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living history

2

We stepped back into the history of our church today for our annual worship service at O’Kelly Chapel, the birthplace of our congregation (as explained by this plaque):


We had an amazing cool, sunny spring day for our gathering, which included dinner on the grounds following worship.

We used the old hymnals, which meant we got to sing a lot of old gospel songs I grew up with, using the old pump organ and the piano in the chapel, niether of which had been tuned in some time. We augmented the accompaniment with fiddles, guitars, and harmonicas.

Being in that wonderful old wooden room with the gentle breeze blowing through the open windows made me want to know more about how we got from there to where we are now. If you come out of the chapel grounds and turn left on Highway 751 all you have to do is stay on the very same highway until you get into town and come to Pilgrim UCC on the right. The spiritual journey of our congregation is more complicated and interesting; the path is not quite so direct. Most any faith journey is full of twists, turns, and surprises.

To stand knee deep in a history I don’t know was fascinating to me because I found much there that felt familiar. The old hymns were the same ones I grew up singing in the Baptist church. The old wooden building was much like my seminary pastorate in central Texas. But I felt something more profound than my personal connections. I caught a sense of the line of faith that connects us all across the ages; our church history doesn’t end at O’Kelly Chapel, but runs through it instead, one thread of a web of grace and love that has caught us all.

Like the old song says:

All glory and praise
to the God of all grace,
Who has brought us and sought us
and guided our ways.

Hallelujah! Thine the glory
Hallelujah! Amen.
Hallelujah! Thine the glory
Revive us again.

Peace,
Milton

it’s my job

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A few weeks back I was on my way home from work when Ginger called to say the main sewer line running from the house to the street was blocked and she had called a plumber, but he had not yet arrived; if I needed to go to the bathroom I should stop somewhere on my way home. I was working nights then, so the plumber showed up a little after eleven and worked until almost two – spending most of the time in the crawl space under our house. Ever since I’ve been thinking about jobs I wouldn’t want to do but I count on others to do so I can live my life. They run the gamut from the plumber under the house to the checker at the grocery store (or most any retail gig, for that matter) to pretty much anything in the accounting field. And that’s just for starters. I dare say most of the jobs that help to provide the goods and services I’m accustomed to having are jobs I wouldn’t enjoy.

I like planting my vegetable garden, but I wouldn’t want to be one of the migrant workers that are responsible for most of the produce we buy. I wouldn’t want to be a truck driver or a toll taker. I wouldn’t want to work on any kind of assembly line or power plant. I wouldn’t want to be a garbage collector or the person who has to take returns at Lowe’s. I wouldn’t want any kind of job where I had to answer the phone all day, though I’m glad someone is there when I call Mac tech support or Durham One Call. And they’re nice when they talk to me.

Mac McAnally wrote a song a long time ago called “It’s My Job” that I find myself humming these days.

In the middle of late last night I was sittin’ on a curb
I didn’t know what about, but I was feelin’ quite disturbed
A street sweeper came whistlin’ by, he was bouncin’ every step
It seemed strange how good he felt, so I asked him while he swept

He said, “It’s my job to be cleaning up this mess
And that’s enough reason to go for me
It’s my job to be better than the rest
And that makes a day for me.”

I got an uncle who owns a bank, he’s a self-made millionaire
He never had anyone to love, never had no one to care
He always seemed kinda sad to me and I asked him why that was
And he told me it’s because in my contract there’s this clause

That says, “It’s my job to be worried half to death
And that’s the thing people respect in me
It’s my job but without it I’d be less
Than what I expect from me.”

