Seven Forms of the Small Church

Small churches can be wonderful, delightful, and a blessing to the world, but they're not all cut from the same cloth.  Precisely the opposite, in fact.  Unlike larger churches, which rely on replicable models and systems, little churches take forms unique to their particular local environment.  They're as unique as the fluttering variety of little finches that Darwin once marveled at as he toured the Galapagos.  Each is subtly but meaningfully different.

That said, there are notable similarities between teeny tiny Jesus gatherings, types of small church that share features with one another.   One of the best typologies I've come across in my years of serving and studying the small church was created by David R. Ray, a Congregationalist pastor, author, and scholar.  In his classic book The Indispensable Guide for Smaller Churches, Ray lays out seven different ways we can do small together.  

I've found it useful, because self-understanding is always useful, and I figure it's worth sharing.  Let's take a look at Ray's thinking about what forms little churches can take:

1) Semper Minor.  That's the motto emblazoned on the crest of a particular type of church, and it just means "Always Small."   As Ray describes it, these are the churches that have just always been the size they are, and they're completely copacetic with it.  They know who they are, and what they are is just fine.  They're not bothered by their size, and the comfort they feel in their own skin makes them tough, resilient, faithful, and effective.

2) The Remnant.  This church was once many times larger than it is now.  It tends older, and is often paired with a sanctuary or facility that it fits into the way your five year old feet fit into your mom or dad's shoes when you snuck into their room and tried them on.  They are lost in memories of what was, and wish they could bring back the day when those pews were filled and they moved powerfully in the world.   "Back in the day," they sigh, "things were better."

3)  The Startup.  Ray describes these gatherings as “Not Yet Large.” Sure, there are only twenty souls gathered, but they're only six months old.  They've been planted in a mushrooming ‘burb by a charismatic leader with a good plan to tap local energies.  They've got a strong online presence, often have connections to an existing ministry that understands evangelism, and all the trappings of a big church in microcosm.  They'll either blossom or wither on the vine, but growth is their goal and big is their aim.

4) Small on Purpose.  These are the Christian gatherings that Ray calls "intentionally small."   They're not unfriendly, but they have a very disciplined and particular way of life, with high thresholds for entry and a demanding set of commitments for continuing participation.  Monastic/Neomonastic communities and collectivist intentional communities where goods are shared inhabit this category.  They're authentic, intense, and by design they ain't for everyone.

5) Islas Etnicas.  These "ethnic islands" provide a home away from home for displaced people, and as immigrant, refugee, or expatriate gatherings, they offer a place of welcome and cultural familiarity.  They are particular blessings to Christians who are FOB (fresh off the boat), as they offer a safe place in which a new arrival can find their bearings.  Unlike most other forms of small congregation, they're not representative of the larger community in which they find themselves.

6) The Clan. These churches tend to form in rural areas, and have their pews filled by the extended bloodlines of one or two families who live nearby.  Although they can be perfectly friendly to folks visiting, and can do good work in the surrounding community, the only way you really become a member is through birth, marriage, or intimate relationship.  They're as robust as the families that comprise them.  Or as dysfunctional.  

7) The Schismatics.  These churches are defined by their constant state of conflict, driven by power-oriented leaders who prevent growth to maintain control.  Who are they in conflict with?  Their denominations.  The other side in the Culture Wars.  Anyone who crosses the pastor or his wife.  They can be strangely attractive to people who hunger for drama in their lives.  Ever see the Knives Out movie Wake Up Dead Man?  There are really churches like that one.  Well, maybe not quite that bad, but close.

Obviously, some of these categories are more inherently healthy of soul than others.  Schismatics are driven by the energies of conflict, and aren't generally healthy places to spend time.  Each of the others has a purpose, and some share paradoxical similarities.  A Remnant church can often be as separate from the life of the community around it as an Isla Etnica, for example.

If we are collectively sentient enough to shape the communities in which we live, I tend to think that we should work our little gatherings so's they have all the best features of Size 1 churches and Size 4 churches.   Combine a sense of Gospel purpose and integrating intent with a comfortable, confident resilience, and you've got quite a blessing.

If you're interested in more of David Ray's writing and thinking, definitely give his Indispensable Guide a look.

Attending a Crow Funeral

I heard them before I saw them.

Coming up the sidewalk towards my house, the sound of their cawing filled the morning air.    

Hearing them, I'd assumed the local murder was rousting a hawk or an owl, driving away the threat to their chicks and their territory.  But they weren't in flight.  There were a dozen of them, perched on the branches of a large poplar, or standing as dark smudges upon the light grey shingle of our roof. And all of them were shouting together, piercing the quiet after dawn with their percussive ruckus.

I peered into the trees, expecting to see the brown wings of a harried raptor.  But there was no evidence that my eyes could discern.  Just crows, yelling at the world and at one another.  I watched the trees for a few more moments, but my dog wanted to go into the house where treats awaited, and so we did, leaving the din behind.

I gave the boy his requisite treat, for he had been a good boy, then settled in to do some writing.  My phone rang shortly thereafter, an old friend calling to chat and talk about a visit.  It was still early, and the house was still asleep, and so I stepped out into the warming air of that summer morning to pace about the front yard and talk.

The crows were still there, although a little quieter now.  As I walked and talked, I paused for a moment.

There, on the ground by one of my four by four raised beds, was the corpse of a crow. 

It lay ragdolled in the grass, wings cupped around its head, as if in its last act it had hidden from the world in a tent of dark feathers.  I came closer.  There was no evident injury, not that I've got the eye to discern such a thing.  Peering down at the glossy black body, I saw that the flies and the ants had already found it.

I would need to dispose of it.  As I had that thought, the remaining crows gathered and flew overhead and to the east, singing their gutteral song of lament.

A few minutes later, when the call was done, I got a lavender-scented garbage bag and a garden spade.  Burying the crow in the back yard wouldn't have worked.  My curious dog is a remarkably able digger, and I didn't want us to be on the enemies list of the local murder.

I scooped up the remains as gently as I could, bagged them, and tied it tight.

Afterwards, I looked up crow mourning rituals.  

"Scientists believe," purred back the AI generated reply, "that this only looks like grief, but actually is just a learned response and adaptive behavior to avoid harm and assess danger."  Digging deeper, I found some of the research that led to that assessment, in which...in a test of the mechanisms of empathy...scientists captured a wild crow, restrained it, showed it images of dead crows, and then tranked it and ran a brain scan to look for signs of frontal lobe activity associated with grief.  

This, to explore another living creature's capacity for empathy?  Oy gevalt.  Maybe you should test your own understanding of "irony," Science.

Later that day, as I attended the celebration of life for a friend who'd been taken by cancer, I found myself coming back to those crows.  

Corvids are highly intelligent and social creatures.  They're aware of loss, aware of the absence of a member of their tribe, aware that death is an eventuality to be marked.  They're not homo sapiens sapiens, to be sure, but grief and the rituals of loss are not just a human thing.  They are part of what it is to be mortal and sentient.

Not just crows and humans, but dolphins and elephants and primates and every bright creature that realizes what it is, and has a flickering sense of its fleeting moment in the great flow of time.

We that live lament those who do so no longer.  We grieve their absence.  We miss the presence of those who have passed on, borne away by Death on great dark wings.

