Going Out Like That

So, here I am, writing the last sermon of my first pastorate. On Sunday, after nearly ten years I will be saying goodbye to the folks in Atwood and Plumville.  On this snowy Friday afternoon, when I normally have things more or less sussed out for Sunday, when I normally am enjoying my weekly Sabbath rest, here I am thinking about the Body of Christ.
As it so often does, the Revised Common Lectionary has thrown me a curve, but as in baseball, if I can manage to track that curve, it might just go out of the park.
Did I mention this is my last sermon to the congregation that I have served since I graduated from Seminary?
Did I mention that this is my last sermon to people who helped Michele and me welcome and raise two children?
What do I want to tell them?
I want to tell them the same thing that Paul told the church at Corinth: "Now you are the Body of Christ, and each one of you is part of it." (1 Cor. 12: 27 NIV)  Actually, that's all I really ever wanted to tell them.
So why is this a curve?
Good question, I'm not sure, but I have this gut feeling that this thing is about to break on me.
See the metaphor of the body is really loaded, we are all intimately connected with our body.  In fact, Incarnation is at the center of Christian faith and doctrine: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Scandalous really, to any good theist, the idea that God, immortal, invisible, omniscient and all powerful, walks around in the same sort of fragile sack of guts and bone that we do.
Gnostics have always had major problems with that, and so they tackled the "problem" of Jesus by trying to make him into something other than God in a human body.  It would just be easier if we could come up with some sort of explanation that didn't involve the Creator of the Universe traipsing about in the body of a Nazarene craftsman.
What to do about Jesus?
That's a real problem.  That's the problem that I have been wrestling with here in this little congregation for almost a decade.  Once the Incarnation happened, for some reason, God thought it was a pretty good idea, and so it wasn't over with just Jesus.  Jesus gave his Disciples marching orders and told them to go and do what he did, represent God to the world, not just in words, but with who you are.  We take up the charge of being the Incarnation of God in the world, the Body of Christ.
I'm not making this up, that's what Jesus said, it's what Paul founded all those early communities upon.  Before they ever called themselves a church or even Christians, they were the Body of Christ.
There's an awful lot of talk in the Church these days about what exactly is going wrong.  We're not growing, and some of us seem to be infected with hate, anger and other bad ideas.  One of the solutions that is rather popular is to look back at the beginning of the church and find out what they did right.  How exactly, did the early church go from 11 people to a world religion in a little less than 250 years.  It's tempting to think that the church then was just different.  That the people were more willing to commit and less distracted by all the nonsense that the world has to offer.
But I'm pretty sure that's not true, mostly because I've read the letters that their pastors wrote to them.
I'm pretty sure that when Paul, emphatically reminds the church at Corinth that they are all part of one body and that no one of them is better or more valuable than another, he did so because they had begun to fight with one another and claim that some were more valuable than others.
Just as the body of Jesus of Nazareth could be beaten up and crucified, the Body of Christ that is the Church, can still be broken and torn apart.  There is eternal significance to the fact that we break the body of Christ and have his blood poured out for us on a regular basis and call it a sacrament.
So what is my last sermon to this part of the Body of Christ going to say?

You are broken,

But you are holy.

Christ has made you.

You are few and small,

But you are wonderful.

Christ has called you.

 Frightened and unsure,

The light of the world.

Christ lives 

In 

You.

You are 

The Body.

You are enough,

You are what God needs.

You are all that God wants.

Crazy like a Fox

I don't know what inspired me to go out on a day like today.

It is about zero degrees.  It's the kind of cold that makes the dog, who loves walks more than just about anything in the world look at you like: "Seriously? You're getting me out of my nice warm dog house for this?"
But out we went, and at first, I thought, "Man you are crazy, it hurts to breathe."  But then I got moving and my natural insulation started to cooperate with the layers I had wisely donned.  Pretty soon both Zeke and I were enjoying ourselves.
As nature is wont to do, she rewarded the bold and slightly off their rocker. I saw fox tracks, rabbit tracks, and these:

Those are wild turkey tracks.  I also saw two whitetail deer and many other signs of animal activity.  If I was on the other end of the resource spectrum, that is, if I wasn't a fat guy walking to try and keep control of his weight and diabetes, and I was a person who needed to go out and hunt for food, this morning, cold as it was, would have been a boon.  I could have come home with several turkey or maybe a deer, enough to feed a family at any rate.

