Faith Works 6-19

Faith Works 6-19-10

Jeff Gill

The Dog That Barked In the Nighttime

___

John Wooden clearly had many fans among Advocate readers, and I'm pleased that so many of you appreciated hearing a bit more about what made this legendary basketball coach the man and role model that he became.

There was one other element of Wooden's story that I wanted to get to (as long as last week's column was, for which I thank the forebearance of my editors). It had to do with his father, appropriately enough for this Father's Day weekend.

His father lost the farm during the Depression, but he taught John Wooden a set of life principles which Coach carried on a piece of paper in his wallet the rest of his life. Wooden was never shy about sharing copies of this list with players, friends, and in speaking engagements, so it was very well known – you may have seen it before yourself.

 

It was so much of the John Wooden legend that the Los Angeles Times included the list in their front page obituary: "Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day."

 

That's how they ran it, anyhow. Without a word to let the reader know they, um, edited it a little. The problem being that so many of us out here almost knew the original text by heart (a useful skill to develop for many reasons) . . .

 

"Be true to yourself. Make each day a masterpiece. Help others. Drink deeply from good books, especially the Bible. Make friendship a fine art. Build a shelter against a rainy day. Pray for guidance, count and give thanks for your blessings every day."

Fascinating edits, no? I certainly understand that sometimes an article or even, perish forbid, a column might have to be cut down a bit, but this was a remarkably surgical excision of three key words from the end of the fourth point, which makes the dropping of the seventh item somewhat suspect beyond the limits of the daily news hole on page one.

Why drop those notes of religious faith? Isn't that what is key to understanding the phenomenon that was and is John Wooden? Would so very many readers of the Los Angeles Times be offended by the very sight of an acknowledgement of belief?

Apparently, someone thought so.  Obviously those who are of a religious persuasion find such sentiments not only inoffensive but encouraging and uplifting, and those whose orientation is more atheistic or agnostic react with a weary sigh. Thus it long has been, and no doubt always shall be.

What's new here is the pre-editing of content based on an assumption of offense by some; to treat religious observations like a hostile act of language akin to a racist name or shocking incident that needs to be elided and adjusted for general audiences.

Other than keeping a wary eye out for such alterations of reality to fit certain narrow assumptions, I don't know what can be said beyond quoting John Wooden a few more times in full, such as:

"Talent is God-given; be humble. Fame is man-given; be thankful. Conceit is self-given; be careful."

And at the risk of giving offense to anyone who doesn't agree with him . . . about basketball . . .

"Basketball is not the ultimate. It is of small importance in comparison to the total life we live. There is only one kind of life that truly wins, and that is the one that places faith in the hands of the Savior. Until that is done, we are on an aimless course that runs in circles and goes nowhere." 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has a truly dreadful top of the key jump shot, and occasionally misses wide open layups. Give him some tips at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 6-17

Notes from My Knapsack 6-17-10

Jeff Gill

 

That's Your Mess, Your Backyard

___

  

There's an auld Irish legend having to do with Heaven, or at least a step before you get there.

 

Not to promote inappropriate drinking or anything, but the belief is that there's a barrel with your name on it up outside of the Pearly Gates. Every drop of Irish whiskey you spill in your lifetime is not wasted in an ultimate sense – it reappears in that heavenly barrel.

 

The folk tradition goes on to say that, when you die, as you approach St. Peter you are picked up bodily by an angel and popped, head first, into said barrel . . . and if you drown, then to Hades with you.

 

Silly story, isn't it? But it makes you think.

 

Over the last few weeks, I've heard many folks say both online and in person that the oil company execs who cut corners or rushed production in such a way as to create the circumstances of the ongoing disaster in the gulf should be stuffed into the drill pipe themselves.

 

That would be wrong, of course, since the great pressures involved at 5,000 feet of depth would just squeeze their carcasses right on through. Wouldn't work at all.

 

More to the point, that one well-head, among the other 75 or so already dotted around the Gulf of Mexico, is part of our life, our cars, our shipped products sold at "low, low prices," our pension plans and investments.

 

Think of that barrel of Irish whiskey in the story. Then think about every time you've poured oil from an engine down a storm drain, dripped the gas nozzle between the pump and your filler cap, run a boat motor without replacing the top of the engine fast enough as it sprays fuel, taken a second trip to the grocery store when you got home and found you'd forgotten something.

 

That extra forty pounds of stuff you took your time removing from the trunk? Trips you could have doubled up but wanted to play the radio really loud so you drove yourself? The job that gave you a pay bump but meant an extra twenty minutes each way to drive every day?

 

There it is. You don't have to have an angel stuff you upside down into the oil well to see it, you can just watch the live feed online from the ROVs working to reduce the flow from thousands of barrels a day to maybe just hundreds (oh, goody). But it's drowning you all the same.

 

This is what Michael Pollan came to explain up at Denison a couple of months ago: it's not just in our cars and our plastics, but the stain of oil goes right down into the ground, since tractors and irrigation pumps and our flash-frozen, pre-processed, shipped-from-continents-away "cheap food" is all based on "cheap energy."

 

That's oil, in other words. It's already in everything we touch, and now we want to figure out how to shut it off and clean its effects up. That is, indeed, the challenge, no matter how soon we finally control that one well deep below the surface of the Gulf waters.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; if you've figured out how to reduce your dependence on oil, foreign or domestic, tell him about it at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-12

Faith Works 6-12-10

Jeff Gill

 

They Called Him Coach, And More

___

 

"Do not let what you cannot do interfere with what you can do." -- Coach John Wooden

 

As is so often the case, I had other plans for this week, and then I heard about the death of John Wooden at the age of 99. He was born and raised in my home state of Indiana, and was a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), the church in which I was born and baptized and ordained, so I've been hearing about "Coach" all my life.

 

He played high school basketball in a state that almost made that sport the established religion, especially in the earlier half of the last century. His high school team helped open Hinkle Fieldhouse, yes, where they filmed "Hoosiers," and they won once in the three trips he made there.

 

Then he went on to play at Purdue University, helping to win what is still their only national championship in basketball as a player, while also winning a Big Ten scholar athlete award as an English major. Wooden liked to say his pleasure in that award was that the whole team won the national championship, but he earned the scholarship part of that award all by himself.

 

That may qualify as one of the few self-centered comments Coach Wooden ever made, because his character and career are best known for the self-effacing, diligent, virtuous job he did for decades as a coach, starting with high school teams out of college, a sojourn in the US Navy during World War II, and then a college career at what is now Indiana State (later the alma mater of Larry Bird) and then to UCLA.

 

Where he just won ten national championships, seven of them in a row, including a nearly 90 game unbeaten streak.

 

Yes, he was a successful athletic coach, but what has so many both saying much about John Wooden and has left many close to him still speechless (like Bill Walton) in grief and loss is that his legacy was in building character in others. Rick Reilly of ESPN said "He is as square as a pan of fudge and honest as a toothache, but I love him." That really can't be improved upon.

