Category Archives: Faith

Starting Out and Starting Over

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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Through ten years, between 1964 and 1973, scholarships, fellowships, and grants got me through college and seminary. I worked and studied mostly through the benevolence of others. The savings from my work before college disappeared in costs for the first year. What I earned during the summers or working during the school years disappeared almost immediately. I felt fortunate to leave the years of private institutional education with no debts and no bank account, a talented wife and two small children. I needed a job.

For months I interviewed with churches and church-related institutions. I felt qualified to be a pastor, or a college or hospital chaplain, or a librarian based on years of working in and for libraries.  My academic record no longer impressed anyone. My denominational connections were tenuous. Clearly wealthy suburban congregations did not see anything in my resume or presentations that convinced them. I was going to start small or as an assistant to someone. Who and where?

In the interviews I was my own worst enemy. I asked questions that no one wanted to hear. How often do you examine social issues, such as race and war and poverty and hunger, in preaching and study groups? How many bible study or issue study groups do you have? (Study groups? What are they?) Is the church involved in serving its community? Providing food, housing, help in finding jobs? (I couldn’t find my own job, let alone help someone else find employment.) One church was offended when they bragged about the success of their dartball teams, and I asked them what dartball was. The discussion went downhill after that. Clearly I was on a different wavelength than my interviewers.

Along the way, the United Church of Tilton, where I had served part-time for a year as a pastoral intern, asked me to come for an interview. Tilton was an industrial village at the edge of the much larger community of Danville, Illinois. The General Motors Foundry was the largest employer, but there were several other factories and a railroad yard in the town. This congregation had blended a few Methodists with a few Congregational-Christians and started over. They built a new building, in large part with volunteer labor, and they had started building a new parsonage. They only had thirty members, but they obviously had courage and faith. Would I take the chance to be their first full-time pastor in decades?

I had grown up on a farm fifty miles away, but this mostly union-member, blue collar community, with decidedly southern accents, was like foreign territory. Racial prejudice lay barely under the surface of a lot of comments, and a college education was suspect among some of them. Biblical literalism was the standard, and the church songbook came right out of old-time Gospel radio. Could I serve them?

The commitment and devotion of this small group won me over. They took a chance on me, and Jan and I took a chance on them and accepted their invitation. A year later they gathered around me in an ordination. Within a few years the membership had doubled and then doubled again and again. Their per capita stewardship led the Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ, although the composition of the congregation looked decidedly different than most of the rural and urban congregations of the UCC.

We had our challenges there. School desegregation, poor economy and loss of jobs, religious fundamentalism and the critical judgment of other Christians, problem pregnancy counseling, competition among congregations for members and support, physical and emotional abuse in families, drugs and alcohol—these all brought plenty of tearful times. We also had successes—reorganizing the abandoned town cemetery, senior adult meals, youth programs and work trips, men’s and women’s and couple’s fellowship experiences, and, yes, study groups. After seven more years I thought that it was time to move on and seek new ministries, and let them show that their faith could keep growing with new leadership, which of course they did.

The Problem Pregnancy Counseling Service

04 Wednesday Jan 2017

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My move to my first full-time parish at Tilton coincided with an important national decision—the Supreme Court ruling in Roe vs. Wade. Legal abortion, formerly restricted to a few states and people of wealth, was then available through qualified medical facilities to every first and second trimester pregnant woman at relatively low cost. Two local obstetrician-gynecologists and workers in the county health department realized that they had a challenge on their hands. Who would provide counseling to the many women who now had a choice that they did not have previously?

The doctors and health workers did not feel ready or able to counsel at length with women who were facing new and legal options for which they had not prepared. The two OB-GYNE doctors disagreed between themselves about the morality of the new option. The health workers had mixed feelings. They turned to local ministers, asking for ministers and other counselors who were concerned to join in providing free, confidential, and non-directive counseling to women who desired it. Eight ministers and counselors responded.

The sticking point was the need to be non-directive, not to tell women what to do, not to impose a religious position, but to be willing to listen to different circumstances and needs and religious positions, explore feelings, provide information that was as objective as possible, and let women make their own final decisions. We all faced a steep learning curve, gathering information on all options that were available, including the medical facilities that provided abortions, procedures used, and costs involved, as well as the ethical and psychological considerations that women and their partners and families might face, whichever decision they made. Available resources for supporting a new child or adoption were necessary as well. Before we began, we developed a standard list of themes that would be a part of each session, and we revised it regularly.