It got me thinking about the rather primal experience of walking in the very cold weather.  I saw and noticed things that would have otherwise been invisible.  I followed a fox's path for a while, noticing that though his paws were just a slightly smaller version of my dog's canine prints, he moved in an almost unswerving straight line, until he intersected with some prints made by a rabbit, and then a rather wild turn in the narrative took place.  Zeke wanders all over sharing the rather human impulse to explore for the heck of it.  The fox did not swerve or wander until his prey was at hand.  The fox lived with a single purpose: find food.  Likewise the turkey and deer that I saw were not out for a stroll, they were out there trying to survive.  They can't just go out to the market like I'm going to do in a while and buy their food, they have to somehow find food in the unforgiving frozen winter.

It makes me feel thankful for what I have.  The fact that I could observe the animals and their signs with curiosity and appreciation rather than hunger.  The fact that my dog and I could leave our rather wanton footprints out there in the frozen woods; that is a true blessing.

All in all a pretty good morning for a walk.

Tour De Lance

A few months ago, another one of our heroes took a rather spectacular fall from grace.
Lance Armstrong, seven time winner of the Tour De France, was stripped of his titles retroactively based primarily on the suspicion that he had used Performance Enhancing Drugs (hereafter PEDs).
It was peculiar that Armstrong, despite vehement past denials, chose not to contest the action of the World Anti-Doping Agency.  You had the feeling that something was brewing.
And so here we are Lance has taped an interview with the high priestess of American culture, Oprah Winfrey, in which he is reportedly going to come clean and admit that, "Yeah, I took PEDs."
On one hand, I want to say that PEDs are a really bad idea, they can mess up your health in the long term, they are in fact a form of cheating and sports really should not tolerate them.  In fact, the thing that Armstrong is perhaps even more famous for than his Tour De France wins is his enormously successful Cancer research fundraising machine, Livestrong.  Because Lance is a survivor of testicular cancer.  He survived cancer before he even won his first Tour.  One wonders about the link between PEDs and cancer... but I'm not qualified to establish causal medical relationships.
What I'm more interested in is Lance Armstrong as a hero, because I think he was, and to some extent, I think he still is.  He's obviously a flawed person, he may be a cheater, but I think in the final analysis being a hero to kids with cancer is probably more important to the world than being able to ride a bike really fast.  So I'm going to ask for a little grace for Lance, before I hear his interview with her royal Oprah-ness, before all the pundits and sports nuts start ripping him apart.  I am personally going to give him a pass on the whole PED thing.  Here's why:
1. The sport he was involved in is a cesspool of doping and cheating.  Cyclists make Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds look like high school wrestlers trying to bulk up with some spurious muscle builder from GNC.
2. Because the cycling world is so FULL of people trying to get an edge the testing procedures are ridiculous, and Lance never actually got caught, which primarily proves that he was just better at cheating than everyone else, but that leads me to the final piece of this argument.
3. The people he was racing against were mostly doing the same things he was and so, while it does not excuse his behavior, it does somewhat vindicate his 7 Tour championships.

If you're competing against cheaters, you have to cheat, or you will probably lose.

Drugs or no drugs, Lance Armstrong is still pretty much the best cyclist since Greg Lemond hung it up.  His primary challengers, Alberto Contador and his teammate Floyd Landis have also run into trouble with the Anti-Dope man.
If Lance had been cheating against a bunch of pure, idealistic, choirboys who just wanted to ride their bicycles for the love of sport, that would be one thing.  But the purity of cycling as a sporting event is laughable, they're pedaling peddlers, rolling billboards for whatever corporate sponsor throws the most cash at them so they can buy absurdly advanced and expensive bikes and travel the world riding around in fancy spandex.
What makes the final difference for me, is that Lance used his fame and fortune, ill gotten though it might be, to do some good for a lot of people who really need it a lot more than the sporting public.  Livestrong helps people who are fighting cancer.  It helps people who have to be on steroids just to stay alive.  It inspires people to give money to research, in short it does a lot more good for the world than the Tour de France or the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Just a guess but Livestrong and Lance's non-cycling related legacy may be the reason he has chosen to enter the public confessional with Mother Oprah.  Maybe, he really is a hero, and he has realized that it's just time to come clean about the cheating.  Maybe he wants to admit that he did wrong, take responsibility for what he did and move on with all the other stuff he might be able to do besides ride a bike really fast.
Even, and maybe especially, heroes need grace.

