Knapsack 11-18

Notes From My Knapsack -- Granville Sentinel 11-18

Jeff Gill

[This is third in a series of stories called "Twelve Years Old in
Granville," each set in a particular year from the perspective of a
twelve year old, based on our local history with a bit of literary
license to help the narrative along.]

1839

When the three of them had decided to head home after a long morning
of fishing in Raccoon Creek, two went up to the town spring on the
back side of Sugar Loaf, and one took off across the lower slope to
cut up through the Burying Ground.

There was a creek that looped behind the tombstones, and he hoped to
mess around a bit there rather than end up stuck inside churning
butter until his arms ached. His older sister was spinning yarn off
their neighbor's sheep, and Uncle Frank was sure to have brought by a
crock or two of rich fresh cream and a jug of milk as he passed
through town from grandfather's farm on Loudon Street down towards
the woolen mill at the end of Clouse's lane. Any pair of hands that
passed the kitchen door were likely to end up wrapped around a churn
handle, and he didn't want those to be his.

So he swung around the wall and up angling through the cemetery,
until he saw someone sitting at the base of a young, but fast growing
oak tree just at the crest of the slope.

"Good day, sir," the boy said, touching the brim of his straw hat.

"Good day to you, young sir," answered the man, who was anything but
young himself.

"Are you well, sir?" asked the youth.

"It is kind of you to ask. My soul is well, my heart is heavy, and
the years weigh me down, but it is all to the good."

At twelve, he didn't quite know how to answer that, but a thought did
occur to him.

"Are you Mister Benjamin? They say you are a hundred years old."

"That I am, all of that and a year more. How old are you?"

"I am just twelve years old, myself."

"Do you know, when I was not much older than you, I was fighting
alongside the British in the French and Indian War?"

"That I had heard, sir, and that you were in the Continental Army
during the Revolution?"

"As a sergeant, indeed I was. And then a pioneer, and now an old man
sitting under a tree."

His new friend considered this, and felt secure enough in the
confidence shown him to say "Most people say you keep to yourself out
at your place on Ramp Creek and talk to no one."

The weathered face creased with a small but distinct smile, and he
replied "But I am speaking to you, am I not?"

"Yes, sir."

"I speak when something needs to be said. There is much said in this
world that could easily be done without. And I come here to talk to
my wife, Margaret," he said gesturing to a stone rising out of the
grass just beyond the old man's feet, "and my daughters," pointing
both up and down the hill in turn.

"I didn't mean to interrupt you, sir," nodded the young man. "Not at
all," was the ancient's reply; "you may sit down and join me." As he
did so, Benjamin added, "You're sitting on my grave."

Since his own elderly relatives often spoke this way, he merely
nodded, and went on to ask if Mr. Benjamin had ever seen George
Washington. They sat and talked until long after the last of the
butter had been drawn from the churn.

[Jonathan Benjamin died at 103 on Aug. 26, 1841, the oldest person in
the Old Colony Burying Ground; he and his wife Margaret were married
67 years.]

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

Faith Works 11-13

Faith Works 11-13-10

Jeff Gill

 

Doctrinal Teaching and Reasoned Responses

___

 

Anwar al-Awlaki doesn't like you.

 

Well, maybe not "you," but if you are an American, a pretty safe generalization for these parts.

 

American-born, this Islamic clergyman has said some pretty awful things from the safety of Yemen, arguing that killing Americans requires no extra theological justification as Islam normally requires of its adherents when considering defense or warfare.

 

It's us or them, says al-Awlaki about us, of whom he once was, and says that we, which I gather he isn't one of anymore, are devils.

 

Let's just establish right off the top that Islamic teachers and interpreters, often known as "Imams" (roughly equivalent to calling clergy Reverends), have said around the world that this fellow is wrong. He represents Islam about as well as Fred Phelps represents Baptists (let alone Christians).

 

Now, we've all heard the saying "one and God make a majority," first said by Frederick Douglass when the abolitionist movement, before 150 years ago, knew they didn't have the votes but were certain they were right.

 

Some ask if al-Awlaki might actually be representing Islam more accurately than the large numbers of imams who say he's an angry man in error. I suppose it's a fair question to ask, but there's an answer in what's generally known as doctrine.

 

Islamic doctrine is not hard to find and research, and tells even a casual reader that the weight of Islamic teaching is towards self-mastery and submission to the Muslim understanding of God's will. Is there a history of conquest and imperial expansion tied up in that? Sure, and we Christians have the Crusades and Manifest Destiny to account for, but it doesn't overwhelm the clear teaching from Christ in the Gospels down through the mainstream of the church against violence and killing.

 

Doctrine is very much out of vogue in mainstream American society today, and most US faith communities have tended to follow that fashion. Doctrine is kept in the background, de-emphasized, and often mentioned only to say "oh, but you really can make up your own mind about that."

 

One very immediate problem with the "downsizing" of doctrine is that it makes it much harder to argue against your own radical dissenters. When a Fred Phelps says "I'm a Christian," is there any coherent argument, other than a passionate and emotional one, that you can quickly deploy to make the case that he's not who he says he is?

 

And for a Muslim, it really helps to have a consistent, sensible body of teachings to which one can appeal to show that an al-Awlaki is not only outside of the heart of your tradition, but actually not telling the truth about it by arguing that you can commit terrorist acts as a legitimate struggle against "devils."

 

Less dramatically, but I'd say almost as significantly, the loss of doctrine makes it hard to enter into dialogue with a different group. I'd assert that one of the big challenges for the modern Christian ecumenical movement is that for most worshipers, it's hard to figure out what we even have to discuss, since we all pretty much believe the same thing, right?

 

I'd want to say, cheerfully and non-anxiously, no, that's not true. Most of the religious traditions active in Licking County today have some central, dare I say doctrinal propositions that are not the same as the church down the street. Discussing these teachings, these doctrines, help us understand what we believe versus what we just prefer, or want, or like. Faith is a superstructure that stays put, even as the shingles and siding get swapped out over the decades and centuries.

 

Does doctrine build barriers, or does it help us figure out where we can put doors and windows? I think it's very useful to do just that, and sometimes, it helps us put a wall where one belongs.

 

A wall which lets folks like Phelps and al-Awlaki know exactly where they stand, which is outside in the cold.

 

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

Faith Works 11-6-10

Jeff Gill

 

A Comma Can Change Everything

___

 

Who doesn't like a panda?

 

And any of us can describe their gentle feeding habits. They mean no creature harm, vegetarian browsers that they are, right?

 

Which is where the infamous description comes from, "eats shoots and leaves." Because if you just add one little comma, the kindly herbivore becomes an armed robber in the feeding area: "eats, shoots and leaves."

 

A comma can say quite a bit. This may be, in part, why the noted American theologian Gracie Allen said "Never place a period where God has put a comma" – although I'm not sure, given that sentiment, how to end the quote properly!

 

That phrase has become a theme statement for the United Church of Christ (UCC) over the last few years. The descendant church body from the Congregationalists who grew from the original Pilgrim settlers in Massachusetts, plus the German immigrant bodies called the Evangelical and Reformed Church (E&R's as we called them where I grew up), the UCC is a progressive denomination with a number of affiliated congregations in Licking County and nearby areas. I preached down in Fairfield County last week for St. Michael's UCC northwest of Baltimore, out in the country on Bickel Church Road.

 

Right on the historic "four corners" in Granville is First Baptist Church, affiliated with the American Baptist Church USA, but having also connected to the UCC recently. There's an interesting irony in that connection, since of the four churches around the intersection of Broadway and Main, First Baptist is chronologically the youngest, but the oldest, First Presbyterian, was originally a . . . Congregational church, started with the migration from Granville, Massachusetts. Their affiliation shifted to the local presbytery in the first half of the 19^th century.

