COMMUNICATION THEORY & THE WILL OF God [R, 5-10-18]

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

COMMUNICATION THEORY & THE WILL OF God  [R, 5-10-18]

Granddaughter Brigid and I share a doctoral academic field—communication theory. She starts her formal doctoral-level study in the field this fall at the U of Chicago, in semiology. My doctoral study was in narratology and… a long time ago.

In fact, I finished my formal academic studies in communication theory when the professors who are retiring this year, after forty years of teaching and research, were my contemporaries. I was older when I got my doctorate—40. They were 25. Now they have put in 40 years and are reaping the rewards of all those years of high pay in the groves of academe, with time now to sit down and write that great contemporary novel.

I did a little research and writing and teaching in communication theory after finishing the academic years, but mostly I just practiced communicating. Sometimes not very well.

When my older sister’s 18 and 19 year old sons, Steve and Tony, were killed together in an auto accident, along with two of their friends, I was asked to speak not only at their funeral but at the general funeral for the four boys together. They were popular kids—still in high school or just out. The high school gym was full to overflowing for the general funeral in the morning. The funeral home was also overflowing for Steve’s and Tony’s funeral that afternoon, so much so that the funeral directors set up loud speakers in the parking lot so people who could not get in could stand outside and be a part of the service.

In both those services, I said: “This was not the will of God. God does not will that beautiful young men in the prime of life should be taken away from us. It is the law of physics, that when fast metal automobiles collide with fragile human bodies, the bodies lose, but that is not the will of God.”

That evening, after the funerals, I was sitting with my brother-in-law, Dick, in his den, as other folks came and went in the house. The shadows were deep when the president of the high school sports booster club came. Tony had been the quarterback on the football team, so he was well-known to Dick and Mary V.

We chatted for a little. Then he turned to me and said, “As you said this afternoon, it was the will of God.”

I was overwhelmed. I had a doctorate in communication. All my research and writing and study was current. Could I have communicated so poorly that this seemingly intelligent man heard the exact opposite of what I thought I was saying?

By the grace of God, I think it must have been, for it certainly as not of my own comprehension, since I had so much ego tied up in communicating “not so well that you can be understood but so well that you cannot be misunderstood,” as one of my mentors put it, I suddenly realized what he was saying, what anybody says at a time like that when they say “It was the will of God.” What they mean is: God did not pull the strings on this, but God is still with us, still willing, still trying to make something good come from this, still loving us.”

When I would get frustrated about communicating, despite all my study and theories, along about Saturday night, because I had not yet figured out a novel and inviting way to preach the next morning, Helen always said, “You worry too much about finding a different way to say it. You have only one job when you preach, and that is to remind us that God loves us.”

Maybe that’s all one needs to know about communication theory. We need to tell one another that God is in charge. That God loves us. That love never ends. It doesn’t make much difference how we say it—what words or symbols or artistry we use. We just need to communicate that love is all that counts, and that love never ends.

Poor Helen. She doesn’t know anything about communication theory. But I hope Brigid pays more attention to her grandmother than she does to her professors. Or to her grandfather.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

Yes, if you have read The Strange Calling, or if you have heard me preach/speak, you have heard that story about “the will of God” before. I didn’t really intend to tell it again here. I was going to write about how time gets by so quickly--because no one has ever commented on that before--and I was amazed as I thought about a whole generation of scholars, forty years, in between my doctoral work and Brigid’s, so I was speculating about time and how every scholar who influenced me is long gone, and how scholars in the same field don’t even speak the same language anymore, [I never even heard the word “semiology” in my studies of long ago] but then that veered off into the will of God, and I’m glad it did, because how time does not conquer love is much better to contemplate than how time passes so quickly.

SLEEP-MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT IT THAN ARE REALLY NECESSARY [W, 5-9-18]

CHRIST IN WITER: REFLECTIONS ON FAITH AND LIFE FOR THE YEARS OF WINTER…

SLEEP-MORE THOUGHTS ABOUT IT THAN ARE REALLY NECESSARY    [W, 5-9-18]

I have been reading in my grandchild journal, preparing myself for the graduation of our granddaughter from college, and of our grandson from high school. Here is an entry from ten years ago…

The men at the next table at the Moose Jackson coffee shop are discussing sleep patterns. “I slept only three hours last night,” one of them says. “If I sleep too much at night, I can’t sleep after work,” he continues. I do not understand what that means. It sounds like a very strange pattern to try to sleep.

I don’t have time to think about it, though. I have to concentrate on what my granddaughter is saying over her hot chocolate. Concentration is difficult for me this morning because I had trouble sleeping last night. It’s because of her that I had trouble sleeping.

