Faith Works 12-17-16

Faith Works 12-17-16

Jeff Gill

 

Halls cold as stone, warmed by starlight

___

 

Clutching his robe a little closer around him, he walked slowly up the stone steps, round and round into the upper part of the tower.

 

The echoing halls were quiet; here in the imperial capital, winter meant damp and chill. Most of the court, and many of the wise men of the academy had traveled south to the warmer coastal parts of Persia.

 

Of the twenty senior magi, he was the only one in residence. By far the oldest, he had not gone with the three sent on their behalf to the east, and ironically the cold meant he felt too crippled up even to ride their calmest camels down to the ocean shores.

 

But the round of observations and recorded notes had to be maintained, and he was glad to have the work. The longest nights of the year were about to pass, and tomorrow the sun's rising should show a notch in the horizon guide back to the north. The days would be lengthening, and the promise of warmth to return. There were festivals on the official calendar to be announced, predictions of eclipses and seasons ahead.

 

Yet he could not help but also keep his separate log of the conjunction to the west, as the two great wandering stars, the golden and silver ones, wove their paths into a coming together, a drawing apart, and the a return. These regal lights were inscribing onto the heavens a pattern in which he was convinced he saw a rhythm, a series of movements which logically would bring them around from the west to the east, and a conjunction with the morning star, perhaps the more portent-filled heavenly body in the sky.

 

It was in search of further wisdom, prophetic knowledge, and better observations over time that had taken his students away to the east, across the great desert beyond the Euphrates. Caspar and Melchior and Balthazar were young enough to travel, but old enough to have the wisdom it would take to navigate the negotiations with foreign kings and distant academicians. Past experience, going back generations and recorded in the archives of the academy along with the star charts from ages past, told of how rulers and potentates of many strange lands were willing to use the wisdom of the stars for private gain and personal advancement. The academy in the capital was present, in no small part, to remind the emperor that their role was distinct from his own, to preserve knowledge beyond the needs of the moment. These stone halls were built to echo the grandeur of the palace, but for wisdom's defense, not to protect royal prerogatives.

 

Would he live long enough to see his three colleagues return, with new knowledge and deeper insights? He doubted it. They had been gone a year and more, barely enough time to get to the shores of the fabled Inner Sea to the west of the great desert.

 

He hoped they would find there the news they sought; a ruler of the spirit more than of the body. The movements in the sky echoed patterns deep in the archives, recorded as forecasts, predictions of a greater ruler to come, from the heavens to earth, of all the nations and not just of one people.

 

Would he like that prophecy to be proven true? Yes indeed. What hope could be sweeter? He was weary of requests to predict profit and gain and achievement of personal goals; he prayed to the Lord of heaven that there might be a greater vision than just selfish desires.

 

That is what the stars are for, he thought. Their purity and constancy, moving in their stately paths even when the clouds obscured human vision, spoke to him of something greater, something more meaningful, something . . . Someone? with a heart for bringing people together more than a plan to dominate and conquer. Someone who ruled even the stars, but spoke to magi and monarchs and even humble shepherds in their field.

 

At the top of the spiral stairs, the broad viewing platform opened to the skies. The stars were silent to most observers, but to this wise man, they told a story. A story whose beginning he did not know, and whose end was beyond this life . . . but he could hope it included him. So he would continue to wait, and watch, and listen to what the stars had to say.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him where you hear echoes of the Christmas story at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 12-15-16

Notes From My Knapsack 12-15-16

Jeff Gill

 

What is it about music & Christmas?

___

 

There's just something about the Christmas season and music that doesn't work quite the same way any other time of year.

 

This December, once again from the night of the Candlelight Walking Tour through this past weekend, I've had to choose from an embarrassment of riches in our blessed village and vicinity.

 

Evening after evening, there have been multiple opportunities to hear instrumental and vocal music aplenty, too much for any one person to attend. Our middle and high school band and choir students, the college ensembles and soloists, the local symphonies and bands . . . and then on Sunday mornings, so many opportunities in area churches to hear, to experience, to sing along with choirs and quartets and musical groups of all sorts.

