Faith Works 4-24-21

Faith Works 4-24-21

Jeff Gill

Freedom isn't free; sometimes, it's a tie that binds

___

One commentator said this past week that our social messaging ought to be 100% "you should get the vaccine, wait two weeks, then go live your life. The vaccinated should be actively discouraged from wearing masks, etc. Again, if they get the virus, it will be mild." His argument, which I think is worth considering, is that we're likely to hit a wall at around 60-65% of full vaccination soon, and the only way we're going to get people in that last 35% to get vaccinated is if we make it clear the vaccine is a ticket to "living your life" as in "without face coverings."

Again, he may be correct about that: I expect we will see rates of new vaccinations slow this week, and then come to a near-stop as we cross that 60% level. I'd love to agree with him about the relative risk of vaccinated people transmitting active virus if I was sure it would get us up past 75%. But what I'm more sure of is that if those of us who HAVE been vaccinated stop wearing masks, you'll see wholesale tossing aside of mask wearing, and I think there's still a very real, quantifiable, calculable risk of additional damage from illness and indeed some "excess death" from spread within that last 30-40%. Not another 500,000, but an avoidable additional 100,000 or more. That's why I'm still wearing face coverings in public settings where distancing can't be consistently maintained, like grocery stores and in school buildings and other gathering spaces. 

I suppose the counter-argument could be made that 100,000 deaths of at-risk, un-vaccinated individuals is both a question of their choices not to vaccinate (true, for some) and a utilitarian balance of how many billions lost in economic activity versus those 100,000 fatalities . . . although I'm at this point thinking more about the follow-on impact of getting COVID with lung damage and other lasting physical effects we're still figuring out, for that more than 100 million Americans still unprotected by vaccine. 500,000 people who lose a few years off their lifespan from COVID impact on their bodies later is a utilitarian calculation that might be more economically damaging than 100,000 additional deaths among people in high risk categories who've not been vaccinated.

So it's a balance of those two hypotheticals for the policy makers to sort out: will telling people they can completely dispense with masking and distancing after getting vaccinated get us up past 75%? It might, it might not. Or will doing that lead to general disposal of face coverings, triggering another new spike of illness and death among at risk populations? That's my concern, but I'll admit we don't know that for sure, either.

We all WANT to stop having to mask & distance in our social gatherings. That's the only thing I know for sure. But in balance, I'm going to keep wearing my post-vaccination face coverings . . . for the good of others. As a good example, as a team player who wants to see as many come through this uninjured as possible. Saying that even social pressure to do so is a "risk of our civil liberties" I think does cognitive violence to what the common good really is in a free society.

And I have to say I worry about the witness, the public example of what religious faith means in practice, of churches that have said — legally, I will add in fairness — they will dispense entirely with distancing or even encouraging face coverings, let alone returning to congregational singing and even social gatherings let alone seated group meals. What exactly are we saying as faith communities when we jump into that way of being church, which understandably is where most of us really want to be?

Yes, I'm aware of Hebrews 10:25, and the exhortation for us in "not giving up meeting together . . . but encouraging one another." I also hear a great deal of "we cannot live in fear" and "perfect love casts out fear" (hat tip, I John 4:18). However, that feels very near to "Do not put the Lord your God to the test," which Jesus himself says at Matthew 4:7.

For myself, I have no fear. Health-wise, or heaven-wise, Philippians 1:21 has me covered. What I believe I reasonably dread is to be the cause of stumbling, or even death, of another (see Hebrews 13:17 on that). If a little discomfort and inconvenience is the cost of discipleship and an opening to the realm of God for others, I think that's a cloth across my face I can bear.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's looking forward to being able to smile with more than his eyes. Tell him how you're working around challenges at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-29-21

Notes from my Knapsack 4-29-21

Jeff Gill

Killer bees are not a problem

___

You would probably be concerned if I told you that we just saw 175 deaths due to honeybees and beekeeping in Franklin County for 2020; let alone that as of mid-April, there had been 60 beehive related deaths in 2021, which would put them on track for 214 fatalities this year.

Or nationally, if I told you that "In 2020, honeybees killed nearly 20,000 Americans . . . more than any other year in at least two decades. An additional 24,000 people died by suicide with a beehive. . . Beekeeping deaths in 2020 outpaced the next-highest recent year, 2017, by more than 3,600." You'd be saying something has gone seriously wrong with the normally bucolic and agriculturally wonderful practice of keeping honeybees, and that someone needed to look into how this vital aspect of outdoor life had become so dangerous, and even weaponized.

