My wishlist
So, inspired by Sally’s suggestion, I am rethinking my holiday wishlist. Here is what I really want for Christmas:
1) That we all might realize the “true cost” of things, and consider when making our decisions who made the product, and how — whether they were paid fairly, whether their working conditions were healthy, whether their community suffered environmental damage, what was polluted in the making of the product, what was destroyed, were communities built up? were families destroyed? For Christmas, I want to consider the costs before pulling out my wallet.
2) That I might spend less time thinking of the perfect object to demonstrate how I feel about another person, and more time thinking of the perfect WAY to demonstrate my caring.
3) That I might be freed from anxiety over people who are “just too difficult to shop for.”
4) That meaningful healthcare reform might come before one more person has to lose their home over suddenly unmanageable medical expenses.
5) That I might not once so much as sigh in exasperation at an underpaid and too often abused retail worker.
6) Is it too much to hope that no one might kill another person? How about if I narrowed it down to no more killing other people ON PURPOSE?
7) And the pews absolutely filled to bursting the Sunday after Christmas. That would be pretty cool!
Like any of my previous wishlists, this list is not nearly complete! Feel free to give me something worth hoping for that I am not expecting – I love surprises!
Love your enemies
So I haven’t posted lately. And I haven’t responded to the many people who have left comments on my blog. I’m so sorry. I have lots of good excuses, including flu and an Advent devotional booklet that I am editing, and very little childcare coverage.
I anticipate that next week, after I have preached (woohoo! first time in more than 2 years!) and celebrated Thanksgiving and finished the devotional booklet and taught Sunday school, I am going to blog like crazy. After all, I have notes built up for several entries that I have just been too overwhelmed to flesh out. But as a stopgap, I am pasting in here one of my contributions for my congregation’s devotional booklet.
(This will make better sense if you read Psalm 70:19-29 first. But you probably know the kind of Psalm I’m talking about.)
I had always had trouble with Psalms like this. Praying that bad things would happen to other people didn’t seem to be what Jesus had in mind when he advised, “love your enemies.” I struggled even more as the desire grew in me to embrace all of the Bible, not just part of it. How could I embrace words like these?
Then a rabbi explained to me how our “Old Testament” is viewed in the Jewish tradition: it is divided into the words of God for humanity (the Law and the Prophets, invoked as authoritative throughout our New Testament), and the words of the faithful to God – the Ketuvim, or Writings. And included in the Writings were the Psalms. Perhaps the inclusion of these Psalms did not mean that God had any intention of raining destruction on my enemies – only that I was liberated to spill even my darkest emotions in the safety of God’s loving presence.
And so it was that I found myself, weeks later, on my knees in Duke Chapel. I was consumed with anger with a fellow student. [Note to my J2J friends who are now wondering who it is: I can say with some certainty that he doesn't even know about this blog, so at least you know a couple of people you can rule out! ] I prayed that God would obliterate him with great fanfare, but only after letting him suffer a bit. I described in great detail all the horrible things that I hoped would befall him. And after many minutes of this – I remember my knees aching on the stone floor – I was spent. My rage was all poured out, and I was empty. And into that silence, a new thought entered: God loved me! God loved angry, hate-filled me! … and God loved my enemy. Could I bring myself to love him, too?
That day, bringing the full force of my anger before God had in fact empowered me to love my enemy so well that I remembered that he was my brother in Christ, and God’s own beloved child – without feeling ashamed of my having expressed such rage, remembering that I continued to be God’s beloved child, too.
Loving Creator, sometimes I get really angry, so angry that I don’t want to admit it to anyone, even myself. Give me courage to bring even my scariest and darkest emotions to you, trusting in your saving love, knowing that my darkness can never overcome your Light. Amen.
So, friends, I hope that you can forgive me for not yet responding to your helpful and thoughtful comments, nor reading your own blogs in the past week or two — or at least I urge you to take whatever vengeful thoughts you have to God in prayer! 
No, that is not really why I posted this. I posted it because I did not realize until later that this interpretation of “be angry, but do not sin” might be controversial. And I thought I’d put it out there for community discussion and review.
Children’s Bible Stories?
