bibfeldt's inquiry

Today's reading

2012-01-16T21:39:00.003-05:00

On this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day I found it a rich day for thinking on difficult issues. A friend of mine asked me to stop by her home to look at a manuscript. She told me that a poet friend had shared it with her, for her comment. She asked him if she could share it with a few others. I was one of those who was given permission to view it.

I arrived at her home thinking I was going to pick up the manuscript and take it with me. But instead she pointed me to a chair and said "I've prepared the place for you to read." The lamp stood over my shoulder as I settled in. It is a collection of poems about the child abuse suffered by the poet at the hands of his childhood priest. He has never publicly spoken of these things.

I was struck right away by the directness of these writings. I would not call them poems. To me, poems rely on metaphor. These were not primarily metaphorical writings. They were quite good. They were stunning and startling in their directness. They were incredibly painful.

In one of the pieces - in just 12 lines he invites you to join he and two other boys as they count the Sunday morning offering. The priest calls one of the other boys into his office. They know what is happening to the other boy in the room. Because they have both been that boy. But they are children - they don't know what to do. So they keep silent and keep counting. And as they do they hear the chair squeaking behind the closed door. And when the author goes home, he hears the chairs squeak in his home - and his shame and guilt and fear are home with him as well.

In the introduction (written by a well known Catholic priest) the priest asks how it is that Cardinal Ratzinger (now Pope Benedict) could have been so public and so aggressive in his pursuit of theologians whose writing and thought he disagreed with (often publicly silencing them, like Leonardo Boff) back in the 1980's and 1990's - but remain so quiet at the tidal wave of child abusers in the ranks of the priesthood.

It made me think about how aware I have been from the beginning of my entrance into the professional ministry of the United Methodist Church how we had our own troubles with clergy acting inappropriately (mostly I knew about inappropriate encounters of male clergy with female laity and male clergy with female clergy). In hardly any of the cases I knew about was anyone removed from the professional ministry. Instead they were often moved to another parish - and nothing was told to the people of the new parish of anything that had happened with this clergy in his previous appointment. We do not have much room to throw stones.

But it also got me thinking of how many decades in the Methodist Church (prior to 1968) the denomination had treated African-Americans and women as second class citizens, officially, in the church and how the time was spent mostly during those crises in taking on ideological/theological battles while treating our sisters and brothers very badly - in many cases ignoring the issues that divided us - or arguing that we couldn't do anything about them because it would be too divisive. Wesley's own arguments in this regard around slavery and the push back he got from his fledgling movement can certainly be seen played out again and again down through the centuries since he first wrote on this issue and continues to be played out in the battle within our denomination regarding homosexuality today.

I am fairly certain that in another couple of decades we will again, as a denomination, have to be putting together a service of repentance and reconciliation on this issue. I just wish that for once we could beat the rush. But that's probably too much to ask.

It is a little surprising to me still (and I'm embarrassed to admit this, because it marks my immaturity) that I still get surprised that we, as a denomination, spend our time fighting less significant battles while literally people are dying from poverty, young people grow up without recognizing that the people and the communities around them see and recognize their blessedness. More than 8 times since Saturday I have had conversations with people in and around the life of our parish that revolve around poor health care decisions that people have had to make because they don't have health insurance and cannot afford the health care decision that might actually make them better. And I'm not talking just among the poor. It is truly embarrassing this obsession we have with sexuality - among people of faith - who have handled the issue of sexual abuse and inappropriate behavior so very, very badly. It appears we have no shame.

I'm tired of seeing young people who die from violence in our communities, because we did not find more ways to celebrate who they are and what they have to contribute to our common life.

We had a funeral at Broadway in the week leading up to Christmas. The church was packed. Even more than on Christmas Eve. Because of a young man who had been shot and killed while visiting a relative and sitting in front of his relative's house. That our denomination here in Indiana is so much more obsessed with numbers and our reporting on those numbers than we are with the flesh and blood people around us...just causes me to weep.

And so much of the day I grappled with it. And then later in the day I talked with a member of our congregation. He was part of meal the day before that had been pulled together by some folks in our congregation. There were people in our congregation who were there (some who live close by and some who don't) there were people in our neighborhood who were at this meal (some who come to worship at Broadway and some who don't) and all were there to celebrate a young man, a literal neighbor to our church, who worships at another church. At the meal people were invited to go around the table and offer a word of thanksgiving and celebration for what they see in this young man. This young man who received a letter from his first high school (he is at his second one - he is a junior) saying (literally) that he would never achieve anything - that he would never be able to drive a car, or get a job at McDonalds and the school would be happy to go ahead and give him his "certificate of completion" (this was in his freshman year!) - because it would be a waste of time for both the school and him to continue. The meal was occasioned in part because this young man had won a scholarship at Broadway to invest in some area of gift or talent in his life. The people at the table gave him their blessings (to remind him of the blessings that fill his life). His grandmother was there. His aunt. His younger brother. Friends from the church who had been involved with him. A tutor from the school next door to where he goes to school who lends a hand with his homework. After they all spoke, he spoke - he thanked them all for being there...and he talked about how surprised he was to hear these words - to hear these words of celebration and thanksgiving (shame on us - that he was surprised by this). The report I got was that as he expressed his gratitude - and his growing awareness of his gifts as witnessed to by those gathered at table with him, the tears flowed. At the end of the meal the young man was asked to name what kind of support he could use from those gathered around. And then everyone went around again and told what they would offer to him. Beautiful. The one who reported to me told me that several people around the table said "I need to do this with all the young people I know." And what I thought was "what's stopping you?" and "why just the young people you know?"

A day that began in pain and frustration - gave way to hope for me. Hope that while so many of our leaders are spending their time fiddling and in fiddle battles with others - there are people on the ground, reaching out and bearing witness to God's goodness all around us. I hope we can play a small part in shining our light on that goodness. And that it may increase. That's what I'm working on. That's what I'm thinking about this Martin Luther King, Jr. Day.

What Gets God Pissed Off?

2011-03-25T22:02:00.002-04:00

Well...let me just begin with a caveat (and a big one at that). I don't know what gets God pissed off. But I have a personal history with this question. On the second Sunday at my first appointment, Asbury United Methodist Church in Evansville, Indiana in the year 1985 - I quoted, during my sermon, from Alice Walker's book "The Color Purple" - where it says "God gets pissed off if you walk by the color purple in a field and don't admire it..." (not sure that's an exact quote, but it is as I recall it). All hell (so to speak) broke loose. They called a meeting of the Pastor-Parish Committee meeting for that very evening. I talked to my mom that afternoon and her exact words to me were "Mike, I didn't raise you to be that stupid." Point taken. I went and apologized to the members of the Pastor-Parish Committee for being young and stupid. They were gracious. But wary. But that's another story for another time.

Lately the Christian blogosphere (and a few places in the secular blogosphere) have been alive with a debate about heaven and hell (as in most cases the argument spends most of its time on the hell side of the debate - as if the debate itself wasn't a good example). The new Rob Bell book has stirred the pot most recently - but it's a hot topic nonetheless. And by a "hot topic" - I mean a hot topic in North America. My friends in Africa and Latin America have been telling me that it's not a topic of much conversation at all where they are. Hmmm. I thought that was interesting. I actually thought it would be much more of a "hot" topic there - guess I was wrong.

So, I got to thinking what did I know about what Jesus had to say about what we today call Hell - since I was 20 years old I've been reading through the Bible every year so I should have a good grasp of that right? It did take a little digging for me this afternoon to find all the references to hell in the Gospels. Seems like Matthew wanted to make sure that anytime Jesus ever said something about it that he got it covered - because Matthew's accounts touch on it twice as much as the rest of the Gospels combined!

The best known of those passages (by "best known" - I mean the ones that appear to be most widely known, anecdotally) have to do with wealth and poverty. There is the story of the sheep and the goats that can be found in Matthew 25. There is the story of Lazarus and Dives in Luke 16. There is the story of the wedding banquet in Matthew 23.

There are of course the very famous references which appear in a couple of the Gospels to taking off a hand, a foot, and plucking out an eye (so as to keep one from hell). Unfortunately I knew a young man in my last parish who took those passages so literally that he sawed off his own hand in his garage. But those passages are not as much in the public conversation (at least not the ones I'm around). I have been struck by what I have noticed as a lack of conversation at all about poverty and wealth when talking about these subjects (okay, I agree we don't talk about money at all in the church really anyway - or when we do it's more about giving to the church).

And it got me thinking that I'm hard pressed to remember any time in the Bible where God says, "you folks are being way too hard on rich people." In fact God's judgment against Israel is often around how they treat the poor. And this seems to be a somewhat common topic in the Gospels and in Paul's letters to the churches as well.

And we United Methodists certainly remember that commitments around responses of justice and charity, often around poverty, were central to Wesley's Methodist renewal movement in the Anglican Church.

I met yesterday afternoon with Terri and Katina and Duane and Lisa to talk together about what we will spend our time with this summer around Broadway. What a wonderful discussion. They talked about all the things they have been learning about their neighbors and we talked and dreamed together about how to name the abundance in the lives of their neighbors, how to bless and celebrate that abundance, and how to multiply it by joining it to abundance that it hasn't yet recognized. It's not perfect - far from it...but gosh I'm glad to be spending my time talking with my parishioners about what God is doing in the life of the world and not spending it sitting around trying to figure out how God is going to handle all the heaven and hell business. Seems like another debate for a group of rich folks to have. I wonder how God feels about that? About missing the abundance around us because of where we end up spending our time? I guess I'll find out one day.

I Can't Fix It

2011-03-20T23:03:00.003-04:00

What a glorious day. Good worship this morning. Great sermon by Rachel at the 8:30 and 10:45. Good, good, good conversations with many folks today. Some I made some mistakes in (but the only way to have avoided that was not to have them in the first place).

We had a meeting today that went very well. Marc did a great job in getting our governing council (called Diakonia - rather than the Administrative Board) off to a good start.

There was a lot of energy in the room. And Marc did an excellent job of channeling it in a positive direction. But there was something striking to me...I often say "go where the Holy Spirit is" (how do you tell? -- It's where the energy is...) - but today all the talk was about church growth - and I realized that this was coming out of anxiety. Not an irrational anxiety...but anxiety nonetheless. We all want to solve it and fix it. And me as much as anyone else. But anxiety is not the same as energy - and it is, I'm afraid, the opposite of the Holy Spirit (who surely is always saying to us "fear not"). So - how do we face our anxiety and fear and move on? I don't know. I can beat myself up plenty about that too.

I was talking with a friend about it this evening and he sent me this little youtube video - only 2 minutes and 23 seconds - of Parker Palmer which helped me. And that sent me back to a Mary Oliver poem I read this afternoon. And I'll share it here.

Another Everyday Poem

Every day
I consider
the lilies--
how they are dressed--

and the ravens--
how they are fed--
and how each of these
is a miracle

of Lord-love
and of sorrow--
for the lilies
in their bright dresses

cannot last
but wrinkle fast
and fall,
and the little ravens

in their windy nest
rise up
in such pleasure
at the sight

of fresh meat
that makes their lives sweet--
and what a puzzle it is
that such brevity--

the lavish clothes,
the ruddy food--
makes the world
so full, so good.

After reading this poem I thought some more (and it seemed an appropriate thing to do during Lent) about how it is that we, in the church, seemed to be just as scared about dying as the rest of the world - while we have a story that could set us free from that fear - or at least free from being overwhelmed by it.

And then I realized the extent to which that fear often binds me. I want to fix things and when I can't I beat myself up pretty well about it. But I forget that it's not mine to fix and as Samuel Wells reminds me - I don't write the last act of this story. God does. And thank God for that.

I think the next time I feel that fear coming up and on around me I will stop us for a moment and tell the Emmaus story...and then share a little bread and wine. I've got to keep that stuff closer at hand.

And so should our denomination. I feel like so much of what we are facing as a denomination is our fear of dying - it's why we argue about so much that counts for so little. Such fear is...as Walt Wangerin says -- "a saw-toothed tool of the devil." Amen. Mary Oliver sees the world through resurrected eyes. I'm going to give that a try myself.

Cherished Diversities

2011-03-17T19:56:00.002-04:00

A couple of weeks ago I had a big thrill. A friend of mine invited me to dinner, and the third party at our meal was Walter Brueggemann. What a delight. A genuine delight. I loved his sense of humor. I don't know - when I usually think of the Hebrew Scriptures - "Humor" is not the first word that jumps to mind (though perhaps it should). He laughed, we laughed, loud and long and often. We told stories and reveled in the mysteries and joys of life in the world, life in the Church, and life in the seminary.

I've been thinking on that evening as I've been reading, for Lent, "Prayers for a Privileged People." A couple of days this week, my friend and colleague De'Amon Harges (the Roving Listener), talked with a group of clergy (mostly younger clergy) from around the state who were gathered at Wabash College. We were asked to talk with them about the Church and it's mission and ministry in the world. I kept thinking of my evening with Walter and his little book of prayers.

Over the past week or so (okay, I'm sure it's been much longer than that) I've been meditating on the ways in which we in United Methodism in specific, and mainline protestantism in general, in this country, can get so distracted from the main thing (or even the main things) to which Jesus is attempting to draw the attention of his disciples. I wonder how it is that when I am so often around my colleagues there is so little conversation, except in the most surface and uninvolved and dispassionate way, about those around us who "the world looks down on and despises and thinks of as nothing" (in the words of Paul in the first chapter of I Corinthians). Oh...someone may offer a word in praise of a feeding ministry or a tutoring program - they may talk about housing the homeless...but if asked to name even one of the persons about whom they are speaking - nary a name arises out of their lips. And then I re-read the preface to Brueggemann's little book where he talks about how "our privilege tends to work against openheartedness." That helped me. Yes. That made some sense to me.

And then it especially came together this afternoon while talking with the poet, Mari Evans - in the midst of our neighborhood -- which even in the last 24 hours I have heard referred to as a "bad" neighborhood - as a place that people look down on - in fear and bigotry. Yes, yes, yes. Sometimes - perhaps too often -- our privilege works against openheartedness. But I had never thought of it that way before. And Mari ended our time together - talking poetry, faith and life...by reminding me of an essay in her little book "Clarity as Concept" - in which she longs for and looks forward to the day when we celebrate our "CHERISHED DIVERSITIES" (caps are mine). What a lovely term.

While that day may not yet be here - we can celebrate it on Sunday morning, sure enough. While that day may not yet be here - I can celebrate that in my conversations with others. While that day may yet not be here - I can find a way to see and know and celebrate those cherished diversities. I may find ways to cherish them actively. I can too often get bogged down in what I view to be the blindness of so many in our denomination -- a blindness that frustrates and angers me (an anger for which I'm grateful and view as a gift of God) - but that can turn me away from celebration, rather than fuel a joyful expression of those cherished diversities.

So - I am grateful today for Walter Brueggemann and Mari Evans...teachers, poets, joyful guides to this life. Thank you.

Visiting Dr. Rich and Pro-Social Investment

2011-02-27T18:01:00.003-05:00

On Friday a group of six us from Broadway visited Dr. John Rich in Philadelphia. My mind is overflowing after the discussion. It was wonderful -- from beginning to end. My attention had been drawn to Dr. Rich from some conversations with friends who have won the McArthur Genius Grant Awards. They thought it would be a good idea to talk with Dr. Rich. They described his work to me several years ago - as work that began when he was in Boston in Med School. This young doctor, who is African-American, found himself face to face with a lot of young African-American men coming through the emergency room at the hospital he was working at in Boston - stabbed, shot and in other ways damaged by violence. A very short version of this story is that he hired them. He hired them to be community health advocates for something he called "the health cru." I loved that. It seemed to blend well with our theology that saw the answers as residing in the very places that others saw only emptiness and pain. As a Christian I believe that emptiness and pain are not the last word. And Dr. Rich put flesh on those bones by his actions.

Last fall a few of us gathered around our telephone lines at Broadway to have a conference call with Dr. Rich. Near the end of that conversation he invited us to continue to the conversation in person. Chad, at Broadway, began to pull together a group of us to visit. That visit happened this past Friday, the 25th. I wanted to take a few friends and listen to what Dr. Rich was thinking - his innovative approach, his looking at the people who crossed his paths as brothers and sisters, his creativity, and insight - being around people like that is always inspiring to me and I hoped it would be to others. So De'Amon, Terri, Orlando, Chad, Tamara and I set off on Thursday to begin our trek.

What I had not expected was that the focus of the conversation with Dr. Rich would be on healing. I don't think I had ever had a conversation with a physician that focused on healing. It was beautiful! He talked about the ways in which, in listening to the young men who came before him, he began to notice some things - for example he began to notice that these young men had experienced constant trauma - many of them from quite young - and that they had a very good ability to describe the experience and the experiences they were having. As I listened to Dr. Rich I thought about how much this made them "healers" to others around - if we could find ways to build on on term that Dr. Tamara Leech - one of our companions on this trip - described as "pro-social investment." It was Dr. Leech's attempt to describe the positive aspects of life in communities that others often look down on. Our friend, Orlando, who is on this trip (and who I've written about in this blog before) - is constantly engaging in "pro-social investment" by engaging the young people in our community around the music that he loves to make - WITH the young people. They make music together - solve the world's problems - talk, tell stories, laugh and challenge one another. How does one multiply that? At least in part we multiply that, I believe - by celebrating it.

What would that look like? We have invited Orlando to share his story in the Lesson for the Contemporary Church during worship at Broadway - and he has done that. But this is a very, very, very small step. How do we make what he is doing more visible - than it is right now? How do we hold it up so that all around our neighborhood see it - and some inspired to do such a thing themselves - that they care about? How do we celebrate it in a way that draws the attention of others around the city? I've been thinking about that. I've got a potential opening to engage the editorial leadership of the newspaper to invite them to see things a little differently (not giving away their old perspective - but picking up the new). Maybe this would be a way that it would be known more widely. But I wonder if this isn't me looking for the "easy way" - by outsourcing the work to the newspaper. I wonder if I could engage United Methodists (and others) from around our city - in helping spread the word. I don't know.

Friday began with breakfast with an old seminary professor of mine - Harold Dean Trulear the III. I was most grateful to see him again after all these years. He had graduated with a PhD from Morehouse in his early 20's - and was only three years older than me when I started seminary as a twenty-three year old. Both he and Dr. Rich have grown up in the Church, Dean has started congregations and worked in congregations and both - painfully so, to both me and them, talked about how unhelpful the Church is to them and to the people they work with in the streets. I actually agreed, wincing, along the way, with their analysis (offered separately - as we did not see them together).

This leads me to my final little section of this blog entry. I am constantly frustrated by reading the blogs of people I know and respect within the Christian community and in particular, the United Methodist community. What frustrates me is that I love the writing styles and color with which they write...but it seems to me that they write of so little that is - I don't know - let's say "real" for lack of a better term.

What do I mean by that? I have done an unofficial count over the last two months of the 10 bloggers I read most often (who post fairly regularly) and I can tell you that the overwhelmingly the social issue that they write about - and that their readers most respond to - is sexuality. Now, I believe sexuality, is an important issue - but many, if not most, of these folks - are giving it time like the Bible talks about this issue more than any other. If you took out the references in the Bible to poverty - the Bible would look like swiss cheese. If you took out the references to sexuality - you would hardly notice and would cover large swaths of the Bible between references - in some cases 100's of pages. It would be hard to cover 10 pages of the Bible without reference to the poor. Now all the references to sexuality wouldn't distress me so much - but I just wonder - where in the hell do people find all that time to look into that and never write, or at least in any sort of close proportionate way, to the issues that are killing so many of our young people, to the ways in which so many of our sisters and brothers are living and dying - with people only seeing them as empty vessels who need to be fixed and not as beloved children of God with lots to offer.

How come there are so many more discussions about the every day life and death struggles of people in secular blogs - than there are in these United Methodist blogs? I can't figure it out. It makes me crazy. Because I know many of the people writing these blogs. They are wonderful folks. Wonderful. Thoughtful. But so much of their energy is taken up with the issues that the craziest people around us want us to take time with - I think this must feel the same in every age. But it makes me crazy nonetheless.

The Church and the Bishop's Statement on Immigration

2011-02-21T07:47:00.002-05:00

Our Bishop put out a statement this past week on legislation being considered by the Indiana legislature. Here is his statement in full.

Bishop's Statement Regarding Immigration Legislation

The legislature of the state of Indiana is considering the complicated issue of immigration. Certainly it is understandable that many citizens and many State Senators and Representatives are concerned about this important issue. However, our Christian faith brings a perspective to this issue which needs to be voiced, and our United Methodist Church has a particular stance on this issue which I share as the Bishop of the Indiana Area of The United Methodist Church.

Among the proposed bills before the Senate and House is one which seems to be gathering some support, namely Senate Bill No. 590. I have read through this proposed legislation, and while I am not an attorney and may not fully understand all of the legal implications of this bill, I do believe that it would be a mistake for the Senate and/or House to pass this Bill and for the Governor to sign it, for these reasons;

First, this bill begins to move the state of Indiana into areas which rightly belong to the federal government, namely the attempt to regulate immigration. Certainly there is frustration over the failure of our federal government to fulfill its duty in this area, but having each of our 50 states adopt their own immigration policies would be chaos and a violation of our U.S. Constitution.

Second, this bill would place our police officers and our business owners in an impossible situation of trying to determine when and if they should demand proof of citizenship or legal residency. It is clear from the experience in other states which have attempted similar provisions that the police are almost forced into racial profiling to meet the requirements of such a provision. Likewise business owners are faced with new liabilities and costs as they seek to monitor their customers according to the requirements of such legislation.

Third, this bill would only add to the climate of fear and suspicion which permeates too much of our culture already.

I believe that Senate Bill No. 590 is contrary to the Social Principles of our United Methodist Church, and therefore I urge all of our United Methodist people to express to their State Senators and Representatives their opposition to this bill. We must find a better way to enforce the laws which already exist against illegal immigration, and we must also find a better way to protect our legal citizens and residents from coming under undue suspicion and harassment.

Bishop Michael J. Coyner, Indiana Area
February 18, 2011

While I am in opposition to this bill myself, I must admit that this statement is troubling to me. My concern is that the Bishop makes only a political argument and not a Biblical/Theological argument. It would seem like we have a rich vein of tradition to fall back on here. Our theological heritage, our roots, certainly start with being immigrants/slaves in Egypt. Our roots have us setting out for freedom from an oppressive situation, looking for a land flowing with milk and honey. The history of the Hebrew scriptures is filled with stories of the people of God finding themselves as strangers in a strange land. And also we find many, many words and stories in the Hebrew scriptures of God's frustration (condemnation?) of the people of Israel for their lack of hospitality to the stranger (the immigrant). The Gospel story plays this story out again and again and again. Even Jesus' confrontation with the Canaanite woman reveals a lesson taught about how one treats the stranger. Paul is often challenging the people of the congregations to whom he writes about the way in which they welcome strangers. Surely, surely, surely, with so rich a vein from the book that we all hold as central to our traditions they are worth a mention (since even the Social Principles get some love in this statement).

I hope I'm not nit-picking here. I don't want to be. I also miss the challenge to our congregations for anything besides calling our elected officials. What about celebrating and challenging the ways in which we welcome the stranger?

I was contemplating reading the Bishop's statement to the congregation yesterday at worship. But I didn't. It just felt too paltry, too shallow...it wouldn't have added to our worship of God. It made me sad.

Race and Christmas

2010-12-31T10:44:00.003-05:00

Walking through my neighborhood this morning I passed a front yard that caught my attention. I enjoy seeing the decorations that people put on their front yards and this year has been no different. But I saw something I had never seen before this morning. The display in this front yard shows a black Santa and a white Jesus. Now I've seen one or the other before - but not both on one lawn. Throughout the whole walk I played with that in my mind.

I reflected on our visit in South Africa back in 2007. I remember how struck I was that the people in South Africa, particularly in multi-cultural situations - but truly all the time, talk about race. That seemed significant to me because it reminded me how rare those discussions are in multi-cultural settings in this country (in my experience). Just to clarify this a bit - if I'm the only white person with a group of African-American or Latino-American folks - we will often talk about race...but if the group has more than one or two white persons race is rarely mentioned.

I thought about Mari Evans telling me about talking with a group of graduate students at a college in Virginia - there were white students and African-American students. She asked the white students - "How often do you think about being white?" And they said, "What do you mean? Hardly at all, of course." And she turned to the African-American students and asked "How often do you think about being black?" The response was, "24-7."

I thought about the friend of mine back in the 1980's who was working at a United Methodist Church in Delaware who said that "the only white folks in that church are me and the picture of Jesus on the wall."

In South Africa people would often argue with each other about race in multi-cultural settings - but with the ease that comes from a real move towards equality and community that still seems missing to me here.

Oh, there are discussions that are formally held - "Race Round Tables, etc..." But I'm talking about in informal settings when folks of varieties of ethnicity are together. The conversations we have because we want to, not because we have to...

I have served my entire professional ministry in multi-cultural settings - and this has been true across those 25 years from Northern Indiana to Southern Indiana.

As we move closer to Epiphany on January 6th - where among other things we celebrate Christ's birth as a gift to the whole world and the recognition that we all belong to God, I wonder if it can serve to encourage those of us in the Church to risk those discussions that we seem to shy away from having. And I don't mean risk those conversations in our buildings - but in our neighborhoods, in our workplaces, in our public arenas.

There are still very significant divides in this country - and the more we talk and work together and face those real divides the quicker we will recognize and trust the healing that is in our hands. It will be hard. But that's what people of faith are about isn't it? A little courage, a little risk-taking? At Christmas.

This also gives me the chance to share one of my favorite poems of Langston Hughes, Carol of the Brown King:

Of the three Wise Men
Who came to the King,
One was a brown man,
So they sing.
Of the three Wise Men
Who followed the Star,
One was a brown king
From afar.
They brought fine gifts
Of spices and gold
In jeweled boxes
Of beauty untold.
Unto His humble
Manger they came
And bowed their heads
In Jesus' name.
Three Wise Men,
One dark like me--
Part of His
Nativity.

What I think about on Columbus Day

2010-10-11T13:35:00.003-04:00

I don't usually think about Christopher Columbus on Columbus Day. On Columbus Day in 1992 in South Bend, Indiana - a little boy named Columbus Coleman was shot and killed. I tell you that story to tell you a story about what I learned about being a pastor out of the death of 7 year old Columbus.

Two young men were running through the neighborhood. They were shooting at each other. They missed. Columbus Coleman was playing in his grandmother's front yard. It was the middle of the afternoon.

The next evening there was a community meeting at Broadway Christian Parish, in the sanctuary. Columbus was killed just two blocks away. The sanctuary was packed. It was standing room only. And it was painful. The police chief got up and said, "I'm afraid to sit in my police car in this neighborhood." The Mayor had said in the paper that morning "he [Columbus] was in the wrong place at the wrong time." Really? His grandmother's front yard in mid-afternoon? It seems like the two young men shooting at each other were in the wrong place at the wrong time.

But I didn't only learn that night what not to say. People expressed fierce anger. People expressed grief and sadness. And for the first two hours it was pretty unproductive. But then the television cameras left. Then the conversation really happened - as people embraced around the room and stopped yelling at each other.

A parent came to see me and told me that she was concerned about trouble that her son was starting to get into and wondered whether the church could give him a job in the summer. But that's another story.

This is a story of what ministry looks like. It is a story of people showing care for one another. It is a story of people coming together and deciding to try and take some action so that their community would be safer and healthier for everyone. That was 18 years ago.

Here is what I learned from that. We could have done better. We could have been wiser. We could have been more trusting and open to God's grace. Really.

I learned some things that evening. The neighborhood organization got re-started. Kick started you might say. It lasted for several years. But it found itself easily co-opted by the efforts that the city officials thought would be a good idea rather than what the citizens and neighbors of that community wanted to do. There's been a lot of brick and mortar work in that neighborhood. Real infrastructure improvement. There's a fire station now. A park that had been a refuge mainly for people who were dealing and using drugs was replaced (nearby) with a park with the newest and best equipment. A new boys and girls club replaced the old one that consisted of four concrete walls and no windows. New houses were put up - both small condos for low - income folks and nicer large homes for middle class folks. The YWCA put its gleaming new building and programs in that neighborhood. The fire department put its newest station in that neighborhood. The new juvenile detention center was built in the neighborhood. All this in the 10 years following Columbus Coleman's death.

But here's the thing - I can name for you way too many of the young and old who have died in that neighborhood and even in that new park since those improvements were made to the community. Every year that the congregation has done it's annual Stations of the Cross Walk there are always murders to observe on the walk. The improvements weren't bad. It's simply that city officials and the rest of us mistook brick and mortar work for people work. Or as an old Pentecostal minister would say, Rev. Doris Danner - who laid hands on me at my ordination - "we're always putting the cart of materialism before the horse of the spirit."

One of the things that I love about John Wesley -- and that I'm challenged by -- is the way in which he approached everything from health to economy to education to theology. He was seemingly unintimidated by any of these areas. He would experiment to see what would work and what wouldn't work. You can see that even in the formation of his class meetings and societies.

One of the things I despair of most among my United Methodist sisters and brothers (okay, mainly among my brothers) is that we seem a lot more willing to engage on issues of theology than on issues of practice. For Wesley there didn't seem to me to be an either/or between works of piety and works of mercy. We spend a lot of time (in meetings, at annual conference, and even on blogs) debating the nuances of theology, but very, very little debating the effectiveness of our works of mercy - and developing innovative new efforts and then learning from them.

So - as I have reflected on what happened in the wake of the death of Columbus Coleman I find myself, every year on Columbus Day, challenged to see the new world that is before me. It's not really a new world - it's the new eyes I have to see it with - or attempt to see it with. That is to say - Gospel Eyes.

I want to work with other Christians, other citizens, and other neighbors, to engage us to put as much effort, money, and material - behind investing in the actual gifts of the Spirit in the lives of people, the people of our neighborhoods - who are treated as empty vessels, as we put in the bricks and mortar and new playgrounds that make up the communities of which our congregations are apart.

