HANGING ON [T, 4-10-18]

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

As I walk this morning, the darkness will be almost gone, but not quite. In that almost-light period, I stick closely to sidewalks, stay away from the streets. I know what can happen when a person and a car try to use the same part of the street.

Years ago, that happened to a ten-year-old boy in a city 50 miles from where I lived and pastored. It was after school. He saw his mother waiting for him in their car on the other side of the street from the school building. He was so glad to see her. He ran out into the street, and was hit by a car. It was going slowly, but his appearance was so sudden, the driver could not react to stop. It was not a hard hit. But it killed him.

His grandparents were nominal members of my church. I had not been pastoring there long, and they did not come to worship, so I knew them only by name and an early “get acquainted” visit I made to them, a visit that did not seem to interest them very much.

When I heard about their grandson being killed, that very evening, I went to their house. To my surprise, the boy’s parents were there. They had come because they knew how devastated his grandparents would be. And they knew how much they needed family solidarity in this time of surprising and wrenching grief.

We had never met, but they took to me immediately. They fastened on to me. They hung on to every word I spoke. They hung on to God.

They asked me to do the funeral, in the city where they lived. They thought it was wonderful. They extolled me to all their friends and family there, how helpful I was to them. Then we all went back to my town, where the grandparents brought in friends and neighbors. Once again, the boy’s parents told those folks how beautifully I had done the funeral, how wonderful it was, how wonderful I was. If I had not understood their need, it would have been embarrassing.

No one in that family ever came to worship or other church activities, the whole time I remained as pastor in that church. But they never stopped singing my praises, sending me notes on occasion to do so.

That was not the only time people treated me like that, but it’s the one I remember, as I walk, and as I look both ways before I cross the street, because neither children nor old people are very adept at dodging cars.

We don’t always need another person to represent God to us, to remind us that we are not alone, but sometimes we do, especially in times of pain and grief. As a pastor, you get to be that person often. As a Christian, you get to be that person.

Through the years, I’ve had people who were God’s representatives to me. The problem now is that they have almost all left this world. I have access to them only in memory. I am finding, though, that young people, sometimes quite young, are the representatives of God to me. I delight in their presence. Through them, I hang on.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

WHEN CHANGE THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE [M, 4-9-18]

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

I had so many good times in that house. Now a bunch of strangers who don’t know a thing about those good times will hang around in it, acting like they own the place. It makes me sad.

No, not my house. Bill’s and Ann’s house.

Bill died three years ago. It is a big house. It’s too much for Ann to keep up by herself. She’s doing the logical thing and moving to a duplex in a senior citizen living place.

On top of that, she sold it to the first family that looked at it. Is that an omen, or what? How much righter can you get?

I wrote her an effusive letter about how she was doing the right thing and all that stuff. Then I saw the videos the realtor had used in preparation for all the work she didn’t have to do to get it ready to show.

I was amazed. I felt so sad. I am never going to be in there again, the site of so many happy memories.

When your friends make transitions, you have to make transitions, too. I didn’t understand that until now, when Ann sold that house.

The transitions old friends make are not totally different from those when we were younger. We all had to change from one house to another once in a while along the way. But there are more memories to sort through in the transitions of our friends when we are old than when we were young. Bill and I were friends for almost sixty-five years. Helen and I visited in that house Ann is selling for exactly fifty years.

And we know that a move like this is the last move before the one to the Shady Rest Home or the Shady Oaks graveyard.

Why do people think old people want shade so much? We want the sun. In the same place it’s always been, through the window in Bill and Ann’s Four Seasons room.

That, however, is not going to be. It’s okay to be sad as the transitions come, because that is real. It’s better, though, to give thanks for the good times we had BC-Before Change.

JRMcF

Johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

If you are on Twitter, I suggest @PhilipAmerson as someone to follow.

I tweet once in a great while as yooper1721.

A WATER-BUCKET CHURCH                     [Sun, 4-8-18]

When I was growing up, we had a neighbor, Jess Hall, a couple of miles away on gravel roads, who was a part-time preacher as well as a small-plot farmer. My father and I drove our wagon over to his place one day to get some walnuts. He told us this story…

He was the preacher in a small Baptist church in the early part of the century [20^th]. Country church buildings then did not have indoor plumbing. Southern Indiana summers were hot, and so the church had a water bucket with a communal dipper—a common thing for families in those days—on a table in the front of the room. Whenever someone got thirsty, they just went up and got a drink and put the dipper back in the bucket. Some folks thought that was unseemly. Not because everyone used the same dipper. No, because it was distracting to have people drinking where all could see them.  They wanted the bucket moved to the rear of the church.

