SHOOTING A DOLLAR BILL [T, 8-30-22]

Helen recently came across the guest book for our wedding. There were only a few pages of names, for it was not a big deal. Only two friends from my high school days, which is not surprising, for we were four years out of Oakland City HS by then, and the Acorns of our days were scattered all over the country.

However, Jarvis Reed and Lea [Pronounced Lee] Sumners were on the guest list.

All this recent concern about inflation made me remember something Lea told me in our high school days, in the early 1950s, and Helen said I should pass it along…

“If you take a girl to the movies, and buy popcorn, and then go out for hamburgers and cokes after, it just shoots a dollar bill all to hell.”

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

REMEBERING A MOTHERLESS GIRL [Sa, 8-27-22]

 

I have felt uneasy for several years now, because I did not write about Charlene when she died.

I almost always eulogize a departed friend, especially one of my Oakland City classmates, but I did not write about Charlene when I saw the notice of her death, because I had nothing to say 

I did not know her well in our school days. We were in the same class in high school, but we had always been in different classrooms before that, so I did not even know she existed until high school. I was class president our first three years in high school, and I encouraged Charlene to be a part of class activities, the way I did with all our other classmates, but she never came to class meetings or parties.

In fact, she did not participate in anything. No band or clubs. I don’t think she even went to ballgames. She didn’t say anything in class. Her grades must have been okay, but not spectacular, because we never heard anything about them one way or another. She was a pleasant girl, a little chubby, clean and well-dressed in current teen fashion, but she did not mingle.

Except one time that I know about. She threw a party. At least, it was at her house. I was running around with a friend that night. He said, “Let’s go to Charlene’s party.” I was surprised that there was a party at Charlene’s. I said, “I wasn’t invited.” He replied, “No one was. It’s just… you know, y’all come.”

So we went. It was a nice house. A quiet party, but everyone having a good time, dancing some, talking, drinking lemonade. Charlene sat to one side, observing, smiling. She said, “You’re welcome,” when I thanked her for the party. That’s about the extent of all our conversation.

She never came to our class reunions, even though we had them every five years. I asked about her, though. Some classmates had a little contact with her. They knew she had become a school teacher, in Monrovia, about 120 miles from Oakland City. They knew she had married. That was about it.

Over forty years, I drove through Monrovia from time to time, right by the school buildings. I didn’t think of stopping to talk to Charlene. But I always thought about her, wondering how she was doing, a girl who had been so disengaged in school, now a teacher.

Here’s the thing, though. Charlene’s mother died sometime when we were in grade school. I did not know about it at the time. Because she lived in town, and I in the country, and since we were in those different classrooms, I didn’t know anything about her until we got to high school. I didn’t know she was motherless, until that party at her house.

There is one more thing I learned about her through the years. She taught Home Economics. The art of home-making. Jon Stewart rightly says that not every person who has a chaotic childhood becomes a comedian. Not every motherless girl spends her life teaching other girls how to cook and sew and manage money and children--how to make a home. But Charlene did.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

PRAYER FOR A LITTLE DOG [W, 8-24-22]

 

Oh, Ernie,

You were such a rascal

Your paw upon my thigh

lest I, or anyone else, think

that I was free

to traipse without you

You saved us

from TV dinosaurs

and unapproved

delivery folk

[None were ever

approved]

Plato would have loved you

The perfect model for a dog

in shadow on the cave wall

You were exactly

what you were meant to be

In your dogged

self-centeredness

you pulled us out

from our own shaggy selves

 

John Robert McFarland

In the picture above, I have just driven ten hours to Ernie’s house for Christmas. That was as far as I could get in before being required to hang out with him.

 

YOU ARE THE ONLY ONE GOD LOVES [Su, 8-21-22]

 

“God loves each of us as though there is only one of us.” Augustine of Hippo said that, and it’s true.

I refuse to call him “Saint” Augustine, though, because he did the Christian church hundreds of years of damage with his interpretation of the Trinity. Who could possibly think that claiming there is only one God but that “He” is actually three would make God easier to understand?

And also because his Roman legalism caused him to proclaim that original sin is physical and so is transferred from one generation to another by sex. As Lee Hays once said, “That set sex back a thousand years.”

However, he is quite right about God treating each of us as though we are the only one, because we are. Each of us has an anterior cingulate in the brain. That’s the site of what John Wesley called prevenient [preventing] grace, loosely mistranslated as “conscience.” That is what some brain researchers call “the god spot,” where our religious impulses reside. It literally has billions of neurons, electrical impulses, chemicals, etc. Just as DNA is totally individual, so is the anterior cingulate. With all those billions of parts, not one of them is like any other.

