HOMILETICS

Jesus as Brave Thinker

The sun revolves around the earth.
Animal species never change. …
The government can’t provide health insurance to old folks.
Humans can’t fly to the moon.
Telephones are only for talking and listening.

So begins “Brave Thinkers,” the featured article in the current issue of The Atlantic.

The assumptions listed above now, of course, seem silly. But for a time—in some cases—centuries, even millennia, such was the conventional wisdom.

The conclusion to draw is not that you can’t trust science—science like other disciplines—works with the raw materials at hand.

What science and indeed the world needs, according to this piece in The Atlantic are “brave thinkers” who challenge conventional wisdom and allow us to experience things about which we had only dared to dream.

I found it curious that of the 27 “brave thinkers” (BT) listed by The Atlantic, not one of them did any “brave thinking” in the field of theology or the church per se.  Maybe the editorial staff at The Atlantic are Hitchens disciples who don’t think that religion is very good at chasing the bus, or ballet dancing (to understand this dense allusion, see my Back Page column for the Nov-Dec 2009 issue of Homiletics).

A partial list of BTs includes Thorkil Sonne, Ceo And Founder Of Specialisterne; Morgan Tsvangirai, Prime Minister Of Zimbabwe; Camille Parmesan, Professor, University Of Texas At Austin; Shai Agassi, Founder Of Better Place; Montgomery McFate, Senior Social Scientist At The Human Terrain System; Freeman Dyson, Professor Emeritus, Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton; Iftikhar Chaudhry, Chief Justice Of Pakistan; John Fetterman, Mayor Of Braddock, Pennsylvania; and Craig Watkins, Dallas District Attorney.

Camille Parmesan, for example is working on strategies which will help save endangered species from the effects of climate change. She’s noticed that species are moving north. She wonders if human intervention is relocating species might be worth the effort.

It’s fascinating reading, and also quite encouraging to know that BTs are looking at radical and fresh approaches to solving some of the planet’s most pressing problems.

And here’s why I think this is relevant to what we’re doing in the local church. We have nothing to fear from BTs in our midst, and in fact, a good retreat with our BTs might turn up some surprising options for ministry in our local neighborhoods.

The Atlantic describes the people on its list as “people who are risking careers, reputations, and fortunes to advance ideas that upend an established order.”

Are you a preacher/pastor/teacher who would risk career, reputation and fortune--oh, wait, preachers don’t have fortunes—okay, career and reputation to advance ideas that upend the established order?

Let’s see.

Didn’t this whole Christianity thing get started by a BT? And a group of 12 BTs who were once described as having turned the world upside down?

We’ll Take Better Care of Our Dogs

I am sorry I cannot be more specific about what follows—or lucid.

I’ve been sicker than a dog for three days. I don’t know which end is up, or down, or sideways.

Jeanie was telling me about this National Geographic show in which islanders from some exotic isle in the South Pacific are brought to the U.S.

They arrive in some city and notice homeless people on the streets. They’re shocked. They don’t see that back home on their island.

They visit a middle class home, where, as it happens, the wife is taking Cuddles, the poodle, to the Pet Pamper shop to have its hair done and nails trimmed and so on.

Again, the islanders are shocked. They don’t do that to their dogs back home.

Then, one of them, shaking his head, says: We will go back home and take better care of our dogs; you should take better care of your people.

 

The January-February Issue of Homiletics Is Online!

Yes, it’s almost 2010!

Can you believe it? [Sigh] Y2K such a distant memory. The Internet bubble still expanding. Housing prices still soaring and airlines still solvent.

Anyway, the new issue is online and as always I’m pumped about it. The issue contain a complete ASH WEDNESDAY order of worship for you to adapt for your own use, and it has a retrospective piece about the 100th Anniversary of the Boys Scouts of America.

Here’s a sample from “Did You Mean?”:

Paperview boxing.

No, that isn’t a rage new sport featured in the X Games. It isn’t a derogatory term for the way an editor slashes up flabby writing. It has nothing to do with the classic knock on a soft boxer: “He couldn’t punch his way out of a wet paper bag.”

It’s a search engine typo for “pay-per-view boxing.” In fact, it was one of the top search typos registered by Yahoo! last summer.

Other top gaffes included “Brack Obama” and “swan flu.” ... Honest or ignorant, such typos happen to all of us as we fill search boxes with inquiries. Knowing this, search engines use spell-check software to predict what we were actually looking for in the first place.

Go to Google and type “Homeletics” in the search box, and Google leads your search result with, “Did you mean Homiletics?” It’s funny to then scroll the list of misspelled search results below it. Apparently, there are a lot of blogs, a few professors and even an online bookstore offering thoughts on this accidental art.

Mark Paskin, a senior engineer with Google, notes that two kinds of misspellings occur on the site: simple typos and conceptual errors. The former is a mistake made for a known word, but the latter happens when people don’t know how to spell something in the first place.

“Paperview boxing” is a perfect example. This is when the Google spelling correction function really tries to read our minds.

“U tube” is another common conceptual error. Almost everyone mistyping this phrase is looking for the video site YouTube; they just don’t know how to spell it. But a u-tube is actually a U-shaped glass tube used to determine the density of liquids and gases. If your daughter is doing research for chemistry class, she’d have to go to the third page of Google search results to get u-tube information, as opposed to YouTube information.

Typos are just mistakes. But these “conceptual errors” are the kind we’re looking at in Jeremiah 1. ...

And the material continues.

Take a look.

One Plants, Another Waters …

I was traveling in a third world country recently and visited an orchard of orange trees. It had been planted in terrace fashion on the side of a hill, and I could tell the farmer and his workers had put a lot of time into building the terrace walls of stone, creating irrigation ditches, tending the small trees and so on. He was very proud of his little orchard. It was his livelihood and he worked hard. All manual labor. No mechanized help whatsoever.

I asked him how he got his oranges to market.

He said that he did not harvest the oranges himself. Rather the “businessman” came to him and the two of them negotiated a price, and then the “businessman” picked the fruit and hauled it off to market—via donkey cart or ox cart.

Of course I thought of the Scriptures—the apostle Paul’s reminder regarding the growth of the church: Some plant, some water, some reap the harvest, but all is done to the glory of God.

This is a good reminder in a day when we’re often so concerned about numbers and size and success.

