Tag Archives: A License to Preach

The Guidance Counselor

16 Saturday May 2015

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3 OwlsDo students still have guidance counselors? Some students talk about having help from advisors in planning course schedules and completing requirements for graduation, but I seldom hear about guidance on choosing careers and making long-range plans. Jim Smith was my counselor when I entered High School. He had lengthy conversations with each student and used a variety of interest and skill inventories to identify what students might be interested in pursuing in their careers. He was also my Sunday School teacher and there were a dozen of us in his class, and we knew that he took an interest in us as persons.

Mr. Smith predicted that I would not have a problem with any subject that I chose to study in terms of academic achievement. The inventories indicated that I had high interest in such areas as teaching and social work and low interest in such areas as sales and marketing or mechanical skills or entertainment. He laid out a variety of career paths that might tap abilities and skills in a satisfying way. Among other possibilities he pointed out that clergy seem to require a high level of interest in sales and marketing and entertainment because of their involvement in leading and developing volunteer organizations. As generalists they also depended on having a variety of interests and skills in many areas, so he didn’t want to discourage me from thinking about ministry, just to be aware of some components that would be more challenging.

I suppose I always carried that piece of advice in the back of my mind. It was present in the first years of my considering ministry as a career because I knew that I would have to study and do some things that I was not fond of doing, in order to get to those that were more rewarding. Speaking before groups became less threatening, but making the sermon and the service interesting and captivating remained a challenge. I decided that I would try for a “conversational” style and leave the captivation to someone else. Still I have seen other preachers become successful because they truly made an effort to sell their product, knowing it is the greatest product anyone could ever sell, if they didn’t diminish the product by the way they sold it.

Even phrasing it that way still disturbs me. Is faith a product that requires a sales strategy? The farmer in me immediately translates faith into the field that requires planting, watchfulness, waiting, and harvesting. The teacher in me makes faith into scores of lessons to be planned, taught, demonstrated, and tested in some way. The social worker in me sees faith as a mutual service to be exercised in assisting people along the way to empowerment. There are scores of ways to describe our product, and all of our skills and interests need to be tapped, and no one can have them all and do it all. So we can all look forward many different incarnations of ministry as the years go by.

Still I am sold on the Gospel and the church and Christ-shaped humanity. If I neglected to do all that I could to promote these “products,” it is not because they do not deserve everything we can do together to promote them in all the ways that prove to suit them, if the Spirit is indeed still present to serve as a guidance counselor.

Make Way for Another Generation…X?

15 Friday May 2015

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Who is not stirred by the steady processional beat of “Pomp and Circumstance?” Even caps bearing strange painted messages, and some graduates acting casual and nonchalant do not conceal the serious sentiment of the exercise.

Like molten lava moving down the mountainside, sometimes rushing and crushing everything in its path, sometimes slowly and inexorably dominating the landscape, so every generation coming to adulthood takes its place.

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I, for one, would trade my status as a “baby boomer” (such a lovely name!) for an “X,” even if the Generation X has technically now given way to yet another moniker. “X” represents an unknown quantity, and who can predict what will emerge from any arbitrary set of years defining the experience of a generation?

I would not have predicted that any modern generation would have been subjected to the crude tastelessness of Beavis and Butthead, the Simpsons, or Rush Limbaugh. I had not foreseen a modern world marred by catastrophic religious and ethnic conflicts in Nigeria and Syria. I had expected that attempts to dismantle national entities in other countries by either manipulation or force would not spread into the United States. Even dreamers of medical miracles shudder in the face of resistant strains of bacteria, or fatal viruses like Ebola.

Even by their pathos in the face of poverty, war, or disease former generations have made their mark, turning an “X” into transformative art, music, literature, and religion. We wait to see what marks will be made, what commitments, what achievements, what regrets.

Meanwhile the graduates process, and celebrate in the ways they have learned.  We who made such moves years ago congratulate them on completing the stages and demands of childhood, not easy in any age– even a modern one. We look to see whether God is implanted in the souls and genetic material of these who now seek their place in an adult world. If so, the world will change again, but not get worse. They will make their mark, and somehow it will take the shape of a familiar cross.

