Peace & Righteousness Will Kiss

Peanut Butter and Jelly

Larry, Moe, and Curly

Christmas and Carols

Some things just go together.  But sometimes things that belong together aren’t always kept together.  Like that lone ranger in your sock drawer, or the hex nut in your hand that is separated from the bolt that has declared “sanctuary” in your garage.   Through the course of time things that belong together get separated.  Maybe it’s you and a friend, maybe it’s you and your spouse.  Maybe you’re estranged from someone whom you love very much, but you find it exceedingly difficult to reach out to him.  

Advent, as it moves us toward Christmas, offers the promise of many things to come when God fulfills the Kingdom that is both here and “not yet.”  Psalm 85 speaks of a time when two things seemingly separated in our day will be reunited.   Psalm 85.11 speaks of a day of salvation when “love and faithfulness meet together, righteousness and peace kiss each other.”  

That doesn’t sound much like the world we see around us.  The great news of Advent is that it points us again and again to the birth of the Christ.  And the birth of Christ set a plan in motion whereby God intends to bring back together all the things that belong together.  Me and you, us and God, the world unto itself.  This Psalm speaks of a day when the promise of peace and righteousness will become a reality.  

Join us at Willow Meadows this Advent season to prepare your soul to celebrate the birth of Christ as if it were the first time.  As you take stock of the things in your life that belong together but are separated, may you find joy in God’s promise that broken things can be made whole again.  Even your separated socks.

A good prayer for this December:  “God, help me to see my part in the broken relationships of my life and to work to mend those things.  May peace and righteousness, as well as love and faithfulness, guide me to participate in bringing peace and righteousness together in Your world.  Amen”

I'm a Winner

So far today, I've won the following things, and was informed via email:

1.  The Irish Lottery (1.1 million pounds - I didn't know the Irish had a currency in pounds???)

2.  A $1.15 million dollar inheritance from a man I apparently nursed to health in the Vietnam war who remembered me and wanted his estate to go the "brave soldier who saved his life."  Funny, I was born in 1970.  

3.  A $550,000.00 sweepstakes claim from Benson & Hedges cigarettes.  I was a little confused, however, when the email told me to reply with my name, age, social security number (for tax purposes, of course), my mother's maiden name, my phone number, my mailing address, and my employer's name.  It gave me a specific address to which I should reply because the "reply address" on the email was not monitored.  You'd think Benson and Hedges would at least take the time to send an email awarding half a mil from a monitored address, don't you think?  Strangely, the information they asked sounded just like the credit app I filled out for my mortgage.

And that's just today.  One can only ponder what will be in my email tomorrow!  What have you won recently?  

Thursday Aphorism

I don't think I got this from anyone else, if I did, my apologies:

A short memory is grace's good companion.

Grace for Monday

I know Monday's are hard for a lot of folk for a lot of reasons.  Here's a good quote from Frederick Buechner to keep things in perspective:

The grace of God means something like:  Here is your life.  You might never have been, but you are because the party wouldn't have been complete without you.  Here is the world.  Beautiful and terrible things will happen.  Don't be afraid.  I am with you.  Nothing can ever separate us.  It's for you I created the universe.  I love you.  There's only one catch.  Like any other gift, the gift of grace can be yours only if you'll reach out and take it.  Maybe being able to reach out and take it is a gift too.  

That's from his book Beyond Words - Daily Readings from the ABC's of Grace.  

I'm reading a collection of his sermons called Secrets in the Dark and they are fabulous.  I've never really enjoyed reading sermons in print because sermons are to living in a spoken kind of way.  This set is different, though.

My prayer today is that you and I would be able to reach out and take the gift of grace.   

Forgive Me Lord, for I am Becoming Intolerant

My Intolerance of Southern Baptists is Growing.

This article from Associated Baptist Press illustrates why Baptists are having an increasingly difficult time sharing the gospel with a lost world.  A gathering of the Baptist State Convention in North Carolina this week voted down a giving plan that would allow churches to designate a portion of their financial support to go to the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.

I don't find this startling news.  After all, "they's kin."  What I mean is, I came from good ol' North Carolina (EXCURSIS ALERT! By the way, the UNC basketball regular season tips off on this Saturday - from the moment of this writing, that's just over 27 hours, but who's counting?  And to my brother-in-law Andy, I am praying for you in your grief on November 19, the day after UNC plays UK.  Andy's a Kentucky fan who will watch his boys wilt under Roy's hand again this year).  Now back to Baptist stuff.  I understand the mentality.  Or at least I think I used to.

Having been raised a Baptist in NC, I was taught that local churches participated voluntarily with state organizations.  I was also taught that part of being Baptist was expressing our differences and celebrating our diversity - not about lockstep uniformity.  That uniformity now seems to be the highest value among conservative pastors there, not church freedom.  The details in the ABP article support my position.

This is deeply troublesome to me, but I really shouldn't be surprised.  Baptists have increasingly marginalized themselves over the last few decades as a few tyrants in shepherd's clothing have grappled for power and prestige.   The carnage along the side of the path to power includes good men and women, pastors and professors who have served Baptists faithfully for years.  That doesn't even count the lay people so disgusted by it all they have either gone to other expressions of Christianity, or left the Church altogether.  And who could even reasonably estimate the number of folk Baptists will never reach because of our tainted image as hypocrites and Pharisees.  We were so concerned with inerrancy and keeping women in "their place" that we forgot about telling the Good News, never mind acting justly and with mercy.   I believe God does not walk with the machine called Southern Baptists, because Southern Baptists have not walked humbly with God.

