My note to FCC-Valpo for this weekend

First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) 175th Anniversary
Valparaiso, Indiana

"Good to be done more abundantly"

To look at our history as a congregation, I'd like to start somewhere about in the middle, just to keep us thinking about history as something more than just a series of dates and an orderly sequence of events. Life rarely feels like an orderly sequence of events when you live it, and it's the life of this congregation I'd like to help celebrate this summer more than our history. 

In "The Life of A.B. Maston," published just two years after his death at 54 in the year 1907, there is the following note about 1878:

"Valparaiso has, besides the City College, a flourishing Normal School, said to be the largest in the United States. Has about 1,200 pupils. The school is under the superintendence of Prof. H. B. Brown, a member of the Christian Church. While in Valparaiso, we visited the Normal School during chapel service, where we met over 600 pupils, who observed the most marked order during the services . . . We met Bro. A. B. Maston, a young man of fine natural abilities and good attainments, who will finish his course in the Normal School this year. Bro. Maston expects to enter upon the work of the ministry in full. A congregation wishing the services of a young man would do well to call him."

In fact, he ended up called not so much to a congregation as to a continent, and became one of Australia and New Zealand's foremost evangelists. You can read more about him at: http://www.mun.ca/rels/restmov/people/amaston.html

"People's minds in this county are taken up with the truth, and are searching the Scriptures to see if the things of which we speak are so." So said the article in Alexander Campbell's "Millenial Harbinger" about what was going on in Porter County, Indiana, at the county seat of Valparaiso, on June 22, 1837.

The August 1837 issue went on to state "there is great prospect for good to be done more abundantly."

Campbell himself never came to Valparaiso, but he did dedicate the Christian Church in Wooster, Ohio, from which came Elias & Phoebe Axe. The Axe family name is still remembered with honor at First Christian Church in Wooster, and Elias & Phoebe of that clan came to northern Indiana not long after, with "the principles of Restoration" still fresh in their hearts. Those were central to the establishment of this new congregation, and the Axes carried into this body of believers the outlines of what they had learned from Campbell and the early Disciples' preachers.

What they began shifted about in a variety of locations close to downtown Valparaiso, and most recently has found a home on Glendale Boulevard, but is centered now as then on the communion table. A table to which all are invited, but away from which some carry a calling, a commission to go out and tell others about this open banquet of God's grace. Or as Sri Lankan theologian D.T. Niles said, "Evangelism is one beggar telling another beggar where he found bread."

Bread has been found, and good has been done abundantly, at First Christian Valpo. My own memories of this congregation don't go back 175 years, they go two thousand, and more. When I think of First Christian, I think of home baked bread, bing cherry jello salad and deviled eggs on the long pitch-in tables just inside the kitchen doors off of Fellowship Hall, and we kids playing (during programs for adults) up in the coat room, where the brick foundations of the high tower above sloped inwards, brick by brick, like an Egyptian temple. It felt ancient and mysterious and downright Biblical.

We ran haunted houses through that mysterious room, hid from junior choir directors in there, tied knots during Troop 7 meetings around the heavy pipe racks, and even occasionally hung coats from hangers in there.

Our history, at least by way of the Bible, goes back at least to Exodus and watching "The Ten Commandments" in a Sunday school classroom, and as a small child I thought of Rev. Percy Thomas as a patriarch from the prophetic books; Rev. Tom Alston talked about working in the pickle factory when he was young like the Hebrews spoke of making bricks without straw. The historic and the contemporary were casually entwined for me in growing up as part of a church family.

I think of Christmas baskets delivered, with bread and more, to home bound members, and others whose names had come to the attention of the elders, and then a pageant in the sanctuary when the brightly colored windows were dark; it was the crowns of the wise men, looking *exactly* like those worn at the stable in Bethlehem, that cast flashes of light and hue across the polished wooden pews with the glitter of their marvelous fake jewels and carefully wrapped foil. Their brocaded robes and gently cradled gifts were messages directly to me from across the ages and the pages of the gospels, promises of God having even more to say when I learned how to hear.

Nowhere did God's voice seem clearer than at communion, if only with the words across the front of the table: "This Do In Remembrance of Me." There is a promise of bread in the grain framing the grapes in the Benham Room windows under the balcony at the back of the church, those elements of communion being the only actual images shown in the geometry of the stained glass, other than the Holy Bible perched atop the south wall. Communion was real, and nothing made it more real than the Sundays when you knew, looking at the nested tower of communion ware, that the elements were there because you and your family had put them there, either that morning or the evening before. Bread, in the form of small rectangles of inedible off-white something, was always carefully poured out into the smaller plates as we filled the larger cup holders with small glasses of grape juice right out to the edges.