Drinking the Hater-Ade

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, 

but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

-Romans 12: 2

I have been part of the twitterverse for about a month now.  Culturally speaking, Twitter is a lot more interesting than Facebook, because Facebook functions more or less like a gathering of friends.  Twitter, however, has a Matrix-like quality in the way that it moves and breathes with a sort of collective consciousness.  Over the last few days I have been following what amounts to a fairly continuous thread of responses to a blog about the ways that hate can spew forth on the internet like vomit from that girl on the Exorcist.  The blog was by Amanda Palmer, who I know about because I'm a music geek (she was the lead singer of The Dresden Dolls), and a literary/comic book geek (she's married to Neil Gaiman).  Ms. Palmer has written a rather wonderful, touching commentary on the phenomenon of Cyberbullying.  Be warned that she likes to use some fairly adult language, but if you can handle that please read: http://www.amandapalmer.net/blog/20130105/

Don't skip the comments and responses, they may be the best part.

For those of you who don't want to here's the gist: Amanda is a successful artist, while perhaps not a household name, she has enough fanboys and fangirls to keep her ego well stoked and cushioned against criticism, yet hate and bile can bring her down.  What about your average 15 year old girl who has rather intractable self esteem issues?

The anonymity of the internet allows those who would hate carte blanche to do so whenever and however they want, with no fear or being punched in the face (not that violence is the answer, but sometimes...).  See, I'm hating on the haters!  It's almost irresistible!

Just this morning, the twitterverse provided me with a shining example of how hate pollutes things.  Besides Amanda Palmer and her husband Neil, two of the most essential twitter follows for me are the Dalai Lama and the Pope.  I am neither Buddhist nor Roman Catholic, but these are two of the most important religious figures in the world today, and I am interested in all things related to God (even a few atheists, because negative space is important in any picture).

So here is the Pope's morning tweet (@pontifex): "Following Christ's example, we have to learn to give ourselves completely.  Anything else is not enough."  Just the kind of thing one might expect the Bishop of Rome to say to his 1.4 million followers (that's just on twitter, the Catholic Church has way more than that).  The remarkable thing is that most of the responses to that were negative, and I'm not talking a little negative.  I'm talking priest-molestation scandal / Nazi Germany kind of stuff.  It makes me glad that the Pope probably  doesn't spend much time actually following himself on Twitter.  Even if he did he would probably understand that those poor people are in need of Christ's love as well and forgive them (JPII forgave a guy that shot him, it sort of comes with the big hat).

Just so you know that this kind of bile is not reserved for Christianity here is the Dalai Lama's morning tweet (@DalaiLama): "We forget that despite the superficial differences between us, people are equal in their basic wish for peace and happiness."  And I thought to myself, "isn't that a nice thought!  I'm not Buddhist, but I could go around for a few days thinking about that and it would probably make me a better person.  In fact, I would probably find it easier to truly love my neighbor and follow Christ's example like the Pope says Christians should do."

Then I read the comments...

Bad idea, I'm going to stop doing that.  There are just so many morons... AHHH!  There I go, judging and hating!  This interweb thing is really insidious!  Maybe I should just stop, get off of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+.  Maybe I should take down my blogs and shoot my computer like Elvis did to his TV.

Then again probably not.

Maybe I should try to be in the middle of all this sin and try not to let it get to me.