 

Now there is again, near the center of the county, another UCC affiliated church, and with that connection, they are joining in an effort to draw forth from history the simple evangelism of "Bring a Friend." Not only are they asking their members to "Bring a Friend" tomorrow to their 10 am worship, but after services they plan to (after refreshments, of course) form a giant human comma out on the lawn, to photograph from above.

 

The picture will be used as part of First Baptist's participation in the UCC "God is Still Speaking" initiative, which is a nationwide media campaign of awareness and invitation around the denominational priorities of openness and inclusion.

 

“Since our name hasn’t changed, we’re looking for ways to get the word out,” says church member Patti Burkett. The event on November 7th aims to do both this, and also to welcome a new element of their outreach. The church has just hired Mary Kay Beall Carter, well-known church musician and UCC interim pastor to lead them while they complete their search for a permanent pastor. MK, as she’s known, is a familiar name to those of us who have sung choral anthems by her and her husband, John Carter, and she looks forward to getting to know the Granville and Licking County community a bit better.

 

The congregation at FBC already engages in outreach and compassionate programs such as their "Lunches on the Square" program on the fourth Sunday of each month, where the entire congregation works together to make meals and take them to people who need them on and around Newark's courthouse square. Their next door annex also hosts a Saturday morning "Farm and Craft Market" that picks up in the winter where the outdoor Farmer's Market leaves off, but still supporting sustainable and local food and art.

 

In the words of the StillSpeaking effort, echoed heartily by FBC: "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here!"

 

Let me add a personal note: everyone is also welcome to come to the Midland Theater tomorrow at 3:30 pm, where I again get to emcee the annual "Gospel Celebration" concert for the Licking County Coalition of Care. To be perfectly candid, you're all welcome, but it's a fundraiser, so you have to pay $20 to get in.

 

We'd still love to see you!

 

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

Knapsack 11-4

Twelve Years Old in Granville -- Granville Sentinel 11-4

[This is another in a series of stories set in and around Granville,
told mostly from the point of view of a twelve year old in each era,
based on actual incidents recorded in our history...with a bit of
literary license to make a narrative.]

1833

She felt, rather than heard the rumble of feet through the frame of
the house itself. Her sister slept, just six years old, in the bed
across the loft from her, and their three month old brother was
gurgling downstairs in the corner of their parents' room, closer to
the hearth and the last glowing embers of the evening fire.

Living in a fairly new frame house, you could tell without even
opening your eyes if someone had on their boots, or was padding about
in their wool stockings. The vibrations traveled across the floor
planking, into the wall joists and up to the loft, along the puncheon
floor, up the lathe-turned legs and through the cords that wound
under the ticksack mattress.

It was full dark outside this November night, but there was a glow,
coming and going oddly through the heavy, rippled glass of the one
window at the gable end. Late as it was, to feel booted feet walking
about downstairs was unusual, so she slipped on her shift and moved
over to the head of the steep ladder down.

There was a creak of the door hinges, and a chill draft blowing up
from below, then a distant sound of muttering voices, punctuated by
the baby's muted cries. She turned, and slid down the ladder,
catching the last wide rung with her bare feet and stepping down
gently to the floor.

Her mother was not in bed, either, but standing near the front
window, which had a set of city glass panes which were thinner and
more transparent.

"What's going on, Mother?" the girl asked.

Mother jumped, then strode over to where her daughter stood and
wrapped an arm around her tightly.

"The world is ending, dear; we must be brave."

Even for a twelve year old, accustomed to the oddity of adult
conversation, this was strange, but not as terrifying as it might
seem. She had been worrying that the strange lights outside were a
neighboring house with a chimney fire, as so often happened,
endangering their own snug home. Somehow, the world ending didn't
sound quite as bad.

"How do you mean?" Before the older woman could form an answer, the
door swung open again, and Father stood there, shaking his head.

"That fool Humphrey boy is just laying out there in the Broadway
watching the show; he's going to get himself run over by a farmer
coming home late." As he spoke, the church bell downtown began to
ring steadily.

"Is it the . . ." the girl began to ask.

"No, darling," he answered, his glance taking in both wife and
daughter with the endearment. "The Good Lord Almighty seems to be
having us on a bit, for his own purposes."

The three of them walked out on the front step, and before looking
up, saw that lamps were flickering into life through windows all
along Equality Street, and people, mostly barefoot, stood outside as
they did.

Above, the skies were filled with streaks of fire, bursts of golden-
orange light shooting from a common point overhead, burning to the
horizon in all directions. They were mostly all the same, and each
one different.

Except to go in and pull on stockings, and check the baby, they sat
there all night, until dawn overwhelmed the still flaring falling
stars. "We may never know what that was, but it was surely glorious,"
said Father as the sun rose, and Mother went back inside to make them
all a hot breakfast.

[The "Night the Stars Fell" on Nov. 12, 1833 was seen all over the
eastern US, today known every year as the Leonid meteor shower, but
never yet again as amazing as in 1833. Perhaps this year?]

Faith Works 10-30

Faith Works 10-30-10

Jeff Gill

 

VITA Could Be Vitally Important

___

 

In the spirit of the spooky season, let me offer a few thoughts about a truly scary subject.

 

Taxes. (Boo!)

 

It may not be scripture, but we all know that nothing is certain but death and taxes.

 

The problem is that there are quite a few people here in Licking County who are certain that filing their income tax return is a fate worse than death, and more to be avoided.

 

As it turns out, that is not always true.

 

The Licking County Coalition for Housing, in their ongoing attempts to do preventive work in helping individuals and families from ending up in homelessness, has worked with the IRS in something called VITA.

 

Standing for "Volunteer Income Tax Assistance," it's a system of training for volunteers and electronic support for tax filing that is aimed at low-income working families. Those families often qualify for something called the EITC (if I didn't scare you with the "Boo," how about a frightening mass of acronyms?), which is the "Earned Income Tax Credit."

 

Last year, almost 500 returns were filed around Licking County through VITA work, leading not to payment of additional taxes, but actually bringing back home nearly $700,000. About a third of that were EITC payments that working families had earned, but were unsure how to claim; two thirds of it was withholding that was rightfully that person's earnings.

 

Without VITA, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars that were brought back to Licking County and largely spent here, that otherwise would never have "come home."

 

And the median household income of VITA filers? Around $14,000.

 

What the Housing Coalition folks are concerned about is that most of the planning and coordination of this was done through the IRS by AmeriCorps members, and that program has been one of the casualties of the still struggling economy. Some volunteers were crucial to making VITA work in the last couple of years, but the program will need to be essentially ALL volunteer to move forward again.

 

The staff at LCCH – www.lcchousing.org -- have told me as their board president, and other community leaders, that they are willing to make some extremely generous over-and-above efforts to keep VITA going: it's that important to reducing the number of households running the risk of homelessness. They really want to do this in 2011.

 

What they will need over the next few weeks is a body of volunteers who can commit to a) some 16 hours of training to be "certified" as a volunteer tax aide, and b) at least four hours a week from mid-January through (of course) mid-April. The training is probably going to be set for two Saturdays, and the sites will be at the LCCH offices in downtown Newark, Opportunity Links on East Main, the OSU-N/COTC campus, and ideally (if there's enough volunteers) some other sites.

 

This is a wonderful way you can directly help working poor families, the county as a whole, and be a friendly, caring presence to people who often wonder if anyone out there care about their struggles. I immediately thought of the faith communities of Licking County as this need was described.

 

If you, members of your Bible study group, outreach committee, women's fellowship, men's breakfast crew, whosoever will, are interested in getting this training (and the very complete legal protection it offers the volunteer preparers), and doing the work, call 345-1970. Let them know at LCCH that you are interested in VITA, and I can guarantee you'll hear back soon from them.

 

Your offer of time and interest could be the difference between 50 returns done in Licking County, and 500; between nearly a million dollars to this county that belongs here in our economy, or next to nothing back; between a working hourly head of household convinced that they are alone, and that person finding a smiling face that helps them earn back what they'd already worked hard for to start with.

 

Call 345-1970. I truly pray that you will.