Eventually the congregation split. The back-bucket people went a mile down the road and built a new building so they could have the water bucket where they wanted it. I’m sure they found some obscure verse in the Bible that could be interpreted to say that water buckets should not be up in front, where everybody had to see them.

Today in church, everybody will see us sit with a gay couple, and a lesbian couple--with the children they foster in an emergency--and a mixed-race couple. All people who a few years ago would have been in jail instead of in church.

There are quite a few old people in other churches who would prefer that they still be in jail, for, they say, loving the wrong person is not only a sin but a crime. Well, they usually don’t say it’s a crime, anymore, just a sin. We’ve lost our appetite for lynching or jailing people for loving [perhaps only temporarily], but we’re still willing to ostracize and humiliate and reject them.

I’m talking old people here, not young people. Even conservative social researchers who believe that homosexuality is a sin admit--because their research shows it--that for 2/3 of young people, interracial sex and homosexuality are just not issues.

I’m going to talk about The United Methodist Church now, but even if you are not UM, this is relevant, because we all live in a water bucket society.

The UMC will probably soon divide into two denominations over homosexuality, just as Jess Hall’s congregation did over water buckets, and as Methodists did earlier over slavery.

In 1844 The Methodist Episcopal Church split into two denominations, one denomination—against slavery--retaining that name, the other denomination—pro slavery, claiming the Bible was in favor of slavery—becoming The Methodist Episcopal Church South. [Or “The ME Church South of God” as the old joke goes.]

That’s inconceivable now, but that split lasted for almost one hundred years. In that hundred years, a lot of old people died off. For younger people, slavery was just no longer justifiable. Racism was, but not slavery.

In 1939, the ME and ME South denominations—both now agreeing that slavery was wrong and not biblical--reunited, along with The Methodist Protestant Church, to form The Methodist Church. [1]

My thoughtful friend, The Rev. Bob Morwell, says he has gone to a number of discussion sessions about what the UMC should do about accepting homosexuals into membership and ministry. He says he is usually the youngest person in the room. He is 65. Younger people just aren’t concerned about or interested in it.

In forty years, almost all the folks who think homosexuality is an issue worth fighting over will be dead. In the meantime, we’ll spend all our resources fighting over who’s in and who’s out of what denomination, who gets to own the buildings and the assets, who has to give up pensions to pay the legal bills…. All that instead of doing mission and ministry.

It’s not about the Bible, or theology, or society. It’s about greed and power, about who has the right to exclude others from God’s church, who gets to knock the holes into the hull of the sinking ship. So the dividers are right; the issue is sin. The sin, though, is not about who gets to love. It’s about who gets to hate.

Fifty years from now the UMC and the UMC South of Gay will come back together, because the fighters will all be gone, and we’ll have used up our time and talent over something that is no longer an issue. We’ll divide over the placement of the water bucket, instead of dipping into the communal bucket to provide drink for the thirsty. [Matthew 25:31-46]

May God have mercy on us… or maybe God should just send us to hell right now and avoid the rush.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

This afternoon, we’ll go to see “West Side Story,” about people loving the wrong people and the people who get mad about it, and no one will claim anything about the Bible. That issue has all-day staying power, because it’s in the soul, not in the Bible.

1] In 1968 The Methodist Church and The Evangelical United Brethren Church united to form The United Methodist Church. They had always held to the same theology but were divided by language. The Evangelical Church and The Brethren Church had started in Germany and folks in those denominations continued to speak German in worship in the USA until everybody learned English. There were many “foreign” language churches in America, including Swedish Methodist and Norwegian Methodist denominations that were eventually folded into The Methodist Church.

TO-DO LISTS-poem [Sat, 4-7-18]

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

I read the obituary for the pretty girl

The one in the white car that skidded on the mud

And off the road into a magnolia tree

Each just about to bud, the tree and the girl

Only twenty candles on her last cake

Someone wrote the obit words

Reciting the names of those she loved

Those who loved her

And the names of what she loved

As well as who she loved

“She loved to make to do lists.”

