"With Eyes Wide Open"

Baptist minister and social work professor Tony Campolo tells of a time he was on a supervisory visit to missions in Haiti where his undergraduate students did internships. One evening he left his hotel and went across the street to a small restaurant. He was placed at a table beside a large, first floor window that looked out on the street. It was a working dinner - he was eating alone. He kept his head down as he carefully checked over the mission files and travel plans he had laid out on the table. It was only when the waiter brought his food that he looked up and noticed the group of small boys outside his window. They had bare feet, sad eyes, and distended bellies. The boys leaned against the window, shading their eyes so they could see as they stared at his meal of chicken and rice with fruit. After placing the food in front of Tony, the waiter pulled down the shade and said, “Don’t let them disturb your dinner.”

The season of Lent is a good time for us to lift up our eyes and hearts from the day-to-day business of our lives to take a good look around at the world’s needs. Too often we are like the waiter, seeing the needs of others as a disturbance rather than as an opportunity to love and serve.

The needs of the world should disturb us, must disturb us. To stand by while children starve, others suffer from curable diseases, and still others are subjected to inhuman living conditions by corrupt and evil governments - this is participation in evil as surely as if we had directly made the decisions that condemned so many to so much suffering. “Things we have done or left undone,” the prayer of confession says. (Book of Common Prayer, p. 360)

Our call as Christians is to keep the shade up; to focus the light of God’s love and righteousness on the world’s great inequities and injustices. Our call as Christians is to find creative ways to make a difference, to do our part to chip away at issues of poverty, disease, and oppression; both across the ocean and across the street. We are not permitted the luxury of turning our heads and looking the other way. There used to be a little religious comic strip called Pontius’ Puddle. The characters were frogs and tadpoles and dragonflies and such. One day a frog said to a dragonfly, “Why doesn’t God do something about all the bad things in the world?” The dragonfly replied, “God Did! God made you, didn’t he?” Peace, Delmer

On “Learning” the Faith

Almost fifty years ago I was in my first semester of seminary, beginning my pastoral education. One of the first books I read was “Values for Tomorrow’s Children” by Episcopal priest and professor John Westerhoff. His basic premise is that learning to be a Christian is profoundly different from learning to be an historian, or a biologist, or an auto mechanic. In most of those fields it’s about learning the facts and practices. If you know it, and can do it, you’ve learned it.

Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are very different. Simply put, intellectual information is a far second to Spiritual formation in Christian Education. To Westerhoff, Christian Education is about shaping “cruciform” lives, lives that conform to the life of Christ, lives that consistently, daily, naturally, take up a cross and follow. The “facts of the faith,” the theological information, is therefore only useful in terms of how it helps us shape our lives in the imitation of Christ.

In the Early Church, Lent developed as a period of Pre-Easter instruction in the faith for recent converts. As a group they studied and prepared together, culminating on being baptized by immersion on Holy Saturday and taking their First Communion together at dawn on Easter morning.

By Medieval times, though Mass was celebrated each day in the church, people were only required to commune once a year, preceded by confession. Then, as now, people have a tendency to gravitate toward the minimum, so Easter Communion was the norm. Since by this time, most people had been baptized as infants, Lent stopped being a time to prepare for baptism and instead become the main period of Christian instruction and formation for adults as they prepared for their Easter Confession and Communion.

Various “Catechism Books” were prepared for the clergy to use as they guided the people in preparation. At first, these were a list of the Ten Commandments, with examples, so that people could figure out what they needed to confess. Eventually the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, IN LATIN, were added for the people to memorize so they could participate in the Mass more easily.

At the time of the Reformation, various reformers used the already familiar Catechism form to teach the new Reformed or Evangelical faith. The main differences were that it was now in the language of the people (German, French, English, etc.) not Latin, and the focus of teaching had shifted from the Ten Commandments and the Confession ritual to the new Protestant doctrine of justification by grace through faith. All instruction was aimed more at a change of the heart and a post-conversion change of lifestyle than the previous emphasis on cleansing oneself of all possible sins. In the process, Christian “education” became a matter of soul formation rather than religious in-formation.

This year, on Wednesday nights in Lent, I will lead short Soul Formation sessions based on the form, but not the content, of Reformation Catechisms. We will examine the Ten Commandments, the Creeds, The Lord’s Prayer, the Sacraments, and yes, Confession (or more properly “Absolution”) as a way of going deeper in our personal and congregational efforts to follow Jesus more closely on the Way of the Cross.

Peace, Delmer

Do You Get It?

Epiphany is the season of light. The word means, “something previously hidden coming into view.” Epiphany is not about something that didn’t exist before suddenly being created; rather it is about our becoming aware of a reality that has been there all along. Perhaps the slogan for Epiphany should, “Oh, now I get it!” It’s like in math class when an equation suddenly makes sense; or one of those optical illusions where, if you look at it just right, you can see the name of Jesus or something. “Wow, now I can see it.”

