MAKING HAY [R, 6-11-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of Lost Skills—MAKING HAY [R, 6-11-26]

 

It’s haying season.

When we moved to the farm, I was ten, and a city boy. The concrete sidewalks of Indianapolis were my world. That concrete was hard, but reliable.

Suddenly, in a day’s time, there was no concrete anyplace. It was all dirt and gravel.

I had loved listening to The Lone Ranger on the radio, and watching Red Ryder and Little Beaver in Saturday matinees at the Tacoma Theater on Washington Street. So, at first, I thought the farm was neat. It was like living on a ranch. It took me a while to realize that we had a horse because we couldn’t afford a car, that we were the kinds of farmers the cattle barons pushed off the land because we didn’t amount to anything, that primitive farm life was hard work. I didn’t get to ride in and solve a problem, like The Lone Ranger, and ride off again, with pretty girls swooning and asking, “Who was that masked boy?” I was stuck there, putting up hay.

There was a lot more farm work than just making hay, of course, but hay season takes on gigantic proportions in my memory of farm life. It was only one season of the year, only a week, maybe less. But when I think about farm life, I don’t think first about gathering eggs or slopping hogs or chopping kindling or carrying water. I think about making hay.

The main things I remember are the humidity and the heat. I guess that is because you can only “make hay while the sun shines.”

 

Also, of course the dust. My father loved [soy] bean hay. It wasn’t like what I call grass hay. Bean hay is mostly fine dust. At least, that’s what got down my shirt and into my hair and nostrils and lungs.

And the thirst. We had no ice to mix with the water we took to the fields, and we had no thermos jug to keep it cold, anyway. We just had a glass jar. We kept it in the weeds on the shady side of the field. It was a big jar, but we gulped from it every time we got to that side, even though the water was hotter every time. Soon it was gone, and we had to wait until a load was done and back to the barn before we could get a refill.

And the sun burn. I don’t think we even knew about sun screen then. Maybe it didn’t exist. I know it didn’t for us. Every year or so now the dermatologist removes a malignant patch of skin from my face. They got their start back in the hay fields.

And the fatigue. Making hay takes all your muscles and all your lung capacity. Chemo fatigue is the only tiredness I’ve ever known that was more depleting than haying fatigue.

Finally, though, I remember the satisfaction. I had survived the heat and the dust, and I learned how to build a load.

We had no fancy new equipment that did baling for you. We put up hay “loose.” My father would walk along beside the wagon--pulled by Prince, the horse who thought he was too good for pulling wagons--and get a big forkful of hay off the ground and pitch it up onto the flatbed wagon, where I stood with my own fork. I built the load.

In doing that, I had to be careful not to stand on hay I was trying to move. I had to build the load in such a way that hay already on the wagon would not fall off as new hay came on. Most important, it had to be unloadable. When we got back to the barn, we needed to take it off the wagon a forkful at a time, just as it had gone on.  As the load got bigger and higher and more complicated, that was harder than it sounds.

Like so many of the skills I learned as a kid, building a hay load is one that I’ll never use again. No one else will, either. But it has served me well. When times get tough, I can always say, “It could be worse. I could be making hay.”

John Robert McFarland

“I like work; it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.” Playwright & author, Jerome K. Jerome.

A CHURCH WITH NO FUTURE [T, 6-9-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings of An Old Campus Minister—A CHURCH WITH NO FUTURE [T, 6-9-26]

 

The church is irrelevant and has no preachers because it has sacrificed its future to spread frankincense on its dead corpus. It won’t be resurrected until it knows once again the importance of ministry on the  campuses of higher education.

Years ago, I was appointed by the bishop to a Conference committee. It was his way of punishing me for making a motion at Annual Conference that we have no conference committee meetings for a year, and spend all the time we would have spent in committee meetings in evangelism, and then come back the next year to see if we might be better off. It failed, but by a surprisingly slim margin. The Bishop had an elevated sense of his status as an agent of karma.

That committee was tasked with learning what help congregations wanted from the denomination staff, to be more effective witnesses in their communities. We sent a survey for each congregation to fill out.

The churches were very cooperative. They all completed the survey forms and sent them back. All the members of the committee read all the responses. Or, at least, I did.

Almost all the congregations felt the same need—help with education, meaning, primarily, Sunday School and youth groups. And, more importantly, they wanted it right where they were. They wanted the helpers to come to them.

So, the committee met. In the Conference office. We came from all over the large geographical area of the Conference to meet. I myself drove 94.31 miles. [Yes, I had to look it up.] The Conference Program Director welcomed us, thanked us for our good work, said that the survey results were clear—we needed more Conference programming about Christian education. Fifteen minutes. He said we could go. Folks started to get up. A day wasted by 15 clergy and lay leaders of the church.

I didn’t get up. I said, “That’s not what the surveys said at all.”

“What do you mean?”

“They didn’t want Conference programming. They didn’t want to drive all day to the Conference headquarters. They wanted Conference staff people to come to their churches, to help them right there…”

The other committee members began to sit back down. “Yes, that’s right. That’s what the surveys said. They want local programming…”

The Conference Council Director was dumbstruck. He had never imagined such a thing. The purpose of being an administrator is to sit at headquarters and have people come to you, isn’t it?

As the numbers of church members have declined, precipitously, the number of administrators in headquarters has increased. We have fewer members and congregations, the reasoning goes, so we need to create more reasons for them to leave their locales and come hear experts, instead of going out into the highways and byways of their own towns and inviting people in. [Look it up. In every denominational headquarters, staff members have increased in direct proportion to the decrease of members and congregations.]

A huge number of pastors—and lay leaders--have come out of campus ministry. Starting with the time I was campus minister at IL State U [1966], more than 100 young people have gone into the ministry, from just that one campus ministry unit. Multiply that by campus ministries at every university.

As denominations have declined financially, though, church leaders have chosen to sacrifice the future of the church to prop up a moribund and outmoded system by cutting funds to campus ministries and adding more and more irrelevant administrators for “development,” who sit in offices and think up “programs” to be executed by non-existent preachers.

