Out of place, out of time

 There is a palm tree outside my window here in Rome - a big one reaching onto my second story and up into the third. The hard tangled knot that sprouts it's leaves is at eye level and the branches sway in tonight's wind. 

No one associates palm trees with Italy. This is hardly the tropics. It feels like they don't belong but because tonight is one of those that won't let me sleep simply for the sake of fomo, I'm watching the tree. And of course, I haven't missed it. The broad Atlantic Ocean was like that. Just there and perfectly itself. 

No one associates rain with Italy either, but we got that tonight, too. Hard short rain so bright that it fizzled from my street lamp like electric current in accompaniment to thunderclap that rattled against the coliseum stones and made it sound like God was not only bowling, but was doing it on marble.

I didn't get much sleep tonight, but in turn didn't miss any of the life that happens while we're checked out. Some nights are just magic. Oh Rome, you can be a hard-edged mistress, but tonight you danced for me, twirling your bright bangles against the dark.

Ah, the birds are singing. The world still turns and I'm still alive. Was starting to wonder if I'd run out of time. Not yet.

Perfectly Round

 

The pantheon in Rome, Italy.

It's the oldest intact house of worship on the planet. Really. Even for people who don't care about history much, and there are a lot of you, that's kind of a thing. 

Anyway, I went to church there today. And  I learned something. Not about history, but about the nature of  God. The thing is, the pantheon was first built in 600-something BC. At the time, it was dedicated to all the known gods at that time. All of them. And the Romans weren't just hedging their bets with their own gods. They had a shrine there for the Unknown God (check your Bible. It's there) just in case they'd missed anyone. Turns out that the one they  missed was the One that hadn't quite come yet.

Well, the pantheon is a church now. A Roman Catholic Christian church. And all the statues of Roman gods and goddesses inside are gone, replaced by Jesus and Peter and Mary, but it turns out that the remodelers haven't forgotten their pantheistic roots. You see, the pantheon is one of the most famous buildings in the world, even in Rome, where famous buildings literally line many streets and the rubble from them sits in piles in alleyways and out of the way corners. There is just something about this place.

Some of it has to do with the building itself - the way it's designed. There's that open oculus in the top - literally an open hole - that makes you feel like God always has a birds' eye view of what's going on inside. And then the shape of it is perfect. It's  not only a two dimensional perfect circle. It's a three dimensional one - the same size top to bottom as it is side to side.  The acoustics are beautiful and the symmetry gives an occupant a feeling of things being just right: God saying He had created it to be Very Good.

Then there are the people. Every color, every shape, every nationality. The building calls them to worship there together as one people. They may no longer be worshiping a pantheon of various gods, but they worshiip together a God who brought them all together conceptually. They are all in Him: every facet of man and life and nature. The hush there has little to do wtih priests or ritual. It has more to do with continuity in a line that extends from the first days of creation through the dawn and maturation of mankind to today. 

And it is beautiful. 

There are familiar places where we join familar faces in worship. But then there are places where we knjow no one, where nearly everyone speaks a language we don't understand, and yet that is where God drives home His point. Come to me. Everyone. Love one another. 

The family of God is bigger than we ever imagined and it takes flying to the other side of the world to begin to understand. It is possible to share the kiss of peace with people who would otherwise be foreign and strangers but, in this context, are brothers and sisters. When God says He brings all people together, He isn't kidding. He gathers people from disparate times and geographies and worldviews under one perfectly round roof and says, "Follow Me."  

I can do that.

This is what it sounded like:

The Cloud that Has No Number

 

A year ago, I graduated from college. This year, I'm finishing my last class, one called God, Faith, and Reason. It was supposed to act as finish of sorts, a way to tie up the ends of what I'd wanted to learn. In the end, it's been only a bit of that but actually rendered what I'd learned both necessary and irrelevant. Two things, only one of which I'd wanted, but that desired thing not able to come to bloom without the one I didn't end up much needing after all. Go figure.

This is my final paper.

I’m not going to write a final paper. I’m writing a position paper instead, a kind of summary, a statement of what Philosophy looks like to me now. Maybe it’s a final position paper. Whatever. I’ve used Philosophy, you know. Used it as a tool to mine for something else. Not for itself, not for knowledge or for proof, not even for the meaning of life. I’ve use Philosophy to find the rest of God. And through grace and perfect timing, and prodding, I believe I did.