Right now the development corporation in the neighborhood around Broadway in Indianapolis is working on "pocket parks." I need to be wise and thoughtful about how I talk with the folks I know involved with that effort to encourage and turn their eyes to an investment in the neighbors even more than an investment in the parks (which wouldn't leave out the parks from happening - it's just that there is much more investment spent on the parks).

There is too much of the "if you build it they will come" mentality at work I am afraid. We don't like complexity these days. In fact, I have a letter from the editor of the Indianapolis Star telling me that the issue of poverty is too complex an issue for them to take on. I just don't think that's true. And I think one good gift we can give as Christians is to challenge that view.

I call out Columbus Coleman's name and remember him every year - because it is easy to forget the toll across the years of lives lost...so many more than necessary. And we Christians in our neighborhoods can make a difference. If we would only pray and get together with our neighbors - and act like people of faith who see the presence and power of God alive, not in the brick and mortar, but in the lives of the people around us.

Bill Stanczykiewicz is Wrong

2010-10-07T19:19:00.005-04:00

In Monday's Indianapolis Star the head of the Indiana Youth Institute Bill Stanczykiewicz wrote an article that got my blood boiling a little. I really don't know Mr. Stanczykiewicz. I met him once at an event that I was leading for a United Way in Anderson, Indiana. I do read his articles and I'm concerned that he is a cheerleader for a way of doing things that does not benefit the people it is purported to serve. I stayed up late on Tuesday night and worked up a reply which I sent to the Indianapolis Star. I doubt that they will use it. So, I will copy it here in my blog so that it will at least be "out there."

Bill Stanczykiewicz is wrong. He is not just wrong, but dangerously wrong. Perhaps he is right that “more opportunity today can mean less poverty in the future.” But that is unlikely as well. It isn’t “opportunity” that is the issue - it is income. He uses all the right buzz words to perhaps persuade someone that he may be right: “Education”, “opportunity”, “tutoring”, etc. How can you argue with all of these things? But none of his prescriptions or buzz words matter more than increased income. Not only academia, but also the Indianapolis Star has reported that income is the most important determinant in educational achievement. Doesn’t Mr. Stanczykiewicz think that at least one of the answers might be to find ways to increase income? The statistics he quotes from Haskins and Sawhill’s book are the type of statistics that can add more confusion rather than clarity to a conversation. And while these issues are complex a little common sense couldn’t hurt.

We have made the poor an industry that has supported people like Mr. Stanczykiewicz with nice salaries while little is done to directly increase the income of people who need it most. The energies spent on pimping poverty must quickly ebb to make way for a flow of innovation, collaboration and investment in people, not programs, to end poverty.

Stanczykiewicz may be right when he says that “growing up poor often means believing that success is for someone else...” The problem is that his solutions are more of the same. Haven’t the efforts over the last 50 years (and longer) taught us, at least, that the efforts we have made to “strike down poverty” haven’t worked? Then why do we keep on trying the same things and have the same people in charge of doing those things? Why I think that what he is saying is so dangerous is that we will continue to do these same things that haven’t worked and watch the number of young people and their families in poverty continue to rise.

The problem with the philosophy behind “Jobs for America’s Graduates” is that it does not take into account the failed model of building upon deficits rather than building upon assets. Any parent would understand this. We would never begin each day with our child by asking that child “so what’s wrong with you today?” But that’s how programs like these begin. Like good parents we could start with these young people and their families by asking - how do we build up what is best? Instead we spend our time poking around for every potential lack in their life. It’s a bad model for success in your home and it’s a bad model of success in our society.

When Julie Puttmann says “Our students realize for the first time they can make it” - I challenge her to name those students and then to talk with their parents and see if that is really true. I’ve lived and worked in low income communities most of my life and I can tell you that I’ve never met a person who “realized for the first time that they can make it” when they were in high school. Most young people have realized that from a very early age. Then they have their hopes dashed - not by their parents - but by a system and a society that tries to tell them that now thanks to this program or that one they can have hope for the first time. These programs aren’t bad things. They make the people who run them feel good. And they help a few people beat the odds. What our society could really find useful is something though that changes the odds for everyone. And for that we need innovation a lot more than we need programs.

Actually the 21st Century Scholars Program has modeled this for us. Over the last 8 years they have shown, by investing in the parents of the young people in their program, that a different way to approach poverty is by investing in the very people who the program is meant to serve and putting the actual working of it in the hands of the parents of young people in the program.

We need every part of the city and state challenging themselves to build on the gifts, dreams, talents, and passions of our young people AND their families. We need religious communities to start paying attention not only to “good works” but work that has good results. We need businesses that invest in our young, not by tutoring them - but by listening to them and investing in their good gifts. But what we need most of all is for each one of us to begin to recognize and celebrate the giftedness of our most marginalized citizens (liberals and conservatives are equally negligent on this) if for no other reason than this - it might actually work (and we have plenty of evidence that the other way doesn’t work). We see that evidence on the front page of our paper every day.

Rev. Michael Mather

Pastor, Broadway United Methodist Church

Stunning - Just Stunning (Maybe not)

2010-10-02T11:34:00.001-04:00

I found myself stunned in the wake of the news that has been building up over the last several weeks of several young men who have committed suicide in the wake of anti-gay bullying. I'm not stunned that young men have committed suicide. I'm not stunned that other young people have been bullying them about their sexuality. What I'm stunned by is that I read on a fairly regular basis some Church Blogs - that is, Blogs by people serving in or a part of congregations (many of them United Methodist). And not one of those blogs has mentioned these suicides - but many of them have commented on the decision by Foundry United Methodist Church in Washington, DC to "come out" (so to speak) and speak a word to the larger United Methodist Church that they will be a place where gay and lesbian marriages can and will be celebrated and that they will support their clergy who choose to celebrate these marriages inside and outside the church.

I can understand that there are different opinions with the larger society and even the Church on this issue. What I find impossible to understand - truly impossible - is how there can be so much more energy about (and in many cases against - in some cases in disparaging and graphic terms) people celebrating the love between two consenting adults than there can be about the bullying that has gone on (often fed by the theology and practice and teachings of the Church) toward young people struggling to come to terms with who they are in a culture that still makes little room, but to condemn - that has at the least has not been helpful to creating a climate where young people who are gay are treated with respect and at the worst played an all too active role in the suicides of these young people.

It makes me grateful that I know young people grow up at Broadway and that if and when they learn that they are gay, they know that they are beloved children of God and that they are valued for who they are and for what they have to give to the world as a human being and as a follower of Jesus Christ. I love it that parents whose children have "come out" to them think that it has been made possible because they see gay, lesbian, bi-sexual and transgendered people being leaders of our church. It challenges me to continue to find ways in which we can keep our eyes open to young people around us who are struggling with bullying and the effects of a larger culture (including Christianity) that seems to have a lot more words for condemnation than we have for truly seeking, welcoming and valuing our sisters and brothers who are in pain, and who our world would be poorer without.

So, I am stunned, saddened, and more than a little angry this morning. Yes, by all means let's get our outrage and discomfort out in the open about people who love each other and are faithful to each other and care so much about marriage that they are willing to break the law in order to be married. And let's keep our mouths shut about those who die as they cannot seem to find a safe haven in the world we have helped create.

The Abundant Community

2010-09-03T16:55:00.004-04:00

I found myself reading again John McKnight and Peter Block's new book The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods. What a wonderful read! A few weeks ago John had sent me a copy of a review of this book that appeared in the Christian Century. Since he sent me a hard copy of the review by Walter Brueggemann I thought it might be alright to copy it and use it as my posting on this book. I can't say enough about how helpful I found this book in a very practical way. It provides more different ways of looking at community and ways in which to build it than one usually comes across. It reveals imaginative and thoughtful ways of being engaged with community rather than reflexive and repetitive ways.

Brueggemann says in this review "It occurs to me...that the book is profoundly theological." And I couldn't agree more. Because while it seems on the face of it a book about community and community development the authors reveal a profound and deeply held faith in what I would call the power of presence of God in the life of each person. Too many mission efforts by congregations are functionally atheistic - but I think, in part, that is because we have not seen and thought of alternative ways of making sense of God's presence in the world around us. Especially in places that we least expect to see it.

Reading this review made me really happy that someone in the theological world recognized the gifts of the authors.

Here is Brueggemann's review...

John McKnight and Peter Block,  The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods
(San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2010) xiv + 175 pp. $26.95.
The primary mantra of real estate, of course, is “location, location, location.” It is not different in this attention-meriting book where the mantra is “local, local, local.” John McKnight (emeritus at Northwestern University) and Peter Block (at “Designed Living” in my home town, Cincinnati) have both written previously about the nurture of local community. Now they offer a quite remarkable book concerning the crisis of our society and response to it that summons back to the neighborhood. The critical edge of this book is notice of “the conversion from citizen to consumer” that has happened in recent time in our society. The antidote that they propose is the reverse process whereby consumers retake their proper roles as citizens. The terms of the argument are crucial:
A consumer is one who has surrendered to others the power to provide what is essential for a full and satisfied life. This act of surrender goes by many names; client, patient, student, audience, fan, shopper. All customers, not citizens. Consumerism is not about shopping, but about the transformation of citizens into consumers. (p. 7)
A citizen is one who is a participant in a democracy, regardless of their legal status. It is one who chooses to create the life, the neighborhood, the world from their own gifts and the gifts of others…they function as full participants in what is necessary for a democracy to work. (p. 7).
The book falls readily into two parts, respectively, on consumerism and on citizenship. The critical part about consumerism will not be completely unfamiliar to readers of the Century but their characterization of “consumer” is poignant and suggestive. The accent is not on an insatiable need for consumer goods (as we often think), but it is the abdication of responsibility for neighborly life and the entrustment of common life to corporations, institutions, or systems at the expense of neighborly interaction. McKnight and Block focus on the way in which we have come, as a society, to rely on specialists and experts to meet our many social needs, thus no longer relying on looking to the neighborhood for associational support. Our lives have become increasingly dominated through reliance on therapists, life-coaches, financial advisors, consultants, social workers in an endless pursuit of “need satisfaction” that mostly will not lead to a “satisfied life”:
-The “human condition” of need, frailty, and vulnerability and eventually mortality is converted into a “problem to be solved.”
-Care becomes commodified and reduced to a curriculum that can be taught and certified in a routinized way;
-Personal “secrets” are privatized, entrusted to professionals, and kept from the family;
-A management mindset takes over; everything is managed, commodified, and specialized so that there is a deep pressure to be “fixed” by professionals who know better.
The intentional work of recovering citizenship, that is, full civic engagement with the neighborhood, requires breaking the power of specialization, accepting the “human condition” as a given of life together, a disclosure of “secrets” in primary relationships, and a serious engagement with neighbors. Beyond these generalizations the book teems with the kinds of interactions that can be taken that range all the way from “potlucks” to “talking to five people.”
While a good deal of theology can be inferred from the book, the authors make no such explicit claim or connection. The closest they come to overt theology is to say that citizenship is a “calling” that has three dimensions: 1. the giving of gifts, 2. the presence of association, and 3. the compassion of hospitality. But of course they do not say who it is that is “calling,” because the accent is elsewhere.
It occurs to me, nonetheless, that the book is profoundly theological. In my probe of Prophetic Imagination, already in 1978, I suggested that the prophetic task exhibits regularly two accents, to criticize and to energize. Criticism, in ancient tradition took the form of divine judgment. The “judgment” that McKnight and Block voice is a trenchant awareness that “consumerism” will never keep its promises of “satisfaction.” They do not imagine any supernatural judgment, but they see that the failure of a professional specialization of life can only lead to greater alienation. The energizing part of the ancient prophets is that they assert promises of gifts from God still to be given. These authors speak of an “abundance” that is generated by gift-giving in face-to-face engagement of neighbors who share and who find surprising resources for coping with and enhancing life. Thus the book is in fact organized around prophetic themes that may suggest a style of being “prophetic” that will ring true for lots of people who sense but cannot name the dead-end of consumerism.
The positive accent of the book is upon associational life in all kinds of groups and clubs like service clubs and book group, anything for constructive face-to-face interaction. Nowhere do these authors in any specific way mention the church, though the church can clearly be included among the venues for association. There is, of course, a great risk in identifying the church as simply as “volunteer association.” In this context, however, it is that even while we insist that it is much more than that. In this list offered here of “the capacities of an abundant community”—kindness, generosity, cooperation, forgiveness, fallibility, mystery, and hospitality—it is not only true that the church focuses on such practices, but that all kinds of “consumers” among us expect that focus in the church and count on it in time of deep crisis. Thus it is an easy case to make that the church, in its most elemental undertaking, is exactly the community that is the antidote to the deep pathology of consumerism identified here. It is not that the church has a monopoly on that role, but it is the church that is singularly and intentionally committed here. We may, moreover, be concerned that the church is frequently tempted to “professionalism” that appeals the practices of the Business School, rather than moving from its own center of gravity. Thus there is, in my judgment, a peculiar overlap between what these authors mean by “citizen” and what we may mean, in the church, by obedient discipleship.
The deep advocacy of the book is that a citizen become an agent in one’s own history and in the history of the neighbor, so that we are no longer passive recipients of a life offered by others on their terms. In the Exodus narrative, after YHWH makes sweeping promises to Israel, (Ex. 3:7-9), YHWH says to Moses, “You go to Pharaoh” (v. 10). After Jesus addresses the paralytic and forgives, he commands, “Stand up, take your mat, and go to your home” (Mark 2:11). And after Peter and John disclaim silver and gold, they say, “Stand up and walk” (Acts 3:6). All of these narratives concern empowerment that permits reengagement in the historical process.
There is so much in this book that is sober; there is even more that is empowering. The
book begins: “Our larger purpose…is to describe a few powerful and small actions to do something about this.” It is all about community, the kind that has been forgotten in the alienation anticipated by Karl Maxx, an alienation from self and from neighbor. McKnight and Block will surely say that this profound alienation is at the root of the malaise, weariness, and violence everywhere among us. I would say that their book is a profound “call” to the church (among others) for what is genuinely mandated and genuinely possible in our social world. Said another way, “’Tis is a gift to come down where you ought to be,” in the neighborhood as engaged citizens carrying out engaged citizenship. The “call” is a move out of abdicating passivity. The hope is mobilization the “workhorses” of community (a variety of associations), led by those who are “connectors” with special gifts:
-of head: “What you especially know about…birds, mathematics, neighborhood history”;
-of hands: “What you know about doing things…baseball, carpentry, cooking, guitar, gardening”;
of heart: “What you especially care about…children, the environment, elders, veterans, politics.”
Imagine, disconnected, disabled, disempowered no longer!

Walter Brueggemann
Columbia Theological Seminary
July 12, 2010

Multiplying Roving Listeners - Changing the Conversation

2010-08-14T18:52:00.004-04:00

Well - something happened that surprised me a bit. Something that we started calling one of our folks -- "The Roving Listener" - became multiplied when we changed our summer activities in our neighborhood. Even though folks around Broadway didn't call the young people and parents who are talking to their neighbors "Roving Listeners" - other folks started doing it. Then last week the Indianapolis Star wrote an article about it that can be read here. We knew an article was coming out. But I didn't know that the writer was going to call the young people Roving Listeners. And then the very next day the editorial that the editorial staff provides every day mentioned "The Roving Listeners" again - you can read that here.

What was surprising to me a bit was that we had originally called "The Roving Listener" - the Animator of the Spirit. But since we have a group in the committee structure of Broadway called that - people found it confusing. So they asked us to change the name. We needed to come up with something in a hurry - so we just threw out the words "The Roving Listener." I have noticed that folks have eaten that up. They have loved the term. They have asked me about "how is the Roving Listener program going."

Actually we are all Roving Listeners. We wander around through our daily lives - having conversations with folks and hoping that something good arises out of the mix. I have heard some of our staff referring to the young people this summer as "Roving Disciples." I liked that as well. In part because it reminded me that Jesus and his band of 12, plus families and assorted hangers-on...seemed to be their own special gang of Roving Disciples. They certainly didn't seem to follow a straight line. They talked with people - tried to send 'em away - Jesus had 'em sit down and eat. Jesus got tired, they changed their plans and headed to the other side of the lake. And so it went. Roving.

I hope that what the title Roving Listeners or Roving Disciples does is help us see the ways in which we are already living out our calling - and just get us to pay a little closer attention to it. Because when we start paying attention to the Holy Conversations that God gives us (which is all of our conversations) then we start seeing God's grace at work in them in very practical ways.

A neighbor and friend, Orlando (seen above), stopped by Broadway and was chatting with another friend and me. At one point he was complaining about the ways in which music (and other arts, but particularly music) is being cut out of the curriculum of public schools as they face cutbacks. He was pretty exorcised about it.

Later I remembered that Orlando gives lessons on his porch to people who want to play the guitar. I was talking with Orlando a few weeks later and he told me that LaMarr (one of the Roving Disciples) had come by his house and had talked with him about their mutual love of music. LaMarr had started bringing his friends by to meet Orlando, because they all love music and love to sing together. Orlando mentioned that he is working on a disc of original compositions based on the Psalms and that he is intending to use LaMarr and his friends voices on the disc (all being made in his basement studio in our neighborhood).

I realized that if we can just shine a lot on what Orlando is doing (including helping Orlando see all the goodness coming out of himself) he will recognize that he is the answer to the issue that he is having in the schools. If he continues to do what he is doing and if others see it and recognize it as such (and he needs to be one of the folks who recognizes it) - then it can begin multiplying and before you know it (okay it will take awhile) - it will be overflowing in the streets so much that the schools won't be able to keep it out! That's at the heart of so many of Jesus' parables - about mustard seeds, and sowers, etc...

I think what I am most hopeful about when the newspaper mentions the work of these young people and what they are doing is that it will begin to change the conversation from one that is about what is wrong with us, to one about how we are overwhelmed completely and entirely by God's grace and the gifts that have been given each one of us.

May the conversation go on and the music continue to play!

Home

2010-07-16T20:23:00.003-04:00

in the inner city
or
like we call it
home
we think a lot about uptown
and the silent nights
and the houses straight as
dead men
and the pastel lights
and we hang on to our no place
happy to be alive
and in the inner city
or
like we call it
home

a poem by the late Lucille Clifton

I found myself turning to this poem after two conversations this week. In both of these conversations I found myself frustrated and I was talking with a friend today about it and I thought of this poem. By the way Lucille Clifton's poetry rocks - at least all that I've seen. This is the first poem in a collection entitled "good woman: poems and a memoir 1969-1980."

The first conversation was with a person I don't know very well. She and I serve on a committee together that meets every few months. But that is mostly work - and we don't have much chance to visit. This week it wasn't a meeting, it was a social event. The person I was talking with began to tell me about the good work that she was a part of at a community center on the southside of Indianapolis. I listened with interest.

At one point she was talking about how this community center did a great job of "breaking the cycle of poverty." And then in the very next breath she talked about it as a great place because people were coming there in the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th generations. If the cycle was being broken, I wondered out loud, then how was it that generations still need to be making use of the community center. She seemed flummoxed by the question.

She talked about the parents who are "all in jail." I said that I found that hard to believe. She talked about drug addiction and other issues - but mainly she focused her discussion on how the community center she was involved in was changing the values that the young people who come there grow up with from their home life. I was appalled at both the naivete and the bigotry of this statement.

I dare say that this woman does not know any of the parents of the young people of that community center. Let me say that I don't know them either. But I know that people say the same thing about parents in my neighborhood - and that these things are not true about the parents I know. What do you think it does to young people who attend these community centers and hear good, well meaning people like my conversation partner talk about their parents in this way? What does that make the young people think about themselves?

Yes, there are parents who are lousy. But I've not seen that income level makes much difference in that. And the values of those in the inner city that I know are not discernibly different than the values of people in the culture at large.

Later this week I was with a gathering of clergy and one of them asked me about the sports program at Tabernacle Presbyterian. It is a well known and well established program. The person commented that this sports program had made a difference in people's lives (which, by the way, I'm sure it has). But when I pressed him about what he meant - he talked about how it was reversing negative trends in the neighborhood. I talked with him about that - because Tab has been doing that program for over 40 years - about the same length of time Broadway has been running a summer program - and other churches in our neighborhood as well. And yet things continue to be (as one neighbor put it recently) "as bad as they are."

When I think of all the money invested in these efforts to "make things better" - I'm sure we would be counting in the millions of dollars by now. And there is very little to show for it. It has, I'm certain, helped a few people beat the odds - but it is a long way from helping change the odds for everyone. And that really is what the people of our congregations around here (and at community centers) would say we are trying to do.

In the clergy discussion the people around the table quickly agreed. But then the conversation then again turned to how lousy the parents are and that this is where we really need to focus our work. In some ways I think they are right - that's where we need to focus our work - but not because the parents are lousy - but because the parents need what we all need - people who will believe in us and love us and see the great gifts that we have. And they need institutions that will not put them down, but will function as investors in the life of the Spirit in their lives; shining a light on the wonder that is who they are.

We need folks who will see our communities not as places that need to be fixed (overwhelmingly by people who have problems of their own that they are often running away from) - but as places that are full to overflowing with grace and love and Spirit and hope and mercy. As places that are, in fact, built on very sound values. The values of David and Delores and Jewel and Dorothea and Nora and Arthur and Yusuf - just to name a few of the good folks who live less than a block from Broadway. I can tell you that these folks are not perfect, but have as finely rooted values as all the other non-perfect people I know, including myself.

And so, Lucille Clifton's poem, to me shines a light on a place of beauty. Often un-recognized. But beautiful. Truly.

What We Count Truly Counts

2010-07-05T21:46:00.004-04:00

I was listening to a presentation by someone named Chip Conley (never heard of him before). The thing he said at the beginning really jumped out at me -- it was a form of this "what we count, truly counts." And this struck me as true on many different levels.

What we count is what we act like is important. So, if we are running a mentoring program, a tutoring program, an after school program, or a feeding program - we count how many people show up - how many people are served - how many people show up every day - how many people volunteer. And we turn over those numbers to the people who support us. Here's the problem: What does that really tell us? It really tells us how many people showed up. That's it. What we count, truly counts. It shapes what we do. It shapes how we understand what we are doing.

If we count how many people show up for a program - then we say, we imagine, we believe that we are making a difference. We are not doing something bad - but whether or not it is good enough or even good -- is up for grabs. We don't know. Because the standard we have set is that if people show up it is good.

Yet I think there is more than enough evidence to show us that this is not true. We see it on the front pages of the Indianapolis Star every day - when we read that graduation rates are down - even though there are a whole lot of programs going on. Why do we keep doing these things if they keep not making a real difference in what we say is important?

We had an intern who worked at Broadway over a year ago who told us stories about how he used to run a grandparents program at a local social service center. All the funders (and the directors of the center) wanted to know was how many people showed up and how often. The crazy thing about it, of course, is that this isn't all that people wanted to know. We want to know much more than this. We want to know that we are making a difference.

The problem is that making a difference is a lot tougher and more nuanced that getting more children or grandparents to show up for a program. The problem is that we are a quick fix society when the issues that we face are not quick fix issues - nor are they six week program answers. Nor are they answered by good work with children and youth, while not paying attention to the communities and homes in which those children and youth reside.

IF we are going to count, let's count what we really think is important. I had a friend, Willis Bright, ask me if as a result of what we are doing in the community are there more neighbors giving one another rides to get tasks done. It's hard to figure out how to count that. But my bet is that Willis is asking us the right question. During the summer of blessings that we have we are asking our young people to name, bless, and connect the gifts that they see among their neighbors. As they do that - we want to find some ways to count whether the economy is growing more stable around us. We want to figure out a way to count whether there are more social networks that spread beyond the walls of neighborhood and family, and do those networks end up resulting in better health, more and better jobs being found, and a deeper mutual delight in one another (how do you count that!). We would like to count whether as a result of our investment in neighborhood gardeners, are there more gardens being grown - and are more people eating from their own gardens? We want to count whether there are fewer young people being locked up and getting in trouble (all these summer and year round programs for young people in our neighborhood hasn't seemed to really reduce that number in a statistically significant way). We want to count whether there are more parents who are being celebrated for the gift they are to their children, their families, and the larger community - and then we'd like to count whether that makes for more parties, more laughter, and more picnics.

What are you counting?

*The poster at the top of this comes from a wonderful artist by the name of Beth Mount. You can find this poster and many others at her wonderful website Capacity Works.

The Church and The Big Short

2010-06-30T13:50:00.003-04:00

I just finished reading Michael Lewis's book "The Big Short" about the crash of the U. S. Stock Market in 2008. He tells the story of how it happened (from his perspective) through the lives and stories of several of the folks who figured out what was going on but couldn't get anyone to pay attention. The bottom line to that (though not to the point of this post) was once the whistle blowers gave up on anybody listening to what they had to say - many just bet against what everyone else was doing and in the process won big (for themselves and their investors).

The reason I am writing about it in my blog though is because when I read it I just felt like this was the story of the Church (note: big "C"). I noticed this from nearly the beginning -- but the following quote jumped out at me, as well. "Lippmann soon found that the people he most expected to see the ugly truth of the subprime mortgage market--the people who ran funds that specialized in mortgage bond trading--were the ones least likely to see anything but what they had been seeing for years. Here was a strange but true fact: The closer you were to the market, the harder it was to perceive its folly."

It seems to me that one could substitute the word "church" for the word "market" in the last sentence of that quote and that would be about right. I have been struck, recently, by how hard it is to see even the things that we actually see. I know that sounds strange, but hang with me for a moment.

I spend some time every year talking with folks in congregations in other parts of the country (and in some years in other parts of the world). I find myself often telling them the story of how we went and talked with the local hospital to see what the food problem really is in our community - we asked the hospital "what do you see people for related to food in our city - and, in particular, in our neighborhood?" Now for years (in many cases decades) the congregations I have been apart of for 25 years have all had food pantries. I have spent a great deal of time getting food and giving out food. But I never really asked "What's the real food problem?" Instead, I just assumed I knew. When we would open the food pantry - there would always be people to get the food that was offered.

So - when I tell this story, I ask the people of these congregations who I'm meeting with to tell me what they think was the answer I was given. Over 90 percent of the time the answer people give me is "Obesity." And that answer is wrong. The answer I was given was, in fact, diabetes. There were no cases of starvation and very few cases of malnutrition (and most of those seemed to be focused not on people who didn't have food, but on older folks who lived alone and seemed to be forgetting to eat). But here's the strange thing - what people seem to believe is the biggest problem (no pun intended) is obesity - and their answer? Food pantries. Now, if you think that the problem is obesity is the answer to that question really more food?

But let's get back to the real problem - diabetes. This really embarrassed me. Because when I found out that the main food problem was diabetes - I figured out that I had not only not been helping with this problem, I had been actively making things worse. So I decided that no matter what I would stop giving people crappy food and start giving people only good food. And if I was going to listen to the words of the prophets (Isaiah in particular was jumping out at me) I was probably going to find myself eating together with folks - rather than giving food to folks.

It is one of the things I'm really glad for around Broadway - these days we are not doing "community gardens" we are supporting community gardeners - those who are growing in their own backyards, front yards, and porches. They are even working towards having a Farmer's Market at a local hospital (Methodist Hospital). We are working to see if this effort will end up with more people growing gardens on their own property - and thus eating healthier. If it happens that way it will be much more likely to last. And it is a good example, I think, of being leaven in the loaf of community.

But back to "the big short." What really dumbfounded me was this reality that what people see with their very own eyes is that their is a problem with obesity - but the only answers are the ones that we've always given. Let's give more food.

The problem with "shorting" the Church on this idea is that there is no money to be made on betting against this (at least as far as I've been able to figure out).

But it has become emblematic to me of so much that we struggle with in the church - particularly in areas of mission - at least the mission efforts I see in this country, particularly in urban communities. Congregations are much more committed to "doing something" than figuring out what is really going on -- or trying to. We want to feel better by doing something - and doing something isn't bad. But the leadership of the churches - both clergy and laity need to do a much better job of laying out the real questions that are before us and helping us see things clearly.

Jesus seems to heal more people of blindness than any other illness. And he seems to battle with the disciples more about their ability to see than anything else. My biggest prayer for myself every day is that I not be blind to the presence and power of God's grace in and around me as I move through the world. It's not easy. But we follow a Jesus who told us that one of the real signs of the realm of God is that "the blind see" and from where I stand that isn't much about having sight.

Waddie Welcome and the Beloved Community

2010-05-07T16:10:00.002-04:00

My friend Anne Mitchell brought me a copy of this book. It's a wonderful story. You can order the book from Inclusion Press. It's the story of Mr. Waddie Welcome and the circle of support that gathered around him. It is a story of community.

Mr. Welcome had cerebral palsy and until those closest to him had died he lived at home. Afterwards he was moved into a nursing home and after that the story in the book picks up. It is the story of his neighbors, friends and a community of folks (a circle of support one could call it) that gathered around Mr. Welcome to see that he could continue to give his gifts in community with others. And he did. And it is a glorious, uplifting, beautiful story.

A documentary was made in 1997 that tells his story. You can see a clip about it on youtube here.

It is a story that challenges me to think about how it is that this kind of care can be multiplied. I think about the economists I read - who write about "nudges" and about ways in which things actually happen rather than ways we would like to imagine things happening. How do stories like the story of Mr. Welcome and his community get encouraged -- so that we can see that it is not the exception, but the rule?

I've been thinking more and more that it takes truly re-structuring our lives, our communities, and our organizations. You would think that the Church would be particularly adept at that - following Jesus, and even having seasons like Lent - where, in effect, we try to "re-structure" our lives around different patterns that we hope will hold beyond the season. But the Church just like other institutions - finds it difficult to encourage freedom, instead we fight for the institutions survival. You would think that an institution founded on the teaching that "losing leads to finding" and that follows a leader who was killed, but that wasn't the end of the story - would be encouraged and blessed and challenged by that. I hope that we are. I try to remind myself of that all the time.

Lead with your Ears

2009-08-27T08:10:00.002-04:00

In the Epistle of James that is part of this Sunday's lectionary Eugene Peterson in "The Message" translates a small part of the first chapter as saying "Lead with your ears..."

