Fat Tuesday--Making the Time Count

This is the last day of the first month of my sabbatical--one-third over all ready. It also happens to be my mother's birthday and Mardi Gras--Fat Tuesday. Sabbatical time use and the marking of time is on my mind now that I've only two months of my sabbatical left. During the past month I've rearranged my schedule to do different things, but it hasn't been as easy as I thought it might be. The beginning of Lent, oddly enough, has brought to mind a time-use discipline that will help. I'm giving up FaceBook for Lent, but I'm picking up a daily post to this blog.
In the reallocation of time that I'm experiencing during my sabbatical time, it's this difference in my use of time that is proving to be the most challenging. Without the rhythm of a 50-hour work week since February 1, it has seemed that my weekly discipline of time use is up-ended. I find it harder than I thought to change habits that have been my practices for so long. What use of time is the best, now that I don't have to commute, study to prepare a weekly sermon, call on parishioners, design weekly worship? All those seemingly mundane tasks are where I've found the practice of the presence of God as my calling as a solo pastor. When all that is gone, it seems like there are vast expanses of time to be filled, with vast choices for how to do it, but very little guidance on how to make those choices. So where is God now?
Discipline in the use of time has never been my strong suit, but this is where my sabbatical challenge is now, for remaining two months until May 1.
The season of Lent has always been the church's time to call to mind the reorientation of one's life to God. This is the root of the practice of foregoing something for Lent, to make room for something else, something that will keep one's attention to God. So it is with the use of time.
So celebrate Fat Tuesday with all your heart, and use it as a time marker to make tomorrow a different kind of day. Nothing like the present to make a change for the future
!

A Sign From God?

The road sign in front of my workplace is our twitter-like mission to the community. The church uses the sign to post messages of encouragement or thought provoking ideas in short phrases that can be read by cars going 30 mph down the road in front of the building. I hope that people reading those messages can use them. Every so often the messages provoke a response from a (usually anonymous) reader--an email message to the church office or a phone call. Never, until this morning, have we had a face-to-face response.
This morning I met a young man in our lobby who came in and asked me, "What's the message?" I didn't get the reference until he asked me again, "The sign. What's the message?"
He was a young-ish, maybe mid thirties, clean cut, not threatening.
I said, "The message is: God loves you," and then I asked him if he would like to pray. He clearly did. We did. He visibly relaxed. I asked him if he needed anything else. (We often get requests for money from passers by.) He said no, that had been enough and it helped. He left as quickly as he had come. It seemed that was all he needed--just reassurance that the God of the universe did indeed love him, in all his particularity, whatever that happened to be this morning. Such a simple message and so life giving. Words on a sign, and a response--God signs. We need all the signs we can get.

Morning After Prayers

An influence in my father's and grandfather's spiritual life was the pastor, professor, and theologian John Baillie. His classic book of daily prayers Diary of Private Prayer has guided the prayer life of many Presbyterians. It's a book of 31 days' worth of morning and evening prayer, one for every day of the month. The copy in my library is one that came to me from my father's library when he died.
This is the prayer for the morning of Day 9, updated for today's language:
Here I am, O God, with little power and less influence. But I'm lifting up heart and voice to you before whom all created things are as dust and vapor. You are hidden behind a curtain of what we can sense, incomparable in your greatness, mysterious in your power. Any yet here I speak with you as a child to parent, as friend to friend. If I could not so speak, then were I indeed without hope in the world. For it is little that I have power to do or to ordain. I am not here of my own will, nor of my own will shall I pass from this life. Of everything that will come to me this day, very little is of my own choosing. It is you, O Hidden One, who will appoint my lot and determine the bounds of my habitation.  It is you who has put power in my hands for some things and not for others. It is you who keeps the threads of this day's life and who alone knows what lies ahead of me.
But because you are my Divine Parent, I am not afraid. Because it is your own Spirit that stirs within my spirit, I know that all is well. What I desire for myself I cannot attain, but what you desire in me you can attain for me. The good that I try to get for myself, I can't get, but the Good that you will for me, you give me the power to do.
Dear Divine Parent, take this day's life into your own keeping. Control all my thoughts and feelings. Direct all my energies. Instruct my mind. Sustain my will. Take my hands and me them skillful to serve you. Take my feet and make them swift to do your bidding. Take my eyes and keep them fixed upon your deep beauty. Take my mouth and make it eloquent to tell of your love. Make this a day of obedience, a day of spiritual joy and peace. Make this day's work a small part of the work of the Kingdom of my Lord Jesus, in whose name these prayers are said.

OK, Ladies.  Time to put on our big girl pant suits
and go to work.

Approaching Thanksgiving

Walter Brueggemann published Prayers for a Privileged People in 2008. (Abingdon Press) I've admired him for a long time, for his ability to say important things with a few right words, prophet words. The collection is poetic prayers. Picking it up again this morning, I was drawn to the title "At Thanksgiving" and will quote it here in full. Maybe those algorithms that track important words (see my last post) will at lease give Walter Brueggemann a shout out.