[Do I sound like an old curmudgeon, or what? Yes, but it’s all true.]

If you want to revivify the church, put whatever money and energy it has left into campus ministry.

John Robert McFarland

 

        

 

 

 

 

 

HOW ABSENT ARE THE FEET… [Sun, 6-7-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings About Irrelevancy by an Irrelevant Old Preacher--HOW ABSENT ARE THE FEET… [Sun, 6-7-26]

 

How beautiful upon the mountains are the feet of those who bring good news, who proclaim peace, who bring good tidings, who proclaim salvation, who say to Zion, “Your God reigns!” [Isaiah 52:7]

So far, I have said that no one wants to be a preacher because they are irrelevant, primarily because the church is irrelevant. But there is a specific irrelevancy of preachers…

THE IRRELEVANCE OF PREACHERS

The church is no longer relevant or necessary in American society, so preachers are irrelevant and unnecessary. Who needs a preacher in a church that is irrelevant?

Preachers aren’t even needed for funerals and weddings. Officiating at those events was the main reason the larger society beyond the church put up with preachers and their annoying talk about God.  Now anyone can officiate, even at weddings. “Anyone” is often preferable, because there is no religious language to negotiate. Couples can write their own self-centered, temporary vows for weddings [‘til love do us part], and no one has to speculate about heaven or hell as we “celebrate” the life of some secular reprobate.

On TV shows, preachers are rarely even shown. If they are, they are usually bumbling buffoons. On a recent Grey’s Anatomy, all the doctors were complaining that there were no chaplains in the building to do an emergency wedding. One of them said, “How can that be?  Chaplains are supposed to be here all the time” But this was the 10^th season of Grey’s Anatomy, and in the 225 shows before this episode, not only had they not mentioned or shown a chaplain, no one had even acknowledged their existence. Of course, it provided a good excuse for some bed pan operator to get ordained online to do the wedding. That’s how important and relevant preachers are, with their seven years of higher education.

{The episode aired originally in 2014, but we have only recently started watching Grey’s Anatomy, via Netflix. We’ve still got 12 seasons to go.}

When we graduated university, my roommate, Tom Cone, went to law school. The guy in the room next door, Tom Lucas, went to medical school. I went to theological school. All our peers, all of society, considered that we would be three equal professionals. Everyone knew that the Toms would earn a lot more money than I did, but we would have the same level of education and respect.

When we got our professional doctorates, that was true. All the newly married and doctorated couples socialized together. Our main friends were young doctors and lawyers and their wives. [There were some women lawyers and doctors then, but they didn’t live in the towns where I was pastoring.]

The main virtues then, the ones that society valued, were education, patriotism, civic involvement, moral living, and respectability. It was the church’s responsibility to encourage [enforce?] those virtues. The primary encourager/enforcer, of course, was the preacher.

Then came the upheaval of social values.

The Viet Nam war was fought, we were told by “the establishment,” to protect those values and virtues. But, no, that war was really fought to protect interests antithetical to traditional values. The values being protected were greed and power. Young people developed a counter culture, a drop-out culture, of drugs and non-involvement, a culture that saw traditional values as corrupt or irrelevant or hypocritical.

When people give up on traditional values, and replace them with greed and drugs, who can be more irrelevant than a preacher of traditional values?

Yes, there are people who still believe in the traditional values, but to exist in a nontraditional culture, they have to “double down,” become strict and inflexible in upholding those values. Mainline denominational churches are seen as wish-washy, cooperators with a lax culture, accepting non-acceptable people. The code word is “obey.” Mainline churches and their preachers don’t use it. They are accepted by neither the traditional religion nor the libertine culture.

Oh, I so wish I could start as a preacher, again, right now. This is just about the best time ever to be a preacher. What a wonderful opportunity, to preach the Gospel in a culture that is so ready for it, and doesn’t even know it!

John Robert McFarland

“When old men become irrelevant, young men become irresponsible.”

 

HE IRRELEVANCE OF DENOMINATIONS [F, 6-5-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Irrelevant Old Preacher--THE IRRELEVANCE OF DENOMINATIONS [F, 6-5-26]

 

I know you are eager to hear about the irrelevance of preachers, and I did promise that for today, but my scheduling is unreliable, and first we have to consider the irrelevance of denominations…

The original purpose of denominations was so that you knew who to avoid. You could go to any town and know that Catholics would not recognize Lutherans, and Lutherans would not recognize Baptists, and Baptists would not recognize one another in the liquor store.

I love that sort of joke, but it takes us away from the main point. There were theological differences between denominations, and people were convinced they would go to hell if they got mixed up with the wrong belief system. More importantly, there were cultural differences. Often language differences. A denominational label was a handy way of knowing who to avoid.

Gene Matthews was the preacher for a while at Forsythe Methodist, the little open-country church that nurtured me. He was a factory worker who got the call to preach in middle age. He took the courses to get a License to Preach and filled in part-time wherever he was needed.

One week, that was the Methodist Church in Darmstadt, near Evansville, where he lived. He was newly licensed and wanted to show off his preaching skills. That was back in the day when many churches had open Bibles already on the pulpit. Gene decided he would study the scripture for the day and just preach directly from the pulpit Bible. When he got there, though, he discovered that the pulpit Bible was in German! It had been a German Methodist congregation. They had given up worship services in German during WWII. But they had kept that old Bible. It was as much a part of their Methodist heritage as Wesleyan theology.

Denominations are about connections. In a denomination, congregations aren’t separate entities; they belong to something bigger, a system that works together, to establish and sustain colleges and universities and hospitals and missions and children’s homes and old folks homes.

Now, though, all those institutions have been taken over by government or rich people on boards of directors. A university or hospital might still carry the name of a denomination—Lutheran or Presbyterian or Whatever—but the church has no say about what goes on there.

