Category: Notes Anthology

If one man pushes an old lady in front of an oncoming bus and another pushes an old lady out of the way of an oncoming bus, it is simply preposterous to describe them both as “the sorts of men who push old ladies around.”
William F Buckley

We’ve come a long way
in 1958, 44 percent of white Americans said they’d move away if a black family moved in next door. Forty years later, that number had dropped to 1 percent. When the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, only 18 percent of white Americans said they had a black friend. By 1998, that number was 86 percent.
Jonah Goldberg

Opportunity
We have an opportunity in this moment of our great transformation. We can approach this time as survivors, desperately clinging to our structures and ways of being. Or, we can see ourselves as pioneers, setting out in the face of the unknown to discover new ways to live faith-filled lives. The inevitable decline of our structures gives us the chance to let go of what might hold us back from that adventure. Nothing today will be the same ten years from now. Why not architect the kind of faith movement we want to see twenty-to-fifty years from now? What do we have to lose?
Cameron Trimble, Piloting Church: Helping Your Congregation Take Flight (St. Louis, MO: Chalice Press, 2019), 132. 

Self-censorship
The room felt tense. I saw people shift in their seats. Someone got angry, and then everyone seemed to get angry. After the professor tried to move the discussion along, I still felt uneasy. I became a little less likely to speak up again and a little less trusting of my own thoughts.
I was shaken, but also determined to not silence myself. Still, the disdain of my fellow students stuck with me. I was a welcome member of the group — and then I wasn’t.
Throughout that semester, I saw similar reactions in response to other students’ ideas. I heard fewer classmates speak up. Eventually, our discussions became monotonous echo chambers. Absent rich debate and rigor, we became mired in socially safe ideas.
By Emma Camp

Woman at the well
The issue here is how men have read the story about her marriages, as if she was some unfaithful woman. But, she didn’t divorce. Men did. Maybe this was being passed around by five men in a levirate marriage custom. Nor is there indication her question about the temple is a smoke screen. She’s a victim and she’s been revictimized by Christian readers about her. She was unmarried. That’s a source of shame. No one would have her. Jesus sees this woman and makes an instrument of gospeling.
Jesus changes her question from Where do we go to worship? to Where does God go to get worshipers? God’s claim is on the world; not on one mountain in one place.
And Jesus is the well of water that satisfies. Drinking of his water gives them water to offer to others, which the Samaritan woman does and brings them to the well to drink from the source.
Scott Mc Knight

Back in the day
We knew who we were by where we were when there was a junior or senior high dance going on. Someone among us once quipped that our youth leaders were against sex because they were afraid it might lead to dancing. 
Scott McKnight

Ask Amy: Our son and his wife just told us they’re polyamorous
Amy DickinsonMarch 7, 2022 at 12:00 a.m. EST
They told us they are involved in polyamorous relationships where each has another partner, lover or person they each spend a lot of time with outside of the marriage.
We are having a hard time understanding this choice and accepting what this will mean for our relationship going forward, and for our larger family. We are the only family members they have shared this information with so far, and we are sworn to secrecy.
They may have eased their consciences by telling us, but now we are left with troubling and unsettling information and no place to go with it. We assured them that we will never stop loving them, but this is awkward for us.
What can we do to ease our troubled minds?
Bewildered:
Let’s start by talking about divorce. Not that long ago, divorce meant a total severing of a relationship. But then Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin highlighted the concept of “conscious uncoupling,” where a couple ceases to be married, but continues to love one another, even as they move on to other relationships.
You may define marriage as monogamy until divorce or death, but as people explore their freedom to redefine the boundaries of what it means to be married, they may choose “ethical non-monogamy,” which is where they remain lovingly married, but are free to engage in other romantic relationships in a way that they believe is open and honest. They don’t define this as infidelity. It is about consensual relationships.

In my opinion, the important question is how these polyamorous relationships will affect children growing up in families with three or four adults who all identify as parents and partners. If all the adults are stable, loving, and committed to the children, then I imagine the kids will be fine.
Take a breath, do some reading about polyamory, and understand that you define marriage one way, while they define it differently.