On Monday night, August 24th there was a City Council committee meetingto consider an amendment to a so-called "panhandling" ordinance. I attended that hearing with Mari Evans.

After she spoke I asked her if I could have a copy of her remarks and I was struck about how much they seemed to go along with the words of the text from James. Below you will find the text of Mari's talk interspersed with the passage from the Epistle of James the first chapter (in italics)

Mari Evans before the City-Council committee meeting on an amendment to the so-called “panhandling” ordinance on August 24, 2009 [The amendment in question restricts panhandling to 50 feet away from intersections where there is a traffic light]

So, my very dear friends, don’t get thrown off course. Every desirable and beneficial gift comes out of heaven. The gifts are Rivers of light cascading down from God. There is nothing deceitful in God, nothing two-faced, nothing fickle. God brought us to life using the true Word, showing us off as the crown of all God’s creatures.

Post this at the intersections, dear friends: Lead with your ears, follow up with your tongue…

At a time when there is already so much misery in the world it is inconceivable that it has become necessary for citizens to come down here to protest the egregious initiatives that are being generated (apparently from the mayors office) toward the end of further devaluing those of our citizens who are already our most vulnerable. Are we trying to create a group of American untouchables that can be identified by the fact that they are without homes, the jobs, the basics that it takes for human beings to survive?

I resent the insensitive negative labeling of the poor, across the board, as “panhandlers.” These are men and women and in some cases children, down on their luck that society does not serve. Institutions run out of beds, food and other forms of help. Are we institutionalizing the personal venom, callousness and disregard for the have nots that often characterize those elected to govern all the people wisely and compassionately, but who find it impossible to look compassionately at folks who are not mirror images of themselves?

The Ordinance demeans me as much as it does the most vulnerable, for it interferes with my constitutional right to interact with whomever I choose. The mayor cannot tell me to interact with a cardboard box instead of a human being.

Further, we as citizens are reasonably sensible. This is not a “public safety” issue. “Public safety” is language used to rationalize what is self serving for the administration. Thank you.

Don’t fool yourself into thinking that you are a listener when you are anything but, letting the Word go in one ear and out the other. Act on what you hear! Those who hear and don’t act are like those who glance in the mirror, walk away, and two minutes later have no idea who they are, what they look like.

But whoever catches a glimpse of the revealed counsel of God—the free life!—even out of the corner of his eye, and sticks with it, is no distracted scatterbrain but a man or woman of action. That person will find delight and affirmation in the action.

Anyone who sets himself up as ‘religious’ by talking a good game is self-deceived. This kind of religion is hot air and only hot air.

Real religion the kind that passes muster before God…,is this: Reach out to the homeless and loveless in their plight, and guard against corruption from the godless world.

Later, De'Amon and I were talking about it and we focused on those words "Lead with your ears." It got us thinking that this is a good way to talk about our calling in the world with one another. This will stay with me for awhile.

Loaves & Fishes

2009-07-07T14:01:00.005-04:00

There are so many stories to tell (and so little time). The Summer of Blessings has been going on for several weeks now. It started with Martha and Terri in May and now there is a group of young people who are "Roving" personages in their own right...traveling the neighborhood, listening to neighbors and sharing stories.

Yesterday, was our regular Monday gathering when Martha and Terri come tell the stories of the people they have named, blessed, and connected over the last week. But today the room fills up with young people. Some of them had just joined the parade of people going to talk with their neighbors - some were people who had been chosen as what De'Amon has begun calling "Roving Disciples."

As those young people told stories about their neighbors the room seemed to have a beautiful hush and quietness to it. I was so impressed as I heard Cameron talk about his neighbors. He talked about one household where the husband and wife have lived here for over 40 years and have been married for over 50 years. He met their daughter as well - who no longer lives at home -- but with great joy told him about who used to live at every home in their block. Kyla reported on several people that she and the three other young people with her had visited. One was an elderly neighbor who everyone thought was the owner of a local liquor store. She found out they had bad information. They also talked about a visit last week that they made to the home of a family whose teenage son had committed suicide (they knew the young man). They brought cookies over from a neighborhood baker and shared them with the grieving family.

There was great energy in the room -- the laughter and stories flowing well. Perhaps not all that different a scene from the feeding of the five thousand (4,000)! It is multiplying and there are more stories to tell. It was a good day yesterday. A holy day.

Annals of this Jubilee Summer: What's Missing?

2009-05-06T23:32:00.003-04:00

I'm a big fan of dumb jokes. I'm not the king of dumb jokes. I can't reel off a ton of them (though this does give me a chance to give a shout out to my friend Phil Amerson!). Dumb jokes do make me laugh - but cheesy jokes make me grimace. One of the more common ones on church signs is the following Ch_ _ch: What's Missing? UR ("You are")

I was thinking of that question on my evening walk tonight as I was pondering several good discussions this afternoon around Broadway. The discussions were around this summer's activities -- what we are calling (at least from this morning's discussion at staff) not "the summer program" but "The Jubilee Summer." I kind of like that. It imbues the whole thing with a sense that what we are doing is filling our lives with the life of God's Spirit active and present in our community -- in the sense of the Jubilee that is all around us!

We created (and opened) some new space up at Broadway. It's right inside the main entrance. Folks who have been around Broadway will know it as the old "Thrift Shop" space. Now it will be a place where ideas and creativity are exchanged. The walls have paper on them. There are markers around the room and you are invited to stop in and post your ideas. There is an order to what we are doing in this Jubilee Summer Space. First of all - on three of the walls we are asking people to write down - the names of people they know and the gifts they have, things they care about, things they are willing to do. We were talking about a conversation that De'Amon had over two years ago with someone in the neighborhood who now worships at Broadway. One of the things that De'Amon remembered was that Lee was interested in hosting a barbecue for fathers who are his neighbors. So - that was one of the first names that went up on the board.

So, that leads to the first responsibility/calling of this Jubilee Summer -- that is to say "NAMING." It is alive in the individuals who make up our life together in this place. We put up the names of artists and cooks - people like Avis, Al, Gary, Mari, Keisha, Kyla, Deloris, Seana, Eric. But they are just the very small part of a beginning. We hope that people will stop by and write on the walls - the things they have heard and seen in the lives of others around. Also, if they see something they are interested in - they can connect someone else to it (if not themselves).

So, what comes after NAMING? The second thing I thought of, is "BLESSING." I've been reading a wonderful little book by Gary Gunderson and Larry Pray entitled "Leading Causes of Life." BLESSING is one of the central foci of the book. I like it, because once we can name where we know and see the Spirit active in the lives of others, we can go and offer a blessing. Terri and Martha who run the program can be "BLESSERS in Chief!" They can go and lay hands on people and bless them and thank them for what they are doing - for the sharing of their gifts. We aren't looking to create things here as much as we are looking to recognize the power and the presence of the Spirit of God. But blessing can also happen in other ways than laying on of hands (though that is a personal favorite of mine). But we could also print up certificates, like Keisha Maxxison did over five years ago, and took a certificate to 30 gardeners around the neighborhood and thanked them for beautifying the neighborhood. That is a form of blessing.

Finally, the next work - once we have named and blessed is what I would like to call "THE HOLY WORK OF ENCOURAGEMENT." This work -- this good and holy work - strives to find ways to surround those with gifts and passions for the working out of those gifts - with a community of fellow citizens/members who will pray for them, encourage them, and walk alongside them - in living out their dream. Many people will already have people in their lives who do this - but can't we always use more?

Okay - this is where it comes back to you, reader. What's missing? What others posts do we need to hang our hat on? What do we need to add to NAMING, BLESSING, AND THE HOLY WORK OF ENCOURAGEMENT?

Finallly, I mentioned what is being written on three of those walls in the Jubilee Summer Space - on the fourth wall is just a place for you to write down any old idea that has come to mind. You may not be able to name anyone who is actually going to do it. But it still has come to mind. Write it up there. Let others see it. Let it marinate. Something good may arise from it. But others need to see it. Share. Build. Play.

4,000

2009-03-28T19:23:00.002-04:00

I love the feeding stories in the Gospels. One of them appears in Mark 8.1-10. I don't think I can do better than re-telling the story here: In those days when there was again a great crowd without anything to eat, he called his disciples and said to them, "I have compassion for the crowd, because they have been with me now for three days and have nothing to eat. If I send them away hungry to their homes, they will faint on the way--and some of them have come from a great distance." His disciples replied, "How can one feed these people with bread here int he desert?" He asked them, "How many loaves do you have?" They said, "Seven." Then he ordered the crowd to sit down the ground, and he took the seven loaves, and after giving thanks he broke them and gave them to this disciples to distribute; and they distributed them to the crowd. They had also a few small fish; and after blessing them, he ordered taht these too should be distributed. They ate and were filled; and they took up the broken pieces left over, seven baskets full. Now there were about four thousand people. And he sent them away. And immediately he got into the boat with his disciples and went to the district of Dalmanutha.

I am thinking of this story because of the discussions we have been having around Broadway about summer. Over the last 30 plus years Broadway has had a summer program that has worked with the children and youth of the neighborhood around Broadway (predominantly). Over the years that program has done great work - it has changed from time to time -- but it has given young people activities to take part in during the day - during the summer.

When I came to Broadway in 1986 the program at that time was primarily recreation: basketball for the boys and cheerleading for the girls. Over the next few years we changed it to art, drama, recreation, history, violin, music, math, poetry -- we started every day with devotions and we ended every day with devotions. We built each week around a different spiritual principle. It was a great program. Over the years following it changed again - it continued to be a program, mainly built around education and activity.

What I have struggled with over the years is this dilemma - throughout the tenure of the program -- things for the people (young and old) of our neighborhood have gotten worse. Graduation rates have continued to decline. Violence remains as does unemployment and underemployment. Broadway -- along with the community has done many wonderful things with this program - but I wonder whether we can do better.

There are around 16,000 people who live in the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood -- and probably a little more than 1/4th live in the southeast quadrant where Broadway is located. Our program has worked, at its height, with about 250 young people. We, like many congregations in low-income neighborhoods, have not examined what we have done in ways that tell us whether we are accomplishing what we believe and hope that we are accomplishing. And, in fact, the reports that we see with our own eyes, and those that we read in the local news would lead us to believe that, in fact, we are not having the impact that we thought we were having. That does not mean that we have been doing something bad. In fact, I would argue, that what we are doing is very good.

The challenge I want to offer is to ask whether we can do better. We can only do better, it seems to me, if we have serious conversations about what it would mean to see that every young person grows up in this community with the opportunity to come into the full flower of their possibility.

We have two remarkable women who will be leading us in our summer activities this year. I have avoided the use of the word "program" because I want to try and think of this differently. I said to Teri Coleman and Martha Wright who are heading this effort -- "I don't want you to think about how we can touch 50, 100 or 250 young people and their families. I want you to think about how we can be involved and invested in the lives of 4,000 people of this neighborhood." I think I saw their eyes bug out of their heads! But they hunkered down and we have begun talking about it.

How can we do something during the summer that doesn't involve people in a program that "we" (the church) runs? But instead finds a way for us to invest in all who are our neighbors and watch for the abundance that there is to be collected afterwards. Sometimes the conversation comes up "how do we involve parents in what we are doing?" That's the wrong question, it seems to me. The better question is how we can get involved in what parents are doing and what parents care about. In the first way it's clear that the church is in the drivers seat. The other thing that happens under option number 1 is that folks end up saying "parents don't care -- they didn't get involved in what we are doing." Under option number 2 we are trusting the power and the presence of the Spirit of God in the lives of people around us and thus we say - "we want to be a part of all the cool things that are going on in your life, because we know that God is making an abundance out of that and we will be poorer for it if we aren't involved."

But how do we do that? That's where it comes to you dear reader. Can you give us your ideas and suggestions? How can we pay close attention to what the Spirit of God is doing in our midst and how do we join ourselves to it? Invest in it?

I've told Martha and Teri -- let's not think of what we are doing as a program - let's think of it like a festival, a party, or a wedding banquet. How about calling it "the Soul Liberation Festival - or just The Jubilee." Instead of inviting people to be involved with us -- let's get involved with others. If there are cooks around - how about a Saturday afternoon barbecue contest on an empty lot? If there are artists - where and how could we invest in them? What about the entrepreneurs? What about those doing hair? What about those who are engineers and math whizs? What would it look like for us to get involved and get engaged? Throw your ideas in. Ask others what ideas they have - and ask them to post them here so we can see. We need your help!

Reading Old, Reading New

2009-03-27T20:18:00.002-04:00

I'm sitting up this evening reading a book by Michael Eric Dyson entitled "April 4, 1968: Martin Luther King, Jr's Death and How It Changed America." I just came across the following paragraph which began with these words of Dr. King's -- "'At the very same time that America refused to give the Negro any land, through an act of Congress our government was giving away millions of acres of land in the West and Midwest, which meant it was willing to undergird its white peasants from Europe with the economic floor.' King wailed indignantly at the nation's unjust demand for self-reliance from black folk while forgetting how white immigrants were offered eduction, agriculture, and subsidies. 'But not only did they give them land, they built land grant colleges with government money to teach them how to farm. Not only that they they provided county agents to further their expertise in farming. Not only that, they provided low interest rates in order that they could mechanize their farms.' It was not lost on King how white privilege and government support contrasted sharply to--and ultimately reinforced--black suffering.
King reinforced that the call for black self-help made hypocrites of those who ignored the aid given the very groups to whom blacks are unfavorably compared. 'Not only that, today many of these people are receiving millions of dollars in federal subsidies not to farm, and they are the very people telling the black man that he ought to lift himself up by his own bootstraps.' The calls for blacks to turn inward and pull themselves up by their own striving, rather than wrestling with the massive structural problems of economic inequality that caused their blight, struck King as plain dishonest. 'So often in America we have socialism for the rich, and rugged, free enterprise capitalism for the poor,' King said on another occasion. 'Nobody has lifted himself by their own bootstraps.' King also knew that there had been a time, and recently too, when the act of wearing boots, and thereby showing some small outward sign of equality to whites, was enough to get a black man hung."

These words of Dr. King, for me, resonate today as they did in that decade when I was still a boy and he first spoke them. As I've watched the response that we have made, as a nation, to the current economic crisis, I've been struck by how Dr. King's analysis of the socialism of the wealthy and the capitalism handed to the poor seems to at least ring a bit true. The other thing that has struck me is the urgency with which Congress has been acting -- trying to do something to fix the ailing economy. And I have wondered - where was that urgency while this emergency has been going on and on and on for decades (if not longer) among those who were poorest? Then - the responses were to volunteer in soup kitchens or to encourage "faith-based" organizations to run programs that would "meet the needs" of those who are struggling. Now when the economic crisis is hitting everyone they see the emptiness of those responses. They are looking for and fighting about what types of structural responses need to be made. Well I say God Bless 'em for finally getting religion. Now let's not forget that lesson when the "big" economy begins to improve for the people on the top of the heap. Let's keep the momentum going and urge everyone (including the "faith-based" communities) to work not just to maintain the problem, but to actually solve it (what a concept!).

I look to the past, in part, to learn from it. Though I can tend to wallow for a moment in my complaints about what has been done in the past - my main desire is to learn from it and find a way forward in the here and now. The words from Dr. King are a good reminder to me tonight. Very good.

At Which Center?

2008-12-25T21:25:00.003-05:00

As I was talking a walk this Christmas Day evening I was listening to an interview with Dr. Cornel West. He commented on Christmas saying that "Jesus doesn't want to be the center of a holiday, Jesus wants to be the center of our lives."

It's been an interesting and full day. After Christmas Eve worship last night we got home around 1 am. I stayed up all night and the rest of the family got up at 5 am, because Kathy was scheduled to work at Methodist. After we opened presents I gave Kathy a ride to work and then Conor, Jordan and I went to bed. Up at 11 am, a little after noon we headed off to Wayde and David's to share in the Christmas Day feast at their place. Among other things David's family shared memories from this past summer's flood in their hometown of Columbus, Indiana. Jordan promptly fell asleep there, Conor helped them set up some new technology, and I went off to make a pastoral call on a member of the congregation who is dying - she's at home with hospice. Kathy got sent home from work early (too many people, too little work on Christmas Day) and we sat down to an earlier dinner than we would have enjoyed otherwise.

On my walk before dinner, in the late afternoon light, I was struck by the presence of a lot of crows. They were flying above the streets that I walked. They were sitting on the top branches of trees, on the roofs of homes, and on the roof of a nearby charter school. This was an oddity for my daily walk through this area -- and it made me wonder at what Christmas significance any of this might offer.

A couple of times today it passed through my mind what a difference a year makes. Since May when Conor's brain tumor was identified and then the summer spent with his surgery and recovery - it seems both normal and very different.

So -- what does it mean in the midst of all of these things to talk about Jesus as the center of our lives. Last night Rachel and I preached together and we talked about how the birth of Jesus marks the beginning of a new age. That new age is witnessed to in his very birth - where the Savior of the World is not born in the halls of power -- but in a stable and laid in a manger -- a feeding trough for animals (later to become the Bread of Life for the world - these Gospel writers knew their foreshadowing!). This new age where Mary sings in the Magnificat not of future possibility, but of present reality - that the hungry are filled with good things, the powerful cast down from their thrones, and the rich sent empty away. And yet, it is absolutely no easier for us to see that today than it was for shepherds, disciples, or followers to pick it up in Jesus' lifetime.

Yesterday morning there was a headline on Huffington Post that said "The Recession is Stealing Christmas." That's ridiculous. The recession can't steal Christmas - it can only steal the world's idea of Christmas. Christmas is the anti-recession. There is so much debate about "the war on Christmas" that those who have pitched this battle are fighting over the wrong thing. As Dr. West pointed out the issue is about having Jesus at the center of our lives. Having Jesus at the center of our lives, means a real effort and straining of our eyes to see that good news to the poor right here and now. It's why I'm very fond of the People's Inaugural I've been hearing about. As I understand it folks from the homeless shelters around Washington, DC will be picked up and given limousine rides, tuxes and ball gowns to attend the People's Inaugural Ball. I love that -- since hearing the Cinderella story I know that magical things happen at balls. And as a follower of Christ, I know he begins his ministry at a party where he turns water into wine, that he was someone who spent a lot of time eating and drinking with sinners and tax collectors, and that he loved to tell parables about wedding feasts (where when the invited guests turned down the invitations -- it was opened up to all). The idea of those who have nothing and those who have more than enough - dancing together, talking around tables, sharing a meal - is to me a possibility and a sign of that good news of great joy for all people -- that the adult Jesus lives out.

So, it seems to me that having Jesus at the center of our lives would challenge us (me) to find myself at the hospital to lay a hand on a sister or brother (a stranger) who just could use a healing touch; a lunch with someone living under a bridge or at the Salvation Army or the Wheeler Rescue Mission, or one with a parent who is struggling to get by.

I keep thinking of Terri Coleman, a friend and neighbor, who walked into the community room on the Saturday of the Christmas Store and said, "I don't see any sign of recession here." I think that's what Jesus says when he looks around. But instead we live as if the real abundance were to be found wrapped under Christmas trees - rather than all around us, every single day - in the gift that we are to one another. That's what should be at the center. If only we can find our way there.

At the end of worship on Christmas Eve we light individual candles and sing "Silent Night." At the end, we asked people to hold their candle high and pause and take a moment to make a commitment to that new age begun in Jesus. I'll try to keep that at the center of my life.

Who Would Jesus Invite to Pray?

2008-12-20T08:28:00.003-05:00

I've had some e-mail and conversations with friends over the last few days about President-Elect Obama's choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation and the inauguration. Several e-mails and conversations offered alternative choices -- all of them, religious professionals - clergy. Most of them well known and out spoken. I liked a lot of the choices suggested.

As I was out for my morning walk I got to thinking - Who would Jesus invite to pray at the inauguration? And the answer came to me after a few minutes. It probably wouldn't be a religious professional. It probably wouldn't be one of his disciples. It probably would be someone like a 10 year old homeless girl from the streets of the Bronx. Now that child would have something to pray about (don't we all). And that child probably wouldn't talk with advisers to decide what to pray. If she was really praying (as opposed to say...performing) she would probably offend more than a few folks. But one could be sure it would be real. Real prayer. Real honesty. Something real -- that sounds like something that hasn't happened on an inaugural stage for centuries.

A couple of years ago there was a big fight here in Indiana over the prayers that are offered in the State House. And while the argument was an important one - I thought that the most important thing that was being missed is that whatever name the prayers were being offered in -- it didn't appear to be having any effect. Personally, I think taking prayer away from us professionals in public places and putting it in the hands (and mouths) of what my friend Phil Amerson calls "the genuine articles" -- sounds like a good idea to me.

That reminds me that it was back in 1990 I think when Phil was invited to pray at a luncheon at Indiana Black Expo. Phil prayed, among other things, "for the Children's Museum that cares more about children on the other side of the world than for children in the shadow of its own building." (I'm really just quoting as I recall it) That prayer sure set some things off. People were awfully upset. Out of that some real conversations happened and some things changed. The executive director of the Children's Museum at that time actually came and sat down in a home in our neighborhood and had some real conversation with parents of children who lived in the shadow of his building. And he made some changes.

Prayer does change things -- or at least it can.

Finders Keepers

2008-09-12T16:16:00.002-04:00

I've been reading a collection of prose by Seamus Heaney entitled Finders Keepers and I came across this -- "...poets themselves are finders and keepers, that their vocation is to look after art and life by being discoverers and custodians of the unlooked for." i think that from now on (though I'm no poet) i'll put on my IRS form that my occupation is "discoverer and custodian of the unlooked for." I just think it's such a beautiful, beautiful description of how neglected the power and the presence of the gospel is. i know this may sound weird (oh yeah) - but a few days ago i was walking down broadway in the 3000 block. a group of women i know were sitting on the porch at one of their homes. i greeted them "how are ya?" i called. and together they responded in unity and harmony as if the conductor had brought down her arm -- together they said, together they sang -- "fine." just another little bit of the unlooked for present in the world.

Whistling and Frisbees

2008-08-01T22:10:00.003-04:00

Well, I must confess dear readers (if there are any out there) that the last few weeks have been exhausting. Not because there is a lot going on...simply because well...times like these are exhausting. But that doesn't mean bad at all...not by a long shot. There have been many cool things over the past few weeks. One was the second night home from the hospital -- I heard the sound of whistling coming from down the hall. No particular song, just the kind of sing-songy whistle that I would often hear from Conor. Except I realized that I hadn't heard it for a long time. Certainly not during the previous 11 nights in the hospital (and I was there every night, so I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have missed it). It was a sign of normalcy. A bit of normalcy. A tiny, thin bit of normalcy -- in a somewhat (okay understatement post-alert) un-normal situation.
That whistle was some pretty good music to my ears.

Then last week Conor said "Dad, can we go out and play frisbee golf?" For Father's Day he had bought both of us a set of frisbees. The picture is from our outing over at Washington Park just a few miles away (taken with my Treo).

He really is doing well. There are certainly signs that he is not back to the way things were before the surgery. He still searches for words, has some problems reading, and a few other things like that...but it does seem to be getting better all the time.

This week he went with his friend Vienh to Kathy's folks cottage up in Three Rivers, MI for two nights. And tomorrow he'll be off to King's Island for the day.

Last night and this morning the story about his surgery appeared on CNN. And it will be on again tomorrow (Saturday) morning - on Dr. Gupta's program at 8:30 am. It was very strange to see the video. I don't think that either Kathy or I thought we would or were prepared to see Conor's brain open in the video. But there it was. It wasn't bad...just very weird. And it was strange to hear him talking to the doctor while the surgery was going on. The link to the video on CNN's website can be found here. There is an accompanying (written) story also available there. There are so many things swirling in my heart and mind to say - but as I said at the beginning -- I'm exhausted.

Next Steps

2008-07-08T10:13:00.001-04:00

Over the last few days things have been getting much better. Conor's last seizure was early on Friday morning. Since then his language has begun to come back. He can speak and read a bit more each day. One of my favorite things is to sit in the same room and listen to him as he talks with others or watches a comedy and hear him laugh out loud.

We may get out of the hospital today or tomorrow. They are still monitoring him to see whether the anti-seizure meds are holding. We've been living at the hospital for over a week and a half now. He's eager to get home. We are eager for him to get home. But it will be a lot of work. The next steps lie right ahead of us.

Playing Catch with Conor

2008-07-03T02:53:00.003-04:00

It's been a roller coaster of a few days. Conor's surgery seemed to have gone well -- even though he had a
bad reaction to the anesthesia -- and thus was wide awake for the
procedure (including them sawing through his skull) -- he seemed to be
bright and sharp and even (wearily) smiling. That quickly changed to much
pain on Saturday through Monday. On Tuesday he began to come out of that
-- as we were able to get some control of his pain. Monday was a
particularly hard day as a couple of the therapists suggested to us that
when we leave the hospital we send Conor to a rehab center (in-patient).
While we are not opposed to that philosophically (at least not for sure)
-- it seemed to quick a step and one that was being made by people who
were offering quick assessments without a complete picture.

Today started well...even though his language had not improved enough for
him to go home --it sure looked headed in that direction (we felt we had
hit bottom with his language on Tuesday when he couldn't locate the sounds
for his name). This morning he could say his name and answer a few other
questions well. The physical therapist came to work out with him and he
did great. Close to the end, we stood in the room and he and I threw a
round medium sized rubber ball back and forth. It reminded me of the time he started playing t-ball and our tossing of a small ball back and forth in the backyard.

His last exercise was one on balance. He stood on one foot for 30 seconds and then on the other one
for a minute. But then time froze. Or more correctly Conor did. It was
clear he was having a seizure and he was locked up. After about a minute
we were able to "un-freeze" him and sit him down in a chair just as the
speech therapist walked in (who I thought was particularly quick to offer
an assessment without much knowledge the day before). I should have asked
her to come back an hour later, after what Conor was just experiencing.
But I didn't. She sat down and began to do some speech work with him and
it was a lot worse than the day before. Conor worked hard, but you could
see the frustration.

I ran home to take a shower (I've been spending the night here). I got
back around 1. Around 2:00 he started to have more seizures -- these with
much more shaking. He had five in an hour. They ordered some stronger
anti-seizure meds. He had a few more, but much lighter. But then late
tonight - he began to have them again. Starting around 8 o'clock and
continuing until after 11:00. More and stronger anti-seizure meds were
ordered. Kathy and I would hold him. Try to offer him words of comfort
that we are not even sure he can hear. When he is done we remind him that
the doctor had told him and us that these things would probably happen.
You can see the fear in his eyes as he realizes what he is going through
(and the lack of language that always comes in its wake).

In the long term we are able to see this as a blip. But that isn't where
we are living right now. It is scary and painful and an all too real
illustration of our complete powerlessness in this instance (and in life,
for that matter). Many have surrounded us with their presence, prayers, and good wishes. We are grateful for them all.

Conor's Brain Surgery

2008-06-26T19:31:00.002-04:00

Tomorrow Conor will have brain surgery at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis. He had a good evening. He seems to be doing very well. Dr. Cohen, his neurosurgeon, stopped by the house this evening. He showed us some of the images of Conor's brain. They were interesting to see.

It's a strange time. Every moment we have is, of course, fragile. Yet tonight, these days, we feel it more than usual. As I was washing dishes, I broke a glass in the sink as it fell out of my hands. Another reminder. It seems like lots of those reminders around us today.

But there has also been another reminder as family and friends and acquaintances have reached out and offered friendship, presence, and care. And while this time has felt very fragile -- it has also felt very rich. That hasn't made it seem less fragile...just less alone.

Another Letter to the Bish

2007-12-31T18:11:00.000-05:00

So -- when I drafted this letter I sent it to a few friends. Phil Amerson said to me, "When I read the article in Together I wondered what your letter would say?" Another friend wrote and said, "Bishops don't have that long of an attention span" (fair point). So - this is the draft of the letter. I have actually broken this letter into four letters -- the first one I mailed on December 2nd. The second one I will mail on January 2nd (and so forth). I trust and believe that you (dear reader) have a longer attention span than a bishop (I'm pretty confident that no bishops are regular readers of this blog -- part of it is the whole attention span thing). Anyway...here goes the original drafted letter...

November 23, 2007

Bishop Michael Coyner

Dear Bishop Coyner,

Greetings! And Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you and your family had a lovely time together, and that you had a much needed and deserved time of rest.

When I picked up the mail on Friday morning I discovered the November/December 2007 issue of Together and read on the front page the article headlined “North Indiana United Methodists repent for neglect of inner city.”

I was glad to read the remarks made by you and Rev. Cobb at the auspicious occasion of the celebration of the establishment of a “ruin [?] park with garden.” Those words cut close to the bone. Perhaps it was mistyped – but it may also have been one of those type of errors that reveals more than we want it to.

You are quoted as saying, “we are here to learn from our mistakes.” I think it would be very helpful for all of us in the church to hear you say concretely and clearly what those lessons have been. Such words then have the opportunity to be standards upon which we can measure ourselves and hold one another accountable. I am honestly afraid – as I’ve heard such words of commitment down through the years – that we are much more adept at uttering such words than at even attempting a step in the direction of actually doing something new – behaving in new ways – changing old patterns.

I too desire repentance – and not a repentance that looks back on the past – but a repentance that looks forward. But my concern is that we continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.

For example, we continue to downsize and close churches in our most ethnically diverse communities (not to mention our most low-income communities – both rural and urban). I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do that – I AM saying that if we are going to do it we should at least talk about it. We should gather together and talk and pray together about the future of the church in our most ethnically diverse and also low-income communities. Jesus’ commitment to the poor and to those on the margins is widely acknowledged – at least in word – by most all of established Christendom. Why can’t we talk about the abandonment of these communities, because of racism – but also because racism and other forms of moral blindness, have left us without imagination – without a capacity to trust in the spirit of God working in the midst of our communities and our congregations.

What would it look like to “learn from our mistakes?” I really do want to hear from you. But lest I be accused of criticizing without offering any thoughts on my own (and I’m not arguing these are good thoughts – just MY thoughts), I will offer a few thoughts.

