don't eat alone

Sen. Barack Obama’s refusal to wear an American flag lapel pin along with a photo of him not putting his hand over his heart during the National Anthem led conservatives on Internet and in the media to question his patriotism. (AP)

Pledge of Allegiance

I was eight years old when they took down
the picture of Queen Elizabeth over the blackboard,
ending her reign over the classroom, making
way for our new President, Kenneth Kaunda,
as we stood and sang, “Stand and sing of Zambia.”

I was eleven, sitting in the middle of the front
seat of his old Ford pickup, listening to the radio
somewhere in East Texas while he went in to
buy some unfiltered Lucky Strikes, when they
said Bobby Kennedy had been shot to death.

I was twenty-one, on a bus in Lenningrad,
going to see the memorial for all those who
had died in Hitler’s vicious siege, when a man
— a survivor – offered to give me everything
if I would promise it would not happen again.

I was thirty-five, teaching school in Boston,
and talking with one of my Chinese students.
When I mentioned Tiananmen Square, he
looked up at me and said, “I was there.”
That’s as close to freedom as I ever stood.

I am fifty-one and they want me to believe
that what matters comes down to lapel pins
and hand signals. I don’t believe them.
I pledge allegiance to the God who made us
and calls us to stand together in love.

Peace,
Milton

It was an odd place to find a poet. She was seated at the end of a long conference table (the kind that hosted meetings that were anything but poetic) in a room, not much bigger than the table, designed for getting to the point rather than ruminating in metaphor. Yet, there we sat, some twenty odd folks (and I do think most of us were odd) on the ground floor of the Duke Clinic building, waiting for words to get us through the day.

I was there by happy coincidence. While everyone else had some connection to the hospital, I had come by way of Garrison Keillor, and then Barbara Crooker’s own website calendar, to take my seat next to her son-in-law who was also the one who had put the web site together. The event was sponsored by the Health and Art Network at Duke (HAND), which is a group that meets together regularly (they’re meeting next Friday to discuss James Thurber’s “The Catbird Seat”). I don’t know much more about them than that. I’m taken by the idea of intentionally looking at healthcare with an artist’s eye and, I’m assuming, vice versa.

As Barbara read her poems, she dropped details of her life like breadcrumbs, leading us to the deeper connection we shared as human beings. She has a new collection from which she read, Line Dance, and the title poem is less, she said, about the Electric Slide than the kind of spontaneous dancing lines that form at wedding receptions, each person affectionately linked to one another. She read the title poem and I kept looking around the room wondering what connections they shared. From there I began thinking of lines of my own, including the one that ran from me to Jimmy to his construction partner who fell off a roof yesterday and was in a room in Duke Medical Center awaiting surgery on his two broken wrists. I was going to see him after the reading.

Barbara lives at the intersection of health and art. Her poetry reflected her acquaintance with grief and with joy and the groundwater of faith that fed her words and her being. She has an autistic son, survived a still birth, had another daughter survive a traumatic brain injury – and those were the things she talked about. When she read her poems, she used her words this way:

Gratitude

This week, the news of the world is bleak, another war
grinding on, and all these friends down with cancer,
or worse, a little something long term that they won’t die of
for twenty or thirty miserable years–
And here I live in a house of weathered brick, where a man
with silver hair still thinks I’m beautiful. How many times
have I forgotten to give thanks? The late day sun shines
through the pink wisteria with its green and white leaves
as if it were stained glass, there’s an old cherry tree
that one lucky Sunday bloomed with a rainbow:
cardinals, orioles, goldfinches, blue jays, indigo buntings,
and my garden has tiny lettuces just coming up,
so perfect they could make you cry: Green Towers,
Red Sails, Oak Leaf. For this is May, and the whole world
sings, gleams, as if it were basted in butter, and the air’s
sweet enough to send a diabetic into shock–

And at least today, all the parts of my body are working,
the sky’s clear as a china bowl, leaves murmur their leafy chatter,
finches percolate along. I’m doodling around this page,
know sorrow’s somewhere beyond the horizon, but still, I’m riffing
on the warm air, the wingbeats of my lungs that can take this all in,
flush the heart’s red peony, then send it back without effort or

thought.
And the trees breathe in what we exhale, clap their green hands
in gratitude, bend to the sky.

