Allegedly Retired

A New Day for the Blemished

2011-08-10T08:54:00.002-04:00

Leviticus 20 and 21 continue a dreary litany of crimes, most sexual but some theological, for which the death penalty is prescribed. There is almost a sense of prurience here as the writer thinks of ever more distasteful sexual deviations ... sex with animals, sex with the dead ... and labors to find new ways to express the penalties to be applied.

The 21st chapter heightens the stakes by focusing on the priests and by calling attention to the variety of imperfections or blemishes which can disqualify them for service at the altar. Various physical anomalies are thought to prevent those born to the priestly class from service ... presumably on the grounds that nothing less than the best is good enough for our God, or on the basis that the priest is to model the perfection that is God's.

But when we think about all of this from a relational perspective, we see that God's perfection is not one of appearance or even of emotional consistency. God is marked by justice and mercy, qualities not immediately apparent on the surface, and it is that we should hope for and look for in His representatives. As we go to the New Testament, we find that it is in fact the flawed, the blemished, and the imperfect whom God can best use. Indeed, if that were not so, the ranks of the ministry today and the rolls of dedicated lay servants would be minuscule indeed!

Too bad the Aaronic priests were rejected for blemishes on the surface! How much more important for them and us to examine the subsurface flaws and then turn them over to Christ for redemption and healing.

The Sovereignty of the Lord: Love

2011-07-29T13:54:00.003-04:00

Leviticus chapter 19 is a remarkable recasting of the Ten Commandments, most of which show up in the chapter in one form or another; but the reason I label it "remarkable" is that, for the most part, it highlights the relational meanings of these commands. This chapter drives us to see that what God is after is not blind obedience to some abstract rule, but a sensitivity to others and to what our behavior does to them.

When we harvest, we are to remember the poor and leave something for them. When we hire someone, we are not to hold back his wages. When we encounter the handicapped, we are not to make their already difficult lives more challenging. When we are dealing with those either above us or below us in social station, we are not to play the partiality game. On and on, about weights and measures, the treatment of slaves, hospitality to aliens -- the underlying theme is given us in Lev. 19:18, "You shall love your neighbor as yourself." How more lofty a sentiment can there be than that, how more compelling a motivation? Follow the law of love, instructed by these examples, and you will be fulfilling God's desire.

God's desire? Does that matter? Listen to the constant drumbeat down this chapter: "I am the Lord." Live the law of love not just because society benefits; live the law of love not just because it will make you feel better; but live the law of love because a sovereign God who has so created the universe has determined it.

An Argument Against Inclusivity

2011-07-18T12:16:00.003-04:00

It is common to hear that the contemporary church must learn inclusivity, that we need to learn how to reach out and embrace "all sorts and conditions of men." If that means eliminating racial barriers, who can argue with that any more? If it means building a fellowship where the needs and preferences of the very young as well as the more senior are respected and attended to, I am right there, though I know it is not easy to accomplish. If it means creating a classless community, in which the poor and marginalized are embraced and the rich and powerful are not catered to just on the basis of their status, then I say let's do it ... although I see very few examples of its success. Inclusivity is the byword for our time.

But sometimes it means being inclusive of belief systems that are inherently anti-Christian, and sometimes the word now implies the joyful approval of lifestyles that have not traditionally been considered acceptable. How far does inclusivity go, theologically? Must one be a Trinitarian to be a Christian? Must one see as the only true church the one in obedience to Rome? There are many similar questions. And how far do we take inclusivity, lifestyle-wise? The clamor for full acceptance of homosexual behavior, including marriage, is deafening in some Christian denominations now. And long ago some of us learned to not to see cohabiting couples in our churches? What shall we do or say about behaviors that have usually been understood to be sub-Christian?

Leviticus 17 is an attempt to make sure that the people of Israel recognize and follow their particularity, their exclusivity. A member of this nation is not to slaughter animals as sacrifices without bringing them to the priest; no make-it-your self religion and no following the practices of the peoples around. There is a particularly strong prohibition against the eating of blood, because blood and life itself are so intimately connected, and one must not take into himself the life-force of another -- in other words, recognize that the God of Israel has made you YOU and does not want you to try to achieve superpowers. Proper faith is essential to the citizen of Israel, and blending attractive elements of other faiths with its core assertions is not acceptable.

And then those verses about sexual behavior ... how many different women are there whose nakedness must not be uncovered? ... including the one short verse about homosexual relations: are these important and must these be followed now? Again Leviticus is forcing us to understand that we are to be different, we are not to walk like the other nations, and we are to be circumspect particularly in the most intimate of human relationships. Do we take these verses now and flog others for not practicing the ideal that sexual relationships are appropriate only between one man and one man, married to one another? No, we do not use an isolated verse as a club, but neither do we throw away the essential issue that this ancient book is pointing us toward: that our relationship with God has in some expectations, and that our highest value is pleasing Him, not fitting in with the culture of the moment.

Peter would years later say it well, "You are a peculiar people ..."

A Yom Kippur for Protestants?

2011-07-17T18:36:00.002-04:00

Leviticus 16 speaks with solemn command about the Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when the High Priest shall sacrifice a bull and a goat and shall transfer the sins of the people to a goat that is sent far into the wilderness, the scape-goat. Is all of this ritual and magic to be scorned by us today, or are there some profoundly meaningful spiritual truths enacted within it?

First, notice that the priest is included, himself. He is not placing himself above his people, but is bringing his own shortcomings to the altar. Rightly understood, then, there will be no over-under relationship, no spiritual oppressor here to lord it over the lesser breeds without the law. We are all together in this thing.

But second, notice that the priest is to name the sins of the people before God. He is to be specific, but generic. I remember a dear deacon from my childhood church who would pray, "Lord, forgive us of any sins we MAY HAVE committed." He really did not suppose such nice folks as we could have committed any serious sins, but just in case ... . Leviticus presupposes that the priest will have gathered somehow a list of the ways in which both he and God's people have violated the Law.

Only then is the sacrifice done and completed; and, if I remain true to my contention that the Old Testament is to be read relationally rather than mechanically, legalistically, then sending the goat into the wilderness is valuable to cement the reality of God's forgiveness in the mind of the believer. It does not accomplish the forgiveness so much as it creates an atmosphere of assurance for those who have honestly confessed their sins before God and His priest.

In modern Christian practice, what are we doing with the confession of sins? Catholics, as I understand it, have soft-pedaled auricular confession in recent years; but of course they still have both priestly and popular confessional formulae in the the liturgy. Liturgical Protestants have such liturgical statements as well ... e.g., "We have sinned against Thee in thought, word, and deed, and are therefore not worthy to receive Thy grace." All appropriate, if in the mind of the worshipper there is an awareness of specific sins and their consequences,

But the free churches?! As a pastor I found it hard to keep people focused on Confessional prayer. I would always have such a slot in our worship, and if I did not lead it myself but asked someone else to lead it, the language would quickly drift away from confession (and at that rather general confession) to thanking God for this and that and asking for His presence among the sick and shut-in, etc. Those items we were going to take care of in other prayers later in the service, but confession of sin as a prelude to genuine worship? Many of us did not get it.

I wonder if we in free-church Protestantism, which so easily moves into happy-clappy, affirm-yourself quasi-religion, ought not create a checklist of sins against which we could examine ourselves each Sunday? "Lord, I confess that I have spoken ill against my neighbor ... that I have suspected my friend's competence because of his race ... that I deliberately passed by the opportunity to share the Gospel with a co-worker ... etc., etc." And only when these things have been actively considered by each worshipper would there be a song of deliverance or a word of praise to the God of redemption. Might take a while ... we can cut out some self-congratulatory music to make time for it ... but confession must be deep, personal, contemporary if it is to be real.

Religion At Its Best Acknowledges All of Life, Even the "Unseemly"

2011-06-20T11:31:00.002-04:00

Leviticus chapter 15 tells us a whole lot more than we really want to know about what to do when a man has a seminal emission or a woman has menstrual flow. My first reaction, upon reading all this detail about washing this and cleaning that, breaking pottery and scrubbing wood utensils, was something like a teenager's "Ewww." Why must we read all this? And why is it so ritualized into rites of purification and even offerings at the altar? (Leave it to the priestly caste behind Leviticus to find another way of coaxing an offering out of the people!).

But the "ewww" reaction may be precisely the reason why these ancient people, dealing with the mysteries of their own bodies, needed this level of detail on how to handle these situations. If the human body is a mystery, how much more are its sexual functions mysterious, and therefore we are likely to deal with sexual matters, if left on our own, with a mixture of guilt, shame, fear, and denial. What we do not fully understand and cannot therefore completely embrace we prefer to hide.

This has been happening for many centuries. Think of those Puritans who wished to repress even legitimate sexual feelings! "The Scarlet Letter" showed how damaging that attitude was. Think of our Victorian forebears who were titillated at the sight of a woman's ankle and who wished to conceal "limbs" even on their furniture! More recently, and since yesterday was Father's Day, I remember my father's mumbled, hurried, embarrassed attempts to tell me where babies came from, as we were about to visit a cousin whose wife was pregnant! Pregnant? Oh, no, we did not say that word. We said "expecting" or "in the family way." Circumlocutions that are innocent enough on the surface, but are all designed to keep naive children from dealing with the messiness of sexuality.

And so from that vantage point I can see the value of actions prescribed in the Levitical code. Here is an attempt to make those whose bodies were "acting out" face that reality, bring it to the attention of their households (all that cleaning could not have been done privately), and even acknowledge it before God. Do I think we should follow these rules today? Of course not. But at least we can reverently and yet candidly respect our sexual functions and can avoid creating unnecessary shame, guilt, fear, and denial

Outside the Camp, But Released

2011-05-31T08:30:00.004-04:00

What a lot of time and energy priests must have put into inspecting and re-inspecting contagious diseases, particularly dermatological disorders! The details given in Leviticus 12-14 about the color of hair in the affected spot, the rawness of the flesh, the duration of symptoms, are fascinating and yet wearying. How deep was the horror of diseases that might not only consume the immediate victim, but might spread to the rest of the community as well! Even what we today call "sick buildings" were known, and the remedy was to destroy the building entirely -- a remedy which still has to be used in some cases today.

There are a couple of interesting notes in this dreary litany. First, note that the incurably leprous (not a specific disease, necessarily, but a category of diseases) must be put "outside the camp." (Lev. 13:46). Quarantine is admittedly cruel, but often a necessity. Social isolation is to be preferred to a raging contagion. As a pastor, on occasion I have had to visit a parishioner from within special clothing and outside a barrier, and even then only after thorough washing. It is intended both to protect the patient from further contamination when his immune system is severely weakened and to protect both the visitor and the outside world from inadvertent spread of contamination outside the patient's room. Awkward, yes; but necessary.

"Outside the camp" -- ah, but the Christian reader picks up a phrase that will be transformed centuries later by the author of Hebrews: speaking of the meaning of the crucified Christ, he says, "Therefore let us go to him outside the camp and bear the reproach he endured." While the reference is to the shame and deliberate degradation involved in the Cross, and not specifically to contagion, the principle is the same -- that in a mysterious and wonderful way, in Christ, God has taken on Himself the isolation, the opprobrium, of that most profound of sicknesses, sin. And we are called to identify with this Christ in His suffering and shame!

I wonder if there were ever any priests who felt such a compassion for those they inspected that they wanted to go outside the camp with them? Perhaps; but then if they had done so they would have lost their ability to minister to anyone, and would have become useless. Just how far do we go in identifying with and serving the desperate and the broken? Hebrews suggests that our identification must be complete ... but how then do we preserve our larger effectiveness in ministry?

One additional note of interest: twice in this passage there is given the formula for a ritual sacrifice when the contagions are gone, and it involves two birds -- one slaughtered and the other, having been dipped in the blood of the first bird, released. Is this a hint that ultimately what God wants is, as the hymnwriter puts it, "redemption and release?" A sign that out of suffering, He is able to create liberation?

God and Our Instincts

2011-05-30T15:57:00.002-04:00

So what are we, nice, rational, scientific, modern that we are, to do with Leviticus 11 and its listing of clean and unclean animals, those that can be eaten and those that are, in the language of the NRSV, "detestable"? At one level, it is commonly said that this is about sanitation and nutrition ... for example, that the pig is unclean because trichinosis could not be eradicated in these early days. Yes, when one looks at the list of unclean creatures, one may reasonably give thanks that we were told not to eat them; "detestable" is the right word.

I suspect that grace goes even deeper than the list, however; after all, not all the inedible creatures in the world are listed. And some things that are prohibited we have found we can enjoy with perfect safety. (By the way, who knew a gecko was among the unclean animals? I will never watch a Geico ad the same way again!).

I suspect that this chapter is uncovering and validating our instincts. Despite many cultural differences around the world concerning what is edible, there seems to be a general sense of what will delight and nourish and what will not. Is this chapter God's way of pointing to and making clearer our instinctive tastes? One might go even farther, beyond the food issue, and wonder if the real core of morality is always what God has planted in our hearts, later to validate and make explicit when necessary.

I don't worry about ritual rules concerning food; but I do need to be concerned that I pay attention to what clearly is wholesome, healthy, nutritious, and environmentally sound. That would take the relationship of God and our instincts to a whole new level.

A Sense of the Holy

2011-05-26T10:14:00.002-04:00

Leviticus 9 and 10 is not pleasant. Two of Aaron's sons are destroyed by the "fire of the Lord" because they tried to manipulate elements of the ritual ... offering "unholy fire", not sanctioned by God. And later two more of Aaron's sons apparently did not consume the meat of the sin offering in the right place, at the right time, but at least get off with something of a scolding instead of losing their lives! What shall we make of all this ritual tidiness, this dangerous God who can and will strike out at offenders against these symbols?

Rudolf Otto, years ago, wrote The Idea of the Holy, and spoke of God and the things of God as a mysterium tremendum et fascinans ... a mystery both frightening and fascinating. When we know ourselves to be in the Presence, we fear the consequences of misjudgment, but we are also attracted to all that the mystery contains. Our very souls tremble with both awe and anticipation.

I can remember that when I was a young organ student, I often practiced in the Lutheran Church where my instructor served as organist/choirmaster, and there were many nights when I was in that building alone. Sometimes I would go and stand behind the pulpit stand, but would not go up into the pulpit proper, feeling as though I did not belong there. And more to the point, I would turn and look at the altar and its wonderful carving of the Last Supper, but never moved the altar rail to go inside the enclosure for a closer look. Something told me, university student though I was, that this was not the place for me. Rationally, I knew that I would not be struck by lightning or consumed by "the fire of the Lord", but there was that sense that I might violate the Presence. And so I kept my distance.

Contrast that with what I saw happening among some of us brash seminarians a couple of years later ... standing behind chapel pulpits mocking others' sermon delivery ... telling stories about spilling Communion "wine" ... laughing about dropping someone in a baptistry ... and it all seemed very secular, very foolish, and possibly very dangerous. Again, we did not expect or receive overt punishment. But perhaps we did receive a searing in our souls, much like Aaron's sons who did not consume the sin offering correctly, for we took one more step away from understanding that if you do not respect the mysterium tremendum you will likely miss the full joy of the mysterium fascinans. To respect God's otherness is to become available for His nearness.

To Fix the Mind on Things That Are Above

2011-05-24T14:09:00.002-04:00

Leviticus 8 moves us from instructions about sacrifice to the service of ordination for Aaron and his sons, setting them aside for priesthood. We quickly see that it is more than just someone's declaring, "You are now priests." There is an assembled nation, there are sacrifices, there are dollops of blood on the ear, thumb, and toe of the ordinand, and there will be a seven-day sequestration before the new priests are even to emerge into daylight. What an impressive and challenging ceremony!

Even though obviously we Protestant Christians today do not feel any need for such elaborate, lengthy, and dare I say it? -- smelly and messy ritual, there are things we can learn from this chapter.

For one thing, consecration to a special place in God's work is a community matter. The assembly of Israel gathered to watch the proceedings, and more than merely observe: to witness them, to guarantee a line of accountability for the days ahead. When some of us in Baptist life treat ordination as merely a concern for the local congregation and not the larger faith community, we are in danger of creating a solipsism that can end up in irresponsibility.

Something else to learn -- that when we take on a responsible place in God's work, we are to be involved with our whole selves. It is not just a matter of learning some doctrines and teaching them; nor is it enough to pick up one or two skills and depend only on those. No, our entire being is to be committed to what God is doing in redemption; is that not what lies behind the anointing of ear and thumb and toe? How we listen, how we reach out in compassion, how we endeavor to go wherever we are needed ... the tasks of ministry are unending, almost unlimited, and certainly compelling. Aaron and his sons could not have missed that message, nor should we.

A third observation -- that ritual is intended to impress on all participants the "things that are above" as Paul would say later. The smells, the colors, the actions, as well as the words engage all of our senses and focus us at least for a few moments on a realm that is beyond the ordinary, a world unseen and yet adumbrated in the rites of the community. We free church folks, Baptists especially, were so affected by the rationalism of the era in which we were born that we cannot seem to break out into the full range of worship. At our worst, music is just something to warm us up for preaching, and architecture is bland and utilitarian. We trip quickly through a Communion service because we are supposed to have it, but with no sense of the awesome power of the symbols involved. And I have even seen baptisms .. our forte, it would seem, and our opportunity to make sensory and potent our worship .. I have even seen baptisms rendered a spectacle of spluttering and of jokes about not having drowned anyone lately! Is it any wonder, when we treat worship with abysmal neglect, that our people lose interest in participating?

Perhaps, then, the most useful observation from Leviticus 8 is the command that the new priests complete their ordination by remaining inside the tent of meeting for seven days. Just as a loaf of bread can be assembled, but it takes time for it to rise and to be baked, so also those who are to be set aside for Kingdom purposes cannot plunge into their work still immature, still unseasoned. Rites and ceremonies, important as they are, turning our attention to the eternal versus the mundane, do not permanently alter the heart unless and until time is spent in prayer, contemplation, and reflection on what it all will mean.

My own ordination, while not as elaborate as that described in Leviticus, lingers with me after more than 47 years, for several reasons ... not the least of which is that I had time to consider, study, and understand what my mission was to be. It took me more like six months than a mere seven days, but maybe that's because I did not have boiled flesh and bread just waiting for me all the time!

Probing Wrongdoing from Beginning to End

2011-05-19T12:01:00.002-04:00

As my readers will know, I was all set to be dismissive and even caustic about the Levitical law. I thought I knew that it would not fit my insistence that the Bible and the Christian faith are always to be read relationally. But Leviticus continues to amaze me. It's not that I think we need to return to animal sacrifice, and certainly not that I believe in the objectively holy quality of sacred spaces and objects; but the ancient wisdom involved in parsing our human failings is most instructive.

In Leviticus 6-7, having dealt with the issue of unintentional sin, the Code now takes up real, gritty, intentional wrongdoing. A typology of error is laid out: the grain offering, the sin offering, the guilt offering, and the offering of well-being. Reconciliation -- there is a relational concept -- with God begins with the grain offering and its measureable, quantifiable consequences. If one has deliberately taken another's property, he must restore that property and pay a premium, and he must offer grain -- the substance of everyday sustenance -- before God. That is minimal, but important. One wonders, reading contemporary headlines, whether this week's acknowledgement of corruption by the former Executive of Prince George's County, Maryland, will result in restoration of stolen money plus penalties; as for the matter of reconciling before God, the man in question says that he is "sorry for what happened" (as if he had not done it to himself) and that "we all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." Yes, but the issue is not what others have done, sir, but what you have done!

So next there is the sin offering and the guilt offering, similar in ritual but, as I see them, graded in intensity. When we recognize that what we have done offends God as well as our neighbors, a new level of remorse is called for, and a cavalier dismissal will not do. Again the headlines are instructive: Dominique Strauss-Kahn, in a most responsible position with the IMF, is arrested for sexual assault of a hotel maid. Thus far he has admitted nothing but has resigned from the IMF and is likely looking at his ambition to be the next President of France going down the drain. We await a more complete acknowledgement of guilt, but it is not yet f0rthcoming.

Why not? Because even when we have sinned we find it hard to admit guilt, that intrinsic and internal deficit that shows us to be deeply flawed. It's easy enough to admit sin-in-general; but to go to the next level and see that what we have done has hurt God and has damaged others -- that is another level. And so Leviticus provides that when we reach that level we must approach our God again and ask for cleansing. Once more to the headlines: do we suppose that Arnold Schwarzenegger felt any sort of pangs for these thirteen years over having fathered a child outside of his marriage? Likely, to a degree; but it is when it comes out to the public and to his family that he does stand up and confess that there is no excuse for his behavior. Guilt offering.

Ah, but Christians can take hope at the sacrifice of well-being, the final one in the ritual of offerings, for what I hear now is that once we have seen the truth of who we are and once we have gone through the pain of being discovered, there is the possibility of redemption. Our God is not so much interested in animal entrails burning on altars, though one might get that impression from Leviticus 6-7; our God is interested in the reshaping of the human heart and in our willingness to turn forever to Him, trust Him for each day and its trials and temptations, and settle into a daily walk with Him. That is true well-being.

"Oops" is not enough

2011-05-12T07:52:00.000-04:00

Our everyday, common-sense morality makes a distinction between intentional and unintentional errors. When, not long ago, my wife backed out of our driveway, early in the morning, taking me to the hospital, she hit a parked car across the street; it was unintentional, though you-know-who went ballistic! Even though I was upset about it, I did understand that it was quite different from road rage or vandalism. It was unintentional.

So was any responsibility incurred because of that fender-bender? Of course. That very day Margaret called the neighbor at whose house the car was parked, and I notified our insurance agent. We knew that we had a responsibility to compensate as best we could for an incident that was not malicious in any way.

And yet, I suspect that many of us take very lightly our unintentional mistakes ... or, better, sins. If we speak a harsh and cutting word, we shrug off the consequences with, "He deserved it." If we let loose with a blue streak of epithets, we smile and dismiss it with, "Pardon my French." (What do Francophones say? Pardon my English?). If we dismiss the motives, abilities, or sincerity of our brothers/sisters in Christ, we justify it by smugly asserting that we are perceptive and are not naive about others' failings. In other words, "Oops." All right, I may have discounted you, but "Oops", it does not matter much. Get over it.

Leviticus 4-5 provides another perspective. This passage assumes and specifies that all of us ... priest, ruler, ordinary people ... will sin unintentionally. When this is discovered, then sacrifices are to be made. Never mind that in our modern world animal sacrifices are not de rigeur; the point is that even unintentional sin must be taken seriously. An acknowledgement that when we sin, whether we intended to or not, means that the expectations of God have been violated, and that requires more than an "oops" response.

In our day we need more tender consciences, more who examine carefully and review rigorously all of their actions, and, when they find they have erred, are willing to come forward and offer restitution. "Oops" can never be enough for the soul in touch with the heart of God.

I now await our sacrifice, by the way; it will not be a lamb or a goat, but it will likely be a higher insurance premium! Somehow State Farm will not be interested in an "oops" response.

All fat is the Lord's

2011-05-11T11:55:00.002-04:00

I have once again put off working through my relational studies of the Old Testament, and for two reasons: (1) my cancer symptoms returned with a vengeance, and, though I have resumed chemotherapy, I am experiencing more fatigue and more breathing difficulty than in the past; and (2) I could scarcely bring myself to face the Book of Leviticus with what I knew would be there ... endless instructions about animal sacrifice. Who needs that?

But I have pushed myself to follow again my daily checklist, slow going though it may be, and worked through Leviticus 1-3 ... and found a tag line that seems particularly appropriate for someone who is always looking for relational insights rather than rigid principles: "All fat is the Lord's" (Lev. 3:16b)

You see, one of the first symptoms I noticed as the cancerous tumor began to grow again was weight loss. I had dropped from around 200 before the cancer to about 150 until the treatments kicked in and stabilized me at about 165. I spent good money to get my suits altered, and thought I was going to do well. But now the weight is dropping again ... 144 this morning. Mr. tailor, not going to spend more this time, not yet! And suddenly my wife and my daughter are pushing food at me, including pies, cakes, brownies, and anything fattening. It is all tasty, and I am grateful, but it is still hard to push food down a gullet that is not interested!

And so it comes back to me again, as it often does, that I must trust the Lord who cares for me even more profoundly than my family does, and must trust Him to guide me in this matter of nutrition and weight. Forcing myself to eat is useless, but staying aloof from food is potentially damaging. And so I am learning to listen to my body and its needs, which I believe to be the promptings of the Spirit, and will focus on eating and nourishing without compulsion but with faith. Yes, "all fat is the Lord's" and from Him I will gain the appetite I need without, again, feeling pushed or compelled.

Come to think of it, that is the stance I expect to take all the way through Leviticus ... that all these regulations about handling burnt offerings ultimately point to a humble and a contrite heart before God. I am just glad, by the way, that I was not around to be a priest having to tear wings off doves or find the kidneys of goats! Tough enough, as a pastor, to have to ferret out the inmost secrets of parishioner's hearts. But it was then and is now all about reconciling our distance from God, accepting His provision. I am glad indeed that "all fat is the Lord's."

Following the Presence

2011-04-21T11:52:00.002-04:00

The last chapter of Exodus (ch. 40) gives us a picture of Moses and Aaron setting up and arranging and the furnishings of the new Tabernacle. We have read the meticulous instructions provided for its construction and ornamentation; now the Lord is represented as a divine room arranger, showing his appointed ministers where He wants everything placed. And when "Moses finished the work" the presence/shekinah of God came into that place -- but came not simply to stay but to prompt movement "at each stage of their journey."

As I write this on Maundy Thursday, I think back to those years when I tried to plan creative and unique experiences for those occasions. A Christian Seder one year, a reverie on our earthiness another year, a set of readings and sung responses another year. I too was preoccupied with how things would look, sound, feel, even smell, for I knew that worship is at its best a response of the whole person, with all of his/her senses, to the presence of God, and not just an exercise in rationality. And yet I was also careful, I believe, not to fall into novelty for its own sake, lest I manipulate the feelings of the congregation. Better to let ancient words and solemn sounds, as well as scenes of dignity, communicate truth.

But I think about how much effort I invested in not only planning creative worship experiences, but also in getting people to attend them. I would sit in the pulpit on Maundy Thursday, for example, and estimate the size of the crowd, taking pleasure in seeing a family that I had not really expected. It was so much about building attendance ... but for what? Does worship exist for its own sake, or, as we might be expected to say, for God's good pleasure? What do I take away from an experience so carefully planned and so rigorously structured?

The hint in Ex0dus is the cloud of presence that would move when it was time for Israel to set out on their journey. The church of the living Christ was never meant to be static and self-centered; its worship is preparation for a journey of discipleship, mission, and obedience.

Willing Hearts and Beauty, Not Guilt

2011-04-18T14:18:00.002-04:00

I have seen situations in which a leader, feeling desperate about accomplishing some object, begins to lay a guilt trip on his people, attempting to motivate them with, "You ought" statements rather than, "You would want" affirmations. It can come from a pastor who wants to get his pet building project finished; it can come from a politician who feels that posturing will gain political points, whether or not it accomplishes the task. It can even come from a parent who reserves her words of approval to a precious few and lays on snippy criticisms to provoke her child into the behavior she wants. Guilt is often used to motivate; but it is only marginally effective. It may get the purveyor of guilt a momentary obedience, but the desire to be obedient for its own sake is not being nourished. The result is often rebellion.

And so I felt such dismay when I read the opening paragraph of Exodus 35 -- a reaffirmation of the command to observe Sabbath, a command which we have already read several times. But this time with a deadly twist: "whoever does any work on [the Sabbath] shall be put to death." I want to scream out to Moses or God or E or whoever cooked this up, "You may gain Sabbath observers with this threat, but you will gain no worshippers."

Thanks be to God, however, the tone turns quickly. As the preparations for the building of the Tent of Meeting are described, the prevailing motif is one of generosity and a willing heart. How many times in Exodus 35 and 36 are the people described as having willing hearts, hearts that were moved within them?! And we are told that the leaders finally had to ask that no one bring anything more, for it was more than enough.

And then Exodus 37-40 describe in intricate detail the design and assembly of this structure and its furnishings, as well as the vestments for the priests. These chapters breath a sense of joy, pride, and rapture at the beauty which has been wrought. Not just at the beauty of the worship center, but, to my eyes, the beauty of willing hearts, able to shake off the negative motivation with which the passage started. Here is the legacy we want to enjoy and emulate, not the legacy altogether still too prominent of guilt, shame, and hostility. God is love.

The Need to Veil

2011-04-11T08:51:00.002-04:00

Exodus 34 contains the account of Moses' second reception of the decalogue, a replacement for the stones he had broken in a fit of anger when he found out how fickle the people were. This time some of the commandments are fleshed out a bit, with regulations about idolatry made more explicit; but there is no mention of the moral side of the covenant this time. It is becoming increasingly clear that, as this very chapter puts it, God is seen as jealous, protective and defensive. He will drive out other tribes to make room for Israel, but Israel is not to make covenant agreements with them, for such agreements always end up in compromise.

A part of me recoils at all of this. I am not prepared to honor a God who will put to flight people who are already settled in the region, just so those whom He favors can have it. This is a religio-political ploy that is still being used in the same region today, and its blatant unfairness cannot be disguised by calling it "God's will."

But the more I reflect, the more I do see why the chosen people are called on to keep themselves separate and unentangled with the pagan culture around them. The God of the Exodus 34 text worries that if Israel makes any covenant with another people, that people's wanton ways will be irresistibly attractive to Israel's people, and ultimately their identity, their holiness, will be lost. I get that, because I am noticing in our own time the reluctance of many Christian people and institutions to remain unfashionable and distinctively Christian. Under the guise of political correctness, or with the label of "keeping up with the times", or yet with the rationale that our older ways were legalistic and unspiritual, we have relaxed our standards and are suffering the consequences.

The use of alcohol is but one example; there are others. But whereas a generation ago we in evangelical Christianity spoke fervently against the sale and use of alcohol, and even included the issue in our church covenants, today we either ignore the question completely and hope it stays hidden, or, in some instances, we even parade our use of alcohol as a sign of our "differentness." Different from what? From an older form of Christian obedience? I hear in Exodus 34, with all its problems, a clear call to be different not from our earlier ways but different from the world and its ways.

Moses veiled his face because it shone from his encounter with God, and the people could not stand so much light. I am afraid we are veiling ours because we are unwilling to let our light shine at all.

God and Self-Control

2011-04-05T11:33:00.002-04:00

First, I apologize to you, faithful reader(s), as it has been just over a month since I posted anything in my ongoing quest to read the Bible relationally. It has been a month of medical procedures and appointments, of general busy-ness, but most of all of some sort of inability to get at the task of Bible study. Perhaps that, as much as anything else, confirms my basic perspective ... that God approaches us in dynamically personal ways, and asks us to respond in similar fashion. He does not diminish His love and concern and care for us, but at the same time does not force us to respond. Nonetheless the time comes when conscience and gratitude both move us to seek His face. This is such a day for me.