 

Which means that no one experiences God in the same way as anyone else. God has to treat each of us individually, because we are totally individual. Each of us has a unique relationship to God. If your spiritual experience is different from mine, well, of course. God is not “one size fits all.”

When it seems to you that your relationship to God is one of a kind, you’re not bragging, or being self-centered. You’re just understanding the way God chooses to relate to us…one person at a time.

I used to criticize the C. Austin Mills hymn, “In the Garden.” It sounded like the worst of Protestant individualism. “The joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.” None other!?! Well, yes. Doesn’t mean other folks don’t share joy with God, but that particular joy, in that particular anterior cingulate, yeah… that is shared only with God.

Billions of universes in the world, so there can’t be one God? Or any God at all? Hogwash. God isn’t too busy because there are billions. You’re the only one God deals with. Right where you are. In your brain.

 

I might add that God probably has more questions about you than you have about God.

John Robert McFarland

The native Americans were on the right track when they said that wherever you are, you are at the center of the universe, and Borden Parker Bowne was on the right track, way back in 1876, with his theology that he called “Personalism.”

WREATH UNFURLED [R, 8-18-22]]

 

I choke up a bit

always have

when faced

with the death

of a young man

 

on the streets of Laredo

down in some lonesome valley

in the jungles of cancer

 

It made sense when I was young

the same age as Tom Dooley

the Laos missionary doctor

the other Tom Dooley

hanging from a white oak tree

that young cowboy

all wrapped in white linen

 

I don’t understand them

did not know them

but I am one with them

I hear the drum

its slow banging

I feel the rope

its slow tightening

I see the cancer

its  slow spreading

 

It does not make sense now

this lump in my throat

for I am old and full

of years and mincemeat pie

 

Still I wonder

which I would have been

the doctor

the outlaw

or the cowboy

John Robert McFarland

Bonus observation: “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Carl Sagan, quoted in B Square Bulletin.

 

 

 

 

JESUS, MARCUS BORG, AND BLINDERS CHRISTIANS [M, 8-15-22]

 

Marcus Borg was a real believer. To “blinders Christians,” that made him a real enemy.

I have written about Marcus before, but I want to again because I just finished Borg’s 1987 book, JESUS, A NEW VISION: Spirit, Culture, and the Life of Discipleship, for the fourth time. I read it about every ten years. It renews me every time.

I read it first around 1992, not long after I was diagnosed with colon cancer and told I’d die “in a year or two.” I was at a conference at Garrett Theological Seminary, at Northwestern U, and picked it up off the book table just because I liked the title.

I knew nothing of Borg. He was just another obscure Bible prof, teaching at the unlikely spot of Oregon State U. I mean, shouldn’t a major Bible scholar be teaching at some place like Harvard or Yale or Union or U of Chicago? He had published a couple of books earlier, by legitimate but little-known presses. They had not caused enough stir to reach small-town pastors in the Midwest. The furor over “The Jesus Seminar” was yet to come. But I always liked to buy a new book when I went to a conference. Made me think I was a scholar myself.

It was because he was a real scholar that blinders Christians could not accept Marcus as a real believer.

I guess I was one of the last kids to grow up with a horse to pull the wagon and the plow. Prince was a saddle horse who thought it beneath his status to be a work horse. Our harness did not have blinders, which allowed Prince to continue his claim to high status. He could see too much.

Blinders are flaps attached to the harness beside the horse’s eyes. With blinders on, horses can’t see to the sides, so they are less likely to get spooked. And since their eyes are on the sides of their heads instead of the front, it means they can’t see much at all. They are not scholars [observers] but only believers. They go along on faith.

Blinders Christians believe that if they believe irrational stuff, like “Jesus wrote every word of the Bible himself,” then they are better Christians than rational people, like Borg, who say things like “the Bible was written by fallible people like us and that is why God is able to use it for our benefit.” The point becomes not the activity of God but the activity of the believer, and the less reasonable the belief, the more that proves the fidelity of the believer.  

Marcus Borg believed because he thought it was the most rational thing to do, not the least.

I can’t say that Borg changed my life with …New Vision, but he changed my thinking. Here was a deep and insightful scholar, who clearly had a deep and meaningful faith. I had always been more of a God believer, and a Christ believer. Borg was those, but also a Jesus believer. He got me acquainted with a Jesus I thought I knew but really did not. His 1994 book was entitled Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time. Borg helped me do that with Jesus, a New Vision.

He wrote several more volumes on Jesus and the Bible. Probably the most comprehensive, and a good place to start reading him, is The Heart of Christianity, published in 2003. That was when his scholarship and thinking reached its mature zenith.

I was so impressed with …New Vision that Helen and I began to go to conferences where Marcus was speaking. The first was at Concordia College, in Morehouse, MN, where Marcus had gone to college himself. Our faith was challenged and deepened with every sentence he spoke. We didn’t really get acquainted with him that time, though, because my book for cancer patients [1] had come out, and I was doing seminars for nurses and others at the Roger Maris Cancer Center in Fargo, ND, just across the state line from Morehead.