A phrase from one of her other poems stuck in my mind: “the untidy closet of my heart.” “Untidy closet” in a redundancy, as far as my life is concerned. I’ve never had a closet that didn’t look as if it had been ransacked. I don’t have to live long in a place before the tiny little space fills up with things and I lose track of what I have in there. When I begin digging and sorting, often times I become an archaeologist of gratitude, finding little pieces of memory and meaning that pull me back into the line dance of life that is larger than I am.

In the untidy closet that is my heart I will need to find room tonight for the words I heard today and the healing they carried as they fell on me.

Peace,
Milton

My travel plans changed this morning. Ginger is not yet over her bronchitis and, well, for several reasons it makes sense to wait a week to go to Birmingham, not the least of which is Ginger and Ella can go with me. About the time I was deciding whether or not to go today, the phone rang and a blogging friend called to ask me to go see his construction business partner who fell yesterday on the job and broke a leg and both wrists; he is at Duke Medical Center. Barbara Crooker, a poet I’ve quoted a couple of times lately, is also reading there today.

We are a week away from closing on the sale of our house in Marshfield and, if all goes well, about a week and a half away from closing on the purchase of a house here in Durham. Needless to say, I’ve got plenty to do around here. Staying is not such a bad thing. The hardest part is shifting gears from how I thought the weekend was going to go to how it actually needs to play out. That shift always takes me a little while. As much as I like to see myself as spontaneous, once I get a plan in my mind I have a hard time letting go of it. I know my destination and I know how to get there, thank you very much.

The destination is still Birmingham, for all the reasons I mentioned in last night’s post. I had my itinerary all worked out: straight down the interstate, get it done, get back home. But I’m not traveling alone. As much as I know that, I need to be reminded – often.

Peace,
Milton

I’m taking the blog on the road this weekend.

One of our reasons for moving south was to be closer to Ginger’s parents in Birmingham. Her dad has Alzheimer’s and her mom has her hands full. They also have Lola and Gracie, our Schnauzers, who making things better there so much that Rachel refuses to give them up. A big part of the reason I’m driving over is to see all of them and another big part is to cook so they can have some soups and other stuff in the freezer for future consumption. It’s a little over five hundred miles from here to there: eight hours and fourteen minutes, according to Google Maps. I’ll take off early in the morning (well, early for me) and get back home sometime tomorrow night. The Cherokee is tuned up and ready to go. By the time I get back, it will have topped 180,000 miles and is still going strong.

In all of human history, only the most recent of us have had the opportunity to move around the globe so expeditiously. Thanks to my car and five hundred miles of interstate highway, I can make pretty good time – until I hit Atlanta. But it was not so long ago that the distance was marked in days, even weeks, rather than hours.

The technology will also let me do something different over the next couple of days as far as my writing goes. My practice for Lent is to write a thousand words a day. Giving myself the liberty of including today’s total in the mix, even though I’m only traveling Friday and Saturday, I’m going to find my three thousand words along the way, taking the opportunity to see what I can hear and see as I travel to be with my family.

I’ll see you down the road.

Peace,
Milton

The path from the restaurant to my car leads me across the heart of Duke’s West Campus five nights a week. Most of the time, not too many folks are out walking when I am, but tonight the Quad was rather well populated with students all standing and facing in the same direction and staring up into the sky. My first thought was they were waiting to see if the Pentagon was going to be able to shoot down its own spy satellite before it fell to earth. I finally asked a girl and guy who were standing near to the sidewalk.

“It’s a lunar eclipse,” she answered, “but it’s behind the cloud now.”

I had no idea that was even happening today. My NPR time gave me nothing but stuff about Castro and the primaries – at least those were the stories I got to hear during prep time. But as I kept walking and trying to look up to see if the clouds might part, I thought of Psalm 8:

I look up at your heavens, shaped by your fingers,
at the moon and the stars you set firm –
what are human beings that you spare a thought for them?

When I sat down to write tonight, I still had the moon on my mind. Ella came in and barked to be taken outside one last time before she went to bed and we stood out under what was by then a clear sky and a moon free of the shadow.

