Merry Christmas!

Last year, around the Christmas Season, a mosque on the Northside had a sign that said, "Allah neither begets nor is begotten."

This seems like an appropriate time to say, "Merry Christmas, and Mohammad was a liar."

Nascent Fables

If I had more time, I’d write these fables myself. As it is, I can only give you the outline.

First fable. There’s a shepherd who listens to his sheep and lets them head into dangerous places, because it’s just what they want to do.

Second fable. There’s a wolf who had been busted for wearing sheep's clothing. But he goes to the shepherd who lets the wolf move in with the flock because the wolf assures him that he has had an “experience” and no longer has a taste for mutton.

Maybe they are the same fable. Maybe the shepherd just wants to be cool. Maybe the shepherd went to one of those shepherd schools where they teach you that to be a successful shepherd you must, at all costs, be liked.

So I am taking a few looks at The Rock La Roca. Wild stuff happening. From the important, basic things like we have a handle on our administration. Martina Ockerman has brought efficiency and professionalism to the church. We have detailed budgets and accounts, things we’ve never had before. I guess the thing Martina has brought to us is a real gift: we are all very ministry-oriented. That is, I have a staff that flat-out gets after it. We’re never in the office, a value I have pushed on them. Get on the street. Meet the people. Meet the needs. Come up with new ministries, plans. I tell them that I won’t get mad if they do something and it flops. Better to do something than do nothing. But since we’re always out there on the front, we’re not quite as good at taking care of the business side of things. Martina has set us free to get after the work. And Martina herself gets on the street, too!

And then there’s the stuff we’re set free for! This huge Monday night ministry—a meal, food bank, and service.

After school music program for kids, with a meal.

A church plant.

70 kids at the Wednesday night program. If you’re a kid, you can eat three nights a week at the church. Good food.

Maybe 10% of our worshipers are African-American. I think this happened without trying. I mean, I have been wondering how to reach out, worrying if we could make the shifts necessary. But apparently, if you flow out of the love of Jesus, you can be as white as you want to be and still reach everyone!

I am probably missing something.

I don’t know what else will happen, but I can’t wait to see.

Saturday Night and Sunday Morning

Ica and I just closed down Third Street. We got a wild hair that we’d walk down there. It was cold and a light mist blew on us, so the café au lait sure hit the spot. We found Jim Embry there, fresh back from his trip to the Slow Food Movement’s Conference, Terra Madre. We had a good hour long talk about where we can go after the information and contacts he gleaned over there in Torino. I have to say, we are a bit jealous of his trip!

We walked back home under a moon playing hide-and-seek with us. We have been talking a bit lately about how there is a lack of “conversation.” That is, most folks don’t have much to say. There’s not much room for serious engagement of ideas. As we walked home, we wondered how it is that most of our best conversations happen outside of the church. I mean, that’s good because we’re engaging with non-believers. But it’s also sad, because if people could get past having their ideas under scrutiny, we could all learn a lot and have a great time.

Any time you talk to Jim, you come back pumped up for gardening. I hope the idea of our garden can get bigger. Quickly. I don’t want to just grow stuff. I want to find better ways to draw growing and eating together. How can we share in the growing and the eating? How can we work in the dirt and sit around the table? This is where real, life-changing fellowship will grow. I wish I had a monastery, a place where I could take some of our hurting kids, put them down in a safe place where they could rest and flourish. In the meantime, the garden will have to do. But it will have to do better.

That was last night. Worship this morning was awesome. Rosario preached and knocked it out of the park. Lots of people at the altar. A few months ago I told Ica that this church plant thing was going to happen and then Roz would be preaching there every Sunday. I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, you have to admire the heck out of a dude who does not juts go to the Bishop and say “I am ready for a church,” and then he gets sent to a place with a building and a budget. Instead, he goes and starts the whole thing. That’s what the church desperately needs. There was a time when guys like Roz needed to be sealed in glass, with a sign on it that says, “Break only in case of emergency.” You can’t train Rambo and expect him not to kill. The church needs it desperately. Anyhow, the other part of my feelings about Roz going on is that he has preached once a month for about a year now. It is really good for me to have the chance to hear the Word, because he always brings it.

Well, after the sermon, John went up to the altar. His first time. I asked him why he went up. He said, “I was praying for Joe-Joe.”

“What did you pray for?”

“That he would remember something about Mommy.”

A few weeks ago, Joe woke up crying in the middle of the night, missing Melissa. I held him and told him stories about Melissa, things he might remember. But he was just so little in all this. John was laying in the bed, not sure what to do or say. I guess he knew what to do this morning.

Holler in the City

On my end of Clark County, there was a holler. Well, there were a few, but this one was easy to miss. I did not pay much attention to it until one evening the fire trucks rolled in there. They came back out pretty quick, so I figured there was no huge emergency. But I resolved to head back up in there.

I found the usual: a canyon, we’d call it out west, a draw that ended with a hill surrounding three sides of it. Some trailers and a lot of scrap metal around. Not much grows in such places because the trees on top of the hill shade the floor below.

I was met at the trailer at the head of the holler by the patriarch, and old man with a beard down to his waist. My kind of guy! He listened with interest to who I was and then commented, “I knew you had to be someone special. You’re the only stranger that dog has never tried to eat,” and he pointed to a mean-looking dog I had not even noticed, curled up in a corner outside the house.