Maybe that's what I can learn from the Pope and the Dalai Lama, because that's probably why they're on here.  They obviously don't need the publicity.  Maybe these two holy men are on Twitter because they see the potential for raising the cultural consciousness above nip-slips and the latest celebrity divorces.  Maybe Benedict XIV puts his encouraging Christian messages out there every once in a while so that someone will know that we can use these computers and iphones for something besides porn and hatred.  Maybe the Dalai Lama actually believes that even the haters have that basic wish for peace and happiness.  I want to believe that too.  And in the end most of our faith decisions come down to what we really want to believe in: God, nothing or something in between, love or hate, anger or forgiveness.  I think I know what side I want to be on.

I guess Twitter might be useful after all.

Change with a Capital C

I told the two congregations that I have served for almost ten years that I was leaving at the end of the month.  For a pastor, that is a little like telling your wife that you've fallen in love with someone else and you're leaving her to start a bright new life with that other person.  I know, that's dramatic, but this is a weird job.
I didn't know what to expect from the folks; anger, sadness, maybe even joy from some (I'm not so arrogant to imagine that everyone will hate to see me go).  What I actually experienced this morning though was nothing that I expected, though, if I really paid attention to God and his people closely, maybe I should have. What I experienced this morning was grace, pure and simple.
When you tell people that you're leaving them, you expect sadness and that is certainly part of it, but what I didn't see coming was the genuine love that people showed Michele and me.  They were happy for us, even as they were sad or anxious about the future of their congregation.  They were happy for us, even as we told them we were moving on, leaving home so to speak.
We were awfully young when we got here, kids really.  The same age as the children, and in many cases grandchildren of the members of the congregation.  I realized this morning, that no matter how much I thought of myself as the pastor of the congregation, I could never really escape the partial identity of a son or grandson.  It's not a bad identity to have, most people like to have a son who is responsible, articulate and goes to church all the time.
I am actually thankful for that role, and for the people who showed me the grace to think of me that way.
As much as the new thing is exciting and challenging, this morning I realized one way I truly hope and pray it is the same: I hope to find the same grace there as I have found here.
I know the people and the place and the very lifestyle will be different, but I trust that the grace will be the same.
Thank you for the grace and peace be with you.

