Pastor's Notes

The Road to Somewhere

June 19, 2021

“College is on the road to somewhere.” So wrote novelist Tom Robbins. As someone who has worked with college students a number of years and once inhabited their ranks, I am well aware of the truth of this statement. The students whom I have seen that struggle most tend to be those who think they know the location of that somewhere. The ones who seem to travel best along that road to somewhere tend to be those whose academic and professional GPS allow for more flexibility in their route.

I recall one year when most of our graduating seniors took jobs that were outside of their college major. As an undergrad business major myself, I found their choices reassuring.

I wonder how many in old age look back at their long life and saw a life like they had envisioned for themselves when young and anticipating and planning for their future?

According to my youthful projections, I am supposed to be living in small town Pennsylvania, working in administration in the health care field. Somehow my road to somewhere instead took me through four other states, more education and degrees, in a calling from which I once ran. What about you? What part of your life turned out as anticipated and what part would have surprised your youthful self?

The road to somewhere. That just might be an excellent thought for Advent. We prepare for Christmas. We know it is coming just down the road, and we know who comes at Christmas to be among us. Yet we do not know where this one might take us.

Should we end up exactly as foreseen, we might need to wonder if this one did not take us, but instead we took ourselves and may have missed out on some very pleasant surprises.

The road of Advent has a destination. We need not, however, ignore some new things that come after us on the journey. As the great “philosopher” Yogi Berra once said, “When you see a fork in the road, take it.” It could be a call to something beyond our often more limited dreams for ourselves. Advent is not just about a destination. It is also about the journey and those people, places, and events that might beckon us along its route.

I remember a couple who joined a church I once served. Prior to their joining they were, on one Sunday morning, off to their Methodist church, traveling the usual streets. On that Sunday a freight train had stalled and blocked off the street they needed to travel to get to their church. After a long time they realized they would be too late for worship, so they headed for home. Passing our church they saw the worship time and knew they would not be late for our worship. They came and worshiped with us and kept returning, eventually joining our congregation. I remember them saying, “We were Lutheran and didn’t know it!” It was a good thing for us and for them. Things like this happen on the road to somewhere. Even roadblocks and detours can lead to something. Sometimes we need to check them out. Christmas will still come. The baby Jesus will still be swaddled in the manger. Don’t forget to look around as you make haste to the manger.

Psâ€¦should a train block your path on College Avenue on your way to worship here, you can go around via Mill Avenueâ€¦.just sayingâ€¦..

Hints from Heloise

June 15, 2021

Are you familiar with “Hints from Heloise”, a back-in-the-day newspaper column of helpful tips for around the house? I was not a regular reader by any means, but occasionally some headline drew me to read how to get stains out of the carpeting before your spouse would see them, or use vodka to clean off camping gear (You can’t make this stuff up!).

One such tip was to clean windows and mirrors with newspaper and either vinegar or a window cleaning product. It seemed strange but I thought I would try it. I pulled the old Plymouth Volare out of the garage ( I told you this was a back-in-the-day column), sprayed the windshield, and then used the front page of the “Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph”, complete with Ronald Reagan’s picture and an article about sewer rate increases and began to wipe in clock-wise circles. Viola! The dirt was gone and the windshield was without streaks! Thank you, Heloise!

Since then I have been a “clean the glass with newspaper” true believer. Now, however, most sheets of newspaper have a colored photo in them. I’m not sure Heloise would approve of using them. Here with my twice weekly subscription to the “Arizona Republic” I have settled on using the obituary pages. Never is there a colored photo in the entire section.

I clean the windows and bathroom mirrors with paper including stories of people much loved and greatly grieved. According to the obituaries, many served in the armed forces, some were heroic stay-at-home Moms while others were heroic breakers of glass ceilings. Some “did it my way” while others were loyal employees or quiet servants going about their duties. All have stories their families found worth sharing even with the likes of those of us window cleaners. Sometimes I do read them. It is not morbid. It can be interesting to see the mixture of humanity that somehow works to make the world go on.

One day as I was cleaning a bathroom mirror I halted. The newspaper obituary page almost seemed like a fire that was to burn my hand or an acid that would eat away my fingertips. It was as though I had just touched an unsanatized surface in a COVID ward. Not really, but emotionally it did. Was I desecrating the dead by using these pages? I would spray, crumble them up, wipe off the spray, then after callously toss them in recycle. Was I dishonoring the words loved ones wrote about their recently deceased loved one? Was I dishonoring the deceased?

Certainly I was doing them no great honor or service. Perhaps the occasional reading of one person’s life’s summary was a small tribute. But I could not do what God will not allow. I, through neither action nor speech, can desecrate a life God calls holy and sacred. In the lives described in obituaries or elsewhere, God sees more than what these words describe at work. God sees God’s own work through that person. God sees persons being touched by these people. And where God sees that touch being harmful, God works in other ways to reach out to those so harmed.

Some of the obituaries are quite large. Perhaps because of a person’s notoriety, perhaps because of the family’s financial well-being, perhaps because the family wants the world to know of their loved one and especially of their hurt, and perhaps, at times, because of guilt.

