Wednesday, June 12, 2024

Two Great Mysteries of Life: Solved

There are at least two great mysteries of life:  What is its purpose? and Why did great civilizations fail?

I figured out the first a long time ago.  Most people do in their lifetime: to love and be loved.  Individually speaking, caring and being cared about are as basic as we can get and if we attain those, we are usually satisfied and happy with our lives over all.

That's easy to say and holds up pretty well no matter the context.

The answer to the other question is really profoundly related.  Maybe not at first glance.

Archeologists are discovering that civilizations made up of vast populations thrived in various parts of the world for milleniaand then dissappeared.  The physical aspects were obviously drought, pandemics, war, volcanic action, etc.  Cataclysms that broke the infrastructures are blamed.  But our current western civilization has survived wars, pestilence, and climate change, as must have other great eras of humankind.  In fact, catastrophe tends to bring people together and can lead to better technologies to recover and thrive.

But not always.  

Skipping past all the things most commonly blamed, I want to go biblical.  When Jesus was asked what was the greatest sin, he replied, "Sin against the Holy Spirit."  Okay.  What is that?

In my understanding, the Holy Spirit is experienced when we bond in collaboration.  Most simply put, it's when we discover two heads are better than one.  It's when harmony is achieved through joint effort.

Sin against that spirit would be to fail to pay attention to the knowledge and offerings of the others around us.  It's when some stop thinking others are real.  It's where empathy has been lost.

When that happens, when we stop listening to all the voices, when we stop caring about what they know, that's when things begin to fall apart, just as in not loving or being loved,

There.  You don't have to go up the mountain to seek wisdom from the all-wise prophet.  Its right here in black and white.   

Aren't you glad you checked with me today?

If you still don't get it, be patient.  You'll figure it out.



Thursday, April 18, 2024

The Prosecution failed to Make Its Case Against OJ.

O J Simpson passed away from prostate cancer on April 15.  The papers and TV were full of rehashing his guilt so I sent the following to the Letters to the Editor of our local paper.  It was printed by them on Wednesday Apr. 17.


In the OJ Simpson case, the prosecution was unable to establish exactly when the murders took place.  Even if either of their guesses were true, OJ still could not possibly have done everything the prosecution said in the time he was said to have done it.  Timelines matter.  The best book on the crime that I would recommend is KILLING TIME by Freed and Briggs.  They help the readers work with the timelines. 

The other thing they do is include the autopsies of the victims.  The autopsies show four different knives were used.  It took four guys, not one, to take down the two athletic victims.

What makes this case so hard is that the media played up everything about the case they got, which was mostly from the prosecution, and the general public saw and heard what they wanted to hear.  The European-American folks heard and saw all the terrible stuff about OJ and the African-American folks heard and saw all the racist gimmicks they had experienced.  

What the general population did not experience was sitting in the courtroom for months on end as the prosecution talked down to the jury of mixed races and the jury having hours to study the photos and other visuals left by the prosecution.  That experience was put into a book MADAM FOREMAN, A RUSH TO JUDGMENT by Amanda Cooley.  It was not Johnny Cochran's theatrics that pursuaded the jury.  It was the lousy DNA work done by the police and pictures of the bloody gloves rolled up in balls.  Read the book to see why.

Monday, September 11, 2023

Reminder of the bad old days

 In 2008, Robyn Carr wrote a novel entitled VIRGIN RIVER CHRISTMAS.  In it, she portrayed a vet from the second Iraq war begun during the G. W. Bush administration.  The description of the isolation and lack of services for most of the vets returned home was appalling.  


That reminded me of how the VA had been cut by the GOP Congress and no provisions had been made for casualties and returning vets with PTSD and other hidden maladies.  Whan Defense Secretary Rumsfeld was asked about the lousy equipment our troops had in Iraq, he said, “We go to war with what we have.”


I wrote a novel at the time that also challenged the war and the way it was being waged.  I’d be glad to send you an e-copy by email if you care to go back to those old days that MAGA remembers as “good.” 

Tuesday, June 6, 2023

The Definition of "woke"

Gov. DeSantis has offered a negative, indecipherable definition of what it is to be woke.  Yes, the way the word is used, it comes over from the African American community where it has been used for at least a generation.  It became a white American term in Minneapolis the summer George Floyd was murdered.  