And how appropriate, as we come to Exodus 33 in our relational reading! In this chapter Moses "seeks the face" of God and gets an answer that both protects the holiness of God and yet also acknowledges the claims of His creature. The chapter is a strange amalgam of taboos and rituals, but in the end it reinforces the insight that God is personal, which also means He can be influenced.

It is astounding, if we have bought into those Greek notions of God's imperfection and immutability, to read of a God who has to have help in maintaining His own self-control: "If I should go up [i.e., to the land of promise] among you, I would consume you ... for you are a stiff-necked people." God's anger is about to boil over; for what sins? Clearly idolatry is a large element here, but I can also read this as a reflection on the harsh reality of the human condition -- that we want what we want when we want it, and stubbornly refuse to listen to advice or follow directions.

The tent of meeting, outside the camp: a sign that one must be careful of trespassing on holy things, lest there be an outbreak of divine disfavor. But Moses had a special relationship that did not involve danger; the people were content (did they have any choice?) to let Moses be the intercessor. There is something here that is deeply repugnant to modern individualistic, rationalistic Christians, who think that there are no sacred places or special people, but that we can all rush into the Presence whenever we choose!

The second half of Exodus 33 is taken up with Moses' negotiation with God concerning His presence as the people prepare to enter Canaan. How bold it seems to us that Moses would insist on that caring presence, and would not even trust God when God says, rather too readily, "My presence will go with you and I will give you rest." Moses wants proof, and insists on seeing God's "glory", to which God responds by promising to parade His "goodness" and proclaim His "name" -- all of these strong symbols for the inner nature, the very core of God's essence. God yields as far as He can to Moses' requirements, "covering [him] with His hand." I am not concerned about these anthropomorphisms, as they are inevitable when one is speaking of the ineffable. I am only concerned about, and intrigued by, a God who worries about His own self-control, but who can be persuaded to work within the framework of the needs of His people and His ultimate, innermost, character.

Incidentally, for some Calvinists, vs. 19b is a touchstone: "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy." To them it reinforces the idea that God's will is determined by Him alone; thus some are chosen for mercy, and, by implication, some are chosen for damnation. But the context in which this saying is located -- Moses persuading God to keep His original promises -- suggests to me a God who is moving forward in His divine plan. He is pulling Himself together to keep His commitments -- to exercise His self-control in a positive way. The negativity of the opening of the chapter is at last removed.

Anger Uncontrolled

2011-03-04T11:23:00.002-05:00

There are, in my experience, gradations of anger, but in the end they all eventually issue in uncontrolled destruction. That destruction may take the form of physical violence, or it may show up as slander, disrespect, prejudice, or insults. Destruction may even poison relationships between those who should be friends and allies, and the end result of anger so expressed will be felt for years and even generations to come.

Exodus 32 is an example of the truism that we are "incurably religious" (as that skeptic Thomas Edison liked to say). Let God's spokesman, Moses, linger too long on the mountain, and the people get restless and tempt Aaron to lead the effort to fashion tangible deities for them. The account imagines the Lord leaning over the parapets of heaven and noticing the ensuing revelry; His response is to be angry and to threaten the destruction of the infant nation. Moses dissuades the Lord from this action ... Exodus 32:14 reports God's "repentance," a conundrum to those who want to think of God as an immutable set of principles and as one who has predestined the course of history ... and descends the mountain. But Moses becomes angry, smashes the tablets, and summons the tribe of Levi to a punitive slaughter. Three thousand people! And Moses dares to tell the Levites that their ordination to priesthood has been earned at the cost of a fellow countryman ... a blessing, he says! And he represents the situation as having come via divine fiat!

What I see is that anger is contagious and multiplies itself. No, Moses, God had already changed His mind about destroying the people, having bought the argument that their loss would bring only derision from the Egyptians. Moses, however, caught the spirit of anger and went out of control; if anyone should have been punished by the loss of his life, it ought to have been Aaron, that lily-livered functionary who "let the people run wild." But Moses' anger becomes undifferentiated and calculating; it is not about ferreting out the ringleaders of the insurrection, but is about widespread killing to send a message. But what a message! And that the spiritual leadership of the nation would get its calling verified by its willingness to perform such a horrible act is beyond acceptability; is this the beginning of spiritual oppression by professional religionists, a phenomenon which we still see?

Once again, we wait for the One who will speak to us about the folly of anger and for a New Testament that will teach us how to set it aside and receive the spirit of peace.

From Life-Giving to Death-Dealing

2011-02-28T09:09:00.002-05:00

A reading of Exodus 30-31 from a relational perspective is a sobering reminder of how life-giving concepts can so easily morph into death-dealing rules. Not only are there elaborate instructions for the making of anointing oils and perfumes for the priests (and here again I am glad that modern Christian ministers, at least in the evangelical tradition, do not keep THIS part of the Law!), but there are also dire warnings about the punishments that will come to any unqualified person who attempts to use these potions. Why such a heavy-duty concern about "holy" things?

But most disturbing of all is the explication of the command about sabbath-keeping into a punitive and deadly threat. The statement about the sabbath in Exodus 20:8, while more detailed than the other commands of the Ten, is nonetheless a positive statement about rest. The usual interpretation is that we are given a day in which not only to worship and contemplate things divine, but also in which to rest and recharge. That is life-giving.

And so how sad, from a relational perspective, to see this command take on such negative connotations in Exodus 31. To do work earns one the death penalty?! Whoever does work on Sabbath shall be "cut off from the people"?! Far be it from me to instruct the Almighty in human psychology, but then I seriously doubt that these are the ipsissima verba of God anyway: if you want someone to follow a rule, persuade him, demonstrate its value for him, love him into it. Threats and punishments may get you obedience for a while, but they will also get you deep resentment and not love.

As for me, I do take Sabbath, but by my choice. I happily attend and participate in worship; no one makes me do it, but I choose to do it. And if the rest of the day is invested in reading, attending a musical event, or just taking a nap, I think I am keeping Sabbath; and I know I am doing it because it is good for me, it is God's gift to us all, and I want to do it. In no way do I think I will be punished if I choose not to do so. That would be to give in to a perspective that is death-dealing and not life-giving.

Memorable Moments

2011-02-24T11:42:00.002-05:00

I have participated in or viewed quite a number of ordination services over the years, most of them for deacons and some for ministers. I have noticed that we Baptists, as with nearly everything else we do, make those services mostly about talk and rather little about symbolism. We make certain to have a Charge to the Candidate and a Charge to the Church, opportunities for mini-sermons, as well as an Ordination Sermon. And when it is all over, we want and expect a Response from the Ordinand. Talk, talk, talk. But what of symbolism?

Well, we do practice, sort of, the Laying On of Hands, following the accounts in Acts of ceremonies setting people apart for ministry tasks. The tradition has been that members of the ordaining body file by and lay their hands on the head of the candidate(s); in practice, I have noticed, few are comfortable with such a gesture and instead lightly touch the candidate's shoulder or maybe give him/her a gentle squeeze -- accommodations to squeamishness about the intensity of hands on head. But the symbolism of passing on the gifts of the Holy Spirit, heart to heart and mind to mind, is lost.

And then, in my experience, it is all over and the candidates mosey back to their seats, the ritual done, but no visible spiritual experience. I compare this to some other ordinations I have witnessed, where the candidates became emotional and felt a power and a presence in a tangible way. Does that matter?

When I read Exodus 29 and the instructions for ordaining Aaron and his sons to the priesthood, my first reaction is to be thankful that we modern Christians do not follow that pattern! I would not have been happy to see bulls and rams slain and burned, nor would I have been keen to receive blood on my ear, my thumb, and my great toe! And yet, with all the sacrifices and ceremonial robes and sights and smells, as well as the physical actions prescribed (elevation offerings), I can imagine that such an occasion would have been memorable and moving. And more.

More, because in the power of that moment lay also the motivation for keeping on. Aaron and his sons are in a permanent position now. They are not to think of retiring or of changing jobs. They are priests forever. And I would suspect that if they indeed had times during their lives when they resented having to fulfill this role, they may have been able to look back in their memories to this occasion and to have drawn power from recollecting how palpable the presence of the Living God was, how empowering His appointment was.

I know too many deacons who refused to serve significantly after a little while, and know too many ministers who got distracted or tempted away from their tasks. A powerful and poignant ordination service might not have prevented every instance of such a breach, but I suspect it would have made many deserters think twice about their decisions. Talk, as they say, is cheap, but actions -- liturgical actions included -- speak louder than words.

God and the Minutiae of Worship

2011-02-22T09:41:00.002-05:00

Exodus 24 is a restatement of Moses' covenant encounter with God, with the fascinating embellishment of the elders who accompanied him up the mountain seeing a divine presence and even eating and drinking before Him. It is really a prelude to the next several chapters, 25-28, that describe in extraordinary detail the way the tabernacle and the ark were to be constructed. If we read these chapters at face value, we are led to think that God is very particular about dimensions, materials, color schemes, and sculpture for the site where He is to be worshipped.

To the modern mind, that seems ridiculous. In the first place, how would Moses record all this detail? I suppose if you believe in plenary verbal inspiration, you simply envision Moses jotting it all down, word for word, as he listens to the divine voice. But in the second place, do we today think that God is all that concerned about the minutiae of worship? Is it not enough, as Jesus would later say, that true worshippers worship Him in spirit and in truth? And do we not suppose that God "should" be worrying about greater things, like a tanking economy and uprisings in the Arab world?

The problem is that we try to define and describe God according to our own value systems, and if Exodus teaches us anything, it is that He "will be who He will be," ehyeh esher ehyeh. He is not to be confined to our understandings of Him, nor to our judgments of what is worthy and what is not. God is sovereign.

And so when I look back at the prescriptions for the worship space, while I still find it hard to imagine God being all that precise about the tabernacle and the ark, the kernel of truth that I take away is that worship must be seen as primary, that care must be given to the planning and administration of worship, and that the space and the accoutrements of worship should speak of the majesty and holiness of our God. I remember, years ago, when my father-in-law decided he would like to give a brass cross to be placed on the communion table of our very plain-looking Baptist church; the cries of "We're getting to be too much like the Catholics" went up! I can only imagine what those good people might have thought had they seen a son of that church (me!) serving a congregation in Washington, DC, with candles, robes, liturgical colors, and the liturgical calendar, but still very Baptist! We need to learn that the beauty of holiness and the holiness of beauty are intertwined.

This past Sunday afternoon I went to a concert at a recently-built Lutheran church in our community. I rather expected to see something awe-inspiring. Instead what I saw was a very bland space, with drab colors and very little to focus the eye other than a cross bearing a statue of Christ, suspended in mid-air with an awkward gesture (not a crucifix, just a statue in front of a cross). A few slim stained glass windows punctured one wall, but did not make much of a statement. A lost opportunity, I thought; maybe their architects should have read Exodus 25-28 to discover that God does care about the minutiae of worship!

From Principle to Practice: It Gets Complicated

2011-02-14T09:47:00.002-05:00

Having announced myself as being all for the law of love in my previous blog post, I now have to rethink and refine that stance, because Exodus 21-23 spells out many of the particulars involved in the Ten Commandments. And from that exercise we see that going from principle to practice can be very complicated indeed. The simple "You shall not murder" takes on a whole variety of shades of meaning when we see how the law was worked out to define various kinds of killing, the conditions under which it takes place, and, in fact, the legal form of killing known to us as execution.

While to my tastes no killing should ever take place, nonetheless I can see and accept how this ancient culture adopted a form of jurisprudence that called for punishment in proportion to the enormity of the offense. It has often been pointed out that the dictum, "An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth," means ONLY an eye, ONLY a tooth. It calls for proportionate justice and does not give a license to those who would overwork their vengeance. And I am pleased to see that laws respecting human life head the list in these chapters.

Again, my tastes and our contemporary values are inclined to complain that slavery was permitted and codified in the Exodus law. Why was it not forbidden outright? The law always has to face the facts of the day and the culture in which it is set, and cannot lead people a great deal farther than they are willing to go. And yet, given the overall value system of the Hebrews, slavery was an anomaly that would ultimately work itself out, just as it did in the American experience.

Interesting, too, are the relatively sparse explications of ritual law. There is not a great deal about observance of the religious prescriptions, though that will come later. (As a former pastor, I grieve that I did not, at budget time, preach on the text, "You shall not come before me empty-handed.")! But it would seem that property law was of overwhelming importance then, as it is now. Regulating our avarice requires huge amounts of time and energy, and is very complex. To explicate, "You shall not steal" was relatively easy for ancient Israel; now we have to apply it to insider stock trading, sweetheart contracts, pay-for-play politics, and stockholders milking companies for their own gain at the expense of the workers. Reading Exodus 21-23 on the heels of my perusal of Arthur Schlesinger's The Age of Jackson shows me how little I know about economics and how much, as a Christian, I need to learn in order to be vigilant.

It's easy enough to enunciate the principles of morality, but fleshing them out in practice is a tedious but important work.

Fear-Based Loyalty

2011-02-10T10:05:00.002-05:00

Without question Exodus 20 is a high-water mark in the Old Testament and in religious history as a whole. What we have come to call the Ten Commandments are seen widely as the basis of all morality; even non-Christians may describe themselves as trying to follow the Ten Commandments.

There are problems with that, however. First, the commandments are not all about personal or private morality, nor are they all about public morality. They are also about fealty to God in the ways God specifies: having no other gods beside Him, making no graven images, keeping the Sabbath day. Clearly the commandments are intended to enforce a rigorous commitment to Yahweh.

Second, the commandments are more about fear than they are about promise. Only one commandment, that relating to how we are to regard our parents, offers a promise; the others are either glaringly apodictic or they threaten (visiting iniquity on the third and fourth generation, e.g.). More than that, the context of the proclamation of the words is a frightening one, so that the people ask Moses to hold God off, lest they die! But Moses assures them that they will be all right, for God has "only" come to test them and to put fear in them so that they would not sin.

It seems to me, from a relational standpoint, that there is a deficit here. Do we do what we are supposed to do because we are afraid of the consequences, or is there another motivation that works more powerfully to move us to do the right thing? As a parent, I know that I used coercion and threat and sometimes punishment to get my children to do the right thing; whether another approach would have been more effective is, of course, not something I can test now. But as I analyze my own life and look at my own heart now, I find that I make moral choices not on the basis of the fear of punishment, but on the basis of what will serve me, my family, and my community best. To take but one example: I do not go to worship on Sundays because of a commandment that tells me to keep the Sabbath, nor because of the fear of social ostracism, but because I love to be with God's people, love to provide music, love to hear the word proclaimed, love to be a part of what the church is about. It is a positive motivation, not a negative one.

So ... for all those who are hankering to see the Ten Commandments on courthouse lawns ... I ask whether we really think they are the last word in sponsoring morality. What we need is the word of Jesus, who, when asked what the greatest commandments were, gave us two: to love God and to love our neighbor as ourselves. That is relational religion ... not legalisms that tell us not to use cutting tools on our altar stones or to climb high altars lest we expose ourselves!

Eruptions Physical and Emotional

2011-02-08T09:53:00.003-05:00

The scene set in Exodus 19 is awesome, whether one reads it literally or thinks of it as an embellishment of a volcanic eruption. Fire and smoke, thunder and loud sounds, and the awareness that those who were present during those days had to have interpreted it all as a theophany of extraordinary proportions. What other categories of understanding would they have had? And even for us 21st century science-imbued moderns, there is something numinous that comes through these ancient words. Perhaps we too are inclined to say, as the people of Israel said, "Everything that the Lord has spoken we will do." although I suspect we are just as inclined to forget such a vow when things cool down!

Several relational observations from this text:

1. God's promise is uttered as the clear statement of one who is in charge and who expects obedience, unqualified. What the Old Testament scholars call a "suzerainty covenant" is being evoked; since God brought the people out from slavery, He expects unquestioned obedience and offers to make them a "treasured possession." Is that a worthy bargain, or is that agreeing to a new form of servitude, on the basis of a single act of liberation? Are we to pay the price forever for an admittedly liberating act?

2. The people agree to do "everything that the Lord has spoken" even before He speaks it! I see there not only the gratitude appropriate to a people who have escaped a terrifying life, but also the kind of blanket promise that intimidated people offer. When you think you have no other choice other than to be submissive, you agree to it readily.

3. The orders for ritual cleansing, followed by the threat of dangerous limits that are not to be breached, sound like more intimidation and feel like an insistence on procedural obedience in order to enforce both compliance and fear. No one dared to test this order, nor am I suggesting that they should have. But was this form of threat, this amount of exclusivity, necessary for the theophany to take place or to be respected? What a contrast to later Biblical material that leads us to hear God in the tones of love and in the accents of persuasion, rather than intimidation!

4. Strange, isn't it, that when Moses ascends the mountain for the first time, he is told to go back down and warn the people and the priests not to touch the mountain? Moses has to remind God that the warning signs have already been posted! Perhaps this is an editing over of two slightly conflicting oral traditions, or perhaps it is an artful reinforcement of the taboos, without any concern for divine forgetfulness! The fact remains that this chapter portrays our God as having won a great victory, about to dictate terms to a subject people, and prepared to kill or at least threaten to kill to make the point that He is God and they are not. Is this the God and Father of Jesus?

Maybe what we must take from this chapter is that when all around us life is erupting in unusual and dangerous ways, we will fall into line behind those who do accomplish something but then vigorously exact a price in loyalty and obedience. We will agree to whatever is demanded; but the time will come when we will rebel against it too. I suspect it will not be long in Exodus until that truth emerges.

The Joy of Being Heard

2011-02-01T15:53:00.002-05:00

As a pastor, I got to thunder at the people every Sunday and every Wednesday, and sometimes they actually heard me and responded with life-altering decisions. That was most gratifying; but I am afraid that most of the time we pastors throw our teaching out into the void and see little or no response at all.

The same goes double for those of us who are parents. We taught, admonished, and sometimes screamed at our children as they were growing up, seeing little evidence that we were getting through. One of my friends commented that the Bible says that we should raise up a child in the way s/he should go, and when s/he is old s/he will not depart from it, but it fails to recognize that between "child" and "old" there are many years and many frustrations! True enough, though I have to say that I continue to see maturing in my adult children, and I am pleased with that.

But Exodus chapter 18 introduces another relationship, that of father-in-law and son-in-law, Jethro and Moses. I find it very interesting that Jethro, having had to sustain his daughter and his grandsons while Moses was out doing his Exodus thing, decided to bring the family back to Moses and to sit and listen and observe for a while. Not a bad strategy, and I suspect it is even better if you are connected the way in-laws are connected: with ties of intimacy but without the baggage of growing up conflicts. So Jethro begins by affirming all of Moses' accomplishments and by acknowledging Moses' spiritual commitments. And so when Jethro sees that Moses has fallen into an ineffective style of management, Jethro can speak and can be heard without recriminations or argument.

As a father-in-law myself, and as one connected to some others with a degree of intimacy minus a conflicted history, I can see how I might offer counsel and accomplish some life direction actions. But first I need to listen to the stories, affirm the accomplishments, and watch for a while so that I can see the whole truth, not just the part that accords with my preconceived expectations.

A side note: Verse 20 appeals to me, as it reminds us that the best thing we can do for those who look to us for leadership is to teach them the life principles that will help them succeed. The old adage comes to mind about feeding someone a fish curing a day's hunger, but teaching them to fish will allow them to cure their hunger for a lifetime. How much we want in our time people who will do what is right because they have made an informed lifestyle decision, not because they have been driven by fear or lured by hypocrisy into conformity! To teach truth is not to shove it down the proverbial throat, but it is to trust the basic integrity of others and to show them how to gather information and make responsible decisions. Thank you, Jethro, for your wise counsel!

It's Not Easy Being the Leader

2011-01-24T15:51:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow night we shall settle down to listen to Barack Obama's State of the Union message, the first one after the "shellacking" of the November elections and the installation of a Republican-dominate House of Representatives. Every word, every clause, every look into the balconies -- it will all be scrutinized for signals and strategies coming from our key national leader. Because the President has dealt with some political defeats and can anticipate a difficult time with this Congress, we will all eagerly look at measures of his leadership, for leadership is never easy, and is particularly difficult in times that breed querulousness.

So Moses and the people of Israel in chapters 16 and 17. They are barely finished with their paeans of praise for deliverance when they start to worry about their stomachs, and complain to Moses that it would have been better to have stayed behind in slavery, well-fed, than to have ventured out into freedom, but hungry. And then the same thing about water to drink ... we don't have enough and what we have we don't like. So Moses, in prayer, seeks the Lord's help, and receives in the form of 'manhu' and water from a rock. Leaders are resourceful and find ways to do what is needed, even if they have to go to some unusual lengths to do it -- like striking a rock and expecting a spring.

Poor Moses! Some of the people blatantly ignore the instructions about how to gather, consume, and distribute the manna. There are hoarders, who discover that their cache will not keep. There are procrastinators, who don't get around to gathering the extra portion for the Sabbath. Most amazing of all, there are shirkers who get the full measure and there are over-achievers whose measure is pared down to the standard! Truly a case of "to each according to his need." Over all this, however, Moses becomes chief judge and magistrate as well as visionary leader.

So it is not hard to understand why, when the Amalekites attack, Moses is tired. Finding that as long as his arms are raised, Israel prevails, but when his arms are down, Israel is hard pressed, Moses calls on Aaron and Hur to prop up his arms. Take away the elements of epic hagiography here, and you still have a man who knows both how valuable he is to the nation and yet how much he needs support. It's never easy being the leader, and you know complaint will be forthcoming; but if you can learn to balance your ego and your ability to enlist solid supporters, you will survive and thrive.

Winners Write History

2011-01-21T15:16:00.001-05:00

Winston Churchill declared that history was written by the winners. Nowhere is that truism more obvious than in Exodus, chapter 15, where the people of Israel are represented as singing a long and laudatory song to celebrate their victory over Egypt. It is natural enough that they should celebrate deliverance, and praiseworthy that they should give honor to God as their deliverer, but was it necessary to go on and demean the Egyptians? What is gained by gloating over the deaths of one's enemies? By contrast, I am remembering how Lincoln agonized over the casualty counts on both sides of the American Civil War. Let there never be any pleasure taken in the death of anyone!

In fact, it would seem that sometimes we use rhetoric to cover over our uncertainties. If we are confident that we are doing the right thing as a nation, we do not need to tarnish the reputations of those who disagree. It is rather like the old story of the preacher whose sermon notes were marked in his handwriting, at a particular juncture: "Weak point. Pound the pulpit and yell like crazy."

I was too young to recall the end of World War II clearly, other than to remember a big picture in the Louisville newspaper with a large X through the face of Hitler. But I do remember the end of the Korean War, and how in our church youth group we were led not to engage in chauvinistic hoorahs, but to reflect on the lives lost, of all nationalities, and to pray that we could find a way other than war to settle international disputes.

And so, for me, Exodus and its triumphal song is a sad sign of human history, where there have so often been winners and losers, and whose attitudes simply set up the next round of hostilities. We are yet a long way from the good news of Jesus Christ, who blessed peacemakers rather than warriors.

The Terrible Swift Sword

2011-01-20T14:54:00.002-05:00

To many of us, the picture of a God who will harden once more the heart of Pharaoh, so that he will once again renege on his promise of freedom to the Israelites, is repugnant, particularly as it is presented in Exodus 14 as something of a ruse to get Pharaoh and his army out into the Red Sea, where they will bog down and die. This does not appear to those of us who are horrified by trickery and destruction to be the way of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Of course, there are others who see this material in a decidedly different way. The Biblical literalist does not allow himself to be troubled by questions about whether something happened the way it was written or about whether acts attributed to God are truly from the hand of the divine. The literalist will simply say that if it is in the Bible, that is the way it was, no questions asked. Along the literalist one might also place the militarist, the nationalist, the violent, who believe that nothing settles an issue better than a decisive victory. History, of course, is written by the winners in these conflicts.

What shall we say, between those extremes? And what can be affirmed from this material, from a relational point of view?

That human reality is that sometimes stances and styles of life become so hardened that nothing will break through but smashing defeat; that the demonic in the human heart is so deeply seated that nothing will alter it but a crushing blow -- certainly a truth I have experienced in my own life and in my pastoral practice. Some of us must be brought to a place of unspeakable shame before we will acknowledge our guilt; that, in the Christian tradition, is when we are born again, when we put off the old life and begin to put on the new. Trouble is, that result was not afforded the king of Egypt, nor his 600 soldiers; they appear to be but ancillary damage in this epic struggle.

But so have the soldiers of all wars been -- cannon fodder for the ambitions of the Pharaohs, sometimes willing participants in the liberation struggles of the oppressed, but always having their lives snatched from them. I could discourse at some length on the unfairness of God as well as on the faithlessness of Pharaoh; I could even point us to the snide remarks of the people against Moses. But in the end a story like this makes me see two things: "the fateful lighning of His terrible swift sword," the pain of receiving God's judgment; and the need to be involved in positive, constructive ways of making peace, whether in the small world of my family and acquaintances or in the larger setting. The ultimate word of our God is not so much, "I will destroy the Egyptian" as it is, "Blessed are the peacemakers."

Discerning God's Thoughts and/or Following Pillars?

2011-01-18T10:37:00.002-05:00

Exodus chapter 13 brings us to the initial movements of the people of Israel out of Egypt, and provides us with interesting contrasts on the business of reading the mind of God.

At one level, there are the clear, unequivocal commands for the way Passover is to be observed in future years, complete with instructions on breaking a donkey's neck if it is not redeemed by a sheep! These instructions specify the answers to be given to a child who will ask what all this means, and it is quite clear that the redactors want to make sure that the worship of the Temple is done correctly and with adequate understanding. (I am assuming here that the final form of this text is from the Temple period).

At another level, there is a pious but daring attempt to read and interpret the mind of God. Why did the people of Israel not take the short route into Canaan? The redactor, operating as many of us do, after the fact, imagines an explanation in the mind of God. Sly old God, to figure out that too much resistance might make the Israelites want to turn back! It seems pretentious to draw this conclusion, but how many of us have learned, after months or years of puzzlement, that the will of God was to lead us on a circuitous path, but that it was the right path. I can personally attest to this truth.

And then at yet another level, there are those pillars of cloud and fire: visible and yet intangible and impersonal, having to be understood and accepted as divine leadership, even though they may have looked to some as nothing more than a natural phenomenon -- perhaps an active volcano? But to me a sign that you follow the best you know, trusting that God is in it somewhere, even if it appears to be cloudy, and particularly when it is the only light you have in the gathering darkness. Just follow, for there is no other light: "Lead, kindly light, amidst the encircling gloom. The night is dark, and I am far from home. Lead thou me on. I do not ask to see the distant scene; one step enough for me."

(Of course my Protestant readers may object that this hymn was written by John Henry Newman, whose steps toward the light led him to the Roman Catholic Church! Not our kind of destination, perhaps. But that may even enhance the point: God's light may not lead to the same place for all.)

A Fearsome Cost

2011-01-17T16:40:00.002-05:00

The action recorded in Exodus 11 and 12 is impossible for a contemporary Christian to separate from the way the images of sacrificial lambs and of deliverance were employed in Christian use, both ancient and modern. As my pastor, Joel Hawthorne, yesterday preached on Jesus as the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world, he focused on Jesus' innocence, His lack of resistance and complaint, and His obedience to the will of the Father. And on this Martin Luther King weekend, one cannot help but remember how powerful the story of the Exodus resonates in the African-American community, with Dr. King as the contemporary Moses.

Obviously not all the elements fit in perfect parallel, but key themes are present throughout the Biblical narratives and in Christian history: [1] the sheer stubbornness of sin and the willfulness of the sinner; [2] the cost in innocent lives from oppression; and [3] God's intent to act on behalf of the suffering. Yes, I am troubled by the portrayal of a God who will destroy the first-born of every household; from the perspective of my personal moral code this is unacceptable. And yet, I wonder whether there is not lying in this story a kind of symbolism -- that in every clime and culture young men have been sacrificed for causes that were not worthy of them. Think of the multiplied thousands of German, Italian, and Japanese youth, to say nothing of those from other nationalities, who were sent to be crushed by the war machines of the Second World War, and for what purpose? Nothing noble in it, from our perspective. But it seems it must be ever thus. Liberty is always won at a fearsome cost, whether it be of lambs or men; and as Christians we continue to probe the mystery that our redemption came through the crucifixion of the Son of Man, God giving Himself to God, a truth for which there are several theories of explanation, but ultimately there must be a deep sense of accepting and appreciating that gift. A fearsome cost, liberty of the spirit as well as political liberty.

I am intrigued by the focus on ritual in Exodus 12. The passover must be done properly and precisely. Its rules are to be followed year by year with care. Why? Is it perhaps that we do tend to water down our observances and trivialize our remembrances? Only doing it "by the book" would preserve our sense of awe and wonder and would allow us to live back into a historical re-enactment ... a cautionary word about how we Christian pastors do baptism and the Lord's Supper.

What Plagues Us?

2011-01-14T10:57:00.002-05:00

What a masterpiece of story-telling resides in Exodus chapters 7-10, the account of the plagues of Egypt! I notice that at first, whatever Moses does, the magicians of Pharaoh are able to replicate, and that likely contributed to Pharoah's "hardness of heart." One theorist has come up with a possible explanation of all these plagues, linked to a volcanic eruption on the island of Santorini in the Mediterranean. Whether such a linkage is accurate would not, of course, been of interest to the redactor of Exodus, who is eager to show that the plagues as well as Pharaoh's attitude are all the will of God -- no other explanation necessary.

And yet I find myself watching the relational side of what happens, as a picture of what happens to people in leadership roles. The plagues of snakes, blood, and frogs were unpleasant, but the fact that the magicians could replicate them made them less threatening. However, the next plague was a swarm of gnats, and this time the magicians were stumped. (Exodus 8:18) Notice that they counseled Pharaoh to back down, but Pharaoh would not. Isn't that typical of some of us who have had leadership roles ... that we do not want to hear the judgments of underlings? We want to wait and see if we cannot tough out our problems, and if these folks cannot get it done, we will find someone who will!

Next the flies, which came after Pharaoh had once more, grudingly, given a bit on his refusal to accommodate the Hebrews, with that pious phrase that many a scoundrel has resorted to, "Pray for me." We think we can curry sympathy if we come across as those on whom the weight of responsibility lies heavily, and suppose we can capture the feelings of religious people around us. It almost becomes a matter of blaming God and not ourselves.