 

Players over and over have said that this man spoke of integrity and commitment and faithfulness in ways that have shaped their entire lives, long after the sneakers came off. He talked about the things that coaches, Little League baseball and club soccer and varsity football alike, all speak of, but somehow coming from Wooden there was an extra weight of absolute sincerity. He lived what he said, loving his wife of 53 years, sweeping up at gym closing alongside of team managers, waiting until the last autograph was signed, right through his ninth decade.

 

What I loved about some of the tributes in print and online after Coach Wooden died was that even with so much having been said over the last century, there were stories still to be told that I'd never heard. One was that as a new high school basketball coach, playing in a regional game, they went down to their locker room at halftime, behind in the score, and the door was still locked.

 

Wooden kicked it down. Then he chewed out his team, returned to the court and got one of his two lifetime technical calls that game (which they won). What I love about that story is that it shows that the preternaturally calm, collected, focused John Wooden wasn't born that way, it wasn't just some innate gift. He had to teach himself some self-control. And he did.

 

I also had never heard about 1948. Coming back from the war, coaching at Indiana State, his team was invited at the end of the 1946-7 season to play in an early version of the NCAA championship – if they didn't bring the one African American member of their team with them.

 

Wooden said, "Then the answer is no." And they didn't play.

 

The team had another good year beginning in 1947, and as the season wrapped up in early 1948, the invitation came again, with the proviso "well, the Negro player can be in your lineup, but he can't stay at the same hotel and don't appear in public with him." Wooden's opinion was that this was even worse, and he said "No" again.

 

Then the NAACP contacted him, after talking to Clarence Walker, a young second-string player from East Chicago, Indiana. They told Coach that having a black player in the national playoffs was worth it, and asked him to reconsider.

 

So Wooden went, taking his team to the finals, playing Clarence Walker in the game . . . and going over to his hotel each morning to eat breakfast with him, where he stayed apart from his team. The color barrier was broken for college basketball playoffs, thanks in part to John Wooden.

 

Christianity could do with a whole lot more Christians like John Wooden.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he has three varsity letters in basketball from high school, but they were all as manager. Tell him about your coach at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 6-5

Faith Works 6-5-10

Jeff Gill

 

A Roof Over Your Head, A Place To Rest Your Heart

___

  

Today you may well hear about the housing voucher line in downtown Newark.

 

Called "Section 8" or "Metro housing" vouchers, this is a federal program that's been around since 1974 to help low-income families stay housed. It's not a giveaway, since each applicant family is means-tested as to income and assets to see if they qualify, and they get a voucher which means that they pay a certain percentage of their income in rent, normally no more than 30%.

 

The federal part is through the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which pays the rest of the rent above that 30% according to what is determined to be "fair market value" for the area and size of the unit rented. Some landlords find that amount to be too restrictive, or the inspections too onerous, and choose not to participate; most landlords like to keep their units occupied, and the guarantee of income from being part of the program is worth any downsides.

 

The major problem, so to speak, with the Section 8 program is that only a certain number of these vouchers are available at any given time, no matter how many people qualify. This means that the waiting list is usually long, and no matter how quickly people increase their income and move off the voucher program, there's plenty already "pre-qualified" to step into that voucher, so the waiting list is opened at what has become long, sometimes up to two year intervals.

 

Which means when the "list is opened" again, as it will be this Saturday for the Licking County Metropolitan Housing Authority, there's gonna be a line. A long line.

 

This time, the waiting list is likely to go over a thousand. If there's a pool, I call 1,200. Sadly.

 

The Metro Housing folks, who have their Section 8 offices now at 144 W. Main St. (sharing the space with the Community Health Clinic), are trying to be kind to their clients, making special arrangements to use the 5^th Street gymnasium just around the corner. This will keep people, some of them, out of the sun or rain or whatever weather Saturday brings.

 

But there's likely to be a line around the block again. It's from 10 am to 3 pm, and you can check out www.lickingmha.org for more information.

 

Some of my non-church friends ask "what do churches do for the homeless?" the answer, in fact, is quite a bit. Between the Licking County Coalition for Housing and its transitional housing program, the Salvation Army emergency housing shelter, the Coalition of Care pooled funds from congregations to help keep people in current housing, and Habitat for Humanity which is working right now to finish one of some two dozen homes to date built by people of faith alongside of the future homeowner: quite a bit.

 

There are also churches which own rentals, who work with some of the above mentioned programs or other supportive housing programs, not to seek the highest income for properties they own but to make the most compassionate use of them. And I can testify from personal experience that both landlords and LMHA board members and staffers in between are often people of faith, who go the extra mile to help families and individuals in need to not fall in between the cracks.

 

What can churches do to help the ongoing problems we have in Licking County of adequate, safe housing for low-income people? First, please pray for grace & peace among everyone who is going through this Section 8 process today. It can be incredibly stressful for everyone on both sides of the table – previous years have been very friendly and filled with little moments of kindness, but the last couple years have not been good for anyone's stress levels. Pray for them all!

 

And look at how your own congregation talks about and uses and relates to property. There is more that many of us in the faith community can do to be aware of the fact that a decent three bedroom rental for a family of four is beyond the reach of a two worker, fulltime, basic wage household. If you're even a couple notches above minimum wage, you may still not be able to find a place to live for you and your kids working 40-60 hours a week, and if you're underemployed as so many are . . .

 

We'll be back to this subject in the coming weeks, but for now, keep praying!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; the need for adequate housing for low-income families is a subject he tries to write about no more than a dozen times a year! Tell him where your heart rests at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 6-3

Notes from My Knapsack 6-3-10

Jeff Gill

 

Artifacts of a Bygone Age

___

 

When you describe it matter-of-factly, it sounds a bit insane.

 

Go far off around the world, to find a substance out of nature and the deep which you must, at great cost simply to extract and transport, bring home to light your living room or illuminate public space, fuel your devices, and even transmute chemically for making other materials.

 

Oh, and it almost inevitably must run out, but we keep using it faster and faster and more wastefully, only occasionally confronting the human cost, let alone the natural impact of what we're doing.

 

Oil drilling, right? Or maybe coal mining? Well, it could describe those economic activities as well. With what's playing out in the Gulf of Mexico, and why we have to treat the Persian Gulf's distant geography like our backyard, all of the above is grimly true for our current dependence on fossil fuels.

 

The reason my hopes for the future are not so grim can be seen, so to speak, in the display window of Taylor Drug (koff), I mean, the CVS pharmacy on Broadway. The next time you stop by Victoria's Ice Cream Parlor or Whit's Frozen Custard, walk as you eat across Prospect, and check out the old time pharmacy windows Greg is kind enough to keep in front of us in 2010.

 

In a large glass jar marked "Spermaceti" is a lump of white waxy stuff. The name is no doubt good for a few jokes from the adolescents on bikes who cluster on that broad stretch of sidewalk, but when you look at it, think of a vast sperm whale plumbing the many thousand foot depths of the Atlantic or Pacific Ocean.