 

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

Faith Works 10-23

Faith Works 10-23-10

Jeff Gill

 

Saved, a Wretch Like Me

___

 

You might be saved.

 

For almost two months, you've been trapped in a place that left you few options, minimal choices.

 

Early on, you were in complete darkness and near panic, but now you can see and hear and understand your plight even more clearly, making darkness and uncertainty seem not so bad.

 

Signs of hope mix with indications of new danger, and you know just enough to be able to imagine additional challenges, while having no concept of how you can be pulled out of the hole you are in.

 

It does sound like the Chilean miners, doesn't it? And they are a spur to reflection, not only because of the happy ending we all shared with a watching world, but because they were a more dramatic, starkly outlined sketch of how many people feel every day, walking around here in the autumn sunlight.

 

You don't have to be stuck in a mine to feel trapped, and you don't have to be in jail to sense the bars and locked doors that keep you where you do not want to be.

 

Addiction is the easy and obvious category, but there are compulsions and habits and circumstances that defy a clinical diagnosis, but from inside . . .

 

The Apostle Paul said "For I have the desire to do what is good, but I cannot carry it out. For what I do is not the good I want to do; no, the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing." (Romans 7:18-19, NIV)

 

That may or may not sound like being in a stony chamber half a mile underground, but how is it all that different?

 

Then in verse 24, having reflected on his plight a bit more, Paul cries out "What a wretched man I am! Who will rescue me from this body of death?"

 

During the final stages of the attempt to reach and save the 33 miners in Chile, I wondered about the problems of even success: if they can drill down to them, and come up with a way to get them safely to the surface, who has to be left down there as the last man out? Who turns out the lights, so to speak?

 

Then I literally sat up straight in my chair, with a shock of startled recognition, when a TV commentator explained how that part of saving the trapped miners would work.

 

In order to get them out, the rescuers up above would have to send someone down; to explain how the procedure would work, to help them into the unprecedented escape vehicle, and to guide them one by one to their salvation, that one would stay behind until all were safe.

 

OK, to be fair, it ended up being six rescuers going down to manage the medical and technical process, but you get what I mean.

 

In order to save them, someone had to go down there from the surface, to freely choose to take on their hazards, in order to ensure that they all might be saved.

 

The man who took the first ride down in the rescue capsule (and huzzah for NASA's assistance in crafting that elegant solution) was also the last man to leave the mine. His name is Manuel Gonzalez, and may his name be long remembered along with those he helped save.

 

It would have been a bit much, I guess, if that mine rescuer who had gone down was named Jesus Gonzalez.

 

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

Faith Works 10-16-10 -- Newark Advocate

Jeff Gill

 

Life Is Like a Box of Chocolates

___

 

 

Forrest Gump had a number of interesting fundamental beliefs, one of which was that "life is like a box of chocolates: you never know what you're gonna get."

 

His momma told him that, and who am I to argue with a mother?

 

The next month for churches and people of faith in the Licking County area has a distinct resemblance to a box of chocolates, Gump-style, or so it looks to me.

 

Tomorrow afternoon, from Noon to 4 pm a number of us will be leading tours around the Octagon Earthworks, this Sunday being one of the four "open house" days at this magnificent piece of 2,000 year old ritual architecture. Enter at 33^rd St. and Parkview where the signs say both Octagon State Memorial and Moundbuilders Country Club (and happy 100^th anniversary to those tenants of the site, as well).

 

It's likely to be a beautiful fall day to enjoy creation in general, and to wonder at how the first people who lived on this landscape reflected on their place in the world under the sun, moon, and stars. Often a few Native American folk will have a singing and prayer ceremony of their own on Observatory Mound at the southwestern corner of the site, as well as next to the public access area near the entrance.

 

Political season means that many churches put on Election Day dinners, a tradition going back to when taverns and pubs were legally required to close for the day (so as not to facilitate the easy bribery of "I'll buy you a round if you . . ."). Fast food and more stay open on Tuesday, Nov. 2, but some of those Election Day dinners not only offer good home cooking for very reasonable prices, many offer a public good by delivering meals to hard working pollwatchers in precincts around their area.

 

You can vote early downtown at the County Administration Building, which more and more people do these days; you don't have to make up an excuse anymore, you can just come in and say you need to vote early. If there's any doubt in your mind about getting to a polling place between 6:30 am and 7:30 pm on Nov. 2, why not get 'r done?

 

Tickets are also available early for the Coalition of Care Gospel Celebration, scheduled on Sunday afternoon, Nov. 7, at 3:30 pm. Once again, the kindly board members of that church based co-operative organization have chosen to allow me to frolic and play on the vast stage of the Midland Theater, which is no small treat (for me). Along with leading everyone in singing "Tell Me Why," I get to introduce acts like the Licking Valley High School Concert Choir, The Calvaliers Quartet, Karrie Miller, Bound for Glory, Frosty Morning, and The Gospelife

Choir.

 

If that doesn't sound worth $20 for a ticket, I can't imagine how you'd get better use out of President Jackson's face. Reserving your ticket for the Gospel Celebration might just make the crusty old duck smile. Call 670-9700 for more info, or www.coalitionofcare.net.

 

Then the following week, beginning at Noon on  Tues., Nov. 9, the Licking County Coalition for Housing will invite us to see the invisible plague of homelessness with their "Shoes on the Square" observance. As the old Indian prayer suggests, we always benefit personally, spiritually, and in our community when we try to walk a mile in someone else's moccasins, even if it's only imaginatively. Learn more at www.lcchousing.org.

 

Faith is a matter of the heart, mind, hands, and feet. Plus, it ought to make you sing!

 

Or leave you as content as someone with a brand new box of chocolates, so full and complete and overflowing you can't help but want to share.

 

 

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

Faith Works 10-9-10 -- Newark Advocate

Jeff Gill

 

Environmental Hot Water Is Easy To Get Into

___

 

 

Last week was "Walk To School" Day in Granville, and I was invited to MC again.

 

This was the fifth (we think) time a lovely fall day was picked to organize a group walk from the main downtown intersection to the elementary school, and like most lovely autumn mornings, rain threatened, but held off just long enough to let us ring the old village bell, thank a few supporters, and stroll down the sidewalk a few hundred strong.

 

We're unusual in Granville in that the school and a large number of elementary age children are located where walking is even feasible. When the school is out on the edge of things, and often there aren't even sidewalks leading to it, walking or bicycling just isn't a option anymore.

 

And to be fair, the action is largely symbolic.  Some of us drove to downtown, walked to the school, and then walked back to our cars where we drove off to work. Many of the kids who walked will possibly never walk to the building again all year, but get dropped off or ride the bus the other 179 days.

 

Yet some will take away from this community mini-rally a realization that walking to school (or cycling) is more feasible some days, at least, than they realized, and the kids who participate at least get a sense of walking as an option – if not always to school, at least sometimes to some places.

 

Faith communities know that symbolic actions are deeply meaningful, and can impact behavior and choices far beyond the immediate contact of a gesture, ritual, or presentation. Baptism for cleansing, weddings for marriages, communion as a core element of Christianity – you can see them as "just a symbol," but as Paul Tillich said, "Never say 'just' a symbol." Symbols have power, as a conduit from the everyday to a wider context, even the eternal.

 

I was thinking about all this as I've been part of an adult study at a church near where the "Walk To School" journey began. Sunday evenings, a few of us have been meeting to talk about Christian faith and "Creation Care," and what environmental issues say to us as we talk about our core beliefs.

 

One thing that struck us is that, in this short series for adults and kids, we begin the evening with a meal. Being good 2010 Americans, we all eat it off of disposable plates, using disposable utensils, drink from disposable cups, and wipe off our fingers with disposable napkins . . . then we go off into our four adult classes to talk about "that which endures forever."

 

Cognitive dissonance, anyone?