What would it look like for us to make a major decision, an out front vocal decision, to invest in new ministries (not necessarily new buildings) in low-income communities, in diverse communities, throughout urban areas in particular? What would happen if instead of acting out of scarcity, we began to make plans, real plans, solid plans, to not only NOT downsize, but multiply (at least 10 fold) the number of ministry sites in low-income communities.

What would it look like if we were to go into urban communities and not say how can we help – but – something like this that William Stringfellow said nearly 40 years ago in a meditation he did on the book of Hebrews entitled Free in Obedience.

…[I]f I were a bishop in one of the great cities, I would not show my compassion for the trauma and violence of city life by building, financing, and consecrating any more church buildings or parish houses. Maybe some of those are needed, but first there has to be a depth and passion of involvement that, for the most part, there has not yet been. Only then can there be intelligent deployment of financial resources and shrewd location of physical facilities. If I were a bishop, I would first of all devote myself to walking the streets, trying to see the inner city for myself. I would, so to speak, make myself available to the actual inner life of the city; I would visit and try to listen to the voices that can be heard in the taverns and the tenements, on the street corners and in the shops. First, I would try to hear the city, if, indeed, the city would tolerate my presence long enough to permit me to listen.

Then, I think, I would go scour the land to find perhaps five hundred Christians—men and women, clergy and laity—to commission and send into the city. When I had found and called these missionaries I would tell them that they were to go and, probably in pairs, into the city and just live on whatever means of survival prevailed in the block or neighborhood to which they were sent; they would have to live, in so far as possible, as those to whom they were sent. I would instruct them that upon their arrival they should do only one thing: knock on every door. Most doors would not be opened, at least not readily. But when a door was opened, the missionaries would say: ‘We have come to be with you because God cares for your life, and because God cares for your life, we also care for you.’ Period. There would be nothing more—no invitations to join the Church, no programs to offer for the people or their kids, no rummage to give away, no groups to join or meetings to attend, no gimmicks, no concealed motives, and no hidden agendas. There would be just the bare announcement of God’s love and the freedom which that love gives people to love each other.

Of course, at first, because the world is so accustomed to guile on the part of those who come in God’s name, the message would not be either welcomed or believed. But with persistence, some would receive the message. Then there would be time enough to deal with all of the other issues of Christian witness beyond the event of merely caring, such as whether some should be baptized or join a congregation, whether a new congregation should be called into being, whether any particular facilities were appropriate to the witness in this place, and so on. But first of all, the Christian (the Church) must simply be in the world, sharing in and caring eloquently and honestly for the life of the world—or the life of any…[person]—just as it is.

Now what Stringfellow has suggested here is a fairly impressive act of repentance that looks forward not backward. But the words I read, in the Together article and in your regular E-pistle – didn’t have much concrete to offer. Please offer something beyond words – that those of us in ministry in these places and across our conferences could lift our voices to support.

What if we were to take some lessons from the Episcopalians and their Living Stones movement that recognizes NOT the lack of professional clergy that they have in isolated rural areas – but the abundance of gifted people in those areas. What if we treated places like Gary, NOT as if they are poor destitute communities, but as if they are places full of people who are bursting with gifts that will enrich us all?

During Advent we often recall the words that Mary spoke when she felt the child, Jesus, leap in her womb. She sang a very practical (and challenging) word about what the coming presence of Jesus had, in fact, already brought into the world. Would anyone looking at us today say be able to accuse us of singing Mary’s song?

Our mission, as the General Conference has clearly stated, and as the Bishops have emphasized over and over again, is to make disciples of Jesus Christ. Unfortunately, in this regard, we have seemed to think that those who are to be “made” disciples of Jesus Christ are those who are not present in the church –perhaps it would be more appropriate if we who are already in the church focused less on “making” others disciples and more on “making” ourselves disciples.

I remember the words of the Gospel of St. Matthew – where Jesus asks the question about which son does the will of the Father – the one who tells him that he will do something and doesn’t – or the one who tells him he won’t and does it anyway. I think that the answer is that it is the second. But my real concern is that we will be the first son.

Words are not enough (as I’m sure you know) – but the presence of the Living Word IS enough.

I know that you cannot be all things to all people. But you can create the space and encourage and support those who are called to this conversation. And you could then use your office (appointment making, etc.) to support such an effort.

Perhaps you already have folks talking about this at cabinet meetings and in other places around the Annual Conference. But if not – perhaps you would consider bringing together folks from urban congregations AND urban communities (who may or may not be in the church) to talk and pray together about how to move forward.

Keep tellin’ the Story,

Rev. Michael Mather
Pastor, Broadway UMC

"I Don't Know" -- the beginning of Wisdom

2007-12-30T14:26:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been reading poets. A friend, Kevin Armstrong, recommended a collection of Poems: New and Collected by Wistawa Szymborska -- and I came across the following that she wrote in the introduction:

"Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets and artists. There is, there has been, there will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It's made up of all those who've consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners--I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem that they solve. What ever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'"...

"That is why I value that little phrase 'I don't know' so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include space within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended. If Isaac Newton had never said to himself, 'I don't know,' the apples in his little orchard might have dropped to the ground like hailstones, and at best he would have stooped to pick them up and gobble them with gusto. Had my compatriot Marie Sklodowska-Curie never said to herself, 'I don't know,' she probably would have wound up teaching chemistry at some private high school for young ladies from good families and ended her days performing this otherwise perfectly respectable job. But she kept on saying 'I don't know,' and these words led her, not just once but twice, to Stockholm, where restless, questing spirits are occasionally rewarded with the Nobel Prize."

"I don't know" sounds like what I heard in South Africa that I loved so much. That is to say -- people struggling to find their way into the future and willing to risk not knowing...stepping out in faith. And willing not to do just what others think might work -- but trusting the Spirit at work among them. It is that type of humility with which we need -- I need -- to approach the world. I read that passage early on Christmas morn. I hope that "I don't know" was re-born with me this Christmas.

The Ninth Commandment

2007-12-28T09:46:00.000-05:00

My dear friend Mary Ann Moman stopped by (as usual) around Christmas this year. And as usual we exchanged gifts (that is to say, books). The one she gave me was by Miroslav Volf entitled The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World. It is a good book to have read with recently returning from South Africa and thinking a lot there about the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (and the more I think about it he more remarkable and holy the whole thing seems).

But, I digress. In this book I came across the following passage that got me thinking about something else. The author offers some insight on the 10 Commandments and the ninth commandment in particular that I had never thought of before. Here is what he says, "Many Christian theologians view the prohibitions of the Decalogue as the negative side of implied positive injunctions. For Martin Luther, the father of the Protestant Reformation, the ninth commandment does not only prohibit false witness; it also urges us to speak well of our neighbors. What fulfills the ninth commandment, he insisted, is not just 'a manner of speech with harms no one,' but further, a manner of speech that 'benefits everyone, reconciles the discordant, excuses and defends the maligned.' The way we talk about neighbors should be more than just formally true; it should also benefit them individually, as well as help repair and sustain bonds between them. This broadened interpretation of the prohibition against false witness is a consequence of Luther's belief that we should be concerned as much with our neighbors' interest as with our own. We fulfill the prohibitions against bearing false witness when we love our neighbor (including our adversaries) as ourselves by speaking well of them."

I thought of this for two reasons. One is I have had some anger recently toward someone who has been getting under my skin. I had not thought of my outward response to this person as "bearing false witness" -- but I will, now. The second thing is that I recently discovered that an acquaintance of mine had taken a shot at me, in print, without talking with me about their concern/issue with what I had said. I realized, in the wake of this, that I will think more carefully about what I say about others, obliquely or not - and try to find ways to keep the ninth commandment so that people are built up, rather than feeling attacked or torn down. It was a good thing to think about as the new year moves ever closer.

What's Your Annunciation?

2007-12-26T22:31:00.000-05:00

Denise Levertov published an amazing poem entitled "Annunciation" that I share with you now (even though, I know, I know - it's "post-Christmas" -- still).

Annunciation

‘Hail, space for the uncontained God’
From the Agathistos Hymn, Greece, VIc

We know the scene: the room, variously furnished,
almost always a lectern, a book; always
the tall lily.
Arrived on solemn grandeur of great wings,
the angelic ambassador, standing or hovering,
whom she acknowledges, a guest.

But we are told of meek obedience. No one mentions
courage.
The engendering Spirit
did not enter her without consent.
God waited.

She was free
to accept or to refuse, choice
integral to humanness.

Aren’t there annunciations
of one sort or another
in most lives?

Some unwillingly
undertake great destinies,
enact them in sullen pride,
uncomprehending.

More often
those moments
when roads of light and storm
open from darkness in a man or woman,
are turned away from
in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair
and with relief.
Ordinary lives continue.

God does not smite them.
But the gates close, the pathway vanishes.

She had been a child who played, ate, slept
like any other child – but unlike others,
wept only for pity, laughed
in joy not triumph.
Compassion and intelligence
fused in her, indivisible.

Called to a destiny more momentous
than any in all of Time,
she did not quail,
only asked
a simple, 'How can this be?'
and gravely, courteously,
took to heart the angel’s reply,
perceiving instantly
the astounding ministry she was offered:

to bear in her womb
Infinite
weight and lightness; to carry
in hidden, finite inwardness,
nine months of Eternity; to contain
in slender vase of being,
the sum of power –
in narrow flesh,
the sum of light.
Then bring to birth,
push out into air, a Man-child
needing, like any other,
milk and love –

but who was God.

A breath unbreathed,
Spirit,
suspended,
waiting.

She did not cry, "I cannot, I am not worthy,"
nor "I have not the strength."
She did not submit with gritted teeth,
raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans,
consent illumined her.
The room filled with its light,
the lily glowed in it,
and the iridescent wings.
Consent,
courage unparalleled,
opened her utterly.

And now a few reflections....

I was young and flip. Some say to me now that they find me old and flip (flippant, that is). But I was even more flip when I was younger. In my first church, after worship one Sunday morning, a fellow asked if I would come by his Sunday School class that morning…an adult class I should note. I agreed that I would. And I did. When I came in these were the first words said to me, “We know that this is the job of the Pastor-Parish Committee (the personnel committee), but since we are the men of the church we decided to talk with you about something.” At that point I should have realized this wasn’t going to go well and walked out. But I wasn’t that smart.

I just thought I was.

The men of the church said to me – “We want to know what you think about the Virgin Birth?” I said (remember I was young and flip) – “Well, I don’t think about it much.” They asked again, “We want to know what you think about the virgin birth,” and again I said – Young and flip that I was – old and flip that I am – “I don’t think about it much.” And the next words took me completely by surprise. They were these – “you are saying that the virgin Mary is a prostitute!” -- “What,” I stammered out. I said, “you’ve got be kidding. The only two choices for a woman are not virgin or prostitute…but let me ask you a question,” I said. “How important is Mary to you?” -- “Well,” someone answered, “she’s not – because that would be Catholic.” Ah…now we were treading in the land of prejudices – I knew it, they knew it, we all knew – ancient prejudices rearing their head. I just didn’t realize that in my prejudice I was as blind as my questioners.

“So,” I said smugly, “It is important to you that Mary was a virgin, but not that she was a human being. Let me tell you,” I said, “I believe in the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus – you asked me what I think about the virgin Birth and I told you I don’t think about it – and I don’t. It’s not important to me. What’s important is Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.” And then I was done. The meeting continued for a couple of minutes more, before I walked out – too late – but I walked out. I was feeling smug in my rightness. And I have told that story many times over the years feeling smug all along the way.
Earlier this year we had an event here at Broadway, called Mari and Fran and Chocolate. At that event Fran Quinn read a poem by Denise Levertov entitled “Annunciation” which has been at the center of my considering what we are talking about this morning. In that poem, Levertov, sees the truth, the real truth, that I missed in the story, because I wanted to be a cute, smart, seminary graduate about it.

It is important for me to be smart. But it is not my calling. There are things that I am good at. Things that are my gift…they are just not always helpful. To me. To others around me. Perhaps you know a bit of what this is like yourself?

But when Fran read that poem, I found myself going back to it again and again and again. And each time I did…I saw something more – something I hadn’t seen before.

I remember being told by a wise friend of mine once – all stories are true; some of them actually happened.

This story – this one about Mary is true. It is a story that we would do well to take into our hearts. It is a story that we would do well to remember. It is story that we would do well to learn from. And that is why we are here this morning. To learn from the annunciation – to learn from Mary and from Gabriel.

We are told, Levertov points out, that Mary showed “meek obedience” – but we are not told – “courage.” Levertov reveals to us that Mary chooses, agrees, and it is not just meek obedience – courageously she receives her annunciation…she takes it upon herself…she chooses it. But not before she wonders. And this is an important thing, to me – do you hear the wonder in her voice when she asks, “How can this be?” She does not ask it in any other way – but the way in which you and I ask the very same question – “How can this be?” -- we ask it breathlessly. For ourselves. The choices come before us – we believe we are to do something – we try to shake it out of our head – out of our heart…but we can’t, we don’t.

Here is where Levertov is particularly helpful to me – she writes – and this is truly what I believe…“more often in those moments, when roads of light and storm open from darkness in a man or woman are turned away from in dread, in a wave of weakness, in despair, and with relief. Ordinary lives continue. God does not smite them. But the gate closes, the pathway vanishes.”

The gate closes, the pathway vanishes. The choices come and we gulp and look away. I think it is less that the gate closes, but that the pathway really does disappear. It is unused. We don’t set foot on it. A path that goes untrod, gets overgrown. But Mary chooses that path.

When I was in that church in Evansville, those people asked me a question and they deserved a better answer than a flip answer of “I don’t think of the virgin birth.” A better answer might have been – “I’m not sure what it means – but I know I want to explore it with you. Will you go along with me? Will you take this journey with me? Can we see where God is calling us?

I think of the birth of a child. Karen and Marc McAleavey are having a child in a couple of months – less than a couple of months if all works out well. That child is a child they have chosen. Haven’t you asked – How can this be? Talulah was chosen by Wayde and David – and haven’t you asked – “How Can This Be.” A year ago around this time we celebrated Lonnie and Sierra becoming a family… Didn’t you ask – “How Can This Be?” On Friday morning, several of us from Broadway gathered to be part of the procession, or part of the gathering at the State House to remember Julia Carson. One of the things that struck me on Friday morning and in accounts of the worship service is people in wonder that this woman, this black woman, this African-American woman, the first woman and the first African-American to represent Indianapolis in Congress achieved what she did, led where she did, remembered people who others forgot as she did. And though the grief was real – I thought that wonder was the main feeling in the air – people asking in wonder and joy “How Can This Be?” When we follow an annunciation – we don’t know where it will lead.

Harold and Diana Metheny could hardly have drawn a road map of the last 50 years, that brought them to a celebration at Broadway UMC, where their daughter is pastor!

Levertov writes that "Mary did not cry, ‘I cannot, I am not worthy,’ nor ‘I have not the strength.’ She did not submit with gritted teeth, raging, coerced.
Bravest of all humans consent illumined her. The room filled with its light, the Lilly glowed in it, and the iridescent wings. Consent, courage unparalleled, opened her utterly.”

Take a moment and think, think, think – ponder in the silence the annunciation that comes to you in your life. It is a path that lies before you. I don’t know what it is. But you do. Be inspired by Mary. Live with courage unparalleled. Be opened – utterly.

So Much To Say...

2007-12-26T21:57:00.000-05:00

Yes, yes, yes. That's what people say "ALLLL the Time." So much to say -- so little time. But there it is. Everytime I've thought about posting on this again, I've been overwhelmed by how much has happened over the last several months. We've traveled. We've returned. We've read. We've written. We've seen Conor off to college. We've seen Jordan off to new heights (he's grown a whole lot). Kathy's job was given away while we were gone. So -- though it looks similar things are a bit different for her.

And now today...the day AFTER Christmas. And it was another full, full day. But let me begin my return, by going off on a small rant, that I've been holding onto for several months.

Back in October...I attended the Indianapolis Prayer Breakfast (may God save me from another visit). It's been a long time since I've been to something so ostensibly Christian that felt so inhospitable to Christ. But that isn't what really bothered me.

They gave an award. They called it the Isaiah 58 award. I love Isaiah 58. They read the following excerpt from that chapter (beginning with verse 6):
Is not this the fast I choose; to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry, and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?

They then gave the award to a group that gives money to help pay the utility bills of those who can't afford to pay their own, and has a food pantry for people to get food. Here's what made me crazy: That isn't what the passage says. It says to "share YOUR bread with the hungry" - your bread, implies your table. We know that because the next says that you "bring the homeless poor into your house." That's not the same as giving them a ride to the Mission or paying a utility bill (that's just a stop gap in overwhelmingly most cases). Isaiah 58 is a real challenge -- a real fast that God is requiring. And it's tough. But it's not the same thing as that which we call charity (which is a good thing in its own right -- but it is not the same thing).

I couldn't get over the thought that if a group that really deserved the Isaiah 58 were to get that award that most of the audience there that morning would have walked out -- offended by the very idea of such people. Just as most people back in Jesus' day complained about him "eating with tax collectors and sinners" - they would have had much less of a problem if he had just run a food pantry where they could pick up a few food items rather than hanging out with such folks. It's the hanging out part that got Jesus killed (or so the gospels would have us believe).

It simply served to remind me that we are raising a generation of Christians who think that justice is something very different than what Jesus seemed to think it was. (sigh)

Jordan and Churros

2007-06-06T03:27:00.000-04:00

The one thing that Jordan was looking forward to in Madrid was churros (donuts dunked in a cup of melted chocolate). On the first day we were able to make it happen! Our first stop after the hotel was at Chocolateria de Gines. We sat in the alley in front of the chocolateria and listened to the strolling musicians and wondered -- in awe and joy at being here.

What a treat!

Mari's Speech

2007-06-01T22:05:00.000-04:00

Dear Friends,

On Mother's Day the poet, Mari Evans, was invited to give the pre-commencement address at one of the schools at IUPUI. You can read (and download) the speech by clicking here. It's amazing and well worth the time to read it. And well worth me keeping my fingers from typing more and keeping you away from reading this brilliant analysis of our world and our society today. Magnificent. Truly.

Graduation Day

2007-05-31T22:55:00.000-04:00

Kathy took this photo last night after graduation out in the parking lot behind Arsenal Technical High School. I found it all a pretty emotional experience. This picture of Conor with his grandparents (Herb and Sue Mather to the left as you look at the picture and Judy and Bob Licht to the right) is a reminder of the ties across generations and I hope it serves as a reminder to him of who he is. I really didn't know my grandparents very well. A little bit. But I think that both Conor and Jordan have had a little more of an opportunity to get to know their grandparents. We live in a more mobile society. We live in a little closer to them physically than I did to my grandparents. Their grandparents have spent time with them, alone and with us. We have tried to point out from time to time aspects of their grandparents stories and lives that we think reveal some things about their own lives -- even as we encourage them to follow their own call in this world.

This graduation day was well spent with this part of his family. That's why I wanted this photograph. I think of how Bob Licht's scientific mind is reflected in Conor's love of mathematics and physics and computer science. I think of how Judy Licht's independence of thought and strong convictions (which I saw reflected very clearly in her parents) are reflected in Conor's own independence and inner strength. I think of how Herb Mather's sense of adventure I can see so clearly in Conor -- always wanting to explore and connect to the world around him. And how in Sue Mather, in the short time she has been around our family, has helped Conor develop a bit more of the grace and hospitality that Sue walks through the world with, so easily. My mother, Lillian Mather, was incredibly resourceful: very "craft-y" and creative and always trying to figure things out -- to make sense of how things worked and why - I see that in Conor as well.

So, as is always said at such events, graduation day is not an end, it is a beginning. I hope it is just another signpost along the road that reveals to Conor who he is and who he is becoming and who God has called him to be. It seems like a pretty good start to me.

WE are VIRGINIA TECH

2007-05-23T12:15:00.001-04:00

Nikki Giovanni's poem, shared with me by Mari Evans last Tuesday, is a Gospel poem. It begins in grief, and ends in hope.

C6H0

2007-05-09T07:15:00.000-04:00

The college decision for Conor has been made. It's Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. The designation that is the title of this piece comes from a slogan at Centre. C6H0 reflects Centre's basking in the long ago glory of a 1921 win against the undefeated Harvard football team, 6-0. The New York Times later called it "Football's Upset of the Century." Seems like living in the past to me. At the same time it seems to be handled in a good spirit of fun.

This got me thinking about graduation and the way we handle things in the public sphere -- particularly related to urban areas and public education. There is often great groaning and wringing of hands related to graduation rates in urban communities -- particularly low income communities. Now urban schools are important -- and they are also not perfect. They are also not the Savior. They cannot solve the problems of why young people don't go to or finish high school. In our public life, it seems that we like to find a scapegoat -- and if kids aren't finishing high school and are getting in trouble -- it's obviously the fault of the school or teachers (or whomever). It is my belief though that schools can't solve these problems for us -- they are part of the solution -- with all of us -- but they are not the solution, itself. Even if we wanted them to be (which we seem to want) it just won't work. Not because there aren't good dedicated teachers -- not because there aren't people who care. It's because young people don't come to school unshaped by family and community. The solution is a community and a family one -- even more than the school.

My brother Alan is a public high school principal in Chicago at Lindblom Math & Science Academy. It's a very fine school. He and his staff and students are really doing a great job there. It is what a public school should be. I think that there are a lot better things going on at public schools than the larger public perception would lead one to believe. It seems to me that we blame teachers and schools for problems that we have been unwilling to solve as a society.

So...I would like to remark on one thing I think communities, congregations and other groups can do to help. That is to celebrate those in our communities that are graduating from high school. A couple of months ago I was part of a group of clergy that was invited to meet with Dr. Eugene White the Indianapolis Public Schools Superintendent. At that meeting he asked the gathered clergy to challenge our congregations to "adopt" the neighborhoods around our church buildings. I remember thinking that we at Broadway are already there.

If you see your neighborhood as part of your family then one of the things that you do - (at least that we are doing at our home as we prepare for Conor's graduation) is you celebrate the graduate. How can that help? And does it help? Well -- I can say that the solutions that the community has been working on -- tutoring, mentoring, etc...haven't really worked. Things have gotten worse over the years. What if we started trying something different? What if we celebrated those who do graduate? What if we gather family and neighbor and sing together the praises of the young people and their families who have gotten across the goal line of graduation? Wouldn't other neighbors and family members see that celebration going on and feel at least a little bit attracted to the good time and the laughter? Lest you discount such things as "soft" -- I would remind you that are "hard" answers haven't been all that effective. What if in the midst of such a celebration we find ways to celebrate the role parents and family members and congregations and neighbors and other organizations and persons have played in that young person's life?

I have been having an interesting (to me) online discussion with another blogger about what makes for successful marriage. My problem with what he is writing is that I don't think his assertions about what will work to strengthen marriage have been shown to actually work. His solutions certainly are the conventional wisdom. But you would be hard pressed to show that those solutions have actually been helpful. It is fascinating to me that a sociology professor (which he is) would use what some might call "fuzzy thinking" to justify his position -- rather than looking at the problem from a variety of different perspectives and seeking what WOULD or at least MIGHT work.

How does that connect to education? I think that our society seems to believe that schools can solves these problems. I don't believe it's been shown that they can. I think that our society seems to believe that the way to respond to it is by focusing on what is wrong. I don't think that is a proven winner either. It strikes me that so much of what the church does today in low income communities -- things like tutoring or after school programs are certainly not at all bad things -- but we keep celebrating them as if they were accomplishing a lot more than what they may actually be accomplishing. We let ourselves "wish" them into practice. Many folks in our congregation work at Lilly. If someone's boss asks her or him to tell them if a drug that they are testing is working and they were to reply "yes, it is..." and the boss asks why and the worker replies "well...I just really think it is..." that would be an unacceptable answer. But we accept it all the time in our communities -- particularly in our work with low-income communities and people. Why?

I've decided I like the fact that Centre celebrates it's victory of Harvard in 1921. I think we need a lot more celebrating and a lot less focusing on what is wrong. One can use a victory to build on other victories -- like building a fine academic institution (and not a football powerhouse).

I wonder if we celebrated in as many fun and glorious ways that we could the young people and families and communities who are graduating from high school this year -- if that may not be the true seeds of new opportunities and change that everyone really wants.

A Visit to the Dentist

2007-05-08T06:00:00.000-04:00

I had thought about entitling this post "Broadway Church in ministry." A few weeks ago I had a chat with a colleague at another church in our fair city. He told me about a program at his church that engages "every member in ministry every day." He talked, very excitedly, about the way in which people of the congregation he attends were getting involved in ministry every day, through the agency of the church. He talked about people mentoring others, about people volunteering at a school that the church has established a connection to. Pretty good things actually. But then he asked -- "wouldn't this be a great thing for Broadway?" I quickly answered, "No." And he was taken aback. "Why not," he wanted to know. "Because every person at Broadway IS ALREADY in ministry every day," I answered. "Actually, the biggest problem we have in our congregation (and in Western mainstream Protestantism I think) is a belief that ministry ONLY happens in and through the agency of the church. Real ministry is what happens in the lives and works of the people of our congregations every day -- in their homes, in their work, in their volunteerism, in their life as neighbor. The problem we have is that people think that ministry is what happens because the church asks you to do something, rather than your ministry is the way in which you live your life in all that you do."

And that brings me to a visit to my dentist. My friend. Bob Taylor. Every visit to his office is a joy. A real joy. Why? Because his work there is his ministry. Because he moves from chair to chair, from person to person - and offers himself to each person. You are very likely to hear laughter -- not only when he is at your chair, but around the room. You will also get serious conversation about important things -- if you want it. And it will be thoughtful. In difficult times you might get tears. All of these things are a prayer. A salve for the soul. Food for the spirit.

I come to the dentist -- expectantly. Not knowing what to expect -- but expecting something good and holy and rich. I can't remember what my teeth have experienced after I've been there -- but I know that I always feel better. I often come away feeling challenged -- sometime with ideas -- sometime with how I can be a better excuse for a human being myself. Sometime I come away simply in wonder and grateful for Bob and the witness of his faith through that place.

While I celebrate Bob in this piece today -- I want to say that I see this repeated over and over again -- in people in our congregation who teach. I see it in the lives of people who make their home and their table -- one that is a place of healing and laughter and good health. I see it in the lives of the musicians and artists. I see it in the lives of those who work in government taking risks and seeing the world new in how they act and the decisions they make.

And not only do I see it in the people of our congregation -- but I see it in my neighbors. I see it in the laughter of a child who as I walk by calls out "Hi, Mike" and seems genuinely happy to see me - that feeds me -- such a simple, small act. Or in the warmth of a tiny baby named Joy on my shoulder early this morning standing in the office at Broadway. Or in the conversation with a neighbor who is dreaming big dreams for their life -- and through that challenging me to dream that big for myself. Ministry abounds. And I sure am glad of it.

Up On The Roof

2007-05-07T21:04:00.000-04:00

Last Wednesday for the staff meeting "The Shining Light Team" of our staff took us on a tour of the church that ended with us "up on the roof." I had never been up here before. Quite a perspective. As spring is coming the leaves are starting to fill out on the trees. The neighborhood looks like a completely different place -- looking at the rooftops rather than the front doors. It makes me wonder about whether I am too often looking at things from the same perspective. How does my perspective need to shift?

My friend, Marc, sent me a link to an incredible video on YouTube -- Here it is. Please click on it and watch. Here's the description Marc sent of it:

"This is a video of a group in New England called Young@Heart. It as an octogenarian’s choir that sings modern songs (I once saw this group sing “I Wanna Be Sedated” by the Ramones!!). They key elements that I gathered from this group, and this video, is the tremendous amount of fun this group has together as they learn and perform songs typically created and listened to by kids young enough to be their great-grandchildren. Evidently, through their fun and work together, they have established great care from one another, which is clearly portrayed in this video. In this video, an 80 year old man with congestive heart failure (on oxygen) sings the song “Fix You” by cold play with the vocal backdrop of the Young@Heart Choir. The fascinating dynamic here is that he was supposed to perform the song with his friend, Bob, who passed away just before the performance. The irony here is the subject of the song which deals with loss in a graciously joyful manner. Bob’s family are sitting in the audience crying which creates a moving dynamic to the whole scenario. So, I may be pulling this a little too far, but I really think that because of this community and their relationships with one another they are TRULY grieving together through the power of this song, its performer and their connectivity. It appears to be a real step towards healing."

This got me thinking about what opportunities we miss that are right in our hands. Who would think to look at a group of octagenerians and see a group of folk who want to sing songs by Cold Play and The Ramones? What are the opportunities that are right there in our hands that we aren't seeing? Is this not a living example of seeing the world with all new eyes -- with the eyes of the gospel?

Prom Night 2007

2007-04-26T06:38:00.000-04:00

Last Saturday night was Prom Night 2007. The last prom for these two. The senior prom. Hmmm. We (Kathy, Jordan and me) rode with Conor out to Abby's home on Saturday evening so that we could take the car back home (Conor and Abby took her parent's car to prom). We stood around in the living room taking photos in front of the fireplace and then some pictures out in the yard out front (where this one was taken).

In just another day Conor will make his college choice. In a little over a month graduation will happen (May 30th) and then we will hit the road a few days later (June 4th). This is what they would call in India "an auspicious time." Indeed.

I hope that we will all be able to see and enjoy and soak in the goodness of these days. They seem to sneak up on me and then the next thing I know I've blinked and they are gone. I hope Conor and Abby and their classmates can enjoy them fully and well, too.

These are good days. They are hard days, too. But good. Really good. And I hope to keep seeing that.

The Four Gs

2007-04-17T08:50:00.000-04:00

I have just started a book by Max Perutz entitled I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity. In the preface are these words -- "According to Paul Ehrlich, the father of immunology, scientists need the four Gs: Geschick, Geduld, Geld, und Gluck (skill, patience, money, and luck)."

I think that it's not only scientists who could use those four things. I think the rest of us could benefit from them as well. At least I could. I've been thinking a lot about my ministry in the last few days as we prepare for our time on sabbatical beginning in early June. I feel like I've been doing a lot of soul searching...and I gotta confess -- I ain't findin' a whole lot.

