I-YOUniverse

In honor of the Epiphany, I offer my first sermon in print, Proclaim Oct 1977 (Baptist Sunday School Board). It’s a dramatic monologue in iambic pentameter (I was young.) The premise is that one of the Wise who followed the star to Jesus, 30+ years later encounters an early Christian missionary.

Those of us who graduated from Louisville in the early 70s held Alton H. McEachern in high esteem. Pastor of the St. Matthews Baptist Church, closely related to our seminary, he was the quintessential Southern  gentleman, and consummate preacher. He taught me preaching by his personhood, sermons, writing and friendship. He went on to other churches, eventually becoming Methodist and founding the Cornerstone United Methodist Church, near Greensboro.

If you aren’t familiar with his books, I recommend them, available through online booksellers, especially Dramatic Monologue Preaching and his book on preaching, too.

As his former student, I sent him this manuscript which he sent on to his publisher. With that introduction I made my first sale! In 1987 I attended a preaching seminar at Emory; the secretary put Al and me together in one room because we were the same denomination. I enjoyed hanging out with this prince of preachers, looking at miniature roses and seeing Children of a Lesser God together. (I think he thought it a bit racy.)

I hadn’t been in touch with Al lately, so I googled him to make a note of his present circumstances when I blogged the sermon. I am sad to learn of his passing January 3, 2009.

So, Al, enjoy your new mansion! Thanks for blessing my life!

Here’s the sermon originally titled “Wise Men Still Seek Him.”

Your sermons, Justus, stir the city as I have seldom seen. Remarkable!—the news that your Messiah of the Jews belongs to all humankind. Since when did the Jews begin to care for Gentile dogs? Take no offense, Friend! Once I was in Palestine, long years ago. I never will forget the priests and scribes, who felt unclean if they so much as touched us.

 But I have better memories. If one morning only had passed by, I would have no clearer vision in my mind of what I found. (I should say who I found.)

 Strangely, you remind me of myself. Your gospel presses you. It drives you to joy and, at last, to tears of peace. Your message tells me your beliefs, your memorized sayings are your life.

 Did you know him—Jesus—whose words you repeat? Did you know him as a man who trudged the hills of Galilee, teaching truths so plain a child could understand them, yet so deep they elude the wise?

 Why your smile? I do not count myself a wise man. You surely do not think my wealth could keep me happy, for I have seen God work his will among the very stars of heaven. Yes! I have studied the stars and wrested from them secrets angels long to know. It was a star that led me to a house in Bethlehem where a carpenter lived with his wife and his son, whose name was Jesus. But I’ve jumped ahead.

 Why study the stars, you ask. The glittering night to most is meaningless. To me the moving stars interpreted life and history. Jews like you cannot conceive of living blind and deaf without a hint of God’s existence or a hope of his care. Yet I, I grasped at specks of light in the darkness. I hungered for the truth. I searched. And long before I journeyed in the brightness of his star, I journeyed in the dark.

 To live and have no gospel to believe! Consider it, my friend. No hell could harbor torments any worse. So a star that filled the sky with light could fill my heart with trembling joy. I thought, it is no chance occurrence; it is a clue to those who will uncover it that God’s good news is soon to break over the world.

 Oh, no! We didn’t know about Messiah; we knew only God had spoken. The silent God had spoken. And on impulse we pursued the star across the desert to Judea. (My friend, obey your impulse: God speaks often to those he loves in fleeting whispers.)

 We traveled together, students of the stars whose life of theorems and of calculations had burst. We undertook the pilgrimage and did it fiercely. For, if we failed to find the promise of the star, then life—the dreams, the wealth, the wisdom we had had—would all be nothing.

 Isn’t that your gospel, Justus? That next to Jesus—whether as a baby or a man hanged or one raised by God from death—next to him the world is darkness, without form and void? And next to him our images of God are cracked and witless lies, and the Law you Jews revere is weak, little more than God  condemning us to death? But in his life the law becomes the Spirit, whose only law is love of God and neighbor. I have heard your preaching, Justus.

