The view(s) from Finney Peak - posted from Flickr for my Dad! From north, clockwise around to west-northwest...

Summer Solstice Sunrise at Great Circle Earthworks:



As i was shooting this, i kept looking up over the camera to see if i was . . . seeing what i was seeing! The glowing patches looked like lens artifacts at first, but then they began moving, right to left. There wasn't really any ground fog or mist directly visible when i walked in, but as my stills showed when i ended this and walked towards the Grand Gateway, there was just enough moisture above the turf to catch the light.

Faith Works 6-27-09
Jeff Gill

Summer Slump May Be Story Of the Past For Churches
___


There really was a day, a summer day for many congregations, when the sanctuary pews were empty, or at least emptied out.

Once upon a time, when travel was harder, but ironically, vacation was often longer, there truly was such a thing as the “summer slump.”

Part of me wishes for people the chance to take a two or three or even four week trip, even as I understand that in a time of double digit unemployment and workplace competition, the concept of “a month off” is not going to make a comeback – not this year.

It is true, as Rick Steves keeps reminding us all on his PBS travel shows, that Americans take both the least AND the shortest vacations of any industrialized nation. If we get four weeks off, we’re likely to take two one week vacations and a few days here and there . . . at the most.

This may not be as good for productivity as an economist might think (let alone a manager), since getting your head out of the details might be the best way to get your head in the game. Studies show this, and the Biblical injunction of Sabbath has something to say about it, as part of the very nature of Creation itself.

So faith communities might do well to speak up for time off, both on a weekly basis in Sabbathkeeping, and through the year for a sort of annual Sabbath. We could remind people of the values, contingent and eternal, behind remembering how God is in charge and we aren’t. Vacations do that for us.

Plus, some of the most interesting ideas in congregational life come from church members who go visit a place of worship somewhere else, and return saying “Hey, did you realize we could do THIS?”

What’s more immediately of concern, on the home front, is the tendency to echo the world’s ways and get so blooming busy through the summer that any rational believer would start thinking “I need some time off from this place.”

Somehow, it seems like we’ve gone in a generation from churches that often all but shut down from Memorial Day to Labor Day (other than the odd church that did a VBS or an occasional rummage sale) to being twice as busy in June, July, and August than we are any months that don’t have “ecember” in them.

What can we do to improve this situation? I think it can be a Godly and gracious thing for churches to think and speak as if vacation time is part of a healthy, inspired life, not something to apologize for. You know the flip side: the folks who are first to say “oh, a vacation; I’ve never taken one in the last fifteen years.”

No, church leaders can affirm and celebrate time away, and also lift up worship as a healthy part of this health-filled decision; we can offer to help identify locations near where you’re going to attend worship, or we can provide materials for family worship out on the beach or up in the mountains. Little “vacation worship pacs” in the narthex say to everyone “time away is actually time that is part of a fully engaged life, and worship has a place there.”

The alternative is, well, what we have, where the whole “um, yeah, we’re, uh, taking some time off” along with the horrendously unhealthy “what happens in Blank stays in Blank” leads to the auto-assumption that no sane person goes to church on vacation.

Truly, some of the most powerful and personally productive worship services I’ve attended have been during “time off,” when I was utterly just another worshiper, with no other expectations or assumptions weighing my soul down.

And for those still hesitant about taking their growing personal faith and taking into corporate worship: there is no better way to try out church attendance, without worrying that a congregation you know you can’t stand will chase you for months, than going to Sunday services hundreds of miles from home.

Maybe on vacation is where you can start to find the path to your heart’s true home.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story of worship on the road at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 6-25

Notes From My Knapsack 6-25-09 – Granville Sentinel

Jeff Gill

 

Stepping Cautiously Into Adulthood

___

 

When does a child become an adult?

 

I have the honor and responsibility of writing a column every Saturday in the Newark Advocate for the "Your Faith" page, and last week's "Faith Works" asked Licking County faith communities to think about their rituals and observances and milestones for young people that mark their passage into adulthood.

 

Out at Camp Falling Rock last week, I had the chance to think about this watching a record setting Cub Scout Day Camp play out, with over 400 kids and more than 100 adults spending Tuesday through Friday clambering around the fields, rocks, waterfalls, hills, and high points (real and symbolic).

 

Pack 3 of Granville was also represented by 34 Cub Scouts and over a dozen different leaders and parents (some one day, some all four), anchored by Cubmaster Ed Hock, who was very pleased and proud with the turnout.

 

For these kids, from all around Licking County and a few Packs out of neighboring counties, there were many who had their first time in a rowboat, first time shooting arrows from a bow or firing a BB gun, who had never launched a rocket they made themselves from a two liter bottle (air pressure style) or walked up a creek looking for crawdads and frogs. A few may even have never been in a pool before, or walked up a hill so steep they couldn't see the top of it when they started.

 

That's part of why events like Cub Scout Day Camp are so memorable, for children and parents. They're full of firsts, of benchmarks and bright lines and beginnings of new experiences that may pale and wear smooth with repetition, but whose origin will never be forgotten.

 

Which is marvelous for seven and eight and nine year olds, who start to sense their place, and their ability to find it, in a world they now know is larger than the backyard and TV remote can encompass. But they know, as they watch the older Scouts helping out (which my son got to do for the first time this year), that they're still a long ways off from adulthood.

 

When is that, though? We put driving at sixteen, which is a major milestone for young people, but voting is at eighteen, "adult beverage" consumption is at 21, and quite frankly, we seem to keep back some sense of cultural acknowledgment that "young adults" are really grown up and fully responsible right through college graduation around 22 and beyond.

 

As we look around the country at an out of wedlock birthrate now past 4 out of 10 babies born to single mothers, I wonder if there's an element in this of young people wanting to prove in a definitive, inarguable way: "I am an adult." Fathering a child or giving birth to one is, indeed, a horizon you can only step across once.

 

Somewhere between a learner's permit and pregnancy is a place where as a community we need to help affirm the gift and privilege and responsibility of saying "I am responsible for my choices and actions and decisions." Even as we build a society where, blessedly, many hard landings are cushioned and buffered, can we also create a solid place to stand that says "Here I begin to shape my life with intention and purpose."

 

One possibility: I think I see and hear a bit of this sort of "rite of passage" with those who go on work trips and mission trips, to take their beliefs and values somewhere beyond their comfort zone and act on them, whether with drywall mud and hammers, or in conversation and conversion.

 

Those who come back from experiences like that know they are creating their lives, not just experiencing events; even as they better understand how dependent they are on others, no matter how independently they might adventure.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about a rite of passage you've known at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow "Knapsack" @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 6-20

Faith Works 6-20-09

Jeff Gill

 

Growing in Wisdom & Stature Before God & Man

___

 

 

When is a child an adult?

 

Religious rituals are often the benchmark for this moment. Most of us know of Judaism's "bar mitzvah" tradition for boys when they turn 13, "bat mitzvah" in some Jewish traditions for girls.

 

It's a cultural milestone with certain religious overtones marking when maturity and responsibility start to include responsibility for one's own faith.

 

Among Christian infant baptism traditions, the maturity milestone is often called Confirmation, a ceremony that's part of worship but, like a bar mitzvah, is usually preceded by a meaningful period of preparation. While First Communion may be at 7 or 8, Confirmation is usually offered at 12 to 14 years of age.

 

In a believer's baptism tradition, a preparation class or "pastor's class" is offered, to help a young person get ready for coming forward to make their own confession of faith. The usual age in such churches for baptism has been, in the past, traditionally around the age of Confirmation, but many congregations have tended younger in their encouragements over the last couple decades, often to 8 years old or so.

 

The Latter Day Saints, or Mormons, usually baptize at 8 calling that "the age of accountability," then young men are ordained deacons at 12, the beginning of their work in the priesthood of the LDS.

 

All of this helps to define how faith communities prepare children and youth for increased responsibility for their own practice and understanding of the beliefs they share, but you can see how the tendency is to lean towards the doctrinal and the structural.

 

What gets left out is the question: when is a child an adult?

 

Anthropologists would point out to us that 12 or 13 is the age of physical maturity, when sexual activity starts to have, um, rather dramatic consequences. (OK, it always does; you know what I mean.) Most religious traditions marking a maturity milestone echo or shadow that benchmark, which makes a certain kind of sense.