The Reflecting Pool Emergency

The area around the Reflecting Pool on the National Mall is one of the most hallowed public spaces in the United States.  It's a place of singular beauty, mirroring the stark presence of the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial, catching the light of the sky.  It's a short walk from memorials honoring America's war dead, like the Vietnam Memorial, where as a teen I was humbled to find that a soldier with my name died in Vietnam the day before I was born.

So when...with no discussion and no input...our president invoked emergency powers to declare it was going to paint it a light powderpuff blue?  I'd thought it was just going to be embarrassingly tacky, conferring all the dignity of a putt putt golf hazard in Ocean City.

But the cerulean he wanted first wasn't patriotic enough, and so what we got instead was a deep, dark blue, so blue it's almost black.

My second thought, having seen the images of the "New and Improved Pool," was that the color was far more elegant and way less tacky than I'd feared.   

"American Flag Blue" now covers every inch of the seven acre concrete rectangle of the pool, which is now being filled.  Millions of gallons of water will be poured into it to fill it, at a shallow depth of 18 to 30 inches.  It will look striking.  Very very dark, but striking.  From my own subjective aesthetic standpoint, I think it's going to be attractive.  

But that was my second thought.

My first thought was: Wow, that's going to get hot.

Very hot.

If you paint a surface a dark color, solar energy isn't reflected, but absorbed.  If you then cover that surface with a shallow layer of water, the combination is going to act as a heat sink.  It'd be like making a baby pool out of asphalt.  The water is shallow enough that it doesn't cool, but absorbs energy all the way down, and then continues to heat up.  That's the exact principle of any garden variety rooftop solar water heater.  

That, in effect, is what the Reflecting Pool has become.  A seven acre open-faced solar water heater.   

This will have two effects.  First, radiant heat will make the ambient temperature around the pool considerably higher, possibly as much as 10 to 20 degrees warmer on a hot day.  Second, at the height of summer that heated water will evaporate far, far faster than previously, shedding as much as an additional 100,000 gallons a day in evaporative loss.  On a day with still or modest breezes, that will supercharge the humidity right around the Pool, pushing the hyperlocal wet-bulb temperature to dangerous levels.

Meaning, simply, that on days exceeding 90 degrees, the human beings who spend considerable time around the Reflecting Pool and the nearby Memorials will be hotter, and it'll be so much more humid that the air won't take up more moisture.  Sweating won't cool them off, and shade won't help.

It's likely to mean more heat-related illness for anyone who spends any significant time around it on a hot summer day.  

Particularly on the Fourth of July.  Especially on the Fourth of July.  The Mall typically sees four hundred thousand visitors that day, folks who settle in and linger for hours to wait for fireworks.  On a typical Fourth, that won't be too big a deal, because temps usually are in the 80s.  People will just be a little more uncomfortable, and the pool will be like bathwater. 

But if the temperature is in the mid to upper 90s with clear skies, especially if that's been the case for several days?  You couldn't design a more effective heat-stroke hazard if you tried.

Here's hoping I'm very wrong.  And if not, that the Park Service and local hospitals are prepared, or that the 4th is unseasonably cool with high clouds.

Because what an absurd emergency that would be.

The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour

That first Sunday after my little church hunkered down to weather the COVID epidemic, we did worship differently.  We went online.  We'd not scaled up for professional level livestreaming, so what this frazzled and slightly overmatched pastor managed to pull off was the best I could manage at the time.

For a couple of months, I'd knit together bits and bobs of audio and video on an old repurposed gaming laptop, cobbling together something that was one part worship, and one part podcast.  

That effort needed a name, and so...as it was intended to serve my small congregation...I decided to call it The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour.   

Eventually, lay-folk with more innate talent for such things were able to gather what was needed for a better livestream, the pastor was relieved of that duty, and The Tiny Gospel Radio Hour name was set aside.

Still, it seemed like that name could serve another purpose.  Like there was more for it to do.

As I've gotten close to wrapping up work on a book about the blessings of life in little churches, the idea kept coming back to me.  "Do something with this," said a little voice, poking and nudging and as insistent as my dog when he really really wants to go outside and chase chipmunks.

What I don't want to do is just have me blabbering into a mic about all my bright small church ideas.  Not that my little church isn't a life-changing blessing, but ours is only one little light.

Out there in America, there are thousands upon thousands of small congregations. 

They ain't fancy.  They're fifty souls in a small suburban sanctuary, twenty five folks in a small town storefront, twelve souls in an old clapboard church in a valley, six folks singing together in the living room of a doublewide, three souls sitting in a bar and talking life and Jesus all the way through to closing time.

Some go back hundreds of years, and some just came into being.  These churches are human scale, intimate and personal and real, and every single one of those gatherings has a story.

So I figured, why not go looking for those stories?  Find the places where church folk are living on a human scale, where they love what they're doing and have found beloved community together, and let them tell the Good News of what that looks like?

I'd also like to share the wisdom of the human beings who've come to love the unique blessings of intimate communities, and who've chosen to spend their lives caring for and supporting them.

Take all those stories, make sure they're witnessed to and remembered, and share 'em with folks who might need a little dose of humble church courage and insight.

So I'm trying that, over on Substack.  Give a listen as you'd like.  Subscribe, and it'll come your way for free whenever I encounter something new to offer you.

And if you've got a story of Gospel goodness you'd like to share, or a little gathering that's been a blessing to you, let's talk.

Peace and Blessings,

David

When Fools Screw Around

During my sermon last week, I had an entertaining bit of call-and-response with my congregation.  As I noted the essential Goodness of God's work in creation, a congregant saucily responded that mosquitoes were a notable exception.  I agreed, of course, as I loathe skeeters.  Only rarely do I feel moved to show them mercy, and even then I'm only inclined to spare the harmless, pollinating males. Beyond the pleasure of serving a little church where sermons can include some dialogue, that exchange was a useful reminder that creation is both very good and often more than a little unforgiving.  

If we human beings are wise, we take every necessary step to ensure that we aren't sickened or devoured by life, particularly those forms of life that find us appetizing.   Only fools traipse through the world imagining it doesn't want to eat them.  

Where, for example, do we find the Goodness in something like the New World Screwworm?

Screwworms are only worms in their larval stage, after which they flit about as a brightly colored fly.  The males are harmless pollinators, like their mosquito brothers.  The ladies?  Females of the species Cochliomyia hominivorax, on the other hand, are the farthest thing from harmless.  When they lay their eggs, they seek out a living mammal.  They find a soft spot...a wound, a cut, an orifice.  The navels of newborns, the perineum, or the flesh near the eye?  Those areas are also particularly desirable.  There they lay hundreds of eggs.  Those eggs hatch into screwworms, which then bore their way deep into the meat of any mammal, rotating as they eat, literally screwing themselves inwards.  In the process, they inflict agonizing pain and considerable damage, to the point where a severe infestation can kill a host.

Generally speaking, those unfortunate hosts are wild animals or livestock or pets.  But sometimes?  Well, sometimes the Latin name of the species is all too accurate.  Literally interpreted, Cochliomyia hominivorax means SpiralFly ManEater.  It'll infest infants, it'll infest the elderly, it'll infest anything with warm blood, which we have.