The first chapter of John sets the tone for the season of Epiphany. The author reminds us that through “the Word” God spoke the world into being, spoke light into the world’s chaotic darkness. John then makes a magnificent connection by saying that “the Word became flesh and lived among us;” revealing to us that the Christ, the creative force of God, has been around since the beginning and is now become visible to us in the person of a humble carpenter from the little village of Nazareth. It is an al most unbelievable claim, one that is widely debated. The God of the Universe, the creator of all that is, was, and ever will be; walking around as a Jewish carpenter/teacher? If we had not been told this all our lives it would stagger the imagination. It is not only difficult to believe now; it was difficult to believe then. This is why John and the other Gospel writers talked so much about signs, and fulfillment of scripture, and miracles, etc. They were putting forth all their evidence that this man was indeed who he said he was – no matter how hard that was to believe.

We in the modern world are conditioned to think of truth as facts – particularly empirical, scientifically provable facts. And the “divinity of Christ” is not that sort of truth, it is not a “fact” that can be measured and recorded and repeated in experimentation. Rather, it is an Epiphany, a revelation, a reality that is deeply em bedded in the fabric of the universe and which becomes real to us through faith. This does not mean that to believe in Christ’s divinity is irrational; it simply means that it is not a thing that can be reasoned out using either science or philosophy. It stands outside those areas of expertise.

The Epiphany of our Lord on January 6 celebrates the arrival of the Magi to worship the king revealed to them by the star in the heavens. Then, on Sunday, January 7, we observe the Baptism of our Lord in which a voice comes from heaven to declare Jesus as the Son of God. The Epiphany season ends on Sunday, February 11, with the Transfiguration story - Jesus goes up on a mountain with a few disciples. There light, and voices, and visions reveal him to be divine. On the Sundays in between we will look at a variety of ways in which the Gospels reveal to us that Jesus is the Christ. We will also begin to see what it looks like for us to be Jesus’ sisters and brothers, fellow children of God. Along the way, it is likely we will all have many “Aha” moments when we say to ourselves, “Now I get it!”

Peace,
Delmer

Something to Sing About

The world’s celebration of the Nativity of Christ is surrounded by Song. No secular artist puts out a Thanksgiving CD or an Easter Album, but almost everybody tries to “cash in” on Christmas, either with new songs or old favorites. Christmas songs fill the malls and stores and radio playlists from early November until Christmas Day. And the question arises: What is it about Christmas that causes the heart to sing?

It was like that from the beginning. In Luke’s Gospel: Mary sings The Magnificat, Zechariah celebrates the birth of his son John (to be called the Baptist) with a song that points to the birth of another child, the “Coming One.” Of course the angels sing to the shepherds on the night of Christ’s birth, and at the dedication of the child old Simeon sees the baby and bursts into a song of praise.

Again, what is it about Christmas that causes us to sing? We have lots of good Easter hymns, but the secular world is much more likely to know “Here Comes Peter Cottontail” than “Thine Is the Glory.” Not so with Christmas carols. Almost everybody can sing at least one verse of “Away In a Manger” or “O Little Town of Bethlehem,” and can at least recognize the tune of a dozen more. Is it just the vast exposure on Radio and TV, or is there something about the Birth of the Christ Child that makes us want to sing?

A couple of things occur to me. First: the only really appropriate response to mystery is adoration, and what better way to adore than to sing. The story that we celebrate at Christmas is a “something more” mystery. Underneath all the theological baggage and argumentation there is this for all of us: life can be very ordinary and difficult and painful and short and depressing. The birth of a child as the Son of God, a message from beyond that God does love us after all, that this world is not “all there is,” that Peace and Love and Joy are real and are really important and are really possible is a message we all need to hear.

So even those who have their doubts about God, and Jesus, and the Church can believe in the “something more” that Christmas represents to them: the potential for good in a cold and lonely world. And that mysterious possibility is something to sing about.

Second: for those of us who receive the story as a true story, a story about how the God of the universe let go of all the trappings and power of Heaven to come and be born in a stable, taking on, as the Eucharistic prayer says, “our nature and our lot,” well, that too is a mystery beyond words. We cannot comprehend a love that big, and that deep, and that complete. So, when ordinary words fail us, we, like Mary, and Zechariah, and Simeon, and the angels; burst into songs of joy and gladness.

Peace, Delmer

Duh-ciples

A few years ago I was leading a preaching workshop when one of the participants, a plain spoken Methodist preacher from south Georgia, brought the house down with laughter when she told us she had recently preached a sermon about the “Duh”-ciples. She said, “That’s how we pronounce d-i-s-c-i-p-l-e-s in south Georgia and every time I hear it I think, ‘That’s about right – whenever Jesus said something important, the disciples looked at him all slack-jawed and said, “Duuuuh? What do you mean, Jesus? ”

When I stopped laughing, I started thinking. “Am I a “duh-ciple?” “Do I only pretend to understand what Jesus is calling us to be and do? Do I nod, all the while both not understanding the message and not caring enough to figure it out? Or am I a disciple? One who both learns and practices what Jesus taught.”

The words “disciple” and “discipline” come from the same root and have similar and overlapping meanings. They both derive from the Latin “discipulus” which means learner or pupil. Eventually in English, disciple came to mean someone who was a pupil of a particular teacher or system of thought and discipline came to mean first the subject studied (“the discipline of mathematics”) and only later the methods used to teach the subject. Finally, discipline came to mean the measures by which authority figures instill obedience in others – be they soldiers drilling, or football players practicing, or first graders learning to stand in line – all need to be taught discipline.