 

The whaling industry of the 1800s traveled the globe in search of the sperm and right whales, the latter of which was "right" because of all the ocean going cetaceans, it was the right one to come upon and harpoon. You could more easily kill, flense, and render a "right" next to your whaling ship, which would float (usually) even when dead, allowing you to cook down the abundant fats from the thick hide in kettles amidships. Those resulting barrels of whale oil were valuable for lamps, making candles, and for lubricating machinery.  If you sighted a sperm whale, a riskier proposition, it was perhaps worth pursuit because, if you could keep the body from sinking, at a certain point you would lower a crewman down into the skull case of this aquatic mammal, yards across, where tons of a waxy material called "spermaceti" was even more useful and much more valuable.

 

Along with whalebone going into corsets and umbrellas and such, the reason a pharmacist would have a supply of spermaceti on hand was that it made for an ideal neutral substance when making up pills, as well as helping make the most clear, bright, steady-burning candles.

 

In the 1850s, a remarkable amount of American life was made from, lit by, or facilitated by products derived from whaling. We couldn't do without it.

 

Can you imagine a day, perhaps a century hence, when using hydrocarbon rich fossil remnants of ancient swamps, drilled from under the oceans or pulled out of distant deserts, will seem just as fantastic? And what technology will replace it?

 

That I don't entirely know, but the likelihood that it will be replaced is summed up by that white waxy lump, harvested a century and more ago from a faraway ocean, now in a jar visible along a Granville sidewalk. Take a look, tell me what you think.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; yes, he's read "Moby-Dick." Tell him a fantastic tale at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-29

Faith Works 5-29-10

Jeff Gill

 

Where Memorials Do Not Stand

___

 

All eyes are watching the Gulf of Mexico, where 5,000 feet below the sunny surface of the water a darker gush blooms in the deeper gloom.

 

Perhaps by the time you read this, the broken wellhead will be capped. Perhaps. The stain of oil across the Gulf will still be poised, sliding, smearing along the coasts.

 

With the larger ecological crisis, a more intimate disaster is still spreading through at least eleven families, the relatives – wives, children, friends, parents – of the men who died early in the disaster that ultimately overturned the semi-submersible drilling rig.

 

Over a hundred other men escaped, and were rescued; something around 75 other platforms dot the Gulf of Mexico, each with their own hundred or hundreds of crew watching nervously, and their families in turn wondering anxiously how this story will turn out.

 

Each time we turn a car ignition or flip on an electrical switch, we are participants in the pressures that led to this extreme blowout in unimaginable conditions of pressure and inaccessibility, all because of the economic hunger for cheap energy.

 

Which of course is not; not cheap, that is, when the entire cost is considered.

 

This is Memorial Day weekend, and the many processions and ceremonies rightly recall us to honor those who have died in our nation's service, beginning from a Civil War era commemoration and extending now to every conflict from the country's beginning to those battles now fought in Afghanistan.

 

There is another way that people die serving their fellow citizens, and that is in a different sort of uniform, but in a conflict with the elements and opposition and resistance almost intentional in its threat. This Memorial Day, I'd like to build a bridge to the roots of Father's Day, still a few weeks away but technically 100 years old in 2010.

 

The best known origin of Father's Day, now the third Sunday in June since Lyndon Johnson affirmed and Richard Nixon proclaimed it as an official holiday, goes back to Spokane, Washington, and a woman who wanted to honor her father, a widower pastor who raised his six children alone after his wife died young; her thought was to place a commemoration on the calendar for all fathers.

 

There's a further connection back to the end of June in 1908, when plans were made at Williams Memorial Methodist Church in Fairmont, West Virginia (now Central UMC), to pair an observance to honor fathers the same way, the month before, Andrews Methodist Church up the road in Grafton had begun to honor mothers on the second Sunday in May.

 

There was an added poignancy to the effort to remember fathers in the spring of 1908. Just a few months earlier, on December 6, 1907, the nearby Monongah Mine had exploded, killing at least 361 men, over 250 of them fathers themselves. Some historians believe that due to intentionally incomplete record keeping, the actual death toll could have been hundreds more, but at least that many are documented and confirmed. There are a few old pictures of streets in the mining settlement of Monongah, and near the downtown courthouse in Fairmont, where from sidewalk to sidewalk, there are coffins packed tight eight abreast, each with a miner inside. The sidewalks are packed with women and children, scanning the faces, looking for their lost.

 

It is in that sense of memorial that Father's Day began, honoring those who work to feed their families, who risk their lives to build up a home, and whose labors make all our lives easier. Spokane got the word out a little more effectively, but the West Virginia roots go a little deeper. Today we recall the miners who died not so very long ago in southern West Virginia, where mines still explode as coal is pried from the depths, and the eleven rig workers whose remains may never be found from the Gulf disaster.

 

Those, too, died serving not only their own families, but their fellow citizens, doing work that we depend upon, whether we realize it or not. Somewhere between Memorial Day, and this centennial Father's Day, and summer's end with Labor Day, we have a chance to recall and remember and realize what some fathers have to do to feed their children and fuel our way of life.

 

In those realizations, we also have a chance to reflect on what we might do together to lessen those risks, to care for those left behind when those risks must be run, and how to live lives that are less dependent on others running such risks on our behalf.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he was proud to serve as a pastor just up the hill from the site of the Monongah Miners Memorial some years ago (not in 1907). Tell him about your father at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-22

Faith Works 5-22-10

Jeff Gill

 

A Long and Winding Road Through History

___

 

We clergy can find ourselves bemoaning, on occasion, our lot in life with the travel we have to do through the week.

 

Pastoral care today can take a fairly modestly-sized congregational leader, in any random week, to four or five different hospitals across multiple counties, and in and out of nursing care facilities on main streets and hidden off country roads.

 

HIPAA has taken away our ability to use the phone as a tool to save steps and trips (if you don't know what a HIPAA is, think the "hippopotamus" of legislative unintended consequences), and health care consolidation means parking garages are often the size of urban shopping center complexes, while the office to get your clergy parking permit stamped is often better hidden than the patient complaint and refund department.

 

The schedule can get weird, too, but that's more and more something people deal with in a variety of vocations as more and more of us do three people's jobs and are thankful for the work at all. What isn't as common, even for those situations, is to have to take your car in a route that would do justice to a delivery service driver, planning out how save miles and time without going through any particularly infamous speed traps.

 

We do have that car, though, and not a mule. It's always eased my irritation at the amount of time I've spent sitting in traffic to reflect on my forebearers in ministry, and what they had to do just to preach on Sundays, let alone call on families when they could.

 

In my own tradition through the Restoration Movement, Alexander Campbell rode out of Bethany, (now West) Virginia above Wheeling, and with the occasional help of riverboats traveled from New England to New Orleans and back again. Horses when he could get them, mules when he had to, which was often, and not occasionally on foot.

 

Francis Asbury, the pioneering Methodist bishop, left journals which detail the thousands of miles he covered over decades of ministry. It is truly awe inspiring to read, if a bit mind-numbing (which is not all that probably went numb for Bishop Asbury). Philander Chase, an early bishop of The Episcopal Church in Ohio & Illinois, traveled to do fundraising for what became Kenyon College and a few other higher ed institutions, not only all across this continent, but frequently crossing the Atlantic to England in the early 1800s.