 In Jerusalem we went to Herod. He, by then, had killed his own sons, lest they steal his throne. And we, naïve, asked where to find the newborn King. Imagine! How it must have landed on those ears, so used to oily praise and fear, to hear us ask the whereabouts of a King that he knew nothing of. He summoned priests who squeaked their admonitions. Certainly they knew the Scriptures well enough to point out Bethlehem. They did not know it well enough to go and find their King.

 Justus, do religious people wrangle over texts discerning hidden meanings and missing the plain Christ? And why did shepherds, as his mother told me, greet his coming and foreigners, but his own did not receive him? Why do those who have the plainest truth of God reject it or ignore it? Why do those who walk in darkness seek his light, while those who live in it are blinded?

 We went alone to find him. Priests and soldiers and king remained behind. And, when they came, they came killing children. The news of the slaughter reached me here. Of course, I thought that they had killed the child, him the morning stars had sung together of and whom the one star shone to honor.

It brought us near who were afar off. We were strangers to the covenant of promise; we had no hope; we lived without God in the world. And you were his beloved people, but you killed him. So I thought. His cross is no surprise, for, from the first kings decreed his death.

I nearly lost my mind! Do you know, the deepest dark is not where the light has never shone. The deepest dark is where the stars glowed once but nothing now is there except the night. What gloom that is! Better never to know God’s salvation, than to see it, touch it, taste it, then to turn away. Old Herod has too many disciples, folk whose lives leave them no room to give a Christ child his rightful place. Telling you of my despair almost brings it back.

But, no, they could not kill him. You say he chose to die. You say he was held to that cross by his love. Though in the form of God, he did not count equality with God a thing to grasp; he emptied himself, became a slave, a man; he humbled himself; he obeyed even to death, even to death on a cross. (He knew the dark.)

And God has highly exalted him, bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus, every knee should bow in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is God. Glory to God in the highest!

I knelt; I worshiped, Justus, though I did not know the full truth you have told me. I knew in part. That God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself I did not know. But this is what I knew as I knelt there: God had brought me to a child whose lullaby the angels sang. The world was not forgot, and God still ruled and brought his purposes to pass in sure, however secret, ways.

I gave him gold, all I had. I was impoverished, and rich! For I had hope I’d never had, and joy! I have known none greater till today. I gave him gold—today I give him all I am or ever hope to be.

Justus, send your brother missionaries here. They’ll find me a friend. And when you leave this city to preach elsewhere I will provide money and whatever else you need.

I followed a star. I made a journey there and back again. But now the night sky has gone bright. There is no star at all. Justus, here comes the Son!

1 a.m.

I always write best in the wee hours, then sleep through the morning. Sandy and Jim will be striking the Christmas set today:

• packing up carefully the  Nativities from Nigeria, Burma, Austria and other countries;
• folding and storing festive runners on tables;
• putting away craft items such as carolers made from coke cans, Fathers Christmas and dozens of miniatures; bells and wreaths on doors—all packed up until next year.
• The tree itself will take a couple hours or more.

It’s an annual gift Sandy and Jim give me and friends and neighbors. This year it’s especially wonderful because Sandy is beginning to feel more her own self. She still has several treatments for anemia, but has been able to grocery shop and do a little cooking.

Also, she did some tedious year end paperwork and transferred all her datebook, appointments, and address book to a new palm pilot.

The software for Vista can be downloaded. However, after about eight hours on the phone with tech support in India, we lost all her data. Three days of keyboarding!

So I’ll do that for her. We did get the HotSync process established, though.

The truly amazing thing is that the tech support person is planning to come to the States to do graduate work in engineering in NC. We recommended Virginia Commonwealth University here in Richmond and invited him to meet us. He promised to come and bring us pickles, for which South India is famous.

