Jim's Place

Like you, I get an awful lot of “come-ons” in my mailbox and email.  People are always trying to sell me something.  I don’t pay attention to most of it, but one came over my email a couple of weeks ago that drew my attention:  “Cheap Ashes for Ash Wednesday and Cheap Palms for Palm Sunday.”  How could any self-respecting minister not be attracted to that?

I can get enough ashes for 1000 people for just $12.75.  That seems reasonable.  And I find that ashes don’t spoil over time, so the unused portion can be kept for next year.  The Palms are a trickier matter.  I have to decide on the appropriate size—should I buy the 24”-36” strips or the 13”-20” strips?  Could it be that we should stay away from the 13” strips because that’s such a –you know—unlucky number? 

The palms are recyclable, too.  Traditionally, you are supposed to burn this year’s palms used for Palm Sunday for next year’s ashes for Ash Wednesday. 

We enter the season of Lent this week.  Lent commences in the Christian Church with Ash Wednesday, a service of repentance and focusing our attention on our relationship with God.  In this service, we invite persons to come forward to the altar to kneel for prayer and to have the sign of the cross placed on the forehead with ashes.  The idea is to enter into a season of forty days of reflection about our commitment to God.

 The notion of forty days comes from two places.  First, the number “40” is a special number in scripture.  There were two periods in which the number “40” was of great significance in the church.  The Children of Israel wandered for 40 years in the wilderness following their escape from Egypt.  These wilderness wanderings were a time of “preparation” for them as they became a nation.  The other reference was Jesus, himself, spent 40 days in the wilderness dealing with temptation.  He emerged from that wilderness and those forty days a much stronger person and prepared to accept his role in following God’s call upon his life.

There was another reason the church embraced the number 40—with a certain amount of mathematical sleight-of-hand, 40 days came to represent a “tithe” (tenth)of the calendar year.  Setting aside a tithe of the year to focus on our discipleship seemed like a reasonable idea.

In the earliest days of the church, baptisms took place only on Easter Sundays.  The season of Lent was the time when those wishing to be baptized were taught the history and doctrines of the faith.

For us, Lent is still a time for us to focus on our own faith, to be reminded of our baptisms and the fact that we belong to God, to Christ, and to the church.  Many of us use this time to “give up” something as a way of helping us to focus on God.  This giving up something is a form of sacrifice and a form of “fasting,” one of the church’s spiritual disciplines (like praying, studying, attending worship, etc.).

The season culminates with the Passion Week as Jesus makes his way to Jerusalem, is tried and executed, and then is risen on Easter.

 We invite you to celebrate Lent beginning this Wednesday at 6:30 with Ash Wednesday.

PEACE
JIM

There is a commercial out right now that is both annoying and troubling to me.  Before I go further, let me go ahead and apologize right now for showing my age and/or lack of faith in technology.

The commercial is from AT&T and it’s about their new smart phone.  Specifically, it’s about how fast their new phone is.  The commercial shows two “heroes” who have these phones while all the others around them have, apparently, “dumber” phones.  Someone will rush to our two heroes with what they believe is late-breaking news of some kind—which they retrieved from their poor, dumb phone—only to find that our heroes already know about the news.

The “tag-line” is, “that is so 17 seconds ago.”

So the point is that the one who gets the news fastest is the winner.  In fairness, there are most certainly areas of life in which the speed of new information is critical.  I think of our military folks in the field.  Having crucial information quickly is a matter of life and death on the battlefield.  Surely there are times when certain medical information needs to be shared with all speed.

The problem with the AT&T commercial is that none of the information is critical.  It’s all pretty much banal.  And the kicker is, our heroes have their faces and their fingers attached to their phones pretty much all the time.

I do not disdain technology.  I know how valuable it is.  I also am more and more aware that it owns us far more than we own it.  I’m particularly fearful for our young ones.  They haven’t been around long enough to remember that the rise of technology, originally, was to allow us to do our work faster so we could have more time available to be with each other—to enjoy our lives.  MySpace and Facebook give the illusion of being “connected” to so many more people, but connected how?  We twitter each other with completely useless information and make believe we have thousands and thousands of “friends.” 

It seems to me this technology has only given us an excuse not to develop genuine relationships.  We risk losing the energizing element of real relationships—intimacy.  As evidence of my point, what is it that causes so many of us to prefer texting to a phone conversation?  The phone conversation would actually be far more efficient than clumsily texting back and forth.  And at least a phone conversation involves a human voice.  Is it because we prefer the “distance” of a text conversation?