And I started thinking about songs. While Ella trotted in the dark carrying a pine cone in her mouth, I sang softly,

I’m being followed by a moonshadow
moonshadow, moonshadow
leaping and hopping on a moonshadow
moonshadow, moonshadow

My favorite part is the bridge:

will it take long to find me
I asked the faithful light
will it take long to find me
and are you gonna stay the night

Italo Calvino has a wonderful short story called, “The Distance of the Moon” (in Cosmicomics) in which he describes the time near the beginning of human history when the moon was close enough to touch. At high tide, people could reach the moon by ladder; they would visit and then get back before the tide went back out. The natural flow of the universe was to expand, so each night the distance became a little greater, as did the risk of climbing to the moon, until finally it was no longer in reach.

Perhaps we keep singing because we can’t get there so easily. And so Shawn Colvin sings (with Ernie)

So if I should visit the moon
Well, I’ll dance on a moonbeam and then
I will make a wish on a star
And I’ll wish I was home once again
Though I’d like to look down at the earth from above
I would miss all the places and people I love
So although I may go I’ll be coming home soon
‘Cause I don’t want to live on the moon
No, I don’t want to live on the moon

There are probably enough moon songs to line the lyrics end to end and reach the cold hearted orb that rules the night, but I think my favorite is Paul Simon’s “Song About the Moon” (from my favorite Paul Simon record, Hearts and Bones):

If you want to write a song about the moon
Walk along the craters in the afternoon
When the shadows are deep
And the light is alien
And gravity leaps like a knife off the pavement
And you want to write a song about the moon
You want to write a spiritual tune
Then nah nah nah
Presto
Song about the moon

If you want to write a song about the heart
Think about the moon before you start
Because the heart will howl
Like a dog in the moonlight
And the heart can explode
Like a pistol on a June night
So if you want to write a song about the heart
And its ever-longing for a counterpart
Write a song about the moon
The laughing boy
He laughed so hard
He fell down from his place
The laughing girl
She laughed so hard
The tears rolled down her face

Hey Songwriter
If you want to write a song about
A face
Think about a photograph
That you really can’t remember
But you can’t erase
Wash your hands in dreams and lightning
Cut off your hair
And whatever is frightening
If you want to write a song
About a face
If you want to write a song about
The human race
Write a song about the moon
If you want to write a song about the moon
You want to write a spiritual tune
Then do it
Write a song about the moon

Tonight was a good night at work. We were busy again – which is great news – and everyone did well. I reworked the dish the critic had maligned and it was better, too. As hard as I worked today, I came out into the night somewhat energized. Maybe the moon’s game of hide and seek and the folks staring together up into the clouds and stars was contagious. Maybe we were all a little bit washed in dreams and lightning. What I came to tell is the clouds passed and our shadow left the moon unscathed. I know because it didn’t take long to find me and send a shadow of its own while Ella searched for pine cones in its soft glow.

Peace,
Milton

As I was driving to work yesterday, I called Chef because I had a couple of questions. We talked about some of the changes I’ve been making at the restaurant at Duke, and I got to tell her I noticed the check average had gone up a dollar, which means we’re making some progress toward not losing money. As we were ending our conversation, she said, “You’re really doing a good job, Milton.”

Last night was our busiest night yet at the restaurant and I was also starting a new expanded menu, which meant Ramon and I had our work cut out for us. When I first took over the kitchen a little over a month ago, I knew there were only going to be two of us on the line and Ramon was just learning how to be a line cook. I cut the menu down to about four appetizers (soup, salad, fried calamari, hummus) and five entrées (steak, salmon, chicken stir-fry, veggie stir-fry, chicken sandwich). I changed how I presented the meat and fish every couple of days, but the menu stayed small.

Ramon and I have both gotten a better handle on the kitchen and he’s come a long way as a cook. The biggest problem to his progress is his lack of English vocabulary, not his culinary prowess. He has three or four dishes that have become his station and his learning more everyday. With that in mind, I was ready to up the ante on what we were doing, so our new menu includes:

appetizers

• homemade soup
• small salad
• fried calamari
• cheese and fruit plate
• hummus platter

salads (entrée sized)