 

"The Amazing Race," indeed.

 

So I'm looking forward to hearing tonight, Saturday evening at 6:00 pm, from Rev. James Quinn. He died in 1847, which means this is a quite a trip for him, but as an old circuit riding preacher he's up to the challenge.

 

Tonight at Centenary UMC in Granville, in Shepherd Hall, Rev. Quinn will get a little help from Rev. David Maze, a former pastor at Heath UMC, who will talk about the circuit rider days in Licking County, and as part of Centenary's bicentennial, will preach tomorrow at 8:00, 9:20, and 11:00 as Rev. Quinn.

 

On pg. 565 of Hill's 1881 "History of Licking County," it's recorded that Rev. "James Quinn … took his place on the Hock-Hocking circuit [in 1804]. There is no record they preached any where else in the county [previously] than in the little church at Hog Run [now White Chapel UMC], but it is presumable that they occasionally preached in Newark, but if they did they must have held the service under a tree, or in the cabin of some settler, as no building had been erected for church purposes, and was not erected for years afterwards."

 

"Mr. Quinn was continued upon this circuit, being re-appointed in 1805, but he was sent to the Scioto circuit when about one-half of his second year had expired, making his whole service on the circuit, a period of eighteen months, running into the early part of 1806. Before he left the village Newark was attached to it, and his congregation usually numbered "from fifteen to thirty persons," says Mr. Smucker. Here then is the first evidence of the establishment of the first Methodist class in Newark. A small class existed here which Mr. Quinn left in 1806, composed of five or six persons, who met at the cabin of Abraham Wright, esq., an emigrant of 1802, from Washington County, Pennsylvania, who was at this period, and had been for some time, an acting justice of the peace."

 

All I can add to that is: "there were giants in the earth in those days."

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio, but he's no circuit rider; tell him about your travels in faith at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.com.

Knapsack 5-20

Notes From My Knapsack 5-20-10

Jeff Gill

 

Enduring Grace & Lasting Values

___

 

This week, I'm happy to celebrate, is the 25^th time the Lovely Wife and I remember our wedding day back at University Church, across the street from the Purdue campus in West Lafayette, Indiana. It was and is an ecumenical campus ministry, and we met there at a church committee meeting (yes, you can flirt at a committee meeting, it just takes a little more couth and caution).

 

Historically speaking, 25 years isn't all that much, though today it's a little more remarkable. I think about James & Euphemia Reeder, now gracing the Avery-Downer House in a pair of Amzi Godden portraits I've already mentioned, married in 1801, together 51 years until his death in 1852.

 

Jonathan & Margaret Benjamin, early pioneers (Lillie Jones was their daughter) were married for 76 years until Margaret's passing in 1835, with ten children, 77 grandchildren, and at least one great-great-grandchild to hold before they died.

 

76 years. Whoa.

 

From page 602 of Hill's 1881 "History of Licking County," about the Benjamins: "Having passed through the French and Indian wars, and through the war of the Revolution, and having suffered much and long by Indian depredations, both in the loss of friends and property, the finer feelings of his nature had be come blunted to such an extent that lie seemed to have lost most of his sympathy for his fellow man. Still he was a man of religious habits, and of good morals, but was generally considered to be a man that was naturally morose and unsociable, and was not known through life to leave expressed his forgiveness of the Indian race. He was not a reading man, hence what time he gave to social intercourse with his neighbors, was given to the relation of personal experience or to business matters. He was a soldier, or frontiersman, most his life. It was not until he was about eighty years old that he consented to settle himself for the balance of his life. He bought in the woods and cleared up his last farm after he was seventy-eight years old. Notwithstanding this life of hardships, the iron constitution of himself and his excellent wife sustained them to a great age. Mrs. Benjamin possessed social qualities that in a great measure compensated for the lack of them in her husband. They lived together as man and wife nearly eighty years…"

 

They became part of the new Methodist class meeting formed in Granville in 1810 by William & Sarah Gavit, themselves married more than 50 years before her passing. James B. Finley, himself married to Hannah for 56 years until his death, was an early Ohio preacher who supported the fledgling congregation of Gavits, Benjamins, and Montgomerys when he passed through as the assigned "circuit rider."

 

James Quinn followed Finley, and it's to celebrate the Centenary 200^th anniversary that he will return to preach this weekend – a neat trick given that he died in 1847. Not much stopped those olde circuit riding preachers, though, and with the help of Rev. David Maze of today's West Ohio Conference, we will hear from Brother Quinn at 8:00, 9:20, and 11:00 am this "Heritage Sunday."

 

Come hear about some enduring grace and lasting values this Sunday!

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's aiming for that "almost 80 years together" mark. Tell him about what's enduring to you at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 5-15

Faith Works 5-15-10

Jeff Gill

 

Just one quarter-century later…

___

 

 

So here we are, married for 25 years.

 

It's more than that, actually, since we dated for four years before that. My wife and I passed the "known each other half our lives mark" a while back, and (ahem) are now married for that percentage of our journeys as well.

 

It seems like I've known her forever, and that we just met a little while ago: funny how that is.

 

25 years isn't one of those major mega anniversaries, what with Willard Scott having all these 75 and 80 year marriages on along with the centenarians. 50 is golden, 75 is diamond, and 25 is silver, but after our microwave broke last week and the new one arrived (happy anniversary, honey!) it feels like it ought to be the Styrofoam jubilee, or maybe corrugated.

 

We can't say that "everyone said it wouldn't last," because they didn't; the campus ministry where we met and ultimately married (yes, we met at a church committee meeting, it was kismet) would often get very excited about engagement announcements during the post-worship fellowship time. When we announced ours, the reaction was a polite, "well, sure." Apparently it was both obvious and inevitable.

 

Staying married used to be that, which of course it is not anymore. 25 years may be a harder trick than getting to 50 these days, given a generational shift between those two eras that's still hitting us with aftershocks. And now, with medical advances, if you can build a marriage to the quarter-century mark, it should readily stand the storms of life and tests of the times to a half-century and beyond.

 

The big increase in this last twenty years has been in the early divorce. I know that some reading this would like me to make the Biblical and moral case for why cohabitation is wrong, which I'm happy to preach on at length on a Sunday, but in a 700 word column aimed at a general audience thinking variously about what faith means, I'm content with saying: we've run a generation long experiment on cohabitation as a tool for building healthier, happier marriages, and the data are in.

 

It doesn't work.

 

Cohabitation doesn't promote stability throughout your life, it doesn't increase marital happiness, and it doesn't reduce divorce. Quite the contrary. The fact that I know a number of couples who lived together, sometimes for quite a while, before "tying the knot" in a legal or liturgical sense, and have stayed married for a long time – that just means that demographically there are more people who have lived together, but the stats are pretty clear that the numbers go strongly towards cohabitation making relationships weaker, less stable, more likely to split. The exceptions, blessings to all of them, don't contradict that fact.