It seems to me that the surest route to not being a “duh-ciple” is a bit of creative self-discipline. No adult likes to be told what to think or do by another person, even if, or maybe especially if, that other person claims to speak for God. Rather, we need to be both students of Jesus and followers of Jesus. We are called to study over and pray about the words and deeds of Jesus. Rather than dully nodding our heads and muttering “duh,” we must think deeply about what is said and make every effort to understand it. Just as importantly, we need to create for ourselves a “discipline” of prayer and actions that follows the example of Jesus.

For example, rather than just thinking about and talking about world hunger; we must also actively engage in the feeding of people who are hungry. It is only through the discipline of acting out our faith that we truly come to understand it.

Peace,
Your fellow “duh”- ciple, Delmer

A Paradox

Aunt Mildred, my daddy’s sister, had a big chest freezer in the basement. One time when she and her husband were away visiting the cousins down near Southern Pines, there was a winter ice storm and the power was out for several days. When Aunt Mildred and Uncle L.W. got home, the freezer had thawed around the seal and then refroze – sealing itself shut. There was no way to get it open.

Well, that’s not exactly true. There was a very obvious way. Unplug it, turn it off, let it thaw. But Aunt Mildred didn’t want to do that. She considered herself to be on the horns of a dilemma. “There’s a lot of good meat in there,” she said, “if I unplug, a lot of that meat will be ruined.” Uncle L.W. countered, “But, it’s frozen shut and we can’t use any of it. We may as well thaw it out and use what we can.” Aunt Mildred’s freezer stayed plugged in and frozen shut for several years while they argued about what to do.

I have thought of that freezer over the years when I have found myself frozen with no idea of what exactly I should do. I have also sometimes realized that, like Aunt Mildred, I thought I had no options when really I did. The problem was simple - I didn’t like any of my options, therefore I did nothing. Aunt Mildred couldn’t see any way to get at her frozen meat without losing some of it, and she was unwilling to lose anything, therefore she gained nothing. There have been times in my life that I have been so afraid of making a mistake, of doing the wrong thing, that I have been immobilized, unable to act.

One of my favorite professors at Duke Divinity School, Dr. Herb Edwards, taught “Black Church Studies.” He often said, “The trouble with the church is that it does not believe in the resurrection. Because we are so afraid of death, we are unable to take the risk of living boldly for God.” This attitude strikes churches of all shapes and sizes, we become frozen, afraid to risk, fearful of losing what little we have, so afraid of dying that we forget to live.

The Gospel calls us to life; to life abundant, to life that takes chances, to life that makes a difference in the lives of others. A couple of weeks ago the Gospel lesson said, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will find it.” (Matthew 16:25) That is the paradox that ultimately solves our dilemma. We are free to act, individually and as a congregation, in new, and bold, and often scary ways - attempting new things that might fail, taking the risk of losing - all for the sake of the possibility of letting loose the love of God into the world.

Peace, Delmer

The Three Legged Stool

Recently a friend fell into a conversation about church with a local Baptist minister. When she said she attended the Episcopal Church, he smiled and said, “Oh, you go to the “thinking church.” How did the Episcopal Church get the reputation as “the thinking church?” Even though most Episcopalians don’t know his name, they owe a great debt of thanks to the Rev. Richard Hooker (1554-1600), a priest in the Church of England. In his book “Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity,” he laid out what became the standard Anglican understanding of how we think about who we are as a Christian people in the world today.

At the time that Hooker wrote, the Church of England had separated itself from the pope and the Church of Rome. Their link to the traditional, hierarchical, top down method of doing theology had been cut. While the Church of England still knew the tradition, now that they didn’t have to listen to the pope, there was much argument over who got to interpret the tradition and decide what it meant. At the same time, the Reformers on the continent, not only Luther and Calvin but also many others, cried out for “sola scriptura” that is, “The Bible only,” as the source of Christian understanding. And both England and the continent were in the early days of the Enlightenment, the renewal of respect for human reason, for humanity’s capacity to explore, and think about, and understand, the world around them.

Tradition, Scripture, and Reason: each raised its voice to say, “Me, me, choose me!” Supporters of each of these ways of “doing theology” pushed for their way to become THE way in the Church of England. And Richard Hooker brilliantly created the combination that has come to be known as “the three-legged stool;” a very homey image for such an important idea. The thing about a three-legged stool is that it will not wobble – it may not be even or level, but it will not wobble. Even if one of the legs is a little shorter or longer than the other two, or if they are all of differing lengths – set it down and sit on it and it will not wobble. So it is with Anglican (Episcopal) thinking. The trio of Scripture, Tradition and Reason are not always given equal weight in answering all questions, but each one is always considered:

Scripture: What does the Bible say about it?
Tradition: What have Christians thought about this for the last 2000 years?
Reason: What makes sense to us now?

The really brilliant thing about the three-legged stool is its versatility. Individual Christians can use it in thinking about their personal faith and life; a congregation can use it to think together about where God is leading them; large groups like the diocese or the national church use it in deliberating on matters of deep import.

