Faith Works 12-15-18

Faith Works 12-15-18

Jeff Gill

 

Christmas music in our heads and hearts

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Got a favorite Christmas song? It's probably controversial to someone.

 

This is a topic probably worth avoiding, but the important part of this ongoing debate in our culture about Christmas music is that I think there's no time of year when songs and tunes and singing are more important, to all of us.

 

It's often pointed out by secular commentators that part of how the birth of Christ got associated with December 25 (not a date specifically mentioned in any of the Gospels) is that Rome had a festival of "Sol Invictus," the "unconquered sun," which began on Dec. 25 because it is the first date you can actually measure with basic instruments that daylight is getting longer.

 

Since around June 22, the longest day of the year and the summer solstice, astronomically speaking, each day has gotten shorter. The longest night this year is coming soon, on Dec. 21 . . . almost six hours longer than night lasted in June.

 

So we put up our lights and add candles indoors and do what we can to increase illumination because, hey, it's dark out! For a long, long time this time of year. And yes, from Dec. 25 you can sense that it is not getting longer, and might just be growing day by day, hallelujah!

 

Which is where music comes in. A song in the night lifts the gloom; a sad song makes it better, according to McCartney and Lennon. If we can't shine as much light on the subject as we had back in the summer time, we can make it glow with music. It's the tunes and tales set in four part harmony which give us another way, along with strands of lights and wreaths set with candles, to lighten the darkness, both within as well as without.

 

Christmas carols are a perfect example for me of this principle at work. They sing of long nights, little towns, stars in a chilly night sky, cold deserts and moonlight. They also tell us about hope and peace and love and joy in ways that make us smile in the silent night, which ask what child this is while answering the question with a song of joy to the world. By the end of the song, if not somewhere in midverse, the light starts to shine, such as over there, round yon virgin mother and child.

 

Everyone feels the growth of darkness and the shortening of the days this time of year, whatever your faith. Even if you have no involvement in a faith community, you have a history with how we have endured the dim days and endless nights in the past, and how we reach out ahead to the hope of light yet to come. So we all like Christmas lights, and the shine of candles, and songs. But we don't all like the same songs!

 

And yes, in an age where many are seeking a secular turn in public spaces, it gets uncomfortable for some to be expected, at school or work or in official settings, to sing "veiled in flesh the Godhead see." Even the "Hallelujah Chorus" and the repeated "King of Kings, and Lord of Lords" ruffles a few who love the oratorio, but hesitate at the statements made.

 

Christmas songs, I'd say, come in three categories. There are the overtly religious: "O Little Town of Bethlehem," or "The First Noel." Got it, they involve religious confessions that everyone doesn't share – and honestly, I don't want people to just mouth those words. So I can work with how they've faded from public view, if it means we really intend to say what we sing. But that's a big chunk of the holiday repertoire.

 

The second category are more festive, less religiously specific songs: "Deck the Halls," "Jingle Bells," or "White Christmas." No confessions of faith involved, but in fact it's a shorter list than you might think.

 

And third are what I'd call chestnuts, or even novelty songs: "Santa Baby," "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," or "The Song Which We Won't Mention, Even When It's Cold Outside." They tend to be very much artifacts of a particular time and era, and as we've seen, they don't always age well. "Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer" hasn't stood the test of time quite as well as "Rudolph the Red-Nosed" has.

 

What gets missed is that through the centuries, many Christmas songs have been written. The large body of Christmas classics we have today are the result of years of sorting and culling and curation. Our standard Christmas carols are still with us because they've earned their place in our hearts.

 

And I think they'll keep coming back up, to drive back darkness and to usher in a season of peace, and of light.

 

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

Notes from my Knapsack 12-21-18

Notes from my Knapsack 12-21-18

Jeff Gill

 

Where things used to be

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My own Christmas memories circle around family scenes and church events, with the usual overlay of retail dreams and commercial fantasy.

 

I grew up outside of Chicago, and a trip to see the windows at Marshall Fields followed by lunch in the Walnut Room was a necessary part of the holiday. There had to be a dessert made from a scoop of ice cream, a marshmallow, and strategically placed licorice making a snowman in a top hat, matching Uncle Mistletoe flying around near the top of the giant tree in the center of the multi-story room.