The Mystery Buttons Behind the Pulpit Chair at Zion Church

13 Wednesday May 2015

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self-portrait

At Zion Church, along the wooden reredos behind the pulpit chair are four ivory push buttons. They are aligned so that the pastor can reach down and press them when wanting something to be done. Probably most people do not pay close enough attention to notice them. When I was pastor there, during worship, when I wanted something to be done, I toyed with the idea of pushing them just to see what might happen. Maybe a bell or a buzzer or a small shock for someone who just fell asleep? 

Maybe someone from Zion who is still alive might remember when these buttons were still being used and what they were used for. I inquired of two other former pastors but they didn’t know what those buttons did either. Sometime they fell into disuse. Today I do not know what legions of helpers or angels might be called if Pastor Brice pressed those buttons when in need 

I have stolen into the sanctuary when no one was around, and pressed them, one at a time, and two or three together, but nothing happened that I could see. But no worship service was happening at the time. Could they have been disconnected, I wonder? Perhaps they fell into disuse when the first pagers and later cell phones became available. Perhaps pastors or worship leaders pressed them and nothing happened. That would indeed be discouraging if they were truly in need. 

What could occur in worship that would require such emergency intervention, you ask? When Jeanne Tyler, former pastor at Keokuk, was preaching several years ago, she evoked the image of dancing the tango with God. If suddenly many of our worshipers started to dance the tango, we might not be able to handle it. I would have wanted some help. The tango, as an image of holy covenant, is indeed “too close for comfort.” I would have known that I had entirely lost control and everything was up for grabs. Buttons to the rescue!  

There are lesser catastrophic expectations that might summon our desire to press for help. I lost count of the times when I realized that everything that I had prepared for a Sunday service had missed the mark. Rather than make fumbling efforts to change and adapt as I went, it would be wonderful if I could just press the button. When all of the other events of worship had reduced the time that I used to hope I could preach something that I was convinced was needed, the button might have gotten someone else to stop talking and let me have the floor or the pulpit. It could tell the ushers to stand with the offering plates at the door instead of passing them down the pews. It could tell Janice to play a hymn four times faster than normal. It could bring the Holy Spirit in the nick of time. 

Or are those buttons just among the many things that worked for a while and then were abandoned? Things that were tried instead of prayer and preparation? Things like we still try, “to make worship more meaningful?” So we won’t be able to let our fingers do the walking? Maybe we’ll just have to pray after all? Guess so.

My Start at Chicago Theological Seminary

12 Tuesday May 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

I was moving to Chicago’s Hyde Park near the University of Chicago campus, driving a small rental truck with our apartment’s furnishings. The direct route from the Stevenson Expressway to Woodlawn Avenue was Garfield Boulevard, and I had been driving on that boulevard for about three blocks when I saw the flashing lights of a police car behind me. I pulled over to the curb right away.

“Where are you going?” the officer asked.

“Woodlawn Avenue south of 57th on the UC campus,” I answered, with trepidation. What I did not need at this time was a traffic ticket that I had no money to pay.  “Did I do something wrong, officer?”

“It’s illegal to drive a truck on a Chicago boulevard,” he answered. “May I see your license?” As I pulled my license out of my pocket, he asked me, “Are you a student or a teacher?”

“I’m a student in seminary and a pastor,” I answered, as I showed him my driver’s license.”

“Excuse me, Father,” he answered as he crossed himself. “If you’ll just follow me, I’ll show you how to get there.” He handed my license back to me, walked back to his car, turned off the lights, and pulled in front of me, waiting for me to drive the truck into the traffic lane and follow. At the next corner we took a right turn, and then a left, following a street that ran parallel to Garfield until we reached the Midway. He waved me forward, and I pulled up beside him. He yelled, “God bless you in your studies, and remember not to drive your truck on a boulevard.”

“Thank you,” I yelled back, but I did not add, “God bless you, too, my son,” although I wanted to.

What is a parable?

12 Tuesday May 2015

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3 Owls  Maybe the answer is obvious, but whenever people say “obvious,” some investigation may be in order. Start with “A parable is a short and simple story that represents a message about values.” Short? As short as a couple of sentences or as long as a few hundred words. Simple? Usually simple means easy to understand or uncomplicated, but here there is a difficulty. On the surface a parable sounds simple enough, but when it comes to what it means, it gets more complicated. Maybe we should scratch out “simple,” though the story itself should at least sound straightforward.