Humans generally don't like getting slowly eaten alive, and in the last century, science and agriculture combined forces to eradicate the New World Screwworm from the United States.  Our approach took advantage of an amusingly ironic screwworm weakness: the female screwworm fly can only screw once, after which it retains the sperm of the male within itself to fertilize its eggs for the remainder of its life.   Knowing this, we bred sterile male screwworm flies by the hundreds of millions.  When they mated with females, the union resulted in no offspring...and the species collapsed.

To keep it suppressed, all we needed to do was to continue monitoring screwworm fly populations, both in the United States and...importantly...across the border to our South.  That, and because flies can fly, we needed to support our Mexican and Central American neighbors in their efforts to keep that parasite from recurring.

There was just such a screwworm resurgence in Central America in 2022 and 2023, which...not being led by complete morons at the time...America dedicated substantial resources to help defeat.

But in March of 2025, America's emergency international support for Central American and Mexican screwworm monitoring and suppression was eliminated.  That wasn't our problem, or so the DOGE Bros and their algorithms insisted.  Why send our Borrowed Dollars to foreigners?   Cut cut cut!  

Among all of those blindly applied cuts, this one stuck in my memory.  First, because it had a powerful element of writhing body horror.  And second, because it was so damnably and obviously shortsighted.  Golly, what might happen next?

The infestation in that region worsened, and by August of 2025, with the parasite spreading northward through Mexico, it was clear it was going to breach our southern border.  Flies can fly over walls, after all.

We've scrambled to ramp up sterile male fly dispersal in the US, with nearly four million released weekly along the border, and begun doing the same in Mexico.  Anticipating that boundary being breached, The USDA initiated emergency construction on a new sterile male screwworm production facility in August of 2025, but it's not going to be done until 2027.

Yesterday, the first case of screwworm infestation in sixty years was reported in Texas.    Back before they were eradicated, those flies could spread all the way up to the Canadian border in a hot year.

So that's where we are now.  Who could have predicted it?  Golly.

For a moment, though, let's return to the question of goodness in creation.  A screwfly is a horror, sure, but is it any more horrific than an industrial pig farm?  It's a mindless nothing, as incapable of malice as an earthquake or a forest fire.  It simply exists, and those mortal beings blessed by sentience can find ways to prevent it from doing harm.  In those efforts, and in the blessings of compassion and wisdom, we can find a hint of grace.

Unless, of course, we become so lost in the echo chambers of our ideology and egocentrism that we fail to see the good path before us.  

Good is Its Name

What the lectionary this last Sunday offered up, in all of its length, was Genesis 1 and the first three verses of Genesis 2.  This is the familiar "God made everything in six days, and on the seventh, he took a breather" story.  The rhythms and patterns of that scripture rise from ancient liturgy and worship, with cycles of repeated words that appear to have been intended to be chanted or recited or sung by priests in the temple.

This story clearly affirms that Creation…all that we see and perceive…is good. It is to be viewed not neutrally, or as inscrutable and dangerous, but as essentially positive. That is certainly true of our tiny delicate little living gem of a planet, but it is also the operating presumption about the entirety of existence as we are able to observe it, all forty-six-and-a-half billion light years in every direction.

Seven times in this ancient liturgical chant, we are told that in the midst of his work, God observes it, and sees that it is good, or that it is very good.

In Genesis, the Hebrew word for “good” is one you probably know.  You do, really you do, even if you weren't required to take Hebrew in seminary.   Seriously.  You can do this.  

Just complete the following two word statement:  "Mazel _____!"

Yeah, you know it.  Tov.

The word for good is tov, as in the familiar Jewish celebratory affirmation mazel tov, which means basically “good fortune.” “Good morning,” for example, is boker tov, which is always a pleasant thing to know when you're entering your wife's synagogue for morning services. 

God sees his creative work, in all of its abundance, and affirms that all of it is either tov or…if it is very good, tov me’od.

In prepping to preach on this, I went down an unanticipated linguistic rabbit hole, one I didn't subject my congregation to when I hit 'em with the sermon.  The focus of that sermon was on the nature of work, and how God values all work in ways our blighted and grasping economic assumptions do not.  Walloping folks with an excursus on a bit of peculiar Hebrew subtlety seemed a distraction.  

I'd always considered those recurring "and God saw that it was good" statements as adjectival in nature, affirming of the character of each stage of the work of creation.  

But tov is a word that serves many functions in Hebrew, and it can be both an adjective and a noun.   In the construction of the verses in Genesis, it's phrased like this: vayar Elohim ki tov, which means, literally, "and saw God that good."   Most English translations incorporate a logically assumed "it was" into that formulation, for obvious reasons.  But in the Hebrew, that isn't actually there.  

Which means, given the sentence construction, that it could be just as easily read as the nominative "And God saw that Goodness," or "And God saw that Abundant Goodness."  Tov could be a noun here.  It doesn't have to be, but there is sufficient linguistic ambiguity that it could be.

For some reason, this struck me as delightful, as a deepening of God's affirmation of Creation, as if Goodness and Great Goodness were so essential to the nature of God's work that it could be our name for it.  It isn't a question of the Lord saying, "Yup, that's some quality work I did there."  It's an ontological affirmation that Creation is fundamentally radiant with the sacred.

If only that was how we were able to perceive it and name it, not as a thing to be used and owned and controlled, but as Goodness itself.

Take a handful of warm sweet compost, filled with the richness of life and the promise of harvest.  The name of that is Goodness.  Look up to the first star in the night sky at dusk in the late spring, and in the cool breeze of the evening, name it all as Great Goodness.

Garlic Harvest

It was time to harvest the garlic.

Those winter-blasted shoots, which had endured the long winter of snowcrete and bitter frigidity, regreened and surged with the coming of spring.  But as May waned away, they were folding in on themselves, the long spears buckling and pointing earthward to where bulbs waited.  The plants were done.

I don't ever totally trust myself on the timing of that particular harvest, invisible as it is.  And so, even though the greens had told a very specific tale for a few weeks, I gave it a bit more time.  That, and I'd gently probe down into the soil around a few representative shoots, parting the earth with the gentleness of an archaeologist's brush.  Down, down, bit by bit, until fingertips met the swelling fatness of a fully formed bulb.  

Finally, finally, I was ready, and with a long trowel levered each bulb from the ground with great care.  Up they came, one by one, and as I carefully brushed the soil away, I could at last see the results of my planting.

Every year the garlic harvest is different, as individual cloves grow in unexpected ways.  This season, a significant minority of my fall planting had spawned free-standing satellite cloves, either around a primary bulb or as a blossom of unattached cloves.  The depth of the cold and the fierceness of the freeze might be the governing factor in that, but I can't say for sure.

No matter, because the harvest was successful and abundant, and I now again have garlic enough to last me the next twelve months, and more to spare.

That harvest now dangles in my carport, shaded from sun, protected from rain, and turning in the wind, where for three weeks it will dry and cure to perfection.

Swindlers and Pimps

In our societies men are paranoiacally ambitious, because paranoiac ambition is admired as a virtue, and successful climbers are adored as though they were gods. [...] What must be the day-dreams of people for whom the world’s most agile social climber and ablest bandit is the hero they most desire to hear about? 