 

Fields' is now Macy's, but the Walnut Room is still there. Uncle Mistletoe is in a display case nearby, for nostalgic former kids like me.

 

In college when I started Christmas shopping for myself with money I'd earned on my own, I created some memories of shopping and the season in marvelous little shops all of which are gone now. Odd stairs leading nowhere, shelves to the ceiling and cabinets here and there, and lighting casting both shadows and golden circles, far from the bright fluorescence now the norm. Once married, Joyce and I would travel to places during the Christmas to New Year's holiday break that are no longer there, but are oh so vivid in my mind; we had a child a couple of decades ago and took him places where we can't go back to now. Only the annual pictures of a growing child in multiple Santa's laps remain.

 

And now we've been in Granville long enough there are a collection of "what used to be's" in our thoughts and dimly visible, half-erased, on our mental maps. Some, oddly, we never knew, but though we didn't come to the area until 1989, the fire of the Opera House in 1982 is vivid in a false memory, colored in by pictures and artifacts in places like Elm's Pizza.

 

In fact, at Elm's there's still a jukebox in my mind, sitting right where a table is now, but it still is part of our family memories about the village and how we left and came back again. (Long story.) Hud's Chevrolet is likewise a mirage in our memory, but the souvenirs of that Williams family history make it a "used to be" for us as Granville residents in 2018. Blackstone's Grocery was a pub before we got here, but between Aline and Tim I catch a hint of it, even as I walk past the Broadway Pub today; Buck Sergeant I barely knew, but the stories about his shop are not hard to find even still.

 

I catch myself thinking about getting a card or candle at Crosswalk Gifts; as much as I like to tell people to visit Reader's Garden, my mind goes back downstairs again and again across the street to the Granville Times Book Cellar. Hare Hollow and Victoria's Parlor were no secret, well before Les Wexner started putting up white fences in New Albany (which had a grain elevator and feed store downtown I used to stop at, before Rt. 161 became a highway).

So much of Christmas is "used to be," whether it's Grandma's house or a store long gone and forgotten by most. The Hadden Sundblom 1930s & 40s Santa Claus, which did as much for our image of the jolly old elf as Thomas Nast an era before, liked to fiddle with hand cranked phones and old wooden toys as plastic and aluminum were taking over our visual vocabulary. Santa and the holiday season are soaked in nostalgia, however far back you go.

 

Likewise our village observances of Christmas and New Year and all the little remembrances of what was, mingling with how it is now, and what it might yet become.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about your memories of what's not there anymore at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

 

Faith Works 12-8-18

Faith Works 12-8-18

Jeff Gill

 

Christendom, Christianity, and Nativity

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When I get to talk to David Woodyard about civil religion and the state of our country, he likes to remind me about the distinction between Christendom and Christianity.

It's a useful distinction, one that points out that there's the faith and practices of those who would follow Christ, the prince of peace, and there's the cultural construct of Christian life which we used to think of as "normal."

In fact, if you look just a scratch below the surface, at the entertainment industry, into politics and justice and foreign policy, there was no golden age of our country actually being comprehensively Christian. The idea of a Christendom had some outward expressions, like Sunday closing laws and Prohibition, but in practice we've been a fairly complicated nation from the get-go.

Yes, the majority religious expression has been Christian, but even there, we've been Protestant and Catholic, Orthodoxy common in Alaska in early days and Pentecostalism since Azusa Street in 1906. Our Christianities have been in the way of our Christendom.

For many Christians, the end of Christendom is visible and disturbing today in a variety of ways: everything is open on Sunday mornings, let alone the afternoons, and liquor is for sale as well. Sports programs for youth take place on Sunday mornings, and public displays of symbols of faith have become contentious, whether on school property or in governmental settings.

What David and I agree on, though, and Stanley Hauerwas and Will Willimon have written at length on the subject, is that the concept of Christendom can be bad for Christianity. If we Christians, of whatever tribe or faction or denomination, start to assume that the government or the schools or our Biblical epic movies are teaching our faith for us, and we can slack off and let someone else do it for us for free, we lose control of the message. So if the culture changes – and culture is a changeable thing, we've learned in the last few decades, haven't we? – then our Christian formation changes and we can't do much about it.