 

Meanwhile, there are cabinets in the kitchen full of ceramic plates with a fine blue etching under the glaze, in a classic font saying "Centenary UM." As a traveling preacher who occasionally ends up looking for a cup or spoon, I know that such dinnerware is not hard to find in most churches around the Midwest, but I also know it gets rarely used.

 

Am I volunteering to wash dishes, I can hear some older (women) folk ask, who remember quite well having to stay long past the end of every food-based gathering, hand washing and drying the cutlery and putting it all up in the cupboards?

 

I can claim truthfully that I have, and I would, but it's not as simple as that.  Hygiene issues, impaired immune systems, all kinds of factors drive us towards disposability. Even bringing our own "pitch-in plates" from home, the kind that let you take a really big pile of potato casserole and broccoli salad, is a complication that people simply look at differently.

 

But what would it take to make a point of, once in a while, using that which is not disposable for a church dinner? You won't change the climate or save a koala bear with it, but how many ways might our thinking, even our hearts, be changed by getting those blue edged plates out, or carrying home our dirty dishes that can be reused?

 

Which would probably be in a plastic bag that you can't recycle after getting food goo all over it. So you'd have to hot rinse everything, which takes energy, too  . . .

 

Many angles to this question, but for believers, and particularly Christians, I wonder how often we think about the symbolic meaning of our common meals and our stewardship of the earth, right down to the stuff we're eating there and where it comes from.

 

Tell me about how your church talks about this, would you?

 

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

Notes From My Knapsack -- Granville Sentinel

Jeff Gill

 

Twelve Years Old In Granville – 1850

___

 

 

The fortress was impregnable, of that they were all certain.

 

Perched on a spur of Prospect Hill, glowering over towards Mount Parnassus, the walls had steadily risen, lunch hour by lunch hour, during this last week of nightly snow and bright sunny (if frigid) days.

 

The boys of the upper form in the village school house said to each other that they were no colder out on the hillside, looking over Granville, than they were inside the gloomy brick chambers of the aged structure that peered south down the Lancaster Road.

 

Even the face of the sun, they said, the one carved into the keystone over the central arch of the lower market level, looked pinched with cold. They were happy to hoot past his stony, warmthless gaze, running outside after flying down the stairs from the third floor (the youngest scholars being on the second), and clambering along the hillside, working up behind the row of homes they now looked down the chimneys of.

 

Their mothers had called out "Dinner is ready!" over and over, echoing across the snowdrifts and backyards, finally giving up and eating their own luncheons in peace and quiet. Their boys would rather play than eat, and it wasn't as if they had anywhere else to get a bite before supper and bed.

 

Today, though, would be different. The week was ending, and while all the town could see their commanding location, that included the sworn foes of the public school lads: their counterparts enrolled at the Academy. Each considered the other faction beneath their notice, and either could not stop noticing the others' antics.

 

All week, the young men of the Academy on Elm Street looked up at Prospect Hill during their all too short (as they saw it) dinner break, and they had been planning.

 

No sooner had the dinner hour been declared than the Academy boys trotted quietly, but in a body, along Elm over to Pearl, then up the road until they were even with the heights the public school lads had fortified.

 

They worked their way along the slope on the east, just as the builders had side-stepped from the west to begin their redoubt. A fusillade of snowballs announced the public opening of hostilities, with the winner being the final resident of the fortress.

 

Flocks of flying snowballs all at once pelted the interior of the icy enclosure, and sharpshooters kept up a more targeted spatter of individual shots.

 

A rush of bodies from below, and the Academy crew suddenly filled the embrasures and opening, vaulting into the sacred precincts themselves. Those who built this stronghold were soon cruelly forced to retreat, under fire, uphill.

 

This state of affairs did not last long. The public boys plotted behind a handy hickory close to the brow of Prospect Hill, and shortly they charged down in two files, attacking with pockets filled by pre-made snow (or ice) balls.

 

Their pincer assault was not only successful, but continued on down the hill. Volley by volley the public school lads pressed their social so-called betters back, step by step, until they made their final stand on the public square itself.

 

One o'clock, then two o'clock passed, with even the teachers as well as the parents watching with smiles that almost seemed to indicate approval.

 

By three o'clock, the lack of lunch, the presence of ice fragments within the snowy spheres, and general weariness began to slow down everyone. Suddenly, as if by a prearranged plan, a number of parents and pastors emerged from behind the broader tree trunks nearby, and declared "a truce." The occasional bloody cheek or brow bore witness to the prudence of this enforced diplomacy.

 

Four hours of snowball warfare may have seemed too short to some, but it was as long as such an epic could unfurl, for a crowd of twelve year olds who really needed to get home and help get ready for supper.

 

(This is the fifth of a series of stories, each called "Twelve Years Old in Granville." Some will be based in fact, as with this tale of the greatest snowball fight the village had ever seen, from Bushnell's "History"; others will require a bit more creative guesswork and imagining. I hope you find them all informative and intriguing.)

 

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

Knapsack 11-4

Notes From My Knapsack 11-4-10

Jeff Gill

 

Twelve Years Old In Granville – 1839

___

 

When the three of them had decided to head home after a long morning of fishing in Raccoon Creek, two went up to the town spring on the back side of Sugar Loaf, and one took off across the lower slope to cut up through the Burying Ground.

 

There was a creek that looped behind the tombstones, and he hoped to mess around a bit there rather than end up stuck inside churning butter until his arms ached. His older sister was spinning yarn off their neighbor's sheep, and Uncle Frank was sure to have brought by a crock or two of rich fresh cream and a jug of milk as he passed through town from grandfather's farm on Loudon Street down towards the woolen mill at the end of Clouse's lane. Any pair of hands that passed the kitchen door were likely to end up wrapped around a churn handle, and he didn't want those to be his.

 

So he swung around the wall and up angling through the cemetery, until he saw someone sitting at the base of a young, but fast growing oak tree just at the crest of the slope.

 

"Good day, sir," the boy said, touching the brim of his straw hat.

 

"Good day to you, young sir," answered the man, who was anything but young himself.

 

"Are you well, sir?" asked the youth.

 

"It is kind of you to ask. My soul is well, my heart is heavy, and the years weigh me down, but it is all to the good."

 

At twelve, he didn't quite know how to answer that, but a thought did occur to him.

 

"Are you Mister Benjamin? They say you are a hundred years old."

 

"That I am, all of that and a year more. How old are you?"

 

"I am just twelve years old, myself."

 

"Do you know, when I was not much older than you, I was fighting alongside the British in the French and Indian War?"

 

"That I had heard, sir, and that you were in the Continental Army during the Revolution?"

 

"As a sergeant, indeed I was. And then a pioneer, and now an old man sitting under a tree."

 

His new friend considered this, and felt secure enough in the confidence shown him to say "Most people say you keep to yourself out at your place on Ramp Creek and talk to no one."

 

The weathered face creased with a small but distinct smile, and he replied "But I am speaking to you, am I not?"

 

"Yes, sir."

 

"I speak when something needs to be said. There is much said in this world that could easily be done without. And I come here to talk to my wife, Margaret," he said gesturing to a stone rising out of the grass just beyond the old man's feet, "and my daughters," pointing both up and down the hill in turn.

 

"I didn't mean to interrupt you, sir," nodded the young man. "Not at all," was the ancient's reply; "you may sit down and join me." As he did so, Benjamin added, "You're sitting on my grave."

 

Since his own elderly relatives often spoke this way, he merely nodded, and went on to ask if Mr. Benjamin had ever seen George Washington. They sat and talked until long after the last of the butter had been drawn from the churn.

 

(This is the third of a series of stories, each called "Twelve Years Old in Granville." Some will be based in fact, as with Jonathan Benjamin, who died at 103 on Aug. 26, 1841, and others will require a bit more creative guesswork and imagining. I hope you find them all informative and intriguing.)

 

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

Notes From My Knapsack -- Granville Sentinel

Jeff Gill

 

Twelve Years Old In Granville – 1841

___

 

 

Jane knew that her mother didn't want her near any crowds, not after the last year.