 

Churches have struggled with how to minister to couples in this new environment. If you say things like . . . oh, like what I just said in this column, from the pulpit, are you condemning all the couples now married and solid and stable sitting in your pews, who lived together before marriage? How do you teach a clear message to your youth when not only the culture but institutions and even most of their families will be telling them something quite different?

 

I would affirm, both here and in my preaching mode, that the key here is not to say what marriage is better than or what manner of life is worse, but to simply proclaim, with great love and clarity what marriage is: a model of God's intention for Christ and the church, a secure basis for building not only families but the indispensible element of community itself, and a school for the soul in good times and bad.

 

Do other manners of life know nothing of those things? Certainly not, but I can say, from scripture, and tradition, and my own beloved experience that it is certainly and indisputably true that an enduring marriage is the revelation of God's redemptive work in creation, an ultimate reality of its own that connects us the reality that is God.

 

Thanks for preaching me that sermon, Joyce. I'm ready to listen another 25 years!

 

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

Faith Works 5-8-10

Jeff Gill

 

Not quite "I gave at the office," but close

___

  

Giving is often a faith community subject in the fall, but not so much in the spring.

 

Which makes this a great time to bring it up, actually.

 

April is usually a time when we think about taxes, and May has just opened with a major set of levy votes for police, fire, school, and library causes, along with mental health & recovery programming going up for a local levy vote for the first time.

 

As we all (I'm pretty sure now) know, while the libraries and some local schools came through this "democratic" process with the support they need to maintain programs and staffing at current levels, much was voted down. The economy is obviously a major factor in these votes, where often very vocal "no" voters will say they support the idea or purpose involved (county parks & green space, vocational education, counseling for low income families), but that their personal situation and that of their friends and families makes a tax increase, especially on property, an unbearable burden.

 

Which may be true. I will note, with cautious skepticism, that I've worked on levy committees in West Virginia and Ohio over the last twenty years, and it's never been a good time to pass a levy, and it's always a tough time for people on fixed incomes. Just saying "well, but now is really a bad time" sounds valid the first few times you hear it, but when you always do, it doesn't represent the compelling case you once thought it was.

 

Individual congregations have to face a similar situation when it comes to giving and launching new efforts, starting outreach initiatives, or just maintaining staff salaries. In good times and bad, there's always someone who will say at board or council or cabinet or vestry (however your fellowship rolls, leadership-structure-wise), "hey, my pay has been cut and/or my benefits are decreasing."

 

Or "many of our people are on fixed incomes." It's not that these statements aren't true, but if one or two people saying it becomes definitive, then you will never grow, expand, or progress in any areas, and your staff will stagnate at best, or lose value in their compensation, broadly defined.

 

My use of "scare quotes" around "democratic" processes above can apply to both church life and our peculiar civic polity in Ohio for school and other public service funding (watersheds can just impose wide-ranging assessments, but schools have to keep using up volunteer and staff time to run election campaigns on a steadily backwards running treadmill?).

 

Even when levies pass, people say "well, not everyone voted on this, it was just [blank] percent." When they fail, adherents say "it's too bad only [blank] percent of the district can vote this down."

 

Now, in church life, I have to admit something: democracy is not an ultimate value in most faith matters. Someone once said "One person and God equals a majority," and we can all think of situations where we wouldn't want a majority vote to determine divine guidance. So I am not at all opposed to, but I am quite cautious about assuming that voting is a good way for a congregation to cast a vision. Leadership is needed, leaders to form and present and explain a vision for where the community is going.

 

On the other hand, there is a blunt force democratic aspect, however your church organizes leadership, hierarchical or congregational, to weekly and monthly giving. Make no mistake about it, that's a vote. Vision casting has to take that into account, which is better than churches getting direct tax subsidies as in state churches such as most of Europe still has. The offering is a rolling referendum, which like polling, can't replace vision, but it should inform that process.

 

Tax season is often a time when each of us can assess our own giving with blunt accuracy, looking in our own giving mirror. The Obamas gave 6% of their adjusted gross income to charity last year, which is pretty good considering that the average churchgoer in America last year gave 2.2%. I should note that the Bushes gave 18% their last year in office, but Obama also directed his entire Nobel award cash to charity.

 

Joe Biden apparently just dropped a few twenties in the plate as it was passed when he attended, putting him right with the average guy, as he likes to say, which in this case is under 1%. Where are you in this spectrum? How are you "voting" on vision?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he's committed to tithing but thinks there's nothing wrong with aiming for 20%. Tell him how you shape your churches' vision at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 5-6

Notes From My Knapsack 5-6-10

Jeff Gill

 

What Time It Is, All Nature Tells

___

 

 

Do you recall View-Master reels? Those 3-D picture discs you slid into a little fake binocular and pointed at a light source, and then pushed the lever on the side to watch the Everglades or Disneyland or astronauts go by in depth and dimension.

 

There was one of a set I no longer have (and I've got a bunch of them still) of a floral clock somewhere, with blossoms that opened in turn through the day, from dawn to dusk.

 

When my Scout troop was about to go visit Greenfield Village, I was kind of excited to learn that they had a floral clock at the entrance, but it was a letdown to find that theirs was just a mechanism for a large set of hands sweeping across flowers arranged as the numbers – it wasn't what I'd come to think of as a floral clock.

 

In truth, it's hard to have a clock garden that keeps good time on a daily basis, but you could have good luck with a calendar garden: by the month, anyhow.

 

We've had the crocuses and daffodils and hyacinth come, and now gone, about to be replaced by peonies and tulips aplenty in May, who will then take a back seat to day lilies and marigolds heading into Memorial Day and the turn to June.

 

Further up into the trees and shrubs, the forsythia are fading along with the flowering pear and cherry, magnolias came and went between the next to last snow and the last snow, but the redbud is lasting right through the spring to tie the earliest blossoms to the fullness now of dogwood. About the time those dogwood petals drop, further up in the canopy we'll see catalpa in full flower, followed by the very tip top skyward facing tulip poplar blooms, all orange and yellow with a hint of peach and pink.

 

Roses will get going seriously about the time greenhouse annuals take over the flower beds, throwing off this whole idea, but it's still true that nature has a clock all her own.

 

I was thinking even more about this as I read about our early settler families, and how special a treat was . . . bread made from wheat ground into flour. They considered the first loaves of their own grain milled into useable and storable form important, because it meant the first steps toward freedom from what was available.

 

We talk nostalgically and responsibly about the utility of eating what is in season and local, but in those pioneer records, it's clear that what this meant in practice, for them, was lots of bear meat most of the year, deer meat other times, and for variety, they made sandwiches. They were a slab of bear meat, put between two slabs of deer meat. I kid you not. No bread, remember?

 

When day lily buds were full, and squash blossoms flowered, you threw those in the frying pan and ate them 'til you were sick of them. Then you got sick of squash, until it was time to get sick of potatoes and onions. But there was always more bear meat.

 

In the modern produce department, time is frozen, sort of. This has costs and implications we need to think about, but we could start by remembering just how thankful we should be for sandwiches in May with good Ohio bacon, local farmstand tomatoes, and some California lettuce atop mayo from wherever they make it and pasteurize it.