It’s more important to take care of the ministry at hand, and the rest will be fall in to place. So if we’re planting seeds, let’s plant seeds. If we’re watering, let’s water. If we’re reaping, let’s reap.

What To Wear, What to Wear?!

Halloween.

This has got to be the most ridiculous holiday or festival ever. Really.

No one knows why in the world we're doing this, and I'm never sure about what I'm going to wear. I prefer something subtle yet understated. Obama is hot this year, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller outfit. I might just jump into a Lady Gaga outfit and see what happens, or, failing that, get out my Richard Nixon mask. Always good as a conversation starter.

And then you have the kids knocking on your door asking for candy.

I got into real trouble from parents one year because I said to a coven of little sheet-covered PreK-ers at my door, “Ghosts don’t exist! Zombies don’t exist! Vampires—they don’t exist either. Get over it.”

My wife, the teacher, explained it to me: “Honey, U.S. core curricula standards have established that we don’t tell kids the truth about vampires, Santa, and the Easter bunny until at least fourth grade. Get over it.”

If it’s Halloween, we must be on the cusp of November, and that’s hard to believe. Wasn’t it August just a few days ago?

But, speaking of Halloween, I have an assignment for you: Think about your congregation and all they’ve been doing this month and the clothes—“costumes”—in which they’ve been doing it. Not scary costumes, to be sure, but the clothes of ministry.

Think of the people who’ve put their aprons on to cook in kitchens[ or the overalls the mechanic has put on to repair the car of a single parent who needs it desperately; of the running shorts put on by people running for “the cure”; or the backpacks worn by youth workers out on the trail with teenagers.

Think of the “clothes” of kindness, compassion and gentleness worn by so many in the community to help make the lives of other better.

This kind of costuming in not ridiculous, it’s real.

These clothes are also suggestive of incredible stories. They tell us about hours of preparation for choir rehearsals in order to bring music every Sunday and during Advent coming up in only four weeks or so;  they speak to the humanitarian relief some church members bring when they go on a Habitat for Humanity trip; they remind us about teamwork and team-building as people come together to clean up the house of worship, or meet with the homebound to rake the leaves and make small repairs.

I’ll bet there are a lot of stories the clothes/costumes could tell in your congregation.
And every day we’re creating and telling stories, and when we leave church, moving on and out into the community and we take with us core values and a faith enriches us as well as others for the rest of our lives.

Meanwhile, I’ll still be wondering what to wear for Halloween.

I’m leaning toward Little Dead Riding Hood or Einstein mask.

Probably Einstein.

 

Measuring Forward Progress

The post-season baseball series have had a few issues with umpires, and even with extra umps on the field, mistakes are made. A long ball to left field is called foul when it was fair by a Texas mile. And baseball has no rules that provide for overturning the call. The home plate ump could’ve called that particular ball, for Pete's sake.

Our subject for  today is football, not baseball, and commandments. After all, there are a lot of rules, or commandments, in football. And if you’re like Bill Cowher, former head coach of the Pittsburgh Steelers, you want to abide by the rules. That’s what he meant when he said, “We don’t want to circumcise the rules, or anything.”

I’m lifting this stuff directly from the Homiletics material for this coming Sunday. This is such great stuff, I want you to be sure to see some of it.

Football has so many rules that not even the players, coaches, referees and commentators can possibly know them all. That’s why football players can sometimes appear, well, a tad ignorant. Former Dallas Cowboy Thomas “Hollywood” Henderson once said of former Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, who has four Super Bowl rings and now sits in the TV analyst booth, that he “couldn’t spell ‘cat’ if you spotted him the ‘c’ and the ‘a.’ ”

Football, unlike baseball, is arguably the most technologically advanced sport out there: You’ve got the radio receiver sending plays into the quarterback’s helmet from the sidelines, overhead cameras, super slow-mo video replay, challenge calls by the refs and computer-generated graphics on the field indicating “downs and distance” to the audience watching at home. …

But in one respect, things are a little more “old school”: determining where exactly the ball is supposed to be located and how far the offense has to move it for a first down. The way that’s done today is the way it’s been done since 1906 — the year the NCAA determined that a team needed 10 yards, not five, for a first down, and the year that the forward pass was legalized. Spalding’s Official Foot Ball Guide of 1907 set down the rules that have lasted for more than 100 years: “To assist in measuring the progress of the ball, it is desirable to provide two light poles about six feet in length, connected at their lower ends with a stout cord or chain 10 yards in length.” Thus, the “chain gang” was born.

Since then, at every football game from Pee Wees to pros, a group of officials stands about six feet off the sideline holding blaze-orange “poles” with a 10-yard length of chain stretched between them. One end is placed ostensibly at the football’s original spot, lined up by the official’s eyeballs with the nose of the ball (even though the ball itself may be more than 25 yards from the sideline). The other end marks the line to gain 10 yards away. When the play ends, an on-field official estimates the new spot of the ball, marking it with his foot and tossing the ball to another official to set for the next play. When the new spot is close to the first down end of the chain, that’s when the “chain gang” trots out to “measure” whether or not the offense gets a new set of downs.

Often, this is one of the most dramatic and breathless moments in a football game. Sometimes the drive continues by an inch; sometimes it comes up just a chain link short.

Now, you’d think with technological advances such as GPS and lasers it would be a no-brainer to figure out just where, in a pile of large, sweaty humans, the ball actually was when the running back’s knee hit the ground. Just put a computer chip in the ball or something. And if they can paint a virtual yellow line on the field to show the TV audience the yardage the offense has to gain for a first down, then surely they can figure out a way to do that on the turf itself, right?

Wrong …

And the material goes on from there to talk about the two yardsticks Jesus gives by which to measure forward progress.

Well, It’s Saturday

Saturdays are such interesting days.

I know that people thank God for Fridays.

But I like Saturdays.

Most preachers don’t really like Saturdays because it’s on Saturdays that we can expect a perfect storm of problems to arise that all conspire to prevent us from doing our normal sermon preparation at 11 p.m. tonight.

Saturdays are lazy days.

This is really the Sabbath day of rest. Sunday is our worship day, but Sabbath, being the seventh day is a day of rest. So I’ve been resting.

Slept in.

Then spent two hours driving round trip to retrieve a thumb drive I’d left behind.

Then, spent some time with a nerd who repaired my broken Internet connection—which is why I can now gab with you for a few moments.

Then did some shopping for some little kids in Utrecht, the Netherlands, wondering what little Dutch girls, 6 and 8, like to play with.