While my views on the so-called "separation of church and state" are complicated and would take longer than I have in a newspaper column, I do think that Thomas Jefferson was not being disingenuous when he said that it was for the good of the churches more than to benefit the state that he wanted to keep them separated. European Christendom is still paying a price for having state established churches, even if the property upkeep for leaks in the steeple is done through tax dollars.

Churches in America today have an advantage over at least most Christian churches of fifty to seventy-five years ago. There's not even a hint of belief that the city, county, or state government is going to teach our kids the Bible; we have no reason to think that the basic tenets of our faith are going to be communicated from the Oval Office; movies and TV have no interest in religious orthodoxy and we all know it. If we want an accurate sense of our spiritual basics to be transmitted to seekers or children or grandchildren, we need to do it ourselves.

Which is why I think it's a sign of healthy religiosity, and a vital Christianity in Licking County, that there are living nativities going on all over the place. I see signs, I get mailings, and people email me asking if I'd promote their church's live nativity whether in house or drive through.

Twenty years ago, these were fairly unusual, but year by year more churches are doing them. So many that I'm actually not going to list any here, for fear of leaving someone out! (And yes, my own congregation is doing one…)

But I think the new popularity of living nativity presentations is a good thing. South Succotash United Methodist Church might do theirs differently than St. Somewhat's Catholic Church would, and I suspect adherents of each would learn something about their own Christian traditions by seeing how another body arranges and offers the old, old story.

So go visit a few. See a bunch of them, and think about what they're trying to tell you. Because it's a story that has shaped human history, and empires and governments, and you and me, whatever your faith. We can all learn from a good manger scene.

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; he has been a wise man and a shepherd, but never an angel in a nativity pageant. Tell him how you fit into the story at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter. 

Faith Works 12-1-18

Faith Works 12-1-18

Jeff Gill



Stewardship and frictionless spending

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'Tis the season for shopping, and of course it's generally assumed that as a pastor and preacher I'd have something to say against rampant consumerism and wasteful spending in a season that should have a better reason than just buying stuff.



Well, sure. But that's too easy. And only a part of the problem.



Art Rainer, a Christian stewardship consultant and author, recently shared three "scary money stats" in his blog: first, that 40% of Americans don't have enough cash to cover a $400 emergency. Other than a credit card, there's no backup capacity.



Secondly, Rainer notes that in 2018, the amount of student loans INCREASED to $1.5 trillion. And he notes that student loan debt is not just a Millennial problem. Did you know that Gen Xers have the highest average student loan debt, at almost $40,000?



His final scary money stat is that 33% of Americans have $0 saved for retirement (and 23% have saved between $1 and $10,000). Two-thirds of Millennials have nothing set aside yet, and the oldest of them are pushing 40.



Now, let's argue that people who attend church services regularly tend to be a bit more organized, have more of plan in mind and in action than the general population. We'd like to think so, wouldn't we? And I think it's true . . . but not entirely so.



So I should assume, if you cut those stats in half, that on a Sunday you're preaching to a room where 20%, one in five, can't come up with $400 cash in an emergency. That Gen Xers (call 'em 57 to 37 year olds) in church have around $20,000 or more in student loan debt hanging over them, and the Millennials if you have them in worship, age 35 or less, are right behind them. And over 15% of your parishioners have literally zero retirement savings.



I'd guess most preachers and church leaders would, on reflection, not dispute any of those projections into their congregation. Add in that the older folks in many of our churches may be more stable, a bit more secure, but feel responsible for adult children who are Boomers or Gen Xers or Millennials that fall right into those scary stats, and you can see where this overall financial picture impacts church life.



What do we do about this? Obviously there are many reasons for them, and one is simple lack of money. If you don't make much, and life costs lots, you won't be able to avoid becoming one of those scary stats. The goal in general is to get to where you make more, control costs, and "come out ahead." "Ahead" being getting out there with savings and plans for your financial future, so your income is ahead of your expenses.



For years many clergy in counseling with newly married couples or families in a variety of fiscal challenges would recommend "the envelopes." It was a simply system of committing together in a household to taking the paycheck when it came in, cashing it, and sorting the dollars into envelopes for "tithing/church giving," "retirement savings," "emergency fund," "rent," "food," "clothing," "entertainment," and so on. If you ran out of bills in an envelope, you didn't spend in that category until the next pay period or month.