I do not see her as much now that school has started. I usually go to the coffee shop alone, but school is on break today, so we are here together. She used to keep us awake at night because babies and little kids do that to parents and grandparents. So did her little brother, and her mother and her aunt before them. Now they are not babies who cry in the night, but they still keep me awake, worrying about them, praying for them.

It’s not all because of worry, though. Last night I laid awake with anticipation, excited at the thought of being with my granddaughter. I kept thinking about taking her to the coffee shop, and how much fun it would be.

I recall the last day before she started kindergarten. Helen and I took her on a special picnic. We knew we would not get to see her as much as we had once she started school. She was so excited the night before our picnic that she couldn’t sleep. Now she has returned the favor.

Most of us, during our working years, have to get up at a certain time, either to get to the job or school on time, or to get others to jobs or school on time. We set an alarm clock, or we are so used to it that we automatically get up at the right time.

Helen was so used to getting up at five a.m. when she was a teacher that she woke up at that early hour for several years after she retired. It really griped her. She finally had the chance to sleep in, and she couldn’t. At last, though, her brain adjusted. Now she can sleep until eight if her body needs extra rest.

I don’t have a job pattern anymore, a time when I have to sleep, so that I can get up at a certain time, so that my body can fall into its natural rhythm. In retirement, no regular alarm clock is necessary. I don’t have to be any place at a certain time. I just sleep until I wake up. Then I get up.

Occasionally, though, like this morning, I have a required rising time. Because so much of my inside was removed by surgery, I have to hang close to the bathroom the first four hours after I get up. If I must be some place by nine, I have to get up at five. When I have one of those alarm clock mornings, it is harder for me to fall asleep and stay that way.

Some old people don’t need much sleep. My friend, Bill White, slept only a few hours each night in old age. If he couldn’t sleep, he just got up and got things done. I think he had a clear conscience.

It is hard to sleep if you are looking forward to something, either with joy or with dread. It is hard to sleep if you are angry or in pain or worried or guilty or excited. Good sleep requires a clear conscience or a dead one.

What does it mean to have a clear conscience?

The purpose of sleep is regeneration. Dreaming is part of that. It’s part of the rhythm of the body and the brain. Perhaps death, which we often liken to sleep, is just part of the rhythm.

Maybe that is why so many old people have trouble sleeping out the night. Our consciences are not all that bad, but we’re just excited about what the morning will bring.

That is part of Christian faith, that death is sleep, part of the rhythm. We fall asleep in death, but the day of resurrection will come, when we shall be awakened by the alarm clock of God, the trumpeting angels.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

WHOSE WIFE, ANYWAY? [T, 5-8-18]

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

WHOSE WIFE, ANYWAY?              [T, 5-8-18]

No, this is not about Henny Youngman saying, “Take my wife… please.”

A young friend recently wrote to ask a question. He and his wife had been watching a movie in which the main character’s wife died, and he remarried. He loved both women. So, she asked, what about in the life to come? How will they work that out?

Here is what I wrote to him:

The Bible has little to say about this question, and Jesus doesn’t mention it, except in answer to a question when the righteous folks were trying to trip him up to prove he wasn’t as smart as common folks thought he was.

That story is in the 6^th chapter of Matthew, along about verse 20. Family was the only economy of the time, so if a woman were widowed, she had no means of support. So The Law provided. Her husband’s brother had to marry her, which meant taking her into his household so she could eat. So, the scribes and Pharisees ask Jesus, what if her husband had six brothers and each of them in turn dies. So,” in the resurrection,” whose wife will she be?

Jews throughout Old Testament times were not particularly interested in afterlife, and were vague about it. By the time of Jesus, though, the idea of resurrection had taken currency. It was, however, a fairly primitive physical body resurrection—we shall be exactly as we are now, physically, after the resurrection. So “whose wife” was a practical, and reasonable, and difficult question.

Jesus replies that his interrogators don’t understand either the scriptures or the resurrection. There will be no marriage in heaven, but that folks will be like the “angels in heaven.” We don’t know exactly what he meant by that, because he does not talk about angels much elsewhere, but he was obviously trying to say that the resurrection means something different from a physical cloning of earthly bodies.

After the resurrection of Jesus, Paul refers to a “spiritual body,” when he says he does not know what kind of body we’ll have in the resurrection, physical or spiritual, but that we’ll have one. He means that we’ll have personal identity, since it is by the body that we are able to recognize one another as different individuals. [He expands on this in I Cors 15: 44-47.]

Now here’s the most important part, I think. Jesus says to the scribes and Pharisees, “You don’t know the power of God.” In other words, God will take care of this.

God’s power is not power at all, but love. As Paul says so eloquently in Romans 9: Love never ends.