Some, on the other hand, are quite brief. Length of obituary does not equate to value of life. Family members left behind can attest to that. Lives have impact; lasting impact. Were you to write your obituary what would it say? What would you include? What might you hope be left out? What it might not say is the impact your life had beyond your living. Lives can have a ripple effect through time far from their source.

After writing your obituary, do something with it if you can…clean something or whatever. Then crumble it up and toss it in the blue recycle bin. It’s okay. God does not recycle our lives. God doesn’t even restore us. God allows us to remain in our grave, our columbarium, the sea, the forest, or wherever. God does something much greater and more profound with us and our lives.

What might God write were God to write our obituary? God would write that with God’s help our life was worth living. God would write though we may be gone, our life goes on. God would not be content to simply say were just a part of the mixture of humanity that made the world go on. We will continue to part of that mix. God used our life and will continue to do so. Our names, our faces, memories of us may be gone, but the ripples flow outward. God makes it so.

Afreud of Living?

June 10, 2021

If you have ever read much of Austrian neurologist and psychoanalysis founder, Sigmund Freud’s writings, you are most likely aware Freud saw sex at the heart of human suffering. Actually he seemed to think it at the heart of most everything human.

On the other hand, famed anthropologist Ernest Becker saw the fear of death at the heart of human suffering and struggle. Becker even wrote a book about this.

Martin Luther, on the other hand, seemed to see fear of a wrathful God at the heart of human struggles.

I am neither a Freud or Becker, but I am an amateur student of Luther and of human behavior. There is something to be said for Freud’s understanding of sexuality in our humanity and likewise there is something to be said for Becker’s understanding of humanity’s fear of death. Certainly in Luther’s time with such short life-spans we can see his point. All can and do contribute to human suffering. Yet into this mix I would like to add an observation I have made over the years.

In watching my fellow humans struggle and in being very much a part of such human struggles, I have witnessed a fear of living as contributing much to our suffering.

Yes, a fear of living. How often have we held back from doing something we wanted to do? Many times we may have even refrained from doing something we were convinced was the right thing to do for us and/or for someone else. Sometimes we choose mere existence over living.

What I find most interesting in all this is that followers of Jesus can be those most inhibited. We don’t want to upset God, after all. “What would Jesus do?”, we ask. We play it safe as though grace does not exist. It is not that we ought to sin profusely so that grace may abound. It is also not that grace has given us a blank check so we can do whatever it is that makes us happy without regards to anyone or anything else.

In a letter written to his Wittenberg colleague Phillip Melancthon, written from Martin Luther’s hideout in the Wartburg Castle, Luther wrote, “Sin boldly!” He followed this with “trust in Christ strongly.” Luther was not encouraging anyone to not take sin seriously. Specifically in this missive, he was encouraging pastors to risk preaching what they believed to be true.

We all have regrets in life. Too many are of choices not made or decisions to back down from what we wanted or thought right. Some such regrets can even seem to haunt us through life. Years later they can still bring at least a bit of pain.

I wish Freud and Becker were still around so I could bounce my theory off their insightful and creative minds. With Luther, we could have many conversations over spouse Katie’s homemade brew. Certainly all of these figures seemed to live by holding little back. This may be one of the reasons people continue to study their works instead of relegating them all to history’s attic.

Jesus saves, we proclaim. It seems to me that from which Jesus most saves us is ourselves. In so doing Jesus wants us to return to our humanity and to live as the human creatures we were created to be. How much of our sin is tied up in trying to deny our humanity? How much of our sin is our failure to live?

Survival and existence have their place. Yet we were created to be those who live. We were created to be those who live not just for ourselves, but for others. Living a life of faith is in great part living as those unafraid to live. People of grace, fear not! People of grace, LIVE!

The God of our Minds

June 1, 2021

I have always envied Bill Moyers for the kinds of questions he could create to ask his broadcast interviewees. Moyers, as you may know, was a press secretary for President Lyndon Johnson. He also had a great interest in religion, earning a Master’s of Divinity degree at a Baptist seminary. Moyers won many awards and honors as a journalist and author following his stint as press secretary.

One question I will always remember Moyers asking was to a Jewish woman who was a professor of law and ethics. “What goes through your mind when you use the word God?” Quite a good question, don’t you think? Now I pose it to you, dear reader, “What goes through your mind when you use or when you hear the word God?

Now first impressions are important. What was the first thing that flashed through your mind when you thought about this question? I wonder how many of us first had a picture flash through our mind that looked like the God represented the in Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco at the Vatican. In that work, God looks like an older Italian man of long ago complete with white hair, white beard, and white robe as God reaches out to a naked Adam. This picture is great for its art and depicts God as one passionately reaching out to one God created. On the other hand, to me, Adam looks a bit bored by it all.

Of course there are other pictures of God that can appear to our mind. God on a throne, judging. God sending lightning bolts to a world with evil. Or God as an invisible, genderless, spirit moving about. Sometimes this spirit is painted as a dove, other times as flames. I remember one painting where people were painted recoiling and rejoicing. In this painting God was a spirit painted by blurring a bit of the scenery where this spirit God was supposed to be present.