 

The Christmas season is summed up in music as other holidays are not. New Year's has "Auld Lang Syne," Valentine's Day has love songs but not the same close correspondence between the event and the activities, and Easter may be the more intended season for Handel's "Messiah," but there's a reason why Yuletide has swiped it clean away.

 

My wife likes to put Christmas music on around the house during these weeks, and some radio and satellite stations go to entirely seasonal music – that doesn't happen at Halloween or Fourth of July. I don't recall any format shifting to all John Philip Sousa during the last week of June and on into Independence Day.

 

We want choruses and harmony and pure, sweet expressions of the season in song because it speaks to longings we have every year at this time. Music is language that communicates without words, and helps the words that are sometimes set to it come across more clearly. Music speaks the way we wish we communicated all the time, with melody and harmony bringing speakers and listeners together into one voice.

 

Or maybe it just makes us feel better.

 

Just as much of the "traditional" seasonal décor reflects a hunger for the old-fashioned and quaint, with sleighs and bells and hearthside wrought iron, so does our taste in music. We seek out and enjoy genres and styles that we'd probably avoid the rest of the year; how often in summer do we think "I'd like to hear a madrigal"?

 

Music can, and probably should from time to time, jar us and disrupt our assumptions. A tune and words set to it are a good way to get inside our heads whether in a comforting or confuting fashion. Protest and resistance have their place. But at Christmastime, we're looking for a bit of reassurance, some connections to our past, and reaffirmation of our ties to one another. And nothing does that quite so well as music.

 

That's why it always cheers me to recall (usually with a little help from the Granville Historical Society) that the settlers who journeyed here in the fall of 1805 carried in their wagons over the Alleghenies not just seed and grain and anvils and bolts of cloth, but books for a library, a sermon for a church, and a set of musical instruments for a village band. The surviving bassoon from that original ensemble may not be the musical instrument that kids dream of playing in a rock and roll band, or that's played much in today's downloads, but it's one of the sorts of instruments that fits the Christmas season perfectly.

 

May your Christmas be filled with music, heard, played, performed, and enjoyed, from your ears to your heart, joining our hearts together in a harmony that lasts beyond the season itself.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he played the 8-track in high school. Tell him how music makes your season sing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 12-10-16

Faith Works 12-10-16

Jeff Gill

 

Are we the sum of our choices?

___

 

According to the State of Ohio, the results are in from the November elections.

 

Yes, I know, there's a number of implications of the last national trip to the polls, but I'm interested here for a moment in a different element of our voting last time around.

 

We are told that of all the ballots cast, a third of them were early votes.

 

By mail and absentee, at the Board of Elections offices around the state, or at special "early voting centers" in some locations, a third of the votes that decided the presidential race, and also county commissioner and school levy and other local decisions of immediate import were all cast before the dawn of November 8.

 

All indications are that these numbers will continue to increase; in fact, some argue that we should be putting more time and civic resources into making voting easier, and earlier. There are a number of points to be made for and against that, but for now, let me just rest on the current state of affairs: one in three voters who did take the time and effort to be participants in the national, state, and local election of this fall did so on their own terms, at a time of their choosing.

 

The nature of an election is such that there has to be some kind of framework around it, for when the races are set, at which point voting can begin, and when it ends. Election Day is no longer a beginning, but an ending; it's not a national ritual of participation en masse, but the conclusion of a lengthy partisan conflict.

 

I do wonder about what happens when people are starting to vote before the local campaigns can even get going. Presidential races can take care of themselves, and I understand (even if I don't personally agree) when people just want to get it over with. But you may have been hearing about candidates for the big races for months: have you learned anything about who is running for city council, or why the fire service is asking for funds? Surely we need a little bit of space within which to let campaigning and educating of voters take place before we go and cast ballots from some knee-jerking set of assumptions.

 

And I reflect on all this as a pastor because I see how the same forces are pushing and pulling on Christian worship, and church community. It's been well-rehearsed that neither Wednesday evenings nor Sunday mornings are set apart by the culture for the convenience of the churches. That's done, and we have to ask our own to make the choices they will, for worship and study and service.