While in the store, I witnessed one of the most awesome displays of childish obstreperousness that I have ever seen. This little girl, about 7, was on her knees in the toy aisle clutching a toy, but wanted another one which her mother refused to buy. She was not only crying, she was wailing—loudly. It caught the attention of other shoppers.

The mother scolded her, but didn’t give in. She could have ended this drama sooner than she did. But finally, to her credit, she simply walked away. This instantly infuriated the little girl and the wailing became louder, and she dropped her first toy and ran to catch up, and the wailing grew more distant, and I never saw or heard her again.

It was such an amazing display, that a father, shopping in the same aisle, asked me what I’d do if my son or daughter had cried and wanted a toy like that. I replied that, 1) no child of mine would even DARE to put on a scene like that at home or in public. So it would not come to that, and 2) if he or she did, I would have put toy number one back on the shelf, picked up the child and removed her from the store, and given her a paddling in the place God provided for paddling.

Good parenting should require very little paddling, but when it’s required, well, it’s required. (ASIDE: When I see something like this in public, I am always aware that some children are special needs children and different strategies are required. But this little girl was not a “special needs” child in a clinical sense, although she certainly had some specific needs!)

Interestingly, of my son and two daughters, it was the daughters who had the most “requirements” in this regard.

But I digress … So I witnessed that little drama … and then I took a nice walk in the gorgeous autumn weather. I told you almost a month ago, that I LOVE October, and I guess I really like Saturdays in October.

Talked to both my aforementioned daughters--one in Denver, another in Houston.

Tonight, going out with the wife for dinner.

Mexican.

She always orders fajitas.

How was your day?

John Wooden at 99

Anyone past the age of 40 surely knows of John Wooden.

A member of the basketball hall of fame as a player and coach, Wooden led his UCLA teams to 10 national championships in a span of 12 years, and won more than 600 games (while losing less than 150) in his 27-year career with the southern California university. .

Anyway, last week he turned 99. If you bing or google him, you’ll find a bunch of stuff about him commemorating this event including a good interview with him by ESPN’s Rick Reilly which you can see here.

What do you suppose you’re going to be doing on your 99th birthday? Wooden just published another book. He’s already well known for his “Pyramid of Success.” Now he’s added another book to the body of his work. A Game Plan for Life: The Power of Mentoring.

Wooden is known as a person of utmost integrity and his players to a man speak of him with the highest respect, and confess that they learned a lot about life from their coach.

Wooden is fond of saying, “If you’re through learning, you’re through.”

It’s Reformation Sunday in a few days, and while Wooden is 500 years past the “Reformation,” were we to adopt Wooden’s perspective and attitude, and good reformation would take place.

 

Global Hand-washing Day

I was confused. I thought today was Global Hand-washing Day. It was actually yesterday, Thursday, October 15.

This is the second annual observance of October 15 as Global Hand-washing Day. It’s aimed at promoting a culture of hand-washing with soap in countries around the world, especially those vulnerable to disease for a variety of reasons.

Many organizations have lined up to support this day, and I think it’s a great idea. The spread of infection can be greatly reduced if people, especially children, remember to keep their hands clean.

Of course, I see a moral lesson here too.

In the Old Testament, including the psalms, references to ritual hand-washing abound. “Who shall ascend to the hill of the LORD? They who have clean hands and a pure heart.”

While in the middle east, you might have noticed the spigots around many a mosque – provided so that the faithful can wash their feet.

When pilgrims ascended to the hill of the LORD, they had to be ritually clean.

What does that mean for us in our worship today?

While certainly we cannot suggest that only saints –no sinners—step through the church door, this metaphor and these Scriptures remind us that while there is a putative sense in which we are “clean” not only through the Word spoken to us, as Jesus said, or via a vicarious layer of righteousness through Jesus’ life and death – clearly, the purpose of our faith and relationship to God through Christ is to help us keep our hands clean and our hearts pure.

That is to say, who we are and what we do should be informed by our faith.

I would like to think more about the “and soap” part of the instruction, but I guess that will have to wait. I just remember affirming in front of my mother when I was a kid, that I had indeed washed my hands before coming to the supper table. Another question inevitable followed as the sun rises in the east: “With soap?”

We need to use soap. (It’s made in part of lye, right? A burning acid, right? And stuff that doesn’t make it burn so bad.) Some soaps include an abrasive, soap, like the LAVA brand my mom used to make us use.

Well, that’s all for now.

Sermon Idea No. 437

Since the Homiletics blog went up, I’ve posted more than 500 times, and I figure at least 436 of those must have had some kernel of homiletical insight however small. So the following is No. 437.

Asylum.com published a few days ago a list of 8 phrases we get wrong. You can read the full list here, but I give you a sampling, to wit:

1. I could care less
What you think it means: "I couldn't care less."
What it actually means: You actually do care.

2. It begs the question
Would you think it means: To ask or raise a question
What it actually means: To use an argument that assumes as proved the very thing one is trying to prove.

3. I did a 360
What you think it means: Completely changing your opinion.
What it actually means: Your opinion changed, but then changed back to your original opinion.

4. PIN number
What you think it means: A non-repetitive way to refer to your personal identification number
What it actually means: That you're being redundant. Especially when you use your PIN number at the ATM machine.

5. Lion's share
What you think it means: The greatest of multiple shares
What it actually means: You're not technically incorrect, because, over time this has become one of the phrase's definitions. But the phrase originally comes from an Aesop's Fable in which the lion took all -- not the largest -- of the shares. Because that's what lions tend to do.

6. I am nauseous.
What you think it means: I have a sick feeling in my stomach.
What it actually means: It depends. Prior to World War II, you'd have been clearly saying, "I make other people sick," and the correct term would have been "I am nauseated." However, over time, the usage has shifted to the point that many language experts have deemed "I am nauseous" as an acceptable explanation of your own queasiness. Just be careful using that term around the old folks' home.

The sermon part?

Think of some of the over-worked platitudes we are muttering all the time in church and do some re-thinking. Do they mean what we think they mean?

1. God is love.
What you think it means: No matter what I do, God has warm, fuzzy feelings for me.
What it actually means: God’s nature is love. That’s why if you manage through some gross stupidity on your part to screw up and make God angry, you have really messed with the essential nature of God.