So, the next time you find yourself feeling grateful for a place like Good Shepherd Episcopal Church where you can not only think freely about your life of faith, but also speak freely about what you think – pray a prayer of thanksgiving for Father Richard Hooker and his three-legged stool.

Peace, Delme

The Passing Form

Do you remember the movie “Selma,” about Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Voting Rights March? My wife and I were talking about it the other day and had trouble remembering when and where we saw it. Turns out it was in Cleveland, TN, because that was the closest showing we could find. As we talked, I also remembered that afterwards we went to Cracker Barrel and had a late dinner. (Depending on how you take the word “cracker,” it was, on reflection, a somewhat ironic choice.) Oftentimes when I go there to eat, I enjoy looking around at the old pictures and knick-knacks that Cracker Barrel collects to decorate the walls. And I always remember a line from 1 Corinthians 7:31. “For the present form of the world is passing away.”

The world reflected in those old family portraits, and advertising signs, and farm implements, is pretty much long gone. There were living echoes of it when I was a child – like my Great-Grandfather Watson. He was born in 1866 and died in 1960 when I was six years old. The world he was born into and grew up in was almost completely gone by the time he died. Or the world of white domination and black subjugation that the white people of Selma, and other places all across this country, tried to hold onto has mostly slipped away. For good or ill, Paul is right, “the PRESENT form of this world is passing away.” It always has and it always will.

Scripture encourages us to hold onto God and the good, and to be willing to let everything else go, because it will go whether we let it or not. Sometimes we humans foolishly think that the world that we create – the political structures, the economic systems, the cultural norms and more, the art and science and definitions of truth and value - will last forever. But they don’t. Even our ideas about how to be church are transitory, here today and gone tomorrow. Indeed, “the present FORM of the world is passing away.”

The “present form,” but not the world itself. The world is God’s precious creation. Remember, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,” and “The Son came not to condemn the world, but that the world, through him, might be saved.” (John 3:16-17)

In his letter to Corinthians, Paul’s advice about “let those who have wives be as though they had none,” etc. can be a bit confusing, but notice – he doesn’t say quit marrying, and mourning, and rejoicing, and buying, and selling, and otherwise dealing with the world. He does say to remember that all those things, including our very lives, are a part of the present form of the world that is passing away; here today and gone tomorrow. The only thing eternally permanent is God and our relationship with the holy – and we don’t have to worry about that passing away, for God has claimed us and will never let us go.

Peace, Delmer

Heavenly Highway Patrol

A few years ago I was on a trip over to Chattanooga when I glanced in my rear-view mirror and saw a silver car with black trim and black writing on the hood. “Oh oh,” I thought, “it’s the Highway Patrol.” First thing I did was check my speed. Okay, not speeding. Then I proceeded to drive very carefully, maintained my lane, used appropriate turn signals to change lanes, etc. And the car stayed right behind me, six car lengths back. This went on for ten or fifteen minutes as I grew progressively anxious. “Why are they following me?” “Have I done anything wrong?” “Is my License Plate expired?” “Do I have a tail light out?” “What!?”

I got particularly nervous when the road widened out to two lanes on my side and four or five cars passed both the patrol car and me, going at least ten miles over the speed limit in the process. “Why aren’t they going after them? Why are they still following me?” As I drew up to a stop light my paranoia was really high; I was thinking of pulling over and putting my hands in the air. The silver and black car pulled up beside me and then I could read: STUDENT DRIVER written across the front. I felt equal parts silly and relieved. Then the passenger side window in the student car was rolled down and the rider signaled me to put mine down. When I did, the driving instructor thanked me for being such a good role model of correct and careful driving. (Apologies to anyone who has ever ridden with me, but it appears I am capable of good driving if I put my mind to it. You can stop laughing now.) I smiled a weak and humble smile, waved and nodded. I was too ashamed of myself to actually say anything; being thanked under false pretenses and all.

Well, I soon recovered and began thinking about both literature and theology, as is my wont. First I remembered a famous line from the Flannery O’Connor’s short story, A Good Man is Hard to Find. A character called the Misfit says about a mean old grandmother who died trying to save her grandchildren’s lives, “she would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life." The Misfit and his fellow criminals were like the Highway Patrol in one respect - their constant surveillance created a situation in which one felt compelled to do the right thing.

The theology question for us as a people of faith is this. “Do we need a Heavenly Highway Patrolperson watching our every move in order for us to do the right thing? Is it necessary for us to be pushed into a corner, confronted with dire matters of life and death, for us to summon up the courage to trust God and follow Christ?” The point of living together in Christian community - joining one another in worship, prayer, Bible study, and caring action in the community - is that we be shaped into a people whose Christianity is natural and not forced; people who will do the right thing not to please God, or to avoid God’s wrath, or because we must. Our aim is to be people who to do the right and loving thing because it is simply who we have become in response to God’s love for us.