 

What is a growing pressure on even fairly small congregations, though, is to offer additional services, more options for when to come together, when you can take time for prayer and communion in community (of a sort) through the week. The Catholic community has long made its peace with the "vigil mass" that takes the Sunday obligation and stretches it out back into Saturday afternoon, and this is effective for them.

 

My own congregation offers two times of service, but the question often comes up – and I think much about – of a third option, for those otherwise occupied on Sunday mornings. Jobs and activities which are not in and of themselves trivial are often in conflict, so why not add choices? The stores are open 24 hours, there are many other services now available online at any time, so how could the experience of worship be stretched out? Why do we have to do that on Sunday morning before noon, anyhow?

 

You can see where these trends and expectations could take us. And there is, to a significant degree, a lessening of social ties in any congregation that offers multiple services, and different ways are tried to weave them together, but for the most part, those who see each other share more with each other. Online worship is not, in fact, something I reject out of hand, but in general and over time, I wonder at what kind of Christian formation it engenders.

 

The expectations for choices and personal autonomy are high; the need for closer community is real. The balance between those two poles will not be found in an insistence on one service, I'm fairly sure, but how far can multiple alternatives go? We will all wrestle with this question in 2017, I'm sure.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about variety and options in worship services you experience at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 12-3-16

Faith Works 12-3-16

Jeff Gill

 

Advent emphases and priorities

___

 

Christian churches in many places last Sunday began a four week journey towards Christmas, called Advent.

 

Marked even in non-liturgical congregations, Advent is a way of preparing for and shaping our experience of Christ coming into the world.

 

Advent looks back, and forward: back to the birth in Bethlehem of Jesus, and ahead to his adult promise to return and finish the transformation of all creation into God's intended fulfillment.

 

So we look ahead to a historic commemoration, as we do each year on Dec. 25, done with manger scenes and living nativities outdoors and children's pageants; we also anticipate the divine "unveiling" of reality as it is meant to be . . . the book of Revelation is called "The Apocalypse of St. John" in many translations, since the original Greek is "apocalypsis" or "an unveiling," the uncovering of the true nature of things.

 

Advent is, if you look at it from the right angle, a big deal. It's not a countdown of shopping days, but a very serious season of preparation just as Lent is intended to be for Easter. Incarnation at Christmas, Resurrection at Easter – Christians are celebrating in these two feasts the core understandings we carry into the world about who God is and how God intends to relate to creation. To believe that the Creator intends to enter into what is made, and to take what we have made of it and lead us on to a more perfect resolution – it takes some prayer and reflection and preparation to really come to grips with what all that might mean, and that's why we have Advent.

 

But yes, it is a countdown. Which is how we can lose sight of Advent just as much as we lose our grip on Christmas itself for all of the wrapping and receipts and rigamarole of the big, big day.

 

Some worship leaders try to reclaim Advent with pushing back against "too much Christmas" before the big day. There's a case to be made for that. I don't see us going back to not putting up the Christmas tree until Christmas Eve, which in the early days of the tradition was the one logical approach (the lights being candles, the decorations being popcorn and cranberries, and the rest paper that was just itching to get lit up by those candles). Trees are pre-lit and artificial, decorations and lights and laser shows go up the Friday after Thanksgiving, and we're front-loading all the Christmas cheer at home and often at church.

 

One way I like to push back is to, at the very least, remind the congregation for the next two Sundays after Dec. 25 that it is now, indeed, the season of Christmastide; those "twelve days of Christmas" famed in song and story, and we can and should carry on the celebration in a new and different way until Jan. 6 (Epiphany, which is another story some other day).

 

But this year, there's a unique challenge, or at least it seems like one in some quarters. Christmas Eve, when many of us are having our biggest worship program of the year, is on a Saturday.

 

And yes, that necessarily means that Christmas Day, Dec. 25, is a Sunday.

