I-YOUniverse

Sunday March 16, 2008

                New York (JP)- Palm Sunday 2008. Traffic on 5^th Ave came to a standstill today as JC a young preacher from Mexico rode a beat up bicycle down the fashionable thoroughfare, gaining attention from thousands of onlookers. The fabled blizzard of ticker tape didn’t fall, but video cams and cell phones recorded the surreal scene, now everywhere on the Internet. As one pundit put it, “What was he thinking?”

                William Browning III, lead statistician for WORSHIPORG, stated that such an irresponsible circus stunt will mark the end of any serious influence that JC might have had on faith in America.

                Another commented, “It’s yet another example of how the pop culture mongrelizes genuine religious faith. His action is an affront to every decent God-fearing American.”

                The crowd could be heard chanting “Feed us! Lead us!” and “USA! USA!”

                The Reverend Dr. G. Forbes Lewellen, dean of the Liberal Seminary of New York, explained that this man’s remarkable speaking ability combined with anecdotal accounts of healings and miracles contribute to a frenzy of interest among the unwashed and uninformed.

                Billy Gene, founder of Focus on Fundamentals, stated this sort of uncontrolled spiritualism often has its roots in demonic possession.

                Meanwhile, a CIA spokeman declined to rule out terrorist connections. “We’re watching him closely,” the source stated on condition of anonymity. “He’s come out of nowhere. We don’t know who he’s fronting for, and we’re not sure what all this kingdom talk amounts to.”

                Meanwhile, Entertainment Now reporter Liza Liza has scooped the journalism world with her uncut no-holds-barred interview with Mary M., JC’s reputed longtime lover, who answers the question on everybody’s lips: was JC’s father an Extra-Terrestrial? Sources in Nazareth report that JC’s mother was the victim of alien abduction.

Tuesday March 25th, 2008

 Dueling Sacrifices

 Out of the wilderness Elijah the prophet appeared, declaring jihad against the priests of Baal, and for three and a half years he turned Israel into a dust bowl. Then, he challenged the king and his stylish queen and their 950 prophets to dueling sacrifices. “How long will you go limping between two opinions?” he asked Israel. (1 Kings 18.11)

They agreed, “The God who answers by fire is God.” Americans, of course, would take a poll.

All day long, the priests of Baal hopped about the altar like so many Easter bunnies, crying out, gashing themselves in their frenzy. “Maybe your god’s napping,” Elijah said. “Maybe he’s relieving himself.”

At the time of the evening sacrifice, Elijah prepared the altar, pouring copious amounts of water on it-perhaps symbolizing repentance (1 Samuel 7.6)-and simply called on God. Fire fell from heaven, consuming offering, altar stones, and water. Elijah then led in slaughtering all the infidel priests; the long drought in Israel ended.

Drought of Doubt

But a drought of spirit began for Elijah. He fled the furious queen for fear of his life. At Mt. Horeb he spent the night in a cave; experienced wind, earthquake, fire-God not in any of them. What a letdown for a guy who pronounced drought and summoned a lightning strike from the blue.

In the sound of silence that came after, there was God. Elijah came to the mouth of the cave, and God asked, “What are you doing here?”

Elijah whined, “I’m the only one left who worships you, and they’re out to get me.”

Doubt = double-crossing, doublespeak

“Doubt” and “double” have the same root. Doubting is hesitating, being torn between two lovers, hopping between two gods. Jesus said, you can’t serve two masters. You’ll love the one and hate the other,  be devoted to one and despise the other. (Matt 6.24)

A double-dealing person is deceitful, underhanded; double crossing someone is betraying them, like Judas did. Your doppelganger is your shadow self, in psychology more positive than in pop culture. Mr. Hyde was Dr. Jekyll’s vicious doppelganger. In his novel 1984 George Orwell coined the term “doublespeak,” personal, political or business equivocation.