Amid football,
family, and
too much food,
we pause quickly and without inconvenience
to remember and to thank.
We remember ancient pilgrims
who followed dreams of alabaster cities
and financial opportunity;

We remember hospitable first nation people
who welcomed them, and then lost their land;
We remember other family times
filled with joy and
filled with anxiety, and
old scars still powerful.
We thank yo for this U.S.venue of
justice and freedom,
and are aware of its flawed reality;
We thank you for our wealth and our safety,
and are aware of how close to poverty we are
and how under threat we live.

We gather our impulse for gratitude today,
grateful to you and to our ancestors,
grateful to you for our families,
our health,
our government,
our many possessions.

We gladly affirm that
"All good gifts around us are sent from heaven above,"
But we yield to none in a sense of self-sufficiency,
our weariness in needing to share,
our resentfulness of those who take and do not give.

Your generosity evokes our gratitude,
but your generosity overmatches our gratitude.
We are ready to thank,
but not overly so;
We remember our achievements,
our accomplishments,
our entitlements,
and our responsibilities
that slice away our yielding of ourselves to you.

Move through our half measure of thanks
and let us be, all through this day,
more risky in acknowledging
that we have nothing except what you give.

You have given so much--not least your only Son.
Gift us the gift of dazzlement and awe
that we may rejoice in our penultimate lives
and keep you ultimate all the day long,
relishing the wonder of your self-giving love.

Discrimination

I opened a page of quotations from Richard Rohr, an acknowledged "guru" of mine and often read by devoted thinkers in my own congregation. His quotations are pithy and relevant to everyone who cares about the future of Christianity and the future of the world.
What struck me was at the bottom of the page. The website designer [Brainy Quotes] has chosen to incorporate a list of clickable links to other "related authors." The list includes: John C. Maxwell, Joel Osteen, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Charles Swindoll, Charles Stanley, Robert Schuller, and Dwight L. Moody.  None of these men bear the slightest relationship to Richard Rohr in outlook or sentiment. The only relationship I can think of is that all are readily quotable because of their large body of searchable text available on the internet and the fact that they are all self-identified white male Christian clergy.  The differences between Richard Rohr and the rest are vast and important.
I take it that the web designers don't have a clue.  Maybe they don't care. Promoting the site as "brainy" doesn't begin to capture the ham-handedness of an algorithm that throws all these authors into the same pot as "related."
My concern is that people have handed over their discrimination job to a vast "cloud" of algorithms that purport to do something about analysis and communication, but that really only magnify the poorly-informed biases of the algorithm writers. This is why I am dedicated to discrimination, that is, the ability to tell the difference between truth and lies. It does make a difference.

Culture is Killing Our Kids

Saw this on a publisher’s website, from youth minister and author Steve Ingraham, who recently sent this letter to the families in his congregation. All I can say is

AMEN!

Dear Parents,

We love your kids.

We love them enough to send you this letter.

Your youth are in a bad place. We have never seen a generation of teenagers who are more stressed, full of anxiety, depressed, suicidal, over-committed, over-medicated, over-worked and over-extracurriculared, and it is killing them, sometimes literally. We know you

want the best for them: the best grades, the best colleges, the best teams, performances, standardized scores, friend groups, etc. We all want the best for them. But they are not the best at everything, and they will never be the best at everything.

I was not, you were not, and they will not stand atop the podium in every area they compete. As I watch the Olympics I have thought a lot about what it takes to get to the Olympics, let alone what it takes to get to the top of that podium. It takes incredible amounts of raw talent, dedication, work, and single-mindedness about that discipline.

Unfortunately, we see many parents pushing these standards and unrealistic expectations in every area of their kids' lives. They cannot do it all; they cannot handle the stress and are being crushed under the weight of the expectation. Now, please hear me; this involves not just your expectations, this involves the expectations of their coaches, teachers, administrators, potential colleges-and the expectations of each other. Expectations are good; they cause us to rise above where we, alone, would usually strive. But they must be realistic expectations based on each student.

Your kids are probably not going to Harvard, and that is okay.

Your kids are probably not going to play a professional sport, and that is okay.

But your kids can be amazing, productive, courageous, and wonderful human beings who love, and have passions and dreams; should we really want more than that?

Our culture is moving to a place where parents are told that they are not allowed to be the ones who determine the limits and expectations of their kids.

When kids come home with 3+ hours of homework every night, you should not accept that; it is not reasonable.

When kids have to practice a sport all summer, every week, so that you cannot take a family vacation or send them on a mission trip because the coach threatens them that they will not play, that is not acceptable.

When you have to beg your kids to get off the computer or video game, or to see their phone, you should remember there should never be any begging involved.

You should set the priorities for your children; you are the ones who determine their schedules; you are the ones who are ultimately responsible for balance in their lives while they are under your roofs. This is not only your right, it is your calling and your responsibility as parents.

You are not powerless in ANY of these situations. Get enough parents together to talk to the administration about the amounts of homework.

Pull enough stars from the football team.

Disconnect their phones.

I guarantee you, that will bring all parties to the table.

