Just before eleven o’clock Sunday morning, a call came in to the 911 Dispatcher of a trailer fire at a Mobile Home Park in Mediapolis, thirteen miles north of Burlington. First fire units were on the scene nine minutes later (phenomenal response time), and were actually able to save the back portion of the trailer. No one was in the unit at the time. All three residents lost almost everything in the trailer. Some clothing was salvaged, though it all has heavy smoke damage.

The owner of the trailer is a sixty-year old man. All his life he has worked in labor and construction jobs. By now, the wear of this heavy work has taken its toll on his body. He can no longer lift with his shoulders; cannot do the type of heavy labor that has earned his simple living before. Unable to find a job, too young to retire, he is slogging his way through the shamefully slow disability process. He had little enough before the fire. Now he has lost almost all of that.

His main source of income has been picking up cans on the roadside and odd jobs such as shoveling snow for neighbors. A few dollars here and there; just enough to pay the lot rent, and not much more. His SNAP (Food Stamps) came last week. He went to the grocery and bought a month’s worth of staples, as far as the SNAP benefit would go. All that food was destroyed in the fire.

This humble man, who had so little, was sharing his elderly mobile home with two others who had even less. Some people might criticize him, saying if he charged the others rent instead of letting them help however they could; or if he had charged his neighbors more for shoveling their walks instead of accepting what they wanted to pay, he might have more wealth now. I’m not convinced that generosity is a common reason for poverty, but if it is, that seems a pretty sound reason. Sharing what you have with others, even when what you have is so very little, seems more like a God-thing than charging every penny the market will bear and then hoarding the profits for yourself.

No doubt some would criticize such an anti-capitalist approach. Instead, it feels to me like a humble, open approach. It feels more consistent with what Jesus might do.

While this man and I talked, he told me more of his life-story.  As we neared the end of our time, he said he has often wondered what God’s plan for his life is with all the tragedies he has experienced. His mind has been sifting through the ashes of his modest home, looking for something that makes it all make sense. Where is God in a calamity like this? Is God trying to send him some kind of message? If so, what’s the message and how does he answer it?

I had little to offer Kevin yesterday other than a few personal items, referral to some others who might offer bits of help, and a promise to help stock his pantry when he has a place to live again. And I had a handshake and prayer to offer; a reminder that he is not in this alone; that others are offering up his name in prayer, asking God to show a way back to stability, and a reminder that all of us are in community together, all children of God.  Maybe part of the answer is that God’s plan is for God’s people, like me, to get involved and help each other. Maybe the message isn’t so much for Kevin as it is for me.

I began writing on this blog hoping some answers would emerge. The best I have is that God does not promise that those who follow The Way will never have any problems. God promises to be with us in the midst of whatever problems we have. God does not promise that life will always be sunshine and light; God promises that the darkness will not overcome us.  God sent the Son into the world to be Immanuel, which means, “God with us.”

 

Fear drives us into irrational, even self-destructive actions. It is instinctive that we react to fear without rational thought. If you are out gathering berries, and a Saber-Tooth Cat jumps up and runs at you, you don’t have time to rationally think about the risk, to analyze various ways to respond, etc. All of our ancestors who took that approach stopped contributing to the gene pool because they were eaten.

When something triggers our fear response, we act without thinking. We flee, fight, or freeze. No higher brain function engages for a while. That is why clever manipulators know they can get you to act without thinking if they can engage your fear response.

Even shopping for a couch, the sales person can use fear against you. You like this couch, but you don’t know what other stores might have, so you begin to walk away. The sales person says, “But you need to act today; these sale prices are only good for today.”  If you don’t buy now, you are going to lose ‘your couch.’ That kicks in the fear response.

It turns out that we are more motivated by a fear of loss than by any logical, rational case that might be made.

Fear is a major element in the argument against Medicare for All. “YOU WILL LOSE YOUR HEALTH INSURANCE!!!” Fear of loss kicks in and the rational mind is left in the dust. But a rational examination of the facts would realize that with a genuine Medicare for All, there would be no need for private, for-profit health insurance. Yes, you would pay for M4A with taxes, but far less than the current health premiums. Everyone is covered, no one is shackled to an employer so as not to lose health coverage, and no one goes bankrupt from medical bills. The cost of covering everyone in a single-payer system in comparable countries is one-half to one-third of our costs which do not cover everyone. And their outcomes are superior to ours in every metric you care to name, except for the profits of the insurance companies.