Sharon Watkins, our current Disciples' General Minister and President, and former neighbor minister down the road at Boone Grove, likes to tell a story about something she learned from a neuroscientist. "Where is the edge of your brain?" she asks. It turns out that it isn't a horizon in your skull, but your brain extends through your nervous system, and in fact the edges of it extend to your outstretched fingertips.

"Where is the edge of the church?" Dr. Watkins continues. For First Christian Valpo, it turns out that our fingertips, our extensions of contact and touch and feeling reach as far as Australia & New Zealand; to Bethany, West Virginia by way of Wooster, Ohio; and an odd assortment of other places we've gotten our fingers into. Our Timothys and Eunices are in congregations around the United States, and our influence extends even into other denominations . . . but if you grew up at First Christian, you still look to the Table for your focus, for your center, for a place where you can count on being welcome.

And we carry forth our welcome, our invitation to God's table, into homeless shelters and jail ministries, through regional & general assemblies to our fellow Disciples, as part of food pantries and Mother's Days Out; at World Jamborees of the Scouting Movement, with retirees to the Rio Grande Valley and the Smoky Mountains, among Civil War re-enactors and pilots and police officers and nurses and college professors and steelworkers.

As one of First Christian's Timothys, I have an ordination certificate on my office wall with signatures on it like Irene Roeder, C.D. Clover, William Eckert, and Ronald Gill. My service of ordination was almost but not quite at 7 Chicago Street, since by August of 1989 the building had been condemned, but not yet brought down . . . so our worship was in a large tent in the west yard across the alley. We had more Scout uniforms than robes, and folding chairs instead of pews, and canvas in place of stained glass, but it was still First Christian Valpo in worship: because the Good News was proclaimed, and the Table was shared. Everyone was invited, and we ate and drank and gave thanks. Then, we left.

To share the bread, we have to break the loaf, and distribute the pieces. You can't have your cake and eat it, too; you also can't just set a lovely loaf up on a shelf and expect it to just sit there. It's meant to be broken, and eaten. And then it finds new life in we who partake. When we worship, it continues in a new way after the benediction, as the body that has been gathered, and formed, is dispersed. Are we still a church then? Yes. Just as a loaf of bread has meaning even after – maybe especially after – every scrap of it has been eagerly eaten by hungry people.

Then, that loaf of bread is at work in and through those who ate it, who are thereby empowered to go out and do what needs to be done. Maybe even doing some good more abundantly. That's what our history at First Christian Valpo is about: we know where bread, the Bread of Life, can be found, and we want to share it, and we want to make use of what that Bread does in us, "for good to be done more abundantly."

In grace and peace,
Rev. Jeff Gill
Granville, OH

Newark Central 6-27-12

Newark Central – Notes From My Knapsack 6-27-12

Travel and vacation time is all around us, and we see seats around us on Sunday fill and empty from week to week, with it hard to tell sometimes who's home and who's away.

 

It's an interesting pastoral challenge, because the elders don't want to assume someone's on vacation when they may be ill, and we can't imagine that every summertime absence is due to health or other problems because usually they aren't: so we have to keep our ears so close to the ground grass grows out the other side!

 

And then some of us are gone; your friendly neighborhood preaching & teaching elder (that's me) is off to Zion National Park for some canyon rambles and scrambles with my wife and son, and other elders have already been to Florida and even further abroad. Add in some family weddings and reunions and such, and you really do need a program for the Sunday service, even if we don't have big numbers on our backs . . . speaking of a summer trip we need to take to go see the Clippers . . .

 

Next week begins our alternating week schedule for the newsletter. Since Wednesday is July the Fourth, that's an obvious week to leave "blank." The following week, our office "elder," Lisa, needs to be with family and a sister-in-law who just had brain surgery, so we will be working ahead, she and I, to have the newsletter ready, but the office staffing will be a friendly assortment of fellow parishioners from July 9^th to the 13^th, with hours trimmed to 8:00 am to Noon.

 

And as you can tell from the rolling "Month of Sundays" preview article in our newsletter, we will have old friends Bob Boyte on July 8^th preaching, and Ken Coy July 15^th, with Mark Katrick at St. John's UCC here in town available for pastoral emergencies. God and the airlines willing, I'll be back July 16^th as will Lisa!

 

Then we have the summer special treat of an outdoor service at the Cedar St. Lodge for the 10:30 worship on July 22^nd, with our Vacation Bible School picking up that evening and rolling through Thursday night (see elsewhere in this newsletter).