Unless you and they are religious, this doesn’t make it “wrong.” It just makes it “what is.”
This is their life and their choice, and if they want to remove the taboo surrounding polyamory, you should discourage them from defining this as a deep, dark family secret.
They (not you) can explain themselves to other family members when the time comes, and yes — it’s bound to be awkward … until it isn’t.

A LOOK BACK

Life is a journey. We will never arrive at “some particular place” that promises peace and safety, short of our promised home in eternity with God. Life as a journey is filled with transitions. Transition is not about just doing better what we have been doing but it is about beginning something we have never done before.  Transition brings both an ending and a beginning.
GE 2006

A New Birth
Feb. 26th, 2006 | 
This past Friday evening our grandson Kyle Gabehart was baptized. As his family looked on his dad Byron baptized him. Kyle is a wonderful grandson who has the heart of a servant. He is very serious about his decisions and was clear about his desire to have his sins forgiven.
As is always the case when a young child (Kyle is 9 years old)wants to be baptized, the nagging question of whether they “know” enough to be baptized comes up. The question, while legitimate, is mostly a product of our Enlightenment mind-set which is centered in knowledge and education. The problem is that just answering that question does not address the heart of the matter. 
I was thinking about the blind man who cried out to be healed and Jesus asked him “What do you want me to do for you?”. Did he know enough to be healed? Was he knowledgeable about the requirements of the law or the implications to his life after he was healed? I think not. Why should we expect any more from a child who has begun to feel the pain of their rebellion and wants to be forgiven?

Incompetent 
March 5, 2005
For the last few days we have been enjoying Disney World with grandkids and their family. One of the things that has struck me is the crowds with their great diversity …appearance, speaking, attitudes, social standing. I am also struck by the lack of resemblance to myself, at least as I perceive myself. I have thought about those people. How could I possibly “share the Good News”? What would I say? How and where could it be said? Quite frankly, I am fearful and feel completely incompetent. 

STILL ON THE JOURNEY

 Pandemic
“[The pandemic] might come to resemble our decades-long battle with tobacco. We should neither expect that every stubbornly unvaccinated person will get jabbed before next winter nor despair that none of them will ever change their mind. Let’s accept instead that we may make headway slowly, and with considerable effort. This plausible outcome has important, if uncomfortable, policy implications. With a vaccination timeline that stretches over years, our patience for restrictions, especially on the already vaccinated, will be very limited. But there is middle ground. We haven’t banned tobacco outright—in fact, most states protect smokers from job discrimination—but we have embarked on a permanent, society-wide campaign of disincentivizing its use.”
Benjamin Mazer – The Atlantic

Born Again
For you have been born again, not of perishable seed, but of imperishable, through the living and enduring word of God. 
Translation: The Miracle has happened. Everything has changed. The center of gravity has shifted. It is like a total restart. i.e. New Birth. 
Still, the typical way the Christian faith gets translated is believe and behave. The problem? This is just not the Christian faith. It is a religion of conformity. The Christian faith is transcendent transformation. The move is not from believe to behave. It is from believe to behold and the outcome is far more powerful than behavior change. It is becoming a completely new kind of human being. 
Herein lives the beautiful mystery of the Christian faith. The way is not “replacement” of bad behavior with good behavior. The way is “displacement” of an old life with a new life. The more we focus on behavior the more that behavior will hold us in its grip. The more we behold Jesus, the more Jesus will hold us in his grip. His presence begins to actually displace our problems. 
J D Walt

Prayer
To pray is to open up oneself to God who dwells within us. It means holding back nothing from God and sharing everything with God. . . . Only the grace of God can enable us to let go of our fears and allow God to be the God of our lives. True prayer is fundamental for life in God. It is that grace of conversion that opens up our hearts to realize the humble presence of God in our lives. Prayer of the heart is unceasing prayer, where God breathes in us and our hearts are turned toward God. This deepening of our lives in the divine life is the path to self-discovery. In and through prayer we discover our true selves, the self that God has created each of us to be. . . .
Ilia Delio

GOOD NEWS
The United Church of Christ has now paid off more than $100 million in medical debt for people across the United States.The UCC announced Monday (Feb. 14) that it used $200,000 from one of its annual Giving Tuesday campaigns to purchase and pay off $33 million in medical debt for residents of Ohio, where the mainline Protestant denomination is based.
That brought the total medical debt the UCC has purchased and paid off since late 2019 to more than $104 million.