• eggplant salad: entrée-sized salad of crispy eggplant rounds topped with mixed greens, granny smith apples, feta cheese, toasted pine nuts, and artichoke vinaigrette
• steak salad: slices of grilled steak over mixed greens tossed with dried cherries, bleu cheese crumbles, granny smith apples, spiced pecans, and balsamic vinaigrette
• grilled chicken salad: grilled chicken breast on a bed of mixed greens tossed with honey-roasted peanuts, golden raisins, parmesan cheese & raspberry vinaigrette

entrées

• honey chipotle glazed salmon served on a bed of mixed greens and coconut-raisin rice and topped with pineapple salsa
• grilled ribeye steak with sweet and white scalloped potatoes, seasonal vegetable, and caramelized onions
• cocnut curry shrimp sautéed with julienne peppers and snow peas in a coconut curry sauce tossed with linguine
• eggplant parmigiana: layers of crispy breaded eggplant and cheese topped with homemade marinara sauce over linguine
• chicken parmigiana: breaded chicken breast topped with homemade marinara sauce and mozzarella cheese served over linguine
• tuscan chicken sandwich: grilled chicken breast topped with portabella mushroom and melted cheese with basil pesto mayonnaise on sourdough bread with fries or side salad
• teriyaki stir-fry: chicken or vegetable

We had a little bit of a rush right at the beginning of service and things never let up. When all was said and done, the two of us served seventy-six dinners in about three and a half hours. Ramon and I were both running around and we were keeping up, even with the new dishes. A little after seven, one of the servers put up a ticket – fried calamari and coconut curry shrimp – and said, “I know this guy; we’re getting reviewed.”

Duke Dining Services sends people around to all of the restaurants on campus to grade and report on everything from the service to the meal to the look and feel of the place. The calamari is Ramon’s dish. He was getting hit pretty hard, but I saw no reason to step in. He does good work. I had my own set of tickets to deal with before I got to the shrimp. The dish took longer getting out than usual because we were busier than usual, but it went out just like all the other dinners. About eight, the server came back and said, “Here’s the review. You ain’t gonna like the comments.”

Here’s a tip: never bring bad news about the food to the chef when there’s still an hour of dinner service left. We were busy already and I tried hard not to pick up the paper and read it; I knew better. I couldn’t help myself and then I had to work hard to stay in the game until we finally stopped cooking a little after nine.

Under “Food Quality” he wrote: “I thought the food was disappointing and needed better execution. Use hotter oil to fry the calamari so it’s crisp. Season the food. Everything needed salt. Main dish was very bland.”

The grade he gave the food was G: Good.

One of other servers came back and could see my disappointment. I was wearing it like a chef’s coat. “Don’t let it get to you,” he said. “I know the reviewer. He’s an ass. You’re doing well. Forget about him.”

When I got home and sent my nightly email to Chef, I quoted the reviewer much the same as I have here. When she wrote back this morning, she said, “The guy is a snob; don’t let him get to you. Do go through the review and find the kernels of truth you can learn from.”

My two choices as I stood at the fork in the kitchen could not have been better delineated.

There are other comments on the page that make it clear the guy is not going to win Miss Congeniality. The tone of his writing carries more than an overtone of superiority and, in the heat of battle, Ramon’s calamari last night was not his best work. As for me, I’m still trying to figure out the coconut curry sauce for the shrimp. It hasn’t had the punch I’ve wanted. I tasted it when I got to work this afternoon. It was bland. The other entrées are in pretty good shape. He picked the one that is still in development, if you will, and it showed. He may be an ass, but he was right on this one.

I heard two things from Chef today that mattered to me. One was that I was doing a good job. I’m a person who responds to affirmation. Her words mean a great deal to me. The second was when she told me to look for what I could learn from the review and then – then let it roll off. Don’t take the feedback personally, just take it and go on.

We made some changes in the way we do the calamari this afternoon and they were nice and crispy tonight. I worked on the sauce, too. It isn’t there yet, but it wasn’t bland, I can tell you that. As we got to the parking lot tonight, I said, “Ramon, you did a really good job tonight.”

I’m not the only one who needs to hear it.

Peace,
Milton

You will write about the sermon, right? Maybe on Monday? What it was like to mount the pulpit once again. How long has it been?
(Gordon, in a comment on my blog)

The last time I preached was October 1, 2006. It was World Communion Sunday, the fifth anniversary of the beginning of our bombing of Afghanistan after September 11, and my last day as associate pastor at First Congregational Church of Hanover, where I served for three years. Yesterday was the second Sunday in Lent, the anniversary of the day Pope Pius XXII declared Saint Claire of Assisi as the patron saint of television, and my first time to preach at Pilgrim UCC.

