HOMILETICS

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.