So then the pestilence and the boils ... the magicians, who have stayed around despite their inability to counter Moses, are affected by the boils, and no doubt complained mightily about them, but Pharaoh is described as unwilling to listen to them. Leadership gone wrong goes from rejecting sound advice to refusing even to listen to it.

Next, then, the plague of hail. A shift in Pharaoh's rhetoric: "This time I have sinned ... I and my people are in the wrong." "This time", Pharaoh? Not prior to this point? This is a confession that is not a confession at all. It is an attempt to buy the favor of Moses and his capricious God, without fully intending to repent.

So, predictably, another plague has to come: locusts. And this time Pharaoh's officials -- his cabinet, if you like -- were up in arms. They want to be rid of Moses. We must give them good marks for candor: "Do you not yet understand that Egypt is ruined?" But sometimes leaders become so devoted to an ideology, an identity, or a style of operation that they cannot do anything else. A new paradigm is needed, but some leaders just cannot shift away from what they have always done, and the result will be ruinous for the institutions they lead. Pharaoh refuses to see what his advisors are telling him, and gives Moses a half-way permission ... the men may go out to worship, but the families may not. In fact, the text says that after this declaration he drove Moses and his entourage out of his presence; if we do not see the personification of an issue, we think it will go away. But of course such problems are systemic, not merely idiosyncractic.

That brings on the plague of locusts, for which Pharaoh summons Moses and Aaron, and whimpers, "I have sinner against the Lord and you ... do forgive me JUST THIS ONCE ..." Threatened leaders begin to bargain, still living under the illusion that they can save face.

When that strategy fails, and the plague of darkness arrives, you can almost see the anger and loss of control on Pharaoh's face, as he shouts, "Get away from me! .... the next day you see my face you shall die." Rationality is gone, the ability to bargain or compromise has vanished, and nothing is left but a murderous pronouncement. He has sealed his own fate.

So what plagues us, that we lose control of our faculties? What issues or demands do others bring to us that prompt us to play Pharaoh's game of yes-and-no? To what extent do we see it happening in our national political life? In our family life? And, yes, in the life of our churches and our denominations? If we cannot recognize justice when it cries out to us, we will likely call plagues galore on ourselves, and increase our own misery as well as that of those around us, for Exodus does proclaim that justice will ultimately prevail. God says, "I will ..." and that is the bottom line.

Oppression Oppresses Everyone

2011-01-13T13:03:00.002-05:00

It is time we learned that to be oppressive demeans not only those who are pushed around; it demeans the oppressor himself. A Hitler screaming for Lebensraum not only created military actions toward Poland, Czechoslovia, and other nations, but also tore down the fabric of morality in the German people and in himself. Even those who appeared to respect him feared him. He had put in motion a system in which no one was a winner.

That oppression oppresses everyone was attested by Martin Luther King, whose birthday we celebrate this weekend, when he reminded us that segregation oppressed and diminished white people as much as it did black people. His insight was that none of us are free until all of us are free.

So when I read the passages in Exodus 5 and 6, in which a threatened Pharaoh, worrying about the size and strength of the Hebrew population, just as at the time Moses was born, commands that the work load be increased and that bricks be made without the supply of straw needed to complete the task. The slaves are to gather their own straw but the production of bricks is not to diminish. This has to do not so much with the need for production as it does with a fundamental misreading of human nature; Pharaoh blamed the Hebrews for being lazy, but could not see that when you enslave a person, you may force him to work, but you cannot command him to do that work enthusiastically or generously. He will do what he must in order to survive, but where is the incentive to do more?

What intrigues me most is the way that oppression goes up and down the line. The slaves are oppressed by the increase in their workload, but the overseers are also oppressed by unhappy workers and by a demand from above that they cannot meet. Looking for a convenient place to put blame, they turned on Moses and Aaron and accused them of facilitating this oppression. Is it not true now that everyone is oppressed, even Pharaoh?

And God! God too is part of the oppressed, for his servants now blame Him for mistreating the people. "You have done nothing at all to deliver your people." How we do find it necessary to rope others into the circle of blame and therefore the circle of oppression!

But, on this Martin Luther King Day weekend, reading this text as African-Americans did during the days of the civil rights movement, I have to affirm as not merely a historical artifact confined to ancient Egypt but as a present reality, pertinent everywhere in our world, that God will move. God will act. The chorus of "I will"s echoes through history: I will redeem, I will deliver, I will bring you out. He will break the chain of oppression ... and I use the word "chain" to suggest not just mechanical shackles but the ongoing pattern of brutalizing whereby those who have been oppressed find it natural to oppress others, and there is a never-ending chain of dysfunction. Only God and God's liberating instruments can break through that chain.

A key verse, with tremendous psychological and spiritual overtones: Exodus 6:9, "Moses told this [i.e., God's intent to intervene] to the Israelites, but they would not listen to him because of their broken spirit and their cruel slavery." That is when oppression has done its dirty work to the full ... when it has so crushed the human spirit that we cannot even listen to a promise and a hope. Lord, let me be a Moses for someone today, to offer hope that can lift up a weary heart and show the way ahead ... with the help of God.

Stubbornness, Humility, Sovereignty

2011-01-11T10:34:00.002-05:00

Exodus chapters 3 and 4 are so full of heavy-duty theology and of ineffable mystery that I am tempted to diverge from my pattern of reading the Scripture relationally and comment on substantive questions of interpretation. However, others have done that so much more ably than I that I think it best not to digress too far.

And yet, the theme of the sovereignty of God and the nature of human will runs throughout this material. The majestic pronouncement wherein God reveals His name .. ehyeh asher ehyeh .. is an assertion of sovereignty, as are other passages in which God declares, unequivocally, "I will". It is clear that the redactor is doing his/her best to establish the concept of the reign of the Lord. This theme, of course, has been picked up by the neo-Calvinists among us, some of whom seem to argue that every detail of our lives has been predestined by an omnipotent and omniscient God.

But this passage shows us that human will is real, and that we do have room to rebel. Moses brings out every excuse imaginable to avoid undertaking a mission to Egypt. However, the sovereignty of God means that God has a response to every excuse, and in some sense corners us into doing what He needs us to do. Can we say that the will of God is inexorable, and that if you and I do not obey, He will find a way around us? I am not so certain ... but in this instance the redactor certainly wants us to see God as victorious.

Still, human agency is required. Is Moses being humble or is he just plain stubborn? Stubborn people, once they have declared themselves on some issue, can often persist to ridiculous extremes, just to save face. Did Moses go that direction, or was it that he truly knew his limitations and felt inadequate for the task ahead of him? There is a fine line between those, and yet I would also observe that the best successes come from those who are genuinely humble, for they know their limits and are willing to accept leadership and instruction from others.

Now, neo-Calvinists out there, explain to me why God "tried" to kill Moses, who was saved by Zipporah's impromptu circumcision? If God is sovereign, why was His attempt thwarted? And if God is moral, what is the justification for this attack? As Macleish's "J.B." puts it, "If God is good, He is not God; if God is God, He is not good." This fragment appears to me to be a surd quantity, a leftover primitivism that the redactor was frightened to leave out ... and it may even be, as Harold Bloom would want us to believe, that there is a kind of feminism here, highlighting the prowess of one otherwise background lady, in her strong sense of self a good match for Mr. Moses!

Another Personality Study Begins

2011-01-10T15:39:00.002-05:00

Just as in Genesis we read the Scripture relationally and looked at the traits that seemed to make their way from generation to generation ... Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph ... but saw that God is able and willing to work out His purposes through these flawed individuals, so now in Exodus a new story begins, wrapped around the character of Moses. No sooner have we read the story of his preservation from a Pharaonic pogrom than we are dealing with a hotheaded young man who takes vengeance into his own hands, and who intervenes in someone else's fight, only to stop when he is afraid that his violence has been discovered. What will this portend for the rest of Moses' life?

A hint is given in the closing verses of Exodus, chapter 2, when he uses his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to defend a group of young women who were being harassed. At least Moses does have a sense of justice; whether he uses it judiciously or not is another matter. It may well be that my discomfort with his readiness to jump to violence is a cultural blind spot of my own ... in 21st Century Washington we expect these things to be settled by hiring attorneys and going to court! Not the way of the ancient Israelite!

We ought not to miss, by the way, the role of women in the life of young Moses. From the midwives who protected him to his mother and his sister who engaged in a ruse to raise him; from the princess who took a fancy to this boy to the Midianite women who brought him to their father's attention; and then Zipporah, "given to Moses in marriage" without her seeming to have a say in the matter, but one who will become a key part of the mystery to follow -- these women are estimable, bold, and, despite the social strictures put on them, appear to have a strong sense of their self-worth. May their tribe increase!

Issues of Oppression Are Not New

2011-01-04T11:38:00.002-05:00

The world has ever been wrapped in issues around the oppression of one group by another. Children, women, persons of other races, socioeconomic classes, educated elites vs the masses ... to read any history at all is to recognize that the story of the human race is permeated by the efforts of those in places of power to suppress their underlings.

But it is also the story of those oppressed peoples and their struggle to gain freedom, opportunity, and recognition. That is certainly the theme of the Book of Exodus, which I begin today, once again, as with my reading of Genesis, trying to focus on relational insights more than on exegetical niceties or doctrinal assertions. For me, although the Bible is of course the premier source for our knowledge of God, that knowledge is not so much propositional as it is relational -- that is, we do not read the Bible to get abstract ideas so much as we peruse it to understand ourselves in relation to our fellows and, above all, in relation to our God.

So Exodus begins majestically with a relational statement! "Now a new king arose over Egypt, who did now know Joseph." (1:8). The past meant nothing to this king, since he had not personally experienced it; and all he saw was the threat of a large group of people who would not assimilate. (I am reminded of the uneasiness some have felt over the mandate to print official documents in both Spanish and English, along the lines of "Why can't these people learn English?" They can, but in order to provide them with government services, we communicate in a way that they can understand, lest they be made into an underclass.) Assimilation takes time, and often is resisted by groups that have a reason to maintain their identity. The Native American, for example, accommodates mainstream culture enough to live and function, but retains his distinctive culture. Political leaders who do not understand or appreciate that soon find that they are up against hostilities that they do not understand. Give us statesmen who are students of history, so that, unlike Pharaoh, they may "know Joseph" second-hand, if not first-hand.

But look at the over-under issues that emerge in this first chapter of Exodus. The ruling elite, feeling threatened by the people of Israel, could have chosen to learn about them, befriend them, meet their needs, and, yes, assimilate them. Instead they chose to react with oppressive measures, and when those did not work, to redouble them. Foolish then and far more foolish now to think that an identity can be crushed as easily as that. In fact, oppression may create a sense of community that is exceedingly strong.

And so Pharaoh turns murderous indeed, ordering that the Hebrew midwives kill all the baby boys, which they did not do. In fact, they lied to the government about why boys continued to be born ... an early use of "situation ethics"! I do not know whether modern feminism has paid any attention to Shiphrah and Puah, but they surely must be among the patron saints of that movement! They could have complied and allowed plenty of baby girls to be born, but to what fate, with Hebrew men to marry? Likely to be concubines of the Egyptian elite. The key here is that these women placed obedience to what they knew to be the will of God at the center of their lives, and did what they had to do, at serious risk, in order to follow that and that alone.

It is interesting to examine the parallel of this passage with the story of Jesus's birth as presented by Matthew, commonly read at this Epiphany season. The murder of the baby boys of Bethlehem and Joseph's flight to Egypt, explained by Matthew with a quote from Hosea, of all places, is clearly a reference to these events and, particularly, to the saving of Moses, about which we shall read in the next chapter. A good many scholars question the historicity of Matthew's account, finding no evidence that Herod, cruel as he was, ordered an infanticide, and sensing that Matthew has a need to introduce Jesus as the new Moses. Be that as it may, there is a powerful message that we will examine more closely soon ... that out of the devastations we work on one another, God will preserve and raise up a leader to accomplish His purposes. (Think Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, et al).

Death Is a Time for Honesty, But It Is Exhausting

2010-12-31T09:20:00.002-05:00

This summer, when I got the word that I had adenocarcinoma, a form of lung cancer, I thought I might die. Well, I know I will eventually die, but I mean I thought I might die sooner rather than later. I even created a "bucket list" of things I wanted to accomplish before that would occur ... not pleasures and palaces, but finances, inventory, library dispersal, and compiling a sermon legacy database. It's a good thing in more ways than one that the chemotherapy is working and death is no longer imminent, because those tasks turned out to be more daunting than I had supposed!

But on Christmas Day I caught up with another dimension of facing one's death. When my son and his wife came in the house, I hugged him, as I normally do, but then found myself dissolving in tears. I realized that I was playing off the thought that earlier in the year I had supposed I might not see this Christmas. And when my daughter and her family came a little later, the same tears flowed. To face death is to deal with the most precious of relationships, those one has with his children, and it is a time to be honest with one's self and with those children.

So Jacob, in the closing chapters of Genesis, lines up his sons (notice that the daughters do not figure into this passage at all, another evidence of the cultural limitations of the Old Testament stories). With each of them he is honest, brutally honest, and some of them receive "blessings" that are more like curses. Jacob has not forgiven their sins, not even when he is in extremis. Other sons receive qualified blessings, and Judah and Joseph get lavish praise. If one is inclined to see Genesis as the product of the later politico-religious community rather than the ipsissima verba of Jacob, one can readily see how both Israel and Judah are given ample support out of these texts.

But I am intrigued by Genesis 49:18. Right in the middle of the pronouncements about his sons, Jacob is represented as crying out, "I wait for your salvation, O Lord." Zebulon, Issachar, Dan -- breathe! Gad, Naphtali, Joseph. Again, while it seems unlikely that the precise words of Jacob were recorded, and that these are compositions of a later date, still the psychology of this pause remains: when we are handing out honest evaluations, we can find ourselves exhausted by emotionally demanding a process. Who of us has not started some conversation, intending to make a point with someone, 0nly to find ourselves nearly wishing we had not started? I see this verse in that way; Jacob (or the redactor) is filling up with the weight of all these blessings and non-blessings, and just needs to call on the spirit of the Living God to steady his voice and keep him going. Honesty, even at death, is necessary, but exhausting.

A footnote: readers of this blog would not want me to miss yet one more deception! After Jacob's death, his sons, fearing that Joseph will now take vengeance on them, cook up a plan to tell Joseph what their father wanted. To their relief, Joseph falls for it ... or did he? They have imputed to Joseph their own values and style; if they had been in Joseph's place, they would have turned on him and destroyed him, and so they assume that he will do that to them, unless they persuade him through their lie. But maybe, just maybe, Joseph's character is such that forgiveness, already given, would have been continued anyway. More than maybe, for Joseph himself roots his actions in the character of God. In one of the most poignant passages of Scripture, Joseph assures his brothers, "Even though you intended to do harm to me, God intended it for good, in order to preserve a numerous people, as he is doing today. So have no fear ..."

Oh, No, Not Again!

2010-12-30T09:15:00.003-05:00

In an eerie recapitulation of the way his father Isaac was fooled into giving the wrong son the blessing of primogeniture, now Jacob is almost tripped up by the "good" son, Joseph, whom we more-or-less thought had abandoned the clan's pattern of deception. Genesis 48 describes the double-cross, in which Joseph, aware that his father cannot see, moves his two sons around like pawns on a chessboard, endeavoring to get the primal blessing for Manasseh rather than Ephraim, the older. But Jacob, assuming that he knew who was who, in turn crosses his arms and blesses the "right" boy inadvertently. Hard to know who is more reprehensible in this scenario -- Jacob, the old trickster, true to himself right to the end; or Joseph, his achieving son, not fully content with the fact that his sons will inherit a portion of Jacob's goods as if they were Jacob's sons rather than his grandsons.

Of course, the issue works only if you accept the pattern of distribution by primogeniture. Here was an opportunity to bypass it altogether, which Jacob had already done in part, by the legal fiction of declaring the boys to be his "sons." Why do we have to find legal fictions for the way we give, particularly the way we give inheritances? Why do families come unglued if one heir is perceived to receive more than another? Can we not simply be grateful that we have received anything at all?

Memories: I managed my mother's funds for her, and kept a strict record, reporting regularly to my brother. When she died and all the expenses had been paid, I sent him exactly, to the penny, one-half of what remained, as her will specified. We justifiably congratulated ourselves on a friction-free execution of her will. But the root of that lay not just in our own spirits, but in our mother's wisdom in specifying a precise division. Everything was transparent; there was no attempt on anyone's part to deceive another.

So it must indeed be true, as the New Testament would later say, that "the love of money is the root of all evil." And money renders families dysfunctional if there has been any sort of misleading pattern. Part of my own confession is that in years past, when funds were tight in our household, I would make financial decisions without consulting my wife, hoping that I could wiggle through. That created some serious issues for us, and now, happily, with much greater prosperity, I am not even tempted to do so. But the Jacob story does remind me that that temptation still lies at the door, and could work havoc in my family even today. Caveat!

Costly Interdependence

2010-12-27T09:30:00.002-05:00

The arrival of the Jacob clan -- according to the Biblical census, sixty-six people, added to the Joseph nuclear family of four already there, to total seventy -- created an occasion for interdependence. Prior to the account in Genesis 46, Pharaoh had invited them all to come and live in his realm, but Pharaoh obviously did not know much about them. And so Joseph, knowing that his family were shepherds and keepers of other livestock, and recognizing that there was a prejudice in Egypt about followers of that occupation, coached his brothers on what to say to Pharaoh. I think I may have to retract some of my earlier postings about Joseph being different from the rest of his clan, because he turns crafty in this encounter as well as in those to come in chapters 47-48. "Tell Pharaoh the truth, that you are shepherds, but immediately propose to him a solution that resolves his issues and also provides an advantage for you: tell him that you will take care of the herds in time of famine, so that there will be food, but that you would be pleased to do that out of sight, out of mind, in Goshen (the Nile delta). Pharaoh, when offered this proposal, is glad to have it suggested to him, and agrees readily. Interdependence can sometimes be built on the basis of complimentary needs; maybe we should credit Joseph not so much with craftiness as with political foresight -- the capacity to recognize that answers come when the needs of all are met with solutions that are not altogether too costly for anyone.

But then in chapters 47-48 the issue of political interdependence takes a sinister turn. Gradually the people of Egypt exhaust all their resources buying food from the government, until the time comes when they have nothing left but their own bodies, and they accept slavery to Pharaoh as the condition for their support. They will hereafter owe 20% of their productivity, bound forever in slavery but protected from hunger.

So is this too costly a price to pay for interdependence? It compares roughly with our federal tax rates today in the United States. We may not all expect our government to feed us, although in some nations the welfare state approaches that expectation. But we do expect protection from terrorism, regulation of potentially ravenous commercial practices, the creation of infrastructure, and a host of other services. Is government too large and too costly? Have we become slaves to our system of government? The Tea Partiers seem to think so, and we will see whether they can succeed in the upcoming Congress in their efforts to dial back some government programs. Nonetheless, this ancient story reminds us that we can and should be able to turn to government for support, but that there is a cost for that help. Interdependence is always on its way to servility, and the issue is whether we, like the ancient Egyptians, will decide that we want to pay that cost.

Oh, that there may be some Josephs in the Congress, to negotiate for the needs of us all!

It's Called Grace

2010-12-23T15:53:00.002-05:00

The story of Joseph and his disclosure to his brothers in Genesis 45 is at bottom a story of grace, unmerited favor, for these brothers expected and might have received harsh recriminations from this one whom they had wronged so many years ago. And old Jacob might have been furnished with the message he half-expected, that another of his sons -- Benjamin, the favorite -- had been captured, imprisoned, or worse. And, looking at the heritage of deception from which Joseph sprang, we would not have been surprised either.

But the story is altogether different. Jacob's sons are "surprised by joy" (to borrow a C. S. Lewis title). Their brother is genuinely moved, weeps unashamedly, and reveals his identity ... and then goes on to promise them handsome treatment in the days ahead. In fact, Pharaoh himself is stirred by his trusted servant's family situation, and offers them carte blanche if they will pack up and move to Egypt -- in its own way reminiscent of the belief of generations of immigrants that if they could arrive in America they would be living off "the fat of the land" (45:18).

So how has this happened? What factors have intervened to make Joseph different from what we might have expected? How is it that the deceptive spirit and the self-centeredness of this family are not seen in this one member?

Clearly the Genesis accounts would want us to give God the credit, and Joseph interprets his own saga in God-centered terms, telling his brothers that ultimately it was not they who sent him to Egypt, but God, who wanted Joseph to be the instrument of saving many lives during the times of famine. But can we also, without doing violence to this theocentric interpretation, also suspect that a change of venue made the difference? Joseph started out with the old family traits -- remember the dreams about the brothers' sheaves bowing down to his sheaf? But as a young man, maturing in Potiphar's household, even with its temptations, and as a man finding his full maturity with tremendous responsibility laid on him, can we imagine that his selfishness was tempered as he picked up other values, other themes? If we surmise that Potiphar was a responsible public servant; if we at least hope that whatever Pharaoh this was under whom Joseph served was a ruler who cared about the fate of his people and was not stuck in megalomania, then perhaps Joseph imbibed the idea of public service. Perhaps Joseph learned, against his early instincts and, one might even say, against normal human inclinations, to be gracious, unselfish, and just.

If so, that suggests to me that environment is indeed important for the development of solid, positive human beings. A child who knows nothing but stealing and lying is far more likely to grow into a thief and a prevaricator than one who is shown honest values from the start. Are there exceptions? Of course. Is human nature at its root, as Jeremiah would say years later, "deceitful above all things"? Without question; "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." And yet I find in all of that no excuse for ignoring the environments in which children grow. I find in all of that, as in Joseph's case, motivation not only for the evangelical emphasis on spiritual transformation but also for the social justice emphasis on proper life enhancement systems. Both, not either/or.

In the end, when grace is given or grace received, we are surprised by joy, because we know deep down that we deserve nothing but punishment or deprivation. But God ... and sometimes one of God's children, favored himself with grace ... offers us hope, opportunity, and a future. Can we be open to becoming Joseph for someone else, seeing how wonderfully we have been treated? Can we be an instrument of grace upon grace?

Me-ism Always Comes Back

2010-12-20T07:58:00.002-05:00

It has been my experience that self-centeredness is profoundly rooted and is very difficult to extract. I know this because I have seen it in myself as well as in others. When we get into the habit of evaluating every incident in terms of how it will affect ourselves ... our income, our reputation, our image ... then the passing of the years may mitigate that habit, but will not erase it. A new crisis will bring it to the fore again.

And so Jacob, listening to the strange tale told by his sons after they had encountered, unwittingly, their brother Joseph in Egypt, thinks primarily of himself (Genesis 42-44). He accuses his sons, again, of bereaving him, thinking that Joseph is dead and that Simeon, left behind, will not survive, and therefore refuses to acceded to the Egyptian's demand for Benjamin. When Reuben makes the incredible offer to sacrifice his own two sons if he does not project Benjamin, there is a deafening silence from Jacob. He seems not to care about anything other than, "you would bring down my gray hairs with sorrow to Sheol."

The story continues as the famine deepens and Jacob wants his sons to try again in Egypt, but they remind him of the conditions under which they are laboring ... that the young Benjamin should accompany them this time. And what is me-ism's reply? "Why did you treat ME so badly as to tell the man you had another brother?" This time Judah instead of Reuben promises to be personally responsible, and Jacob, without other options, agrees, but not without suggesting a little present ... bribe, maybe? ... and after turning the issue back to himself again, "As for me, if I am bereaved of my children, I am bereaved." Yes, Jacob, you will have lost your sons' presence, but they will have lost their very lives! Does that not matter?

The reception that Joseph provided his brothers is a charming story of positive deception, a story that draws out in extraordinary detail Joseph's strategy to put his brothers through an exquisite anxiety before he will reveal who he is. And clearly Joseph knows his father, asking about his health and his attitudes, and playing a cat-and-mouse game with Benjamin's fate, calculated to bring out the truth about Jacob's self-absorption. Joseph knew exactly what he was doing, and surely must have anticipated the response that he received from Judah, "For how can I go back to my father if the boy is not with me? I fear to see the suffering that would come upon my father."

Me-ism is not only a life pattern in those who are devoted to it; it ropes in all others around its devotees, and makes them calculate their moves to avoid unpleasant encounters. Me-ism always comes back to haunt everyone involved in such an emotional system, and it becomes the stackpole around which a family is organized.

How About a LIttle Self-Promotion?

2010-12-17T09:11:00.002-05:00

Ambition is an ambiguous thing ... just as my use of two similar-sounding words might suggest. On the one hand, we want our children to be ambitious, when it means that they are hard-working, eager to learn, and think creatively about how to do their tasks. On the other hand, we know that ambition can lead to selfishness, insensitivity to others, and an overriding concern for status. So what do we do with the issue of ambition? And is a little shameless self-promotion acceptable?

Joseph, in chapters 40 and 41 of Genesis, is discovered to have the ability to interpret dreams. He accurately predicts the restoration of Pharaoh's cupbearer to his former status and equally accurately points to the demise of the chief baker. Good work, Joseph; but did you need to use your gifts to ask for the happy cupbearer to use his influence to get Joseph out of prison? Why not argue your case on its own merits, rather than have someone act as your advocate?

But of course it did not work anyway, at least not right away, as the cupbearer promptly forgot all about his former cellmate. But when Pharaoh himself needed dream interpretation, the dormant memory sprang to life, and Joseph was summoned. The dreams about cows and ears of corn -- seven years each of fat and sleek, seven more years of thin and ugly -- were interpreted, and Joseph slyly suggested that Pharaoh needed someone smart enough to manage his resources for him to prepare for the lean years during the upcoming good ones. I can almost hear him saying, as a child might, "Pick me, pick me!" Pharaoh did what political leaders often do ... he took the path of least resistance and selected the man who had presented himself as the solution. Is there anything wrong with that?

The proof, as is typically said, is in the pudding. If Joseph can handle the assignment, then both he and Pharaoh will be lionized. If he fails, Pharaoh still knows how to hang unprofitable servants! It seems to me that self-promotion, when you truly believe you can make a difference, is not unbridled ambition, but is evidence of a godly self-confidence. But once you put yourself forth for some responsibility, the focus had better be less on the honor of the position and much, much more on getting the task accomplished.

The Price of Integrity

2010-12-16T16:26:00.002-05:00

In Genesis 39 we are introduced to the mature Joseph, sold into slavery in Egypt and ultimately bought by Potiphar, captain of Pharaoh's guard. The Joseph of pride and vaunted self-esteem we met when his brothers decided they could not stand to have him around any longer has now grown into ... or at least is being portrayed as ... a man of responsibility, capability, and integrity. Potiphar makes him the manager of his household, and is content that everything will be handled well.

All goes well, until Potiphar's wife turns seductive and tries repeatedly to create a sexual liaison with Joseph. Joseph has a two-pronged defense against her advances, and it is not a bad way to do moral reasoning: to succumb to your advances would be to betray my master's trust, and it would be against the will of God (this understanding of the will of God well before the introduction of the Seventh Commandment). A preliminary form of loving God and loving one's neighbor as one's self. And Joseph almost pulls it off; perhaps the one thing missing is an attempt to interpret more fully for Potiphar's wife what this mysterious God wants and why. Today I suspect we would turn Rogerian on Mrs. Potiphar and ask her what it would mean to her to be intimate with this handsome young Hebrew. Was she trying to regain a lost youth? Was she attempting to punish her very-busy husband? But these categories do not interest the editors of the Bible.

What does interest me is how the desire to seduce quickly becomes seizing the opportunity to punish. She gets hold of one of Joseph's garments and then uses it as evidence to accuse Joseph of attempting the very thing he had so carefully avoided. So William Congreve, in "The Mourning Bride", 1697: "Heav'n has no Rage, like Love to Hatred turn'd, Nor Hell a Fury, like a Woman scorn'd." I am reasonably sure one could reverse the genders on that and still find it true.

And so we learn that living in integrity has its price. You may be tempted, repeatedly, and find that your explanations are not convincing. You may find that you have lost a friend. And your reputation and your position may even be destroyed, for a time. But, as we shall see in the ongoing story of Joseph, faith in God is the road to vindication. It may be long in coming, but God is ... to use the word that we find so powerful in Job ... go'el. He is redeemer. His justice will ultimately play out. Wait for it in faith. Wait to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

Double Standard and an Acknowledgement

2010-12-15T09:41:00.002-05:00

We have become more sensitized, I hope, in recent years, to the issue of double standards. We expect one thing from men, another from women. We expect a certain level of performance from Caucasians, but insult African-Americans by saying ... more subtle than in earlier days, but nonetheless real ... "That was really good, for a black man." We even look at pastors as being somehow more noble and less tempted than ordinary Christians, so that when one of our spiritual leaders does fall, then we condemn him/her more loudly than we would others. Can we get to the place where we simply know that "all have sinned and come short of the glory of God." As one revival preacher put it at the church I once served, "What part of 'all' do you not understand?"!

So in Genesis 38 we have a sordid story, one which I have never preached on and probably never will, though I did recently read a set of suggestions about that from one of those preachers who feels it is good to preach straight through a Bible book, verse-by-verse, skipping nothing. I think I could in good conscience skip this one for preaching, though it has, as I trust we are about to see, some important lessons that could be taught to adolescents, young adults, and mature adults in a setting where there could be ample discussion.

The right and duty of relatives to fulfill the intimacies of marriage when a husband has died is an ancient Eastern custom, not exclusive to Israel. Levirate marriage, as it is called, was designed to protect a family lineage in an era when property rights and the sheer need to replenish the population of one's tribe were paramount. It was a duty, a right, and, in the eyes of some, a privilege. But young Onan did not see it that way; maybe he was spooked by whatever it was that lay behind the terse statement that his brother Er was "wicked in the sight of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death." Be that as it may, Onan faced the same fate after he played fast and loose with the Levirate marriage responsibilities by faking his intercourse with Tamar, making sure the semen did not take its proper place. We get the term "onanism" for this practice. The issue is not so much the spilling of the semen as it is the fakery and false relationship involved. Fakery, because he is satisfying his father's expectations without accepting the responsibility that would come with children the culture would not even consider to be his. And false relationship because he is "using" Tamar for a modicum of pleasure, but is not providing her with the satisfaction she presumably would like. I say "presumably" because there is no record of anyone having asked her what she preferred! Double standard: no one asks women what they want in that setting.

But then things get more sordid and more convoluted. Widowed Judah, Tamar's father-in-law, seems to think that because he is widowed, he can now indulge in the occasional use of a prostitute. Not recognizing his daughter-in-law, dressed as a prostitute soliciting by the side of the road, he solicits her services. She engages in entrapment, because he is about to become her victim, since she feels he has not done her justice by providing another of his sons for the Levirate marriage responsibility. Pledges are given, identifiers are provided, and Judah promptly makes her pregnant.