2. We all believe in the same God.
What you think it means: As long as you worship something, or someone, the universe is going to be kind to you.
What it actually means: You are simply lazy and don’t want to really study your faith, or explore theological questions.

3. God must have a reason or he wouldn’t have allowed this to happen.
What you think it means: I didn’t screw up. This happened because God was behind it, so fortunately, maybe I can find a way out.
What it actually means: It doesn’t mean anything. It’s nonsensical.

And so on.

Think of some phrases of your own. I think you can get some mileage with this. I just spent four minutes on this post.

Think what you could do in four hours.

President Obama Awarded Nobel Peace Prize

Let’s talk about the Nobel prizes for a few minutes.

First, let me say that I am "surprised and humbled" that I myself was considered for nomination to the Nobel committee for a significant body of work--if I do say so myself--achieved over a number of years.

Not for the Peace prize, of course. But I was sorta expecting a nomination for my research in the 1970s which involved the motion of psychic straws in the bars of Chula Vista, California, not to speak of the seminal work I did at the same time developing origami roses out of bar napkins.

But that was another time and another place.

Yesterday, I’m sitting in front of the TV watching the BBC and I see the ticker at the bottom scrolling left, announcing, of all things, that President Obama had become the first sitting president since Wilson about 90 some years ago to be awarded the Noble Peace Prize.
 
Literally—my mouth gaped, and my first words were, “For what?”

The guy’s been in office for all of 270 days, and he gets an award for “extraordinary” efforts to “strengthen cooperation between peoples to meet global challenges.”

Show me one blog site, major newspaper, or media outlet where Obama’s name was even mentioned prior to the announcement as a possible recipient of the award.

In fact,  the Oslo-based International Peace Research Institute (PRIO) in the days prior to the announcement had predicted that “Sen. Piedad Cordoba [of Colombia] [was] the most likely recipient among three leading contenders …” the others being Jordanian Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad, a philosophy professor in Islamic faith at Jordan University, and Afghan physician and human rights activist Sima Samar.

So we have President Bush who gets a dusty shoe thrown at him by a disgruntled Iraqi journalist, and President Obama who gets a Peace Prize dropped in his lap by a remarkably gruntled Prize committee.

And the world, frankly, is non-plussed.

This makes for good water-cooler discussions to be sure—as to who was more deserving: Bush or Obama, and there are some who would argue that Obama should get the shoe, or the boot, and Bush the Peace Prize. Rational arguments can be, and are being, made for all positions, trust me.

Here’s my problem: I feel a sense of pride as an American that my President was awarded this prize. On the other hand, my American sense of fairness interferes because I just can’t see it, and neither can the pundocrats around the world. I fear that this announcement trivializes the award—but then perhaps that has already happened.

So Sunday, I think that it would be appropriate—not to comment on the controversy—but to pray for the President that he may grow into the oversized suit that has now been given him. And if he’s had insufficient time to demonstrate his peace-making skills, perhaps awarding him the prize will encourage the leader of the free world to aggressive in the pursuit of peace.

But here again, it gets tricky. Every field commander the president has is telling him that 25,000 to 40,000 more troops are needed in Afghanistan, or we might as well set up the gallows in the town square of Kabul and sharpen the swords to make the Taliban’s Friday afternoon hanging parties and beheadings more convenient. Will Obama make the hard decisions? Can a Nobel Peace Prize president escalate a war, defend our country by every means necessary, keep military options on the table?
I hope so.

And I hope Obama is up to the task.

So far I am not convinced that he is. But I echo the sentiments of Gil Troy of the Boston Globe: "Let the aspirations embedded in his award quickly be transformed into impressive achievements."

Computers Can Now Read Ancient Texts

Israeli researchers say that they’re created a program that can read ancients texts hitherto unreadable and that in the future, scholars might be able to do a Bing-like search of historical documents.

The program uses a “pattern recognition” algorithm like databases that search for fingerprints. This computer program doesn’t identify fingerprints, but is rather able to distinguish between letters, words, and handwriting styles.

All of this and more can be found in the December issue of the journal Pattern Recognition where the program is explained in such detail, that it would take another computer program developed by Israeli nerds just to dumb it down enough for me to understand it.

But it would appear that the study of ancient biblical texts will be enhanced by this technology which according to some of these researchers will reduce in some cases YEARS of research to MINUTES of research.

I did fairly well when I took Greek in seminary. Never took Hebrew.

But people tell me that I have definite skills in ENGLISH.

And there are a ton of ancient texts already available in ENGLISH, including the Bible.

So computers can read ancient texts. Big deal. So can I.

I know that someday I will benefit from what these researchers are doing now. But it might be a good thing if I’d read some of the material that’s already accessible.

Why I Love October

It’s Monday morning, and we’re five days into October. It’s my favorite month of the year.

I love October days.

I love Oktoberfest and the smell of brats on the grill.

I love the colors of the trees, and the patches of golden aspen on the shoulders of the mountains.

I love sloshing through fallen leaves and listening to the sound of them under my feet.

I love the crispness of the morning air.

I love stepping out into the morning of the first frost.

I love seeing the children in their Halloween costumes.

I love pumpkin pie.

I love pulling on a sweater for the first time.

I love noticing that the days are getting shorter.

I love reading in October.

I love singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” on Reformation Sunday.

It’s great to be alive! Life is grand!

Unison Benediction for World Communion Sunday

Lord,
Take me where you want me to go,
Let me meet who you want me to meet
Tell me what you want me to say
And keep me out of your way.

— Fr. Mychal Judge, O.F.M.
Chaplain, New York City Fire Department, who perished in the collapse of the World Trade Center towers

Three Pillars of Success

Jonathan Borden, a friend of mine and a committed Christian, and author of Confucius Meets Piaget: Understanding Korean Students and Parents (he was a high school  principal at an international school in Seoul for many years) recently shared with me his experience at an conference in Orlando where he met  Eileen Collins, Commander of the Space Shuttle Colombia on flight STS-93 in July of 1999.  She related to the audience at the conference how, after the January 2003 Colombia disaster, NASA had struggled with itself to figure out what went wrong in its human systems that allowed the actual mechanical malfunctions to occur.  