I started these irrelevancy columns by saying no one wants to be a preacher. Well, that’s not true. There are plenty of folks who want to be preachers, but they don’t want to be part of a larger church, a denomination. They don’t want to go to seminary, or be vetted by peers, or know anything about comparative theology, or be questioned about whether they have the necessary “gifts and graces” to be effective pastors. They don’t need a degree or an ordination. They are “called,” and that’s all they need. They are business entrepreneurs. Denominations are irrelevant in a culture that is entrepreneurial.

Ordination is outdated. Now, whoever wants to be a preacher, they just declare themselves a preacher. They rent an empty building, give it a name that includes words like journey or harvest or new or start or, especially, community, and they’re a preacher, although they rarely call themselves that. They are the messenger or the leader or the prophet.

We don’t want to relate to other people in other congregations. We want just our own little New Start or New Life or New Hope or New News congregation, our own bunch of people self-selected to be like us, our own preacher who has no responsibility to anyone but us.

In a non-connectivity culture, indeed an anti-connectivity culture, denominations are irrelevant.

John Robert McFarland

“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure, which is to try to please everybody.” Herbert P. Swope

 

 

 

ONE MORE THING ABOUT CHURCH IRRELEVANCY [W, 6-3-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Musings About Irrelevancy by an Irrelevant Old Man—ONE MORE THING ABOUT CHURCH IRRELEVANCY [W, 6-3-26]

 

“Just one more thing…” That’s what Lt. Columbo always said on the “Columbo” TV show of the 1970s. He was on his way out the door, hand on the knob. The killer looked satisfied. The police detective was leaving without learning the truth. But “Just one more thing…” was preface to the question that would befuddle and expose the murderer, every time, for ten years.

So, just one more thing about the irrelevance of the church, before we go on to the irrelevance of preachers… 

If you take a quick look at America today, it does not look like the church is irrelevant. In fact, it looks more relevant than ever. There is a strong Christian nationalism movement, from The White House on down. Indeed, surveys show that almost all the people who voted for Donald Trump are in church every Sunday, and he is the kind of president who gets whatever he wants. That’s relevance…

No, it’s not, because politics and culture are very different creatures. The church is relevant to current politics but not to culture, what people really believe and how they really live.

Politics is ephemeral and manipulatable. Elections rarely reflect how people actually live. Voters can be manipulated. Elections can be falsified. Courts can declare that the winner actually lost.

People vote on politics. Culture is not up for a vote. We think we make decisions about cultural matters, and we do, but not by vote. Culture just happens, one personal act at a time until the whole world has shifted.

It’s an old phrase now, but I was impressed when I first heard it, 56 years ago, from James Spalding, the Dean of The University of Iowa School of Religion, when I was his graduate student assistant: The axe man of The French Revolution was exceedingly proud of the sharpness of his blade. They put a poor bloke on the chopping block before him. He swung mightily. The man laughed. “Ha! You missed me! I didn’t feel a thing.” “Just wait ‘til you sneeze,” the axe man said.

Political ascendency periods are very short. Usually no more than ten or twelve years. Even the Christian nationalist churches are already irrelevant. They just haven’t sneezed yet.

Yes, of course, there will always be a church. The Body of Christ will always be resurrected. But not in the ways that require preachers to lead them. So, next column, the irrelevancy of preachers…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

STICK A FORK IN THE CHURCH [M, 6-1-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Mutterings of An Irrelevant Old Man About Irrelevance—STICK A FORK IN THE CHURCH [M, 6-1-26]

 

The annual meeting of my United Methodist Conference starts tomorrow. The Illinois Great Rivers Conference comprises 2/3 of the state of Illinois, everything below Interstate 80. There are 646 churches in that Conference. When representatives from those churches meet in solemn assembly this week, there will not be even one new pastor ordained.

For several years now, in most United Methodist Conferences, retirements have outnumbered ordinations about ten to one. Now it’s gotten to be ten to zero. Yes, we have a pastoral crisis. Not just in the UMC, but in any denomination: nobody wants to be a preacher.

At least, nobody wants to be a preacher in a denomination, where there are folks who are checking to be sure you’re not mixing up any kool-aid.

Why are there no new preachers? Four reasons: The Church is irrelevant. Denominations are irrelevant. Preachers are irrelevant. Campus ministry is non-existent.

Today: The irrelevance of the church. I’ll talk about the irrelevancy of denominations and preachers and campus ministry in subsequent columns. [If that doesn’t discourage you from reading, nothing will. There’s nothing as deadly as a preacher who starts a sermon with “This is the first in a series of…”]

THE IRRELEVANCE OF THE CHURCH

Society has evolved, especially in sexual mores and morals, and the church has not. The church still holds to a sexual ethic of no sex except in marriage. The current cultural sex ethic is no sex until you’ve known someone for two minutes. The current church could not possibly be any more irrelevant to the current society.

Nobody worries about going to hell. The church was important when people worried about going to hell when they died. Going to church now was insurance against going to hell then. Now most folks think there might be some sort of afterlife, but no one believes in a physical heaven up there and a physical hell down there. Certainly church attendance, and the disciplines of personal holiness, have nothing to do with what will happen to you in some unknown future, so why go to church and do churchly stuff?

The church is all about personal fellowship. Each of us is a part of the Body of Christ, and we need the other parts of the Body. John Wesley even had his Methodist class members confess their sins to one another. The only way that could be done now is via text or Facebook. We live in a society that has no personal connections. Who needs them when you have a cell phone and “social” media? We are never alone, and incredibly lonely.

 

The church used to have enough hold on government that it could dictate cultural and business schedules. No business or school activities on Sundays. Or Wednesday night [prayer meeting]. When we stopped worrying about going to hell, we had to have a different God, and a different form of relating to one another. If you live only for now… Enter money. Enter making money. Enter 24/7/364 shopping and gambling hours. Enter feeling good, right now, via alcohol and drugs and sex. If going to church doesn’t make you feel good, again, why bother?

Nobody likes to be irrelevant. Nobody wants to be associated with irrelevant losers. People don’t want to be part of an irrelevant institution like the church, so they spend their time and money and energy in relevant activities, like sex and golf, and relevant institutions, like shopping malls and bars and sports arenas and casinos.