Now it may be one thing not to recognize your daughter-in-law veiled as a prostitute, a temple prostitute at that (much has been written about the practice of temple prostitution in Canaanite and therefore early and not-so-early Israelite culture -- my favorite Old Testament book is Hosea, in which the prophet sees the prostitution of his wife Gomer as a metaphor for Israel's faithlessness before God.) But not to recognize her during the intimacies of intercourse? That seems incredible ... except that the whole business of sex without commitment involves a physical intimacy without any sort of emotional bonding or even recognizing of the other as a person. She is merely a vessel for pleasure, slam, bang, thank you ma'am.

And so when they tell Judah three months later that Tamar is pregnant, he is full of indignation and wants her burned, until it is proved to him that he is the father. Double standard ... he wants the woman punished, but asks no questions about the father. But there is hope ... I keep asking about that, don't I? ... there is hope because Judah grudgingly says that "She is more in the right than I, since I did not give her to my (other) son Shelah." And the text tells us that he made no effort to have intercourse with her again.

So we men CAN be brought to our senses. I once had a man in my church (twice divorced) who told me that "of course a man has to have a woman once in a while." When someone proposed him as deacon, I had to veto that proposal, albeit without giving the reasons. Some of us are brazen and braggadocio about sexual exploits; others own up only when we are caught. I'd be more forgiving of a Judah, who does seem to get it that he was wrong, at least in one aspect of his sin.

Hmm, twins are the result, one of them supplanting the other in birth order. Would you suspect that the whole Esau and Jacob struggle is about to be repeated? My thesis remains intact, though unsubstantiated by other evidence in this case, that family systems issue do persist from generation to generation, unless there is intervention. Thanks for the help with this, Rabbi Edgar Friedman!

Arrogance Multiplied

2010-12-10T09:35:00.002-05:00

Jacob's legacy of duplicity and self-centeredness continues, as we see in Genesis 37, even when he is not around to suggest it or supervise it. His boys have learned some things -- perhaps not because he taught them precepts directly, but more likely because they picked up on the atmosphere their father provided.

First there is Joseph, dreaming dreams about his own greatness, and having the temerity to tell those dreams to his brothers and his father. It is one thing to believe in your own giftedness; it is quite another to ask those around you -- your peers and your elders, particularly -- to believe in it and kow-tow to it! But from Jacob Joseph must have learned that one may consider himself the center of the universe!

And then there are Joseph's brothers, all full of righteous indignation, or perhaps of jealousy, or just miffed that they didn't have such elegant dreams themselves! And, as sons of Jacob, each secretly wanting to be the superior one. And so their plot to destroy this dreamer. (Who of us of a certain age can ever forget the drama of Martin Luther King's funeral, after his assassination, which focused on Genesis 37:19-20, "Here comes this dreamer; let us kill him ...?" But of course Dr. King's dream was not about his own prominence, but about justice for all Americans ... "I have a dream ...")

We are relieved when Reuben stays the hand of his murderous brothers and suggests putting Joseph aside rather than killing him. Maybe there is a shred of integrity in this family. But then along comes Judah, who sees and opportunity to sell Joseph into slavery (interesting, considering the theories of some Old Testament students who see everything etiologically ... Judah, the progenitor of the southern Kingdom, the slave-trader?).

Reuben's integrity disappears when he finds out what has been done; his first concern is for himself ("I, where can I turn?"), and only secondarily for the feelings of his father Jacob. I see no real concern for Joseph, no effort to think about how to rescue him or buy him back. But Reuben comes up with the goat's blood on the favored son's robe, and the brothers let their father think that Joseph has been killed by a predator. Let the old conniver be fooled; he has done it to others, let him now take the fall, disguised as softening the blow. But Jacob refuses to be comforted, and says he will go to his grave grieving for his lost son ... true to form for any parent who has lost a child.

But notice that the keys to this grim story are not only Jacob's pattern of dissimulation, learned by his sons, but also the statement that Jacob "loved Joseph more than any other of his children." Favoritism and obvious preference creates jealousy and ill-will even among the best of men. Jacob should have known that from his experiences with his mother and his twin brother; but, again, we learn values and relationships by osmosis more than by precept or by observation. And so Jacob is repeating, with his own spin on it, the mistakes perpetrated on him; why should we be surprised if they show up in the next generation as well?

So, as I have asked before, is there any hope for dysfunctional or toxic family systems? Are we doomed to repeat the mistakes and inadequacies of our heritage? Stay tuned as we follow Joseph, this favored one, to see what he does to rearrange the deck chairs on this sinking Titanic!

Those Who Contribute Do Get Noticed

2010-12-08T10:35:00.002-05:00

It is sobering to think of the billions who have inhabited this planet and/or who are now alive, but whose lives will be scantily remembered and, in some cases, whose deaths will go almost unnoticed. As a pastor I did some funerals at the behest of a funeral director who would sometimes have clients with a burial to perform, but little or no emotional or spiritual connection with anyone. I had to pick up a little information on the spot and do a rather generic funeral!

When we come to the 36th chapter of Genesis, one of those "begat" chapters in the King James Version, I get much the same feeling: who are these people and why are their names written in the Bible? The intent of the editor is to offer a history of Esau's descendants as a way of explaining the origins of various towns and groups, particularly the Edomites. But most of the names remain obscure and of no special value to the modern reader. (By the way, one small piece of evidence that this material was not written by Moses but that it came from later editors is the notation in v. 31, to the effect that we are going to identify some kings "before any king reigned over the Israelites." Clearly Moses would not have known that kings were coming to Israel at all. Just one snippet of evidence among many.)

However, one person is singled out for a bit of recognition, and I think there is a clue to the reason for it provided in the text. Verse 7 says that Esau moved away from Jacob because "their possessions were too great for them to live together; the land where they were staying could not support them because of their livestock." As much as I would like to rhapsodize on the notion that possessions create rivalries -- keeping up with the Jacobs -- I do see that this is an economic and ecological statement. The land simply would not support too much livestock. Too dry, too little food; and so one of them, Esau (ever the accommodator?) decides to move.

But then in the middle of all the boring begats is this note about one person, in verse 24 Anah is identified as the one "who found the springs in the wilderness, as he pastured the donkeys of his father Zibeon." Aha! Anah is remembered because he discovered a solution to the problem of sufficient water. A one-time discovery, and perhaps he did nothing else noteworthy in his entire life. But this one thing he did, and for it he received credit, enshrined in the pages of sacred Scripture. I'll bet he never saw that coming when he found the springs!

Maybe you and I will be forgotten soon after we die. Once my children and my grandchildren finish their course of life on earth, who will know or care what I have done? And will there be anything worth remembering? I do like to think that I "found some springs in the wilderness," sources of spiritual and emotional refreshment, and pointed others to them. I do like to suppose that the places I have invested my life -- campus ministries, churches, the denomination -- will have been improved and advanced by my efforts. And so recognition is not really important, not being remembered. Like Anah, if I can do one thing that makes a difference for others' well-being, I shall have succeeded.

Events That Grow Us Up

2010-12-06T08:17:00.002-05:00

Jacob, in Genesis 35, arrives at a time in his convoluted life in which he grows up. Events not of his own making, but ones in which he can see the hand of God, give him a new maturity. The decision to move onward, the unnamed terror that shut down potential enemies, even the death of Rachel's nurse -- tangential to Jacob and yet a sobering event -- are preludes to another of the classic struggles we have seen in Jacob's life. This time, however, there is nothing so dramatic -- just a quiet realization on Jacob's part that despite everything that he has done, God is still with him and is blessing him. The change of his name to "Israel" symbolizes this revision in his self-awareness, although Genesis will use the occasion as a way of reinforcing the myth of national rights to the land. It is curious to me that the text goes right on using "Jacob"; a relational reading might suggest that this means that even when we change, or are changed, there is much in us that keeps on using our old identities, our favorite habits.

But then the birth of Benjamin and the death of Rachel in childbirth -- it feels as though there is now a quiet maturity in him. He buries her and "Israel journeyed on." Soon he will have to join with Esau in burying their father Isaac as well. Quiet, resigned, accepting: I see these things at least by inference if not by actual characterization in the text.

Perhaps the key to all this is found in the opening segment of Genesis 35, where Jacob demands that everyone in his household put away their "foreign gods." It sounds like a new determination to set a straight course, unpolluted by worldly values, and to be God's man. To do that is to experience a new centering, a sense of who one is; to settle on God as God and not hedge one's bets with other options is to grow up into a strong identity and a receptive heart. At last, Jacob, at last, you are settling down, not just in a place to live, but in a spiritual place as well.

However, I do wonder about Jacob's hiding the foreign gods and the bling under and oak near Shechem. Why hide them and not destroy them? Was it in the back of your mind, you old struggler, that you might want to come back and get them again? But you did not, and for that we can be grateful.

The Next Generation, One More Time

2010-11-26T11:15:00.003-05:00

Nothing I read in Genesis 34 convinces me to diverge from my concept that family values and practices pass on from generation to generation unchanged, unless there is powerful intervention to change them. The rape of Dinah is inexcusable, of course; that her family should be outraged is understandable, and, indeed, if they had been casual about it, that would have been cause for serious criticism. Jacob and his sons are angry.

But isn't it interesting how quickly and easily, apparently, they are drawn into a scheme, one in which their old ways can come out? To Hamor's proposal that his son Shechem be allowed to marry the girl he has just raped, and that in fact the families move into large-scale marriage alliances, Jacob's sons answered with what seemed to be an acceptance, but was actually a ruse to disable the men of Hamor's tribe so that they could be more easily slaughtered. The blatant misuse of the religious rite of circumcision, building on the greed of Hamor's clan as well as on their need to avoid retribution, becomes the means by which Dinah's brothers, Simeon and Levi, can work vengeance not only on Shechem himself but on all the men of their inhabitation. And they captured the wealth, the wives, and the children as well ... it made even Jacob a bit worried. Worried not about the fate of Hamor's people, but about himself: "You have brought trouble on ME ... if they attack ME ..." Who is paramount to Jacob?

Simeon, Levi, you want to know, "Should our sister be treated like a whore?" And of course the answer is that she should not. But you are way over the top and you have demonstrated that this family's talent for deception has not diminished one iota. Is there any hope at all?

I notice that no one asked Dinah what she thought should be done. Is that, brothers and father, not also treating her "like a whore" who has no rights?

Suspicion, Struggle, and a Significant Move

2010-11-25T09:42:00.002-05:00

I had expected my brother to come visit me this month, which he could not do because of a health condition; but I had thought of greeting him in the words of Genesis 33:10, "For truly to see your face is like seeing the face of God, since you have received me with such favor." But now that I have re-read Genesis 32 and 33 relationally, I am rather glad I will not be doing that. It is only slightly less a back-handed compliment than the Mizpah covenant I wrote about yesterday.

For, you see, Jacob, knowing that he must confront his brother Esau after all these years of no communication, no attempt at remorse, no concern for restitution, is now worried. He thinks Esau may be gunning for him, and who would not expect that? So Jacob, ever the planner and the plotter, decides on "appeasement." Flocks of his animals ... a display of wealth ... are to be paraded out to where Esau may see them. As he sees one drove, he may be impressed; then another, and another, and another ... all spread out so that his response will be one of astonishment. Instead of a quick reaction, Jacob wants to manipulate Esau's feelings and impress him with his success, all under the guise of atoning and appeasing.

Anyone here older than I and remember the infamous "appeasement" of Hitler, attempted by Prime Minister Chamberlain in 1938? We know how well that went. Now Esau is not Hitlerian, but Jacob does not know that, and so Jacob tries appeasement: can we just get you to settle down, Esau, and let me come in and settle?

However, Jacob is hedging his bets and is going for all-out manipulation. He sends his family, children and all, across the Jabbok, into Esau-land, but stays behind himself. What does that mean? He hopes that if Esau gets that far and sees this crowd of women and children, he will ease off. But if not, Jacob has protected himself. The women and children may be expendable. Isn't this still the Jacob we have seen all too often?

Then, however, the all-night struggle. The stranger is never clearly identified as God, but only as "a man." Not to get too Freudian, but can we not see Jacob wrestling with his own conscience, a conscience which is, after all, placed in him by his creator and now activated by that same creator-spirit? I have always felt that when I honestly look into my own heart and listen as candidly as I can, I am hearing not just my prejudices or my desires, but I am hearing the voice of the Lord as well. So Jacob interpreted his night of struggle as an encounter with God and as a command to move forward, albeit wounded ... changed, just a little, limping on a still-lingering postulate: that he must have his own way. But it does not work so well any more!

Yet there are still evidences of the old Jacob, even after the struggle. Look at the family systems thing that comes next, at the beginning of Chapter 33: the maids/concubines and their children go out front, on the vulnerable side; next Leah and her brood; and Rachel and her Joseph, favorites always, are behind all the rest, protected. The one thing we do see that changes is that Jacob, the limper, goes out in front to take his medicine first. That is a significant move in the right direction.

And what happens? Not what anyone might have expected, given the culture and the interpersonal history involved: Esau, the offended one, the one who had every reason to remain hostile, "ran to meet him, and embraced him, and fell on his neck and kissed him, and they wept." Does that remind you of Jesus' parable of the prodigal son, better described, as Helmut Thielicke does, as the parable of the waiting father, the father who saw his son a great way off and ran to greet him?

We learn from this that a gesture, however flawed, in the direction of reconciliation, offered to the offended, may ... though not always ... bring grace and mercy in abundance. And Jacob seems grateful, too; the characterization of seeing his brother being like seeing the face of God, probably a reference to the Jabbok struggle with the anonymous man, is to my mind flawed slightly, in that Jacob cannot resist urging his gifts on his brother by bragging, "I have everything that I want." (A statement that many of us could utter this Thanksgiving Day!). And is Jacob still a little suspicious of his brother's equanimity when he declines Esau's offer to travel with him and help protect Jacob's property? He brushes Esau off and goes to create his own places. Perhaps he knows that, sweet as the reconciliation is, he cannot trust himself (Esau is not the problem, Jacob is), and so puts a safe distance between himself and his brother in order to manage the relationship.

Suspicion, probably; struggle, surely; and some significant moves in the right direction, though we do not yet see old Jacob fully turned around. And maybe that can never be. And yet, here again in the Christian worldview, we never altogether give up on our own growth or on the formation of our brothers and sisters into Christlikeness. Old habits will jump up and demand to be recognized; but in the redeeming Spirit they can be changed and reshaped, can they not?

Let's stay with Jacob for a few more chapters and see!

Speckled, Striped, and Mottled: Will These People Ever Change?

2010-11-24T08:55:00.003-05:00

What little I know about family systems theory suggests that we do learn patterns, both good and bad, from our parents, which they in turn learned from their own parents, and on back in a chain. That chain may include deception, shame, guilt, greed, self-centeredness, and arbitrariness. Or it may involve other and more positive traits. Will we ever escape or exceed these patterns which we have learned so intensely?

The extended story of Jacob and his family relationships in Genesis 29-31 certainly gives us no cause for hope on that point. He is deceived by his uncle Laban into marrying the wrong sister, Leah with the lovely eyes; for cultural reasons that are foreign to us, Jacob swallows the raw deal and works seven more years to "earn" Rachel. So there is deception and acceptance of that deception, to begin with. Sounds quite a lot like Jacob's mother Rebecca and the trick she helped play on father Isaac and brother Esau, doesn't it? Into the family pattern, with a touch of justice perhaps ... Jacob the supplanter is now more or less the victim.

But then the terrible business of Rachel's being unable to bear children and Jacob's being handed the two maids, Bilhah and Zilpah, so that he may have more sons even than Leah can provide. That should sound familiar too ... the thing with Sarah and Abraham, Hagar and Ishmael. And they knew how badly that all turned out; but that does not stop them from repeating the same mistake. Jacob could have refused this illicit concubinage, but he did not. So we compound and set up rivalries because we act out of our gut instead of with consecrated reasoning. Human beings do not HAVE to act out sexually just because they feel inclined to do so or because they are given the opportunity. There is such a thing as responsibility and fidelity to commitments.

Then we come to the mandrakes incident ... mandrakes are a hallucinogenic plant in the nightshade family, and were supposed in ancient times to have magical properties that would create pregnancy. A bit of bargaining goes on and Reuben's little stash, intended for his mother Leah, makes its way in part to Rachel. The result? More sons for Leah and one for Rachel. Reminiscent of the Jacob and Esau mess of pottage and the forfeiture of birthrights, although at least this time each wife gets something out of the deal! But the key word is manipulation ... between the women, over against Jacob, and even with God. How do these proto-Yahwists justify the use of magic blended with pious references to God's will? The same way, I suppose, as people do today, asking for last rites when they think they are about to die, even though they have not been in fellowship with Christ up to that point.

So now Laban and Jacob agree that they must separate. Long overdue, if you ask me. But they cannot even do this without dishonesty and deception! What an ironic and laughable story as Jacob breeds the goats in order to create a strong flock for himself and a weak one for Laban. I am no agriculturalist, so I cannot comment adequately on the strategy, except to say that it must have taken a long time for Jacob to pull it off, more than one generation of breeding. What lengths we will go to to fatten our coffers and deceive others! He wants to leave, but he sets himself up for a lengthy process of cheating. The animals turn out "speckled, striped, and mottled" and that seems to me to be an apt description not only of the outside of the goats but also of the inside of this man, Jacob, and the others around him.

For soon Jacob and his entourage take off, without so much as a by-your-leave, and Rachel steals her father's household gods, then squats on them and tells her father, who is searching for them, that she cannot get up because it is her menstrual period! Lies which the naive Laban buys ... another characteristic we have seen in this crowd. Wouldn't you think that after a while they would all become suspicious of one another? Striped, speckled, mottled -- they do not learn.

And when Jacob and Laban finally see that the only solution is to separate and mark a boundary line between them, the modern irony is that church folks today like to quote the Mizpah word, "May the Lord watch between you and me, while we are absent one from another." They seem not to notice that it is a statement that calls on God to keep them from harming one another, since there is no trust between the two!

So the question remains: are we always going to be "striped, speckled, and mottled" or can we hope to change those family systems sins that we have learned? The answer is going to be a mixed one, I suspect; we will read on in Genesis about Jacob and Esau and their reconciliation. We will read on, too, about Jacob's favoritism and the dynamic it sets up. We will see how God does work through Jacob's life, sometimes in spite of him. I am not sure we are going to be able to say that Jacob changed a great deal; but we will be able to see how God can work through our flawed relationships to press toward His purposes.

"Speckled, striped, and mottled." I am no goat, but I am still the product of all sorts of influences, and the sooner I sort them out, seek forgiveness for those that are negative, and allow the redeeming Christ to work in me to alter unhealthy patterns, the sooner I will be more effective as a husband, father, grandfather, and Christian.

Rocks IN and Under Our Heads

2010-11-20T10:30:00.002-05:00

What makes us think we can bargain our way to what we want? Why do we suppose that we have anything of real worth to offer God or, for that matter, our society, in exchange for the fulfillment of our expectations? In some fiction genres there is the idea of selling one's soul to the devil in order to gain material or romantic or other forms of success. But in Genesis 28 Jacob dares to bargain with God.

What a set of conditions he lays out! "If God will be with me, and will keep me in this way that I go, and will give me bread to eat and clothing to wear, so that I come again to my father's house in peace, then the Lord shall be my God ... and of all that you give me I will surely give one-tenth to you."

Funny that I have never preached on this text in order to motivate tithing! It is a window into a warped soul, Jacob the usurper, who learned from his manipulative mother how to get whatever he wanted and who sensed from his failure father how to demand outrageous concessions. He must have had rocks IN his crafty brain; we already know that he slept with a rock under it!

God is portrayed, prior to Jacob's bargaining, as offering security, a future, continued blessing. Part of me wants to say, "Watch out, God! You are promising too much! This guy will drive a hard bargain and will likely not keep up his end of it." But more mature reflection suggests that this text is a reminder that God is always more ready to give than we are to receive responsibly, that what the theologians call "prevenient grace" is above, below, behind, and before all that we do. It would seem that God provides us with His dream for our relationships, knowing that we will violate it, but making sure that we understand that His love for us is unconditional and His provision for us is not calculated to be commensurate with what we deserve.

So go on, Jacob; go on and drive your bargains with God. Let's see if you can carry your end of the relationship. God will do His part, and more. God is not one who has to be wooed and placated all the time; He is grace and mercy, not like old Isaac, whose other son Esau poignantly tries to keep in his graces by marrying within the family and not a Canaanite. Poor Esau; your father is flawed and will not, cannot, bless you no matter how compliant you are. Better that you struggle with Isaac as your brother Jacob struggled with God; it would be more honest, whether it would be successful or not.

Poignant Pleas

2010-11-19T09:06:00.002-05:00

One of the most dysfunctional of Biblical families is that of Isaac and Rebekah. Genesis 27 records the deception through which Jacob deceived his father into granting him the primogeniture rights. We have blind Isaac, scheming Rebekah, compliant Jacob, and angry Esau, and, if you know the chapters that follow, you know what a horrendous relationship was set up between these two brothers.

For me, the villain of the piece is Rebekah, who encourages and enables her son Jacob in the blindsiding of Isaac. Even when Jacob raises a question about the consequences, as if to suggest he has at least a glimmer of a conscience, Rebekah brushes it aside and says that she will accept those consequences herself ... as if that were really possible.

We find in this story, among other things, a clash of cultures. On the one hand, there is the ancient culture that saw words as concrete things, things flung out toward others and thus unretractable, effective in and of themselves -- not entirely out of date now, since it is true that hateful words have a lingering life in the hearts of those who must endure them. On the other hand, there is in Esau's plea a more modern understanding of speech, a psychological dynamic: "Have you only one blessing? Will you not bless me also?" But Isaac feels bound by his cultural assumptions and cannot, will not, offer anything but the dregs to Esau.

That speaks to me as a parent: did I play favorites with my son and my daughter? Did I think of my son as somehow superior because he is male and the older? Or did I treat my daughter in some special way because she is female and younger and therefore I thought of her as more vulnerable? It is impossible for me to sort that out now, and maybe each of them will read this and chime in. And it is even more impossible for me to rectify such differentiations, now that both are well into adulthood. But I can think about how I may bless my grandchildren ... not so much "equally," as if blessings could be quantified, but emotionally, spiritually, each according to her/his need.

You see, in families it is altogether too easy to resort to game-playing and manipulation. Just as Rebekah and Jacob manipulated poor helpless old Isaac, so today it is easy for us to treat one another as sources of self-gratification rather than of mutual support and love. And I do not suppose that Isaac is without blame in this, as he must have set a tone that encouraged this sort of behavior.

I hear Esau's poignant pleas that he too be blessed as a sign that this family has gone terribly wrong, and it makes me reflect on the family for which I am now "patriarch." The positive thing that I can and must say is that my cancer diagnosis has brought out of both my son and my daughter extraordinary and wonderful demonstrations of genuine affection, with not the least hint that either of them wants something from me. They have been givers, not takers; I like to think that that means that there have been from their parents honest and true blessings for both.

From Fear to Friendship

2010-11-18T09:33:00.002-05:00

Yesterday I went to a local hospital, a place where I have been many times (as patient, pastor, and grandfather-in-waiting), and saw something I had never noticed before: that hardly anyone I encountered looked like me or sounded like me (well, sounded like I used to sound; I would scarcely expect others to go around whispering!). Very few of the people in the lobby or the corridor were white (what Archie Bunker in the old sitcom "All in the Family" used to call, "regular people"). They were black, Asian, and particularly Latino, and as I listened I heard everything from trilled Spanish to Jamaican lilts. What a nation of mingled peoples we are becoming!

However, across the land there is a growing murmur about immigrants -- the suspicion that many have arrived illegally, the feeling that they are "taking jobs" from natives, the awareness that they are creating separate subcultures (most of the new churches I know about in this area are language- or culture-specific, and the language is not English nor is the culture Anglo). Some of that murmur may be legitimate, but I believe that we are called to move from fear to friendship.

In Genesis 26 Isaac and his family are immigrants to the land of Gerar, illegals, I would guess. Poor old King Abimelech ... not only does this man enter his land and begin to prosper, but also he and his lovely wife Rebekah try to pull much the same stunt as did Abraham his father: passing Rebekah off as someone other than his lawfully wedded wife. Note to Abimelech: fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. (I do suspect that this story, already given twice in the Abraham cycle, is a duplicate of the original rather than another actual incident.) But the real "rub" comes when Isaac and his tribe are too successful and crowd the people of Gerar. So Abimelech expels them and the people of Gerar even harass them by confiscating the wells they dig as they move on, trying to find a place to settle.

But the climax of the story, for me, is that eventually Abimelech buries the hatchet and makes peace with Isaac and his entourage. And right away one of the wells is productive! There is enough for all when fear finally becomes friendship.

The church of which I am a part is becoming increasingly diverse, and though I suspect that some of us older white folks have kept our distance, the truth is that our church will be richer and the Kingdom better served because of this growth. We are Indian, Camerounian, German, Korean, and a variety of other nationalities now, in addition to the "regular people", and, though there is no open hostility, it is time to move into active and outreaching friendship, that the well we have dug known as Montgomery Hills Baptist Church may flow and flourish for years to come.

The Tyranny of the Immediate

2010-11-17T09:44:00.002-05:00

There have been times when I just wanted something, or wanted something to happen, that I forced the issue and paid a price that was too high. Once we had settled on a car that we wanted, and when the salesman refused to dicker, I just plunged ahead and paid sticker price. That vehicle did not last as long as it should have, and I was left with an empty checkbook and the need to replace the car. The tyranny of giving in to immediate wants.

And of course our materialistic culture builds on that. The infomercial screams at us, "And if you'll call in the next hour ..." (never mind that we saw the same infomerical with the same urgency yesterday!). The retailers offer coupons that promise money back IF you come today before 1:00 pm (and I did not even look at the newpaper until 9:00 am). Our immediacy button is pushed regularly, and our desire for instant gratification makes somebody else a ton of money.

So Esau, famished, yields all too quickly to his brother Jacob's insulting demand, and sells his birthright for a bowl of "red stuff." And of course the stew was soon consumed and the loss was permanent -- the birthright meaning the application of the rule of primogeniture, the oldest son receiving the privileges of inheritance, respect, and leadership.

But, much as I feel convicted for having done the same thing, albeit on a lesser level, I find myself also wishing that Jacob and Esau could have escaped their cultural values and agreed to live outside the laws of primogeniture, or indeed outside any patterns of discrimination. It's too much to ask, I know, but what a statement it would have been if they had agreed to ask Isaac, when the time came, to divide everything equally and to include any future sisters as well as brothers. Still, I can hardly blame them for not being ahead of their time, when in matters of this sort we are still struggling. As a pastor, I have seen families torn by dissension when a younger child tries to take the lead in caring for an aging parent or, most of all, makes the decisions about a funeral. Number One Son thinks he should have the last word in all things! But why? And why not mutuality? It is difficult for us truly to be open to one another, even in families ... or maybe especially in families ... and to practice genuinely egalitarian relationships. How much different the history of Esau and Jacob could have been! And how much different our own histories can be when we learn to respect one another, and, in the words of Scripture, not to "think more highly of ourselves than we ought to think."

Whither Thou Goest

2010-11-16T09:07:00.002-05:00

Often in weddings people want read the passage from Ruth about "whither thou goest I will go." Trouble is, that was spoken by a daughter-in-law to her mother-in-law, in the context of their both being widows -- not about a wife speaking to her husband-to-be.

Nonetheless, there is that mysterious thing that happens when people wed ... that each is committing to participate in whatever the other chooses to do and wherever the other chooses to go, for good or for ill. In Genesis 24 there is the charming if unnecessarily repetitive story of Isaac and Rebekah, and what a bunch of impossible circumstances are involved! Abraham makes his servant go find a wife for Isaac (what, Mr. Laughter could not do this for himself?) and specifies that the bride must not be a foreigner and that she is expected to leave her place and come to Isaac's. Moreover, the servant is to engage in a little test of charity and compassion to identify the right person; how many of us would want to be judged on a one-time response to a happenstance meeting? Love at first sight is not a myth most of us believe in, do we?

But Rebekah passes the tests and, even though her family is not quite ready to let her go immediately, off she goes to a muted first meeting with her husband-to-be, whom she has not even met. At least, since he was also her cousin, she knew his background ... possibly a dubious asset! No quarrels, no demands, just compliance. What is this?

Is it resignation to a cultural inevitability, wherein women just get traded about and do what they are told? Possibly; but would not the Biblical writer have recorded something of Rebekah's feelings or remonstrances if that were true?

Or is it at bottom a matter of faith, wherein Rebekah not only trusts God's guidance (she too hears the story of the test that had been set up for her and how well she passed it); she also trusts her own instincts. I have long felt that trusting one's own heart is approximately equivalent to trusting God; I do know that there are potentially huge problems with that assertion. But Rebekah was secure enough in her faith that she could also be confident that she would handle this new possibility in her life.

The joining of two lives always takes faith ... one would hope, faith in God; but at least faith in one's ability to discern, and ultimately in one's capacity to be flexible and receive new opportunities. I think of the day in August 1963 when I phoned Margaret from my part-time government job and told her I had been offered the position of campus minister at Berea College in eastern Kentucky. I do not remember any worrying about where this place was or what life would be like there; we had committed ourselves to one another and therefore to the "whither thou goest" dimension. She made a life for herself in that place, and it will forever be enshrined in our hearts as the birthplace of both of our children.

After a move to the University of Kentucky and then after a time of growing discontent, when I began to seek another position, I was given the opportunity to come to Maryland and begin campus ministry at College Park. This felt like a huge move to both of us -- 600 miles away from family -- but we made it work without any misgivings or arguments or holding back. How profoundly the decision made by one of us affected the other as well, and yet, through faith, without conflict.

Then consider that we also brought along our then-small children, who had no say in the matter. How much we do determine our children's lives! I have often thought about my parents' decision to start my brother on piano lessons at a very early age and to invest in additional, expensive, lessons with major teachers. Did he have any choice about becoming a pianist? Yes and no ... but with faith and confidence they provided the context for his development.

It used to be popular, in the era of self-expression, to back off influencing anybody about anything. They were to be "free to be you and me." The truth is that freedom grows more out of one's faith and self-confidence, one's ability to take what comes and shape it, than it does out of surrounding circumstances.

More blessed to give, but receiving is blessed too

2010-11-15T11:42:00.002-05:00

Since my cancer diagnosis, I have received many gifts from people that care about me, particularly from my family and from members of the church where I served as pastor. Videos, cakes, flowers, books, meat loaves, a ham, brownies and muffins -- on and on. And on each occasion I mumbled my thanks, not really knowing how to receive the generosity of others. I suppose I have always labored under the assumption that you work for what you get and, conversely, expect others to work for what they get, quid pro quo.