What is lost? For-profit health insurance companies lose several trillion dollars of profit, elected officials lose tens of millions of ‘campaign contributions’ from the industry, employers lose a point of leverage to keep their employees from leaving.

When a Saber-Tooth Cat is chasing you, fear might keep you alive. When the issue at hand is whether to keep vastly profitable health insurance companies raking in your money while skimping on your care vs. a system that covers everyone for one-third the cost, fear can stampede you into making a bad decision.

Walking through the hospital the other day, I enjoyed identifying each person’s profession by their uniforms. There was a police officer, talking to a nurse; down the hall, a doctor, wearing her long white lab coat, with a stethoscope around her neck. If you are particularly observant, you can even pick out which department or floor the nurses work by the color of their scrubs.
Most of us Christians don’t often wear uniforms which identify us as Christians. But are there ways that others can see we are Christians?
One Sunday morning, just before morning worship service was to begin, the church door opened and in came a frantic woman. Her car had suffered a flat tire. Her husband was out of town; she didn’t even know who to call for help.
Several church members were in the building when their visitor arrived. They all jumped into action; some of them making phone calls to summon a repair truck, others checking out the car; still others offering hospitality to the lady, helping her to calm down. In a few minutes, the tire was replaced, and she was ready to resume her journey.
These Christians were not wearing uniforms which identified them as Christians, but they demonstrated by their actions that they were followers of Jesus. By caring for a stranded stranger, they bore witness to the love of Christ.
It is very sad, but all too common to hear from people outside the church about their impressions of Christians. Some of them think Christians are judgmental; a closed group who are more interested in preserving their traditions than welcoming in new people.
When you stand in line at the supermarket, meet your neighbor over the back fence, or encounter other parents at the playground, what uniform do they see you wearing? Will they know you are Christian by the way you behave? Based on the way you treat them, what impression of Christ will they form?

Several recent shootings in Burlington are reported to have begun during group gatherings. People enjoying a party in a home, or just hanging out by the river. Whatever the occasion or location, there were a number of people present in addition to the people shooting and being shot.

I’ve heard many asking, “What can be done?” Well, for starters, how about more of us taking responsibility for the groups where we are? When you see an argument beginning to escalate, how about stepping in to de-fuse the situation? One person acting as peacemaker can often change the temperature of an entire scene. And if one person can have such a powerful impact, the concentrated efforts of the whole group working to de-escalate an argument almost always works to lower tensions and reduce the potential for violence. The group can adopt the value that disagreements are to be expected, but that arguments do not have to escalate into violence. The group explicitly adopts a group value that says, “we don’t shoot each other.” Most of the members of a group will change their behavior. Those that refuse are not invited to the next parties.

Today I came across this meditation by Danusha Lameris, from her book “The Moons of August.” It speaks to me so strongly about the value of simple courtesies.

“I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you” when someone sneezes, a leftover from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying. And sometimes, when you spill lemons from your grocery bag, someone else will help you pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot, and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder, and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass. We have so little of each other, now. So far from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange. What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here, have my seat,” “Go ahead—you first,” “I like your hat.”

― Danusha Laméris, The Moons of August

Almost all of us are a long way from our ancestral council fires; most of the people surrounding us are not as closely related to us as the tribes of our origin. We live and work and socialize next to people from a variety of homelands and cultures. Out of the jumble of diverse neighbors, we cobble together our own tribes. No longer expressly given us by birth, we now choose who will be invited around the campfires of our inner circles. Our circles will come into contact with other circles holding different group values. Sometimes, the coming together will generate friction. It almost never needs to lead to violence unless we allow violence to be acceptable.
Why not adopt the intention to create “fleeting temples” of hospitality, a “true dwellings for the holy” as a Burlington town value?

There are in life some gentle folk who have the ability to see the best in others, to find God’s face in every encounter. These saints see the best in us, even when we know how far short we are falling from the images they seem to see in us.
Maybe they’re born with it, but I suspect their ability to find God in the darkness is a hard-won craft, grown from years of dedicated practice and countless hours of diligent prayer.
Throughout my life, I have been blessed to have known a few of these people. One of the earliest ones I remember was my High School Latin teacher, Ms. Marion T. Page. Surely, she knew what rascals we were, but she treated us as if we were the most honest, most serious students any teacher had ever had. Even when she caught Dudley Griffin and me skipping class, her response to us was to pretend that we absolutely could not have been up to anything except behavior of the highest principles. As a result, we tried to live up to her opinion of us. Half a century later, her unearned trust in me continues to impact my life.
There are a few of those people in my life at present, thanks be to God. It would embarrass them to be named here, and each of them would surely deny the honor, but they are of infinite value to me. Whenever I am around one of these special ones, they show by their actions the presence of the Holy in every other soul. When I am quick to judge and criticize, they find the hurt, bring out the good, and find spirit enough for prayer, even for those I would be quick to name as ‘enemy.’
For all of you who have cultivated the ability to find the face of Christ in the most unlovable of people, thank you. Thank you for your example, may it teach me to practice your skill so that I might begin to live up to your opinion. And thank you for finding that tiny spark of Christ in me, as well. You may not know it, but you have pulled me out of the miry bog of despair many times and renewed my awareness of God’s unending grace for me.
May God grant me the ability to reflect a fraction of the grace you have taught me.