The National Council of Teachers of English bestow a Doublespeak Award each year. The 2007 winner was Alberto Gonzales, whose Senate testimony was evasive and confusing in the extreme. In response to questioning by Senator Edward Kennedy, Mr. Gonzales said, “Senator, I have in my mind a recollection as to knowing as to some of these United States attorneys. There are two that I do not recall knowing in my mind what I understood to be the reasons for the removal.”

Gonzales’ boss George W. Bush won in 2006 for his speech in New Orleans on September 15, 2006, calling for an end to deep, persistent poverty with roots in racial discrimination. However, a week before the President’s speech, he signed an executive order suspending the 1931 Davis-Bacon Act, thereby allowing federal contractors rebuilding in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina to pay below the prevailing wage.

Does W  stand for double-dealing, double speaking?

You’ll find more about the NCTE Doublespeak Awards at http://www.ncte.org/about/awards/council/other/106868.htm

Double-minded 

James says, “The one who doubts is like a wave of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind; for the doubter, being double-minded and unstable in every way, must not expect to receive anything from the Lord. James 1:6-7 (NRSV)

Doubt is Thomas’s Domain 

In the New Testament the doubt domain belongs to Thomas the Twin. He certainly was two-faced. He could say, “Let’s go die with Jesus,” (John 11.16); but, faced with the witness of Jesus’ resurrection, he replied, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” John 20:25 (NRSV).

When the Risen Christ bared his wounds for Thomas’ touch, he didn’t need to touch to know for sure, answering instead, “My Lord and my God!”

Sometimes I throwback to the cave dweller, sniffing to myself, “I’m the only one who…” You fill in the blank. Other times my brave avowals of bearing the cross with Jesus are so much doublespeak. I confess that I’m even double-minded on occasion.

“If only I could see Jesus, like Thomas,” the seducer whispers, “it’d be easy to follow Jesus.”

Let us be One

Martin Buber in “The Way of Man” wrote,

“The man with the divided, complicated, contradictory soul is not helpless: the core of his soul, the divine force in its depths, is capable of acting upon it, changing it, binding the conflicting forces together, amalgamating the diverging elements - is capable of unifying it.” (Pendle Hill pamphlet #106, p. 18) http://www.pendlehill.org/resources/files/pdf%20files/php106.pdf

The fire of God’s love can meld us into one, one with self, one with others, one with creation, one with God. Let it begin in me.

THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 21, 2008

There’s still the OG, GOG & MAGOG BLOG to write someday. But this one will do for now-jlh

This is not a war story. It’s about George Bush and Al Qaeda, Iraq and America, Israelis and Palestinians; it’s about the Shechinah God’s glory in exile, how a Jew wrote about the Shoah, and how you and I deal with evil in our own heart.

But all the conflicts of Gog and Magog arise out of those evil forces which have not been overcome in the conflict against the Gogs and Magogs who dwell in human hearts.

-Martin Buber, For the Sake of Heaven, (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1945), p. 284.

Martin Buber’s novel For the Sake of Heaven, alternately titled Gog and Magog, is set during the Napoleonic wars. In understated narrative it relates the conflict between two Hasidic rabbis, the Seer and the Yehudi. It causes me to reflect on conflict in my personal history.

Conflict ministry ain’t what it’s cracked up to be

During my pastorates I lived on a first-name basis with conflict. At the denominational level, I finished three years of graduate study in Hebrew and Old Testament at Southern Seminary in 1979, the year conservatives announced a 10 year plan to gain control the Southern Baptist Convention by winning the presidency each year. The president appoints trustees of boards and agencies. In 10 years conservatives replaced trustees representing a broad constituency with those who represented only fundamentalists. Depending on your viewpoint, you call this the SBC controversy or takeover or conservative resurgence.

I only went once to the Southern Baptist Convention meeting-in Dallas in 1985. That year, a massive 45,000 messengers attended. The fifth year of the takeover, moderates at last had realized what they were losing and mounted a challenge. Dr. Charles Stanley, pastor, First Baptist Church, Atlanta, presided. On Tuesday morning the crucial vote for president occurred. At 6:00 a.m. thousands of messengers jammed the halls of the Tarrant County Convention Center, waiting more than two hours for the doors to open.