In fact, replacing honeybees and beehive and beekeeping with gun violence and gun or shooting, and you have a recent Washington Post assessment of where we're at nationally. I'm sure Agatha Christie or some other writer of cozies has figured out how to sic a swarm of generally inoffensive honeybees onto a murder victim, but I assure you it really can't be done, unless you figure out how to roll your desired target in honey and walk them up to a working hive.

Honestly, my general experience of firearms is more like how I think of beehives than as murder weapons. Another parallel I've used in discussions about firearms use and restriction is that of power tools: having a lathe or belt sander or radial arm saw in your basement or outside workshop. I grew up with all this stuff, and it's part of outdoor and rural life in most of the country. Bees pollenate crops, power tools build things you can't buy at the big box store, and guns help you manage the woodlots and hedgerows. All of them can hurt you if you misuse them, but they aren't intended for harm, they are all tools, means to useful ends.

But seriously: "Last year (2020), the United States saw the highest one-year increase in homicides since it began keeping records, with the country's largest cities suffering a 30 percent spike. Gunshot injuries also rose dramatically, to nearly 40,000, over 8,000 more than in 2017." And that was with almost no mass shootings, which get the major media attention, but are even now a very small part of the larger question at hand.

Obviously, a major difference is that a drill press can't be carried in a coat pocket, and you can't sneak one into a workplace under your coat and use it to harm or murder multiple people. You can lose a finger in it by inattention or misuse, and even die from blood loss, but it's not a weapon for killing. I grew up with three firearms in my house, but Dad had muzzleloading black powder Civil War replica rifles which an intruder could take from us and threaten to shoot us with, and we would have two minutes to laugh at them while still leaving another minute to trot out of range before they loaded and fired, assuming they could figure all that out.

What we're looking at today is a field of fire and range of implements far beyond what the Framers had in mind as they drafted the intentions behind the Second Amendment of the Constitution. We're going to have to think today more constructively about what the intention, and the application, should be in our nation today. It's not just about having beehives in the backyard anymore.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been around firearms from youth to adulthood, and thinks everyone should take Hunter Safety training even if they never plan to use it. Tell him what your solution to gun violence is at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

*   *   *

Craig --

This one is a touch long, but I have time, so if you'd like me to figure out how to get 100 words trimmed, just holler. My source on the numbers is the link here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2021/03/23/2020-shootings/

Pax, Jeff

Faith Works 4-17-21

Faith Works 4-17-21

Jeff Gill

Beyond COVID, within reason

___

We're on the upslope out of the valley, I think we can say, from the worst of COVID's impact on our community. It's a long journey up unstable footing which is very much the old "three steps forward, two steps back," which is a weary way to travel, but if you think about it, it is progress.

As we're slipping and stumbling forward with a great deal of backsliding (who knows what new complications will come up by the time you read this after I've written it), the vaccines that are available, which people are getting, are making a measurable impact on hospitalizations and deaths. This is good.

How we all should behave, I don't have a simple template to share. Some of you have pointed out that I've not said much about what all churches should do, and that's true. Because I think architecture and demographics and capacities mean that different churches can embrace different models of return to gathered worship. Some did drive-in worship, and it worked well. For others, it just didn't work. Some are back in worship centers in ways that make sense to me, and others are putting people together in ways I think are reckless even if legal. But I don't have a good formula for "this is good" and "that is bad."

What I do welcome is the clear indication that there are ways to be together in groups that can be healthy and health promoting. Outside is idea, distancing between unrelated household groups is still going to make sense for a while, and face coverings too, unpopular though they are with some. Yes, vaccinations seem to not only protect but keep people from transmitting viruses. Yet as long as we're below fifty percent coverage, and we're not using vaccine passports to check, I think people who've been vaccinated will be helping out the overall process by wearing their masks so we can simplify this and just expect everyone, when we're indoors and moving around within a few feet of others from time to time, to wear them regardless of vaccine status.

I realize that last statement will make a certain number of people irritably turn the page, or click on to the next story. Fine. I can defend my case at length, but there's my view in brief. Let's keep wearing them for most indoor group settings, whether the law requires it or not. If you don't like that idea, you'll hate the rest of this column.

Because another worry I hear voiced about how things have been handled is "how long are we going to keep doing all this COVID stuff?" There's an assumption that it's all mostly disproved because some guidance has changed. Which is not quite right.

Handwashing and sanitizing, for instance, is no longer seen as a COVID-necessary provision. Right, but my problem is that it was not only a good idea, but a public health need in any group gathering setting LONG before coronavirus was a thing. Seasonal flu, norovirus, C.diff., E coli . . . these are all contagious agents that, if you ran summer camps let alone had church leadership responsibilities, you long ago learned were real issues in crowd management and event planning. Fleas, bedbugs, roaches: if you work with people in groups, you deal with those aspects of their lives in your workspace or worship center.