I am overjoyed

1. that Sandy is on the mend; I’ll remember this Christmas as a dark one, akin to 1987, which I equate to the Holy Family’s flight into Egypt. Not that we’re a Holy Family. But Mary and Joseph and the Babe fleeing on donkey into exile strikes the same minor chords I felt the year we moved from Indiana to here. We left with a sense of betrayal by people we’d trusted the care of our minor son to, if both of us should die. It’s the kind of bitterness only the church seems capable of. It was December 26. We had no Christmas that year. God, however, has prospered us here, taken us out of the Southern Baptist denomination into the wider world of faith.
2. that we have prayer support of family and friends, including fellow strugglers in the blogging world.
3. that we talked with Jean-Emile and Sophie Ngué. Willie, Alise, Marie-Ange and Benjamin joined their Dad and us singing hymns together. Then this morning I had a chance to speak just to Sophie, a rare treat, because it’s usually her husband we talk with. Sophie was soloist at a wedding with a choir of 300! She has many responsibilities among Protestant women of Cameroon. And she is a mighty woman of prayer.
4. that we met a young man from India. When director of pastoral care at Hermitage United Methodist Home here, I had an intern from Madras, India, Stephen Satiasatchi, a professor of English who was studying Christian education at Presbyterian School of Christian Education. The tech we spent hours with on the phone yesterday wants to do graduate work in engineering in the States. He invited us to India. I wish we could go. Friends who’ve been there say it is the mother of the spirit. If only the world could learn Gandhi’s nonviolent methods! And Mother Teresa’s order is rooted there. I don’t know much about Hinduism, other than an outline from world religions.

It’s incredible to me that, from this chair, I can reach hearts and be touched by them in return anywhere in the world!

For many years, since our first bout of heart disease in 1993, I have lived with the awareness of how quickly my life could be totally ripped apart. Anyone’s can, really. I live constantly on the pain scale at 2-3, but that can quickly spike to 6-7, or more (God forbid). To stay at low levels, I am indebted to the pain medicine expertise of my physician Dr. James Levenson, at Virginia Commonwealth University medical school. His compassion and delightful rebellious streak and occasional stories of the rabbis from the Talmud make him a stalwart companion on this journey.

There are so many people struggling today. As Christ-followers we cannot afford to ally ourselves with the comfortable class. In the darkness Gaza and the borders of India and Pakistan burn. American and NATO warriors patrol treacherous mountain passes. Robber financiers lounge beside pools of cash in tropical anonymity. Street kids scrounge trash for plastic bags, and dodge kidnappers.

The star of exceeding great joy shines on a world where Herod also rules and darkness roams the streets. We are called, in moments of happiness or grief, to take up our cross daily, follow Christ, and make a difference.

God, be merciful to this sinner, and make it so in me.

I did not send the prophets,
     yet they ran;
I did not speak to them,
     yet they prophesied.
But if they had stood in my council,
     then they would have proclaimed my words to my people,
and they would have turned them from their evil way,
     and from the evil of their doings.

Jer 23:21-22 (NRSV)

On this Sunday morning I woke early, got a breakfast bar, cracked open a diet coke; sat down in front of my Wordpress Write post screen, and began thinking about what to write after a Christmas week that I think of as heart bruising.

Most Sundays of my life by this hour I’d be going over my sermon. It would be outlined, at least; often written out in full, and I would be mentally rehearsing it. What phrases did I want to hang on to? What transitions?

Most of all: what outcome?

Only in my freshman years in the pulpit did I read a manuscript. Reading a sermon is like reading “I love you” to your lover. It just doesn’t work.

African American politicians have a secret weapon; they’ve all been trained in the tradition of the African American pulpit. The best preaching in the history of the world has occurred in the black pulpit in America. I hope it still is.

Sermons are good or bad based mostly on what hearers do because of them, or rather because of how God speaks to hearers through them,

Do hearers re-examine their lives? Change priorities? Forgive their husbands, wives, siblings, parents? Do they begin to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?

If so, then, the sermon is a good one.

George Buttrick told his preaching class he once graded a sermon. The preacher disputed the grade. “Sir,” he said, “this sermon has won 110 people.” Buttrick replied, “Won them to what?”

Our culture’s preference for statistical evaluation can’t do right by most sermons.