In the end, Philosophy doesn’t have as many answers as I thought it might. And Philosophy professors certainly don’t. Most Philosophers do an odd concentric dance that draws circles around the God I was looking for, ever expanding and contracting, around Him, but each stuck away from the center in their individual orbits of pet theories. I still blame Descartes more than anyone, who started with faith and tried to use logical progression to prove God and ended up only handing down a bloodless Thinking Thing. Yuck. After Descartes, most of them got lost in the Disneyland of Reason, systems, hermeneutics and dialectic. Even the best of the moderns – Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Kierkegaard – stopped short at the points of their own relative stakes in the ground.

The odd thing is that when you say that Kierkegaard is your guy, I get it. He has the awe and wonder, along with the angst that makes him relatable. In my mind, however, Kierkegaard’s angst is exactly what keeps him from going all the way in. He’s made the leap of faith, all right, but stopped on a ledge part way down the chasm at the place that demands he let go of the philosopher in him in order to grab onto the God in him. He won’t let himself be taken by the mysticism that has to be God. He mocks the philosophical logicians, but in the end, is still one of them.

I guess it happens to all of us. The leap of faith isn’t one and done. That’s why I liked John Caputo so much. What a great way to end this! He picks up all the pieces philosophy left ungathered, mashes them together, and then says effectively, ‘See how beautiful it all can be!’ Caputo saw what has happened to faith.

“Faith” now stood in much sharper contrast with “reason” than could ever have been imagined by the authors of the Confessions or Proslogion, who viewed their books as an exercise in fides quaerens intellectum. ….What had disappeared under the guns of modernity was the robust faith of the medievals where fides and intel-lectus, the love of learning and the love of God, went hand in hand. (Caputo, On Religion, 61)

In fact, as much as I enjoy him, Socrates might carry some of the blame for this, too. He, for all of his exalted forms, enjoyed slicing and dicing mankind and thought into categories that were, although not as remote and detached as Aristotle’s, were certainly elitist and divisive. After all, look where they led him…

For my money, the PreSocratics made the least mess of it all. I’ll take Thales’ “The world is full of Gods” as an appropriate entry point anytime. Spared the ability to disassemble reality into its sensible component parts, he assumed that the world and God were one and he was right. Caputo got it, too.

Human life has a dark center, an unlit core, a concealed depth, to which we have at best limited access. That is the ultimate condition under which we live our lives...as soon as we come to be, we find that being is already up and running. (Caputo, 77-8)

In other words, deep calls to deep. We live, we experience being, hidden from one another but together. The gathering of saints.

Now I am sliding near another cliff, bracing for another leap, this one into a mystic cavern whose occupants no longer need to know why. An orange cat is already there, and the rose, both of which instinctively live within what they were made to be without wondering what it might be like elsewhere. I have one advantage over them, though. I am warned. The cliff is sheer, and the road back no longer available, but I am not afraid.

It may be that I will haunt a classroom again, but I will probably not ask again to be graded or to earn a credential. A door is shutting, and I’m not sure yet where the opening one leads. There is a Cloud of Unknowing there, though, that I want very much to breach. You know what I mean. The woods were dark, but I’m coming out of them now and I have appreciated the company of my Virgil.

Ordinary Time: The Sword and the Fire

 

This teaching was presented at the First Congregational Church of Rochester on January 12, 2025

Scripture Lesson:

Psalm 27: 1-14

 

Sermon: Ordinary Time, the Sword and the Fire

 It turns out that last week, our new Pastor Joe gave me the perfect introduction to a teaching I’d already written when he talked about the seasons of the Liturgical year. We’ve just finished three of them – Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany. Today starts another one…does anyone know what it is? It’s called Ordinary Time…and takes up all the weeks until the beginning of Lent, when we’re not waiting for anything or doing anything particular. It’s a time that’s just well, just ordinary. And, in my mind, that makes it very special indeed, because it is in these times we don’t focus on an event, but on the bread and butter of our Christian faith and walk. It’s the place we spend most of our days. There’s an old saying that tells us that life is what happens when you’re making other plans. Well, the same is true with our walk with God, too. And ordinary time is when a great deal of our life with God happens.