Now I’ve been lazy most all my life writin’ songs and sleepin’ late
And any manual labor I’ve done was purely by mistake
If street sweepers can smile then I’ve got no right to feel upset
But sometimes I still forget
‘Til the lights go on and the stage is set
And the song hits home and you feel that sweat

It’s my job to be different than the rest
And that’s enough reason to go for me
It’s my job to be better than the rest
And that’s a rough break for me

It’s my job to be cleaning up this mess
And that’s enough reason to go for me
It’s my job to be better than the rest
And that makes the day for me

I often forget what an amazing gift it is that I get to choose to do something I love. It’s a gift that I get to choose, period. If I pay attention as I look at those around me, I see a lot of folks who aren’t afforded that chance. I get to talk about calling and purpose and passion when I talk about vocation; not every job holds those kinds of possibilities. I know there are those, like the street sweeper in the song, who take pride in what they do even though their job choices are limited. I also know there is a lot of value in manual labor because I am a manual laborer. And there are lots of things I don’t want to do that I expect to be done so my life can go on.

This afternoon I bought groceries and the checker and sacker were both gracious and engaging. As I pushed my cart away to head for my car, one of them said, “Thanks for shopping with us today.”

I think I’m the one who needs to learn to say, “Thank you” much more frequently – like it’s my job.

Peace,
Milton

can we talk?

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“Baptists don’t baptize infants,” I heard some say not long ago, “they ordain them.”

In the spring of 1977, in the summer after my junior year in college, I was called as pastor of Pecan Grove Baptist Church near Gatesville, Texas, which meant I needed to be ordained. In early June, an ordination council was convened (right before my ordination service) and pastors and deacons from the other local churches came to ask me questions. One of them said, “How do you explain the Trinity?”

“If I could do that,” I answered, “I’d write a book.” Everyone laughed and we moved on to the next question.

In the years following, I’m not sure I’m any closer to an explanation, but I do have a greater understanding of who God is. It’s not for nothing that Genesis recounts God saying, “Let us create humanity in our image.” The plural pronoun points to the relational complexity of God from the first. It also makes me think of the opening of Mary Oliver’s “Poem”:

The spirit
likes to dress up like this:
ten fingers,
ten toes

Whoever God was (is) from the beginning, incarnation and relationship burst from the core of God’s being.

On Sunday mornings at our house, we watch TV preachers while we’re getting ready for church. I’m not sure it gets us ready for church, but it’s what we do. This morning, we split time between Ed Young, Jr. and Joel Osteen. Young was talking about how to be “good and angry” and did some good work talking about how our anger is fed by fear, so we had to learn how to face our fear in some other way than exploding in anger. Osteen was talking about broadening our world, encouraging folks to do things they had never done before because it was the only way to keep growing.

Somewhere in the middle of the second sermon, I looked at Ginger and said, “They say some good things but I’m not sure they are ready to live with the consequences of their theology.” I don’t know that for a fact; it’s a hunch on my part – maybe even a prejudice. But my comment came back to me in the middle of the wonderful sermon preached by Carla, our Minister of Christian Education, who was recounting our church’s decision, in 1964, to baptize an African-American child. The pastor had made it clear he was going to do it. The deacons met and voted to support the pastor. One of the deacons came home and told his wife about the meeting. “How did you vote?” she asked.

“As we were talking,” he said, “I thought, ‘How could I vote to not baptize a child?’”

On this Trinity Sunday, our church, along with many other UCC churches around the country, was beginning a “sacred conversation” about race. The idea grew out of the initial burst of media coverage of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who is a UCC minister. Our denomination (like it’s predecessors) is committed to a theology of justice and inclusiveness. We ordained an African-American man to pastor an all white congregation before the Civil War. We ordained women sixty years before they could vote. We ordained the first openly gay pastor in the early seventies.

“Whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey,” we say, “you’re welcome here.”

“God is still speaking. There is more light yet to break forth.”

The consequences of that theology call us to do more than play into the media feeding frenzy or run for cover or do anything other than try to come to a deeper understanding of one another, each of us created in God’s image – and this time working hard to begin a meaningful and redemptive conversation about race. Carla was not far into her sermon when she quoted Rev. Peter Gomes, who spoke recently to a UCC clergy gathering here in the Triangle. Gomes was clear in placing at least part of the blame for how Wright was perceived and received by the American public: “Jeremiah Wright was preaching the gospel. What are you preaching that no one recognized it?”

