Christmas time, I will say the truth, in the words of William Wadsworth Longfellow:

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:

‘God is not dead nor doth he sleep.’

The wrong shall fail, the right prevail

With peace on earth good will to men.’

 

May the peace of God be with you,

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE BEST MAN’S DILEMMA-Purity Laws [Su, 12-20-20]

 

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

 

[Today is the 67^th wedding anniversary of Don and Gloria [Richeson] Survant. Don died in 2012. The column below is not about Don & Gloria, but I want to honor them on this, their anniversary day. Don was the friend of my teen years that I could always count on, who always had my back. He stood by me, in any circumstance, and I stood up with him, 67 years ago today. It’s also appropriate today, because soon, Dec. 25, we shall celebrate the birth of a baby conceived out of wedlock.]

THE BEST MAN’S DILEMMA-Purity Laws [Su, 12-20-20]

[I found the picture online. It’s not of anyone I know, but it’s also of every wedding couple in the 1950s.]

I had a lot of good friends in high school, several of whom were really close, guys I played ball with, ran around with, shared hopes and dreams with, tried to pick up girls with. When they got married, they asked me to be the best man at their weddings. I felt very good about that. I loved having friends, friends who thought enough of me to have me by their side at their most important moments.

Except when one friend--I’ll call him Brad, since there was no one named Brad in those days—told me that he and his girlfriend—I’ll call her Whitney since there was no one named Whitney in those days—were going to get married and he wanted me to stand up with him, except he understood if I didn’t want to, since they “had to get married.”

I felt greatly honored, to be selected for such a significant role, and honored, also, that Brad respected my religiousness. Even though I felt honored, I felt disappointed and confused. Did people, even a close friend like Brad, see me as the kind of narrow-minded Christian who would put adherence to a purity law ahead of friendship? Put rules ahead of people? Did he really think I would refuse to be his best man because he’d had sex “outside of marriage?”

That was the only way you were supposed to have sex at all back then, inside the commitment of marriage. That was the Christian way. Because of the Bible. The Bible, like it so often is, was just a convenient reason. The prohibition against sex outside of marriage was actually because of the risk of pregnancy outside of marriage. The sex prohibition was protection for unwed girls and bastard babies.  Our general acceptance of when sex was acceptable changed with “the pill,” when pregnancy was not a possibility every time a girl or woman had sex.

But we didn’t realize in the 1950s that our “sex only in marriage” rule was primarily a cultural constraint to prevent unwanted pregnancies. We were told that sex had always been wrong outside of marriage. {And there are enough other reasons why sex outside of marriage is bad/wrong to make such a claim at least plausible.}

It’s so nice to have clear definitions, isn’t it? If the difference is married or not-married, well, you know if you’re married. Our current approach to sex is more realistic than the “marriage only” approach, and it includes more people than the old paradigm, including people who can’t marry for one reason or another, but it’s a lot harder now to say for sure when sex is okay, and joy-full [rather than merely pleasurable] and relationship-building, and when it is exploitative or abusive or just plain cheap.

Who’s a Christian? It’s nice to have clear definitions of that, too. I wanted to be a Christian, and that meant that I went to church. I did not swear or drink or smoke or tell or laugh at dirty jokes or disrespectful comments about people, either individually or as a group. I did not treat girls as lesser people or sex objects.

But did I come across as self-righteous in my attempt to be Christian? Probably so, if a close friend like Brad would think I’d put rules ahead of people.

Nonetheless, I think Brad wasn’t really doubting my friendship when he said he would understand if I didn’t want to be his best man. I think he knew I would come through. He was being respectful when he gave me an “out.”

In giving me that out, though, he gave me a gift. He let me know that when you keep the rules, you have to let folks know that you keep the friends, too. Since then, I have always tried to “keep” the friends by keeping the rules. When Bishop Leroy Hodapp named me to the committee of our Conference to investigate wrong doing by clergy, he said he wanted me on that committee “because every sinner needs at least one friend.”

I still struggle with the problem of law vs grace. I like the purity laws. They keep me out of trouble. They give me purpose and satisfaction. They make me happy. But if you keep the purity laws, do you come across as some sort of stiff-necked, self-righteous prig who doesn’t know the difference between keeping rules in order to be happy in one’s self and respectful to others, or keeping rules just to keep rules?

Brad and Whitney had a long and happy marriage together. I still feel honored that I got to stand up with them right at the beginning.