 

So keep in touch, and come back with stories of how you saw Jesus out on the road, because he likes to show up out there in unexpected encounters!

 

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

 

 

p.s. – Route 66, our Wednesday Bible study at 6:00 pm, is on break for the month of July; we're on the road again in August!

 

Newark Central 6-20-12

Newark Central – Notes From My Knapsack 6-20-12

 

Wednesday nights we're having a great trip at 6:00 pm down "Route 66," a long summer ramble through the Bible without a particular plan or itinerary, just the road before us, and plenty of places and markers to stop and see along the red line across the map.

 

We've begun at Acts, chapter one, and we're not making time because Route 66 is no interstate freeway express: three weeks in and we haven't finished the third verse. Truth be told, we'll probably take a July vacation from this journey, what with the Fourth of July coming on a Wednesday, and conflicts two of the next three. But August, we'll put down the top and cruise back out onto the road, and maybe even make it into chapter two!

 

There've been a few small changes this summer, like moving the study from 6:30 to 6:00 pm, or switching the hymn and prayer at the opening of the Sunday service. A few people have asked, and not in a negative way "do you have other changes in mind for the Sunday morning service?"

 

Actually, for an answer, I want to reach back, waaay back. Back to about 160 AD, and the earliest description of Christian worship we have for the early church. Justin Martyr's writings were also referred to by Alexander Campbell in the founding years of our fellowship, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), when people asked him how worship services should go.

 

"And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen; and there is a distribution to each, and a participation of that over which thanks have been given, and to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons. And they who are well to do, and willing, give what each thinks fit; and what is collected is deposited with the president, who succors the orphans and widows and those who, through sickness or any other cause, are in want, and those who are in bonds and the strangers sojourning among us, and in a word takes care of all who are in need. But Sunday is the day on which we all hold our common assembly, because it is the first day on which God, having wrought a change in the darkness and matter, made the world; and Jesus Christ our Savior on the same day rose from the dead."

 

Sounds to me that we're on the right track!

 

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

Faith Works 6-16

Faith Works 6-16-12

Jeff Gill

 

Walking, standing, sitting, kneeling…

___

 

 

How do you pray?

 

Some prefer to sit and close their eyes; others are more likely to spend their prayer time looking straight ahead since their devotional period is most often while they're commuting to work behind the wheel of their car.

 

And for the record, I think that counts. If Francis of Assisi could pray while riding a mule, then why not while driving a pickup truck? The potential distractions are not dissimilar.

 

In his book "Long Wandering Prayer," David Hansen reminds us of J.R.R. Tolkien's words: "Not all who wander are lost." His book has been a guide for me in a form of prayer not often remembered in the western Christian tradition, of prayer walking.

 

These last few years my spirituality has been enriched by time spent with Native American spiritual traditions, including those of community gatherings known as "powwows." At a powwow, there's a circuit that is "danced," or rhythmically walked, if you like, while the drum's beat and the singers' songs carry you around. It can be a powerful time of reflection, and renewal, and restoration.

 

The Fort Ancient Celebration last weekend, down near Cincinnati, has used the slogan "We dance our prayers." In contact with many Native people of a variety of tribes, whether out of a traditional spiritual practice, a Christian belief system, or a mix of the two, I can say that the idea of "we dance our prayers" is a reality.

 

Two weeks ago, as a "Sacred Walk 5K" on Sunday morning with a local powwow at the Great Circle, we set out from the opening of that portion of the Newark Earthworks, if located itself in Heath, and crossed back into Newark itself and visited a number of portions of our 2,000 year old earthwork complex while promoting both physical health, and spiritual wholeness.

 

This afternoon, at 1:00 pm today, we will walk that same route, some 3.2 miles, or 5 kilometers, starting at the Great Circle Museum off of the Rt. 79 parking lot. We will see places that even many life-long residents of the area aren't aware are still visible, of this once four-and-a-half square mile complex of geometric earthworks. Our walk is largely on sidewalks and along modern city streets, but is designed to try to help us envision two millennia old alignments and passageways.

 

There's so much we don't know for sure about the original plans and purposes of the Newark Earthworks, but one thing is clear to a casual viewer of maps depicting this landscape. People who built this, walked this. There are lanes and defined passages for walking from one element to another, a mile at a time.

 

Hansen's book on "Long Wandering Prayer" is much more explicitly Christian, but it gets at an element of how we are made as creatures in this world. We are designed, in so many ways, to move; we are oriented to motion and understandings that blossom out of transition and travel. Prayer may be effective seated, or even standing but still; none of which overwhelms the idea that prayer, a communion with the Creator of the world that unrolls before us in the powwow arena's circle, or down the streetscape of modern day Newark, is a rhythmic pattern of life that starts to help our hearts to beat in tune with the drummer behind the Great Dance itself.

