THE WORD IS THE WORD IN ANY WORDS

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

Two Sundays ago, before worship, JillAnn told me that her sermon was on the pulpit. JillAnn is home this summer after her second year in seminary, doing CPE [Clinical Pastoral Education] at the local hospital, and filling in at her home church pulpit when the regular preachers are too exhausted, by the previously unexperienced joy of watching the Cubs win, to rise up into the pulpit themselves.

I thought it would be a great lesson to slip in ahead of time and take her sermon and hide it in a Pokemon Go gym. It’s important for preachers to know how to improvise when things go wrong.

Helen said, fairly emphatically, “No!”

“But lots of old church people are doing battle in Pokemon Go gyms,” I said. “It will turn up quickly.”

I did not persuade. It did remind me, though, of Gene Matthews’ first sermon.

Gene was a lay preacher from Evansville, 30 miles away, who was assigned to my home church, the open-country Forsythe, whenever he was needed. Gene worked in a factory. He was smart but not academically educated.

As he was in the process of becoming a lay preacher, the District Superintendent sent him one Sunday to preach his first sermon ever in a small church near Evansville, Darmstadt, I think. Gene decided he would impress the folks by not using a manuscript or notes, but simply opening the pulpit Bible [there was always a pulpit Bible in those days] and reading the scripture for his sermon and then preaching straight from the Bible. He had worked hard in preparation and knew what he would say for each verse as he went through the scripture.

The service went fine, the announcements and hymns and prayers. Then it was sermon time. Gene got up and went to the pulpit and opened the Bible. It was in German! Not just German, but the old-fashioned fancy German that even Germans can’t read.

That church had been a German Methodist congregation. We had lots of European language churches well into the twentieth century. Many of my older colleagues when I started preaching in 1956 had started out preaching in Swedish or German. I myself was the first English speaking preacher, in 1958, at Wycliffe Methodist Church in Chicago, where the earlier preachers had all spoken Czech. The Methodist Church recognized all those language churches as part of the denomination. There was no difference in theology, just in language.

It’s strange now, how exercised some folks get about churches that do services in Spanish now. Their forebears a couple of generations ago probably went to churches where worship was in Polish or German or Finnish. 

Christ is “The Word.” That Word was originally “Ho Logos.” That’s the transliteration from the Greek. Even that is a step removed from Christ, who spoke “The Word” in Aramaic.

It’s the Word, not the words, that make it Good News. The Word is still The Word, in any language. That Word is Christ. That Word is Love.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

BUT SHE SANG

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

 “They might say I couldn’t sing…” Yes, indeed they might, Florence!

That’s what Florence Foster Jenkins said at the end of her eponymous movie.

Bob and Kathy called yesterday and said, “We’re coming to town to see the Florence Foster Jenkins movie. Do you want to go?”

Of course. That’s the only way we ever see a movie, if Bob and Kathy come to town. They always pick good movies. Well, almost always. They picked really well this time.

It’s about a patron of the music scene in NYC in 1944, for whom music is life. So she wants not just to be a patron, because her parents left her quite a bit of money, but she wants to be a performer, too, a singer. The results are hilarious and tragic.

I recently saw a statement that Meryl Streep could never be tried for anything because she has no peers. She proved that once again in the title role, but, oh, Simon Helberg--better known as Howard Wolowitz in the Big Bang Theory--was magnificent as her befuddled accompanist, and Hugh Grant was great as Hugh Grant, aka St. Clair Bayfield, Florence’s husband and enabler.

Florence is probably the worst singer in history, even worse than Marie, a choir member in one of my early churches, who was remonstrated by the new choir director one day not to sing so loudly because “You sound like a cow bawling.” The new choir director was right, but she didn’t last very long.

After her disastrous Carnegie Hall performance, for which she paid for the hall herself and filled it by giving free tickets to drunken soldiers and sailors, with predictable results, Florence says…

“They might say I couldn’t sing, but they can’t say I didn’t sing.”

It runs against everything we are told in our current world, especially in our current political climate, but life is really not about whether you were successful, but whether you tried. It is very nice, at the end of life, to say…

…they might say I couldn’t, but they can’t say I didn’t.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I love films set in that period, because I get to see the old cars. There was one Packard in particular that was magnificent. They did have a couple of anachronisms, though, a 1949 Chevy and a 1951 Chevy. They were only parked in street scenes, so not too noticeable, but they definitely were not around in 1944.

