FULL-SERVICE MINISTRY [W, 11-30-22]

 

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER: FULL-SERVICE MINISTRY [W, 11-30-22]

The obit of Rev. Larry C. Meadows was in the Princeton, IN newspaper online this week. He was 75. It said, “The last few years, he ministered directly from his front porch.” How neat.

I didn’t know Larry. No opportunity to. We were 10 years and 12 miles and one high school and several denominations apart. But I loved the obit of this tent-maker minister.

Not tents, literally, like the Apostle Paul in the New Testament. Larry was an auto mechanic. The obit said he got his first car at age 12 and was a mechanic forever after. He owned and operated the last full-service filling station in the county.

Full-service was the norm for gas stations when I worked at Moe’s, while I was in high school. That place was even more full-service than most, because we had a grocery section, too, where we had to slice the bologna—no prepackaged stuff at Moe’s--as well as a hydraulic lift, in a side building, where we changed oil and lubricated cars. And, of course, we pumped the gas while you sat in comfort in your car. Also we checked your oil and washed your windshield and head lights. FULL service, to be sure.

Larry was also a Pentecostal preacher for 30 years. Served one congregation for 24 years. And then that wonderful line: “The last few years, he ministered directly from his front porch.”

I don’t know the details. I assume that Larry was physically limited in these last years. Maybe couldn’t get beyond his front porch. It’s neat to think about folks he served in his Sunoco station, and folks he served in his churches, just dropping by to hear the Word while having a chat with words.

If you’ve lived the right kind of life, you don’t have to go to the highways and byways to get them to come in. [Mt 22:9-11] They’ll come to you. Especially if you’ve kept both their cars and their spirits running. Full service.

John Robert McFarland

A PRAYER FOR PROTECTION [M, 11-27-22]

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER

Our church doesn’t use hymnals. Everything is printed in the bulletin. It’s handy, but does provide opportunity for typos, such as in the bulletin for yesterday, 11-27, in the hymn, “Blest be the God of Israel.”

“So have the prophets long declared that with a mighty arm

God would turn back our enemies and all who wish us farm.”

Thinking further about it, though, perhaps that is not a typo, but something Michael Parry intended. After all, he was born only five years after I, so if he grew up on a farm, he might have lived the same way I did on the farm—using an outhouse, carrying water in from a well [and from the nearest neighbors, a quarter mile away, when the well went dry], hoeing weeds in the garden, plowing with a horse, making hay with a pitch fork, picking corn by hand, milking cows the same way… did I mention hoeing weeds?

So, I pray: Oh, God, please turn back my enemies, but don’t stop there. Turn back all who wish me farm.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

STILL NOT OLD ENOUGH [F, 11-25-22]

 REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER

So, people are worried, because we have our first octogenarian president. The worriers include me. I’m concerned that Joe Biden is not old enough yet for the office.

“Old enough for…” is a moving target.

The first time I figured I was old was when I accidentally went into a big grocery store on Senior Citizen Day. I had just run in to get some dog food for Wags. [J. Rodsdale Wagsworth, III] I got trapped behind old ladies pushing carts, old men with bifocals trying to read labels, old people comparing current prices with those of 1922. “Why, I can remember when this was only…”

I finally got the dog food and managed to get to the checkout. The cashier was… maybe 19. She looked at me and rang up the Senior Citizen Day discount. I didn’t know exactly what age activated that discount, but I was sure it wasn’t 43. I started to yell, “How old to you think I am, anyway?” Then I realized that was not a smart question to ask a nineteen-year-old. She was probably seeing only my bald head and white beard, not my trim and taut runner’s physique. [Some people called it “scrawny.”]

Of course, being bald and white bearded and scrawny at 43 allows people to say for the next 40 or 50 years, “Why, you haven’t changed a bit.” Anyway, I figured if she was going to insult me by seeing me as a senior citizen, I’d just take the discount, even though I wasn’t old enough.