A parable’s representation of something else is metaphorical, but not allegorical. In an allegory each part of the story, or each key part of the story is a symbol for something else, which it should resemble in some important aspect. A parable may sometimes become an allegory, when the teller of the tale decides to interpret its elements as symbols for something specific. Jesus’s parable of the sower and the soils (Mark 4) becomes an allegory when the soils become symbols for several specific kinds of human responses, like deafness, apostasy, fickleness, weakness, conflicted values, and faithfulness, and the sower becomes the preacher of the gospel. In its original telling, as a parable, the story merely suggests a comparison. It is more or less obvious to the listener how amazing it is that a bountiful harvest usually follows the scattering and waste of much of the seed. Many parables have been interpreted allegorically. The allegorical method of interpretation dominated the early centuries of the Christian church. In the same centuries rabbis continued to teach with parables, leaving the interpretation to the imagination and consternation of their listeners.

The interpretation of parables does sometimes lead to frustration and other times to inspiration, to disturbance and to comfort, to puzzlement and to satisfaction. If it leads nowhere, it is not a parable. If it answers its own questions, and leaves no sense of incompleteness for us to think about, it is probably not a parable. If the analogy is too perfect, and we see a meaning immediately that is exact, it is unlike the parables of those teachers who used parables so well, like Jesus of Nazareth or the Baal Shem Tov.

What about the values that parables suggest? Is there a limit to the kinds of values that can be espoused in the parable form? While I may favor humane and compassionate suggestions over cruel and selfish ones, parables can be moving expressions of all of the attitudes people rank as important.

Where will we find parables? That is what I’d like to know. I’m looking for them In nature or human interactions, in memories or imagination, in dreams or lived moments that make an impact, everywhere that my attention is grabbed and something is discovered.

As far as how the parables I find may be used, I must leave that up to the listener. Have fun with them. Make a sermon out of them. Let them suggest experiences when you have discovered your own parables. Carry on.

The Hunger Simulation at a church conference

09 Saturday May 2015

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Monkeys see, hear, speak no evil, Bangra.com

In 1974 a concern for food deficits and hunger swept through the church and the nation. Famine in the Sahel and the rediscovery of large pockets of hungry people in the United States moved many people to take part in study groups, organizing, advocacy, and simulations. Simulations? In order to identify with hungry people, those of us who were not usually hungry had to remind ourselves what hunger felt like.

I attended my first Illinois Conference of the United Church of Christ Annual Meeting at Dekalb, Illinois, in June of 1974. I had attended many conferences, many annual conferences of the United Methodist Church, but this was my first UCC Annual Conference. I did not know what to expect. My ignorance went so far as to include what my registration fee covered. It seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. I assumed it covered the costs of the meeting itself, housing, and meals. It was the latter item that revealed that I had assumed too much. The cost of meals was not included.

I did not have much money in those days, living paycheck to paycheck and paying off education loans. I had a family of a wife and two small children who needed cash more than I did, so I had about five dollars in my pocket and a gas credit card for the travel. What else would I need?

The conference meeting lasted about four days, and my loaf of bread and jar of peanut butter had stretched about as far as I could make it stretch. I had access to plenty of water. I also had a conference dinner to look forward to, with a ticket that was prepaid in my registration fee. I felt very happy that the fee had at least covered that one meal. The dinner itself was elaborately set up in a grand ballroom with white tablecloths, napkins, glassware, and tableware, no plastic or paper in sight.

The servers had specific instructions that began with the serving of about ten people out of a hundred with hors d’oeurves. Then came the salads which were served randomly to about fifty out of a hundred, including of course those who had already been served. Meanwhile the grumbling had begun from those who had not yet been served. The servers just continued their quiet compliance with their directives. As a newcomer I did not yet have a voice, but I was in tune with the times and catching on to what was happening.  When the main course arrived, about seventy people out of a hundred had full plates with meat, potatoes, vegetables, and bread rolls. The rest got small plates of rice. In front of me sat a small plate of rice.

