Faith Works 2-9-19

Faith Works 2-9-19

Jeff Gill


Conversation hearts by any other name
___

Yes, there's more to say about emergency shelter and addiction and the faith community coming together. Not this week! But more to come. Thank you again to the more than a dozen congregations which shared time, treasure, and talents to shelter over 30 persons who are currently homeless in our county, plus another dozen who for a variety of reasons stayed out of any shelter, formal and ongoing or temporary, but who received care and concern in a time of need.

 

Much more to say here. But not yet!

 

This week, we honor an obscure saint of the Christian faith who once lived in an ancient imperial capital.

 

Valentinus lived in Rome, did something for a young couple out of his faith in Jesus, which resulted in his martyrdom. Certainly he deserves honor and respect for that example, that witness – and that's what the word martyr literally means, witness – which lives on in the Christian community today.

 

The normal way to do that in the church calendar is to mark a saint's day, like St. Nicholas on Dec. 6 or Saint Lucia on Dec. 13. So St. Valentine is remembered on Feb. 14.

 

The commemoration has, um, changed over the years.

 

The community leader who died a martyr has been replaced with cupids and hearts and lots and lots of candy. It has become a festival of love, and that's not entirely beside the point. Love is at the heart of what Christians believe, and everyone knows something about love and its transformative power whatever your faith perspective. So Saint Valentine certainly can be shared, even if some of us would like to make sure he doesn't get buried in the cards and decorations and boxed delivered sets of pajamas and giant teddy bears holding a heart.

 

Saint Paul wrote a powerful passage in I Corinthians chapter 13 about faith, hope, and love, and how the greatest of these three is love. He didn't mean sentiment, and he surely wasn't talking about romance, but his Greek original talks about "agape," one of four Greek words that can be translated as "love" but is specifically "sacrificial" or self-giving love. It's not about deciding who gets the rose, or the chocolate covered cherries, but about giving of yourself.

 

My own Valentine is a woman who has given much to me over the years. Ministry is, to be blunt, not always the best thing that can happen to a marriage. When I was a little tiny baby minister, there were still older clergy who would come and tell seminary students, and I quote, "you need to understand that between the church and your family, the church will always come first." Ahem.

 

The hard reality of this is that there's a particular bandwidth of life and ministry where this is true. When a family event is happening, and the message comes that a church member is being rushed to the Emergency Department of the hospital; when the family schedule is set but a funeral plan intrudes, it's often true that the family has to make the change. But those critical incidents shouldn't become anything and everything to do with church life . . . yet I recall when I first moved to Ohio an older clergymember asking why I didn't come to a particular event in the region, on hearing me say "because it's the same weekend as my wedding anniversary," responded "I haven't been home for my anniversary for thirty years, son."

 

That's not the Body of Christ, that's just stupid. Thirty years ago, I didn't say stuff like that out loud, but I'm now that older minister, and I want to say loudly "don't go down that road." Sacrifice that is compelled is no sacrifice at all, it's basically theft.

 

Yet I know my wife has given up much so I can serve, and I honor her for that; she's gotten a chance in the last couple of decades to do some leadership of her own in building up the Body of Christ, and I hope I am at least making some offerings in response. We've learned, as couples do, that there's always the need to adapt, and to change. This year, the originator of "conversation hearts" has ceased production, but other makers have stepped in. Things change, and to keep the continuity of love, we have to figure out how to deal with the sacrifices of the temporary and external to allow the essence to carry on.

 

That's where many older couples are indeed a witness to us; my prayer for you, dear readers, is that you have an older couple or two around you to witness to what a life of adaptation and stability, change and enduring love, can look like. Sacrifice, and gift, and change, but something truly permanent in this changing world.


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

 

Faith Works 2-2-19

Faith Works 2-2-19

Jeff Gill



A warming tale
___



No church event is over until two pastors are walking around behind
push brooms . . .

Okay, 9 am Thursday and we have shut down our temporary overnight
warming shelter, a pop-up project of local churches working together,
across denominations and traditions, with one holy spirit driving us
all. (Holy? Spirit?) Blessings to Vertical 196 for opening early this
past week, and Newark Naz for doing transport back and forth – it was
so cold Wednesday morning their van wouldn't start, but they Dunkirked
the problem and five drivers later we #GotRDone.

We also got some help taking beau-coup blankets over to the Haven at
St. Vincent De Paul Center Newark, OH, whose blanket stash was empty,
but we were certainly overabundantly blessed at Newark Central
Christian Church. Hundreds of blankets were brought in through the
first night.