ALL OF GOD’S CHILDREN GOT THE SAME SHOES

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

One of my CIWs, the one for May 22, 2016, entitled “When Bad Theology is Good Theology,” was reprinted in the current edition of Sharing the Practice: The Journal of The Academy of Parish Clergy. That’s the one about the hymn, “In the Garden.”

In it I mentioned my favorite professor at Perkins School of Theology at SMU, H. Grady Hardin, the “H” for Henry.

A lot of southern boys born around the turn of the century were named after Henry Grady. Most of them went by H. Grady.

Henry Woodfin Grady lived only 39 years, but his impact lived long. He was the managing editor of The Atlanta Constitution newspaper in the 1880s, the advocate of “The New South,” helping the Confederate States reintegrate into the United States, urging industrialization of the South, moving forward with hope instead of looking backward with regret.

H. Grady Hardin was a child of that “new” south, the son of a North Carolina Methodist minister who preached forgiveness and reconciliation. It was a natural to name his son for the great progressive editor. [1]

Grady got his B.A. degree [A.B. back then] from Duke and continued on at Duke Divinity School. Toward the end of his first year in seminary, though, his father suddenly died. Since he and his family lived in a parsonage, and there were no death benefits or retirement accounts in those days, Grady’s mother, and his much younger brother, had no place to live. His brother had a heart condition that required his mother to take care of him 24/7, so there wasn’t even a possibility for her to get a job, not that many jobs were available for women then anyway. So Grady dropped out of seminary and took a pastorate so his mother and brother would have a place to live.

He felt the absence of a seminary education keenly. He knew he would always be behind his peers, so he wrote to his friends who were students in the seminaries, like Union and Yale and Boston, and got their reading lists for all their courses. He read all those books, mostly by borrowing them. He said it was years later that he found out no one else read everything on the lists.

A friend persuaded him to come to Texas. He was appointed to a little church on the edge of Houston. Within ten years, that church had four thousand members. Part of it was that Houston grew in that direction. Part was that Grady was a terrific preacher. He looked the part and he preached the part, and he had a wealth of knowledge from all that reading.

When Perkins School of Theology was looking for a new professor of preaching, Dean Quillian said, “The best and smartest preacher I know is Grady Hardin. We should get him.”

So he did, and it was a great hire. Grady was every bit as good a teacher as he was a preacher. But his hire was not without controversy, and you know why. Perkins is a graduate school. Professors in seminaries typically have three year professional degrees, the equivalent of an MD in medicine, plus a PhD. Grady had only an A.B. That’s the way he was listed in the catalogs. All the other professors had many letters behind their names. His was simply H. Grady Hardin, A.B., Duke University.

I actually had classmates at Perkins who not only refused to take classes from Grady but would not even go to chapel when he was preaching. “His education is inferior,” they said. “He has only an A.B. He should not be on a seminary faculty.”

That mystified me. In the church, surely all God’s children are equals, not in talent or ability, but in status. My guess is that Grady Hardin did more good for the church and the world than any or all of those who wanted a caste system for the church.

There are always those who prefer a caste system, even in a democracy, where all are equal “before the law,” and where merit is the only thing that should separate. It’s part of our original sin, that desire for status, some standing that automatically says we are better than others. Even in the church.

At St. Mark’s UMC, one of our Sunday morning events is breakfast. Last week, I was working the line when our senior pastor came through. “Good morning, Reverend,” I said to him. “Good morning, Reverend,” he replied. If anyone overheard, they might have thought we considered ourselves above the hoi polloi around us. But we were just reminding each other, “Don’t take yourself too seriously, Brother.”

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] Many boys born in late 19^th and early 20^th centuries were named for cultural heroes, national or local. My Grandma Pond named her sons, Ted and Claude and Jesse and John, for young men from their little town of Francisco, IN who had “made good,” ”gone onto bigger and better things,” “made something of themselves.” That included the Presbyterian preacher’s son, so Uncle Johnny got that boy’s name, Hubert, as his middle name. My mother got confused once, though, and said that her youngest brother was named for the Presbyterian preacher’s dog, which is a much better story, so I try to keep it alive, especially with my cousin, David, Uncle Johnny’s son.

KEEPING THE PICKLEBALL PADDLE

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

I still have my ball gloves [1] and bats and t-shirts, too. I played baseball and softball for 60 years. I loved playing baseball. I loved the identity it gave me as an athlete, from the age of ten on.

