August 23, 2009 - That's a Lot of "I Dos"

This afternoon, I officiated at a wedding. As I was recording the details afterwards in my pastoral record book, I happened to notice that this wedding was the 250th I’ve performed, since my ordination in 1983.

That’s a lot of “I dos.” It’s hard to believe I’ve been through the premarital counseling process with so many couples.

Maybe I should have offered the couple a prize. You know, something like: "Congratulations! As the one millionth customer to walk through the doors of this department store, you’re the lucky recipient of a shopping spree!" Don’t know what I’d offer a newly married couple, though... Somehow, I don’t think a coupon for a complimentary marriage counseling session would be much appreciated (and would be no bargain, anyway, since I don’t charge for marriage counseling).

I like doing weddings. They’re such joyous occasions. Every couple is so different, yet also so similar in their hopes and aspirations. As I scan down the list of names in my record book, I can still picture a great many of them. Some I haven’t seen since their wedding day (often because they were in typical young-adult transition, and moved elsewhere). Others are still right here in this congregation. For some of those couples, I’ve already had their kids in confirmation class (no weddings, yet, of any of their kids – I haven’t been here quite long enough for that).

Some of them, I’m aware, have divorced. A sad, but true reflection of national trends.

Personal anniversaries like this are great milestones. They remind me there’s much more to who I am than my cancerversary.

Thank God.

June 11, 2009 - At CREDO

I realize it’s been quite a while since my last post. Life has been more than busy – bordering on overwhelming, at times. Each year, I always underestimate how hectic the month of June is, in parish ministry. June is the month when most church programs make ready to go into hibernation for the summer (yes, even here in a beachfront resort community). There are lots of end-of-the-year special events to occupy a pastor’s time.

Not only that, I’ve been away from home since Monday, at a continuing-education event called CREDO (an acronym for Clergy Reflection Education Discernment Opportunity, which also happens to spell out the Latin word for “I believe” – or, as some have more poetically pondered, “I give my heart to”). The invitation-only program is put on (and heavily subsidized, financially) by the Board of Pensions of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), although they borrowed its design from the Episcopalians, who pioneered this concept of ministry support. We’re meeting at Beaver Hollow, a well-appointed executive conference center in a rustic, woodsy setting near Buffalo, New York.

It’s an unusually long continuing education conference: eight days. It’s kind of a mid-career tune-up for ministers who have been at this work for a long time and who’ve perhaps have not had an opportunity for a while to get away from the daily grind and reflect on the experiences that led us into this line of work in the first place.

It’s a wonderful group of people: gifted men and women from all over the country who are, for the most part, quite good at what they do. The ages range from 40-55. Few of us have ever met before, but the bonding was instantaneous and we’ve been having a great time.

It’s a wholistic sort of approach, focusing on finances, health, spirituality and vocation. Mostly we’ve been listening to presentations so far, with some small group work. Later in the event, there will be some time set aside for writing our personal “CREDO Plan,” a sort of personal to-do list for strengthening our spiritual life and ministry.

I’d like to share something from a CREDO handout on the subject of health. It has a lot to say to cancer survivors, and to everyone else as well:

A VIEW OF HEALTH

1. Health means a sufficient absence of injury or disease processes so that my basic functioning operates without impairment (This is the traditional view of health).

2. Health means having an awareness of and reliance upon the life force within each one of us, which makes for growth and in the event of illness, for recuperation (we call it a positive attitude).

3. Health means having a sense that each of us belongs to others, and a desire to contribute to the common good (we call it an other-centered attitude).

4. Health means having an understanding that each of us is more than a product of history; that as individuals, we cannot only cope with the flow of events, but we also participate in shaping them (we are co-creators).

5. Health means interacting with others in such a way that our self-constancy, stability and individuality are not dissolved; even under threat (our egos are intact).

6. Health means having a sense of integrity. That is, we function as a unit and are not self-destructing (we have direction, focus, purpose).

7. Health means having a sense of the value of life and of living as a steward, not an owner (we are optimistic and free because nothing belongs to us individually. We have nothing to lose. We can live sacrificially).

8. Health means having a view of life that acknowledges dependency as a part of reality and rejoices in it; which recognizes gifts, including the gift of God’s love, mercy and ever-present Spirit and gratefully accepts them; which accepts creaturehood, as befits children of God.

9. Health means having an appreciation of living from the aspect of eternity that allows us to find security in the hope and expectation of life everlasting, not everlasting life (We can hang loose through all adversities of life because our perspective is eternal).

10. Health means embracing mystery and ambiguity as welcome friends.

Source: Adapted from Richard P. Ellerbrake’s remarks, Helen J. Westberg Lecture, Sixteenth Annual Westberg Symposium, September 11, 2002.

What I like about this statement is the way it integrates the medical and the spiritual. We need more of that sort of thing.

May 9, 2009 - A Most Useless Place?

Dr. Wendy Harpham sent me a link to the blog of Rabbi David Wolpe, who also has non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Several years before that, he had surgery for a brain tumor. Here, he writes about receiving his last Rituxan infusion, ending a two-year follow-up regime after chemotherapy for NHL:

“Recently I had the final infusion. But I was not at all sure that pulling away the safety net was a cause for celebration. My doctor poked his head into the curtained chamber to assure me that he expected a long remission. Kind of him, but what could he say?

Remission is cancer's suspended animation. The renegade cells are poised to return but no one knows when. It could be a month or a decade; for my type of lymphoma (one of the more than thirty varieties of Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma) there is no cure. So I am stuck in what Dr. Seuss – in a book I used to read to my daughter – calls “a most useless place. The Waiting place....’”