Duces and Fuehrers will cease to plague the world only when the majority of its inhabitants regard such adventurers with the same disgust as they now bestow on swindlers and pimps. So long as men worship the Caesars and Napoleons, Caesars and Napoleons will duly arise and make them miserable. The proper attitude towards the ‘hero’ is not Carlyle’s, but Bacon’s. ‘He doth like the ape,’ wrote Bacon of the ambitious tyrant, ‘ he doth like the ape that, the higher he clymbes, the more he shewes his ars.’

Aldous Huxley, ENDS AND MEANS, p.50-51

Adapting Together

I’m not sure how many churches have Tibetan Buddhist Trader Joe’s Delivery Time as part of their Sunday ritual, but one of the spiritual gifts of little congregations is our idiosyncrasy. The small church can be delightfully, beautifully weird.

from a piece in The Presbyterian Outlook, highlighting the unique loveliness of my little congregation.

Organized Lying

"At no period of the world's history has organized lying been practiced so shamelessly or, thanks to modern technology, so efficiently or on so vast a scale as by the political and economic dictators of the present century.  Most of this organized lying takes the form of propaganda, inculcating hatred and vanity, and preparing men's minds for war.  The principal aim of the liars is the eradication of charitable feelings and behaviour in the sphere of international politics."

- Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, p. 7

He'd have loved social media.  /s

Wary in the World

It’s been a weird spring, and it’s hard to believe that the official start of summer is still a month away. The leaves are green and new. My gardens, filled with soft rising fronds of post-harvest asparagus and the splash of potato greens. My green beans are once again shouldering themselves up through the rich amended soil. And all around the neighborhood, scampering here and there, there is a fresh harvest of gray squirrels.

Squirrels, let it be said, are not my friends. At this time of year, they’re fond of digging up my gardens looking for the nuts that they assume I must have buried there for them. 

"Oh, you’ve turned that earth? Maybe you’ve hidden a nut under this green bean seedling. Let me dig it up to see! No? What about this one?"

At this time of year, the juvenile squirrels are out and about, just now down from the nests, noodling about in the grass. These little critters are cute as can be, but they’re also tiny little fools.  They're oblivious to the world even though their parents clearly haven’t gotten them a smartphone yet.

This last week, on one of my morning walks, two adolescent squirrels were noodling around at the base of an oak as my dog Norm and I walked towards them. Norm noticed their presence, but seemed a little befuddled, because the adolescent squirrels paid him no mind. 

They just sat there as we approached. Seven yards. Still sitting. Five yards. Still those squirrels didn’t seem to care. Three, and they weren’t moving. Norm was being a very good boy, and not lunging, because again, he was being a very good boy, but Lord have mercy, did he want to go get ‘em.

So at two yards out, I said, “go-git’em” and he surged forward, and both of those nonchalant little rodents suddenly realized three things. 1) the world is a scary place; 2) dogs have mouths full of big teeth, and 3) there’s a reason they live in trees. Up they scurried in a panic, Norm literally inches behind them.

Did he catch them? No, no he did not, because he was still attached to me. But as we passed that tree, I looked at the nattering, panicked squirrels now high above and muttered to myself, “Well. Did we learn a valuable lesson today?”

Young squirrels aren’t yet wary. They haven’t learned yet the way of the world around them, filled with dogs and cars, hawks and cats. Faced with something they don’t recognize, their instincts haven’t yet been honed by the perils of the world. 

Just because you’ve discovered Christ’s new path of life, it doesn’t mean you’re not as vulnerable as a kit. 

All those old hungers...lust and greed, hatred and bigotry, anxiety and paralyzing fear? Those are all waiting, prowling, lurking within you. There are still people who will hate you for no reason, or harm you to further their own desire for power. There are still blighted souls who will manipulate you and betray your trust.

All of that remains true, even though Jesus has shown us the way not to let that be true for us and our dealings with those around us.

Keep yourself disciplined, maintaining your focus and your commitment to the Way of Jesus, because complacency just makes you easy pickings for the brutes, hucksters and demagogues outside, and the stirrings of your own worst self within.

Bloomin' Onion

A couple of months ago, with the snow finally melted but spring still a distance away, I made a decision about planting in my garden.  It was, as those decisions often are, inspired by my providential forgetfulness.

One of the yellow onions I'd bought from Harris Teeter had been left unused for too long.  It wasn't rotting or foul or ready for the compost.  It was growing.  A five inch long shoot stuck out like a green spear from the non-rooted end, as despite a lack of water or soil, the life was still strong within it.

Maybe, I thought, that one needs to be planted.   I took a trowel, wandered outside, and plopped it into the soil of an unused corner of my four by eight garlic bed.  I watered it, then left it to its own devices.  

If it grew, it grew.  If it didn't, no harm, no foul.

As the weather has warmed, it's thriving.  I soon realized that atop the now two-foot long primary shoot and another secondary shoot, a scape had formed.  The scape looked remarkably like a wee little onionette sitting atop the shoot.That meant it was going to flower, and if it flowered, it was going to seed.  Or so I assumed, having only ever grown spring onions before.

A little Googling revealed that onions have, like many similar plants, a two year life cycle.  Year one, the energy pours into the root, which grows fat and tasty.  Year two, that energy-dense root pours all of the stored life into flowering bodies, which create the seeds that will continue the process.

Meaning, I might be able to get an entire bed worth of onions, if I seed-save it.  This seemed a lovely prospect, and so I've waited and watched as the scape has grown, the outer onionskin thinning, tiny little buds forming into what will be a lovely white chrysanthemum-esque blossom.

It's just bursting open now, and as a hundred little buds prepare to spread their petals, I'm eager to see how it progresses.

Remarkable, how much happens in the garden if you simply leave things to live as God intends.

Every No is One Step Closer to No

Yesterday was Tuesday, which meant it was task, shopping, and lunch day with Mom.

The tasks were multiple.  The bush by her front door needed trimming, as did the shrubs and trees around the path that leads from her screen porch to the back yard.  The screen porch also needed a good sweep. 

It was a beautiful day, blue skies and puffy clouds and still-crisp late spring morning air, so the work was a pleasure.  With three exceptions.  The boxwoods were thick with pollen, which my trimming cast in thick particulate clouds around me as I worked.   There were gnats by the thousands, blossomed out into the world with the first warmth and rain, pressing in like willful pollen around my eyes.  

And there was a door to door salesman, one of those aggressive young guys in company monogrammed t-shirts who ride through neighborhoods on their knockoff electric Segways.  I was in the zone getting stuff done, and had no desire to hear from him about how he was just there because he was doing work for a neighbor, and had a special deal to offer on internet/phone/roofing/tree work/gutters/windows.  He hummed around on his wheels, pausing briefly on the sidewalk in front of my Moms' house to fiddle with his tablet.  I put out as radiant an "I am a Man Working who does not Wish to be Disturbed" vibe as I could.  He moved along.

Once that was accomplished, it was time to head over to Safeway to get groceries for the next week.  Mom doesn't need all that much, but the walking involved in shopping has become too uncomfortable as the years have progressed, so I'm happy to oblige. 

The last couple of weeks, I've also picked up a few things for a dear old friend of Moms' from the neighborhood.  She lives alone like Mom does, and is in treatment for cancer, which makes life a bit more difficult.

Yesterday, we'd gotten some over the counter meds for her, and Mom and I dropped by her place to deliver them.  While Mom waited in the car, I walked them in and then chatted with her friend for a bit, because of course I would.  As I was preparing to leave, she said, "Hey, David, looks like there's a salesman at the door.  I don't want to talk to him.  Could you run him off?"

