Timothy Merrill

Cigs and Cellulars

Maybe you read about this. It just strikes my fancy--which is itself an antiquated little expression that, well, strikes my fancy.

In a leading newspaper in the U.K., Dr. Vini Khurana--who is reputed to be one of the world's top neurosurgeons--says that there's a growing body of evidence that using handsets for 10 years or more can double the risk of brain cancer.

The risk is potentially more deadly than lung cancer caused by cigarette smoking.

So you can quit smoking, but if you're talking on that mobile all day, after a few years, you could have cancer on the brain.

Or, you could quit using your cell phone, and take up cigarettes again, preferring--if you got to die--to lose your wind while you'r dying and not your wits.

Or, you could keep smoking and keep talking and lose both your brain and your breath.

Personally, I am glad for this report. And I fervently hope some crusader will begin to mobilize those who were born to be activitists, and get them on this new bandwagon, i.e. banning the use of cell phones in public places. New legislation should be enacted immediately, so as to protect us from ourselves, and to save millions of dollars that will inevitably be spent on curative and surgical treatments for the impending tsunami of brain cancer incidents we can begin to expect. It's a cost-benefit analysis if nothing else.

I demand that using one's cell phone in restaurants and bars, on buses or any form of public transporation, in banks, post office and public schools, in elevators, grocery stores, civic buildings, courtrooms, office buildings--be banned and severe financial penalties imposed for violations.

Further, I demand that all advertising for cellular phones on television be banned, and that print advertising for cell phones be monitored to ensure that cell phone companies are not pandering to unthinking children and adolescents.

In addition, I demand that a label be affixed to every cell sold in the U.S. that says: "WARNING: Some Neurosurgeon in the UK says that using this cell phone will addle your brain in 10 years."

I tell you. I've got a new cause.

All for the public good, to be sure.

The common weal.

Grace (Eventually)

Love Lamott. She's got a new book out. I caught this blurb from Religious News Service (RNS) and thought I would pass it on.

NEW YORK -- The carpet guy, as Anne Lamott calls him in an essay, cheated her out of $50 for a moldy church rug she returned to his store. She cursed and threatened him. Later, Lamott realized the absurdity of it all, that she too had misbehaved in their little feud. She sent daisies and an apology note. Lamott views the incident, recounted in one of 24 essays in her best-selling book, “Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith,” as an example of how grace often comes unannounced. Her point, however, wasn't about him: “I've got to keep my side of the street clean,” she said. Lamott is widely adored, especially in liberal circles, for her best-selling books on faith, writing and motherhood. Through essays touching on her Christian faith, her church, her son, her past drug and alcohol excesses, her life story is well-known to millions of readers she has never met.

Selig Sind

Last week, holy week, was the week from hell, if I may use the expression. But it was pretty awful.

I was feeling pressure with some publication deadlines in advance of some post-Easter vacation time, Jeanie and I had three hour chorus rehearsals for Brahm's Requiem every night except Tuesday. My bike was stolen. I accidentally failed to retrieve a debit card from an ATM machine and so the machine, thinking I had walked off, which I had, ate it. I had to sit in a dentist's chair for another installment on my root canal crisis. And then on Saturday afternoon, I had a major, major computer event. Pretty sickening. It was an awful, painful death, after which Jeanie and I left for the concert hall to sing the Requiem. Fitting.

After the performance the chorus and orchestra were happily mingling in the back stage hallways. Someone asked me, "How's your wife?"

I said, "What do you mean?"

She said, "She fainted during the sixth movement." I was on the far end of the stage left, and JEanie was on the far end stage left, so I could not even see her during the performance.

So I rushed around trying to find the dressing room and found my little petunia, wilted and droopy, sitting on a chair. I got her outside for some fresh air.

What a week.

I woke up on Easter Sunday morning however with hope. He is risen! It was a new day, a new life, a new beginning.

And then I recalled that Brahm's Requiem begins with "Selig sind..." and ends with "Selig sind..."

"Blessed are ..."

I can live with that.

This Isn't So Easy

It's Monday morning, the day after Easter.