Stick a fork in the church: it’s done.

John Robert McFarland

Okay, the next two columns might be irrelevant to you. And boring. Because you’re probably old enough that you are irrelevant, too. If you don’t want more of the same screeds, you might want to wait for the column of June 9, when I talk about the irrelevance of learning to build a hay load with a pitchfork.

 

THE SECRET OF A LONG MARRIAGE [Sat, 5-30-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Man—THE SECRET OF A LONG MARRIAGE [Sat, 5-30-26]

 

It was time for our every-five-years high school class reunion. I think it was the one for 35 years. I say “our” reunion, even though it was only I, not Helen, who had been part of that class. Even though she had been valedictorian of her large high school class in Gary, IN, she didn’t really feel a part of it, didn’t identify with it. And she had been to so many of my class reunions, and was so totally accepted by and popular with my classmates, that she said, “If anyone asked me where I went to high school, I’d probably say, ‘Oakland City, Indiana, Class of 1955.’”

Hovey and Sally Hedges had invited Helen and me to spend the week-end with them. Sally said, “Everybody in the class gets so excited when they know you are coming, because you’re not divorced. All the rest of us are divorced, so we know forever vows aren’t forever. But you show that they can be.”

It seems a bit strange, now that we have been married 67 years, that our friends were impressed back then, when we had been married only about half this time.

Sally was Hovey’s third wife, but she always introduced herself as “Hovey’s last wife.” Even put that on her name tag at the reunion banquet. Alas, she was not.

For many folks, once the divorce bowl starts rolling, it’s hard to stop it.

Helen and I are probably among the last long-term marriages, 67 years tomorrow. Marriages are shorter now, not just because of the prevalence of divorce, but also because folks get married later. The birth control pill makes it possible to have sex without marriage, so why rush things?

The biggest reason, though, for divorce and later-life marriage, is this new-fangled idea that both people should be involved in choosing how to decorate a house. Helen says, “I like the old method, where I just did whatever I wanted and you didn’t notice.”

See? Marriage today doesn’t have to be more complicated, even if it’s shorter. The secret to a long marriage is staying out of each other’s way.

John Robert McFarland

“You have to be very fond of men. Very, very fond of them. You have to be fond of them to love them. Otherwise, they’re simply unbearable.” Marguerite Duras.

 

 

PIZZA JOINT MEDITATIONS [R, 5-28-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Pizza from an Old Pepperoni Sort of Guy—PIZZA JOINT MEDITATIONS [R, 5-28-26]

 

To me, the purpose of meditation is to get in touch with God, and with your own true self. Most people usually define meditation along those lines.

Generally, folks like to do that “getting in touch” sort of meditation in quiet settings—a worship building, nature, listening to a guided-prayer tape, the patio first thing in the morning, the bath room when guests are in your house… A quiet oasis away from the hustle and bustle of the every-day world.

I like all those ways, but I’m not very successful in trying to meditate in quiet and sacred places. I do some of my best meditating in pizza joints.

Well, one pizza joint in particular.

It’s just a mile from our house. We could have them deliver. Or I could call them with our order and go get it 15 minutes later. But I like to drive down there, and park in the place that the whole town reserves for me, and walk in, and be greeted happily by an overly efficient college student, and state my order, then sit on one of only three high backless stools at the narrow counter overlooking the strip mall parking lot, and stop thinking.

My eyes are open, but I’m not observing. My ears are open, but I’m not listening. My nose is open, but… well, yes, the aromas are part of the meditation. I don’t try to make sense of the sights and sounds and smells. I’m not processing them, to feel certain emotions, or to gain any life lessons, or to understand Kant’s “categorical imperative.” I just let them take me into the presence of God.

I meditate well enough that the college students don’t call my name from the counter anymore when my pizza is ready. They bring the pizza box to where I’m sitting and quietly stand there until I notice them.

Frankly, I’m not a good meditator. I’m not even a good pray-er, except for intercessory prayer. I can pray for others all day. Usually do. But praying to get in touch with God…no, within 30 seconds my mind is off wanting to do something.

After many failed attempts at practicing “the spiritual disciplines,” I finally accepted my limitations. I’m just not a very spiritual person. I’m a religious person. A church person. But not really a spiritual person, a meditating person. No use fighting it. especially not in old age. Too old a dog to learn new ways.

Until Helen got tired of cooking one day, and I began to go to the pizza joint. Not very often. Only every two or three weeks. But if you’re having trouble meditating, waiting for a large pepperoni is just the right amount of time to get in touch with God.

John Robert McFarland

 

  

OUTLASTING THE DEMONS [T, 5-26-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: Reflections on Faith for the Years of Winter… OUTLASTING THE DEMONS [T, 5-26-26]

 

I suppose there is a literature in fundamentalist circles of how the author used to be an open-minded “liberal,” tolerant Christian or Muslim, but had an encounter with the true God and now knows that the only correct way of serving God is the narrow way, that not only shuns those who are not true believers but actively works against them, either to convert them or to subvert them.

I don’t know those books/testimonies, but I suspect they are there, because I know their opposite.

Their opposite is the former fundamentalist who had an encounter with the true God and now knows the only correct way of serving God is the open way of tolerance and acceptance and love, working to allow into the fold those who are shunned and vilified by their former fundamentalist brethren. Folks like Frankie Schaeffer and Brian McLaren and Philip Yancey come to mind.

And many other people I have known personally, who have told me their personal stories. That includes one friend who is skeptical about our new pastor, because he occasionally asks for an Amen as he preaches. She shudders as she says, “It reminds me too much of the church I grew up in.”

In these cases, and in any other where a person has changed her mind [i.e., I used to be a Bears fan but now I love the Packers], the assumption, at least by the one making the testimony, and by their admirers, is that the latter position is the correct one precisely because it is the latter, the one changed TO instead of FROM. We are a future-loving people. If we have changed from something of the past, the newer position has to be better.