Auld Lang Syne

The whirlwind is about to start.  It feels like that blur of stars as the Millennium Falcon enters hyperspace or the Enterprise goes to warp.  It's going to be 2013 before I get to take a breath again, and the new year is going to bring a lot of changes, so I think it would be good to take a minute to reflect on the year that was.
First, let me say this to 2012: good riddance.  I don't feel this way about every year, in fact, there are some that I would have liked to last a little longer, but by any standard that I can imagine at the moment 2012 was one of the worst years on record.  However, I will try to find some good in at least a few aspects.  First on a micro level, I enjoyed reasonably good health.  I didn't have any diseased organs removed or find out I had any new diseases (that was for 2010, the year we were supposed to make contact).  To the bad, there was more than enough earthshaking personal tragedy in our immediate context to give 2005 a run for its money (that was the year my brother Jonathan died, just to give you some idea of the scale of sadness we're talking about here).  There was a tragic accident where an Amish boy died in my neighbor's silo, followed a week later by a triple homicide where a father killed his two little girls and his estranged wife (and I had been counseling them, and the family attended the church where I'm the pastor and I had to do a triple funeral), then as the icing on June my neighbor's sister suddenly passed away at 34, leaving two little kids and a stunned family behind.  I put that all in one sentence because it happened in a three week span.  I didn't even mention another tragedy in the community involving a domestic incident where an estranged husband shot his father in law in the neck (that was bad too, and it happened one day after the triple homicide).  Pardon me if this is starting to read like some sort of cruel joke, but that's actually what it felt like.  At the end of the summer a really good man from my other congregation rolled a tractor on himself and left the world a little poorer for his absence.  Finally, after Thanksgiving we had to have our chocolate Lab, Maggie, our good friend of almost ten years, put to sleep.  Amidst all this local and personal stuff there were the national tragedies in Aurora Colorado, a mall in Oregon and an elementary school, a freaking elementary school, in Newtown Connecticut.  That's why I say to 2012: Good Riddance!
But let's not leave it at that, because that would let the darkness win.
Let's move on through this mess into something hopeful shall we?
First word: Peace.
We need some peace.  We need peace in our hearts and minds, we need peace in our families, our communities, our nation and our world.  Are earth shaking tragedies going to stop?  No, but that's precisely why we need peace.  We need peace that does not depend on external circumstances.  We need peace like an Amish man, who had just lost his 18 year old son, had when he came to console the man who had been working with him when it happened.  We need peace, like the strange inexplicable peace that I felt when I stepped into the pulpit to proclaim the resurrection behind the caskets of two dead children and their mother.   We need peace that can face the rage of the void and say: "Be Still!"
Second word: Enough.
We live in a world that never has enough.  Part of the reason why tragic things happen is because we never have enough.  Some of us honestly don't have enough, some of us are threatened every day by a sense that everything we have will be taken away.  Some of us just don't have enough time.  But, truth be told, most of us have too much and it's eating our souls.  Some people have too much because they take from others.  Some people have too much because they just can't learn to say, "no more."  But for the people with a little or a lot, enough is an important word.  It's a word we need to learn to say with more frequency, clarity and conviction.  Unless we get a grip on the concept, the reality will be that we will never have enough.
Third word: Trust.
What is happening in our world right now is a failure of trust.  Nations don't trust each other, factions and political groups don't trust each other.  Often times, families don't even trust each other.  I would say it's a failure of love, but I know thanks to Wendell Berry that "we must love where we cannot trust."  We can love someone in the abstract, but trust is a personal thing.  You either trust someone or you don't, you can't really help it very much.  Some people seem to be trusting by nature, not many, but some.  For most of us though, it's rather an uphill slog.  I've loved certain people I did not trust, but I've had a hard time trusting people that I already love.  The most tragic failure of trust is the fact that we, as a species, and even as a segment of of our species that pursues a quest for God known as religion, do not trust God.  We'll give it lip service, but when the rubber hits the road, we would rather do it ourselves than have to trust God.
If there's one over-riding good lesson that 2012 has taught me, it's trust God.  This year taught me that by putting me so close to the chaos of the void that I had no choice.  It put me so close to a situation where children were harmed that I could not, simply shrug it off and move on.  2012 has given me the faces of two little girls that are never going to grow up and have lives, which is a sadness that I will carry for a long time.  It has also forced me, as a pastor, a father and a human being, to trust that those faces and those lives are in the everlasting arms of God.  I must trust that.

May old acquaintance be forgot, and never brought to mind.
May old acquaintance be forgot, for the sake of Auld Lang Syne.

It's Time to Consider Our Symbols

And then Jesus asked him, "What is your name?"

"My name is Legion," he replied, "for we are many."

-Mark 5:9

As a modern person, I find Jesus interaction with demons a little unnerving.  Maybe it's because I have been trained by my secular education to disregard the possibility of supernatural evil, after all don't we have enough natural evil to go around?  But when it comes to things like the shootings in Connecticut, demons all of the sudden begin to seem awfully real.  The man that Jesus confronts in the region of Gerasa, across the sea of Galilee from his usual stomping grounds, is described as living among the tombs.  People had tried restraining him with chains, but he broke them, in other words the standard practice of treatment had not worked.  Living among the tombs is a powerful image for people in pre-industrial societies. These tombs were not the sanitary, well manicured graveyards that we all automatically picture.  These were caves and cairns where bodies lay decomposing and vermin of all sorts scurried about feasting on human remains.  And the Legion drove a man to live there.

Rather than being disgusted and angry with the man who was afflicted by these demons, Jesus has compassion for him.  In many situations, like the one I experienced here in June and the one that Newtown CT is living through right now, that is difficult, if not nigh impossible, for human being who is not the embodiment of a merciful and loving God.  And the Legion would be just fine with that.  Legion was not afraid of anyone, not the people who could chain them up, not the anger of the townsfolk or the power of the secular government, but they were afraid of Jesus, because he could cast them out.