 

Even adults here in Granville had been pulling pranks and doing tricks on each other, since the huge rallies for Tippecanoe and Old Kinderhook, Harrison and Van Buren, had so riled up all the Whigs and Democrats.

 

Horses lost their tails, and well-aged eggs flew when crowds pushed close, protecting the names of people who would never want to be seen clearly doing such mischief. It had gotten so bad, when the Whigs announced their nomination of the Hero of Tippecanoe for the presidency, that young women had to fear for getting jostled and bumped on the street, even if only by accident.

 

But last fall Jane had climbed out onto the roof of the buttery that extended from the house below her bedroom window, and swung down the branches of the maple tree out back, so she could walk up Bowery and down to a vantage point where she could see the Grand Illumination: all of Broadway and most of the streets adjoining were lit with candles in every window. Trundling along, pulled by cheering young men of the Literary and Theological Institution, were carts with broad sheets of parchment nailed to staves along the outer edges, and a row of oil lamps inside projecting profiles and puppets in sharp black outline onto the warm brown panels.

 

Every window was lit, except in a few houses known to support the Sage of Kinderhook, president for the last four years. Some of those houses lost panes to thrown hickory nuts, to the general disapproval of all but the most political in the village.

 

Now Mr. Harrison had been elected, had died after a month, and Mr. Tyler was sworn in, of whom it was now realized: he came from Virginia. The slavery question flared all the brighter, as both sides suspected the other of ill-dealing, and no one asked the slaves what they thought.

 

The Atwell house had never seen a slave, but people from the South would occasionally pass through with their African servants, exciting no little discussion. What had Jane sneaking out the back fence and down Pearl to Elm Street and over was a loud discussion in the Academy building, one you could hear blocks away.

 

Crossing the Lancaster Road, she saw the crowd of men in profile, like the illumination, inside against the windows, and a larger crowd outside, the boys clambering up on the sides of a sea of wagons nearby, trying to see in.

 

Then suddenly, there was a stir throughout the crowd, a silence within that spread without, and then dimly, from inside, a loud voice calling "There'll be no shackles here! Make way for Liberty."

 

In silhouette she saw a man being lifted up and passed over the heads of the crowd inside, a few hands reaching for him and being beaten back. Then the actual person, a black man, came feet first out the top of the door, and was gently set on the ground.

 

Mr. Hillyer she knew, and he pushed through the crowd at the door leading two horses; he leapt on one after helping the African fellow onto the other, and together they galloped up to the Broadway crossing, disappearing to the west beyond Sugar Loaf.

 

She was glad she had snuck out again, but marveled at what she had seen; heading home, it occurred to her that she couldn't, this time, ask her mother to explain it all.

 

 

(This is the fourth of a series of stories, each called "Twelve Years Old in Granville." Some will be based in fact, as with the slave John, who escaped after a habeas corpus hearing in the Old Academy Building in 1841; others will require a bit more creative guesswork and imagining. I hope you find them all informative and intriguing.)

 

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

Knapsack 10-21

Notes From My Knapsack 10-21-10

Jeff Gill

 

Twelve Years Old In Granville – 1833

___

 

She felt, rather than heard the rumble of feet through the frame of the house itself. Her sister slept, just six years old, in the bed across the loft from her, and their three month old brother was gurgling downstairs in the corner of their parents' room, closer to the hearth and the last glowing embers of the evening fire.

 

Living in a fairly new frame house, you could tell without even opening your eyes if someone had on their boots, or was padding about in their wool stockings. The vibrations traveled across the floor planking, into the wall joists and up to the loft, along the puncheon floor, up the lathe-turned legs and through the cords that wound under the ticksack mattress.

 

It was full dark outside this November night, but there was a glow, coming and going oddly through the heavy, rippled glass of the one window at the gable end. Late as it was, to feel booted feet walking about downstairs was unusual, so she slipped on her shift and moved over to the head of the steep ladder down.

 

There was a creak of the door hinges, and a chill draft blowing up from below, then a distant sound of muttering voices, punctuated by the baby's muted cries. She turned, and slid down the ladder, catching the last wide rung with her bare feet and stepping down gently to the floor.

 

Her mother was not in bed, either, but standing near the front window, which had a set of city glass panes which were thinner and more transparent.

 

"What's going on, Mother?" the girl asked.

 

Mother jumped, then strode over to where her daughter stood and wrapped an arm around her tightly.

 

"The world is ending, dear; we must be brave."

 

Even for a twelve year old, accustomed to the oddity of adult conversation, this was strange, but not as terrifying as it might seem. She had been worrying that the strange lights outside were a neighboring house with a chimney fire, as so often happened, endangering their own snug home. Somehow, the world ending didn't sound quite as bad.

 

"How do you mean?" Before the older woman could form an answer, the door swung open again, and Father stood there, shaking his head.

 

"That fool Humphrey boy is just laying out there in the Broadway watching the show; he's going to get himself run over by a farmer coming home late." As he spoke, the church bell downtown began to ring steadily.

 

"Is it the . . ." the girl began to ask.

 

"No, darling," he answered, his glance taking in both wife and daughter with the endearment. "The Good Lord Almighty seems to be having us on a bit, for his own purposes."

 

The three of them walked out on the front step, and before looking up, saw that lamps were flickering into life through windows all along Elm Street, and people, mostly barefoot, stood outside as they did.

 

Above, the skies were filled with streaks of fire, bursts of golden-orange light shooting from a common point overhead, burning to the horizon in all directions. They were mostly all the same, and each one different.

 

Except to go in and pull on stockings, and check the baby, they sat there all night, until dawn overwhelmed the still flaring falling stars. "We may never know what that was, but it was surely glorious," said Father as the sun rose, and Mother went back inside to make them all a hot breakfast.

 

(This is the second of a series of stories, each called "Twelve Years Old in Granville." Some will be based in fact, as in the "Night the Stars Fell" on Nov. 12, 1833, and others will require a bit more creative guesswork and imagining. I hope you find them all informative and intriguing.)

 

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

Notes From My Knapsack 10-7-10

Jeff Gill

 

Twelve Years Old In Granville – 1809

___

 

His father's funeral was a solemn affair, with mother and two sisters weeping nearby. The Rose brothers offered to dig the grave for the Averys, which was a blessing, but the nine year old son insisted on helping.

 

He was a strong boy, big for his age, and he'd have to be mature beyond his years to figure out how to support the four of them now.

 

That all began in 1806, and now at twelve he and his father's axe had been contracted to clear a parcel of land out on the edge of the village, one tree at a time.

 

Mother feared that he had gotten the job out of pity, and Alfred wryly asked what difference that made if he could do the work and got the pay from it?

 

The landowner had stopped him on Broadway and asked if he would do it, "could he" not really being the question after two winters' worth of firewood chopping since father's death. The pay would see them through another winter, and a bit more besides which could go towards buying some goods from the East, to sell here in the wilds of the Northwest as it still was, statehood or no.

 

They'd met out east of town to organize this area as a county last year, holding the first court sessions under a tree. It still stood, but many trees had fallen to build Licking County in the last year, and Alfred was ready to do his part.

 

He'd been ready to do his part to help father, as well as mother and his sisters, when he was just eight and they'd all left Granville, Massachusetts to come here alongside Raccoon Creek. They were more from the Connecticut side of the border, with many well-to-do family members still in that state, but father felt that his chances for success were greater out on the frontier, than in the more crowded bucket full of frogs back in New England. Father felt that out here, a man might stand out, without being overshadowed by any other man standing nearby.

 

Father had fought bravely in the Revolution under General Wayne, helping carry the day during the night attack on Stony Point, the battle that saved West Point (no thanks to Benedict Arnold). He had survived much, but his sudden death not a year after they came to Ohio left all his dreams of security and wealth in the hands of his son, along with an axe.