 

To explain why this matters, I’m going to begin with a little history, a very little philosophy, and a little theology, and a guy almost no one has heard of.

 

Plotinus was a philosopher living in Egypt under Roman rule sometime during the 200’s, just when the Christian faith was gathering steam and spreading into both and east and west through the efforts of men like Diocletian and Constantine. In other words, Plotinus lived just when the church was being born and, in his time, learned men were hearing about it so that as a philosopher, Plotinus spent a lot of time thinking about this new faith and he came to believe that in order to understand the world, he had to understand the God who made it. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he decided that reason, or logical thinking, was not enough to find God. More is needed. He wanted to do what a lot of us want to do. He wanted to pierce the veil that separates God from humankind, and he thought he knew how to do it.

 

To that end, he detailed two principal ways to get close to God. First, he said, we should dwell, or hang out, where God is. If we see God through His creation, well then, that’s the place to be. If we find God in His children or in church, or in music, or on a mountaintop, or in fresh baked cookies or somewhere else, then hang out there. Just stay in God’s field of vision. He can be found anywhere, but there’s usually a place where we especially feel His presence. That’s the place He’s easiest to find, but even though He’s not only there, that can be our starting place. Be near where you feel Him to be and look for Him there all the time you’re near.

 

It turns out that finding God in everyday life is important. There have been entire theologies that revolve around this idea. One of my favorite belongs to a 16^th century French Carmelite monk named Brother Lawrence. He never wrote anything or actually preached anywhere. Instead, he worked in the kitchen of his monastery and that was where he encountered and visited with God. In his case, it wasn’t because he liked being there. Quite the contrary. In fact, the kitchen was one of his least favorite places to be. But doing the dishes was the job that was given him, so he figured that God had something for him there. And God did. Brother Lawrence went every day without complaint to the place God had put him, expecting to find him there. Not in the pots or in the dirty spoons or the cranky monks that worked with him, but between them, in the silence, in the still places, in obedience and love.

 

What Brother Lawrence learned in that kitchen is that it’s not the place itself that would ever make him happy, but the God he found in it would. And when he found God in the place, the place brought him closer to God. The same is true of everywhere we find ourselves or with any people. Our circumstances are not accidents. God puts us in a specific place and a specific time for one reason only and He tells us what it is – to find Him.

 

Acts 17: 26-27: From one man God made every nation of men, that they should inhabit the whole earth and He determined the times set for them and the exact places where they should live. God did this so that men would seek Him and perhaps reach out for Him, though He is not far from any one of us.

 

We are where we belong because God is there waiting for us, and His arms are open. That doesn’t mean anything noteworthy is going on when we do this. Don’t look for an angel or a burning bush. In the Bible, it’s called abiding, and it’s just kind of being there. Sometimes it means stopping what you’re doing and just thinking. Sometimes, it’s filling the car with gas or changing a diaper. Sometimes it’s looking out the window at a rainstorm or snowfall. Sometimes, it’s driving your truck or playing the piano, or feeding a chipmunk, or calculating a payroll. Sometimes, it’s washing dishes. Whatever it is for you, abiding is one of the ways we develop intimate relationship with God and almost all of the time, it’s ordinary. That’s the first way to get close to God.

 

So: step one to connecting with God—Find God in a place, whether you choose it or are assigned it, and hang out there with Him.

 

The second thing Plotinus said to do was to pray. He didn’t mean the Lord’s Prayer or any other memorized prayers that we grew up with and love. He meant something quite different. He meant the unrehearsed actions and thoughts that well up in us while we’re doing our dwelling – while we’re hanging out with God. His kind of praying is everything that happens, inside and outside, when we feel God is near. It’s not asking Him for things. It is not reciting something someone else made up. Prayer, to him, is “speaking of God, invoking God by extending our soul to meet His so that we can confront Him alone.” It is doing what many think shouldn’t be possible. It is  experiencing a common reality together with the divine. This is not to gain insight or understanding or favor. It is just meeting God in one place alone together and sharing our thoughts with Him. Think of it as sharing a quiet car ride with someone or watching a sunset together with someone you love. Not too many words. No unnecessary explanation. Just being in the same place at the same time and sharing a moment. Something pretty, well, pretty ordinary. Ordinary prayer. Daily, constant prayer. Just being together, each one seeing and remembering the presence of the other. Plotinus says he would, “Call on God and invite Him to enter and may He bring with Him His own universe…” God wants us to join Him where He is. Not just in heaven after we die, but right now.