Part of leaving the church in Hanover was also choosing to no longer be a vocational minister. I was even listed as “retired clergy” in the Mass. Conference directory, a label I choose over that of my friend Joy who reminds me I’ve “left the ministry.” I feel called to cook professionally, to write as if it were a profession, and to be the spouse of the pastor on a personal level. Being Ginger’s husband is my favorite thing.

When Ginger asked me to preach because she and Carla, our associate pastor, would be on the Women’s Retreat, I was happy to accept. Part of the reason was, of course, because Ginger asked me. Part of the reason is I like getting a chance to say what’s going through my mind and heart. Most of the reason was I love worship and I love getting to help lead in worship.

I love being a part of the church and The Church.

Since we’re still not unpacked completely and my clerical robe is still in the Pod, I wore a suit to preach yesterday (an event in and of itself). I’m glad it worked out that way. I didn’t feel as though I was stepping back into a role I had chosen to no longer play. Instead, I felt more like it was just me doing my part in the service along with the liturgist and the choir and the other worship leaders. I don’t feel like a Reverend anymore. (Did I ever?) I do feel like a contributing church member. Yesterday, my contribution was the sermon.

Worship requires a recipe, much like cooking dinner. You have to figure out the ingredients and how they are going to mix together to make something compelling and comforting at the same time. The sermon, even as a part of the total mix, requires a recipe of it’s own: text, thoughts, connections, and people. Many years ago, Gene, one of my friends from seminary, was talking about what he was learning about preaching. He said when he tried to preach to everyone, he got to nobody. When he thought of five or six specific people in the congregation and wrote his sermon to speak to them, it felt like everyone came out of church saying, “I felt like you were talking straight to me.”

I’m grateful that we have been in Durham long enough for me to feel something other than brand new here and to have a few relationships that have moved past introductions to allow me to preach with specific people in mind. I’m also grateful that I think of the sermon as a conversation starter in the context of a community of ongoing conversation rather than a Word From The Lord.

As I’m writing, two things come to mind.

When I was growing up in Baptist churches, people who felt God calling them into ministry either “surrendered to preach” or “surrendered for special service.” There are a couple of blog posts at least dealing with that vocabulary, but I’ll have to do that another time. As a youth minister, I began to realize that the only time we made a big deal about someone following God’s call on their lives was when they “surrendered” for ministry. I don’t remember ever being a part of a service when we celebrated a young person feeling called to be a physical therapist or a carpenter or an accountant, an actor, a teacher, or a chef.

The other story probably happened not long after Gene made his comments about preaching. I was in a church in Central Texas where Miss America was scheduled to come and give her testimony. One of the men in the church said, “Why is it when we have someone special come to speak they have to be someone famous? Aren’t there any plumbers who want to talk about Jesus?”

I’m not saying ministry, as a vocation is something that is no big deal or doesn’t require special gifts and skills. One of the reasons I’m retired is I don’t have the gifts or skills to do the job in a way that didn’t eat me alive. The story is told of Margaret Atwood, the Canadian novelist and poet, being at a cocktail party when a physician approached her and said, “You know, when I finish my career as a neurologist, I think I’ll write a novel.”

“And,” Atwood replied, “when I finish my career as a novelist, I think I’ll take up brain surgery.”

I am saying there was something redemptive for me to step into the pulpit, not as a minister, but as a church member, as the spouse of the pastor, as Milton to speak my part of the conversation.

After church, Dewitt and Alice, two wonderful people I am getting to know, asked me to go to lunch with them before I had to go to work at the restaurant. While we ate, Dewitt was wonderfully specific about the things that had spoken to him in the sermon. He obviously listens better than I do on most Sundays.

The conversation continues.

I’m not sure if that answers your questions, Gordon, so let me try a bit more succinctly. Sunday was a good day. I stepped into the pulpit with those who have been church for me in the past holding me up and those who are becoming church for me sitting in front of me and calling me on.

It was a good place to be.