I still wear running shoes, although now they are for walking, and I have all the t-shirts and trophies I won in road races. Running was an important part of my life for fifteen years, until cancer surgery and a year of chemotherapy slowed me so much I could no longer refer to my perambulations as “running.”

I still have my pickleball paddle, and I still wear my pickleball t-shirts. I played pickleball for only two years. [2] Short-lived, but I loved it. I loved feeling like an athlete again.

Pickleball hasn’t been around very long, especially not where we lived, so I did not have opportunity to play until a couple of years ago. Yes, I could have continued when I quit about a month ago. I can still get around the court, still make all the shots. One of the other players called me “St. John of the Angles,” because of my ability to slice the ball just over the net and just inside the sidelines. I liked the people I played with.

I stopped playing, though, because I had a wake-up fall on the court. Backwards. It was a controlled fall. I didn’t hurt anything. But I couldn’t stop it, either. Once it started, I knew I was going down. I have known several old people, two quite recently, who had backward falls, hit their heads, and died, or worse.

Until the day he died, every time my father was in a nursing home, he would proclaim, “I’m going to get out of here and get my own apartment.” Sometimes he did. But he would start falling, and he’d have to go back to “the home.” Then it would start all over again. “I’m going to get out of here and get my own apartment.” One time, Helen replied, “But Daddy, you’ve been falling so much. What if you fall in your own apartment?” “Well, I’ll just have to stop falling,” he said.

It’s not that simple. Sometimes you have to accept reality, and accepting it before you do some damage to yourself or others should be part of that wisdom we always claim comes with old age.

It seems a little silly, keeping my pickleball paddle, and my bats and glove and uniforms. With the end of pickleball, I am not an athlete anymore. That was always an important part of my identity. Where I grew up, and in the US in general, athletes are the most feted [and often the most fetid] of all persons.

But I still have my pulpit robes, and a lot of books I’ll never read again, and pads and pencils and other office supplies I’ll never use since everything now is on computer. They were all part of my identity once, too.

The most important thing is to leave an inheritance for my children. There won’t be any money when I die, but I’m sure they can get a good price for splintered old baseball bats and a King James red letter New Testament, and a 3-hole punch on which 2 of the punches still work.

Don’t spend it all in one place, kids.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] When granddaughter Brigid was three, she called baseball gloves “ball mittens.”

2] Pickleball is a cut-down version of tennis. It’s lots of fun. You can read all about it, and even see videos, on the web. One day a few months ago a young woman came to the Y to play. I invited her to take my place on the court. “No, she said, “I just want to watch for a while first.” I noticed, though, that during the whole game, she had her head down. She wasn’t watching at all. Then I realized that instead of watching the game right in front of her, she was watching videos of pickleball on her phone. That seemed silly at first, but she undoubtedly learned better how the game should be played.

FRIENDS IN WINTER

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

Helen and I have been driving up to Indianapolis the last couple of weeks to see Joan and Tom in hospital. It’s about fifty miles. To people in their years of winter, in the middle of the most extreme heat of summer, on a road under construction to make it into an interstate, it seems like a hundred. Or a thousand. Miles lose their meaning after a while.

Tom was my college roommate. We were put in a very small room together sixty years ago come September, just because neither of us smoked. We had little in common, but we have remained fast friends throughout that time. I have officiated at the weddings for his children. He suffered a severe stroke several months ago, and has recently had several heart attacks.

Joan is the first of my “children in the ministry.” There were very few women ministers in the Methodist Church when I was her campus minister at IN State U. Indeed, women had been ordainable for only ten years at that time, but she was beginning to feel the call to ordained ministry, and I saw her abilities and encouraged her to go to seminary. Along the way, she decided she fit better in The Episcopal Church than with the Methodists, but, as with Tom, we have been fast friends all these years. She’s officially retired but serves small parishes that cannot afford a full-time priest, so we encouraged her to come to Bedford, where she would be close, only thirty miles south of us. After only ten weeks in Bedford, she had a brain aneurism. She went to a rehab center this weekend, so today we’ll see her there rather than in hospital.

Fairly early in my ministry, I saw a pattern to the hospital calls and funerals that I did. The first couple of years, I called on and buried church members. After that, I was burying friends.

I don’t have church members anymore, members who become friends, but I have a lot of old friends in general, although their ranks are growing thinner on a regular basis. Whenever I go to a hospital or a cemetery now, it’s for a friend, often a long-time friend.