Then there is the Children’s sermon answer: Jesus. A good and correct answer, of course. Yet that also forces this question: which Jesus? The one overturning tables in the temple? The Jesus carrying a lamb? The Jesus sitting placidly on the mountain teaching the crowds? The Jesus raising Lazarus or healing a woman’s daughter? In many ways we could sum up these pictures of Jesus along with many others in this picture: Jesus hanging on a cross. Here is an image of God for us. A God who is willing to suffer and die and take no revenge on those who would kill God.

I had a theology professor who defined God this way: God is whoever or whatever brought the Israelites out of Egypt and whoever or whatever raised Jesus from the dead. This may be a good definition of God, but it is lacking as a visual image. This is why Christians have always gone back to the cross. It is not because Christians are morose. It is because even now, millennia later, there is a part of us that is still dumbfounded that a God would allow this to happen.

What goes through your mind when you hear or use the word God? Perhaps it may depend upon which day this question is asked. Certainly it depends upon the stage of life we are inhabiting. Over the years what goes through our mind when we hear or use the word God changes as we evolve and change. The God of Jesus can be pictured in many ways. That is a good thing for those who, over time, need God in many ways. Hang with Jesus….there are lots of pictures there to take up residence in our mind.

The Good Sometimes Needs the Bad and the Ugly

May 26, 2021

It was tenth grade. Michael Lukac was a new teacher in our high school. Sophomore year was the year American history was studied for those traveling the path toward college. Mr. Lukac was also my baseball coach. What a combination for me: historian and baseball guy! God is good!

Like all other students I also had American history in fourth grade. Between fourth and sophomore year such history came in bits…Black history month, Washington and Lincoln’s birthday, etc. Other history courses were world history, Pennsylvania history, and early world history including classes on anthropological discoveries and theories….just ask me about Louis B. Leakey and Olduvai Gorge!

Mr. Lukac began his first class by saying we were going to learn history in a new way. We were going to study people and events as they were, not as we hoped them to be. He quoted a few things from Ben Franklin’s Autobiography (required reading for those planning on college) where, let’s just say, Dr. Franklin was not quite consistent with his New England Puritan roots while in Europe. Scandalous!

But Mr. Lukac would not let us linger there. He shared with us some of Franklin’s harsh comments regarding the Germans in Pennsylvania and the good points of Franklin’s participation in the writing of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitutional Convention. We learned about Poor Richard’s Almanac, the Franklin Stove, and, of course, the experiment with electricity and lightening.

What we learned was the man on the hundred dollar bill was a complex person. He did both great and not so great things, but his contributions to the founding of our country are that for which he is rightly most remembered. Many find such complete pictures scandalous. We should only be taught the good things and ignore or feign ignorance about the others. I would argue to do so is to deny our history, and to deny our heritage is a human history and heritage. Rather than inspire us to do better, it can have the opposite effect of allowing us to give up as we cannot aspire to such greatness.

What about family? Do we cover up the faults of family members past and present? Or do we call them for who they are or were in all their completeness? For heroes of family or history, I do not think such complete pictures bring these people down. Moreso, I think they can work to bring up ordinary people as we become more acutely aware that we share a common humanity.

Likewise, can we not talk about the evils of slavery while simultaneously holding up our ideas of freedom, equality, and justice for all? Too often we look at our American ideals as something we have accomplished. Instead they are ideals to which we aspire and remain works in progress. It seems to me our founders did not think they had constructed a system or nation that had it all right (constitutional amendments were anticipated) but rather a democracy that could fix wrongs and continue to move forward. To know where we need to go, requires knowing fully who we have been and who we are. Fully.

Followers of Jesus need not be threatened by the fact we and all our heroes and heroines are human. If such figures are to inspire and help us be better human creatures, we must be linked to them in our humanity. Jesus did not come to create or rescue heroes and heroines. Jesus came to save us from denying our humanity so we could better live it out. Grace is not for mistakes or errors. Grace is for things done and left undone. …things that wound our humanity, wound the humanity of others, and matter deeply.

Years ago a member of my congregation came to me asking if I would do her son’s funeral. He was shot by his wife in front of his children as he was attacking her. Over the years he had been arrested for abuse and for being a drug dealer. “Will you do his funeral?” she asked. “Only if I don’t have to whitewash him” was my response. She didn’t want me to paint a picture of him as anyone other than who he was. The mother had hoped that perhaps those in attendance might learn something from his troubled life.

In my funeral sermon I was clear about who this young man had been. Then I said to both parents, “Thirty-five years ago you both brought your son to this very baptismal font. You knew then to whom your son really belonged. Once more, today, you are called to do the same thing again; put him in God’s hands and entrust him to God.”

Both parents experienced these as words of grace that helped lighten their heavy burden. I don’t think this could have happened if we had pretended him to be otherwise. I am convinced God’s grace comes through most strongly when we confront our human realities. Thank you, Mr. Lukac for teaching us about our heroes in their complete humanity. Thank you, Jesus for embracing our humanity. Thank you, Jesus for enabling us to live as the humans God created us to be.