Carla went on to say we might think Wright was wrong in claiming the US government might have had something to do with creating AIDS, yet our government did do life-altering, if not damaging, medical experiments on African-American men without their knowledge as late as 1972, which is the same year Jeremiah Wright became pastor of Trinity UCC in Chicago. Though I have no desire to ask God to damn anyone, he is right about our lack of care and concern for the poor and marginalized in our nation.

I’m not trying to write in defense of Wright as much as work to follow the consequences of my theology. Beginning a sacred conversation about race on Trinity Sunday makes sense to me because believing that we are created in the image of a God who could be the One being baptized in the river, the voice in the heavens, and the dove descending all at the same time; the God of Abraham and Sarah and Hagar, of Jacob and Esau, of Cain and Abel; the God who, through the course of human history, has called humanity to come to terms with the inextricable connections between us: we, like God, are many and one at the same time.

One of the working definitions of racism Carla used today was “choosing my rights over your humanity.” Not your race. Your humanity – as in, like my humanity. It sounds a lot like Jesus’ admonition to love our neighbors as ourselves – live as though they were as human as we think we are.

Our nation was nearly one hundred years old when we went to war against each other, partly over issues of race and humanity. Two hundred years on saw us still hedging our bets when it came to seeing all of us as fully human – and it wasn’t simply a “southern” issue. The Boston Public Schools didn’t integrate until the mid-seventies. I dread the presidential campaign in the months to come because I expect a whole lot of dehumanizing racist rhetoric to hit the airwaves at full volume, doing its best to shout down any meaningful conversation.

If we, as people of faith, are not willing to throw open our hearts and talk to one another then the toxic tirades will destroy us all. The title of Barack Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope was taken from one of Jeremiah Wright’s sermons. I love the phrase because it is prophetic and pastoral, renewing and redemptive. We are audacious to hope for a world where we could move as fluidly in relationship as the God in whose image we are made, that we could grasp, as Paul says in Ephesians, how deep and wide and high God’s love is so that we would trust that love as the environment in which we relate to one another, rather than the vitriol and violence that fuels what passes for conversation in our wider culture.

If I am to come to terms with the consequences of my theology, these words are a good start. They are the prayer of confession we prayed in unison in church today.

Living God, we come before you and each other today to search our ways and thoughts and to acknowledge the truth of our personal and collective journeys, in holy anticipation of your transforming grace.

We confess how often we neglect to respond and refuse to listen to your voice calling us into communion with you and into your cleansing love.
We prefer to listen to ourselves.

We confess our often we neglect and refuse to heed the cry and pain of all our neighbors on life’s journey.
We prefer to listen to ourselves.

We confess how often we neglect and refuse to address the legacy of genocid, slavery, and colonialism
We prefer our slanted histories and selfish liberties.

We confess how often we neglect and refuse the unity of your one Spirit over all the earth.
We prefer the prison of our pride and divisions.

We confess how often we neglect and refuse to stop the hate, oppression, and violence inflicted on those who are different.
We prefer our own safety and comfort.

We confess how often we neglect and refuse simply to love you with all our hearts, minds, and souls, and our neighbors as ourselves.
We prefer to love our gods and ourselves more than we love you and each other.

Loving God, we repent of our neglect and refusal to follow your ways and thoughts. We pray that you will have mercy on us, forgive us, and free us to know, embrace, and live truthfully and wholly in you and in each other, now and always. Amen.

I think I’ve got my work cut out for me just coming to terms with the consequences of that prayer.

Peace,
Milton

choosing peace

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A little over a month ago, my friend Billy sent me a link to a talk given by Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, a neuroanatomist, who spoke at the TED Conference, which I had never heard of before but evidently involves a whole bunch of really smart people. The folks at TED want to get good words out to as many folks as possible, so they allow people to embed their videos as long as we link back to them. You need some time to take it in – because her talk is eighteen minutes long – and it’s worth taking the time.