A year ago, a little girl told my (non-church-going) niece that she was going to Hell because she didn’t know a particular Bible story. This has all worked itself out in the meantime, with the two little girls each coming to a broader understanding of the world, and becoming friends. But one lingering effect of the initial trauma has been my niece’s conviction that in order to understand certain people, she is going to need to know about the Bible.
I would know just how to proceed if she were 14. But from what I have been able to see, the quality of younger children’s Bible story books is, at best, inadequate. Story lines are altered to suit rhyming schemes, works righteousness abounds, God is everywhere “He,” and the single thrust of most every story is that it is our bounden duty to tell everyone that Christ died to save them from damnation – even if the story is from the Old Testament. (See, for instance, Arch Books’ Zerubbabel Rebuilds the Temple.)
This may be an evangelical strategy, but it seems doomed to be an evangelistically ineffective one – families who are not churchgoers are going to be so turned off by these stories that they wash their hands of the Bible entirely and move on to Old Turtle. And so I had been fantasizing about writing my own series of children’s picture books from the Bible – that this might not be another lost opportunity to introduce children to Christianity.
It is a popular argument that the Bible is not particularly kid friendly. The stories we tell to children from the Old Testament are almost comically grim: the expulsion from the Garden, David killing and decapitating Goliath, Jonah swallowed by a giant fish, Ananias and Sapphira struck dead for lying… “Noah’s Ark” is a great example of this – not in reality a story mainly about a bunch of animals living peaceably together on a dear little wooden ship, but unavoidably a story about the death of all humanity except for 8 people (and all of the arguably blameless animals but two (or 7) of each species) at the hands of an angry God.
But even this is nothing compared to the stories we dare not tell children – Tamara raped by her brother, Jezebel torn apart by dogs… so I have begun to agree that perhaps the Bible really is not a book for children. My niece is right to think that the Bible is an essential book, but perhaps wrong to consider that she therefore needs to know all about it right now, as a second-grader. I hope that one day she reads Crime and Punishment, too, but by “one day” I mean “when she is sixteen or older” – and again every five to ten years. I am not in the meantime frantically scouring bookstores for the storybook version.
The Bible is a diverse collection of texts, so naturally there are passages which I would except from my “this is no book for children” dictum – but most of them are not the narratives. For instance, I recently came across a beautiful rendering of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 for children (To Everything There is a Season, by Jude Daly.) Certain Psalms would lend themselves to this sort of treatment, certain sayings of Jesus and passages from Paul and Isaiah.
But on the whole it seems that we are more in need of Tolkien-esque authors – writers who can write stories that illustrate the themes and truths of Christianity in new settings – settings that do not necessarily invoke Christ, but rather evoke Christianity.
What do you think? Are Biblical narratives suitable for children? What are some of your recommendations for books for readers under 10? Not only Bible stories, but also those books which point towards the insights of the Christian faith?
Could my tears forever flow…
These days, I am up to my ears in John Wesley’s economic theology, preparing for a series of Sunday school classes on the topic. I am scratching the old itch — what does following Christ mean in detail, in how I eat, how I shop, how I give…
This was an all consuming issue back in the days before I had a sense that God’s love was not something that I needed to earn (thanks for the big kick in the pants, Robert Farrar Capon!), but I still have a strong sense that grace is not an absolution from working the details out.
For years, I have used the analogy of my marriage to talk about the grace/works relationship: Brian’s love is not contingent upon me doing housework. Which was such a relief to me that I went a couple of years without doing the dishes. I guess I was sort of testing the theory. But one day, I just had the urge to do the dishes – as a response to the kind of love that did not require me to do them. And as the years have gone by, as I have grown into the assurance that Brian’s love is not contingent upon my housewifery, I have been freed to do things around the house because to do them makes our lives better – in our marriage, when I fold laundry or wash dishes or tidy the living room, I am acting out of love instead of fear, out of freedom instead of bondage.
But all this Wesley had me wondering if God does not in fact require me to do the dishes, so to speak. And this crisis is (for the first time for this Wesley acolyte) making me see the point of some of his contemporary critics, including Augustus Toplady, who apparently wrote “Rock of Ages” as a sort of anti-Wesley protest song. Which is sort of ridiculous, since it is not like Wesley did not believe that we were saved by grace, right? Right? Poor guy – the answer to that appears to have even been a head- scratcher for Wesley himself, at times.