A most useless place. That phrase does sum up how it feels, sometimes. Unlike David, I’m out of remission – have been for a couple of years – but there are days when I, too, feel like I’m in suspended animation.

David’s experience is similar to mine, too, in that he is a member of the clergy, serving a congregation:

“I had the strange, surreal experience of hearing my congregants' shock that this could happen to the family of the Rabbi – as though professional piety was a shield against disease. As though God played favorites.

Right before my brain surgery I appeared in front of the congregation and asked them for their patience and their prayers. Three year later I was standing before them, bald. I witnessed the realization in their eyes that there are no guarantees, no protected people. No one is safe.”

No, no one is safe. Yet, that observation ought to be surprising only to those who believe God is some cosmic puppeteer, manipulating the lives and loves and illnesses of us poor, benighted souls who dwell below. Is cancer a thunderbolt, cast down in righteous anger from Olympian heights? I’ve never seen it that way – although I’ve met plenty of people, both inside and outside my church, who fear it may be.

Granted, there are strains within the biblical tradition that portray God that way. God punishes the ten spies who brought back an unfavorable report of the promised land by killing them with plague (Numbers 14:37). God gives the adulterous David and Bathsheba’s infant love-child a fatal illness (2 Samuel 12:15-17). Even worse, God famously afflicts Job with boils, not because he’s an unjust man but simply because God wants to win a debate with the devil.

Yet, before everything is said and done in the Hebrew scriptures, the Lord is portrayed as “merciful and gracious, abounding in steadfast love” (Psalm 103:8). That’s the majority witness. When it comes to the New Testament, of course, God not only sympathizes with human suffering, but personally undergoes it, becoming incarnate as Jesus Christ.

Yet, the ancient images of a capriciously angry God, that dread smiter of sinners, are maddeningly persistent. “What did I do to deserve this?" is the anguished cry we pastors hear again and again, whether spoken or unspoken, standing at the foot of many a hospital bed.

No one is safe. We’re all going to die. Some of us sooner than others. If we’re spared from some fatal catastrophe on the highways, we’re all going to hear some doctor admit to us, someday, “I’m sorry, but there’s nothing more medical science can do for you.” Is this God’s judgment?

The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden suggests it is. Death is, that story suggests, God’s judgment on the entire human race. That may be so, but, unless we toss out all the biblical witnesses to God as patient and merciful, it’s hard to make a case for God micro-managing the entries in our individual medical files. We belong to a race for whom that dark, old lullaby is all too true:

“Hush, little baby, don’t you cry,
for you know your mama is born to die...”

The divine decree of death is meted out to the human race en masse, not on a case-by-case basis.

The fact of death is perhaps the deepest mystery we children of Adam and Eve seek to plumb – as Rabbi David has himself come to realize:

“For now I am just waiting. I am trying to find my own way through this because, inevitably, I will be asked how I did it. Rabbis are supposed to be figures of authority and calm. It was hard enough to reassure my congregation that a fickle universe does not mean that God is absent. That belief does not indemnify me against adversity. That my faith through all this is unshaken. How does one live, Rabbi, is the question my congregants ask, of not so directly. Tell me, Rabbi – it is your job to know.

My answer, I now realize, is: Live as if you are fine, knowing that you are not. Death is the overriding truth of life but it need not be its constant companion. My safety net is gone. I feel, as all people in remission do, that each time I fly my hand may slip from the trapeze. But to live earthbound is to give the cancer more than it deserves.”

The place David and I find ourselves in may feel, at times, like “a most useless place.” On deeper examination – and, viewed through the eye of faith – it turns out to be anything but.

February 1, 2009 - Authority

My, but I’ve been busy. With my seasonal teaching gig at New Brunswick Theological Seminary still under way, I’m now working three jobs. Besides serving as pastor of the church, I’m also working part-time as Stated Clerk of the Presbytery of Monmouth (a Presbytery is a regional governing body in the Presbyterian Church, sort of like a diocese in the Roman Catholic Church). A Stated Clerk is like corporate secretary, archivist and parliamentarian rolled into one. In early January, there are all kinds of end-of-the-year reports to complete, and as a newbie Clerk, I’m learning how to do them for the first time. Bottom line is, I’ve scarcely been able to think about a blog entry, let alone write one. Until this afternoon.

Today in worship, I preached about authority. My text was Mark 1:22, “They were astounded at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority, and not as the scribes.”

During the second service, I learned about one of the pitfalls that go along with authority – at least, authority of the pastoral kind. Robin, our church’s associate pastor, had called in sick today, so I was up there all by myself, except for one of the junior-high youth who did a fine job reading the Old Testament Lesson. When it came time for the New Testament Lesson, I guess my mind was wandering, because I skipped it. Just blew it off. There was a long silence, as I just sat there. I was sure Sara, our organist – filling in for our absent choir director today – had lost her place in the service. Finally, she just moved on, launching into the choir anthem, while I continued to sit there, blissfully unaware of my blunder. When I arose to give my sermon after the anthem, it was – still unbeknownst to me – sans New Testament lesson.

The curious thing about it is – nobody told me about it. Not, that is, until I was shaking hands at the church door much later, when about the twentieth person in line gently asked, “Did you mean to skip the New Testament lesson?” Most of them knew all along that I’d goofed, but nobody felt bold enough to correct me on it.

Pastoral authority is a funny thing. When you stand up there and speak for God Sunday after Sunday, sometimes folks get a mite confused. They can be hesitant to point out errors they wouldn’t think twice about correcting, had a lesser mortal committed them.