I have real questions about how I'm being helpful to the congregation I serve here. They are a truly wonderful group of people. They dream big. They laugh a lot. They hurt some. They take big risks. They have an incredible and rich history. And I feel like I'm lettin' 'em down. Probably that is the clock ticking on our heading out of town. But it is something I'm aware of these days.

The Easter season, as the passage about "doubting" Thomas attests, has a full measure not of triumphalism (at least the original Easter) -- but instead a time of searching and questioning. I often feel like the rhythms of the church year are my own rhythms -- and that certainly seems true, today. So -- my own Easter struggles, and the struggles of others around me -- are good reminders that we are simply going through what the early disciples of Jesus did in the wake of Easter. A time of questioning, struggle, and tentative steps. So, when I read those words in Max Perutz's book this morning I maybe thought -- hmmmm....maybe I should hold on and pay attention to those things around me.

Having said all that -- let me pay tribute to one of my favorite writers -- Kurt Vonnegut. Jordan goes to the school he graduated from. And one of my very favorite passages of his can be found in his book TimeQuakes.

I still quote Eugene Debs (1855-1926), late of Terre Haute, Indiana, five times the Socialist Party's candidate for President, in every speech:
'While there is a lower class I am in it, while there is a criminal element I am of it; while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.'
In recent years, I've found it prudent to say before quoting Debs that he is to be taken seriously. Otherwise many in the audience will start to laugh. They are being nice, not mean, knowing I like to be funny. But it is also a sign of these times that such a moving echo of the Sermon on the Mount can be perceived as outdated, wholly discredited horsecrap.
Which it is not.

Holy Saturday in the City

2007-04-07T12:40:00.000-04:00

I was catching up on reading some blogs I enjoy but hadn't been able to get to in the last few busy weeks - and I came across something on John Hay's blog a week ago on William Stringfellow and his reflections on ministry and the city. The passage Hay quotes was written back in 1963 by Stringfellow.

William Stringfellow was not a theologian, by profession, he was a lawyer. He was a Christian by calling. After graduating from Harvard Law School he moved into Harlem to begin to practice law. There he was a keen observer of both social life and the church and its practice of Christian faith in the life of the nation.

Back in the early 1980's I was fortunate to have spent some time with Mr. Stringfellow. My father had first introduced me to his writing about the time I was heading to seminary in reading "An Ethic for Christians and other Aliens in a Strange Land." I was struck by the clarity with which he saw his life in this world and the role of the church. I persuaded one of my professors who was a fan of his to allow me to call him to set up a dinner in New York City for the two of them -- if I could come along. And that's what happened. Later I would give Mr. Stringfellow a ride to the seminary to address our chapel service and then have conversation with the students and faculty. I was glad I took the time to do that -- he died a short time later. But I find myself often going back to his writing and quoting him in a variety of different situations.

This week I met with a pastor of a suburban congregation in our city. Among other things he talked with me about a debate he had "presided" over at a conference, between Adam Hamilton and Leonard Sweet. It seems that Adam Hamilton was arguing that, as pastor, he tried to speak to the middle. Leonard Sweet to umbrage at this and suggested that there was, in fact, no such thing as "the middle." The pastor I was speaking with seemed energized and interested in this debate and where he fit into it. The thing I realized is that I had little interest in the debate - it doesn't seem to concern me at all. It isn't where I live. I don't think that most people care whether I speak to the middle, or even whether I believe there is a middle or not. I think the question really is - what happening in God's presence in the world around me and how can I share that as clearly as I can with others? I think about the people I know in our congregation who are grieving. Do they care where the middle is? I think of the family of the women and girls who have died in fires in this neighborhood over the last two years. Do they care where the middle is? I think of the people here and around the world - who struggle every day for a little dignity and a roof over their head -- Do they care where the middle is?

Stringfellow wrote these words:

"Little can be said about the present estate of the churches in the city which does not sound as if the churches are ridiculous. Some churches, for example, have physically quit the city- closed down, sold out, and moved to the suburbs, only to find out that the problem of the mission of the church to the city still plagues them. For suburbs are satellites of the city and commuters spend much, if not most, of their time in the city. Perhaps the churches which have remained physically in the city have eluded the church's mission to the city more effectively-by virtually full-time preoccupation in ecclesiastical housekeeping, in massive indifference to the excitement and conflict of the city, or by plain malingering."
"Some churches have fled the city, but the churches that have remained, for the most part, have been hiding out."

"Consequently, of course, the city pays little attention to the churches, save for some patently absurd or innocuous event in which the churches manage to call attention to themselves. Recently, a clergyman convened a press conference in New York to announce the discontinuance of pew rentals. If that is all that the churches have to report to the city, it is probably shrewder to suppress the news. But that is just the sort of thing by which the churches are normally, albeit not yet exclusively, identified in the city."

"The notorious fact about the churches and the city at the present time is that the churches do not know the city. And yet the rudiment of the mission to the city is the immersion of the churches in the common life of the city and the dispersion of Christians within the turmoil and travail of the city's existence. The rudiment of mission is knowledge of the city because the truth and grace of the Incarnation encompass in God's care all that is the city. Mission for the church, and hence for the churches and for Christians, in the city means a radical intimacy with every corner and every echelon of the city's actual life in order to represent and honor God's concern for each fragment of the city."

The debate between Hamilton and Sweet is not a debate I really care to enter. It's not a meaningless one. It just needs to be lower on the priority. At a church conference it would seem to me that there would be a lot more important things to talk about -- and that there is not -- is perhaps the biggest of the problems we have.

Good Friday In Rhythm

2007-04-06T18:20:00.000-04:00

It is a strange thing in the nature of the Christian faith that we call this "Good" Friday -- the day that Jesus was killed. But there it is. "Good."

At Broadway Christian Parish we would begin the Easter Vigil at 5:15 on Easter morning, outside around a fire on the darkened street. The new paschal candle would be lit and one of the church members would carry in the light, while singing. Some of the first words of what that person would sing would be "O happy fault..." The words "Happy" and "Good" striking odd notes for this week, this Holy Week.

It is odd and a bit incongruous. Today I was thinking as we walked on Good Friday, that this day truly does "feel" different to me. And the word I would use to describe that would not be "happy" or "good." It wouldn't be "bad" or "evil" though, either. It would simply be different. Let me try and say it this way -- it feels like the story of Jesus that day, this day, somehow feels "in rhythm" with my life.

It's strange for me to describe it as "in rhythm" because I never quite feel like I "connect" to music on Good Friday. At least I haven't found any that I've heard on that day that adds to the day for me -- even though I've heard some fine music already today (and will hear some more this evening).

Years ago, over 20 years ago, when I was regularly in jail on Good Friday, I would sing a song, by myself, in my cell, that I had been taught my first Good Friday in jail by my cellmate. It went Crucem tuam, adoramus domine, resurrecionum tuam, laudumus domine. Now maybe my latin is rusty and so I haven't spelled these words right. But they sounded right, echoing off the concrete walls of my cell. A lone voice on Good Friday (even if it was my own).

But the goodness of the day I find in many places today, much to my surprise. I talk and walk with an old friend as we reminisce about people we both care about and know. I sit and talk with a friend who has recently lost a person they love more than anything in the world. And though the grief at his partner's death is real and strong, so is the life that is in him. And so is the memory of his dearly beloved alive still in his own life. We talk and we pray. And then there is this - we walk and pray at the home of a woman, Bonnie, who died in a fire about a block and a half from the church. Piled on the steps going up to the abandoned and burned out home are white teddy bears, that have accumulated ash and rain in the months since Bonnie died and her friends and even strangers memorialized her with these bears. We haven't forgotten. We stop and pray -- for her and with her. And that, strange as it sounds, is good.

Later I laugh with some other friends as we talk about our work together at Broadway. These folk here - how amazing they are to work with -- a joy, truly "good."

Later the boys and I run out to pick up some things for Kathy for her birthday on Easter Sunday. We pick through the cards in the store, laughing at most of them, keeping one each for ourselves to give her.

In a few minutes worship will begin here at Broadway. Folks will gather - much is going on in people's lives here, as always. We will tell the story, their will be a somberness in the room, even though the story is "good." It's one of my struggles with how to "celebrate" this day. But perhaps I've already done it. Maybe I'll feel the rhythm.

Bestowing Admiration

2007-03-15T09:04:00.000-04:00

A few weeks back I read a novel called Pearl by Mary Gordon. In it I came across this passage: "Until she met Pearl, Breeda had never felt admired. Perhaps we forget that admiration is something large numbers of people never feel but yearn for without being able to name. Admiration is a luxury, a big-ticket item. And yet it can't be bought or even asked for. It must be bestowed. Pearl bestowed admiration on Breeda, and Breeda felt its richness; suddenly she was, to herself, a person of wealth."
At the Children's Moment in worship in the First Sunday of Lent I encouraged the children not to give up something for Lent , but to add something -- the thing I encouraged in particular was laughter. Today I'd like you to think about bestowing admiration on someone for this week of Lent. It's a gift beyond measure. It costs nothing. And it will mean the world to someone.
Today Conor and I are down at Centre College in Danville, Kentucky. It's one of the two schools he is deciding between for next year. We walked around the campus and it was a terrific atmosphere. It got me thinking about what we gain from the "professional educations" we receive. Experiences at places like this can be a wonderful gift. But it is the bestowing of admiration that we do every day that creates the kind of school of the spirit that I want to live in. When Troy and I visited with Richard Florida on Monday one of the things he said, very excitedly, was "you are talking about community as school!" We hadn't thought of that...but I think he's right...and not just community...but...truly...world as school. There is much research to show that bestowing admiration brings good things. Many if not most of them cannot be measured. But it is where the real joy lies.
On Tuesday afternoon Marc McAleavey and I went for a walk and a talk. The subject (really) was happiness and joy. We walked along Fall Creek in the beautiful spring air and the man sitting in front of the apartment building at Park and Fall Creek greeted us warmly. He had never met us. We didn't know one another's names...but he was just exulting in the day -- and the joy of sitting outside in the sunshine. It's hard to describe but what was in his voice sounded a lot to me like freedom for the oppressed. What was in his voice was something deep and powerful and true. It was what Marc and I were trying to talk about. How do we not get in the way of such joy? How do we multiply people's experiences of it? How do we give up our notions of success and adopt the sense of God's delight in us and Her desire for our delight in one another and the whole created order?

The Prophet Isaiah Weeps

2007-03-15T07:56:00.001-04:00

Is not this the fast I choose: to loose the bonds of injustice, to undo the thongs of the yoke, to let the oppressed go free, and to break every yoke? Is it not to share your bread with the hungry and bring the homeless poor into your house; when you see the naked, to cover them, and not to hide yourself from your own kin?
Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your healing shall spring up quickly; your vindicator shall go before you, the glory of the Lord shall be your rear guard. Then you shall call, and the Lord will answer; you shall cry for help, and he will say, Here I am.
--Isaiah 58.6-9

I was embarrassed and angry. At myself. At last night's Wednesday evening vesper service one of the saints of Broadway chastised her congregation. She feels that "we haven't done anything for the homeless for years. Lots of churches, smaller churches than we are, are part of the Interfaith Hospitality Network that allow the homeless to stay in their church buildings. But we don't do that. I have one other person who will do that with me -- isn't there another?" The Rev. Dr. Vanessa Allen-Brown was leading us in worship. She had challenged us to medidate on the passage from Luke 4.14-21 where Jesus reads from the scroll of Isaiah announcing "freedom to the captives." I wanted to weep myself.

"Freedom to the captives" is a night, one night, even a months worth of nights in a church? I've slept many a night in the church -- it's not nearly as nice as a home. I've spent many a night in a homeless shelter for that matter. It's not nearly as nice as a home. Freedom to the captives is food from a food pantry? Isn't it a pantry of one's own stocked to the gills? Or at the least isn't it the warm welcome of every home that has a full pantry that one can take a seat at the table and join the feast?

How is it that we in the church have grown so far away from the roots of our faith that we are much quicker to think about opening our church buildings -- than we are to open our homes? I think I know. It is fear. We are afraid of the fear that Jesus announces. We are afraid -- what if someone who we invite into our home steals our stuff? What if they rise up in the night and hurt me or my family? We are afraid. Let me "outsource" this problem. Forget freedom to the oppressed -- let's talk about a bed for the night.

We have so scaled down our expectations that we barely even think about it even more. And then what is even worse - we beat ourselves up over the fact that we have not sustained the system by creating institutions that don't even pretend to offer liberty to the captives. The salt has lost its savor.

Why do churches spend so much of their time stocking food pantries and so little time really getting to know the lives of those who come in to visit those pantries?

Around a table at a conference a few weeks ago, one of the Broadway members suggested closing the food pantry at Broadway. I felt myself revolt against it. But maybe that would be closer to Isaiah -- if we closed the pantry and opened our homes. But will we do such a thing? Will we really open our own dining room tables -- our own hearts? I don't know. But I do know this. We won't if we don't try.

I embarrassed myself last night by using the invitation to communion to challenge what had been said. I said something like "as we serve one another bread from each other's hands, let us also open our homes to those who God has announced are set free from oppression. Besides," I added, "it's a lot better to sleep in a bed in one of our homes, than it is to sleep in this church." That wasn't necessary. It wasn't gracious. It wasn't "forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us." Isaiah weeps - over me.

Mari and Fran and Chocolate

2007-03-13T22:45:00.000-04:00

Tonight was the delayed and second annual "Mari, Fran and Chocolate" event at Broadway. It was delayed due to snow on February 13th. But it is now 70 degrees and March 13th (not to mention the early time zone shift). So tonight we gathered. Mari Evans and Fran Quinn read their own poetry and Fran read the poetry of a few others -- what a night. Carol and Dave both mentioned to me how good the last two weeks have been with the reggae concert less than two weeks ago and then this evening today. And it has been a full, full, full day for me. It started early in the morning with me still flying high off of the experience with Richard Florida yesterday. I still can't believe it really. After telling a few people around Broadway about it this morning I headed off to visit Mari (it is Tuesday morning after all). We talked about my visit to Washington, DC and her reflections on race around the city and in the country. Always interesting...Then back to the church and a quick lunch with Kathy and then off to meet with lay leader Scott at his work place - where we talk about the glory and grace of the people of Broadway. We talked about the joy and energy and spirit of Broadway. We talked about the places and people who need prayer around there. Scott, as always, gave me wise advice. Then I began walking back to the church, Scott Semester picked me up and we headed up to the district office to meet with the district superintendent, Ned. It's always a struggle for me to head into the district offices. You are stopped by the armed guard at the door. You sign in and then are given a badge which you used in the elevator to flash in front of a laser light which allows the elevator to take you to the floor. It is at the United Way building just north of 38th Street on Meridian Street. What strikes me is that the United Way building with its stated mission of serving the poor and needy of the community and the United Methodist Church which shares a small part of the building -- both are so scared of the people of the city that they surround themselves with all this protection (practicing "safe religion" and "safe community service" one supposes). I'll return to this theme of fear in a few moments. Scott and I met with Ned to get his approval for a letter that would come from him to support the ministry of Broadway. He agreed. Then back to the church to meet with Ann Reynolds, the community ministry staff person, from Tabernacle Presbyterian in our neighborhood. Ann is delightful. She saw my book by Richard Florida and told me she had heard him speak awhile back. She asked me if I had ever heard him speak. "As a matter of fact...," I began - and then told her of Troy and my trip the day before. We went on to talk about some of the ideas we have been kicking around Broadway about building on our ministry in our parish in the summer. This year, perhaps, instead of having a program in the building for children and youth in the neighborhood, we could hire 10-20 youth and adults to be "Animators of the Spirit" who could have as their job descriptions "find the talents and gifts of your neighbors, or people who share the same interests as you and find a way to invest in them for mutual delight and the strengthening of our common life." For example, as my friend Chad pointed out, you could have a "Roving Barber" who went and talked with people doing hair in the community -- in home and salon -- and in the listening found a way to invest in what people care about. Perhaps some of the people doing hair would want to have a community festival where hair gets cut and "judged." Perhaps some of the hair folks would want to start a small business that could potentially grow into a career. Who knows. We could have Roving Artists, who would find other artists, maybe invest in the public art (sculpture, murals) that some might want to do -- others might want to teach classes -- in their homes, in churches or around the barber shop! We could have Roving Scientists, Roving Naturalists, Roving Gardeners, Roving Entrepreneurs, etc... These "Animators" or "Rovers" would gather a couple of times a week and share their stories. Ann and I talked about the Animators meeting in different churches or other public spaces and telling their stories while others listened in. It was fun to talk with her. It was fun to dream with her. Heck, dreaming with folks is what it's all about isn't it? Then off to meet with Scott who stopped by for a few moments. And then De'Amon and Marc and I met with Ray Newbill from South Bend who had an inspiring story about his rise from a violent and crime filled past -- and now he is an emblem of responsibility, and nonviolence, and community action. The frustrating part is that he wants to solve this by doing mentoring programs, etc... Things that I believe have been proven ineffective (as programs). What I would love to do is to hire people like Ray - with inspiring stories - to cook their barbecue (as Ray loves to do) and hang out and encourage and bless others around him with his story -- without it being part of a program. We could call it "The Men and Women of Scars!" I didn't have much time so I had to move him quickly through things -- so I just was direct and say, "I don't want to do programs....but let's keep the conversation going." I left him with De'Amon and Marc and I went for a walk. And we talked about joy and happiness and struggle. Along the way we ran into Jim Fore who walked with us. What a joy just to be walking with these two good men. Then back into the building with Marc, to sit and share some more about life and joy and genuine hope. Then off to the Finance Meeting -- what a great turn out and discussion. Very impressive. Roger Sell is doing an awesome job (with things at church it can be an awful lot like herding cats). Then off to Mari and Fran and Chocolate...back where we started from.

I love the language and the clarity with which Mari speaks. And Fran -- my God he sees connections and depth in things that I am always missing. He talked for a few minutes about gargoyles. He talked about how the people who made gargoyles made them to try and reflect their fears. Then they put them up so that they could see that their fears where held captive in stone and wood and not roaming the earth. And - when your enemies came to face you -- they could see that you had already faced your own fears and they had better turn back if they couldn't bring anything more fierce than what they were facing. What a gift. What a gospel gift.

It was an important reminder to me to not let myself be held back by fear -- but to take it out and face it. To "sin boldly" as Martin Luther urged. As we face the future my role as the pastor is to find a way to encourage the good gifts of God that are in the good people of our parish...many of them in the room tonight. People like Jan Hirschman, and Pat Pearson and De'Amon Harges, and Tom Williams, and Seana Murphy, and Jim Hartsock, and I could go on and on. What a gift, what a gift, what a gift.

Well I'm off to make my gargoyles and head to sleep!

Richard and Troy

2007-03-12T23:39:00.000-04:00

Today in Washington, DC my friend Troy (on the left) and I met with Richard Florida (that's him on the right -- just in case you thought it was me). Richard wrote the book The Rise of the Creative Class. Both Troy and I wanted to meet him so I e-mailed him and another six weeks later we were winging our way on a late Sunday night to Washington. This morning we rose early and headed off to our meeting place. Four or five men walked in the coffee shop and we wondered if each of them were Richard. Then a car pulled up outside and a guy got out and Troy said "That's him." And he was sooo right. What a great conversation.

We thought we would have about an hour conversation -- we ended up spending two and a half hours talking together. Richard was very encouraging of the work we are doing at Broadway. And quickly suggested some ways that we might be able to work together! It was a wide ranging discussion which I'll try to write about when I'm more awake. But it touched on inequality in income, it touched on the openness of communities to gay and lesbian folks, it touched on creative work going on around the globe. It was fascinating. He told stories about conversations with Jane Jacobs that I just lapped up. Anyway...what a great day. Troy was the one who made this happen. He told me how much he liked the things that Richard wrote and we talked about how it would be great if we could talk with him. That gave rise to this visit -- which I think will have an impact on our lives and our community/parish -- for years to come.

Jayber Crow

2007-03-05T08:47:00.000-05:00

I love to read the following by Wendell Berry during Lent -- It's from "Jayber Crow" (and it's Jayber who is speaking) --

For a while again I couldn't pray. I didn't dare to. In the most secret place of my soul I wanted to beg the Lord to reveal himself in power. I wanted to tell him that it was time for his coming. If there was anything at all to what he had promised, why didn't he come in glory with angels and lay his hands on the hurt children and awaken the dead soldiers and restore the burned villages and the blasted and poisoned land? Why didn't he cow our arrogance?...
But thinking such things was as dangerous as praying them. I knew who had thought such thoughts before: "Let Christ the king of Israel descend now from the cross, that we may see and believe." Where in my own arrogance was I going to hide?
Where did I get my knack for being a fool? If I could advise God, why didn't I just advise him (like our great preachers and politicians) to be on our side and give us victory? I had to turn around and wade out of the mire myself.
Christ did not descend from the cross except into the grave. And why not otherwise? Wouldn't it have put fine comical expressions on the faces of the scribes and the chief priests and the soldiers if at that moment he had come down in power and glory? Why didn't he do it? Why hasn't he done it at any one of a thousand good times between then and now?
I knew the answer. I knew it a long time before I could admit it, for all the suffering of the world is in it. He didn't, he hasn't, because from the moment he did, he would be the absolute tyrant of the world and we would be his slaves. Even those who hated him and hated one another and hated their own souls would have to believe in him then. From that moment the possibility that we might be bound to him and he to us and us to one another by love forever would be ended.
And so, I thought, he must forebear to reveal his power and glory by presenting himself as himself, and must be present only in the ordinary miracle of the existence of his creatures. Those who wish to see him must see him in the poor, the hungry, the hurt, the wordless creatures, the groaning and travailing beautiful world.
I would sometimes be horrified in every moment I was alone. I could see no escape. We are too tightly tangled together to be able to separate ourselves from one another either by good or by evil. We are all involved in all and any good, and in all and any evil. For any sin, we all suffer. That is why our suffering is endless. it is why God grieves and Christ's wounds still are bleeding.

Just Another United Methodist Fundraiser

2007-03-03T11:03:00.000-05:00

Pretty bad picture I know. But it's the best I could do with my cell phone. It's a picture down in the community room at Broadway United Methodist Church last night. While the picture may be fuzzy -- the feeling as folks gathered last night was anything but!

It was a fundraiser for the SECO radio station at Broadway (91.9 on your FM dial). The radio station only broadcasts for a few blocks around Broadway (can't afford that FCC licence). McKeith Pearson and Jordan Mather-Licht are the two main young people involved in this. Both are 7th graders at Shortridge Middle School. Their adult sponsor is Kwanzaa Popps who plays drums and sings with the Indiana Reggae Band.

This particular fundraiser was billed as a tribute to Bob Marley. I laughed out loud when I thought of that -- for many reasons. It's not many churches that host a tribute concert to Bob Marley, for one thing. Back in the early 1980's I read a book by Timothy White about Bob Marley. I was impressed with Marley's commitment, real commitment, to peace. In Jamaica the two main political parties were literally killing each other in the streets. Marley brought them together in a concert billed as "One Love" (a title of one of his most well known songs). He made the politicians shake hands and entreat their followers to stop the violence and come together as one nation. I tried to imagine an entertainer in this country showing that kind of leadership and courage (we could really use it these days, it seems to me).

One of the other things that tickled me is that I knew that today (Saturday) there is going to be a concert put on by the American Guild of Organists at Broadway. I thought of these two events happening less than 24 hours apart -- and thought...hmmmm...the way to complete this circle is to have a country western concert on Sunday afternoon! I loved it. I'll have attended both of these concerts and I'll have a little bit more joy in my life because of it.

As I was talking last night with Carol Neu-Frauman and Dave Frauman I said - "now this is a Lenten discipline I really enjoy -- one that adds joy to my life." Lent is seen as such a penitential season that I think we forget the things that happened along the road to Jerusalem. Things like the feeding of the five thousand and lots of healings and lots of eating with tax collectors and sinners. If we are going to be facing days like Good Friday -- crucifixions, challenges to our faith, feelings of oppression and injustice, grief, etc... -- attending a concert with old friends and making new friends as one feels the music sweep over you -- can give you courage for the days and the Holy Weeks ahead. Or so it seems to me.

There are plenty of days that are tough...that's why the times to dance and rejoice in the company of others is so important. One of the things that was so interesting about last night -- is that this was a very, very diverse group -- folks who would not have ever found themselves together, before, I'll bet.

There were lots of children running around and dancing in the delight of the music. There were old folks and young folks. There were folks from Carmel and folks from the Mapleton-Fall Creek neighborhood around Broadway. There were more dreadlocks in the Community Room than at all other times combined, I'll bet and there were bald heads like my own (and a few others). There were people from the Broadway congregation -- and people who had never set foot in the church building ever before. The room was full of smiling joy - filled people. Folks who were getting to know one another. There were folks recovering from recent divorce, other folks going through the pain of the death of a loved one, others who feel mistreated by their parents, others who feel tension in their most intimate relationships, others who are struggling with desires unfulfilled. But last night -- the reverberations from the speakers did more than shake our bodies -- it caused us to vibrate like tuning forks that were finding that we were truly in tune with one another and with God. From the Chicago physician to the financial executives, to the railway worker, to the unemployed single mom, to the Butler students, to the utility worker, to the funeral directors -- we were all together - a time when you felt like the realm of God was just a little clearer.

There were connections happening around the room...some of the planners of a Spirit and Place event were meeting some good cooks who could cater an event this fall. Some folks from St. Luke's UMC were thinking that maybe they needed to get one of these reggae groups up to perform at their church! Some folks were simply meeting each other for the first time and enjoying getting to know one another. A neighbor, who works in youth ministry, grabbed me and said -- do you think we could have a youth music event here this summer? Who knows? Why not?

The concert featured two reggae groups: Mystic Rain and the Indiana Reggae Band. It also featured a hip-hop group called "The Philosophy." I liked them all. But I've kept noodling with the name of the group The Philosophy. My own philosophy (simple as it is) -- is that "people are weird." (and that certainly includes me). Last night the philosophy to me was clearly -- "we are all one." It was no more clear than in the putting together of this event. Kwanzaa used his connection with the musicians and the DJ -- DJ Dicky Foxx (he was great, as well) to give their time to support this effort. Tom worked with Kwanzaa to help organize the publicity and the logistics of the event. De'Amon is the one who brought all these people together in the first place. Truly a special night.

On to the organ concert -- the Anglican Chorale!

Laughing Jesus

2007-02-06T19:24:00.000-05:00

After the 8:30 service on Sunday, Mari stopped me and said -- "I've never heard of anyone saying that Jesus threw back his head and laughed." I was stunned. Mari has had decades of attending worship. On Monday I heard the same thing from Tim, another life long church attendee. We in the church have done a really lousy job of communicating the joy of Jesus.

Yes, it is indeed true that Jesus worked hard -- he spent a lot of time on healing people and speaking -- so much that he would wear himself out and have to go off by himself and rest. Yes, Jesus got himself worked up more than once -- driving the moneychangers out of the temple, and expressing frustration with the disciples on a fairly regular basis. But I think that life around Jesus must have been a whole lot of fun -- and across the years the church has often done what it can to bleed the fun out of life in Christ. Shame on us.

One could argue that the main reason Jesus got killed was for "eating with tax collectors and sinners." Now -- you've gotta believe that such a group really knows how to have a good time (probably a whole lot of pretty good -- albeit off-color -- jokes). In one of the gospels he is called a "glutton and a drunkard." Now I don't think he was one - but I think they couldn't have made this charge unless he was having an awfully good time.

Around Broadway we have a good ol' time. It's not always easy. People in this congregation struggle on a daily basis -- some against illness, some against poverty, some against injustice -- heck some against all of these at the same darn time. And yet there is a lot of laughter. Truly. And we could use to laugh some more. That's my commitment for Lent this year -- to give up being morose!

I think Jesus, when you really think about it, was a person who must have had a lot of laughter around. Think of the feedings of the thousands. When once there was no food -- and now there is an abundance. That laughter should be coming down like a thunderstorm all around them.

Sara Maitland's book about a Joyful Theology challenges me to think that the proper response to life in this world is NOT gratitude (which I have often thought it to be) -- but Joy. I like that. It's not gratitude that God wants as much as joy in the world that we have and our life in one another.

I know that as mom struggled with cancer the last few years of her life...in the midst of those battles she seemed to make a conscious decision to do things that made her happy. I'm not saying she or anyone of this ever get this right...but I hope I can think about that joy -- that joy that I believe was in Jesus -- and find more of a place for it in my life.

I have a lot to be joyful about. Kathy, Conor and Jordan to start. And they give me a lot of reason and opportunity to laugh. And there is the people I'm blessed to work with. And there are the people I worship with. And there are my neighbors and circle of friends. Yes, yes, yes. There is a lot of joy around.

In My Language

2007-02-04T20:19:00.000-05:00

Wow...I just finished watching an 8 minute clip on YouTube entitled In My Language that my friend, Mike Green, recommended to me this past week. It's amazing. It's better than watching the Super Bowl. If you click to it -- please take the time to watch the whole thing, 8 minutes and 35 seconds. It is a woman communicating in her own way with the world around her. She talks about being confined by the way that people put her into a box and say that she is only communicating when she is speaking in language that others can understand. Through the sharing of her story -- and through watching her interact with her world (the first four minutes) and then listening to her explanation (the last four minutes) it helps one (okay, it helped me) see a whole new world. The woman in the video mentions autism as one of the definitions given to people who interact with the world as she does. But it simply makes me aware that we all have are own way. And it is a challenge to me, to look more deeply, to pay more attention to the way each of us see the world and live within it.

Coming out of church today Bob said to me that his doctor had been concerned that his blood pressure was so high. He asked Bob why he thought it was so high. Bob responded that it was because he lived in this world. The way the woman in the video interracts with her world -- seems very healthy -- including making this video to share her story with others. What a gift!

Congratulations Conor!