The dessert that followed the main course came to about thirty out of a hundred. The grumbling increased in volume and anger, and the faces of those who had received and eaten the extra food looked appropriately humble. Everyone scarfed down what was set in front of them. No one within my view was sharing anything that they received, although I learned afterward that some tables had several sharers when the dessert arrived. By the next business session, facing an angry audience, the planners of the simulation extended their apologies and promised not to surprise the attendees with such an ill-conceived plan again.

The rice that I ate was probably the best rice I have ever eaten, and the portion, though small, satisfied my hunger. I could return home with a clear conscience to a place where I had enough to eat.

Shall we join the demonstrators?

06 Wednesday May 2015

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cropped-circledance.jpgWhat is a demonstration? Is it a showing, a calling of attention to something? Or is it a proof of the reality of something, bringing enough evidence together to be persuasive, as some of us would assert the validity of the metaphorical statement, “Christ is the light of the world?” Like most words we may use the word “demonstration” either way.

Some of us grew up in a world of demonstrations which grabbed our attention, and persisted in presenting uncomfortable truths, and made life more difficult for both demonstrators and others immediately involved, with positive results I would hurry to add. There were sit-ins, marches, and boycotts– many of which demonstrated effectively the presence of racist discrimination and injustice in our world. The demonstrators often had to pay a price in fines and imprisonments, ridicule and bodily injury,

loss of security and even life, in order to demonstrate the deprivations of dignity and opportunity to others. The people demonstrated “against” had to deal with a challenge to their authority, routines and attitudes.

We owe much to one who expressed so powerfully the rule of love as a means to effective demonstration, including self-giving, sacrifice and refusal of violence–  M L King Jr. He made his source in the love of Christ a central affirmation of his work, but he made no secret that he owed much to the influence of the Mahatma as well.

I think of Sheltered Reality with its focus on homelessness, youth and their capacity to express themselves, their songs and their drums as a form of demonstration. The sound of dozens of drums can be deafening, literally, when people do not protect of their ears. It can be uncomfortable and challenging, and those involved pay a price in time and energy for their effort. The obvious “target” is the people who ignore and dismiss the problem. Yet, as the years have  gone by since the group was formed, the problems of homelessness have continued to mount, and someone must make noise about it. As in the earlier demonstrations, youth are often more willing and ready to show their true colors than their seniors.

Many of our demonstrations are more polite and subtle, less brash and potentially offensive, and as a result often less effective. We have some noisy and obvious tools at our disposal– bells, lights, and whistles to draw attention. When and how will we use them? We come from many centuries of tradition calling for human dignity and mutual service, the relief of suffering and life in solidarity with the oppressed. We live with the benefits and burdens of mass media letting us know of innumerable insults and attacks on such values. Where shall we apply ourselves and our resources? Does it matter which situation of need we address or where we work as long as we do? Shall we join the demonstrators?

Starting a list of the odd things that happen around death

05 Tuesday May 2015

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Luna mothA colleague told me about his uncle who was killed in the Battle of the Bulge during World War II. He went to visit the military cemetery in Belgium where his uncle’s body was buried along with thousands of other casualties from that battle. He entered the memorial chapel where the book is kept that records the names of all the soldiers buried there, with the locations of the graves. He approached the book. It was already open to the page with the name of his uncle, out of thousands of names, and no one there to open the book for him.

A friend’s grandfather died at the ripe age of 95. He had lived at his own home and tended his own garden until a short final hospitalization. She had lived nearby and helped him in his garden. The day of the funeral they went back to his house for a family gathering, and near the front door there was a fresh rose blooming on an old plant, but the rose showed a new combination of red and white, his favorite rose colors, on a plant that before had only produced reds.

I had spent several hours of the day at the bedside of a dear and faithful member of the church, knowing that her time was growing short. She had no family left, and her aged peers could not remain at her side. I also needed a break and took a few minutes for something to eat, and returned as quickly as I could. When I approached the door to her room, I heard lovely symphonic music coming from inside. At least I thought it was coming from inside, though no player or radio had been there before. I supposed a thoughtful nurse had brought one in, to provide the soothing sounds that sometimes calm the sufferer. When I opened the door, walked into the room and stood at her bedside, I saw that she had died, her face finally serene after her struggles with pain. Then I noted that the music had stopped; the room was utterly quiet. There was no player or radio there, and there was no music coming from outside either.