It was the same dude on wheels, of course, and as I headed over to the door, he wheeled over to the car where Mom was patiently waiting.  Great.

I went out, and he was mid-schpiel with Mom.  "Hey there," I said.  "We're not the homeowners here."

He continued with the pitch as if I hadn't spoken.  "We're not the homeowners," I repeated.  "We're dropping medicine off, and the homeowner has cancer and doesn't want to come to the door."

He looked at me from the perch of his machine, with bright and uncompromising eyes, behind which seemed to be a non-sentient process with only limited reply options.  There was no evident emotional response to "medicine" or "cancer."  

"Well, I can come back later, then."  

"No," I said, a little more emphatically.  "She has no interest in anything you're selling.  She does not want to come to the door."  

"I've helped seventy percent of your neighbors save money today," he continued, lying so brazenly it could get him a position in the current administration.

I ignored that, and shifted to a more sympathetic tack.  "Look, I know it's hard going door-to-door," I said, getting into the car.  "Did it myself for a while.  All those turndowns aren't easy."  Oy, that was a merciless job.

There was a faint hint of a reaction buried under the sales pitch, and it wasn't the relief that comes when the souls who are doing those godforsaken jobs realize I see them as human.  

It was defiance.  

The blunt algorithm that seemed to have control of this particular human fished for an automated retort.  "I'm good at what I do.  I'm a good salesman.  Every no is one step closer to yes.  Every no is one step closer to yes."  With that more-than-a-little-rapey sales mantra hanging in the air, he wheeled backward.

"I am not going to let you bring me down.  I am one step closer to yes."

And with that, he whirred away on his little machine wheels.

Lord have mercy on his soul.

The Cage of Asparagus

It wasn't the best harvest season for my little asparagus plot this year.

It's been five years since I put that rootstock into the soil of a four by six bed, and I've been tending and feeding it ever since.  The first two years I just let the bed run, tall sprawling ferns rising taller than I.  For the last three, I've taken the first month of growth, a modest yield of tasty spears to begin the spring growing season.

This year, the weather has wildly oscillated, and the asparagus got a little caught out.  Two weeks of summer-warm heat back in April started the spring growth cranking, but things suddenly shifted back to near freezing many nights.  The surge which began with the ferocity of an advancing phalanx petered out to near nothing, with yields significantly below the prior two years.  

After four weeks of harvesting a small handful a day, I decided to call it.  I didn't want to strain the roots, pushing those plants to the point where I was actually harming them with my picking.   Like all living things, asparagus officinalis needs rest, needs a time of Sabbath from the demands of production.  If you take and take and take and take, what you end up with a dead plot the next year.

There's a metaphor in there for our compulsive busyness, I think. 

So I let the ferns grow, and set about building a structure around the bed to support their growth.  I've done this in prior years, as I realized that those six foot plus ferns weren't exactly stable.  As they leaned to the south to catch the light of the sun, they'd flop down onto neighboring beds, or collapse during high wind events.

The structure is made entirely of the growth of my garden, as I take the dried stalks of last year's sunflowers, a roll of garden twine, and with a little snipping and securing, hey presto, I've got a structural cage for asparagus.  They're stablised, protected from the wind and errant lawnmowers.

I suppose the next step would be to add a movable protective cover, to shield those delicate ferns in the event we get significant hail.

As every gardener knows, it's important to have an awning for the cage of asparagus.

The Logic of Worldly Success

 

"The logic of worldly success rest on a fallacy: the strange error that our perfection depends on the thoughts and opinions and applause of other men!  A weird life it is, indeed, to be living always in somebody else's imagination, as if that were the only place in which one could at last become real!"

Thomas Merton, Seven Storey Mountain, p. 362

Wordsmithing is not a Spiritual Gift

Continuing on from my prior meditations on the PCUSA's Proposed New Confession:

Having laid out the nature of God and our stubborn violation of the good in its first two sections, the third section tells the story of God's response.  It describes the point and purpose of Jesus, and the blessings of the Holy Spirit as it gathers and empowers those who are moved by the grace of the Gospel.

There are things, of course, that one can pick at and quibble with.  

Calling Jesus a "Palestinian Jew," for example, is comprehensible but peculiar.  Would any Judean of the first century have spoken of themselves in this way?  Would Jesus?  Generally speaking, the understanding of that region as uniformly "Palestine" is a historical imposition of imperialism, both Roman and British, which means it's got some wildly ironic resonances.  Colonizing history with ideological anachronisms isn't just a venial sin of right wing nationalist hagiographers, eh?

Or in the very next sentence, where we are told that "Jesus showed that the brutality of facts does not define the truth of God."  It's a very pretty sentence, but...huh.  "The Brutality of Facts?"  What exactly does that mean?   Is factuality a problem?  It sure is in our post-reality culture, where facts are whatever we say they are, and alternative facts are the wormed tongue of tyrannical systems.  "We will not allow Our Truth to be defined by Facts," sounds like the sort of thing one hears from a White House spokesperson these days.

Saying "the brutality of facts" seems far less sharp than "the facts of brutality," which creates a cleaner mirrored couplet with "the truth of God."  Assuming, of course, that this is what was meant.

I could keep going.  

But I won't.

Mostly, this is because as I engage with these latter two sections, I can feel the Dark Spirit of Wordsmithing rising within me.   Picking over language and legalistic quibbling are both bitter fruits of the Presbyterian compulsion to wordsmith, in which we imagine that we can build a semiotic tower to heaven if only we can workshop just the right words.  I succumb to the prideful, perfectionist, endlessly dissatisfied obsessions of that particular demon just as easily as any other Presbyterian.

And mostly?  Mostly these last two sections are lovely and thoughtful, gracious and faithful and hopeful.  Really solid work.

I would have no trouble integrating large sections of them into my little congregation's weekly Affirmation of Faith, where we read from the Confessions as a shared expression of what we hold together.

Once I've stopped worrying at it, that is.

Murderous Birds

In the cycle of liturgical readings this last week, we were again served up the story of the murder of Stephen by an enraged mob.

Lord have mercy, is it a violent, unpleasant scripture. We’d rather not see it, rather not have to deal with a brutal death, not on a Sunday morning.

It’s one of those texts one struggles to find a framing for, not because it’s hard finding some contemporary analogue from our fevered newsfeeds, but because there are just too many. Perhaps a failed assassination attempt might best reflect the blight of violence this week, I thought, assuming we hadn't forgotten about that already. 

I was fiddling about with several options, sitting at my kitchen table workspace working on the sermon, when a sound caught my attention.

It was a frantic chirruping, loud and relentless as an alarm, sounding from the bush just outside of my window. I glanced over, and I saw a big bull bluejay, six feet away from me, pecking intently at something on a branch. “What’s it eating,” I wondered, as the sounds of avian distress continued. It looked like a little strip of thin sliced chicken. Then I said, “Oh,” because attached to one end of the limp chickenslice, there was a single lifeless leg. And on the other end, a bald beaked big-eyed head. It was what was left of a chick. 

I realized that this was likely one of the offspring of the shy Carolina wrens who flit about in the leafy underbrush beneath that bush, and I was right in the mess of watching one-a-them old school 1970s nature documentaries that used to traumatize me when I was eight.  

