Talk With the Preacher

There is a little stretch of sidewalk in downtown DC called Therapy Row.

The specific stretch of sidewalk I’m referencing is actually a square from the corner of 8th and H down to the corner of 7th and H, across H to Starbucks (pause here for a Grande Pumpkin Spice Latte) out the door and back down the other side of the street, then across H again and back to Calvary.

Actually, “Therapy Row” is not this block’s official, historic name.

Truthfully, this little plot of land has only acquired such name as the Calvary staff has worn a little path along the sidewalk from Calvary’s front door to the front door of the Starbucks on the corner of 7th and H NW.

It occurred to me today as I traipsed down Therapy Row with my fellow staff members that this little stretch of city is a geographical marker of God’s faithfulness, tangibly expressed in the hundreds (thousands?) of times I’ve made the trek, sharing concerns, laughter and comiseration with a whole host of wonderful people.

Topics of discussion today: a strange dream of being attacked by the church secretary (we don’t have one, so the secretary in question was not a real person . . . I personally believe this dream may well be evidence of post traumatic stress disorder); a $1300 car repair bill (the outrage!); the ongoing controversy of whether we should have pita bread AND tortillas for communion this week on World Communion Sunday (flatbreads: are they all created equal?); and a reprise of the critical question: what kind of message do the curtains in the pastor’s office send to the first-time visitor?

All of these critical issues (plus very likely a few more that have slipped my mind) were thoroughly explored down one side of H Street and back up the other, providing what is an almost daily ritual: the 10-minute therapy session . . . just enough therapy to keep us sane one more day!

I had a conversation with our 8-year-old resident sage Sam this weekend that made me remember how different life looks from that vantage point.

Do you remember?

Sam is a meticulous student and committed learner. He was discussing his concerns over the fact that he feels it will be very likely he will need a cell phone sometime in the future.

(The prospect of such an acquisition was clearly one of the most exciting things ever.)

Sam’s concern over his future ownership of a cell phone, however, is that he knows there’s something you have to do about paying for minutes. And the whole system is a deep and mysterious abyss of knowledge that seems, from his 8-year-old vantage point, desperately inaccessible.

I know how he feels, though I don’t recall having these concerns until I was about 18, away at college, and desperately trying to wade my way through owning my first credit card.

Sam asked, “Is there a class in school you have to go to to learn how to get a cell phone?”

I’m not sure, but I don’t think there is one on that particular subject, so I told Sam I thought it was mostly the job of the Mom and Dad to help a kid learn about the mysteries of cell phone financial arrangements.

Sam’s furrowed brow told me he was still concerned (and rightly so, since he was in this conversation with me, whom he knows to be highly inept at helping with 3rd grade math homework).

I reminded him, though, of the intense time his Dad spends with him and his brother and sister every week sorting out allowance. They carefully spread out piggy banks and offering envelopes, bank statements and wallets on the counter; Mark hands out allowance; they each work through the math of allotting tithe, savings and spending; and then they leave the table with a good understanding of where their income is going.

I’m not sure how financial education on payment of cell phone bills will play out in our family, but I told Sam I thought it would be something like that. Dad would sit down with him (not me, I assured him, and his brow smoothed noticeably) and help him understand what he needed to know when the time came for him to know it.

And then I told him I thought he could probably wait a little longer before he needed to take on the responsibility of a cell phone payment.

Then we went back to reading aloud on the couch together.

Oh, to be 8 again!

I was rather skeptical.

Not unlike my friend Homer I scratched my chin in wonder as a friend and colleague told me of her great success using a book called The Gospel According to the The Simpsons as a jumping off point for group discussion of faith issues.

I’m not too much of a TV watcher, but I have watched my share of The Simpsons and, truthfully, did not instantly connect those 30 minutes of laughter with deep theological conversation.

The Simpsons are a family full of foibles, and creators have been criticized for depicting an American family like the Simpsons. Even George Bush, Sr. chimed in at the 1992 National Religious Broadcasters convention when he declared that we needed to be a nation “closer to the Waltons than the Simpsons.”

But we’ve been watching and discussing in two different groups at church, and are slowly finding that perhaps The Gospel According to the Simpsons holds quite a bit of meaning and substance for those of us trying to figure out what it means to live the Gospel in everyday life (could it be that we’re really more like the Simpsons than the Waltons?).

This is how our experience has been. Last Tuesday a group of young adults got together to watch Homer vs. Lisa and the Eighth Commandment, where young Simpson daughter Lisa has a moral crisis when her father, Homer, acquires illegal cable.

There were moments of hilarity, such as when Lisa visits her minister, Rev. Lovejoy, to ask if stealing is wrong. Lisa says: “So even if a man takes bread to feed his starving family, that would be stealing?” Rev. Lovejoy responds: “No. Well, it is if he puts anything on it. Jelly, for example.” And Lisa answers: “I see.”

But there were also moments of serious contemplation, such as when we considered Miss Albright, Bart and Lisa’s Sunday School teacher’s assertion that “the 10 Commandments are 10 easy rules of live by.” True? Are they really easy to follow . . . and, further, are following the 10 Commandments what our faith is really about?

And how about the more sensitive issue of stealing? Is stealing always wrong? ALWAYS? What about using your neighbor’s wireless Internet . . . ? Is that stealing?

It was true what my friend said . . . there’s a whole lot of theology in the Simpsons, and we’re having a pretty good time laughing and thinking together. Who would have thought?

(If you’re in town, join us on Sunday mornings at 9:15 or Tuesday nights at 7:00!)