So I think we need to be very careful about laughing off "we don't have to sanitize door handles and railings anymore" when it might well be something we should have been doing better before. And masks? Look, seasonal flu may have a case mortality of .1% (that should come out in print as point-one-percent!) while COVID may be 1.5% or higher, but for those other infectious agents I mentioned above? You may not have the same speed and ease of transmission, but their impact and mortality may be higher than COVID. Worse for vulnerable elderly, seasonal flu included. If you visit hospitals in flu season, you already knew this. Cloth masks are better than oxygen masks.

And for many of us in pastoral care, we've seen people be hospitalized and even die because of folks who insist they need to be in church even though they're clearly sick. The challenge moving forward isn't how fast we can cast aside face coverings: the question will be how we can affirm the importance of being together in faith, while still using the tools we've learned to apply this past year to let people with infectious illness know they can and should stay home.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's still not delighted to preach to his laptop screen, but it's clearly a useful option. Tell him how you've learned to adapt your faith life at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 4-15-21

Notes from my Knapsack 4-15-21

Jeff Gill

Moonlight on daffodils

___

Daffodils are much in evidence around Granville, and here on the southern edge of the Welsh Hills of Licking County, it's only right that we identify so strongly with the spring flower, a symbol of Wales itself.

Across the pond, they're a big part of St. David's Day, which comes March 1, the national festival of Wales, but around here the daffodils tend to open up later than that. And to me, as the yellow or white blossoms start to wither and fade, that's when it feels as if spring is ending.

My dogwood hasn't opened up yet, and I'd say the dropping of the flowers from that tree that really signals the start of the summer season in my mind. In deeper forest, the tulip poplar, or yellow poplar, has glorious blossoms that we only tend to see past peak and after they fall, and so later in May and into June: yellow-green petals and bands of a soft orange, showing their best only to those occupants and passers-by of the forest canopy, squirrels and butterflies and warblers on their way through.

And I love the Latin name for tulip trees: Liriodendron tulipifera. You can say it as a magic spell to summon the wonders of the blossoming world, as they finish their term above and flutter down to cast their beauty onto woodland trails. Liriodendron tulipifera . . .

For now, we still have full beds of daffodils, and some evenings as I head up to bed, I'll look out across the front porch to the mounded clumps of blossom, and see the luminous white of those deeply yellow trumpets under the moonlight above. It's a very particular white that I associate with this time of year, daffodils and night time and the weeks after Easter when the sun is in a hurry to rise earlier and earlier each day, and in general so am I.

Now that I can go to bed with windows open, I believe I sleep better, and find it easier to get up sooner, and coffee may taste better to me in the spring than it does any other time of year, and trust me I've been running a long-term, year-round experiment on this vital question.

Earlier in the spring, it was warm enough of an evening to try sitting out on my patio for the first time in what seemed like a year — last summer I was much on the road and too little at home — and saw my first insects of 2021, small black ovals so inoffensive and unstingery as to be welcome companions. We're told in national media that a major cicada brood will be out this year, which usually means "around DC and New York City" but in fact Brood X is probably the largest seventeen year cycle group of cicadas, and they have an interesting and complicated range, which includes western Ohio.

In Licking County, we're mostly in Brood V territory (entomologists use Roman numerals for the various brood cycles, which gives Brood X a wonderfully ominous name for no particular reason), but it's also well known that cicadas can't read maps, so it wouldn't be odd for a few batches of Brood X to show up especially in the western half of the county.

As we wait for the cicadas to start their drone, I'll just sit here and whisper: Liriodendron tulipifera.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's ready to be outside more this summer. Tell him what you love about nature at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-10-21

Faith Works 4-10-21

Jeff Gill

Relics in the modern world

___

In Jerusalem deep beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and in the west of Ohio at the Relic Chapel of the Maria Stein Shrine, I've been in the presence of what are believed to be fragments of the cross on which Jesus was crucified. These relics, actual objects directly associated with Christ or a saint, are considered by many faithful to be an aid to devotion.

American nineteenth century writer Washington Irving, on the other hand (he of Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow fame), wrote that if all of the splinters he'd seen in Europe said to be taken from "the one true cross" were put together, you'd have enough lumber to construct a ship on which to sail back across the Atlantic.

Relics are not something that makes much sense to the modern mindset. A rationalistic, scientific world view isn't ready to call a scrap of cloth or a lock of hair from a long deceased holy person a means through which we can learn how to live today.

Or is it?