Oh, my poor sensitive vegetarian eyes! 

The jay took its time, gulping down the strip, and then the head, and then all of the leg but one tiny pinkish claw, which it left draped over the branch.

Then it turned, and winged deeper into the foliage. It returned to view with a frantically struggling baby wren in its beak, bludgeoned it to death, and then…the cries of distress that had caught my attention now silenced…proceeded to tear it to bits and devour it, right there in front of me.

Ah, I thought. The nature of violence.

Because for all of our romantic suburban haute bourgeois daydreams of how lovely it all is, nature is at the same time pretty danged harsh. 

That jay does not care about the lives of those wrens. The wrens do not care about the caterpillars and spiders and beetles that they eat. The spider doesn’t care about the fly. None of them are aware of one another, or of the suffering that their predation inflicts. That violence is done without thought, without reflection, purely driven by the need to eat, the need for territory, the need to defend oneself. It’s unpleasant to watch, but it isn’t evil.

But we, we who are supposedly sentient beings? Why do we carry that with us? Why do we hold on to the inflicting of harm, we who are aware?

Stephen likely would have had something to say about that.

The Deathbed Confession

Confessions, if one is a reformed Christian, are the place where a church stands and makes a statement about a crisis facing the church.  Who are we, and how do we retain our integrity as God's people given a moral challenge that faces us right now?  What is it that subverts our discipleship?  What must we declare together, if we are to follow Jesus as authentically as we can?

It is, in that, a declaration intended to be both unifying and integrative.  

Like the Barmen Declaration, which challenged the usurpation of the church by the Nazi regime, or the Belhar Confession, which renounces the spiritual blight of racist segregationism from the depths of South African apartheid, most confessions rise from a condition of conflict, and give the faithful a clear vision of where the Beloved Community must stand.

They are a fierce call to integrity in life together.  It's why Presbyterians remember confessions, and why the Book of Confessions is part of the Presbyterian Church (USA)'s Constitution.

Our era poses plenty of challenges for the church, and so...Presbyterians being who we are...we've convened a committee to come up with a statement that speaks powerfully to where God is calling us right now.  They've done the work, and now we've been asked, by that committee, to give that confession a read.  

Then, we have been asked to sit with it a while.  Where it troubles us, reflect meaningfully on why, and then consider it some more.  When we've done that, respond.

The confession they've drafted for our consideration does not yet have a name, other than "Proposed New Confession." This doesn't quite have the ring of "Second Helvetic" or "Westminster," although it's probably already catchier than "Brief Statement."  Were I a marketer, I'd really want us to have a stronger brand identity at launch.

So how does it read?  What does it say?  What are we called to affirm, and what crisis calls us to a moment of choosing and shared witness?

The language is reflective of the academic-progressive character of the PC(USA), and marks our denomination's continued emphasis on inclusion and welcome.  It has four sections.  The first, entitled Image of the Triune God, lays out our understanding of the nature of...surprise surprise...the Triune God.  It does so in language that moves even further down the inclusive language path than the Brief Statement of Faith.  In tone and semiotic choices, it's fuzzier and more prone to poesy than other confessions, but nonetheless retains a vital and necessary core witness to the nature of our Creator. 

I particularly appreciated its Augustinian expression of the Trinity as Love, which shows some solid theological chops cast with concision and poetry.  It's in essence the same understanding of an interrelationship of love that C.S. Lewis expresses in Mere Christianity, even if it's wearing some soft flannel pajamas.  

One could quibble, I suppose, with some of the language.  Like, say, the use of the word "affection" as a wiffle-ball euphemism for "sexual orientation."  Them's ain't the same things, y'all, not by a long shot.  στοργή is not Ἔρως is not ἀγάπη, right?  

Generally speaking, it's perfectly fine.

The second section, Turning Away From God's Image, establishes the nature of the crisis.  

In four powerful paragraphs, it lays the essence of the challenge of our age.  The first three name that challenge: that humankind has once again lost itself in the thrall of wealth and power.  This love of Mammon and the sword has corrupted the witness of faith, and as a prophetic critique, it's dead on.  It stings like Amos and Micah, and delivers the sort of uppercut to heresy that would do Saint Nicolas proud.

In the final paragraphs, there's a clear naming of our deepest moral and spiritual challenge: the mutual careening towards the sabotage of our entire ecosystem.  Taken together, those paragraphs are succinct, cogent, and complete.  

But in the midst of that fierce declaration, the confession takes a detour.  There's an abrupt tonal shift, the punch is pulled, and instead we get the rote neo-Cistercian self-flagellation of the Presbyterian People's Front.  

Meaning, all of a sudden we've donned our best intersectional sackcloth, mourning our Complicity in such pressing contemporary crises as...checks notes..."manifest destiny."  What follows, if one knows generic progressive discourse, is the usual performative litany of historical wrongs.  We're colonialist, and racist, and sexist, ableist and queer-o-phobic, all of us damnable sinners, pie Crenshaw domine, dona eis requiem, whack. 

I find this both baffling and frustrating, for a variety of reasons, three of which I'll pitch out here.   

First, all of these lamentations seem to operate under the assumption that the PC(USA) is made up entirely of cisgender White men who can trace their lineage back to the Mayflower.

"We have," the Proposed New Confession intones, again and again, but that "We" is not a "We" that the church as a whole can confess together.  Sure, our demographic skew is heavily towards being the Presbyterian Home of Honkeytown, but...and I don't know if you've noticed this...that's not who all of us are now.

Can a Korean American choir director or a Ghanaian elder claim to have reviled their immigrant neighbors?  Can a historically Black church say that it has covered itself in racism's robes?  Can the women who make up a supermajority of our membership lament their complicitness in their own self-denigration?  Can the Queer folk who have fought for decades for inclusion declare themselves morally responsible for the harm inflicted upon them?  None of them can, not meaningfully.

All of these Christians are (and here I'll turn on all caps) PART OF THE (PC)USA.  They are not they.  They are us.  They are we. Yet those members of our shared fellowship are all positioned as the objects of the confession, not the ones proclaiming it.  It's an exclusionary, neosegregationist liturgy, which is jarring given the confession's stated purpose. 

Second, it just doesn't resemble the PC(USA) I've known for the entirety of my 57 years as a cradle Presbyterian.  Every Presbyterian congregation I have worshiped in, been a member of, or pastored?  None of them have lived out their lives together in a way that would justify these laments.  In the more recent cases, be it the civil rights movement, the ordination of women, the inclusion of Queer folk, or the embrace of those who live with disability?  In every one of those instances, we've fought our way through to an authentic witness, and at nontrivial cost in relationship and membership.  Saying, for example, "You took a consistent stand for women's voices, but, you know you could have done more, and you're part of The Patriarchy, so you are automatically complicit?"

I don't buy it.  I've looked at it, sat with it, thought about it, and...no.  One cannot repent for a sin they have not committed.  We have plenty of concrete and material sins to attend to, and repentance...understood from the whole witness of Scripture...just does not work that way.  Here, I'm very much aware that I'm not compliant with the demands of our particular denominational Newspeak. I still view persons as the fundamental unit of moral analysis, for example. I'm guilty of so many doubleplus ecclesiastical thoughtcrimes.  Mea culpa.

And finally, it feels, and here forgive me...Old.  Not just Old, but Old Old, in a very particular gerontological way.

