GETTING THE RIGHT WORD IN THE RIGHT PLACE [8-18-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Reminiscences of An Old Preacher—GETTING THE RIGHT WORD IN THE RIGHT PLACE [8-18-26]

 

I don’t preach anymore. In fact, I don’t talk much at all anymore. I used to talk a lot. Words slid off my tongue quite easily. I’m thinking about this because I came across an old note from Don Houts.

Don had a PhD in psychology, and taught pastoral psychology at St. Paul seminary before becoming the “pastor to pastors” in the Illinois Area of The United Methodist Church.

While he was the counselor to pastors in our conference, he was a member of Wesley UMC in Urbana, IL, “The Church of The Wesley Foundation” at the U. of IL, when Jean Cramer-Heuerman, their young pastor, died of cancer. She’d been dealing with the cancer for a while, but her death was unexpected and traumatic. Since I was also a cancer patient, and her friend, the bishop asked me to do grief work with the church staff and the congregation, including preaching there on the Sunday after her death, grief work through a sermon.

The associate pastor had been scheduled to preach that Sunday, before Jean died. He had come from a different Conference and had not been at the church very long. He did not know either Jean or the congregation very well. He did fancy himself to be a great preacher, though, and he simply refused to yield his time to me. He said that I could “do my thing” after he was through preaching. [1]

He went ahead and preached the sermon he had already written, on a subject that had nothing to do with Jean’s death and the congregation’s grief. I ended up with only five minutes at the end of the service, after the offering, to address this huge disruption to the congregation’s life and psyche.

Afterwards Don Houts sent me that note. “Five minutes was enough. That’s all you needed. You preached as you always do—every word the right word, every word in the right place.”

That surprised me. Not that Don was gracious and generous, but that the words were in their proper places. I was a story-teller, not a preacher.

I had wanted to be a preacher, but it just didn’t come naturally to me. I wrote sermons only a few times, when I was preaching on touchy subjects and wanted proof that I did not say… whatever antagonists wanted to accuse me of.

When I went into a pulpit, I had not considered what words I would use. They appeared as I told the story.

That difficult Sunday morning, the words came easily because the subject was Jean. She was twenty years younger than I, but we had become good friends as we worked on issues together—social justice and church reform. We became even better friends when we got cancer at the same time and went through chemo together.

When you have the right subject, one you really care about, the right words find their proper place.

John Robert McFarland

1] It wasn’t very long before he returned to the Conference from which he came. It’s not wise to tell a bishop “No,” even if it’s only to the bishop’s surrogate.

 

 

SUBSTITUTING FOR THE SUBSTITUTIONARY [Sun, 8-16-26]

BEYOND WINTER: The Irrelevant Theological Redactions of An Old Man—SUBSTITUTING FOR THE SUBSTITUTIONARY [Sun, 8-16-26]

 

[This is a “long grass” effort at theology, 400 words beyond my usual 500, so beware…but it’s Sunday, and my brain is grooved to talk about the mysteries of God on Sundays…]

I do not believe in the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement. I believe in the mystery of the substitutionary atonement.

Jesus is my savior. He died in my place. He died for my sins, to put me back into right relationship with God. All that good stuff.

It’s meaningful. As long as it’s a mystery. When it becomes a doctrine, all the meaning is gone.

The substitutionary atonement theory says that Jesus died for our sins, to put us back into right relationship with God.

I believe in 1/3 of that theory.

I would believe in 2/3 if I were a first century Jew, and 3/3 if I were a fourth century Roman. Or a third century Greek

As was Jesus, the first Christians were Jews, the people of religious sacrifice. Their earliest religious story centered on sacrifice, the willingness of Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Issac, to God. [Genesis 22:1-19] God counted Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his only son as righteousness. It restored their relationship. That idea became the linchpin of Hebrew religious beliefs. A propitiation, a sacrifice, is necessary to get into right relationship with God.

As the original Jewish Christians tried to understand the meaning of the resurrection, the meaning of Jesus as the Christ, they naturally turned to the language of sacrifice.

In early [and continuing] Christian theology, God sacrifices, on the cross, his only son. That is a direct retelling of the Abraham story, father willing to sacrifice his only son. [One of the ancient-culture reasons why Jesus is called God’s only son.]

In Hebrew sacrifices, it was a lamb without blemish that was the perfect sacrifice, so Jesus became “the lamb of God,” and we were saved by “the blood of the lamb.”

But if God is Love, as Christians claim, no propitiation is necessary

The Romans, who ruled the land of the Jews, didn’t believe in that sacrifice stuff. They thought Jews were quite primitive. They believed in Law. [The Jews did, too, but it was a different Law, the Torah, a lot of which had to do with the proper way to sacrifice.]