You may have heard in the last few weeks about the latest NASA rover to land on the surface of Mars, some 140 million miles away (depending on where our respective orbit put each planet). The NASA Perseverance rover carries with it the Ingenuity helicopter, a four pound piece of carbon fiber and titanium and aluminum, with bits of copper and foam holding it all together. Weight is at a premium, and the flying experiment is about four pounds total.

To have and use a working helicopter on surface of Mars is certainly a "Wright Brothers moment." And in honor of that, 118 years after the world's first powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight at Kitty Hawk, a piece of history, a piece of the 1903 Wright Flyer itself — a piece of Ohio I might add — is attached to the Ingenuity flyer, just below the solar panel on the top of it.

Not unlike a holy relic, a scrap of cloth from the Wright brothers's wing covers is adding to the weight, however modestly, of the Martian aircraft. And it turns out this isn't the first time: a fragment of Wright Flyer wood and fabric flew to the moon with Apollo 11 and Neil Armstrong in 1969. A swatch of 1903 muslin was also with John Glenn when he flew with space shuttle Discovery in 1998. Both astronauts, I hope you notice, were from Ohio. (Another swatch went to the International Space Station in 2000.)

NASA representatives explained they felt that this move honored "A deep connection in history." As a person with a deep connection to spirituality, I respect their intention around marking the historic aspect of this first flight on a different planet, but I think the potential contrast with science here makes the decision interesting. On a device where every decision about its construction is about saving weight for an un-precedented experiment in flight, adding even a modest scrap of cloth is an odd choice. If you're cutting everything you can to ensure success, why add a piece of anything that's not mission critical?

Which is the point, or so I infer. It makes no "sense" to do, yet the impulse is strong. Deep, even. To find that connection beyond electronics and wiring and torque, from past to future, between what once was, and what is about to become. Those sorts of connections are mysteries when they happen, and can't always be rationally explained. It's the sort of connection that relics represent as a presumed existing reality. Connection is possible, it's been seen in the flesh before, and it could and surely will happen again.

Over a century ago, Wilbur and Orville Wright bought a roll of plain, unbleached "Pride of the West" muslin fabric at a Dayton, Ohio department store, stitched it into shape using a Singer sewing machine in their bicycle shop, and stretched it across their unprecedented aircraft's wings, rudder and elevator. After years of successes, setbacks, and struggle, the Wright brothers finally made controlled flight a reality on this planet, and a piece of that struggle is now part of humanity's attempt to do so on Mars.

This is what relics are about in a personal and spiritual sense, to connect us to how what seems impossible to us now has happened before, and can happen again. As amazing as flight on Mars, the idea that we might indeed love one another here on Earth.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he was called a space cadet in elementary school and didn't even mind. Tell him where you find inspiration in our modern world at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Photo: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/mastcam-z-gives-ingenuity-a-close-up

Notes From My Knapsack 4-1-21

Notes From My Knapsack 4-1-21

Jeff Gill

Won't Get Fooled Again
___

Whether this column runs, in print or online, April the First, we all know that there's a trust issue around any announcement or information that comes out around that date.

I've served on panels and committees that have contorted work schedules and release dates just to make sure that a press release or resolution doesn't have the dreaded "April 1" at the top of it, and run the risk of people thinking it's all a joke.

What's been so worrisome in public discourse over the last few months, certainly well before the events on the Capitol grounds in Washington at the start of January, is how many people are thinking it's April Fools Day 365 days of the year.

Not trusting government isn't new. Pete Townsend wrote "Won't Get Fooled Again" in 1971, and "The Who" released it just in time to be echoed by the New York Times with the publication of the Pentagon Papers. Mistrust of the federal government was a thing even before Watergate got rolling the next summer.

And now we have different branches of state government arguing about trust, with the legislature overruling a veto by the governor of a restriction on his ability to declare public health emergencies. Were businesses hurt more by Mike DeWine's policy decisions, or the reality of an infectious agent rumbling around our communities? Did the citizens of Ohio listen more to an inaccurate state leader, or to the evidence of their own eyes and experiences?

I have been baffled by the actions of Statehouse Republicans to make it a mark of party loyalty to not wear masks on the floor of the two chambers while in session; I have Republican friends and associates who have tried hard to convince me that their data about mask wearing is more reliable than the information the state health department is using, and that Dr. Fauci's initial statement a year ago is more reliable than what he said later as the pandemic developed.

To say the least, I am not convinced. But there's the whole problem in a nutshell: I have information sources and data analysis I trust, and they have different ones. My suspicion is that they are picking the inputs that get them the outcome they want — not having to wear masks and telling people to go on about their lives — and they suggest I am preferring studies which . . . and this is where it falls apart, I think, because I honestly don't see how anything about this past year suits me or has helped me or mine. If you know me personally, you can fill in about a thousand words of confirmation of that understanding.