 

Why is this important? It matters because this is why Jesus came. Remember how the curtain in the temple tore in two when Jesus died, exposing the Holy of Holies to public view for the first time? It was an invitation to find Him, all of Him. It was permission to approach Him with boldness and confidence. He and the Father made us to be like them. In Their image. And He came to restore access to that image, to allow us to take our intended places among His creation so that we, by grace, can be what He is by nature.

 

Peter said it in 2Pet 1: 3-4:

“His divine power has given to us all things that pertain to life and godliness…so that we might partake of the divine nature.”

Jesus Himself said it when He quoted Psalm 82: “All of you are gods.” All of you are gods.

 

We are not God. We are not divine. We are not all powerful or all knowing. Still, we are gods –with a small g- to the extent we take part in what God offers us. The divine image is in us. There is nothing we can do about that. It’s what makes us humans instead of animals. As we draw ever closer to God the Father, and God the Son, we put on more and more of what we were made to be. In the ancient world, this was taught as the sword and fire principle. Think about a blacksmith working as his forge. When a sword is thrust into a fire, it takes on the fire’s energy. It becomes just as hot. It takes on the same color, looking more like a star than steel. But it never becomes fire. It only becomes like it as much as it is able.

 

This is what Jesus means when He says, “The kingdom of God is within you.” When

1 Thess 5:17 tells us to pray without ceasing, it doesn’t mean we go around with heads bowed and eyes closed all day long. It’s an attitude, not a posture. It’s not even words. It’s living every waking moment in an awareness that God is with us, that He walks every step with us and we love Him back for being there. The raw materials are all there already. This concept, often foreign to us today, was very familiar to early believers. It made perfect sense to them and if we do not try to understand it as well, we are missing a big part of why Jesus died. He wants us to die, too – to die to the wretchedness of sin, to put it away for good, and take hold of a risen life just as He did. He wants us to enjoy a union with Him, a constant communion. Not just to spend all our life hoping for something we don’t have, for a faraway heaven we can’t touch today. We’re supposed to have it all the time, not just when we go to church or when we eat the bread and wine, but all the time, every day. Starting right now. And prayer is the union, the union with God in ordinary, everyday time. That’s why the ordinary is never ordinary. It is always full of God.

 

Martin Heidegger, a German 20^th century philosopher, believed that the modern era has cut us off from our proper place in the world and has separated us from what we were meant to be. And it does feel like that. We often hear that this earth is a place of misery and tears and that our only hope for happiness is in heaven, that we have to die to finally find God. But that’s not what the Bible tells us. Psalm 27 says this:

I remain confident of this: I will see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living.

The land of the living.

 

Heaven is not in some faraway place where God is waiting for us. Jesus opened the way to heaven on the cross and doesn’t expect us to wait to enjoy it with Him. Remember the paralyzed man sitting at the pool of Bethesda? He sat there, stuck, for 38 years. Jesus healed him but He didn’t tell Him, okay, you’re healed, but don’t walk anywhere just yet. Just stay put until you die. You can walk when you get to heaven. He didn’t say that. He told him to pick up his mat and walk. Right then. No waiting required. Jesus accomplished our salvation on Calvary and all we have to do to enjoy it now is to pick up our own mats and walk. We didn’t earn this, but we are intended by God to acknowledge it and enjoy it right now. Jesus’ death created the conditions through which we receive forgiveness, die, and rise in new life like He did, a new life that can start right now if we just reach out to find Him.  

 

So: step two to connecting with God—Pray. Talk and listen to God. In your words about what’s going on in your life. Be honest. Be real. Use words that come naturally to you, or no words at all.