The icing on the cake came after I walked back up the aisle, and was making ready to leave the Sanctuary by the exit nearest the church office. Little Sara, the three-year-old granddaughter of our organist, was standing there. When she saw me, she gave me a wave, then a big grin that would light up the darkest of days. “Hi, God!” said she.

I’ve been addressed as “God” before, by kids her age. “Jesus,” too, on occasion. (Never “Holy Spirit,” but I suppose the third person of the Trinity is a harder concept to grasp.) This just goes with the territory of ministry. It’s an understandable error for little minds to make, as they try to puzzle out what church is all about. Their parents tell them they’re going to “God’s house,” and after looking at the same guy standing up front in that funny-looking costume week after week, they make the logical connection.

I corrected her, of course. Her grandfather, who was standing nearby, thought it uproariously funny. The story was already making the rounds at the Communion Breakfast in our fellowship hall, by the time I made it over there a few minutes later.

“Doctors playing God” is a stereotype in the medical world. There’s even a corny old joke about that. A famous surgeon dies and goes to heaven, but finds quite a crowd of fellow new residents lined up in front of St. Peter’s imposing desk. The minutes tick by. The line’s moving very slowly indeed. The doctor, who’s been something of a V.I.P. in his earthly life, is starting to get impatient.

Finally, a man with a long, white beard, clad in a lab coat with a stethoscope around his neck, goes barreling up to the desk, passing right by the long line of applicants. Giving St.Peter only the briefest of nods, he strides right through the pearly gates.

The distinguished physician has had enough. He walks up to St. Peter and says, “I’d like to lodge a complaint. Some of us are doctors, too, and we’ve been waiting a very long time.”

“You don’t understand,” replies St. Pete. “That wasn’t a doctor. That was God playing doctor!”

(Sorry, I couldn’t resist.)

I imagine most docs hate that line about playing God. I figure most of it comes not from the doctors, though, but from the patients. All of us wish, in our heart of hearts, our medical caregivers had godlike qualities of omniscience, omnipotence and benevolence.

They don’t, of course. They’re only human. It’s a good thing for us patients to pay attention to what our medical caregivers are doing, and to ask questions when it appears something important has been omitted. Authority doesn’t carry with it infallibility.

We’re partners in this healing thing, after all.

January 16, 2009 - Leadership: It's Personal

The recent news about entrepreneur Steve Jobs’ sudden medical leave from Apple Computer brings back memories for me. When you’re in a very public sort of job – like CEO of a company, or pastor of a congregation – there isn’t much of a right to privacy. You’re doing more, professionally, than just filling a box on an organization chart. Personality and profession are all wrapped up together. When you get sick, people feel they need to know.

Steve Jobs has pancreatic cancer. So far, he’s been one of the truly fortunate ones. Not only is he still around, more than 4 years later, but – except for several relatively brief absences – he’s thrived, remaining at the helm of the innovative company he founded. Now, Mr. Jobs has announced he’s taking another, longer leave to see to medical concerns – at least until June.

Apple stock has plummeted. It must be a terribly difficult spot to be in, knowing the stock analysts are watching him like hawks (or vultures?), ready to issue “sell” orders at the least sign of physical weakness. For a man like Steve Jobs, even getting the flu could have a notable effect on his company’s value. The fact that he’s actually stepping down for a time indicates that something is, indeed, seriously amiss.

At least one commentator has issued a call to privacy on his behalf. I agree with that. News reports speculating about the future of the company and the value of its stock are inevitable, I suppose, but it would be nice if the media could find some way to discharge their duty to the public without heating up Mr. Jobs’ life with their spotlights. He needs to find a place of peace and privacy where he can concentrate on healing.

I’m grateful that my congregation gave me such a place, during the acute phase of my illness. I used this blog to let them know how things were going, but that was my choice to do so. This online journal has also been a kind of therapy for me, providing a way to reflect personally and theologically on what’s been happening to me, and what God is doing in my life.

Sometimes I wonder, though, whether certain developments in the life of the church may be attributable to my cancer. As we struggle with issues of membership growth and finances, as nearly all mainline Protestant churches are doing these days, I ask myself whether some of this church’s particular challenges are attributable to my health outlook. Has this become “the church whose pastor has cancer,” in some people’s minds? How does my health situation affect long-range planning? Did the intense focus on my health back when I was receiving chemotherapy – as God’s people ministered to their minister – help or hinder the church’s overall mission in the long run?

These are mostly unanswerable questions. As with families, churches sometimes find they can’t choose or plan for certain eventualities. They have to face whatever comes.

Still, the questions remain in my mind. Leadership is personal – and nowhere is this more true than in ministry.

November 2, 2008 - Talking to Children About Death

Today – the Sunday closest to All Saints Day – is our annual Service of Remembrance at the church. In our worship bulletin, we list the names of all the members and friends of our congregation who have died in the past 12 months, and pray for those who are mourning them.

This year, I do something I’ve never done before. I preach an entire sermon directed to the children of the church. There are plenty of adults here, as well, but I explain to them that their role today is to sit back and listen in to what I’m saying to the children.

My sermon is about death. Now, that subject may not top most people’s list of things to discuss with children, but in my experience it’s something kids do worry about sometimes – and parents, too, as they try to figure out what to say to their kids when there’s been a death in the family. With our Service of Remembrance theme today, the topic does seem to fit.

I’m used to doing brief two- or three-minute Children’s Sermons in the worship service, but I wasn’t sure I’d be able to pull off an extended version. Somehow it all does seem to come together.

Here’s an excerpt:

“You’ve probably noticed, when someone you know has died, that other people around you feel sad. Maybe even your mother or father felt that way. Maybe you even saw them cry – something you don’t see very often.