When it comes to public policy, we've beaten to death the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's apothegm: "You are entitled to your opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts." The challenge for us all is that, in fact, people do pick their own preferred facts. The opportunity we have in public policy is in figuring out what irreducible facts are relevant to our common life.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been fooled before, and wouldn't say he never will again. Tell him how you ascertain facts you live by at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 4-3-21

Faith Works 4-3-21

Jeff Gill

Following Jesus to Heaven

___

Then Jesus says "Follow me."

To the cross, to the tomb, and to resurrection. "Christos anesti," "Christ is Risen" is the ancient greeting of Christians, one to another, on Easter day and after. "Alithos anesti, alleluia!" or "Christ is risen indeed, alleluia!" we reply.

Getting to this greeting, reaching the confidence of faith affirmed on an Easter morning, we do best to follow Jesus all through Holy Week, as long and as far as we can, for everything we have been put into this world to learn and share and comprehend. It takes a Lent to make an Easter, you could say. Following is the preparation we need for arriving.

Tim Keller's essay in "The Atlantic" that I've quoted before in this space (which is easy to find online), all-too-aptly titled "Growing My Faith in the Face of Death," has been a tool for me in cracking open John 21:18-19, to get at the good material within those two verses. 

After learning alongside of his wife that he has cancer, this Manhattan pastor writes: "Since my diagnosis, Kathy and I have come to see that the more we tried to make a heaven out of this world—the more we grounded our comfort and security in it—the less we were able to enjoy it. To our surprise and encouragement, Kathy and I have discovered that the less we attempt to make this world into a heaven, the more we are able to enjoy it."

Some say this world is all the Hell we need, all there is. That's a subject for another day. But certainly the sorrows and torments of this world don't take a great deal of description by me to convince you or anyone that it's far short of any kind of adequate Heaven. Just check out the last few weeks in this paper.

But part of the revelation of Easter is that resurrection takes place both in this world, and the next. I know the rejection of any hope or idea that there IS a next world, beyond the one immediately available to our senses or mental understanding, is what pushes some away from the Christian gospel. What Easter I believe opens a door for, whatever your present faith perspective, is the awareness that there is in THIS world the beginning of many of the promises of heaven. This sometimes hellish world also contains wonderful and mysterious hints of a heavenly hope, available to anyone.

The caterpillar and the chrysalis, the spring blossoming out of winter, discovering in a box full of letters something a century old that speaks to us today: the Easter moments are all around us. And if we can take some of our anxieties and set them aside in the present moment, there are immediate joys available to any of us.

Keller went on to say about this world, in the light of his deeper hope: "No longer are we burdening it with demands impossible for it to fulfill. We have found that the simplest things—from sun on the water and flowers in the vase to our own embraces, sex, and conversation—bring more joy than ever. This has taken us by surprise."

This world is not heaven, but it can point the way to it. And if we don't confuse the map for the territory, the sign for the destination, there are joys in simply seeing the marker, the milestone come into view, saying "Columbus 21, Cumberland 236." Kirkersville may not be heaven, but you can find the way from there, just as it isn't Columbus, either. 

In Bethany, West Virginia, which is not on the way to anywhere, actually, there is a sign. It tells you on arrival in that Northern Panhandle hillside town: "This is the center of the universe. You can get anywhere from here." Likewise, you could say that the kingdom of God is in the midst of where you are; the realm of heaven is very near us, indeed.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been seeking to follow Jesus more closely this Lent now ending. Tell him about your journey and temporary destinations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-27-21

Faith Works 3-27-21

Jeff Gill

The Jesus I want to follow

___

And after saying this he said to him, "Follow me."

John 21:19

Palm Sunday is tomorrow, and Holy Week is ahead, a journey from the Mount of Olives into the valley of Hinnom to the Temple courtyards, a way of sorrow through Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, a week of strong emotions and painful episodes before we reach the joy of Easter. We dress it all up with Latin and labels, "Via Dolorosa" and Passiontide, but the reality behind it all is hard.

A hard journey, with a solid hope at the end: Resurrection. That promise redeems a great deal of suffering, but the suffering comes first. And in a way continues, since the passage we've been gnawing at all Lent takes place in the light of resurrection, by the Sea of Galilee, with the Risen Christ speaking to Peter.

There Jesus talks to his leading apostle about what is to come, and after calling on him (redemptively) to take on the challenge of tending the flock of his Lord, he cautions him that everything will not be in his ability to command, even where he is to go. Specifically not always Peter getting to decide where he wants to go.

And then says "Follow me."