So the love between a woman and man in marriage will not end, because the love in that relationship will not end. We don’t know how that works, but we know that we can trust God to keep love alive.

JRMcF

Johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

THE MYSTERY OF BANKS [M, 5-7-18]

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

THE MYSTERY OF BANKS    [M, 5-7-18]

I got my first car loan when I was 19 years old, from the First National Bank in Oakland City, my home town. I was going to school at IU and preaching at three little churches, 16 to 35 miles from Bloomington, I needed reliable transportation. My brother-in-law’s 1947 Oldsmobile, which I had bought from him for $50 while the Navy had him and my sister stationed in Antigua, was barely limping along, using a quart of oil every 50 miles.

The banker in Oakland City knew my family was poor, but I had checking and savings accounts in that bank. Neither ever had much money, but I was a customer. He took a risk. I got a loan to buy a used green 1952 Chevy.

From that time on I got lots of loans from bankers, for cars and houses. I never questioned the existence of banks, though—how they got there. They were just there, on the corner, like the police station or the school. I knew they were a business, but it never occurred to me that somebody owned them. I mean, they were sort of like the government, just there, a public service, doing their thing so life could go on.

I did not find out about bank owners, I’m embarrassed to say, until I was in my late 30s. My excuse is that while I knew bankers, and even had some as church members, I was not in the social class to know bank owners.

Until I met Vic Pavlenko.

Vic and I were doctoral students together. His parents had been quite wealthy, his father the Caterpillar sales director for Russia and vicinity, and that’s a pretty big vicinity. [1] Vic’s parents were killed together in a car wreck. Vic and his brother each inherited a whole lot of money.

Vic was a Lutheran pastor. He used his inheritance to start and fund a regional ministry for poor rural people in the Dakotas. He brother bought a bank.

When Vic said that as he told us his story, when he said “My brother bought a bank,” I had my financial Eureka moment: “So that’s where banks come from; they have owners, just like flower shops.”

It’s like pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz. There are some things we’re better off not knowing.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] An interesting side note is that Yul Brynner was Mr. Pavlenko’s Mongolia salesman before he went into acting.

EXPIRATION DATES [Su, 5-7-18]

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

EXPIRATION DATES                        [Su, 5-7-18]

A woman was explaining to me why she was leaving the church I pastored. We were not “prophetic.” By that she meant that we did not try to predict the end of the world.

That’s the way “prophesy” is used in “evangelical” circles these days. It means foretelling the future, specifically when the world will end. That definition does not come from the Bible but is imposed upon it. Biblically, prophets don’t foretell, they forth tell. They don’t foretell the future but tell forth the word of God.

Which is right in the wheelhouse of Jesus, who shot down the idea of prophecy as predicting the end of the world once and for all.

“But about that day or hour, no one knows, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” Matthew 24:36.

So I quoted those words of Jesus—THE WORDS OF JESUS!—to her. As I said, Jesus had settled the matter once and for all. Not exactly.

She replied, “But he did not say we could not know the month or the year.”

In some ways, I wanted to cut her some slack. In the first place, I liked her. She was a new faculty member at our university and had not been in our church very long, but she was nice. More importantly, her PhD, and thus her teaching field, was food science. Nutrition and such. Expiration dates are important in that field. So I could see why she might be interested in the expiration date of the world.

But the intentional perverseness of what she said left me speechless. Anybody with even an elemental acquaintance with the Gospels knows that Jesus spoke metaphorically, not as a scientist or news reporter. Clearly, by “day or hour,” Jesus meant any time at all—month, year, decade, millennium, whatever.

For someone who claims to be a follower of Christ to dishonor him so completely by twisting his words in order to believe and do the exact opposite of what he was trying to accomplish is mind-boggling.

Yet people keep doing it, especially about predicting the end of the world. We know of about two or three thousand such predictions over the years since Jesus spoke his words. They were all wrong.

Except were they? 99% of those predictors are dead. For them, this world has ended.

I think that is what Jesus was concerned about, the end of the world for each of us. Yes, this world will end for me, and for you. With the help of modern medicine, we might predict fairly accurately when that will happen, as oncologists do when they say “You have six months.” To which we reply, “But Doc, I can’t even pay your bill in six months.” To which they respond, “In that case, you have twelve months.” Predicting the end even for doctors is kind of iffy.

Yes, the world will end for me and for you, and we don’t know when. Why not just get ready and stay that way?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

A PARENT CONSIDERS COLLEGE-poem [Sat, 5-5-18]

A PARENT CONSIDERS COLLEGE-poem    [Sat, 5-5-18]

[I wrote this poem as our younger daughter headed off to college. Today her daughter graduates from college. In the fall, her son starts to college. The worries of parents don’t change much from one generation to the next.]