 

What we struggle with in today's society is that we have been steadily defining the horizon of mature and self-responsible behavior older and older. Abe Lincoln and Charles Dickens were sent out to work at 12 in the early 1800s, and no one thought it particularly odd. Now we place the major passage into adulthood at 16 for getting a driver's license, but only allow voting at 18, and consumption of alcoholic beverages at 21.

 

When I hear people say that Bristol Palin and Levi Johnson at 18 are too young to know what they want in life, part of me agrees, but I also wonder about how they would have been about right for most of the last few thousand years to be starting a family.

 

Carrie Prejean at 22 was said to be too young and inexperienced to know what she was getting herself into in the Miss USA pageant, and Britney Spears at 27 is still described as a near helpless "young woman":  maybe she is. The Jonas Brothers range from16 to 21, and they're still the anchor act for a show called the "Kid's Choice Awards."

 

There's much anguish over "our kids are growing up too soon," but I'd ask if we could wonder if we try to keep them children too long, and make it almost impossible for them to see when they become men and women. Is it the first car? Leaving for college? Getting a job?

 

And I wonder about this as I read, on the verge of another Father's Day, that in 2007 we crossed the milestone of 4 out of 10 children born to single mothers, out of wedlock, choose your term.  1.7 million kids, in this county, nearly two years ago, out of  4.3 million born, effectively had no father . . . of course we know, whoever showed up in the delivery room, there was a father out there somewhere.

 

Is it that we have no clear, clean benchmark for moving out of childhood that so many young men – for they have certainly passed that biological horizon we discussed earlier – put themselves in the lifelong complication of "fathering" a child without setting up the standard and support system of marriage and being a husband, because it is a clear-cut, unmistakable way of saying to the world "this day, I am a man."

 

I wonder no less so for the young women involved, who are surely mothers and doubtless women, even if not a wife. When most of our faith oriented rites of passage are set so early in childhood, as most now are, how can churches help to offer a public way to celebrate maturity and responsibility?

 

Perhaps more awkwardly, to do that we'd have to discuss and agree on the question: at what age or by what measure should we declare them an adult?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him your rite of passage at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow "Knapsack" @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 6-13

Faith Works 6-13-09

Jeff Gill

 

Putting Youth To Work For the Summer

 

If you have a teenager about the house this summer, now that school is done – and let's be brutally candid: jobs are hard to come by.

 

So they don't have work to do, and even a teenager is liable to the sorrowful cry of summer plus a day or a week or so, "I'm bored! I haven't got anything to do!"

 

A very interesting and worthwhile option is to wander out the east side of Newark, turn at the KFC on Tuscarawas Street, behind Blessed Sacrament School, and then left on Penney Street, going past the old historic Penney Mansion, until the road runs into the vast berm of Route 16.

 

You may have noticed, if you glance to the right driving east on Rt. 16, just after crossing Cedar Street, that a new house is being built on the last lot next to the highway. This is a Habitat House, a project of the Licking County Habitat for Humanity, a key part of our community response to housing and homelessness since 1988, and this "build" is the 21^st the local chapter has put up.

 

But this project is a bit different: it's called a "Youth Build," a special invitation is out to young adults, ages 16 to 21. Project supervisor Allan Smail is welcoming young people – who will, of course, need to sign some waivers and such, and a parent signature for those under 18 – regardless of skill level or experience to come and help build a house.

 

The house will be occupied by a family chosen by the local Habitat chapter, whose director, Sarah Oneson, has worked with the board and Habitat team to select. They need to get to where they have a clean credit record, and be willing to put what's called "sweat equity" into the project, whether that's labor on the house itself or office support with Sarah, but in return for their participation, they get a house with an interest free loan that they pay back into Habitat's revolving fund, so their "mortgage" payments actually go to help build the next house, and so it goes.

 

Habitat for Humanity is a Christian-based ministry open to the entire community; in fact, a number of area churches are looking at teaming together to do a "church build" for the 22^nd house that Licking County Habitat for Humanity will build. But right now, the interest is in bringing together young adults, 16 to 21, to learn a bit about homebuilding, a great deal about teamwork, and perhaps more than a little about faith in action.

 

Obviously, you might want to call and find out more, and the office number for Habitat locally is 788-8778, but Allan assures me that if you can bring a parent to start out the process (particularly for 16 and 17 year olds), just come on out today to the end of Penney Street, and say "hey, can I help?"

 

The project will be under roof shortly, and interior work will create many options for building trade "newbie's" to help out. Allan and the team will be on site Wednesdays and Saturdays, 8:30 am to 3:30 pm; he'd really like to thank C-TEC and the students with Mr. Kirschner for the work building the exterior walls and framing before the school year ended.

 

If you'd like to see this project through to completion, or help a youth in your family know what it's like to see a house finished that you helped to build, put down the paper and come on over today . . . or give Sarah a call and see where you can pitch in later.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's proud to have helped with a half dozen or so Habitat projects, but has never swung a hammer next to Jimmy Carter – maybe next time. Tell him about your celebrity carpentry experience at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow "Knapsack" @ Twitter.com.

An online bonus to the Granville Sentinel piece set for this Wed./Thur., June 10/11, 2009, a short scene from just a little further on in Rev. James B. Finley's autobiography, just after Nov. 1810 --

"During this round I made an attempt to preach in the town of Newark. This place was notorious for its wickedness; and, as no house was opened for me, I was obliged to preach in the bar-room of a tavern. Fearing the citizens would cut my saddle, or shave my horse, I hid him in the bushes. When I stepped into the door I found the room full; and many were crowded around the bar, drinking. It looked to me more like the celebration of a bacchanalian orgie, than a place for the worship of God. But I had made an appointment ; and I must fill it at all hazards; and, as the Gospel was to be preached to every creature, my mission extended to every place this side of hell. I procured a stool, and, placing it beside the door, got upon it, and cried out, at the top of my voice, "Awake, thou that sleepest, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give thee life."

[Finley ended up preaching in the new log courthouse, and formed a Newark class meeting in 1811.]

Faith Works 6-6-09

Faith Works 6-6-09

Jeff Gill

 

What's a Trinity, & Do I Really Need One

___

 

Trinity Sunday is traditionally the Sunday after Pentecost, the first Sunday of "Ordinary Time," the long slog through the church calendar to Advent, with the green paraments on the altar (or table), Bible stand, and vestments.

 

Personally, when I've served churches where there were paraments, I always liked to keep the red paraments of Pentecost out through the first Sunday of July, if only to even out the wear on the long suffering green ones.

 

Trinity Sunday is also traditionally ignored even in the liturgically oriented churches that might be more likely to keep track of such things.  Like Christ the King Sunday, the last Sunday of Ordinary Time just before the first Sunday of Advent, it tends to get shoved to the back of the preaching and worshiping cupboard and not even get taken out and shaken out on the one day they could claim.

 

Quite frankly, the very concept of the Trinity tends to get short shrift, and quite a few Christians aren't sure even why we need the idea. Other than a few lines in very old hymns about "Three-in-One," we don't go there much, and end up being de facto unitarians (nothing personal to Unitarian Universalists, who at least know why they're Unitarian!), since the theology behind the Trinity doesn't get often unpacked. It doesn't "do" much in practical terms, and in our pragmatic, non-theological age, even many committed Christians think of the Trinity as being out there with Purgatory and the Apocrypha, largely optional and basically unnecessary holdovers from an earlier age.

 

On the eve of Trinity Sunday, I'd like to suggest you give this another thought.

 

Like most key elements of Christianity, it begins with Jesus.  As Romans declared their emperors "Son of God, Prince of Peace," they elevated each one into a raucous pantheon of divine beings, a Mount Olympus filled with heavenly condos, and a contentious owners association where Zeus may hold the chairmanship, but the members don't always listen to the decrees from the top, and the roster keeps changing.  Tiberius, Nero, Caligula, Caligula's horse: there was plenty of room on that mountaintop for expansion.

 

Christians said, in keeping with their Jewish roots, "No, there is one God, Lord over all, creator of all that is and was and ever shall be."  So who is this Jesus whom you call Lord? Greeks and Romans alike pointed out that if Jesus was God, then his prayers were to . . .