That can be one of the hardest things about somebody dying – how sad everybody around us feels. When somebody who’s close to us dies – someone in our family, or even an animal that’s a pet – we do feel sad.

Nobody wants to feel sad, but sometimes it’s a good thing to feel that way. Sad isn’t bad when someone we love has died. Sad is just the way we feel at a time like that. It feels good, then, to be around other people who are feeling the same thing. It’s good to get some extra hugs, or to give them. It’s good to crawl up into the lap of our mother or father – if you’re small enough to do that – and just feel safe and warm and loved....

The Bible tells us that, if we love Jesus, you and I go to live with God when we die. The place where God lives is called heaven. We have no idea what heaven looks like, or feels like, or sounds like, but we know it’s a very wonderful place. This world of ours is a wonderful place, too, and God wants us to stay here, with our families, as long as our lives last – but we know our lives don’t last forever. When we die and go to be with God, it’s something like climbing up into the lap of our mother or father, and feeling all warm and welcome and safe.”

There’s more to it than that, of course. You can check out the full version HERE, if you’d like.

I refer to a couple of Bible passages. One is the story of Elijah’s restoring to life the son of the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:17-24).

I also draw upon a passage from 1 John:

“Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is.” (1 John 3:2, Contemporary English Version)

What I do, this morning, is speak from the heart. There’s nothing sophisticated about today’s message: it’s just basic Christianity.

I don’t think this is a sermon I could have preached before I had cancer. Somehow, the experience of having had a life-threatening illness has freed me to speak with a certain degree of personal authority. Not that I mention my own health situation, of course. The effect is more subtle, and interior to me.

I get a lot of favorable comments from people at the church door afterwards. Some of the adults respond with emotion: there’s nothing like trying to see death through a child’s eyes to bring out strong feelings.

No matter how old we get, on some level we never stop being children.

April 12, 2008 - The Dance Goes On

This morning, I conduct a funeral for someone I’ve never met.

It’s not that unusual an occurrence, in parish ministry. From time to time, one of the local funeral directors calls me, and asks if I’m free to conduct a service in the funeral home. Usually, it’s a case of the deceased having no current church membership. Often, there’s some tenuous history of church involvement – sometimes Presbyterian, other times something else.

The funeral directors know I generally say yes to such requests. I consider it an important part of the church’s ministry to the larger community.

Kay, whose funeral this is, had some connection with a Lutheran church in a nearby town, but the pastor had another commitment today. Rather than postponing the service, the family decided to let the funeral director find a minister. That’s how I got the call.

Yesterday, when I went over to the funeral home to meet with Kay’s daughter, I learned that Kay loved ballroom dancing. I also saw a snippet of video, of her dancing with her husband. This wasn’t your garden-variety, wedding-reception stuff. I’m talking “Dancing with the Stars,” Fred-and-Ginger elegance – ball gowns, tuxedos, the works. The woman I saw in those brief moments on the screen fairly soared across the dance floor, moving with joy and grace. She looked like she was having the time of her life.

Kay’s daughter told me of a woman who’d known a lot of disappointment in her life, with a couple of failed marriages in her past. She’d finally found happiness with her third husband – ironically, just about the time she was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. Eight years of treatments later, it was all over. She was only in her 60s when she died – still young, by today’s standards. It hardly seems fair.

In planning the service, I decided to depart from the old-standby scripture readings. There’s nothing wrong with them, but for today I felt we needed something different. So, I went on a hunt for Bible passages dealing with dance. I found more than I’d expected.

Lamentations 5:14-15 tells of how hard it is to dance when you’ve had a devastating loss – in this case, the fall of your country to foreign invaders:

“The old men have left the city gate,
the young men their music.
The joy of our hearts has ceased;
our dancing has been turned to mourning.”

The poetry of Lamentations is traditionally attributed to Jeremiah – and, if that’s true, it’s remarkable how much his tune has changed in his better-known book, the prophetic book that bears his name, as he speaks for the Lord:

“I have loved you with an everlasting love;
therefore I have continued my faithfulness to you.
Again I will build you, and you shall be built, O virgin Israel!
Again you shall take your tambourines,
and go forth in the dance of the merrymakers....

Hear the word of the Lord, O nations,
and declare it in the coastlands far away;
say, “He who scattered Israel will gather him,
and will keep him as a shepherd a flock.”
For the Lord has ransomed Jacob,
and has redeemed him from hands too strong for him.
They shall come and sing aloud on the height of Zion,
and they shall be radiant over the goodness of the Lord,
over the grain, the wine, and the oil,
and over the young of the flock and the herd;
their life shall become like a watered garden,
and they shall never languish again.
Then shall the young women rejoice in the dance,
and the young men and the old shall be merry.
I will turn their mourning into joy,
I will comfort them, and give them gladness for sorrow.”
(Jeremiah 31:3b-4, 10-13)

“Our dancing has been turned to mourning,” says Lamentations. Now, the Lord says through Jeremiah, “I will turn their mourning into joy.” Clearly, this passage is all about God providing, one day, changed circumstances – circumstances propitious for the dance.

Psalm 30:5 provides a similar assurance that “Weeping may linger for the night, but joy comes with the morning.” The psalmist then goes on to declare:

“What profit is there in my death, if I go down to the Pit?
Will the dust praise you? Will it tell of your faithfulness?
Hear, O Lord, and be gracious to me! O Lord, be my helper!”
You have turned my mourning into dancing;
you have taken off my sackcloth and clothed me with joy,
so that my soul may praise you and not be silent.
O Lord my God, I will give thanks to you forever."
(Psalm 30:9-12)

What sort of dance is this? Not a rock dance, and not ballroom dancing, either, but probably something more like the circle dances of many near eastern and Mediterranean folk-dance traditions. They’re the sort of dances in which everyone participates, everyone finds a place. Eventually, the circle moves as one, becoming like a single dancer.