 

That’s why ordinary time isn’t ordinary. God is in the places that are only a short reach away, in the uninteresting, in the plain, in the everyday. When we reach out to find God in these places – because He’s there – we make a way for God to reach back and discover possibilities for communion we were never able to imagine on our own because they aren’t human. They are divine. We are God’s children. We carry the kingdom within us. Abiding and prayer is the way we find it so that every waking moment becomes an act of union with God. When we do our part, then He will do His and when He does, life will never be ordinary again.

Holy Waiting - Or What to do with our Tree

 This text is from a teaching delivered on Sunday, December 1 at the First Congregational Church, Rochester, Wisconsin. 

This is the first Sunday of Advent, a church season characterized by waiting, and waiting is what I’m going to talk about today – what it is, what makes it holy, and what in particular holy waiting might look like to us specifically at this church. Advent reminds us that sometimes, God intends us to wait. In many churches, no Christmas carols are sung until Christmas Eve, but lots of churches don’t wait. For them, Christmas carols begin early in December and there’s a reason for that. We don’t like to wait. We just don’t. We’re Americans, after all, and we like to get things done. Waiting just doesn’t seem very productive. And we’re impatient, too. Waiting takes a long time—too long for most of us.

But there are some good things about waiting. Waiting itself can be productive because of what it is – it’s very nature demands that we stop doing whatever we were doing and prepare for something else, some goal or looked-for event - usually something pleasant – waiting to turn 16 to drive, waiting for a baby to be born, waiting for school to be out and summer vacation to begin, even just waiting for a light to turn green or the nurse to call your name in the doctor’s office.

There is a lot of waiting in the Bible. In the book of Jeremiah, the Lord makes a promise to send a savior to the people of Israel. They believed God’s promise and waited for it - they waited six hundred years for this promise to be fulfilled. And then, finally, when Jesus was born, it was.  That’s serious waiting. In fact, it’s not only waiting, it’s holy waiting.

There are also examples of holy waiting in the New Testament.  Mary waited for the birth of Jesus as foretold by the angel Gabriel.  John the Baptist waited for the Lamb of God to reveal Himself.  The old man Simeon and the prophetess Anna waited their entire lives, praying constantly in the temple for the consolation of Israel. Mary Magdalene, too, practiced holy waiting, completely confused and weeping outside the tomb of the crucified Jesus. 

These are all examples of holy waiting and what made their waiting holy is that it is always waiting for God. That’s what makes the waiting holy. Holy waiting is different from the waiting we do for summer vacation or the light to turn green. Holy waiting is different because its goal is God.

My favorite of the New Testament examples is Simeon and the way you can almost feel the relief in his voice. He’s finally seen Jesus and could die happy. “Now let your servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen the Savior, whom you have prepared for all the world to see. A light to enlighten the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” He had waited and was satisfied. But there was a problem and Simeon didn’t know yet what it was. The problem was that Jesus wasn’t the savior Simeon thought he was getting.

Because there’s another thing about holy waiting.  In every biblical example, the end of the wait came with dramatic change, change that was not expected. The Jews, all of them, Jeremiah, John the Baptist and Simeon, expected a king coming in triumphant victory and instead got first a helpless baby and then a humble carpenter. Mary Magdalen, mourning and terribly confused by a dead savior, certainly expected, at that point, a lord and teacher who would stay dead, but instead got a savior who awoke, very much alive, calling her name. And who knows what Mary, Jesus’ mother expected, because she kept it treasured in her heart, but it certainly wasn’t doing a stint at the foot of the cross watching her son slowly suffocate to death in humiliation and then show up again only to levitate into the clouds.

So this lesson is meant to emphasize two things – first that we are sometimes called to holy waiting for God and second, that if we let God have His way, what happens at the end of the waiting is not predictable. In fact, usually the opposite. Hence, the cartoon.

It shows a squirrel sitting in a tree - a tree he's pretty proud of, and he should be. It's beautiful. He knows the tree has come from God but he has cared for it and nutured its growth for years. He thanks God for it, but all the while we know that he's taking most of the credit for what it's become. Still, he says, have your way with it, God, and sure enough, the Holy Spirit shows up peeking around the corner. I get the feeling that the squirrel anticipates a pat on the back, but then we see what God has in mind. He has a hatchet in His hand and the squirrel is  not happy. 

