Faith Works 3-11-17

Faith Works 3-11-17

Jeff Gill

 

So Much I Still Can't Anticipate

___

 

No, I haven't seen "The Shack" yet.

 

Yes, I've been told I should; no, I don't have a problem with the author's or filmmakers' view of the Trinity. I'm just not up for the window into tragedy and trauma right now. In time, I will, I'm sure. But not just now.

 

It's clear from the trailers and promos that we get a taste, insofar as Hollywood and special effects can do the Biblical interpretation, of what Heaven is like. There have been a string of movies in the last couple of years that take a shot at that one, the "beatific vision" granted only in former times to saints and mystics, now available to anyone with a debit card and a tub of popcorn.

 

I know, I should be more appreciative of any attempts to consider religious faith in the public sphere. Once we painted the heavens opening onto the ceilings of central churches and even public buildings – the US Capitol rotunda is, directly overhead, a view of George Washington being bodily assumed into the divine realm – or let natural light filter through stained glass showing the pearlescence of St. Peter's gates and the feathery beauty of angels' wings. So why not movies?

 

Hell, intriguingly, gets attention from a relatively limited number of producers and directors. Disney has not been afraid to take on the infernal, from "Mickey's Christmas Carol" and the fires from below erupting around Scrooge's potential future grave, to the live-action movie of "The Haunted Mansion" at the conclusion, or at the end of "Fantasia" when Chernabog's terrifying rise is beaten back only by a chorus softly singing "Ave Maria."

 

Everyone likes Heaven, though. Even atheists tend to speak well of it, though more as a misplaced metaphor for a better life on earth. Since the Apollo program, preachers are much less likely to refer to Heaven as simply "up" or even "out there," so much as "within." For which we have some Biblical warrant, as when Jesus speaks of the Kingdom of God being in us.

 

The problem with most casual reflections on Heaven, I believe, is that they tend to be focused on "after." As in "the afterlife." When you die.

 

That, of course, is when we're thinking most about the place. (Or "place" if you prefer.) When someone has died, someone we love, even a person we barely knew but we're in line at the funeral home waiting to hug the family and passing close to the casket, when we ourselves start reflecting on our mortality, on our own limits, on our own death waiting for us on ahead, we like to push fast-forward and think about Heaven.

 

Except – and warning, this is one of those times your "Faith Works" columnist is much less generic and more specifically the Christian pastor he is – the point and reality of Heaven is intended to be present to us right now, not just later. Heaven is a promise of a secure future that gives us a solid place to stand in the tides of the times today. The Realm of God is a reality in which we have citizenship and standing even as we live and work as "strangers in a strange land" through the brokenness of the here and now.

 

I know "The Shack" is meant, considered in full, to address just that. Paradise is a place where we not only see those we love as saved, as secure, as solidly present even as their bodies have given out on them, but it's a connection for us to hold onto between their lives and our own in this life. Papa wants Mack (the protagonist in the story with which we're to identify) to know his love for his daughter is still a real relationship, different for a time, but not ended entirely.

 

We do get stuck on those pretty pictures, though. The perfection and the power and the glory. How does a believer keep on feeling that connection to the celestial as we step over broken glass and kick aside the trash in our journey through today? And are we just marking time until we can get to that "better place" (a term I'm not exactly in love with, by the way)?

 

Or is there something of Heaven present in the world we know right now, obscured a bit, but when you change your angle of vision, startlingly apparent all around? Could we already be halfway home and only just be starting to realize it?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he lived for years in "Almost Heaven" which, after all, is just across the river from Ohio. Tell him about where you see Heaven breaking forth at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 3-9-17

Notes From My Knapsack 3-9-17

Jeff Gill

 

A rivalry for the ages

___

 

I've read with interest the efforts of members of the Newark and Granville Police Departments to get proper honors due to Carl Etherington, a duly deputized marshal of Granville, who served his brief term on behalf of the Anti-Saloon League in Newark, and therein lays a story.

 

The tragedy, and the honors, came as he was killed by a mob in the line of duty, lynched on the night of July 8, 1910, which was the same day he was deputized that morning on the courthouse steps.