Recently read “The Great Influenza” by John M. Barry, about the 1918 pandemic of influenza. The author claims it killed as many as 100 million people worldwide, more in one year than the Black Plague killed in a century.

One of the key ingredients in the explosive spread of the disease in the United States was from Army Camps. The US was in the midst of World War I, ramping up the size of the army as quickly as possible. Hastily erected army camps held tens of thousands of soldiers in close quarters. Housing conditions made spread of influenza from one soldier to another much more efficient. One sick soldier enters a barracks and quickly infects the entire troop. Barry titles one of his chapters about this, “The Tinderbox.”

Despite repeated warnings from the US Surgeon General, the Army continued to move troops from one camp to another. This multiplied the spreading of the disease even more broadly across the US Army.

There are currently reports that the children being held in the detention camps are not being vaccinated. They are being held in even worse conditions than the soldiers during WWI, making it far more likely that diseases will spread quickly throughout the population.

Epidemics begin in conditions such as these. But they don’t stay in the camps; they spread like wildfires out of control. Concentration camps full of unvaccinated children are creating conditions for epidemics that would soon spread into the US population at large. This is a very dangerous situation.

Today is the 4th day of August; it is the 216th day of the year. As of this morning, there have been 251 mass shootings in this country. Day 216; mass shootings 251. More than on per day. Yesterday morning, families in El Paso were doing their back to school shopping; many of them at Wal-Mart, when yet another young white male walked in with a military assault rifle and began firing indiscriminately. So far, 20 people have died and at least 26 were wounded. El Paso officials are concerned that some people may have been wounded but are afraid to go to hospital because their immigration status is questionable. A hatred-filled manifesto has been found allegedly by the shooter with racist language about a “Hispanic invasion” of El Paso.

If this were not heart-breakingly deadly, it would be funny; the Spanish were in El Paso for a century before the Mayflower ever landed the first English settler on this land. Racism released by rhetoric from a supposed leader of our country who fans the flames of bigotry and hatred and then pretends to be innocent of the carnage his words have inflicted.

Early this morning in Dayton, Ohio, another shooter. This time 9 dead, at least 16 wounded; again, military assault rifle, multiple ammo magazines holding large numbers of rounds. Nothing to do with hunting or target shooting. Only purpose of this equipment is to kill people.

My heart breaks for the wounded, and for the families grieving the death of innocent children, for parents buying back to school clothes for their families.

Those we have elected to represent us mumble thoughts and prayers, but nothing will be done.

Nothing will be done because almost all of them have been bought and paid for by the NRA— once upon a time an organization of hunters and target shooters, now receiving almost all of its budget from the gun industry; its second biggest donor being Russia—an adversary nation whose leader once stood in the chamber of the United Nations and swore that his country would destroy ours from within. His warnings appear to be coming to full light.

Nothing will be done to see that we have health care for every person in the country because the for-profit health insurance industry and Pharmaceutical industries spend 50 million dollars and more to pay for those elected officials who are supposed to represent us but instead represent their corporate owners.

Is it ironic, or is it a message from GOD that today’s Gospel reading speaks to greed? “One’s life does not consist in the abundance of possessions.” But we have reached a place in this country where the wealthiest individuals and corporations own Congress, the Supreme Court, and the Presidency, and operate those as wholly-owned subsidiaries of their own profit-making machinery. Nothing will change until this changes: until the influence of billions of dollars of bribes is removed from politics, those seeking election will not do what is best for the most of us but will do their master’s bidding.

God save us.
Dear GOD almighty;
Here we are again—we have allowed greed, lust for power and evil to run us over. We sat quietly while the devils took control. Now our inactivity has come to flower and we are stunned by what we experience every day.