 

There have been more points along the way when I thought I was old enough, but then I found out I wasn’t. That has plagued me ever since, not being old enough. Not just for senior discounts; I passed that line a long time. No, the problem is being old enough to know everything I need to know. There is always something else that I need to get right, need to figure out, need to understand, need to avoid…

 

Poor Joe Biden. Only 80. He thinks turkeys should be pardoned. Still not old enough…

John Robert McFarland

 

THE BIBLE IN JEOPARDY [T, 11-22-22]

 REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER

Did Paul write Hebrews, the book in the New Testament by that name? Yes, according to the Jeopardy TV show. No, according to most Biblical scholars.

Don’t we have enough Bible controversies without Ken Jennings creating yet another instance of authorship brouhaha? Of course, Ken was not the one who thought up the question, but he is the face of Jeopardy these days, so he gets the blame. [Yes, I know: In Jeopardy, the answers are the questions, and the questions are the answers.]

It was the Final Jeopardy question in The Tournament of Champions: “Paul’s Letter to Them is the New Testament Epistle with the Most Old Testament Quotations.”

Amy Schneider said “Hebrews.” Sam Buttrey said “Romans.” Andrew He said “Philippians.” Jennings declared that Schneider was correct.

It’s sort of a common-sense sounding question. “Hebrews” sounds more Old Testamenty than Romans or Philippians. And I assume that it must have more OT quotes, by count, than Romans or Philippians, although I have not done such a count myself. The controversy could have been avoided, though, if the Jeopardyians had just said “The letter to them” instead of “Paul’s letter to them.” We know it’s a letter. We don’t know that Paul wrote it. 

Reminds me of when daughter Mary Beth got married at the Suburban Temple in Cleveland. Rabbi Oppenheimer said I could put “anything Methodist” into the service, as long as I didn’t mention “you know who.”

That was tricky, since “you know who” is fairly important in Methodism.

I asked about I Corinthians 13, since Mary Beth wanted a friend to read it in the service. “Oh, that’s not Christian,” the rabbi said. “That’s just part of the culture now.”

So we were okay on that, but how to do a Christian homily and liturgy in a Jewish service? I used the various passages from the New Testament where Jesus—who was a pretty good Bible scholar-- quoted from the Old Testament, although Jesus did not call it that. Worked perfectly. The Jews at the service thought I was quoting the OT, and the Christians thought I was quoting "you know who."

I think Jeopardy’s only escape now from the controversy they have created is to announce that they have hired me as a consultant for future Bible questions.

John Robert McFarland

STILL JESUS [Sa, 11-19-22]

 REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER

STILL JESUS [Sa, 11-19-22]

 

I heard a lot of chopping sounds from the kitchen before Helen came into the living room for mid-morning coffee time. “It sounds like you were busy,” I said.

She sighed. “It’s so satisfying. I have vegetable soup on the stove, and the bread is rising. I feel so authentic.”

Well, yes, that’s who Helen has always been, a competent person who works smart and gets things done. That’s her authentic self.

That’s who she still is. She’s still Helen…even though she’s old, and it takes longer to make the soup and the bread.

We recently watched the movie version of neurologist Lisa Genova’s novel, Still Alice. A brilliant linguist, only fifty or so, gets early-onset Alzheimer’s. Julianne Moore does an excellent job of showing the stages of Alice Howland’s decline into… nothingness? [1]

Genova is saying that she is “still Alice.” But is that right? It’s comforting, but is it true? Who are you when you don’t recognize anybody, even yourself? Are you really “still” your authentic self, even when you can’t get the satisfaction of working smart and getting things done?

I have reservations, but I think Genova is right. Alice was still Alice. Because, as CS Lewis says, “You are a soul that has a body, not a body that has a soul.”

Your soul is your self. Your self is not your body, not your brain, not your memories. Because you are a soul, you are always your authentic self.