 

What does it mean to say that God decisively intervened in human affairs through a person in first century Palestine? When Christians say that, if you would see and understand God, you can look to Jesus for all you need to know, though not all there is of God, how does that work?

 

It is essentially out of the question "what does it mean to say that Jesus is God incarnate" that the doctrine of the Trinity arises.  Beginning with Jesus' own words about his relationship to his Father, the early church wrestled with the right way to express who the Son is until 325, when the Nicene Creed was written, stating that Jesus is "God from God, light from light, true God from true God . . ."

 

And how does the Holy Spirit, manifested on Pentecost (which we observed last Sunday), relate to the Father and the Son? In fact Eastern and Western Christianity still have a subtle but resonant disagreement on this question, going back over a thousand years (think "filoque").

 

But the essence of Trinitarian belief goes back to the need to say two things at the same time: "The Lord our God, the Lord is One"; and also, "Jesus is Lord."  Unitarian belief takes most of the pressure off that debate by saying that Jesus is not in any specific or unique way "of one substance with the Father."  He may be the exemplar or focus for our human sense of who God is, but that's it from a Unitarian perspective.

 

Trinity Sunday is another opportunity for us to ask ourselves "Who is this Jesus? What does it mean to call him the Christ, the Son of God?" And gets us closer to the question "what does Jesus tell us about God?"  Which is the heart of the matter.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what you think about the "filoque" clause in the Nicene Creed at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow "Knapsack" @ Twitter.com.

Knapsack 6-11

Notes From My Knapsack 6-11-09 -- Granville Sentinel

Jeff Gill

 

A Swashbuckling Granville Privateer, a Roughhewn Preacher, and…

___

 

Laura Evans ably holds down the historical side of things here in the Sentinel pages, and always adds a narrative dose of personality to the oft' distant figures she describes.

 

I hope she doesn't mind my poaching on her terrain a bit, as I carry on a little further about one William Gavit, converted at a Methodist revival in Muskingum County in the summer of 1809, and the first "class leader" of what became Centenary United Methodist Church in 1810.

 

There's a number of versions of the story that led the "freethinker" Gavit to attend a camp meeting, but they all agree that he rode some distance east and spent time at a preaching revival. As it happens, Rev. James B. Finley was appointed to that area in the spring of 1809, and on pg. 202 of his "Autobiography" he describes his unassuming arrival in Zanesville:

 

"Several days travel brought me to Zanesville, the principal appointment on my circuit. When I arrived in town it was raining hard. In lieu of an overcoat, to protect me from the storm, I had procured a blanket, and cutting a hole in the middle of it, I thrust my head through it and found it a good protection. Riding up to the door of one of the principal Methodists of the place, I asked for lodgings, informing the brother that the conference had sent me there as the preacher. Eyeing me closely from head to foot, he replied, "You look like any thing else than a preacher." I told him he should not judge too rashly, as he might, perhaps, think better of me on a closer examination, and I suggested the propriety, at least, of his giving me a fair trial."

 

Almost sounds like Clint Eastwood coming to the door in the rain, doesn't it?

 

His preaching the next day was, in fact, well received, and he continued from there to Barnesville and Leatherwood Creek (ah, now there's a story for later), and up around to the Tuscarawas River. It was in that valley that the first camp meeting east central Ohio was held, somewhere near Dresden, and it was almost certainly that revival where Gavit and his traveling companion heard and responded.

 

Of Gavit it must be said, in the words of an early Revolutionary War historian, "His application for pension reads like a romance of the sea." Born in Westerly, Rhode Island, he joined the small privateer navy that the Continental Congress tried to throw together on the cheap, enlisting in New London, Connecticut at the age of 15. He was a sailor on the privateer "Favorite," the sloop "Randolph," the schooner "De Crops," and the brig "Martin." But his most dramatic post was as a prisoner of the British on the grounded prison hulk "Jersey," an infamous deathtrap for literally thousands of American prisoners. He was captured by the Royal Navy not once but twice, escaping from the "Jersey," and returning near the war's end. 8,000 and more died there, but Gavit escaped, married his boyhood sweetheart, and headed in country away from the sea to Granville, Massachusetts, where he joined the famous 1805 settlement party.

 

What I find most interesting, but so far unprovable – his second son had the middle name "Denison," the one-n type. And Westerly is just a few miles from the Denison Homestead near Mystic, Connecticut, where William S. Denison was born and from which his family set out for the valleys near the junction of the Tuscarawas and Muskingum.

 

Was William Gavit related to the Denisons by blood, or by marriage to his wife Sarah? And could the elderly old pillar of his Granville community, still alive in 1854, have helped pass the word to a wealthy relation over Muskingum way, who made a gift that placed his name upon the college on the hill?

 

Ah, that's more a storyteller weaving a tale than history, but that's why it's so much fun to be a storyteller.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; spin a tale for him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @ Twitter.

Faith Works 5-30-09

Faith Works 5-30-09

Jeff Gill

 

Meeting Of the Minds, Maybe Not

___

 

There's been an interesting intersection of left and right, liberal and conservative, religious and secular in political debate lately.

 

Since the "sides," so to speak, have backed into each other, they may not know how close they've gotten, or that they've actually bumped a bit.

 

On the one side is the torture debate. This gets sticky for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that no one (or at least very few) want to come out as being "pro-" torture. My own sense is that no one actually is for torture, anyhow (even Dick Cheney).

 

And to be perfectly candid, I think there's quite a bit of posturing on the anti-torture side, not that they aren't actually against inflicting pain to speed an interrogation, but because the politics are driving the discussion far more than the facts of what's at hand.

 

What's at hand goes back to 2002 and 2003, which if you were around then, were nervous and anxious days, with smoke still metaphorically rising from the crater around the site of the World Trade Towers, and every plane crash and "Breaking News" seemed to have the potential to tell us of another mass casualty event in a city or mall or airport, even here in central Ohio.

 

Apparently, government officials, with the usual disputation between the FBI and CIA folks, looked into what actually and technically constituted torture, got legal opinions on where the line was, and used a set of new guidelines to creep right up as close to the line as they could justify to interrogate freshly apprehended terrorist suspects.

 

There were three fellows who had these new techniques used, and now, some six years later, there's still dispute over how helpful it was, and actually longer ago it was decided the line should be eased back further towards where it had been, and waterboarding should be considered off-limits.

 

Lost in the political debate over whether waterboarding was, or legally should be prosecuted as torture, is not only that everyone agrees we should stop doing it (even Dick Cheney), but that there's general agreement that if you could read the law as allowing the specific set of techniques to be this side of torture, the USA should stop doing it because . . .

 

This is where the noise and static sets in. If doing waterboarding can be done in a way that is technically legal under US and international law, what's the problem?

 

Well, the biggest problem is that it is so close to torture that it really doesn't matter, mainly because it a) creates a coarsening effect on those who use it, b) those who have it inflicted on them, c) those who support those it's used upon, and d) our entire culture. "If this is OK," the argument goes, "then no justification in the short run makes up for the damage it does to who we are and what we represent in the long run."

 

Which is exactly the argument used for years by the pro-life movement.

 

Truth be told, there are many pro-lifers who are not comfortable with a Constitutional amendment putting life as beginning at conception, and are not willing to vehemently affirm that a baby at three weeks is morally and theologically equivalent to a baby at eight months.

 

But the working majority of Americans who are opposed to the growth of abortion and public funding for abortion is based in no small part on the large number of us who think that there's a coarsening effect on our entire society when you kill a living thing because that's what some other living thing wants done. We're not sure about the exact moment a soul or a spirit or moral standing is imparted under the law to a fetus, but it seems scientifically reasonable to stay with conception as a default safeguard – because working from the other end of viability gets us nothing but coarse and roughhewn definitions that change with the season.

 

The torture debate and the abortion debate are largely saying the same thing, if partisan politics can be lifted away from the basic faith in human uniqueness and value that is our common holding in this country. Don't inflict pain, even for good reasons; don't kill fetuses, no matter how early – because any justification in the moment becomes a rationalization that can spread and grow and gnaw away at so much more.

 

Draw bright lines, do no harm, and don't try to dance too close to the edge. You never know when you might fall off.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's against a great many things he will never have to deal with himself, but he's also for quite a bit he will never get to do, either. Tell him what you're for or against at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @ Twitter.