Did that obit writer know how sharp

That line would stab into the hearts

Even of those who never knew her?

The agony

Making lists of what to do

And never marking off the lines

As done?

She probably made the lists upon her phone

But I prefer to think of her

Sitting on a weathered bench beside a lake

A slight frown upon her unlined brow

As she tries to think of three more things to write

To fill the lines at the bottom of the page

Of her small, flowered spiral notebook

I shall do three things for her

Watch a movie

in which women talk and cry

Eat an ice cream cone

while laughing at a lightning bug

Buy a tube of lipstick

which I shall give to a pretty girl like her

Hoping that one of them was on her list

Her most important list

The one on the pale pink page

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

PRAYER FOR A PEACE-LESS FRIEND [F, 4-6-18]

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

A couple of years ago, Bert, an old high school acquaintance, came across my email address via another high school acquaintance. He sends out group emails. He added me to the group.

He was a year ahead of me in school. I did not know him well. We did not hang around together. But in a small school, you’re always in some of the same activities, and you get acquainted that way. I remember him as a nice kid, just a regular kid, like all the rest of us.

I do not recall him being especially religious then, but he is now. Every day I got several emails from him quoting Bible verses, most of them having to do with love and forgiveness and the peace that comes with knowing God.

Also every day he sent several irrational emails with scurrilous messages that exhibit the exact opposite traits of his Bible quotes, about how “Obama is a socialist moslim devil” and “you can tell michelle obama hates America because she holds her hand wrong during the national anthem” and “the Obama daughters are ugly and dress like sluts” and “the supreme court is taking away our freedom” and “the gay agenda is all about taking over and putting straights in concentration camps.” There are more, but you can get the drift.

My only replies were to the Bible quotes about love and forgiveness. I told him I appreciated those. I encouraged him to send more of them. I didn’t say a thing about the racist irrationalities. I thought maybe my encouragement of love messages and ignoring of hate messages would lead to a deeper discussion. But it didn’t. I finally gave up. I asked him to stop sending me anything at all. 

He’s older even than I am. He’ll die before long. Then maybe he can find the peace that has so eluded him in this life.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

THE STORY CAN FINALLY BE TOLD [R, 4-5-18]

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

Recently I saw Eunice’s obit, and Frank is already dead, so this story is safe to tell.

Frank and I were in theological school together. Most seminary students in those days were straight out of college, but we had a few second-career students. Frank was one of them. He wasn’t much older than the rest of us, because his first career had been short, but he and Eunice were definitely more mature than the rest of us. Their children were already in school.

Well, they were more mature in that way, but not in others. Eunice had grown up in a very conservative denomination. It was no small thing for her to marry out of the faith—that is, to a Methodist, one who decided to be a preacher in that faith, even. Methodists were pretty conservative themselves in those days, especially when it came to alcohol and tobacco and sex outside of marriage [nobody even thought about the possibility of drugs], but we no longer forbade dancing—especially if it were round or square—or card playing or going to movies. Those, however—dancing and card playing and movies--were the unholy trinity of sins in Eunice’s background.

Most of our seminary students were already appointed to be the pastor in small churches in WI and IN and IL and MI, some even as far away as MN and IA, because they were married, and beginning families, and needed the money, because wives didn’t work in those days, and even if they did, there were no jobs for them in those small towns. Childless wives who were school teachers or nurses were excepted from the “no job” rule, but usually not from the “no job within a thousand miles” rule.

The distances from those little towns were too long for daily commuting, so students—all male—stayed in the dorm during the week and went home to wife and family, and church, on the weekends. It almost worked. The weekends were long. We had no Monday classes, and got out at noon on Friday. It was still hard on families. [1]

So the seminary made an occasional attempt to include wives. There was an annual experience—during the week, of course—for a couple of days, when wives came to campus, went to classes with husbands, had a banquet in the cafeteria, and had a night free for a good time. For most, that meant going to a movie--a big deal since there were no theaters in their little towns of residence.

That’s where Eunice faltered. She agreed with the Methodist contention that there was nothing wrong with movies, as long as they featured Doris Day. The first year, though, she had gotten all dressed up—the way you did for movies and church in those days--but got so sick before movie time she couldn’t even go. The next year, she made it to the movie but got such a bad rash after that she had to go to the doctor. [2] You can take the girl out of fundamentalism, but it’s hard to take the fundamentalism out of the girl.