That’s the point of the resurrection of Jesus. Even in death, he was still Jesus. That is what it means to conquer death. That is what it means to be Christ. That is what it means to be authentic.

John Robert McFarland

1] Fortunately, we don’t have to worry about that. As daughter Mary Beth said not long ago to her mother, “At least you don’t have to worry about early-onset anything.” She seemed to think that was comforting.

 

 

 

 

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER 

FAILING AT DOUBTING [R, 11-17-22]

 Going through old papers, I came across this page, handwritten, from 4-8-03. I think I was rather perceptive, considering how young I was. [66]

 I tried to doubt this morning, to sit at my end of the sofa and look out the window at the unpainted fence and the gray sky and the leafless tree and say, “There is no God.” It didn’t work. I ended up giggling; it just seemed so silly.

 The wellspring of doubt is not the absence of God but the absence of me. It is when I have become hidden under layers of isolation and addiction and busyness and selfishness and self-pity that I am able to doubt, because there is no me to believe. When there is so much ME there is no room for me.

 It is my existence that is really in question, not God’s. Jesus said that the one unforgivable sin is the sin against the Holy Spirit. That’s because when I refuse the Spirit, I refuse my own existence, for it’s the Spirit that gives life. And, like everyone else, I am a soul that has a body, not a body that has a soul.       

I spent the first part of my career preaching to doubts. Perhaps that was because I was on college campuses, where there is so much ME that there is no room for me, no one left to do faith. Later I began to realize I needed to preach to people’s faith, not their doubts. Preaching to doubt encourages us to believe that our spiritual life is about believing instead of faithing. I can be a believer, conquer doubts, but still have no me to do faith. Belief and faith are not the same thing.

When John Wesley expressed to Peter Bohler his inability to preach faith, because he had none, Bohler told him, “Preach faith until you have it.”

It is important for preachers to preach faith, in order to have it, but it is important for the rest of us to hear faith, in order to have it.

The less Me there is, the more me there is, to do faith.

John Robert McFarland

 

BAPTIZING THE WORLD [M, 11-14-22]

 

REFLECTIONS ON FAITH & LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER

Our daughter, Katie Kennedy, the author [1], emailed me to say that she had to do a 3 or 4 minute devotional to start a meeting at her church, and that she could think of nothing, and had looked online without anything appealing to her. Did I have any ideas? I’ve been thinking about the meaning and efficacy of baptism recently, so, I wrote the following…

When the great Reformer, Martin Luther, was tempted to give in, to take the easy way, to say that sin was too strong for grace, he would shout, “But I was BAPTIZED!”

All of us here could say that. “I was baptized.” But what does it mean?

Did Luther think his baptism was magic, that if he reminded the world and himself that he was baptized, he would automatically do the right thing? Hardly. He still made plenty of mistakes.

John, the Baptizer, said the baptism he gave people was “for the forgiveness of sins.” Putting water on folks was a good symbol for that. Water makes us clean. Did that mean that the people washed with baptism sinned no more? Not likely. It certainly does not seem that those of us in this church who are baptized manage to get by without sin.

In Methodism, we recognize two sacraments—communion and baptism. We say that a sacrament is “a means of grace.” Apparently, a “means of grace” is a work of the Holy Spirit. But does the Holy Spirit automatically appear when we commune, regardless of how distracted we are, or stays on us when we are baptized any more than the water does? Isn’t it arrogant to think we can summon the Holy Spirit with our rituals?

Methodists tend to say that the sacraments are “symbols.” They remind us of a reality that can’t be expressed easily or completely in words. Yes, but it feels like there’s something more than just a symbol…

At least at its base, baptism is a reminder that we belong to God. And as God’s people, we have the joyful responsibility of being the baptizers of the world, of pouring the water of grace upon the world. Or, as Methodists, maybe just sprinkling it.