There is a whole culture of Christians who lived dissolute lives and then were saved so now know how important salvation is, and we should believe what they say because of the difference. Folks laughingly refer to the dissolute life part as building a testimony. “I was just doing bad stuff so I could be a witness later to how much better it is to be sober and saved.”

I appreciate folks like Anne Lamott because they write well, and because they don’t sugar-coat the present [the demons are still with them, but so are the angels], and because they help others to realize it is okay to come out of the darkness into the light, where they can get help.

I also envy people like Lamott. They are able to get such good testimonies from their dissolute pasts and ragged presents. I envy them, yea, even get angry at them at times, because I can’t get the sort of accolades they do, because I don’t have an adequately sordid past to live down.

Or maybe I’m just not willing to acknowledge my demons, the way the “I’m better now” folks do. Through sixty years of listening to people talk privately about their demons, I’ve learned that not everyone is possessed by demons, like with the life-change testimony people, but almost everyone is beset by demons. Many people would have great testimonies about their former addictions and dissolutions, but they can’t talk about them openly, because of the damage they would cause, not just to themselves, but to others.

I am sure that being open about your demons is a good and health-giving thing. I admire people who can do that. but some cannot. If you’re one of those folks, don’t worry about it overmuch. One of the great things about getting old and decrepit is that your demons are puny and feeble, too. Another thing I’ve learned from sixty years of pastoring is that demons get tired. Your demons are as fed up with you as you are with them. Just walk away. Shake the demon dust off your feet. They’re too tired to run after you.

“I bored my demons into giving up” is a good testimony, too.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WELL, IT WAS A QUIET WEEK IN… {Sun, 5-24-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Radio Listener—WELL, IT WAS A QUIET WEEK IN… {Sun, 5-24-26]

 

“Well, it was NOT a quiet week in the Bible…” That’s the way I began sermons back in the halcyon days of the Prairie Home Companion radio show [PHC].

In the 1980s, when Prairie Home Companion went national--so that folks outside the range of Minnesota Public Radio could listen--like many other people, I became fascinated with Lake Wobegon, “out there on the edge of the prairie, the little town that time forgot.” Garrison Kaillor’s “News from Lake Wobegon” became must-hear radio at our house. I insisted that everyone in the house observe “radio silence.”

That happened in a lot of other houses in our church, too. PHC was on the radio on Saturday night, so it was still in our minds come Sunday morning. That’s when I began to introduce my sermons with, “Well, it was not a quiet week in the Bible…”

Not “a quiet week,” as it always was in Lake Wobegon, because the happenings in the Bible were rarely quiet.

Keillor always started his monologue with, “Well, it was a quiet week in Lake Wobegon…” Yes, it was quiet, except the happenings there were quietly hilarious.

We knew from the goings-on there that Lake Wobegon was the same town in which we had grown up, and probably where we still lived. One of my members claimed that he knew all the people in Lake Wobegon, and he had grown up in Chicago! More than one of our members would give their addresses on the Sunday morning attendance sheet simply as “Lake Wobegon.” That was the appeal of Lake Wobegon. We all belonged there.

So I began to try to get my congregation folks to see the Bible as their Lake Wobegon, the place where we all belong.

Today is Pentecost, and today’s lectionary readings are Acts 2:1-21, John 20:19-23, and I Corinthians 12:3-13.

So, if I were preaching today, I would start by saying, “Well, it was not a quiet week in the Bible. The disciples of Jesus were just sitting around, wondering what was going to happen next, now that Jesus has gone off to heaven, when their heads got really hot, and this big wind hit them, and they all began to preach the Gospel in languages they hadn’t even gone on Duolingo for. That started a big argument in the church about whose language was best, so Rev. Paul, of the First Methodist Church of Corinth, had to remind folks that no one’s way of talking was any better than anyone else’s…”

People liked it, but my next appointment was to a church where folks didn’t listen to the radio, at least not Public radio, and they didn’t know about Lake Wobegon, so that particular attempt at biblical interpretation faded away.

I still read the lectionary scriptures each week, though, and I always think, “Well, it was an interesting week in the Bible…” If you’d like to see what an interesting week it was in the Bible, just do a search for “common lectionary.” Or go to: https://lectionary.library.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/faq/downloads/2025-2026/Year%20A%202025-2026.pdf

John Robert McFarland

 

 

PERILOUS PROM [F, 5-22-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Memories of An Old Man—PERILOUS PROM [F, 5-22-26]

 

Yes, I’ve told this story before, but it’s prom season, and, as I have also said before, this column no longer makes any pretense of being useful to anyone but me…

I think it was Mike who first told me that I was taking Judith to the prom at Ft. Branch, 20 miles from my home town of Oakland City. It was news to me. I had never heard of her.

Judith was the only child in a wealthy family. Her father was a judge. Her parents had given her a new Chrysler convertible at the start of the school year. That guaranteed that no Ft. Branch boy would date her, since no Ft. Branch boy had a car that could compete. So as prom time approached, she was dateless.

Judith’s mother was a friend of Ann’s mother. Ann was in my high school class. Judith’s mother told Ann’s mother of the prom date problem. Ann’s mother asked what Judith was interested in.

“Journalism. She’s editor of the school newspaper.

“Have I got a deal for you,” said Ann’s mother. “My daughter is in class with the editor of our school newspaper. He’s a nice boy.”

That’s the curse all the mothers always put on me: He’s a nice boy.

So Ann’s mother and Judith’s mother decided I would take Judith to the prom. The irony is that I was poorer and further out of my league than any boy in Ft. Branch. My family didn’t have a car of any kind.

Judith’s mother told her that she had a prom date with me, a boy she’d never heard of. Ann’s mother told Ann, and Ann told Mike, and Mike told me.

I had no way to get to Ft. Branch, to take Judith to the prom, so the mothers arranged for Mike and Ann to get invitations to that prom, too. How, I have no idea, but in a small town, the mother of the judge’s daughter can usually get whatever she wants.