2007-01-29T20:35:00.000-05:00

I apologize for the photograph. It's the best I could do. Standing to the right of center in the green sweater is Conor. This was taken on Saturday night in the Media Center at Arsenal Technical High School. The occasion was Tech Community Leadership Night. The evening began with the recognition of people as Distinguished Alumni. After that several of the graduating seniors were given scholarships by what is called The Tech Community Council. This is really a beautiful example of citizenship and democracy at its best.

Several civic and religious organizations around the Tech neighborhood give scholarships every year for the last 20 years to graduating seniors. They do it because they are neighbor to one another. At a time when there is a lot of handwringing about the lack of community this stands out to me as a shining example of the beauty of it (though they claim this is the only such council or scholarships offered at any public high school in Indianapolis).

But this one had a special undercurrent for me connected to Conor as well. Conor received the East Tenth United Methodist Everson Class Award as the program said "Presented by the Everson Class to a Tech senior who has demonstrated dedicated service to church and community ministry." The chairperson of the Tech Community Council and the M.C. of the event (the person behind the podium) is John Kanouse who is a member of that Sunday School class. I first met John about the time Conor was born. Our friend Lynne Butler was the pastor of East Tenth Street and she had me come in and meet with some of their leadership. I had called Lynne, who lived just a few blocks away from us, the night that Conor was born, to get her help with the birth as we needed another pair of hands in our home that night. Conor was born in the guest bedroom at home on April 13, 1989. Lynne Butler was sitting on the headboard holding Kathy's head up, and wiping her brow, as he was born. The next Sunday she told the congregation at East 10th Street about it. As John Kanouse announced that Conor was receiving this honor -- he mentioned that he had known me for 20 years and that he knew about Conor from nearly the first moments of his birth. It was a surprise and a delight to have Conor receive this award from this good man, this good congregation -- one that had a connection, however small, to our family.

This whole experience of Conor finishing high school has been a new experience. One that has been very rich and delightfully full of such surprises as Saturday night. I never would have thought -- even five years ago, that we would be back at Broadway, that Conor would be graduating from Tech High School, and that he would receive a scholarship from a church who in some small way was a part of his birth. It reminds me of Dr. King's words -- "we are all tied together in an inescapable network of mutuality." I guess so.

Seana's Words

2007-01-24T09:13:00.000-05:00

My friend, Seana Murphy, wrote me last night in response to the words in yesterday's posting.

Here is what she said:

I too experience existential agony over the deaths of those named to us
through relationship and half hearted media and those unnamed to us and
the demanding question of the cross-the scriptures-what are we called to
do? What are we called to freaking do? Rufus would say that we are
called like the story of the cross to die and to live again-thus the
question how do we-members of a community of faith-like the named and
unnamed-resurrect when the flagrant loss smolders in the ashes that was
once home-that once held the lives that are now gone?

There are no real answers-no good ones-take to the streets! In the
spirit of those gone due to faulty functions of other humans-burn down
the establishment? My Black Panther rhetoric fails me because like you
and the named and unnamed who loved them-my heart is broken? What do we
do-as remaining children of God? We call upon each other-to call their
names-in our own way-in our own time.

I call their names in this poem-I call their names with a sadness that
is all too familiar and a superficial hope in the promise of my
ancestors-that they are in a better place-and I call their names with a
love for community that still burns-and I call your name-because when
hurt like this strikes the soul-your name too must be called-your
spirit-passion-hope-restored in the calling-in your calling-and in love.

Resurrection

Allyson..
Allyson, did you know
Someone said your name was French
Meaning..of noble kind
Music once moved your feet to dance
Will you dance again?

Mary..
Mary,
You must have known the weight of
Your foremother-birth mother of Jesus
The irony-the greatest pain-other mothers
Witnessed-some cried out-some silently wept
As you-like Mary's son-were taken away from us
Will you rise again?
Will you meet Ms. Allyson of great nobility
And dance?

Evon..
Evon, someone said your name meant fighter
Your desire to remain independent
Your power to say I can still stay here
Your imagination!
You reached back in time and remembered that
Before there was gas and electricity-there was simplicity
Covers and conversations by candlelight
Will you, and Allyson, and Mary converse tonight?

Valarie..
Valarie,
A writer said your name meant BOLD
Rhyming with gold..the precious chameleon metal
Changing form with temperature-liquid-solid-liquid
Smiles changed, hugs changed, walks & talks changed
A gap in time exists between each-each changed because of you
Will you, and Allyson, and Mary, and Evon
Smile, hug, walk & talk together-
Fill in the time that once held you here?

Porsha..
Porsha,
Did you know that your name was hidden in the stars?
Did you know your brilliance?
Your name-stars-irony-existence
Your name, now your flesh, your spirit-hidden in
The stars
Will you and Valarie, and Allyson, and Mary, and Evon
Playfully collide in the sky-display the light that
Is missing down here?

Arneshia..
Arneshia, beauty waiting in bloom
Spring is just around the corner and we wait for
You, Valarie, Allyson, Mary, Evon, and Porsha to
Rise again in our hearts
Through a song, a dance, a smell, a taste, a touch, a sound, a vision, a
something
A something
A anything
Remind us-through calling of your names
Remind us-of the power-Evon-
Remind us of the Boldness-Valarie
Remind us of the Brillance-Porsha
Remind us of the Nobility-Allyson
Remind us of the Beauty-Arneshia
Remind us of the Dance-Mary (Mother of Jesus)
Remind us of the Dance

Fire

2007-01-23T17:02:00.000-05:00

This photo is from the Indianapolis Star -- it's a block from the church where I'm typing these words. Evon Griffin died in this fire early yesterday morning.

I've been thinking about Sunday's scripture as I prepare to speak in the presence of fire.

Here's a passage from the Book of Jeremiah:

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; and before you were born I consecrated you." These are the words of God to Jeremiah. As I read these words I couldn't help but think of the six (6!) people who have died from fires in their homes in the last two (2!) years -- heck in less than the last two years -- in the four block radius of this church. That's stunning.

Weren't Allyson and Mary and Evon and Arneshia, Valarie, and Porsha consecrated? And for this? For this? To be burned up in their homes? Why? (by the way -- all but one of these was under 15 years old) Of course there is no answer for that. Or at least no good answer. Less than fifteen years old. Children in the full flower of their possibility. Each one of the six, beloved children of God. Each one.

In the famous love passage from I Corinthians 13 we will read -- we will read these words from that passage "If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing." Another translation says, ..."if I hand over my body to be burned, but do not have love..." -- the Oxford Annotated version notes that the word "suggests voluntary self-immolation, martyrdom, or branding as a slave." Oh man.

So, I keep thinking of the deaths of these women. All of them women. That was another thing.

But the words of Paul about love are etched in my mind and soul..."Love never ends...Now I know in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known. And now faith, hope and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love."

The greatest of these is love. I don't feel very hopeful today. I think of the barrenness of grief. The desolation that Isaiah speaks about (in last week's lesson from the Hebrew scriptures) I see before me. Six lives in less than two years in a four block area -- where's the hope in that? I don't feel very faithful. I sit here at my computer - a person of faith would be somewhere else doing something. So...I'm out there. But what does it mean to have love? What does it mean to love these women? They are no longer here. But isn't there someway we can love them? Maybe if we can pull together some people -- people who loved them, to talk, to cry, to pray... Maybe in that love something will arise.

The lesson from the Gospel has Jesus saying, "Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing." Love.

The Imagination Superhighway

2007-01-22T07:09:00.000-05:00

On Christmas Day I received a book entitled "A Joyful Theology" by Sara Maitland. Ms. Maitland is a novelist. Having read the book I wish that all the theology that I had to read in seminary had been written by novelists! (or anyone who really knew how to write) It's a wonderful book. It's hilarious, witty, serious, thoughtful, and engaging.

I came across this in her book:

M. Eiffel, an eminent French engineer of the nineteenth century, proposed to build a tower for the Grand Exhibition in Paris. His plans were not moderate: the tower would be the last word in contemporary engineering-- it would involve fifteen thousand steel girders, and over seven million threaded rods, held in place by two and a half million bolts. It would be the tallest structure ever built in Europe (the previous claimant to this glory was Lincoln Cathedral spirit, which had fallen down more than three hundred years before). It would be so tall and so delicately constructed that it would actually weigh less than the cylinder of air that encompassed it. It would be tous qu' y a de chic and modernity.
He drew up the plans. The exhibition committee was keen. A site by the Seine, at the bottom of the Champ de Mars, was selected; subscriptions were raised...Then Monsieur E his a substantial snag: no construction company would build it for him. It was held that erecting a structure more than seven hundred feet high was scientifically impossible and probably blasphemous as well. It would fall down and their souls, together with their professional reputations and their pocket books would be put at risk.
There is something intrepid and unstoppable and many of those high Victorian engineers. Eiffel was no exception: undaunted, he became his own site foreman and advertised up and down the length of rural France for acrobats, tightrope walkers, circus professionals who could, he thought, understand his vision and have the nerve to act it out.
He was right. We see the result still, the epitome of Paris, serene, elegant, bold, floating over the river and displayed on several million post cards.
The Eiffel Tower was built by acrobats and tightrope walkers; engineers and philosophers of balance; artists of the body.

A few years ago people talked about the "superhighway" of the internet. Reading this reminds me of the superhighway I want to ride on. That is the Imagination Superhighway or the Inspiration Superhighway.

I kept thinking of a post that I wrote last year after the death of young Brennan Marsh. I entitled it "No Wasted Meetings." As I sat in the meeting today I realized that this was one of the meetings I had to get out of. And I will. The imagination and the inspiration were small. Perhaps Edison was right -- maybe this life is mainly perspiration...but even when I have perspired most heavily it has often been an occasion of delight. I remember throwing hay out in the fields of the Lammers Farm in Huntingburg, IN -- laughing and telling stories as we walked alongside the wagon and tossed the bales on. Later we would be up in the barn stacking the bales -- that's when the perspiration would really come -- blinding my eyes as my contacts filled with salt and the hay swirled around.

Yet in those times we often let our imaginations run wild. We talked about the world we wanted to see, about the dreams we had, the ways we could make those dreams come true. That's a far cry from a meeting where one talks for hours about "what our purpose is or our values are." This is not to demean the meeting. There were really good people there. People who care about many of the same things I do. It's just that we spend so much more time talking about how we communicate what we do that we never get around to...well...actually doing something.

I love Monsier Eiffel's approach -- bring together unlikely people to work together on something. On spiritual development bring together children (the heart of spiritual development is play) -- for worship bring together circus performers (they know how to use their bodies to "SAY" something) -- for economic development get some cooks and gardeners together (they know how to grow things from the ground up and how to take what's grown and make it into a delicious meal!). Now Monsier Eiffel turned to this because all other paths were blocked. Maybe we could turn to his way of seeing things before that. I remember reading in a book years ago about Curitiba, Brazil and it's incredible Mayor (at the time) Jaime Lerner. Jaime fired all the city planners and hired architects in their places (he said he needed people who were actually used to building something). Then when young people vandalized some of the gardens in Curitiba he was met by the police chief who wanted to authorize overtime for the police force. Mayor Lerner told him no -- that instead he would take the money and hire the young people who were vandalizing to be gardeners. He was doing with what was in hand - but using imagination and inspiration to do it.

I recently read the report of the Mayor's Task Force on Crime and Violence here in Indianapolis. It is pretty darn lame. It lacks those crucial ingredients of imagination and inspiration. I lack it to often myself. So I ask for your prayers -- that I will not be a block to imagination and inspiration around me...

Bloom

2007-01-21T22:43:00.000-05:00

An expression that often runs through my mind is "bloom where you are planted." I think about that for myself, my family, and for my neighbors and parishioners. How can we help one another bloom where we are planted? What does that look like?

The picture at the top is from an exhibition entitled "Bloom" by the artist Anna Schuleit. This exhibition is set in the Massachusetts Mental Health Center. She took this abandoned Mental Hospital and set up 28,000 flowers throughout the place. She said that she did it because mental patients never get flowers (while regular hospital patients often do). After the four days of the exhibition she took these flowers (one halfway is depicted in the photograph at the top) and had them sent to mental patients around the Boston area. How beautiful.

Back in 2001 she took the old Northampton Mental Hospital (abandoned as well) and put speakers in many of the rooms and for 28 minutes one day she played Bach's "Magnificat" throughout the grounds (through the broken windows) as people gathered. In the interview I got the idea that the people at the event were former mental patients, their families, people who had worked there, and people from the community. It was a way to say goodbye officially. And -- how beautiful that the "Magnificat" was sung -- this reminder that God has turned the world upside down from the way we understand it.

I take a lot of inspiration from this woman and I find myself being inspired by her witness to see the world around me with new eyes. Bloom. Yes, indeed.

When Pastors Made A Difference

2007-01-18T20:06:00.000-05:00

I'm reading this new book by Stephen Johnson entitled The Ghost Map, about the cholera epidemic in London nearly one hundred and fifty years ago. I've been thinking about the book as I've been walking tonight. Certainly the most important person in getting the epidemic stopped was a physician by the name of John Snow. He was remarkable. He didn't take the conventional wisdom, but went ahead and tried to see the world clearly for himself. Even though the newspapers, the medical establishment and others were against him, he hung in there and continued to do his research and learned what was really causing the spread of cholera.

But it is not his story that I want to tell you, dear reader. Though you may not have heard of him, he is well known. I want to speak of another important "actor" in this drama - one less well known in our day and age. I want to tell you a little of the story of Rev. Henry Whitehead. He is the pastor at St. Luke's -- which is in the area where the cholera epidemic is most rapidly spreading. Rev. Whitehead visited people in their homes. He talked with them as the cholera epidemic was sweeping through the community and tried to make sense of it himself. He asked questions, he paid attention, and he didn't let his brain go to sleep. As the epidemic began to reach its peak and then diminish he heard of Dr. Snow's thoughts. He didn't thik they were right...but he thought that perhaps he should consider them. As he asked more questions he began to see that Dr. Snow was right -- the culprit had been water coming from the Broad Street Water Pump.

But now that Rev. Whitehead believed him he wondered how he could help the rest of the city see that Dr. Snow was right and thus be able to take appropriate preventive measures in the future. Rev. Whitehead was listened to on the important committees that were considering the cause and effect of what had happened. Though there was great skepticism about what Dr. Snow had deduced and proven (even though it was proven), it took Rev. Whitehead's recounting his experience and his observation to get the support of the majority of the committee.

Because he paid attention -- because he knew the people of his community -- because of that -- the cholera epidemic was stopped before it could greatly expand its reach beyond the horrible limits it made. And, perhaps more importantly, the city of London began to take preventative measures.

I thought of a conversation that I had with a friend, Mac Hamon, recently (another pastor). He asked -- where are we in really being able to be helpful to the common good? Where?

We don't know the people of our parishes well any more. We might know some of the people of our congregation -- but that larger notion of parish has shrunk. We also have had our understanding of what area(s) are "ours" to speak to are primarily that of the "spiritual" (as if God weren't concerned with every single corner of our life.

I was thinking about this as I read the Indianapolis Community Crime Prevention Task Force Report (click on it to download the report for yourself). There are a couple of clergy on the task force. But they don't seem to have done their homework (nor anyone else on that committee). The crime and violence in Indianapolis over this past year has raised a great concern. Yet the responses of the task force are trite, cynical and an inch deep.

They are trite in that they just repeat the conventional wisdom that has taken ahold of us these days. The report encourages the growth of mentoring programs. The problem with that is that there are more mentoring programs in Indianapolis right now than at any other time in our history. Yet, clearly our violence and crime problems are not all right. Other social programs are encouraged as well -- day care, after school care, etc...

They are cynical in that they recommend steps that they have no authority or responsibility to see implemented. The things they recommend are not on the face of themselves "bad" -- in fact quite the opposite -- and yet no one is actually likely to do them, because of the report of this task force. And that, I'm afraid, is quite cynical.

Finally, their report is only an inch deep (if that) -- there is no critique offered of things like the mentoring programs or school based programs. There seems to be little or no actual experience with the victims and perpetrators of these crimes, beyond only the most surface. There is no gathering of facts and/or data at all, that they might use to bolster their empty ideas.

Pastors use to make a difference. We knew our communities. What we didn't know we knew how to gather data to find out. We used common sense. Now we are quicker to type up a blog than sit down with our neighbor (let me indict myself along with anyone else).

The concerns of pastors, are the concerns of our communities. Churches all too often act like they are islands having nothing to do with or no connection to their communities. If they church grows or shrinks it is due to the spiritual dynamic in the congregation rather than anything to do with the demographics. No wonder we have problems these days with science and religion. Religion has scooted over and is no longer willing to sit too close to science. That is our arrogance (this is not to say that science doesn't have an arrogance all its own).

We need -- the city, the state, and the nation needs -- pastors who are citizens of the community -- who help us see the real lives in and real life of our communities.

I'm searching for a way forward. Maybe the Ghost Map can help.

Lo, How a Rose E'er Blooming

2006-12-21T08:55:00.000-05:00

The lyrics to this beautiful (to my ears) hymn are:

Lo, how a Rose e'er blooming
From tender stem hath sprung!
Of Jesse's lineage coming
As men of old have sung
It came, a flow'ret bright,
Amid the cold of winter
When half spent was the light.

Isaiah 'twas foretold it

The rose I have in mind,
With Mary we behold it,
The Virgin Mother kind.

To show God's love aright,

She bore to men a Saviour,
When half spent was the night.

O flow'r, whose fragrance tender

With sweetness fills the air,
Dispel in glorious splendour
The darkness ev'ry where.

True man, yet very God,

From sin and death now save us,
And share our ev're load.

Those words give me comfort in the days leading up to Christmas. They remind me, both in form and in substance, of the beauty that is so much a part of our faith -- but is so easily and often forgotten.

I often miss the beauty that strays across my path. And then in moments like this I take the time to think on those things of beauty -- of the woman who offered me forgivenss as I passed her in the church office. The fellow who greeted me as we walked on opposite sides of the street the other evening. I think of the dark blue of the sky as I took a walk around the neighborhood last evening. I thought of the sound of the waters as I crossed the Central Bridge to and from the church today. I thought of Jordan's gangly self bounding down the stairs late at night to give his old dad a hug before he headed off to bed. I thought of Conor's beaming exuberance as he walked in the back door heading home from an evening out with his girlfriend. I thought of Kathy lying snug under the covers with her head and her book visible by the light of her bedside lamp. There's a lot of beauty surrounding me these days - in little ways and large. Christmas is coming.

I came across the following Christmas piece by the great African-American theologian Howard Thurman and that I offer to you both in celebration and I suppose, as challenge!

When the song of the angels is stilled
when the star in the sky is gone
when the kings and princes are home
when the shepherds are back with their flocks
the work of Christmas begins
to find the lost
to heal the broken
to feed the hungry
to release the prisoner
to rebuild the nations
to bring peace among the people
to make music in the heart.

Oh Holy Night

2006-12-16T21:23:00.000-05:00

Oh Holy Night
The stars are brightly shining
It is the night of the dear Savior's birth!
Long lay the world in sin and error pining
Till he appear'd and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!
Fall on your knees
Oh hear the angel voices
Oh night divine
Oh night when Christ was born
Oh night divine
Oh night divine
Led by the light of Faith serenely beaming
With glowing hearts by His cradle we stand
So led by light of a star sweetly gleaming
Here come the wise men from Orient land
The King of Kings lay thus in lowly manger
In all our trials born to be our friend.
Truly He taught us to love one another
His law is love and His gospel is peace
Chains shall He break for the slave is our brother
And in His name all oppression shall cease
Sweet hymns of joy in grateful chorus raise we,
Let all within us praise His holy name.

I love the sound of this Christmas Carol. Years ago at the Amerson household for the staff Christmas party I would often stand by the piano when it was being played and would theatrically (and badly) collapse on the ground while singing "fall on your knees." Pretty cheesy.

I was recently with my friend Phil in Evanston and he was telling me that he often had to sing this song as a boy (I think it was a solo in church). I remember noticing what Phil reminded me of -- that this hymn is really a hymn of liberation. It is a song that reminds us that the gift of Christ in the world is the announcement that there is now liberty for the prisoner.

I think of how often we overlook the truly joyful message of Christmas that in the very presence of evil (or the spiritual forces of wickedness if you will) that the good news of God is that those forces no longer have predominance -- that they have in fact been destroyed. Now that seems like a pretty hard thing to argue for in the face of what we see in the world...but it also is a real challenge to remember that it is our calling to live as if this is true. We certainly can live as if it is not true -- we can certainly live as if evil and oppression have the upper hand -- but it would be a denial of our faith. So -- how do we work that out in practice?

What would it mean for me, in this week before Christmas, to show that I believe the prisoner has been set free? Perhaps it would mean something like what you can read about in this article.

And So This Is Christmas

2006-12-16T20:44:00.000-05:00

And so this is Christmas, for weak and for strong,
For rich and for poor ones, the road is so long.
And so happy Christmas, for black and for white,
For yellow and red ones, let's stop all the fight.

A very Merry Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
Let's hope it's a good one,
Without any fear.

John Lennon penned these words a few years back and I hear them a couple of times during Advent. As I understand it this was written as an anti-war song.

This year, I don't know why, but all the stuff I've been hearing about "the war on Christmas" has been coming to me in neon lights. At first I just ignored it. And then I started hearing about it on the radio in the car, on the Daily Show, and from more and more people I know around town. Some think it's ridiculous, and some seem to think it's deadly serious. So I got to thinking -- what do I think "the war on Christmas" is about? So here's my best shot.

Nothing. Or more precisely - everything.

One of the things that is weird about this for me is that I have friends who are absolutely convinced there is a war on Christmas. And while I believe there is one, too -- it is a completely different one than they talk about.

I keep thinking that this is reminiscent of a battle recorded in the Gospels that I like to call "The War on Sabbath." Who was the leader in the war on the sabbath? Well -- the good religious folk thought that it was Jesus. You see, Jesus healed someone on the Sabbath. And when he was confronted by the religious authorities he asked them -- "Were people created for the Sabbath or the Sabbath for people?"

I think that it drove Jesus nuts (not clinically so) that folks made religion into something that could overlook a brother or sister who was hurting -- simply because it was "against the rules." I think that was Jesus' problem with what religions become. Religions become boxes, prisons if you will, where we hold one another hostage to the whims and dictates of those who have gone before. And while those who have gone before may have been guided by the Holy Spirit - they were also human beings who made mistakes (see Galileo, Copernicus, The Crusades, etc...).

But I do think that there is a very real War on Christmas. When you think that Christmas itself is this reminder of God's incarnation in the world - God putting up a tent with us, well then - we can see where the threats to that incarnation are present can't we? They are present whenever we have people who are homeless languishing on our streets, while we have empty beds in our homes. That's certainly a front in the war on Christmas (especially in celebrating a Christ who was born in a manger -- today, as my friend Chad told me it would probably be in a grocery cart down at Wheeler Mission). The war on Christmas is happening in Darfur, Sudan where children are watching their parents being raped and killed; where brothers and sisters are tortured in front of one another or their parents are; it kind of embarrassing to claim that someone saying "happy holidays" to you pisses you off, after that isn't it?

How about the War on Christmas that is happening when a city builds a new stadium for a professional football team full of multi-millionaires (not to mention sky boxes for multi-millionaires who don't play), but can't be convinced to invest in the lives of low-income people whose gifts and energies and dreams are being wasted simply because someone has to sell $4.50 hot dogs for $5.25 an hour. Why do we know that is part of the War on Christmas? Because we know how to read Matthew 25.31-46.

How about the War on Christmas that happens when in the midst of war we bomb civilian areas "because we have to" -- and little children are considered "collateral damage" by leaders who call themselves Christian. Jesus must weep. Weep.

How about the War on Christmas that happens when we lock up an extremely high percentage of our population and keep forgetting that one of the signs of God's realm that Jesus announced at the beginning of his ministry was "freedom for the captives." Churches and other faith communities do plenty of work to "counsel the prisoner" when he or she gets out of prison -- but ask them to "set the prisoner free" and they look at you like you are crazy.

How about the War on Christmas that happens when people have to hide their love for one another, the simple act of walking hand in hand downtown as one celebrates an anniversary, or the act of dancing together at any party -- because people might be offended -- or worse, respond violently. Yeah, Jesus would be real happy about that celebration of his birthday.

Yes, Virginia there is a War on Christmas. Unfortunately, it is being waged in the words said over a cash register and not in the wounded places of our communities and world.

Gloria In Excelsis Deo?

2006-12-15T22:10:00.000-05:00

Every Sunday at Broadway we pray for one another and we pray for the world. A member of the church called me yesterday and sent me to the Internet to watch an ad about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. It shows people from around this country reading words of those who are dying and watching others die around them. My friend asked me, “What does it mean that we pray for Darfur every Sunday?”

It’s a good question. What does it mean to pray on Christmas? The ad ends with the words “400,000 in Sudan haven’t lived to tell about the genocide.” You can see the ad by clicking on this Word.

The Church, our church, and others are called to bear witness to hear the voices, to hear the songs, of all those who struggle and yearn to have a chance to live lives of hope and meaning even in the midst of violence and struggle. We not only hear the songs, but we sing them ourselves.

When I was talking with Rachel about this today she said -- "Can't we do more than bear witness?" Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Can't we? And then I thought...well maybe really bearing witness is much more than the empty meaning it seems to have all too often today.

Earlier in the week Rachel and I were talking about the liturgy for welcoming new members into our life together at Broadway. In my original draft we have this question (in part): Do you renounce the spiritual forces of wickedness...? It led to this great question about whether people would understand that language these days. I struggled with it because I believe that it's hard to understand things like what is happening in Darfur without calling it...well..."wickedness." Or what words to use to describe what is happening to African-American young men in this country.

At Christmas this year, I ask you to find, in a magazine, a newspaper, a poem, a web site, a book – somewhere -- the voices of those whose lives seem very far from your own. Listen to a new voice. Listen to that song.

I'd like to think that our prayers in the sanctuary on Sunday morning, and throughout the week we are in hospitals, schools, homes, streets, businesses, lead us into acting out of the commitment we have heard and voiced in our prayers. The ad that I have the link to on this page is a very powerful communicator and it makes me wonder how we can be more visual in leading us into and out of prayer -- in leading us in and through our liturgy.

Gloria in Excelsis Deo. The words are from one of my favorite Christmas hymns -- "Angels We Have Heard on High." It's words challenge me to make sure not just to mouth them, but to sing them with my life. Gloria in Excelsis Deo? I sure hope so.

Do You Hear What I Hear

2006-12-04T20:38:00.000-05:00

Consider this posting a beginning homage to Christmas music. I love good Christmas music. Okay, I love cheesy Christmas music, too. But I digress. I was writing a letter to some of my friends who I share life and work with and I was musing about what we need to keep at the heart of our Christian life and mission around our church. I was writing to Carmen, and Marc, and De'Amon and I wrote to them about the three things that I think we need to keep at the heart of things. The final one was that we needed to have a little creativity going. And the truth is that we have a lot of creativity going. But creativity is not about much else than blind eyes seeing from my perspective. Creativity is about discerning -- how to use the gifts of God in the people of God. And so -- we have been looking around at the people in the congregation -- the people who come through our doors. We have a yoga group meeting at the church tonight. I wonder what it might be to ask them to tell us what they think we ought to know about health and spirit. I bet they would have something to say. But the question is how we do that in a world that is not in the practice of listening. But listen we must. And listen we shall. Or at least listen we shall try.

We should be praying for each other more. Okay, I should be praying more. We have a prayer group at the church -- we should be using them for more prayer. Please, we should say to them, please pray that we can see and hear the gifts of God in the people we come across. Why? Because, as Walter Wink says, history belongs to the intercessors. At least if you know that some people are praying with you and for you -- well -- who knows. It sure can't hurt. And it is one of the practices of our faith. Prayer, as William Stringfellow once said is not about asking God for things -- it is about becoming aware of the unity of all things (he said it much better than that).

One of my favorite Christmas songs was given to me on a cd of the Three Blind Boys of Alabama from Troy and John. It's called "I Pray on Christmas" -- some of the words go like this:

I pray on Christmas
That the sick will soon be strong
I pray on Christmas
The Lord will hear my song

I pray on Christmas.

The Answers to Poverty

2006-12-04T16:33:00.000-05:00

Someone in our congregation e-mailed me last week. At the end of her note she added this question "and what are the answers to poverty?" Wow -- what a great question (I of course had the answer -- ha!). It was a wonderful reminder that life is about asking interesting and good questions. How blessed I am to get such questions. Anyway...what follows is my response.

The answers to poverty? Hmmmm. I watched an interview last night with Muhammed Yunus (Grameen Bank) on the Charles Rose show. One of the things Yunus said is he believed we could do away with poverty. Gotta admit – the man blew my mind with that one. Maybe so, maybe so, maybe so. But I believe that one of the “answers” to poverty is to believe what Mary sings in the Magnificat. “That God has filled the hungry with good things and sent the rich empty away.” And that the answer to poverty — is to live as if that were true. It is to do what Jesus said in John 15 (“no longer do I call you servants, but friends”)...that is to say that the answer to poverty is the kind of friendship that Jesus talks about — the kind of friendship that pays attention to the life of the person before you... The person that the world sees as poverty — but you know as one of those hungry who has been filled with good things — so you sure as heck better start hangin’ out with that person and bein’ a part of all the cool things that God is doing in their life...which draws me back to the first question — and through this we will help one another see that the gospel is indeed truth in the life of the world (and the church as a part of that larger world). It is why I don’t have any problem with seeing God’s grace at work in the lives of all of God’s creatures — it is because it isn’t, at all, dependent upon us — what is called forth from us is the eyes to see and the ears to hear — so that we can dance in joy — so we who live in darkness can see a great light. It’s here. It’s shining.

Bitterness

2006-11-27T21:03:00.000-05:00

Thanksgiving is over - so why am I thinking of Passover? At Passover a meal is shared and each item that is shared has significance. One of those is a bitter herb -- to remind the Hebrew people of the bitterness of their slavery in Egypt. I've been reading a book by Garret Keizer entitled The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin. It's a fascinating book -- I highly recommend it. But as I was thinking on it today I thought not only about anger -- but about bitterness. I wondered if, in bitterness, and in remembering bitterness there is any grace.