John Robert McFarland

“Jesus never commanded me to love my religion.” Barbara Brown Taylor

 

 

 

 

ODE TO A TWO-FOOT K-MART CHRISTMAS TREE [12-18-20, repeat]

 ODE TO A TWO-FOOT K-MART CHRISTMAS TREE [12-18-20, repeat]

 

[This is a repeat from Dec. of 2016. It is even more applicable this year. Last year, after Christmas, Helen put it on the patio, with outdoor lights, assuming/hoping the winter would ruin it and we could get something new. But when spring came, one of us stuck it in the garage, unsure how to trash it, since it wasn’t really eligible for regular Christmas tree pickup, nor for regular garbage pickup, waiting to figure out what to do with it. Then the pandemic hit, and we couldn’t go get something else, and Helen dutifully cut off all the old lights that no longer worked, and searched through the closets until she found some little lights that would work, then carefully chose the few ornaments it would take. All the more important, since we will be staying home this year, enjoying our little tree.]

Helen is an excellent and enthusiastic seasonal decorator. Christmas has always been her favorite time for decorating, but when we moved from a large house to a small condo 18 months ago, she bravely gave up our big Christmas tree and a lot of decorations.

Still, I had to hang as many shelves as possible on the walls of our narrow one-car condo garage to accommodate the remaining decorations. Yesterday I took down 16 boxes—some large, some not quite as large--and a wreath.

16 is actually a smaller number than last year. We learned in our first condo Christmas that some things were not necessary. We did add one thing last year, though, and Helen has been very brave about accepting it, in part because last year and this year, we did not host Christmas, for the first times, but instead go to daughter Katie’s house. She has a really big tree.

Anyway, I thought it wise to write a poem about our new condo Christmas tree, in honor of Helen’s gracious acceptance of a smaller Christmas. It’s not long, but you can sing it…

ODE TO A TWO-FOOT K-MART CHRISTMAS TREE

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree

How shortened are your branches.

You stand upon a table round

You’re much too short to be on the ground

Your ornaments do not make a sound

Gifts beneath you cannot be found

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree

How shortened are your branches

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree

Forever short your stature.

But your tiny lights bring large delight

We smile when you are in our sight

O Christmas tree, O Christmas tree

Size is no measure of pleasure

 

John Robert McFarland

 

  

THE FORGOTTEN WEDDING [12-16-20, a repeat from 2012]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith from a place of winter For the Years of Winter…

 THE FORGOTTEN WEDDING [12-16-20, a repeat from 2012]

It was the Sunday before Christmas. We’d had two good morning worship services. I was tired. I was sitting at the table in the kitchen, sans shoes and tie, gratefully full of lunch, sipping a second cup of tea, when the phone on the wall beside me blared more forcefully than necessary. I picked it up. A rather thin, small voice…

“Rev. McFarland, aren’t you coming to our wedding?”

A minister should not schedule anything on a Sunday afternoon. A Sunday morning is intense. It empties your brain out. By the time it is over, there is no room to remember anything that is coming up.

In over 50 years in ministry, I forgot two events. The first time I was supposed to be part of a panel discussion for an evening program at a church on the other side of town. It’s not too bad if one member of a panel doesn’t show. It’s definitely not good if the only minister doesn’t show up for a wedding.

It’s even worse if the bride is a scared teen-ager whose family threw her out when she told them she was pregnant. 

I hadn’t known her or her boyfriend, but they came to me when her pastor refused to marry them. “People say, when there’s no place else to go, they come to you,” they told me. Now the pastor of last resort had forgotten about them, too. 

I set a record for retrieving shoes and tying tie, and I flew out the back door. Helen was right behind me. Mary Beth and Katie, who were teenagers, were right behind her. Fortunately, we lived next door to the church building, and there was already a path shoveled through the big snow drift that always swept in and up between the back doors of the parsonage and the church building.

They were in the kitchen, the bulging bride, and her skinny husband-to-be, and the nervous teen couple they had brought along as witnesses. This was well before cell phones. When I had not showed up at 1:00 o’clock, they had wandered through the building and found the phone in the kitchen.

I led them back to the sanctuary. Oops. I had forgotten something else. After the morning services, we had prepared for the Christmas program that evening. The pulpit and lectern and altar table had been removed, turning the chancel into a large Akron-plan wrap-around stage. The chancel was bare.

But we were decorated for Christmas. Wreaths and candles and red ribbons, and a crèche set. They took their vows standing in front of the manger, part of a scene that said, “Love came down at Christmas.”

Every Christmas, the wedding I forgot is the one that I remember.