Winning the Battle of Wallabout Bay -- Pentecost Sunday, May 31, 2009
Centenary UMC, Granville OH

Knapsack 5-28

Notes From My Knapsack 5-28-09

Jeff Gill

 

Like a Tree Falling In the Forest, But Louder

___

 

Will people who never heard Fred Andrle miss him when he's gone?

 

By asking the question that way, I'm obviously signaling that I think the answer is "Yes."

 

If you've listened to Fred on WOSU-AM and his "Open Line" call in radio talk show, you know what I'm talking about. Most recently a two hour block from 10 am to Noon, "Open Line" is a radio talk show with a terrifyingly friendly, gentle voiced, well informed host . . . in other words, not like almost any other radio talk show you've ever heard.

 

Fred would do two guests, or topics, one each hour, with some hours being an "Open Forum" for callers where he might throw out a topic but the tone and subject would always be set by those calling in, and Fred would work with wherever that was.

 

The callers are largely a set of regulars, with some of the most memorable being "Dave from Powell" and "A caller from Worthington." The regulars on the 820 AM phone lines run from committed Marxists to devout conservatives who feel that the Republican Party is far too liberal for their tastes, and local stops in between.

 

Indeed, I have called in on occasion, though "Jeff from Licking County" has never been a regular. Most of my listening to Fred Andrle has been in the car, and all too often the peak of discussion would arrive just as I had to arrive somewhere and get out of the car.

 

Sometimes, events would allow the NPR-infamous phenomenon of "driveway moments," where you sit in the car, hand on the knob, saying to yourself "I've got to get out, I've got to get out," but staying to the end of the segment or the caller, or most often to the attempt Fred would make to resolve a dispute raised by one caller in reaction to the views of another.

 

Fred Andrle has a great gift of ladling out large portions of calm and reason without pouring treacle all over a necessarily hot and spicy dish. I've heard Fred mediate disputes over abortion, nuclear weapons, church & state, and even . . . horrors, public transit, and keep most callers within the bounds of civility and reasoned exchange. And trust me, even on WOSU, not all callers (or guests, to a point) want to stay within those bounds.

 

When you listen to "Open Line," you can't assume that you know Fred's own personal point of view . . . except for public transit, which he's pretty quick to speak up for. Over time, you can tell that he thinks that the environment, and justice for all, and the common good are very important to him, but I suspect many of us know less about the what and the who of where Fred's politics come down than we might think.

 

Fred is, everyone who listens to him would agree, fair. (Maybe not Dave from Powell, who really should get his own show.) He was the moderator of a public debate I was a participant in once, and I had the pleasure of a couple of hours sitting next to him on a long table at Capital University, and I suspect he was more on my end of the panel's side than the other: but he pressed both sides with equal grace and firmness.

 

Central Ohio has been influenced, I believe, by the example of Fred Andrle over the last twenty years. We don't have many role models like him, and his retirement will remove a positive influence that I firmly believe has had a ripple effect far beyond the wide circle of public radio listeners.

 

Thursday, May 28, his last two guests will be Michael Coleman, mayor of Columbus, and Thomas Moore, author of "Care of the Soul," and I suspect that tells us a bit about Fred's basic interests, that and his farewell "party" interview with Neal Conan of NPR, where his closing counsel was for us all to love life, and seek justice.

 

And Friday, May 29, his last day on air will be a two hour open forum. You could call in and say "thank you," or even take one last chance to hear him for the first time.

 

Thank you, Fred.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's called into a few radio shows, but few with nicer producers than WOSU-AM. Send him a message at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow on Twittter @Knapsack.

Faith Works 5-23-09
Jeff Gill

Who You Calling a Hypocrite?
___

I am a hypocrite.

There, got that out of the way. Now, what is a hypocrite?

Generally speaking, a hypocrite is someone who says one thing, or stands for one thing, but then does something quite different, usually in opposition to what they claim to represent.

A police officer who breaks laws would be a hypocrite; a firefighter who is an arsonist would certainly be hypocritical; a “family values” politician who is found to be cheating on their spouse would be lucky if hypocrite is the most people call them.

(No, I have nothing to say about “Jon and Kate + 8” and please don’t make me.)

So those would be dramatic and clear-cut examples of hypocritical people. Now what about my admission up top there, in the lead paragraph?

Well, there’s another way of using hypocrite which has some common currency behind it, and that it the more rhetorical, more argumentative way to label someone a hypocrite. That would be saying that if you don’t always and emphatically live up to the best values of a strong, public stance that you take, you are in fair danger of getting tagged as a hypocrite.

If said “family values” pol is so committed to their cause that they travel constantly, hardly know their eight kids’ names (ahem) one from another, and neglect basic parental duties like birthdays and anniversaries, can you call them a hypocrite? Sure. A different sort, perhaps, but hypocritical in degree if not to an extreme.

This past week my wife and I celebrated our 24th year of marriage, and if I said I was not always the best husband I could have been, I doubt that the Lovely Wife would disagree. If I take a strong stand in defense of marriage in public settings – say, in a weekly newspaper column – is that a wee bit hypocritical? Sure. It doesn’t take being a John Edwards to make you less than the husband and father God wants you to be.

When I want to make a comment about the recent news that we’re now up to 4 out of 10 births in the US being “out of wedlock,” I think a decent respect for the opinions of mankind makes me think carefully about what stones I might throw.

And then still say “Folks, does this worry anyone else? ‘Cause it sure does me!” Because being a little less than the angels means I am a sinner who has fallen short of the glory of God, but a sinner who still should say what’s on their heart.

All of which makes me watch and listen in bemusement to the long line of people waiting to take a gleeful pitch of the hypocrite hardball at Miss California USA in the dunk tank of public opinion. Apparently, she’s a hypocrite because she’s said something out of her understanding of where her Christian walk has taken her, but she has a) taken pictures in her foundation garments, b) gotten artificial enhancements of the blessings God already gave her, and c) walked down a runway in a sash.

News flash, folks: yes, some Christians are adamantly against beauty pageants and such, but there are probably more progressive/liberal Christians against them as exploitation of women than there are Christians who think women should wear burkhas. Joke all you want, but I think breast augmentation surgery is doing just fine in Oklahoma and Texas, so where did you get the idea that conservative Christians were against them as a matter of faith?

(I think they represent poor stewardship. See, theology to go, that’s me.)

There is a real insincerity at work when you hear commentary that tries to tell Christians to go back into a ghetto enclave that exists only in the commentator’s mind (and perhaps in their hopes). Ms. CA may be somewhat inarticulate, she may not be politically correct, and she may not be the best preacher I’ll hear this month, but hypocritical is an odd point to make.

Where it comes from, in my hearing, is the use of “hypocrite” as a bludgeon to end debate, to close discussion, to tell people what they can and can’t disagree about. My solution is to simply say as quickly as possible “I know I’m not perfect, but let’s talk about the merits of what I’m proposing, and not whether I’m the best advocate for it.”

Because, you see, I know I’m a hypocrite, but I’m working on it!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he thinks the big debate about marriage is in that 4 of 10 babies born outside of it. Tell him what you think at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” @Twitter.com.

Faith Works 5-16-09
Jeff Gill

Decoding Certain Movies, One Error At a Time
___

Growing up in northwest Indiana, my interest in morning radio was limited to days when the snow had fallen by the foot the night before.

Obligatory snarky comment: a few miles off of Lake Michigan, as my friends in Ashtabula County, Ohio can tell you along Lake Erie, you get lots of snow, and your highway departments are fully equipped and your school staff is used to opening up on time even when eighteen inches fell the night before, unless it was blowing. So we all hoped for wind much more than we counted on snow to get us a day off.

In my youthful neck of the woods, the best station for getting the fastest school closure announcement also had a gentleman of the region who subscribed to everything the John Birch Society mailed out. This meant that along with waiting for the joyous news of “no school” (or the grim silence that meant the bus was coming at 7:00 am sharp), I learned a great deal about the Bavarian Illuminati.
.
Or at least what the John Birch folks thought about the Illuminati.