Peace,
Milton

Genesis 12:1-4; John 3:1-17
A Sermon for Pilgrim United Church of Christ, Durham

It’s written matter of factly in our scripture passage this morning:

“Now the LORD said to Abram, “Go from your country and your kindred and your father’s house to the land that I will show you,”

as though God and Abram were having a conversation. If they were, we aren’t privy to it. The chapter starts with God talking and gives us no background or context. If we back up into Chapter 11, we learn about Abram’s family tree, that he was originally from Ur (which is modern day Iraq), and that Terah, his father, had actually set out from there for Canaan, but only made it as far as Haran before he settled down to live out his two hundred years. We don’t know why.

Abram had been in Haran a hundred and twenty-five years or so when God spoke to him about moving on. He was settled and secure. God offered him promises and unsettledness – pack up everything, leave your family and friends and the land you know as home – for a reason: “and I will make you a blessing.”

Nicodemus was a settled man as well. He was a religious leader, which meant he both power and money. He heard Jesus speaking and came to find him to ask more questions, I think, but began with a statement instead:

“Rabbi, we know you are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the miraculous signs you are doing if God were not with him.”

Jesus’ response – also in a matter of fact tone — seems to indicate that he wasn’t interested in some sort of esoteric theological discussion. He wanted to make it personal:

“Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

Nicodemus got to hear the phrase “born again” before it was road weary and politically laden. He took it at face value, wondering how he could climb back into his mother’s womb and come back once more as a bouncing baby boy. The image is not a sentimental one, but a painful, messy, even bloody image. How could something as visceral as childbirth be repeated? And why would you want to do that?

After listening to Ginger’s sermon last week on the temptations of Jesus, I told her I thought they could all be summed up in one phrase: I matter most. The Tempter was trying to get Jesus to live as though he mattered most. From that perspective, these two stories could be summed up in an opposite way: God matters most. God is where things start and finish, God is the Alpha and Omega, the First and Last Word.

The other thing that struck me was something I remembered from a New Testament class many years ago. The temptations were not a one time thing for Jesus. Deciding whether to feed people to gain allegiance, or to use the miracles as a way to gain popularity, or to see the world as belonging to him were things Jesus had to stare down everyday. Our stories today are no different.

Abram left Haran and made it all the way to Canaan. He even built an altar at Bethel. Then a famine came and he and Sarai were forced to go to Egypt to find food. The man who had trusted God on the first part of the journey lost his nerve. As they got close, Abram told his wife he was afraid, when the Egyptians saw how beautiful she was, that they would kill him and take her to be with the Pharoah. His plan was to say they were brother and sister. Abram made himself safer, but he didn’t prove himself more faithful in what he did to himself and his wife.

I don’t mean to be too hard on the guy. Maybe he thought the journey to Canaan would be a one time thing: he would unpack at Bethel and then he would get to live two hundred years in the same place. He had hardly taken the saddlebags off the camels when it was time to go again.

Nicodemus shows up two more times in the gospels. In one scene, he asks a rather innocuous question as the other Pharisees are plotting to kill Jesus. Then he shows up at the tomb with oil and spices to pour on Jesus’ body. Perhaps the thought of outing himself as a “born again believer” was too much.

The sentence closest to the heart of our denomination over the last few years I, “God is still speaking.” Those are dangerous words. If God is still speaking – and saying the kind of things Abram and Nicodemus heard — then the Bible is not an expanded version of Life’s Little Instruction Book or Robert Fulghum’s Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. God’s words to us are incendiary, and intentionally so. If we listen, ours are also. When the children lead us in prayer each week, here’s what we say:

Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.

The trip from Iraq to Israel was less complicated in Abram’s day and Nicodemus didn’t have to contend with globalization and climate change and a world as large as the one we know. So will we ever get to settle in the Promised Land or be born once and for all?

The short answer is no.

If birth is our working metaphor, then it is God’s womb we climb into over and over, and with each birth we see another way we are called to be the people of God, whether it’s figuring out how to respond to Darfur or Kenya, or how to meet the needs of the poor and homeless in our city and our nation, or how to hold our government accountable when they torture and abuse people, or how to handle our finances as a church so that we are faithful and generous stewards of what we have been given, or how to deal ethically in our business practices, or how to live with honesty and integrity as a church community. We are called to be born again and again and again, each time a fuller incarnation of the God who gives birth to us over and over and over.