What we didn't need: food. Sadly, I had it strongly demonstrated to me
that one major impact of meth is not that it "makes you skinny," but
it does massively depress the hunger instinct (among other things).
Food was not a big item, and we didn't move much of what we had.
Blessings to our friends at the Naz and Brucker and Kishler and John
Edward Price Flowers for dinners, and to Trinity Episcopal and Family
of Faith Community Church for breakfasts (and Pastor John for helping
with final clean-up the first day). We didn't need much in the way of
food, as it turned out. Coffee and lots of sugar and creamer go fast,
and we were all set there.

Did I mention we don't need blankets? Blessings to all the families
and individuals and churches, we didn't get names, no thank you notes
to write I guess, but they came from friends and acquaintances and new
friends I haven't met yet from all over Licking and half of Franklin
County. Truly, God bless you.

Thanks to Licking County EMA and Sean Grady, we got 14 cots, ended up
with 12 filled the first night, and if we had 3 new arrivals (all 12
said "oh yeah, we will come back if we can") on Wednesday night, we
are out of cots. Two guys have sleeping bags we gave them, and they
offered before anyone even asked to sleep on the floor for new people.
No, I'm not crying, you're crying.

(Did I mention the guy who left at 5 am to get to work? And his 8
months pregnant girlfriend who left at 5:15 because she wanted to
stick close to him? Wouldn't take a ride. Nope. One guy the van crews
found getting ready to sleep in his car at the library lot, and asked
him if he wanted to sleep warm. He said "well, yeah!" and came in, got
a cot . . . but ended up sleeping most of the night in a chair, which
seemed weird to me, until I realized: he's been sleeping sitting up
for weeks. It felt more comfortable to him, in the warmth, but sitting
up, like in his car. [sniff]. Did I mention the guy who dug through
all the coats and sweatshirts on offer, found a lone towel, and asked
if we had any washcloths? No, we did not have a single washcloth. A
hundred blankets, no washcloths. "If it's okay, and you have some
scissors?" And this fellow thinking faster than I cuts the towel into
six washcloths. Problem temporarily solved, eh?)

I am so thankful. Thankful for this opportunity to serve in Christ's
name, and for our community to measure with a new angle on things the
need. We had full emergency shelters, and about 20 unsheltered
homeless who needed what we offered in two locations overnight during
this chill interval. We know for sure of two guys the Crossroads
Crusaders took propane to, who stayed out in tents with their dogs. So
the need is there, and it is real. The problems people have that get
them to this place, they too are real, but they have solutions. We can
find them, together.

Let keep working on that. Bless you all who were mindful of us last
week, and who are praying still. All God's people need homes. Now, and
forever.



Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he
got a little upset when folks said Monday afternoon we just couldn't
come up with a warming shelter for two nights in this community. He's
touchy that way. Tell him what gets under your skin and spirit at
knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 1-26-19

Faith Works 1-26-19

Jeff Gill

 

Seeking faithfulness

___

 

Two weeks ago I picked up a theme off of the well known hymn "Great Is Thy Faithfulness."

 

I talked about a number of ways we struggle with faithful living and faithful lives in terms of church attendance and involvement. There were allusions to wider questions of being faithful in our culture, but I didn't go there.

 

You all did, however. And I'm not surprised.

 

A number of emails and messages came to me sharing pain and struggles with marital infidelity. As I stated, faithfulness isn't honored as much as it once was, and those who have experienced that most intimate form of faithlessness can see that problem more clearly than most.

 

Add to marital breakups the increasing infrequency of not getting married, putting faithfulness in a relationship into a more fluid, less trustworthy basis. If you've been together for ten years, own a house together and have a child or two, you don't – as we're told all the time, it seems – need a piece of paper to make that relationship real. But if the conversation's never had, if it's just assumed (and sometimes assumed by one, not the other) that this is now a committed, faithful relationship, without the marriage bond it's much easier for one or both to say "well, we're not tying each other down."

 

And I appreciated hearing it wasn't just me thinking that there's a link, distant thought it might seem, between a lessening of faithfulness in personal relationships to a loss of faithfulness in some fairly trivial areas of life: and a question about chickens and eggs. There used to be Ford families and Crest toothpaste users and CBS households and Captain Crunch breakfast tables, just as people once looked first for the Methodist or Presbyterian logos before they asked about the youth group or the preacher's politics.