Someone began to sing. Amazing Grace, What a Friend We Have in Jesus. For two hours thousands of voices filled the building with sweet harmony. But, once the doors opened, from the moderates’ viewpoint at least, hardball politics governed the meeting. Of course, conservatives report events much differently.

My wife Sandy and I met Hollie and Janell Atkinson from Texas and sat with them through a Convention totally controlled by conservatives. We wept. We never went to another annual Convention meeting.

Escape to Virginia, bastion of liberty

In 1989, the year conservatives completed this plan, my family and I had moved to Virginia, the state widely regarded among Baptist moderates as least likely to fall to fundamentalist control. For 10 years I pastored a small congregation near Richmond. The controversy raged on at the state level of the denomination. Blow-by-blow descriptions absorbed many pastors meetings: what the fundies did, what the liberals did, what the fundies did back, what the liberals did back. After a year or two, I stopped going.

The controversy was personal. My family were Baptists the way people are Catholics or Jews. It’s engraved in my DNA. I was a Ph.D. candidate at Babylon the mother of harlots, Southern Seminary in Louisville. The year the SBC banned ordination of women, my wife Sandy was ordained at St. Matthews Baptist Church, where her uncle had pastored, her father was married, and her grandparents were baptized. (Her uncle refused to attend.) I wrote curriculum for the Baptist Sunday School Board. The man who installed the modem lines connecting my computer with the BSSB warned me against writing liberal lessons!

Unless you’ve had surgery without anesthesia, you can’t comprehend the pain. One aged matriarch described it as “an unending funeral.” But most ordinary Baptists didn’t know or care what the brouhaha was all about.

Conservatives used to invite liberals to become Methodists or Presbyterians or other liberals.

Exit to Babylon

In the film Places in the Heart, Mose, a black itinerant, teaches a widow woman how to bring in a crop of cotton, in fact the prize-winning first bale. When the KKK shows up, a blind man identifies them by voice and stops a lynching. The widow returns from a dance to find Mose about to leave. “I best be gettin’ along , ma’am, before they come back,” he says. “Guess I got a little more attached to this place than I thought.”

Baptist preachers used to joke: “if the Convention ever splits, I’m going with the Annuity Board.” Some years ago, I transferred 30 years of retirement savings from the Annuity Board. But the joke puts its finger on what really fueled the SBC Armageddon: who owns the billions and billions of dollars worth of assets-the schools, the seminaries, the boards and agencies. My mother and dad gave sacrificially to SBC causes for a lifetime; they considered it giving to the Lord. How could I let people whom I viscerally despise steal what my family helped to build?

I realized that my folks gave to the Lord. The SBC assets belong to the Lord, not to conservatives, not to liberals, not to me. The Lord can do as the Lord pleases with them.

As X-rated as it gets

In the novel the Seer viewed the Yehudi as his enemy. The Yehudi had a vision of a woman swathed in the black veil with bare feet. Apparently, for a Hasidic rabbi, that’s as X-rated as it gets!

The woman spoke: “I am weary unto death, for ye have hunted me down. I am sick unto death, for ye have tormented me. I am shamed, for ye have denied me. Ye are the tyrant, who keeps me in exile.

“When ye are hostile to each other, ye hunt me down. When ye plot evil against each other, ye torment me. When ye slander each other, ye deny me. Each of you exiles his comrades and so together ye exile me.”

[The woman raises her veil and asks:] “When shall I find rest? When may I go home?”

(p. 229)

In returning and rest

Spoiler: The Yehudi gave his life for the Seer and for the woman, the Shechinah in exile. I won’t pin it down with an exact quote, but Buber believed that each of us can redeem evil by teshubah (from the root shuv, often rendered repent), by returning, by using the evil impulse the yetzer ha-ra for good.

For thus said the Lord God, the Holy One of Israel: In returning and rest you shall be saved; in quietness and in trust shall be your strength. Isaiah 30:15 (NRSV)

Buber’s story of two rabbis, far more alike than they are different, challenges me to find the evil impulse within me; and to deny that within which divides the world into people of God versus Gog and Magog.