Early Christian thinkers, especially Augustine [354-430], realized Christians would never be accepted in Rome if their theology was not acceptable to the Roman legal system. So Augustine interpreted the Christ story in legal terms…

…people [Adam and Eve] sinned. That first sin, the original sin, humans trying to take the place of God, was inherited all the way along, passed down through sexual intercourse, Augustine said, since there had to be a legalistic way to account for everyone being born with original sin. [One of the main reasons Christians have always been so conflicted and queasy about sex.]

Sin abrogated the justice of God. It was a legal matter. Humans deserved punishment for sin. [Law always requires punishment. It’s called justification, putting things right, an eye for an eye.] So Christ took the necessary and deserved punishment for everybody by dying on the cross. We say that we know God accepted the death of Jesus as adequate punishment for the whole world because of the Resurrection.

One of my University of Iowa profs, the great George Forrell, explained it thus in The Protestant Faith: An isolated African tribe is declining because everyone is drunk all the time. The king declares that anyone who brews booze will receive fifty lashes. Everything straightens up for a while, and then one morning, everybody is drunk again. He demands to know who made the booze. It was his own mother! Justice demands that the fifty lashes be administered. But he loves his mother, and the lashes will probably kill her. So, he commands the villagers to lash him instead.

Wonderful story. I thought it was perfect when I read it. But it’s a metaphor [analogy?], not reality. Punishment doesn’t make any sense if there was no law abrogated, if God gives and demands mercy instead of sacrifice, instead of punishment, to make things right, to make them whole. Christians say God is Love, not Law. “Crime and punishment” is not the way of Christ. Christian faith starts with forgiveness.

In the third century, in an effort to make Christianity acceptable to Greek philosophy, Plotinus divided the body and soul. That’s been a problem for Christians ever since.

The Hebrews were sacrificers, the Greeks were philosophers, the Romans were lawyers. “The surest way to be irrelevant tomorrow is to be too relevant today,” even if “today” takes in a millenium or two. What was relevant for those old Hebrews and Greeks and Romans is not relevant today.

The substitutionary atonement made sense in first century Israel, in second century Greece, in fourth century Rome. Ever since, adherents of those different approaches to God have argued so effusively with one another about whose view of the substitutionary atonement is right that we haven’t noticed that it makes no sense today, that it doesn’t answer any of the questions being asked now, in the 21^st century.

I don’t know what to do about that. Christian tradition is so full of the substitutionary atonement, especially in our hymns. We do need, though, to understand that we are not bad Christians if we trust in the love of God and the community with Christ without going through some propitiation like the substitutionary atonement.

John Robert McFarland

VIOLENCE IN THE HEART [F, 8-14-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Impatient Old Man—VIOLENCE IN THE HEART [F, 8-14-26]

 

Now, to be clear, Henry did not suggest that I go with him to help beat up his son-in-law, Clete. It was all my idea.

Henry was in his sixties. He was not a member of my church, but he had come to me for help. I had walked with him through the long, slow death of his wife. So he kept coming back. He said it was to help me through my chemotherapy, but I think it was mostly because he was lonely, and we had become friends. Also, because his son-in-law, Clete, was regularly battering Henry’s daughter, Imogene, and he wanted to know what to do about it.

So, naturally, I said, “Let’s go beat up on him.”

I was in the midst of my reactions week, the 2^nd week of my monthly chemo round, the one when I got all the side effects of chemo. This was before the nice anti-nausea drugs they have now. I should have offered to go throw up on the guy instead of beat up on him.

I was miserable all the time, and I just had no patience with anyone, like Clete, who caused unnecessary misery. Besides, I figured I’d probably die soon. What did it matter if I went to jail?

My suggestion, which was kindly received, but politely declined, did have some drawbacks…

Henry was old. I was weak. Clete was a big guy in his prime. Imogene was a grown woman, almost forty, and probably did not want her father and his friend trying to fight her battles for her. Also, I was a preacher in a small town. A violent preacher would probably have been frowned upon.

If this had been a TV sitcom, we would have gotten into Henry’s rusted-out old Chevy pickup and gone looking for Clete and not found him and ended up drinking in the local bar. But, while the town had several package stores, it did not have a bar, so that would not have worked.

I was saved from my own violence by Henry’s loneliness. He was lovelorn. He had fallen for a younger woman, younger even that Imogene. Karen was a local divorcee, and a member of my church. She often came to me for help with her teen son, Keith.