John Robert McFarland

***

The photos are from a later date, but the same sanctuary as in the story.

 

The “place of winter” mentioned in the title line is Iron Mountain, in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where we lived in 2012, where life is defined by winter even in the summer!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

GOD’S CHRISTMAS CARD: I SEE YOU [M, 12-14-20]

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

GOD’S CHRISTMAS CARD: I SEE YOU   [M, 12-14-20]

 

As I walked this morning, I waved to a woman who was walking on the other side of the street. I do not know her. Never saw her before. But I felt a smile starting when she waved back. She saw me!

That’s unusual these days, actually to see and be seen by a real human being, one who is not in a little Zoom box. It’s like getting a Christmas card.

That’s what Christmas is, I think, an exchange of greetings. God is saying to us, in Christ, the little Jesus baby born in Bethlehem, a real person in a real time, “I see you.”

As we celebrate Christmas, we are replying to God, “I see you, too.”

Our cards to God--our attempts to say, “I see you, too”-- are sort of jumbled--sleigh bells roasting on a rubber cigar, Jack Daniels dripping from your nose—because we don’t really know how to say to God, “I see you.” In fact, we can’t see God at all, so shrouded in mystery, so far beyond the understanding of these brains. It’s easier to act like Christmas is about a reindeer with a red nose, or bells that jingle, or a jolly fat man who brings us toys.

Religion in general is an acknowledgement that we don’t understand, humility in our finiteness as we face the infinite. Christian faith is that God, understanding our lack of understanding, sends to us someone we can understand, someone like us, brought into human form the same way we are, taken out of human form in the same way we are--Jesus, called the Christ, because Christ is the Word of God, the language of God, the communication of God, God saying, “I see you.”

Incarnation, God in human form, isn’t just about Jesus. Incarnation is about God in every human. But Jesus is the World Series of incarnation. The World Series is the essence of baseball, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t any other baseball. No, there is Little League and minor leagues and Uncle Johnny hitting fly balls to me in our pasture as a kid. But to see what baseball is in its most perfect form, we look to the World Series. To see what humanity is in its most perfect form, we look to Christ.

So, this Christmas, it’s okay just to give God a wave, and say, “Thanks for seeing me. I see you, too.”

John Robert McFarland

 

MORNING HOUR SONG-poem [Sa, 12-12-20]

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

MORNING HOUR SONG-poem [Sa, 12-12-20]

 

As I sing my morning song

in a key known but to me

 

I hear the distant chant

of ancient peoples in a native tongue

wistful woodsmoke for their harmony

elk and rabbit keeping time

with watchful eye

plains song

 

I hear the chorus of solitary monks

in stone cold chapels

as lowing cows and crowing roosters

join in the monotones

of their kind

plainsong

 

I hear the moaning

clank of chains

as mocking birds and croaking toads

do grace notes as they hear

the strains of chariots swinging low

slave song

 

I hear the groaning from the cross,

the silence of an empty tomb

grumbling of the devil

and laughter of the cherubs

the morning hour song

our song

 

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

HAUBSTADT MEMORIES [R, 12-10-20]

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

HAUBSTADT MEMORIES [R, 12-10-20]

I realized that the pandemic had gotten real when I saw in the Princeton, Indiana paper that the Haubstadt Christmas Golf Cart parade was canceled. Basically, I refuse to let the limits and upsets of this pandemic time get to me, but that makes me very sad.

Princeton is the seat of Gibson County, where the town of Haubstadt, with its 1600 residents, is situated, ten miles away.

You would think that if you have seen your wife’s face as she watched a man eating a brain sandwich in a restaurant in Haubstadt, that would be the highlight of your Haubstadt memories, but no, the pinnacle of my Haubstadt memories is the time in Bloomington, IL that I took my mother on an emergency trip to the bus station.

But first, the sandwich. We were spending a couple of nights with Hovey and Sally Hedges at the occasion of one of the every-five-years reunions of my high school class, maybe the 45th. Hovey decided we should go down to Haubstadt for supper, since they had a neat, old-fashioned restaurant there. As we looked over the menu, Hovey asked Helen if it would bother her if he ordered a brain sandwich.

He didn’t bother to ask me. We had grown up together in Oakland City; he knew what delicacies I grew up eating. My classmates, though, were always in awe of Helen. She was a big city girl, Gary, and was the valedictorian of a high school class three times the size of ours, so Hovey figured she was a fragile and sensitive soul. She enjoyed her popularity and unique role at our reunions so much that she often said, “If anyone asked me where I went to high school, I’d probably say, Oakland City, Indiana, Class of ’55.”