The laments themselves are cast in semi-chronological order, a retelling-in-negation of the history of the Presbyterian church in this country.  They are decades out of date and centuries passed, sepia and crumbling.  None of them, not one, meaningfully reflects the PC(USA) now, or the specific crisis we inhabit.

It's almost like we don't know where we are anymore, like we can't remember what we did yesterday, or the names of the people around us.  But oh, do we remember the past, past struggles, past traumas, and past conflicts.  We remember when we mattered, back when we once shaped the direction of a nation, when our voice made a difference.  Remember at the General Assembly of 1818, when we let expediency and groupthink water down our witness, where we made a bold statement and then equivocated?  Remember when we marched at Selma?  No-one else remembers that, not anymore, but we're lost in the thrall of wouldacouldashoulda.  It's a little solipsistic, a little maudlin, and more than a little morbid.

This section reads, to be blunt, like the deathbed confession of White Liberal Christianity.  

"The Deathbed Confession?"

Do we want that to be what this is?  An end of life groan of regret at mistakes made and things left undone, croaked from dry and dying White throats as the denomination falls into the Consuming Fire?   Maybe we do.  Maybe that is what we want.  I know that's what some of y'all want.  

The time for that church is over, some folks say.  It should just cash out. Think of the things we could do with that money!  Choose any charity!  Give to the poor!  

But again,"The Deathbed Confession" has kind of a ring to it, if we're talking brand identity.

As a foundation on which to build, though, and a naming of the spiritual battle facing the church, this section might not be the best step forward.  

Because we're not dead yet.

To those who've labored long and hard over this work, in the unlikely event you find yourself reading these reflections: I recognize that some of these responses might feel uncomfortable.  But, you know, just sit with them for a little while.  And anyway, it's just one portion of one section, and y'all did ask for responses.  I mean, you did.

There's so much more to the Confession than this, though, and I'll get to that in another post.

Frass

The morning sun rose

Over the trees on the hillside

And a new day's light 

Shone so bright

Through a thousand drops

From the rain last night

'Cross that sea of stars, from left to right

A single bee, caught gold in flight

And as I, like caught in reverie

Was glorying in that radiant bee

Out of that bug's tiny ass

Came a spray of bee poop frass

Which glowed illumined by the sun

Fell fulgent bronze and then was gone

I laughed, how wondrous and absurd

The sun, the light, the bee, the turd

Ends and Means

 

"Is it possible to achieve progress in charity by means that are essentially uncharitable?  If we dispassionately consider our personal experience and the records of history, we must conclude that it is not possible.  But so strong is our desire to believe that this is a short cut to Utopia, so deeply prejudiced are we in favour of people of similar opinions to our own, that we are rarely able to command the necessary dispassion.  We insist that ends which we believe to be good can justify means which we know quite certainly to be abominable; we go on believing, against all the evidence, that these bad means can achieve the good ends we desire."

Aldous Huxley, from Ends and Means: An Enquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods employed for their Realization, pp.27-28

Stirring My Scots Blood

No one told me how pleasant an MRI could be.

I'd expected it to be a little challenging, to feel a little bit entombed in that tube, surrounded by unsettling roarings and thumpings and rhythmic pulses as magnetic energies surged around and through my body.  Claustrophobic panic isn't ever helpful in a procedure, so I'd considered calming exercises, tools from meditation and prayer that would gird up my loins for the process.

I needn't have worried.

It was profoundly restful, and on several occasions, I had to attend to not falling asleep, which might have messed with the imaging process.  But it was more than restful.  No-one had told me that it was possible to feel the magnetic fields as they surged through your body.  It's not common, but there are folks who swear up and down that the electromagnetic pulses set off a response in their nervous system, and given that I'm just the teeniest bit hypersensitive to things, I guess I'm in that camp.  

CHUKCHUKCHUKCHUKCHUK, the machine would go, and with each beat, I'd feel a peculiar tickling, like every nerve along a plane would activate.  It felt like I was being bisected, over and over again, each slice very faintly pleasurable, like a caress of energy, an aurora in my flesh.  With that came a deep, comfortable warming, and it was lovely.  

"This is really nice," I thought, "I'd pay money for this."

Which, Lord have mercy, I did.

The bill, when it came, was well over four thousand dollars.  That's for the procedure only.  Having a radiologist look at the results for ten minutes was another two hundred dollars.  

I have insurance, thank the Maker and my congregation, so my out of pocket costs were less.  Blue Cross Blue Shield negotiated the asking price of the procedure down to a wee bit over three thousand bucks, of which the "patients responsibility" was eight hundred bucks.  I paid seventy two dollars and seventy three cents of the two hundred dollars for the radiologist.   Total cost to me: over nine hundred dollars.  Total cost to the insurer:  over four thousand dollars.

So, combined, roughly five grand total, for a thirty minute non-invasive procedure and ten minutes to assess the results.

I have Scots blood, through my paternal grandmother Arline Tionesta MacDougall, and this outlay stirred that thrifty gene more than electromagnetic pulses ever could.  I know, we all know, all of us, that this is too much money, that we're being fleeced by a system that doesn't even begin to represent the actual costs of the services provided.

Let's do that familiar "how much does it cost elsewhere" exercise.  Were I to get an MRI from a private clinic in Glasgow, Scotland, how much would it run me?  Here, I'm talking about going outside of the public health system in the United Kingdom to a privately operated for-profit clinic, and paying out of pocket.  I found a nice little clinic in Glasgow.  Costs for the process there varied, based on location and procedure, but for the lower pelvic/prostate, I could expect to pay about four hundred dollars, exchange rate dependent, and that includes radiological review and a formal actionable medical report.

Four hundred dollars.   A round trip flight to Glasgow?  Nine hundred dollars.  Two nights in a nice hotel in Glasgow?  Four hundred dollars.  Meals?  Two hundred dollars.  A rental car to putter around Glasgow for two days?  Three hundred dollars.

Total cost, to fly across the Atlantic, stay in a nice hotel, eat well, have the procedure, do a little tourism, then fly back?  Two thousand two hundred dollars, nearly two thousand bucks less than the "best price" Blue Cross Blue Shield could negotiate here.  

Same procedure, same results, half the price.  How many times have you seen this same exercise done?  The "you fly halfway across the earth, get a procedure done, and fly back for cheaper" schtick is well worn, and yet still we tolerate the parasitic drain of our bloated mess of a health care system.

Defenders of that system claim that it's the "gold standard," the best in the world, and that we should be grateful for the privilege.

But we know that's a load of bollocks.  

The Art of Not Getting Into It

I was in the waiting room of a medical office, waiting to be called back for another round of imaging, and I was filling out forms on a tablet.  You know, the forms you've already filled out a dozen times, and filled out online before you came, but still have to fill out again?  Those forms.  

We all love those forms.

I was absorbed in the process of checking boxes when I heard her voice.  It was a loud voice, a we're-fighting-right-now voice.

"This is all your fault!  I couldn't do it because of you!  I've waited years and years for today, and you ****ed it all up for me!"

I looked up.  She was in her thirties, best I could tell, disheveled and awkwardly dressed, and the older man she was yelling at was likely her father.   From context, I figured she'd failed to tolerate an MRI, which I was looking forward to encountering myself just a few minutes later.  For some folks, the enclosure causes a claustrophobic panic response, and sedation is necessary.  I was about to find out whether I fit into that category.