 

Or you could wish for the natural days of a deer-bear-deer sandwich to get you through pushing a wooden plow across your acreage! No wonder they drank so much whiskey . . .

 

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

Faith Works 4-30

Faith Works 4-30-10

Jeff Gill

 

Be well, or at least get better

___

 

 

Going back to the subject of health and health care (and thanks for all the e-mails), this is a subject that is of great interest to people of faith.

 

Pretty much everyone who practices a religious tradition acknowledges that there is no spiritual practice that promises guaranteed cures all the time. The stereotype of the faith healer who claims that complete healing is possible as long as "you believe, completely" is just that, a stock figure used to mock and not a description of any actual consistent reality.

 

What is found across denominations and traditions is the belief that for a variety of reasons, healing can take place physically, as well as spiritually. Miracles do happen, say most believers, and we are invited to ask for them or seek them out, but the fact that they don't always show up is handled differently in various churches, while all concede that they might not.

 

Again, blaming the victim for their illness is so rare in actual practice (versus in fiction) as to hardly be worth discussing.

 

Still, there's always a church somewhere it seems with a family in the news, over withholding medical care from a child or refusing to wear glasses because "it would be a sign of a lack of faith in the possibility of divine healing."

 

That's disturbing, but it's also the case that there were doctors who recommended smoking before track meets "to improve your wind" back in the 1920s, and in the early 1980s not a few doctors told their patients to never eat eggs again if they could help it.

 

So we should ignore all doctors today? Nope, didn't think so.

 

I'm sure there's no end of things in medical care today that two hundred years from now will look, to them, then, the same way bleeding a patient in 1799 looks to us now: "hey, you crazy docs, you just killed George Washington!" Chemotherapy and radiation therapy come to mind, but they are the best we have in 2010. In 2210, they'll say "why didn't you give them the anti-cancer shot when they were babies?"

 

Meanwhile, we turn to our spiritual practices as both an indicator and an index of our physical health. If I've learned anything from my health challenges of the last few years, it's that the condition of my body impacts my ability to be spiritually present, whether in worship, in service, or just in my own meditation & prayer life. Likewise, my spiritual robustness helps me to keep on going even when the physical support is not there, or even pulling you back.

 

It's not either/or, it's both/and.

 

Which is why so many churches offer "parish nurse" programs (do an internet search for that phrase – they take many forms), along with congregations that even put together a community clinic as part of their community outreach. That's not an "extra," it's an essence.

 

Caring for the physical body is basic "temple maintenance" (cf. I Cor. 6:19), and it is hard, HARD to pray, with focus and consistency, when your body is tugging your attention back to the self and all its distractions. By the same token, when your spiritual life is a mess, or empty, you are that much faster to self-medicating, whether that's with food, alcohol, drugs, or just pure, unmitigated sloth.

 

Those are the kinds of unspiritual uncenteredness that lead to a body-temple with cracks in the facade and broken sidewalks outside, leaky roofs inside with stopgap buckets set all around, and crumbling plaster with erupting mold and mildew along the baseboards.

 

What would it look like for churches and temples and mosques to take health more seriously? How do we integrate our spiritual care with the medical resources that, quite frankly, do so much for us and add years and years to our lives? Can the building maintenance and the program services departments communicate?

 

Body and spirit are not in opposition: at least in traditional Christian teaching, the body is not a curse or a mistake, but a gift. It is how we experience the gift and blessing of creation, which is why resurrection is mind, body, & spirit, not just a floaty ghosty thing.

 

We need to start living that teaching in how we preach to and with and through our bodies, which is the essence of holistic health care.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he knows that his tuckpointing needs some work around the middle stories of the building. Tell him about your maintenance plans at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 4-24

Faith Works 4-24-10

Jeff Gill

 

Secrets and Hidden Agendas, Not So Much

___

 

 

Spring is a beautiful time, but not always a very calm one. "Be still and know that I am God," says Psalm 46:10, but this is often a season of ferment, turmoil, and uncertainty.

 

Board meetings get tense as the winter deficit is barely balanced out with the Easter bump; plans for vacation season activities reach fever pitch, whether VBS or camp or special series' for adults and families; visitors are either making or not making a choice to return after Easter.

 

Pastors feel the stress of the Easter season not quite ease out of their lower back muscles, but a summer vacation is neither on the calendar nor in the cards; lay leaders start horse trading responsibilities for the post-Memorial Day Sundays.

 

And I think you could blame it on tree pollen if not the Adversary himself: people just get a bit wacky. The fringe stuff starts to get handed around during coffee fellowship (Madalyn Murray O'Hair: still dead, people!), long-simmering questions come up in Sunday school, and there's always someone asking for an evening Bible study of Revelation.

 

Just to help clear out some of the spiritual underbrush for the spring/summer season . . .

 

There is a God. All creation, no matter how you read the signs and chronologies, points to an intention and plan somewhere behind it all.

 

Death is not the end. Spring is when any child should be able to start to make sense of this fantastic belief.

 

The Bible rocks. No, seriously. We're talking the wisdom and discernment of three millennia, sorted and culled in a process that took place right out in the open, written in Hebrew & Greek which are, yes, "foreign languages," but not so strange that any thoughtful person can't use a few simple tools to double check for themselves, translated by dozens of prayerful, careful, thorough teams into many translations. Read any three translations side-by-side of a common passage, and feel the underlying truth start to come alive for you, maybe even something a bit more Alive than that.

 

Jesus did not get married, didn't have any children, and so they didn't end up ruling France or hiding stuff in Scottish chapels, he didn't have much in the way of advice to give anyone, then or now: he just kept pointing out what God was doing, until all that was left was to [ital]be[end ital] what God was doing.

 

That woman on the other side of the church who keeps looking at you that way? She doesn't hate you, that's just how she looks. She can't even remember your name. she has acid reflux.

 

All those people who are trying to stop your ideas? They don't object to your ideas at all. They don't like any ideas, and haven't for decades.

 

The end times? We're in them. Have been since the Ascension. Get over it. As John Wesley said, asked about it while weeding, "First, I would finish working in my garden." Neither the day nor the hour – that seems straightforward enough for anyone.

 

Your budget? You have plenty of money. You may not have enough to do what you want to do (translated: "what we need to do…"), or what you hope to do, but compared to a church in the Congo whose weekly offering is about $2.27, you're rolling in it. What is God calling you to do with that?

 

Is God speaking to you? My prophetic answer is: Duh. Constantly. Sometimes you need to be quiet (Ps. 46:10 again), and sometimes you just need to pay attention (Prov. 26:11); sometimes God speaks directly to us through the Bible (read Augustine's "Confessions" for a wonderful example of this) and sometimes indirectly through others (also read the "Confessions" for a tale of children at play when the saint was at pray).

 

God has said quite a bit with strong emphasis and unambiguous meaning (Deuteronomy 30:19), and no little amount of wisdom that adapts itself to the hearer's need and situation (Acts 2:42); God speaks to your heart all the time, but you need to not try to understand that all alone. You need others to help you sort out your own indigestion from the movement of the Spirit, and you need others to help you actually do what you've never really had any trouble hearing clearly from the start.