John 3:16 is the first verse I memorized as a child. It begins, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son . . .” Not only is God still speaking, but God is still so loving the world that God continues to live in a constant state of labor, giving birth to us, the children of God, again and again, that we might be a blessing so the world may know how deeply that love runs. Amen.

Peace,
Milton

Curious George has gone to Africa.

Sorry. I couldn’t resist. Bush is making a whirlwind tour of The Largely Ignored Continent, visiting countries not in crisis where he can point to what he has done to help them. Yes, my cynical sap is definitely rising. Kofi Annan has been in Kenya for a couple of weeks trying to do something to stem the violence firsthand, but Bush chose to go next door to Tanzania and let his Secretary of State go to Nairobi. None of them is going to Darfur.

Before you skip to wherever you’re going next, this is not going to be a rant. I’m headed to one particular thing I heard today on NPR related to the $19 billion Bush pledged five years ago to help fight AIDS in Africa. The money has been spent on AIDS and also to try and lessen the damage done by malaria and tuberculosis, and the money has helped. The NPR reporter noted before the aid was pledged, less than two percent of people with AIDS were able to get any help. That number has now risen to over thirty percent. Yes, that’s good news and . . .

We’ve spent twenty-six times that much on the war in Iraq, a number that is truly impossible for me to fathom. Over twenty million dollars clicked by on the counter here on the blog in the time it took me to write this post. It will only take five months to spend $19 billion in Iraq, not five years. Beyond feeling frustrated and helpless at the way the government spends money, I’m pulled by the numbers in a more personal way that makes me contemplate my generosity and values.

Some years ago, when the news still talked about Brad and Jennifer, Ginger talked in one of her sermons about the big deal that had been made because they gave a hundred thousand dollars to something. For the organization receiving the money, a $100K was a big deal, but when Ginger did the math as far as the gift as a percentage of income, it was the equivalent of she and I giving about five bucks to the cause.

All of it flows together for me when I look at the story of Abram because I keep thinking about what was at stake for him, and for Sarai, even though she doesn’t get equal billing. Genesis 12 opens with God telling Abram to pack up and move – no context or explanation. I looked back into the previous chapter to find that Abraham’s father, Terah, had been the one who originally left Ur (Iraq!) for Canaan, but only made it as far as Haran and settled there. We aren’t told why; he just stopped. Who knows if the prospect of taking up the journey was ever the topic of discussion over dinner, if Terah was going because God told him to go, or if he just felt like moving west and then got tired like the guide in Waiting for Guffman.

Abram and Sarai got to the land they were promised and built an altar of thanksgiving, but a famine came, so they went south to Egypt, as did Moses and Mary and Joseph, to name a few. As they came into the Negev, Abram got a little nervous. His wife was beautiful and he didn’t fancy himself much of a fighter, so he told her to say she was his sister so they wouldn’t kill him to get to her. She “went to live” with the Pharoah and Abram became a wealthy farmer, getting comfortable in Egypt the same way his father settled in Haran.

Abram’s plan worked well, I suppose, if you’re Abram. Sarai was the one who had to pay the bill. I imagine “going to live with” the Pharoah was a euphemism for more than doing housework and looking pretty at dinnertime. Sarai, who was barren and wanted children, was being forced to have sex with the Pharoah so Abram could get set up in business and not get killed. He probably thought he was doing her a favor.

Being compassionate is not the same thing as doing someone a favor or doing something nice for those in need. Being philanthropic – making sure we spread things out so everyone gets a little something – is not the same as being generous. One of our folks in Marshfield was so deeply moved by the plight of the victims of Katrina in Mississippi (who, FEMA said today, were given trailers contaminated with formaldehyde) that he continues to figure out how to get down there as often as he can to help people rebuild their homes. He isn’t being nice; he identifies with those folks, hurts with them, and hardly goes a day without thinking about what he can do to help. One of these days, we’re going to get a call and find out he retired as a CPA and moved to the Delta.

It wasn’t Abram’s idea to leave Egypt. Left to his own devices, I think he might have been the same sort of settled footnote as his father had Pharoah not found out he had been fooled and told them both to get out of the country. Abram made sure to take all of his wealth and comfort with them. But God’s promise wasn’t that Abram would be rich and comfortable.