Palm Sunday marks a strange day where almost any of us can easily imagine joyfully and happily following Jesus. The crowd proclaims him king, and we shout out loud and in public the ancient formula of salvation "Hallelujah!" which is simply archaic Hebrew for "Praise God!" There's a parade and children and families and both Rome and the oppressing local authorities are safely at a distance, even if frowning. The Jesus movement is heading for the Temple, and we are all celebrating the Messiah together. "Follow me"? Sure!

Yet there is more to come. And still Jesus says "Follow me." The mystery of the supper in the upper, rented room. Darkness in the garden, then confused battles and betrayals; a trial, a whipping, humiliation, pronouncement of sentence. And Jesus says "Follow me."

And the way of the cross, through the streets, to the knoll overlooking the dump and civic garden and road towards the port and the world, to nails and spears and pain and death. And Jesus says "Follow me."

Yes, if you've read ahead like a good student, you know there's more to come. But there's also no short cut, no "skip a step" here. You want to follow Jesus in the Palm Sunday procession, and you want to follow Jesus into resurrection and life eternal, you will be following Jesus on the path in between to get there. Following Jesus when its convenient, when we want to, when it feels good and everyone is right there with us — that means ducking into the parade and out of it. The great thing about Jesus is he's always going to want to let you come back on board the bandwagon; the problem with sin and separation is that the more time we spend out of the parade, the more likely it becomes we won't find our way back into the procession.

The kingdom of heaven, the realm of God, is a street fair with a conga line that makes some strange turns along the way, into neighborhoods far from the temples and palaces and "good people," which can suddenly become a nervous, frightened line of children holding the hand of the one in front and the person behind us, walking down narrow alleys closing in on either side, the streetlights far behind and the doorways looming and ominous. Jesus knows what he's doing, but we wonder what happened to the band, the shouting, the joy. We recall something said earlier about parks and picnics and green grass and music on ahead, but why are we here you think, as you step into a puddle and rats scatter. You hold onto your faith in Jesus our leader, no longer on a donkey but still up ahead of us as always, and you're glad you didn't step out of the parade anywhere sooner because you'd never figure out this stretch of the path on your own, but you wish you were somewhere else. 

"Follow me," Jesus says.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's been in a few parades. Tell him about your path following Jesus has taken you at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-20-21

Faith Works 3-20-21

Jeff Gill

Following Jesus when you can't move

___

This Lent I've been inviting you to reflect with me on where Jesus tells Peter in John 21:18 that: "…another will…carry you where you do not want to go." And as I said before Ash Wednesday, when Lent began, the path to Easter this coming April 4 takes us from verse 18 to verse 19, when Jesus concludes his teaching to Peter and to us by saying "Follow me."

Except, Jesus has been talking about not being in control; he's not telling him or the disciples about good decision making, or what acts are to be honored in his name. Yes, he's spoken just before about feeding the sheep and tending the lambs as the work all who love Jesus are called to share in together, but then he turns to Peter and cautions him that all this is, in a way, preparation for a time when others will carry him where he does not want to go . . . and it is in response to that situation that Jesus tells him "Follow me."

Following Jesus, in this Lent, in our lives, at any time, is not all about what we do. Our acts of faith, our service in Jesus's name, our living out of being sisters and brothers in Christ, is not what following Jesus comes down to. How we respond is a reflection of how we have chosen to follow, but it's not the heart of the following, of the follower-ship, the discipleship of the Christian journey. The work of faith that is the rock on which Jesus promises to build a community of faith is something you can do, in obedience, as following him, when you no longer have any control over external events.

Recently, Tim Keller had an essay in "The Atlantic" which you can find easily enough online, titled "Growing My Faith in the Face of Death." He wrote it because he's dying. He wrote it, as a noted Christian preacher and teacher, because we all are. It's the one most externally obvious thing we all have in common. Rich and poor, whatever our color or ethnic loyalty or personal orientation, and yes, even old or young, we are dying. This is an element of much pastoral work, whether you're a minister in a medium-sized Ohio city or a celebrity preacher in New York City: helping people confront and deal with the reality of death, when much of our culture is deeply invested in the denial of dying and decay and endings.

Keller has written a number of books on Christian themes, one titled "On Death." At the doctor's office when he learned he had pancreatic cancer, he writes how as he waited he "caught a glimpse of 'On Death' on a table nearby. I didn't dare open it to read what I'd written." It's one thing to counsel others, and another to come to terms yourself with this in your own life.

His essay, which I hope you'll seek out yourself, speaks of how his faith had to work through some "head" and some "heart" issues around death and dying. His story continues, for now, and he talks about how putting his immediate existence in the light of eternity, how seeing today's gifts as reflections of God's more lasting promises, makes the current moment more precious, not less.