 

Those details have been narrated elsewhere in this paper and our sister publication, the Newark Advocate. I was privileged to be part of a quiet memorial on July 8, 2010, when a few of us met by the Old Jail, walked the path the young man was dragged along, past the Brunswick Building, under the stony gaze of Adam Kiesel and east along South Park Place to the site of his hanging just off of Courthouse Square. We set a wreath on the site, and 24 hours later I took it to Kentucky and placed it on his grave in the Willisburg Cemetery, in view of his childhood home just up the road.

 

In the years since, I've had reason to reflect on the animosities between our village and the county seat, and how they might have begun, and why it endures. I now live in Granville, but serve a church in Newark: a church that first brought me to Ohio in 1989 as an associate pastor. In those years, my wife, while working on her doctorate at Ohio State, was also the handbell director for First Presbyterian in Granville…and I began to learn that there was some tension in the jokes between our two communities.

 

In truth, I couldn't have then done what has worked out to be the case today, living in Granville and serving in Newark. It would have been at best hard, and at worst failed entirely. And even now, comments get made. Jokes, you know. With an edge.

 

But from 1808, there was a clash. Granville's area hosted the first meeting of the Common Pleas Court as Licking County was first established, under a tree just west of Cherry Valley and Newark Granville Road. We hoped to keep the courts here, but Newark took that round.

 

In 1815, Sereno Wright moved here from Randolph, Vermont, where he was a printer, and published the largest newspaper in that state, "The Wanderer." That masthead continued in Granville, and by 1822, Bushnell's history recounts something of the competition between the Advocate, founded by Benjamin Briggs in 1820, and Wright's "Wanderer." Apparently "about seventy copies of the paper were taken at Granville. The paper displeased its Granville subscribers on some political ground and they gathered all the copies of the paper at hand, formed a mock funeral procession and marched to the beating of a muffled drum, from the hotel to the old parade ground, or further east, and after a speech by Jerry Jewett, the papers were buried. Mr. Briggs had advertised to receive payment for his paper in produce. The subscribers then gathered the most inconvenient kinds of produce they could find, went to Newark, paid their bills and stopped the paper, and the circulation in Granville was reduced from seventy to two."

 

And then there was 1910. The leaders of Granville were "drys" who had won election on a Prohibition platform; technically Newark should have been dry, too, but the popular sentiment, at least downtown, was very, very "wet." The Anti-Saloon League out of Westerville agitated for "right thinking citizens" to take action, and the mayor of Granville at the time chose to lead the push to close Newark's bars by force. So it was that deputies were recruited, sworn in, and sent to work.

 

The aftermath of the debacle was essentially state control of Newark, imposed by the governor (a Denison alum) to reform both the mayor's office and police department, plus the county sheriff was drawn in as well. Hard feelings went deep, and arguably still echo, even if not quite audibly to the casual listener, between Granville and our neighbors to the east.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about the stories that whisper within your earshot at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-4-17

Faith Works 3-4-17

Jeff Gill

 

Trying to see clearly down a foggy road

___

 

Over the last two weeks, I've shared some thoughts about trends and social changes that caught me by surprise. Honestly, while I expected change in my life as a preacher and pastor, some things were not on my radar screen thirty or even ten years ago.

 

Debt, functional literacy, marriage as an institution, aging as a growing demographic with a significant social impact: all of these are changes that I thought I saw developing, but in terms of size and ripple effects, I now realize I might as well have not anticipated these shifts at all, given how significant their roles have been in my work in ministry.

 

A couple of things more . . . The coarsening of the culture is one of those things that everyone talks about, but no one is quite sure what to say. Swearing, sexualized content, semi-nudity and then some, plain old vulgarity of style and presentation . . . and that's just in politics. As a preacher, I have to ask myself over and over "do I make this illustration, quote that person or movie or TV show, allude to some artist?" Because an otherwise innocent reference can suddenly slide you into having signed off on something more that you had no intention of endorsing.