Two-thousand years ago, a small band of disciples are just beginning to get excited. The word has spread: He is risen!

The hard part's over, right? Jesus is alive! Great things are going to happen now! Hey--they look at each other--"That was easy!"

That was easy. It's a marketing tool for the office supply chain, Staples. The big red button. You get good service or a problem is solved. You hit the button. That was easy!

The reading for this coming Sunday suggests something else. Jesus' words to his disciples before the cross and in the post-Easter season is not, "This is easy" but: "This might hurt."

Jesus called on his disciples to also take up their cross.

The disciples are going to be jolted once again. It's not going to be easy.

In fact it might hurt--a lot. Sometimes, that's the nature of discipleship.

There is more in Homiletics for this Sunday. Take a look.

A Slightly Puzzling Reglious Celebration

I'm in Shanghai, China, right now and I picked up a copy of the only English language paper in town. the Shanghai Daily News, when I saw a front page blurb about an article inside.

The blurb read: "Easter Egging It: Chocolate eggs, rabbits and buns ... that's what will be on the minds of people celebrating Easter."

That sounded interesting, so I turned to C8 inside to find the following headline: "A Slightly Puzzling Religious Holiday."

The article began by noting that most of the country's 1.3 billion people don't have a clue about Easter.

The story then developes some history about puzzling Easter traditions, like the egg, the Easter hare, hot-cross buns, and more. While all of these traditions developed out of a religious ethos, today, the religious context has been lost for most people.

That's why, for millions of Chinese, Easter is a "slightly puzzling religious celebration."

Here's your lead for the sermon tomorrow. It's puzzling to millions of Chinese--and perhaps millions of other non-Christians around the world. Is it any clearer for us? Can we who are Christians make sense of this?

Then you, the preacher, can proceed to try.

The Pressured Christian

I had a conversation a couple of days ago with Dr. Michael Thompson, author, educator and child psychologist. He's the New York Times best-selling author of Raising Cain: Protecting the Emotional Life of Boys, as well as Best Friends, Worst Enemies, a book about powerful childhood issues such as popularity and social cruelty.

He's also the author (with Teresa Barker) of The Pressured Child: Helping Your Child Find Success in School and Life.

Thompson told the story of the parents of a Grade 9 boy whose parents thought he was unorganized. They sought Dr. Thompson’s help.

He asked the dad if he himself was “organized.”

The dad replied, “Yes, I am.”

Thompson then asked him: “Well, when did you get organized?”

The father replied: “Well, when I was a junior in college.” Ah!

Thompson acknowledged that some anxiety can be helpful in the learning process but constant pressure is not helpful. Moreover, the pressure that parents place on children is now equalled by the pressure parents exert on teachers to ensure that teachers are providing the education the parents want and need their child to have.

In fact, children are looking for experiences that make them feel that they’re achieving developmentally and that they’re as competent as they can be. In short, they’re looking for:

Connection
Recognition
A sense of mastery

Generally, these feelings do not come from report cards. They know that the report card is not who they are.

THE PRESSURED CHRISTIAN

The idea that kids deal with a lot of pressure to succeed--from peer, parents and teacher--leads us to ask how the "pressured Christian" responds when faced with day-to-day issues such as unethical business practices in his or her place of employment; expectations for service and ministry in church; family obligations; fidelity, love and trust in relationships; career paths; spiritual and devotional life. What are the stressors? How do Christians deal with them? How should we cope? Is this the nature of the Christian life: facing pressure and responding in a way that's consistent with our core Christian beliefs?

I suspect that Christians, like children, are looking for: Connection, Recognition and a Sense of Mastery. That is, Christians need connection and community to thrive and grow spiritually and emotionally toward a wholeness that enables them to deflect pressure or channel it wisely. They also need Recognition, that is, their particular skill-set must be affirmed and authenticated by the ChristBody in order for them to function and serve effectively. When you are affirmed in what you're doing, handling pressure is a piece of cherry pie. Finally, they need a sense of mastery. Christians can handle the pressures of life when he or she has gained control of themselves. This is the right kind of control, the kind of control or self-discipline about which the apostle Paul offer spoke. We're not talking about control over others, but the ability to discipline oneself. When a Christian is able to exercise restraint, discipline, control, then that Christian may find not only that pressure is easier to handle, but that some stressors don't even show up for work. Self-discipline and mastery can do that.