Helen liked Hovey, but generally felt that he probably could use more brains, and, besides, you don’t get that sort of request every day, so what could she say? It looked like any other sandwich, but she knew what was inside. Hovey was a polite eater, but when you know what is in the sandwich, you can hear the sandwich screaming. Helen decided it was not an experience she wanted to repeat.

My only experiences with Haubstadt previously had been playing basketball there. We looked down on them, because their town was so much smaller than Oakland City, with its 3500 residents. Also, because their teams were the Elites, pronounced E-lights, emphasis on the E.

We once had a team meal in the back room of a restaurant there before a game. You really have no right to look down on other teams if you are known as the Acorns, but we did. We had no idea what an E-light was, but it sounded like a mythical creature from a fairy tale. Or were they just proud of having electric lights, hence the E-light business? We didn’t know, but it was fun to speculate.

But, the story of Mother and the man at the bus station: My little sister, Margey, had been down for a visit. When she left, she forgot her coat. Mother wanted to get it to her as quickly as possible, which meant on the next bus. We were moving my parents around with us during those years, never living in the same house, but in the same town. Mother called me to come take her to the bus station. I hurried over to do so. She had the coat all packaged and ready to go. All we had to do was get it to the bus station in the next five minutes, before the next bus left. I pulled up in front of the station with a minute to spare. Mother jumped out and dashed through the door. She was back out in 30 seconds. “It’s the most interesting thing,” she said. “The man who works in there, his mother is from Haubstadt.”

Thirty seconds! She not only had done a business transaction with the man, but found out where his mother was reared! That was Mother. And that’s why it makes me sad, that they had to cancel the Christmas Golf Cart Parade in Haubstadt.

John Robert McFarland

The picture is of an actual past Haubstadt golf cart parade.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WHENEVER I MAKE LISTS-poem [T, 12-8-20]

 

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

WHENEVER I MAKE LISTS-poem   [T, 12-8-20]

 

Whenever I make lists—

--and I make plenty—

be it items or people or tasks

I always forget one

not by choice but by chance

I mention this

not to pique your interest

so that you will peek

behind the list

to see what puzzle

I have posed

No, it must be

to keep me searching

for that one

item or person or task

that will complete the list

that will make me

whole

 

John Robert McFarland

OPEN, ORDINARY, CHRISTIANS [Su, 12-6-20]

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

OPEN, ORDINARY, CHRISTIANS [Su, 12-6-20]

When I wrote on 11-26, about saying goodbye to our Jewish Director of Children’s Music at St. Mark’s UMC in Bloomington, I noted that Aaron didn’t know, when he moved from Chicago to Bloomington, that churches like St. Mark’s, with its eclectic staff and congregation, even existed. His knowledge of Christians and their churches came from what he saw on TV, the ones that ignore the clear teachings of Jesus while using the Bible as a cudgel and wall against anyone who is different.

Granted, St. Mark’s is a unique congregation, in a unique, university setting. I suspect, however, had he dropped into any of the 26 churches I pastored over the years, he would have said the same thing. He would have been surprised and impressed by how welcoming and open-minded the people there were. [Yes, that’s a lot of churches. There were several short multi-church appointments in the early years.]

Forsythe Methodist, the open-country church where I grew up, in Indiana’s “pocket,” between the Ohio and Wabash Rivers, the Mississippi of the North, was probably an exception in its day, because of its openness to people of color and women, even women pastors. I grew up thinking all churches were like that.

Maybe the other little rural and tiny town congregations I pastored in my early years weren’t quite as open as Forsythe, but their members were not malicious. They might not want to associate with certain peoples, but they didn’t want bad things to happen to them. Often, the rest of society around them was active in being mean to black folks and poor folks, but not those people I saw in worship on Sunday. Granted, if nice folks do nothing against injustice, it allows the ruthless to do whatever they wish, but sometimes you’re just far enough down on the power scale yourself that the best you can do with those who are lower is sympathize.

I remember one church where a woman announced during the Joys and Concerns that she had placed in the narthex a petition, sent to her by a famous “family values” organization, against gay marriage. She wanted people after worship was over to line up and sign up. Everyone looked a bit anxiously at me. I thanked her for doing that, since, I noted, it is important for Christians to be active and take a stance in the political realm, but said that I myself would not be signing, since I was a big believer in marriage.