I personally like time bomb  sermons, the subversive kind that you carry home in a pet caddy, feed, house break, and cuddle every night—only to find you’ve adopted a pet that eventually breaks your house, makes your present lifestyle unlivable.

Now that I don’t preach three times a week, as I did for 30 years, there’s a hole in my life. Small group Bible studies help fill it, but cannot entirely.

I miss the gale of gospel wind. I miss the still small voice.

Preachers hold in trust the Word of God for their people.

I don’t mean, as one fundamentalist said, that the preacher is the only one who knows the Word of God. I mean, God gives to the shepherd the food for the flock in a way they can’t get for themselves any other way.

Using a different metaphor, if preachers don’t stand in the council of the Lord, they don’t have hammers, wind or fire they need to build the spiritual building.

I miss the preaching that comes  not just from an intellectual commitment to scripture, but from an experience of nothing worthy of God happening in the church that doesn’t arise from its encounter with the written and living Word.

What a treasure it is to be called to stand before the fire for the sake of a people.

A conversation with Rev. Songbird

1:13 a.m.

The morning of 9/11 I was standing in my friend Donna’s office at the Methodist Retirement Center where I was one of three part-time chaplains.

“I heard a plane hit the WTC,” Donna said. “I’m going to find a TV.” I joined her, and the day of horror began.

The thing about cognitively impaired old folks is, their emotional antenna are more acute than other people’s. They may not be able to spell out why they feel fear or angst, but they feel it keenly. And they pick up whatever’s floating in the air.

So I spent the day playing on the piano soothing old time hymns of faith.

By day’s end my fingers fell off.

A month later, emotionally overwhelmed, I resigned. The company (which was building an upscale new facility in Williamsburg VA) had no use for three chaplains.

Knowing one of us three was to be let go, and knowing I was about to go on disability, I chose to be the one to get the ax. Might have been me any way.

My 25 year old supervisor and I never got along. (The Associate Administrator said of her, “This chick is going places.”) 

I had this odd notion that a Methodist facility ought to understand pastoral care as a discipline, and view ordained clergy as professionals, whom a secular MSW grad would not be prepared to supervise. But like so many facilities, this one was Methodist mostly when raising money and recruiting new residents and volunteers. The rest of the time administration was almost always business and secular.

With some relief I began life on disability. My days began to be more and more ordered by osteo arthritis and cerebral palsy from infancy.

What’s it all about, Alfie?

What’s it all about? If you’re just eating and sleeping and watching the Food Channel, the meaning of life on a 1 to 10 scale (1 = little, no meaning) sinks quickly to minus 10.

My online friend Rev. Songbird mentions her search for the meaning of illness. So here’s my shot.

I found you’re invisible even to a well meaning church, if you can’t be there on Sundays at 11. So with the help of cool neighbors and committed seekers, I began a couple Bible studies in my home. The psalms. How to pray. Now at Christmas: Mary, the mother of Jesus according to the NT.

I write the blog, though lately I’ve questioned its value. Frankly, I feel called to silence. To the ancient spiritual riches of the early and medieval church.

So I don’t chat with other bloggers. No surprise then you don’t often chat with me.

My call to silence, to seek the Center, has grown stronger. Our fractured, faltering, dark, globally warming planet with its mass extinctions and vanishing habitats, needs new colonies of the committed, whether Buddhist, Islamic, Christian, Hindu, Jew. More than once in history, renewal movements have begun with a few.

Illness and vocation

Illness can be acute, like my wife’s current bout with heart and kidney disease. Frightening, it shreds your schedule, stops you dead in your tracks. Suddenly all the demands of schedule are stripped away. There you are, dependent on God, subject to contingencies of which even the best health experts are only somewhat aware.

Illness can be chronic, creeping along, the little red wagon on the shoulder of the interstate. Getting a bag of groceries takes all morning. Rest becomes the second commandment.

So much you thought you’d do with your life won’t  get done. Ever.

So what you do has to count. It has to cover the essentials. Love God. Love spouse, kids, extended family, neighbors.