Yes, I know, not believing they exist is one of the ways they work their evils plans, no need to send me that e-mail. But I and my fellows all knew that the Bavarian Illuminati were founded, eerily (cue music) in 1776, by one Adam Weishaupt.

You can web search more if you want.

So when Dan Brown tries to say that Galileo the scientist and Bernini the artist were members, subverting the Catholic Church with their materialistic machinations, I thought way back when I read his book (koff) “Angels & Donuts,” or something like that, “hey, there’s something wrong about the dating here.”

Sure enough, Galileo died in 1642, and Bernini in 1680. So something was wrong here . . .

“Ankles & Demons” was written (koff) by Dan Brown before his opus manglous, “The DaVinci Code” sold sixty bazillion copies and got Dr. Langdon made into Tom Hanks. Since that movie got made first, they’ve gone back and retrofitted “Angles & Deacons” into a sequel, Hollywood’s favorite sport, second only to mangling history.

I’ve already written about the DaVinci Head Cold’s various congestions of fact, and I’m driven to pull out “Angels & Detours” just to alert y’all to what they’re very likely to inflict on you while you’re innocently trying to eat your popcorn in air conditioned peace.

Copernicus was killed by the evil, nasty papacy, Brown tells us, when he died in bed of a stroke at 70 (they recently found his bones buried with honor in a cathedral where he had served as a priest – cool story; they weren’t sure it was his skull, but did DNA analysis on the bone and hair from among the pages of a book he was known to have owned, and got a match!).

He tries to say that Winston Churchill was a staunch Catholic; he might have been a staunch alcoholic, and committed cigar smoker, but when he went to church it was the Church of England, the Anglican Communion.

And the idea that a pope (the one he names was dead by the time the event described, by the way) banished the famous “Ecstasy of St. Teresa” because it was too sensual flies in the face of the well-known fact that a Cardinal (not from St. Louis) commissioned Bernini to make it for his mortuary chapel, which is exactly where it still is on display today.

My point is simply that Brown isn’t making errors based in ignorance or poor research: he’s changing facts to make his point. Does he have a point? That’s a different argument, but if you change facts to make it, I think one should be suspicious from the start. I’m not saying “boycott the movie,” but I am saying that you should know you’re being sold a manipulative bill of goods if you go.

Don’t even get me started on what he does with anti-matter and physics . . .

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he is not a physicist, but he knows anti-matter isn’t what Brown says it is. Tell him a true story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” @Twitter.com.

Staycation 2009 Licking County

Summer of 2009 -- the season of Staycations, a family trip that
doesn't involve plane tickets, passports, or time changes.

May: You run the family budget numbers, and determine that the plans
for this summer will not involve major travel.

Memorial Day weekend: You check www.newarkadvocate.com and find out
when the ceremony at the local cemetery is held on Monday; Sunday,
you watch the Indianapolis 500 on TV and then cook out, with the
family talking about where you went last year (they're still coming
to terms with it). Monday morning you get up and go down to where
the Legion fellows are lining up with the high school band and the
Scouts and all, and walk down to what turns out to be a very moving
ceremony, with stories about people from right down the block from
you that you'd never heard. You and the kids walk along the
tombstones and grave markers, and they ask about their great-
grandfather.

The next weekend is Strawberries on the Square, and the county
courthouse makes a solid centerpiece for this big event you've always
heard of but never been to. Everyone finds the evening fun, and the
strawberry shortcake is delicious; the Kiwanis server tells you the
shortcake is from Riley's and the ice cream is from Utica and Velvet
Ice Cream, which gives you an idea . . .

June: On a weeknight, you drive out to Utica to Ye Olde Mill, which
you'd been meaning to do for years. Spouse notes that neither of you
had tasted Moose Tracks for too long, and you should come back again
before the summer's over.

A later weekend takes you past Brownsville and up to Flint Ridge
State Memorial, which the Licking Valley Heritage Society is now
operating. You realize that this flint stuff is not only the "state
mineral," but it's beautiful, and you find out that people 2,000
years ago traded across thousands of miles to get it -- which makes
sense. A hike around the flint pits makes you feel like you earned
the ice cream from last week.

When you go on vacation, you like to stop sometimes at a completely
off-the-wall little hole-in-the-wall place; so you do that on the way
home through Newark (or were we still in Heath?), and get some
delicious fried chicken and roasted garlic mashed potatoes.

July: You hadn't been to Granville since the Candlelight Walking
Tour last December (or was it the December before that?); the Old
Fashioned Fourth of July is a ridiculously affordable trip into a
Rockwell painting of a carnival on Main Street in a New England
village -- both of you wonder if you've ever thought to drive through
the Welsh Hills in autumn instead of going to New England and being
disappointed by a badly run B&B, when you can underbake your own
muffins and not water down the OJ. As the sun sets, you pick up a
flyer about the free Sunday evening concerts on the College Green.

Someone mentions at work that Licking County has enough golf courses
that you could play a different one every week all summer; you and
some others decide it isn't too late in the summer to try to hit 'em
all. But that evening, while the light still lingers, you load the
kids' bikes into the back of the van and run down to Toboso -- think
of that, a Licking County town named after a place in "Don Quixote"
-- where you go for a ride along the Black Hand Gorge trail. Looking
up at Council Rock, it's like the Grand Canyon, on a slightly smaller
scale but without three dozen Germans all complaining about the food
right next to you.

August: The kids ask you to take their friends to the trip they'd
heard about to the "floating island," Cranberry Bog. Sure enough,
you call the Greater Buckeye Lake Historical Society and they have
regular boat trips and guided tours of one of the very few floating
islands in the world, left adrift in the 1830s by the rise of the
lake for the Ohio & Erie Canal, with plants dating back to the
glaciers 12,000 years ago. Mmmm, glaciers. You stop in Hebron at
Hayman's Dairy Bar for ice cream.

Then you finally make it to the new museum, just open a year, at the
Newark Earthworks State Memorial, air conditioned but so interesting
that you actually want to go back out in the heat, and walk around
this largest circular earthwork in the entire Western Hemisphere.
They give you a flyer that reminds you there's a huge event back at
Flint Ridge on Labor Day weekend, and you realize -- that's coming up
soon, and the summer's almost over. The 151st Hartford Fair up in
Croton, and when the week is over out there, school begins just a
week or so later.

And you haven't even made it out to Pataskala yet.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Jeff-Gill/811054678#/group.php?
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Notes From My Knapsack 5-14-09 Granville Sentinel

Jeff Gill

 

Design In Living, In the Village, In Your Life

____

 

Painting the old gas station black (ok, charcoal) did not strike me as a good idea at first, and then I though "oh, it'll be a base coat."

 

What I simply could not have imagined was that this color, even before spring has cast a green and gold shading across the dark exterior, would bring out a new appreciation in me for the lines and angles of this very simple building.

 

Add some brushed aluminum, or at least what looks like brushed aluminum, and a few well placed lights, and you have a whole new experience as you curve into the village around Mount Parnassus after crossing Clear Run.

 

Yes, there are some who still don't like it – "why did they paint it that way?" – and as my childhood Scoutmaster said and still says, "Some people would complain if you hung them with a new rope."

 

Monique Keegan is about to launch Enjoy Co. and you can see a bit more of her work in design at www.enjoyco.net, but it's the very idea of design that intrigues me, maybe because it's a bit beyond my usual skill set. The ability to move a vase and bring in an old trunk and lean it in a corner, after rearranging the furniture and adding a coat of paint to one wall, seems a bit like magic to me. Only a bit, because it works, and those who can make it work do it over and over again, without any goats being sacrificed or pixie dust sprinkled.

 

Steven Jobs of Apple likes to point out that design isn't about how something looks, but how it works. How a living space works is something we're usually most aware of when it doesn't, but the tricks and techniques of making a place to work and cook and eat and relax is definitely more than aesthetics. Although I suspect design professionals have to convince people quite often that what they think they want in a room is what they are used to seeing, and not what will make it "work."

 

The design of a life has the same sorts of complication to it, as we know what we're used to seeing or expect to see play out. We've just gone through a generation that had to deal with "life design" assumptions changing, about women staying home and men staying with one business, or even one company, for their whole lives.

 

Some of us are watching our Boomer friends start to redesign retirement, which doesn't look much like shuffleboard anymore, unless it's full court, full contact shuffleboard with titanium pushers and special stretchy fabric outfits.