The Problem Pregnancy Counseling Service continued for the next seven years. The counselors met together regularly to compare and enhance what we were learning, to recruit and replace counselors, and to support one another in emotional struggles. Not everyone of the original group could maintain the standards that we had imposed on ourselves, nor did new volunteers find them easy. At the end of that time, the polarization of abortion as an issue had grown to make non-directive counseling sound like ‘permissive’ or ‘encouraging’ to outsiders, so the counseling pool had shrunk and recruitment of new counselors became politicized. Women and doctors were more familiar with their own options as people had made their separate decisions and shared them with others. Fewer women were asking for counseling. We disbanded.

What had we learned as counselors? There was no standard case of a woman coming for counseling. Women’s motivations and circumstances varied enormously, and our awareness of heart-wrenching circumstances and difficult decisions expanded. Male partners were seldom available for support. We varied among ourselves in our ability to empathize or offer emotional support to those who came to us. We also had to deal with our own grief and depend on others for support. The politics of the issue made abortion more accessible to some and more difficult for many. What had long been an illegal underground activity remained part of an emotionally charged secret, as ‘underground’ as ever, although usually without the dire medical consequences of local illegal abortions.

None of us were immune to the personal threats that were directed at us from abortion absolutists. Yet all of us had people come to us later thanking us for help in their difficult times.  We would face the same issues again wherever we were, but not with the frequency or intensity of those seven years.

A Church Finds Ways to Reach Out to Others

03 Tuesday Jan 2017

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St. Paul’s Church in Minonk supposedly had six hundred members when they called me to be their pastor. About fifty of that number turned out to have no names, but they were still a substantial congregation. Many were related to each other after four generations of German family intermarriage. The town of Minonk was 2400 in population and rapidly shrinking, due both to the elderly imbalance of its citizens and to the loss of industrial jobs in its area. Clearly St. Paul’s dominated the five congregations in the town in size, but that had not resulted in taking more responsibility for community life.

They did take part in the one social service project of the town, sponsored by the Ministerial Association (the four ministers—the fifth coming a distance only on Sunday), and that was home-delivered meals prepared by the nursing home and delivered by church volunteers. That was a beginning, anyway. Otherwise the town had only the local community services that were provided by town government, namely the police, fire and rescue services. Lions Club, Scouts, and 4-H did occasional helpful projects. As poor people moved into Minonk to take advantage of low-cost housing, there was not much more to serve their needs.

St. Paul’s had mostly looked after its own needs, caring for one another in family duty. When a 4-H club, led by congregation members, asked to use the church facilities for regular meetings, it was the first such request that any of the current leaders could remember. They hesitated, but the argument that they should serve more people in the community won the vote. There was not much sacrifice in providing a free location for a 4-H club.

The next steps were harder. It was clear that more people were having a difficult time making ends meet. Food banks were beginning to make an appearance in the larger communities in the region, and access to surplus and donated food was simple, given pick-up vehicles, a few volunteers, and a place to distribute. A few church members saw the need, provided some volunteers, two of whom loaned the use of their trucks. The city provided space in an  old city hall, if another organization took responsibility for staffing and liability insurance, which St. Paul’s insurance provider was willing to do. The Ministerial Association recruited a few more volunteers. With St. Paul’s members in the lead, the church gave its approval of the project. Food and money donations came in and the pantry was underway. (Several years later, outgrowing the old city hall, the church provided space in underused accessible rooms.)

After a few months, a local restauranteur volunteered to provide a Christmas party to needy children of the area, and she asked the food pantry to gather a list of children to be invited, along with gift requests. The food pantry clients happily cooperated. St. Paul’s and another congregation sought volunteer sponsors, and there were enough to cover the fifty children who were the anonymous recipients. St. Paul’s Youth agreed to wrap and identify the gifts with the number tags that maintained the anonymity. So, Santa’s Helpers was born, and continued year after year.