But there is an art to receiving, one which I need to learn. Jesus told us that it is more blessed to give than to receive, but the operative idea is "more blessed," a comparative that suggests that it is of course blessed to receive.

In Genesis 23 it would appear that Abraham did not know how to receive a blessing. He asks to buy a cave in which to bury his wife, and the owner of the cave steps forward and offers to give it to him. Back and forth they go, with Ephron, the cave owner, waving his hand and exclaiming, "400 shekels of silver, what is that to us?" I can afford it, you need it, go and bury your dead.

And so it is with some surprise that the next verse tells us that Abraham counted out the 400 shekels anyway! Why?

Was it his pride that would not allow him to receive this gift?

Did he suspect that Ephron was not sincere and really did want his money (looks like Brother Ephron did receive it)?

Was it that in a rigid form of legalism Abraham operated on the quid pro quo principle, even when it was to his advantage to abandon it?

Did Abraham fear that there would be strings attached to the gift, some form of compulsion or expectation in the future?

Was Abraham just bound and determined to have the last word in this matter?

Whatever the reason, Abraham shows himself to be a rather ungrateful, or at least ungracious, receiver. He had a chance to bond with Ephron and share a joy in the future; instead he insisted on its being nothing but business. Too bad, Abraham, that you robbed yourself of this joy and that you in effect belittled Ephron's generosity as well.

I think I need to go and write some thank-you notes!

Just who was bound?

2010-11-13T10:04:00.002-05:00

I continue to read the stories of Genesis with questions that seem to veer off to the side, but that, in my judgment, are raised by a relational reading of the text. The story of the Binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 is one of the seminal stories of the Abraham cycle, and one of the most troubling if read literally. And, for those of us who have a lengthy background in Southern Baptist life, there is a reminder from our denomination's history that relational readings of the Scripture can get you into trouble! (I am speaking about the storm that rose around G. Henton Davies' reading of Genesis 22 in the first publication of Vol. 1, Broadman Bible Commentary; Davies raised the question as to whether God literally commanded Abraham to sacrifice his own son, and posited the idea that we attribute to God our own unresolved conflicts -- that Abraham could not quite rid himself, on his own, of the guilt associated with his past misdeeds, and so undertook without quarreling to slay his son, ridding himself of the visible memory of these sins, and blame it all on God.)

I do not profess to know whether Davies was right; I do know that his writing should not have been banned. But in the providence of God, even evil creates the occasion for good. And so, as I wrote many years ago, in a review done for The Capital Baptist, we ended up with TWO sterling commentaries on Genesis once the substitute volume was published.

Nor can I profess to know what was going on in Abraham's mind. But there is something truly extraordinary about a man whose reported response to such an outlandish divine command is nothing more than, "Here I am, Lord." Yes, there is a certain piety that lauds unquestioning, passive, obedience. I do not understand it, nor do I appreciate it. The God whom I serve is able to deal with questions, doubts, and arguments without commanding, "Just do it." For me, as I look back on this story from my time and place, and most of all, from my psychology, I see Abraham as just as much bound in his belief system as Isaac was in the cords his father had provided.

But I do wonder whether God does in fact deliberately test our faith. I do wonder whether God does create circumstances in which we have to choose a distasteful path in order to discover how He will bless us more abundantly. Hard as it is to envision a God who would order so unthinkable an action as killing any child, let alone one's own child, still it may well be that hiding in the crevices of this story is a truth I do not want to acknowledge, because I too am bound up with my accomplishments, my righteousness, my reputation, and my need to succeed: the truth that all of this is a will-o'-the-wisp, capable of vanishing in a moment, and my dependence on my array of attributes binds me! May it not be that I need to see that the only thing that frees me from my spiritual bindings is faith in the One who took Himself to the mount of sacrifice and allowed cruel hands to be laid on Him? And for Him there was no ram in the thicket; the Father sacrificed His own son, not at the orders of others, but out of His own volition, to give us freedom from the bindings of shame and guilt.

Just who was bound? And now, give thanks, for we are free!

It's Never Enough

2010-11-11T09:29:00.002-05:00

Every month I review my financial picture, and recalculate my net worth. If it goes up, I am pleased. If it goes down, I want to institute an austerity program and/or see if there is some way I can earn more money. It's never enough. And even though that net worth figure is so far above anything my parents or grandparents could have imagined, even though I know that I have a secure income stream for the rest of my life, somehow what I have is never enough. That is our human dilemma, the principal blockade to our being generous and gracious.

So Sarah has her son. She and Abraham, according to Genesis 21, have now the child that was promised, the child from whom a great nation is to spring. But Sarah sees Ishmael, son of Hagar, and wants him removed. Never mind that he is a half-brother to her own son; never mind that his very existence is due to Sarah's own impatience urging her husband to take Hagar as his concubine. The very presence of Hagar and Ishmael is offensive, and Sarah wants them sent away. How will they survive? Sarah does not know and does not care. "Just do it, Abraham."

Guilt makes us do many things that are not pretty. And when you combine guilt with cupidity, the result is especially ugly. Sarah is not content to have her child; it is not enough, for she wants the removal of all competition, indeed of all reminders of her less-than-laudable behavior. It will not work, you know; simply hiding the visible evidence of our misdeeds does not erase the responsibility, nor does it wash away the shame. Sarah is one of those persons who never seem to learn that either instituting dishonesty or complying with it will not resolve the ultimate issues in our own hearts.

And, sad to say, Abraham is no better. His weakness before his wife is nowhere more clearly displayed than this incident, when he does as he is told and sends Hagar and Ishmael out into the desert. Oh, yes, presumably he has been assured by God that all will be well; one wonders, as always, about these human-divine dialogues in the Bible: how much of them are the pure projections of what we would like to hear from God? So out they go, Hagar and her son, to what appears to be certain death. Hagar says that she does not want to watch her child die, and keeps a distance from him; but that is not nearly as horrible as the distance that Abraham and Sarah keep from the tragedy that could have occurred.

God intervenes, and nourishes the mother and child; we learn that our God is capable of making a way when there is no way. Subsequent events, however, are likely to demonstrate that for Ishmael and his descendants, as for Isaac and his, not even the providence of God is enough. No matter what we have, except our hearts be remade, it's never enough.

I'm No Prude, But ...

2010-11-09T08:43:00.002-05:00

I do not think I am a prude. I do not recoil in horror from mentions of sexuality or displays of attractive flesh. I believe I have normal hormones. I do have two children, after all, and they are not the products of parthenogenesis!

But chapters 19 and 20, particularly 19, of Genesis, strike me as truly horrific and offensive, and I wonder what the intent of the authors was in retelling these bizarre tales. The episode where Lot's guests are marked as the objects of rape ... presumably homosexual rape ... is not mitigated when Lot offers his daughters ("Do whatever you will with them"). Hospitality to strangers trumps protecting one's family? Not in my value system.

But we do learn, and I think accurately, that when people cannot get what they think they want, they become totally irrational. The reaction of the inhabitants of Sodom toward Lot and his family makes no sense as a political strategy, but it does make sense psychologically, up to a point. We can get a rush by blowing off steam, making threats, posturing, and engaging in destructive behavior; but in the end that only brings on us recriminations and, to use a Biblical term, judgment.

And I must say I do identify with Lot's caution. He does not want to move, because it's just too much trouble. Or if he must move, let it be to this little insignificant place nearby called Zoar. If fire were raging on my street, I would likely be among the last to leave my house, because too much of who I am and what I have done is wrapped up in its walls. Who would I be without my books, my files, my computer, my stuff?! Ah, Lot, and Lot's wife, you do show us how ridiculous it is to be so attached to accumulations. It will all eventually dissolve. As I have been working these last few months, since the cancer diagnosis, to secure my legacy -- financially, legally, professionally -- have I been creating a pillar of salt?

I will not develop more thoughts on Genesis 20 just now; it is a repeat of the story of Abram in Egypt in Genesis 13, and may simply be a variant reading that has been preserved. But it may also suggest that in matters of sexuality and exploitation, not even the father of the chosen people has been able too learn his lesson!

Haggling With God?

2010-11-08T08:48:00.002-05:00

The story of Abraham (with his name now changed) and his encounter with God over the fate of Sodom is a bit embarrassing, isn't it? We have come to think of God as all justice, all love, and all mercy, and, in the words of Isaiah, "Holy, holy, holy, high and lifted up." But the Yahweh of Genesis 18 is a destructive force about to vent His anger until one of his creatures argues him down to a more acceptable level. That's not consonant with the way we think of God; and Harold Bloom in "The Book of J" has a particularly vigorous commentary on J's secularity and lack of reverence. I do not know that I can follow Bloom all the way on his assessment of J ... in fact I do not know that I can even understand Bloom's assessment ... but on this episode I surely do see the rough, even crude, portrayal of a deity whose feelings run ahead of him. It's not very dignified to see Abraham haggling with God.

And yet is this far different from Jesus' parable of the importunate widow, who keeps after the unjust judge until she receives her due? In an a fortiori argument, Jesus points out that if unjust judges eventually yield to justice, so much more will a loving Father yield ... yield after continued prayers, if not haggling ... to the pleas of His children.

During my illness I have been the beneficiary of numerous prayers. There are at least three churches, perhaps more, where my name is regularly mentioned in prayer. There are individuals who tell me that they pray for me every day. There is even a report of a prayer group in Prague that lifts me up! And just this week my grandchildren's other grandfather told me he was praying for me because "prayer changes things."

Now it still seems odd that we should barrage the gates of heaven with many prayers for me or for any other cause. And yet there is the witness of Scripture that somehow the mind of God is changed because we pray. Is it that for the Scripture God is ultimately personal, interactive, dialectical? God in the Hebrew-Christian tradition is no marble sculpture, no immutable abstraction, no untouchable perfection. He is intimate, dialogical, personal, available, "nearer than breathing and closer than hands and feet."

So, Abraham, you trusted that God's justice was deeper than what He exhibited when He first confronted Sodom, and you called Him to be consistent with His own values. Do I dare do the same when I pray? And may I then encourage my prayer partners to insist that God be God? What an amazing thing, haggling with God!

No laughing matter

2010-11-04T16:49:00.002-04:00

Genesis 16-17 tell us much about human nature, and it is no laughing matter (referring to Sarai/Sarah and her laughter concerning the promise of the birth of her son in Genesis 18).

The root sin is anxiety, is it not? That we are not willing to wait for God's good time or to trust that God will do in and through us what He has committed to do, but must attempt to force His hand .. that is all about anxiety. At its base, anxiety means that I think I have to manage everything and cannot trust others or God Himself to manage for me; of course I must accept the responsibility of obedience, but obedience is a faith journey that consists of following God's leadership, not usurping it.

So there is supposed to be a great nation, but there is no legitimate son for Abram, for Sarai seems unable to produce. Sarai, seeing the anxiety in her husband, compounds that anxiety by suggesting ... really insisting ... that Abram use her slave girl, Hagar, as an incubator! And to this bizarre suggestion he readily agrees. It's not just about randiness; it's about cutting corners with what is moral, and, more than that, it's about not being willing to trust God to be God.

Hagar accepts the situation, and one does wonder how much freedom she had to refuse. A modern sensibility would say that Hagar should have fended off this dirty old man, but she may not have had that right. Or if she could have stopped him, is it that she did not because she saw a way to curry favor and/or to hold her child's status as a slave child over her master's head? No laughing matters, these.

So what we get is an ironic turn, but then one that could have been expected: the child, Ishmael, is born; Sarai gets upset as she witnesses the consequences of her very bad idea; and Sarai and Abram collude to send Hagar into the wilderness to wander and, presumably, perish. Out of sight, out of mind ... an old strategy but a futile one. The Scripture says elsewhere that we can be sure that our sins will find us out.

So God has to redeem and repair the situation as best he can: the child Ishmael will be the progenitor of a great nation (the twelve princes corresponding to the twelve tribes that will eventually constitute Israel). But there will be conflict in the generations to come ... no laughing matter. Lord, did you have to set it up so that sibling rivalry will always occur? Or is this the Lord's description rather than His prescription? He has not decreed rivalry and conflict, but He has had ample opportunity to understand what anxiety does in us, and so He knows what we will do.

Once the dynamic of competitiveness and of driving ambition gets under way, simply because we cannot trust God to work His way among us, we will not soon emerge from destructive behavior. Sarai, when Isaac comes along, you may laugh, but the relationships that are to come will be no laughing matter!

Management Messages

2010-11-03T15:45:00.002-04:00

Genesis 13-15 gives us the picture of Abram as a wealthy man, with flocks and herds and retainers and everything a man of his age could want, with a few possible exceptions. He had no fixed address; he did not sense that he was secure, given his nomadic nature and the dangers from petty kings all around his wanderings; and he had no proper heir.

Much of that was taken care of, although trust and faith had to be employed. When he and his nephew Lot bumped up against one another, because they each had so much "stuff", the solution was not difficult: "you take the low road and I'll take the high road." Of course Lot shows us the acquisitive side of human nature ... even though he was already wealthy he scoped out the land and decided on what he thought would be the most prosperous. Management lesson from Abram: it's not an issue when someone wants to be more wealthy than you, because you have enough and more than enough; let him take what he wants and see if it does not bring him problems. A message there too for those of us who want to pull government back from all it has done and could do to "promote the general welfare" -- one of the basic functions of the American experiment.

But Lot does have his comeuppance, for he finds himself squarely in the middle of a messy tribal conflict, where we are even given the score: five kings against four. And Lot has to send for help to his uncle, knowing full well that he has taken a selfish choice and now is about to lose it all. Abram comes ... and here is one of those fascinating little items of numerical exactness that not only shows us how powerful this one man was but also suggests an exactness in the reporting that we might not have expected ... 318 fighters come to help rescue the miserable nephew.

The result of all of this is that several times God promises Abram not only a large chunk of land for himself but also speaks of innumerable descendants -- a sore point with Abram, who has no son. And without a son/heir, how can there be any descendants?

Management message: trust God and do what He asks, however strange it may be. The covenant ritual involving cutting sacrificial animals in half, so that there is an assurance that the promises of God will be fulfilled, is very peculiar to our sensibilities. But I suspect that for Abram and for his culture there is here a sense of solemnity and certainty not unlike our paying "earnest money" when we want to make a major home purchase. There is a commitment on God's part as a result of Abram's following these instructions. Sometimes management is done by hunches and handshakes, by trust; and sometimes it needs the evidence of something more sturdy.

When I see Abram managing his resources and looking for a sense of security in property, relationships, and family, I see something of my own pilgrimage. It is good indeed at age 72 to know that my home is secure, my income is guaranteed, and my legacy of faith and family is positive and growing. I have passed through some of Abram's stages of life, and can testify, as he will be able to do, that God is good and God is faithful. We do have to use good management sense and we do have to exercise trust when we cannot fully see what the future holds.

One cautionary note: I cannot agree with contemporary Zionism and some of its evangelical Christian supporters that these verses provide a political base for present-day Jews to remove Arabs, build settlements on Palestinian lands, and make painfully difficult the lives of non-Jewish Israeli citizens. Ancient assertions, however literally read, cannot trump justice and charity. Those who have lived in this land for many years deserve to be treated as full citizens, with rights and dignity, and should not be beaten down with an oppressive reading of an ancient text.

Another Altar Needed

2010-10-29T08:57:00.002-04:00

Genesis 12 chronicles the startling journey of Abram and all his family, herds, possessions, and psyche! Imagine setting out from your comfort zone with nothing more than the promise that there will be land ready when you arrive! Some readers think that this has much to do with Abram's sense of the oneness of God as over against the polytheism of his native environment.

The journey is a spiritually charged one. Every place Abram stops he builds an altar to Yahweh -- presumably not only an act of thanksgiving and worship, but also an act of claiming. These spots, holy to the Canaanite gods, are now to be holy to the One God. The text summarizes this by saying that Abram passed through Canaan "by stages."

But then the episode in Egypt -- a sudden run to Egypt because of famine, and a horrifying story of Abram's willingness to lie and put Sarai in jeopardy to save his own skin (an incident doubled, but with Abimelech of Gerar instead of Pharaoh of Egypt in chapter 20). Here there is no altar-building, here no act of gratitude, nor any claiming. Here there is only Abram's humiliation. Too bad he did not see fit to build an altar in Egypt, not for the purposes of asserting superiority, but for repentance. Too much like we are, too: we are very quick to assert God's presence when things are going well and ventures we have started on seem to succeed. But our arrogance, our self-serving, our lies, when exposed, go underground, and we mope instead of committing our sins to the One who could not only forgive, but, better, could teach us and mature us out of those experiences.

Ah, Abram, another altar was needed, and you did nothing. And in you I recognize my own heart and its desire to escape from my sin rather than allow its lessons to be crafted into the fabric of my life and its journey forward.

Was there an alternative?

2010-10-26T11:11:00.002-04:00

The story in Genesis 11 about the Tower of Babel speaks on many levels. It is an attempt to explain why different nations have different languages. It is the nostalgic cry of a nomadic voice against the problems associated with cities. It is the deep-seated anxiety of an individualist who worries that, in the phrase of another generation, we are "getting too big for our breeches." And it is the less-than-subtle political slap against that great empire of Babylon which had worked so much damage. The story has many uses and focuses on God's discovery that His creatures are working to cross or eliminate boundaries, so that "nothing they propose to do will be impossible for them." So the confusion of tongues is introduced.

God's attempt to frustrate human progress, or hubris, did not work all that well. First, different languages meant that an element of misunderstanding either created or deepened hostility between peoples. And second, we have found all kinds of ways to cross boundaries -- what would J say to space travel, to digital communications, to the United Nations, to speak of only a few possibilities we have reached. One can only imagine what any ancient would have thought of the architectural and engineering achievements of our world ... from the late lamented World Trade Center to the Burj Dubai!

So the confusion of tongues did not eliminate or forever frustrate our human creativity, which was in fact given us by our Creator as part of our being in His image and after His likeness. The Babel story seems to suggest that God has not been able to predict what His creatures will do, nor has He succeeded in finding a strategy to curb us.

Was there no other alternative than this failed effort? Yes, but it had to wait until the fullness of time. The Pentecost narrative in the Book of Acts, where all the believers are gathered and each is able to understand the strange tongue of the other, is the antidote, the answer, to Babel. God in Christ, working His redemptive work, is about reconciliation, unity, and hope. Confusion becomes confidence and understanding. We are at last on the right track, in the work of Christ.

Highlighting Is Worrisome

2010-10-25T20:20:00.003-04:00

The tenth chapter of Genesis is a rough genealogy, an attempt to report the origins of various places in the range from the Fertile Crescent to Egypt. Some of the names of places or peoples are readily identifiable to us now; others are not, but must have been significant for earlier readers of Genesis. Whenever I read the various " -ite" peoples, I remember Dr. Laurence Howe, my Ancient History professor, who would regale us with a recitation of the "-ites" and finish it off with "stalagmites and stalactites." For those of us who were speluncularly challenged, those names made about as much sense as the old Biblical names for the descendants of Noah.

One of those names, however, stands out to the reader: Nimrod, in chapter 10, verses 8-12. He is lifted up as "the first on earth to become a mighty warrior" and a "mighty hunter before the Lord." We cannot help noticing that his name is then associated with the founding of at least two of the ancient world's military empires: Babel (Babylon), Assyria/Nineveh. He is singled out; no other person in the listing is characterized in any way other than by his descendants and place names.

So what is the writer/redactor saying to us? The implication is that Nimrod is something special. He is to be remembered and valued. And why? For his warlike traits. "A mighty hunter before the Lord" -- and just why does the Lord need or want a "mighty hunter?" As with previous passages, I find myself longing for a word of peace, a strain of love, to be attributed to God and to God's children. But it is absent; and I know enough about the rest of Genesis to know that it will be very long indeed in arriving.

You may say that Nimrod's achievements are just reported, not praised; but I would argue that highlighting someone or something is a form of praise and approval. Can we learn how to look at and lift up quieter, more positive, less worrisome achievements in those around us?

Vioence? Just Who Is Violent?

2010-10-24T16:57:00.002-04:00

The Flood accounts (plural, because in Genesis 7-9 it is easy to see the mingling of sources ... repetition of details, conflicting stories about how many of each sort of animal were taken into the ark) continue the fearful and, to the modern mind, crude reports of a God whose anger lashes out in all directions. He is a power that can bless but can also destroy, not only with the weapon of weather, but also in His words and His judgments.

For example, God assesses humanity very harshly: "all flesh had corrupted its ways" and all had given themselves over to violence. Does that not sound unduly harsh? "All" is a very wide range indeed; I suppose an infinite God can do a census instantaneously, but is His judgment fair?

Whether it is or not, He chooses to requite violence with violence! What is the lesson to be learned from the flood? That we are always in peril of One who decides that when He is offended, He will snuff us out? To be sure, the rainbow sign at the end of the Flood narrative promises that never again will He flood the earth; sounds as though there is plenty of room for some other form of punishment, however!

And this Noah and his family ... the only righteous ones, the only ones that walk with God and follow His ways? Hard to believe. But, as always in Genesis, we are not really reading precise history, "Geschichte," here. We are reading a cautionary tale, a warning; and we are reading at least a glimpse of an understanding of a God who can make gracious promises. Do not read this story and attempt to locate the ark on Ararat (how preposterous that some have attempted to do so); and do not try to load the "curse of Ham" on any ethnicity. Whatever etiologies or nationalisms may be remembered by these things cannot be substantiated by responsible history-writing today. Read instead this much: that God does react and respond to us, and that we do well not to take His mercy for granted, lest we find ourselves in the grip of circumstances that may hurt and destroy.

Not so incidentally, as for violence, what are we to make of this: Noah and family have carefully preserved the various animals, according to the story; but once they land they kill a few of those animals as a sacrifice to God! I hear one of those Yahwistic ironies again!

Everything in this story tells me that I must look beyond this violent God for a true understanding of my Creator; and that the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is in stark contrast to the God of the Flood accounts. And yet, and yet, I do see that I must not presume on the mercy of God. If I receive it, it comes as grace and gift, not because I have been able to be as perfect as Noah allegedly was. And if I do not receive mercy or if I reject mercy, I must not assume that there are no consequences. The God of the Flood will not quite go away, no matter how much I would like to think He has been superseded.

Who needs all those years?

2010-10-24T06:45:00.004-04:00

It's a bit dangerous, this business of reading Harold Bloom's "The Book of J" along with the Biblical text, attempting to discern significance in the text ... and not just objective significance, but personal, subjective, what-does-it-say-to=me significance. For when I read the genealogy of Adam to Noah in Genesis 5 and the early portion of Genesis 6, I am struck, as Bloom would have it, by the incongruities and the ellipses and the ironies in the text.

Incongruities: Adam, now banished from Eden, along with Eve, because they overreached the boundaries God had place on them (Bloom says "arbitrarily"), now has a son "in his image and after his likeness." That's the language we first saw to describe Adam as the inspirited creature of God. It is as though Adam, though punished for a desire to be like God, does not fully escape his godlikeness. Might that suggest to us that no matter how depraved or evil someone may be, there is still inherent within him/her that God-given potential?

Ellipses: Bloom says that J's art is often expressed in what she leaves out ("She", for Bloom thinks that J is female and maybe associated with the post-Solomonic court in Jerusalem). If so, much is left out of this genealogy: "other sons and daughters" are mentioned and glossed over for each of the patriarchs. Obviously the author is heading toward what she deems significant, the story of Noah. But I am reminded of how easy it is to ignore and write off scores of people, simply because they do not suit our ends. We call them the "little people" or the "also-rans" and we gravitate toward those who best serve our purposes. At our worst, we invent such awful practices as war so that we can with a veneer of justification eliminate them. In a subtle way the violence of the death of Abel is hinted at by the omission of the names of these others.

And then ironies ... things that do not turn out as expected. We were created mortal, but aspired to be "as gods" -- immortal. Yet these extraordinarily long lifespans hint at a near immortality, which God is forced to modify and limit, once God sees this mating between humans and semi-divine beings. What ancient mythologies are being referred to here I do not know; I do know that to modern rationalistic minds this copulation between the human and the ultra-human is both attractive and repugnant. A mysterium tremendum et fascinans. And I am left thinking that indeed God is well justified in changing the rules so that no longer will humankind live for centuries. We would only deepen our arrogance!

So who needs all these years? I'll take my 120 and be happy with it (though how many people do you know who approach that limit?). In fact, what I must do is to wrestle with my own incongruity with the will of God, with my own ellipses that write off too many of God's children, and with my own ironies, for I am not what God intended me to be -- not yet, not in 72 years, nor probably in 120. I pray God will continue to shape me and to breathe spirit into me even into eternity.

Who is responsible for violence?

2010-10-22T21:44:00.002-04:00

A number of years ago, when I was doing campus ministry, I took a group of international students to the United Nations. We were able to set up a variety of interviews and discussions. One of these was with the Polish ambassador to the UN, and it was during the time when the sectors of post-war Germany were approaching union. The ambassador spoke passionately against the reunion, and, when asked why, responded something like, "If you were a Pole and you remembered that your nation had lost millions of people to Germany in two vast wars, you would be opposed too."

Violence, warfare, recriminations, vengeance, aggression ... my vocabulary is not sufficient to characterize the horrors of human history. The reading of history is a long-time interest of mine, and of late, since my cancer has forced me to a degree of idleness, I have been reading a good deal more. I have in recent weeks read about the first World War, about the American Civil War, about the Dulles family and their post-World-War-II manueverings, and about Gandhi and his struggles for human dignity in South Africa and in India. Every one of these episodes reports countless thousands killed in war and an incredibly insatiable bloodlust. Where does this come from?

The locus classicus for the origin of violence is Genesis 3, where Cain kills Abel in a fit of jealousy because their offerings are treated unequally. Cain fears vengeance from others, and his descendant Lamech is also reported to have feared recriminations from his own act of violence. It is clear that violent behavior, though decried, has become normative quickly.

I cannot read Genesis 3, however, without noticing God's culpability in this sordid state of affairs. God sets up competition and jealousy with His unexplained discriminatory action, and then scolds Cain for his poor performance (against what standards, one wonders). Cain's banishment is, as Cain himself intuits, an invitation to a hostile world for attacks; God's response to Cain's plea is to announce that those who do attack Cain will themselves be attacked by God -- is this the antidote to violence? Do threats and penalties really resolve anything?

I wonder what it means that the Yahwish, at the end of this passage, introduces and interprets the name of God, Yahweh -- usually thought to have roots in the verb "to be" with an active tense form that suggests one who performs His own identity. Does it mean that the social structure arrived at a point when violence became so normative that people sought to understand how a supreme being might act out of capricious will and hurt them?

I do not know; but this much is apparent from Genesis 3: that our world is a blend of the innocent bystander and the hostile aggressor, and our aggressiveness has caused many of us, perhaps all of us, to wander fruitlessly, Cains, always afraid we will be attacked and remembering our own deep-seated anger. Do we have a friend who can deliver us from this body of death?

An impish needleworker?

2010-10-21T14:46:00.002-04:00

I have been accompanying my re-reading of Genesis with a perusal of Harold Bloom's work, "The Book of J" and its companion re-casting of the Genesis text by David Rosenberg. Bloom builds on the work of recent generations of Biblical scholars, who identified the several sources, or strands, in the Pentateuch, and focuses on the Yahwist, or "J" strand. Among other surprises that await the reader, Bloom posits J as a woman, likely associated with the court after the reigns of David and Solomon, and then speaks of her generous use of irony (things that do not turn out as one might have expected) and of what today we might call secularity -- that is, says Bloom, she does not fear or revere God, but uses Him as an "impish" character in her history.

I am certainly not equipped to evaluate thoroughly all that Bloom says. Much of it is incomprehensible to me, and some of it seems just outrageous. I want to read more of his argument. Of course Bloom puts me out of the pale right away when he insists that "normative" Jews and Christians cannot appreciate J's extraordinary literary achievement, because we have been poisoned by being taught that these are sacred, untouchable, texts. "When script becomes Scripture, reading is numbed by taboo and inhibition."

Perhaps so. But I have to say that his assumptions about J do give me added insight, or at least clues, when I read Genesis chapter 3. Here is no mere etiology, nor is it an excuse for male domination (as when the Southern Baptist statement of faith speaks of woman having a special responsibility for the "edenic fall"). No, here is ... I shall use Bloom's term ... an ironic twist: God tells us what to avoid, and so we turn to it right away. God informs us what is for Him alone, and so we reach out to take it. And God's perfect world, so confidently pronounced as "good, very good" by the Priestly writer in chapter 1, turns out to have a "snake in the grass" after all. And when the denoument comes and Eden must be left behind, the Creator of all things turns to needlework to make clothes for those He has punished. Irony, impish, yes! What of it?

What of it is that I find I have a tangible God, one with personality, one with wants and hopes and fears and frustrations like my own. He is not a passionless deity, with some sort of glossy perfection that leaves me cold. He is from the outset nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet. His personality in Genesis 3 is one that can lead me to sense the Second Pers0n of the Trinity far more quickly than any philosophical sophistry: the needleworker who evicts His prime tenants but then makes sure they will be prepared for the journey is believable as the One who entered into our time and space in Bethlehem and wore swaddling clothes.

Again, the triumph and the joy of a relational reading of the Bible. I am not worried about talking snakes and mysterious "apples". I only know that God and I have walked past one another, but that, thanks to His abundant care for me, we can work it out.

Biology, geography, and relationship

2010-10-20T09:04:00.002-04:00

The so-called second creation account ... attributed to "J" in the scholarly jargon created alongside the documentary hypothesis concerning the sources of the Pentateuch ... provides some interesting biological and geographical details. It speaks of a mysterious watering that ultimately enables plant life to flourish, and then reports the naming of all the species. That must have taken a while, since today we know that there are multiplied thousands of species! I read in National Geographic recently that there are more than 2500 species of orchids alone!

But the point is not, of course, a primitive nomenclature. The point is that human beings are, in the image of God and after His likeness, given control and responsibility for the earth and for all of life. Naming is equivalent to understanding, and understanding is the first step toward responsible management -- not exploitation or destruction. A strong ecological lesson there.

And then the geography -- we today know about the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, but the others seem mythological or fanciful. I hear an attempt on J's part to give us boundaries, to suggest that our reach is not infinite but limited. It is in this garden that cannot be located on the map that God has planted trees with obviously symbolic names: the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You cannot and must not give species names to them! They are suggestive of a set of relationships, designed to be lived out within limits, albeit generous limits.