When Henry turned down my help to beat up on Clete, I realized that he had a much more perilous job in mind for me. He wanted me to help him get in good with Karen. That sobered me up pretty quickly from my thirst for violence

All that stopped, though, when Henry’s mother got sick and he had to move back home to another state to take care of her.

I sometimes wonder what I would have done if Henry had said, “Great. Let’s go beat up on Clete.” Violence is the answer when you think you’re out of other options. You need a friend who says, “Wait. You’ve got other choices.” Sometimes that friend is The Holy Spirit.

Surely I could have found a better way. I was famous for talking to people until they just gave up and said, “Okay, I’ll be good if you’ll just shut up.”

But… Who knows? Chemo brain is a real thing. I was not thinking very well back then. There is violence in all of us. It’s important to recognize it and find a different solution first.

I think it was in the original Father Brown books, not the current PBS series, when Father Brown said that the best thing he could do for the world was to keep one violent man from acting out his anger—the one, as he put it, “…under my own hat.”

I’m still way too judgmental about people who say stupid things, and try stupid solutions for their problems, but not nearly as much as I was before Henry and Clete and Imogene. I’ve learned that there is violence and stupidity in all of us, and that there is also that “prevenient grace” that allows us to make decisions for love.

John Robert McFarland

[All the people are real, but all the names are false.]

THE SECRET OF FRIENDSHIP [8-12-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Relationships of An Old Friend—THE SECRET OF FRIENDSHIP [8-12-26]

 

Social psychologists tell us that there is a loneliness epidemic today, especially among men. They say that a man rarely has more than one or two close male friends, certainly no more than five or six. I have fifty-one.

Well, I did have 51.  Most of them are dead. That’s what happens to your friends when you live too long. That’s why old men are lonely. Not because we have few friends, but because we had friends who are no longer with us.

No, wait… I’m going to say that I do have all those friends. Their death doesn’t end our friendship.

One of the reasons I have so many friends is that we have lived so many places. In each new town, I would make two or three new good friends. Usually, they became close friends.

I never replaced friends. I added on. The list got longer each year. Then…we got old, and the list began to get shorter.

I identify close male friends this way: They are…men you can say anything to and expect them to understand rather than misunderstand. You can be totally honest with them. You’re not afraid to tell them you don’t understand what Paul was talking about in Romans. You go out of your way to seek each other’s company. You can tell them you think their wife could have done better. You go to coffee or lunch together, and you know which places they’ve gotten thrown out of in the past. You spend nights at each other’s houses. You don’t mind if their dog gets into bed with you. If you get up on the desk and jump and down and yell “That damn bishop,” they don’t ask you which bishop, or what she’s done, they just get up there with you and yell “That damn bishop!”

Good friends are precious and valuable, but close friends and good friends are not exactly the same. Good friends fit most of those close friend categories, but not all. Especially as we have gotten older, it is harder for them to get up on the table. That separates close from good pretty quickly.

I have several close female friends, too. They usually started as the wives of male friends and then became friends in their own right, as we went through the vicissitudes of life together.

I identify close female friends this way: They trust you to save them from a homicide charge. They know they can call you and tell you if you don’t get your friend out of their house right now, they are going to kill him, and they know that you will drop everything and come.

That list is getting short, too.

Why do I have so many friends? Not just because we lived so many places. Because I want them! It’s not complicated. Growing up, life on the farm was lonely. No place to go. No way to get there. No money to spend. Any kid at school who was willing to talk to me, I asked them if they needed someone to jump up and down on the table with them. I loved those friends so much. They gave me a life, because you can’t have a life by yourself. Still in touch with those who are still in these bodies. And I added to their number wherever I went.

It’s such a cliché, but it’s true: If you want a friend, be a friend.

 

John Robert McFarland

 

 

 

THE PARABLE OF THE PEA GRAVEL [M, 8-10-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Misadventures of An Old Man—THE PARABLE OF THE PEA GRAVEL [M, 8-10-26]

 

I pulled the one thousandth weed today. From the pea gravel beds on the sides of our condo. That will hold off the weed police for a little while.

The weed police are two cheerful women in a golf cart, which allows them to drive up and down hills, through grass plots, and right up to the pea gravel beds. If they find even one weed in the pea gravel, they give you a desist notice, that includes how much your fine will be for transgressing the rules against weeds. They post the notice on the wall of your unit so that all who drive by can see your shame. You can avoid a fine if you can prove to them, through time-lapse photography, that the weed has been there less than one hour.