Many young couples reported that "the envelopes" helped them get into good habits of controlling spending and disciplining their financial practices. Few keep it up forever, but it's a great way to start out. The problem, of course, is that our economy is pushing all of us in many ways to frictionless spending. There's nary a paper dollar involved in most purchases, between credit and debit cards, tapping your phone or scanning bar codes. We order items through apps and on a browser, and the envelopes are as quaint as, well, writing a letter and putting it in an envelope.



Some financial services companies are offering apps that hearken back to "the envelopes," letting the user create categories of purchases online, and you tag each interaction like clicking through your email, sorting them into various virtual folders which you can place a limit on, so the bank app tells you that you are reaching the maximum for your "eating out" budget, for instance.



One way or another, though, the challenge for most of us is to become conscious and mindful of our spending. The commercial marketplace has a vested interest in keeping us unconscious and unmindful of how our earnings are flowing back away from us into their pockets. This is where the question of frictionless spending is a spiritual as well as an economic issue.



Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; the first three years of his marriage, he and his wife wrote down everything they spent and went over their lists at the end of each week. Tell him what has worked for you in not being a slave to your money idols at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.

Notes from my Knapsack 12-6-18

Notes from my Knapsack 12-6-18

Jeff Gill

 

What makes us a community?

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We share, many of us, a zip code. 43023.

 

It binds us together if only to confirm at gas pumps that we're using a legit credit card.

 

There is a happy geographic accident, united with school district boundaries, which ties together Deeds Road to the south, Dry Creek in the north, from Highbanks Valley Court to Carmarthen Way, from Hardscrabble Road to the Welsh Hills.

 

We have residents of the village, and the not-village, people who live in the old village, and the newer outlying portions. Heading east on Newark-Granville Road there's village and township, and you have to look closely to know which is which.

 

And yes, some are "Granville" and others are "Newark" address, but the school district makes for a different sort of embrace. Township versus village doesn't mean the same thing when Union Township, let alone the city of Newark, becomes part of the communal whole. And then there's the "great wall" and odd boundaries down towards Heath which always make me squint to make sense of what's Granville and where is not.

 

There are those who have lit the luminaries and sung carols along Broadway, and people who have never seen the Christmas Candlelight Walking Tour; we have long-time village core residents who have made a point of leaving town for many years when the Fourth of July comes along, and others with more tenuous links to "the real Granville" whatever that might be who have stomped trash cans at Bluesfest and walked around selling water for the Scouts at Wildwood for fireworks. Some of us have helped build Wildwood twice over, our actual address shifting between the two experiences, but always feeling a tie to this place, this community, this village writ large.

 

I am concerned, as I've said, about a small but meaningful trend to moving out of Granville, however defined, once your children complete their educational round and receive their high school diploma. It doesn't sound like a sign of health for a community for people to casually want to leave when they've gained a narrow sort of benefit for living here, as important as a good school district can be in college admissions.

 

On the other hand are so many signs of life and health and overall vitality that, quite frankly, many communities whether larger or smaller would love to have on their balance sheet. We have vital, active faith communities in Granville – little known in the village, let alone in the county, is that rates of churchgoing in Granville are higher than anywhere else in Licking County – and the parent commitment to schools is still strong, plus the involvement in things like the Chamber of Commerce or Farmers' Markets or service clubs like Kiwanis and Rotary: it's amazing, and wonderful, and a good sign all around.

 

Granville has much going for it, however defined. Narrowly or widely, and I recommend the later, we encompass a community where community is valued, and celebrated, and supported. Any shortfall or complication I would identify is only because I want even more for us, and perhaps because I see so many social trends at work around the country pushing against local community strengths and solidarity that I want us to hold onto everything we can, because the storms ahead will swamp all sorts of places.

 

We are doing fine here in Our Fayre Village, and even when I mock our bubble with the moniker of Brigadoon, it's to make sure we stay aware of the bubble we've create for ourselves, in a hyper-individualistic, de-centered culture heading into 2019 and beyond. Granville is my adopted hometown, and perhaps its that sense of adoptedness that makes me want to hold onto our community unity all the more fiercely for having gained it secondhand.

 

Or as wiser and wittier people have said before me, I'm not from here, but I got here as fast as I could.

 

 

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about what brought you to the Granville community at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.