don't eat alone

One of things I find to be true in this life is evangelical churches have it all over us mainline folks when it comes to sound systems. I’ve been in several on both sides of the aisle and my observation remains spot on. I don’t have an explanation for this phenomenon, nor do I intend to attempt to assign blame. I do wonder sometimes if of the mainline folks have just never heard the difference a great sound system makes and so they think what they have is good.

I notice it because I respond to sound. I’m moved by music. I would almost rather listen to a Red Sox game on the radio than watch it on television. When I go to the movie, I look for the theater with the Monster Extra Dolby Sound, even if it isn’t the biggest screen. I like to feel the bass line resonate in my chest cavity, to hear the clues before anyone sees them, to swim in the ocean of tight bluegrass harmonies.

I like to hear and it’s getting harder for me to do.

So when I get to church and I can’t hear, I end up complaining about the sound system. (I refer you back to paragraph one.) I want someone to do something about it; I want them to fix it where it works for me. About a month ago, in my frustration, I picked up one of the hearing aids we have available at the back of the sanctuary – a churchpod, as I like to call it – and used it for the service. I heard every word.

And I had to sit in church wearing a hearing aid.

About halfway through the service, I realized I was being discreet. I took it off during the hymns and the passing of the Peace. I was doing my best to not look like I was wearing it, even though I was not aware of my attempt to hide the little gray box. As I drove home from church, I tried to listen to myself to see if I could figure out what was wrapped up for me in wearing the churchpod. I’ve been thinking about it ever since, even as I pick up the little receiver each Sunday morning.

As far as sound systems go, the issue appears to be mine more than the congregation’s at large, because I don’t hear anyone else talking about it. We have a good audio committee that works hard and I don’t have the time or energy – or knowledge – to get on the committee to try and do the leg work to see if we could install a more effective system. If I’m not going to put in the time and effort to help change it, I need to quit complaining. “I’ve got a great idea of a couple of things you need to do” is never a helpful statement on any number of levels.

The emotion behind the whole issue for me has much less to do with sound systems or churchpods than it does with my own anxiety or even fear. I’m scared to come to terms with the fact that I am losing my hearing, even if it is incrementally. As both my ears and eyes change, I have to stare down my own fear of the claustrophobia that I think would come with being unable to read and listen. Books and music are two things that feed me deeply. What would I do if I lost them? I can rationally understand my question is reaching for an unnecessary extreme at this point, but that’s where the fear lives.

My other realization is not any easier to take: my limits are drawing closer; I need help. The truth in that sentence runs deeper and more profoundly than my embarrassment at wearing the churchpod. The earphone is the tip of the iceberg. I can hear I need help, even without the churchpod, and it’s hard to take.

In Earthly Good: Reflections of Life and God, Martha Sterne writes:

Because it is hard to see God, find God, know God, love God, when we get busy posing like the strongest, richest, happiest people who ever walked. Because it’s just terribly hard to connect with God when we don’t need God, it’s just a terrible curse to suffer from the awful soul-killing delusion of self-sufficiency.

All of us know the word “woe” from the inside. The woes are part of the truth of what it means to be human. Yen and yang, blessing and curse, heartbreak and heart open, life and death. We know that. And yet and still we people with much riches, much laughter, much power, we say “cheese” so well. We, more that poor people, can delude ourselves. So, for Christ’s sake, remember that self-sufficiency is not the truth of us, lest we forget our need for the One who made us and gives us every breath.

In her sermon Sunday, Ginger talked about the different self-sufficiencies in the tax collector, the synagogue official, and the woman with “the issue of blood,” as I’ve always remembered it from my King James days. Matthew chose a profession that alienated him, Jairus was used to power and position, the woman had to be on her own because no one would include her. Jesus called Matthew to follow, Jairus was brought to his knees by his daughter’s death, and the woman grabbed Jesus’ robe in an act of ultimate desperation. They each found healing because they let go of the myth of their self-sufficiency.

Even though evangelical churches will probably always have better sound systems, the truth is I can hear in our sanctuary when I use the churchpod. They keep them in the back for people – like me – who can’t hear in the sanctuary without help.