This could be a sermon series.

N.T Wright on the Resurrection

Easter's only a few days away, so I thought I would revisit my conversation with N.T. Wright while he was lecturing at Harvard about 18 months ago. The interview was published in Homiletics (and I think I referenced it here in this blog somewhere). Just think of this as a little primer on the meaning of the resurrection before facing the Easter crowds who--if they're looking for anything--are looking for a good resurrection.

HOMILETICS: Let’s start with the resurrection. You say in one of your books that there really hasn’t been any new evidence in the past generation or two to dispel the notion that when people die, they stay dead. So what accounts for the increased levels of discussion concerning the resurrection?

WRIGHT: The word “resurrection” has commonly been used by Christians for many years now to mean effectively, “life after death.” So that when people read the Easter story they think, “Isn’t that wonderful? Jesus died, then he was raised, then he went to heaven; well, we’ll die, we’ll go to heaven and that’s pretty much the same thing. And they miss the whole point of the bodily resurrection, which has to do with “new creation,” because most Christians — and indeed many Jews in the modern world as John Levison has argued in his new book — don’t actually have in their minds a picture of what resurrection really is, which is: a new bodily life after a period of being bodily dead.

In other words, resurrection is not life after death, it’s life after, life after death. We’re talking about a two-stage post-mortem reality. A time of being bodily dead, and then — if you want to talk about going to heaven, then that’s what’s going on at that point. But then, the new heavens and new earth that were promised will form the theatre or stage within which we’ll be given new bodies to live within God’s new world.

To me, the almost amusing thing is that this was absolutely common coinage in Christianity until probably the early 18th century in Western Europe, at least. You can see it on tombstones and the way that people wrote about their future hope on tombstones.

Somewhere in the late 18th and particularly through the 19th century, this got completely overtaken by a platonic hope for simply going to heaven, and the word “resurrection” simply became a metaphor for that hope of going to heaven — which now is all that most Christians think about.

HOMILETICS: But it was also the Jewish understanding of resurrection in the ancient world.

WRIGHT: Absolutely, but not just a Jewish understanding, because the meaning of “resurrection” was clear. In the ancient pagan world, the Greco-Roman world, if someone mentioned “resurrection” — anastasis in Greek — people knew that that meant someone who is already well and truly dead coming back into a bodily life of some sort, and they knew that that didn’t happen.

HOMILETICS: So when you say that the resurrection is a “historical” problem or issue, is this what you mean? Getting back to an understanding of the word itself?

WRIGHT: Well, yes. If you say “Did Jesus rise from the dead?” and then suggest that that means, “Is Jesus still around spiritually somehow having left his body behind in the tomb?” — that’s a notion that one can understand; the ancients would have words for that — ancient Jews, ancient Hebrews, ancient Greeks would have had a word for that. But they wouldn’t have used the word “resurrection.”

HOMILETICS: So if you want to describe that position, fine. Just don’t use the word “resurrection.”

WRIGHT: Exactly. If what you mean is that you “sense his presence still with you,” “His call continues,” whatever. Exactly. Say, then, that “His call continues and I sense his presence with me.” We’ve got language to say that. The word “resurrection” does not mean that in the ancient world.

So it’s quite clear what the early Christian claim was. The early Christian claim was that Jesus was well and truly bodily alive again after a short period of being well and truly bodily dead and that they knew that this totally broke the mold. Many Jews in that day did believe in resurrection, but they didn’t believe that one person was going to be raised before all the rest. That’s a totally radical innovation. Nobody was expecting that.