The people who had for several years gathered clothing to take to Goodwill and other groups in larger communities found that they could distribute coats and shoes and other items in town at the food pantry before they took the surplus to other places.

Requests for counseling increased as the newer residents found that they had a home in Minonk and people who cared about them. The four ministers reported that their counseling loads were increasing with people outside their congregations. We investigated the resources available in the area and places to refer people in need for those situations that exceeded our abilities.

Eventually St. Paul’s would hire an associate pastor who provided a children and family program for several years, although the funding for that effort became too great a burden to bear.

St. Paul’s Church always had plenty to do to take care of their own members, but a shrinking town population and the diminishing power of extended family ties did not keep them from growing in their care for others.

Moral Man and Immoral Society Reread

02 Monday Jan 2017

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It was 1968, for the last semester of my senior year at Illinois Wesleyan, and I requested permission from Paul Bushnell, the head of the history department, to join the senior seminar in history. That would not be surprising, but I had never taken a history course at IWU, except the History of Christianity that was taught in the religion department. My theory had been, “Why take a course in a field that was my hobby anyway?” Paul Bushnell invited me into the seminar.

He knew what I intended to do, which was to study as much of Reinhold Niebuhr’s writing as possible, leading up to his 1932 work Moral Man and Immoral Society. Another course had required the reading of that book. My interest was to trace the historical sources of his insight, that there is a “basic difference between the morality of individuals and the morality of collectives” that makes it exceedingly hard for groups to check impulses, transcend their own needs, comprehend the needs of others, and restrain their own egoism. He did not imply that this is easy for individuals, just that it is much harder for groups.

The method for the course began with collecting every essay Niebuhr had written before his book was published, and many afterwards, since 1932 was just the beginning of his application of the insight into the development of the Third Reich. In addition to English, as a German reader and writer, his awareness of German developments exceeded most of his contemporaries. I had not even begun to read German yet, so I had to rely on others’ translations of his German essays. The library of the University of Illinois was nearby, and their collection provided over a hundred essays that I could not find elsewhere, as well as a photocopier that worked, and I emptied my wallet making copies.

I was lost in a forest of insights. How could a pastor, occupied with the needs of his Detroit parish, find the time to delve so deeply into the social conditions of his nation and his world? Some relief came with the personal reflections in Niebuhr’s Leaves from the Notebook of a Tamed Cynic. Niebuhr was human, after all. He was also totally immersed in thoughtful analysis of “the disproportions of power in society” and “the stubborn resistance of group egoism to all moral and inclusive social objectives.”  People hold onto their prejudices, hypocrisies, and dishonesties, and use them to justify the privileges they enjoy or seek. The powerful are more likely to be personally generous with a portion of their wealth than to grant structural change for social justice.

Essay by essay Niebuhr built a catalogue of social wrongs from police suppression of labor demonstrations, to legal and extra-legal racial discrimination, to Nazi scapegoating of Jews, Romani, and “non-Aryans.” He was a persistent witness to the continuing struggle of one group or class of people over another, seeking vengeance and employing vindictiveness in repositioning themselves, and using any and every means to justify their actions, even from a moral point of view. “Society needs greater equality, not only to advance but to survive….”

Occasionally I look over that dog-eared collection of essays and that most popular book that summarized them all, with its many underlined passages. Circumstances and characters have changed; in significant ways they remain the same. How contemporary the insights appear.

A Panegyric Upon Plymouth

24 Thursday Nov 2016

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The only time I have been invited to preach at a college chapel service was for Illinois Wesleyan University just before Thanksgiving in 1969. I chose the presumptuous title of “A Panegyric Upon Plymouth” as my sermon title, drawing from Soren Kierkegaard’s “A Panegyric Upon Abraham” and the historical fictions surrounding the founding of Thanksgiving as a national holiday.

A panegyric is supposed to be an oration or public address in praise of something or someone. By using the scripture of the Pharisee and the publican as the scripture text for the sermon, my praise was reserved for the publican who approached God humbly and with repentance, in contrast with the Pharisee who proudly thanked God that he was not like other people because he was so much better. With no small amount of sarcasm, I compared the Pharisee to the usual message of thanksgiving in America and expressed the hope that we would learn to use the publican as a model instead.