White young adults joined the BLM demonstrations and men dressed in reservist-type garb kidnapped and held some of them because they looked like the leaders of the white demonstrators.  The next night, the mothers of those young demonstrators hit the streets to also march with the BLM people.  Those reservist-type enforcers used teargas on the lines of moms.  So the next night, the BLM marchers were joined by the young adults, their moms, and their dads who carried leaf blowers.  

Some Black preacher used the word "woke" to describe the white folks and it stuck.  

The "woke" are people who care about justice and care about each other, even across racial lines.  Gov. DeSantis should have been in Minneapolis that summer to learn the meaning of the word. 

Thursday, April 20, 2023

The GOP's Other Tactic

 We enjoy BLUE BLOODS on TV.  I wondered why NewsNation plays it many hours of the day.

I found I could not stand watching its news programming because they were Fox wanna-bes.  I knew that because they lead with crime news and feature many conservative "reporters."
NPR reported today that the rash of home owners shooting strangers accidently at their doors is based on the fear they have of strangers generated by the constant emphasis on murder and mayhem they have seen on the Fox and their wanna-bes' broadcasting.  
This emphasis on crime sells guns too, it was noted.  Right down the GOP alley.
I wish those channels would pay more attention to the humanity shown every episode and not just focus on the anger and violence of one of the characters.  If the managements did, they'd take BLUE BLOODS off.

Sunday, April 2, 2023

Six things that really happened and I think are funny

 My first Sunday at my first appointment was exciting, of course.  I wasn't sure how I would be received but things had gone well at the rural church.  So we shared worship together at my other church in town and I preached well, I thought.  So I was only a little surprised when one gentlemen took my hand as he was leaving the church and said, "That was a great sermon, Pastor, a great sermon!"  

"Thank you," I responded.  "Why, may I ask, did you like it so much?" 

"It was only seventeen minutes."


-----


The rural church on a two point circuit I served when I became a minister in Wisconsin was physically too small for a wedding involving two large families.  So the couple chose to be married in the small town church, the larger of the two on that circuit.  It is a good thing because even that church was filled to capacity with the large number of family and friends.

Both churches has been founded with German families by German circuit riders in that part of the state.  Both had been conducting English-speaking services for only two or so decades.  You can imagine that even the young people were inured with the seriousness of church.

Seated in the second row on the bride's side were the bride's girl friends.  I had gone over what my sermon was to include with the bride and groom.  Both of them had been okay with my material.  Both, by the way, were headed back to his farm near the rural church after the honeymoon.  As part of my homily, I included an old joke which the couple had enjoyed.  To that phrase in the wedding ceremony where part of the vows I point out that the wife is to obey the husband, I addressed the bride with tongue-in-cheek saying, "When he says jump, you say 'How high?'"  I presented the line with no unusual inflection, as straight as I could say it.

I paused just long enough to see that the older folks in the congregation accepted the line with no realization that I had laid out a joke.  The bride's girl friends, however, faced a huge dilemma.  They got the joke and wanted to laugh out loud (it was new to them).  But they didn't dare laugh in church, which is the very dilemma I think was what the bride and groom hoped for.

Fortunately, the girl friends did not explode from keeping their laughter inside. I found out later they went from laughter to anger at the bride.  Who says there isn't conversion in wedding ceremonies? 


-----


My second appointment was as associate pastor at a large church.  My job during worship was as liturgist, which meant I was the reader of the Scriptures, offered the pastoral prayer, and took care of the offering and its prayer.

During my third month there, the Holy Spirit struck me and inspired me to give the following prayer.

"Dear Lord, we know you love a cheerful giver.  Receive our gifts and love us anyway.  Amen."

 Not even a titter.  The service concluded and no one commented except my wife.  I explained my inspiration and her response was, "Next time, have the Spirit check with me first,"

Two weeks later, at a couples' fellowship, one young bank manager sidled up to me and said, "Did you really say that?"


-----


In a small church up north, the warmth of the day required that we open the windows and a door to the outside for cross ventilation.  

As worshippers gathered, one older couple showed me their tiny pet dog which lay quietly in an oversize bag.  They apologized but could not leave him home.  This was forty years ago, long before such a thing became so popular.  They promised to leave if the dog made a fuss so I accepted their bringing him in.

I was in the middle of my sermon, not having heard a sound from that tiny dog, when I caught a bit of movement out of the former of my eye.  The door to the outside was to my right and in walked a cat.  It came into the worship area in the general direction of where I knew the little dog to be.  

The cat paused, looked around at the people, turned around, and sauntered back to the door and out the way it came in.