And I caught an echo of this passage, John 21:18-19, in his reflections. How we find in our hearts the way to "Follow me" when Jesus calls is a turning which starts in there, within our selves, between our heart and his, before the idea rattles through our heads and gets turned into acts and movements and deeds.

A good Calvinist, Keller quotes a great Puritan writer of Colonial America in saying "As the early American philosopher Jonathan Edwards argued, it is one thing to believe with certainty that honey is sweet, perhaps through the universal testimony of trusted people, but it is another to actually taste the sweetness of honey."

How do we follow when we can't go anywhere? This is what Jesus is talking to Peter about, there on that long-ago lakeside. And to us.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's listening closely to a few things this Lent. Tell him about your lakeside conversations at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 3-18-21

Notes from my Knapsack 3-18-21

Jeff Gill

What do I have to do?

___

Whether it's a stop sign or a face covering, there is law and there is consensus.

Ohio Revised Code or Village Codified Ordinances alike, we have a body of law that can be enforced, but few of us have read those source documents, and we work from a day by day basis on a set of understandings that are part of our local culture, perhaps a result of our upbringing, and frankly can carry with them a wide variety of misunderstandings.

When I spent a long stretch in the honorable duty of homeowner association president, I had many conversations where people were certain that certain things were law that were not. Usually, it was because a certain practice or rule or guideline was true in Santa Barbara, CA or Easton, MD but not in Granville, OH. And I work across the county with school principals who will tell me things that I have the sad obligation of telling them are not true, even if they're correct for Beavercreek or Parma in other school districts of Ohio.

Local option is a very big thing in Ohio, and where in some states a policy in one county is true for all, you'd better not assume that here. Which makes state gatherings of all sorts of professions a challenge, as we share wisdom and best practices that often simply can't be carried across county lines. Townships and judges and school boards have autonomy in a wide variety of areas, and that's how we seem to like it.

So the governor and other state boards and panels have less sway over community decision making than you might think, especially if you came here from somewhere else. And the year of health orders in many states that we've recently experienced, or as some wags say "the first anniversary of 14 days to slow the spread," now behind us, leaves many legislatively minded people wanting to further limit the authority of governors and health commissioners from issuing instructions that can be enforced, which is the basic definition most of us have for a "law." You can call them administrative code or county status announcements, but if a law enforcement officer can enforce it, with fines or force or both, most of us just call it a law.

And understandably, the legislature wants to protect their prerogative to make law by limiting the law-like actions the chief executive officers of the state and cities and counties can issue, certainly when they're for longer than it takes for snow to melt or floodwaters to fall.

Pandemics represent a new challenge for the usual legal perspective on emergency orders. Can you have an emergency that lasts a year and more? Arguably, yes, we just had or are still having one. It's not permanent, even the most worried and cautious will concede that, but 14 days and 30 days and 100 days are now well past 365. How do we govern ourselves in an ongoing emergency? This is the discussion we're in the middle of right now.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's mindful of the old saying about what not to do if you appreciate either law or sausages. Tell him what you think we need in the mid at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-13-21

Faith Works 3-13-21

Jeff Gill

Belief in God, and how to get there

___

Jesus tells Peter in John 21:18 that: "…another will…carry you where you do not want to go."

Loss of control is part of faith. If everything is in our control, and clear in front of us, it's not faith. It's simply work. We might need to develop some faithfulness to keep at it, but faith is about wider narratives and how our immediate steps are on a path whose end we do not know.

The things I have the most control over, the paths that are most familiar to me, are reassuring, but they neither challenge me nor give me a deeper hope. They have a place: running laps can be good for the heart and even the mind, but the journey of faith asks me to make a turn off the track, and into what can appear at first to be darkness.

Some trips, I have to be willing to let someone else drive. At some point, I may even need to get into a wheelchair and allow someone else to push. And I've known a few times that queasy feeling of laying back on the gurney and having the attendant wheel me down the hall to a place where I know I'm going to sleep, and then . . . well, I have a rough idea, but I'm not sure.

Those are the times I need faith.

I believe in God. This is my most fundamental faith stance, that I believe there is a divine reality beyond and behind the immediate reality I experience, which knits together past and future, my life and someday my death, lives which I've never met in life who have played a role in my own, and the deaths of others who are with me in one moment and in another . . . gone. Gone somewhere, or nowhere? I believe in God, which is a faith that in one dimension extends into believing that those who die go somewhere, in some part.