Will some long-armed cult

Reach out and pluck her

From depression’s barren limbs?

Or simple, mindless boredom

Press her flat like concrete

Minus pattern, texture, tone?

Will booze engulf her

In a fog of unremembered days

Spent staggering into empty doors?

Or mindless PhDs beat

On her with their rounded, rubber

Mallets ‘til her brain is perfect…

Symmetrical, spherical, “parameters

Impacted by environments

Confronted with events” unfinished?

Will boys called men when their names

Are seen in crime reports

Whisper sweet nothings

That are much more nothing

Than sweet, and love is unrequited,

Unfulfilled, unfull, finally

Unhoped for, even

Or by some miracle of God

Will she be like me?

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

CIW BONUS: “Only in poetry is a word that means only one thing dysfunctional.” Billy Collins

GOOD ENOUGH TO BE IN THE CATALOG [F, 5-4-18]

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

GOOD ENOUGH TO BE IN THE CATALOG                      [F, 5-4-18]

I love college catalogs.

            I was standing beside our old gray Chevy, in a gravel parking lot, outside Oak Grove Church, in the open country, on a humid summer day, waiting for my little sister, to drive her home from Vacation Bible School. It was the summer of 1954, before my senior year in high school.

            The windows on the car beside mine were down. On the front seat was the catalog—five by seven, plain white, with a round seal in restrained red, which I later learned was crimson, and underneath, in simple but elegant type, Indiana University. I reached through that car’s window and pulled out the catalog.

            As I leafed through it, I knew my life had changed forever. I saw those pages a world where no one in my family had even visited, but I knew it was a world where I wanted to live. If I could get into that catalog, I would no longer be a simple country boy. I would be a college man.

One of the greatest sacrifices I ever made was putting that catalog back into that car when Margey came running out the church door to show me the picture of Noah and his ark and his strangely shaped animals that she had drawn.

            The idea of me going to college made no sense. My father was blind. We were on welfare. There were three other children. No one on either side of the family had ever gone to college. I was already working part-time to help support my family. But when Iva Jane McCrary, our high school Home Economics teacher, asked me what I would do after high school, I said, “I’m going to IU.”

            Iva Jane was a large and forbidding woman. In addition to Home Ec, she taught biology to the girls. Because of scheduling problems, I had been in her biology class, one of two misplaced boys. She looked at me strangely and finally said, “Yes, I suppose you are college material.”

            Suddenly I was not sure about that catalog. Iva Jane had given me her imprimatur, said that I was college material, more or less, but I had never before considered that I was not. Sure, I knew that I did not have the right clothes or the right money to go to college, but I had not considered that I might not have the right stuff.

            I had been class president for three years. I was editor of the school newspaper. Only James Burch did better in class than I. But maybe I wasn’t college material. Ann Turner, the doctor’s daughter, was going to IU. Bob Nation, who was going to be a doctor, went there. So did Shirley Black, the cheerleader, whose father had his own business. Was college for the likes of me?

            When I heard that the factory in the next town was hiring, I applied, set the record on their aptitude test, [which James Burch later broke], and quit high school to go to work.

            My forewoman said that I was their best adjustor of electrical relays and got me a date with her very attractive daughter, but I think she knew my heart wasn’t in the factory. They didn’t have a catalog.

            Because classmate Jim Shaw said to me, in the middle of July, “On your day off, let’s drive up to IU and see if they’ll let us in,” I did go to college. I went to graduate school. I got a doctorate. Altogether, I did ten years of higher education. All the way, though, Iva Jane’s grudging acceptance of me as “college material” pulled sideways on me, trying to get me to write dim and shaky answers on the pages of life’s Blue Book.

            I think one of the best things I did as a minister was expecting people to be better than they wanted to be. I said, in any way I could, “Yes, you are Christian material.” I was sometimes wrong, but more often, people who had little faith in themselves learned to have great faith in God, because their pastor expected it.

            I suppose I’m thinking about college catalogs because tomorrow granddaughter Brigid graduates from The James Madison College at Michigan State University and starts a PhD at The University of Chicago in the fall. Later this month grandson Joe graduates high school and starts college at The University of Iowa in the fall. I get excited when I think about what treasures are hidden in the catalogs of those universities for them. I know for sure that there is no catalog big enough to contain my pride.

I still love college catalogs. I regret, though, that they are now usually electronic instead of paper. It is unlikely that some poor girl or boy will see a CD on the seat of a car with open windows and pull it out and stick it into the computer that just happens to be sitting there in that gravel parking lot on a humid summer’s day.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

I used to keep a careful index of stories and ideas used in CIW. That became cumbersome, though, so I gave it up, figuring that when one writes a blog for old people, they won’t remember if they’ve read it before, anyway.