I've talked with a friend in the past few days who in the midst of some current struggles made a comment that showed his bitterness at an event 10 months ago. Clearly it feels to my friend that the world has conspired against him. Perhaps God. But in whatever case -- it's tough. And he tastes the bitter herb on his lips.

I thought of a situation in my life from 6 years ago. I can remember walking for miles and miles every day -- for over a year and wondering if I would ever be able to walk again without having my mind filled with the question over and over again -- "Why? Why did this thing happen?" I would find myself in situations -- with people who were involved with my bitterness and I wanted to snap at them.

I wonder if bitterness is healing if one expresses it. Does it serve a liturgical function to encourage violence -- or does it inhibit rage by speaking its name, rather than allowing it to simmer? Or does the occasion to speak bitterness -- fuel us with a righteous anger that gives us the strength, the energy and the commitment to make things right? Can it also serve to remind us that we have come from this bitter past, and that we have survived to face our current travail -- but freed from the bondage to the past?

Today, as a friend of mine and I talked together about sadness, sorrow, and grief -- I thought of all the trouble I got into as a kid. I remember being angry -- bitterly angry -- at my punishments. But I also have a memory of one time, in particular, when in the midst of my punishment my mother came to comfort me. And the memory of that time has returned and returned to me at odd times throughout my life. Perhaps it is a reminder that the cure for bitterness is comfort. Not a hiding from the problem at all -- but providing comfort in the midst of the bitterness. Often we shy away from it -- we don't want to get close. We are afraid. We are intimidated. We think people want to be left alone. Maybe so. But maybe comfort could be a help as well.

Tonight as I left the church building after dark a woman stopped me to tell me of her plight -- her hunger. We talked for a few minutes. In the few short minutes, I could hear some of her bitterness at the "rules" of places that didn't allow her to touch base with them until after a proscribed number of days. I tried to provide a little comfort. I think I failed. I hope I'll do better tomorrow.

Weapons of the Spirit

2006-11-20T20:30:00.000-05:00

Years ago I read a book that made an impact upon my life. It is called "Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed" by Phillip Hallie. It is the story of the village of Le Chambon in France and, in particular, the story of this Protestant communities courageous actions in providing hospitality to Jews during World War II.

Much of the story, as it is told, centers around a pastor, Andre Trocme and his wife, Magda Trocme, who lived in Le Chambon. Trocme was a pacifist who urged his congregation to resist the Vichy government and their German patrons with "weapons of the spirit." He told the police who came with buses to take away the Jews, "We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men."

I was reminded of the story of Le Chambon while reading a book by Garrett Keizer entitled "Help: The Original Human Dilemma." In it he recalls: "Magda Trocme said, 'If we had been an organization, it could not have worked.'...There was no formal organization in the village dedicated to the work of saving Jews. (After the war some villagers who participated were surprised to find that certain of their neighbors had been engaged in the same work.) An organization would have been easier to infiltrate than the village and easier to incapacitate by seizing its leaders....What Magda Trocme's statement belies is the fact that there was a much deeper organization at work in the village, that is, the organic structure of the community itself. Simone Weil once noted that a phenomenon like Hitler would be inconceivable without 'the existence of millions of uprooted men.'"

That's enough quoting for this entry in my blog. It is enough to make me think, to challenge myself, about whether the work we are doing, in our lives, in our church, is helping not only ourselves, but others to take deeper root. This weekend I read the tales of my friend Chad in Lockerbie-Central UMC and their listening to the stories of the homeless and finding their church revitalized in the storytelling. Tonight I traveled to friend Danny'in Lebanon, Otterbein UMC, to discover that their are doing ministry -- one person at a time - one family at a time. Earlier today I took a walk with De'Amon and he told me the story of a woman he met at the food pantry at Broadway today. He also told me that he was going back to visit Russell, who he met in his home visits last week, and who is a professional jazz sax player. And I wonder again -- what causes deep roots to take hold and grow deeper and stronger?

Is that the cause of so much of the trouble within our own country and world these days -- a sense of rootlessness?

What does it mean for us to be a people? When we are at home and comfortable within ourselves, when we are not fearful - then the stranger is one to be welcomed into our home - we are entertaining angels unawares. Otherwise, everyone is a terrorist, a potential enemy, thief, and criminal.

How is it that we can take root, even deeper as a people? We cannot do it by a program. But perhaps by "weapons of the spirit." That still begs the question -- from where do such weapons arise. I guess my answer is that they are there in the stories that each of us share -- if we will pull ourselves away from the screens in our lives, long enough to listen. Those...those are the true weapons of the Spirit. Why? Because they show us that we belong to one another. They show that we are of one soil -- and one Spirit. And nothing is more powerful to set us free.

A Tale of Two Meetings

2006-11-17T10:35:00.000-05:00

Sometimes life sets contrasts right next to each other. It is helpful. We can easily forget that we live in one world -- and that there is another world where things are going on at the exact same time that are the exact opposite. I can easily forget that. I can think that the little world around me is the only one I live in. I can sink into despair when I think of myself as an island. But when I am reminded of the larger world we live in, by seeing another dimension or aspect of the world that I hadn't noticed before. Well then - that despair is tempered with a bit of hope -- and even, dare I say it, happiness.

On Wednesday evening we had our Charge Conference at the church. It is our once a year business meeting. The leadership for 2007 is elected. My salary is voted on. We receive reports from the Finance Committee and from those with responsibility for our building and grounds. It's fairly perfunctory. The lay leader and the pastors often give reports on what might be called "the state of the church." The District Superintendent attends these meetings -- and, in fact, presides at them. The District Superintendent, for non-United Methodist readers, is a "supervisor" of sorts over 50-80 churches in a defined geographical area. Ah -- I digress.

Both Mary, our lay leader, and Rachel one of the other pastors, gave fine reports on the state of the church. I spoke briefly about what I thought some of the highlights of the past year have been. I tried to speak honestly about what we are still learning and challenged by. But I also wanted to take the opportunity to voice my concern about what I see happening in the coming union of the two Indiana United Methodist conferences into one. There are people working on this union and I have seen their reports -- and I'm pretty disappointed. That's saying it mildly. The reports I have seen fail, from my perspective, on three accounts: 1) they do not reflect any theological grounding/thought; 2) they lack imagination and creativity; and 3) they don't seem to have any understanding of how organizations really work. I expressed my concern about that. Our District Superintendent interrupted to say that he is serving on one of the "discernment groups" but that he honestly doesn't have any "emotional investment" in it because he's sixty-one years old and by the time he retires it will be all said and done...and for the most part he agrees with what I'm saying -- but there's not much to be done about it (he seemed to say with a shrug of his shoulders). What a stunning view of leadership in our denomination. It was appalling.

I tell you that story, so that I can tell you this one. On Thursday morning I was in my study and I saw our intern, Greg, come in to the office. I stopped by his room and chatted with him. The night before he and our other intern Carla had pulled together a meal about a block and a half away from the church at a place called Unleavened Bread at 30th and Central. The restaurant was closed -- but the proprietor, Eleayse had opened it up for this "meeting." Greg and Carla had called together people who she knew had a love for cooking. They invited them to each bring a dish to share and there was no other agenda. Just a group of people who love cooking to share their food and get to know one another. I asked Greg how it went. His face brightened up immediately. This is what he told me. People came in he said and he told me the names of those who had come. Eleayse had pulled some tables around so they could sit together and eat and talk with each other. They begin to eat and then -- Greg said -- it exploded -- recipes were flying around the room, they were talking about techniques and ingredients and the energy was contagious. He said that they set another time to gather again and that this time the theme would be "international foods." Greg and Carla had been a little nervous about this gathering. Would people expect an agenda? Would people want something to come from this? But I had hoped and believed that if you bring people together who care about similar things, even if it doesn't go anywhere from there -- you'll have a delightful meal together.

This is one of the real ministries of our church -- to witness to the Spirit of God alive in people. To bring together people across all kinds of boundaries -- but who share a sense of calling and commitment. And out of that, as we say at Broadway -- "have conversations and have faith." Greg and Carla brought people together -- and I don't know what will happen long term out of it - but something was born out of that time on Wednesday night.

And it was in stunning contrast to a meeting where a tired church bureaucrat told us of his lack of care for what he was doing. I wonder if what we are doing at Broadway can help seed a renewed sense of setting people, like our D.S., free from his misery and inviting him into discussions and commitments that he truly cares about. How can we multiply the effect of that dinner - and reduce the effect of the first meeting?

Let this be our revolution...

A Story

2006-10-23T22:14:00.000-04:00

That is at bottom the only courage that is demanded of us; to have courage for the most strange, the most singular, and the most inexplicable that we may encounter. That [humanity] has in this sense been cowardly has done life endless harm; the experiences that are called 'visions,' the whole so-called "spirit-world," death, all those things that are so closely akin to us, have by daily parrying been so crowded out of life that the sense with which we could have grasped them are atrophied. To say nothing of God.
-Rainer Maria Rilke

Rilke's words ring true to me in my day to day life around here. I've known David for years. Many years. He and I were first neighbors back in 1986. One night a couple of years after we met I found him knocking on my door. When I answered the door he fell into my arms weeping. He had been at a swimming lesson with his son at a public park here in Indianapolis and during the course of the swimming lesson his son drowned (it sounds impossible even as I type it). David was standing by the side of the swimming pool. David was destroyed. There is no other word for it. Over several years his life fell apart. He is a gifted man. But a broken one too.
When I moved back here in 2003 David and I ran into each other again. His life had hit bottom a few years earlier when he was shot nearly in the exact spot that our home now stands on. After that he began, slowly, to put the pieces of his life back together. It's been a new beginning in fits and starts.
At the beginning of the summer he had a new summer job working with young people. But within a week he had been fired. He came to see me. We talked. He was so disappointed in losing the job - in part because he intended to use his earnings to buy a ticket to New York City to see his other son graduate from a special program there. Our church provides neighborhood assistance...but a plane ticket to New York didn't seem like what that was meant for -- but I had some extra money after a little extra work I had done that summer. I told David I would buy him a ticket to New York if he would come up with some contribution he could and would make to the life of his neighborhood.
So we talked together. He had big dreams (like usual). He is a dreamer. But he's not necessarily the best implementer of dreams. So, I asked him to dream smaller. And so he did. We talked together about his gift of encouragement and his joy at being around people. I talked with him about a neighbor who has suffered a couple of strokes and who is lonely. I said, I would like to see David spend some time with this guy. He agreed that he would.
Later that summer I got a call from David. He had enjoyed his time with his son in New York and he told me that he would be visiting the neighbor we talked about.
Over the next few weeks I wondered if David had gotten by to see him. One Saturday evening in September I got a call. It was David. He told me that he and this neighbor had gotten together a few times. The day before he said they had gone out to the golf course. And though his companion was not up to playing he loved being out on the course again. They talked and laughed for hours. Then David began to choke up. I asked him what was wrong. He said that his companion's wife had called him that morning to tell him that her husband had just died. "Oh David," I said to him, "what a gift you gave to him. In the last 24 hours of life he got to spend a beautiful day in a place that he loved. He wasn't lonely. Just think how rich that made those last few hours." David sniffed and I could hear him seeing the gift through his grief. I thought of what courage it has taken David, through death and guilt and addiction and unemployment and disillusionment -- to bear witness to life and love. And I think what a privilege it is to see such courage. It helps me see a whole new world.

Jordan

2006-10-22T17:20:00.000-04:00

Friday our youngest son, Jordan, turned thirteen years old. And this is something to celebrate. Why? Because Jordan is the ultimate celebrator. And yet he is an amazing cross between a Trappist monk, a pied piper of children, and a mimic (and memorizer) of tales he has heard (and loved), and (and this is a very special and unique gift) a young person seemingly comfortable in his own skin. In short - he is a wonder.

Jordan is the one among us who is most comfortable in a crowd. Though he would much rather be alone. Jordan loves children, though he claims to be annoyed by them, he will spend three days with his young cousins -- they will follow him around, play with him, climb over and around him, and never a word of complaint arises from him -- never seeking a moment of hiding away from them. He is amazing.

He loves the camera -- positions himself both in front of it and behind it. On Monday he will go to film a Shortridge Soccer game (talk about a thankless task). But point a camera at him and he will not be shy -- he will show you something. It may be funny. It may be quiet. It may be outrageous. But it will be all him. And all his choice. He is himself. Oh...it is a rare gift that he is -- being comfortable as he is in his own skin.

He will tell you what he thinks of something. He loves to tell a story -- either something that he witnessed or that happened to him - or one of the stories that he sees on television or in a movie. He memorizes dialogue of his favorite stories - and will spill it out to you at just the slightest opening.

He eats just a few things. He loves pasta - spaghetti and elbow macaroni and shells and penne are among his favorites. He likes a good steak. He like Ramen noodles, un cooked, with the sauce, dry, poured on top. He likes bread -- but only with the edges cut off. He likes hot dogs (sometimes). He likes peanut butter meltaways from the South Bend Chocolate Company. There are a few other favorites but not many.

Each of us is a unique creation. And I see (in my own life and others) that it is often to forget that. But Jordan is a wonderful reminder to me each and every day to trust and believe in who God made each of us to be. What a gift that is. Thank you Jordan!

Old Friends, New Dreams

2006-10-18T08:35:00.000-04:00

What's homecoming when you are already at home? That's my question as I reflect on Sunday. Sunday was the first Broadway Homecoming. It was a remarkable day. Actually it was a remarkable weekend. My life is different than it would have been without the day -- and yet I was always (and already) at home. How does that make sense?

It makes sense in the same way that the Gospel makes sense. Each day, each moment is full of possibility. The question is will we see it and live it? This homecoming photograph is of a group of us who were here all together back in 1990, and half of us are still together. Suhyoung Baik, Rachel Metheny and I were here back in the day with Phil Amerson, and Mary Ann Moman and Vanessa Allen-Brown. Rev. Baik has been the only one who has stayed across all these years. But Rachel and I have both left and returned. So what does it mean to have homecoming when you are already at home (we were far from the only ones with that question).

It is like this -- Phil and Mary Ann and Vanessa and I have always been together. We have been physically apart. But with each other we are always at home. That's what I mean by comparing this to the Gospel. Jesus says time and time again -- that it is not the way things look to the world that is reality -- it is the way that they are, in the realm of God which is right here and right now.

It is the same way I think of things when people think about who we are and what we do at Broadway without paying attention to the depth. People from outside of us (including many of our funders) think that we do our summer program to "help" our low-income neighbors. They are so wrong. We do the summer program so we won't miss out on the energy, the joy, and the gifts of the children and families who make up our summer program. People think we do our tutoring program so that we can "help" these low-income kids do better in school. Nope. Wrong again. We do it so that we can invest in the lives of young people who will grow up to be scientists like Madame Curie, who will be astronauts like Mae Jemison, who will be lawyers and judges like Thurgood Marshall. Why would you want to miss out on something like that?

The Gospel calls us -- always and each and every day to see a whole new world. It calls us to do that not by leaders having a vision that was never thought of before - but by people living and trusting the vision that God gives to each of us, in the small daily acts of pouring ourselves out in love for one another.

In Christ we see a whole new world -- Paul says this in 2 Corinthians. We would do well to pay attention to it. And we do - when we celebrate the past by welcoming old friends home. We do that when we celebrate the future by naming the wonder of who we are today.

I guess my main hope for this whole homecoming weekend is that...we will see that whole new world even more clearly. I think this is always a possibility that arises from a good party. My observation though is that we think parties are not to be taken seriously. That's exactly the opposite. It is in the joy of the celebration that we truly know ourselves, that dreams get loosened up and shared, that laughter spills out and brings us health and healing. Nothing could be more important.

Old friends and new dreams all tied together. And through that -- a whole new world.

Risking the Truth, Sleeping in Indianapolis

2006-10-11T21:23:00.000-04:00

I visited my friend Mari yesterday. She had recently had to give away her car -- a 1960's vintage Chevy. She ran it until it didn't run anymore. I have ridden with her in it a few times. Bench seat, front and back. AM radio. Stick shift that takes a little muscle to move. It's got it all. But now it's dead. She had a hard time letting it go. But no one could get it running safely for her. She found an old 1970's Monte Carlo (though she's frustrated that it looks "mass produced") that she is driving now.

She gave her old car to the "kid" next door. He's in his early 20's. He often has other young men over to visit with him. She keeps an eye on her neighbors. She is always willing to be helpful -- within her limits. This was something she could do.

Sunday morning, just a short time after she had given the car away, she remembered that she had left some pliers under the driver's seat. She went to get them out and as she opened the door, she noticed something shift in the back seat. One of the young men, looked groggily up from the back seat. He had spent the night in the back of her former car. She told him it was alright -- to go back to sleep and that she was headed to church (she said she mentioned that last thing so that he might be comforted by her appearance).

She told me that she was sure that several of the young men are homeless. When she told her neighbor who she had given her car that she had found this young man in the car, he said "Oh, I told him that I could give him a ride home." She stared back at him and said, "I know he has no home."

She talked with me about the invisible homeless who are not at the shelters downtown but instead at places like this. We talked about young people. We talked about young people who grow up into young women and men without a home. We talked about the invisibility of so many people.

And I continued to think about how it is that God calls us to see and know the invisible. I don't know one thing -- ONE THING -- that I can do about this. But I'm glad I know about it. Because by knowing the truth, I might be able to see the gift that is there. If I don't see what is real and true, I won't be able to know anything else. I won't be able to learn what there is to learn, here.

I talked today with a friend who is struggling with a deep dark secret. And he thinks he is alone. He isn't. But he feels like he is. Because he doesn't want anyone to know the problem he is struggling with -- and it just makes him feel more alone. Talk about a Catch-22!

I wish my friend knew that there are others struggling with similar issues. Others in his church. Others in his community. I think that is one of the blessings that there is in the urban church. We know that we nobody is perfect. We can admit our brokeness and our need for healing. And we are a safe place for that. But my friend doesn't know that yet. He doesn't feel safe enough yet. At some point I hope he will risk the truth. I hope he will. Because his struggle is our gift -- it is a blessing that we can receive from in overflowing measure. But not if it remains invisible. I pray he will risk the truth. I pray for young men sleeping in cars. And I pray for the eyes to see.

Frank

2006-10-10T21:11:00.000-04:00

I wanted to show an overflowing cup. That's what the last month has been like. I can't believe that I haven't typed on this darn thing for that long. It's been a month of ups and downs and all arounds. So...instead of catching myself up all at once, let me try and take a moment and write about yesterday.

Yesterday was a full day. And last night I presided at a worship service celebrating the life of Frank who died late on Friday afternoon. His partner Peter and his son Justin were at his side. Others of his family gathered around as well. And on Monday night we came to sing our faith, to comfort one another in our grief, and to recall the witness of his life and to have a place, together, to express our gratitude.

Frank was an amazing man. He died as a result of pulmonary fibrosis. In the end he just couldn't breathe any more. But as I thought about Frank's life I thought of the courage with which he lived his life. He was from a small town in Northern Indiana. He married young. He and his wife adopted a baby boy and raised him. His wife died 20 plus years into their marriage. And he found his way into living his life as the gay man, he knew himself to be. It is a difficult thing to make such a move after a lifetime of living another life before the world. And it was not easy for him. But he did it. And in that he found a fuller happiness.

He had a loving son who considered his father his best friend. After his wife died, Justin and he took off to New York City and explored the city for several days - sightseeing and eating at all the restaurants they could stomach! One of my favorite Frank stories was of the gift that he got around his 40th birthday of a hot air balloon ride. The problem with his lungs had been diagnosed nearly 20 years before. I love the irony and the beauty of him floating on air, even as his lungs battled to take it in.

I thought of that passage from the 3rd chapter of the gospel of John. Mostly folks know it for the words "you must be born again" -- but it talks about being born of "water and the spirit" and of "the wind blowing where it will." I think Frank lived like that. I think he allowed himself to be grasped by the winds of the Spirit.

It is infuriating that the born again passage has been used by so many to argue for a religion of exclusion. Birth is in fact one of those moments when we know the presence of wonder in our lives. It is a moment when all things are possible. And what Nicodemus gets from Jesus is the opportunity to realize that the world is to be experienced again and again and again, as if we were born anew -- to the wonder that is life. Frank allowed for the possibility of wonder to fill his life. We can deny wonder. We can live as if we are not ever in its grasp. In fact we can do all sorts of dumb things like that. But Frank didn't. He allowed himself to be grasped by wonder. Perhaps because he had to gasp for so many breaths -- it made him appreciate the gifts of the spirit so much more.

Always cited in a list of the gifts of the Spirit is "gentleness." My friend Mary Ann gave me a book years ago on the spirituality of gentleness (I still could use to learn some of its lessons). Frank's gentleness came out of a life lived with courage. He was fearful of not being able to breath. And yet he tutored children in the program at our church. Other tutors talked about the way in which he calmed even the most energetic child whenever he was around them. It would have been easy to stay hidden away, not giving himself to others and the world. But that isn't the way he lived.

He lived, fearful, but not in fear. He lived a life open to the Spirit's working in him, in his life, and in his love.

He and Peter took a cruise near the end of his life. There is a wonderful photo of Frank sitting in the sand with the laves lapping around his legs in the Caribbean. Waves, I think, are like liquid wind. And in his hot air balloon ride I imagine he could see how guided by the wind, we can see the world from a whole new perspective. To one who longed for and lusted for air...Frank lived open to the winds of the Spirit. Finally leading him into a love that is still risky in this day and age and society. Finally leading him home. His cup overflowed. And mine does for having known him.

A Bar, A Park, and a Neighborhood

2006-09-13T06:31:00.000-04:00

What does Broadway think? What do I think? Those are the questions that have been asked of me lately as the pastor of Broadway UMC. People want to know about what Broadway thinks about the bar that is coming in to the Julia Carson building. And I've been frustrated that people ask me this question. Why am I frustrated? Because of all the things happening around our neighborhood this is probably the very least of all the concerns.

Here's my question: If the bar is a bad investment in this neighborhood -- where are the people proclaiming/working toward/making happen an alternative? It is only the chorus of "no's" that rain down on this effort. Less than a block away from the Julia Carson Center there stands a big empty lot - a huge empty lot at the northeast corner of Central and Fall Creek. It has been empty for the over 20 years I have known this community. Economic development efforts have been talked about but nobody has actually accomplished anything. Right behind the Julia Carson building at the Northwest corner of 28th and Central there is an abandoned storefront. I haven't seen any moves to do anything about that. It just sits there empty.

At the neighborhood association meeting last week television camera crews showed up to film what that group would have to say about it. I thought back to the summer when the Mapleton-Fall Creek Development Corporation held a celebration of the young people who graduated from high school this year who live in the neighborhood. One of the Colts was the Master of Ceremonies, the head of the 21st Century Scholars Program from the state was there, so were persons who are giving scholarships to young people graduating from the neighborhood. But did any television cameras show up for that? No.

We have learned over the past 9 months that our neighborhood is full of incredible entrepreneurs like Joe King who started a Hunting & Fishing Club (a first class operation) that seeks to work with the young people of our neighborhood (their neighborhood, too). We have learned that their are gardeners in nearly every other household. We have learned that there are talented artists, poets, and musicians. We have learned that there are people with positions of authority who live within our neighborhood. We have learned that there are people who really care about young people in our neighborhood.

Not one of those people did I see out there leading the fight against the bar. They were too busy doing their good work to pay attention to something that they knew would end up not having a very big, if any, effect on what they are doing. But it is disappointing when all the energy, all the goodness, all the gifts, all the spirit and hope that is alive in a place is ignored so that the politicians can play war with each other in the public eye.

The election season seems more and more like the WWF everytime I look around. A lot of body slamming and choreographed moves. No one gets hurt. People pay a lot of money. And, in the end, people's eyesight and attention is drawn away from the joy and music and beauty that is all around us. It is a challenge to think about how to amplify the sound of the singing that is the beauty of our community. We'll keep working on that. But it's time like these that seem to sap a bit of my energy at least.

Book Notes -- What's Going On?

2006-09-12T23:22:00.000-04:00

I can't figure out what's going on. Maybe I'm in a manic phase (some people think I'm ALWAYS in a manic phase). I don't usually have the huge down times though that those who I know who struggle with being manic have.

But scattered around my home and the church right now must be close to a dozen books that I have "started" reading.

Here are the titles (and a note about why I got them, if I can remember):

Rory Stewart's book about his walk across Afghanistan after September 11th called The Places In Between.
A Team of Rivals, by Doris Kearns Goodwin (recommended to me by the son of Granny D when we visited her at her home in New Hampshire).
Gandhi's Letters to Americans (I bought this here in the U.S. after spotting it first in Ooty, India in the year 2000)
Two books by Mike Tidwell: the first was written in 2003 and is entitled Bayou Farewell (it's about how the levee system in New Orleans is destroying the land) and the second book was written in the wake of Katrina and is called The Ravaging Tide -- I thought that reading these two together would be really interesting)
I'm reading a novel entitled The Walking Guide by Alan Cowell who has been a reporter around the world -- in many of the more current hot spots.
I'm reading Defying Hitler by Sebastian Hafner (it's been on my shelves for ages and been calling to me).
I'm reading a book entitled After by Steven Brill. It's his collection of stories of many different people (including Indiana's own Mitch Daniels) in the minutes, hours and days following September 11th).
Garrett Keizer's book The Enigma of Anger and Thich Nhat Hanh's book, simply entitled Anger are both on my list because of conversations that parishioners have had with me that has sent me to these books.
I also have been reading Dennis Ross's book The Missing Peace (about his involvement with the Peace Process in the Middle East over the last 20 years)

A pretty eclectic mix I know. But I can assure you that they are good reads. But the words of Marvin Gaye -- "What's Going On" -- keep ringing in my ears. I wonder if I should read more theology or "church books" from time to time (they sneak in there every once in awhile) - but these books give me insight into worlds that I might not otherwise know. I feel hungry and thirsty to see and know the world better. The different experiences of what it means to be human are endlessly interesting to me. And books open those worlds to me.

A September 11th Type of Day

2006-09-12T06:55:00.000-04:00

"In a time such as this, when we have been seriously and most cruelly hurt by those who hate us, and when we must consider ourselves to be gravely threatened by those same people, it is hard to speak of the ways of peace and to remember that Christ enjoined us to love our enemies, but this is no less necessary for being difficult." -- Wendell Berry, 2001

Yesterday I went to Big Hat Books in Broad Ripple to pick up a book I had ordered. Standing near the counter I listened as the woman who owns the place talked with a friend of hers about "having a September-11th type of day." She is from New York and she talked about the over 50 funerals that she had attended in the wake of the attacks in New York. She talked about how it had overwhelmed her this particular morning again and she talked about "tearing the whole side of her car off" as she was driving to the book store this morning.

As she was looking for the book that she had called to tell me had arrived, she kept up the patter. When she saw the title of the book I was getting she gave a scream and started talking about what a wonderful book it is. As she was ringing me up she said, "I'm giving you the September 11th discount for having to stand here listening to me." Then she said, "but I think you're a teacher so you get the discount anyway. Aren't you a teacher?" "No," I answered. Long pause. I decided to go ahead and tell her, "I'm a preacher." "Oh, that's soooo beautiful," she said. "Where." "Broadway United Methodist, down at Fall Creek and College." "Beautiful." She said, "Well, I'm giving you the preacher discount, but today it's the September 11th discount."

One of the things that struck me as she talked is that she did not talk out of a sense of defeatism or hopelessness or depression. It was more a sense of wonder that seemed to describe her feelings. Perhaps that seems obscene. But it didn't seem so standing there. I thought I saw in her something I've seen here or there over the last five years -- and that is not a person held in hostage by fear, nor a person oblivious to the very real threats and dangers of our day - but instead a person of faith and hope who looks at the world around herself, realistically, but still keeps moving ahead.

As we left my friend, Marc, said "that woman needs to have her own reality tv show." As we walked down the street we talked about a reality tv show on BookTV (C-Span 2) with her as the centerpiece. It would be great tv I'm sure. At the same time it is a reminder that there are folks like her all around us -- people with a sense of wonder -- in the amazing diversity that we human beings come packaged in. If we wait to see them until they pop up on the television screen, we'll miss the real McCoys' as they stand in front of us. And that would be a shame.

September 11th five years ago was my first day with a woman named Liz who became a good, good friend as we watched the Towers fall on the television in the church office. Later I sat down with her answering the phone and wrote letters to each of the children of our parish. I wanted them to hear from their church about what had happened, not only from the other parts of the culture around them. And I hoped that they might hold onto those letters across the years and that it might remind them that everything that happens in this old world deserves at least a shot to be seen through the lens of faith. Or at least genuine wonder (even in the midst of grief).

Forgiving Persistence

2006-09-04T20:34:00.000-04:00

In my devotions this morning I came across the following reading from a friend of mine by the name of Daniel Berrigan (from a book entitled Sorrow Built a Bridge):

Of this I am certain: of our calling to holiness, our vocation to persist, in season and out in the work of healing others, even as we seek healing for ourselves…
So we take heart. We commend the woman who quite simply, with all her heart, on behalf of someone she loved, refused to give up [the Syrophoenician woman of Mark 7.24-30]. We might think of her act as ‘forgiving persistence’ toward Christ. We might also wish to ponder a kind of ‘persistent forgiveness’ toward the church.
The woman refuses and persists. And so prevails.
And so must we. And so shall we.
We must forgive, deepen our love, persist in our conviction that even the church can be redeemed from sin.
In so fulfilling our vocation, we ourselves are healed.