Where did we go wrong? How did we allow this to happen? Were we just not paying attention while greed and corruption took over? Or have we been complicit in this coup because of our laziness and inattention?

But here we stand, GOD; in need of rescue yet again. Grant us backbones, grant us courage, grant us willful outrage and purposeful anger to sweep away the powers of evil and restore justice, peace, and sanity to our land again. We know you well enough to know better than to ask you to fix things while we sit back and watch. We know that you guide, strengthen, inspire, encourage, and motivate, and but that it must be our hands, our voices, our votes that make the changes. Provoke us to get off our backs and demand an end to this evil. Send us into the streets and into the polling booths to demand a return to justice for all with favoritism and partiality toward none.

Stir up within us as much fervor for defending the defenseless ones whose names we do not know as we have energy to pray for our family and friends. Let there be no difference between our love for the least as we have for our own.

Let your people find you again; and find once again, our purpose as children of yours, followers of Jesus Christ. AMEN

A post by the Rev. Dr. William Barber reminded me of a Harry Emerson Fosdick hymn, God of Grace and God of Glory
Cure your children’s warring madness, bend our pride to your control; shame our wanton, selfish gladness, rich in things and poor in soul.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage, lest we miss your kingdom’s goal
Save us from weak resignation to the evils we deplore; let the search for your salvation be our glory ever more.
Grant us wisdom, grant us courage lest we fail our call from you.

Still I Rise

Maya Angelou – 1928-2014

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I’ll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don’t you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I’ve got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

-From And Still I Rise (c) 1978 by Maya Angelou. Pub. by Random House

“In Praise of Uppity Women”

One of the racist code words I heard growing up was “uppity.” It was used when people (mainly people of color) had the audacity to speak truth to power, as if they were as fully human as the white men they were challenging. When powerful and wealthy white men spoke, it was supposed to have the unassailable force of undeniable truth. If someone called out the lies in their language, that protester was attacked– at least verbally by being labeled ‘uppity’, and often enough physically attacked. 

First comes the verbal attack, with shouts of “Go Back to Africa!” A frantic,  anxious, rushing mob presses in to force the truth-speaker off the podium. If that fails, the violent words of the powerful white man incites powerless, poor white men to violence. Their leader’s violent language grants them permission to commit physical violence. Countless trees in the South wept while their limbs supported the strange fruit of lynch mobs.

Thanks be to GOD for uppity women like Maya Angelou, and for a new generation of uppity women who are brashly speaking truth to power: Ilhan Omar, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Presley, and Rashib Tlaib. May the rest of us find our tongues and courage and join them in refusing to allow voices to be stifled just because they are voicing a different perspective. May every one of us ‘get uppity’ and claim our First Amendment rights to speak freely, even when the speech illuminates evil deeds done under the cover of power. Let freedom be strengthened, not silenced. Let every voice be heard, and every heart be treasured for its inherent value.

GOD help us if we allow greedy, evil, racist forces to stifle the diversity which has given this country its greatness.

— Brice Hughes, attempting to follow in the liberating footsteps of Christ.

How do you think you would feel if you opened that brand-new, super-size box of Crayons to find that every last one of them were exactly the same color? Would it even matter WHAT color they were, if every one were the same? Not entirely useless, but certainly far from maximum utility, don’t you think? What you need is difference, not uniformity; the more difference, the more you can accomplish. Isn’t that why you bought the super-size box?

As an undergraduate student of Terrestrial Ecology, I studied forests and fields, ponds and lakes. We surveyed the total number of animals and plants in each eco-system and also counted the number of different species. A cold mountain stream might have fewer total number of plants and animals, but a much larger number of different species. A hog pond with an algae bloom killing the pigs in the field would have so many individual algae plants, but almost all of them would be of one species. One environment with lots of numbers of plants but very little diversity, the other environment with fewer individuals but much more diversity of species. Do I have to tell you which one was the healthier eco-system? The greater the diversity of different species, the healthier the system.

Lots of congregations talk about their need to grow, but when someone shows up who doesn’t look exactly like the ones already inside, they throw up the barriers. Crying for growth but refusing to accept any diversity is a recipe which guarantees death. And it is as much against the teachings of Jesus as anything you can imagine.

If a healthy church is what you want, seek out diversity; diversity of every kind. The United Church of Christ carries the motto “That They May All Be One.” We work hard to seek unity, but not uniformity. We work towards accepting and celebrating diversity among those we welcome into our community. We understand that the greater our diversity, the stronger and healthier a Church we will be. Let us give thanks for the multitude of diversity God has woven into human beings. Let everyone who will come in and find within our diversity our unity in God through Jesus Christ. Thanks be to God.