 

No, I am not saying consumer choice led to rootless emotional and spiritual lives, but I would argue it becomes a large sticky ball of clamorous choices, rolling right over all of us and leaving a certain amount of anxious confusion in its wake. If we are the sum of our consumer choices, in a world of obvious advertising influences, then how can the real me be my choices, when clearly a clever ad with Flo or Tony the Tiger or Matthew McConaughey can cause me to choose differently?

 

Leaving us with an odd taste in our mouths as we're all encouraged to define ourselves by our choices while the media culture we're saturated in pounds away to influence those decisions, in means both obvious and subtle.

 

And the larger corrosion of that acid bath into our psyches is to implicitly condemn as false and foolish any sort of consistency. How many different little oblique ways do you feel it communicated that staying in a pattern, sticking with a "rut" (can you hear it there?), continuing with a product line or shopping habit, or even staying with the same partner for decades is somehow a denial of your true self, even your best self? Change is the sign of life, and more change is more lively.

 

What reinforces that is how the marketplace makes it hard to stick with anything for long. You find a candle whose scent you like, a gum you want to chew, a brand of shirts that works for you, but inevitably, you can't get it anymore. The five types becomes sixteen, and you hunt in vain among the sixteen for the closest to the one you used to buy. Do you notice what that also means? You have bought a product for years, then it's discontinued, and you have to buy a couple of different versions to ultimately come up with the closest match to what you already knew you liked.

 

Less product gets sold if you keep selling the same stuff. Everyone knows that. So we stay off-balance, vulnerable to impulse, groping for the right new that's really who we are.

 

So it is with picking a spouse, or choosing a church. Dating apps and cafeteria spirituality allow us to keep on playing the field, checking out what's new. Meanwhile, faithfulness is not just kind of stuffy, but implicitly a bad thing. You might just get comfortable with who and what you have, stay at home, make some bread, throw some things out you don't need, and not replace them.

 

And you might just develop habits of the heart, towards peace and love. Where's the profit in that?

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he usually tries to avoid being too snarky in these columns, but sometimes it's hard. Tell him where you see faithfulness as a blessing at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Faith Works 1-19-19

Faith Works 1-19-19

Jeff Gill

 

Milestones and vantage points

___

 

This week I begin my fifteenth year of writing this column for the Newark Advocate.

 

You've gotten about 725 "Faith Works" columns, and adding in a weekly piece called "Hebron Crossroads" in the old "Community Booster" which became a biweekly "Notes from my Knapsack" in the Granville Sentinel, there are over one thousand newspaper columns somewhere on the hard drive of my computer.

 

I'm typing on my fifth laptop, and the files have (I think) been transferred from device to device, so they're probably all there. It's surprising to me how infrequently I go back to check what I said before, but there are times, and even questions that come by email about "that piece you wrote back in 2011 about…" which cause me to troll the digital depths to find what I once said.

 

The first ones I wrote for us here were done on, I kid you not, a tangerine clamshell iMac, fondly remembered but long gone. I've cobbled them together in three homes but many more locations, a few under deadline pressures even on my more recent smarter (they tell me) phone with one finger. I've composed them on vacation, on the road, one literally in a cave, a few in cabins, a couple of them sitting near if not by the Grand Canyon.

 

But I've written all of them thinking of you.

 

This is the tricky question of column writing, I think, and I suspect it's true of all columnists (I've only discussed the craft with a couple of fellow practitioners) let alone religion column writers. It's a practice very closely akin to preaching, something else I have done weekly for time out of mind. (Okay, that's a lie, I've been preaching consistently for thirty-seven years if not weekly, somewhere around 1,500 pulpit messages delivered plus 250 eulogies at funerals.)

 

When you preach, you open up God's word in the Bible, and you try to open up yourself to God's Living Word in the living Christ at work in you, and you attempt to, well, interpret that word to the world around you.

 

Which means you have to be attentive both to God, and to your audience. If you are very attentive to the Lord, but give little thought to who you're trying to communicate with, you can have a clear sense of what the Divine One is up to but put it across poorly. Granted, you can also spend too much time wondering what the people need, or want to hear, and not tell them what God is nudging you firmly to say. It's a constant balancing act.