These words come to me at a good time today. I think of people who I've sat with, walked with, talked with, prayed with, over the last few days. I know and hear the pain in their lives (and in my own) and yet I find myself so encouraged by the persistence that comes to seek healing from a friend, from a pastor, even from a stranger. That to me is hope...that reaching out, even when it seems like the storms of life are raging.
Yesterday, my car got towed. I parked in the wrong place downtown (at the wrong time) and so, feeling sick, I had to walk down to the County City building and pay my fine and find out where the car was to pick it up. I was feeling lousy and I walked in the door on the west side of the building and realized that I couldn't go in that way. The police officer by the door told me where I needed to go. And then, unexpectedly, he asked me where I was going. I told him, and he gave me a smile (at the end of a long day, I'm sure it wasn't the easiest thing to summon up) and told me where to go -- and with his words he commisserated with me (it's hard to say how, it's just that in how he spoke I knew I wasn't alone). This small act of kindness in a weary and sick day was a reminder to me of the small ways, in forgiving persistence, that we bless each other every day, and yet often are unaware.

First, the symmetry

2006-09-03T20:12:00.000-04:00

Tonight after arriving back home from the weekend with my family over in Cincinnati,I finished reading a book I had sitting around for awhile. It is entitled Evil: An Investigation and it is by Lance Morrow. In it he tells the following story: There is a story about the nineteenth-century naturalist Louis Agassiz.

When a student would come to his Harvard laboratories applying to study ichthyology with the great man, Agassiz would go to a shelf in his office and take down a jar of formaldehyde, from which he would withdraw a large dead fish. Placing the fish on a metal plate, he would hand it to the student with the words, "Study your fish."
The student would be instructed to sit in an adjoining room, with no texts and no instruments of any kind, and simply to look at the fish, to study it. Sometimes Agassiz would leave the student in there for hours.
The student at first would be mystified. But after a time, he would begin to do as he was instructed. He would study his fish. He would stare at it, first on one side and then th eother. And he would begin to notice, among other things, what?
First, the symmetry.
That the fish was a marvel of symmetry, a masterpiece of twinned features.

It is interesting to spend time with one's extended family. All of a sudden you begin to see "twinned features" between people that have perhaps missed your notice before.

We gathered to celebrate the 50th wedding anniversary of Kathy's Uncle Bob and Aunt Helen. Their five children were all there, along with their children. Kathy's sister and brother were there as well. I looked at the array of family and I began to see a symmetry that I hadn't always picked up on before. Perhaps the years of looking finally revealed something to me that was there in front of my eyes all along. It was fun to be there and see the varieties of symmetry's that could come from within one family. I saw the same thing around the dinner table at Kathy's folks home as we would gather for meals throughout the weekend and see Kathy and her sister and her brother revealing different dimensions and yet coming together to form each a unique symmetry. Very cool.

And it got me to thinking about the way in which we recognize each other in the church and in the community. Do we look for the ways in which there is symmetry and find ways to put those things together to create something new and amazing? Or do we look and shake our heads and think that nothing coming together is possible. In the church, at least, we do a bit of both.

In the community at large, I fear we rarely ever look for the symmetry. When violence takes off in the community we see it as someone else's problem (though, of course "we" have to do something about it). We have a hard time seeing our part of the symmetry. I see the same thing when I read the paper and see an article about "the breakdown of marriage" in the community -- and instead of looking for the symmetry -- we look for how to fix the people who are broken (you know the people whose "fault" this problem is -- take your pick, by the way, it's a smorgasbord!).

I yearn for vision that is able to see oneself and others we come across as belonging together in a symmetry. It's not my birthday, but I'll still close my eyes and make that wish tonight.

On Notice

2006-09-01T19:19:00.000-04:00

This is my "On Notice" Board. My sons have turned me on to the Colbert Report. I don't get to watch it much but one of the pieces on the show that has attracted me is the two boards he uses. The first board is the "On Notice" Board and the second one is the "Dead to Me" Board. While they seem self-explanatory enough, let me just say that the first board is those things which are getting under his skin and the second board is for those that he isn't going to even acknowledge their existence any more.

I've been feeling like an "On Notice" Board would come in handy around the house, as we all have things that get under our skin. I could have added many more of course. I could have a board just for theological terms that get under my skin. I could have a board just for the way in which it seems to me that the Christian church wastes the wonderful gifts of the spirit in the lives of the people of our congregations and communities. I could talk about the way the church treats the poor. The way that Christianity and the larger society tends to ignore racism and homophobia all in the interest of being "nice." It's just that it's really difficult to fill all those out on the little bit of room you have with an "On Notice" Board.

But what I like about it best of all is that it is a way in which I can laugh at things that make me all too angry. And that laughter ends up helping. It reminds me of the "minjung theology" from Korean tradition. One of the center pieces of this theology is a making fun of the powers that attempt to rule our lives. David James Duncan writes about it in his book God Laughs & Plays as well when he tells a story which concludes, "Those Lizard People, they think they run everything." That is certainly in the spirit of minjung theology and the concept of han. I hate ever feeling like a victim of the powers of this world or other people who try (deliberately or not so deliberately) to drive me nuts. And this is one of the ways to handle this.

One of the things I really appreciate about Stephen Colbert is his attempt to poke fun at things that make so many of us angry. And in the laughter, hope is revived.

So I offer my list which through the magic of the Internet I was able to upload so that it appears that the Colbert Report list is my own! What's on your list (or who)?

Happy Homecoming

2006-08-31T22:48:00.000-04:00

This is Chandra and BJ prior to their wedding outside of Broadway UMC.

This week has been a time of talking about the upcoming Homecoming celebration at Broadway (October 14 and 15). You can read about it at a special blog that has been set up by Troy Smythe. Check it out!

But I want to tell you a bit of how it looks from my perspective. I've been blessed to be one of the pastors here since 2003. But it's my second stint here as I was also one of the pastors from 1986-1991. So I guess you could say that I've already had my homecoming at Broadway!

There's a lot that changed in the 11 1/2 years I was gone from Broadway. But a lot that has remained constant as well. As I look across the long and rich history of this congregation I think of the amazing changes they have borne witness to across the years. Through the first World World, through the Great Depression, through the II World War, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, Watergate, assassinations and resignations the world has changed a lot. The late 1940's and early 1950's were a real hey day for churches in the United States. And it wasn't any different at Broadway. People poured into the limestone cathedral located on Fall Creek on the north side of the College bridge. There are photographs of people parked up and down Fall Creek Parkway. The place was packed. What a grand time.

Through the fifties and sixties though the numbers at Broadway went down the congregation that stayed showed incredible faith and steadfastness. And yet today the life around our place seems to be bursting out of the walls. I can't imagine what it was like to be around here 50 or 75 years ago, but I can hardly believe that it could possibly be a more beautiful, diverse, healthy, joyous, hopeful place than it is today.

This summer our 17 year old son Conor spent 7 weeks away from our family, in Spain (part of a language immersion program through IU). I've found myself meditating some on homecoming since his return. A couple days after he returned the two of us were at dinner together and I looked across the table and the thing that overwhelmed me was that I could see how happy he was. I loved that. He was happy because of the terrific experience he had over in Spain, he was happy to be home, just happy in life. And I thought to myself -- I hope that this will be the experience of people in coming home to Broadway this October. And I hope that if that indeed happens I'll be able to look across the table at the folks who have returned home and see in the faces the shining happiness that I could see in Conor's face. Part of that is on me, to recognize that in the faces of those around me.

The other thing that happened, that took me by surprise, was that Conor and Jordan, all of a sudden, miraculously it seemed to me, were getting along great. They are 4 1/2 years different and have gotten along quite like one might expect a couple of brothers to get along. But now it all seemed different. And like the happiness in Conor's face, I cannot explain it -- but I certainly hope to see that at Broadway's homecoming as well.

My bet is that old frustrations and arguments that have been had across the years will be forgotten as people see one another and recall the stories of good times (and hard times) with laughter and graciousness. Oh, I think there will be sadness as well, as people look around the room and miss those that are no longer with us, the saints of the faith, of our life together. But I think even that sadness will find comfort and (dare I say it) joy in the communion of the saints who have gathered and in the powerful memories and remembrance of times gone by.

And at the same time Conor's homecoming also reminded me that we do not live in the days before he left this summer. But, in fact, these are new days. I miss some of the old days -- I miss the days when Jordan at 1 year old would run to me as I presided at communion at Broadway Christian Parish and I would pick him up and hold him in my arms as I prayed the prayer of Great Thanksgiving. I miss the days of walking down the street in South Bend with Conor at 4 years old, as the murderous dog two doors down would bark so fiercely at us that I was convinced that he was going to bite a hole through his thick chain link fence and be feasting on us in seconds, but Conor would lift his voice in a sing-song calling "Hello, friend dog." But truly, though I miss those times, they will live in my memory forever. I will not ever hear again the same rhythmic tones of Conor's pre-pubescent voice with his freedom from fear or feel Jordan's arms around me at the altar -- but these new days are so good as well (and I hope I will look back on them and miss them as well, in the future).

The days ahead (both for our family and for this church) look full of promise. And it is fun to both live in these days, remember the past, and live in joyful anticipation of the future that lies ahead (even though we know that some of that future will have its share of burdens and pain and grief).

My gosh, I look forward to this. I look forward to the laughter and tears, the memories and challenges into the future. Happy Homecoming!

How To Throw A Great Party

2006-08-31T06:13:00.000-04:00

Last night my son Jordan sent me a paper on e-mail so that I could print it off on the printer for him. It was instructions on how he thought to throw a great party. Now -- that seems like a really great thing to think about. It's a gospel thought. I'm glad he's thinking about it and setting his ideas down in black and white. What do you have to say about how to throw a great party?

How To Throw A Great Party
By: Jordan Mather-Licht

There are a few essential things to throw a great party. I think there are eight essential things and one, not so essential. You will need invitations, a location, a proper chaperone, food, music, a date for the party, entertainment, and maybe a pool.
You can handwrite, create on the computer, or buy invitations. You can deliver them in many different ways. Some ways are e-mail, mail, hand delivered, or stick them in someone's locker at school. Keep in mind not everyone you invite will be able to come. Keep a list of everyone who says they can come.
You must decide on a location. Decide on a place big enough for all your guests. It needs to be somewhere where everyone can find it and it's not too remote. There will need to be room for dancing, snack tables, games, and chairs. Also be sure a chaperone is watching carefully to prevent anything illegal, lethal, or hazardous from happening.
Organization is also essential because without organizing everything who knows what could happen. Next snacks will be needed so everyone doesn't leave for food. You want to have a good outfit especially if you are the host. You will want decorations all around maybe just classic streamers etc. but nothing tacky.
You need the proper music that fits this time and age. You do want some activities like pin the tail on the donkey, but that is just a suggestion. A swimming pool is optional but it could be good. You don't just want random people at a party you probably want friends you have known for a while. Those are the essentials.
You want to pick a day when everyone can come. Like when they don't have an early curfew. You don't want a party that will last two days. The party should last a few hours and leave an hour to clean the decorations up. So timing is very important.
If you can afford it you might want to book some entertainment, but don't max out your parents credit cards. If you do hire someone you just want a singer or something. If you can, get a comedian. Just watch your budget.
Never promise anything you can't deliver or else you can be in a lot of trouble with your guests. So be careful of what you say. Don't try too hard to impress your guests. Just be yourself and you'll do fine. That is how you throw a great party.

Drinking Deep of the Spirit

2006-08-20T20:50:00.000-04:00

The letter to the Ephesians today challenged us to drink deep of the Spirit. And the passage from I Kings told us that Solomon prayed for a "God-listening heart." I look out at the congregation each Sunday (and whenever I encounter them and others throughout the week) and I struggle to see whether I am living out what I am trying to do. I fail a lot. I've been meaning to teach a Bible Study around this place for months. Months! And I just haven't been able to get it together. Finally it happened. We'll do it beginning in September. It's the first time I'm not just doing a book of the Bible by itself. Instead it will be a class on Bible Study, the Indianapolis Star, and the Indianapolis Recorder. I keep thinking of the old Karl Barth comment that we should read the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other. So we'll do that for several weeks this fall. (But I digress -- I was talking about drinking deep of the spirit).

I think of several conversations this morning. One was with Duane, who is the chair of our Committee on Lay Leadership. I love what he is doing and the way he is leading that body. The discussions that the group has about people in the congregation and larger community is exhilarating and sometimes overwhelming (but mostly in the best way). I talked with Dan who is struggling with his father's illness. I talked with Betty and Howard who served communion at the 8:30 service -- and did so with easy laughter and generous hearts. I talked with Debbie and her dad, Don who promised to get me some blackberry jam that he had just received a case of from a friend in Oregon. Oh yes, I get to drink deep of the Spirit here.

I talked with Bob about his work on the school board in his community. I loved hearing him reflect on that important work and his process of discernment on how to be most helpful to his community -- and his congregation. I watched Jim, the head usher, train young Daniel and Mari in acolyting. They made several passes down the center aisle. I stopped and hugged Bill -- a friend from my first tenure in the congregation -- who always has a generous and gracious word for me. At the passing of the Peace, Margaret came and gave me a big hug -- that always makes me feel good to get a hug from her. Frank sang beautifully. Peter talked with me about what has been going on in his life. And Frank told me about his battle with his illness this week -- and then I watched as George ran up and asked if he could give him the flowers from the altar to brighten up their home in the midst of his illness. Chris and I sat and talked about some of the folks from here who took a trip out to San Francisco last week and what it had caused him to be thinking about.

Kathy, Conor, Jordan and I went out to lunch with Lonnie and talked and laughed as we told him about our experience with watching the movie "Little Miss Sunshine" last night. Afterwards we came home and each had a piece of the Milky Way cake that Kathy had made yesterday. And then I fell asleep at the table. I was thinking about the passage from Ephesians and how it talks about drinking deep of the spirit in the same place that it urges temperance in drinking alcohol. I guess I must have been drinking deep, because I fell asleep at the table as we talked.

Later Marc called and we talked together about his internship, about mutual friends, and about how we make change. Great talk. Good things are happening. What a blessing to drink deep of the spirit in this place.

Where to Begin

2006-08-18T21:33:00.000-04:00

It's hard to know where to begin. The last blog entry I made was an angry one. Since I wrote it there has been more violence here in Indianapolis. Since I wrote it I have been gone for about a week to the Chautauqua Institute in New York. Since I wrote it I have been in and out of the office, in and out of hospital rooms, in and out of telephone conversations, and in and out of my home. I've sat and talked with my friend Mari about grief, I've sat in on church meetings where we talked about the church we have here in wide ranging conversations (asking great questions from my perspective). I read seven books (most of them top notch). Conor has started his senior year in high school and Jordan has started 7th grade. It's been an eventful 12 days -- that's for sure.

So -- what do I write about? Where do I start? My homiletics professor from Drew, Charles Rice, would say "where do you start a sermon? Pick a place and start." So here goes.

Today I sat with my friend and co-worker Jack and we talked about worship at Broadway. We talked about how we help the worship of the people who gather at Broadway form us as people of God. Today I called a friend who was giving a job reference for someone we are considering hiring. On his voice mail the friend said, "May God fill your life with Blessings." (or something like that). I reacted against the message. I thought to myself "We don't need to ask God for blessings -- we need God to relieve our blindness from seeing and knowing the blessings that are in our lives." But what does that mean for us when we gather for worship and when violence and poverty and injustice continue to abound? Today I finally got a response to the letter posted on this blog that I had written to the bishop. He seems open to continuing the conversation. But one of the things he mentioned in his brief response was that he thinks that "justice ministries" should be more focused on at Annual Conference. I wanted to scream "AARRRGGGHHH." Programs aren't going to solve this problem. The problem will begin to be solved -- when the Cabinet sits down to make a decision and they begin by saying -- "we need to put our best clergy in the places that have the lowest income. Because that's where the realm of God is really breaking through and we can't afford to waste seeing it." or "Have you heard about the violence in the Indianapolis area? What are you guys (the two Indianapolis District Superintendents) seeing happen in response to this? What are your congregations doing in relationship to this? What are the people of your districts (not only the church folk, but the people who live in the boundaries of your districts) saying?" But here's the problem. No one is asking them the question.

Andre Lake was one of the last of the 13 murders that have occurred over the last three weeks here in Indianapolis. Andre was a little boy who lived five doors from the church when I lived here in the late 80's, early 90's. He always had an easy smile -- he was a person that made you feel better just by his being around. He was a person who built you up just by being in his presence. And now he's dead. And I've been to meetings and one on one conversations a lot over the past few weeks -- and it's extremely rare to hear this topic come up. I'm not trying to suggest that we all get together and weep and wail. In fact one of the most frustrating things is that I know some "institutional" people (people from the Police Department and other institutions) have gotten together to share their answers. The problem is that those answers are the same ones that they have had for years and years and years. Maybe things shouldn't start with answers, but with questions.

Where to begin? We begin by asking the right questions in the places that we are. We begin by not shying away -- but by jumping right into the tough questions. Because if we don't ask them, they certainly won't be asked anywhere else. Let's do it. And feel good about it. It is our gift.

Talk about these things. If need be -- go sit with family members, friends and neighbors of those who have died. Listen to their stories, and their grief. Pray together. Hold hands. Listen. Something will come. Something will arise. And I'mm pretty sure that what won't arise is glib answers like "mentoring programs" or "community centers" -- but instead, if we listen closely, we can recognize the blessings that God has around us not only this minute, but each and every minute. And if we pay attention I think we can begin to see the mentors that are already there and we can find ways to support, encourage and pray for them. And that will begin to make more of a difference than we can imagine.

We Are At War?

2006-08-06T18:33:00.000-04:00

The headline of the Indianapolis Star Sunday morning was – We Are At War. It seems an unfortunate choice of words. If we have learned anything about war these last few years it is that it is not solved by overwhelming force and tightly cordoned off communities. This week our own military leaders spoke of the growing civil war that they fear in Iraq. They agreed that things are worse than they were a year ago in this regard. What has come out of the Iraq war that we can learn from in our own community? It is what Paul talks about in the text from Ephesians we read on Sunday – it is being robust in love that works. The clearest and most helpful information I hear from Iraq is from those who have chosen to work alongside those that threaten them, not those who seek to destroy those that threaten them. They seek to make friends, rather than to punish. There are military leaders who are working with civilian leaders there on the ground – just way too few.

In the headline I see a city that is more concerned about a new stadium for its football team than it is for children who will live in the shadow of that building. It makes me think of a city where there is much brick and mortar work done in rebuilding the crumbling buildings and houses in the area just south of us – but the people who used to live there are just simply shuffled around to new areas of the city. What if the same investment that has been made south of the creek in the land and the buildings was made in the lives of the people of this city? What if the same amount of money that has been committed to the new Colts stadium (at least in tax breaks) was committed to the lives of young people who will grow up not only to be football players but scientists and doctors and teachers and business people in this community? Why? Because it’s easier, they say, to “sell” investors on buildings than it is to “sell” investors on the lives of people who will live in those buildings or who will attend those games. What a shame. What a shame. We have lost our capacity to believe…in the living bread. And it is a shame.

Friday Quotes, part 2

2006-08-04T09:05:00.000-04:00

I do quite a bit of reading every week and I can't share all of it (it's just too much) -- but here are some of the highlights from this week. This first from the book The Best Day the Worst Day: Life with Jane Kenyon by Donald Hall (a memoir of Jane Kenyon's dying at age 47)

Meantime we lived in a house of poetry, which was also the house of love and grief; the house of solitude and art; the house of Jane's depression and my cancers and Jane's leukemia. When someone died whom we loved, we went back to the poets of grief and aoutrage, as far back as Gilgamesh; often I read aloud Henry King's "The Exequy," written in the seventeenth century after the death of his young wife. Poetry gives the griever not release from grief but companionship in grief. Poetry embodies the cmoplexity of feelings at their most intense and entangled, and therefore offers (over centuries, or over no time at all) the company of tears.

The reading that comes to mind is shaded by life. Yesterday, my friend Shary's brother Dean died after a battle with cancer. She and his family were by his side.

In the midst of all the craziness in the Middle East this poem of Wendell Berry's came to my sight this week (from his book Entries)

A Lover's Song
When I was young and lately wed
and every fissionable head
Of this super power or that
Prepared the ultimate combat,
Gambling against eternity
To earn a timely victory
And end all time to win a day,
"Tomorrow let it end," I'd pray,
"If it must end, but not tonight."
And they were wrong and I was right;
It's love that keeps the world alive
Beyond hate's genius to contrive.

This week, as always, around here has been a time of meeting new folks who walk in looking for help with rent or a utility bill. The question always comes -- What to do in the midst of such questions." I picked up a book I really love by Donna Schaper. It's the first one of hers I ever read back in 1991. The title is A Book of Common Power: Narratives against the current.

My so-called ministry with the poor is not tender, or gentle, or even kind. It has had most of its softness stripped away. Confronted with a request for assistance, I never yield unitl at least three nasty questions are asked. How did you get yourself into this mess? How are you going to get yourself out of this mess? And who besides me and God, is going to help you? I then invite the stranger to worship and start telling him or her just how much help our congregation needs. We are desperate for their leadership and participation. They don't believe me, but it is true.

I've been reading for the last several weeks an old book (1977) by Howell Raines entitled My Soul Is Rested: The Story of the Civil Rights Movement in the Deep South. It is entirely a collection of interviews with participants and witnesses to what was happening in the Civil Rights Movement. Yesterday I read an interview with Amzie Moore who is described by Raines this way: "The U.S. Army made him a man, his own man, when it sent him from the segregated Delta to a segregated unit in the Pacific in World World II. 'Here I'm being shipped overseas, and I been segregated from this man whom I might have to save or he save my life. I didn't fail to tell it.' He kept on telling it when he got home to the steamy Delta town of Cleveland [Mississippi] in 1946."

But when an individual stood at a courthouse like the courthouse in Greenwood and in Greenville and watched tiny figures [of the SNCC workers] standing against a huge column...[against white] triggermen and drivers and lookout men riding in automobiles with automatic guns...how they stood...how gladly they got in front of that line, those leaders, and went to jail! It didn't seem to bother 'em. it was an awakening for me...

The Best Part is the Blessing

2006-08-03T22:15:00.000-04:00

I was talking with my friend Phil Amerson this afternoon while he is out in San Diego. He is there attending a conference on Church Redevelopment. He's giving a speech on urban ministry and he wanted to read me some things he had put together. It's going to be one heck of a speech, I can tell. He talked about being a five year old and hearing a man call for his father, the preacher, from out in the street. Even at that young age, he said, he knew such sounds. And even though the man was using curse words in his calling out for his father, he knew that his father's presence with the man was redemptive. Phil says, "redemption is beautiful." He went on to say -- we've given up on redemption. I'm afraid he is right. I was talking with my friend Chad today and he was telling me about the district superintendent who told him and his congregation that he was being appointed there "as hospice." In other words he was telling the congregation, and this new young pastor, that they were dead. We have sold ourselves out for technique. We think that if we just did things right then everything would be okay. That's just not so. We can't fix the system. We can't even fix each other.

Tonight I was on a panel on Health Care at a community forum at another church in our city. I was glad to be there. The keynote speaker -- a physician and politician from Kentucky was brilliant. But before he spoke and before the panelists spoke - there were testimonies from five people who have struggled with the high cost of health care and the effect on their lives and their families. They were moving and each one different. They all told a little different story of what it's like to be caught in a trap that they cannot find their way out. A grandmother spoke about her "million dollar grandson." She and her husband have lost their house as they have been helping their daughter and her husband to keep the medicine coming that the child needs to stay alive...and to keep the oxygen tank rented so that it wouldn't be repossessed when they child still needed it to breath. A man read a letter from his wife, who was supposed to be there to testify, but she was too ill. The letter ended with her cry that she sometimes wished she was dead so that she would no longer be a burden on her family. After the evening was over an acquaintenance came over to speak to me. The man with her thanked me for my words. She didn't. She said, "I wish we would have taken up an offering for Mr. Cooper [one of the testifiers] -- but I felt like they were just window dressing/entertainment for the experts." She took off her glasses as her eyes and nose glowed red -- "I don't like it when we do that." I understand her frustration. It would have been the one truly helpful thing that might have happened tonight. Every thing else was so much hot air -- and self congratulation that we all recognize the problem and that something must be done. But in the meantime we simply walk away from the stories that are shared. We don't talk with each other. Pray with each other. Encourage each other. We just look uncomfortable and move to the other side of the room and try not to make eye contact.

Back to urban ministry and Chad. I said to Phil what I had said to Chad earlier in the day. "Wouldn't it be great if a district superintendent would come to each of the churches in the city, would lay her/his hands on each member of the congregation -- would offer a word of thanksgiving to the gathered church -- in thanks for staying in the city when so many across the years had fled. Thank them for the blessing they are to the denomination. Thank them for bearing witness across the years to the grace and abundance of God in the midst of a downhill slide and increasing poverty. And then anoint each person in the congregation with oil." Why is it so hard to imagine such a thing. Instead all that can be imagined is that we would offer the latest technique to solve the problem. I don't mind the techniques. Some of them are quite good. They are good. But they aren't God. And that's the problem. There are plenty who will bear witness to the efficacy of the latest techniques...but instead of holding onto both the technique and the blessing -- the trust and faith in the redemptive power of God -- we think we can only have the technique and not the blessing. Man that sucks. The best part is the blessing. It's like getting oreos with all the insides scraped out.

Let me tell you I feel uncomfortable a lot -- a whole lot. The tears of the woman at the meeting tonight are a reminder that redemption is what we have to offer. Not answers - but listening and praying with each other...Not avoiding each other because we don't have an answer. So...my goal for tomorrow is to remember the best part is the blessing -- to offer it when I don't have any answers especially.

Forceful Liturgy

2006-08-02T22:30:00.000-04:00

The picture here takes the place of one I could not find. It is a photo of U.S. soldiers in Iraq grieving the death of a fellow soldier. Last week I was chatting with Mari Evans and she mentioned an image I remember seeing as well. It appeared in Newsweek. It showed soldiers gathered into a small space in Iraq. In the photograph was also a pile of stones that the soldiers had put together to commemorate their friend who had died. Each of them had taken a stone and written a message to their buddy and their friend on the stone and then in a grieving liturgy they had created this pile, this makeshift memorial for their friends memory. Mari talked about what a powerful image that was and how if she had been there and participated in such a thing she would have walked out of their angry enough to want to kill someone -- to lash out in grief and rage at the next person who came along who you might blame. Who knows whether that happened...but I cannot help but think of that ever since our conversation because it made me think of two things. One it made me think of the battles that are raging in the Middle East even as I type these words. I think of how it is not only the soldiers who are grieving in ways that perhaps build up and upon the rage rather than heal it...but also the civilians as their body tolls rise in both Israel and Lebanon (not to mention Iraq). There will be funerals galore...will those funerals be liturgies of healing or liturgies that will deepen the divisions and pain between peoples (of course no liturgy can erase the pain, for example, of a child's death -- but it can address the pain or it can feed the pain and rage). The United Methodist Book of Resolutions (I can't believe I'm quoting it here) says that war is incompatible with Christian teaching. And one doesn't have any doubt living in the midst of it -- or even watching it on our television screens.

The other question that image raises for me, though -- is how do the rituals the liturgies that we participate in, as the community gathers for worship on a weekly basis, shape us, form us? Every Sunday we gather for worship at Broadway -- how is it that the images and symbols that we use (not to mention our words and music) shape our lives, the choices we make, the people we are and that we are becoming? As a worship leader I don't believe I think clearly or creatively enough about this issue. When we share the peace of Christ in worship, we often find ourselves extending a hand or a hug to someone who we have had problems with in the past week or months or perhaps years ago. Yet...we "practice" our faith -- we practice the peace, in hopes and with faith that peace is there. But perhaps we are just going through the motions. Are we providing ways for one another to participate in our life together that more likely works for our healing -- that shapes us in ways that cause us to consider the choices we make each day to recognize God's presence and love even when things are miserable? I just don't know. But I'm glad to be wrestling with this question.

I worry that in our worship and in the commodity that has become Christianity in the United States we have made worship so nice that it doesn't shape us, it doesn't challenge us, it simply becomes a marker along the road that says "you're a nice person, you are doing alright, don't worry about a thing, you've checked the religion thing off on your checklist this week - now move on to the next thing -- i.e. trips to the grocery store, teeth cleaning, volunteer work, and then home to bed).

At the same time I see examples every week of ways in which the liturgy and language of faith intrudes on the choices of Christian people I am around. But I wonder still if we cannot be more thoughtful and creative about the opportunities we give to people to meet that in our corporate worship. Hmmmm.

Friday Quotes

2006-07-21T09:01:00.000-04:00

Every week I come across interesting things in my reading. I thought I'd share a few of them here.

I came across this in some reading today. "I see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes me to tremble for the safety of my country. As a result of the war, corporations have been enthroned and an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money power of the country will endeavour to prolong its reign by working upon the prejudices of the people until all wealth is aggregated in a few hands and the Republic is destroyed."

The author of these words? Abraham Lincoln.

The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried. G. K. Chesterton

The Baptist sage Will Campbell calls televangelists "electronic soul-molesters." I like the justified revulsion in this comment, but as a believer in the Vedantic atma I feel that the soul, though being capable of being smothered, is ultimately unmolestable. Televangelists remind me more of people who, on a cold dark night, when you're huddled up by a small, carefully tended, soulful little campfire, drag over thirteen plaster statues of Jesus and the Apostles and a fourteenth bronze statue of that fine old sexist, St. Paul, plus a three-ton titanium-covered edition of the Americanized and bowdlerized and reified Metallic Bible, and throw them all on your little fire, smothering the flames. As you huddle in the dark, freezing your ass off, the televangelist defends his effrontery by claiming it's the plastic statues and Metal Bible you need, not your life-giving fire. He then pulls out an offering plate and asks you to pay him for what he's done. David James Duncan

In organizations of the old story, plans and designs are constantly being imposed. People are told what to do all the time. As a final insult, we go outside the organization to look for answers, returning with benchmarks that we offer up as great gifts. Yet those in the organization can only see these packaged solutions as insults. Their creativity has been dismissed, their opportunity to discover something new for the organization has been denied. When we deny life's need to create, life pushes back. We label it resistance and invent strategies to overcome it. But we would do far better if we changed the story and learned how to invoke the resident creativity of those in our organization. We need to work with these insistent creative forces or they will be provoked to work against us. Margaret Wheatley