And so again the point of the Scripture is relationship. Our understanding of our relationship to the created order, to the author of life, to our self-understanding. Then comes the climatic moment as God, the great experimenter (notice how God is not working from a pre-determined plan, but is looking for the right solution ... sort of the way I sometimes write sermons!) creates the finest of his works, human intimacy. Our sexual nature, our relational nature, our desire for intimacy all comes together in the beautiful metaphor of the rib taken from under the heart of man. Do I need to say it again? Not a hard science description, but a lovely picture of how connected and intimate we are. (In my pastorate, I counseled with a widow who had just lost her husband of sixty-two years. "Ruth, how does it feel to be alone after all this time?" Her answer was classic: "Just as though somebody had torn a part of my body away.")

Let us allow the Scripture to penetrate our rationalism, our petty objectivity, and our insistence on precision. Let us permit it to address our hearts and elevate our spirits with the beauty of its poetry.

The Symphony of Creation

2010-10-19T17:13:00.002-04:00

My childhood memories having been exhausted, I am now going to turn to some reflective meditations on the Scripture. I am going to begin ... where else ... at the beginning, without committing myself to reading, hearing, or commenting on every passage. But there is something powerful, I believe, about reading the Scriptures as narratives and not as sound bites. As one of my professors liked to say, "Paul did not sit down and say, 'I think I will write a few Bible verses today.' He wrote letters, with continuous thought lines, to real people." And that is the way I want to read and reflect on the Scriptures ... using their natural fault lines, but at the same time, trying to see each such passage in its larger literary and theological context. And if from time to time I drag in by the hind legs observations from contemporary life or factoids from the sweep of human history, dear reader, you will, as you always to, incorporate those into your own thinking or discard them as pointless.

As with my earlier musings, this blog is really for myself. I write to think through what matters to me. If others find it helpful, that is a bonus. You are welcome to look over my shoulder, to comment or complain, to offer new perspectives; but remember that what I see is what I see, and it will be reported as such.

Now ... b'reshith ... in the beginning. When I read Genesis 1:1 - 2:4, I feel its symphonic character. It is as though a great theme is enunciated from the first {"And God said ...") with a supporting theme a little later {"And God saw that it was good"). The symphony builds, with ever grander expositions, until the finale, the creation of man and woman in God's image, and the conferring of dominion. The composition rests with God's resting and blessing all the work He had done.

My point is that this is music, it is poetry, it is lyrical, it goes to the heart. It is so very clear to me now that this was never intended by its author (or authors, if you like) to be hard science, a step-by-step description of the sequence of creation. Efforts to count backwards in recorded history and figure out the time of creation (like Ussher's calculation of 4004 BC) are just silly. They are unnecessary, they do violence to the spirit of this writing, and they will inevitably expose those who attempt them to the ridicule of the rationalistic world we are trying to reach. My late father-in-law put it like this: "When the poet says, 'My love is like a red, red, rose' he does not mean that she has prickly thorns and is likely to drop her petals after a few days! He is trying to evoke a feeling, not a scientific description."

I remember as a teenager, learning a bit about science, but thinking that the Bible had to be taken seriously, that I dug through our family encyclopedia and learned about the great periods of prehistory -- Jurassic, etc. -- and thought I could fit them with the days of creation. A rather awkward task, as it turned out, but even at that tender age I knew I could not dismiss out of hand the findings of paleontologists, nor could I commit myself to a woodenly literal reading of 'yom' (day). It was a clumsy first attempt to take the Bible the way the Bible is intended to be taken ... as poetic and relational, rather than propositional. That is a pattern of interpretation which I believe I have used in subsequent years, not only about Genesis 1, but about much of the rest of the Scripture.

And so today I do not want to argue evidence with anyone; I especially do not want to get involved in pointing out to the fundamentalist that his/her argument that we who do not read Genesis 1 literally are surrendering to rationalism, because it seems to me that the fundamentalist and his focus on evidence is itself a very rationalistic act. No, I simply want to bathe in these words as one bathes in a symphony, letting their power wash over me and assure me that God has made this universe, has made it with a purpose, and has declared His work great and good. To do that will prepare me for the next chapter of the Bible, and the next chapter indeed of my life.

Through the Maze

2010-10-13T07:33:00.002-04:00

Seeing a picture of a maze in a magazine has reminded me of my boyhood experience with solving and creating mazes. Mine were not, of course, like the one in the photograph, which was done with shrubbery. Mine were done on paper, surreptiously during classroom time at school!

I do not remember how it started, but it may have come from my habit of comic-book reading. Often the comics would have a puzzle page, with a simple crossword and other features, occasionally a small maze. The maze would consist of a box with lines in it, and the reader was to push his pencil between the lines and, getting caught in dead ends occasionally, would eventually find his way through to the other end. Usually pretty straightforward.

A friend of mine, who sat across the aisle from me in fifth grade, was also a maze-runner. And either he or I, I am not sure which, decided to improve on the comic book variety. One of us drew a maze with more false starts and cul-de-sacs that could be contained in one of those printed boxes, devising little traps for the unwary, and then passed this puzzle to the other. The recipient eventually solved this puzzle, sort of listening to what was going on in class, and then felt challenged to one-up his puzzle supplier with an even more elaborate maze. This process continued and escalated, not only that day, but for days to come. We both got to be very good at creating tricky mazes (for example, ones with narrow gates that looked as though they were blocking the path, but which had left a tiny opening through which the solver could go if he saw the deception). And we got to be pretty good at this surreptious passing, solving, and creating -- until one day the teacher directed a question to me, and I had no clue what the question was, much less what the answer would be. Of course the teacher had detected that something was going on between me and my friend, and confiscated our "work." We had a little confessional session that afternoon with the principal, Emma M. Stanley, whose stern demeanor stopped the a-mazing creativity of two fifth graders (for a while). We were chastened for a few days, but found the attraction strong, and pursued our games again, just with more attention to lunch period than to classroom time!

As I reflect on this now, I am drawn to several conclusions:

[1] That illicit activity becomes incurably attractive, an insight found in the Bible: "The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do."

[2] That there is something mesmerizing about both creating and solving goal-oriented issues, much more than doing rote and routine, basic learning ... but the truth is that we need the basics in order to do the more interesting things. I still get stuck on parts of the multiplication tables; I wonder if that is what I was missing during the maze-phase?

[3] And that no matter how difficult or deceptive or tricky life's real mazes are, there is a Designer who has made sure that indeed there is a "way of escape". "I am the door ..."

Discerning a Legacy

2010-10-07T07:53:00.002-04:00

This post will likely be the last one in my series of reminiscences ... or at least the last one until something else pops up in my aging brain. I have made no secret of the fact that this exercise has been about my discerning and recording aspects of my legacy -- both what I have received and what I can share with those who follow after. It was occasioned by my cancer diagnosis and by the recognition that, perhaps, I may not have a whole lot of time to live. As it happens, I am now much more optimistic than when I began that I will survive and thrive; the program of treatment appears to be helping, and I no longer think daily about death. But the time I spent doing so has been beneficial to me, and, I hope, to my family and to you, dear reader.

I have saved the best until last. I have told this story many times, and always with a tear in my eye. But hear this and be aware that into your life came influences and motivations you did not understand at the time. However, once they are interpreted, these things become powerful.

One day my dad and I were walking together on some errand. It was in the later years of his life ... probably around the same age as I am now, early 70's. He began to tell me about his home life, saying that he had become a Christian and was baptized at the age of 18 at the little Calvary Lutheran Church in Cromwell, Indiana (a site which my brother and I visited a couple of years ago). At almost the same time as his baptism, he felt a call to preach, and told his father about it. My grandfather, Adam Homer Smith, announced, "We aren't going to have any damn preachers in this house." And my dad let go of his inclination.

Some years later, my dad met and married my mother, and moved to Louisville to establish a home. He also trained as a singer -- how many times, growing up, did I hear him report the wisdom of "Madame Sapin"?! And so along came an offer to sing, full-time, for a radio station in Cincinnati. Those were the days when radio stations did a great deal of live programming. When he reported this opportunity to my mother's parents, her father nixed the idea, saying, "You are not going to take my little girl all that way from here." ("All that way" is only a little more than a hundred miles, but I suppose in the 1930's that looked like a long, long distance).

And so, years later, my dad said to me, "So my dad kept me from going into the ministry, and Mother's dad kept me from a music career. I never got to do the things I wanted to do. But now I have one son who is a pastor and another who is a musician. I guess my life has meant something after all."

Do you see why I weep when I tell that story? I am sure that some of us are wondering why he did not just defy the powers that be and follow his own inclinations. But to say that is to fail to recognize the social, emotional, and financial realities he faced. Let us just be glad that my dad worked his way through lingering disappointments and frustrations to discover meaning. Neither my brother (Professor of Church Music at Southwestern Baptist Seminary) not I will ever fully know how much he influenced us toward our professions without his ever overtly pushing us. But we are grateful.

And so now I offer this story and allow you to ponder what my legacy will look like, in my children, my friends, my parishioners, others.

The Hefty Halves

2010-10-06T07:51:00.002-04:00

I have a pocket full of change -- pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. But it does not contain the finest coin of all, a half-dollar. Fifty-cent piece. They still circulate, technically; but I am never offered one in change. And it's too bad, because they evoke wonderful memories for me.

As a young teenager, I was often assigned tasks to do around our home. In particular, I was asked -- nay, told -- to mow the lawn. Now that was no small task. First, there was a prolific magnolia tree in the middle of the front lawn, and its huge leathery leaves had to be raked up and removed before the grass could be mowed. Sometimes they spread, it would seem, almost all over the yard. So there was a preliminary task that was arduous.

Then the mowing. Think not gasoline power or electric power. Think boy power. We had a reel mower, and it was operated by pushing it forward a few feet, then hauling it back and pushing forward again to get the blades of grass that were missed the first time. Back and forth, back and forth, all around the lawn, frequently stopping to pull out from the cutting edge some clump or weed that was too big for the blade to chop. One of my Sunday School teachers, a seminary student, suggested that it would save time if I were to mow in a great big circle, never stopping to go over any ground the second time or to deal with corners. I tried that -- once. The results were most unsightly and, I knew, would never pass my father's inspection.

And this was no small lawn, either. We lived on a corner lot, which meant there was a side yard as well as a front yard and a back yard. And, most of all, it meant that there were easements to mow along both streets. Mowing the easements was easy enough, but after mowing, the next step was trimming. Every inch of every sidewalk, both sides, and every inch along the curbs was to be clipped neatly. Again, think not weed-wacker; think hand-operated shears. I would sit down on a curb to start clipping and would look up toward the other end of the block, and it would seem to be miles long. Trimming in the heat of summer was the nearest thing to torture my thirteen-year-old boy had experienced.

And then it must all be swept. No residue on any part of the sidewalk. Mow, trim, sweep -- the unchanging routine of my summers. And when it was finally done and the tools put away, my dad would come to look at my work, and would reach in his pocket and present me with a hefty half-dollar.

Now understand that we had no contract, no agreement. He never said, "If you mow, I will pay you." It was always simply expected that I would do the job, without any money being promised. And sometimes none was given. But many of my mowing jobs, and other tasks as well, were rewarded with one of these particular coins. Never two quarters, never a bunch of change; always a half-dollar. Fifty big cents.

I wonder if my dad knew that somehow the weight and heft of that coin made it seem more valuable than its mere face value. I wonder if he knew that receiving one of those would make an indelible impression on his son, who would pocket the coin and then walk around with his hand in his pocket, fingering and feeling its contours. I wonder if he understood that it represented a tangible expression of his approval of my work, far more significant than anything the coin might eventually buy (although I rather hated to spend them ... so maybe it was his way of turning me into a saver rather than a spender).

Obviously I went on to earn more money in other ways. My friend Brooke Griffith invited me to join him on summer evenings at Bonnycastle Field, picking up discarded soft drink and beer bottles under the stands, and collecting a bounty from the concessionaire. We could bring home several dollars each on a busy night. And the summer after I turned sixteen, I got my first real job, tax withholding and all -- as a bicycle delivery boy at Cole Drug Co., being paid 55 cents an hour (when one of the in-store clerks resigned, I got his job and was raised to a whopping 70 cents an hour). But they paid in folding money and change; no body else paid in half-dollars. And I am glad of that; the special feel of those hefty halves was and is reserved for rewards from my dad.

Even the Hapless Have an Occasional Victory

2010-10-05T08:47:00.003-04:00

You are reading the blog of perhaps the least athletic person you know. There is no sport at which I excel; in fact, there is no sport at which I can manage even the least achievement. I never been able to run, pitch, catch, shoot baskets, or jump hurdles. I am an utter non-athlete, able to do nothing with sports other than watch on television. Even then I have to have the commentators explain to me what I just saw! I do not, cannot, will not do anything remotely athletic.

Oh, wait, there is caroms. I have perfected a mean carom shot. But can you call it athletics when it involves only one finger? (Don't go there!).

And so as a boy I would line up with all the others along the schoolyard fence, while the two team captains selected their players for dodgeball or kickball. One by one they would call out names, until it became perfectly obvious that I would be among the last still standing at the fence. On one particularly memorable occasion, there were only two of us left, and one captain chose the other boy, leaving me to face the disgusted look and, "Oh, well, okay" comment of the other captain. Many are called, but I was never chosen.

Softball was a sore trial. I do not remember ever getting a hit and running the bases. Whiff and sit down. And when our team was on defense, I was usually placed in deepest right field, where no one was likely to hit. I wore out the grass back there packing back and forth, waiting for something to happen, and, frankly, glad that it did not.

I would have avoided these games altogether, but they played them in a church context as well as school. As I grew up, if it had to do with church, we did it. If it was church, it was to be attended. And so, when I could not avoid it, I played with the other boys on a church softball team.

Our church had organized a new mission congregation, and as a part of the celebrations for Davis Memorial Baptist Church, there was to be a softball game between our boys and theirs. Play I must, for good old Deer Park Baptist Church, which would have been better off making me waterboy. The usual whiffs at batting, the customary jeers from other players (done politely, because this was church softball), and the expected placement in right field. Deep, deep right field -- where likely, nothing would ever happen.

True to form, I managed to while away the evening standing still in right field, pounding my glove just for something to do. Deer Park was winning the game, no thanks to me, but in the ninth inning Davis Memorial had loaded the bases, and, though there were two outs, a good hit would drive in enough runners for them to win the game.

The crack of a bat, a white sphere arching into the night air (hard to see, but everybody else saw it and yelled at me). For the first time in the entire game, apparently the ball was coming my way. That's what they all said ... but I could not find it until at last I saw it start to come down in my general direction.

Oh, the things that went through my mind! "Where is it? What do I do now? I am going to flub this, I know. I wish I were at home reading a book." I did all that I knew to do: I stuck the glove up and out and more or less closed my eyes.

And the next thing I knew they were all screaming and shouting and cheering; they were running in my direction and jumping for joy. And when I looked in my glove, there lay that ball. I had saved the game for my team, all by accident!

So let us no longer say that I am a non-athlete. Say rather that I can on rare occasion be an accidental athlete. And say too, that somewhere in this universe there is a moral principle that allows even the hapless to have an occasional victory. Savor it when it comes!

The Scourge of Self-Righteousness

2010-10-04T07:07:00.002-04:00

A friend of mine used to say, "Those who think they are correct really irritate those of us who know we are correct." In many of us there lurks a self-righteous streak that, in the end, is calculated to put down and injure those about us.

Occasionally I would answer the door as a boy, and in our neighborhood, the guest was frequently someone selling raffle tickets for St. Agnes or St. Francis or the Knights of Columbus. Something would stir in my Baptist-cum-Lutheran soul on those occasions, as I would hurriedly report that no one in this house wanted any such tickets. Once I screwed my courage to the sticking place and announced, "No, we are Christians; we don't gamble." I knew exactly what I was saying to the hapless seller of chances: YOU, you Roman Catholic, are not really Christian." And I aimed to hurt by that. Self-righteousness that cared nothing for courtesy.

I got into that mode for a while as a teenager. No one could memorize more Scripture verses than I, or, if they did, I was certain that they did not understand them all. No one could write a better school essay than I, or, if they got a better grade, it was because the teacher was biased. And at home ... well, the story of the game boards.

My friend Brooke Griffith and I spent long hours playing Monopoly. In fact, we even invented our own rules, so that no one would actually win or lose; we just rigged it so that it went on and on and on, for days at a time, interrupted only by breaks for meals and overnight. We played so much and so long that Brooke's grandmother called it, "Monotony." Playing games of chance, using dice and play money, was not an issue.

However, one evening while I was doing something elsewhere than at home, the family decided to get out another of our board games, Michigan Kitty. Mother and Dad and Bob sat down to play this game, which involved playing cards and poker chips and some sort of wagering. I came home and was greeted with cheers: "Come and play, we need you. This game works better with partners than with three individuals." I stopped on the stairs down to the basement, surveyed the situation, and loftily announced, "No. I'm a Christian, and I don't play with cards and chips."

Now never mind that I had played this game many times before. Never mind that I had invested long hours in Monopoly, with its dice and play money. Never mind that my Grandmother Smith had taught me the joys of solitaire and that I had learned to play five or six varieties of that lonely card game. Now, suddenly, with the zeal of a convert, I was eschewing the aces and spades, demeaning the diamonds and hearts. Moral high ground that suggested that no one else in the family was near the Lord, no one else truly moral.

But of course I knew exactly what I was doing. I was intentionally spoiling their fun. I was deliberately disturbing the equilibrium. Should I have been surprised, then, when my self-righteousness was greeted with howls of protest and screams of scorn?! They knew precisely what this was all about. And as I withdrew to my room to read or listen to the radio or whatever recreation was open to me, all I could think about was how smug self-righteousness hurt their feelings and how much it was now injuring my soul as well. It was not easy to come downstairs for breakfast the next morning; all faces around the table were grim. Including mine. For self-righteousness, in the end, is a scourge on those who wear it as well as those against whom it is directed.

"The Good is the Enemy of the Best" -- Don't I Know It?

2010-10-02T08:05:00.002-04:00

It has often been said that "the good is the enemy of the best," that is, that we settle for "good enough" when we could and should go on to achieve something superior. My life in music illustrates the point.

At Longfellow School one day they announced that there would be stringed instrument lessons after school. It so happened that my Grandfather Harpole possessed a violin, and so it was easy enough to decide that I would take violin lessons. We even had a small school orchestra by the time I got to the sixth grade. I did learn, though never enough to be a soloist -- always second fiddle.

I must have showed some promise, however, as after the school lessons were finished, my parents engaged a private teacher, Charles Letzler. Mr. Letzler was one of the prominent violinists in the Louisville Orchestra, and came to the home to give lessons. I do not know what he charged, but I am sure that providing these lessons came at no small financial sacrifice to struggling parents.

It came time to attend Highland Junior High School, and one of the elective classes was Orchestra. I signed on for three years with G. V. Gobba, the orchestra teacher, carrying my battered violin case back and forth every day. That case and its appearance is a story in itself ... but I digress. At this stage in my musical studies, the family determined that I would stop violin lessons and start studying piano. Not only could I not really invest the time in both instruments, but also we thought I was now "good enough" with the violin. Good enough for what? Playing second violin, sitting well back in the section, and never, never agreeing to any sort of solo work. It was good enough to be one of the also-rans, a condition which persisted not only through junior high, but also through three years in the orchestra at Atherton High School as well. There orchestra teacher Joseph Klan tried to tease something more out of me, even providing free summer tutoring one year, but I remained solidly mediocre. I had hit my level and was sticking with it, thank you.

Meanwhile, however, piano study was flourishing, to an extent. Under Evelyn Walker's leadership I made my way through the Bach two- and three-part inventions, participated in any number of Music Club evaluations, and did my bit playing hymns at church events and occasionally accompanying my dad when he was asked to sing a solo. But I did not aspire to anything extraordinary ... no solo recitals for me, no headlining anything. It was not my skill level, and I knew it. I was content.

However, in my senior year of high school, Mrs. Walker persuaded me to enter a Louisville Orchestra competition, the outcome of which would be that the winner would play the selected composition in a public concert, accompanied by the orchestra. As I look back on the decision to attempt this, I marvel that it was even broached; so unlike me to do anything of this sort! But maybe my teacher was trying to push me to another level.

The selected composition was Carl Maria von Weber's "Konzertstueck." It is not easy, even though today you can find on YouTube a ten-year-old playing it with aplomb! I worked and slaved, practiced and memorized, and thought I was -- well, good enough. Came competition day and Memorial Auditorium, where all the contestants gathered to hear one another. Out of the corner of my eye I saw not only the other contestants and my family, but also a young lady I had dated a few times ... that raised the emotional stakes a bit!

They called my name; my accompanist and I took our places at the longest grand pianos I had ever seen. The introduction began, and I attacked the opening notes of "Konzertstueck." Almost nothing came out of that great long piano! I quickly found, to my dismay, that the action was so stiff as compared with the old upright I had practice on that my accuracy was ruined, my musicality was compromised, and, to put it simply, I missed a lot of notes! How they ever gave me "Honorable Mention" I will not know, unless that is something you got just for showing up! I wanted to slink away out a side door, though there I found "her" with kind words of sympathy. The good enough of practicing on an easy piano had been the enemy of using the best and most challenging facility, and I had failed.

My piano lessons ended shortly after that. I took some organ lessons for a while, until I got good enough to play as a substitute for worship services, even as the interim organist for Highland Baptist Church in Louisville. But I never worked at this long enough, hard enough, diligently enough to move beyond good enough to authentically capable. A little defeat here, a small challenge there, and, most of all, telling myself that what I was doing was, for the moment, sufficient -- good enough. No one kept me from achieving musical excellence other than myself.

At this stage of life, trying to resurrect a few musical skills (niece Emily, if you are reading this, do not worry about bringing back the old violin!), I am also wondering in how many other ways I applied this mode of thinking during my life. A sermon that was prepared, but could have soared if I had not settled for "good enough?" A counseling session where I listened half-heartedly, but could have provided helpful insights if I had not thought my listening skills were good enough? An outing with my children when my mind was focused on something other than their needs, because just being there was good enough?

I practiced the hymns yesterday, preparing for Sunday worship at Montgomery Hills Baptist Church in Silver Spring, where they let me have at their organ. But something moved inside me to do a bit more than that -- a Bach chorale prelude, a run-through of one of the "Eight Little ... " I have a lot of catching up to do, but is it possible that I might correct the trend of many years and go on, even now, beyond good enough to some degree of excellence?

The Invasive Power of Keeping Up

2010-10-01T07:04:00.002-04:00

When television was new to American households, it took hold of our imaginations and captured our desires for consumer goods and services. It invaded us.

One of my wartime memories is of sitting in a darkened room, with all the shades pulled down, because there was an air raid drill. We sat listening to our radio, wondering whether the yellowish glow around its dial was visible to the Luftwaffe! But the conversation that night centered on the fact that there was something new on the horizon, television, that could send pictures through the airwaves, and that after the war, we would be able to get one of these devices.

Hitler came and went; the Japanese Emperor surrendered on the battleship Missouri. But we had no television. It was not all that readily available. But the promise was still out there: we will eventually get a television set.

One day we walked around the corner from my grandmother's apartment to stand in front of the shop windows at Ruth Electric: images flickering on the screens of two or three large boxes. We could not hear the sound, but were fascinated that there was, indeed, this new phenomenon. But we never went into the store to buy a television.

A trend was developing, as I soon discerned. Dad would say that he really would like to get one of those things, and Mother would say that we did not need it. Dad would aver that it looked like a lot of fun, and Mother would remind him that we could not afford it. The discussion would die down for a while; and of course there was no television in our house.

I have mentioned in earlier postings that about 1950 we moved into a larger house to accommodate my ailing grandmother with us, and that we rented the old place. It was rented at a bargain price to a family in our church that had fallen on some hard times; the father seemed unable to keep a job, and so we loftily felt that we were helping them by letting them rent our place. They did not always pay the rent on time, which made for some less-than-edifying encounters at church or at school (their daughter was my age and in some of my classes). But we were helping them out.

Then came the Sunday night the church youth group was invited to their home to view -- their new television! A giant box that filled almost the entire end of what had once been our family's living room, and in the middle of it a small screen, with someone singing. The program was soon over and we were all treated to a view of the test pattern, but we had seen television. We had seen it in the home of people who could not pay for the basics, but who had splurged on this new fad! At least that is the way my mother saw it; and the fact that these folks had bought a television made it even less likely that we would get one. My father resigned himself to a television-free life -- for a while.

Our church bought a television set and mounted it on a shelf in the basement. Nearly everybody cluck-clucked about that, and blamed our somewhat flamboyant associate pastor. Clucking or not, however, after Boy Scout meetings several of us and our dads sat there to watch the wrestling matches. I would never have learned about "Gorgeous George" had it not been for the church television set!

And then a phone call, to which we responded with alacrity: Aunt Katie and Uncle Ed had bought a television, just in time for the broadcast of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Would we like to come over and watch it? Indeed we would and did; I can still hear the peers shouting, "Vivat! Vivat regina!" On the way home from that experience my dad once again mentioned how much he would like to have a television, but the suggestion was met with stony silence and with the unarguable fact that the coronation was over.

I do not recall just how long until my father's pent-up desires exploded; but I do recall the astonishment we all felt when he just went out to a store and plunked down the money and bought a television set. No permission, no discussion, no agreements -- he just went and got the thing, brought it home and set it up, and faced the consequences.

Now I do not advocate unilateral decision-making within marriage. I think that Margaret and I have been faithful to the principle of mutuality during our married life. In fact sometimes she will ask me whether she can purchase these shoes or that sweater, and I will tell her she does not have to do that. But the habit of mutuality is a good one to retain. But there are times, I suppose, when the pull of desire and the frustration of not being heard is overwhelming. My dad had allowed himself to be lured by the need to keep up with others and by the desire to be a part of the consumer economy, and succumbed. Years of living on the promise of what was to come, but always being thwarted, had led to a breaking point. At last, we had a television, though I got the feeling that every time it was turned on there was an emotional price to pay.

So do we all deal with our conflicting motives, don't we? We listen to the lures of this world and resist them, for a time. But the need to be au courant, the desire to be a part of the mainstream, is likely to be overwhelming. The question is whether we are dealing with a matter of genuine principle or whether the issue is ephemeral or incidental. And the larger question is what our submission to the trends of the times does to the relationships that matter most to us.

We did notice that occasionally my mother would look up from her newspaper or the Reader's Digest to glance at the flickering screen. And gradually she began to watch a little more, and then more yet. I wonder what she would think about my household, where we have four televisions and a subscription to FiOS that gives us several hundred channels? More than that, however, I think I know what she would say when we try to find something of value amid all those channels: "We don't need that."

Strategy of Silence

2010-09-30T07:23:00.004-04:00

Our family sometimes met awkward situations with a strategy of silence. Let some difficult topic arise, and my mother would make a clipped comment and turn to my dad, who would shake his head as if to say, "Off limits." I soon learned that there were topics that we would not be talking about.

For example, human anatomy and sexuality. We were about to go on our annual family vacation to visit relatives in Indiana, and my dad called me into the bathroom while he was shaving. He shut the door and said, hurriedly, from behind a mask of shaving cream, "Babies come from their mother's tummies. I wanted you to know that because Josephine will look pretty large. I didn't want you to say something embarrassing." With that, he opened the door and motioned me out, while he went on with his ablutions. Sex education 101 in thirty seconds; I think of that every time I communicate with my cousin Jacqueline Kuhn, born in September 1947. The strategy of silence opened up just enough, but it was hardly thorough. We did not talk about awkward things.

If we had said more, it would have been very helpful for me when I got to the 7th grade and was introduced to physical education and the need to acquire the proper uniform for that class. We were told that we needed trunks, gym shoes, and something called an "athletic supporter." I took that list home so that my mother and I could shop at Tots and Teens, and neither of us knew what that last item was. So the next day I dutifully raised my hand and asked the teacher, Reed Miller, to identify an "athletic supporter." He turned six shades of red and muttered something about the need to keep our trunks up. I still did not know the function of this item, but knew I had crossed a line of propriety -- particularly that afternoon on the way home when at the school gate another seventh-grader asked if I were not the kid who asked about athletic supporters, and then, without waiting for me to craft an answer, offered up a bunch of disparaging remarks, the thrust of which was that I was unbelievably ignorant. Yes, I was, because we had a strategy of silence in our family.

Fortunately, the clerk at Tots and Teens did know, and I was properly equipped. Female readers, if you still do not know that an athletic supporter, in this context, is not a person who buys a ticket for a game, well, follow the Bible's counsel and ask your husband or other male counselor!

It was not only sexuality that we treated with silence. In the summer of 1950 the phone began to ring frequently and family members began to gather and whisper about "Frank." My great-uncle, Frank Lander Moorman, the youngest of the six members of the Moorman tribe, was dead. I did not feel anything special, as I had met him only once. But I kept hearing hints that this was no ordinary death, and finally discovered, mostly just by listening from the next room, that he had committed suicide. This fact we handled with a strong strategy of silence. This was not something we wanted the world to know; nor did we want to process our own feelings about it. If we did not discuss it, it would more or less go away.

I have no memory of Uncle Frank's funeral or burial. But what the family did, rather than suppress my curiosity, ultimately aroused it. I learned that Uncle Frank had been married and divorced -- again, something that we scarcely admitted in our family -- and that his present wife was "the French woman." Eventually I found that "the French woman" had a name, Suzanne. And ultimately, in recent years, as I have become involved in genealogical research and have become adept at finding various documents, I have discovered that Frank had invested in oil speculation, had made and lost large amounts of money, had lived everywhere from Kentucky to Texas to California, had been confined in 1933 to a mental hospital in Sawtelle, CA, and had returned to Texas to give the oil business one last try. From confinement in 1933 to suicide in 1950; one does wonder who in the family reached out to him during all these years. Did we contribute to Uncle Frank's demise by our strategy of silence, acting as co-conspirators?

Just a couple of years ago I was able to visit the Filson Club historical society in Louisville, KY, and to see and copy a pamphlet Uncle Frank wrote and had published: "It's Smart To Be Born in Kentucky: For a Colonel the Sun Shines Everywhere." In it he painted a self-portrait of his ability to attract attention everywhere, even among British royalty, simply by letting it be known that he had been born in the Commonwealth. I suspect most of it is fiction, though it purports to be a memoir. It is not clear when the pamphlet was published, but one wonders again whether anyone could have reached out to this wandering soul, had we not engaged so consistently in the strategy of silence.

So I am left wondering what else was never communicated appropriately to me, and, more profoundly, what I have chosen to ignore or manage with the strategy of silence? What gaps have I left in my children's formation, and what cues have I missed as a pastor? Fools may rush in where angels fear to tread, but I now suspect that we are often called to be that sort of compassionate fool.

No Visible Means of Support

2010-09-29T09:38:00.004-04:00

My great-aunt. Lois Adelia Moorman, never seemed to have any visible means of support. But her invisible and emotional support system was extraordinary. She ranks among the most extraordinary characters I have encountered.