My delivery was not so good that evening. I recall that my wife compared it to a dirge, since it was slow and halting. I was nervous and had never preached to a college audience in such a formal setting. My mentor, Chaplain Bill White, gave me the benefit of the doubt and said that sometimes it takes a while for a message to sink in and later people come it understand it better. Probably they would understand it from someone else who spoke it more effectively.

Maybe no one else understands that message better, but I do. If the legend of Thanksgiving bears any truth, it is in the generosity and good will of the Wampanoag people in helping the pilgrims to survive, even though the Wampanoag themselves had suffered the worst decade of their own existence as a people. As a result of the pilgrims and the actions of later puritans, we can attest that “no good deed goes unpunished.”

When President Barack Obama addressed the Arab nations in Egypt early in his presidency, expressing regret for some of the actions and attitudes represented in United States’ interventions in the Middle East (never using the word ‘apology’ although that was later used by Obama’s critics), my thoughts returned to my earlier diagnosis of American pride. We have not learned to be humble supplicants to a gracious and merciful God. Our ideas of American greatness are distorted and deadly to the future of the earth. We need to appreciate the humanity that we share with people everywhere, and realize the failures that also come with that humanity. We need to learn humbly from each other. We can only be grateful that God has given much more, much more than we deserve, and perhaps we will have more chances to do some good with what we have received.    

Making Dreams Come True

12 Saturday Nov 2016

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hot-owl-southern-white-faced-owl-in-botswana-trying-to-keep-coolThe evening before the election, I heard Donald Trump say, “I will make all your dreams come true.”

I have a lot of dreams. Since the days of studying both Carl Jung and Gestalt Therapy, I have taken my own dreams and other people’s dreams seriously. These may not be the dreams Donald Trump had in mind, but sleeping dreams reveal much about us and the world we live in.

In the days before the election of George W. Bush, I dreamed repeatedly about going to war with Iraq again. A year before 9/11 and two years before the Second Iraq War, there had been enough talk about Saddam Hussein as a devil that the dreams were understandable. My dreams were chaotic and yet clear in their aversion to the prospect of war in Iraq. As Iraq fell into chaos after our “victory” had been declared, the news became a daily experience of déjà vu.

Before the election of Donald Trump, I had a series of automaton dreams, with people crawling out of a trunk that an orange-headed man had opened. The automatons were zombie-like and yet their faces were full of expression. Their smiles were broad and fixed and their eyes were bright, as they screamed and yelled obscenities and attacked other people, including my friends and family and me, because we were not like them. We did not “belong” to this order of Pandora. Sometimes they attacked people of color and foreigners, sometimes same sex friends and couples (“We’re just friends; we’re not married,” I heard them say, defending themselves.), sometimes crippled and helpless people who just melted under the assaults, as the attackers called them “freaks” and “losers.” They even attacked scrawny children, clothed in rags, who fell under their trampling feet. Once I had my hands around the neck of one of the attackers, and I squeezed her throat, until I stopped myself, and said, “I can’t do this. (I’m becoming like them.).” When I awoke, I’m glad to report, Jan was sleeping soundly at my side, undisturbed and unthreatened. The dream reoccurred with small changes, and I supposed they resulted from the frequent media footage of Donald Trump rallies.

I studied at Chicago Theological Seminary with Franklin Littell, historian of the rise of fascism in Europe, and Andre Lacocque, a biblical scholar who experienced the years of the Third Reich, and whose teaching of Daniel and Job were framed by those experiences. My dreams are often affected by memories of what I’ve learned and by the echoes of those years in the words and actions of extremist leaders and groups of all kinds. It doesn’t take much to reawaken the dreams-turned-nightmares—a straight-armed salute, a swastika or similar angular symbol, the waving of certain flags, especially the Confederate flag. Even our own Pledge of Allegiance, recited with too many flags, too many uniforms, too many people, gives me the creeps.

Mass deportations of millions , indiscriminate stop and frisk, silencing and demonizing dissent, shredding the social safety net for the underclass and the already impoverished and the desperately ill, expanded militarization of the police and search and seizure in our neighborhoods, climate and war refugees crowded into mass camps and prisons across the earth—all of these are nightmarish prospects that have been spoken aloud and celebrated. I pray these dreams are not the ones Donald Trump had in mind when he promised to make all our dreams come true.