Your further calling shrinks to one or two specialties like writing or cooking or weaving. And your flock becomes one or two or five or six whom God gives you to love and be loved by, in return.

More than anything else, chronic illness teaches you to loosen your grip; hold life as if it were a cat that wants to scamper away at any moment.

For at any moment all that you call yours in life may be gone.

Cherish it now, while it is day.

Sandy will be OK, coming home in a day or two. They’ll be able to treat her with meds.

We have a Christmas tree with several hundred lights. There’s a switch on the floor I can’t reach, so the tree stays off except when we have company or family who will turn it off. Nasha (our miracle survivor cat) has a place under the tree among the presents on top of the switch. She actually offed the tree once.

The unlighted tree has become a symbol for me of the house, all done up for Christmas, but without Sandy. She brings such light and beauty into the house. So while she’s away, the tree remains dark most of the time.

We’re coming up on our 39th anniversary by the grace of God. We’ve weathered storms of illness, stupidity on my part, major job change, and countless relatively minor crises. We’ve seen our son mature from a 19 year old college kid whose best qualities were just emerging to a 35 year old man who stands tall with us, a help beyond words.

This episode reminds me how fragile our life is. The outcome could have been so different. Everything could have vanished. I give thanks for God’s constant grace and mercy.

I’m also reminded of how precious are family/friends (often hard to tell the difference): the Tuesday night group, the Thursday morning pray-ers, our African family the Lindjecks and Ngues, the Kruschwitz clan, my big sister Pat, the folks at Trinity UMC, and online friends. We are surrounded not only by a great cloud of witnesses but a huddle of fellow strugglers.

In the African American churches I’ve visited, laying on of hands has taken place all together rather than one after another. I like that huge hug.

I didn’t go to the hospital. It’s cold and rainy. My pain was elevated (5/6 on ten scale), and would have spiked. Outside my station, I would have required people’s attention, who needed to focus on Sandy. So we talked by phone.

But for some years now, physical distance hasn’t mattered. We’re always together. In her last spell of serious illness I learned, love transcends geography, even physical time and life; the people you love most populate your soul space and remain close, regardless of things like separation.

I’ve a confession to make. I’ve been praying with the Virgen de Guadalupe in mind. There’s a light in the image. It’s the light of God’s love and God’s presence. For, God is with us in the darkest, shortest days of the year, a light that never goes out. Our little lights are only faint blips on the screen of eternity.

There will come a day for Sandy and me when the outcome of some illness is different. Others face such hard sad days today, and for all of you even though I don’t know you by name, I am praying. 

But no matter what, for all who have hearts to see, God is a star storm of love and light! light! light!

Several weeks ago Sandy consulted her doc and a stress test was planned. However, Sunday Dec 14 she had possible cardiac symptoms and decided to go to the ER. She was admitted, and they have done further tests. Today she’ll have an angiogram and perhaps some procedure as a result. We hope for the best, and docs say she’ll be home on Friday or Saturday. She had a quad bypass 15 years ago. Since, I don’t go many days without being aware that each day with those we love is a gift.

From The Preacher’s Wife: Look in wonder at the faces of those you love for they are the face of God. Thank you for your prayers.

Hidden in the womb of a young girl, growing up in the backwaters of Empire, lived a tiny secret. Legions marched, cultures shifted, the “fullness of time” had come.

In a typical birth sperm and egg form a zygote, from the Greek word meaning “yoke.” No bigger than a dot, this cell becomes a baby.

All births are miraculous; this one, uniquely so, because Mary was a virgin.

The Angel said to her, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be holy; he will be called Son of God.” Luke 1:35 (NRSV)

What happened, we long to know. But the Most High, sheltering Mary under wings of love, hid all those fascinating (and ultimately irrelevant) details from prying eyes.

A zygote, a yoke: a thought with a rich family of meanings! Literally a yoke is a wooden collar that couples two farm animals, such as oxen.

That picture of the yoke broadens, like circles on a pond, to include many things.