I tell the people, then, a story from the Hasidic Jewish tradition, about a famous rabbi who had been asked to come to a particular village to share his teachings. The village was looking forward to his arrival with great anticipation. Each person considered carefully what question to ask the holy man.

When the rabbi finally arrived, they ushered him into a large room, but he didn’t do what they expected. He walked silently around the room, softly humming a Hasidic tune. Before long, everyone found themselves humming along with the music and swaying to the rhythm. Before long, the whole community had formed up into circles, dancing ecstatically. They felt the presence of God in their midst as never before.

The dancing went on late into the night. Finally, the rabbi put up his hand and brought the swirling motion to a stop. Slowly he walked around the room, looking into each person’s eyes and saying, “I trust that I have answered all your questions.”

Sometimes there just aren’t the words. Sometimes the powers of logic are insufficient to the task. Sometimes the only thing to do is to put one foot in front of the other, in the time-honored patterns of the worship dance.

One of staples of the Christian folk-music tradition is Sydney Carter’s “Lord of the Dance” (no, not the Michael Flatley Irish step-dancing extravaganza, but a lilting hymn that depicts Jesus’ life and ministry in terms of a dance). The refrain goes like this:

“Dance, then, wherever you may be
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.
And I’ll lead you all, wherever you may be,
And I’ll lead you all in the dance, said he.”

The song goes on to tell how Jesus danced through his teachings and healings, even right up to the cross. When he died, it seemed to his followers like the dance died with him. But then comes this verse:

“They cut me down and I leapt up high.
I am the life that'll never, never die.
I’ll live in you, if you live in me.
I am the Lord of the Dance, said he.”

Sydney Carter himself died 4 years ago. The fame that accrued to “Lord of the Dance,” disproportionate to anything else he’d written, made him kind of a “one-hit wonder” – and he knew it. So, it’s perhaps not surprising that he chose to have these words carved into his tombstone, recalling his famous song:

“Coming and going by the dance, I see
That what I am not is a part of me.
Dancing is all that I can ever trust,
The dance is all I am, the rest is dust.
I will believe my bones and live by what
Will go on dancing when my bones are not.”

I tell the grief-stricken people in the funeral home that what we are about here, today, is reminding one another that the dance of life goes on - in this life as well as the next. Cancer cannot stop it. It surely can’t. In Christ, the dance goes on.

Robin, our church’s associate pastor, shared with me these words from an early Christian tomb inscription. I don’t have a source for it, but it sounds like the sort of thing those early Christians believed with all their hearts:

“No sorrowful tears, no beating of the breast
For a safe repose has taken me. I dance
Ring dances with the blessed saints
In the beautiful fields of the righteous.”

Yes, indeed. In places and in ways we can only imagine, the dance goes on.

February 6, 2008 - Remember That You Are Dust

"Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return." These are the words I repeat over and over again this Ash Wednesday, as I do every year. I speak them as I smear a thumbful of ashes in a cross-shaped pattern on church members' foreheads, as they come up to me during the worship service.

The imposition of ashes is a curiously intimate act. It involves a brief moment of human touch, applied to a highly sensitive area, the face. Most of us aren’t eager to have others outside our immediate family touch us on the face. There are a few exceptions: doctors, barbers, or – for women – maybe a hairdresser or makeup artist. That’s about it: other than a minister or priest, on Ash Wednesday or in the less-common rite of anointing with oil.

We Presbyterians haven't been doing this ashes thing for very long – about 15 years or so, in this congregation. In years past, most Presbyterians have shrunk from the imposition of ashes, considering it – for no good theological reason – "too Catholic." But those days are pretty much behind us. Even though we make a big deal about it being voluntary, nearly everyone comes forward, now, to receive them.

For me, the most emotionally powerful encounters involving the ashes are with the very old and the very young. When an elderly person comes up to me, and I say, "to dust you shall return," I figure both of us know that return could happen any time now. It's not an especially sad or mournful thing. It's just the way it is, the way of the world.

It's even more poignant when the person is sick – like the advanced cancer patient who came in to see me this morning, to talk about her funeral plans. Her doctor says she’s got a few months to live. She's here at the Ash Wednesday service this evening. I wonder what the ashes mean to her, this year of all years?

When young children come up – ushered forward by a parent, or perhaps even held in a parent's arms – it's something else altogether. It seems deeply wrong, almost an obscenity, to smudge ashes on such a little forehead and say "remember that you are dust." It feels, somehow, like I'm marking these youngsters for death. A powerful symbol, these ashes.

In a death-denying and sin-denying culture, to smear ashes on a person's forehead is a deeply counter-cultural act. The ashes are a reminder both of our mortality and of our tendency to sin. They're a reminder, in other words, of our creatureliness. It never ceases to amaze me how many people come up to me and ask for that reminder, then tell me afterwards how meaningful it feels to them.

This afternoon, I was in Dr. Lerner's office for my monthly port flush. Unbuttoning my shirt, I let the nurse probe around by my collarbone with a surgical-gloved finger, until she located the hard little button under my skin. Then, after smearing the area liberally with antiseptic, with a nursely combination of gentleness and firmness she swiftly plunged a needle through my skin and into the port.

I've had this done so many times, now, it's no longer troubling to me. I know the pinprick of pain will last a brief moment, and no longer.

This, too, is a reminder of my mortality – a reminder of the cancer I can't feel, but that I know is still there, somewhere within me. "Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return."