Into the woods
We understand something, we humans: woods are never just woods. Sensing the breaths and rustlings inside, we have learned to marvel at and to mind—at times, to fear—the exhale of otherness that meets us when we stand on the sparser side of a wall of trees.
In storytelling and specifically old Anglo-Saxon fairytales, woods are a place of transformation, a world apart where loss is faced and pain shifts its shape. Always a thin place, woods guard a realm in which the spiritual mingles confoundingly with the temporal. We feel our humanness differently there; no one who goes in comes out the same.
Jamie Townsend

No one is alone
No cure or antidote for our creeping self-centeredness exists, other than humility and the presence of one another. Without these, we do our best and so often don’t have the radical vulnerability to simply say it isn’t enough. We lose our tempers. We miss out on ideas and nuances and growth. We take sides even when there really ought not to be sides for the taking. We judge others. For the more righteous of us, we judge others for judging others and still blindly perpetuate the buzz of masses playing judge, jury, and executioner. We forget to spare such judgment even for ourselves. In summary, we forget that every person who lives and breathes, or almost does or once did, is sacred.
Because life is sacred. Because, as best we can guess, God crafted us and breathed life into us out of his want for nearness and creativity and work and dwelling with us. And so we are not only sacred, but loved.
And no one truly loved by such a constant compassion as their Creator can ever be truly alone, so no one is alone, nor is anyone ever meant to believe such an exceptionally brilliant, crushing lie.
Jamie Townsend

Tapestry
“It will be very interesting one day to follow the pattern of our life as it is spread out like a beautiful tapestry. As long as we live here we see only the reverse side of the weaving, and very often the pattern, with its threads running wildly, doesn’t seem to make sense. Some day, however, we shall understand. In looking back over the years we can discover how a red thread goes through the pattern of our life: the Will of God.”    Maria von Trapp

Death in the Modern Church
…the culture has moved even deeper in its “normalization” of death. A mega church in my metropolitan arena has now set a rule that does not allow for the body of a deceased person to be present for the funeral. The service is a “celebration of life” with music, a video presentation, and remembrances (maybe a sermon?). Dealing with bodies is awkward, cumbersome, fraught with emotions, and such. No doubt, the new rules make everything easier for everyone.
Death is anti-modernity. It mocks progress and the project of a better world. At the grave, we have everything in common with a pre-historic figure and nothing in common with the schemes of our modern world. Everything has come crashing to its ironic conclusion. As we bustle about with slogans of a better world we force ourselves to be oblivious to the fact that our Sun is dying and our planet will someday grow cold or be dissolved in fire, or, much sooner, endure yet another extinction-level visitation from a modest-sized asteroid. It is, of course, utterly astounding that the Creator of the universe Himself walked among us, speaking Aramaic, sweating beneath the heat of the noon-day Sun. His visitation alone makes us, the merest specks in a near infinity, remarkable and of significance.
Fr Stephen Freeman

Bible
Everyone reads the Bible from a location, a context. And everyone reads that Bible for their own context. It’s impossible not to. It’s just as impossible not to know these truths. 
The ones who don’t know these truths are the ones most dangerous to church and society. To think we are unimpacted by location and that our location does not preform our eyes to see one thing and not another weaponizes the Bible on behalf of one location.
Scot McKnight

You are a Royal Priesthood
…a royal priest moves about among the human race, helping to orient people with the King who sits on the throne at the center of it all. You are a living signpost pointing people to our King and Good Father and helping them get there. To hold your hand is to feel the clasp of mercy. To listen to your voice is to hear the sound of grace. To be in your presence is to smell the fragrance of Christ. To behold your countenance is to share in very Peace of Jesus. To sit with you at table is to taste and see that the Lord is good. You, priest, are a living reminder of the love of God, a way finder for the lost and a way maker for the weary. Instead of giving directions you walk with them along the road. At times you will seem to follow their lead in the wrong direction, patiently waiting for them to come to the end of their broken self and make the turn toward home. At other times, you stand at the end of the road, seeing beyond its winding ways, with your eyes peeled on the horizon looking for the fragile frame of returning sons and daughters—ready to run at the drop of a hat. 
JD Walt