That’s the nature of the years of winter. We care for and then bury our friends. It gets lonely at times. I feel the absence in my life of George and GL and Bettie and Raydean and Bill and Mike and Dianne and Darrel and Don and…

We can either feel sorry for ourselves, that those friends are gone, or we can appreciate how they gifted us with their friendship for so long.

It’s also a good idea to make some younger friends.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I tweet as yooper1721.

An idea for making younger friends: give them copies of Katie Kennedy’s great YA novel, Learning to Swear in America.

UNCLE WIGGLY IN THE GOSPELS

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

There are many preachable moments in the lectionary Gospel for today, which means there are many life themes for Christians in Luke 12:32-40. I was a preacher, though, so I always think first in terms of what will preach best. What preaches best is usually not what is easiest to live.

I did not get around to reading the Gospel for this week, even as preachable as it is, until this morning, for I don’t have to preach on it. Truth be told, there were some weeks when I did not start preparing the sermon until Sunday morning, like the week our second baby was born, but usually I had at least read the scriptures for the day before then.

I am intrigued by the idea in today’s Gospel of keeping your clothes on all night in case God comes and requires some work. I’m old enough to think that it’s too much work to put on night clothes. I don’t think I’d preach that, though, in part because I don’t have a story that echoes it.

It’s good to start a sermon with a story folks can relate to, one that picks up the melody of the scripture and riffs on it. People get involved with the scripture that way and see ways it applies to their own lives.

So I’d preach on that part about not storing your treasure where moths can eat on it. Or a mouse.

We have been BUMBS for fifty years. BUMBS stands for Bakers, Ungers, McFarlands, Basses, and Storys, the five couples who started sharing monthly fellowship meals when our children were all very small and we lived in the same town. We don’t get together nearly that often anymore. We live in varied places. Three have transferred to the church triumphant. But the memories are fresh, like the years when we exchanged simple Christmas gifts.

At some monthly time together, Paul Baker, now Illinois State University Distinguished Professor Emeritus, told of a Christmas as a child when his only gift was an Uncle Wiggly book. His family was very poor, but his mother was a good manager of what little money they had and would get a gift for each child whenever she found an appropriate one at a good price. She found the book at a good price in the summer and hid it in the attic. When she got it out on Christmas morning, she found that a mouse had eaten on the book.

Paul told this story in terms of what it meant to his mother rather than what it meant to him, but when Helen drew his name for the BUMBS gift exchange in October, she immediately set about getting him a new, unchewed, copy of Uncle Wiggly. It was not easy, but she traced one down.

Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

MY NEW RED BRAIN

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

My current brain is red. It used to be gray. Helen got me the gray one. I found the red one myself at The Dollar Tree.

Since I am old, I need to have my brain with me at all times. Oh, I know, recently in a CIW I bragged about having a better than average memory. That, however, is about stuff from 50 years ago. I need help with the stuff from two seconds ago. That’s why I carry my red brain with me.

Several of us in our family have a problem with finding the right noun. Technically, that’s dysnomia. [Dysnomia is also the name of the only known moon of the dwarf planet Eris.] So in our family we often refer to an object just by its color, because when we started sentences about it, we couldn’t find the noun, so we would say, “You know, the green,,, the thing in the driveway that you get into for going places.” After a while, the car would simply be “The green.”

This did not work well when our daughters were little and we would say, “Stop hitting your sister with the blue hammer” and she would reply, “It’s not blue; it’s azure,” and keep on pounding her sister’s blond.

My red brain is plastic and has a sturdy handle and three compartments. My old gray was nice, and the same size as my red, but it had thin plastic handles that broke and only one compartment. If you need to carry your brain with you, it’s good for it to have a handle. If you have a lot on your mind, it’s good for your brain to have compartments.

I’m learning to use my new red compartmentalized brain. It’s quite exciting. Just today I found a special place to keep my extra hankie, good for wiping glasses lenses and for a quick mop-up of spilled coffee, that makes the hankie more accessible but still not in the way of the poetry part [a 5x7 tablet] of my brain. There are places for a magnifying glass, and tall skinny folder with to-do lists, and a cup for pens and pencils and scissors and a little flashlight and a Swiss army knife and a chapstick, and an address book, and various pairs of glasses, and a Greek New Testament, and two telephones. My red brain is complete.

Now if I could just remember where I left my red brain…

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com