In an article that Borden subsequently wrote about her address, (which I have edited here)  he said that  Commander Collins argued that success rests on three pillars, all of which must be in place for any program — whether it’s NASA or the church, or  indeed for any person — to experience true SUCCESS, beyond fame, fortune, power, status, or even luck.  These “pillars” are:

Technical Knowledge.  People need to the “stuff and skills” of the profession they’re pursuing.  Whether it is memorizing data, developing Internet research skills, learning new skills — we must become proficient in order to move forward in life.  Not only that, Commander Collins stressed, you need to know and learn more than you are required to know and learn.  It’s not enough to just get by to be successful – either as a student, or as an adult in the workplace; you need to move beyond the learning goals set out for you.

Communication Skills.  You might think you know everything there is to know about a subject, but if you cannot communicate it to others and work collaboratively with them, then that knowledge is like a tree falling in the woods with no one to hear it.  We have to be able to write, to speak, to listen, to cooperate, to work in teams, to have the personal skills to negotiate various personalities with differing priorities.  Without those skills, a Ph.D. from the most prestigious university in the world is worthless both to him or herself and to the world.  The truly successful seldom work alone.

Integrity.  Finally, and perhaps most elusive but nevertheless the most important characteristic that Commander Collins described, is Integrity.  Going beyond simple honesty, Integrity includes knowing who you are and being comfortable with that; knowing what you stand for — your values and inner core — and knowing what you won’t stand for — those things that regardless of pressure or friendship, you cannot ignore or condone.  We can have tremendous knowledge and enjoy wonderful communication and interpersonal skills — but if we have no integrity to hold it together, it is worthless.  Some of the greatest tyrants of all times were smart and had amazing communication skills — yet they were not successful as humans beings.  Integrity is the fuel by which we contribute to leaving the world a better place than we found it.

Thanks, Jonathan. Good thoughts.

Roots & Shoots

Roots & Shoots is an oranization, often found in high schools as an extra-curricular club, that encourages communities and organizations to "go green."

One school I heard about recently raised funds to plant 1000 trees in Inner Mongolia in an area that is facing increasing desertification and other ecological challenges.They raised the funds and a "forest" was planted and named after the school.

I think this is a very cool idea, and might provide an idea for youth groups in our churches.
It's a great project that can be undertaken in conjunction with biblical teaching about taking care of God's creation.

If you want to know more, send me an e-mail and/or go to www.rootsandshoots.org.

Lutheran Writers' Workshop

Got an e-mail from Paul Shephard the other day. Homiletics subscribers might remember our interview with Shepherd when he was teaching at Florida State University and had just published the award-winning More Like Not Running Away.

He has long been interested in the literary structure of sermons, and also has a passion for helping clergy develop their writing interests. Now he sends me this e-mail about the Lutheran Writers workshop. It was a shotgun e-mail to a number of people and organizations. Here's part of what it said: 

"We have conducted our first-ever Writers' Workshop for Pastors, on using narrative structures and techniques in sermon preparation.  The workshop, led by Lutheran Writers Project founder Paul Shepherd, in Charlottesville, Virginia, was at capacity.  Two spring workshops, one in Wisconsin and one in South Carolina, are also planned—look for details in our next newsletter.  The Wisconsin workshop will be led by Paul and acclaimed author Thomas Maltman.   The South Carolina workshop will be co-led by Dennis Bolton, a pastor, editor, and seminary educator whose preaching is highly regarded.  Additional workshops will be scheduled for fall of 2010; any pastors interested in having a workshop in their area can write Paul Shepherd directly. Be sure to check the LutheranWriters.org website regularly for news about writers, literature, and programs."

These workshops are not limited to clergy. Lutherans could hardly ask clergy to swear they were Lutherans cause they know they'd just lie about it--boldly--and register anyway. So check it out. Paul is a great teacher and a wonderful person. If you have continuing education funds available to you through your church, this would be money well spent.

Any Among You Sick?

The epistle lection for this week in the Revised Common Lectionary is James 5:13-20. The text invites us to consider healing and prayer for healing — and to take this matter seriously in the life of the church.

For many congregations, healing services are edifying and significant experiences in their common life together. This Sunday Homiletics offers a complete service for use in lieu of a typical weekly worship service, or for evening vespers. We invite readers to adapt this material for their own use, adding denominational resources or other materials to what is offered here. Or you can take this Order of Worship and use it as is.

I realize that if you haven't already started to prepare for this--it could be difficult to get this in place for this Sunday. But look through the material. I think you will find it inspiring and meaningful, and perhaps you will want to adapt it for use with your congregation soon.

 

"Do You Know Where You Need to Be?"

Last week I visited my wife’s school on an errand of some urgency—although now I couldn’t tell you what it was— I’m sure it was vitally important.

I was passing by the Middle School Administration office when I saw Cody Howitt, MS Mathematics teacher, loitering outside the office. He was just standing there, hanging cool, hands in his pocket, pacing a little, looking up and down the hallway, and whatever he was doing it was obviously not as urgent or important as my own quite forgettable mission.

Still, I stopped for a moment to chat and offer a neighborly “Wassup?” and having done that, I  asked him whether he was unemployed, waiting to talk to the principal, hiding from his class, or having a nervous breakdown.

He smiled grimly and then told me what he was up to: “I’m the ‘Do-you-know-where-you-need-to-be?’ guy,” he said. He was on hall duty to help stragglers get a-move-on, or re-direct miscreants to the place they “needed to be.”

I left him to his duty, and scurried down the nearby stairway to get to Jeanie’s office. But his words rang in my head and set off all sorts of philosophical bells and whistles.

“Do you know where you need to be?”

I’m not sure—but I don’t think any one has ever asked me that question. I think this is a nagging issue for a lot of folks. They get to a point in their life when they wonder if they are where they need to be, and if not, how to get there, and how they'll know when they've arrived.

Bob Buford, a Harvard grad, and highly successful entrepreneur in telecommunications and founder of Leadership Network, realized in mid-life that he wasn’t sure where he needed to be, but he surely wanted to find out. He wrote a book about his journey called Halftime and followed that up with Game Plan. He realized that although he had had a life of success, he hadn’t had a life of significance. In the second half of his life, he set out to change all of that.

Howitt’s question to wandering middle school kids—“Do you know where you need to be?”—is a good one. And it seems to me that perhaps this is one way to describe our pastoral and preaching role, i.e. to pose to people: “Do you know where you need to be.”

Ahoy, Mateys

Today, September 19, 2009, is International Talk Like a Pirate Day. Find out more at www.talklikeapirate.com.