May I make a suggestion?  The church is very near to the season of Lent.  Traditionally, Lent is a time when we consider giving something up as a way of re-connecting with God.  To my teenaged friends, relax—I am not about to suggest you give up your phones for Lent.  But how about all of us committing to setting aside a certain amount of time each day or each week to leave the phones aside and be with each other?

Try it and see what happens.  Do it intentionally.  After all, you can always go back to doing what you were doing, before. 

Peace,
Jim

     “Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what the universe was made for?” the humble man prayed.  “Ask for something more in keeping with that little mind of yours,” came God’s reply.

     “Dear Mr. Creator, please tell me what man was made for?”  God said, “Little man, you ask for too much—you’ll never understand it.”

     “Then Mr. Creator, will you tell me what the peanut was made for?”  “That’s better,” the Lord replied.  And beginning that day, George Washington Carver discovered some 300 uses for the lowly peanut.

     We remember Carver for his brilliance.  He reminds us from his laboratory—that he was fond of calling “God’s Little Workshop”—that his brilliance began by humbling himself and recognizing the limitations of his own understanding. 

     George Washington Carvers humility stands in sharp contrast to our world that says promote yourself, advance your own cause, push your own agenda even at the expense of those around you.  In our world everyone quests for greatness.  Carver knows what the Bible knows and what the faith knows: the way up is down.  If you want to be truly great, then the way up is down.

     I suppose that’s why I am constantly on the lookout for “quiet heroes”—those folks who do the simple things or the things nobody else wants to do and they do those things without any spotlight or fanfare.

     I’m thinking about this today because John Irving pulled me aside recently and told me he wouldn’t be able to continue doing something for us that most of you don’t even know about—for many years, John has been the one to come behind us after the early worship service and clean up the discarded bulletins or whatever else we leave behind. 

     John performed this humble task faithfully and beautifully, Sunday after Sunday, and he performed it very quietly.  I bring it up only to offer a special “thank you” to John for what he has done for us all this time.  We are very grateful.

     And I bring it up to remind us all that there are other “John Irvings” in our midst who humbly perform any number of tasks every week.  Please be on the lookout for them and offer them a quiet word of thanks.

PEACE,
Jim

 Joe Paterno died last week.  His is truly a tragic story and one we must never forget because it is such a cautionary tale.  We all have something to learn from it.

My connection with Paterno was like most everyone’s.  I knew he was an old, successful football coach who seemed to be “old school” in the way he conducted himself and wanted his players to conduct themselves.  I can’t remember one “scandal” involving a Penn State player.  I do remember Paterno not liking the limelight and seeming publicly shy.  I have no reason to believe that he wanted anything but to help coach and mold young men into good, productive human beings.  He ought to be remembered and admired for that.

I’d also like to give credit where it is due.  When he was confronted with so much evidence that his longtime friend and assistant had abused a number of boys—even inside the Penn State facility—Paterno didn’t attempt to hide his own complicity.  He admitted that he had made a mistake in not pursuing more action.  He didn’t attempt to deny and then blame somebody else.  He had the grace to admit his error.  In the end, he took the heat and it cost him.  I suspect he died of a broken heart every bit as much as he did from cancer. 

Having said all that, Paterno also doesn’t deserve a pass.  He was a very smart guy.  He had enormous influence at Penn State.  When it became apparent that the ones along the hierarchy to whom he had reported the abuse were not going to pursue it (for reasons that passeth understanding), do we really think for a moment that Paterno wasn’t aware that this friend and assistant would continue abusing boys?  One can pretend about such things only for so long.

Can you imagine many things more difficult than being forced into a situation where you must turn in your close friend and surely ruin his life?  Can you imagine being in Paterno’s cleats and wanting to believe the best about his friend, but knowing what all is at stake?

In our toxic culture, the refusal of people to speak the truth and to accept responsibility for their actions is corroding our nation’s character.  Those of us who claim to be followers of Jesus must accept our obligation to be people of integrity.  We bear the name of Christ and we owe it to him to live our lives in a particular way.

There are no heroes in this story.  Paterno is like most of the rest of us.  We want to do the right thing and we know what the right thing is almost all the time.  But knowing it and doing it is not the same thing.  Joe Paterno could have done more.  He chose to believe that someone else would do the right thing.  They didn’t.  Others paid for it.  That’s not right.

