Traveling in Place

The Spiritual Value of Bird-Watching

One day last month, my furnace needed some work. When I called to make an appointment for the repair, I was given a window of time when I could expect the service person to arrive, with a promise that he would call when he was on the way to my house. When the call came, I was in the middle of about five different tasks that seemed pretty important to me. But as it turned out, the interruption provided an unexpected moment of grace.

After welcoming the repairman inside my home and showing him where the furnace was, I went back upstairs so he could do his work. I sat out in our sunroom, and noticed a couple of sparrows exploring the birdhouse near our vegetable garden. It was a cold day. The birdhouse was capped with snow. Yet, here were these two sparrows busily preparing for spring. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. A half hour or so with the birds made all those “important” tasks seem a lot less urgent.

Two bird feeders also hang from a tree outside the windows of the church offices. They have attracted cardinals, nuthatches, chickadees, sparrows, goldfinches, juncos, blue jays, and woodpeckers. Sometimes, all these species show up at once and put on a show. When that happens, all our work on the other side of the windows stops.

I’m not making this up. Jesus really did say, “Look at the birds!” (Matthew 6:26). I confess that I haven’t paid a lot of attention to birds until recently. Now, I am discovering the wisdom of Jesus’ admonition.

Struggling with Demons

Joel Tooley is pastor of First Church of the Nazarene in Melbourne, Florida, a mainstream conservative evangelical congregation thriving in a growing area of the Bible belt. Like most other evangelicals, he voted for Donald Trump. When he heard that Trump was flying in to his hometown for a political rally last Saturday, he was excited for the chance to see the President. So he went to the airport and took his 11-year-old daughter along with him.

He described the scene on Facebook. Before the President and First Lady arrived, the crowd sang “God Bless the U.S.A.”, raising their hands in the air in the manner usually seen at a religious revival. The feeling of “religious zeal” sent shivers down Tooley’s spine. “I felt like people were here to worship an ideology along with the man who was leading it.”

As patriotic music gave way to dramatic orchestrations reminiscent of “Star Wars,” Air Force One pulled up to the hangar. When the First Couple emerged from the airplane, the already boisterous crowd erupted in cheers, much as one would expect upon seeing the President in person. But then, Melania Trump led the crowd in reciting the Lord’s Prayer, which sounded to Tooley less like a prayer than a “pep squad cheer.” Trump himself did not join the prayer until the last line, “be the glory forever and ever, Amen,” then he raised his hands in the air and the crowd began chanting, “USA, USA, USA!”

It got worse. Tooley noticed two women who had come to protest Trump, one with her young daughter and the other with a wheelchair-bound child. When they were threatened by angry members of the crowd, Tooley instinctively moved to protect them, using his “Make America Great Again” sign as a shield. When he defended the protestors’ right to express themselves, two angry women screamed repeated profane invectives at him, frightening his daughter. Another man threatened to “take out” Tooley and the protesters for “disrespecting my President.”

Snowshoes, Crampons, and a Beautiful Day

Yesterday, I hiked in snowshoes for the first time in two years. Last year’s tepid winter never gave me a chance. Even in the Adirondack High Peaks, the snow never reached much depth, and in the few stretches when it did, warm air came to melt it away before I could find a free day to go hiking.

This year has been different. While we in Central New York have seen greater-than-average snowfall, we’ve also experienced warmer-than-average temperatures, so the snow has come in bursts but hasn’t stayed. In the mountains, it has remained cold, and every snowfall has just added a new layer. In some sections of the Adirondacks, the snowpack approaches four feet.

Yesterday’s promise of plentiful sunshine – and a day free of commitments – lured me into the mountains. I decided to hike up Rooster Comb Mountain. In every other season, this is a nice little jaunt that takes me about an hour and fifteen minutes one-way. It is only moderately steep most of the way before becoming very steep near the end. The last half-mile features several challenging rock scrambles up to the top.

In the wintertime, however, this hike can be more of a slog than a jaunt. The first time I trekked up Rooster Comb was in January 2008 with Aaron. The snow was just deep enough for snowshoes, but when we got to the rocky scrambles, the problem was ice. Still, it was manageable. While visibility was good, it was a very gray day. Thick clouds drained the sky and the evergreens of their color.

The second time I tried climbing Rooster Comb in the winter was in 2011. Thirteen inches of snow had fallen the night before, and no one had been on the trail ahead of me that morning. So while it was discernible, the path wasn’t packed down, and when I got to the right turn that leads to the summit, I was dismayed to see that it hadn’t been cut at all. I tried to negotiate it, but gave up when – even with snowshoes – I started sinking to waist-level.

Would I have better luck this time? At the trail register, I saw that one other hiker was ahead of me. Before him, it had been two days since anybody had ventured onto the trail. But it was nicely packed, maybe 8-10 inches below the surface, and easy to follow.

Don't Destroy the Johnson Amendment

When I heard about President Trump’s typically a-typical speech at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, I wondered how his audience of dignitaries and mostly conservative religious leaders received him. Did they think he was funny? Did they regard his unrehearsed, stream-of-consciousness ramblings as refreshing? Was anybody offended that he used that solemn occasion to make fun of Arnold Schwarzenegger, his successor on “Celebrity Apprentice,” and his poor ratings? I don’t know. I guess we’re going to grow so accustomed to this sort of performance that we become numb to it.

Significant among his otherwise baffling remarks was the President’s promise to “get rid of and totally destroy” the “Johnson amendment,” the 63-year-old law that prohibits tax-exempt non-profit organizations – including religious congregations – from endorsing candidates for public office. He probably assumed this pledge would be received warmly, even enthusiastically, by those assembled before him. Many conservative evangelical pastors have been lobbying for the law to be rescinded on the grounds that it is a violation of their rights to free speech and free exercise of religion. As he was excoriating this law, Trump maintained that the “sacred right” of religious freedom “is under threat all around us.” What he apparently doesn’t know, or chooses not to believe, is that 80% of the American public, including a large majority of practicing Christians, support the Johnson amendment as a way of maintaining the separation of church and state.

Leaving aside the fact that the president cannot unilaterally “get rid of and totally destroy” a federal law, several thoughts come to mind that I, as a Christian pastor, feel the need to share.

"Christifying" Life

During last Sunday’s sermon, I briefly related the story of Maria Skobtsova, a deeply committed Christian and political dissident who fled Russia soon after the Socialist Revolution. She eventually settled with her family in Paris, where she set up hospitality houses to aid the poor and give refuge to other Russian immigrants. During World War II, when the Nazis occupied France, she helped smuggle Jews to safety. Eventually, the Gestapo uncovered her scheme of providing fake baptismal certificates to Jews so they could avoid arrest. She was sent to the Ravensbruck concentration camp, where she was killed in a gas chamber. Skobtsova was canonized as a saint in the Orthodox Christian Church.

Amy Frykholm, associate editor of the Christian Century, recently published an article that closely examined an essay by Skobtsova entitled, “Religious Types,” in which she discussed five distinct ways of practicing the Christian faith. One type celebrated tradition above all else. Another placed primary emphasis on ritual. A third was principally interested in religious “beauty,” like architecture, iconic art, and music. A fourth type was mainly concerned with the salvation of the individual soul and sought separation from the world. According to Skobtsova, all these types failed to represent love. The command to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength” and “love your neighbor as you love yourself,” she said, represent one single truth. Christianity cannot reflect Christ unless love is at its heart.

According to Skobtsova, love is most clearly expressed in her fifth “type,” what she called evangelical Christianity – which of course meant something very