My fears about the ultimate isolation of fundamentalist Baptists subculture, and their ultimate irrelevance in American culture, were realized when I read that fellow pastor Eric Page of Victory Baptist Church actually said, "It's time for us to pop out a can of spinach and put an end to tolerance."   On the convention floor.  In public.  To other Christians.  I'm sorry, but there is no contextualizing that my feeble mind can fabricate to make this an ok statement.  

How can any self-respecting Christian say such a thing?  To "put an end to tolerance" would be a setback to our society, and to the cause of Christ.  Jesus' ways were about respect and grace.  Jesus did not call Pastor Page to "follow me and eliminate tolerance."  Jesus calls each of us to "follow him" - and there is no further amendment to that call, except to say that in following him we are to live out that Golden Rule.

Ending tolerance sounds antithetical to "loving neighbor as self."  Pastor Page and NC Baptists, for the sake of us all, could you please retract that or explain it?  Meanwhile, I'll be on my knees asking God's forgiveness of my intolerance of your intolerance.

Guest Column

Todd Ferguson is one of the Associate Pastors at Willow Meadows Baptist, where I serve as Pastor.  Todd handled the graveside portion of a funeral recently and wrote this great piece about the funeral industry.  Thanks, Todd, for sharing.  You may direct comments to him by posting here.

The Factory

 

The art on the wall was mass-produced, and the ficus was definitely fake.  The carpet was supple and industrial and dark forest green to make sure no stains would show.  There was even a coffee station.  The woman with the name badge looked at me with a genuine but well-rehearsed smile.  I told her who I was, and she replied, “Yes- You are in Grand Room 3.”  I graciously smiled back, but internally, I sighed deeply as I walked passed other rooms with fake ficus trees and fake art.

I sighed because I was not walking to any ballroom at any national hotel in America.  Sure, places like Holiday Inn or Double Tree are known for their Hobby Lobby-esque art, their industrial carpet, and their coffee stations.  I sighed because I was at a funeral home.

“Funeral Home” is such an ironic term for what I experienced today.  The word “home” implies a place of familiarity, of comfort, and of knowing.  The family that I saw today was not familiar with the couch on which they were sitting.  There was no dip in its springs from years of watching TV with the rest of the family, no Dr. Pepper stain from a Friday night 3 years ago.  Instead, this family- in the midst of their grief- was removed from all comfort and familiarity and placed in a foreign “home” so that they could mourn.

However, they couldn’t mourn too long because the genuine-but-rehearsed woman with the name badge guided us to the actual gravesite (while another family moved into Grand Room 3).   As we drove to the site, we passed thousands and thousands of other graves.  They were testaments to the thousands of other families who sat on that same couch back in Grand Room 3 looking at the same fake ficus tree through their weary eyes.

I could go on and on to describe the experience, but I’ll stop.  This funeral home, which is a franchised chain of thousands of funeral homes, did the best they could.  I am not blaming them.  The woman with the name badge was pleasant, respectful, and extremely helpful in facilitating a funeral.  I think, however, that the funeral home is a product of our culture.

Since the 1780’s, our culture has been creating factories because the factory system can accomplish things more quickly, efficiently, and cheaply.  It’s easier to build watches if all parts are made in one location with one streamlined method with one series of interchangeable parts.  That’s the factory system.  Before this process became popular, each watch piece had to be handcrafted at the watchmaker’s shop. 

Today, I experienced a funeral factory.  In this location, there was a streamlined method for how to take care of a loved one’s death.  Chapel, Grand Rooms, gravesites- they were all there at this one place, and it was efficient.  We celebrated this beautiful woman’s rich and full life in under 30 minutes.

            My question is this: “Is this the best place to honor Grandmother’s life and to lay her body to rest?”  A funeral and a gravesite are places where a person’s life is both celebrated and remembered.  But at these funeral factories, life can not be celebrated because life was not lived there.  This beloved Grandmother did not worship week in and week out in that chapel.  She did not get up and make coffee every morning at that coffee station, and she did not take a long nap every Sunday afternoon on that couch.  This place is not known.  And because it is not known, it is not a “thin place” where the holy meets the mundane.

Instead, the funeral “home” is a location that removes death from everyday life. It keeps the sacred apart from the profane.  This funeral factory contained acres and acres of thousands of graves, separated from actual daily living that continues after the funeral is over.  Having death so far removed from our society keeps us arrogantly unaware that we, too, are mortal, and we will die.

Many people, especially Christians, are realizing the factory-like nature of funeral  homes.  They are wanting to hold together the sacredness of death and the holiness of everyday life.  One way many churches fuse these two is by building columbaria within their garden walls.  These places allow a loved one to rest in piece in the space where they worshiped God each week; it is a familiar place.  And because it is familiar, it is known, which is the perfect “thin place” for God to meet us.

Sarah and the Moose

Here's a picture - not an endorsement - of me with Palin again.  It was hysterically funny to watch all the little kids get their picture made with her at Trunk or Treat (outreach event at our church).