So, who is the squirrel? He’s us, of course, and the tree is the First Congregational Church of Rochester, Wisconsin and we are in our tree, waiting. During the liturgical season of Advent, we are waiting for God. We are waiting to celebrate the anniversary of the birth of Jesus at Christmas.

But we also waiting for something else right now. We are waiting for a pastor. And this is also a kind of holy waiting, not only because we are waiting for God to act in this situation, but also because we have no idea how it’s going to turn out.

I don’t know about you, but I feel a kind of dichotomy, a kind of psychological tug of war. I want two outcomes at the same time, and of course, that’s not possible. One of those outcomes is wanting someone like Paul back – someone who fits right in, who loves easily, who understands God’s world primarily in terms of mercy and grace, who sings with joy, and whose happiness and friendliness is visible to everyone who meets him. Someone we can grow to love and trust. He is a hard act to follow but follow him someone must.

And this is when I remember my second desired outcome – to do like the squirrel in the tree said he wanted to do - to do God’s will. The squirrel reminds me that God’s will is not predictable, but that God doesn’t make mistakes. I remember that we wouldn’t be looking for a pastor at all if God had allowed Paul to live longer. He could have, after all, but he didn’t. So we are waiting and looking. And I remember that we are not guaranteed someone like Paul. In fact, if I understand the pattern of how God seems to work, it is more than likely that God may offer us someone completely different, someone who will fulfill His desires, His plan, not ours. He’s done it before. Remember the Jews who waited all those years and got a savior completely different than they’d hoped for, and for Simeon who held the baby thinking he would be a conqueror, and of Mary whose pain of burying her son was not erased even when He rose from the dead, and of Mary Magdalen who didn’t understand why Jesus had died and was then stolen from his grave. All this confusion, misunderstanding, and suffering was not an accident. It was God’s will – God’s will for the people He loves.

 But change assumes there’s something about us that needs changing and what in us is there for God to work on? As a congregation, we already click. We get along in genuine affection. And because we feel this way about each other, we also get things done not only efficiently, but organically - naturally, and congenially. We have a kind of system, practiced and cemented into place after long years of implementation. We’re a Swiss watch of a congregation. Humming along and knowing our places together. And this is good. It’s almost a miracle, actually, given the amount of strife churches often experience. Our church family is not broke, and there seems to be no reason to fix it. We are justifiably glad about the love and harmony that binds our church family. But at the same time, we are a tree, a tree that is nourished not by one another, but by God. We run the church, but the church, the tree, belongs to God and God could easily come into our church world with a hatchet like in the cartoon. Just because we are good at what we do doesn’t mean that God doesn’t have more for us, something we haven’t yet considered. If He does, He may be hacking some things apart and we may be in for some surprises.

 It’s easy to say that God is in this place, and I think we all feel that in one way or another, but it’s important to remember that the place where He resides isn’t in these four walls but implanted deep inside every one of us. We will not get God’s love or discover His will from our church building or from our committee work or from the Congregationalist headquarters. They can all help us achieve practical ends, but they will not help us find and follow God’s best for us. That comes by a very different path. It comes only through God Himself. So if we are going to care for our tree, we have to connect with its source of energy, God.

 The funny thing is that He’s already here. In the everyday. I learned this in a really vivid way from a bunch of monks. I once did a week long writing retreat at a monastery, New Mellaray Abbey, in Peosta, Iowa, not far from Dubuque. The monks make caskets there, praying as they work, and they also practice of the presence of God, praying as a community seven times a day. People who stay with them do the same and they helped me to understand what a healthy relationship between spiritual and practical work looks like. It’s a funny thing to watch, because the monks work in the wood shop, but when the bell rings they stop their work and all file into the church, wood shavings hanging off their robes, tool belts banging around their waists, and raise their voices together in prayer and chant. My work there was there to write and even I found that, just when I got deep into my project, the bell would ring for the call to prayer and I’d have to break off what I was doing to trail into the church behind the monks. It was as though priorities had been turned upside down. In a world that works first and often struggles to find time to stop and pray, they lived in a world where work took a back seat to conversation with God. Eventually, days no longer framed themselves around the work. They framed themselves around the prayer, around God. One learned to look forward to the prayer more than the project. In the contest between the practical and the spiritual, both were accommodated, but the spiritual won.