That’s me. I need help. Even when I hide it under the hymnal.

Peace,
Milton

P. S. — There are new recipes here and here.

I always knew her as “Grandma C.” Her name was Marie.

She was my dad’s stepmother. My father’s mother died a month after he was born and his father remarried when my dad was eleven. She saw me when I was born and then saw me get on a boat with my missionary parents to go to Africa when I was one year old. The first time I remember seeing her, I was five and we were on leave from the mission field. She lived in Hawaii. I remember the fresh smell of the leis they hung around my neck and the pineapple juice that came out of what I expected to be a water fountain at the Dole pineapple farm. She was, for all practical purposes, a Baptist minister without being named one, since Baptists allow women the title, even when they did the work. She was also by herself. My grandfather died before I was born. She still wore her wedding ring.

When I saw her again, I was in sixth grade she was living in Dallas and working at Wilshire Baptist Church. That’s the first time I remember eating her Ritz cracker crusted fried shrimp. I saw her again when I was in tenth grade and she was working at Dallas Baptist College, where she worked until she retired. She and I both lived in the Metroplex for most of the eighties and I saw her (and ate shrimp) with some regularity. I was in my twenties before I began to understand what it meant to have a grandmother.

One of my favorite memories of Grandma C was taking my two roommates, Burt and Robert, to eat shrimp at her apartment. Robert was adamant about not being called “Bob” and Grandma C called him nothing but that the whole evening. Burt and I did the hospitable thing and followed her lead.

I’ve thought about her the past couple of weeks while the strawberries have been in season because she is the one who taught me to cut them. She would pull off the green leaves and then cut a small circle around the stem with a paring knife leaving a small hole where the stem had been. I still do it that way.

In the early eighties, she suffered such a deep depression that she had to be hospitalized at Baylor Medical Center where I happened to be a chaplain. She fought hard to beat back the darkness. After thirty years, she took off her wedding ring. When I asked why, she told me she got to the end of her rope and knelt down by her bed and prayed for God to either take her or provide some means of relief. She said she felt peace wash over her and she decided to start writing letters, trying to reconnect with friends and rebuild relationships. One of those letters brought a response from a man, Roy, whom she had known in Arizona when she was married to my grandfather, who was starting churches there, and he was married and also pastoring. Though their story is worthy of more than this brief paragraph, the short version is the letter led to their dating and getting married when they were both eighty. I got to sing at the wedding.

They grew old together, making the transition from their home to assisted living to a full-fledged nursing home. As Ginger and I stopped to see them on our way to Boston, they gave us a hundred dollars. “You’re our missionaries,” Roy said. After his death a few years ago, her health began to fail, though her spirit did not. She lost her sight and most of her hearing and she still kept going, even if she never left her room at the nursing home. She outlived two husbands, many of her friends and siblings, and most of what you and I might think necessary for a meaningful existence.

Last night she died in her sleep. She was a hundred years old.

Marie Tatum Cunningham Sutton lived a good and a hard life. She was a stepmother, a minister, a curriculum writer, a lover of children, a dorm mother, a shrimp fryer. And she was my grandmother.

Today, for the first time in a long time, she knows what it feels like to feel whole. I can’t help but lean into song lyrics on a day like this: Mac McAnally’s “Somewhere Nice Forever.”

mama I know you’re feeling low
let’s be low together
got to say it’s time to go
somewhere nice forever

there won’t be no leukemia
they’re gonna keep it out
there’ll just be redeeming love
like we sang about

mama you never let it show
you talked about the weather
and jesus love me this I know
somewhere nice forever

you gave us all you had to give
I could not ask for better
you told us of our chance to live
somewhere nice forever

there won’t be no leukemia
they’re gonna keep it out
there’ll just be redeeming love
like we sang about

mama you’re tired we’ll let you go
promise when you get there
you’ll think about me here below
somewhere nice forever

for the bible tells me so
somewhere nice forever

jesus loves me this I know
for the bible tells me so
little ones to him belong
they are weak but he is strong . . .