Moving On from ‘A Fail’

28 Wednesday Sep 2016

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Yesterday I got the news. I had failed. There was good news with the bad. I had averaged six and a half hours a night during the past six months with the blessed Bi-PAP machine. My number of apnea incidents per hour had reduced by… three. Whoopee! The resulting total made it three times the acceptable goal. My fifth mask had done pretty well. It usually let me sleep an hour before waking me. Unfortunately my face is evidently misshapen from what any of the existing masks fit. The neurologist’s verdict—a fail.

It is not easy to accept failure. I never failed a course. That ‘B’ in English the freshman year in high school, and in Biology in my sophomore year in college, were had to take, but in my defense I suffered with a kidney stone and infection during that college semester. I was never fired from a job, and when one job ended I always had another one to go to. I married one of the most helpful, loving, and gracious persons in the world, and we had two wonderful children who found terrific spouses, and we have three fantastic grandchildren who amaze us with their accomplishments, and they all still love me. At least they do everything to make me think they do. Somehow I have survived illnesses and close calls and the deaths of people close to me, and to faith goes the credit, but I made it through. I have made many mistakes and people have for the most part forgiven me and let me know that. I have enjoyed a long career that was, if not successful, at least fulfilling and rewarding in every way that I could expect. I consider myself to be one of the richest, most fortunate people who have ever lived, even without winning a lottery. Why buy a ticket? I can donate directly to the schools.

The money that my insurance companies have spent could have helped someone who really needed it. It could have bought a new car. (Not for me. I didn’t really need a new car.)

I am pretty tired of the Bi-Pap machine, but I will continue to use it until something else replaces it. I cannot remember sleeping so badly for months at a time, and feeling so exhausted because of it. I am cured of the sin of looking forward to bedtime. The initial hopes of reduced angina and arrhythmia have given way to just being glad I do not bother my wife with snoring as much as I did. That is probably enough, come to think of it.

One is supposed to learn from failure; it is respected as a great teacher. Next on the agenda is an “oral appliance.” I will make a call to the installer now. I have been delaying long enough.

The Call and the Calls

23 Friday Sep 2016

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Methodist Bishop Edwin Voight sponsored a Convocation on the Ministry at First Methodist Church in Springfield, Illinois, in 1961. The aim was to inform and recruit young men for the ministry; no women attended. My pastor, Glen Sims, aware that I had completed the God and Country Award in Scouting and was serving as a de facto chaplain for the local Boy Scout troop on our monthly outings, thought that I might be interested and shared the invitation to attend. Families of the Springfield churches generously provided accommodations and hospitality.

Fifteen years old, I was the youngest in attendance. Most were older high school or college students. I knew I was out of my league. The program consisted of young adults and older ministers recounting their calls to ministry and their formative years in ministry, as well as prayers and worship around the theme of vocation. Their stories were impressive and elaborate, though fifty-five years later I cannot remember a single one of them.

What I do remember was my inadequacy and youth in the face of the experiences shared. The personal experience that I had to share, when in small groups we were asked to share our own stories, was the fact that I walked regularly four blocks to my home church, after school when I had to stay for some extra-curricular activity, in order to use the church telephone to call home. Then, while waiting for my mother or father to pick me up, I would stand in front of the impressive stained glass window or the great Last Supper carving and pray, while I waited twenty to thirty minutes for a ride (Our home was five miles away.). During those times I came to think of the church as my second home. I prayed about my future and how I could use the talents that people around me told me that I had, though I wasn’t at all sure.

When I had finished recounting ‘my calling’ in this way, the group leader noted appropriately that not everyone had a call to the ministry, which I took as a direct response to my story. That stung a little. Later in the gathering, the call of Moses, who was not an effective speaker at the time, and Jeremiah, who was just a boy at the time, gave me a little courage to think that I might yet be in the right place. I was not convinced, but the thought was effectively planted.