I have no desire to stomp on Paterno.  I really liked him and the end of his life is nothing but tragic to me.  Out of a lifetime of service to a fine university and thousands of students, his legacy will forever be tarnished.  Perhaps we would all be better served to ask what we might have done in those circumstances.

PEACE
Jim

      I regularly read the Op-Ed pages of the Tennessean and the New York Times as a way of trying to stay informed on the day’s events.  I do so with an ever-increasing wary eye on the new reality of media outlets being “influenced” by political parties or corporations.  In other words, be cautious not to believe everything you read.

     I also tend to read the local “letters to the editor.”  It’s one way to keep your finger on the “pulse” of certain things going on.  Today I see a letter from a gentleman titled, “It’s time to end the Bible’s influence on public opinion.”  The title draws me to read the letter.  It is a response to a story from last week about how clergy and other religious folk are trying to use the Bible to advance their opposite opinions on immigration reform. 

     You may have seen last week that the recent controversial immigration law in Alabama is being opposed by a lot of clergy, including the United Methodist Bishop of the area.  They claim one of the Bible’s chief admonitions is to show hospitality to the stranger and that the new immigration law does the opposite.  On the other hand, another group of Christians is saying that the Bible also says it is important for people of faith to obey the laws of the land and that the Apostle Paul was adamant about this.  Anyone entering this country or remaining in this country illegally is going against the law of the land and, therefore, the Bible.

     So today’s letter is from a guy who asks, “When will humans in this enlightened and advanced age of progressive science and technology learn to escape the church’s and the clergy’s claim of ‘authority’ and use their God-given ability to reason in order to properly identify and solve their problems?”

     I am filled with mixed reactions to his letter.  My first reaction is to scream at the top of my lungs that his view of the Bible and the church is mistaken.  I want him to know the richness of the story of God’s interaction with creation and humanity.  I want him to see that the people of faith, as they are reported in those pages, are real people with real problems and that they often suffer and bleed and die.  I want him to know of this Jesus we talk about—the one who spent time with sinners and prostitutes and tax collectors and loved them all.

     And then I remember that this guy’s understanding—or misunderstanding—of our sacred text is the result of nearly 2000 years of church folk fighting the wrong battles.  We clergy and you laity apparently decided long ago that the Bible serves as a dandy weapon if that’s the way you wish to use it.  We have mistreated people outside AND inside the walls of the church with the Bible for as long as it has been in print.  People have died because of certain ways they interpreted the Bible.

     In other words, I resonate with his frustration because I know we (and I) are partly to blame for it.  If we, in the church, continue to bicker over petty differences, we will deserve the ignominious death that awaits us. 

     My answer to this letter writer is the same as it is to the rest of us—the only way to properly appreciate what is in the Bible is to know what’s in there—NOT just what somebody else TELLS you is in there, but what you have discovered for yourself.  Our scriptures have withstood 2000 years of scrutiny and seem to be doing just fine.  What they cannot withstand is the ignorance or laziness of believers who don’t care to take the time to learn what’s in there.

     So pick up your Bible today and get re-acquainted.  I promise everything you need to know about God and how God wants us to be with each other can be found there.  Join a Sunday School class and learn more.  Attend one of the Bible studies that are taught during the week.

     One more thing–the next time you hear someone wax eloquent about how sure they are that God wants us all to do something that sounds suspiciously like it might have come from one or the other political party in this country–and then claim that the Bible says so– just walk away.

PEACE
JIM

  Have you noticed that we are in a presidential election cycle?  Kidding.  How could any of us miss it?  The Republican Party is in the process of determining a candidate.  The Democrats will be spared a primary battle this time around and both parties are positioning themselves for the general election.  The driving issue for this election has been –and will continue to be—the economy.  Even though there are a host of very critical issues that need to be addressed (i.e. healthcare, military, education, social security, etc), it is the candidate who can convince us he knows the way out of our economic mess that will likely remain standing next Fall.

     I wonder if we Christians understand that the economy is a religious issue?  The root of the word economy goes back to the idea of the stye-ward, from which we get our word, steward.  The stye-ward’s function was to make sure that everyone in the household had what they needed to live—no more and no less.  The Biblical notion of economy was one of enough.  The story of the children of Israel in the desert following their escape from Egypt contains the basic premise:  God provided manna for them to eat—but only enough for one day.  Any attempts to collect too much and hoard it, failed—the excess manna spoiled.