Peace,
Milton

I had been youth minister at the church I served in the eighties about six months when the couple that taught twelfth grade Sunday School let me know – actually, they told the pastor – they were leaving the church. Because of me. He was a professor of youth ministry at the seminary and was not pleased with the changes I was making because they didn’t follow the denominational curricula and weren’t the things he taught. And I didn’t have a degree in youth ministry. And – oh, yeah – he had been the interim youth minister prior to my coming.

Their announcement caught me by surprise. I had asked him to be on the Youth Committee. He had two kids in the youth group who were very happy. But he was determined to leave and he took the family with him. I was hurt, confused, and angry. I took in personally – mostly because he said I was the reason they were leaving. I never got to have more than a cursory conversation with them before they left. When I talked to the wife, she cried and said she was sorry. When I talked to the husband, he was curt and dismissive (my read on his feelings). The situation didn’t seem to hold any possibility for healing. They left. I didn’t. Life went on. (Well, I worried about how they would talk about me to others and, of course, it hit at the heart of my lingering feelings of not measuring up.)

When I was associate pastor at a church in New England, several families left the church over our decision to follow the equal marriage law in Massachusetts and perform same sex marriages. The issue came up because a gay couple in town came to the senior pastor and asked to be married in our church. The issue with the families was not so much equal marriage as it was the process by which the decision was made: they felt left out. We asked our area minister to lead a conversation among the families, the deacons, and the ministers. As the meeting progressed, the anger moved from the immediate issue to things they had carried around for awhile, many of them having to do with me — my preaching style, my dress, my manner in general – their read on me being based on the assumption that somehow I was gunning for them. One specific example was I had sung “We Shall Overcome” as part of my sermon one Sunday, which they took to be a brazen in-your-face challenge to them. I reminded them the sermon had been an account of our visit to a church for homeless people on Boston Common where we had sung the hymn and I sang it because I was moved by people with nothing having the faith to sing those words. Again, despite our best efforts, the situation did not end in healing. They left. I didn’t. It wasn’t any easier to take the second time around.

In both situations, there were things I could have done differently, less defensively, more compassionately. In both cases, the point came when I decided I had done all I could do, or at least I couldn’t change their minds or their hearts. By that time, in both cases, I was beyond being mad; I was hurt and sad.

I thought about both situations this week with the news that you and Michelle had decided to leave the church that has been your spiritual home for the last two decades. I haven’t been able to find any more information than has shown up in the various news stories, so I know I don’t know the whole story. Your move has some personal impact because you are a part of the United Church of Christ, my denomination. So is Jeremiah Wright. So are the other people at Trinity. You are my peeps who are hurting and hurting each other. That’s hard.

I have no idea the kind of pressure you are living under these days. I imagine you are right when you say your candidacy has created a great deal of pressure on Trinity as well. I’m saddened that the pressure has broken relationships that took years to build. I’m sad your church was not a place you felt you could go for comfort and support after all of these years. I’m also sorry you didn’t post anything on your website that provided more explanation for your decision and left that, instead, to the media who don’t understand faith and church to begin with. They make it sound like a political decision, as though you needed to break the ties in order not to damage your campaign. I don’t want that to be true.

Only you know your heart. Here’s what I know, looking back. I stayed another six years as youth minister and would have had the chance to see both of those kids graduate from high school as a part of our youth group. At the Massachusetts church, one of the guys who left used to go to Red Sox spring training every year and send an nightly email about the games that rivaled any sports writer you can think of. After he left the church, he took me off the mailing list. I missed out on a great deal because we couldn’t (wouldn’t?) figure out how to be church together.

You’re walking away from people you love and people who love you. Walk slowly. And know you can always turn around and go back.

Peace,
Milton

Thanks to the folks at DirecTV, we have XM Radio in our house. Thanks to XM Radio, we have a channel called “The Village” that is all acoustic singer-songwriters. I play it when Ginger isn’t home, just as she listens to the disco station when she is alone in her car. When she came in from her meetings the other night, she left it playing while she got settled; I was writing. When she came back into the room, I had moved to the living room and was sitting on the couch. When she asked what I was doing, I answered, “Listening.”