This is not a universally held way of looking at the world. You can argue that in the decades of my youth and maturity it held sway in American life, but I can both look back and do research today to show that it wasn't a definite majority view even in 1961, let alone in 2021. Oh, you can find surveys over the last sixty years of a vague, diffuse "86% of Americans believe in God" but it's generally of a very loose, uncertain, deistic sort of belief when you get into any details at all. Regular worship attendance on any given weekend has declined in that period from an optimistic 40% at best to something south of 20%, and as I've written about in this space before, a quick objective check of the numbers will bear that out, with no more than 15% of Licking County attending any service at all each weekend when you add everyone up and even round things in a favorable direction.

I believe in God, creator of heaven and earth, who loves and cares about what has been created, who desires to redeem and save it for a new and more wonderful dawn, and who has promised to come down into the muck and mess and complication of life as it is to show by example and patient teaching what it could yet be. I believe, in fact, in God who is with us, which is the same divine creator we know as Father because he sent a Son, a human form of that divinity into the everyday world. And we still have a Spirit with us and in us and working through us to understand how the everyday and the eternal intersect, cross-wise if you will.

And I have to admit that my faith is not entirely my own. I did not get here by my own efforts. I was picked up and carried on the first stages of the path of faith by my father. He taught me, mostly by example, occasionally when necessary with words, though words were not his strong point. He did. And he didn't look over his shoulder often. He just did what his faith led him to do, and expected that God would lead others to follow. Which we did.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's on a journey of faith this Lent. Tell him about your path into valleys of shadow at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 3-6-21

Faith Works 3-6-21

Jeff Gill

Everybody wants to clean up, but…

___

When Jesus is talking to Peter, at John 21:18, he says to him: "Truly, truly, I say to you, when you were young, you used to dress yourself and walk wherever you wanted, but when you are old, you will stretch out your hands, and another will dress you and carry you where you do not want to go."

And "where you do not want to go" is where much of this past year, and this Lent, is taking me. With apologies, I'm taking you with me, because as with most of scripture, I think what Jesus is saying is for us as well.

Yes, he's talking about death, but only in part. The prophecy implicit in the verse above is Peter's martyrdom, but it's also about aging, and limitations, and endings.

I've also found that it's about dumpsters.

This coming week is the one year anniversary of my father's death, and to be blunt how it came as a crescendo for the losses that began in the Christmas season of 2019, of losing people important to me and whose passing left a mark on my spirit, of nearly a dozen in the span of ten weeks. Yes, I'm still sorting through that.

But Dad's death opened up a giant dumpster lid that I'm still flipping back and forth. My sister and I had a house in Texas to sort quickly (which had twice as much in it as you'd think looking at this little winter home from the outside), a childhood home in Indiana my brothers and others helped with clearing at a modestly more leisurely pace, and then a church office and its storage long shoved aside, needing some final attention as I stepped down from pulpit ministry. 

As I've noted before, this past year I was sifting and sorting and discarding, of necessity (please, no helpful comments at this point about where I could take it or who could use it, it's pretty much all behind me and as COVID hit, everyone was clearing out basements to where many places that took in stuff had to stop doing so), not just my own piled up notes and outlines and memorabilia, but that of five or six other lives in my family going back into the earliest years of the 1900s, and of church history to boot, both of the congregation I was serving and in my church tradition's region. 

The important stuff, I kept. Or tried to. But my sister and I have already had a few incidents of learning that something we pitched was important. All in the "there's no way we could have known that had value" category, a special pencil or a drab brown dress among dozens (hundreds) that had a particular meaning. If you let that haunt you, then you keep everything just in case, and I am here to tell you, that way lies madness.

And overstuffed basements and closets and cabinets.

Our lives produce more meaning than we can save, just as our culture produces more stuff than we can use. Keep one piece out of a hundred, and you still end up with thousands in no time.

So this is not Marie Kondo, or what brings you joy to posses, or any magic clue to how to downsize and sort, except for this: there is a spiritual discipline to accepting the need to put stuff into dumpsters. It's not joy, and it can produce waves of anxiety, but it can also bring peace.

At a certain point, you get into a space of saying, to God, the universe, to your future self, whomever: I can't keep it all, and this is what I am casting aside. Sure, recycle or take for reuse or hand along to others what you can, but I've noticed in both self and others over the years that those idealistic proposals can just be further means of evasion of the reality — most of our lives are junk, trash, detritus, debris. An awful lot of it can be safely thrown into dumpsters. And the regrets over a few stray pieces has to be seen in relation to the impossibility of keeping it all.

Letting it go brings clarity, and yes, peace. Throwing out the trash starts with admitting that's what it is, which is often a place we don't want to go. But there we are called.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's done dumpster diving before, but this is different. Tell him about your spiritual disciplines around taking out the trash at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.