 

And I think I'd have to mention I didn't anticipate the sea-change in the very nature of work. It's been commented on so widely by others wiser than me I almost hate to try to take it on, but here goes. The idea that you could hire someone for a pittance and pay no benefits: it's always been around, but it's now embedded in a process called "work-for-hire." The big push is to have no employees, but contracts; to get hired, to help get someone hired, is a different process altogether than it was just a decade ago. For a minister, you might jump in and offer references, make phone calls, attempt personal appeals: today, preacher, forget it.

 

But not that long ago, church members and clergy were an integral part of the job seeking effort, and today, we're largely shut out. That's a huge change, and one I'm still shaking my head over.

 

Now that we're in the season of Lent, with the countdown to Easter taking us week by week, day by day towards Palm Sunday, it's a good time to reassess, to pare down, to get back to essentials. And for all the changes that I've shared my bemusement over, most of which are not good developments as far as I can see (which we've established isn't that far, so keep that in mind), I do find my way through this dark wood to a place of hope and promise.

 

What this exercise has said to me is that the focus of my ministry, our church's mission, and what I'd offer to any other person of good will, is best placed in three areas. Looking at what isn't working, and where trends are more powerful than any one sermon or pastoral call might turn aside, I see a small but definite opening, a triangular doorway if you will that's solid and reliable to use as an escape from the passing troubles of this old world.

 

I want to find ways to celebrate and affirm family as the first foundation of faith formation. Yes, family broadly defined, but if you read the book of Genesis, family has never been just a mom, a dad, and two kids with a dog. A household committed to the care of children with love and respect is a family I can support, and is where personal faith is going to grow. The second side of that triangle is the local congregation, the gathered church where the word is preached and the table is open to those who are hungry in mind, body, and spirit. And third is the community, but not defined by political boundaries. We could spend a whole month of columns just discussing that question alone: is it school districts, watersheds, cultural boundaries of habit and connection?

 

But there's an internal consistency and solidity to those three lasting institutions that holds fast even as some of the exterior view of them seems to change. Family, congregation, community. As a Christian pastor, I have some particular ways to understand those three, but I think anyone can look at these areas in their own life, and see how work to sustain them would have enduring value.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him what you're holding onto as everything seems to change around you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 2-25-17

Faith Works 2-25-17

Jeff Gill

 

Nope, didn't see that coming…

___

 

Picking up again on the theme of "things I didn't see coming," changes that I thought I was anticipating but actually arrived in forms other than what I'd expected, starting this week with:

 

Books, reading, and smartphones. Truth is, it's not that everyone read so much when I was young, but you were expected to pretend back then, sort of. Everyone subscribed to a newspaper (I delivered papers for nearly five years, selling subscriptions, earning trips to football games and making money for college), and church magazines were the benchmark for what we used to call "churchmanship" in a less inclusive age.

 

But now between smartphones and tablets, reading has changed in such a comprehensive way I still can't quite track it – I see and hear many colleagues trying to hold to printed word and text on a page for their preaching, their teaching, in their church life, but I also see ways in which it's not working. But tech and reading has meant the consumption of text comes in bits and pieces, more than through a robust engagement with the "written" word. This piece, for instance, is already in violation of any number of online guidelines for length and style if you want to get readers, clicks and likes and shares. Ah well.

 

Then there's: Marriage. We have had quite the national debate in the last few years about same-sex marriage and civil unions and the like, but my biggest question continues to be "but what is happening to the basic institution of marriage and family with children?" First, just to get this out of the way and hope you forgive me: even older couples are not marrying. That's become a new normal, and everyone expects clergy and the rest of us to affirm that. Huh. Okay. Why not, because marriage is simply not "normal" any more. In more and more areas, children are born to mothers. That's all. Just mothers. Fatherhood is not a role as much as it's become a legal and legally contested category. There are some fathers who are husbands who are participants in the childbirth program, but not enough. Over fifty percent of kids in many youth serving programs are fatherless. All of which adds up to family becoming at best a complex category, and one we still struggle to respond to – in church and society at large -- with care and compassion. Meanwhile, what do we want to affirm that marriage is for, and how do we celebrate it and communicate its value?