Born in 1881 in Adairville, KY, the second daughter and third child of a country dentist, she married John Clyde Miller in 1910. Uncle Clyde was a farm laborer, then a tenant farmer, and finally a railroad worker; there were no children, and he died in 1939. I was only a year old, and so have no memories of him.

But my memory of Aunt Dedie, as she was always called, is of a woman who lived first here and then there; who might call and tell us she was moving again; and who worked at this job and that, far more than I can recall after all these years. I am sure there was never enough money; but I am equally sure that she managed to survive and even thrive emotionally, perhaps even enjoying the game of cat-and-mouse she must have played with the bill collector.

One of Aunt Dedie's more memorable jobs was as a governess for Barbara Wayne, the daughter of Irving Wayne, manager of the Jefferson County Armory. Barbara was the only child of socially-connected parents who -- at least in the eyes of the very traditional Smith family -- did not place interaction with their child above their social whirl. So Aunt Dedie was engaged as governess, and as such was invited to live in the Wayne family home on Garden Drive. I can still see in my mind's eye the long driveway and the turreted roofline.

Now Dedie was not one to confine her feelings to herself. Whatever she felt, she expressed. And so when Barbara got out of line, Dedie let her have it. However, let me or Bobby get a little rough with Barbara, and we were quickly reminded that that was no way to play with a girl. Dedie knew what she thought and said so.

But now Dedie did not simply bask in her own good fortune, as this job not only provided bed and board but a rather decent wage. She found ways to extend that to others. Uncle Ed (Edward J. Weber, husband of my other great-aunt, Katherine Klyde Moorman Weber) had been out of work for a while. He had been a partner with his brother in a wagon works ... but, guess what? By the 1940's not too many people were buying wagons! So Uncle Ed needed work. Dedie discovered that the Armory needed a night watchman, and interceded for her brother-in-law. Uncle Ed got the job and perks to go with it, which included free entrance for the family to lots of shows. I probably would not have seen the Coldstream Guards or "Holiday On Ice" if it had not been for that form of largess. All because Aunt Dedie knew how to extend her good fortune to others.

Eventually, of course, Barbara Wayne grew to an age which did not require a governess, and Dedie was let go. Back to another little rented apartment ... until notice came one day that Uncle Jesse's wife had died. Jesse Haynes Moorman, her brother, born in 1884, had early on sought his fortune in Montana, and had married there. None of us back in Kentucky had ever even met his wife; Montana might as well have been on the moon, so far as our thinking of ever visiting there. But when Dedie heard that her beloved brother was now a widower, she announced that she was going to Montana to live and to take care of him! We were astonished; almost no one else in our family had ever ventured so far from Kentucky (with one exception, the last child of this clan, Frank Lander Moorman, about whom I shall write later). But Dedie cleverly matched her need with another's, and made lemonade from lemons! Actually she did find work as a concessionaire at Glacier National Park, and regaled us with stories of bears and tourists for years to come!

And how did one travel to Montana from Kentucky in the 1950's? Do not think of airlines or high-speed rail. Think Greyhound -- days of travel from remote mountain towns through the plains and across the rivers until finally, 5th and Broadway, Louisville. And who steps off the bus for a visit home but a laughing lady, still merrily chatting with some other passenger she had met, exchanging stories and over and over again talking about when "Clyde and myself" were married. To the end of her long life (d. 1972), Lois Adelia Moorman Miller taught me that joy is not what is around you, but what is inside you.

By the way, if any of my relatives are reading this ... "Adelia" had a set of serving implements engraved with the letter "A", supposed to be given to the first girl born into the family who would be named Adelia. No one has taken her up on this yet. But I'll bet from the halls of heaven you could hear a shout, "Clyde and myself got those for you."

Control Becomes Demonic

2010-09-28T09:12:00.004-04:00

When I was in the fourth grade, Longfellow School organized a garden club, and I joined it. Each of us was given a small plot in a corridor across the alley from the school building, a corridor to the next street left vacant between two houses. When I was told the choices I had for items to plant in that little plot, I chose zinnias. I had been told that they were colorful, quick, and dependable. And I was not disappointed. Dig a hole, put some water in it, push the seeds down, fill the hole, water some more, and wait; only a few days later, some tender yellow shoots, and then, seemingly over a weekend, green stalks and flower buds. I was elated.

So at our home there was a strip of earth maybe eighteen inches wide between the back wall of the house and a narrow sidewalk parallel to that wall. Nothing much grew there, and I was told I could plant in it if I wished. I was ready for something more than zinnias, so was pleased when my mother gave me a couple of packages of "four o'clocks." This wonderful name signified the time of day when the flowers could be expected to open.

I planted, I watered, and soon enough, God gave the increase (Okay, so I was not speaking in Pauline terms at the age of nine!). The plants grew and put out some buds. I waited, I really did, until it seemed they were ready to open, and at precisely 4:00 pm I went out to view the glories of the vine. Nothing. Closed up tight. What was wrong? I went in the house disgusted and wondered if my planting techniques had damaged them.

But later that afternoon my mother went out the back door and called me; they had indeed opened up, these four o'clocks! Maybe they should have been called "four-thirty-o'clocks!" Nature is not on our human timetable.

And yet for several days after that I went out at precisely the canonical hour, somehow expecting that my flowers would act according to my preconceived notion of how they ought to act. Sometimes a few were open, and others were not. More often than not they slowly unfolded during the next thirty minutes or so. I think I learned a bit about how one cannot be in total control but must wait and let things take their natural course.

However, along that self-same sidewalk that bordered my obstinate flowers, I learned another lesson about control, this one bordering on the demonic. My little brother, who adored me and I knew it (this was the boy who had watched an airplane fly over and had asked, "Joe, did you make that?" -- which I sort of denied), had a new tricycle, and was riding it along that sidewalk. The sidewalk intersected with another perpendicular to it, leading to the back gate, and at the intersection there were two or three steps, where an older brother could sit and watch his minion ride. I found that if I motioned for Bobby to come, he would come. If I motioned for him to turn, he would turn the corner onto the perpendicular sidewalk. And if I signaled him to stop, he would indeed stop on a dime.

Being the traffic warden became a real exercise in control for me. I made him start and stop at peculiar places. I ordered him to stop half-way into his turn. I barked commands in rapid sequence so that he became confused. And when I found that I could also control his speed by ordering him to pedal faster and faster, I became utterly drunk with power. As he raced toward the corner, intent on making the turn, at the very last nanosecond I threw up my restraining hand, and over he tumbled. Tricycles are not made to take 90-degree turns at top speed and then halt immediately.

And when he picked himself up, crying, he uttered words of complaint and rejection, and I was never again the infallible, all-competent, fully-trusted big brother. I had abused my influence, I had overreached my powers, and I had destroyed a sweet modus vivendi.

I went back to waiting for the four o'clocks that I could n0t control, but which also did not go inside and tattle on me.

Love Is Trust

2010-09-27T08:09:00.002-04:00

Almost exactly six years after I was born, along came my brother, "Bobby". That would probably have been cause for joy for me, except for what happened with our mother. I suppose today it would be called post-partum depression; in 1944 it was called a "nervous breakdown", and she had to go to a rest home/sanatarium for an extended recovery period.

So who takes care of a six-year-old and a new-born while Mother is away and Dad must work? First, Grandma Harpole; next, Aunt Dedie (Lois Adelia Moorman Miller, about whom I shall write stories later in these blogs); and for a time, Grandma Smith, who lived in northern Indiana but who came to stay and help for a while.

My memory is that it was all torture for my dad. He not only had to work, worry about his wife, attend to the needs of his boys (the older of whom still wanted to be the center of the Smith family universe); but now he had to referee among three dominating women, each of whom had her own ideas about what should be done and when. My dad was always protective of his mother, and I think he felt keenly that the sisters Mary and Dedie were not very respectful of her and her Hoosier ways and accent.

The year went on, with my being mostly oblivious to the strain and stress around me, until it got to be December. Christmas was coming. Every child expects goodies at Christmas, and I was no exception, although somewhere down inside I sensed that we were not going to be as joyous as customary this time. Actually, in some ways, I had learned to temper my expectations because of wartime restraints and my dad's low-paying (but steady) employment in the Post Office.

But a tree did appear, and some packages. Came Christmas Eve, an annual occasion which carries for me far more significance emotionally now than its liturgical meanings might suggest; my dad came home late (in those days carriers worked on Christmas Eve until every scrap of mail was moved out to its destination), and sat down on the little chair nearest the Christmas tree. He reached out to me, drew me into his grasp, and said, "I know it's been a hard year for you. I know it's been hard without Mother. We don't have a whole lot of things for you for Christmas. But I want you to know I love you, I love Bobby, and it's going to be all right."

Now why would I remember that simple statement after all these years? Why does it move me to report it even now? Because my dad trusted me with the truth. Because he loved me enough to tell me what he was feeling and to acknowledge my feelings as well. It was an epiphany for me, that I had been heard, I had been noticed as something other than an irritant to my grandmothers and my great-aunt. I was real to my dad, and he was real to me. I learned to trust him that Christmas Eve night.

And, sure enough, a few weeks later, Mother came home for a visit. I actually asked for and ate, with a flourish, a helping of asparagus, just to delight her. And it seemed as though the time between her visit and her ultimate return home was as nothing, because I lived in a trusting/trusted environment.

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans

2010-09-24T08:21:00.002-04:00

It was not until I got to seminary and read Rudolf Otto's "The Idea of the Holy" that I more clearly understood some of my feelings about church buildings. Otto's classic phrash is "mysterium tremendum et fascinans" -- a mystery that creates fear and yet fascinates. It refers to our mingled feelings when we are in the very presence of God and/or in certain locations that carry religious associations.

When I was a boy I somehow became fascinated -- there is that word again -- with our church building. Deer Park Baptist Church had been built originally as a large fan-shaped sanctuary, with large porticos facing two streets, Bardstown Road and Maryland Avenue. Each of the porticos led to two doors into the building: one into a corridor that brought worshippers into the auditorium (we Baptists did not use the word "sanctuary") or to stairs up to the balcony and/or down to the basement' and the other a smaller door that led into some sort of space that it seemed only the pastor entered. It was obvious that it was behind the pulpit and the baptistry and under the organ loft, but what was it?

And so one Saturday after junior choir I lingered instead of going home, and found my way into the empty sanctuary, down the aisle, and at the bottom of the pulpit platform steps. I lingered a bit there, feeling that maybe I should not go up there. That was where the pastor preached on Sunday. Not my place; but hey, there is no one else here. What could happen? I went up on the platform, walked over to the pulpit, stared down with amusement at the worn place on the carpet where our pastor, Lucius M. Polhill, commonly planted a foot and twisted incessantly while he preached! And what a clutter of books, bulletins, papers, and clutter on the pulpit shelf. The mystery was beginning to diminish.

Then, with a tentative hand on the knob, I opened one of the two tiny, narrow doors that flanked the baptistry. Inside I found a space that was filled with more clutter, a bunch of white robes, a set of waders, and a couple of garments that seemed to have been discarded. I was in nothing more than a dressing room, though in my mind it had been built up into a place of mystery. Incidentally, it was not too long thereafter that I found myself using one of those dressing rooms for my own baptism; I think it helped me get through that evening service that I had demystified the space if not the experience.

Fast forward a few years: I am learning to play the organ, and practice sometimes at Deer Park and sometimes at Calvary Lutheran Church, where my father was a member and from whose organist, A. D. Burger, Jr., was my instructor. The console was situated in a choir loft at one side of the chancel. The chancel contained an altar with a lovely Last Supper carving modeled after a Riemenschneider, and the customary paraphernalia of candles and the like. My father instructed me very specifically when I first began practicing there: do not go beyond the altar rail, and do not step up into the raised pulpit. Those are locations only for the pastor or other ordained men. I heard, and for the most part I obeyed; but there is that other side of Otto's formula -- fascinans. I remember the night when I had finished practicing and started to slide the altar rail aside so that I could get a better look at the carving. Something deep down said, "Don't do this." The place was quiet and there was no one around; who would ever know? I slid the altar rail back into place, but then stepped over to the pulpit. I put one foot up on a step; nothing happened. I dragged the other foot up and heard the clunk of shoe on bare wood, but nothing else. For a long ten seconds I stood in that pulpit and surveyed the room the way the pastor saw it -- and then hurriedly climbed down, gathered my music, turned out the lights, and scurried out the door, breathing more easily once I got outside.

What was that all about? My head tells me that the altar and the carving and the pulpit are all just wood and stone, made by the hands of rough, possibly crude and profane, workmen. But it had become infused with a sense of holiness, separation, and it affected me profoundly. Rationalist and Baptist though I became and still am, there is something about spaces set aside for worship that awes me. Even though when I became a pastor I knew every inch of the all-too-limited baptistry, choir, and pulpit area of my church, there was still something very special about mounting those steps on Sunday morning to stand in the place set aside for me -- for me? No, for the Word of God. It is not the wood and the carpet that is holy; it is what happens there, or is intended to happen there, that renders holiness palpable. I hope never to lose that moment of awe and wonder.

Many years later, I was asked to share in officiating in a wedding in the Great Choir of National Cathedral. Right up there next to the Canterbury Pulpit ... below the six=foot carving of the Crucified ... beneath the horizontal Trompette stop. I nearly froze. I was unsure that I, mere Baptist preacher, should be there and might incur the wrath of whatever powers there be in that place. But I relaxed once my co-officiating minister began the service; a Roman Catholic priest, Father Richard McSorley read his wedding homily off the back of an envelope and other scraps of paper, and as he finished each page, he let it flutter to the grandly tiled floor of the Great Choir. That made the grandeur more homelike, and reminded me that our God may be He whom Isaiah saw, "high and lifted up", but He is also "nearer than breathing, closer than hands and feet." Tremendum but always fascinans, and gracious.

The Sign of Undeserved Suffering

2010-09-23T11:58:00.003-04:00

I have reported that after my Grandfather Harpole died in 1947, my grandmother decided to sell the Maplewood Place house and move to an apartment that had just become vacant in the fourplex she owned at 2006 Alta Ave. The only problem was that the unit was rundown and unpleasant. So my dad, a very good craftsman, undertook to remodel it for his mother-in-law.

Plastering, painting, some plumbing, and the piece de resistance, a remodeled bathroom. The old one had had some fixtures in awkward places and featured lots of damaged plaster on the walls. So my dad found a then-new product, rubber tile, and applied it to the bathroom walls from floor to half-way up. Rubber tile was light, inexpensive, easy to cut (note that characteristic well), and readily cleaned. So a lemon yellow rubber tile went up in the apartment bathroom, and the apartment was almost ready for occupancy.

It was time for the family to come and see his work. Dad and Grandma and I went to 2006 Alta, Apt. 3, for a tour. In my pocket was my new prized possession, a little pocketknife. What boy does not prize a pocketknife and look for a place to use it? So when the tour included the rubber-walled bathroom, where my dad extolled the virtues of this product to us, and I noticed a slightly bulgy spot where the remains of an old plumbing fitting had not been completely removed, I lingered behind as the other two went on to the living room and bedroom. I felt it with my finger, and it gave a bit. I pushed with two fingers, and it yielded some more.

I cannot tell you why I did what I did next, but it was something my ten-year-old soul found irresistible. I got out my pocketknife, opened one of the blades, and stuck it in the rubber, making a small horizontal cut in this virgin piece of tile. When I pulled out the knife to admire its work, I saw that the cut was rather visible, so what did I do? Nothing remotely logical. I took the knife and made another cut, vertical to the one I had just done, so that now there was a cross-shaped cut in the tile. Obvious, unrepairable, unnecessary, and inexplicable.

A couple of days later, when we moved in Grandma, my dad saw the cuts, and expostulated all around, asking how those got there. I had to have been a prime suspect. But I never acknowledged the crime. I just suffered the pangs of guilt every time thereafter I went into that bathroom and saw my handiwork. And, of course, as time went on, there was soilage and discoloration at the cuts, and they became more and more obvious.

Why do we do the destructive, unnecessary, inexplicable, harmful things we do? Why do we so woefully misuse others -- their property, their legacy, their dignity, their self-worth? I can only say that in each of us there lingers a brutishness, an unredeemed surd quantity, that will out at the most awful times. And we will hurt each other. It's there; deal with it.

Ah, but it has been dealt with. I felt guilty and convicted every time I entered that bathroom and saw the cross-shaped mark I had made. And when I see One who died on a Cross for me and my brutishness, then too I feel shame. But I no longer carry the guilt, for Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. Sin had left a crimson (or rubber-tile discoloration) stain, but He washed it white as snow."

To this day, however, I am tempted by pocketknives.

Generosity and Greed

2010-09-22T15:19:00.002-04:00

My grandmother Harpole was a very generous woman. While I cannot prove it, I suspect that when my mother and father married and moved into one of the four units of the apartment house at 2006 Alta Ave., Louisville, it was for little or no rent. My grandparents had invested in this building as an income source, but my father found it hard to get decent work in 1935. He worked at service stations, back in the day when that meant cleaning a windshield, checking the oil, and pumping the gasoline; not a high-paying position. I suspect they lived on Alta for free. That's where they were living when I was born in 1938.

A three-room apartment was soon too small for a growing family. So the grandparents bought the house at 1803 Bonnycastle, where we lived until I was 13. I believe they paid about $4200 for it! Five rooms, a basement with garage, and an attic. I am sure my parents were very grateful, as once again it would have been difficult for them to purchase a house. I suspect mortgages were not easy to come by in those days, even though after a while my dad landed a permanent and substantial job as a U. S. Post Office letter carrier. Not a way to get rich, but at least steady work.

My grandfather died in 1947; my grandmother sold her 1934 Maplewood Place house and moved into one of the Alta Avenue apartments. But it was not long before she suffered a stroke and had to come live with us on Bonnycastle. That meant that my parents gave up their bedroom for her, turned the dining room into their own bedroom (sans privacy). My brother had come along in 1944, so he and I were esconced in the other, very small, bedroom.

It became clear that we needed more space. My grandmother agreed to purchase 1834 Roanoke Avenue in 1951, for something like $12,000. My parents did not even have to sell Bonnycastle, but kept it as a rental source for a while. Our family was the recipient of uncommon generosity from Mary Burr Moorman Harpole. We all should have been grateful.

But one of us turned her generosity into his own greed. While my grandmother lived in her Alta Avenue apartment, it was my responsibility to go over there on Saturdays, after junior choir practice at Deer Park Baptist Church, and perform any chores she needed to have done. I carried garbage out for pickup, I mowed the little lawn, I swept the stairs, and, my favorite task -- at seasonal changeover I washed and hung screens on all the apartment windows. There was no set payment for me to do these things; she would just open her purse and give me all the loose change. Sometimes that was maybe a few nickels; sometimes it would be over a dollar (an amount which sent me past Bonnycastle Drugs for a candy bar and the comic shop for the latest "funnybook" on the way home).

But, as I have said, that soon ended. She moved to our house, and the chore Saturdays ended. No more money for candy bars and comic books. What is an eleven-year-old boy to do?

Rationalize: the logic went like this. Grandma always just gave me the loose change in her purse. That is what she would be doing now if things had not changed. So I will just go get it. First one Saturday, then a second, and then, with some other rationalizing, why wait until Saturday -- and I accumulated a pretty decent stash in my dresser drawer. I could not, would not stop.

Until Grandmas noticed that change she thought she had was disappearing. I heard her discussing this with my mother. My name turned up, but they really could not bring themselves to believe that I could have done this thing.

What to do? Clearly I could not continue and draw attention to myself. But I was not about to confess. I tried to sneak some of the coins back into their source. But that too was suspicious when Grandma looked again. Coins do not just put themselves into purses.

She never said anything, but the look in her eyes told me that I had breached a line of trust that would be hard to restore. I was ashamed of myself and fearful of punishment; but punishment as a spanking or a lecture or the like never came. My punishment was to know that I had disappointed and disrespected this lady, who would have given me anything I really needed or asked for. There was a nasty name for what I had done, and I knew it, for I had memorized the Ten Commandments: "Thou shalt not steal." And now I knew why; theft thrusts at the dignity and selfhood of the one from whom possessions are taken.

The mystery is that her woundedness never expressed itself in any way other than the look on her face.

And I often imagine that if one can think of looks on God's face, they must be quite like Grandma's lo0k when God sees how we let greed govern our relationship to Him.

Loyalty, But To What?

2010-09-21T07:32:00.002-04:00

We laud the quality of loyalty. Friends who do not forget us, family members whose love for us is sustained, commitments kept -- loyalty is a quality without which our families, our institutions, our nation could not continue effectively. Loyalty, but to what?

My first automobile was a used 1955 Dodge, for which I paid the grand sum of $695. Well, that was a grand sum in 1959, carefully saved from my wages as a Hydrologic Field Assistant for the United States Geological Survey. The title sounds impressive; the role and the wages were not.

But I had a car, which my fiancee and I dubbed the "Declaration of Independence." Off and rolling, in a Dodge. Now I bought that car from family friend Herman Butler, who had sold cars for many years at Broadway Chevrolet in Louisville. At my parent's suggestion, I had gone to Mr. Butler; it was a matter of loyalty to a friend. Mr. Butler asked what I wanted, and I described my needs, and then said, "I want a Plymouth or a Dodge." This grated on the ears of a Chevrolet man, and he asked several times whether he could not show me something else; but he did have the '55 Dodge in stock, and once I saw it, the deal was done. I had already developed a brand loyalty. Where did that come from?

Well, my parents' car at the time was a 1957 Plymouth, one of those with fins and lights and geegaws. They had bought it while I was away working for a while in Akron, Ohio, and surprised me with it when I returned home. With great care I was permitted to sail this boat out on to the street occasionally. Large and a bit flashy, but a Plymouth, one of the low-priced three among American cars. My dad spoke about Chrysler Corporation's engineering prowess, and the car was an attention-getter. I got a big dose of brand loyalty from listening to those plaudits, and so demanded something like it when I became a car owner.

Flash forward a few years: when I was finishing seminary, the Dodge was failing. Margaret and I bought an almost-new 1962 Plymouth Valiant (later to be dubbed the "Blue Bomb"). It took us to Berea College and my first campus ministry assignment.

Several years later we moved to Lexington and decided that we now needed a second car so that Margaret and our little children would not be isolated in our suburban home while I drove the Blue Bomb to work, and so we found a used 1966 Plymouth Valiant. A two-Plymouth, two-Valiant family now.

Stay with me: 1971, a move to Maryland that included driving two Valiants full of children, plants, and assorted small goods while the moving truck took the bulk of our stuff to Silver Spring. Not too long thereafter the Blue Bomb gave up the ghost, and we needed a bit of hauling capacity, so we scrapped the Valiant for an AMC Hornet station wagon. I felt a little queasy about that; we had deserted Chrysler, and was this AMC thing reliable? Shall I regale my readers with tales of starters that gave out or of electrical systems that drowned out when we drove through puddles? Do you wish to hear about hinges that readily broke off the hatchback if a wind caught it while it was up? No ... that is another set of reminiscences. I had deserted my brand and was paying the price. There was later a brief episode with a Mercury Comet, but I returned with joy to Plymouth, and found a 1968 Fury III, two-tone green, and as long as a battleship. I could barely get it into a parking spot at the University of Maryland Chapel, but I was proud of this green monster. It took several of my colleagues to a conference in Oklahoma and transported family and some gasoline cans back and forth to Kentucky for Christmas during the gasoline crisis of the Carter years. I was proud of this critter, though my children to this day tell me that it was far too smelly! Nonetheless, my brand loyalty was confirmed.

And when the green monster died, and we inherited for a time my father-in-law's Chevrolet, I waited for the day until we could return to Plymouth. In 1990, at last, the very first time I ever bought a completely new car, a Plymouth Acclaim. We loved it and felt comfortable with our brand loyalty continued ... but we had not realized that the much-praised Chrysler Corporation engineering had deteriorated and that this car was not built to last. It did not; the transmission was in such bad shape that I had to crawl around to auto dealers to look for something new; and the best trade-in offer I could get was, "I can give you $100 to take it off your hands for scrap."

I now drive a Honda and a Hyundai. What happened to loyalty? I finally figured out that what mattered was being loyal to quality, serviceability, and dependability, not a nameplate. I discovered that what I really wanted was a car that would give me safe and reliable transportation for a reasonable price, not another example of the output of a company whose name I had known.

And any lingering feelings of guilt I may have had about deserting brand loyalty to find a higher allegiance was assuaged when I looked back over the years and found out where that bogus brand loyalty had come from. Remember my dad's 1957 Plymouth? It was his second Plymouth; the first one was a 1949 model, bought after his 1937 Ford struggled through WWII and gave out. Why the Plymouth? We lived in a house with a garage underneath. The driveway from the street was fairly steep and included an arc over which a car had to pass. The folks tried several cars ... Ford, Chevrolet, Studebaker (the one they really wanted), but only the Plymouth would come close to clearing that spot! In fact, my dad had to modify the driveway by chiseling out a patch of the surface so that the tailpipe would not hang up!

So our long brand loyalty began with nothing more than, "Which car will go in and out of our garage?" And so, irrational as it may be, we sometimes make commitments to values, organizations, lifestyles, and forget why we did so, or rationalize it with speeches about engineering or quality. It's time to examine closely and carefully why we do what we do, and to what we give ourselves. Life is too precious to be given to unexamined loyalties.

When Death Crept In

2010-09-20T07:23:00.002-04:00

I cannot recall what my feelings were, but I do recall the very first time I encountered the death of a family member. Unbelievably, I was only three years old. But maybe because of the peculiar combination of circumstances it has lingered in my memory.

I remember a night in my little bed in my little bedroom in our little house on Bonnycastle Avenue. Picture it, if you can (or maybe you should not!): I am standing in my bed, my parents are there, and my mother is giving me a glass of water to drink. My father is holding a pan of some sort, into which I ... well, you know. I can even recall some laughing about water going in and water coming out. All of that pretty normal for a three-year-old, I suppose.

But then my father said, "Great-grandma died last night." That's it. No embellishment, no sermonizing, just that raw fact. And, again, while I do not recall emotions, the very fact that I remember it being said tells me that this new thing of death was entering my young consciousness.

I do not even recall being with Great-grandma, though we have photos to prove that I was -- a lovely four-generations picture in which she, Sallie DeHaven Sterett Moorman, looks lovingly at chubby little me on my mother's lap. The only one of my great-grandparents whose life span overlapped mine -- a woman of proud family heritage and of sturdy western Kentucky stock. But all I remember is this announcement that she had died.

The next instance was the death of my grandfather, Joseph VanDorn Harpole, in 1947, when I was nine years old. This relationship was very different, especially given my growing older; I adored my grandfather. He could make anything work, and spent time with me in his basement workshop, showing me how to use tools and to organize materials. To this day when I handle a saw I think of his instructions about how to use it. By the way, I am named "Joseph" in honor of him.

His death was sudden and without warning, though he was 85 years old. My mother got a phone call from her mother, and we rushed over to Maplewood Place, just a short walk from our house. There he was, laid out in his bed; and I really did not know what to do or to think. I just stared at this ultimate mystery. Through the funeral at Pearson's and the burial at Resthaven, I simply went along and did what I was asked to do. What did I feel? I do not know. But here is a coincidence of dates that suggests that surely I was processing this event spiritually: I had been baptized in April 1947. He died on May 9, 1947. How could I not have wondered about ultimate things, given those circumstances? And yet without emotions that I can remember now. Does this mean that I am a remote, unfeeling person? Or does it mean that in my heart, even then, the great issue was settled, and I could accept death as a part of what we all must deal with?

One vignette about Grandpa Harpole's death: everyone said that it was a shame my brother Bob was so young -- only three at the time -- because Bob was just beginning to "make up" with his grandfather! Odd language, as if they had had some sort of falling out. All I know is that Bob (well, we called him Bobby at the time) had a tired old Bugs Bunny comic book, one without even any color in the cartoons, but he wanted Grandpa to read that rag to him over and over. So goes the ritual of reconciliation, so the litany of reassurance that things will not change.

But they do. Or do they?

Reminiscere Domine

2010-09-19T07:02:00.003-04:00

"Remember, O Lord ..." is the plea of the psalmist. And it is my plea, too, in a sense. We do now know that I have adenocarcinoma, that my lungs and lymph nodes are involved, and that whatever the eventual course of treatment looks like, it will involve chemotherapy and radiation. Tedious, probably a mixture of hope and disappointment, and likely to be wearing not only on my body and spirit but also the spirits of those around me who love me.

"Who love me ..." I am not sure I have often said that phrase. Of course I knew it was true of my wife; naturally I expected it to be true of my children; and then of course I bask in the unconditional love of my three grandchildren. But to think that others loved me? It did not cross my mind until the news of my illness got out, and the calls, the cards, the visits have so often said, "We love you." What a blessing just to know that!

It has started me to reflect on all the evidences of love I have experienced throughout my life: family love, God's love, the love of those who simply chose to care for me. It feels good to remember these things, and in a sense to remember them before the Lord, in whose infinity nothing is every lost, but in whose grace all misdeeds can be forgiven. And so each day ... or each day when time and feelings permit ... I am going to write a little reminiscence from days past. They will not be in chronological order; they will be written just as they come to me. They may or may not be didactic in the usual sense; but no doubt a discerning reader will be able to draw some useful conclusion from them ... or, if not, at least a smile of recognition! And so whatever happens with my health, I will have left here a record of moments that now seem significant in my life, so that whoever does indeed love me can come to understand me even more.

Allegedly Retired ... it's still the name of the blog. But it will only incidentally be about work and post-retirement happenings. It will delve back into my childhood days and will present vignettes that now demonstrate some elements in my formation. Reminiscere, Domine.

The first: Religion was always at the fore of our family's life. Among my earliest memories are seeing my grandmother sitting in one of the high-backed wooden chairs with white antimacassars in the room occupied every Sunday by the "Wide-Awake Class" at Deer Park Baptist Church. Senior ladies, "Wide Awake" ... well, maybe. Meanwhile, downstairs, if my grandfather went anywhere at all, it was to the "Glad Hand Men's Bible Class". This was one of those independent Sunday School classes that were popular in the early to mid 20th Century ... organized apart from the church in which they were housed, and somewhat ecumenical in flavor. It was always a bit of a mystery to me that my grandfather described himself as "Cumberland Presbyterian" but usually spent his Sundays examining the newspaper.

Sidebar: we would laugh at Grandpa Harpole reading every inch of the Sunday paper, including the classified ads. One day we got into this again, and of course he denied reading all that boring material. But as the conversation went on, he dropped in, "Oh, I saw that the XXX house is for sale." Gotcha!