Baptism isn’t just grace we receive, but grace we give. Whenever we share the bread with the hungry and give drink to the thirsty, we are baptizing the world. Whenever we visit the sick and imprisoned, we are baptizing the world. Whenever we share the good news, we are baptizing the world. Whenever we sprinkle the baptism of grace, we remind the world that it belongs to God.

We already know these things. We already do these things. But the world is so abrasive, and original sin is so insidious. We get worn down pretty quickly. So whenever we come together, we are reminded, “Yes, we are baptized.” Whenever two or three of us are gathered together in Christ’s name, he is with us, and our baptism is renewed, that we might baptize the world.

As the writer of II Corinthians put it, “God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, and he has given us this message of reconciliation.” [5:19]

John Robert McFarland

1] The Constitution Decoded; Learning to Swear in America; What Goes Up.

 

 

FIRST SNOW [Sa, 11-12-22]

 

Are two inches enough

to justify yet another poem

about morning snow?

What else can be said

than has not already been

blurted out about

the covering of sins

and the coming of winter

and whatever the hell

it means?

Is it enough, even,

those two inches

to justify a Christmas CD?

Well, yes,

especially with coffee.

 

John Robert McFarland

 

DEALING WITH UGLY SISTERS [T, 1-11-22]

 

An older woman out in public ran into an old friend she hadn’t seen for a long time. They started chatting, decided to have coffee, etc. She kept trying to think of the other woman’s name and just couldn’t. Finally she said, “I’m sorry, but I just can’t remember your name. Will you tell me, please, what your name is?” The other woman thought and then asked, “How soon do you need to know?”

The older we get, the more relevant that joke is. We just don’t remember very well. If we remember at all, it’s a lot slower than it used to be.

I had two sisters. Still have one. Both quite pretty. So I don’t like the term “ugly sisters” very much, but brain scientists tell us that it’s the “ugly sisters” who create so many of our old age memory problems.

Ugly sisters are memories that are sort of like the memory we are trying to construct.

That’s a key—construct. Because we don’t remember a memory, we re-construct it.

Here is a very crude synopsis of how memory works: An event happens. It comes to us in sight and sound and smell and emotion, to the hippocampus part of the brain. The hippocampus takes all those different elements and combines them into a whole. But, unlike you’d think of something named for hippos [yes, I know], the hippocampus is relatively small. It does not have room for all the different memories it is creating. So it farms them out to other parts of the brain… but not all in one place. There are different places for smells and sounds and sights and emotions. Then you want to remember that “memory,” your hippocampus has to re-call them and recombine them. That’s when the ugly sisters appear…

…because you have lots of smell and sound and sight and emotion stuff from the past in your brain. The older you are, the more of it you have. And the hippocampus has to look all through your brain to get the right elements together to recreate that former event, what we call a memory. When people say their memory is slow because they have so many memories, they are right!

But say you’re trying to remember the name of the car dealer who sold you that Ford Fiesta. The Ford car is stored in the same place in your brain as Gerald Ford. Isn’t he the one that Lyndon Johnson said he played too much football before they invented the helmet? And fiesta is Mexican, isn’t it? Was the Ford Fiesta manufactured in Mexico? Don’t they have tacos at fiestas? Oh, oh… ugly sisters. All understandable, but you begin to think about Gerald Ford and Lyndon Johnson and football and tacos. Those are the ugly sisters. Nothing wrong with them in themselves, but they are leading you away from the memory you are trying to recreate about that Ford Fiesta.

There is no simple solution to memory retrieval, nor to the ugly sisters. They are there, a part of life. And just like the rest of life, you have to resist the temptation, as consciously and as focused as you can, and stick to the most important thing.

I used to worry about new and interesting ways that I could present a biblical story or a theological truth in a sermon. Helen said, “You worry about that too much. You have only one thing to do in a sermon, to remind us that God loves us.”

When the ugly sisters show up, just turn away and say, “My memory might not be very good, but God loves me.”

John Robert McFarland