We are Smarter than Me

Just a few random thoughts to get of my desk on this beautiful Saturday morning:

First, ran across this book which I have not read except for the back cover: WE ARE SMARTER THAN ME. It continues the discussion of Wikinomics and The Wisdom of Crowds. I am waiting for some big name Christian writer on the speaking circuit to write a book: WikiChurch, but hasn't happened yet, although Homiletics did a piece called "Wiki-Christianity" in 2006 (November 12). Lots of stuff going on in business and education with wikis--it's really phenomenal.

Anyway, for pastors who work in covenant with a community, and who often--let's face it--think that ME IS SMARTER THAN WE, I thought this might be a good read, but I can't guarantee it. I think it's focus is to take what The Wisdom of the Crowds has done, and to show how the business community can actually make crowd-wisdom affect the profit margin.

Second item: I just learned that my friend, Tim Cargal, who has a Ph.D. in New Testament from Vanderbilt and writes NT exegesis for Homiletics, and who is also pastor of Northwood Presbyterian Church in Silver Spring, Maryland, has written another book, and it sounds very interesting: Hearing a Film, Seeing a Sermon: Preaching and Popular Movies (Westminster John Knox Press, 2007). Haven't read this book either, but I would love to, and will.

Third item: Remember the post I wrote a while back about Barack Obama's comment that a person's relationship with his pastor can be a tricky thing? Or something like that? Well, it's gotten even trickier. It's too bad. And it's too bad for the United Church of Christ which is not populated by pastors who think like Jeremiah Wright. And, while we're at it, I don't know what Geraldine was thinking when she spouted off about Obama. She's a politician. She knows the power of her words. She knows the media isn't going to provide context for her comments. What was she thinking? I am not a Clinton or Obama or McCain supporter yet. But it would be nice if Clinton and Obama could please have a discussion without having to deal with all the fools and buffoons in their entourage.

Speaking of entourages--and the problems CLinton and Obama are having with theirs, Homiletics did a piece called "Entourage Energy" coming up in June, 2008. The idea came up after reading a piece in Mental_Floss by Harry, Lou and Todd Tobias. “7 entourages that changed the world.” Mental_Floss (September-October 2007, 35-39). Fascinating piece. Homiletics looks at some of the problems Jesus had with his own entourage (The Mental_Floss article includes "Jesus & Co." as one of the seven entourages that changed the world.)

Fourth item: Eliot Spitzer scandal. Unbelievable. Ted Haggard. Or consider the case of David Vitter, a father of four and a Senator from Louisiana, who gets himself involved with a sleazy escort service. Or Michael Vick, a talented quarterback for the Atlanta Falcons, arrested for running a dog-fighting operation in rural Virginia. Or Lisa Nowak, the married NASA astronaut who makes a marathon drive from Houston to Orlando to confront her romantic rival. Or Bill Clinton — Rhodes scholar, six-time governor of Arkansas, and President of the United States — who has an affair with an intern in the Oval Office. These are all highly intelligent, rational, people. What's going on? Homiletics did a piece about this. It's coming up April 20. Called "Hot Faith, Cool Faith," and it looks into the psychology of this. These people get themselves worked up into a hot emotional state and do things that in their cool emotional state--the state we're in when we're reading about this and wondering how people so smart can be so stupid--they would never do.

Final item: Louis de Cazenave, France's oldest man, a First World War veteran who refused a medal and spoke powerfully about the horrors of war, has died at 110, leaving--in France--just one veteran alive from the conflict. de Cazenave died at his home in the Auvergne region in central France on Sunday, the government said. His death was a reminder of the 1.4 million French who had lost their lives in the 1914-18 war. According to REUTERS, Cazenave survived both the Battle of the Somme in 1916 and the Second Battle of the Aisne a year later, two of the bloodiest episodes of the "war to end all wars".

I found this sad, for some reason. I guess because almost 100 years after the "war to end all wars," there's more warring than ever. Perhaps someday, someday, the world will observe the passing of a man who is the last survivor of something called "war." A poppy for you, Louis. Repos dans la paix.

Guess that's it.

Wishing you a meaningful Palm Sunday. I assume you're going to pick up the palm branches from the florist today--don't forget--for the children's procession tomorrow.

Trying to be helpful.

May-June Issue of HOMILETICS is Online

FYI, if you're a Homiletics subscriber, you'll find the next issue now online.