Peace,
Delmer

We are all Beggars

“Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food.” I have always appreciated this quote from the Rev. D. T. Niles, a minister from the island nation of Sri Lanka. Today I ran across it in its original context and was even more impressed. The full quote goes like this: “Evangelism is witness. It is one beggar telling another beggar where to get food. The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty. We are all simply guests at the Master’s table and, as evangelists, we call others to dinner.”

“The Christian does not offer out of his bounty. He has no bounty.” We in America might say, “Christians do not offer to others out of their personal wealth. We have no personal wealth.”

What Niles means is simply this; all we have to offer to others is what God has already given to us. Generosity of spirit begins with remembering that all that we are and all that we have has come to us from the graciousness of God. Not simply, or even primarily, our material things; but more importantly the love and forgiveness we as Christians have experienced from God in the church. This sense of receiving from God’s grace goes out from our emotional and moral center as we realize that who we are; our physical and emotional and intellectual giftedness, comes directly from God’s hand. Our ability to work and earn a living, our enjoyment of the arts and sports and community life; the love we give and receive within the life of the church; all these things are gifts from God’s hands. They are pleasures to be received at the Master’s table.

At some point all of us begin to ask ourselves a variation the Kris Kristofferson song, “Why me, Lord?” “Why do I have plenty while others suffer?” And the answer comes to us as it has come to many Christians down through the ages, “You have what you have, you know what you know, you can do what you can do – not for yourself but for others. You have been blessed not for privilege; but for purpose.”

True generosity flows out of the awareness that all that we are, and all that we have, has come to us from God’s gracious hand, and that it came to us so that we could pass it on to others. We are invited to use it where it is needed most to serve God’s people best.

We are all beggars, and as beggars we are called by God to invite everyone to the Lord’s bountiful table.

Peace, Delmer

A National Prayer Concern

Like everyone else my age, I remember where I was when I heard about the assassination of President Kennedy; the fourth grade classroom at Red Bank Elementary School in Claudville, VA. It was, for me, the beginning of the end of innocence. Until that time I lived in a warm little bubble of family and friends and school and church. Almost everyone I knew (except my evil older brother) was good to me and everywhere I went I felt safe. But a man with a gun and a problem shattered my world.

In the years since there have been many people (mostly male) with guns and problems. And they all seemed to think that the guns were the solution to their problems; or at least a way to scream into the dark night of their despair with a voice certain to be heard. The list is long. There have been very public shootings like Martin Luther King, Jr., way, way too many school shootings, and three in the last week (April 13-20) - 1) a teen-age boy knocking on the wrong door in Kansas City, 2) a young woman and her friends in the wrong driveway in rural New York, and 3) a high-school cheerleader getting in the wrong car in Texas. Over the years there have been other gun deaths that were very personal and private; relatives and friends and parishioners who thought that their only way out of their particular problem was a gun fired at themselves or others.

It is because of these many personal occasions that I am not quick to dismiss the more distant, public events on TV as awful things that frighten but do not affect me. As the poet John Donne said, “Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.” No, we are not islands, living out our lives secure behind out actual or metaphorical locked gates. We are connected to one another in more ways than most of us can count, and in answer to Cain’s rhetorical question, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” we are impelled to answer, “Well yes, actually we are.” As people who are called by God to live responsibly in relation to one another, it is our Christian duty to do our very best to care for our community and our country.

As a nation, we have a problem. In particular, we have a gun problem. There are certain people who simply do not need to have access to guns. For whatever reason, the system we have now is not working in keeping guns out of the wrong people’s hands. I invite you to join me in praying, and thinking, and working on ways to help this community and this country deal with this very serious problem. I have no solutions to offer, only a belief that, with God’s help and a firm resolve, we can find a way to step back from running off the edge of this societal cliff.

Peace, Delmer

Nostalgia

A few years ago my wife Deborah and I attended a family funeral. As is typical in the south, many people brought food to the family’s home. While we were still on the way down east, Deborah called a cousin and learned that Aunt Evelyn had brought one of her “famous” lemon meringue pies. Deborah immediately told that cousin to make sure that some of that pie was “laid back” and saved for her. It’s a long trip to eastern North Carolina and I heard a lot about that pie on the way. So many of her other cousins, as she frequently called them to make sure her piece was safe. After the funeral we went to the family’s home for a meal and Deborah got her pie. Actually, all of us had some - there was plenty. The pie was good, but as one of the other “cousins-in-law” and I agreed, it wasn’t “all that.” We also decided that nostalgia must be what made all these now 50-something cousins lavish such praise on a good but not great lemon meringue pie.

My friend the Rev. John Fairless is a Congregationalist minister in Florida. He is originally from the west Tennessee town of Martin, and he recently posted on his Facebook page that he was in “the” barbecue joint in his hometown. He also put up pictures of his plate. After saying he had eaten and enjoyed barbecue all over the south, he opined “But I gotta say, I know I'm home when I get a taste of some good old, hickorysmoked, pulled pork BBQ in west Tennessee!” In a very few minutes, he had 25 likes, and more to the point of this reflection, a lot of folks from Martin chiming in about how great west Tennessee BBQ is, and how much better it is than the BBQ anywhere else in the world. Nostalgia again, I think. I’ve eaten barbecue in Memphis and other places in west Tennessee. It’s good. But Wilbur’s in Goldsboro, NC is better; to me.