In her closing comments, Taylor says, “We have the power, moment by moment, to choose who and how we want to be in this world.” The context of her words is her years of researching the two hemispheres of the brain and her surviving a stroke. The choice she lays out is between the right hemisphere of the brain, which connects us “with the life force power of the universe” and helps us feel our interconnectedness and the left hemisphere, “where I am an individual separate from everything else.” She goes on: “The more we choose the peaceful circuitry of our right brain hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world.”

The distinction she makes resonates with me because I know what it feels like to feel connected, whether I’m cooking or writing or painting or singing or just walking in the neighborhood with Ginger and Ella. I also know, when I turn into my task-oriented self, how easily I can see nothing but my stuff and my schedule and my way of doing things, which creates peace in no one, including me. Her words leave me these questions:

Is there a way I can choose to live my life in such a way as to see all of it as a creative choice to wage peace?
Can I chose to expand my consciousness to recognize when I have ceased to be a peacemaker without facing some major calamity?
Why is it so hard for us to be peacemakers?

Peace,
Milton

P. S. There are new recipes here and here.
P. S. My Red Sox are showing. Take time to see this video of Manny catching a fly ball, high-fiving a fan in the bleachers, and then making a double play all in one motion.

minor league play

7

Crash Davis couldn’t do anything but play baseball.
With a name like that, what else could he do?
Quick – name all the baseball players you know
named Milton. (You get my point, I’m sure.)

Twenty years after Crash and company graced the
silver screen, I stood on the deck above the first base
grandstand in the house that the movie helped to build
and picked up the foul ball that fell at my feet.

The ball was foul, product of bad swing. Only a few
folks around us sharing in Clergy Appreciation Night
sponsored by a local funeral home – even noticed.
There was no great story attached except for this:

For the first time in my life, I got a baseball at a game.
I came home with a token of the game I love and
cannot play. I wasn’t even breathing through my
eyelids. Good times never seemed so good.

Peace,
Milton

were you there?

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I love live music. I love being in the room for those one of a kind moments that can’t be replicated. I saw Emmylou Harris, Patty Griffin, Gillian Welch, David Rawlings, and Buddy Miller a few summers ago on their “Sweet Harmony Musical Revue” tour. The evening was full of amazing things, but the hallmark was David Rawlings, who is known for his old school acoustic guitar, strapping on a Fender and tearing up the night with Buddy Miller. There aren’t any recordings, any YouTube videos (I checked); either you were there or you weren’t.

I was in Tarrrant County Convention Center when B. B. King opened for U2 and then came back out for the encore and they sang “When Love Comes to Town.” Some of that did end up on film, but not Bono turning to Edge as King left the stage and saying, “For a minute there I felt like a musician.”

Ginger and I sat in a small jazz club in Cambridge and heard Jimmy Webb sing “Galveston” and “Wichita Lineman” and I understood those songs differently when he was finished.

For all the moments I’ve gotten to share, I’ve missed even more. For all the times I’ve seen Springsteen, including the last concert in the Boston Garden, I didn’t get to see him play Fenway Park and open the show with “Dirty Water.” I simply wasn’t there.

I’ve spent the day thinking about those being there moments because we got news this morning that Vera, one of the dear souls in Marshfield, died over the weekend. She was well into her nineties and full of great things. When I shaved my head during coffee hour as a youth mission trip fundraiser (talk about your being there moments), Vera kept a lock of my hair. I was not there when she died; I won’t be there for the funeral. It is the third significant funeral I’ve missed since we moved south. We shared seven years of unrepeatable life together with the folks at North Community. As I grieve those who have gone on, I also grieve not being there. I must also say the grief is matched with gratitude. Of all the days and all the places on earth, I got to spend seven years there, years filled with moments from mission trips to memorial services, coffee hours to confirmations, dinners and dances, smiles and tears.

When I used to walk the beach in Green Harbor looking for sea glass, I was often struck by the fact that I had to choose a path when I walked; I couldn’t cover the whole thing. Unless the shiny little piece of refuse happened to be in the path I chose, I didn’t find it. Conversely, had I chosen a different path, I would not have found the glass I brought home after each trip.