October 25, 2007 - Showing Up

Woody Allen once quipped that "95% of life is showing up." Today I earn a handsome certificate of merit, just for showing up.

It's my 25th reunion at Princeton Theological Seminary. At the luncheon, I'm called forward to receive an elegantly-printed piece of paper, declaring that the seminary and its Alumni/ae Association "pay tribute to the faithful ministry of Carlos E. Wilton."

Now, in case any of you may be thinking I've just won the ministerial equivalent of a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, let me make it clear that every member of the Class of 1982 received one of these things. There were about eight of us there, out of a class of maybe a hundred or so. All we had to do, to be so honored 25 years after our graduation, was to keep breathing – that, and show up at the reunion.

The 50th reunion class outdid us in that regard. Judging from the number of reserved tables in the dining hall with "1957" placards on them, they had four or five times the number of classmates turn out. Sure, these people are all retired, and have a little more discretionary time to pull up stakes and travel, but I think there's something deeper going on here.

I can tell, from paging through my old student photo directory and recalling the stories I’ve heard, that quite a number of the men and women I graduated with are no longer in parish ministry. Some got caught in the cross-fire of church conflicts. Tired of dodging bullets, they got up one day and simply walked off the field of battle. Others committed ethical lapses of the financial or sexual kind. Still others – many of the bright women who trailblazed their way into seminary in the 1970s and 1980s – discovered that the congregations that welcomed them as earnest young associate pastors weren’t so eager, a few years later, to invite them as seasoned professionals to sit down behind the pastor’s desk. Tired of gazing up at the “stained-glass ceiling,” they left for other occupations. As for the rest of those graduates who are now MIA, I suppose they just drifted away, for whatever reason.

Judging from the number of tables set aside for the Class of 1957, I don't think there are so many MIA ministers in that group. At their graduation, they were pretty much all young men in their twenties, so there was no sexism or ageism to contend with. They started out doing ministry in Eisenhower's America – probably the most congenial time in history for mainline Protestants. True, they persisted through the turbulent sixties and seventies, but the church in that era – while assailed from without – still had plenty of internal momentum to keep it going. By the time the eighties and nineties rolled around, and church-leadership pundits started pontificating about "the end of Christendom" – meaning, by that, the end of the unofficial Protestant establishment in America – these people were already at or slightly past mid-career, so there was little question they would stay the course, no matter how unbreathable the atmosphere seemed to be getting outside the ecclesiastical airlock.

When I think of what I’ve been through, medically, in the past couple of years, I realize how easily I could have become one of the MIA ministers. If my cancer had been of a less easily-treatable form, I might not have been able to jump in the car and drive over to Princeton to pick up my one-size-fits-all, suitable-for-framing certificate.

I suppose I could treat it as my diploma from the School of Cancer. I’m not done with that instruction, by any means – I’m enrolled in a few graduate courses, at the moment – but I feel like I’ve finished with full-time studies for now. (And a good thing it is, too, that I can say that.)

A number of friends at the reunion, from various class years, know of my health situation and ask me about it. A surprising number of them have discovered this blog somehow, and visit it from time to time. After I give them the lowdown on my general condition – how I’m out of remission but in “watch and wait” mode – I find myself saying how much cancer has taught me. It’s true. It’s been one of the most formative experiences of my life (although not one I’d wish on anyone).

No one offers you a certificate of merit when you finish chemotherapy. But, they should.

October 3, 2007 - Catching the Wind

Yesterday evening, Claire and I had a wonderful time with our friends Myrlene and Eric, who invited us out on a sunset cruise on the Toms River, on their sailboat, the Pequod. (For the record, things are a lot more relaxed on this boat than on the original Pequod, of Moby Dick fame. I said to Claire, as we were boarding, that if there's a gold coin nailed to the mast, I'm getting off right now. There was no such thing. It was a metal mast.)

Eric loves to teach people how to sail. His idea of a good time is letting his guests steer the boat as much as possible, while he and Myrlene see to the ropes. Consequently, either Claire or I was at the wheel nearly the whole time.

I hadn't been out on a sailboat more than once or twice, since my days taking sailing lessons at the Toms River Yacht Club when I was a kid (my parents had a social membership there for a few years; we never did own a boat, other than a leaky, wooden dinghy with an outboard motor that my Dad used for fishing). It was amazing to me how much of the technique came back to me, all these years later.

One of the things I hadn't thought about for a while is how much indirection there is in a sailboat's progress. You always go in a straight line, but the straight line is rarely oriented precisely towards your goal. You tack up and down, in zigzag fashion, as the wind's direction dictates. It's kind of like the knight's move on a chessboard. There's a logic to it, but not the sort of logic you'd ordinarily expect.

The progress is also exquisitely slow. At times, you have the sensation of not moving at all, although a quick glance up at the full sails confirms you are getting somewhere, after all.

Eric and Myrlene take groups from their church (Morning Star Presbyterian, where Myrlene is pastor) out on the boat, and use it as an opportunity to teach not only sailing skills, but also a thing or two about faith. I'm still reflecting on something Eric said to us last night. He was remarking how, in sailing, you need to be attentive to the wind's direction, and orient the boat so as to catch the wind. He quoted Jesus' words in John 3:8: "The wind blows where it chooses, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes." Eric didn't complete the verse ("So it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit"), but he didn't have to. We know it well.