It’s time to get your prirattitude going, mates, and learn to speak with an accent.

I have a kiwi mate, Jeff, who's a friend for God knows why or how. Crikey, can’t understand a word he says, unless—he realizes he’s talking pirate, and he pulls it back a bit so that he makes sense to a landlubbering Yank like myself.

Once, Jeanie and I were far north on the coast of Maine, just below Lubec, and we were walking along the rocky shores of the Bay of Fundy and chanced upon a fisherman and got to talking about lobster and lobster traps and bait and whatnot. He started to explain how lobstering works in that thick downeastern brogue of his, and later I asked Jeanie, my wife, if she knew what he wuz saying. Not a word.

It’s not like I’m blaming pirates for talking funny or Kiwis for speaking so weird. It’s just that I don’t hear them right.

I wonder sometimes whether we Christians don’t sometimes speak with such an fool accent that most of the people out there don’t understand a bloody word we’re saying. Maybe we need to pull it back a bit, lose the accent and start to talk like plain folk in plain language that others can understand.

On the other hand—we did a piece on Pirate Day a couple of years ago in Homiletics (you’ll find it in September of 2006 or 2007—maybe 2005, I forget)—and our thought then went a different direction. We wondered whether--if you can learn to talk like a pirate you couldn’t also learn to talk like a Christian a little better.

Here’s an example. My friend—I’ll call him, Eddy—was saying to me just two days ago that some colleagues of ours were really a tough bunch and not too charitable, except for Brenda, he said—real name—she seems to be different.

I know Brenda, and I said, “Well, perhaps that’s because she seems to take her faith seriously.”

Eddy was silent, letting that morsel sink in.

“Well,” he says, “I suppose if you have faith, it’s a good thing to take it seriously.”

Got that right, matey.

Five Foundational Moral Impulses

This little pass-it-on post comes by way of UTNE which got it from Miller-McCune (May-June 2009), a solutions-minded magazine published by the Miller-McCune Center for Research, Media, and Public Policy (www.miller-mccune.com) in a piece called “Liberals aren’t un-American; Conservatives aren’t ignorant.” And the person generating this discussion in Jonathan Haight, a moral psychologist, a self-avowed liberal who has been helping Democrats understand why, for example, the country voted Republican in 2004.

Influenced by Lawrence Kohlburg’s 1981 book, The Philosophy of Moral Development, Haight argues that morality not only in the ethical decisions made by individuals who learned—in a moral evolution over several millennia—were framed not just because humans established values based on how others treated them, and they treated others, but also emerged as communities grappled with values and ethics that would ultimately benefit the group or the culture. Morality, Haight says, “Morality is not just about how we treat each other, as most liberals think; It is also about binding groups together and supporting essential institutions.”

Out of his research, Haight came up with five foundational moral impulses:

• Harm/care: It is wrong to hurt people; it is good to relieve suffering.
• Fairness/reciprocity: Justice and fairness are good; people have certain rights that need to be upheld in social interactions.
• In-group loyalty: People should be true to their group and be wary of threats from the outside. Allegiance, loyalty, and patriotism are virtues; betrayal is bad.
• Authority/respect: People should respect social hierarchy; social order is necessary for human life.
• Purity/sanctity: The body and certain aspects of life are sacred. Cleanliness and health, as well as their derivatives of chastity and piety, are all good. Pollution, contamination, and the associated character traits of lust and greed are all bad.

The Miller-McCune report says that “Haidt’s research reveals that liberals feel strongly about the first two dimensions—preventing harm and ensuring fairness—but often feel little, or even feel negatively about the other three. Conservatives, on the other hand, are drawn to loyalty, authority, and purity, which liberals tend to think of as backward or outdated. People on the right acknowledge the importance of harm prevention and fairness but not with quite the same energy or passion as those on the left.”

Then there’s the issue of moral disgust. Conservatives experience it when liberals don’t share the same passion as they for items 3,4 and 5; liberals likewise experience it when people who embrace items 1 and 2 with the same passion as do they.

Haight believes that liberalism and conservatism broadly speaking are necessary points of view that work well when in a sort of sympathetic balance in the cultural discussion. The demonization of those who reasonably hold a point of view other than our own, is not only pointless but destructive.

That’s why—this is me talking, not Haight—Michael Moore virtually handed Bush the Oval Office in 2004, and why he was noticeably keeping his big mouth shut in 2008.

It’s why the congressman should not have called Obama a liar, and why Jimmy Carter once again has demonstrated – well, I won’t go there.

Anyway, reading Haight’s five foundational principles, made me think that they might provide a useful rubric for you to use in an adult study class or even a sermon, assuming you bring up the issue of the origins of morality in your preaching from time to time.

We Should All Be Wearing Crash Helmets

I got an e-mail the other day from Stephanie Martin, a colleague at Homiletics, who was working through some material we’re putting together for the January-February, 2010, issue. She said:

   Hey Timothy, I just have to share something cool …  Last Sunday, we visited a different church and were intrigued by a disabled man using a walker. He put on a crash helmet before walking up to communion. It struck me as so odd, but then I began thinking about spiritual armor and how worship and connecting with God can be dangerous. I figured there was a HOMILETICS point in there somewhere. So I thought it was really cool to read this quotation in the material I am working on right now: “On the whole, I do not find Christians, outside of the catacombs, sufficiently sensible of conditions. Does anyone have the foggiest idea of what sort of power we so blithely invoke? Or, as I suspect, does no one believe a word of it? The churches are children playing on the floor with their chemistry sets, mixing up a batch of TNT to kill a Sunday morning. It is madness to wear ladies’ straw hats and velvet hats to church; we should all be wearing crash helmets. Ushers should issue life preservers and signal flares; they should lash us to our pews”  (Annie Dillard, Expedition to the Pole, Harper & Row, 1982, 40).

I wrote back briefly, and Steph responded: I’m still wigged out about the “coincidence.”  And I feel guilty that our first instinct (my husband and me) was to laugh about the incident. Why, we wondered, wouldn’t he just ask them to bring the Sacrament to him instead of going through all that trouble (and danger) to approach the altar? But the more we talked about it, the more we thought a crash helmet was pretty appropriate, symbolically.

Well, that is an interesting story and a good reminder that if we’re following Jesus, we’re in for a ride. Buckle up, my friends, and secure your tray table. We’re headed for turbulence.