Still on the Journey

a Better Place
Modernity’s mantra, “make the world a better place,” is invoked repeatedly in one guise or another. Every invocation promises that with money and power, we could really make a difference. The myth (or lie) that this perpetuates is that the only thing standing between us and a better world is lack of resources. The truth is that, at the present time in our modern age, there is no lack of resources, no lack of wealth. The abundance of the world is overflowing. People are hungry and starve, etc., for lack of goodness. It has been observed by some that every famine in our modern time has had politics as its primary cause. We are not the victims of nature – but of one another. (unknown)

Free Speech
No right was deemed by the fathers of the Government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government. Daniel Webster called it a homebred right, a fireside privilege. Liberty is meaningless where the right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions has ceased to exist. That, of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down. They know its power. Thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers, founded in injustice and wrong, are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.
‘Fredrick Douglass

I value free speech, not so much because I’m right and you need to hear from me, but rather because I’m very often wrong and need to hear from you. Free speech rests upon a foundation of human fallibility. 
David French

three possibilities in any given argument:
1. You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.
2. You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.
3. You are 100% correct, in which unlikely event you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.
Greg Lukianoff

Evil is corporately agreed upon as good before individuals ever dare to do it.  We all cooperate in absurd systems. When we humbly and honestly recognize this, we learn much more readily how to join hands with one another. We’re trained to compare and compete; that’s the nature of capitalism. The gospel undercuts that by saying, first of all, that we are one; and secondly, that each of us is a unique individual. Holding our oneness and individuality together reveals the Christian mystery: “You are all Christ’s Body, and individually, you are parts of it” (1 Cor. 12:27).
Richard Rohr

Without Comment
Get well cards for Terminally Ill

ubuntu
The concept comes from the Zulu phrase Umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu, which literally means that a person is a person through other people. Another translation is, “I am who I am because we are who we are.”. . . With this in mind, who I will be is deeply related to who you are. In other words, we are each impacted by the circumstances that impact those around us. What hurts you hurts me. What heals you heals me. What causes you joy causes me to rejoice, and what makes you sad also causes me to weep.
By channeling the ancient wisdom of ubuntu, we can engineer a badly needed love revolution to rise up out of the ashes of our current reality. . . . The empathy that grows from listening to others, from connecting with our neighbors, and from loving our neighbors as we love ourselves can define the courses of action we take.

Searching
…as belief in God fades in the modern world we increasingly turn inward to discover a ground of being, value, and meaning within ourselves. We no longer look “up” but “in.” Through subterranean self-exploration, as spelunkers of the soul, we wander through the mineshafts of our psyche seeking our “true,” “real,” and “authentic” selves. And having discovered this “true self,” like digging up a diamond in a coal mine, we set it as our North Star, seeking to stay loyal and true to ourselves. 
And if that fails, if we return to the surface empty handed, we turn outwards toward each other, co-dependently hoping that the meaning of your life can be borrowed as my own. 
Richard Beck

Social media
…social media, it is a circus tent full of funhouse mirrors where distorted, twisted images stare back at other distorted, twisted images. Every screen is a portal into a vast, churning sea of human insecurity, confusion, and anxiety.  So where are we to turn? Wherever we look, inside ourselves or outward toward each other, every mirror I find is either broken or distorted. I’m never able to get a clean look at myself or a clear look at you.
…we need a relationship that is fundamental and foundational, a mirror that is steady and clear. Something transcendently solid where we can find constant, unconditional rest. Something possessing an eternal, oceanic calm beyond the stormy churn of human need and the anxious raining of my own mind. God, dear readers, is this grounding, fundamental relationship. God is how we escape the quicksand of neurosis and the needy, inconstant web of human brokenness. 
Richard Beck

Fantasy and fiction, at their best, are not good because they are created by someone. They are good because they make it possible to see more clearly what God has created – something that is neither fantasy nor fiction. Such is our life. Gifts. Joy. Wonder. Fr Stephen Freeman

STILL ON THE JOURNEY