There’s nothing wrong with nostalgia, with remembering things from the past with fondness. A problem arises when our affection for the past prevents us from living effectively in the present, or preparing wisely for the future. These are not easy words for me to write. I like the past, a lot. I read massive tomes of obscure church history for pleasure. I picked a hairstyle, and a beard cut, in 1982 - and I have stuck with them for forty years. But I have had to learn to know the difference between something that’s good because it’s classic with enduring value; and something I like just because it’s old, and familiar, and makes me feel safe.

Pastor Fairless often says to me that Dr. Liston Mills of Vanderbilt Divinity School frequently reminded his students that all religious questions boil down to one basic issue: “Can God be trusted?” for if we cannot completely rely on God, it is wise to stay in the safe zone of tried and true ways of doing things. But if God can be trusted, then it is important for us to raise up our heads and look around, to see what new “Promised Land” God is calling us to occupy, what new mission and ministry God has for us to explore, what new ideas God is dangling in front of our faces, what new pilgrimage of faith we are invited to step out on. My core Christian belief is that God can be trusted to lead, guide, and provide for us. And I am certain that God’s provisions on our journey will be at least as good as Aunt Evelyn’s lemon meringue pie or Wilbur’s Eastern North Carolina barbecue and hushpuppies - probably better.

Peace, Delmer

It's About Time

By Rev. Beverly Braine

January 1st, New Year’s Day, falls on a Sunday this year. I will be doing the services at All Saints in Franklin on that day. I have requested parishioners to bring their 2023 calendars to church that morning, as I want to incorporate a Blessing of the Calendars in each service.

The ancient Hebrew faith, and the Hebrew faith at the time of Jesus, saw all of life as life under God. There was no concept of a division between sacred life and secular life. God was just as much in charge of the selling of chickens in the marketplace as God was in charge of accepting sacrificial offerings brought to the Temple. All time was God’s time. I think we have lost that perspective, and I think our culture is oriented toward a division between Church and the Marketplace, between sacred and secular activity. In asking God’s blessing upon our new calendars for the new year, I believe we are asking God’s blessing on the activities that will occupy every one of the days of 2023.

In my preparation for the doing of these January 1st services, I took some time to look through my 2022 calendar and my 2023 calendar. I found myself musing over the difference between one’s having almost every square with something written on it (2022) and the other’s squares being mostly blank (2023). Then I noticed that every written-on square had an indication of some involvement with another person or group of people. Whether it was an appointment, medical or business, or a repair service call that was to happen; whether it was a class to attend or a church service, or a social event, other people were involved.

So the squares on my new calendar, mostly empty, some filled in, began to speak to me as both invitation and opportunity: each day ripe with the possibility of entering into a relationship with another person or people, whether the relationship be casual or serious, long or short, lasting or fleeting. I would like to approach each new day as an invitation to travel through that day intentionally in the presence of the Holy Spirit. And then I want, also, to view each day as an opportunity to invite the love of Christ to be present with me in such a way that the presence can be felt with the person or people with whom I will be in contact that day.

In a sense, I think I am trying to reclaim a unity of all of life as life under God. And in that sense, my calendar will be a spiritual aid in that endeavor.

I invite you to spend some time with your not-yet-filled-in 2023 calendar. Hold it. Ask God’s blessing upon it and upon all the days of invitation and opportunity it represents. Treasure the possibilities of the many ways that lie ahead for the sharing of God’s love. May each of our 2023s be filled with blessing and hope.

With gratitude,
Bev+

Active Waiting

In Advent, we are called upon to take both our God and ourselves seriously. We are called upon to recognize that life can be snuffed out in an instant and to live accordingly. We are to stay awake, to watch out for signs of God’s activity in the world. This is a difficult thing to do in the midst of modern, secular, consumerist, Christmas. After 2000 years, we’ve sort of stopped looking for Christ to come, and we’ve settled for a pale, weak, neon lit imitation. We schedule office Christmas parties and celebrate family dinners. We buy presents for our spouses and partners and children and other significant others. We decorate our homes with lights and trees and ornaments. We send out holiday greeting cards to people over the country and we hope that our sanity and our bank account will hold out until New Year’s Day. The church’s plea during Advent is that in the midst of all the “Holiday Hoopla” we will remember to look for Christ, to seek signs of his coming, to be alert for his presence “in, with and under” all the gifting and decorating and partying.

Many of us have for many years held onto a vision of a hopeful future, a future in which no children starve or fall victim to incurable diseases, a future in which people lay aside their differences to worship a common God at a common altar, a future in which peace reigns, where military budgets are empty and schools and hospitals are fully funded. And yet we wait, and we wait, and we seek to stay awake, and we seek to trust and hope and believe that God is coming; God is really coming. And we continue to look for signs that God is just around the corner.

Let me suggest that instead of merely looking for signs of Christ’s coming – our more important invitation is to be a sign of Christ’s coming; in our families, in our communities, in our world. I am inviting us to a season of active waiting, of busy anticipation, of involved preparation, of participatory readiness. As we enter this season of Advent, I invite each of us to not only look for signs, but also to be the signs, of Christ life in the midst of the world.