 

Please consider joining us then, this afternoon, whatever your spiritual disciplines or practice, if you would like to work with prayer in motion, if you would like to learn more about walking, and meditation.

 

If you just would like to learn a little more than you do right now about the Newark Earthworks, you're invited as well . . . but who knows what some thankful walking might do within you?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; tell him your story of prayer in a different sort of format at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Newark Central Knapsack 6-13

Newark Central -- Notes From My Knapsack

June 13, 2012

 

With the approach of Father's Day, I think about a book that's now over 25 years old, but has a message that's as relevant now as it was then, if not more so.

 

It's called "The Blessing" by John Trent & Gary Smalley, and it talks about something that we see young men looking for in so many wrong and tragic ways, then and now. It's summed up neatly in the title itself: "The Blessing." A blessing, from father to son.

 

The book looks at Biblical models for the imparting of a blessing from a father, or father figure, to a child, but particularly to a son. There's an element of touch, whether hands on a head or just a gentle grasp of a shoulder. There are words spoken that are clear and unambiguous, and there is a reminder of a tradition, of hopes, and of the assurance that one way or another, the one being blessed will always have you in their corner.

 

It's a rough summary, but it gets the point across. Young men over the last few decades have been left unsure and uncertain about what it means to be a man, about how they can become better men. And they need to hear this guidance, even if in brief, and awkwardly put, from an elder they respect and value. Ideally, this is their own biological father, but if such a blessing comes from another person they respect and value, whether an uncle, a friend of the family, even an older female, it can have much the same effect.

 

As it is, many young men have distant, cloudy relationships with the mentors and father figures in their lives, and they've never had a moment when they clearly were given a . . . blessing, a passing of the torch, an affirmation from one who has walked this lonesome valley that the youthful one will find their path, and walk it to a brighter day.

 

We see this process go astray with Isaac and his sons, but we understand how important a blessing can be, for both Esau and Jacob; Elijah blesses his student Elisha; Elizabeth blesses Mary. Blessings between generations are all through scripture.

 

How might we, in the life of the church, help to reawaken the practice of "blessing," from fathers to sons, and beyond, so that no one reaches adulthood without knowing their journey to maturity as being blessed?

 

In grace & peace, Pastor Jeff

Knapsack 6-9

Notes From my Knapsack 6-9-12

Jeff Gill

 

Mr. Electrico may have been right

___

 

In 1932, somewhere along the streets of Waukegan, Illinois, a carnival performer who used the still unusual technology of "electricity" to make children's hair stand on end, touched his sword with a light charge on it to a young man's nose, making his hair literally stand on end.

 

And he said to him, "Live forever."

 

That almost-twelve-years-old boy died on Tuesday. Perhaps the amazing Mr. Electrico was wrong in 1932, but from the perspective of 2012, he may have been on to something.

 

Ray Bradbury, who died this past week at the age of 91, was the kind of man who could say with a straight face "Space travel will increase our belief in God." If you've read "The Martian Chronicles" you have some sense of just how serious he was in saying that.

 

On the other hand, this is also the writer who said "I don't believe in being serious about anything. I think life is too serious to be taken seriously."

 

Some might argue that he did not take God seriously, and Ray would probably agree, even as he ended each conversation with "God bless!" He believed that the only reason we thought that science and religion were at odds was because we hadn't gone deeply enough into science, and that the journey would take us closer to a Creator, whose mysterious ways would prove to have a sense that would surprise us all.

 

I preached a sermon once titled "Dandelion Wine," and while I didn't explain much about Bradbury in the message, those who already knew his work came up to me, and smiled. We knew. The mix of fond memory and optimism about the future is something that sticks with you.

 

If you've ridden "Spaceship: Earth" at Disney World's Epcot (inside the giant silver geosphere) you've heard one of Bradbury's works – the script narrating your journey through human creativity and imagination, carried along by a sense of wonder.

 

In recent years, when Bradbury would talk about his work, he would say he was not really a science fiction author, or even a fantasy writer, but suggested his career could be summed up by saying he was "at play in the fields of the Lord."

 

Just the day before he died, The New Yorker published a story by Bradbury, remembering events of the summer of 1932. It was a reminiscence of the personal history that lay behind his earlier short story, "The Fire Balloons."

 

"I'd helped my grandpa carry the box in which lay, like a gossamer spirit, the paper-tissue ghost of a fire balloon waiting to be breathed into, filled, and set adrift toward the midnight sky. My grandfather was the high priest and I his altar boy. I helped take the red-white-and-blue tissue out of the box and watched as Grandpa lit a little cup of dry straw that hung beneath it. Once the fire got going, the balloon whispered itself fat with the hot air rising inside."