The whole congregation, not knowing about the dog but seeing this cat enter the sanctuary, was almost as relieved as I and the dog were.  I had to comment.

"I don't think it was a Methodist.  I think it left when it realized we were not cat'olic."  


-----


My wife and I were celebrating our 25th anniversary on a Sunday afternoon after church so my brother, sister, and their families all came to church.  None of them have ever held me in awe and there was always that implicit threat that they would conspire to crack me up during the service at some point that would catch me by surprise.

The service went smoothly.  There was no incident during the sermon when I was most vulnerable.  I breathed a sigh of relief as I announced the closing hymn.  It happened to have six verses but not long ones.  As the hymn began, I looked down at my brother-in-law and his straight-laced conservative Lutheran son-in-law seated right in front of me.  

They were both wearing "Groucho" glasses, fake mustache and all.  

It look me till the middle of the last verse to stop laughing so I could catch my breath and close the service with the benediction.


-----


A month ago, I wrenched my back.  Since then, I have had a bout with lower back pain, something I've been able to minimize because of previous bouts.  When I first started having problems when I was in my thirties, I was fortunate to have a chiropractor who was of immense help.  Along with his usual routine meant to get all the vertebrae in the right place, he had a good way to realign my neck bones using a technique involving Thompson table counter-pressure.  Since lower back pain was associated with a misalignment of certain neck bones, he set my head on a small platform and pressed my head until the platform structured to spring back upon a particular level of pressure had been applied.  He set the thing so that by pushing down with, say, 2.8 pounds of pressure, the small platform would pop back with 2.8 pounds of counter pressure, thus putting my head back to its proper position at the top of the spinal column.

This recent period of painful back spasms reminded me of one such bout many years ago when I was allowed to be a weekly resource at the youth shelter in our county.  It had been built to house kids who were run-aways, got involved with drugs, and other activities that had landed them in jail previously.   

One of those afternoons, before I met with the youth, I was discussing some important matter with the administrator.  As I carefully stood, tending my sore back, he held out his hand and said, "Jerry, you know what I most appreciate about you?  You are one of the few people I know who really has his head on straight."

I thanked him for his gracious comment and replied, "That's so nice of you to say.  My chiropractor thinks my head is on crooked."

Maybe you had to be there . . . .


-----


When we were in college, we belonged to the Wesley Foundation.  Everything year, it held a retreat at one of our church camps.  Among the tasks facilitating the retreat was getting everyone to the campsite a hundred miles away.  The guy who coordinated that task, mainly lining up students and staff who could take attendees in their cars, was an engineering grad student named Bob Sparks.  Quiet, unassuming, and  responsible, he did that task very well.


During supper that night, Bob rose, tapped his coffee cup with a spoon to get us to look his way, and intoned, "May I have your attention?"  We all quieted our table conversations.  When all was silent in the room, he said, "Thank you, I just love attention."  And he sat down.


If you had been there, you would have laughed too.

Thursday, March 2, 2023

Schubert Ogden 1928-2019

I have not been able to find any materials from my time in seminary so my spelling of names is a little shaky.  The historical details are as accurate as my memory will allow.  Being seven years younger than Dr. Ogden, I assure you that that you have a right to fact check me!  Classmates like Norman Stephenson, Terry Vaught, John Johns, Gene Leggett, F. D. Dawson, Dan Solomon, James Mayfield, Bill Cotton, Bruce Southard, Wesley Nelson, D’Armond Hunter, and Larry Robertson might add their own recollections to that of a new student from Wisconsin of that first year at Perkins, 1958. 


Schubert Being Schubert


“I’ll try to be a little less hard on you,” Dr. Ogden told us.  The six of us new students had been invited to his home.  He was to be our faculty adviser.  Classes had not yet begun and so we really did not know what to expect.  Rumors were abroad that he was a tough grader and had the highest IQ of any member of the faculty.  We were sitting in his living room going around the circle giving names, a little background about ourselves, and getting to know him in the process.


“One of the faculty got on my case,” Schubert went on.  “He pointed out  that I thought everyone was as smart I was and to back off expecting perfection from my students.”


We all laughed.  As I look back on that story, I think it had to be John Deschner who laid that on him.  John was the most willing to raise questions about his ideas and approach to theology


“I don’t know about that,” he told us, “but I’ll do my best to help you become competent theologians.”