The cover story focuses on the Hagar-Ishmael allegory and is called COLD NEST MOTHERS. But there's a huge chunk of more great material. This issue looks at two books, too; one that's been out a while, The Art of Woo by G. Richard Shell and Mario Moussal, and one that's more recent and attracted a lot of attention in the secular press, The Year of Living Biblically, by A.J. Jacobs. Both of these treatments take us to th biblical text for the day in a way that will grab the attention, if not the hearts, of your congregation.

There's a look at a movie, too: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. The text is the Great Commission in Matthew 28. We call it: "The Kingdom of the Crystal Commission." In this same installment you'll find a great commissioning litany written by 16-year old from Hinsdale, Illinois. The whole installment and this litany will work well for those of you commissioning youth people on upcoming mission trips, but could work with other contexts as well.

Favorites? I hate to say, but I love "Catching the Wind" for Pentecost Sunday which looks at harnassing wind where the wind is blowing, like 50,000 feet in the air. Sometimes, if the wind isn't blowing where you are, you've got to go to where the wind is blowing.

Another favorite is "Ballast in Your Bottom," a look at the research the robotic engineers are doing using turtles as a research subject. The problem with robots is that once they fall, they have a devil of a time getting back up. So, how do turtles do it? How do we get back up once we've fallen.

Anyway, take a look. It will get your homilietical juices going!

Holy #$%#$#%&! The Church Accepts Dropping Blasphemy Laws

We’re in the U.K. now, understand. Here, blasphemy has been some kind of misdemeanor since well before Disraeli was making fun of Lord Acton. Now they’re about to be repealed, and although Church leaders have signaled that they’re willing to accept the inevitable, they urge caution and hope that repealing the laws won’t result in a rise of religious hatred and abuse against the Anglican church. PM Gordon Brown himself has said he wants to consult the CoE before coming to any decisions himself.

Sounds funny to hear that the Church is dropping it’s resistance to repealing a blasphemy law, doesn’t it? It puts the Church canoodling in the same bed with atheist and Oxford professor Richard Dawkins, et al. Eeeeww! $%$(&*(8@#4!!! But, understand, that to be anti blasphemy laws, is not the same as being pro-blasphemy. To be blasphemous, I think, is choice that consensual adults ought to be able to make in the privacy of their homes, or indeed, in the public square where we routinely bow, in passing, to the god of Free Speech.

The only people around these days who believe in blasphemy laws are extremist Muslims. And as Salmon Rushie knows (he is among the supporters of the move to drop the laws—surprise), in the muslim world, if you blaspheme you could be put to death--and they don't seem to see the irony.

The issue has generated considerable debate: One blogger wrote — “The Church of England has already promoted the greatest blasphemy of all time when it allowed the 'ordination' of women. That it should agree to the elimination of the law of blasphemy comes as no surprise, for they have completely lost the plot to the atheists.”

Said another: “Why is it perfectly fine for everyone to have a go at Christianity but mention a minority religion and it's hell to pay? This is nothing more than the secularists pushing their agenda again, they can believe or not what they like but IF they wish to pursue this course then it should apply equally to all religions and not just be anti-Christian in bias.”

On a related matter, in southern California—of all places—while the Brits are dropping laws against blasphemy, one municipality is adopting cussing laws. South Pasadena’s just gone through its first NO CUSSING WEEK, and it plans to observe such a week the first week of March every year. Town leaders are hoping that people will make an effort to be more civil.

“That's one of the purposes of this,” Mayor Michael Cacciotti said of his city's proclamation designating the first week of March as No Cussing Week. “It provides us a reminder to be more civil, to elevate the level of discourse.” [from CNN]

Well, I think both ideas are good ones. No point having a law that’s not being use or has no legal force. And quaint little laws like the one in South Pasadena are indeed good reminders. And it feels good to think there are people out there who foul language as a problem.

Christians, of all people, are people of the Word, and the gracious word, seasoned (says Paul). The text is Colossians 4:6: “Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer everyone.” And, of course, there’s James 3.