 

Most of us can't write like that in our prime, let alone at 91. Then his next paragraph tells us:

 

"But I could not let it go."

 

Of course he does, because that's what fire balloons are meant to do. You cannot hold onto them. They fly into the night, as they should. And yet he did not let it go, because it's now as real to me in 2012 as it was to that eleven year old boy.

 

He could never let Jesus go, either, and places him in a number of his stories as vividly as anything I've ever read this side of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. Sometimes people can see him, and other times they miss who he is. That's real, too. Bradbury was a Hollywood script doctor at times, as helped create the best part of the movie "King of Kings," its ending, whose creation is imaginatively described in "A Graveyard for Lunatics." (You'll just have to read it, long story.)

 

Someone, I can't remember who or where, said "Ray Bradbury didn't predict the future; he tried to prevent it." So many odd little pieces of tech and social trends are, in fact, outlined far in advance of their appearance in his imaginative fiction, but that wasn't what he was writing for. It may be hard for many to remember how essentially pessimistic the 1950s & 60s were in spirit, although "Mad Men" is trying to help.

 

In that era, Ray Bradbury looked to the future, and smiled. I cannot let that smile go.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; tell him your story of hope in the future at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Knapsack 6-14

Notes From My Knapsack 6-14-12

Jeff Gill

 

Politics and the economy in Ohio

___

 

If you're hoping for or wanting a partisan angle on the fall elections, already spattered all over our media windshield, just turn on your wiper blades and drive on to another column or page. No endorsements here.

 

Nor is there condemnation, at least of the sort beloved by campaign die-hards. I think the last fifty years of political debate and economic maneuvering has been made up of largely decent intentions and well-intended actions, excepting the fellow who "invested" state money in rare coins. And as for gambling, state or otherwise, that's a different topic.

 

What can't be disputed is that something hasn't worked in Ohio. In the 1950s, we were Detroit's parts supplier par excellence, a steelmaker in our own right, and Etch-a-Sketch wasn't a punch line, but a product made right here in the state.

 

We had manufacturing, and a range of jobs from newbie puddlers in mills along the Ohio River, and middle management with dreams of Parma working in the Terminal Tower. Pigs, if not turkeys, flew in the Queen City, at least out of packing plants, and Dayton was entering the second half of a century where the Great Miami River carved a sort of Silicon Valley, of innovation and entrepreneurial leadership where technology was a Buckeye hallmark.

 

Another half-century, and Dayton is a hollowed out shell; auto manufacturing and parts assembly is a niche for various locations around the state, and we make baskets, at least when the economy is good.

 

One way of responding to that facile summary is to point out how much it misses. Kaiser is still pouring red hot material into giant hammering devices to create a saleable something out of molten nothing, just down the road; Owens is still spinning a pink web; razor wire and bulletproof helmets and the very essence of assembly lines are made down near I-70.

 

And baskets ain't nothin'.

 

Yet all the talk of smaller, nimbler, and right-sizing can't quite obscure the general fact, particularly addressed by both parties in this electoral contest, that Ohio has large amounts of empty brick buildings and open concrete pads where only memories are the output. We know, right down to our working class bones, that we missed a turn somewhere back up the road. Yes, Tom Friedman, our youth need to get more education than Uncle Clem did, who dropped out in 9^th grade and still retired a senior VP, worked up to middle management with a cabin on a lake and a paid for home. Maybe that was a bubble of sorts, and once popped, can't grow the same way twice.

 

The most obvious answer is that as the world changed, and the global economy shifted markets, there was a massive failure of managerial foresight. Was it really unforeseeable that labor costs and raw material development would make a compelling case for moving durable goods overseas? Could no one see, even by the 70s or 80s, that technology was about to transform decision-making?

 

Some did, but corporately, they generally didn't. Why weren't the few visionaries listened to? For one thing, we tend to hold onto the ideas of the visionaries who were proved right, and forget that, say in 1972, there were all sorts of crazy ideas out there about jet packs and food in a tube. To figure out which visionary is leading with a vision: aye, there's the rub.

 

What seems so dreadfully unproductive, though, is the dichotomy we're stuck in. The right says that it was largely union intransigence that kept companies from being nimble and adaptive, so unions are largely to blame; the left blames greed at the top for draining profit without any interest in the future other than their own in a gated retirement community on a beach somewhere, so the rich and the owners are to blame.