Tri-Conference Annual meeting 2019
If you are one of those people who enjoy coming to worship, gathering in a community of other believers, seeking God’s presence, being reminded of God’s love for you, being stretched and challenged, inspired and motivated by the music and the prayers and the words of the speakers in worship, then Sunday morning worship is a time you look forward to all week. Weekly Worship is like the Friday night football game, the high point of all that week’s practice. (Or, if you were in the Marching Band, it is Half-Time, the real reason for Friday night’s activity– a football game being just something to fill in the time around the Band event).

If that is the way you look at Sunday morning worship at your home church, then gatherings of the larger church like this past weekend’s Tri-Conference Annual meeting are the All Star game of worship.

Hundreds of worshipers gather; the cream of the varsity of worshiping congregations across the Conferences. The boldest singers, the most fervent pray-ers, the best and brightest worshipers all in one space, worshiping together.

The larger crowd means being able to afford to bring in the best preachers and speakers and musicians. There are lots of people helping out in worship: preaching, and praying, and speaking. A select team of the best worship planners have spent countless hours planning the worship experiences. And there is also this: Something happens to preachers when sharing a worship time with one of those best-ever preachers; it brings out our competitive instincts. Each one does their best, and their best motivates the others to do better. We all want to do our very best when we appear before the very best of worshippers and before our colleagues, so we urge each other on to better and better work, making the whole event better still.

One of my favorite things about gatherings like Annual Conference and Synod and General Assembly is that the worship is almost always WAY over the top spectacular. It is the best worship we can muster, but there is more than that for working pastors. Most of us serving in the pulpit are busy on Sunday mornings. Worship is important to us or we wouldn’t be in ministry, but it’s hard to fully lose yourself in worship if you are the one in charge of making sure everything goes well. I love to be in worship, but there is always a part of me that is aware of the time, and worried about what is coming next, and will the person coming to do the next segment remember, and will he even show up today, and will the pieces fit together in the way we imagined they would when we planned the day.

And then, there is the preaching. Most Sundays, I have to listen to my own preaching. I rarely get to hear the work of others as they proclaim the Good News.

This Tri-Conference Annual Meetings had WORSHIP! Whenever we have a multi-day meeting like this one, there are several opportunities for worship, and every one of these was an absolute gem! The worship times were dramatic and different from each other. We heard the best preachers, we heard stories from our Conferences’ past, and we heard personal stories told by the people who experienced them. I’m not one to cry much, but there were several points along the way when I could only weep. I wept for a friend as she spoke of a time when her heart was broken, and how God touched her in that moment with a reminder that weeping may go on for the night, but there is healing in the morning. I wept with laughter at stories of God’s quirky sense of humor reminding us of what is truly important.

On Sunday morning, our last official act of the Conference meeting was to officially install three new Associate Conference Ministers and affirm the continuing call of the fourth; Jonna Jensen, thanks be to GOD she is staying!

My original plan was to leave after that early service, which should have had me home by late afternoon. Then I saw the church bulletin information. The eleven o’clock service had a Jazz group. Second service had music provided by a tenor sax, bass guitar, drum, piano, and singer. They did some of the same hymns as the first service but sang the lyrics to decidedly different music. The theme for the Annual Conference meetings was “Come Together.” If you are as ancient as I, you know there was a Beatles tune by that title. That was their postlude. I had never thought of Old Flat Top as a Jesus symbol before that, but I will never again hear that song without thinking about how our community of faith comes together to worship the one who defies borders, and titles, and boundaries, and even styles of music.

South Dakota, Nebraska, and Iowa Conferences continue to live into this innovative and unique structure where three very different Conferences share one talented team of Ordained and Support staff. There are challenges, to be sure. Making accommodation for each other means greater travel distances for some of us. There are distinct cultural and historical differences between the three Conferences. We have some learning and personal growing to do as we live into what it means to be church together in a different way of organizing ourselves. Now that we have a full slate of Associate Conference Ministers, some of those struggles are beginning to settle out. As we continue to remind ourselves that Jesus reached out beyond the boundaries and barriers of his Palestinian Jewish culture, accepting and loving all of God’s children, we will grow in our own faith and in our imitation of the Christ. As each of us grow in our faith, it will be easier for others to see Christ in us and by that, be drawn to God. As we grow, we will continue to live into the prayer of Jesus that we may all be one. Thanks be to God.