The song was “My Father’s House” by Bruce Springsteen from his Nebraska album, which ought to make most anyone’s top ten list. The whole record is achingly sparse and beautiful. The song says,

Last night I dreamed that I was a child
out where the pines grow wild and tall
I was trying to make it home
through the forest before the darkness falls

I heard the wind rustling through the trees
and ghostly voices rose from the fields
I ran with my heart pounding down that broken path
With the devil snappin’ at my heels

I broke through the trees, and there in the night
My father’s house stood shining hard and bright
the branches and brambles tore my clothes and scratched my arms
But I ran till I fell, shaking in his arms

I awoke and I imagined the hard things that pulled us apart
Will never again, sir, tear us from each other’s hearts
I got dressed, and to that house I did ride from out on the road,
I could see its windows shining in light

I walked up the steps and stood on the porch
a woman I didn’t recognize came
and spoke to me through a chained door
I told her my story, and who I’d come for
She said “I’m sorry, son, but no one by that name lives here anymore”

My father’s house shines hard and bright
it stands like a beacon calling me in the night
Calling and calling, so cold and alone
Shining ‘cross this dark highway where our sins lie unatoned

After the song was over, Ginger came back into the room and said, “You want to know why you’re depressed? You listen to depressing music.”

We both laughed.

The evening came back to mind when I got to work this morning and one of the chefs (who also lives with depression) chose Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town as our morning prep music. I told him the same story I told you and we laughed again, then we moved on to talking about what the singer and the songs have meant to us over the years. Somewhere after we stopped talking and I was kneading the dough that would become the English muffins (our homemade hamburger buns), Bruce started singing “Promised Land.”

On a rattlesnake speedway in the Utah desert
I pick up my money and head back into town
Driving cross the Waynesboro county line
I got the radio on and I’m just killing time
Working all day in my daddy’s garage
Driving all night chasing some mirage
Pretty soon little girl I’m gonna take charge

The dogs on Main Street howl ’cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man
And I believe in a promised land

I’ve done my best to live the right way
I get up every morning and go to work each day
But your eyes go blind and your blood runs cold
Sometimes I feel so weak I just want to explode
Explode and tear this whole town apart
Take a knife and cut this pain from my heart
Find somebody itching for something to start

The dogs on Main Street howl ’cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man
And I believe in a promised land

There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor
I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm
Gonna be a twister to blow everything down
That ain’t got the faith to stand its ground
Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart
Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and brokenhearted

The dogs on Main Street howl ’cause they understand
If I could take one moment into my hands
Mister I ain’t a boy, no I’m a man
And I believe in a promised land
I believe in a promised land…

For a guy from New Jersey, Bruce has spent his fair share of time in the dark and in the desert – at least in his songs. He’s always taking to the road, with despair driving and hope in the sidecar, the two inseparable traveling companions somehow, moving between the wounds of all that has been left unfinished and unatoned and the wonder of the cleansing storm that wipes things clean. We’re all on the same road between houses that hold the hurts that don’t heal, the places that have been vacated or abandoned, and the mansions that are being made for us, fueled by both hope and despair.

And I’m sure when we get to the Promised Land there will be no disco.

Peace,
Milton

Christine’s blog at Abbey of the Arts has been one I’ve visited regularly for about as long as I have been reading blogs. A couple of weeks ago, she offered me to take part in one of her “sacred artists interviews” that she does from time to time. She posted it yesterday. Here’s the first question:

Are you rooted in a particular faith tradition?

I was born into a Christian family that was also Southern Baptist. I turned one on the ship going to Africa, where my parents served as missionaries, and left the continent for good on my sixteenth birthday. During those years I was exposed to Christians of many denominations, many of whom my parents took seriously as colleagues in ministry. As an adult, I have found my home in the United Church of Christ and it’s gospel of extravagant welcome.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

Peace,
Milton

I’ve been turning Brenda’s request over in my mind for several days. I wish I knew a way to tell a short version, or to tell one in which I didn’t feel like I was leaving out major chunks, or running the risk of being misunderstood. That said, the practice of trying to tell the story has been an important one for me, so it feels worth sharing.

