Talk With the Preacher

I thought she was joking when she told me she was a “motivated beginner” but there it was in black and white on the elementary school Christmas Band Concert program:

Jingle Bells . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Motivated Beginners

I’d listened to Jingle Bells, of course, over and over and over (and over) during oboe practice sessions in the living room, but what I didn’t know was that the band teacher had assigned Jingle Bells to all the new students to work on in their free time. Depending on the level of accomplishment, I learned, those who could play Jingle Bells with a reasonable amount of competency the week of the Christmas Band Concert would automatically be included in the group of “motivated beginners”-with their very own listing in the program.

I thought about what it meant to be a “Motivated Beginner” as I soldiered my way through the band concert (only because I love my daughter more than life itself and, by the way, God bless the band teacher forever and ever), and later as I pondered the services I’ll lead this week.

See, this time of year presents specific challenges for the preacher. Instead of a wide and varied romp through the text that characterizes almost every other Sunday of the year, come this week, well, the story pretty much stays the same.

You know, baby, Mary, angels, shepherds, star.

There are a few interesting variations in the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ birth, of course, but YOU try to effectively communicate a message by exegeting a text in front of a group of tired, stressed out and over-sugared folks who can barely think of anything other than how they plan to survive the relatives’ visit this year.

In other words, I’ve found that examining Greek words and exploring scholars’ views on the text are often not the most effective communication strategies on this particular week.

No, even though I determine to do something different every single year, I always come back to just telling the story.

This, I confess, sometimes feels like professional failure. I studied for years to be a pastor-surely I can come up with something fabulously different and brilliantly thought-provoking this Christmas?

That familiar feeling of failure came creeping back last week, but I finally put this Christmas frustration and the band concert together. I pondered: maybe the story can stand on its own? And I mused: maybe it doesn’t need flowery interpretation or pretentious exegesis? And then I realized: if I tell it again and again, year after year after year, it might be that pretty soon I’ll get good at telling the incredible story of God-with-us, that I might eventually become . . . a motivated beginner!

Because, I finally realized, there are no experts on this night of the year.

All of us are beginners, crowding our way to the manger and straining for just a glimpse of salvation. We try hard the rest of the year but most of us have trouble getting the hard message that little baby came to teach us, anyway.

And so it is on this holy night that we find ourselves, again this year, starting again the journey of transformation that began in a Middle Eastern feeding trough two thousand years ago. 

Yes, we’re beginners, again. 

This year as we hear and read and tell the story again, I want to let it sink in, deeper and deeper, until it is indelibly imprinted on my heart.  That way, when the song of the angels begins next year maybe I’ll find myself sitting with the “Motivated Beginners.”

Blessed Christmas, everyone.

The following is pretty personal . . . it’s one of those entries you probably don’t want to read if you like to think the pastor is all shiny and perfect.  But if you’re okay with the preacher as a human being, well, then, you might be okay reading this.  It’s comforting that I’m not the only one out there who struggles with this.  I know this time of year is hard for a lot of people.  So, I offer this as my own reflection.

Some people think that life moves along at a pretty happy pace, pockets of sadness here and there, a swift dunking under cold water from time to time . . . then inevitable resurfacing and eventual acclamation to the water temperature. Then, life continues, like that horrible song they made us sing in elementary school choir . . . “we’re moving along, singing our song, side by side.”

Give me a break.

It’s never quite been that way for me. And it’s not that my life doesn’t have a lot of happy things in it.  But along for the ride is someone I never invited who insists on jumping in from time to time.  I don’t always know when he’s coming but at this point along the journey I’ve learned to recognize when he comes knocking at the door. By “he” I mean . . . well, whatever you want to call the personification of the feeling of a heavy, water-soaked woolen blanket thrown over your head, making breathing just about all you can muster.

Elizabeth Gilbert says she has two: twin goons called depression and loneliness, which I maintain could be just one really, really big one. At least in my experience. But she’s ahead of me, as I’ve just learned to recognize him . . . I do everything I can to keep him at bay but I haven’t gotten around to naming him yet.

Name or no, there he is, knocking at the door, turning life situations that would ordinarily merit one determined burst into “we’re moving along, singing our song, side by side” into desperate squeezes of the heart, panting moments of pain where taking the next breath seems like the hardest task I could ever hope to master.

Is this just me, or does anybody else know what I am talking about?

I had an experience recently where that guy was knocking on my door and, even when I refused to answer he came right in and made himself at home.

When this happens I know it’s going to be hard to breathe.  See, when he’s around he sits right next to me all the time. He plants doubt where hope was just about to bloom. He makes my heart squeeze . . . I mean, like really, really contract in a way that hurts, hurts, hurts.  And so I think about what it will take to breathe, knowing in the best part of who I am that the world he creates in his whispers is not a world I recognize at all . . . that the heavy draping of his presence might just be hiding something really, really wonderful.