I had nothing to wear to a prom, so my sister, who had graduated and was working fulltime, bought me a suit, and a pink and gray tie, which I still have. [You don’t outgrow ties.] Ann’s mother, of course, knew all about Judith’s dress, so she bought a corsage that would coordinate with it.

When the great night came, Mike and Ann drove down the gravel roads to our farm to pick me up, and I rode to Ft. Branch in the back seat of Mike’s two-door hardtop Pontiac. Since Ann’s mother had bought the corsage for Judith, it rode in the front seat beside Ann. When we arrived at Judith’s house, Ann scrunched up toward the dashboard so that I could push the seat down to get out…forgetting about the corsage, which got flatly crushed.

It was a big house, fronted by a high porch with a dim light. I carried the crushed corsage up the long walk and climbed the creaking steps to the shadowed front door. I knocked. The door opened. A classy blond girl in a formal stood there. I spoke one of the best opening lines in the annals of blind prom dates: “It looks like I’ve come to the right place.”

I pushed the crushed corsage at her. She looked at it and was speechless. An older blond appeared over her shoulder, took the corsage away to the kitchen, where she performed voodoo on it. Judith and I stood there and tried not to look at each other. “That’s my father,” she said, indicating a man sitting in a dark corner of the living room, peeling an apple, with a butcher knife, one long peel sliding off the apple with surgical precision. He didn’t say anything.

Judith’s mother returned with the sort-of repaired corsage, and taking no chances that her daughter might get crushed, too, pinned it on Judith herself. She handed Judith a boutonniere. Judith tried to slip it through the button-hole of my new lapel. It wouldn’t go. The mother tried. “It’s not cut,” she said. [What farm boy knows you have to slit the buttonhole in a new suit yourself?]

“I’ll take care of him,” her father said, jumping up and advancing on me with the butcher knife. He grabbed my lapel and began to saw at it, the knife an inch from my throat. He was really good with that thing. The slit was perfect, and Judith slipped the flower into it.

I don’t remember much from that point. I assumed my job was to make the Ft. Branch boys jealous, since Judith must have gotten such a much better date, because she had to go out of town to get one, and out-of-town is always better, so I acted mysterious, which meant I spent the evening telling Judith stories of editing our school newspaper, while Mike and Ann danced. The only thing I remember for sure was that I mispronounced the word “intricate,” while explaining my reasons for eschewing all dances but the “bunny hop.”

I never saw or heard of Judith again.

It’s important when looking back on such experiences to find the good in an otherwise disastrous event. I have done so, and it’s this:  I’m sure Judith won the contest among the Sisters of Perpetual Responsibility for who had the best reason to become a nun.

John Robert McFarland

 

 

AFTER THE PILL [W, 5-20-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Optimist—AFTER THE PILL [W, 5-20-26]

 

Of all the major changes/inventions of the last 70 years, I think that the birth control pill is the most significant—yes, more than computers and the internet and nuclear bombs and toaster ovens. The birth control pill changed the very basis of society—marriage and family.

I was a campus minister when the Stonewall Uprising occurred in 1969, and gay folks began to proclaim, “We’re people, too.” It didn’t make much difference to college students. They were too busy with sex in general to care about gay sex.

Everybody got all hot and bothered in 1975 when Loretta Lynn sang her paean of praise to “The Pill,” but that was fifteen years behind the times to college students.

I began to say to anyone who would listen—and there weren’t many who wanted to—that homosexual sex wasn’t the problem. The real problem was promiscuous sex, recreational sex, meaningless sex, disrespectful sex, which was at least as prevalent among straights as gays.

Nothing wrong with sex, I said. Plenty wrong with using and dehumanizing people, including yourself. Plenty wrong with turning sex upside down, and using the quality that nature gives us to lead us to intimacy in order to avoid intimacy.

The church, I said, needed to develop a sexual ethic beyond “no sex at all except in marriage,” because that horse had left the barn, in 1960, when the FDA approved “the pill.”

Of course, the church’s response was, “Let’s ignore that issue and concentrate on gay stuff, because we can all agree on that, right?” Oh, yes, right.

I first tried preaching a sexual ethic of commitment. No, you didn’t have to be married, but you should be faithful and committed to your partner. That was much too narrow for college students, who figured they needed [wanted] time to experiment before committing, so I went through several other stages until I settled, more or less, on an ethic of respect—we should respect sex, meaning respecting ourselves [Your body is a temple, I Cors 6], respecting the temples of others, and respecting the Creator of sex.

That was too complicated. And cerebral. Sex is not a thought-centered activity. College students liked the idea of respectful sex, as long as it didn’t get in the way of casual lustful promiscuous recreational sex.

And, as I said in the column for May 14, if you want to find out what society in general is going to think and do next, look at what college students are thinking and doing now.

I’m not a campus minister anymore, but I live in a town with 48,626 college students. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking, but I get the impression that they are starting to get bored with sexual promiscuity. Maybe they really are the brightest generation…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

COUSINS [Late in the day on M, 5-18-20]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Family Reminiscences of An Old Man—COUSINS [Late in the day on M, 5-18-20]

 

[We ended up staying at the reunion longer than planned, so I did not post early today because I didn’t have my computer with me.]

As we planned the memorial service for my “little” brother, Jim, I invited all our cousins. I realized that it would be the last time I would ever see a cousin. I’m glad that Natalie, oldest daughter of Uncle Bob McFarland, from whom I get my middle name, was the only one who was able to come.

We cousins, on both sides of the family, have always been close. Now, those of us left, we live too far apart. We can’t get on an airplane. We can’t drive. We can’t walk. We can’t remember which color is ours on the Chinese Checkers board. We shall never see each other again.

That seems so strange, for I once had 26 cousins, ten on the Pond side of the family, and sixteen McFarlands.

I said above that I invited all our cousins, but that wasn’t accurate. There are some for whom I have no address. As our adult years went along, some cousins dropped out of the family, either by death or by geography, or by choice. I mourned each time I lost a cousin, especially those who dropped out, because being part of that generation was so important to me.