 

Walking out beyond the edge of the village, Alfred came to where two rough-cut stakes were placed along the road, a ragged bit of calico fluttering on the ends. Between these stakes, and a hundred and fifty paces straight back from the road, he was to cut down, segment, split, and quarter every tree, piling the cords where the owner's wagon could trundle by and pick them up on the way back into town from Newark.

 

Could he do it? Alfred Avery thought so. He spat on his hands, took up a firm grip on his axe (his father's axe), and walked up to the first tree. Then he swung.

 

(This is the first of a series of stories, each called "Twelve Years Old in Granville." Some will be based in fact, as in the earliest days of Alfred Avery, builder of the Avery-Downer House in 1842, and others will require a bit more creative guesswork and imagining. I hope you find them all informative and intriguing.)

 

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

Faith Works 10-2

Faith Works 10-2-10

Jeff Gill

 

Do You Kiss Your Mother With That Mouth?

___

 

 

It humanizes them.

 

That's the publicist answer, usually, if someone actually has the nerve to ask about a celebrity and cursing. When you're in a setting that is surrounded by cameras and microphones, with a sense that there's little said that isn't scripted (as in written in a script by writers on staff), it's hard to think a curse word is entirely an accidental phenomenon.

 

I exempt Joe Biden in this category, a very unscripted politician.

 

Last week Brandy and Maks on "Dancing With The Stars" were getting interviewed after their routine. Brandy has been a sweet young innocent for about fifteen years now, and apparently is trying to transition to hot new rap star, so she gets regularly "bleeped" in the taped segment. 8:00 pm hour, opening of the show, and the Lovely Wife and I look at each other with a mix of irritation and frustration.

 

Then the Lad says "Why is she doing that?"

 

Why, indeed?

 

We have tried to raise our son not in a bubble, but with a clear sense that obscenity is bad, rude, and a sign of sloppy thinking mixed with careless behavior, akin to running across traffic without even looking. The idea that it's a moral failure is more (to us, at least) an index of the problem, not the source of it. Clean up your act, and your language will follow.

 

But he's also learned that it's a more serious matter to casually flop a mention of God into your speech. Back when "Trading Spaces" was a Saturday night regular in our house, the "reveal" moment could on one level be neatly divided into two categories. There were the "Oh, my gosh!" reactions, and another that phonologically was very closely related.

 

Usually, you could tell who would say which, but sometimes you'd get surprised, either way. I'd say "Oh, my gosh" was maybe one in three or four at best. The Lad started learning that referring to God in that way was not the end of the world, or an occasion for cringing horror, just a raised eyebrow of "was that really necessary?" He figured out almost on his own that if you're going to talk about God, you really shouldn't do it casually, but respectfully, as you should in talking about any person.

 

The Old Testament includes in the Ten Commandments the idea that "taking the Lord's name in vain" is wrong, and we teach that in our house. Swearing may or may not include that proscription (I recall a bumper sticker years ago that said "That's not Jesus' middle name" and almost driving off the road I laughed so hard), but they relate.

 

On the other hand, there's a fair amount of class and culture caught up in what makes for polite language versus curse words. When the French Normans invaded and conquered the Anglo-Saxon English, we began a social stratification that is still evident in our speech: you may urinate and defecate and even copulate while consigning someone to perdition, and still be accepted in polite (Norman) society. Use the Anglo-Saxon versions of any of those, and you will . . .

 

Well, there's the problem. Are we actually better off for having smashed those social boundaries? I'm sure it will help Brandy in her career re-invention as a not-so-young, not-so-innocent women in hip hop. In general, not so much. The F-bomb has become conversational punctuation among both genders and down to lower grades of school, to the point where it's the odd sidewalk where you don't hear it.

 

What I think is worth teaching, alongside a decent respect for those names that are held dear by some, of us is what my former junior high English and Latin teacher said early in 7^th grade to all us young, um, creatures. "It's not so much that swearing is wrong, ladies and gentlemen, it's that curse words are a sign that you just couldn't think of anything else to say. Put some effort and thought into it if you want to let someone know you're unhappy with them."

 

I thought of her when that commercial ran with old Marine sergeant Lee Ermey as a not-so-good therapist: not a swear word in it, but the impact was all the clearer.

 

Not to mention more precise!

 

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

http://knapsack.blogspot.com/2010/01/links-for-newark-earthworks-tours.html

Faith Works 9-25

Faith Works 9-25-10

Jeff Gill

Or We Could Talk About Money . . .

___

In churches around our area, fall is usually the time for a swing
through Stewardship Land.

You remember Candy Land, right? With the Gumdrop Mountains and the
Molasses Swamp and the Crooked Old Peanut Brittle House?

Stewardship Land is more of a hazard filled board with Mission
Statement Mountains and a Deficit Swamp and a Optimistically
Projected House of Pledge Cards. Everyone knows the rules, everyone
has played the game, and everyone looks forward to reaching Home
Sweet Home, which is moving on to November and preparing for Advent.
There aren't really winners or losers, it's just the act of everyone
getting together and playing the game.

Sometimes there are congregational leaders who step up and say "let's
play a different game!" They get out "The Game of Tithe" or "Monopoly
on Decision-Making" or "Stratego Vision Planning."

And there are a number of outside "manufacturers" who create new game
boards with different pieces and counters and layouts, which can make
for a brief buzz of excitement . . . and after a few years it's
become a sort of "Candy Land" repetition itself.

Then there's the fellow who said "What good is it if you pass Go,
collect $200, and win the game, but lose your soul?" (GSV translation*)

In Christian churches we've usually made sure to say at least once,
with much head nodding, that it's not about our giving, but about our
everything. Plucking the first fruits off the Gingerbread Plum Tree
is all well and good, but only if it is, itself, a reminder to us
that the entire game board is a gift, and this span of time where we
get to draw cards and move around together has a beginning and an
end, but there's a wider reality out beyond the kitchen table which
our time here is part of.

We all know that Cousin Ernie always tries to palm the "Get Out of
Jail Free" card, and we recall guiltily that we've nudged a top hat a
square ahead when everyone was looking at the cat; likewise we're all
quietly calculating what the minimal amount is that we can give and
still feel like we're good people, while speculating on what others,
especially "others like us" are giving as a measure of our basic
obligation – and then working up quickly, but at length, our
justifications for not giving more.

Here's the easiest way out of all: we're not good people, and there's
no amount that can be fit into an offering plate or wedged into a
pledge envelope that will change that. It's all gift, everything we
have, and the truth of it is in how much of what we "possess" comes
from someone and somewhere else (check the tags on your clothes, for
instance), and how much we will take with us when we die.

Yeah, I had to go there.

So if we can't look at what we make as what we deserve – and c'mon, I
know I just heard you say you deserve much more than you get, right?
– and our assets are ultimately going to be used by others someday
anyhow, can we skip the game and get real about what Stewardship
really is?

This is a useful season in the life of any faith community to look at
our own income and outgo, consider where our values and priorities
lie, and ask if our spending and supporting accurately reflects who
we aspire to be, how we want to be seen in that large, wider, even
eternal sense; by the One who sees things in that way.

"Where your debit card statement itemizes, there your heart will be
also." (GSV*)

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around
central Ohio; occasionally he looks at the Hebrew & Greek of the
Bible and does the *Gill Standard Version, which is, to be fair, a
paraphrase. Sort of. Contact him for translation assistance at
knapsack77@gmail.com.

Knapsack 9-23

Notes From My Knapsack 9-23-10

Jeff Gill

 

A Season For Orange, Or Something Like It

___

 

Autumn arrives today, in an official sense, with all its astronomical papers in order.

 

We've already been suspecting the presence of a new season, quietly waiting just around the next corner.

 

Browned off grass and singed leaf edges confirm this suspicion, and then there's the appearance of orange on the landscape.

 

Now, in this age of industrial chemical coloration, the word orange itself starts to take on an unearthly hue in our minds. Orange barrels, construction worker vests, overhead alert sleeves on power cables – that's an orange of a sort.