 

Obviously, I think those narratives are both over-tidy fictions, designed to lull the faithful to a boisterous sleep in their mass gatherings. But it doesn't explain . . . well, the real problem is that these fairy tales don't explain what stopped working for Ohio, and they explain even less what IS working.

 

Because we do have advanced materials production in Licking County, and our state does have Battelle and NASA and Boeing, and universities aplenty. I'm still interested in figuring out what we *could* have done differently, and I also think we can find a path forward that everyone can travel with security & confidence.

 

We may have to share lakeside cabins, though.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor; tell him your story of Ohio's lost, and impending glories at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-2

Faith Works 6-2-12

Jeff Gill

 

A feud with heaven

___

 

This past week "The History Channel" ran a mini-series with the fairly self-explanatory title "Hatfields & McCoys."

 

Kevin Costner starred as "Devil Anse" Hatfield, along with other Hollywood stars like Bill Paxton, Powers Boothe, and Tom Berenger (in an incredibly unpleasant character which he renders so well I'd feel nervous today if that actor walked in the room).  Costner was a major player in getting this story to the screen, and his band "Modern West" put together a concept album around the events, which actually preceded the making of the movie, and whose title may even be better than the one for the production in summing up the grim narrative: "Famous For Killing Each Other."

 

That is what the Hatfield & McCoy families are best known for in general: killing each other. The movie makes it clear that retribution and suspicion and recrimination and revenge are what kept the feud going from the end of the Civil War to 1891 . . . but many locals along the Tug Fork, separating Kentucky & West Virginia, say the tensions and hostility continued until the present day.

 

And with the great migrations from Appalachia up into the industrial Midwest after World War II, there are Hatfield and McCoy descendants in central Ohio, in Licking County today. I know a few of each sort; none with the memorable family name, but with genealogy that ties them closely to the valley of the Big Sandy River.

 

Their stories, when you hear them, are less of gunslinging heroics from the menfolk as they are the grinding realities of everyday life in that time and place from the womenfolk. In portrayals by Mare Winningham, Sarah Parish, and Lindsay Pulsipher you see the cost of this sort of grudge-holding, of an honor culture where guns represent a higher law than any court can offer.

 

When we hear about the culture of different lands where other faith systems are dominant, it's easy to get judgmental with an overlay of "well, that's how less developed cultures get by." One of the benefits of a historical movie like this one is that it forces us to remember that less than 200 miles and 120 years from right here, people pretty much like us lived lives not much different from what we hear about in Fallujah or Kandahar.

 

In fact, many mornings I watch the sun rise over a beautiful pair of hills to my east. It's a lovely scene, but darkly tinged with my knowledge of a story from the pages of the Advocate about the same time as the Hatfield & McCoy feud.

 

On the southern slopes of that hill here in Licking County, back around the 1880's, there had been a string of chicken coops broken into after dark. One property owner, guessing his hens were the next target, sat up inside the coop with a shotgun. Sometime that night, the hen house door opened; somehow, when all was said and done, two dead men lay in the farmyard. At dawn, as the neighbors gathered, all agreed that the corpses were not local residents. The two deaths, and their lack of identification, were reported in a chillingly casual tone, akin to the next note about the county fair.

 

Violence is not far away from the human heart. Not in distance, not in time. Our decision to value human life, when it isn't a life that's blood relation, is contingent . . . constrained by factors from self-interest to passion to simple greed.

 

I wonder about those two dead, anonymous chicken thieves. They died un-mourned, and some even today would say that's only just. But where were they buried? On the slopes of the hill I contemplate with my morning prayers and sunrise coffee? Tossed into Raccoon Creek for nature to take its course? Or buried in unmarked graves on the margins of a cemetery nearby?

 

Here and on the Tug Fork, "say your prayers" would have been words that in the 1880s did not bring hope. And many prayers, heartfelt and sincere, such as those of Randall McCoy in the film, go unanswered, then and now.

 

We still wrestle with that feud of the divided heart, those conflicts between earth and heaven , deep within; our outward vendettas may be less vicious and deadly, but they still have ultimate implications. And like Uncle Dyke Garrett at the movie's end, the community of faith has certain tools for making transformation possible, and visible.

 

From the blood of the Lamb to the waters of Island Creek. May it ever be so.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in central Ohio; tell him your story of feuds and forgiveness at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-26

Faith Works 5-26-12

Jeff Gill

 

Late night at the grocery store

___

 

With the last of five well-attended community meetings about hunger in Licking County, there are some new possibilities which you'll hear about over these next few months.