 

In a couple of weeks, on Pentecost Sunday, which is May 31 this year, I get the pleasure of preaching at Centenary UMC so Pastor Steve can focus on his daughter Laura graduating from GHS, laden with well-earned honors. Her life, I'm sure mother Emily would agree, carries a very different set of design criteria into planning a future than did the generation her parents and I share.

 

What I'm also looking forward to that weekend, though, is sneaking ahead a bit in the timetable for Centenary's bicentennial, since the church was founded in 1810. I plan to preach, in part, about a fellow who wanted to change his life one way, and found it changing in a completely different direction; I'm going to address how the biggest battle of the American Revolution, at least in terms of casualties, may have found its ultimate closure right on the northeast corner of Broadway and Main.

 

Designing a life doesn't always turn out the way you plan – that may be a good thought all around in this season of graduations, up the hill and around the village.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow "Knapsack" at Twitter.com.

Faith Works 5-9-09
Jeff Gill

Engage Thrusters, Helm; Chaplain To the Bridge

Yes, I am a Trekkie.

It’s said that hard-core fans of Star Trek prefer “Trekker,” but i’ve never heard anyone use that term for themselves, and I have trouble believing I’m not hard-core enough.

When “Star Trek” was a TV show (now, with so many later elements of the franchise, that is known as TOS for “The Original Series”), I saw it first in black and white. It was made in color, of course, but I may have seen one of the four or five I saw as a kid on a color set.

Then it went into syndicated reruns, but the basement TV was black and white, so I had a pretty shaky sense of who wore what color – for instance, I was slow on picking up the fact that a red shirt, unless your name was Scotty, meant you were plot filling dead meat, waiting for Bones McCoy, ship’s doctor, to look up and (never) say “He’s dead, Jim.”

I knew where my crew berth was, on Deck 8, aft portside, sector 24 on the TOS USS Enterprise NCC-1701, on Deck 13 (they aren’t superstitious in the 23rd century, or the 24th) on TNG’s NCC-1701D. It looked out from the underside of the saucer section towards the prow of the port nacelle, with an external bulkhead that sloped inwards towards the deck.

Is that Trekkie enough for you?

What I didn’t see a place for in the Star Trek universe was my faith. This was, obviously, no accident; the crew was certainly multicultural enough, with Uhura, Sulu, and Chekov, and more than multiracial with Spock on TOS and Worf on TNG. So presenting any kind of religious perspective would have been challenging, but should have made sense.

Anyone who has ever known a chaplain in any branch of the military would understand the challenge, and have stories about how you work past and around and through them.

But Gene Roddenberry, the creator of the Star Trek universe, saw from the traumas of World War II and in the optimism of the 60’s where it all began, a future where science would give everyone a rational, reasonable, evidence-based, faith-free world.

He couldn’t resist giving Spock a coldly rational kind of spirituality that hinted at . . . something, but for the rest of the crew . . .

It didn’t matter to me, since I always inferred for myself a chaplain and a chapel just around one of those endlessly curving corridors, just out of sight. After my call to ministry came and I went to seminary, one of my papers was written essentially as a story, only vaguely disguised as the Trek universe, with the protagonist a chaplain on board a ship that wasn’t quite the Enterprise. (Actually, it was a Miranda class starship called the USS Bozeman, but that’s another story.)

The professor found the basic elements of what the paper was supposed to contain, graded that, and then added a note “but what happens next?” That’s what makes the Trekkie experience what it is, I guess – it doesn’t end when we leave the theater or turn off the TV.

Our family went Thursday night to see the new, “rebooted” Star Trek movie, and I’ve blogged about it as a movie at the newarkadvocate.com website. There’s still no chaplain, unless you count Bones, who strikes me as a doctor whose grandfather was a Southern Baptist minister just outside of Atlanta and has issues, but still questions that take him back to that childhood congregation, where . . .*

See? We just can’t let it alone. Where else do you see faith at work and at play just under the surface, and how does your own faith weave into those imaginary pictures?

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he holds the rank of Lt. Commander in Starfleet on a Cultural Contact Mitigation team (in his imagination). Tell him your story, true or imaginary, at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” at Twitter.com.

*DeForest Kelley's father was, in fact, a Baptist preacher.

[After ". . .turn off the TV." and before "Our family went . . ." were supposed to be these paragraphs, deleted by my hasty cut-n-pasting, in my rush to get an after-deadline column turned in after watching the Trek premiere Thursday night:

Science fiction doesn't always ditch the clergy or religious context of life in the future. Orson Scott Card, a committed and active Mormon, always shows the life of faith in his novels; not always the Latter Day Saints, either. The best example (from my point of view, anyhow) may be in "The Mote in God's Eye" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, where an obvious homage to the Trek universe can be seen in the descriptions of the bridge of the INSS MacArthur.

The CoDominium Navy in this future history has chaplains, and in the "first contact" at the center of this book, an Anglican clergyman and linguist is sent along on the voyage, shown performing both roles in the narrative; another ship in the novel, crewed largely by ethnic Russians, is the INSS Lenin, which has an icon corner on their bridge with a nearby samovar of tea bubbling away.

Many science fiction authors, if not Gene Roddenberry, see a lively and vital role for a robust faith when they look into the future through their unique lenses.] [Return above to "Our family went . . ."]

Faith Works 5-2-09
Jeff Gill

You’re Going To Die, Get Used To It
____

Nearly 100 people died of the influenza today.

And about that number the day before.

Oh, and last week? Same number. Or a month ago today, or this day last year.

Right, I’m not talking about the swine flu. Which sounds nasty, and I hope me and mine don’t get it.

What is clearly dangerous is influenza in general, which – news flash – affects the respiratory system in ways that doctors are still trying to fully understand. It’s a virus (which means antibiotics don’t do a lick of good) and we don’t know as much as we’d like, but we can identify new strains, new types of flu virus, through laboratory means.

In the labs, they talk about H1N1, but it takes a news story to come up “swine flu” or “bird flu,” neatly confusing people about whether you get it from eating those items (nope) or if you catch it from them (perhaps way back at the start, but not now).

There’s also no little confusion about the nature of the threat, hence my distinctly uncheery note to church-going folk of “you’re going to die, get used to it.”

Of course we don’t want to be casual about transmitting disease, and sick people and people with compromised immune systems – two often completely different categories! – should not be piled up next to each other. (And a hospital is where you do just that…)

What folks who are responsible for gathering and managing worship need to keep in mind is that there’s essentially nothing to learn here that we shouldn’t know and practice in general. Using “swine flu” as a way to focus attention isn’t all bad, but let’s not go pitching bathwater out upstairs windows without checking the contents, shall we?

First off, people who are coughing and sneezing shouldn’t go into public gatherings if at all possible. Masks? C’mon. Just stay home and keep using fresh tissues. We don’t need mass mask wearing (try that at the airport, ha ha), we need some common sense. And hand washing. Lots of hand washing.

Perfect attendance? Schools gently set most such recognitions aside for exactly this reason – good attendance plus (whatever) is worth rewarding, but awards or recognition for just showing up no matter what may not actually accomplish what you think. If it gets people who know they have a metabolism full of viruses to still go to church thinking “hey, I have a tissue in my pocket,” then you really aren’t promoting healthy anything, let alone healthy theology.

Inside the worship space and restrooms, keep tissues around. If you have relevant and meaningful worship going on, you’ll need ‘em for all kinds of reasons. Don’t be cheap or chintzy with ‘em, either: get ones that are better than sandpaper, and keep them stocked. I could go into detail here, but it may be your Saturday breakfast with the Granville Kiwanis or Jacksontown United Methodist folks I’m ruining, so I’ll just say – use a new one, and dispose of the old. Now.

Should we ditch “the passing of the peace”? Many introverts quickly say “Yes!” if not “Hallelujah!” For some, that can be the most excruciating five minutes of their week, not to mention the service; for extroverts, the grim smile and perfunctory handshake from others is a mystery to be solved by a big, long hug.

There’s a case to be made for siding with the introverts when public health situations are afoot, and any flu season, let alone swine flu, makes a case for inviting people to turn, smile (from a distance), and say “Peace be with you,” letting “and also with you” replace the warm, two-armed embrace, let alone big kiss on the cheek.