Another facet of the biblical accounts of demon possession that troubles my soul is the rather confusing dynamic that is created when we begin to consider mental illness.  There is no doubt in my mind that much of the pathology that was once labeled demon possession was in fact mental illness.  The frightening corollary of that belief is that at least some of what we now classify as mental illness may be demon possession.  

Camouflage is perhaps the devil's most cunning skill.  As Goethe's Mephistopheles said in the play Faust, "Not if the devil had them by the neck..." would most people even be aware of the grip that sin and evil has on their lives, and of course that is the great dilemma we face.  It is not a problem of classifying mental illness over and against demonic possession, it is rather a need to recognize that both are tools by which human lives are broken apart and evil lashes out at the world.

When people are trying to deal with that lashing out, we often come to an impass.  Yesterday, in the unofficial religion of most of America, the NFL, players had moments of silence, they hugged children, they put decals on their helmets, they wrote words of sympathy and remembrance for the victims on their gloves and shoes.  In short, they revealed a rather poignant example of what sets human beings apart from most other animals: the use of symbols.  Words are a rather specific kind of symbol, but as a species, we can attach symbols to just about anything.

If you have read the blogs from the last few days, you know I am rather obsessed with wrapping my mind around the large cultural forces that create an environment, where someone, even a mentally ill or demon possessed person, would direct their violence deliberately at children.  Violence of this particular sort seems new to us.  Children are far too often the victims of physical or sexual abuse.  Children are far too often the collateral damage of large scale catastrophes and violence, but this seemed to be different, because there was no motive other than simply to kill children, on a rather massive scale.  Something that holds our humanity together was seriously broken in Adam Lanza.

What circumstances produced this unholy anomaly?  "My name is Legion, for we are many."  Broken home, mental illness (and maybe demon possession), a culture of violence, access to weapons, disconnection from a stable community and God only knows what else.  The end result was catastrophic, and we want to blame someone or something.  The problem is that the devil is good at camouflage, he attacks from many angles and leaves little forensic evidence in the midst of all that carnage.

In the absence of a clear answer, perhaps it would be good to analyze our most powerful symbols as a culture, not to assign blame, but to try and understand how we got out here among the tombs of all these dead children.  The first symbol that I can't seem to get away from in all this is the gun.  A gun is a symbol of power, you could say our country would not even exist if it weren't for the invention of the firearm.  The American Revolution would not have been numerically or strategically possible without the ability for the colonials to attack the British troops from a distance.  Without guns we would still be subjects of the Crown, without guns it is very possible that democracy would not be possible.  It is quite possible that the gun is wired into our cultural DNA.  Guns give us the ability to kill from a distance.  If you are going to kill someone with a knife or a sword, it's an up close and personal kind of thing.  Guns are not dependent on physical strength and with a minimum of training they can make a five foot woman every bit as formidable as a six foot man.  After all, killing from a distance was how David slew Goliath.

This is not good or bad in any a priori sense, it just is.  Guns have real power and symbolic power.  They symbolize freedom to a people who have made freedom one of their highest virtues.  When symbolic and actual power align, things are truly dangerous, not just physically but spiritually.  Our obsession with guns is closely tied to an underlying symbol that is perhaps the most definitive symbol of American culture: the individual.

How can an individual be a symbol you ask?  Easy, you just divorce the idea of an individual from any actual living individual and invest your thinking in a concept of individuality, without ever asking the hard question (that many of our founding fathers actually spent a great deal of time thinking about), what is the responsibility of the individual to the community.  There is no doubt that if the gun is part of our DNA than individuality is practically our entire genome.  We idolize the mythology of the mountain men and the cowboy, we hold on to the image of our founding fathers as the rugged individuals that tamed a new continent, we easily forget that their greatest challenge and accomplishment was actually forming a community, a great union upon this continent or something like that.

The biggest challenge for Americans has never been how we take care of number one, but how we stay together as a society.  We easily forget that in the idolatry of personal (individual) rights.  We have to get better at the community thing if we as individuals are going to be truly free to flourish.  If our children are going to be safe in their schools and community.  It was an individual that fired those guns, but the factors and forces that put the gun in his hand and gave him the sickness to use it on children were indeed Legion.