• It means service due a king. Upon his death Solomon’s subjects objected that his yoke was heavy, and petitioned his son to lighten up. Rehoboam, listening to the wrong advisers, boasted, “My father disciplined you with whips, but I will discipline you with scorpions.” 1 Kings 12:11 (NRSV). The northern tribes quickly gave him the boot.
• It means slavery and subjugation. Centuries later Jeremiah prophesied that God had put an iron yoke on the necks of many nations and given sovereignty to Nebuchadnezzar (Jer 28). The rule of other empires such as Egypt also was likened to the yoke of slavery.
• It means friendship and cooperation. The apostle Paul wrote, “Be ye not unequally yoked together with unbelievers.” 2 Cor 6:14 (KJV) Here he unites with a long history which prohibited yoking together different species, weaving different kinds of cloth, planting different crops in the same field.
• It meant being a disciple. Jesus said, “Come to me, all you that are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.” Matt 11:28-30 (NRSV)

  Jesus’ yoke is gentle because he shares our human condition.

 Surely he has borne our infirmities
     and carried our diseases, said the prophet. Isaiah 53:4 (NRSV)

 Quoting an early hymn Paul wrote,

[He] emptied himself,
     taking the form of a slave. Phil 2:7 (NRSV)

 The English word yoke shares a common origin with the Sanskrit word yoga. The spiritual goal of yoga is more than to enjoy strong bones and limber muscles; it is to yoke, or unite, the soul with God, Eastern and Western understandings of which profoundly differ. In the West unity with God does not mean loss of individual self. Rather, it means becoming a mature, whole self, then surrendering to God.

These mysteries begin in the heart of God beyond words, beyond thought.

They first enter human history, however, in the remarkable personhood of a young peasant girl. When confronted with news that has baffled theologians and philosophers for millennia,  she said simply, “Here am I, the slave of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Luke 1:38 (NRSV)

Like a bright star in the dark night, doesn’t she shine!

In the physical realm a flash of lightning exposes reality hidden by darkness. In the moral realm, an event can reveal the stark truth as suddenly.

Moral lightning struck on black Friday in Long Island, NY, when a mob of 2000 shoppers rushed a Wal-Mart employee opening the store at 5 a.m., trampling him to death. 34-year-old Jdimytai Damour was a temp. The Wal-Mart remained closed for half a day.

Godless matrerialism lives!

Post-capitalist world?

We’ve seen the demise of communism, supposedly. I frankly wonder if we’re not going through something similar with capitalism, at least as it has existed in the Pax Americana of the 20th century.

If I were France or Germany or Japan, I’d be spitting mad at having my economy poisoned by toxic American securities, so mad I’d demand change: no more dependence on the USA economically. I wonder what the long-term implications of this mess are for the global economy.

As for individuals, I wonder if following Jesus at the household level means living simply, with bare bones debt (house, car, education), and a standard of living geared toward global standards rather than North American white privilege.

Following Jesus at this point means reaching out in all practical ways to the 10+ million unemployed, to the invisible homeless, to the people with strange names and odd accents that pick lettuce, clean hotel rooms, and do day labor.

Next time somebody complains about welfare, ask them what welfare mother they know gets a $700 billion bail out.

 What’s the reason for the season, again?

Laments about the commercialism of Christmas are as common as plastic Santa Clauses. Nothing changes.

We watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas, hearts warmed. Nothing changes.

We read Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, how, after being haunted by ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future, Scrooge is transformed. But when the rich man in hell pleaded with Father Abraham to send someone from the dead to warn his brothers, Abraham said, “They won’t be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.” Luke 16:31 (NRSV)

How much money does it take?

A five dollar gift doesn’t satisfy a child, nor will $500 worth of presents. $500 is not a sufficient salary—neither is $500 million, according to Richard Fuld, former CEO of Lehman Bros.

Money can’t satisfy the deep longings of the human spirit. Yes, it buys bread, warm coats, and a safe roof over your head—things to which every human being has a right.

But “money can’t buy me love,” the Beatles lyrics go. And you can’t serve Christ and cash.

