Making a List and Checking It Twice…

 

   It’s the 21^st of December, the solstice, the anniversary of my father’s death, and more to the point, four days until Christmas.  There are very few events or celestial movements that take precedence above the list of purchases to make, dry cleaning to drop off, packages to wrap, parties to attend, bills to pay, sermons to write, pastoral calls to make, items to return to their point of purchase, gifts to procure from a spectrum of sources, devious and straightforward, cards to write, address, stamp, and mail.  The only way to keep track of this chaos is ‘the list.’   

   My wife is a blessing in many ways.  Her ability to bring some sort of order to a chaotic universe is one of them.  In her infinite wisdom, she knows better than to attempt to push and shove all these discordant entities and vectors toward an order that she has determined.  Her experience as a single parent has taught her that this is a waste of energy.  Rather, she composes, magically, bringing it to being from the bits and pieces of sensed and known dynamics, capabilities and possibilities, arcs and planes, the answer to all our worry and lack of understanding.  It seems to be just a piece of discarded envelope with numbers and words, paper-clipped to coupons and receipts, but we all know that this is what all magic is made of, common elements, herbs and minerals gathered together in to proper way, bits and pieces seeming so common until they are joined with words and motions, each exactly right.  Words like, ‘Well, we’ll be over there, it makes sense to drop by their house.  We’ll only stay a minute.  Then we’ll go to the mall.  We can get Starbuck’s while we’re there.  That will hold us up until lunch.’  See what I mean?  You’d never know that magic was brewing.  Magic that holds the world together.  Magic that allows all the insanity of this crazy season to become Christmas.

What's In Your Textbook?

I heard the other day that text books mentioning evolution were banned from Texas schools.  There is little doubt or discussion that this has to do with people’s unwillingness to allow any competition to the creation story in Genesis.  I could do some ranting about a terrible lack of understanding about the Bible’s intent.  An explanation of ‘How’ was not its purpose.  The identification of ‘Who’ was.  Nuff said.

 

But an even more basic discussion is about evolution.  Most consider uniformity the rule.  What is happening now will continue with small changes toward some evident result.  But such has as little to do with evolution as a six day agenda has to do with the Bible’s story of creation.  Evolution has to do with moments of change, sudden jumps and starts, unforeseen lightning strikes pulling forward  unappreciated strengths, altering species’ destinies.  Such a mechanism more closely resembles miracles than it does some ‘natural’ law.  It demands that we pay attention to the meek, the ones who are not dominant, who are not powerful according to the world’s definitions.  Gee, I’ve heard someone else talk like that.  Some guy who was giving a sermon on a hill in a back woods place called Galilee.  Taking all of that into account, I’m more comfortable with evolution than uniformity’s stolid unwillingness to confront God’s and nature’s obvious preferences.  Texas, put that in your pipe and smoke it.    

Omen

 

 

At that time in the morning, we were little more than groggy.  The mug of latte consumed during the walk in the cemetery is designed to peel the veils from the eyes and allow the morning sun into the shaded senses.  We were on the gravel, under the trees that line the road when the hawk squeaked twice and lifted across our path, up into the lower branches to the southwest.  He sat there, looking at us, intruders stopped, stunned by his short flight. 

I broke the silence with a diagnosis.  “It’s an omen.”  “An omen of what?”  A good question, but one that meant nothing to the teen aged red tail up in the tree.  Omens aren’t pointers toward some specific bit of our normality.  We’re going to run out of gas.  The guests are going to be late.   Omens are rumblings, touches of that which is beyond us, outside our cause and effect universe.  They express relationships that dance at the edges of our small vision.  They shimmer.  Reading omens seems so silly, so non-evidential.  What would CSI think? There’s a fallacy pointing to this weak way of thinking.  But there sat the hawk.  I wonder if he knew what he meant to us.  I wonder.