These were my thoughts the other day when I came upon a scene that broke through my reverie.  I watched a shaft of sunlight fall on the face of one of my sleeping children. His eyes were closed, long eyelashes laying against a cheek that has not lived long enough to know about the hope-sucking darkness. 

Yet. 

And I notice on that beautiful cheek not just the light but also a shadow . . . darkness falling into the light, life in relief.

Is that what he’s going to have to learn about life?  Light and darkness?  Contrast and opposing realities?  Light and dark?

Life in relief?

I’m afraid so. 

But, please, make the life in relief my children live a little softer than mine, would you? Gray, fuzzy edges instead of stark, cutting black lines?  Gradual transitions instead of large, intimidating musclemen breaking down doors? 

So that soft little cheek won’t have to bear so many tears?

Please?

He could tell that I was green, green, green, and profoundly unsure of what I was doing that day, the Wednesday of my first week ever as a pastor.

I could tell he was wondering what parallel universe he had entered to find himself sitting across the table from his new pastor-a woman fully 50 years younger than he was.

He was guarded. And dubious. It was clear that anything approximating friendly interaction with the pastor was an unfamiliar state of affairs for him. He wanted to know what my agenda was for meeting with him.

I was scared and lonely. This job I’d longed for for so long seemed so much bigger than I could get my mind around. And while I liked all the people I’d met so far, they didn’t feel like “church” to me at all-I missed my congregation in New Orleans.

And thus it began: my first ever meeting as pastor with Calvary’s Chair of Deacons. Cutting to the chase, he asked me why I wanted to meet with him and what it was I wanted from him. I looked across the little table at somebody who reminded me so much of my grandpa, but the two feet between us seemed like a yawning chasm we’d never be able to cross. I could feel the tears in my eyes and my throat began to close up as I choked out what it was I most desperately wanted in that moment: “You know, right now I could really use a friend.”

The moment hung there, suspended. Then his face softened. His eyes filled with tears that began to leak down his face. He reached across the table and grabbed my hands. He said: “I’ll be your friend. I’ll be your friend.”

That was almost five years ago and life has changed for everybody. I’m a slightly paler shade of green, with a little more experience under my belt. He’s approaching 90 and can’t make it down to church anymore. Yesterday I got the news that he was in the hospital again . . . another in a long series on increasingly debilitating medical challenges. So I went to see him. I came into his hospital room and sat down across the little rolling hospital table between us.

He could tell I was stopping by on my day off and he managed a comment about knowing you’re really sick when the pastor shows up on her day off.

I could tell he felt terrible . . . he was pale and shaky, dressed in a flimsy hospital gown and taped up with all kinds of tubes.

He tried. He tried to be his normal, jovial self, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even manage a full sentence without breaking into tears. His shoulders shook and he fumbled for tissue. Finally he said, “Looks like you’d better do the talking this time.”

I didn’t know what to do. Usually I can’t get in a word edgewise with him . . . I wondered what parallel universe I had entered to find myself sitting across the table from someone I had known as so vital and opinionated, now weak and scared.

“What do you need?,” I asked him, feeling desperate to provide some comfort. But he just looked at me and shook his head, tears keeping the words in.

A memory surfaced: the memory of sitting across the table from this same person five years ago. I had the sudden memory of how wide and impassable the distance between us seemed then.  The distance felt just as overwhelming as I looked across the hospital table.  

But then I suddenly remembered: why, he’s the very one who taught me how to bridge a yawning distance like that!

I reached out across the table and took his hands.  I managed to choke out, “I guess now I get a chance to be your friend.”

A twinkle of recognition flashed in his eyes and we sat there together, our tears pooling on the table, filling the distance between us one more time.

How predictable.

For one entire calendar year I have visited my orthodontist with a level of commitment that rivals the church attendance of many modern church members.

Why?

Because I have been flossing my way toward the day when those metal gum-terrorists would be gone, forever, and I would, for the first time in my life, face the world with perfectly straight teeth.

That day happened last Friday and, aside from the whine of the dental drill, it was all I had hoped for. I looked in the doctor’s mirror in amazement: I recognized the reflection but definitely not the teeth.

But then I got the bad news: RETAINER.

Maybe I wasn’t listening but I did not know I would be wearing a metal retainer on my upper teeth. The doctor sat me down and snapped it in, then said: “Don’t take it off.”

“But . . . ,” I protested . . . .

“Cleaning. Eating. Otherwise, keep it on.”

“But doctor! Do you know what I do for a liv . . . ?”

“No, I do not know what you do for a living. But I don’t care. Wear the retainer. Don’t take it off.”

“But on Sunday mornings I have to . . .”

“No. I don’t care. Wear it.”