 

Or as a brother in ministry once said to me, "Giddy-yup."

 

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

Faith Works 4-17

Faith Works 4-17-10

Jeff Gill

 

Beyond the Health Care Debate, A Healing Discussion Is Needed

___

 

 

Back in junior high school, our town had a 135^th anniversary come up (I'm not even sure if there's a Latin tag for that like "quasiquicentennial" for 125^th).

 

Our social studies teacher saw an opportunity, and grasped it firmly, getting the local paper to basically give us both the occasion, and a chance to fill some pages.  Each of us in the history club (yes, and I was in the AV club, too) got an assignment, and I ended up with the hospital.  I forget how the various civic institutions were parceled out, and I recall wanting to draw the assignment to write about the library – I loved going to the library, and who wants to go to the hospital? But I embraced the inevitable, and recalled that the hospital administrator was on my paper route.

 

The next time I collected there, I asked Mr. Malasto if I could interview him, and he was entirely delighted to say yes: I barely avoided having to do the interview right there, but the route was only half finished.

 

The next day, I went back, notebook in hand, after the route was delivered, and sat down at his kitchen table. "You know, Jeff, your church founded our hospital."

 

That was not what I was expecting to hear. I had a bunch of questions in mind, but that just completely threw me. A church, founding a hospital? How does that happen?

 

Back in the late 1800s it happened that way quite often, actually. Over the years, I've always had this extra incentive to find out what the "origin myth" of the local hospital is, and most of them trace back to a start in a big old house near a church where a few walls got knocked out, some "casual wards" were set up with beds shoved in remarkably close together, and a surgical suite arranged often in the solarium (good clear north light is good for both artists and pre-electricity surgeons, it turns out).

 

As a ministry student, I did my Clinical Pastoral Education at Methodist Hospital in Indianapolis, and many is the time I've glanced up at the large white neon cross that is the remnant of the "White Cross Society" and Methodist history behind Riverside Hospital over in Columbus – and you don't have to know much history to intuit the Catholic roots of places called Mount Carmel or St. Ann's.

 

Once upon a time, churches did health care. It was part of their outreach and mission like baking brownies, raking leaves, and providing surgical services. It looks kind of crazy there on the page, put like that, doesn't it? But that's how it started.

 

Baking and lawn care have stayed pretty much in our ballpark, but hospital care has grown and developed in some interesting (ahem) ways. If a church said "we're planning on starting a hospital," your response is likely to be "oh, in Haiti?" and you're thinking of more of a glorified clinic, with cinderblock walls.

 

If the person replied "No, here in Licking County," you might just wonder how long they've been off their meds. Technology, billing, staffing – a congregation just can't do that kind of stuff, right?

 

What the modern world of medical care can and should help us consider as people of faith is the distinction between cures, and healing. A medical cure today is likely to include surgery and prescriptions and rehab work, and the growth or tumor or injury is excised or shrunk or repaired. That's all important, useful work, and the cure rates for all kinds of formerly fatal illnesses is simply amazing.

 

But even when there's a cure, there's often still a need for healing. Healing can take place when there is no cure, in fact, perhaps even more importantly so. Cardiac patients still feel cracked open long after their sternum knits back together, they need healing. AIDS patients who have their illness under control still feel disconnected from society, they need healing. Hospice care is not a matter of dials and knobs and white coats (mostly), but of healing, for the patient and for those who love them.

 

In all the debates around health care these days, can churches still do healing? We can visit and pray and participate in preventive care and be a meaningful part of the medical world, and miraculous cures are a subject all their own, but what about healing? Is this an area we can see ourselves in with a central role, or has the hospital experience left us thinking that a spot beside the bed is the only proper place for faith?

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; tell him about healing work you've been a part of at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Knapsack 4-15

Notes From My Knapsack 4-15-10

Jeff Gill

 

Meeting Friends You'd Never Seen Before

___

 

Have you had the experience of meeting old friends for the first time?

 

Most of us have had the chance to run into someone, start to interact with them, and suddenly feel like we've known them for years . . . and those opportunities usually do end up lasting for the rest of your life.

 

Last fall, I walked into the Avery-Downer House on Broadway, here in Granville, to do a program for Ann Lowder and the Robbins Hunter Museum she so ably directs. Ann smiled wisely at me while talking to some earlier arrivals, and waved me back to the Long Room, in the back of the 1842 Greek Revival marvel next door to the library.

 

I walked into the room, nodded at Robbins Hunter, Jr.'s portrait in his usual spot over the sideboard, turned, and stopped cold.

 

On the north wall were two old friends, familiar looking, and quite new in a very antique sort of way.

 

There were a couple of other people already in the room that I fear I was quite brusque with, being minimally polite until I could turn again and walk a bit closer to the pair of portraits in modern, elegant, simple black and gold frames.

 

After I'd stared from near and far, straight ahead and at an angle (yep, these were real, original oil paintings, from somewhere in the early 1800s), Ann came in the room, beamed at me, and said "Well, what do you think?"

 

"What do I think? I think you have two new Amzi Godden portraits!"

 

The sneak had been holding out on me, but in fairness to Ann, they'd just arrived the previous week as a bequest to the Robbins Hunter Museum from a lady who had visited the Avery-Downer House perhaps only once, back in the late 1960s.

 

Jean Rumsey had a passion for genealogy that fired her spirit well into her 90s; her home in Lombard, Illinois was so much a workshop for assembling family history from across New Jersey and Connecticut and back into England, into the mists of the medieval era, that she slept on a sofa in the living room, so the breadth of her bed could be yet another platform for sorting and sifting the folders and forms which traced her family history. Those relations included the two elderly figures now on a wall in Granville.

 

James & Euphemia Reeder are buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery in Newark; they both died not too long after these portraits were painted, just before the Civil War. Thanks to the staff at Cedar Hill, I quickly found their plots, but the gravestones are long gone, now unmarked if well recorded. A few letters in the Licking County Historical Society point to their home near 11^th & Merchant Streets "up on the bluff," and they have a pious history with Newark's First Presbyterian Church where both James, and Amzi Godden's father Lewis were elders and builders of the first church there, and where Euphemia "lived her love to God, and died a triumphant death."

 

In these two paintings, though, they are remembered, visible, and in a fascinating post-Easter sense, very much alive. You should meet them!

 

The Robbins Hunter Museum is open Wednesday through Saturday, 1 to 4 pm or by special arrangement; call Ann at 587-0430 or e-mail annlowder@windstream.net for more information.

 

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

Faith Works 4-10

Faith Works 4-10-10

Jeff Gill

 

Clericalism and Its Discontents

___

 

 

Respect for the clergy is one of those categories of "how things used to be" that I suppose I could have written about, along with other changes in the life of faith communities in general and Christian denominations in particular, Protestant or Catholic alike. (I leave Orthodoxy out only because they're fairly under-represented in Licking County, although I know they're out there, usually driving into Columbus for worship.)