 

But I'm seeing an older orange, the one that is the true harbinger of autumn

 

You could call this color pumpkin, since that's the broadest, most obvious place to pick it out. Big ripe garden gourds waiting for a knife and a candle to reach their jack-o'-lantern apotheosis, pumpkins are obviously orange, but with a lighter touch and an inner vibrancy.

 

Up in the canopy, where most leaves are holding on for a last few days equal to the nights, there are glimpses of russet and reddish-brown and orange.

 

Even out in the lawns, where much of the turf has given up the ghost, there's a faint hint of orange-ish-ness out in the middle of the dormant patches, made all the more distinctive by the green corners that flare up after fall rains renew the shady patches.

 

Then when you roll out through the countryside, there's a dry, dimmer orange underlying the corn and soybeans, past their growth, withdrawing into aridity, waiting for the harvesters to roam the fields by night under the September moon.

 

"Shine on, shine on harvest moon . . ." which itself can be seen, on first arising, as an orange orb in the east.

 

From now through the end of December, nights will be longer than days, having just passed the equinox. For a little while longer, though, there's still a bit of an evening where a walk around the neighborhood or down the side of the road can still stretch the legs and clear the mind.

 

Henry Thoreau wrote a beautiful essay titled "Walking" which is worth reading as a spur to doing some sauntering yourself, easy enough to find online. It closes with a poem which talks about a road in the neighborhood of Concord, MA which once went to Marlborough but is now a farm lane, still displaying milestones much as Licking County's own National Road does.

 

Henry closes with a thought that applies just as well to Newark-Granville Road or Pearl Street, Main St. or Cherry turning into Broad:

 

If with fancy unfurled

You leave your abode,

You may go round the world

By the Old Marlborough Road.

 

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

Faith Works 9-18

Faith Works 9-18-10
Jeff Gill

Whatever You Might Choose To Call Him
___

Not infrequently the question will come up, in regards to Jesus.

It gets asked courteously, sometimes confrontatively, occasionally combatively, always very curiously: "So you, as a Christian, think he was God?"

To which, of course, my answer is no.

We Christians believe he *is* God, then and now, before and after.

Jesus?

Yep. That's the deal.

If there is further conversation on the point, it's usually along the lines of "So how does that work?"

The short answer is "the Trinity." Yes, the doctrine of the Trinity doesn't get much play these days, in our marvelously rationalistic era, since it's (at its best) an extended philosophical argument for the Three-in-One-ness of God. This was much more common a point of clarification, oddly enough, in a more so-called primitive era, like the early medieval period of Ireland, where Patrick, late of England, stolen slave by the Celts and now returned Christian missionary, plucked up a shamrock to help answer the question all the cool Druid priests were asking.

A three-leaf clover actually doesn't work as a shamrock, since it really is three separate leaves off the central stem. A shamrock, if you look verrry closely, is a single leaf, with deeply incised lobes which from a bit of a distance looks like three separate leaves. On closer examination, it's really one. There's God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, said Patrick, soon to be bishop and saint, and patron of a springtime festival with the wrong plant stuck up on the barroom windows.

Most folks aren't that much more concerned than a Druid, and leave the Trinity as well enough alone at that point. But the whole idea of Jesus as . . . what did you say he was?

God.

Right – seriously, you believe that?

Muslim folk of good will let me know that they are puzzled by Christian claims to be monotheists, believers in one God, but that we think we can say that Jesus is God. As I mentioned last week, there's some surprisingly positive stuff said about Jesus in the Qur'an, but there are also some unmistakable assertions that you simply can't, shouldn't call Jesus either God or the Son of God. It's a mistake, one we should correct forthwith.

And some Christian folk will downplay that kind of formulation, and aver that Jesus represents, or embodies God to us in a very compelling way; he's a metaphor, or a window . . . but they may be very hesitant to emphasize that Jesus is in any way God himself. A door to God, a metaphor which Jesus himself uses.

On behalf of orthodox Christian teaching, let me try to get into my inner St. Patrick and describe what many of us mean when we say "Jesus is Lord." If you look at the sun – first, you really barely even can and truly shouldn't look directly at the sun. You'll put your eyes out, kid.

As powerful and visible and effectual as the sun is, when you glance up in its general direction, you can "see the sun." It occupies a particular place, and that place appears from our point of view to move.

In fact, the sun is what we orbit around ourselves, and even when the sun goes down, the light of the moon is reflected sunlight, and the warmth of the earth is radiating from the day's store of illumination; the gravity and mass of the sun hauled together and formed the planets of the solar system, millennia ago and spinning still.

You can calculate the movements and position of the sun's appearance in the heavens, but that doesn't even begin to encompass the physics and reality of nuclear fusion that is the heart of what makes the sun sunny. It looks round and reassuring on an autumn blue sky day, but what the hydrogen atoms are up to for that to be there beggars the imagination, hinted at when we glance too long, and look away with an afterimage burned into our eye from 93 million miles away.

When we look to Jesus, we see enough. We Christians believe that pointing to Jesus directs people to as much of God as we can handle, and then some; no matter how Trinitarian we're feeling, we know that there's even more to God than what we see in him.

And it's the "sent-ness" of Jesus that makes us stop and take notice, because everything about him and the time he walked among us points to how he was a specific, intentional, intended message of God to us. To their then, and our now.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him a story that shed light into your life at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 9-11

Faith Works 9-11-10

Jeff Gill

 

People of the Book

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Are you one of the "people of the book"?

 

In Islam, there are a number of verses in three different chapters of the Qur'an that spell out how Jews and Christians are also "People of the Book," and should be treated with respect and fellowship alongside of Islam.

 

That's not to say Islam doesn't still hold firmly to their central teaching that God's communication with humanity was not completed until Mohammed received the Qur'an and fulfilled what the Hebrew Scriptures and Christian Testaments (Old & New Testaments of the Bible to most of you) also said.

 

Not too dissimilarly from what members of the Latter-Day Saints would share with you about their Book of  Mormon, that it completes and concludes what the Holy Bible teaches.

 

So for an Islamic worshiper, the Qur'an (from the Arabic for "The Teaching" or "The Recitation" as it was first spoken from God to Muhammad and is still most often shared verbally, in Friday worship in mosques) is the final revelation of God. As a Christian would say about the Old Testament, the New Testament does not invalidate the Old Testament books, but fulfills them through the person of Jesus Christ; so a Moslem would say that the Hebrew & Christian scriptures are not invalidated by the Qur'an, just completed by them.

 

Nine years ago today, a group of 19 men committed a vast and horrible crime, claiming that they did so in the service of Islam; their directors and minders, who made statements after the death of their students and the thousands they killed along with themselves, also have maintained that the "jihad" or "struggle" they carry on against the Christian west is a true expression of their faith.

 

Islam in Arabic means "submission," which is specifically "submission to God." The jihad all faithful Moslems are called to in the Qur'an is the struggle to overcome one's own desires and fleeting wishes and submit to God's will for your life, expressed in unity with fellow worshipers, charity to those in need, and a life lived out with care and consideration for decency and order in the larger community.

 

Are their disturbing verses that, read alone, undermine that general outlook? Yes, as does the Bible (see Psalm 137:8-9), and if you tried to define Christianity by such a passage, I'd be offended. Have their been teachers who preach angry and destructive doctrines in Islam? Sure, and please don't make me defend Fred Phelps, but I don't feel like I have to apologize for him anytime I'm talking about my faith.

 

I've heard plenty of Islamic religious teachers explain how suicide bombings and unprovoked attacks are themselves Islamic. The Arab world has political and economic issues which weave in and out of Islamic concerns; the Industrial West has consumerism and environmental problems that weave in and out of modern Christian teaching, but should not be taken to define each other, either.

 

Dozens of Moslems were among the nearly 3,000 killed when the Twin Towers were attacked and ultimately collapsed (estimates range from 19 to 28 as best as I can find). Those who were trapped and seeking safety no doubt prayed as they sought escape, as they faced death alongside of Jews and Christians and Jains and Zoroastrians and Buddhists and doubtless a few praying agnostics.