CAKE has a song that begins, “Jesus wrote a blank check, one I haven’t cashed yet…” When I hear it, I think of those checks that, right below the endorsement line, have something to the effect of, “by signing this, you are agreeing to…” There is so much disagreement about what would follow the ellipsis on the back of Jesus’ blank check – just what are we agreeing to when we endorse it? What would it mean to cash this check? No wonder there are so many who are wary, who are not interested in cashing that check – at least not yet.
The Bible could be more transparent here. Many love to point to John 3:16 – “whosoever believes in him…” But what does that mean? What does believing in Jesus really entail? Believe what about Jesus? That Jesus is God incarnate? And if Jesus is God, shouldn’t believing in him, I don’t know, mean something? Like maybe we should pay attention to some of the stuff he said we should be doing with our lives. And if those who believe that every word of the Bible is literally true want to put their money where their mouth is, then I double dog dare them to take every teaching of Jesus’ at face value. Like not storing up treasures on earth, for instance. This is a big one for Wesley, by the way. According to Wesley, the rich are those who have something more than adequate food and clothing to their names. Televisions? Computers? CD players? Forget about it – a rocking chair is decadent by Wesley’s standards.
The thing is, if faith without consistently following Jesus’ teachings is not faith at all, and if there really is a hell to which unrepentant sinners are consigned, then it is hard to believe that as many as 144,000 could escape it. Roger Williams is more likely to be right – it will just be him, with the rest of us burning like those magic birthday candles that cannot be blown out.
We share the Jesus bread
Less than a year ago, our friend Joan handed Brian half a loaf of communion bread after early worship. When on the drive home from church the little one complained that she was hungry, I handed her a chunk of the bread, telling her that this was very special bread, and that we eat it together with other people, and when we eat it we are reminded of how much Jesus loves us. After eating her bread, she held out her hand and said, “more Jesus bread, Mama!” And that is how our family took to calling the consecrated loaf “Jesus bread.”
Leaving aside the debates on whether it is okay for young children to participate in the Lord’s Supper, I am going to take it for granted in this post that, as a United Methodist, I am on firm ground toting my not yet three year old up to receive the elements. Certainly it has been both an educational and spiritual experience for me to witness the way in which Eucharist has been a means of grace for her.
It is not often that I have her with me for the entire service, but lately I have been sure to have her with me for the Great Thanksgiving (prayer before communion) and all that follows. I whisper to her during the service, pointing out a couple of things that I think she might be interested in (such as “What is Pastor Duke doing with the Jesus bread right now?”) or might be ready to start learning about. Every time, I talk about how we are all family together with everyone who loves Jesus, and how we share the bread all together, and we take turns, and there is always enough for everybody. I tell her that Jesus loves each of us very much, and that Jesus is with us especially when we all eat the Jesus bread together. And then as we get to the front of the line, I whisper, “hold out your hand,” and she does, and Pastor Duke puts the Jesus bread in her hand, which she ordinarily pops directly into her mouth.
But this Sunday, she stopped just before the bread made it into her mouth, and dipped it into the grape juice! I was so excited that she had decided to do that on her own. She is a pretty picky eater, so I had never suggested intinction to her as a possibility – I did not want to risk a big soppy pile of Body and Blood spat unceremoniously onto her clothes and my clothes and the carpet. Oh me of little faith! She ate it very solemnly, and on the way back up to the nursery after worship said, “We all take turns with Jesus bread!”
This was all more than enough to make my heart burst with joy – “she gets it!” But something even more beautiful was in store for me (praise God from whom all blessings flow – abundantly!) Yesterday morning, my daughter came into my bedroom carrying a beautiful flowered plastic tray that her grandma gave her to play tea party with. On the tray there was only a single slice of wooden “bread.” As she walked in, she was singing quietly — I couldn’t make out the words. She sat down and laid the tray on the floor in front of her. Clasping her hands and closing her eyes, she rocked back and forth as she sang, “Pray for the Jesus bread! Pray for the Jesus bread!” Then she plucked off an invisible piece of bread and handed it to me, and put the slice into her own mouth. When she took it out, she was singing, “Jesus loves me, this I know, for we share the Jesus bread.”
To such belongs the kingdom of God.