1) Take five minutes every morning and make a Christmas list. Not a list of things to buy, or things to do, or things you want. Instead, make a list of blessings in your life, a list of people you love and who love you in spite of yourself, a list of the signs of Christ’s life in your day-to-day world. After you’ve made your list, pray a prayer of thanks for each thing on the list

2) Take another 10 minutes every day and read a chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. There are only 28 short chapters in Matthew, so you should be able to finish it. By Christmas morning, you will have been reminded of why Jesus came and of what he did for us. By Christmas morning, you will be ready to celebrate with thankfulness and joy, and to praise the Coming of the Messiah, Emmanuel, God with us.

3) Pick out five names from your Christmas card list. Pick out five people that you have almost lost touch with, five people you seldom see or speak to. Call them up or write them a personal letter or send them an email and tell them how much they mean to you and why. Thank them for being a sign of God’s presence and love in your life.

4) Perform a totally “new to you” act of charity this year. Reach out and surprise someone with the unexpected love of God. Give a part of yourself to someone in gratitude for the fact that Christ gave himself for us.

5) And finally, spend the last five minutes of every day asking God to come into your life in a fresh, new, unpredictable way this year.

But I must warn all of us to be careful. Watch out! God just might explode into our lives at a time and in a way we would never expect!

Delmer

Putting Flesh on our Faith

Recently, I posted the following comment in an online chat group of parish pastors:
“The difficulties in moving from seminary to parish, from classroom to ministry, from in the church to outside the church - are all brought on from a failure to realize two inter-related things. 1) The Bible and the church's statements of doctrine are NOT the good news of God active in the world - they are words about the good news. We get hung up in words and forget that the words are about true events of a God who is active deep into our lives. Creation, Covenant, Exodus, Promised Land, Exile, Return, Birth, Life, Cross, Resurrection; all these are words about actual involvements of God in the life of the world.

#2) - We are too long on being conversational about the faith and too short on being incarnational of the faith; the call upon us is to live the story out, not sit inside and talk the story to death.”

I ended the post by saying I was going to think about this some more. It received a lot of “likes” and several comments, most of which were to the effect that I had got it right the first time and should not overthink it. Alas, I am an ENFP on the Myers-Briggs personality indicator (look it up on Wikipedia) and I am constitutionally incapable of not overthinking things. So here are some more thoughts on the subject.

I think it was C.S. Lewis who pointed out the difference between 1) looking at a map of the Amazon River and 2) actually taking a trip to Brazil and traveling up the same river. Too often, we pore over the map without ever plunging into the river of life with God.

Soren Kirkegaard wrote about two young lovers, one English, the other German, who met on the beach in France where they spoke to one another in high school French. They returned home and soon the English young man received a letter from the young woman, written in her native German. He laboriously translated it using a dictionary and a grammar. Kirkegaard points out that it is only because of his personal experience with the girl that the young man bothers to translate it at all, and it is through the actual experience of knowing her that the letter itself has meaning that only the young man understands.

So it is with our Bibles and Prayer Books; we only bother with them and truly understand them because of some encounter with or hunger for that mysterious holiness that lies behind and beyond them.

In recent years there has been a lot of talk among church growth types about how important it is for the church to move from trying to be “attractional,” to being “missional.” Attractional means trying to get people in the world to come to you, missional means being purposeful about going into the world.

I believe being missional is the same thing as being “incarnational.” We are called to put flesh on our faith in the midst of other people’s lives. That is the reason Jesus built no buildings and started no organizations and spent his time in the streets and by the lakes and in the dining rooms and backyards of notorious sinners.

Now, we are not Jesus and we need a place to meet together with others who are attempting to follow Christ. Even Jesus went to synagogue every week and took a community of folk around with him that evolved into the church, the body of Christ in the world.

It is those words, “in the world,” that we should pay attention to. Each congregation is called to plan its ministry in such a way that it is focused more on the community and less on itself –and each individual believer is called to be what Luther called a“little Christ” to other people in our everyday lives; to be kind and generous and forgiving at work and at the store and in the neighborhood and with our families. It is in those spaces that we can really become “the truth that we confess,” the body of Christ "in the world,”

Peace, Delmer

Put Not Your Trust in Princes

"Put not your trust in princes" the psalmist tells us. (Psalm 146:3) In the modern world, "princes" applies to presidents and governors, members of the US Congress and state legislatures. The Bible tells us to obey the government and the Book of Common Prayer encourages us to pray for government leaders, but neither says we should "trust" them, at least not in the final, ultimate sense we are invited to trust in God.

The Psalmist reminds us that our final and lasting hope is in God and God's goodness alone - all else falls far short. As Winston Churchill once said "Democracy is the worst form of government humanity has ever devised; except every other form we have created." The last several year's sharp political divisions in this country are frustrating to all of us, liberals and conservatives, Democrats and Republicans and Libertarians and whatnot alike, and they are a reminder of the truth of Churchill's observation.

Whatever else we can learn from these past few decades in our nation's history, we can at least all agree that they serve to teach us that there is nothing new under the sun (check out Ecclesiastes 1:9 on that one), and that whoever is in charge of the governing of others - be they emperors, kings, tsars, princes, presidents or members of congress - they are all human, and therefore they are all fallible, sinful human beings.