Later, though, we became… more colleagues than friends, I guess. His wife, an Episcopal priest, used my book with cancer patients. We’d chat around the edges of conferences. Whenever he published a new book, he’d send me a copy, and I would do the same for him with mine. Helen didn’t like the available confirmation materials when she mentored our granddaughter, so she asked Marcus to do another version of Heart… for junior high confirmands. He said he couldn’t write at that level, but she could, being a teacher of teens, so if she revised the book, he’d put both their names on it and get Harper SanFrancisco to publish it. Alas, she was busy with many things and did not get that done. 

Through the years, so many people have said to me, “Marcus Borg made it possible for me to be a Christian.” He tore off blinders so that we could believe for real. At a time when my life was at its lowest ebb, he gave me “a new vision.”

John Robert McFarland

1] NOW THAT I HAVE CANCER I AM WHOLE: Reflections on Life and Healing for Cancer Patients and Those Who Love Them

 

THE DWELLING PLACES OF PRAYER [R, 8-11-22]

My pastor, Jimmy Moore, told in a sermon several weeks ago, of praying for his father.

His father was diagnosed with cancer when Jimmy was only about eight years old. His mother put a picture of Durer’s “Praying Hands” over Jimmy’s bed. He began to pray for his father, who died six years later.

Jimmy said, “My prayers made a place in my heart where my father could live forever.”

That is such a helpful insight into intercessory prayer.

John Robert McFarland

 

THE PHYLLIS TEST [Su, 8-7-22]

The cute little math professor waited until all the other worshippers had gone by me at the door. Then she grabbed my pulpit robe by the lapels and pulled me down into her face and said, fiercely, “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 be damn sure that what you say is the truth.” 

Phyllis was a PK, preacher’s kid, daughter of a Baptist pastor. She knew about preaching.

In my most recent column, I wrote of how nothing you say in preaching can remain hidden. After all, preaching is a social medium. I don’t worry overmuch about that, about saying something that should have remained hidden, because each time I have entered the pulpit since 1964, I have made sure the sermon passes the Phyllis test.

Phyllis Graham and I were friends from age ten, for 55 years, until she died. We were in high school together until sophomore year, when her family moved away. I forgot about her until I graduated seminary and was appointed to be the campus minister in Terre Haute, serving Indiana State U and Rose-Hulman University, then called Rose Polytechnic Institute. There I met this new math prof, a new PhD from IU. New math prof, but old friend.

I’ve written about Phyllis before, including how she became part of our family, friend to Helen and aunt to our little daughters, how I officiated at her wedding to Jim Parr. We shared a lot over the next 40 years.

I miss her, but I think about her every time I preach. I give the sermon the Phyllis test.

When I preached at her funeral, I made damn sure that what I said was true.

John Robert McFarland

NOTHING IS HIDDEN… [W, 8-3-22]

 

Preaching is like the internet. I’ll explain… 

July 31, when I preached my final sermon, again, I recounted how my father told me, when I was 66 years old, that I was not really his child. It was an entirely new sermon. I had never talked about that publicly, only privately. The bottom line of the sermon was that it makes no diff who your earthly father is, for we all have the same eternal father. [And mother] The point of the Adam and Eve story is that none of us can claim better lineage than anyone else.  We all have roots in “the ground of being.”

I had not spoken publicly of my father, and the problems he caused us as he aged, because I was afraid I might sound disrespectful. But he has been dead for 18 years, and he lived his final years not in Oakland City, his [and my] home town, but in Spencer, 20 miles from Bloomington, where my brother had moved him and Mother when she could no longer drive. No one in Bloomington would know…

Well, of course, on the St. Mark's first-time visitors list on Monday morning was the name Dan Grossman. Now, the Grossman name might sound familiar to football fans, for his son, Rex, once quarterbacked the Chicago Bears. But I knew Dan as my father’s eye doctor!

It’s quite possible that Dr. Grossman was sitting there thinking, “This fill-in preacher is named John McFarland, and he’s talking about his father, who was nearly blind. I used to have a patient by that name who was almost blind. This jerk is dissing his father!”

Of course, considering that Dr. Grossman has had thousands of patients, and my father was a patient a long time ago, he probably thought nothing of the sort.

Still, let me suggest that preaching is like the internet. Anything you say will be out there for everybody to see, regardless of how private you think you are being, so it’s good always to preach stuff that is true.

Jesus of Nazareth said long before the internet, “For nothing is hidden that will not be revealed, nor is anything secret that will not become known and come to light.” [Luke 8:17]

John Robert McFarland