The Times


That was early September, 1958.  Joe McCarthy died a year before but anti-Communism was still heavy in the air.  President Eisenhower had seen us through the Korean War’s cease fire and years of negotiations at Panmunjom only to be watching Communist North Vietnam’s fight with the French going against France.  John Kennedy had not yet announced he would run for President.  The United Nations was getting its feet under them.  NATO was the new bulwark against Communism’s advance in Europe.


In the Church, the World Council of Churches was going strong following its startup at the end of WW II.  In Bossey, Switzerland, the Ecumenical Institute was expanding, seeking to spin off satellites in the U. S.


Reinhold Neibuhr and Paul Tillich were the biggest names in theology, both having fled Nazism in Germany to teach in the United States.  And a German New Testament scholar, Rudolph Bultmann, was leading the charge on demythologizing Christ, a follow up to the movement among Biblical scholars in the quest to find the historical Jesus.  A young American theologian named Schubert Ogden was finishing his dissertation on Bultmann’s work.


IBM had put together a computer, IBM 1, a roomful of electronic gear that could calculate a thousand times faster than a roomful of mathematicians.  And Yale University put it to the task of developing a concordance for the Revised Standard Version of the Bible.


The post war boom, which because of the GI Bill, put veterans into colleges and seminaries in record numbers.  All of the mainline denominations were growing.  The Methodists were approaching 11 million members in the United States and their mission work overseas was flourishing particularly in Africa and the Philippines.  Communist China had driven the church underground.  But in suburban America, churches sprouted up everywhere.   It was the golden age of the Church in America. 


In Dallas, Texas, a company called Texas Instruments was working on a tiny piece of technology that would revolutionize the world, the transistor.  I-75 was completed through the city.  Lovers Lane Methodist Church spun off hundreds of members to start Northhaven.  Friends, who married around the time my wife and I did, attended Dr. Ogden’s Sunday School class on a regular basis.


And Perkins School of Theology had a vibrant young dean with the unlikely name of Merrimon Cunniggim.  Perkins, situated on the SMU campus on the northside of Dallas in the suburb of Highland Park, was best known for its leading theologian, Albert Outler.  He was internationally known and was a guest at the Roman Catholic Church’s first and second modern day ecumenical councils.


In class, Outler put us all at ease by telling us that following his seminary days, his ministry started in small rural Texas churches.  “They weren’t accustomed to seminary trained preachers so I told them I was a simple Bible preacher and tried to prove it every Sunday.”


He was not the only professor of stature with a local church background.  More on that below.


On the faculty was R. F. Curl.  Dr. Curl taught church administration and was a member of the Judicial Council.  Fred Gaeley taught New Testament and Church music.  And I believe he had been a missionary as well.  Dr. Irwin, who came back to complete a semester for the newest Old Testament scholar (Emanuel Gitlin), opened his lectures with a weather report relative the Biblical event or text that was the basis of his lecture for that day.  Joe Mathews taught ecumenical affairs, though he left the year before I came.


What Dean Cunniggim did was bring in a remarkable group of young faculty members.  For pastoral care, he brought in Bob Elliott, a practicing pastoral psychologist.  For ethics, he hired Joe Allen, who as a graduate student had edited the computer-generated concordance (which I still use today, over sixty years later).  For church history, Richie Hogg came.  For social concerns, Douglas Jackson joined the faculty under Cunniggim.  The dean found a Missouri district superintendent to come and teach courses on town and country ministry.  He plucked a pastor from one of the largest churches in Texas to teach homiletics, Grady Hardin.


Notice the pattern here.  Cunniggim took practicing professionals, several with local church experience, to teach at Perkins.  It is no wonder both campus ministers serving the Wesley Foundation in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1957 urged me to think beyond the Midwest for my seminary training and suggested Perkins.  


Cunniggim’s greatest achievement was finding young theologians who could stand with Albert Outler, Van Harvey, John Deschner, and Schubert Ogden.


Seminary with Dr. Ogden


After supper, we went back to the living room where Dr. Ogden fielded questions about life at seminary, drawing on his own years occasionally though never talking about his accomplishments.  He was, in my experience, a private person, humble, and extremely attentive.


One of the students asked about Joe Mathews.  Dr. Ogden described what it was like to have Joe on the faculty.  “Never a dull moment.  His creativity and willingness to explore concepts and ideas was amazing.  But scholarly discipline was not one of his gifts.  SMU has a policy that those without doctorates or at least a masters in their specialty may not teach more than three years.  Joe’s third year was last year.  We did everything we could to get him to finish his degree.  Neil MacFarland even locked him in his room for days at a time to help him focus and finish his dissertation.  Then Joe got a call to set up the Ecumenical Institute office up in Evanston and that ended his time with us.  He is greatly missed.”