One more thing: this version is more of an emotional landscape than a chronology or even autobiography. I tried to find the line that runs from the God I first knew as a little boy to the God I trust now.

_________________________________________

I don’t remember a time in my life when I didn’t know that God loved me. I was born into a strong Southern Baptist family where my parents sang hymns to me to put me to sleep (many of which I still know). When I was five years old, I gave my heart to Jesus. I wasn’t converted. I’m not sure I became a Christian in any understandable sense. I didn’t turn from a life of sin and sex and drugs. I did what a five year old would do: I gave my heart away. Then I told my three-year-old brother he was going straight to hell if he didn’t give his heart to Jesus. Ah – memories.

As much as I knew God loved me, I’m also pressed to remember a time when I didn’t feel like that love (or anyone else’s) had to be earned, or I had to prove myself worthy of receiving it. As far back as I can remember being loved, I can also remember not feeling like I was enough, in most any sense of that word. I worked hard to be good, to be best, to be at the top of the heap. It wasn’t a competitive thing for me, primarily; I just wanted to prove myself. I was a fairly compliant teenager. I didn’t get into a lot of trouble because I was mostly worried about disappointing my father, the preacher. It was many years before I realized I had had a hard time figuring out where God stopped and Dad started. The good side is that dynamic kept me out of a good bit of trouble. The downside is I defined myself by who I thought people around me wanted to be. I took my cues from them.

I went to Baylor University primarily because that was where all of my family had gone. I didn’t even apply to another school. I “surrendered for ministry” (an interesting Baptist phrase) primarily because that was the family business. I started pastoring (at Pecan Grove) at the end of my junior year because a family friend who had pastored there called and said he thought it would be a good match. I graduated from college and moved up I-35 to Southwestern Seminary because that’s where everyone else was going. Again, I never thought to look anywhere else.

All of them were good experiences. (OK – the group of us who hung together at Southwestern to survive were worth remembering; I have done my best to never step on that campus again.) I pastored that little church for four years. I loved my time at Baylor, even though I feel far from the person who walked that campus. Even as I was doing all the right things, my inner contradictions were breaking the surface. At the end of my first semester of seminary, and after Alabama had drubbed Baylor in the Cotton Bowl, I stood on a table in George’s, a legendary bar in Waco, after way too many beers and sang, “Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam.” Most of the crowd knew the words and sang along. I didn’t know what to do with feeling somehow at home in that bar, even as I felt at home at church.

I don’t want to over-romanticize the moment. I was dead drunk and making a fool of myself. My internal conflict lasted long after the hangover was gone, however. To speak in the terms of the emotional landscape I mentioned at the first, the way my heart has housed my insecurities has always pulled my gaze to the margins. I’ve never felt as though I had a guaranteed place in the in-crowd, so I’m drawn to the others who stand outside the circle, for whatever reason.

The fundamentalist overthrow of the Southern Baptist Convention began while I was in seminary. The fight was then, and continued to be, much more about politics and power than it ever was about theology. The push to get everyone in lockstep let me know I was quickly becoming a Baptist at the margins of the denomination.

After seminary, I moved east from Fort Worth to Dallas, at the suggestion of one of my professors, and completed eight units of CPE (Clinical Pastoral Education), which was sort of like emotional surgery without anesthetic. The premise of the program is you learn who you are by examining what you say and do – scary stuff for a guy like me who didn’t know how to integrate the various faces I presented to the world around me. Needless to say, I found my way to therapy. From there, I found my way into youth ministry, in large part because I had been doing youth retreats and people told me I was good at it.

I was the Minister to Youth/University at University Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas for six years. I was good at it. I loved working with junior high and high school kids – their lives were at the margins. My memories of high school were mostly of wishing I could have been anyone else but me. I knew their pain, I took them seriously, and I loved them. It was good combination. As the eighties drew to a close, the denomination I knew was falling a part. The hardliners were vicious and tenacious and those who saw themselves as moderates had been caught by surprise and were left to define themselves by who they weren’t rather than who they wanted to be. (I understood the dynamic quite well.) It all served to make me mad.