They got me last year, posted a notice. But not this summer. Ever since I saw the first pea gravel weed in April, I have pulled ten weeds per day. So, today, the thousandth.

The HOA takes care of the yards in the Sherwood Green condo complex. The C&G yard maintenance guys love to mow. Every day if they can. They love the noise. And they don’t just mow. They trim. And they blow off, and out, any spot that might have received the indignity of a stray weed or blade of grass. Even the patios, which are otherwise the responsibility of the tenant. They use industrial strength leaf blowers. When they are done, throughout Sherwood Green, scattered on the grass plots, are lawn chairs, flower pots, and small dogs.

The pea gravel beds, though, at each unit, are the responsibility of the folks who live there. That’s where the weed police come in.

It’s sort of hard for me to pull weeds. I bend over at the waist, with my cane in my right hand. Then I pull with my left hand. If it’s been dry, the weeds resist coming out. If I pull too hard, I lose my balance and fall on my face in the pea gravel. If I bend over too long, I lose my balance and fall on my face in the pea gravel. That’s why only ten weeds per day. Every day.

Don’t worry. I have a new plan. Next year, in the place where the weed police post their shaming notices, I’m going to post a copy of Matthew 13:24-30. That’s the parable of the weeds and the flowers. 

Jesus notes that weeds are coming up among the flowers, and the weed police insist that the home owner pull them out. Jesus says he can’t do that, because he might pull out one of those pretty flowers--even a brown-eyed Susan, or a lily of the fields, flowers that are holy--so he should wait until fall when C&G can just blow them all to kingdom come together.

At least, that’s the version of Matthew 13:24-30 that I’m going to post for the weed police to see. I call it The Parable of The Pea Gravel.

Joh Robert McFarland

THE WHOLE WORD [Sat, 8-8-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Irrelevant Reminiscences of An Old Runner—THE WHOLE WORD [Sat, 8-8-26]

 

I once memorized the Gospel of Mark.

It’s not as great a feat as it might sound. At one time, candidates for the ministry in the Church of Scotland had to memorize the Psalms, all of them. I tried that. I couldn’t do it.  They were too much alike. I could memorize Mark because it had movement, a story, a beginning and a middle and an end, and another beginning…

I memorized the King James Version, because I read that the British actor, Alec McCowen, had memorized the KJV of Mark and was performing it on stage. I did a little acting at the time, in community theater, and I thought that would be a neat thing to do, to perform Mark.

I was also a long-distance runner in those days, and the long miles on back roads got lonely and boring at times. I thought memorizing Mark would give me something good to do. I bought a dozen little paperbacks of Mark, so that when one got sweated through from being carried in the waistband of my running shorts, I would always have another in reserve.

I chose Mark and the KJV for the same reasons McCowen did, because it is the shortest, and the KJV is the most dramatic, most stage-worthy version. I also chose it because Mark is the template for the other Gospels.

I did perform Mark a few times, but that turned out to be just a byproduct of the memorization. The real payoff was seeing the Gospel story as a whole.

Hans Frei has said that our current misuse of the Bible comes from “the eclipse of biblical narrative.” [The title of his book.] One of the reasons for that eclipse is that we look at the Gospel, and the Bible in general, only one pericope, one story, one passage at a time. [1] We take a verse or story from one spot in the narrative--Exodus or Romans or John—and say that it is the Word of God. No, those might be the words of God, through the words of authors, but the Word is the whole story. [2]

The Bible is a narrative. It is continual, not continuous. The narrative is composed of many stories, but it has a red thread of meaning running through, from the beginning of the world to the resurrection at the end. The stories are not meant to be a scientific reporting of the history of the world, but a meaning-full reporting of how God deals with the universe, and with each of us. 

I can no longer recite the whole Gospel. In the winter of my years, I can’t even memorize a grocery list of three things, like bread, bread, and bread. But I know the whole story. I know that it starts with the intention of God, and ends with the intension of God. [“Intension” is about internal meaning.] In between, if we let God tell it, the whole story is about the presence of God.

John Robert McFarland

1] The MSW sphelczhek is not very knowledgeable about biblical and theological language. It changed pericope to periscope. It also changes pastored to pastured.

2] I cringe a little when a liturgist in worship reads a scripture passage and ends with “This is the Word of God.” Not quite.

CIVIL RIGHTS IN TERRE HAUTE [R, 8-6-26]

CHRIST IN WINTER: The Ancient History of an Unintentional Activist—CIVIL RIGHTS IN TERRE HAUTE [R, 8-6-26]

 

[Caveat: Today is the anniversary of The Voting Rights Law of 1965. This column is twice as long as it is supposed to be, 1000 words instead of 500, and it is too much about me instead of about voting rights, so, read only if you have a little extra time and generosity of spirit.]