Now, I am a youth minister. I have been in youth ministry for 16 years. It has not always been this way, trust me. Also, know that when I talk about a balanced life, I am not excluding their spirituality. There was an article written a few months back that compared youth ministry and church to an elective or extra-curricular. I think that is generous at best.

Most parents and students take electives and extra-curriculars much more seriously than they do regular involvement in a faith community.

Now, do not get me wrong; the lip service is there. "I want to be at youth group on Sunday night, but I have too much homework,"

"I wish my child could go on the mission trip, but he has football,"

"I really want them to be in church, but they just have too many things going on right now."

Let's stop playing the game.

If you really want them there, you can make it happen. If a student really wants to be at church or youth group, homework will not get in the way; it doesn't get in the way of basketball, show choir, or ACT prep classes.

Why?

Because we value those things, we love those things, and we are committed to those things.

I will argue you that we are over-investing in each of these things, and are under-investing in the long-term spirituality of our youth.

If it is a priority, them make it one; if not, that is okay, but do not make excuses about it. We will respect you a lot more if you do not apologize about your priorities and often try to make us feel bad that your student cannot find one hour a week to come to one of the ten things we offer.

Balance also means not creating kids who spend every waking moment at church. We are not asking you to have them there five times a week. They need other communities, activities, and things that balance their lives. Sports, academics, the arts, etc., are all wonderful things as long as they are balanced.

We want you and your student(s) to commit to one or two things a week that will feed them spiritually and give them the opportunity to engage in a community of faith, the way their faith calls them to. Youth group junkies are not what we are trying to create, and is not why this article is written.

Finally, we want to tell you that we know it is hard. We know these decisions are not easy and you have the enormous weight of cultural and societal expectation bearing down on you. But know this...

We as youth ministers and clergy are here to help you. To support you. To join with you as we push back against this culture of excess and strive to bring sanity back to our kids' and our families' lives. We want this-for us, for our communities, and for you. We want families and students and parents to have sabbath, not so you can refuel but so you can rest. We want balance, not so you can add church onto your list of to do's but so you can have time and bandwidth to live out your faith. We want this, not to make you feel guilty, but to help you reclaim your kids' lives, their schedules and your calendars.

Ultimately we want this because we love you, we see you suffering, and we want to help.

Let's do this together.

Steve Ingram

What's the Pastor Reading this Summer?

The summer of 2016 is an especially rich one for reading. Lot's of new books among religion publishers. I'm almost too overwhelmed to get any of them from the "to read" pile into the "done reading" pile.
But here are a few titles--

The Road to Character, by David Brooks. (Random House, 2015) I've wanted to get through this since a discussion about it from the NEXT Church conference in Atlanta last March. Brooks' columns in the New York Times are well-known. It was interesting to listen to him think through his own moral maturation in the light of well-known personalities he admires: labor activist Francis Perkins, Dwight Eisenhower (one of the presidents that may have actually been a Presbyterian), Dorothy Day, civil rights pioneers A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, George Eliot (nee Mary Anne Evans), Augustine of Hippo (the one many call "saint'), and Samuel Johnson. Brooks is a master at capturing the big picture of cultural America and its movements. The deeply religious AND spiritual lives of each of these serve Brook's aim to trace the development of ethical personhood and plumb the depths of moral bankruptcy he sees in the current culture.

America's Original Sin, by Jim Wallis. (Brazos Press, 2016) Wallis' theses: Racism is a faith issue for Christians. Can this summer's events be any more clear? The book came out right in the middle of the resurgence of the topic in the political campaign. How can we afford to look the other way any more? Another book in the same topic has just been released and is the entry on the "to read" pile: The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks about Race, by Jesmyn Ward (Scribner, 2016) It takes its title from James Baldwin’s 1963 The Fire Next Time. Ward has collected essays and poems about race from important voices of her generation.

The End of White Christian America, by Robert P. Jones. (Simon & Schuster, 2016). Jones is founder and CEO of Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that describes itself as a non-partisan research group for the examination of attitudes on the intersection of religion and public policy. The book came out to much fan fare.  It is a quick read, with lots of statistics and anecdotes that illustrate the author's thesis: White Christian America is dead, that is, the hegemony of Northern European-descended Protestants instrumental in the founding of the United States and its governance since then, in both public elected and private leadership, is gone, never to come back again. Surviving so far are two strains of Protestant Christians--evangelicals primarily in the South, and the mainline Protestants in the Northeast and upper Mid-West.  It remains to be seen if either of them will last the next twenty years.

You might think I have a bad case of the doldrums about the state of the American Christian church after reading all these downers, but not so.  Loving Jesus, by Mark Allan Powell (Augsburg Fortress, 2004), an older spiritual biography genre is a kinder, gentler look back on the aftermath of the "Jesus Movement" in the 1970's. Powell's life sets me smiling about the reason for it all.

Next on my reading list, Ruined (a memoir), by Ruth Everhart.  Just came out yesterday! Ruth is a talented writer and pastor in my local presbytery.  I can't wait to read her story.