We cousins were much involved with one another, from the time we were little kids. We visited in each other’s homes, stayed overnight, slept on the floor because there weren’t enough beds. We played tag and baseball. We played Parcheesi and Chinese Cheekers and never-ending games of Monopoly.

I made no distinction between Ponds and McFarlands. To me, the aunts and uncles and cousins were just one family, where I was accepted, where I was encouraged to be a good person.

That was probably aided by my status as the oldest grandson on either side. I never thought of myself more highly than I should have thought, though, because I had an older sister and four older female cousins who made sure I understood there was no primogeniture in our generation.

When my parents reached fifty years of marriage, I decided that we should celebrate by getting the whole family—both sides—together in one place. I rented a church camp in southern Indiana, the place where both families got their start, and invited all their brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews for two days of eating and talking. Almost everyone came. A lot of good relationships got started or expanded, especially among the cousins, some by Ponds who had little previous contact with McFarlands, and vice versa.

In retrospect, I realized I did that as much for me as for my parents. I never thought of myself as just part of my immediate family. Indeed, our immediate family life was so chaotic that I think I always felt a bit outside it; I felt that I was the social worker who needed to solve the family problems rather than being a part of that family. The family that gave me identity was that conglomerate of McFarlands and Ponds who played that eternal game of Chinese Checkers, who gathered that weekend at Temple Hills.

When I first started preaching, at nineteen, I was not surprised that folks in those churches, even older people, thought that I was a competent preacher, because I had so many relatives who had always treated me that way, from the time I was a child. They assumed that I was a good person—not just a good boy-- who was capable of doing good things.

I’ve had to give up almost all of those aunts and uncles. Only Edna, Uncle Mike’s widow, is left, out of that wonderful phalanx of 24 [counting spouses]. But cousins…those are young people…except, now we are not. No more cousins, but so many good memories.

I think a big extended family is a little like heaven. I wonder if they play Chinese Checkers there. I wonder if God cheats, like Grandma Mac did…

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

MY ‘LITTLE’ BROTHER [Sat, 5-16-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Grieving Remembrances of A Big Brother—MY ‘LITTLE’ BROTHER [Sat, 5-16-26]

 

All in all, my brother, Jim, was a strange man. Weird, even. I like to think that he got that from me.

He grew to be two inches taller than I, but he was nine years younger, so, my “little” brother.

He was Jimmy, until he got old enough to be called Jim. I always thought of him, though, as Jimmy. Especially since his death, at the age of 79.

In the photo above, Helen and I are on the left, Jim’s wife, Millie, in the middle, and our daughter, Mary Beth, between Millie and Jim. Notice that Jim is looking at things from a different angle. That was always the way he looked at things.

Even when very young, he showed a different face to the world. We have photos of us four siblings posing together in front of our farm house, for Aunt Dorothy’s box camera, where three of us are smiling, but Jimmy is twisting his face into some contorted mask. Even as a little guy, he didn’t want anyone to see the real him.

That was understandable. He had four “parents,” including a sister 14 years older [Mary Virginia] and a brother 9 years older, telling him what to do, and a sister [Margaret Ann] 18 months older, whose cuteness factor was off the charts. She was hard to compete with for attention. His only chance for individual identity was to draw into himself. He did that his whole life.

His humor was sardonic, a little sarcastic, a little silly, always a bit sideways. He wanted to be different from everyone else, but he didn’t want to be noticed, sort of like a sideline commentator who is off-camera, as is Jim Day on the Cincinnati Reds broadcasts.

He had the great, good fortune to find one of the two women in the world—Milicent Ellard & Helen Karr--who were able to put up with the strange ways of the McFarland brothers, even think those ways were endearing and attractive. Or maybe they thought it was a duty beyond the ability of other women. As the old saying goes, “It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.”

Jim died last Nov. 1. Tomorrow, Millie, and Helen and our children and grandchildren, and Margey’s children and grandchildren, will gather for a memorial service, along with the few friends and cousins and nieces and nephews who are still alive and able to travel.

I’ll wear the little wooden cross necklace that I bought at Jim’s health food store. He had a friend who made them. I don’t think Jim believed much about the cross, but he tried to help his friend by selling them at the store.

I’ll read the funeral service from the same Book of Worship that I used when I officiated at the marriage service for Jim and Millie, some 60 years ago. Then we’ll share our memories of a man who never wanted to be noticed, who wanted to hide behind a funny face. We’ll honor that.

John Robert McFarland

 

BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Observations of An Old Trouble Maker—BEYOND THE HALLS OF IVY [R, 5-14-26]

 

Methodist annual conferences will soon meet. The pastoral appointments for the next year will be read out. When I started going to Conference, in 1957, no pastor knew until that reading where they would be the next year. I assumed, though, that my appointment would always be to some congregation.

I never intended to become a campus minister, even though I held campus ministry in high regard. After all, I met Helen at The Wesley Foundation at IU. And I liked universities in general. I loved learning. I loved songs like The Halls of Ivy and Sweetheart of Sigma Chi.

While I was a college student, though, in my sophomore year, I became a parish preacher. Church was as important to me as campus. I assumed that life as a local church pastor would be my career.

Campus ministers were not respected much back then. They were called “student workers.” They were trouble makers who preached about social justice and were always wanting “change.” They were guys [all men, then] who didn’t fit in local churches, so they weren’t real preachers. Many times during my campus ministry years, colleagues would ask me, “When are you going to come back to the ministry?”

Their question was not criticism, but concern, because as a campus minister, you lost your place on the appointment ladder. The “ladder” meant that, as long as you didn’t cause any trouble, each time you were moved to a different church, it would be a little larger and more prestigious. Campus ministry years didn’t count on the ladder. If you “came back to the ministry,” you had to start over at the bottom of the ladder.

Because no one wanted to lose his place on the ladder, the bishop had trouble finding someone willing to be a campus minister.