 

And in terms of preaching, it's a public high wire act. You go up into the pulpit without a net, so to speak (this is why many preachers prefer to use a manuscript, which is the closest thing to a net you've got under you sometimes), and walk out across the falls in public view. You don't want to fall off on one side into being too esoteric, so Godly as to be incomprehensible to the people listening over the roar of the worldly waters; you also don't want to fall off on the other side, so proud of communicating vividly and clearly you don't say anything shocking or disturbing or even about the Lord at all. So you want to put your feet very carefully, one step at a time, until you return to the solid ground of "and now let us turn in our hymnals to . . ."

 

Likewise, column writing. Sure, I like for people to like reading these; I suspect my editors through the years (I literally can't tell you how many, but they've all been incredibly supportive and helpful, from Michael Shearer who first invited me to take up this challenge, to Ben Lanka today) want readers to look forward to opening up their paper or webpage and read this week's entry.

 

You are a very diverse and complex congregation, though. It's not as if I can just sum up one image of a "constant reader" in my mind, though the emails you send help me develop a bit of a picture. In my thoughts, in my prayers, I do think about you . . . and what God is asking me to challenge you with, invite you to consider, present as the word in this space each week, for as long as Gannett has the patience to give it to me.

 

And I pray that it is, even when it's not a perfect column, always a word of life to you in your own living.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he's hoping he's got another fifteen years in him of column writing, but wonders what the format and media will look like in 2034! Tell him what you are hoping to hear at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 1-17-19

Notes from my Knapsack 1-17-19

Jeff Gill

 

Might as well face it

___

 

Robert Palmer suggested that we could, in fact, be addicted to love. Or maybe he didn't mean it as a general statement, but we might as well face it: addictions are not uncommon.

 

I've been involved for some time now with the Licking County Addictions Task Force, and if you think that doesn't include Granville, I suggest you do an online search for a video about Denial, Ohio (which looks awfully familiar on the screen). View the full 55 second version.

 

Opioids have gotten the headlines and the major media attention through books like "Dreamland" by Sam Quinones, which starts and ends in Portsmouth, Ohio and features Chillicothe and Columbus; Elaine McMillion Sheldon, who has been brought to our area a few times by our own Jack Shuler, has made a striking short documentary that you can see on Netflix titled "Heroin(e)" which in forty minutes follows three women around Huntington, West Virginia that's about the same size as Newark & Heath and in many lights looks the same (if you're really pressed for time, watch the music video she did for John Prine's "Summer's End").

 

But our local scourge has tended to be meth, which Jack has described in searing detail for a piece in the new January/February "Pacific Standard" which you can also find online. Many in our county have banded together to try to deal with a wave of fentanyl-related overdoses, and the ongoing addiction problems these situations have inadvertently helped reveal more generally. It's wide, it's deep, and it's often multi-substance use and abuse.

 

I've been asked repeatedly versions of a perfectly reasonable question: "why do addicts use drugs, anyhow?" The point being that if we can figure out what's become so intolerable about modern life that it makes drugs attractive, then if we address that we eliminate the demand side of the equation . . . because the war on the supply side of the drug problem doesn't seem to have worked.

 

For what it's worth, part of my response would be -- Why did Vikings drink copious amounts of mead? Why did Malay pirates incessantly chew khat? Why did Soviet era leaders let alone kulaks before them drink vodka to the point of insensibility? To some degree, this is a human universal, and the interesting question is "what happens when people choose to live otherwise?"

 

Or closer to home: why did Austrian glassblowers after migrating to Newark, Ohio drink Morath Brewery beer in mass quantities after they left the Heisey Glass plant? Or why former Baden-Wurttemberg residents in large numbers at Union and W. Main and 11th St. pour gallons into their steins before coming home from the Wehrle stove works?

 

I think the focus can also be usefully put, as Jack has tried to do, on those who successfully navigate recovery, and to ask "how do you live a fulfilling life without mood-altering substances?" Because there are answers to that question out there, and I think those successes are worth pursuing and interrogating. I encourage you to find his article online, and start thinking about your own answers to that question.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he really hopes you'll read Jack Shuler's articles. Tell Jeff what you think about addiction in Our Fayre Village at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

For Craig: links mentioned here stem from — https://psmag.com/magazine/a-year-in-the-heart-of-the-addiction-crisis-in-rust-belt-america

Sidebars — https://psmag.com/magazine/five-groups-successfully-fighting-addiction and https://psmag.com/social-justice/licking-county-ohio-a-corrections-strategy-that-offers-counseling-art-classes-and-mindfulness-training

Oh, and — https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--3nEGmeFW8