Traveling in Place

Anarchic Anger

In the spring of 2002, I entered local politics. I successfully ran for a seat on the school board, riding a wave of discontent over the school system’s administrative leadership. Because I had been actively and publicly involved in an effort to prevent the closure of our neighborhood school, community members drafted me as a candidate. Ten of us ran to fill four seats. Turnout was higher than it had been in memory. The incumbents lost and the rebels won. Those were heady days.

The interest in the race that year was generated by widespread anger in the community. One group was angry about the school closure. Another group was upset by the decision to demolish the original high school building. Still another group had been complaining for years about the rise in property taxes. The teachers’ union disapproved of the administration’s heavy-handed leadership style. All this anger created a perfect storm of voter discontent. Change was in the air. The people would prevail!

Too Much Jesus?

These are troubled times for the Crystal Cathedral, the once thriving megachurch in Garden Grove, California, founded by Robert Schuller over 50 years ago.

Schuller retired in 2006 after appointing his son, Robert, Jr., as his successor.  But under the younger Schuller’s leadership, the church’s membership and giving declined dramatically.  According to the Christian Century, the father blamed the son, saying his sermons were too biblical, filled with too much Jesus talk. 

The elder Schuller, of course, is a devoted disciple of Norman Vincent Peale, prophet of the Power of Positive Thinking.  I remember years ago being ill on a Sunday morning and deciding to check out the religious fair on TV.  I found Schuller’s “Hour of Power.”  That day, he was preaching on Romans 3:23: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.”  Schuller began by confessing that he normally stayed away from texts like this one because, “it’s just too negative.”

Unfinished Work

For the past several years, getting change at the store has been interesting.  First, there were all those state quarters, then quarters featuring American territories.  I got into the habit of examining every quarter I received to determine whether I needed it for one of four collections we kept at home – one for each child and another for good measure.

Starting last year, pennies became interesting as well.  To mark the 200^th birthday of Abraham Lincoln, the Treasury issued four new reverse designs – the log cabin where Lincoln was born, Lincoln the log splitter reading a book, Lincoln the Illinois legislator, and the Washington D.C. Capitol dome under construction.

For 2010 and beyond, the Treasury has issued another design – a shield with 13 stripes and the phrase e pluribus unum (out of the many, one).  This shield was a symbol of the union cause during the Civil War.

My favorite of all these is the unfinished Capitol dome, and I’m sorry we won’t be seeing more of it.  Lincoln’s greatest gift was his ability to shape the American story with powerful words and symbols.  He didn’t just win the Civil War, preserve the union, and end slavery.  He transformed how America sees itself, ensuring that as a people, we would always be striving toward the ideal of equality.

God's Teaser

My backyard is graced with seven tall Norway maple trees.  Nearly two weeks ago (September 3), I was mowing my lawn and mulching up a lot of red and orange leaves.  Splotches of color had already come to the upper branches of the trees.  

Early fall colors often indicate that a tree is under stress.  For instance, an unusually hot, dry summer or some sort of disease will cause a tree to redirect its energy to the root system and away from the leaves, aborting the process of photosynthesis early.  But I live in upstate New York.  This year’s summer was hot but not dry.  (In fact, while the rest of the Northeast languished in near-drought conditions, we enjoyed above average rainfall through the summer.) And besides, we are accustomed to seeing a few rogue trees turn color in late August or early September.  The serious leaf-peepers around here sometimes refer to them as “show-off” trees that are looking for attention.

God Help Us to Love

The weeks leading up to today’s anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks have not been good for America.  The overblown, often irresponsible rhetoric concerning both the building of a mosque near Ground Zero and – unbelievably – whether it is appropriate for Christians to burn copies of the Quran, have presented an ugly face to the world.  Both of these issues have received far more attention than they deserve, but that seems to be the inevitable consequence of living in a media-driven culture.  In my estimation, we have dishonored the memory of the 3,000 who lost their lives in the terror attacks nine years ago.