I’m in Durham now, so I don’t get to be in Marshfield for Vera’s funeral. My path leads me to different things, such as what I saw in church yesterday. We stood up to sing a hymn and Bella, a wonderful little girl stood up between her parents and put her arms around them as they sang. They returned the embrace and I couldn’t help but take a picture with my phone. It’s the kind of scene Vera would have liked.


In my youth ministry days, I worked hard to get every kid I could to go to youth camp or whatever retreat we had planned. Once the bus loaded, I chose to be content with those who attended and would tell them, “We will never again be this collection of people in this place at this time. Let’s make the most of it.” Over the years I’ve realized those retreats were no different than everyday life , which is a string of unrepeatable moments and gatherings, only a fraction of which I can attend. Billions of people have come and gone without my knowing them. Millions of concerts have played that I have not heard. And – in this giant universe – I got to be the one whom Vera asked to give her a lock of hair.

That’s the way love comes to town.

Peace,
Milton

swinging with the spirit

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We wrapped up Pentecost by watching the Red Sox game with friends. At one point, the commentators took time to talk about how quickly a batter has to decide whether or not to swing at a pitch. They showed the action in super slow motion, with a digital clock in one corner of the screen. On average, the batter has one quarter of a second to decide to swing or not to swing.

Our friend Terry said, “We don’t see and hear with our eyes and ears; we see and hear with our brains.”

Before the eyes have really had time to focus, the brain has already sized up the pitch and sent the message to the legs to dig in and the arms to start swinging to send the ball searching for the fences, all in less than half a second. All the hours spent practicing in the batting cages pay off because the body knows to trust itself and do what it has been prepared to do, which is an amazing and beautiful thing to behold for a baseball lover.

My earliest understanding of Pentecost was that the disciples spoke in different languages, thanks to the hair-singing descent of the Spirit (did anyone else think of Michael Jackson’s Pepsi commercial?), astounding those in the crowd. Years later, I figured out it was not that they spoke different languages but that the folks in the crowd heard their own language as the disciples spoke. They weren’t seeing and hearing with their eyes and ears, or even their brains, but with their hearts. Some heard nothing but a rushing wind and a bunch of gibberish, leaving them to accuse the speakers of being drunk on “sweet wine.”

“Seriously?” asked Peter. “It’s nine in the morning.”

Ginger spent a good part of her sermon asking what we need to do to talk about our faith and our church in a way that others can hear it in their own language, so they will know they are loved and welcome in Jesus’ name. Her sermon and the Sox come together for me because I think each day holds any number of opportunities where I have a split second to decide whether or not to swing, if you will – to try to speak the language of Love in a way that can be heard by everyone from Ginger to the guy at the convenience store to the people I work with in the kitchen. Occasionally, like a batter with a 3-0 count who knows a fastball is coming down the pike, I have some time to think about what I want to say, but most of the time the chances come quickly and I have to hope I have prepared my heart well enough to see and hear – and act – before I am conscious of the opportunity.

If today is the birthday of the church, as we say, then we do well to notice it began with people speaking and acting in a way that allowed those who were listening to hear of God’s love in a way they could understand – in a way that let them know they belonged with the beloved. That is our foundation, our heritage, our fundamental calling. And so I wonder tonight: who am I practicing to become? how am I training myself to respond to those around me? how does my life speak and what does it say?

Peace,
Milton

cheese plate communion

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It was a perfect night.

The four of us sat around the iron table on the patio of La Hacienda and shared an evening filled with wonderful Mexican food, frozen margaritas, friendship, laughter, and stories – all a part of our celebration of Ginger’s birthday. It was not the only food of the day. During our time in New England, one of the rituals for Ginger’s birthday was a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston to wander and wonder among the paintings and then to share the cheese plate in the museum café. We didn’t make it to an art museum yesterday, but we did end up at Six Plates, a wine bar owned by a new friend here in Durham, that has a great cheese plate to keep up our birthday tradition. My girl likes her some cheese.