Before I got sick, I used to delude myself into thinking my life is on a straight course, that my forward progress is as simple as driving a car down the road: point the tires in the desired direction, and off you go. Anything on the highway that threatens to change that course, like construction delays or heavy traffic, can lead to pointless frustration (even, for some, the infamous road rage). I had one professor in seminary who taught us that sort of goal-oriented behavior very explicitly, in his lectures. For him, it was all about making it to the tall-steeple church someday: the more influential the pulpit, the better. It's clear to me, now, that he considered ministry more of a career than a calling. He wouldn't have grasped Eric's point about needing to be attentive to the direction of the wind, and to set your course accordingly. He would have had us all roaring down the river in motorboats, churning up the water.

He taught us wrong. Ministry's not like that, at all: nor is life in general. We like to fool ourselves that we're in total control. Sure, we're in control of a few things: there's a rudder we can turn, there are ropes we can pull. Yet, there are certain times when, should we doggedly continue to point the prow directly at our intended destination, we'll only end up dead in the water, sails flapping helplessly in the wind.

Attend to the wind. Position yourself so as to catch it. It's the only way.

September 16, 2007 - A Hole in the Roof

This morning I’ve got a guest-preaching gig at the Morning Star Presbyterian Church of Bayville, New Jersey. This is a first for me. Never once, in a quarter-century of ministry, has anybody asked for a rerun of one of my sermons.

The sermon is one I preached for Morning Star ten years ago, at their chartering service, when they were formally established as a congregation. A few months ago, I was surprised and pleased to learn from my friend, Myrlene, their pastor, that my sermon of ten years ago influenced the architecture of their new building (into which they’ve recently moved). That’s why they wanted me to repeat it – or, at least to preach on the same scripture passage.

I’ve had sermons result in all sorts of things, over the years: action, discussion, questions, jeers, slumber. Usually, the effects of sermons are pretty ephemeral. Never before have I had a sermon result in architecture.

The new Morning Star Church has a cupola, which sheds borrowed light into their worship space. Their roof is not literally open to the elements, of course, but symbolically it is. Several of their members insisted on this, I’m told.

The sermon is on Mark 2:1-12, the story of one of Jesus’ healings. This is the story that includes the rather colorful detail of a paralyzed man on a stretcher being lowered through a hole in the roof – this, in order to get around the crowds who are pressing so tightly around the house that no one can get in.

What I said to the people of Morning Star ten years ago – and repeat to them today – is that they need to keep a hole in the roof, so hurting people may continue to find a way in. Some long-established churches have a way of forgetting how to do that: focusing more on serving the needs of their members than welcoming those from outside their walls. New churches like Morning Star tend to be pretty good at this, but the more years of history a church accrues, the harder it becomes to maintain a missional outlook.

Today is a day I’ll always remember. One of the frustrations of ministry – particularly the wordsmithery that is preaching – is that tangible results are so hard to identify. Plenty of preachers have retired after many decades in the pulpit, wondering if they’ve made much of a difference. However long I remain healthy and am able to continue in ministry, I’ll always be able to recall that, in south-central New Jersey, there’s a church that keeps a symbolic hole in its roof, because of something I said to them back in 1997.

During the service, reminders of cancer are all around. Myrlene’s late husband, Ed – a minister who co-founded the church along with her – died several years ago of brain cancer. Candy, a church member who’s leading the intercessory prayers, asks for prayers for herself, as she’s recovering from breast-cancer surgery. Another woman asks for prayers, remembering the loss of several family members to multiple myeloma. A man tells how he's preparing for kidney surgery in a few weeks – again, a cancer diagnosis.

Most churches, in fact, are filled with people whom cancer has touched – either directly, or indirectly through family members and close friends. They are like the crowds pressed around Jesus, in that little house in Capernaum.

Let us always remember to make room for more!

September 9, 2007 - Centered, Spun, Molded

One thing people with cancer will tell you is that it’s hard to escape from the disease. Our awareness of it is something that’s always with us. At home, at work, wherever we may happen to be, cancer is an unwelcome companion.

When you have a job like mine, one that requires standing up before a congregation every week or so and giving a sermon, that means things get a little more complicated than for most other cancer survivors. Preaching is, by its very nature, a highly personal form of communication. One of the classic definitions of preaching is that of Phillips Brooks: it's “truth communicated through personality.” We’re meant to share something of ourselves and our spiritual life in the pulpit. It’s part of what makes a sermon real.

Yet, on the other hand, there’s a fine line we preachers must be careful not to cross. Personal anecdotes are like salt in a pot of soup: a little is tasty, a lot ruins everything. We can all picture some televangelist or other, whose crocodile tears have made a mockery of the whole homiletical enterprise. Or, maybe we’ve had the agonizing experience of sitting through endless, navel-gazing sermons, presented by shallow drudges who just can’t stop talking about themselves.

(It’s occurred to me, by the way, that maybe that’s one reason I’m writing this blog. It’s a place where I can say what I have to say about my personal experiences, and keep most of that stuff from leeching into my sermons. Them as wants to read that sort of thing can visit here. Them as don’t can steer clear. Meanwhile, I can be as shallow a drudge as I want to be.)

Maybe it was that self-possessed sort of preacher Anthony Trollope was thinking about, when he skewered the preaching profession in his novel, Barchester Towers:

“There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilized and free countries than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silently and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanor as though words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips... No one can rid himself of the preaching clergyman. He is the bore of the age, the old man whom we Sinbads cannot shake off, the nightmare that disturbs our Sunday's rest, the incubus that overloads our religion and makes God's service distasteful.”

Ouch.

I’ve tried not to mention cancer too often in my sermons. Sometimes it can’t be avoided: as I share my own reaction to a scripture text, in certain situations I do need to tell folks where I’m coming from. Other times, I keep my own counsel, and speak in generalities.