"All I wanted was ten dollars, and would you give it to me?  No!  Just ten ****ing dollars, that was all, and you're too ****ing cheap and selfish to ****ing do even that."

This seemed a little baffling, so I continued to listen, as the father sat quietly while she paced and ranted at him.  "Just a little ****ing weed, ten dollars for a little weed to calm me down, and you wouldn't do it.  I can't ****ing believe you!  I've waited five years for that test, and you couldn't give me ten ****ing dollars!"  

It seemed fairly clear in that moment that ten dollars worth of cannabis would not be likely to solve that young woman's primary life challenges.  I wondered if that MRI would have been of her brain.  It seemed possible.

He began packing up a bag, still silent, and her raging intensified.  "I wouldn't be so ****ing ****ed up in the first place if it weren't for you!  You and Mom are the worst parents!   You're a ****ing sadist!  A sadist pervert!  You're PERVERTED, that's what you are!  A PERVERT!  A perverted masochistic SADIST!"  

The father looked up at her and smiled at this phrasing, just a little bit, as if he was suppressing a laugh.  Then he got up, and began walking to the elevators at a calm pace.  He seemed neither embarrassed nor angry.

She followed, cursing and berating.  But following nonetheless.

There is so much that a parent can endure for the love of their child.

A Scripture for the President

When I heard it, I laughed.

This last week, the Least Christian President in American History (tm) sat at the Resolute Desk and recorded himself reading from Holy Scripture.  It was part of a week-long cover-to-cover Bible reading with scores of participants, one whose intent was to remind America of the power of reading the Bible, or so the organizers hoped.  

I am, rather obviously, fond of reading the Bible on the regular.  It's not a single book, mind you, but a Sacred Book of Books, a collection of texts assembled over a millennia that reflects the journey of a covenant people with their God.  It has many authors, but also one Author, and all of it, every last bit of it, speaks transforming truths that we need to hear and understand.  Reading it changes us, if we're willing to read it deeply.

And so it was that Donald J. Trump, Forty Seventh President of the United States of America, a man who is happy to hate his enemies and whose not-going-to-church-today golf-trip-motorcade blocked the Beltway and almost made my family late for worship this most recent Easter morning, recorded himself reading from 2 Chronicles. 

Trump?  Reading from Chronicles?  It was perfect, just perfect, so much so that again, I laughed.  The textual portion itself centered around national humility and repentance, which is not something Trump's America does, ever, not ever.  Demanding that people you despise repent, sure.  But actual, sackcloth-and-ashes we-messed-up-Lord repentance?  That's a sign of weakness.  The cardinal rule of MAGA is to always double down and punch back, and never, ever admit fault. 

It is, in a plain reading, wildly ironic.  

But it gets weirder if you go deeper.  

The books of 1 and 2 Chronicles are among the most MAGA-friendly books of the Bible.  Or, to be more accurate, they're all about Making Judah Great Again, even if M'JuGaH doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  Sounds too much like meshuggah, eh?

Like the books of Ezra and Nehemiah, Chronicles was most probably written in the period closely following the Babylonian exile.  The people of Judah were rebuilding, having been returned to their land by Cyrus of Persia.  Tradition holds that the author of Chronicles was Ezra the scribe, and though there's the inevitable scholarly debate around that, it's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis.  Rebuilding requires having a powerful sense of what came before, and, well, that's the whole point of Chronicles.

1 and 2 Chronicles are a scribal retelling of the history of the national aspirations of the Hebrew people, as Ezra took the story that spans the older books of 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings and edited them to meet his interests.  He cuts and pastes those histories as vigorously as Thomas Jefferson, and those editorial choices are striking.  They speak to the purpose of Chronicles.

Because Chronicles...like Ezra...tells of a deep yearning for the restoration of a nation to greatness, and looks to the past with a powerful hunger.  That shapes the way memory is recalled, and the way that the story of the past is told.  

There are many changes, like largely ignoring the history of those cursed "northern Kingdom" Samaritans.  Most relevant, given the liturgist in question, is how Chronicles approaches King David, first and greatest of the kings of the Jewish people.

In the older stories of David, those told in the Deuteronomistic History, he is remembered as deeply human.  In 1 and 2 Samuel, David is an emotionally complex soul.  He cares deeply for Saul and his son Jonathan, even though the erratic, moody Saul threatens his life over and over again.  When David's son Absalom rises up to take power from him, David desperately clings to hope for reconciliation, and when the news of Absalom's death is brought to David, his heart is utterly broken.  David knows indolence and lust, murdering the honorable Uriah to cover up his infidelity with Uriah's wife Bathsheba.  The prophet Nathan is forced to confront David with the horror of his actions, and David is shattered and repentant.  At the end of his life, David is a weak and diminished old man, easily manipulated by Nathan and Bathsheba so that Bathsheba's child Solomon can take the throne.  

These are meaty, real, earthy stories, ones that speak to the truth of our human mess and the ways even the best of us fail to uphold God's covenant.  They teach and they preach powerfully to the human condition, and are willing to question power.  Particularly the power of kings, because kings are people, and people are a mess.

That ain't how Chronicles presents David.  

Even though Chronicles is almost entirely reliant on the history recorded by those earlier books, it spins their story with the doggedness of a White House Press Secretary.

David, or so Chronicles describes him, was perfect.  He's buffed and without blemish, run through an Instagram filter, naturally tan and with a full thick head of hair.

Ezra's David almost never puts a foot wrong or makes a bad choice, unless Satan himself leads him astray.  He never weeps or shows weakness.  The conflict between David and Saul is only mentioned sotto voce, and there is no discussion of any of the intrigue in David's house.  There is no Bathsheba-canoodling in Chronicles.  The fight with Goliath isn't mentioned, likely because that would suggest David was once small and not mighty.  David fights, and wins, and fights, and wins, and gives long set piece speeches about building the temple with specific attention to the choice of only the best and most expensive materials.  He hands over the throne to Solomon completely of his own volition.  

As narrative, it's pretty danged flat, and Ezra's scribal compulsion to insert Lists of People and Things don't help that cause none, neither.  There's a reason that all the stories we retell and remember aren't from Chronicles, because generally speaking, we don't read aloud from spreadsheets in worship. 

Taken as a whole, Chronicles is history as hagiography, history as a glossing-over of anything uncomfortable or difficult or messy, history that desperately wants to find perfection in the glories of the past and the shine of remembered wealth and power.  

Which, I would contend, is precisely why it is God's will that Chronicles remain forever part of sacred scripture.  Because human beings are great at editing out the hard parts, not being challenged or changed, and utterly failing to learn from our mistakes.  We need to remember

Lord, does history teach how we're great at that.

Pride and Courage

"Do not pursue spectacular deeds. We must deliberately renounce all desires to see the fruit of our labor, doing all we can as best we can, leaving the rest in the hands of God. What matters is the gift of your self, the degree of love that you put into each one of your actions.

Do not allow yourselves to be disheartened by any failure as long as you have done your best. Neither glory in your success, but refer all to God in deepest thankfulness.

If you are discouraged, it is a sign of pride, because it shows you trust in your own powers. Never bother about people’s opinions. Be humble and you will never be disturbed."

Mother Teresa, from Called to Community