 

And then there's aging. We knew people were getting older when I was younger. I'm not sure we knew how much . . . or that for some, not so much. Dementia and independent living has become a pastoral issue far beyond any scale I anticipated as a new pastor, coming up weekly if not daily. Expectations about mobility and autonomy in old age are bumping up against some hard, practical limits: we didn't see this so very clearly as we prepared for more and better nursing homes and retirement communities.

 

Which culminates in the question of going to church at all. Trends were moving, even in my youth, against church as an institution. But the outright hostility to church in general, and Christianity in particular: I don't think I'm the only one to have not seen that coming. I'm not claiming persecuted status, and I don't post/publish this to ask for any kind of sympathy, I'm really just trying to make a specific point. I've had my choice for faith challenged in public settings of all sorts, and I've heard in professional circles the role of clergy questioned as being comparable to a fortune-teller or ignorant bigot, simply because they are holders of a religious faith. If you can say you saw that coming thirty or forty years ago, I'd like to hear more about what helped you realize that, because I surely didn't.

 

I have some words of hope and encouraging signs to talk about next week, but these are some of the social and cultural trends I did not anticipate, and that I think faith communities in general and Christian churches in particular are struggling to respond to. Do you have others I haven't highlighted?

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about the changes that caught you and your church off-guard at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes From My Knapsack 2-23-17

Notes From My Knapsack 2-23-17

Jeff Gill

 

Dudgeon, high and low

___

 

Are you offended?

 

No, I'm not asking about what so much as if. If you are, in general, offended.

 

Some folks just don't get riled too quickly, and others are easy to stir up, quick to retort, hasty in their comebacks.

 

There's a phrase, somewhat archaic, mildly mysterious in origins, that you can use when someone is ready to go off half-cocked or on full automatic at any time, and that's when you say someone is "in high dudgeon."

 

There's an etymology that's tempting to follow in the Granville area, because it has to do with a Welsh word for "resentment or indignation," and would fit the usage as it's used today for a person leaving a room "in high dudgeon." But none other than the Oxford English Dictionary says a lengthy and scholarly version of "whoa, not so fast, bub."

 

What we do know is that in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" and earlier English usage, a dudgeon was the hilt of a dagger: "I see thee still, And on thy blade and dudgeon gouts of blood, Which was not so before." So.

 

"High" dudgeon, and the application of the term in the following century or two, seems to indicate a person who walks around with a hand on their hilt, always ready in the "high dudgeon" position to pull their sidearm and brandish it aggressively.

 

High dudgeon would be like an armed person walking around with their hand on the butt of their gun all the time. Not quite threatening, but not altogether reassuring, either.

 

Rhetorically, on TV cable news, online in all manner of venues, social media and otherwise, it seems like everyone is walking around, metaphorically, ready to draw and fire. On a hair-trigger, or locked and loaded all the time.

 

It probably doesn't help much that so many of our metaphors for dispute and debate are not just militant, but weaponized. Look through the ones I've used so far, and you can see the view down the sights. "High dudgeon" is only quaint and less violent sounding because our context has changed, and people, mostly gentlemen, don't walk around with a dagger in their belt as a part of being dressed for the out-of-doors. But in its day, it had as much a message of "kill or be killed" as "two go in, one comes out" does today.

 

I would never tell someone who is offended or concerned these days that they're wrong (for one thing, I value my life too much to do that). But I do wonder about what our alternative paths might be to talk about opposition and interest and ultimately policy in terms that are other than high caliber, major impact, mushrooming or armor-piercing language.

 

This may be my Quaker heritage showing through, but on all sides of the current political swirl, I hear speech aimed at the other side's positions that sounds awfully violent and martial. What if we were looking for ways to express differences or reconcile opposition that picked up on a different set of images and methods?

 

It's instructive to me, at least, that as I try to come up with some new terminology, I just keep coming up with different ways to rally the troops, charge the ramparts, or decimate the opposition (look up the roots of that last one, yuck). Do you have any ideas? From art, biology, architecture, dance?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him how you think we could speak differently about differences at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.