 Something similar is always happening in our lives. Even a church makes a conscious decision regarding how spiritual their lives together are to be. This time in our church life might be an opportunity for us to reevaluate our own dynamics. At the end of our holy waiting, we will probably get a new pastor. But it is not the new pastor that is standing at the door knocking. It is Jesus.  It is always Him, and in the knocking, God is showing us a opportunity for a renewed future. He has already declared it by taking Paul home. Yes, I want a pastor like Paul and I want nothing to change, but in the end, I think I want God’s will more. And that might mean that things will be different, that they’re supposed to be different.

God has already changed our circumstances, and He promises that it is for our own benefit. He is giving us an opportunity for something new, not because the old was bad, but because with God, there is always something more. We can embrace His gift, open our arms to welcome the more and all of the relearning and rethinking that comes with it, or we can remain what we were, but this is when we welcome everything He has imagined for us, or we don’t. I’m pretty sure He will not abandon us either way. He will simply give us as much of Himself as we show Him we want.

 So, we are in the time of Holy Waiting. We wait for Christmas, of course, but we also wait for the unknown to show itself. We do not just wait for a pastor. We wait for God. So I call you all today to pray, to read, to sit quietly before God and let Him show you, and thereby show us, what He wants. And then to communicate that to the rest of us. We can do it alone or together, by email, around coffee or a meal or in a quiet corner by ourselves.  This prayer is not intended toward choosing a minister for this church. The selection committee is already doing the heavy lifting for that. This prayer is intended to find the more God has for us, to grow us in God so that we might become as spiritually adept as we are practically efficient.

 We are so lucky to be the little corner church in Rochester, Wisconsin, already trained by God and good pastoral leadership to be faithful and loving, so who knows? We may become not only the neighborly church on the corner but the light on God’s hill. It’s no accident that Advent sounds a lot like adventure.  It will be an adventure, all right, but God has already built a church well equipped to love each other through whatever He brings us. It is up to us to decide whether we will take the community and warmth He has fostered in us and use it to keep ourselves warm and dry, or to let him wield his loving weapon of change to make us something we never imagined. He will tell us. Let us pray. We can find out together.

 Cartoon Credit: John Hendrix, The Holy Ghost

John Adams: Patsy or Prophet?

I've been ruined by the musical Hamilton. It's songs still echo at the slightest provocation. For example, I'm reading a book, Hamilton, Adams, Jefferson: The Politics of Enlightenment and the American Founding by Darren Stadoff and every time I open it to the chapters about John Adams, I hear King George scoff, "Adams? They'll eat him alive!" Well, as it happens, the song and characterizations are catchy, but the musical's version of history is a little off. That's okay, though. It's excused. It's still brilliant. And so, it turns out, was John Adams.

The Enlightenment, you will recall, heralded the age of reason we take so for granted now - the idea that human reasoning ability holds the key to any knowledge worth having, that science trumps faith, and that rationalism is capable of paving the way to as close to utopia that mankind can achieve - and came by the pens of thinkers like Rousseau, Voltaire, and Locke. And all of this at exactly the time this country was being born. So of course, as educated men, the founding fathers of this country were influenced by it, but each had their own wrinkle and I found Adams' particularly compelling.

Adams was not a successful President. He followed Washington and was voted out after one term in favor of Thomas Jefferson, but he had some compelling ideas that made me think of our country, especially as it lines up today, angry battle lines ready to fire at one another at the slightest provocation. 

Adams' take on mankind contemplated the degree to which the equality of mankind was possible. He agreed that people have the potential, even the mandate, to reason, but as they work toward it, are often ruled by pure passion. When we say equality, we don't often mean it, envisioning a mass of people more or less equal to one another, but presided over by, hopefully, ourselves, rising just above the masses or lacking that, presided over by someone more wealthy, more motivated, or more gifted. Equality is fine, in other words, but we are more comfortable when there is someone in power more equal than others. 

Whoa! Whoa!

Don't shoot the messenger!