I have long said that the best preparation for urban ministry is rural ministry. They share the same problems, but rural ministry is usually a little friendlier, so you get broken in a bit more gently. Rural and urban areas suffer from isolation, despondency, lack of opportunity, being forgotten by the rest of the society. When they are remembered, it’s to be made fun of, if not completely degraded. “Trailer trash” are the new “niggers.”

This is all to say that I ended up in a holler on the Northside of Lexington on Thursday. Jessie and I were out doing pastoral visits, and we came to a very small dead-end street that is less a street and more the pattern of a holler—houses strewn about. It’s an enclave. Even tho no real geographic barrier prevents you from going down the street, why would you?

But these are some of my newest people, so I go.

I think that the isolation of this street, right in the middle of thousands of people, is a refuge. The folks who are on the street are on it out of social ties; that is where, a holler in Eastern Kentucky might be built on families, this is built on people who have a kinship forced on them. They are the poor who are most on display. White, uneducated, disabled, some facing mental handicaps, sweet, devoted to each other.

I wish you could have been there with me, to be invited in, to have a chance to read 1 Peter 1:1-9 to them (words that 2000 years are re-filled up with meaning for this flock), to get to pray, to hear the devotion of a husband to his sick wife.

Have you ever seen ‘em pack the kids in the car after work on a Friday night,

Pull up in the holler ‘round three a.m. lights still burning bright?

Those mountain folk stayed up all night

Just to hold those little grandkids in their arms.

I’m proud to say I’ve been blessed by their sweet hillbilly charm.

--Dwight Yoakam, “Readin’, Writin’, Route 23”

Boys

Wow.

We’ve been doing some family devotions out of a Veggie Tales book, and then we have prayer and communion together, before bed time. For some reason, the past two nights, we have read out of a child’s bible that John has. Last night, it was really wonderful.

John read the story, about Jacob and Esau. I was not sure if Joe was going to follow it because John was reading at his pace (but I guess children know exactly how to follow along with that!) At the end of the story, just when Jessie and I were about to start off some discussion, John did! He asked what we thought was the point of the story. Joe raised his hand and said, “it’s because the two brothers were fighting about the blessing.”

“So it’s in the category of jealousy?” John asked. I was wondering where he got the words, “category of jealousy…”

It was a sweet, wonderful, telling moment: the boys are perfectly capable of reading and understanding the Scriptures. In fact, you have to wait for the time when they are going to see more clearly than we do, what the point is.

Why I Did Not Vote

I did not vote in this last election. I noticed that my last post on Wal-Mart had some friends howling at me, tho I have not seen any comments. I suppose what I’ll say here will seem the same. I guess I should also say that I like to debate, and so if I’m wrong here, let me know. But I probably won’t think so without some real help!

The reasons why I did not vote go back a bit. Well, there is only one reason, really. I don’t want to be involved in what is going to happen over the next few years. So I was not going to give a vote one way or the other. Here’s how I came to that conclusion.

I had voted in every election since 1988. But I only voted for a major party candidate once. I voted Libertarian every other time.

The proximate cause for my decision came a little over a year ago at a fund-raising banquet. A speaker, by way of talking about inspiration in his life, praised Eisenhower. Now, Eisenhower was a great man and president. But in other spheres, I am not sure he can be accepted that way. I am a Methodist pastor. And one of my pastor-brothers is a man from Congo, Jonathan Lumumba. His father, Patrice, was the first democratically elected leader of Zaire. The Belgian secret service with U.S. help or perhaps U.S. apathy, assassinated Mr. Lumumba. Eisenhower was briefed on all this.

Then, Sojourners had an editorial on Robert Kennedy and how his assassination crushed the dreams of a generation. That was a bit much, given that we should not put our hope in men or kings. There was also something in praise of JFK. All of which is fine. Great men. And yet, I began to think we should not be surprised they were assassinated. I know it is a deep wound in the country’s history, but they were involved in assassinations of other world leaders, and best I can tell, you live by the sword, you die by it as well. It seems to me that if the Book of Kings were written today, and we were looking at, for example, the Kennedys, they would be in the categories of Ahab and Omri, with touches of Josiah and Hezekiah.

So, basically, that night at the banquet I was sad. What if Rev. Lumumba were there to hear praise for the man who either had his father killed or could have saved him? How can I praise Obama? He will be part of shady dealings in his administration. And clearly, unborn people are in more danger than they have been in years. Bloody years ahead: on the battlefield, in hidden places around the world, and in the womb. I simply did not want to have my name attached to any of it.

But I take a second look. Peter Storey preached a sermon on the eve of elections in South Africa. He said that because his church was integrated, the whites were going to have to look the blacks in the eyes after they voted. Would they vote to keep them subjugated? Or would they vote with an eye to casting a vote that would give the voiceless a voice?

I think this is the only thing I have heard about Christian politics that makes any sense.

Then there’s this. If we’re so much in an “empire” as is fashionable to say now, then why do we not act like Christians in the Empire? This has been a question I have been asking for about 5 years—not because I believe we’re in anything like Babylon or Rome (you’re going to have to do more than say so to make me believe we are) but because we’re not. Peter and John did not have a vote. And so I wonder—would they do anything differently? That is, they did not seem to give a rip what the Romans did. They did not lead protest marches. They did not crave audience with power to bring about justice. Rather, they invited people into the Kingdom life and rejected this disgusting and dying world in favor of life. Vultures live on a carcass, my friends.

But was this the Apostles’ way because they were disenfranchised? Would they vote if they could? Would they care to?