     Somehow, we have embraced a different notion of economy in this country.  We seem to have replaced God’s idea of enough with a new idea of excess.  It appears that we have embraced a very Darwinian understanding of life—the survival of the fittest.  The strong only get stronger.  The weak get only what they deserve.  And in the end, they get run over.

     I’m not qualified as an economist to imagine what all this means.  But as a Christian, I’m pretty sure it means that we have stepped out of what God wills for us as a community.  I’m pretty sure it means that we have decided that selfishness is somehow better than generosity.  And I’m pretty sure it will lead to a decline of what made us such a unique nation—in fact, the decline is well underway.

     Lest you believe this is a diatribe against capitalism, it isn’t.  I am a firm Wesleyan on this.  John Wesley said that the faithful Christian should “earn all he can, save all he can, and give all he can.” My aim is to be sure we Christians stand up together and remind everyone that it is the “give all we can” that seems to be in danger.  And selfishness diminishes everybody.

     One last point—one of the newer movements of the last year has been the “Occupy” movement.  For them, the battleground is between the so-called “1 percent” versus the so called “99%.”  I admire their passion—just as I admire the passion of the tea partiers.  But I would remind them and us that to be counted among the world’s richest 1%, a single individual has to earn a total of only $34,000 a year.  Members of the planet’s true middle class live on an average of $1,225 per year.

     Give all you can.  After all, most of us are in the 1%.

PEACE
JIM

      It’s already hard to tell that Christmas was just two weeks ago, isn’t it?  We manage to “tear it down” as fast as we can—maybe so we can get back to “normal”?  I heard somebody say, “It’s good to get back to work and to my regular schedule so I can get some rest.”

     We are now in the season of Epiphany, the time in the Christian calendar for “revealing” who the child in the manger really is.  We did that a week ago with the Wise Men—they helped to reveal who Jesus is.  Old Simeon in the Temple helped to do it, too.

     This past Sunday, we learned more about this Messiah at the baptism.  There are a few more weeks of this “revealing.”

     One of you sent me a quote from Howard Thurman that I had not seen before.  Thurman is one of the most underrated theologians of the last century.  It is a quote that captures one very important piece of the Epiphany story:

     “When the song of the angels is stilled,

      When the star in the sky is gone,

      When the kings and princes have gone home,

      When the shepherds are back with their flocks,

      The real work of Christmas begins:

      … To find the lost,

      To heal the broken,

      To feed the hungry,

      To release the prisoner,

      To rebuild the nations,

      To bring peace among brothers and sisters,

      To make music in the heart.”

PEACE
JIM

Two stories crossed my path this week and I share them with you in the spirit of the season.  The first comes from the world of K-Mart.  It seems that dozens of individuals have contacted K-Marts around the country, anonymously, in order to pay off the layaway balances for strangers—specifically those who used layaway to pay for their children’s Christmas. 

K-Mart is the store of choice for many low income families and immigrants whom certain “patriots” are trying to keep out.  K-Mart’s prices are low and it is one of the few “Inns” where they are made to feel welcome.

Sure, these anonymous benefactors are engaging in “seasonal generosity which isn’t likely to fix what ails these families.  But it is generosity, nonetheless, and it is still giving to others.  Maybe it won’t end the economic chaos we’ve created, but it is doing “the next best right thing.”

In a world that seems evermore populated by hatefulness, such acts of generosity make our world a little better and a little more humane.

The second story comes from Plymouth, Minnesota where a teenager is celebrating his 12^th straight year of sleeping in a cardboard box from November 12 through December 31^st in order to spur people to pledge money for the homeless.  His name is Peter Larson and he has raised over $400,000 in these past 11 years with the hope of raising another $100,000 this year, alone. 

 All told, he has spent over 30 nights sleeping outdoors in temperatures as low as minus 20 degrees.  When asked why he does it, Peter simply says, “because I know in my heart I’m helping other people”.

 I wonder if such acts of kindness don’t just serve to give the rest of us hope, but maybe they also give God hope for us, too.  How else could God keep coming back to us year after year at Christmas time when it is painfully clear that we have missed the mark God dreams for us?

Maybe stirred by nothing deeper than singing “Silent Night,”a few more of us turn to the light and a bit of the darkness is vanquished.