 

Yet the towers fell.

 

Those prayers, however you understand them, were real, and I believe aimed in the same direction. Each of us in our own faith tradition wrestles with the question of what an unanswered prayer (as we see it) means.  But it troubles me deeply when people feel the need to specify whose prayers are real, whose are heard; my faith is in one God.

 

What I would also want to say, respectfully, about my faith, is that I believe one's ability to focus and live by prayer, and to hear or discern what response comes from such prayer, is best found in the person of Jesus of Nazareth, definitively revealed to us in the Gospels of the Christian New Testament. I don't see how that belief is in any way undermined by also affirming that prayers of other faiths seek the same God that I find clearly shown to me in Christ.

 

All the Moslems I've ever known would agree that my prayers are to the same Allah (simply Arabic for God), but would, with a twinkle, ask me to hear and read what the Qur'an says about my Jesus. To which I'd say, I've read it, and let me tell you about how I read the 22^nd chapter of Revelation . . .

 

And the discussion continues!

 

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

Knapsack 9-9

Notes from My Knapsack 9-9-10

Jeff Gill

 

Notes From an Unrepentant Optimist

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Glasses that are half full and half empty, spectacles with roseate hues, buttered toast falling to the carpeting – plenty of metaphors out there for the spectrum of optimism to pessimism.

 

What do you call it if you believe, and generally feel that everything will turn out all right, but only after a fair amount of misery? If you assess the nature of most people as lazy, but well intended, while suffering from a surplus of rationalization, still always trying to do the right thing: does that make one a misanthrope? A Timon of Athens?

 

If you watch too much cable news, or its vast extrusions across the internet, you generally hear about fear, terror, crisis, collapse, epidemic, outbreak, disaster, anger, bitterness, resentment, anxiety, and oh yeah, fear.

 

All of which gets you to read down past the jump, click to page two, or stay for the second half hour.

 

That being their main point and purpose.

 

In general, the picture they paint of reality is done in primary colors, mostly blood red and coward yellow and depressive blue. As any of you know who have to work much with computer printers, it's amazing what you can do with those three tints, but it takes some subtle mixing and attention to detail. Lose either of those qualities, and you get ghostly shadowing or muddy outlines that aren't even recognizable.

 

We're up against the tenth anniversary of a horrible act, a crime against this nation and against the very idea of peace and justice. It still beggars my not inconsiderable imagination that anyone, no matter what their motivation, could shoulder their way past families with small children to butcher flight attendants and pilots to fly planes into office towers.

 

There is, afoot in the world, the ability to choose an evil beyond imagining, and I do imagine that this is part of what our presidents have to try to vividly imagine every morning, so that Bush now looks ten years younger and Obama ten years older, only two years after their change of responsibilities.

 

So sure, we have to be able to think the unthinkable from time to time, and it's deeply unsettling to learn that some who wanted to walk in the footsteps of the 9-11 assassins met to plan in an Upper Arlington coffee shop that I've been in myself. It makes you think.

 

What it shouldn't make you think is that this is the norm for humanity, that most people are readily able to turn that corner into darkness. We have it in us, and some do, but for the most part, most bad decisions are no more than the result of looking for a corner to cut, wanting to knock off early, to get a task done faster so as to move on to . . . well, to do what we want to do.

 

There's an old saying "Never attribute to malice or hostility what can more easily be explained by ignorance and laziness." Most so-called conspiracies and crimes, whether of omission or commission, are more a convergence of corner-cutting characters than they are shrouded figures plotting our harm, or their gain, in private.

 

I promise to say a bit more about the Newark Holy Stones next column, but that needed to be said first, for the season we're in, and actually, to help set up what really is at work with those puzzling artifacts found 150 years ago.

 

Meanwhile, be of good cheer: most of the opposition we face in this world means well, but is looking for the easy way out. I remember that every time I look at my greatest enemy, which is most mornings while brushing my teeth.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him what makes you hopeful or fearful at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter. 

Faith Works 9-4

Faith Works 9-4-10

Jeff Gill

 

Willisburg, Kentucky

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It had been just a few days past a hundred years since the coffin preceded me into Willisburg, Kentucky.

 

Actually, Carl Etherington's body had probably gone by train to Springfield from Lexington, and then been driven, almost certainly by an undertaker's horsedrawn hearse, up to Willisburg.

 

Today, in 2010, I was driving my car along a road whose curves betrayed its wagon-worn roots, dropping down from the divided highway of the Bluegrass Parkway, ten miles and more into the Kentucky hills.

 

In 1910, the week after July 8, the small town of Willisburg saw a child of their community now returned, never grown to full manhood but having seen more than most men did in twice his years, ending with the horrifying sight of a mob calling for his life, which they claimed and took.

 

We know very little for sure about Carl, but his gravestone clearly shows his age as seventeen. His parents surely got that part correct, and there was no question about the date of death.

 

Many articles were written in the weeks and months after the Newark riots and infamous lynching, and what seems certain is that Carl Etherington lied about his age. It may not have been the first time, since there are mentions of a career at sea, or perhaps with the Marines. He was apparently a tall, strongly built young man, and no one realized at the time, with him or against him, that he was so terribly young – they thought 22, or possibly 20, which was surely young enough.

 

He was hired at a time when jobs were scarce, and to work as what we would call today "private security" or more caustically a "rent a cop." He was part of an effort to "clean up" Newark when the county had voted dry a very damp town. Officials outside of the city's own power structure, including the mayor of Granville, had pressed to have the new liquor laws enforced, by force, and young Mr. Etherington was caught up, in Cleveland or Columbus or Worthington (again, accounts vary), and sent by interurban to another day's wages in downtown Newark, a city he would not leave alive.

 

Those events have long been part of the lore of downtown, perhaps even part of its burden, and the 100^th anniversary has moved a number of us to seek commemoration if not resolution. That story is not done, and some Christian leaders have invited us to join them tomorrow, Sunday afternoon, at the Courthouse Square gazebo for a 4 pm remembrance.

 

On the evening when, just south of the courthouse, Etherington was lynched in 1910, a few of us gathered, walked the path he was dragged from the old jail's north door to the deadly corner, and briefly set a wreath on the spot where he died. We prayed, quietly and solemnly, for peace.

 

Then I told those there July 8 that I was going south in a few days, and would take the wreath away, to place it on Carl Etherington's grave. We agreed that this would be right, and so I did.

 

A week later, I parked at the Willisburg Christian Church, which hosted a century before what is probably still the largest gathering the county had ever seen, some 3 to 4,000 who turned out for Carl's funeral. His marker was easy to spot, near the road, and with a bronze plaque inset with a letter engraved from the Ohio Methodists meeting at Lakeside that summer. Their offering for the family also paid for this gravestone.

 

I set the wreath, offered my own prayers, and went back across the street. Near a basketball hoop in the parking lot were half a dozen youth of Willisburg today. I explained my visit, and asked if they knew the story of the stone with the plaque. Most didn't, one thought she'd heard the story before, her friend nodding.

 

"But I thought he was . . . how old was he?" Seventeen, I replied. They all looked at each other, and their realization was apparent. "Why did you come down here?" she asked. I answered that a few of us thought it was never too late to admit that a wrong had been done, even if we couldn't right it.

 

I was asked much the same thing by e-mail the following week, by a name that startled me when it popped up in my in-box. The last name was "Etherington." I explained as I did in Willisburg, where this man's father had been a cousin of Carl's family in his youth. They now live far away, but had been back to take pictures and wonder at long ago stories. We had seen each other's photos searching online, and I'd left a message. Even so, to see that name in my e-mail . . . I answered right away.

 

His reply to my description of the ceremony, and the wreath, and my visit was "Let me say, on behalf of the family, that we are very grateful for your remembrance and your efforts."

 

Somehow, I believe that statement has an echo that spans centuries.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about your family stories that bridge centuries at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.