As a Christian pastor, I am gravely concerned. Our nation’s struggle for the last nine years has been against terrorism, not Islam.  Yet, there are Christians in this country and Muslims elsewhere who do not represent anything more than a tiny fringe element in their religious traditions, but who are also loud, crave attention, know how to get it, and who fervently desire an all-out Holy War between Christianity and Islam.  It would be a tragedy of unspeakable proportions if future historians were to write about the early 21^st century as the age of a global religious struggle that resulted from self-fulfilling prophecy.

Fanning the Flames

This post includes a 9/9 update at the end. - JML

In the streets of Kabul and Jakarta, angry Muslims are protesting against the United States, not because of military action, foreign policy initiatives, or even because of any controversial statements coming from U.S. government officials.  These protests were ignited by the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida, whose pastor, Terry Jones, has called for a national “Burn a Koran Day” on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.  Two U.S. commanders, including Gen. David Petraeus, have publicly expressed concern that this event will endanger American soldiers and might even undermine efforts to bring peace to Afghanistan.  Pastor Jones says he’s sorry if young men and women are killed, but his congregation has to take a stand against Islam because “it isn’t going away.”

As appalled and sickened as I am by people who claim to represent the Prince of Peace (and who name their church the “Dove Center”) yet proceed to incite violence with acts of hate, my frustration over this spectacle is not entirely with Pastor Jones or his flock.  The Dove World Outreach Center is not a large church with wide influence.  It isn’t even an established congregation in the Gainesville community.  It is a splinter group totaling 50 people.  That’s right – just 50 people.  In a democracy that values freedom of speech, a small percentage of crackpots and hate mongers will always demand a hearing.  That is a price of our freedom.  The question is, why is the action of this tiny extremist sect getting so much attention?  Answer: the 24-hour cable news cycle.

Crowding Christ

The gospel lesson for this past Sunday began, “Large crowds were traveling with him.”  Interesting text for Labor Day Weekend.  It’s the last weekend of the summer.  People are at the State Fair, out on the lake, up in the mountains, visiting with out-of-town family, doing whatever they need to do to ring the last drops out of the summer vacation season.  Those of us who come to church likely hear a bit of an echo in a mostly empty sanctuary.  And we read about large crowds following Jesus.

But this is not reason to lament poor worship attendance or berate those who choose not to be in church.  To the contrary, Jesus didn’t like big crowds.  He was always suspicious of them.  He consistently lobbed his most difficult teachings into large crowds of people, causing the people to disperse with a mixture of anger and confusion.  In this week’s text from Luke 14:25-33, he tells a large crowd, “Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciples...None of you can become my disciple if you do not give up all your possessions.”  When confronted with a large crowd in John 6, Jesus shocked his hearers with this gruesome pronouncement: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”  Soon afterward, many “turned back and no longer went about with him,” complaining, “the teaching is difficult.”

New Testament Church Principals

Back in my Southern Baptist days, I used to hear church planters and denominational leaders talk about creating “New Testament churches.”  The more closely I read the New Testament, the more I wondered with a chuckle, “Which ones?”

Let’s see.  There’s the Corinthian church – the one divided into four factions, where some members ate all the food at the weekly potluck and let others go hungry, and one member was openly sleeping with his stepmother.  There’s the Johannine church that split down the middle over Gnosticism.  Then there are the churches of Galatia that all started strong, but quickly caved in to the pressures of conservative legalists who told them Paul was a liar and they must strictly follow the Jewish law code.  At the church in Rome, people of Jewish background and those raised in Gentile homes were distrustful and resentful of each other.  The Jerusalem church was more promising, though I haven’t seen any contemporary American church show the slightest interest in common ownership of goods.  Paul seemed to have nothing but good to say about the Macedonian churches, praising them for their overwhelming generosity despite their poverty.  In most American churches today, average giving is less than 3% of annual income.