So we could not but laugh in our last year when Frank told us that their children were old enough now that Eunice could take a job. No job available in their little town, of course, but it didn’t matter, because she was a traveling saleswoman, going from store to store, and gas station to gas station, and pharmacy to pharmacy. With the trunk of her Methodist preacher’s husband full of her products. She was selling condoms.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com

1] I just could not stand to be away from Helen and our two little girls in Cedar Lake, IN all week so I commuted daily, 65 miles each way. Took four hours, because it was up through Hammond, IN, through Chicago, into Evanston, in the days before multilane controlled-access highways. But when I told the congregation that I had graduated from seminary after three years there and was receiving a “full time” appointment to the Wesley Foundation campus ministry in Terre Haute, most of them said, “We didn’t even know you were in seminary.”

2] We learned in Carroll Wise’s pastoral counseling course that the three physical areas where emotionally-caused illnesses are most likely to show up are gastro-intestinal, skin, and breathing. It’s too bad Eunice didn’t get to try the movies a third year; she might have gotten asthma and hit the trifecta.

THE SILENT PAIN CONTEST [W, 4-4-18]

Our church did a Good Friday service on the words of Jesus from the cross. I was asked to reflect on his word of lament, as a spiritual discipline, in four minutes. I do a lot of prayer and thought preparation for an assignment like that, but don’t write things down as I prepare to speak. My theory is that if I can’t do the prep in my head, I can’t expect hearers to do understanding with only their heads. But I’m usually able later to record what I said, so I think the words below are close to those of Friday night. Lament is not just about Good Friday, and like most writers, I like to get as much use as possible out of a piece, so I share it with you now…

THE SILENT PAIN CONTEST       [W, 4-4-18]

In my midnight surgery, they cut me open from coast to coast and took out a good deal more of my insides than I really wanted to part with. Afterward, I was in a lot of pain, but for what seemed to me good and proper reasons, I refused pain medications. My reasons were not good enough for my wife, so she talked to the nurse, who said to me, “Look, this is not a contest to see who can stand the most pain.”

That was news to me! I thought all of life was a contest to see who could stand the most pain. Not just stand the most, but stand it without saying anything about it. If you said anything about it, you lost points in the contest.

But as the nurse sat there beside me, and the pain medicine entered into me, I began to think more clearly. [It’s hard to think clearly when you are in pain.] I began to wonder why I thought life was a silent pain contest.

After all, I was a Bible scholar. There are laments about pain all through the Bible. That is why the Bible is so valuable and helpful to us—it’s realistic about what life is really like.

And I was a follower of Jesus. By the time of  my surgery I had preached about twenty Good Friday services, preached about Jesus on the cross saying, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” Surely if it were okay for Jesus to acknowledge his feelings of pain and abandonment, it was okay for me.

Now some preachers tell us that Jesus was not really lamenting, really feeling abandoned. He was a Bible scholar, too, and was just quoting Psalm 22, which starts with those very words, “My God, my God, why…” That psalm goes on to describe a scene very much like Jesus’ crucifixion, and finally ends on an upbeat note—it’s not all that bad… no abandonment…

As Lee Corso says on the Game Day football show on ESPN, “Not so fast, my friend.” We don’t know Jesus was quoting that psalm. We do know that he cried out in lament, “My God, my god, why have you forsaken me?” and if he were indeed Psalm quoting, of all those 150 psalms from which he might have quoted, this is the one he chose. Because it said how he felt.

If it is okay for Jesus to lament feelings of pain and hurt and loneliness, then it is okay for us. The problem is that most of our laments will sound to others only like complaints, whining. It is probably best to express our laments to God.

So as a spiritual discipline, I suggest this: keep a lament journal.

Each day, on a piece of paper, as each cause for lament presents itself, write it down. Or do it on an electronic device. Or speak it into a recorder. At the end of the day, turn it over to God. Throw the piece of paper away. Wipe the phone or the iPad or the recorder clean.

I’ve been doing this so long I can do it in my head. At the end of the day, I just pray it away.

If it is okay for Jesus to lament feelings of pain and hurt and loneliness, then it is okay for us.

JRMcF

johnrobertmcfarland@gmail.com