Traveling in Place

Reflection and Praise

I’m relaxing at the end of a busier-than-usual week that concluded with a Saturday morning funeral followed by a Saturday afternoon wedding.  The juxtaposition of two ceremonies marking such different nodal moments in the journey of life makes me reflective.  But I find that my reflections are centered on two moving visions that have occurred outside of both these events.

Yesterday, I underwent a precautionary stress test.  After a very nice medical technician hooked me up to an ultrasound machine with four screens and a fancy control board, I laid on my side while she probed my chest with the ball at the end of a transducer that somehow (amazingly) takes videos of the heart.  I heard the sound of my heart beating dutifully and in perfect rhythm.  The technician then had me sit up.  She left the room to get the doctor, who would oversee the actual test.  As I sat on the edge of the raised examination cot, I watched those four screens.  I was mesmerized by four different looping videos of my heart from different angles.  I was moved by the thought that this same heart had been beating non-stop for my entire life.  During all that time, out of sight and usually out of mind as well, it had been pumping blood and oxygen to every part of my body, giving life to every organ, including my brain.  This heart has been making possible all my movements, all my thoughts, and all my feelings for almost 50 years.  It has been doing its job without any effort or intention on my part.  It is a masterpiece for which I, of course, can take no credit.  Like my lungs, my brain, and indeed my whole body, that heart is a priceless gift.  It is God’s creation, more magnificent that all my deeds put together.

Bible-Belt Religion

My family just spent the last week in Arkansas, where Martha and I both grew up.  Whenever we travel south, I experience a bit of culture shock.  The religious landscape there is quite different than in the Northeast.   The “Bible belt” is still saturated with religion.

Martha is from Ft. Smith, the second-largest city in the state, located on the Arkansas River and the border with Oklahoma.  The house she occupied as a youngster, where her parents still live, is located in a subdivision of less than one square mile, bounded by major thoroughfares on all four sides.  When we visit, I like to take an early morning walk around this large block.  As I do so, I pass eight houses of worship: a large Southern Baptist church with its own school, a non-denominational church, a Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, a Church of Christ, two Pentecostal churches, a Nazarene church, and a Buddhist temple.

Consumerism and our Food Supply

“This is what we’ve come to,” my wife Martha said with utter disgust.  She was expressing disappointment in the peaches she bought at the grocery store.  She had cut one up the night before, and now she held a second peach in her hand. “It looks like a peach, it feels like a peach, and it even smells like a peach.  It’s very pretty.”

“Where did it come from?” I asked. 

“California,” she replied, shaking her head.

I started to ask, “How many days – ” and she finished the question for me.

“Did it spend in the back of a truck before it got here?  Exactly,” she said.  “This is what we’ve come to.  We buy food that looks pretty but doesn’t taste like anything.”

The Good News from High School Teens

Everyone who attended either of our worship services this week went away with a broad smile and a full heart.  The high school teens who recently returned from a mission trip in West Virginia – where they repaired homes all day and worshiped together every morning and evening – shared pictures, music, and reflections from their experience.  One by one, they stood in front of the congregation and gave moving, substantive testimonies.  The adults in the congregation were bursting with pride.  But more importantly, we felt the spirit of God among us.

As I listened to the testimonies of our high school youth, I noted several important themes.

1. CONNECTION.  Over and over, I heard about how these young men and women connected with each other, the residents of the homes they were repairing, other Christian teens who gathered with them, and God.  The connections were powerful.  They experienced firsthand what it meant to be instruments of God.  They learned the meaning of Christian fellowship.  They also became more connected to themselves.  They discovered themselves as children of God.

Compromise: A Sin or a Virtue?

The recent political brawl over the federal debt ceiling raises the question: is compromise a virtue or a sin?

Clearly, some of our elected officials believe it is a sin.  A significant number of them said they would not vote to raise the debt ceiling under any circumstances, no matter what conditions were attached to an agreement to do so.  Then, there was a group that said they would vote to raise the debt ceiling under certain non-negotiable conditions.  Both these groups stuck to their guns, and believed that morally, they had no choice to do otherwise.  To compromise on their positions, in other words, would be a compromise of their principles, and therefore a blow to personal integrity.  In addition, a third group wanted to raise the debt ceiling without conditions, and were only willing to negotiate certain terms.  It looks to me like, out of 535 Representatives and Senators, these three groups comprised all the 187 “no” votes on Monday and Tuesday.  This includes about 40 absolute purists, 45 or so provisional purists, and around 100 provisional compromisers.

The 343 members of Congress who voted “yes” represent a large bipartisan group that considers compromise the essence of government.  Most of these people voted “yes” on a bill they didn’t like, but preferred to the alternative of default.  They expressed publicly that it is the nature of governing to vote for bills that contain some things you agree with and other things you are willing to tolerate in order to get something done.  You don’t compromise for the sake of compromising, but to advance your principles as far as possible within the bounds of political reality.

Discerning the Covenant of Marriage (Part 3)

About ten years ago, our deacons beefed up the church’s wedding policy because it had become apparent that many couples were choosing to be married in our sanctuary simply because our policy was the least restrictive of any in the area.  I knew we had a problem when a bride-to-be was 45 minutes late to the ceremony and, while an increasingly rowdy crowd waited in the sanctuary, a family friend entered from the back with an open beer bottle in hand and yelled, “Hey, everybody, I see I didn’t miss nothin’!” and the guests responded with raucous laughter.

The wedding finally did come off, but I was so furious at the lack of respect and reverence shown by the wedding party and their guests that I was determined never to expose our church the same way again.  I vented my frustration with the deacons, and together we crafted a policy that clearly spelled out a number of expectations – about premarital counseling, appropriate music, when pictures could and could not be taken, etc.  The policy also spelled out a theology of marriage and made clear that any wedding ceremony in our sanctuary would be designed as a service of worship.

This week, at my request, our deacons reviewed our wedding policy again in light of the change in New York state law legalizing same-sex unions.  They were surprised to discover that, except for a couple of phrases, the policy was already amazingly inclusive, because it speaks of marriage as a “covenant” rather than as a means of pro-creation.   None of them had any objection to changing the phrase “a man and a woman” to “two people,” so as to make the policy entirely inclusive and, actually, more internally consistent.