“I’ll make you a blessing,” God said. Abram may have stopped listening after, “I’ll make of you a great nation.” (I like the way The Message puts it: “I’ll make you famous.”)

Being an American Christian means, for most of us, growing up with Abram’s sense of comfort and wealth, particularly compared to the rest of the world. We like feeling as though we are the chosen ones, God’s celebrities, able to do nice things for those in need from time to time without really grasping what our choices are costing those around us.

I say, “we.” I should begin by saying, “I.”

I’m thankful this story and others shows God works with and loves flawed people, otherwise I don’t know I could say, “I’m bound for the promised land.”

Peace,
Milton

In getting to preach this Sunday, since Ginger is away on our church’s women’s retreat, I’ve been thinking about Abram and Nicodemus, the two stars of the lectionary readings this week, and tonight that’s led me to thinking about invitations.

As one who grew up Southern Baptist, invitation is a loaded word, tied to the altar call at the end of every service, calling people to conversion, church membership, or (as we often said) to “redecorate” their lives. As we sang the final hymn, the pastor stood at the front of the church and waited for people to step out into the aisle and come forward. On many occasions, the pastor would signal to the organist to pause and he (they were all men in those days) would implore us to not let the song end without responding to God’s call. For the most part, we all stood still and sang.

The hymns we sang were ones that spoke to our desire to be changed by our encounter with God.

All to Jesus I surrender, all to him I freely give
I will ever love and trust him, in his presence daily live

I surrender all, I surrender all
All to thee, my blessed savior, I surrender all

The songs were filled with imagery of transformation:

Have thine own way, Lord, have thine own way
Thou art the potter, I am the clay
Mold me and make me after thy will
While I am waiting yielded and still

The one I remember as the pinnacle of invitation hymns was

Just as I am without one plea
But that thy blood was shed for me
And that thou bidst me come to thee
O, Lamb of God, I come

Thanks to YouTube, I’ve spent the better part of my evening alone flipping through gospel videos, listening to songs full of invitations to follow and calls to come home. I think about Abram, who hailed from what we know as Iraq, hearing God tell him to pack up and head west. The story is told in only a few verses because Abram didn’t do much talking; he packed up and left.

Nicodemus’ question to Jesus – and Jesus’ answer – unwittingly created one of the great dividing lines in Christianity, as some cling to the idea of being born again as label more than metaphor. Both were trying to come to terms with how we are changed when we encounter God. Neither had any idea how their words and actions would alter the landscape for those who came after them.

The story of our faith is a collection of short stories of individuals and communities of faithful followers who have answered God’s call to move and grow, or to be born anew into a world that needs a fresh incarnation of God’s love. Some of the stories are rich and full; some are tragic and some are laced with laughter.

In my musical journey this evening, I came across Mark Heard’s song, “Heart of Hearts”:

Tears in the city
But nobody’s really surprised, you know
My heart’s taking a beating
Existence is bleeding me dry, you know

But way down in my heart of hearts
Way down in my soul of souls
Way down I know that I am a fortunate man
To have known divine love

The world is in shambles
I’m just a young man but it’s been getting a little bit old to me
I’m already aching
The years have been taking a little bit of a toll on me

But way down in my heart of hearts
Way down in my soul of souls
Way down I know that I am a fortunate man
To have known Divine love

Two in the morning
The siren is a warning that everything is not quite alright
The city is sleeping
I’m down on my knees in the night tonight

But way down in my heart of hearts
Way down in my soul of souls
Way down I know that I am a fortunate man
To have known Divine love

I still don’t know exactly where the sermon is going, any more than Abram knew how to get to Canaan. What I do know is I can sing a few more verses and prepare myself to be changed, converted, even born again once more.

Just as I am, poor, wretched, blind;
sight, riches, healing of the mind,
yea, all I need in thee to find,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Just as I am, thou wilt receive,
wilt welcome, pardon, cleanse, relieve;
because thy promise I believe,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

Just as I am, thy love unknown
hath broken every barrier down;
now, to be thine, yea thine alone,
O Lamb of God, I come, I come.

As the old preachers used to say, close your eyes and make it a prayer.

Peace,
Milton