Mending and Fixing

Carlos Wilton passed this on to us at Homiletics. He finds us a lot of interesting stuff. And I thought I would pass it on.

He picked it up from Susan Cooke Kittredge, senior minister at the Old Meeting House in East Montpelier Center, Vermont, in her comments for the National Public Radio Weekend Edition feature for February 3, 2008. She talks about the difference between fixing something and mending something:

I have come to relish the moments when I sit down and, somewhat clumsily, repair a torn shirt, hem a skirt, patch a pair of jeans, and I realize that I believe in mending. The solace and comfort I feel when I pick up my needle and thread clearly exceeds the mere rescue of a piece of clothing. It is a time to stop, a time to quit running around trying to make figurative ends meet; it is a chance to sew actual rips together. I can't stop the war in Iraq, I can't reverse global warming, I can't solve the problems of my community or the world, but I can mend things at hand. I can darn a pair of socks....
    
Mending something is different from fixing it. Fixing it suggests that evidence of the problem will disappear. I see mending as a preservation of history and a proclamation of hope. When we mend broken relationships we realize that we’re better together than apart, and perhaps even stronger for the rip and the repair...
    
Mending doesn’t say, “This never happened.” It says, instead, as I believe the Christian cross does, “Something or someone was surely broken here, but with God's grace it will rise to new life.”

Homiletics, Nov-Dec 2009, now online

Just a quick post to let you know that the November-December 2009 issue of Homiletics is now online, including all the commentary, illustrations, worship resources you’ve come to expect.

We have also added material for you to work with for this year’s Christmas Eve service.

My favorites? Well, if I MUST choose, I’d say I really love the Christmas Eve material which starts with the problems some people have trying to get on Facebook if they have a weird name, like Pancake, or Beers, or Batman.

And then I really like the stuff we did for November 1 as well, which begins with a discussion of the NFL—which, of all the professional sports leagues in the world, probably is the most hi-tech you can get, including television coverage, and yellow yardage lines, and telestrators, and so on. But how do they measure forward progress? The same way they’ve been doing it for 100 years—with two sticks and a chain! Hilarious.

So those are a couple of my favorites, but I like ‘em all. And I know you can preach up a storm if you take a look at this material and do a little cooking with it …

J Impersonators

It’s been over two months since the unexpected death of pop singer Michael Jackson and tributes and memorials are still going on here and there. Fans are still mourning.

But according to Michelle Rindells, “Thrilling times for Michael Jackson impersonators: Jacko lookalikes are back in demand,” (Los Angeles Times, August 14, 2009), some fans are doing better—in fact they’re doing much better—since his demise, and I’m talking about the Michael Jackson impersonators.

Not since Elvis, has there been such a golden opportunity, and opportunity that waxed brighter and brighter as Jackson’s golden coffin was winched into the ground, or slid into a vault—I don’t know they put him to rest.

Given Jackson’s controversial—weirdness—behavior of the past decade or more, being a MJ impersonator was not exactly a hot gig.

It is now, though.

According to Rindells, “A mere two months [after Jackson’s death] the Royal Talent Agency of Las Vegas reported that calls for Jackson impersonators had topped even the demand for Elvis lookalikes.  And this was in Las Vegas — the one place on the planet where you can hire an Elvis to perform your wedding, sing “Viva Las Vegas” at your office party or even jump out of an airplane.”

I guess this is news.

Still.

Jesus has been dead for 2,000 years, and we’re still impersonating—the biblical language is “imitating”—him after all these years.

Or at least we’re supposed to be … imitating him.

Some of us better than others, I guess.

Fritz Lang, Director

Eric David is an author, film critic and reviewer and all around nice-guy.

He also is a contributor to Homiletics, and gives us his ideas of film clips that might work well with certain themes and texts. He lives at ground zero for the film industry: Culver City, California.

Eric has published in a variety of venues, including—frequently—Christianity Today. His latest piece, published last week, is about the film noir director Fritz Lang, seen here left.

Lang, was born in 1890 of a Jewish mother who later converted to Catholicism. His father was Catholic in name only. This religious background created an ethos for Lang that provides grist for the mill in terms of interpreting his body of work over the years.

Although some of his movies were popular with the Nazis, he fled Germany before the war, and continued to make films. Today, scholars still debate the extent of and the nature of the religious themes in his work.

I insert here, forthwith, the last three paragraphs of David’s essay. You can read the entire thing—and it’s worth a read—right here.

David writes:
In 1967, when asked about making a film that might discuss God or morality in a time when many did not believe, Lang said, "Naturally I don't believe in God as the man with a white beard or such a thing, but I believe in something which you can call God in some kind of an eternal law or eternal mathematical conception of the universe. When they said in the States that God is dead, I considered it wrong. I said to them 'God has only changed his address—he is not really dead.' That seems for me to be the crux: naturally we cannot believe in certain things that have been told us over the centuries."

In 1973, the Director's Guild honored Lang with a special award. The man, who had not made a film in more than a decade, stunned the audience by saying, "All of my German films and the best of my American ones deal with fate. I don't believe in fate anymore. Everyone makes fate for himself. You can accept it, you can reject it and go on. There is no mysterious something, no God who puts the fate on you. It is you who makes the fate yourself."

Lang died three years later, asking on his deathbed for a priest to help him remember the words of the Lord's Prayer. However Lang's widow and third wife Lilly Latte, who had married him in the presence of a rabbi, rather than a priest, told others that Lang wanted to be remembered as an atheist. To the end, Lang kept people in the dark, perhaps even those closest to him, about where he stood with his Maker.

The Importance of Shoujing

Our Taiwanese “daughter,” (I call her that because she lived with us for two years while studying at the University of Colorado for a master’s degree) Shu-ling, sent us some travel brochures recently. She wants us to come visit her in Taipei someday.

Reading casually through one book, I came across an ancient rite called shoujing. It’s a very common sight, especially at the Xingtian Temple. Shoujing is the practice of “retrieving the soul.” When a person is deeply frightened by some event, the soul may flee the body, it is felt, and must be coaxed back.

A person whose soul has fled, goes to the temple where specially trained blue-robed lay workers ask a few questions, and then a fistful of burning incense sticks are waved over the soul-empty person, and a few incantations or prayers are recited until slowly, the soul returns to its place in the body and the person is whole again.

It’s a lovely metaphor. It recalls the psalmist who positions himself in green pastures and still waters, and then says of God, that he “restores my soul.”