 

The Mid-Ohio Food Bank team, Matt Habash's excellent staff, field-tested a process here because, well, because we have Chuck Moore and most other counties don't. I know Chuck will read this and cringe, but tough! The Food Pantry Network of Licking County is indeed a team effort, and the dozens of church groups and a few other groups who staff and support the direct service around the county to families in need are the real heroes, as I know Chuck would say, but his spirit and energy shine out beyond even our geographically large county's boundaries.

 

I'm not on their board, but I work with many of their board members, and they would be first to say our spirit of co-operation and collaboration and willingness to just dive in and do what needs to be done is spearheaded by Chuck's sacrificial spirit. He's out there, and anyone working alongside knows they'd better keep up if they don't want to lose sight of the front lines of the effort to eliminate hunger in Licking County.

 

So now other counties in Ohio will get to test their collaborative vision against  a model of discussion and visioning and action plans. I'm not here to lay out the full sense of the planning outlines we've begun (the FPN board will be on that shortly), but I do want to report in this space a few things.

 

First, the Christian congregations of our area are both working hard, and are very interested in learning from each other how to work smarter. None of us thinks we have this whole "following Jesus" deal figured out perfectly, and if we hear about approaches that are both more faithful, and more effective, we're open to that.

 

"Choice pantries" are one part of this process; as I've mentioned here before, most of us hadn't considered the assumptions about the working poor and hungry people that were implicit in standard-model pantry approaches. Here's your bag, take what we give you: that model is quietly but clearly sending messages of "you should feel lucky you're getting this, so deal with it," along with our own assumptions that there's a certain grabbiness to poverty that means we don't dare open the shelves to clients.

 

In fact, while there's always someone who pushes the rules (ain't there always, in anything?), that's not what choice pantry folks see. There's actually more communication, more understanding, and even more appreciation, in both directions.

 

And we're thinking about our hours. Can we push ourselves to look at being open when people can get there? The reality is that most clients of food pantries are working, often two jobs, so respecting their time looks different when we remember that. No one meant to say that food pantry clients are just sitting home all day, but only being open 10 am to Noon on weekdays does imply that's what we assume.

 

The second general learning the hunger forums kept coming back to is the need to increase community awareness about what being working poor looks like, and why the problem of hunger is so quietly persistent, even in an era of EBT cards for Food Stamps (the stamps are gone). That's why realizing our guests, our visitors are almost without exception *working* people is so important.

 

I went out shortly before midnight as May 1 started to turn, just to see something for myself. It's often noted that if folks have used up their EBT cards earlier in the month, then a) food pantries tend to be busier at the end of the month, and b) folks will go to 24 hour groceries as the new date dawns, and "the card" is electronically recharged. In fact, I dashed around to four between 11:45 pm and 12:30 am, and met a number of people doing just that.

 

One was a mom, with two adolescents in tow; I introduced myself and explained my interest, and she introduced me to her two very polite, if baffled children. She explained they'd "almost made it through the month!" but needed lunch food for packing school lunches. And that's exactly what was in her cart as she hovered by check-out, waiting for midnight, and to get her kids home for sleep and school the next day.

 

"It's tough out there for lots of people, but we're making it. It's going to get better. This helps us get there." Then she checked her lunch supplies through the register. It was 12:05 am.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor; he will worship with the "Sacred Walk 5K" starting tomorrow at 9:00 am from the Powwow grounds at the Great Circle Earthworks. Share your tales of hunger and being fed with him at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 5-24/31

Notes From My Knapsack 5-24/31-12

Jeff Gill

 

Angles of perspective

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Now that the canopy has filled in across the forest, with only the sycamores waiting for the end of June to fully leaf out, there's a green canvas over most of our local hills and valleys.

 

Add in that the season, not quite summer by the calendar but as official as needs be when school lets out, now gives us cumulus clouds more than stratus layers, and you see something unique to this time of year.

 

When the sunlight is general, punctuated by puffs and clumps of cloud, instead of winter's slate roof dimming the whole of creation, you see in May and June and July the play of rushing shadow running down the slopes and filling up the hollows.

 

In truth, it's the dark edge that's moving, but depending on your vantage point, it usually appears that the brightness is what's rippling over the green shimmer, on the move to illumine and examine and, if you're lucky, to rush towards you and splash your spot with warmth and brightness.

 

Walking down the new, ADA-compliant path at the Great Circle to the parking area (the old path had too steep a grade for wheeled chairs, and now a simple re-drawn arc shifts the slope to where it's navigable; hat tip, OHS and the Convention & Visitor's Bureau!), I saw as I walked through a cluster of tulip poplars that their blossoms had burst their cases, with tan outer layers scattered on the pavement.