Before 1890, many Protestant denominations had a common cup for their communion practice – many congregations in Licking County, Presbyterian, Disciples, Baptist, UCC, Methodist, and so on, still have a pewter or maybe even silver pitcher and chalice . . . in their historical cabinet.

The advent of little cups for communion (shot glasses, say the disrespectful) was in the 1890s and a growing understanding of tuberculosis. A fascinating book, “The Gospel of Germs,” by Nancy Tomes (Harvard University Press), explains how the religion of hygiene collided, and ultimately ran over the theology behind a common cup.

Never mind that there is little or no data to show that you can get much of any disease from a common cup (especially if you use actual wine, a whole ‘nother debate).

The swine flu flap may just be a handy time for churches to tell the sick it’s OK to stay home, to stock up and keep clean the restrooms, and maybe lay in a few bottles of hand santizer next to the tissue boxes. Just in case.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’d like folks to keep in mind almost 3,000 people died today of malaria, but not where you see it on TV. Let him know what you worry about at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-25-09
Jeff Gill

Updating Your Glossary With a Word or Two

A few weeks ago I was updating my Facebook status with a Twitter feed from my cell phone texting function, which I reviewed later on Firefox from my MacBook.

Trust me when I say that the year I started seminary that sentence would have been so much gibberish.

Anyhow, my tweet had to do with my bemusement at spending a Saturday night finding a few pictures on Google Image search to use in the PowerPoint that would augment my sermon; other than Saturday and sermon, that sentence also would have competed in the “say what?” sweepstakes in 1985.

Add in the fact that said images and messages would be captured on digital video to ultimately be uploaded to YouTube for a congregation website that most of the church members subscribed to for e-mail notice of updates, and . . .

Let me say in my own defense that I had an e-mail account in 1978, which is not something many people can claim. Each account was awarded the munificent quantity of memory of, if memory serves, 500 Kilobytes. Keep in mind that we landed on the moon, 40 years ago in July of 1969, with a combined Apollo command module and lunar lander computer capacity of about 150 Kb of memory.

(And today your car probably has about 1 MB of memory running the emission control system and various elements of the automotive systems, which is impressive until you remember that your computer nowadays probably has 2 GB of RAM, so it’s 2,000 times more than your car, which is almost a thousand times more than the Lunar Module.)

All of which is to say: I started seminary in 1985, and if I had started seminary in 1960, most of what I learned about preaching and administration and leadership would have aged pretty well by 1985.

But here we are in 2009, and much of my 1985 knowledge base, about the basic tools of ministry, is scrap metal, by which I don’t mean the kind of scrap metal they run TV commercials about, telling people to not get electrocuted stealing that scrap metal.

The most useful content from that year of 1985 is what I learned of Bible content, and my seminary was busy trying to de-emphasize required coursework like that, plus most of the Bible content I know didn’t come from seminary coursework, other than Hebrew classes (which I will always be glad I took, regardless of relevance to the modern world). My Greek was and is fragmentary, but even that wasn’t required for graduation.

So, anyhow, I was doing a series of dialogue sermons with a pastor who wanted to open up some of the tough questions of Christian faith, and in one Sunday, where we were wondering what people already thought, we decided to try something a little out there even for 2009.

We started the message portion of the service with a “yes or no” question, and projected a slide with the two options, each with either his cell number or mine, asking the congregation to text a blank message to one number for “yes” or the other number for “no,” and over 70 text messages came to our two phones over the next five minutes, giving we two preachers a bit of data to work with as we worked to share our understanding of Biblical teaching into the modern world.

What is most striking to me about these tools for ministry is how simple and easy they are to use. Cell phones, digital video uploads, e-mails: they all are incredibly cheap, commonly available, and quite easy to use. Figuring out how to use a Biblical concordance or Greek lexicon is really much harder than making sense of these modern ministry tools.

It’s simply a question of being able to step out of the standard forms and approaches that were the norm from the 1950s to the 1990s, and trying on the virtual reality goggles of the post 2000 world. It’s a bit disorienting at first, but the twisted landscape makes quite a bit of sense once you figure out the new frame of reference.

And if you’re curious about how timeless truths communicate in new forms, you can search YouTube for melbrian1991 and click around, whatever that means!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story or link him to your video tale with an email to knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow “Knapsack” at Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 4-23-09
Jeff Gill

A Few Books To Read, and To Re-Read
____

Roxana Saberi is a freelance reporter whose work has been on NPR along with other national venues.

Her profile may have gotten a small boost from being Miss North Dakota over a decade ago, and her ethnic background with Iranian parents led her to try to cover the story of women’s lives in Iran from the inside.

If you’ve heard her story, it’s likely because she’s been arrested by the Iranian government on suspicion of espionage; which friends, family, and most recent employers all agree is balderdash. Sharing accounts of how women have to live in the Islamic Republic of Iran may be as worrisome to authorities there as the possibility of spies checking out their atomic program, since neither issue gains them much favor around the world.

What caught my attention about Ms. Saberi’s story is a recent development, when her parents traveled to Iran and finally got the chance to visit her in prison. They asked her what they could bring her, and she asked for books.

Specifically, she requested Plutarch’s “Lives,” a biography of Gandhi, and a French dictionary, since many Iranians speak that language (odd quirks of colonial history pop up across the Middle East – lots of older Iraqis speak German, especially if they worked on the railroads).

Still no word (as of this writing) about whether she will be allowed these books in her cell, but it set me to thinking “what books would I ask for if I had a long undefined stretch ahead of me?”

For myriad reasons, I’d ask for a Bible, ideally with the Apocrypha (extra books, y’know), but it isn’t clear whether that would be allowed in any case, just as they are entirely and shamefully illegal in Saudi Arabia.

Beyond that Book full of books, what else would I request? If I could only have, say, five other books, what would I pick? “Tristram Shandy” would top my list, and then . . . this gets hard! They would have to hold up under re-reading, not just be long, although length would have to be a criterion.

Herodotus’ “The Histories,” Dickens’ “David Copperfield,” “PrairyErth” by William Least Heat-Moon, where he does for Chase County, Kansas what I hope to do for Licking County someday, and then I think “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau.

When Shannon Lucid was up on the Russian “Mir” Space Station in 1996, and the internet was new, there was an interactive feature on a NASA website that allowed you to click through a series of pictures showing life during her then-record-setting nearly 200 days in space.

In one shot, within a mesh bag near her berth, I could make out the distinctive cover design of the Penguin Classics edition of “Walden” and I thought “Brilliant! The perfect book to take on such a trip.” When the Mir was “de-orbited” in 2001, I wondered, as we saw the footage of the burning hulk slash into the South Pacific on TV, did anyone bring that copy of Walden back home?

Having said all that, I wonder if poetry might not be a better choice for re-reading: a volume of Shakespeare’s plays (his birthday today!) and a collection each from Frost, Maxine Kumin, Jaroslav Seifert, and Billy Collins. What five books would you pick, in a prison or for a season in space? It’s an interesting thought experiment.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; toss him a list of books at knapsack77@gmail.com or on Twitter at “Knapsack.”

Faith Works 4-18-09
Jeff Gill

A Profession May Be a Vocation, Or Even a Hobby
____

Profession is a word with religious roots. You profess your belief, and a professor is one who helps you understand and explain what it is you believe.

Professions have come to be known as vocations – another religiously rooted term, from Latin “vocare,” or “to call,” meaning your calling in life – which have a set of certain standards and are self-policing in their practices.

Medicine, legal work, teaching, journalism, and of course ministry have all been referred to as professions in the now technical sense of the term, as well as career military service.

Since World War II, professionalization has been coming up as an expectation for all kinds of job fields, from secretarial work (I mean, administrative professionals) to service employees (ahem, service professions). As with many such terms, when you expand it so far as to cover everyone, after a while the butter is so thin on the toast you can’t hardly tell that it’s there anymore.

And at the other end, many of the classical “professions” have been experiencing a certain nibbling away of their exclusive rights and assumptions. With professional standards comes expectations of professional pay and benefits and certain perks, like sabbaticals and paid continuing education. Which costs money, even as other elements of economic models are . . .