What are the chances that there’s a goodly number of people in church on a given Sunday who feel soul-less? Who feel—because of an illness, a death, a loss of financial resources, loss of a marriage—that their soul in this frightened state has left them. They’re numb and lifeless and wondering when they’ll be whole again.

I feel like this from time to time—not for any particular reason. I find that sitting at the ocean’s edge “retrieves” my soul. This simple little meditative activity seems to put breath and life back into every cell of my body. Being in the mountains has a similar effect, but perhaps not as strong.

Possibly, we all have particular remedies, of which being in the house of God, or in a garden, art museum, in a boat fishing, at the ocean—somehow restores our souls. Perhaps this is what Oscar Wilde meant when he said that “nothing can cure the soul but the senses, just as nothing can cure the senses but the soul.”

Ted Kennedy Served Well

I have watched Teddy Kennedy for many years. When his older brother died in Dallas, he was only 31 years old, and the general consensus was then, that of the four Kennedy boys, he, the youngest, was the runt of the lot, intellectually, emotionally and in other ways. Chappaquidick did little to alter that perception. He was the one Kennedy kid who didn’t seem suited for politics.

And now he’s dead at the age of 77, and he’s long since proved his critics wrong. Turns out that of all the Kennedy’s, including his father, he’s the one who has rendered his country the greatest service and provided the greatest value.

I certainly didn’t agree with all of his political views. Well, let’s be honest. I’d wasn’t comfortable with most of them. But you’ve got to acknowledge that his positions were honestly taken, defended with vigor and integrity, and were plausible and defensible, even if often wrong—in my view. He served the people of Massachusetts for many years, as he did our entire country.

He is one of those public servants who fought the good fight and keep the faith. He was a patriotic American. You have to honor a man like that. And now that he’s gone, he leaves an example of what it means to put together a body of work, a lifetime of achievement and meaning. His life had that.

You can’t ask a person for more.

I’m Getting My Eyebrows Pierced

About three weeks ago, I am in the Netherlands visiting a friend. We’re on a train to Rotterdam. I get off, and I leave my clip-on sunglasses on the train. When I go back to retrieve them 30 minutes later, they’re gone.

It’s not a big deal. They cost $9.95 at Wal-Mart. I know, because over the past few years I’ve bought probably a good three dozen. I’m forever losing those clip-ons, or butt-crushing them when I absent-mindedly slide them into a back pocket.

Then yesterday, my colleague and staff writer at Homiletics, Kari Myers, passes on a blurb she saw on www.totallyabsurd.com about stud spectacles. Don’t like the way your glasses fit? Rather than slide on your eyeglasses over your ears, instead you use body-piercing studs through your eyebrows and simply hang your glasses from those studs.

So, this sounds like something that might work for me, only I’d make it more permanent. I’d fasten my clip-on sunglasses and swing them up or down as needed, but just leave them there.

And—and—this gets more interesting because think of the possibilities. I am always losing keys, too. I could drill a stainless steel stud into my left hipbone, and fasten my keys to the bolt with one of the neat retractable cords that zip in and out of a receptacle. On the other hip, I might attached my wallet with a similar device so that it would be impossible for me to leave keys and wallet on a toilet top in the men’s bathroom of some restaurant, or in a taxi, or at the dentist’s office. You get the idea.

I’m not crazy about getting my body all pierced and scarred like this, but you have to do what you have to do. Body-piercing may be the answer for the problem I have of leaving stuff behind.

Still, as my wife pointed out when I mentioned this possibility, it probably won’t work. I forget stuff and leave stuff because I’m not intentional and I get distracted and I don’t have “procedures” I follow.

Then it hit me, that this is precisely what Jesus was getting at in that famous Sermon-on-the-Mount piece where he talks about lust and temptation and “plucking out an eye” –not eyebrow plucking, but actually gouging out an eye, and lopping off a hand, as it would be better to do that, he says, than to commit the sins of lust or something else.

I heard a sermon the other day in which the preacher actually assumed Jesus was speaking literally here.

He’s not. He is using the language of the absurd. He could’ve been a writer for totallyabsurd.com. He's saying that—if you REALLY claim that it's your eye that's causing you to look lustfully, and if it's actually your hand that's committing the sin, then, you better gouge out your eye and cut off your hand. He mentions the right eye and right hand specifically, because Jesus knows that if you were to be an idiot and totally insane and actually commit either of these follies, you’d still have the left eye and left hand with which to look lustfully and do bad things, and therefore you’d have to gouge and lop again…and the long and short of it, to be free of sin, using this logic, you’d have to undergo a series of amputations that would leave you looking like a freak and then – ultimately, you’d have to commit suicide.

Jesus is saying: You guys are nuts. It’s not your eyes and your hands: You have these problems because something is goofy INSIDE. You’re messed up.

So, I guess I WON’T get my eyebrows pierced. I’ve started to work on what my wife calls “procedures,” i.e. habits with respect to my glasses, keys and wallet. For example, she says I should NEVER lay my wallet down on any surface for any reason, but instead always return my wallet to my pocket—except at home in the evenings, and then I should put my wallet on the same surface (a desk or nightstand) every time … and so on. She’s trying to manage my dementia.

So what was I talking about?

Temp Check

H1N1 is not going away.

The numbers don’t seem huge to me. I’m not reading of people keeling in swarms of fever and sweat, in something like a global “wave” of death.

But, authorities say that H1N1 is a “pandemic” because it IS global, and it’s a monster that evidently is still viral, still active, and lurking—who knows what lies beneath—and could explode into something huge if appropriate measures aren’t taken.

At my wife’s school, no one gets into the building and on the campus without their temp taken. Period. I visited the school yesterday, and watched as hundreds of kids and teachers were channeled into a line, and in turn, placed their feet on some yellow “feet” outlines taped to the floor, looked a gun that was very similar to a radar gun. This apparatus shoots some kind of beam at your forehead and registers heat, and relays the information back and instantly gives a temperature reading. If you have a fever, you can’t get in, and are sent home, and told to stay there.

I pass this on, as a metaphor you might be able to use, about the importance of daily temperature checks, i.e. quiet time, study time, meditation time, prayer, whatever. These periods of reflection, perhaps no more than 10 minutes, are still a powerful way to check the pulse, the temperature of our inner life before stepping out into a world where who knows what kind of “infections” we’re going to encounter.