Ghost in the Machine

I have a new computer.  Do you ever wonder if there is a mind inside the machine you're blithely using?  Is it listening to what you're trying to say?  Does it watch what you're trying to design?  Does it smirk at the silliness, the fallacies, the redundancies, the unsupported inferences leading you out of the present tenses toward plans and supposed understandings and opinions?  Or is it a complicated shovel, a lawn mower with many attachments?

I never do that.

I'm pretty sure this is a female.  Shirley or Rhonda.  She doesn't talk much, yet.

Herbert’s Discourse

There’s a hawk that spends a lot of time yelling at us.  When we come out the back door, when we walk in the cemetery, and sometimes we can hear him when we’re watching the Yankees.  The truth is, I’m not sure he’s yelling at us, or just yelling.  He may be calling for his girlfriend, or alerting other hawks he’s in the neighborhood, or complaining about a stomach ache.  I’m not sure if it sounds angry or lonely.  I don’t speak hawk.

It made me realize that there are a lot of languages I don’t know.  I’m not even aware of many of the priorities driving others.  Even others that walk around on the ground and don’t have wings.  It’s scary how arrogant we are, isolated in our assumptions.  And it’s so rare that we ever even notice how our small attitudes shrink our environments.  The glory is that it doesn’t take a lightening bolt to open us to bits and pieces of truth.  All it takes is a hawk’s cry.

Chris named him Herbert.  I wonder if he likes the name. He might be a Red Sox Fan. He does have a red Tail.

Waiting for the Rain

It’s hot, hot as only New Jersey can be.  The humidity is higher than the temperature.  Everything’s sticky.  They’ve been forecasting rain, even heavy rain every day for a while.  It gets cloudy, it rumbles, it feels like a cool breeze will bring a deluge.  And then the sun comes out.  What the heck!  If we’re going to put up with the ramp up to Noah’s flood, build the ark, buy the golf umbrellas, make sure all the windows are sealed shut…  We’re ready.  The hydrangeas are beginning to wilt.  The koi are gathered under the water lilies, assuming they’re going to need protection from the down pour.  So where is it?

There are frustrating bits and pieces of life, sticky, pregnant, ready to deliver something that we’ve been expecting, preparing for, working toward, even depending on, and it hangs there, just beyond actual.  It leaves us in the discomfort of labor, full of anxiety and frustration.  Sticky doesn’t cover it. 

Now, you’re all expecting a conclusion, a point.  Right?  No such luck.  Now you know what it feels like.  Pain in neck, isn’t it?

Witness

Nelson Mandella is dying.  His life has been so full of threat and abuse, it’s a miracle he lived this long.  But his life cannot be measured in days.  He’s a giant of history.  He was imprisoned for years for standing up for justice.  He refused to believe what he’d been told by the powerful people who had been telling such things to black Africans long before he’d been born.  The whites had told them to keep their place, to give up their rights to vote, to stop want a good education, to marry who they wanted, to get a good job.  They were told to give up their dreams for themselves and their children.  They were beaten and killed.  They were like lambs led to the slaughter.

In spite of all the horror and ugliness, Mandella refused to back down.  He insisted on maintaining his dignity and his humanity and his faith.  And his faith and his dignity pushed him beyond all the ugliness that had been heaped on him and his people.  He said, don’t let your past determine your future.  He lived by those words and by the dignity and faith of his Lord and Savior.  And because of his courage and witness he became an incarnation of the power of the Good News that guided his life, refusing to trade violence for violence, refusing to be determined by the ugliness offered to him.

Every time I get the feeling this faith business, this preaching business has little power or importance, I read the call of Jeremiah.  He was told that the words he spoke would “…destroy and overthrow, …build and plant.” 

If we are to believe in the promises of God and remember the cloud of witnesses that have lived by those promises down through the ages, we will never be able to denigrate the calling that has brought us to the ministry and the pulpit.  And we should never believe the statements of the smart and intelligent people who tell us we are wasting our time in this religion business, who tell us to take our Lord’s vision of love and justice back to the dark corner where all ideals should be kept. 

Nelson Mandella is dying, but he will never die.  His life rests in the hands and in the heart of his crucified and risen Lord.  As does each of ours. 

Thanks be to God.