The battle for equal rights for black citizens started officially with President Lincoln’s “emancipation proclamation” of Jan. 1, 1863. It was up and down, mostly down, for 100 years, as major white supremacy forces, notably the Ku Klux Klan, won the peace even though they had lost the war, by enforcing segregation as the common law of the land in much of the nation.

The modern era of the equal rights battle culminated in the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision that held that school segregation was unconstitutional. The activist era, what we call the Civil Rights Movement, started with college students sitting in at a whites-only Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, NC on Feb. 1, 1960.

One of the major shifts in the battle came at that lunch counter. Young people, especially college students, became foot soldiers in the battle.

Before Greensboro, the battle had been waged by generals, people of substance, folks like attorney Thurgood Marshall, who argued Brown vs Board of Ed. Students were beginning to understand that the fight for citizenship involved more than learning about Thurgood Marshall while sitting in a social studies class room.

That was when The Wesley Foundation [WF] at Illinois State University [ILSU] hired me as campus minister.

I underlined campus minister because it identified a new role for folks who had previously known as student workers. “Student work” was essentially a college-age youth fellowship. As a student worker, you gathered up kids to sit around a campfire and sing Kum Bah Ya.

Don Ruthenberg was the Chair of The Board of Directors of the ILSU WF. He was also the Dean of Students at Illinois Wesleyan University, a mile down the street from ILSU. He was in the perfect position to see the shift taking place in students. They no longer wanted to be isolated in class rooms and camp fires. They wanted to be on the front lines of change.

 

At that time, I had the title of campus minister at The WF in Terre Haute, serving Indiana State University [INSU] and Rose Polytechnic Institute [now Rose Hulman University] and in an unofficial collaboration with St. Mary of the Woods College, Our ministry, though, was still called “student work.” I wasn’t even the head guy at The WF. That was, by bylaws, the minister of the church next door. He was paid a salary to be sure The WF, and, especially, it’s campus minister, didn’t “cause any trouble.”

He wasn’t very effective, since I caused a lot of trouble, advocating for Civil Rights, not because I wanted to be “a trouble maker,” but because the times and my students required it. The Greensboro movement had reached Terre Haute. A new breed of student was in the class rooms and in the streets and in The WF.

I became the leader of The Civil Rights movement in Terre Haute without ever intending to be, and mostly without realizing it. I just responded to the times and the opportunities.

 

I preached equality as a Gospel imperative when no other preacher in town was doing so. [That was the start of my trouble making, according to local church leaders.] I went to Alabama to march with MLK, Jr, because the Alabama Methodist Student Movement asked us to come down and march with them. I started a tutoring program for underprivileged black kids at the dilapidated community center in the black neighborhood. [1] Over a hundred INSU students were involved. Then I formed a new board for the community center where the tutoring program took place, and built a new building. [2] I got our WF kids to staff the Vacation Bible School at Saulters Methodist Church, the church in the black community. We sent students to Albany, GA to assist with black voter registration in 1965. Later that summer, Aug. 6, today, The Voting Rights Act was signed into law. [3]

When Dr. Ruthenberg called me, and asked me to come to ILSU, he said, “There is a new student these days. They aren’t content with staying on campus. They want to be part of making the whole community better. We need a new kind of campus minister. I’ve asked a lot of church leaders and professors, asked them who they know who can deal with this new expansion of ministry. They all say that you’re the one.”

I felt complimented but said no. I told him that apparently I was already that new kind of campus minister right where I was. After all, INSU and ILSU were very similar institutions, teachers’ colleges that had just become universities.

Then he asked me what my yearly salary was. I said, “$4500.” He said, “If you come here, we’ll pay you $6500.” I heard the Lord call!

John Robert McFarland

Lest you think that I am too full of self-congratulation, I am well aware that being the civil rights point man in Terre Haute was a very minor role compared to what folks like Ed King and Bob Kochtitzky did in places like Mississippi.

1] Unofficial segregation was a reality in Indiana in those days, and much of the rest of the North.

2] I started the new board and building for Hyte Community Center, but it was really accomplished by my late, great friend, Andre’ Hammonds, the first black professor [sociology] at INSU, and the first black person to get a PhD at The University of TN.

 

3] When my good friend, Sister Mary Jean, professor of history at St. Mary of The Woods College [SMW], west of Terre Haute, found about the voter registration program, she asked if she and Sister Alma Louise and some of their students could go, too, so it was really a combined WF/SMW project.