Notice, I didn't say they are evil, I said they are sinful. There is a difference. One can be sinful without being intentionally evil. To be evil is to set out to harm others for one's own pleasure or benefit and to feel no pity for those whom you might hurt in the process. Being sinful is often much more complicated. We may set out to do good, but some combination of an inability to control the outcomes of our actions, mixed in with a lack of humility about either the limits of our knowledge or the self-centeredness of our desires creates a recipe for disaster. So we see posturing, and the drawing of lines in the sand, and finger-pointing from grownups acting like first-graders arguing over the slide at recess.

As I write this in late September 2022, I hope and pray that somewhere in the leadership of our governments there are people with the wisdom to lead us safely through these perilous times. In the meantime, I am reminded that while I will vote for, pray for, and to some extent hope for, the goodness and wisdom of politicians; I will always and only put my eternal trust in God and God alone.

Peace,
Delmer

Crossing Lines to Spread the Gospel

There is an almost unique situation in our local Episcopal and Lutheran churches. Messiah Episcopal Church in Murphy has a Lutheran minister, the Rev. Dr. Maggie Rourke; and the Lutheran church in Andrews has an Episcopal pastor, Father Horace Free. And Good Shepherd Episcopal Church has a Lutheran pastor hanging around as Theologian in Residence - who also recently served as the interim pastor of a Presbyterian Church. To many of us this ministerial jumping across denominational lines feels like something very new. In a book on Lutheran church history in North Carolina I discovered it isn’t so new after all.

In the mid 1700’s a young man named Robert Miller was born in Scotland. Although the state Church of Scotland was Presbyterian, there was also a small Episcopal denomination in Scotland, derisively called by the Scots, “The English Church.” The Miller family were members of the Episcopal Church of Scotland. Young Robert was very religious, so much so that he was an active participant in the Methodist Society weekly meetings in his local Episcopal parish and became a certified Methodist Lay Preacher. He intended to go to University to study for the ministry but an economic downturn in the country led him to emigrate to America with his family. Not long after they arrived, the Revolution broke out and he served in the Continental Army. After the war, he settled as a farmer in western North Carolina, in what is now Lincoln County, northwest of Charlotte. There he became active in White Haven Church, an Episcopal parish whose priest had left for England during the war. The congregation’s situation was dire: they had no priest and there was no Episcopal bishop or even a diocese in North Carolina to provide them one. On the plus side, the local Lutheran church worshiped in German and the younger people in that church wanted to worship in English so they came to White Haven for services. Most of the White Haven church members had been active in the Methodist Society before the war, but they didn’t want to join the newly formed Methodist Episcopal Church, preferring to remain Episcopalians. So, when they found out young Mr. Miller was a lay preacher, they persuaded him to lead worship and preach.

All was well for a while, until the congregation began to yearn for communion more frequently than the occasional visits of a wandering priest or Lutheran minister, and for someone to baptize their babies. Though the Protestant Episcopal Church in the USA had been formed, there was still no bishop or diocese in North Carolina, so the good people of Lincoln County hit upon a very practical plan - they petitioned the North Carolina Ministers of the Evangelical Lutheran Church to ordain Robert Miller. And the six Lutheran pastors meeting together in Concord NC in 1794 agreed to do so, writing in German on the back of his ordination certificate, “We hereby ordain Robert Miller to the Ministry of Word and Sacrament in the Episcopal Church;” a very interesting choice of words. Pastor Miller spent the next 24 years serving a number of Lutheran congregations as pastor, well as several years as Synod President (Bishop). When the Episcopalians got organized in North Carolina in 1820, Robert Miller was ordained as an Episcopal priest and served among them for another 15 years.

Why did the Lutherans of North Carolina ignore all rules and precedent to ordain a Methodist lay preacher as an Episcopal priest? Because it seemed to them, at the time, the right thing to do under the circumstances for the sake of the gospel. In Lutheran terms, it was an “emergency decision,” bending the rules when to do otherwise would deprive people of the Gospel. They took seriously the idea that people needed the preached Word and the celebration of the sacraments of Holy Baptism and Holy Communion in order to live; that these things are as necessary to the life of the soul as air to breathe and food to eat and water to drink are to the life of the body. They looked at the situation and decided that ordaining Robert Miller was the only way these essential needs of the people of White Haven Church in Lincoln County, NC could be met.

In 1998, the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America finally caught up to the far-sighted wisdom of the Metho/Lutho/palians of Lincoln County. Our two church bodies entered into CALLED TO COMMON MISSION - an agreement that clearly stated it was created to make it easier to find and share clergy in places and situations where people would be deprived of the gospel without it.

I invite us to do two things. 1) Celebrate and pray for our sister congregations in Cherokee County as they move forward in mission and ministry in these excitingly creative circumstances. 2) Open ourselves to the leadership of the Holy Spirit as it invites us to think creatively about what other “emergency measures” we might take to make sure everyone around us hears and experiences the Good News of God’s love for us in Jesus who is the Christ.

Peace, Delmer