 

I understand that for some churches, having a worship service on Christmas Day itself is just the way it always is. I tip my hat to y'all, but suffice it to say that it isn't that many of us, even in the heart of observant Christendom, think of going to church on Christmas itself. Christmas Eve has become the focal point, to the degree that I have heard a number of churches are considering not having any service at all on the next day.

 

Which is Sunday, and the day Christians gather on what the ancients called "the first day of the week" which commemorates the discovery of Christ's resurrection. In acknowledgment of the profound truth that both Christmas and Easter bear witness to, I can't imagine not having a worship service on a Sunday. So we will turn around, at our church, and come back – maybe not all, probably not even many, and God bless all who don't – and worship again after the gigundus service we held the evening before for Christmas Eve.

 

We'll just have one service, not two, and attendance may be light, but we will be there. As a witness to why Christmas and Easter and Advent and Lent are on our calendars in the first place!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your plans for a joyful Christmas at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 12-1-16

Notes From My Knapsack 12-1-16

Jeff Gill

 

Some birthdays are more special than others

___

 

If you or I were to turn 185, there would probably be a bit of a fuss made. For a person, that's old.

 

For a building or an institution, it's a significant number of years, but the number does make a difference in how much attention is given.

 

The Alexandrian Society building on Broadway, aka the Granville Historical Society museum is 200, and that's worth some celebration. We've seen a few 150^th anniversaries with the last few years' worth of Civil War commemorations, too; St. John's UCC over in Newark just concluded a year of 175^th anniversary celebrations.

 

But 185 just doesn't grab people the same way. I guess the assumption is "let's see if they make it to 200, then make a fuss."

 

December 13, 1831 is when the Granville Literary and Theological Institution held classes for the first time, Tony Lisska tells us, with John Pratt gathering a dozen or so students at 2:00 pm that day in the Baptist meetinghouse which would then have been on the northeast corner of Cherry Street and West Broadway – just west of today's home of the president of the G.L.T. & I., where Adam Weinberg is probably happy they changed the name in 1856 to Denison University.

 

(Thank you to Dr. Lisska's Spring 2007 article in "The Historical Times" of the G.H.S. for details.)

 

Granville College it was briefly, from 1845 to the donation from William S. Denison which gave rise to today's label, and Denison is very much why Granville is known as a college town.  Our village is 211 years old, and the county 209, neither of which are reminders to conjure with, but 185 . . .

 

I do hope to be around for 2031, God willing and good tailwinds, and there's a bicentennial or two in the next few years I hope to help celebrate, but it just felt right to ring a bell, even if a small one, to mark a modest beginning which continues to grow and develop in wonderful ways.

 

Denison University is not working on growing in size or student count these days, but the development and advancement of the nearly 2,200 students and some 235 faculty is a process that continues to enhance the village, this county, our region.

 

I like to imagine, from time to time as I know Tony does, those first students: yes, all male, all white, all Baptist . . . also all cold, all curious as to what this Pratt fellow would talk about. All wearing their coats and maybe a cloak or two, sitting on hard benches in a drafty space meant for an austere worship experience on Sundays, and on this Tuesday it was no less chilly and could not have been better designed to at least help the new student body to focus on the soft-spoken gentle scholar standing before them.

 

They ranged in age from their early teens into their 30s, a marked difference from today's Denison students; they also looked forward to a curriculum focused on subjects like Latin and Greek – not unknown to current scholars atop College Hill, but far from a majority experience.

 

Women would arrive across the street at a Young Ladies Institute, and ethnic diversity would arrive within a few decades, even though the numbers of students of color wouldn't begin to approximate percentages of the nation until well into the late 1900s. The campus would move that first full year south across Raccoon Creek, then back into the village atop what was then Prospect Hill in 1854.

 

Denison's history is not quite Granville's history, but it is well-nigh impossible to tell the one story without the other. John Pratt, when it was considered to move the young Baptist educational institution elsewhere in the Midwest, is said to have spoken of "the value of the college to Granville and of Granville to the college."

 

If his first lecture was as true as that statement, he was a good professor. And some true stories deserve retelling, in every decade.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about anniversaries worth celebrating at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.