PEACE ON EARTH
JIM

     Christmas gifts come in various packages, don’t they?  Sometimes the best gifts come in the smallest packages.  Other times, the best gifts don’t come wrapped at all.  Maybe what most of us need these days is a different kind of gift, altogether.  A gift that stirs the heart.  Here’s one:

     Ed Freeman died last week.  You can be forgiven for not knowing who he was.  Ed was 70 years old and lived in Boise, Idaho.  His death didn’t make any headlines anywhere.  He wasn’t famous—unless you happened to be one of the people whose life he saved one day in 1967.  You see, Ed was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. 

     Imagine yourself being 19 years old and critically wounded somewhere in the Central Highlands of Vietnam.  Your unit has come under a very heavy attack and you are vastly outnumbered—so much so that your commanding officer has ordered all MedEvac helicopters to stay away.  To stop coming for the wounded.  You know this is a death sentence, but you also know the C.O. is right.  He couldn’t risk any further loss of life.

     As you lie there waiting “your turn,” you hear the faint sound of chopper blades.  Soon you see a Huey coming in that doesn’t have any MedEvac markings.  Captain Ed Freeman heard the call and decided to disobey the order.  He wasn’t a MedEvac pilot.  But he dropped in, anyway.  He loaded three of you and flew out amid heavy gunfire and took you to a MASH unit to be cared for. 

     And he kept coming back.  13 times Ed Freeman dropped into that hot LZ to rescue the wounded.  No one knew until afterward that he, himself, had been hit 4 times in the legs and arms.  All told that day, Ed Freeman took 29 wounded out of that jungle.  It is reasonable safe to say that none of them would have survived that day without him.

     Ed Freeman, Medal of Honor winner, died last week in Boise, Idaho.  You probably didn’t hear about it.  I thought you might like to.

     My gift to you. 

Peace
JIM

     We had a good Sunday yesterday with Bishop Joe Pennel helping us to celebrate our 40^th anniversary.  Our youth and handbell choir both led our two services and they were terrific.  So it seems good to ask the question “what’s next?”  After 40 years at our current location—and 120 years as a worshipping Body of Christ—where are we headed??

     I was out of town last week doing sermon preparation through Easter.  I found myself reading the “In-Flight” magazine on my Southwest Flight and, wouldn’t you know it, Southwest also is celebrating 40 years this year.  That article caught my attention.

     In 1972, Gary Kelly—the current CEO of Southwest Airlines—was a student in high school in San Antonio, Texas.  He scheduled a flight to go to Houston in order to visit Rice University and chose to fly with this fledgling airline.  He recalls that flight, vividly.  “I was one of three—yes, three—passengers on that flight.  My first thought was, ‘there is no way this airline is going to make it.”

     Fast forward to 2011 and Southwest is the most profitable airline today and one of the world’s most admired companies.

     I remember when Southwest began and what I remember most was how “out of the box” they were.  Their flight attendants wore hot pants (anyone under 40 may need to consult with their parents on this) and they did crazy things on board—it was almost like they were marketing a party at 35,000 feet.  Southwest has grown up in the years since, but their core values remain the same: lower fares, high quality customer service, convenience, efficiency, and having fun.

     What does this have to do with the church??  No one I know of is under any delusions about the challenges facing the church these days.  60 years ago the church had been given an “untouchable” place within which we did our work.  A very high percentage of people attended one of about 5 mainline denominations.  Sundays were days that no one dared schedule any other activity before noon.  For goodness sakes, there was such a thing called a “Blue Law” where most all businesses were closed on Sunday mornings.

     The world has changed.  The church now competes with business, entertainment, and sporting enterprises on Sunday mornings.  Even our children must frequently choose between church and “travel teams.”  Organized religion is no longer untouchable.  We must now earn our respect and our allegiance like every other enterprise.

     We can either weep and gnash teeth over this, pining over the good old days and how things used to be.  Or we can get creative and entrepreneurial in our work.  I believe more today than ever before that the world in which we live needs the message of the Gospel.  But with so many competing claims on people today, there are too many who not only don’t attend church, they aren’t bothered by the fact that they don’t attend church.  We have our work cut out for us.  Maybe a good place to start is to recognize that there is a very rich mission field right in front of us.

     We collected “messages” from everyone Sunday in the form of birthday cards that will be kept and saved for the believers at Forest Hills UMC in the year 2051—40 years from now.  What will our legacy be?  What will they think of us?  Will they marvel at how we did some things “out of the box” that distinguished the people called Methodists?

     Here’s hoping and praying that they will remember us fondly as people who exercised genuine faith in the midst of hard times.  I hope they will remember us as deeply committed to missions and evangelism.  Are you ready to build that legacy??

 PEACE
JIM