Before the evening ended, he said our first year theology course would be taught by three professors at the same time.  It was experimental but he was excited about the possibilities.  He said the curriculum would be traditional, with each of them having several lectures and then all three would as a panel conclude the section with a question-answer session with the class.  We were in complete agreement, as students, that the idea was a good one.  Our experience with it turned out to be even better because the three professors were in attendance with each other, taking notes, which gave them chance to respond when each took his turn and especially for interaction among them during the summary class, which no one wanted to end!   The three that first semester were Van Harvey, John Deschner, and Schubert Ogden.  (Albert Outler took Van Harvey’s role the second semester.)


There were many things that experience meant to me.  Of the ones that remain in my consciousness, there are three to mention.  The first is “prolegamina.”  All three lectured for several days each to get across to us that our beliefs, and how we make sense out of them, come from many sources, some deep inside us and some from the milieu around us.  Every person, whether they realize it or not, draws upon many sources as they put together what it is they believe and what influences might cause a change in their beliefs.  That was a good basis for understanding John Wesley’s four bases pointed out by Albert Outler, the Wesley Quadrilateral.  (I think it was those classes which helped Outler pull together his great work added to the Book of Discipline within the following decade.)


The second was Dr. Ogden’s strongest contribution to my thinking was this: “All good theology has to meet two criteria.  Is it adequate?  And is it understandable?”


While he pushed us hard on those when he critiqued our papers or when we made contributions in class, he pushed himself on those, being aware that his work in existential philosophy provided a jargon which was not widely shared and not understood well enough to use with any facility.


John Deschner loved Schubert’s two criteria and tweaked him about them.  


The civil and always friendly challenge between the two culminated before I completed seminary.  In my third year, Schubert announced that he was going to give a special lecture on the Trinity.  The hall was packed with students and faculty.  


Schubert said he was aware of the critique of his theology of the Trinity.  He said he was trying to conflate what he found in Scripture with what existential philosophy offered and had thought he’d found that resolution which had become the point of his teaching on the Triune God.  But he realized that philosophy fell short, especially his categories, of dealing with the very human ways Father, Son, and Holy Spirit were depicted in the Bible and experienced by the Church.  And he had moved to a new insight about the Trinity, laying it out in more traditional terms.


John Deschner, who was seated a couple rows behind where I was, leaned over to a couple faculty colleagues and said, “It’s about time he joined the historical understanding of the Trinity.”  


Theology is fluid because it comes out of several places in our background, it faces the difficulty of translation to ever-changing contemporary vocabulary, and it faces challenges from directions outside of our own original bases, problems our theology had never considered before (like homosexuality?).  But it finds its stability in history, in human experience, as also seen in Scriptures.  


The third was that theology will always be at that point between being what Albert Outer called “doxological ballet,” the best possible expression of the indescribable, and Schubert Ogden’s demythologized expression of faith, something that has to be based on reality and expressed in sufficient, clear, and understandable terms.  


As someone trained by both, I expect neither would be pleased with the current theological struggle between the “traditionalists” and the rest of the church.  I believe both theologians would have found problems with the “traditonalists’” stances related to using faith to justify anti-gay legislation, and the wider acceptance in the denomination that splitting it would be an act of faith.  I think both would feel both would be apostasy, both would be wrong thinking for Christians.  


Not having heard nor seen their writings since the 1972 introduction of anti-gay legislation to the Church, I will stand corrected by any such materials where they exist. 


Dr. Ogden remained my faculty advisor through the four years I attended Perkins.  I took his Bultmann course my last year.  I noticed that he purchased an Opel, a small GM car manufactured in Germany, if I remember correctly.  My car was on its last legs so we turned it in and bought a new Opel, a fact which I slipped into the final exam.  It was shameful, I know, but he laughed.  It least I think he did.  That was the only item in the exam to which he had not applied red print of critique.


Conclusion


Word of Dr. Ogden’s passing triggered all kinds of memories that extended all through those precious years at Perkins and beyond.  When each of my parents died, I thought my main way to grieve was to be angry.  But over these latter years leading up to my 60th year as a member of the Wisconsin Conference, and especially now as I look back upon Dr. Ogden’s ministry to me, I find my grief comes out in the form of grateful remembrance.  And by putting that down on paper, I hope I am extending his ministry to my reader as well.