Erosion under the sidewalk?

04 Monday May 2015

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cropped-circledance.jpgThe church that I served for nineteen years stood on a steep hill. When a crew broke up the sidewalk in front of the church in order to replace it several years ago, everyone wondered what they would find underneath it. After forty years sections were cracked and uneven, and holes had developed. When the street caved in a year before that, with a hole large enough to swallow a car, we thought that the same caverns might have developed in other areas nearby, including the sidewalk. Erosion had obviously taken its toll, at least in the view from the top. Would there be gaping holes, and even damaged drains and pipes?

Yet when the concrete was gone, there were the sand and the gravel that had been tamped into place before the last sidewalk was poured, with little evidence that the water flowing downhill for decades had done much damage to that base. Where the old window wells had been filled, there was no sign of subsidence. In a few places the curbing, damaged by snowplows and weather, had allowed some erosion, but not nearly what we expected.

There has been a lot of social erosion over the same forty years, at the same time that there has been significant progress in some areas of justice and equality and understanding of diversity among people. The frequent outbreaks of crime and violence, alongside some severe cracks in the moral stature of religion as people practice it, make us wonder what is happening to the foundation of personal and social life. Our world is awash in money and choices for some people, not all of which are constructive. Masses of people are themselves in danger of washing away, sold down the river. Are there gaping holes underneath? Or are the obvious cracks and holes and unevenness just a sign of a need to replace the obvious areas of damage? To work on and replace the surface?

Our answers determine how radical we get with our proposed solutions. We need to check the foundations, and tend to them, but do we need to replace them? Is there more there than we suppose or expect?

The Gospel that we revere is radical in the sense of being rooted where we believe it has always been—in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. You will not get the sense that people need to tear the world up or each other apart when you listen to Jesus’ words or attend to Jesus’ actions. They live quite substantially in many of the world’s spiritual leaders, even those who come originally from non-Christian faiths.

It is certainly instructive to break up the surface once in a while, if only to examine what lies underneath.

A license to preach

02 Saturday May 2015

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When does a person run out of things to say? Oh, there are plenty of times in conversations when there is a lull, no one knowing quite where to go from the last comments, but after a few moments we think of something to talk about. And there are those moments when the talk comes abruptly to a full stop, because the “last word” has been spoken on a particular topic, and the next words must either change the subject or plunge into deeper turmoil. There is usually something to be say.

When I first started to preach, at age 16, receiving a Methodist Local Preacher’s License, I couldn’t imagine not having something to say. There was a rather full Bible. There was a four thousand year history of Abraham’s children to draw from. There was my own “vast” experience as a teenager, and later young adult, and still later….  After all I had a “license” and people were willing to have me preach. To fill ten to twenty minutes of sermon time started as a challenge, but after getting started it rarely was a problem for me. For my listeners on the other hand….

After more than fifty years the question is still not one of running out of material or topics. I have no trouble filling three hours of class time in one evening session at the local community college. The question of value persists. What difference does all this talk make? Who is listening? Who is really paying attention? When do we reach the heart of the matter? Or is it so much fluff and unimportant irrelevant detail? Where is the good in all this talk? Will people recognize it when they hear it? Will they remember it?

Maya Angelou, who often had profound things to say, in well-chosen words, said, “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”  This is more than the “medium is the message” of McLuhan’s theme, which itself seems more valid now with all the technical options available for communication than it was in the 1960’s.

I have mostly stopped making speeches during the last eight years. In writing and editing students’ words I haven’t stopped reworking vocabulary to say things in the simplest way, eliminating passive verbs and being verbs, trying to touch emotional nerves without rubbing them raw, detecting where we have hidden the meanings rather than revealing them. I have been listening to preaching and powerful speaking and taken time to remember the many times speakers and writers have moved me in different ways with different voices. Not simply informed or entertained, but made me alive.

Parables are a part of this search for meaning beyond the words. More on this later….