Nobody signed. Well, in a church, how can you be against marriage? I think it was more than that, though. I think those ordinary Christians, forced by social circumstances into churches where everybody was the same, still knew that the good news of the Gospel was for everybody, if they were like us or not. The ordinary preachers and Sunday School teachers and YF leaders who had been there before me had done a good job.

John Robert McFarland

“The best way to get freedom in the pulpit is to take it.” Reinhold Niebuhr

 

 

 

MAYBE THE FARM UPSTATE WON’T BE SO BAD [F, 12-4-20]

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

MAYBE THE FARM UPSTATE WON’T BE SO BAD [F, 12-4-20]

I think I know now why old people like dogs, even though old people can’t stand up in sleet and snow and rain, when they have to take that dog out to pee and poo; it’s like having a child or grandchild in the family, at a time when everyone in the family is now an adult. A dog is a substitute child.

We no longer have a dog. We did once. We tried to get another one. We went to the shelter. They wouldn’t let us have one, even the blind one with three legs. They said we wouldn’t be able to take care of it because we would soon be going to that farm upstate, where old people go to have a better life, away from the hustle and bustle, but that would be okay, because then we’d have lots of dogs, that were sent there to have a better life, where they could run and play.

When we had a little black dog, though--J. Rodsdale Wagsworth, III—it was like always having a little child in the family, for 18 years, the usual amount of time you have a child at home. Granted, a child with “special needs,” that centered mostly on food, but very lovable. 

Now we have no children or grandchildren, just a bunch of adults who spend the time they once used bouncing on our knees to research “a place for Mom.” [Helen hates those ads on TV. “How come it’s never Dad they’re going to send off to that farm upstate?”]

I love these big people, these adult-like creatures, who have our name and genes and money, even though they have not yet learned to do things the way we think they should. But I miss those children. And that little dog, Waggs.

I surely do hope that “all dogs go to heaven.” That seems to be my only chance for another dog, or substitute child.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

  

THE RUNNING PREACHER [W, 12-2-20]

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

THE RUNNING PREACHER     [W, 12-2-20]

Someone recently asked me what I am doing for mental health during these pandemic days. The answer is: I walk. I’ve been a daily runner or walker for over 40 years now.

Since March 15, I haven’t missed a day walking 45 to 60 minutes, outdoors. I won’t walk indoors, at the Y or the mall, because there are too many people, and questionable air circulation. Even outdoors, I always carry a mask, in case I encounter someone I need to help, like old the lady who had fallen and couldn’t get up. We live in a temperate zone, so outdoors is almost always walkable at some time of day. During the pandemic, even on the rainy days, there has been a break of an hour at some time when I could get out and walk. It really does help keep me sane, or as close as I’m going to come to sanity.

Answering that question, though, reminded me of the new Disciples of Christ pastor who came to Hoopeston, IL when I was the UMC preacher there.

I didn’t get to know him very well. He was there only a few months before the bishop moved me to Charleston. But I heard enough about him from my members to be jealous of him, and to be mad at him for making me look bad.

He was a coffee schmoozer. Every morning he went down to one of the watering holes for coffee and donuts. There he would greet and schmooze with all of my members who gathered there. They told me how wonderful he was. There was, at least to my mind, an implied complaint—their pastor did not do that.

I became a long-distance runner when we lived in Hoopeston. I was turning 40 and aware that I was out of shape. Fortunately for me, that was the time of the big running explosion, ignited by the combination of the greed of Phil Knight [Nike], the medical affirmation of Dr. George Sheehan [On Running], the mentoring of Jim Fixx [The Complete Book of Running], and the modeling of Bill Rodgers [Boston Marathon]. Thus, it was easy for me to get into running; it was socially accepted, even for a preacher.

I wasn’t a very fast runner, though, so by the time I had done ten or fifteen miles to start the day, at coffee time I had to be in my study, working on a sermon, or in my office, doing whatever it is that preachers do there. Also—and the “also” is usually where the truth is—I just didn’t really enjoy café schmoozing much.

On our last day in Hoopeston, he came down the street to say good-bye to me. [Our church buildings were only a block apart.] He was dressed as usual—dark, three-piece suit, white shirt and tie, a gold chain across his vest. Pretty much the opposite of the way I usually looked.

The gold chain was always very prominent because it stuck out a long way. I felt sort of bad about being unhappy with him, because he had made me look bad during the months we had shared in that town. That was neither Christian nor collegial. And after all, he really was a nice guy. So I told him how I felt.

He said, “I know how you feel. When I’m having coffee and donuts with your members, they look at my belly and say, ‘You know, our pastor runs.’”

John Robert McFarland