But religious identity was always up for discussion among us. My dad grew up a Lutheran and remained faithful to his heritage. My mother grew up Baptist and was equally persuaded of that heritage. I am told that after I was born, although my dad would have liked for me to be christened, my mother and my grandmother outvoted him and won the day by noting that he did not go to Sunday School at his church, but they did go at the Baptist church, and "this boy is going to have Sunday School." So I suppose I am something of an accidental Baptist (albeit one who imbibed deeply of Lutheran worship traditions later on).

So, one rainy day, when it was not possible to play with the neighbor children on the yards and sidewalks, we gathered on our front porches and shouted at each other across the little divides between the houses. Somehow the topic of religious identity came up. I shouted to Barbara and down the road to Jimmy, "I'm a Baptist." Barbara announced, "I'm Jewish." Jimmy said, "I have to go and ask." In a moment he ran back out on his porch and proclaimed, "The maid says I'm a Messocheese."

"Messocheese" ... well, but in Louisville in the 1940's you had to be something!

This Is What Love Looks Like

2010-08-25T08:10:00.003-04:00

I have not posted for several weeks, during which the problem of my illness has deepened. I will spare my dear readers the details of all the tests, but will report that there is at least a chance that I have lung cancer. That is not a definitive diagnosis, as no biopsy has been done; but other indicators point in that direction. This even though I have never smoked and have not worked in a chemically toxic environment since my days as a college student, fifty years or more ago, at Goodyear in Akron.

And even though this possibility has raised in my mind the prospect of long-term treatments and even of struggling without success until the end, I can also honestly say that the prospect of death has not frightened me. I have received this possibility with a sense of equanimity and of faith; how could I, who have preached the Resurrection and the Life to others, do anything less than trust that for myself?

But something else has entered the picture, and it is most gratifying: expressions and actions of love from a variety of people. My wife, who takes on household tasks that I normally do so that I can continue to rest; my son, who shows up to do yard work and handyman tasks, and who lectures me about staying inside during "Code Orange" weather; my daughter, who shops for us and brings the world's loveliest grandchildren around for me to hug.

And pastor friends, family members, and others who want to be kept apprised and who promise that they will pray for me. The most poignant moment came this past Sunday afternoon, when I got a phone call from the oldest member of our church, 98 years old, who gruffly insisted, "Don't say anything. This is between me and the Lord," and then proceeded to pray for me. Some folks promise to pray and do very little, if anything. Others make that promise real. And this brother had sensed my emotional condition, too; I had played the organ, as usual, but had left the church by going down below through the basement level, successfully avoiding the crowds on the main level, with whom I just did not want to interact.

This is what love looks like: showing up to do what needs to be done; being personal and even being firm when the object of that love does foolish things; and making good on promises. Thanks be to God.

Alea (Almost) Jacta Est

2010-07-31T06:48:00.002-04:00

Strange and wonderful how decision-making works. Over the entire summer, as I reread my blog entries, I have been pondering the time when I can/must/will leave my various post-retirement jobs and just drop the "allegedly" from this blog. Health began to be of more concern as the summer has moved on.

July has been an eye-opener. Cardiac anomalies detected and, where possible, corrected. Nobody can do anything about a congenital defect: a bicuspid aortic valve (only two leaves to close the valve instead of the standard-issue three), but a cardiologist at Washington Hospital Center took care of the atrial flutter and prescribed meds for the atrial fibrillation. Within a few days, an EKG was pronounced "perfect."

But clearly the pneumonia did return, and a chest x-ray and a CT scan show a small nodule in my chest, near my heart. Probably the result of the infection, but could be more. New antibiotics for that.

The major symptom? I cannot use my voice! I can whisper, but not much more. Trying to speak produces a high-pitched sound and then coughing. Apparently I strained my vocal cords preaching July 18 at Montgomery Hills. So steroids for that.

And then the real issue: I must rest, rest, rest in order to get past this thing. Simple, huh? No.

Not simple because I cannot rest AND be faithful to the work with the DC Baptist Convention as well as to the supply preaching opportunity about which I wrote in a previous blog entry. Hmm, "opportunity" -- doesn't that say a lot about what I would really like to do? But I had to notify my pastor friend that I would not be able to fulfill my promise to him -- certainly do hope this does not torpedo his study leave plans.

When I look at what I am doing for the DC Baptist Convention, I am pretty sure I do not see a way to do it in the near future, even discounting the meaning of "rest, rest, rest." The task is to meet with the pastors of churches that have been distant from the Convention and to work with them to encourage them to lead their churches into involvement and financial support. If I must slow down and if I must rest my voice, how can I accomplish that? If the task were only pushing papers at the office, I think I could make a case for continuing that. But it is so much more than that. And so I am asking for counsel from the Convention staff and from its officers, trying to determine whether they see any perspectives that I don't see. One factor is a hint from a member of the Search Committee that suggests it may be some months (!) before a new Executive can be called. That does not encourage me to stay on.

But -- there always has to be a "but", doesn't there? -- but there are reasons to try to stay with the DCBC job. One of them is emotional/psychological: I just do not like to renege on promises and commitments made. One of them is interpersonal: What will the effect be on the rest of the Convention staff, particularly its Associate Executive Director, who already does more than his share of the work, and who would presumably have to pick up my work unless and until the Personnel Committee finds someone to take my place? And the other reason is candidly, financial: I like the extra income, have been saving it to bolster my retirement investments, and like the feeling of not having to pinch pennies. There! I've said it in public -- I have some attachment to that old "mammon" thing.

Aha, now the issue has become a spiritual one! Will I push myself to stay with this task, largely for financial gain? And can I honestly say that I "need" this income? I am afraid I know the answer to that question: no matter how much our income is, we portray as "needs" something beyond that. How many times I have been critical of pastors who tell pulpit committees that they "need" more than is being offered! And now here I am in much the same situation -- not demanding anything, but nonetheless wanting it, wanting to grasp it. I need not recount all that the Bible says about that! When I consider what Margaret and I are guaranteed for life via our Guidestone pensions and our Social Security, and then add in the performance of the investments we have been able to make, it is not likely that we are going to suffer any hardships, and it is also probable that we will have enough for at least a modest set of extras. I just need to get over this thing of financial concerns -- especially when I consider that I have a son who once persuaded me not to spend money on long-term care insurance by saying that his (considerable) resources would be of no value to him if he did not willingly dedicate them to his parents when in need! What better insurance policy is there than that?!

So, there is another spiritual component as well: the need/desire to serve in Kingdom concerns. I do enjoy church life and all the ways I can contribute to it with my education and experience. I like putting myself "out there" for Christian causes. But my daughter has put that into a perspective for me that I would not have approached on my own. Acknowledging that it is good for me to give myself away, even sacrificially (well, I don't know when I have ever really done THAT!), she theologized a bit and reminded me that the reason I do not have to spend myself into oblivion is that, to quote, "Someone REAALLLLL important" had already suffered and died for that! Wow! Yes, I have read old Paul, too, and all of that about the Cross meaning that we do not have to prove ourselves to God, but that He loves and accepts us ... it's real. It's not just about old Judaism and its legal system; it's about contemporary spiritual/psychological truth as well. In other words, I need to accept myself as an older person, with health compromised a bit, and just let life be.

So that is why this alea is almost jacta ("Alea jacta est" is Latin for "the die is cast" -- about Caesar's crossing the Rubicon River into Italy, from which there was no turning back). I am reasonably certain that, unless something startlingly new shows up in the consultations with staff and officers, the views of my family and the reflections into which I have entered will prevail, and I will resign. Stay tuned, dear reader.

Oh ... must add this. The pneumonia and its effects do not include, according to the physicians, causing the atrial flutter and atrial fibrillation. However, the pneumonia's effect has lifted those things to the fore, has emphasized them. So when I think that sequence through, I have to be grateful even for the pneumonia, without which my cardiac issues might have gone undetected and untreated for a long while. It's rather like the "accidental" discovery of an aggressive prostate cancer five years ago -- discovered at the right moment and treated successfully. Gloria Dei! His providence is ample.

And Yet One More?

2010-06-29T07:24:00.002-04:00

Yesterday came the news that a friend had received a grant that would permit him to take a brief sabbatical from his pastorate to do some research. Months ago he had talked with me about whether I would be able to preach and do pastoral care for him if that came through. Blithely I agreed, assuming that the work at the D. C. Baptist Convention would be very brief, and rather suspecting that he would not get the grant because only a small number of applicants succeed.

Oops! He got the grant, I am still at DCBC, and have been making noises about how this work as Interim Regional Minister is going to be the last "hurrah" ... but a chance to preach for three months? An opportunity to visit the sick, comfort the sorrowing, listen to the troubled? How can I pass on that?

So bear with me, family, and dear readers. The blog "Allegedly Retired" is not yet misnamed. We will see how things develop, particularly since the DCBC gig could be coming to an end quite soon.

Role Reversal

2010-06-21T07:15:00.002-04:00

Yesterday the family deemed me well enough recovered from the pneumonia bout that I was permitted to go to the Washington Nationals game with my son, Bryan. In the runup to the game, I learned that Margaret, my wife, has alerted him that if I showed any sign of distress, he should bring me home. And I learned too that my daughter, Karen, had communicated with him to wonder if going to the game was such a good idea.

They need not have worried. Role reversal kicked in. He whose diapers I used to change; whom I used to ferry around to scouts, church, school, and whatever; whose phone calls from college were generally along the lines of, "Dad, I need some money" -- he was attentiveness to the max. If I coughed, he asked if I were all right. When the water salesman came around, before I could blink, he had bought bottles. He would not permit me to sit in the sun without using sunscreen. And on the way home he mentioned that my daughter-in-law Jackie, his wife, had also been vocal in her concern that he take good care of me.

It's all so funny and yet also so gratifying. He and Karen both drop everything to attend to us if we are in distress. Hospitals are visited, lawns are mowed, loads are carried. Everything we used to do for them they now do for us, except for supervising homework! And even there, there is a close questioning about how long I will continue in my interim work situation, how heavy the load is, and surely I won't take on anything more, will I?

I think I am beginning to reap the benefits of two proverbial truths: "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made." And"Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Nor will he depart from you!

I thank God for my children, for their respect and love, and for the time to get comfortable with role reversals that I will need in the coming years.

The Tyranny of Busy-ness

2010-06-04T11:01:00.002-04:00

For the past several days I have had to lie low because of pneumonia. The coughing and the clutter began several weeks ago; I expected them to go away on their own, but they did not. So when, last weekend, my wife began to cough and clatter as well, we knew this was more than an early summer cold. Off to the physician on Tuesday morning: bronchitis for her, pneumonia for me. So a regimen of antibiotics, bronchodilators, fluids, and, to quote the instructions precisely, "Plenty of rest, Joseph. Stay home."

So that I have done, using emails and the telephone to take care of what absolutely needed to be done for the D. C. Baptist Convention, and, knowing that the staff is capable, competent, and self-directed, just let the rest of it be. Be, as in lie there. Be, as in "Noli me tangere." And I have learned from this.

I have learned that I can pump myself up into self-importance when I want to. "Wait for me, I'm your leader." But no, that is not only sinful; it is also unnecessary. When we learn to assume and therefore expect the best from our colleagues, they will give it, not grudgingly, but gladly.

I have learned that my tendency to be agenda-driven, while not entirely demonic, is not entirely altruistic either. Much of that is an inglorious need to be needed, to be affirmed, to be thought capable. In other words, it is a need to rise above the crowd and to be seen as an achiever. Sounds more than a bit like the sin of Babel, doesn't it? And the result is often a confusion of communications, just as post-Babel ... someone seeing through my pretenses, my claiming they just don't understand.

And I have learned that, as has often been said (and which I myself have preached, sometimes, just because I knew that it is a common insight), "being" is more important than "doing." I do not have to do in order to be. I do not have to accumulate tasks checked off my To-Do list in order to be valued. I do not have to prove to anyone, most of all to myself, and least (?!) of all to my God, that I am of infinite worth. I am His child, redeemed by grace, and that is all that needs to be known!

This is really a liberating insight ... not exactly one I invented. The Galatian letter and the Roman letter write it large. But sometimes one has to take in insights at a personal level before they become real.

So thank God for the pneumonia slowdown. And thank God also that I am to preach from the Galatian letter this coming Sunday, and that therefore its message is targeting my heart afresh.

The Taste Test

2010-05-12T06:56:00.002-04:00

When I was a boy, there were a couple of foods that I did not like. Well, truth to tell, that I had decided I did not like. I did not like tomatoes, particularly the jelly-like substance between the ribs of its meat; I most especially did not like tomato aspic salad, which my mother would make for the occasional meetings of the Fidelis Sunday School class or the WMU Circle at our home. I gagged on that stuff.

And then there was asparagus. I could not stand asparagus. I am sure that I did not know that it was considered something of a delicacy by the French, but I would not have cared. At age six, I had neither knowledge nor regard for things French. I did not like asparagus, and needed no arguments about it. I knew what I knew.

For almost a year, however, my mother was confined to a hospital/rest home, recovering from what I suspect we would now call post-partum psychosis, after my brother was born. It was very exciting indeed to learn, just about the time of my 7th birthday, that she would be coming home. What could I do to celebrate her return? How could I welcome her? I could learn to eat asparagus!

And so I did. I asked for asparagus and "practiced" eating the stuff. And the first night my mother was home, there it was on the table. With much aplomb, and due drama, I held up a stringy stalk and pointed out that I had "learned" to eat asparagus, just for her. And she smiled and complimented me. Gift given and received!

The point of this little story is simply that life has in it those distasteful things -- tasks, people, bills, misguided value systems, and the like -- that we would prefer to avoid. We would love to wiggle out of unpleasant tasks, we would prefer to avoid irritating people, we push the bills to the bottom of the stack, and we go into denial about some of the value judgments we see being made. But guess what? These things always come back to demand our attention. They are unavoidable. And we can learn to address them ... if not love them, at least address them. And sometimes we actually do learn to appreciate the unpleasantnesses that come to us.

When I reflect on the work I am doing now, as Interim Regional Minister for the D. C. Baptist Convention, I think about aspects of that work that are distasteful. I dislike listening to pastors grumbling about the theology they think we represent, especially since they are dealing with a perception rather than reality. I am unhappy when lay leaders question and express mistrust about decisions that other leaders have made in good faith, wondering whether there is a destructive agenda behind the questions. I am most put off by the atmosphere of decline and resignation that affects many of our churches and therefore creeps into our common life. And I would love just to ignore or walk away from all of this. I can scarcely believe that there was a time, twenty or so years ago, when I thought I wanted to be the permanent Executive.

But I have learned from the asparagus incident that it is possible to embrace the distasteful, to give thanks that there is a challenge, and to love what has seemed rather unlovely. This work has a strangely fulfilling element, and I am choosing to put my arms around it spiritually and to do all I can to resolve the Convention's issues within the limited time and authority I have. Bring on that asparagus and I will show you that I can bite it off!

But I still dislike tomato aspic, and think there is no way to come to terms with that!

What Happens to Passion?

2010-05-03T06:47:00.002-04:00

I only half remember, now, a poem quoted by, I believe, Dean Penrose St. Amant, in a chapel service at Southern Seminary nearly fifty years ago. (I think I am doing well, by the way, to remember how to spell his name this far along!). The poem went something like this:

"Oh, when I was young, then right was right and wrong was wrong.
But older now I am, and things seem less clear ... the which is called philosophy."

Not so much a diatribe against the formal discipline of philosophy as it is a critique of the way in which, with the passage of time, we lose clarity. We find that life is more subtle than we originally supposed. And that is to the good, up to a point. But if we remain stuck in the clarifying mode and do not advance to at least a few sure and certain convictions, convictions on which we can build our lives and about which we can feel some passion, we will be miserable and muddled, and ineffectual.

So, when I was a young minister, of course the aim and object of church's financial stewardship was to produce dollars for missions. Of course we aimed at giving away half of what we took in, and of course it all went through the SBC Cooperative Program for local, state, national, and foreign missions. Of course ... just a given ... that that is what good Baptist churches did, and that, as we heard repeatedly, everything that can be done is being done by one or another Baptist entity -- things that your local church cannot do.

Seems we bought that, or at least in the churches of which I was a part, we labored in that direction.

Then came a number of tsunamis! Then came the conservative moments of the 1970's, making it distasteful for some of us to keep on supporting entities that we thought had been captured by the wrong ideologies. Then came, also, inflation, making it tougher to pay the local church's bills and staff appropriately and still give generously to missions. Then also came the awareness that not a few non-Baptist or even non-religious organizations were fulfilling at least a part of the Kingdom mandates to feed the hungry, heal the sick, and clothe the naked; we could not, would not, compete with those organizations.

Put all those movements together and then come to the present moment, where I am finding that many of our pastors and churches, at least those here in the District of Columbia Baptist Convention, were not around in the days when churches competed to see who could give the most to missions. (Some of my friends tell me I was a weird kid indeed, as I used to read through the giving reports in The Western Recorder, the Kentucky Baptist state paper, to see how my church was doing in comparison with others.) No, now the question is more like, "What is the minimum we are expected to give?" and "We have lots of other places for our money, so what are you doing for us?" How in the world can we turn this around and return to our local church leadership a passion for missions giving?

To that end I am committing my energies and my thoughts during my interim work with DCBC. If we can change the climate of minimalism back to one of passion, even for a few pastors and churches, we will have done something significant for DCBC and, more important, for the Kingdom. Churches will challenge their members to responsible stewardship if they will themselves be worthy stewards of their resources.

That Uneasy Feeling

2010-04-23T08:28:00.003-04:00

Of late I have been subject to uneasy feelings, those slight but nagging disturbances that may mean nothing, but may also be the harbingers of something more to come.

Physically, I have had any number of instances of feeling just slightly dizzy, just a wee bit nauseated, noticing that my eyes do not "track" just right. Fear not, dear reader, I am monitoring this, paying attention to blood pressure, to (can I say this?) bowel movements, and other indicators. And I am going for a neurological workup on Monday. I am not ignoring this kind of uneasy feeling.

But there are other such feelings. I have an uneasy feeling about the institutions to which I have given myself, particularly the local church and the Baptist denomination. I see church after church declining, with little growth and much more loss, and with only a small commitment to evangelism and outreach. True, there are some churches that are growing, but all too often they seem to be those that are intellectually bankrupt, emotionally manipulative, or leader-dominated. I cannot really call those "churches" in the best sense of the word, nor would I want to belong to any of them. They seem to grow for all the wrong reasons. I feel uneasy about the future of the responsible church, if it has lost its passion for outreach and cannot maintain much forward momentum. And my uneasiness is not just about the institutions and their survival; it is about whether the next generation will really have a chance to hear the Gospel. That's critical.

An uneasiness about the Baptist denomination? Is that a worthy feeling? Is it perhaps a form of idolatry to want to see our Baptist way maintained and strengthened? Here's my logic, in a nutshell: it is of eternal significance that people be presented with the Gospel and the claims of Christ, for if they do not receive that, they will "all likewise perish." If it is crucial that people hear the Gospel, then they must hear it in a way that is personal and heartfelt, rather than propositional and ritualistic. Who will do that? It must be someone who is, for want of a better term, evangelical. Someone who is pointed toward a personal relationship with Christ rather than mere church membership.

And when I look at the range of evangelicals and ask who there is who can be both rational and passionate, both scholarly and emotive; when I ask who there is who knows about empowering people and liberating them rather than simply making them "pay, pray, and obey", I see the Baptists. I see our dedication to soul liberty, I see our insistence on democratic church government, I see our missionary heritage that includes a justice component as well as an evangelism component, and therefore I must conclude that the survival of the Baptist movement is crucial to a thriving contemporary Christianity.

Are we the only fish in the pond? Of course not. Do we have everything right? I doubt it. But I just believe that our emphases have within them the potential for renewal that the world of the 21st Century needs. Will we find ways to preserve and to extend our heritage? I feel a bit uneasy.

Anticipating Agony

2010-04-01T07:13:00.002-04:00

This week I officiated at the funeral of one of my Takoma Park parishioners. It is always a privilege, by the way, to be asked to come back to the church from which I retired to engage in these sad obsequies; it is affirming to me, and I hope to the families, that these old ties of affection be acknowledged and completed in this way.

But we remembered, this week, Alberta Perry Faulkner as she had been, not as she was in these last few months. We remembered her laughter, her commitment to missions, her involvement with children (especially scouts), her collecting memorabilia, her attendance at any and every Baptist event that was going on. We did not dwell on the months of dementia and disorientation.

But of course we did not really know what was going on inside her heart and mind during those months. Was she suffering, or was she oblivious? We do not know. But we rather hope that if she was away from her normal sensitivities during those months, it meant that she did not anticipate the agony of death. We hope she was just "out of it".

On this Maundy Thursday, however, we are made aware that Jesus was not "out of it." Jesus was aware of what was to come, and He lifted up bread and broke it, poured out wine and drank it, to sear the souls of His disciples with His anticipating agony. He went from that Upper Room to Gethsemane to pray, "Lord, let this cup pass from me," for He knew how trying and painful and unspeakable it would all be. But He resolved His fears with one great statement of faith, "Nevertheless, not My will but Thine be done."

Of late I have been feeling my age a bit. Occasional nausea, slight dizziness; the medical tests show nothing, and it probably is nothing. And yet there is that slight tinge of awareness that I am getting older. The old knees demonstrate that fact every time I struggle to get up from a squat! It means that I must anticipate that some day, perhaps not all that far off, I too must agonize. Not from a cruel cross or from any form of persecution, but from the natural progress of aging. And/or from disappointments concerning the things I thought I might accomplish, but never will. And/or from the relationships I thought I might transform, but never did. And/or from the hearts I said I wanted to turn toward God, but never managed to get around to. There are all sorts of agonies to anticipate.

But Maundy Thursday, at the Lord's Table, I will remember. I will remember that nothing that I may suffer in the days/months/years to come will equal what He suffered in that room, in the garden, on Calvary. I will remember that as He found comfort in sharing His anticipated agony with His closest, so also may I turn to my family, my friends, my pastor, to be heard. And, most of all, I will know again tonight, in the breaking of bread and the pouring of the fruit of the vine, that my little life has not been lived in vain, but that it matters to the Eternal One.

I may anticipate some degree of agony, but I also anticipate victory!

The March of Time

2010-03-22T09:24:00.002-04:00

Do you remember ... and if you do, dearie, you are just as old as I ... the newsreels announcing, "The March of Time"? The idea was that time inevitably marches on, with a regular rhythm like a band on a parade route, and that there is nothing we can do to stop it ... we can only be observers.

That is not an image that has taken hold with me until lately. Of course I know that all living things must die. But my death ... oh, that is far, far off. No need to think about that now. Of course I have done numerous funerals, most of them for people much older than I was at the time, and many if not most for people older than I am now. Someday someone will do my funeral, but that is far, far off. No need to think about that now. Of late I have played the organ for some funerals, much less demanding emotionally than officiating, and so I can pass those occasions off, worrying only about hitting the right notes and setting the right mood for the mourners; it's not about me, not now.

But now and then there comes along a death that reminds me of this march of time, this inexorable move from life to death. Word came of the death on Saturday night of Alberta Perry Faulkner, one of the pillars of Takoma Park church ... one on whom we depended for missions promotion, for nursery service, for advocacy for scouting, and so much more. Alberta and her husband Robert had a serious auto accident several years ago, while I was still their pastor, and neither ever fully recovered. I am told that her mental state in recent months was severely deteriorated.

All of that gets my personal attention. I was almost in an auto accident yesterday. Collision was avoided, but I too could have become a victim of a life-altering incident. What must I take away from that near-miss and from Alberta's last several years and now her death?

That, as the song says, "Only one life, 'twill soon be past; only what you do for Christ will last."

That my wife, my children, and my grandchildren are infinitely precious to me, and that I must maximize every opportunity to be with them and to empower them.

That the tasks that are important enough to go on my "To do" list but never important enough to tackle today are either not imp0rtant at all or are significant enough to claim concentrated attention.

That the post-retirement pattern of work, more work, and yet another work needs to come to an end, so that I can focus on what matters most, Kingdom causes.

And that the intention Margaret and I have of simplifying our lives by, in part, divesting of possessions that could do others some good is right on target and needs to be pursued diligently ... because the march of time will indeed move forward.

Nothing to be gloomy about. At Alberta's funeral no doubt we will sing of victory. Let's start the victory celebration now, while folks can still tramp, tramp, tramp in the march of time!

Hazy Vision

2010-03-10T08:53:00.002-05:00

Last night while I was washing dishes, it felt as though my eyes were crossing. I could not see clearly, straight ahead, for a while. I told my wife Margaret about it, but kept on with the dishes. It was really a form of denial ... if I keep doing what I supposed to be doing, the problem will go away.

This morning I am better, and there is no longer that sense of the eyes crossing, but I can sense that they are not quite right. One eye is seeing better than the other, and so the result is a slightly hazy image. So what have I done about that? Nothing except to sit down and pen two hand-written cards to my granddaughters. Denial again, or forcing myself to do something productive through the challenge.

Now there is a part of me that, even when I label it as denial, thinks it is meritorious to plunge ahead. Get the job done, tick off items on my "to-do" list, get some spiritual credit for persistence. Last Sunday I even preached about the folly of the "do-nothing" failed fig tree (hmm, "folly", an alliteration element I did not think of then!).

But there is also a part of me that recognizes that the body sends its signals ... it could be telling me that I am overworked, or that I have some incipient illness, or just that I am aging. How do I acknowledge and work through those signals when my spirit keeps on insisting that work, work, work is the way forward? Why can I not give myself permission to be frail or fatigued (more alliterations!)?

Well, I did email the office to say that I would not be coming in today. That's a start. And so, quite frankly, is this blogpost. It may be a mile marker on the way to removing the "allegedly" and toward finding a way to live quietly and at peace without so much striving.

Enmeshed Again

2010-03-02T08:04:00.002-05:00

Can it really be that it has been a whole month since I posted on this blog? And why might that be?

Because in the one month of working as Interim Regional Minister for the D. C. Baptist Convention, I am finding myself getting enmeshed again.

Enmeshed workers get wrapped up in their work, and often in its details and its minutiae. I have found myself thinking about committee agendas, lunch menus, and attendance at ceremonial occasions ... most of which was quite unnecessary. The staff are excellent and take care of those things beautifully, and really all I need to do is to ask the right questions, probe at the spots that seem "squishy", and respond to the communications that come in. Even then, I have learned, it's best to consult with the staff before I offer a definitive response.

And so I am learning. After years of being a hands-on manager, even when I was the pastor of a multi-staff church, I am finding that it is not only possible but also fulfilling simply to trust others to do their work and to think through how to get it done. I do not have to manage everyone and everything; I do not have to correct every jot and tittle (although I do have this terrifying ability to spot a typo immediately when I look at a page!); I do not have to apologize to others, to myself, or to the Lord for falling behind on some tasks because I was enmeshed in others.

And yet old habits are hard to break. This is what Jimmy Carter found out when he, as president, was writing tennis court schedules! My prayer is that I will learn a new balance between management and trust, so that all of us in this organization can continue to be effective, responsive, creative, and forward-thinking.

The Old Dog and New Tricks

2010-02-02T17:50:00.002-05:00

Surely by now ... age 72 tomorrow ... I qualify as the proverbial "old dog." Whether there are new tricks to be learned we shall see.

Yesterday was the first official day on the job as Interim Regional Minister (most would call it Executive Director) for the D. C. Baptist Convention. I went to the office with a few papers that had been sent me, with a flash drive filled with transferable information, and with only a general idea of what I would be doing. I did think that I would not stay all day, having told the staff ahead of time that my age and recent health circumstances might dictate shorter stays at 1628 16 St.

It was not to be. I stayed all day, and was packing up a larger stack of papers to take home when Margaret called to ask, "Where are you?" A harbinger, possibly of things to come?

But here is the discovery ... that this role will involve not so much hands-on project planning, as I did when I was a campus minister; and not so much worship and preaching projection or personal counseling, as I did when I was a pastor; and not so much filing and chasing administrative details, as I did when I was a Foundation Executive. It will be: availability, presence, vision interpretation. It will be soft enterprise much more than those hard, precise decisions and actions I am accustomed to.

Can I learn to relax and let the rest of the staff do their work? Can I create a sense of presence that will lead others to the Presence and will affirm them in their work for the Kingdom as expressed in D. C. Baptist life? And most of all, can I find within myself a passion and a joy in being a non-anxious person who will generate a positive, confident, cooperative spirit among the leaders of our churches?

That may be a new trick for this "get-it-done" person! But at this stage in my life I think I am going to relish that role. My prayer is that I may offer this to the Kingdom with a sincere heart and a joyful yet serious spirit.

We May As Well Drop the "Allegedly"

2010-01-20T11:42:00.003-05:00

The theme of this blog all along has been the tension between seeing and engaging in new opp0rtunities for meaningful work, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, just going fully into retirement and leading a "quiet, godly, and sober life" (as the Book of Common Prayer puts it). The title of the blog, "Allegedly Retired," was intended as a way for me to poke a little fun at myself and at my propensity for taking on more and more, despite the advancing years.

I have not written anything for about three weeks now, because I knew some things were pending and that I could not mention them until they were resolved. That time has come, and the result suggests that we ought to drop the "Allegedly" out of the title. Wait, no, that's not right. We need to drop the "Retired". Or something.

A couple of weeks ago, discussions which I had been having with my pastor, Joel Hawthorne, at Montgomery Hills Baptist Church in Silver Spring, came to maturation. We mutually agreed, the deacons concurred, and the church voted that I should be called as Associate Pastor. It is an entirely voluntary position, it involves no precise hour expectations, and it entails no financial compensation. It is a way for us to validate and communicate my willingness to help with preaching, teaching, pastoral care, and the resourcing of selected lay ministries, particularly those related to finance and to evangelism. It also expresses a historic Baptist principle, that attachment to and responsibility in a local church is the most appropriate role for a Baptist minister.

And then yesterday ... oh, dear reader, you will think me strange indeed ... I accepted the offer of the Search Committee and the Personnel Committee of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention to become the Interim Regional Minister, working to provide leadership for the Convention while a process of discerning and selecting a new Executive Minister moves forward. This work could take as little as two months, but it may also take a good deal longer ... there is no way to know at this time. I begin on Feb. 1, just two days before my 72nd birthday. How odd is that?

But I have learned again what is clearly discernible throughout the postings on this blog ... that I am happiest when I am working; that there is in me a pride that is stroked by such opportunities as these, but it does not feel like an unhealthy pride (someone will tell me, I am sure, when it turns to sickness); that prayerful discernment does indeed bring people together in consensus, as I have heard of no opposition to either of these roles; that a marriage can be strengthened by this kind of work (Margaret exhibited interest in both of these tasks from the time they were first mentioned, as over against her pronouncements that I should not take any more interim pastorates). My heart is content. And I praise the Lord for whose service I was ordained 46 years ago this month.