But I owed Bishop Richard Raines, for getting me out of trouble numerous times, and he knew that I owed him, so when he asked/told me to be the campus minister in Terre Haute [Indiana State U and Rose Polytechnic], I figured I should do that, for a year or two, as payment to him. Also, I was never very smart about anticipating the consequences of my choices.

Campus ministry, though, turned out to be a more significant ministry than I would have had as a local church pastor, for two primary reasons.

First, my influence was much wider than it would have been as a parish pastor. Every year some of my students graduated and scattered to various jobs and towns and churches. They took with them the ideas they had gotten on campus. Even while they were still in school, they went home on the weekends and vacations and enjoyed upsetting their parents and pastors with all the radical stuff they got through their time on campus—stuff about civil rights and voting rights and women’s rights and gay rights and saving the planet and Viet Nam and situational ethics and “contemporary” worship and prayer and faith and Bible interpretation and sacrificial service and the church as the place to have a really good time.

Second, I learned before anyone else what was going to happen next. Whatever society was going to do next, college students were already doing it.

So, if you want to know what’s coming up, look on campus. Strangely, the social observers say that students are going to church more and drinking less. That doesn’t sound right…

John Robert McFarland

UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Ramblings of An Old Man—UNTOUCHABLES [T, 5-12-26]

 

It was our soph or junior year in high school. As I approached a group of boys in the hallway, Louis Simpson looked up and said, quite good-naturedly, “We’ve got to stop telling dirty jokes now; John’s here.”

I don’t think they were actually telling dirty jokes. It was just a way of acknowledging me as an untouchable, someone who didn’t belong in the real world.

Of course, the very fact that to this day I think they were not telling dirty jokes may tell you why I was an untouchable. Untouchables are naive. That’s part of how we are set aside from the real world.

Some real-world people try to take advantage of untouchables, use our naiveite against us. But—if you’re lucky, as I’ve always been—folks protect you, because they know you need it 

I remember seeing movies and TV shows called “The Untouchables,” about America in the 1920s, when politics and the economy were much as they are now, when enough bribe money can get you anything, regardless of the law. Enter Eliot Ness and his special police, called unofficially “The Untouchables,” because they could not be bought or bribed.

I guess I was that sort of untouchable, in a minor way, except no one ever tried to bribe me, anyway. No, I wasn’t an Eliot Ness sort of untouchable. I was not pure of heart, like Ness. I didn’t even need to be pure of heart. I was untouchable because people protected me. I was in a tiny niche of society that not only did not get its hands dirty but that didn’t even know how to get dirty hands.

I am part of the 2%. Not the way that is usually used, the 2% that has all the money and power, and abhors the rest of us as untouchable because we are, compared to them, poor and powerless.

No, I’m in that 2% that has always, without knowing it, led a charmed life. Because others protected us from the real world.

That does not mean, of course, that we two-percenters have no bad days. I’ve had cancer. People I love have had cancer. Good friends have suffered, and died too soon. I’ve had to be a comfort in tragedy when the tragedy was so bad that comfort wasn’t even possible; that’s hard.

Friend Kathy Roberts says that she has a face that says, “Tell me weird things.” I think I have a face that says, “Don’t tell me bad things.”

Now, again, that isn’t literally true. Indeed, my profession was listening to people tell me bad things. But it was bad things about themselves. it wasn’t bad things that involved me. I was just a listener, not a participant.

That distance, though, was one of the traits that made me a fairly good pastor. In that sense, I was a Ness type of untouchable. Since folks knew I wasn’t going to get lost in the jungle with them, I might be able to show them a way out.

Sometimes I feel a conflicted about being an untouchable. I didn’t like being excluded from that group of laughing boys, the ones telling the dirty jokes. But I feel grateful that they protected me. Being an untouchable has made my life so easy. I hope you are an untouchable, too.

John Robert McFarland

“Old age is like everything else. To make a success of it, you’ve got to start young.” Fred Astaire, via The Writer’s Almanack.

 

 

MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reflections of A Doddering Old Man—MOTHER’S’ DAY [Su, 5-10-26]

 

Today is Mother’s Day, or Mothers’ Day, according to how many mothers you are trying to honor. Both singular and plural were always a problem for me. Not a life-shaking problem, but a problem I had trouble solving.

Mothers’ Day I dealt with primarily as a preacher. I looked out on the congregation on this special day and saw mothers whom I knew were not going to have a happy day. And I saw others, of so many ages, who felt guilt or anger about their mothers. If I were sensitive at all, I didn’t plow ahead with a Hallmark Mothers’ Day sermon. But what else to do?

I was relieved of my guilt, slightly, in my early churches, because the women of the church who were in charge of such things--either by tradition or acceptance or audacity—decided how we would celebrate the day.

I was disconcerted at my first Mothers’ Day Sunday, when I was 20 years old, when flowers were passed out to the mothers at the door following the service, but only mothers. I mean, all churches back then had lots of women who were not mothers. They were reminded of that as they left the church without a flower.

By the time I retired, usually flowers were pressed into the hands of every woman as she left worship on Mothers’ Day, whether she wanted one or not. An adequate solution… well, not really. They/we justified that on the premise that every woman has a mother, even if she is not one. But so does every man there, so where does that leave us? Still kind of up in the air.

As far as Mother’s Day is concerned, I never had any trouble honoring my mother. I loved her. She loved me. But she was a puzzle and trial to me all sixty years we shared. The problem was inconsistency. As a child, the rules of conduct changed all the time, sometimes within the minute. As an adult, she would ask for help and then at the last minute veto everything we had agreed on, always for some fallacious and ridiculous reason.

Don’t worry; I know she did the best she could to be a good mother, and I did the best I could [with a lot of help from Helen] to be a good son.

The mother-child relationship is fraught with… well, everything. No relationship more important, or more difficult and complex. A flower hardly does justice to the depth of that relationship. Neither does Red Lobster shrimp. But they are good symbols. They represent beauty and nourishment. Those are the things that are necessary for life. Just as mothers are.

John Robert McFarland