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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

John Robert McFarland

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

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

 

I choke up a bit

always have

when faced

with the death

of a young man

 

on the streets of Laredo

down in some lonesome valley

in the jungles of cancer

 

It made sense when I was young

the same age as Tom Dooley

the Laos missionary doctor

the other Tom Dooley

hanging from a white oak tree

that young cowboy

all wrapped in white linen

 

I don’t understand them

did not know them

but I am one with them

I hear the drum

its slow banging

I feel the rope

its slow tightening

I see the cancer

its  slow spreading

 

It does not make sense now

this lump in my throat

for I am old and full

of years and mincemeat pie

 

Still I wonder

which I would have been

the doctor

the outlaw

or the cowboy

John Robert McFarland

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

 

 

 

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Robert McFarland

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

 

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

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

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

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

That is such a helpful insight into intercessory prayer.

John Robert McFarland

 

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

The cute little math professor waited until all the other worshippers had gone by me at the door. Then she grabbed my pulpit robe by the lapels and pulled me down into her face and said, fiercely, “You don’t know it yet, but when you’re in that pulpit, you’re something special. People will believe what you say just because of the way you say it. So, you be damn sure that what you say is the truth.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Robert McFarland

NOTHING IS HIDDEN… [W, 8-3-22]

 

Preaching is like the internet. I’ll explain… 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

John Robert McFarland

THE MIDNIGHT HAIR CUT [F, 7-29-22]

 

Telling about how the mother of my preacher friend, Paul Unger, wanted him to be a barber, [7-26-22] made me think of another preacher friend, half a generation older, Bob Gingery.

Saturday night was the big shopping night in small towns back then. That included haircuts for men and boys.

Arcola, IL funeral director Steve Shrader told us how he went to Don Black’s shop one Saturday night and then strolled down Main Street so the girls could admire him. Instead they pointed and laughed. He used the plate glass window of Vyverberg’s Dept store as a mirror and realized that the sometimes distractable Don had buzzed off the right half of his hair and left the left half standing at attention.

Back to Rev. Bob Gingery. It was midnight on Saturday, and Bob realized that he needed a haircut. His hair was far too long to go into the pulpit the next day.

That seems strange these days. Preachers go into the pulpit, and anywhere else, with hair of any length, style, and hue. Part of that is because there are women preachers now, and there were none back in the Eisenhower 1950s. Mostly, though, it’s because we don’t expect everyone to look like everyone else. In that way, society is…well, maybe not “better,” but certainly more interesting.

In the 1950s, however, young men wore crewcuts. Older men wore their hair slicked and combed. “Bryllcreem: A little dab’ll do ya.” Regardless of age or style, it was short.

Only classical musicians wore long hair, which gave rise to calling classical music, “long hair music.” If you got a day behind on your haircut schedule, your friends would taunt you with, “Where’s your violin?” Nowadays, “long hair” music is more likely redneck country music.

But where do you go for a haircut in a small town in southern Indiana on Saturday at midnight? Well, your kitchen. Bob persuaded his wife to give him a haircut. Men believe wives can do anything, even if they have no experience or aptitude for the necessary action. Bob sat on a kitchen chair with a towel around his neck. His wife took up the scissors. Things did not go well. “The last state was worse than the first.” [Matthew 12:45] Now he was desperate.

The only person he could think of who had hair-cutting experience, and who was used to midnight hours, was the undertaker. He called him.

“Okay,” said the undertaker, “but you’ll have to come over here and lie on the embalming table, because that’s the only way I know how to cut hair.”

This Sunday, I’ll be in the pulpit again, 66 years after I first stood there. Back then, I had a crewcut. Now I’m bald. I have no worries.

John Robert McFarland

No, that is not I in the photo above. But it's close.

I’m going to preach again, or at least tell stories, at St. Mark’s UMC in Bloomington, Indiana at 10:30 Eastern Time on July 31. You can “attend” by clicking on the livestream button on the smumc.church web site. [Not smumc.org.] Or you can get it via the archive button any time after noon on 7-31. I don’t intend for this to be a regular thing. My eyes and back and voice are already too old for preaching. In fact, I’ve dragooned a friend into leading the rest of the service so that all I have to do is preach. But one thing I can do for our pastors, and thus our congregation, is give them some rest time. Besides, Jesus came to teach us how to have a good time [John 10:10], and I think preaching is fun.