And so it was that I found myself walking up to the pulpit on Sunday morning, ready to deliver the pastoral prayer I had worked so hard to prepare.

“Oh Lord, we hear: ‘Peace, peace . . . but there is no peace!’”

Well, that’s what was on the paper in front of me.

What came out was something akin to: “Oh, Lord, we hear: ‘Peath, peath . . . but there is no peath!” . . .

. . . accompanied by the ever-attractive saliva spit all over everyone in the front row.

Leave it to me to get a retainer right before the Advent Sunday of Peath . . . uh, Peace.

This is the way I heard it:

Our friend Carol was standing at the counter in her kitchen rolling out cookie dough for the hundreds of sugar cookies she’s baking for our church Christmas craft fair. Candy canes and stars, Christmas trees and angels-they quickly spread out over the counter as pan after pan came out of the oven.

The word in the kitchen was: you can have ONE since the rest are for Friday night.

As you might imagine, however, this warning did not discourage hopeful children from trolling back and forth through the kitchen, peering around the cook while she worked and offering comments and suggestions.

Possibly in an effort to secure another cookie or possibly just because he likes to comment on the world around him, Sam began a conversation with Carol about the shapes she was cutting out. After some discussion during which I was not paying much attention, my ears pricked up when I heard Sam ask: “Well, do you have a baby Jesus cookie cutter?”

Carol replied, “No . . .”

And Sam asked, “Why not?”

In preparation for a sermon series on the Apostles’ Creed I’ve been reading Alister McGrath’s little book I Believe: Exploring the Apostles’ Creed. I’ve been discussing some of the theological issues with a friend who’s reading along with me and, as a result, I’ve discovered that talking about God is like opening a can of really squirmy worms-everybody thought they believed pretty much the same but, turns out, we’re all different.

That was obvious when we started talking about Jesus. Who was he? Who is he? And, were they really trying to help when they created the clear-as-mud description “fully God, fully man?” Is he our brother or is he our master? Or both?  Was he adopted or created? Who cares?  And what about that whole conception issue?

There are books (and books and books) you can read on all these issues and more, but I guess for me it boils down to a relationship. This is the holy gift of God-come-to-earth: that we are finally (me and God, that is) able to communicate with some level of experiential understanding. God knows what it’s like to be me. For me, that’s the holy jumping-off point, the place from which my relationship with God can grow into so much more than God’s one-time redemptive effort on my behalf; it becomes something full of mystery and holiness, something that changes all the time as I get to know this God who lives in relationship with me.

So, while I checked online and did, in fact, find a baby Jesus cookie cutter (scroll the mouse over the cookie cutter-don’t you just want to pinch his little cheeks?), I think it’s probably best if we stick to bells and Santas in our cookie cutter collection because I don’t really think you can come up with a good cookie cutter Jesus, one that will look the same to everyone. 

Truthfully, I don’t think I’d want to. 

And, anyway, who’d want to eat baby Jesus?

Don’t you love it when you happen to pick up a book that lives with you for a few days, and almost like a fascinating stranger, invites you into a whole new world?

I just finished reading one of those books that I loved so much I slowed down my pace toward the end wishing I would never have to turn the final page.  Please . . . take a look at Jim Fergus‘ novel, 1000 White Women.

I’m not an avid reader of Westerns, but I loved Kevin Costner’s epic, Dances With Wolves.  Think of this book kind of like that movie. The book is a novel, through and through, but I tell you, you won’t believe you’re not reading the actual journals of a white woman living among the Cheyenne. So many themes and ideas run through this book, not the least of which is a stark portrayal of the US Government’s treatment of the American Indian, which ranks right up there as one of the most heinous tragedies of our country’s history.

In and among the pain of the story, though, there runs a little thread of faith, a little piece of hope to hang onto.  The main character, May Dodd, is Agnostic, if anything, largely due to her painful experiences of life. Christian missionaries in the West do nothing but add to her conviction that religion is a farce used by people with power to hoist themselves up and over everybody else.

Curiously, as she lives among the Cheyenne she begins to find a new way of relating to God, largely through the beauty of nature and the richness of community. Toward the end of the story an Anglican missionary, Father Anthony, comes to live with her tribe and manages to stitch together for May some kind of presence of the divine. Her journal reads: “On Anthony’s behalf I will say that he spreads the Gospel of Jesus very gently among the People, with none of Reverend Hare’s fire and brimstone or threats of damnation, and none of Narcissa White’s evangelical zeal. Rather he visits from lodge to lodge in such a spirit of honesty, humility and generosity that the people hardly know they are being preached to. He is, I think, our best hope yet for the salvation of their souls . . . if salvation they require.” P. 238

I think it wouldn’t be so bad to be known as someone who has spent a life ”spread[ing] the Gospel of Jesus very gently among the people . . .”.