To Be Called a Muslim

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

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65% of Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim, according to a recent headline. Since I first met President Obama (when he was State Representative Obama, and he was regularly attending the same church I was attending that day) at Trinity United Church of Christ, the same denomination that ordained me as a minister, I knew at the outset that he was officially and formally a Christian, even though his name had a Muslim heritage. ‘Barak’ was the great steed that carried Mohammed into heaven in his vision at Jerusalem, and ‘Hussein’ has many associations, for better and worse. ‘Obama’ suggests Africa, and could be Muslim or Christian in Kenya. (My name on the other hand suggests a peddler of trifles or cheap books, or a barbarian tribal warrior. Neither seems to have handicapped me or determined my destiny.)

The other part of calling someone a Muslim is the significant meaning of the words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam,’ which derive from the definition of “one who submits to Allah” with Allah being the name for the One God. The God referred to is the God of the “people of the Book,” that is, the Bible, before it came to include the Koran. The title is therefore an honorific title as well as an aspiration for those who accept it. If someone were to call me a Muslim, I would consider that an honor, knowing what I have studied about Islam and the faithful Muslim people that I have known.

On the other hand, ordinarily, to be a Muslim is to accept the Muslim creed, that there is only One God and Mohammed is a prophet of that One God, although that One God has many names according to God’s many attributes. To use the title of prophet for Mohammed puts him in the company of an impressive historical, and from my perspective, some ahistorical characters, but they include Abraham, Moses, Elijah, Isaiah, Mary, and Jesus, among other lesser figures like Jonah and Job. Does Mohammed deserve the recognition that places him in that company? Traditionally many Christians have said no, but that is without assessing what Mohammed accomplished. Mohammed converted scores of Arabian tribes from paganism and idolatry to monotheism with all of the moral dimensions that traditional monotheism entails, not a small or unimpressive accomplishment. When he finally had the opportunity to utterly destroy his opposition, who had so often attempted to kill him, he offered mercy and forgiveness. Unlike most of the prophets who spoke to power, but had little of their own, at least in earthly terms, Mohammed was able in the last years of his life to exercise a great amount of political power, and he did so with some admirable accomplishments as well as some judgments that were more problematic, not unlike some of the wisest leaders the world has known. The title ‘prophet’ seems to apply to him at least as well as to most of the others.

I grew up in a Methodist Church, recognizing that the title ‘Methodist’ was first used of John Wesley as a pejorative, ridiculing the disciplined and ordered life that he espoused. I never lived up to that name, nor would I confidently describe myself as a Muslim, in the tradition of those who have fully lived out the meaning of that name, but I sure would like to be.

The Storm’s Unpredictable Wind

13 Tuesday Sep 2016

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“You hear the sound of it but you don’t know where it comes from or where it goes…”

I was sitting in my overstuffed chair last Wednesday evening, working on one of the online philosophy courses that I teach, when a great wind blew with the sound of crashing, followed quickly by the storm warning siren and pouring rain. Putting my laptop computer aside, I jumped from the chair and headed toward the kitchen where Jan was, just to make sure she was okay. She was. The only noise to follow was the sound of heavy rain, so I went to the basement, not for its supposed protection from the wind, which quickly subsided, but to check on the water that might be invading. Sure enough, the water was bubbling out of the drain, because the city sewer could not handle the volume of the downpour. I monitored the water level for the next two hours, but the electricity did not go out and the constantly running sump pump kept pace with the invading water.

The next morning, I again checked the house for damage, which the darkness could have hidden the night before. No problems showed up.

Early in the spring I had noted the two large limbs of the tulip tree that overhung the house, knowing that sometime this season I would need to make arrangements for the tree surgeon to remove them. Friends in Zion Church had given the tree to me when my mother died suddenly twenty-six years ago. It was one of her favorite tree species, and it grew quickly into a lovely specimen. But those two limbs had to go.

I did not notice at first, when checking the house after the storm, but those limbs were indeed gone. Where did they go? Forty feet away in the small space between the crabapple tree and the garage, one large limb was planted rightside up against the fence, the large trunk of the branch into the ground. Behind it, the other large branch sat upside down with the heavy trunk on top.   

The wind had removed both eight inch-diameter branches close to the trunk, without damaging the roof or breaking windows, and placed them so neatly in the yard that they almost looked like they belonged there.

I think I owe the Great Tree Surgeon in the Sky big time.