One of my former professors told me he thought I should start working on a PhD in New Testament at Baylor, so I did. I drove from Fort Worth on my day off and took two seminars that fall. In January I met Ginger and, for the first time in my life, felt unconditionally loved. By the end of the spring semester, I decided I wanted to be in love with her more than I wanted a doctorate, so I withdrew from the program. We married in April, 1990. Though I was happy in my work, we were both feeling more and more alienated from Baptist life. We needed to be in a more open place. A perfect storm of a new pastor at UBC who wanted to see me leave, a realization on my part that I was going to explode in anger if I didn’t get out of Texas, and a chance to go to Boston to try and start a church led us to move to Charlestown in August of that year.

For four years we worked to start a church in our neighborhood. We both had to get other jobs because of the way the whole enterprise was funded. Ginger managed a group home for troubled adolescents and I got a job substitute teaching. The church didn’t take. We realized we weren’t evangelists. Ginger moved to a job as the youth minister at First Congregational Church, Winchester. She went on to transfer her ordination to the UCC (boy, is that the short version!) and we found a home at the church there. I was raised – well, I think — in faith by a very conservative denomination and found a home in the most liberal mainline Christian denomination – “the last house on the left,” as they say. And I am at home here.

I went back to school and got my teaching certification and my masters in English because a position opened. Once again, I loved being with the kids. Ten years of bureaucracy and the coming of standardized test took their toll. I also struggled with grading. I hated it. For me, good teaching meant inviting the students into an honest relationship of trust and sharing. I wanted them to feel safe enough to risk and grow. Then came the end of the semester and I betrayed the whole enterprise by saying, “Your life is a C.” At least that’s how it felt to me, the one who felt as though he wasn’t that good at making the grade.

When we moved from Winchester to Marshfield, I stepped out of the classroom and fell off into the bottomless darkness of depression. Looking back, I can see where it also showed up along the way, but for about eighteen months all I could do was get out of bed, walk the beach, and try to write poetry. Early in May eight years ago, Ginger said, “I know this has been hard, but you have to make some money.” I spent the next week driving all around the South Shore trying to figure out what I wanted to do. For the first time, I was looking for a job based on what I wanted to do, not because someone told me I was good at it.

I came home with two jobs. The first was a part-time gig at the South Shore Music Circus, a summer open-air music venue. I went in to see about a stage crew job and got hired as security, thanks to my size and my shaved head. The other was a cooking job. I knew the kitchen was a depression free zone for me, so I thought that might work professionally. I talked my way into a job at a small place that was just opening. By the time the restaurant did open, I had to take time off for a church mission trip. I got back to find the chef and the owner had gotten into a big fight the night before and she had fired him. I was the only one in the kitchen who spoke fluent English, so she put me in charge. Joao and Carlos, the two very capable Brazilian cooks taught me how to do my job. The restaurant didn’t last but six months, but I’ve been cooking ever since.

When we moved to Durham, I moved as a chef. Fifty-one years on, I’m doing what I most want to do: cook and write. I’m a member of a church of ”extravagant welcome,” which comes through in what we say each week: whoever you are and wherever you are on life’s journey, you’re welcome here. I have dear friends who have stayed in Baptist life. I couldn’t do it. My anger would have gotten the best of me. I don’t do well when people are drawing lines to decide who is in or out, who is acceptable or not. (I make that statement to say more about me than them.) I’m a part of a people who ordained a black man to pastor an all white congregation before the Civil War, who ordained women sixty years before they could vote, and who ordained the first openly gay man as pastor in the seventies. I belong to a church that looks to see who is standing at the margins and brings them in. I belong here.

I’m almost halfway to fifty-two and I still can’t remember not knowing that God loves me – that hasn’t changed. What has changed is I’m better at trusting that God loves me because I’m breathing, because I’m here and created in God’s image. That’s enough.

Peace,
Milton

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

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

“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

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.