 

This past Easter season saw a firestorm of clergy sexual abuse coverage, most of it stemming back to stories coming out of the 1960s and 70s, within the Catholic churches of the US, Ireland, and Germany. Questions of proper handling then and cover-ups or pay-offs later all gave much fodder to the usual media shots taken at the Roman Catholic Church, using eminently telegenic shots of Vatican liturgy with Pope Benedict XVI front and center.

 

That's called having your cake and eating it, too.

 

If you think I'm downplaying the problem of clergy sexual abuse, you've not been reading my columns for very long.  It's a huge issue, and one that I believe deserves cultural and media attention.  Thank heavens that, since Martin Luther reaffirmed the right of clergy to marry back in the 1500s, Protestant Christians have had no sexual scandals among their ministers.

 

Oh, wait.

 

My point is that there's a gleeful piling-on aspect to all this pre-Easter froth, where some, especially in TV news, have been dealing from the bottom of the deck in their treatment of the Catholic tradition. They want to show they're addressing religion, since the research on their dwindling audiences shows that many of us located somewhere in between their New York and LA studios actually attend worship services and read old books for current guidance. So they want the visuals, but they also want to get in snide references to hypocrisy and tell untold stories hinting at mystery and hidden secrets. Think "DaVinci Code."

 

The reality is that these stories are very simple, and not unique to the Catholic faith. Powerful people in charge of organizations tend to not like to turn in their own employees, and back in the 60s, 70s, and even the 80s, a "therapeutic model" was in the ascendancy that said "let's not traumatize the kids further, and let's send the abusers to a remote residential treatment program."

 

Which turns out to be a fairly muddleheaded way to proceed, but it wasn't a Catholic piece of muddleheadedness.

 

But where's the story in saying that? And folks who disagree with a male only clergy, or dislike clerical celibacy, will have their own reasons for pushing these stories a bit farther than they really can roll on their own.

 

Meanwhile, if you're thinking I'm saying any of this as a Catholic myself: not so much, nor is anyone in my immediate family. I grew up with more extended family members scared of Catholicism than understood it (another element to the coverage I'm not even going to get into).

 

Just as a general point -- I said to my fellow mainline Protestant clergy colleagues back 20 years ago "don't enjoy laughing about Swaggart & Bakker too much, because they are impacting us and our churches, too." Oh, no, they all cried, those fellows aren't like us at all, and our parishoners and communities know we aren't them.

 

That next year, with no national financial issues roiling the waters, the United Methodist Church saw a 3+% decrease in giving; many UMC, PCUSA, UCC, & DoC churches in our area saw the same or more, up to around 5%.

 

I fear that while I tend to hang out with a more mixed mainline and evangelical crowd these days, they are, too many of them, repeating this mistake: I say "beware your amusement with the plight of the Catholic hierarchy flailing to explain their incompetence and irresponsibility in reporting child sex abuse." Oh, no, they respond, no one would confuse us with the Pope in Rome and all his pomps . . . and the current generation hears and feels even more affirmation for their lack of respect or consideration of any authority, temporal or spiritual, that is relevant to their lives from the leadership of wiser, more senior figures.

 

When we Protestant Christians get in our own digs on the Vatican and the Roman magisterium ("wrong in 1517, still wrong today!" a clergy acquaintance nearby chortled in his blog), we may be digging a pit that we'll shortly find ourselves inside.

 

I don't like the view.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and supply preacher around central Ohio; he will never be Pope. Tell him a story from your road to faith at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow Knapsack @Twitter.

Faith Works 4-3

Faith Works 4-3-10

Jeff Gill

 

At the Crack of Dawn, Rumblings of a Cloudless Sky

___

 

 

The "crack of dawn," no doubt, thought the gardener, as he rummaged in the dim pre-dawn light through his rough leather sack for the last of yesterday's loaf of bread.

 

Right enough, with the sky finally peeling back to show stars and the promise of sunlight, after these last few days of darkness at noon, ominous roiling clouds overhead, and the very earth shaking right through yesterday.

 

It began Friday, with a shock in mid-afternoon enough to knock a man off his feet, toppling grave markers and it's said in the streets that even the high, wide veil in the Temple itself tore from top to bottom, as the vast walls of the inner chambers heaved about.

 

Strange days, he thought, but now the first day of a new week, and a new week is just what we need. After the distraught frenzy of the crowds, building and growing through the Passover preparations, rioting in the porticos of the Temple itself, Roman processions in the street flaunting their condemned captives, snatching innocent pilgrims out of the throng for commandeered dirty work on their behalf: the Passover itself yesterday was subdued, quiet, with just the occasional shaking deep beneath everyone's feet to keep the uneasy calm off balance.

 

Now light is splitting the sky overhead, and the nearly visible beams of dawn reach over the Mount of Olives, touch the gold peaks of the Temple as with fire, and soon even this rocky garden patch on the west side of the city, just beyond the walls, would have light enough to move about without fear of a foot set wrong, a wrenched ankle for your troubles.

 

It was not the first time the Roman swine had used his property for an execution ground, and it was not as if he had any choice in the matter. No one bore him any ill will, for who could say "No" to Rome? Only messianic raving preachers on marketplace platforms could shout contradiction to the imperial eagles as they passed, and they were snatched up and stuffed away so quickly you couldn't keep their names straight in memory. All the Johns and Jameses and Joshuas started to blur together.

 

What this dawn and new week meant was a setting to rights. Crowds gathered, not too disorderly with legionaries nearby, but new spring flowers were trampled, gravestones not shaken by earthquake might have been swung about to make a place to stand and see more clearly . . . what kind of thoughtless fool would stand on a tomb slab? Didn't they know that someday they would want the peace of their grave to be uninterrupted into the ages? The Sadducees said that death was oblivion and the disposition of the body was no matter to anyone, least of all to the dead, but in his garden, the body would be given rest and respect, and the . . . soul, or what ever the Almighty might determine, would have a place, here if not in Sheol.

 

Dawn breaking over the western wall of Jerusalem, and the crust worn down by equally eroded teeth, the old gardener stood to survey his plot. The one piece of property he owned outside of the city proper, it was a rough square of rocky knolls, level spaces of bush and planted herbs or flowering shrubs, the vales each with their funerary niches and large stones to seal them from the dogs.

 

The Romans were all too good about cleaning up their own messes, so the post holes chipped into the higher rocks were bare to the sky, only the stain of blood on the bare ground about them showing their purpose. No nails, fragments of wood, or even nastier pieces of anything were left. It would be the litter of the witnesses only to pick up, and a few broken stems to either saw off or bend back.

 

Yet even at this hour, there was some disturbance further below; he could see, down where there was still some shadow, a figure quickly striding away in a clean white robe, and closer still a group of women rushing towards where he stood, holding ointment jars and no doubt looking for a particular tomb, or help with moving a stone.

 

The gardener sighed. This was never the start of a good day, or good news. He hitched up his robe at the shoulders, and walked towards the women to see what they had to say.

 

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