As Ginger told of our travels from cheese plate to queso and chips, our friend Lindsey said, “You all are such creatures of ritual.”

Yes, we are.

Ritual is best defined as “meaningful repetition” – repeating those things that help you remember, as the old saying goes, who you are and whose you are. So we end up in a Hard Rock Café on our wedding and engagement anniversaries, we chase down a good cheese plate on Ginger’s birthday, and we keep repeating any number of little sayings and actions that remind us of the promises we are committed to keeping, transforming daily doings into something sacred.

The repetition is a stacking of time, each experience laid one on top of the other, so that when we return to repeat it again we do so from a new perspective. All the years of cheese plates give us a different view of what it means to be together, to be alive in this world. One of my favorite stories is Joshua’s telling the people of Israel to stack up the stones after they had crossed the Jordan so that when the children asked what the stones mean they could tell the story of their deliverance, over and over again.

If ritual is meaningful repetition, habit is the opposite – repetition that grows out of convenience, compliance, or just because: unexamined repetition. Where habits grow like kudzu, rituals have to be cultivated and nourished. We have to keep stacking up stones and slicing cheese if life is going to mean something.

When Jesus first passed the bread and wine, he said, “As often as you do this, remember me.” As a chef, one of the ways I like to interpret his words is to think he was not so much envisioning a Communion service at church as much as he was talking about meal time in a more general sense: every time you break bread together, remember. Let our meals be rituals and not habits.

Soon after Ginger and I started dating, I cooked dinner for her. I sautéed some chicken with pasta and alfredo sauce. She loved it and it became one of our ritual meals, which we call Saturday Night Chicken, since it was a Saturday night when we first had it together. Now it’s a meal I prepare, particularly when we have gone through a busy or stressful time and I want to reconnect. All the meals over the almost twenty years since I first served it to her stack up to give a great view of who we are and where we have come from together because we eat and remember.

Rituals are the raw material from which we can build of our lives a mountain of memories, offering us the chance to see that we have come from God and we are going to God, that we are inextricably connected to one another by the grace of God, and, even in the scope of so grand a universe, it matters that we celebrate with cheese plates, over and over again.

Peace,
Milton

shall we gather at the river?

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It’s late and I’m restless. After the two deaths last week at our church here in Durham, word came that one of the dearest souls in the Marshfield church died unexpectedly. Grief, like my depression, sends me searching for songs in the middle of the night, mostly looking for old friends to comfort me. I found a few at church this morning in the hymns we sang. The postlude was “Shall We Gather At the River.”

ere we reach the shining river
lay we every burden down

I rode the river of new technology tonight that is YouTube, finding all sorts of old friends camped out along the way. Somewhere in my sojourn, I landed on a song I had not thought of in years, perhaps: Gary Chapman’s “Sweet Jesus,” a haunting melody that captures the paradox of faithful grieving and the kind of hopeful suffering Ginger preached about this morning, following 1 Peter’s lead:

Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good. (4:19)

Here are the lyrics:

Sweet Jesus

There is a river running through this town
It carries the water
There isn’t any way to slow it down
Or make it stop
I was a baby when the big bridge fell
So I don’t remember
But I have listened to the stories well
And so I know
They were falling
To the surface
They were calling
To their God
And their cry was

Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying

Fishing for luck beneath the bridge that day
A man in his eighties
He saw it happen and began to pray
As he dove in
He found a mother and a baby boy
They both wouldn’t make it
The mama handed him her only joy
He took the child
Then he was swimming
Like he was twenty
He made shoreline
Then he died
And his thoughts were

Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying
He was crying

I miss my mother and the brave old man
Though I never knew them
They are the soul inside the man I am
I bear their dreams
And I am walking
In their footsteps
I am talking
To their God
And my cry is

Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you catch us, save us
Sweet Jesus, please won’t you hear us crying
We’re all crying

There is a river running through this town
It carries the water
There isn’t any way to slow it down
Or make it stop

Yes, we’ll gather at the river, the beautiful, beautiful river, gather with the saints at the river that flows by the throne of God.

Peace,
Milton