Think about it a minute. How do you see the world? How does anyone? It's not possible to see the world through any eyes other than our own. We are always the central character in the story, in any world we experience. It can't be any other way. I can't see the world through your eyes or you through mine. It's not possible. We have a deep love for ourselves that automatically makes us self-centered and selfish. That's why our emotions are geared toward individual experience and, inevitably, individual welfare. It is our only reference point. 

That doesn't mean we're corrupt. It only means we care about ourselves more than we care about anyone else. We tend to admire people whose desire for the improvement of others brings them personal notoriety - Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, Eleanor Roosevelt. Their passion for compassion may render them more pure of heart, but even they cannot live the lives they try to improve. They are merely living their own. 

But let's look at most folks. We say we want equality. We want an egalitarian society, where everyone has their say and the will of the people is enacted without interference from an elite nobility. 

But we don't. 

We don't. Think about it. Communism doesn't work. The French Republic drove them to chaos. These happen because the will of an amorphous, uneducated, or uninterested people can't be trusted either. Like it or not, we look at power as a zero-sum game. If one person has more, that automatically means someone else has less. And we want to be on the side of the more. We tend to ignore that with power comes work and responsibility. Many of us don't want that, either. Look at how many people, even in an election as seemingly important as the last, didn't bother to vote at all. More than 35%. What some people want is a comfortable life determined by someone else, someone smarter, richer, or more advantageously placed. They want a kind of equality but at the same time want to be ruled.

Actually, our government is designed to accomodate both camps. The Senate represents the elite, the few. The House of Representatives represents the many, the commonplace folk. The Presidency, designed to maintain a balance, actually operates on one side or the other to accomplish the agenda of the party in power, but the power of the Presidency lasts only as long as the President remains in office. 

Adams understood that a pure democracy will always be short-lived and the source of its own undoing. We do not have a pure democracy, nor do we really want one. 

A modern Roberspierre would inevitably rise up and those looking for a strong leader would support him. America, after all, has its own aristocracy. Every society does. Actors, sports stars, Musk and Jobs and Gates and Trump. They are our modern aristocracy and we expect them, not us, to get things done. 

John Adams knew this and it wasn't more welcome news then than it is now. Yes, they ate him alive for it, but he thought the truth worth the torture. I would probably not stand as he did in front of a firing squad for it, but as difficult as it is, I welcome the divided government he believed to be essential and look to it as the foundation of the struggle that paves the way forward.

Photo: Farside, Redbubble

Why Baking is Dangerous for Philosophers

I made pumpkin custard for breakfast today. Last week, I bought a good-sized whole pumpkin at the grocery for only 99 cents. At the time, I didn't know what I was going to do with it exactly, but since then, it has become a lovely yeast bread and savory soup. Today, with a couple of cups of cooked pulp still left over, I decided to make custard. It was easy - I had everything already and only took a few minutes courtesy of my handy dandy immersion blender. After mixing everything, I poured the silky pumpkin cream into cups, about 3/4 full.

After about an hour in the oven, this is what I got.

Look at them. Eggs and heat made them rise far above the edge of of their rims into things of true beauty, giving me more out of the oven than I put into it. Intellectually, I know at least part of why this happened. Eggs are leaveners and help baked stuff rise and I also whipped air into the mix, so it becomes a kind of pumpkin souffle. 

 

But I've also been reading The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus. Dangerous territory for almost any activity because it's Camus' stage for explaining the absurd - the state in which nothing makes sense after a certain point. The natural world will eventually extend beyond our ability to explain it. Our own reason will collapse when it reaches a certain threshold. When we reach those points, we are suspended over an abyss and have to figure out what to do next.

There are ways out of this, of course. God or magic, for instance. In those places, the absurd doesn't matter so much any more. Of course, there's another way to look at the unexplainable, and that's to start with allowing for it. If we assume from the get-go that we won't be able to figure everything out, that reason only takes us so far so we might as well not depend so heavily on it in the first place, that maybe the Enlightenment didn't do us so big a favor after all, well, life gets a lot more interesting. 

So, this morning, looking at my little pumpkin souffle-custards and in spite of knowing at least some of the science that spawned them, I've decided to yield to the inevitable absurd, to allow the beauty of my custards to be magically granted or God-graced miracles. That way, I avoid all looming contradictions. 

But then again, maybe allowing for the beautifully unexplained just makes me feel special.