Teaching at the household level

And, what about our grandchildren? How do we teach them the real meaning of Christmas? 

• Make Advent real, and instead of the shopping frenzy, celebrate the historic 12 days of Christmas (Dec 25 to Jan 6).
• Demote Santa. Teach kids the difference between the “game we play” called Santa and the real St. Nicolas, who saved dowerless girls from a life of misery—one example. We always opened gifts Christmas Eve, and reserved Christmas Day for Jesus.
• Ask kids “What are you gonna give this Christmas?”
• Limit the number and value of gifts. Don’t give any gift you can’t pay cash for. No plastic.
• Give more to those outside your household than to yourselves.
• Volunteer as a family all year long, not just at Christmas.
• From gold posterboard make a cross four squares vertical, three squares horizontal. Make this into a cube: fold the two horizontal squares and the top vertical square up to form sides; fold the two squares below the horizontal up to form side and top of cube. Write John 3.16 on the inside. Fasten loosely with scotch tape. Put a bow on top. Open this “gift” first, and thank God for the gift of Jesus.
• Give to effective, legit charities and to missions, if your church does missions at Christmas.

After 40 years in ministry, I continue to have a love-hate relationship with the church.

SPOILER! Since this post is mostly about the sweet side of church work, I’ll get the sour side over with. And there is a sour side, as every idealistic young volunteer for church-related service should be told and told again.

There’s

• the racism and prejudice, whether against those college kids and Mexicans or against northerners or against blacks and newcomers.
• the blindness and stinginess, as when somebody sent missionaries a gift of used tea bags for which the missionaries paid postal duties, and my especial favorite, when setting the pastor’s salary.
• the lack of vision, the pettiness, the parochialism.

But, truth is, after being retired for several years, I still dream of the local church every night. There’s

• Lady Anderson and Edith Shadday, and many others like them, the mighty widows whose sweet, generous spirit always inspired me.
• Lee, whose courage never flinched in the face of terrifying questions, and whose home became a place of peace.
• Tommy and Becky, John and Beth, Mark, Jeff and Janey, Tim and Ginny and other young people who went on into ministry
• the time we surrounded a troubled house and sang hymns
• the time we surrounded a dying man’s bed and prayed him good-bye
• Harold, James, Ralph, William, deacon chairs who did their jobs well, with glad and generous abandon, and always had my back
• the bake sale “to raise money for the preschool suite” which was really to buy my wife Sandy a ticket to Chicago to greet our infant son coming from Korea
• the hours of study in God’s Word, and the morning call of silver trumpets
• the 100s of folks who came to know the Lord through the Sunday School, the youth group, the worship, the Vacation Bible School
• the people who found courage to take the next step.

I no longer preach sermons per se, though we have Bible study here at the house. I no longer identify with a particular denomination. But oh, the wild nights when there’s a perfume of Presence on the air and the sky blazes like a burning bush!

I’d like to know, aside from the objections of vested interests, why a plan like this wouldn’t work:

The state passes a law which says, any company that sells health insurance in this state must provide insurance to every resident of the state at a cost determined to be reasonable compared with the poverty rate. Persons below poverty would get state help.

The state could negotiate mandatory fees with health care providers and pharmaceutical companies for services provided under this policy, giving them power to lower costs.

Fancy items like botox would be excluded. Catastrophic care would be provided with medical boards helping to limit coverage.

Lower fees or bonuses could motivate preventive care and good personal health habits (don’t smoke or lose weight or exercise, etc.) Companies that demonstrate they’ve lowered costs of adminstration (paper) could receive bonuses.

States could lower costs by reinstating PE in schools.

All residents’ status and files would be protected by law. INS could NOT troll these files for victims. Why undocumented residents? Because the Bible says so.

The alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt: I am the LORD your God.

Lev 19:34 (NRSV)

 Besides (for those less inclined to follow the Bible) it costs less to provide preventive health care than wait till people show up in the ER.

Why won”t this work? (Except for the howls of lobbyists.)