This morning the air is crisp and the leaves are starting to turn. This is my favorite time of year. Everytime the seasons change I remember God’s faithfulness–the theme running through every one of the changes.

Lamentations 3:23-24
The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. ‘The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him.’

I’m sorry to say I am not sure the exact number, but I think this is probably about #534 on my list of “What I Did Not Learn In Seminary”.

We tackled the issue of poverty last Sunday in worship, as the lectionary texts spoke eloquently to the question of how our faith might lead us to address the inequities in our society. Right as the service began, almost as if we had planned it, a man who appeared to be someone who lives on the streets came into worship.

This is not an uncommon occurrence, as Calvary is an urban congregation in the middle of a city with a considerable homeless population.

This man caught my attention more than usual, however, because he was wearing a bulky sweatshirt with a hood and because he came right down to the front to sit.

(It was right then, of course, I knew with certainty that he was not a Baptist.)

I’ll admit I had my eye on him, just to be sure he was okay and that we might be prepared to minimize any disruption that might occur. Some of the ushers and I were giving each other knowing looks right about when two officers from the Washington Metropolitan Police Department marched right down the aisle into worship. All the way up to the front row. And they were not coming forward to join the church (if you know what I mean).

It was right as the Prelude ended that the officers clamped the handcuffs onto the church attender.

It was troubling in that it violated the sanctity of the worship; and that the situation brought a worshipper under civil scrutiny in the sanctuary.

Yet, the realities of being an urban church seemed at the moment to collide with everything I feel about worship. I’ve been wondering all week long: if a violent criminal is aprehended and it happens to be in worship, what’s the appropriate response?

I posted some more about this event here.

The cards on the flowers read, “A little something to remind you of God’s beautiful creation and that you are loved. In remembrance of 9/11″.

They stood on the four corners of our busy downtown DC block and handed flowers to weary pedestrians weighed down by the intensity of life in this city capped with the memory of a horrible tragedy 5 years ago.

Kids who struggle to achieve what comes too easy to many of us, turning our neighborhood upside down by reaching out with compassion to those who passed by the church . . . I’m proud of the kids in Calvary’s after school program, Horizons Club, for reaching out to our neighbors with compassion and love on this very hard day.

“Religion that God accepts as true and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.” James 1: 27

The place . . .

The people . . .

The promise . . .

Hebrews 13:5

For God has said, “I will never leave you or foresake you.”

Thanks to Life Long Learner for these thoughts to ponder . . .

• Change is inevitable
• If people want to go to church…they will.
• There are churches for church minded insiders to go to.
• There are churches that think about and adjust their practices to reach out to the outsiders. (I want to be a part of this church)
• Since the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results, would it not stand to reason that from time to time things need to be “shaken” a little?
• God does not need us to defend Him, but to live in a way that we walk and move in Him. Thus, evangelism is no longer door knocking and beating people up with canned manipulative scripts rather it is loving people enough and believing God is big enough to save them through what we might find as very ordinary acts of kindness including listening to them, respecting them, loving them as they are not as they should be. RELATIONSHIP with no conditions – even if they choose not to follow Christ!
• Some people might respond to guilt, coercion, even reason, but most will respond to loving kindness in the form of respect.
• A worship service should be to allow us to express our worship to God and find the “boost” we need to go back in the world and love people, to be the workers God sends, to listen, to love, to learn.
• Conversation in Community then Conversion. Conversion belongs to God.

I’ve heard that one thing that keeps you young is if you are always learning.

Well go ahead and take a few months off my ticking clock because I learned something very important this week: when you get tickets to a sporting event in a three-tiered stadium and your section number starts with “3″, you should expect quite a climb to your seat.

Tuesday found us climbing the stairs at the beautiful Arthur Ashe stadium near Flushing Meadows, New York for a day at the U.S. Open. We’d spent part of the morning in the Grand Stand watching doubles play and got a little spoiled because we were a mere five or six rows from the court.

As we proceeded into the main stadium for the singles matches, I started to think our view might not be as great when we went up . . . and up . . . and up, all the way to the third level . . . then up again to section 319, where our seats were located.

Whew! All the way up to section 319, I turned around and, if I squinted just right, I could see some folks on the court below, not unlike seeing cars from the airplane. Thank goodness for the television monitor, mounted at the very top of the stadium (in other words, directly in our line of vision).

I grabbed my bag, eager to find my seat when Mark pointed out that while we were, indeed, standing in our assigned section 319, our seats were actually in row N, another 14 rows up.

The good news is the view up another 14 rows was not all that different from the view at the bottom of section 319.

The bad news is as soon as we sat down to watch the match, it started to rain . . . . Tournament play for the day: cancelled.

Yesterday began a week of vacation in Manhattan. Vacation or no, I swear I can never seem to escape the invitation to reflect on the ongoing adventure of relationship with God. Some of those thoughts are posted here, since Tuesdays I chime in over at the Mainstream Baptists Blog Site.

But I think I’ll drop in here to say that all of these thoughts on fear and faith, relationship and inclusion came together again for me last night when we got great tickets to see the musical RENT on Broadway.

I’ve never seen RENT, only heard ominous stories of its risqué nature (even more reason to line up, ahem!).

RENT was gritty, troubling, difficult to watch . . . but on our way back to where we’re staying Mark and I talked for awhile about the universal need we all have to be loved, whether you live in a parking lot or a penthouse apartment on 5th Avenue.

And, what matters in the end is the part we play in each other’s lives.

So, in honor of lessons learned on Broadway last night, here are the lyrics from the RENT soundtrack single, Seasons of Love: