Notes From Jon

I’ve been looking for a while for a way to filter RSS feeds that I subscribe to. For instance, I like to keep up with what my friend and former pastor, Jim Evans, has to say in his weekly columns. They’re published in a few places (The Anniston Star is one), but you can’t just subscribe to get articles by him. Up until now, I’ve been frustrated…

Today I stumbled on filtermyrss.com, which will take your feed (html://whatever.com/rss) and will filter it by certain criteria you control. Then you get a new feed that contains only what you’re looking for.

So, lots of you probably already know about it. But I was so excited to see it that I had to share!

(Deja vu? I just posted this on the-parks-family.net as well… sorry!)

 Note: I’ve tried to get back to my semi-regular column in the local paper, the K-V Dispatch.  This is the first I’ve done in a while – it appeared in the February 28, 2008 edition.

These past couple of weeks, the news channels have followed a kind of story they don’t focus on very often:  the U.S. Space Program.  Occasional updates have followed the attachment of a new module to the International Space Station, and tests of the shuttle’s heat shield to make sure there won’t be another accident on reentry.  These stories about space are a rarity these days.  It seems like there are so many things to worry about here on the ground that we left behind the idea of space exploration a long time ago.  Occasional stories have caught our attention – the losses of the astronauts of Challenger and Columbia for instance.  But for the most part, save a tragedy, the eyes of the nation toward space discovery are either indifferent, unknowing, or outright hostile.

The hostility is understandable.  In a society that values things and money so highly, and where people and items are usually judged by the amount of their output, it’s easy to understand why people would see spaceflight as a waste of the government’s money.  And in a time of war, the crunch is even tighter.  And so manned spaceflight is rapidly becoming a private venture – taken on either by a few cloistered government workers, or by billionaires enamored of a new hobby.

What does the space program contribute to our world?  Lots, if you’re willing to look into it.  All kinds of inventions – plastics, medicines, new technologies – would not have been possible were it not for the work of scientists in the zero-gravity atmosphere of space.  And we don’t have to look hard to see that we’re going to need help on this planet before too long; New energy sources, modes of transportation, and places to live are all problems that space scientists around the world are working on.

Truth be told, our indifference and hostility toward space are a lack of imagination.  Much like the many naysayers who ridiculed or ignored Columbus’ crazy venture around to this side of the world, we simply can’t imagine (realistically) a world outside our own.  And yet, men and women around the world continue to put their lives on the line, year after year, to continue the slow crawl of progress in spaceflight.  Decades from now, when we’re celebrating our first colony on Mars, when the world has come together to push past Mars because Earth has become crowded and used-up… it’s likely in those days that we won’t pause long to remember the folks who, like Columbus, could imagine what those days would look like and were courageous enough to keep acting on it.

So what does all this have to do with God?  This column is called Speaking of Faith, after all.

Like the men and women involved in space exploration today – wrapped up in the “useless” waste of time and money – we are called on a similarly “foolish” mission.  Here we are, placed in a world that’s not really our home… but one in which it’s sadly too easy to feel comfortable.  And when we start looking at things from a “normal” point of view, we might see our mission as foolish.  Talk about good news in a world filled with all this mess?  Help out the poor when there are too many to count?  Work for justice for people who don’t speak our language?  Live as if God were real and made a difference in our lives?  That just sounds crazy!  And it’s close to impossible!

“For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,” writes Paul in 1 Corinthians 1:18.  And not just to them – sometimes it’s foolish to us, too.  But fortunately, “the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom” (v. 25), and this foolishness is the very power that saves us… and that will one day make our world brand new.

Why stick with this foolish Gospel?  Why keep risking our lives in space?  Why sail around the other side of the world?  Let’s live with holy imagination, like explorers who can see things that others can’t see.  We might just turn out to be right after all.

I’ve been doing an “ambitious” series during Lent. I call it “ambitious,” because once my church folks caught on to where I was going, they might have decided to skip church during Lent.

The series is “Living With Death” – coming to terms with our own deaths, the deaths of those we love, and other things we typically don’t like to think about (but that are important to think about anyway). This is the second sermon in the series, on losing those we love and on comforting those who have experienced a loss. I was concerned to discuss some of the psycho-emotional aspects of the grief process, alongside our theology and how it makes a difference to people of faith. Read the rest of this entry »

I found this quote last week, and I love it:

To be a witness
does not consist
in engaging in propaganda,
nor even in stirring people up,
but in being a living mystery.

It means to live
in such a way
that one’s life
would not make sense
if God did not exist.

- Emmanuel Célestin Cardinal Suhard (April 5, 1874—May 30, 1949)

Just wanted to share – Happy Monday!

On January 27, I had an opportunity I’ve never had before (and likely won’t again): I got to preach at Second Baptist in Richmond. This past Sunday, someone handed me an audio copy of the service, and I thought it would be neat to put it up here. I’d really like to find a way to get my sermons up here on audio, since I don’t get too many of them written down anyway. This can be a trial run.

Use the play button below to listen now, or use the other links to download the file.

[display_podcast]

I’ve started a new series during Lent on the hard topics of death and grief. I am a firm believer that the only way to keep these things from ruling our lives is to deal with them honestly and directly. This is a shortened version, really, just my notes… but I think it gets all the main points across.

“A Good Death?”

I used to hear the phrase, “It was a good death.” But I think all of us can agree there’s nosuch thing as a “good death.” Whether you’re 95 and have lived a long full life and die peacefully in your sleep, or whether you die in a car accident at age 26 – death is hard. But there are degrees of dying, dying well and not dying well.

And the difference is not to be found just in the circumstances: You can die at 26 in a car accident and still die well. No, it’s not our circumstances that make the difference. It’s our outlook and understanding of death that makes the difference. And that’s hard for us to hear, because we don’t like to talk about death. We might talk about it in abstract terms, sure. But thinking about our own death… that’s another matter.

We don’t like to think about our own death because we fear death. We fear death because it’s unknowable, uncontrollable – and if human beings are anything, we’re creatures who like to know and to be in control.

• We don’t know what it will be like to be dead – we can’t imagine life apart from… well, life.
• Don’t know what it will be like to die. Even though we might see some ideas in the tabloids by the checkout counter, the fact is that no one can really claim to know what it’s like to go all the way and come back.
• We don’t know when our death will be, so it’s hard to really plan for it.
• We have faith that there’s something (and Someone) waiting for us on the other side, but we can’t really claim to know much beyond that.

And so we treat death the same way we treat other problems we don’t understand or can’t solve. We ignore it. Even popular wisdom tells us that running away from your problems won’t solve them – just watch a Disney movie and you can learn that. But for some reason, we usually decide it’s still OK to do it in some areas of our lives.

“Teach us to number our days…”

We might ignore the fact ouf our death, but the biblical writers do not ignore it. The Psalms are full of these kinds of reminders (39:4 and 90:12 are a couple of examples). Look at Ecclesiastes – quite a depressing look at life based on the writer’s understanding of his own death. While we are used to thinking about the theological significance of it, it’s sobering to note the various times Jesus alludes to his coming death. We find detailed examples of great saints who died well – Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and David to name a few. The biblical writers could not “put off” death as we are able to – with medicines and life support. Death was a daily reality – one you could not afford to ignore.

In movies, cartoons, fables and fairy tales, you find death personified – a tall man in a black robe with a sickle, for instance… notice that it’s usually something frightening. I think that people began to do this in order to come to terms with the fact of death – to try to clarify their relationship with a cloudy and unknown thing.

And that’s really what it’s about when we come down to it: finding a proper way to relate with our inevitable enemy. We can run from death (ignore it, pretend we don’t have to worry about it), or we can run TO death (obsess over it, worry about it, consider suicide). Either way we do not have a proper relationship to death – it is master over us, and not the opposite.

Coming to Terms with Death

I’ve thought of a few things that may help as we come to terms with our own death, to come with a right relationship with it. You can probably think of more. But these are things that we, as Christians, understand about deth that can help us put things into perspective.

First, death is not a wall – it is a doorway. It’s not the end. We know this, but I don’t think we always remember it correctly. Death is not “point-B” in the point-A to point-B route. Our lives are point-E to point-F in the continuum of Alpha to Omega. Of all people, Christians should be prepared to live this way!

Second, we do not have to die alone – we’ve lived in a Christian community, and we can die in the midst of community.

I love to fly, but I’m always uncomfortable when they’re explaining the emergency procedures. I don’t like to think about a plane wreck, but it does happen. And I suppose it’s good to be prepared. But as uncomfortable as it is to think about a plane wreck, there’s something that’s even harder for me to imagine. Have you even been able to sit in an emergency exit row? I remember my first time. I thought, “this is great! Look at all this leg room!” Then the flight attendant knelt next to me and started explaining my responsibilities.

Responsibilities? Who wants to stand at the door of a burning plane and help OTHERS out? And yet airline folks know just how crucial these people can be in a crash – someone standing there, calling out, helping others across the threshold to safety. If it were up to us all to do it by ourselves, we’d probably lose twice as many people in airplane incidents. That’s the difference between dying alone and dying in community.

Third, we don’t know everything about death – there’s no one to tell us about it. But GOD DOES. And we know that the God who made life is, in some way, responsible for the fact of death as well. He’s the master of death, and he can bring us through.

Living Life to the Full

Finally, it’s helpful to know there’s some good in coming to terms with our own death. Not only does it help us die well – it helps us LIVE WELL. In fact, some might argue that we can only truly gain mastery over life itself when we choose to acknowledge its temporariness.

Pretend we found out this morning that the world’s oil problem is much bigger than we ever realized, and that we’re going to run out of gasoline and oil products by the end of the year. Think of all the different places we use oil products and how this would affect our lives. How would you live differently in light of that understanding? What kind of changes would you make to your lifestyle?

Now what would you think if I told you someone knew, but decided they were just going to pretend the problem didn’t exist. They kept driving their truck that got 5 miles to the gallon, refused to think about finding an alternative source of transportation or an alternative heating source.

Now, if we all choose to understand and live in light of our death, how might we live life differently? What kinds of things do you do now that you wouldn’t do? What kinds of things would you want to make sure were done? How about our relationship to God? Deciding to live lives of discipleship instead of putting it off until later, as we tend to do?

I’m not saying we should live the “next five minutes” theology – we’d never get anything done. We can never have our loose ends all tied up… there are just too many. This is (once again) allowing death to rule our lives. But there is a middle ground. We can live in such a way that, if we were to die right now, we could look back and say, “I may not have been completely ready, but I had the important stuff taken care of.”

What is that important stuff? It’s different for every one of us. And the fact is, we have no control over what happened yesterday, and no control over what happens tomorrow. But we DO have control over right now – this moment.

So this is the moment to think… and the moment to choose. Choose to live in the light of death. I think we’ll find that life can be all the richer if we do.

By the way, I’m aware that some of my previous sermons are stretched out on the page.  I just realized the other day why that happens – because I’m pasting from MS Word.  I read on the Wordpress.com website a post called “Why Not to Use Word.”

Henceforward, I will not.

[note: I found this on my iPaq the other day from when we were traveling to Africa this past summer. I'd forgotten it was there, but I was glad to find it again.]

I get some of my best writing done in airports. I’m not sure why that is… I think it’s because when I’m in an airport, I’m usually waiting on something. I think a lot when I’m waiting.

Waiting affords us the chance to think a little more deeply about things than we usually do. I think we’re lost the art of waiting, much like we’re lost the art of silence. We don’t like silence anymore – when things are quiet, we start to think, start to deal with the stuff that’s going on in our heads. Waiting is the same way – it gives us time to think, so we would rather occupy ourselves another way: shopping, listening to music, reading a book, just walking around the airport. We can’t just sit still and think and wait.

There’s something about “active waiting” that makes us come to terms with what we’re waiting on. I’m waiting to get on an airplane for a long journey. And up until now (after a 24-hour weather delay), I haven’t had time to sit and realize how much I’ve been looking forward to this trip. I’ve been waiting, hoping, expecting. And now the time is almost here. Just sitting still for these few minutes has helped me see more clearly what I’m waiting on, what I expect and hope to happen. It’s a moment of active waiting, and I think it will make the moment – when it arrives – even more clear and special because I really took time to WAIT for it.

Come to think of it, we spend a good deal of our lives waiting on something – actively or passively. I’m not just talking about waiting in lines or waiting in traffic; we do plenty of that too. But what about those intangible things? Waiting for Mr. or Ms. Right to come along; waiting for our big break; waiting for that annoying pain to go away; waiting for things to finally go our way; waiting for that bad thing we just know is going to happen; waiting to die.

We wait. It’s part of being limited to one-way time travel. And if we counted all the moments we spent waiting for things vs. all those moments we actually spent enjoying the things we were waiting for… well, let’s just say we’d find things way out of balance. It would be even worse when we realize that usually when we come to a moment we’ve been expecting, we’re too busy waiting for the NEXT moment to even notice.

What if we lived our lives in active waiting instead of passive waiting? What if we took the time, on occasion, to sit and really WAIT – to think about the things we’re expecting and what that expectation is doing to us? Will getting married REALLY change things? Will that baby REALLY make things better between us? Will this vacation REALLY be just what I need?

I think if we all took more time to actively wait, we just might find that our expectations and the actual realities will match up more often. And in the meantime, we’ll learn to appreciate the other 98% of our lives… the time we spend waiting.

Lent is on the way. It’s a season I look to with both excitement and dread. Excitement, because it is a very meaningful time of year to me. Dread, because I know that my habit is usually to give something up. I dread that because not only is it a hard thing to do, it’s something I usually end up giving in to at some point or another (I dread the guilt, in other words!).

And I must confess that I have a difficult time understanding the traditions behind Lent, as well – things like Mardi Gras and Fat/Shrove Tuesday, the idea that fasting only takes place on the weekdays, not eating meat and so on. These are things I’ve done a little research into, and I understand the basic idea and all… I just don’t think it makes the season any more meaningful to me. It’s probably a result of the tradition I grew up in, in which folks talked about things like Lent and Advent in the same hushed tones of voice that they used to talk about satanic rituals and cult gatherings.

Things have changed for me (fortunately). But while I understand Lent now and the penitence that many observe, I still confess to some ignorance of all the traditions surrounding it.

I remember in high school when some older friends of mine decided to “get saved” and join the church. At a lunch after worship on the Sunday they were baptized, they told us how they’d spent their Saturday night: They’d gone out drinking, smoking, having sex, and all kinds of other crazy things (or at least they told us they did, and judging from how I’d seen them act at other times, I didn’t find it hard to believe). Our youth leader was shocked and seemed sad. I remember simply being confused. At the time, it didn’t make sense. Now it does make sense, I’m sorry to say – too much sense.

This year, I’ve decided to “add on” instead of taking away. I’m going to get up on the weekdays and go over to the church early for prayer and devotion. I’ll do it at a time that will allow others to join me before they head to work or other tasks, and I hope some others will join me. This is something I don’t do regularly enough, I admit. I don’t know if it will be meaningful or not, but I certainly know it’ll do me more good than giving up chocolate.

But that’s me. If you’re reading this, how do YOU plan to observe Lent this year? Are you used to observing it at all? How does your church observe Lent?