This morning is one of those times. I’ve decided to preach on Jeremiah in the potter’s house, as he watches the artisan transform a lump of clay into a thing of beauty. I’ve also decided I have to say something about the new book that’s coming out about Mother Teresa, revealing her as a person who – surprisingly, to some – struggled with doubt through most of her adult life.

I’ve had my own doubts over the years, like anyone else, but I can’t say I’ve lived through “the dark night of the soul” as long and as consistently as Mother Teresa appears to have done. Yet, I have to be honest, also, and admit that the experience of a cancer diagnosis has shaken me up – as it would shake up anyone. I feel I’ve come out the other side both a stronger Christian and a stronger person, but getting there has been difficult at times.

I decide not to share any of that in my sermon. I share, instead, some selections from letters Mother Teresa wrote to a few close friends, in which she speaks honestly of her spiritual struggle. Then, I talk about Jeremiah’s vision of the people of Israel being like a lump of clay in the hands of the master potter:

“It can't be a very comfortable process – by definition. If that lump of clay in the potter's hand had feelings, you can only imagine what those feelings would be. The cutting of the wet clay, the punching it down, the throwing of it onto the wheel, the centering, the molding – and then, at the last, the firing – it's all a process that could only be described as painful.


As painful as a dark night of the soul, such as Mother Teresa felt? Perhaps.

The point is, there are times in life when you and I do experience suffering, of one kind or another. The work of faith, then, becomes a sort of re-positioning of those painful experiences, so we can understand them as directed toward a higher purpose. In the tough times you and I sometimes undergo, God just may be molding us into something beautiful, something we may not get to see in its entirety, because of our position in the center of the potter's wheel. Perhaps it will not be until the life to come that we glimpse the ultimate outcome.”

I make the point that, in times of trouble, it helps if we allow ourselves to be centered, spun and molded – just as happens to the lump of clay on the potter’s wheel. We must center our lives on God; we must endure the spinning, disorienting sensation of change; and we must understand that, when we feel the transforming pressure of the potter’s hands, it is all, somehow, working towards a greater good.

I wonder what the people in the pews think – at least, the ones who are paying attention – as they hear me say things like that? Are they immediately thinking of my struggle with cancer, though I haven’t mentioned it specifically? Or, are they thinking more of the troubles they’ve seen in their own lives?

“Truth communicated through personality.” It’s a fine line we preachers walk.

April 8, 2007 - Touching Base, On Easter

If last year was my cancer year, then this is my survivor year. What I've been doing, particularly when it comes to milestone celebrations in the liturgical year, has been touching base.

A cardinal rule of baseball is that a runner has got to touch all the bases. If you miss one, you've got to go back and rectify your error. I feel like there were a lot of bases I missed last year, so as I come upon them again, I've got to make sure I touch them.

If the liturgical year is a baseball diamond, then Easter is surely one of the bases. While I haven't referred to my medical situation in most of my sermons, as I come up to a base like Christmas or Easter, I feel I've got to make some reference to it. Partly this is because I know the "C & E" crowd is different from the folks I see on a typical Sunday. Many of these are people I know, though not well. Many of them are aware of my recent medical history, but haven't been here to see that I'm really doing OK. I said something about being a cancer survivor in my Christmas Eve sermon, so now as I come up to the Easter base, I feel like I've got to touch it, as well. This is particularly true of Easter, because that was the one major holiday I missed completely, because of my illness.

Here's some of what I said in my Easter message:

"As many of you know, on Easter last year, I was sitting in the Manse, too sick to come across the street. I could see many of you, though, through the curtains, coming and going in your Easter finery. On the Wednesday before last Easter, I spent eight hours sitting in a lounge chair in my oncologist's office, as chemotherapy drugs dripped into the port I still have implanted in my upper chest. By the time Easter Sunday rolled around, I felt so weak, I probably couldn't have sat upright in a church pew for an hour, let alone stood here at the pulpit and delivered a sermon. You all muddled through without me – you did just fine, as a matter of fact – and now, a year later, I stand here before you: a witness to the resurrection.

When I say that, I don't mean to claim I had any mystical visions of Jesus. Nor do I mean to say that God healed me in some spectacular, supernatural way. God used all the tools of modern medicine to put my cancer into remission.

What I do mean to say is that I've learned some things, in the past year or so, about resurrection faith. I can't stand up here today and present incontrovertible historical evidence that, round about the year 30 A.D., a dead rabbi by the name of Jesus got up and walked out of his tomb. I believe that he did, but I can't prove it to you. But I can tell you something I have learned: that the story of his rising is true for me, now more than ever."

We preachers are in a dilemma, when it comes to Easter. How do we convey the truth of something that happened centuries ago, for which we have no credible evidence, only secondhand testimony? Recently, I read an article by Diana Butler Bass, who was addressing this very question. Coming out of a liberal Protestant background, whose preachers tended to treat biblical miracles figuratively, she recalled being curious about what one particular preacher, Episcopal Bishop Daniel Corrigan, would have to say about the resurrection. Surprisingly – after what she'd heard him say about other miraculous events – he affirmed its truth, unequivocally. When someone asked him if he believed in the resurrection, the bishop replied, "Yes. I believe in the resurrection. I've seen it too many times not to."

I guess that's where I am, too. I've seen resurrection in other people's lives. I've felt its power in my own. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is not so much a historical reference, a single point in time, as an ongoing process. We can spend all our time peering into an empty tomb, if we want – discussing the details of what may or may not have happened there – but there's no real future in that. "He is not here, but has risen," say the angels to the women, in Luke's Easter account. Sooner or later, we've all got to decide whether we wouldn't do better to look for the risen Lord not among the tombs, but rather in human lives. There is where we find him. There, he continues to be active.

That's what I'm about these days, anyway, as I round another base.