So one example is the growth of “nurse practitioners” serving in the role once exclusive to doctors. Granted, nursing is a profession and has been since Florence Nightingale, but to be the first and sometimes only medical person to see and treat a patient – that’s a major change in what most of us think of as the job of a medical professional. But that’s what we’re seeing.

Legal services are popping up on the internet (with myriad ads on TV) and lots of legal filings don’t require a lawyer anymore, but just a quick chat with a paralegal. Public schools are losing budgets and market share to charter and private schools, where the teachers do not necessarily come out of the standard “professional development” model to reach their position, no matter how professional their behavior or supervision.

Blogging and other internet forms of media are never going to entirely replace the need for skilled, experienced journalists to seek out stories and get behind the spin, but “citizen journalism” is all over the place now, and not likely to go away; the series “24” is highlighting the growth of paramilitary organizations that may or may not have a professional ethic of national service at their heart.

And then there’s the ministry. The profession that is at the root of the very word itself is de-professionalizing in some ways, even as church structures are emphasizing the “profession” of clergy more every year, with mandatory licensing and training and contract guidelines.

A professional clergymember is assumed to have a bachelor’s degree and a seminary-based master’s degree, and some are quite rigorous (mine was 90 credit hours, and included a thesis with oral defense at the end), and are under strict accreditation review themselves by the Association of Theological Schools.

Meanwhile, more and more congregations are finding that unless you have over 120-plus in worship a Sunday as your baseline membership, it is basically impossible to have a budget that pays for the salary and benefits that would support a full time, seminary trained pastor (with often the student loan debt that comes with all that academic background).

So what you start to see, more and more, are bivocational (preacher with a day job), tentmaker (ditto, see Paul in Acts), licensed ministers, many of whom have no seminary per se behind them, and not that likely ahead of them (see entry: day job). Does this phenomenon change the profession of ministry? Of course it does. Is it a “problem”? It depends on who you’re talking to.

This is a major change in the church world many of us grew up in, and it’s happening faster than many realize. It began with assistant and associate positions going from “fully ordained” and seminary trained to licensed or commissioned status, and now more and more congregations are served exclusively by lay or licensed clergy.

Church by church, the numbers are creeping up past a third in many denominations. Larger churches are still only looking at fully professionalized pastors, but the size of congregations considering this step is steadily getting larger.

What do you think about this shift? E-mail or Twitter me your comments, or add them to the column at newarkadvocate.com. This is a conversation that is going on right now all around us, and isn’t likely to stop anytime soon!

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he’s ordained but works on training and equipping licensed ministers for a number of Protestant denominations. Tell him your reflections on this at knapsack77@gmail.com or on Twitter at “Knapsack.”

Are seminaries relevant?

http://www.rev.org/article.asp?ID=3230

The answer is yes, and no . . . or maybe no, but yes.

[Note: i have the honor of preaching the Maundy Thursday service at Centenary Church in Granville tomorrow, 7:30 pm with, of course, communion!]

Maundy Thursday 9 April 2009 CUMC

Opening Call to Worship
(adapted from Psalm 116)

Leader: We love the Lord, because our voice and our pleas are heard.
People: Because our prayers have a listener, we will call on the Lord as long as we live.

L: In distress and anguish, we felt death and darkness overwhelm us;
P: Then we called out: “O Lord, I pray, deliver my soul!”

L: Gracious is the Lord, and righteous; our God is merciful.
P: The Lord preserves the simple; when we were brought low, God saved us.

L: What shall we render to the Lord, with all the blessings we have received?
P: We will lift up the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord!

L: Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his saints.
P: O Lord, we are your servants; you have loosed our bonds.

Unison: We will offer our sacrifice of thanksgiving, and call on the name of the Lord.
We will pay our vows to the Lord in the presence of all God’s people, in the courts of the house of the Lord,
in your midst, O Jerusalem. Praise the Lord! Amen.

* * *

Unison prayer of confession and redemption

Lord of every banquet and buffet, God of creation and cafeterias, we call on you this evening. You tend to the fields and the harvest, the grinding and the cooking, and your hand rests gently on all who clean up after. Almighty God, we barely understand how bread rises, or how sunlight fills the grapes with sweet life. Our hands are far from the effort of reaping and kneading; our feet do not stomp in the vineyard, or tread out a path around the olive press. Here, O Lord, we would break bread we have not baked, pour out fruit from vines we did not pick. Help us, God, to take from this holy meal a greater awareness of how we depend on one another, and how such true community can only be born in love and forgiveness. And lift our hearts, Father of farmers and loving Lord of all who cook, to celebrate the Son who called Martha from the kitchen, who surprised Mary in the garden, and who offered, even to Judas, the choice to come to his table, and eat of his freely offered salvation. For it is in Christ’s name that we pray, Amen.

Faith Works 4-11-09
Jeff Gill

Traveling on a Saturday, Heading Towards Sunday

Just on down the road, a dust devil swirled into mad, manic life, and skittering across the dusty pathway, spun out into nothing among the rocks beyond.

He stepped cautiously forward, walking steadily but with hesitations, almost as one with a lame ankle or a sore toe. It was a fact that going up to Jerusalem necessarily meant going down as you left, whether to the east and down the rocky defiles leading to Jericho, or the longer and less steep decline to the west, on towards the Roman’s Mare Nostrum, the Great Sea, the Mother of Storms.

There had been great storms yesterday, and a shaking of the earth, but the western sky had not foreshadowed with “a cloud the size of a man’s hand” on the horizon. It came up suddenly, full of lightning and wind, but who had really been watching the skies off to one side?

Shaking his head, he banished the vision of Friday’s events from his mind, and went back to watching the ground closely, for loose rocks that could make his already shaky legs twist right out from beneath him. One sandal was already mended with cordage, where the leather had torn as he ran up the side of the olive tree covered slope, stepping on a rock in the late Thursday darkness. He’d been able to find the lost sandal and keep running, hopping, ludicrous in his fear mixed with anxiety over having to purchase a new sandal.

Even with Roman soldiers at his back, imagined in pursuit, poverty squeezed his thoughts into their mold. It was a puzzle still that they had not followed anyone, but the teacher, their leader, was apparently all they wanted.

A scrap of cord in a gardener’s shed near the top of the mount let him find his footing and his dignity of a sort. Back to their Passover throng’s campsite among the olive oil presses, the “gethsemane” workshop busy during the fall harvest, but where springtime visitors to the Holy City were welcome as out of season guests.

Among the rattled, confused followers of the Galilean rabbi whom he had recently joined, all that he could make out was that an arrest had happened, spurred by the betrayal of one of the core followers, the students, the “discipuli” who came to Jerusalem from the north.

Some said the soldiers had taken their captive to the main fortress overlooking the Temple Mount, the Antonia, others said it was to the Chief Priest’s palatial home at the other end of the city walls. Most went back to a troubled sleep.

By noon the next day there was no question where the focus of attention had turned, to the Romans’ preferred killing ground just west of the city’s exit to the west, the main road of commerce and travel, where most of the visitors for this sacred week would leave and have to choose to turn away, or to glance up, cringe, and keep moving.

He had stayed far away, but his wife joined a group of women who stood near the condemned man’s mother – odd how it was hard to think of him as a teacher, having been refuted and rejected and tormented to such a shameful death. He was the condemned man, innocent though he might be, but if Rome said he was guilty, then who . . .

Stumbling forward, starting at any sudden movement in the brush or stony slopes on either side, he kept his unsteady route to Ein Kerem. His wife had family there, and when they met near the city gate, after the dead body had been removed from the cross and carried to a nearby tomb, she told him they would meet at Ein Kerem tomorrow, and then Sunday walk on down to Emmaus, and from there back to Joppa. The women would grieve together, while the men scattered.

Cleopas thought about the hope for God’s active working in the world that he had felt so strongly just days before, and how hopeless he felt now, fearful again of bad luck, dust devils in his path, the weight of Roman rule hard across his shoulders.

He was glad the two of them were walking, not paying to rent a mule, but just taking one step at a time, quietly letting the miles wear the sadness down. There was an inn at Emmaus where he had known comfort before, and hoped to enjoy again; there they might find a measure of peace.

That was his prayer, as he walked away from Jerusalem on a Saturday afternoon.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow on Twitter at “Knapsack.”