 

A hundred feet above, the broad yellow and orange and pink blossoms face up, away from ground-level concerns, the pinnacle of these "redwoods of Ohio," with their own seasonal ecosystems of insects and butterflies and birds enjoying and using them to the full, while invisible to we earthbound creatures below.

 

Over the next few weeks, having done their work in the lifecycle of these multi-century behemoths, they will slowly shed their petals and create a carpet of pastels that appears as if by magic. Occasionally, a scampering squirrel will knock loose a full blossom, and give us down below a faint hint of what it must look like in the penthouse of the forest's towering apartment blocks.

 

Here atop the soil, we've seen a similar piece of natural alchemy at work, with the explosion of hairy bittercress across our lawns in early spring. It's mostly run its course, and has faded to a last few sprouts in the dimmer corners of our lawns.

 

The warm winter and damp conditions were a springboard for this species; that much we all get, but the amazement is from wondering "where has it been all these years?" Some botanists have suggested that it is always around in empty lots and un-treated corners of the landscape, and that the 2012 explosion is because of a multi-year arc of warmth and soil temperature, edging the seeds into a profusion only noticeable at the peak. Others have suspected that the hairy bittercress has lain largely dormant, part of the rich brew that is topsoil, erupting all at once when the time is right.

 

Nature is more than just clouds, trees, and grass. When you start to look more closely, the fractal detail gives you more wonders the deeper into the picture you go. Pixels, it ain't!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor; tell him your story of nature's beauty at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-19

Faith Works 5-19-12

Jeff Gill

 

A pastoral prayer for us all

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Dear Lord:

 

We gather here today in thankfulness for another Saturday, another newspaper, another summer afternoon ahead. You are our creator and our life-giver, and while we may think you are overdoing it in that department in regards to the grass, even as we mow we reflect on the sweat of our brow, and the story of how you have been at work to save and redeem us through the years.

 

Lord God, in this time we set aside to reflect on your will and your Word, or for some of us just to open up the Advocate and flip past the "Your Faith" page in Section C, we are blessed to know that our prayers, individually, are welcome to you. We also know, loving Lord, that like Jesus asleep in the boat during a storm, we can find ourselves thinking you are not listening, that you don't care. Grant us the calm of spirit and ease of heart that gets us through the storm, and even gives us the boldness to step out of the boat when you call.

 

We also pray together, Eternal One. There are words from our fathers and mothers in the faith which we use, some of us from missals and prayer books, and even with the words of hymns. Some of us worship where much of the service takes that form, and we honor the respect of our forebearers such prayers and praise show.

 

Others of us are more familiar with a style where the prayers are new each week, whether we call it impromptu or extemporaneous or "filled with the Spirit." Lord, I've been asked if I could explain what a "pastoral prayer" was to those who are of a more liturgical and formal experience, and to those who are unchurched. I pray that this approach in print, but very like how I pray as a pastor in such a moment (even supply preachers get asked to do pastoral prayers ofttimes), is both respectful to You, and is understandable to those who were wondering.

 

And Gracious God, you already know the names of those who are ill, whose health is failing, people who are simply waiting for test results, or our friends and family and fellow worshipers who are painfully working through rehab and recovery. But it is our practice to lift up names, sometimes just first names, sometimes a situation without even a name to it, but "lifted up" in the pastoral prayer as a way to remind us all to be persistent in prayer on their behalf.

 

God of forgiveness and grace, we ask that you keep us from using those prayer concerns as an occasion for gossip or speculation, as well; our sinful nature can lead us down that path from time to time.

 

Yet we would be specific in our prayers, and that's the great impact of this part of our services, because we have been told by your Son that we should be bold, and be persistent, and ask that you may answer…even when the response may be "No," or even worse (to us) "Not now."

 

And Lord of life and light, it is part of the power of this moment, these petitions, as we lay them before your throne in heaven, which becomes more real, almost visible to the eyes of faith as we (mostly) bow our heads and close our eyes; the cosmic nature of what we are called by You to share in means that there is a sense and a sensibility to praying for others far away, even unknown to us. We lift up missionaries at a city dump in Honduras, soldiers on patrol where this Sunday is already dark and done in Afghanistan, and friends who travel towards the setting sun on a long-awaited, deeply-anticipated trip.

 

All of this we ask in the name of your Son, whom we call by many names, who is our Lord and Savior, and whose prayer is often prayed together to close this time. But since this pastoral prayer is in the paper and online, I'll leave those reading to conclude as they will, while I ask your special blessing on all those readers who are shaking their heads and thinking "these are empty words, prayed into nothing, to no one." May they know both our love and yours, and presence made real in prayer.

 

And all God's people said: Amen!

 

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