MONDAY, MARCH 3, 2008

Hamlet asked his friend if Alexander the Great became an ordinary skeleton.

The Hebrew Bible’s Stephen King, master of macabre, wizard of weird, pornographic, catatonic- Ezekiel is never dull. In chapter 37, the valley of dry bones, he questions God, “Can these bones live?”

Welcome to beautiful, downtown Death Valley

Sometimes preachers survey the congregation and see Death Valley; other times they feel Death Valley in the heart. You get tired of petty power games and fragile egos, not least your own. You grow impatient with myopic minds and dead devotion. You pray, “Let a tornado sweep away the walls that quarantine the church from the world.”

The year before I came as pastor to one church, it did. A tornado blasted away the building, leaving Easter sheet music on the chairs of the choir and the Alpha and Omega symbols on part of the front wall of the sanctuary still standing; the rest lay in rubble. Then, the young handsome pastor left his wife to marry a young girl with whom he was counseling.

Because of my own mild CP, I took great pride in our church providing space for a handicapped preschool, where children with cerebral palsy came for a few hours a day. Volunteers helped do motion exercises to create new brain patterns, and parents enjoyed brief periods of respite from the onerous responsibilities of caregiving. When I left after eight years, the first thing the church did was kick the preschoolers out. (All those diapers.)

Who are the least of these?

Paleontologist in the Pulpit

In regard to some people of the church I don’t know the answer to the question, “Can these bones live?” In regard to myself, at least on Mondays, I don’t either. And some weeks are all Mondays.

Can these bones live? Zeke had more faith than I do; he said, “You know.”

Then with a rattle and a bang there in the mind’s eye were bones, arranged in decency and order, an anatomist’s pride, plus sinews and flesh-a zombie army. Maybe he should stop while he’s ahead. Zombies like zealots are low maintenance, after all, if you don’t mind the smell.

CS Lewis was fond of saying, the gospel doesn’t make people nice, but new. (Something like that, anyway. It’s Monday.)

Nice Zombies

Most of us, if we’re honest with ourselves, choose nice in the trice. New people have all those rough edges to rasp down smooth. They have to be trained in how we’ve always done things around here, the seven last words of the church. They ask embarrassing questions, besides “Where did Cain get his wife?” That one we can handle. Others, not so much: Why are the churches dying in urban neighborhoods being reborn? Where are the people who can’t read, who can’t speak English, who need jobs and clothes and dental work, who can’t get into a building at 11 a.m. on Sunday?

I recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of my ordination. Most of those years I was doing time in the church, so I get to ask such questions.

The incorrigible God says, “Preach to the ruah breath-wind-spirit, preach to these slain.” I’m with Martha, “Lord, they’ve been in the grave so long, they’ll stink!” God says, “Preach!”

The damn thing is, you have to preach with love-not love of preaching, not even love of God is enough. You gotta love the people God has put within earshot of your words. Love isn’t all sappy Hallmark moments. Sometimes it stings like a hypodermic, sometimes it stuns like a cancer diagnosis. Sometimes it’s safe enough for a kitten to cuddle close to, sometimes it’s too dangerous to say out loud.

Love is being the truth out loud. Ain’t EZ. The Lord warned Zeke:

They come to you as people come, and they sit before you as my people, and they hear your words, but they will not obey them. For flattery is on their lips, but their heart is set on their gain. To them you are like a singer of love songs, one who has a beautiful voice and plays well on an instrument; they hear what you say, but they will not do it. When this comes–and come it will!–then they shall know that a prophet has been among them. Ezek 33:30-33 (NRSV)

Moon rise

I’ve learned to put my guard up when someone says, “I need to speak to you in Christian love.” That usually means brass knuckled spite or, worse, velvet malice.

No, the love I mean is agapé. You know, 100% giving love, try-it-on-your- own-and-be-spent-in-a-minute love. You learn it on moon days when God isn’t just a quick bright thing swallowed by the jaws of darkness, but a rising light reflected off a moonscape of desolation.