Monday, March 31, 2008

Road Trips Build Relationships

First published Friday, March 30, 2008 in The Daily Sentinel.

What’s a true test of family togetherness? The big Thanksgiving Day dinner? The Christmas festivities? Getting everyone into their Easter-Sunday best and to the church on time? All of those may be a true test of family togetherness, but I now know what can top them all: 40-something hours driving together in a minivan to Texas and back.

Much of both my wife’s and my extended family lives in Texas. My parents, all but one of my siblings, my grandmother, and many aunts, uncles, cousins, etc. are scattered from the top of Texas in Amarillo to the bayous of Houston. My wife’s grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins are concentrated in Texas, too; but her parents and brother are all here in Ohio.

A couple of weeks ago, my wife’s paternal grandmother died unexpectedly. And so we had to make an unplanned trip down south. From Meigs County, it takes a minimum of 17 hours of driving time to get to Dallas. That doesn’t count being caught in traffic jams, construction detours, bathroom breaks, or anything else. I checked into airline tickets – briefly. The cheapest seats I could find were going to cost us around $2500! Ouch! Driving sounded a whole lot better.

Driving between Ohio and Texas under normal conditions, we always stopped for the night at a motel along the way. But this trip, we couldn’t afford the time that would take away from everything else. So we left on a Tuesday evening and planned to drive straight through.

It actually wasn’t going to be too bad, because my wife’s brother was going to go down with us. That meant three drivers could relieve each other and not leave any one of us totally exhausted. Her brother lives in the Dayton area, so we went there first. One the way, we got a phone call. My wife’s parents had just discovered the cost of flying and were now driving to Texas, too. Would it be okay if they took him as a third driver, instead of us?

Who am I to argue with my in-laws? I’m much smarter than that! So now it was just the two drivers in our car – and that meant it was really mostly one driver: me. My wife doesn’t see as well at night, plus she “hits a wall” about midnight that leaves her dysfunctional until she gets some sleep.

The nice thing about night driving is that one can miss the rush-hour traffic in the bigger cities. We went through Cincinnati, Louisville, Nashville, Memphis and Little Rock during the off-hours and experienced no delays at all.

The bad thing about night driving is that there are more 18-wheelers moving than I ever imagined! And they aren’t consistent in their driving. I was constantly passing or being passed by these huge trucks. And every time we would come near one another, the rumbling of 20-thousand pounds travelling at 70 miles-per-hour was loud enough to shake the van like it was in an earthquake!

I must say that my three kids were real troopers on this trip. Sure, we had our share of sibling bickering, but we also had a lot of fun. You can only imagine the hilarity of stupid jokes at four a.m. I am convinced that the closer one is to exhaustion, the more funny everything becomes!

There was also plenty of time to talk about some serious stuff – the kinds of conversations that can only happen after prolonged togetherness in tight confines. Give people 10 hours of car-sleep-hair, Doritos-breath, and three or more 32-ounce sodas, and they’ll talk about anything! Guards are let down, and some soul-baring takes place. I wouldn’t trade that time with my family for anything!

What’s true for me as an earthly father, I think is even truer for our Heavenly Father. In fact, my relationships with my family are first based upon the relationship God has with me. Why do we get the experience of this life? To give us time together with Him. Some have a short amount of time here, others get as many as 10 decades. My wife’s grandmother lived into her 80s, but she never lost that child-like quality of faith that Jesus describes in Mark 10:14-16:

Jesus said to them, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it." And he took the children in his arms, put his hands on them and blessed them.

How long has it been since you want on a “road trip” with God? Have you had the time to let your guard down for some serious one-on-one time with Him? Have you allowed the rumbles of troubles in your life shake your confidence in your Creator? Or have they focused your driving to stay on God’s highway?

May your travels be filled with goodness and mercy all the days of your life!

Saturday, March 22, 2008

The Power and Peril of Easter

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, March 21, 2008

“Jesus, regardless of where his corpse ended up, is dead and remains dead.”

Think that statement is provocative? Absolutely. Spoken by an atheist or irreligious person? Actually, no. Thomas Sheehan, professor at Stanford University’s Department of Religious Studies, said that. Dr. Sheehan has a theory about the story of Jesus’ resurrection: It’s a legend loosely based on obscure memories of what might really have happened when some women discovered that Jesus’ body was missing.

“The original Christian community in Jerusalem was deeply troubled by that deathly silence of the tomb, the utter absence of Jesus,” Sheehan wrote in his book, The First Coming: How the Kingdom of God Became Christianity. “They began to speak into the dark cavity of the tomb and give it a meaning born of their disappointment and their hope. The women had fled into a silence that corresponded to the absence of Jesus; but the Jerusalem community began to fill that silence with words. They invented a story of an angel who appeared inside the empty tomb.”

Sheehan builds his case for that conclusion through something called historical-critical analysis. He assumes that the gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were all written as propaganda – documents designed to convince people to think and behave in particular ways. Therefore, to discover the historical accuracy (or inaccuracy) of the gospels, one has to go into speculative theories as to how those documents came to be written, and what sources may have contributed to their creation. Somewhere in the mist of the unknown, Sheehan concludes, there are documents and facts that contradict the historical accuracy of the gospels.

The gospels are dangerous, and religious historians like Sheehan attempt to “disarm” them because of that danger. What is the danger? That people will believe that God actually does something miraculous! In the worldview formed by modern science and empirical study, there can not be something that stands outside the natural order. People don’t suddenly become alive after death anymore than they can turn into werewolves, vampires, or ghosts.

Marcus Borg, a retired priest in the Episcopal Church, agrees with Sheehan. Jesus did not physically return from death – the resurrection was symbolic and theological. “I think the resurrection of Jesus really happened, but I have no idea if it involves anything happening to his corpse, and, therefore, I have no idea whether it involves an empty tomb … so I would have no problem whatsoever with archaeologists finding the corpse of Jesus. For me, that would not be a discrediting of the Christian faith or the Christian tradition.”

Sheehan and Borg are smart men. On an IQ test, they probably would score much, MUCH higher than I. But intelligence can get in the way of believing when it is used to debunk faith and rationalize it away. I am not anti-intellectual. I think God gave us intelligence as a gift that can be used to help us better understand God, ourselves, and one another. But, as I have said before, every good gift can be abused and misused. Borg and Sheehan have used their intelligence to push us away from understanding the Resurrection as something that actually happened. And I think that’s sad.

Historic, orthodox Christianity insists that God broke through time and space to become REAL – someone who could be touched, fed, clothed – and killed. Further, it insists that God’s actions in that physical reality did something that forever changed human destiny. Christianity, therefore, isn’t simply about how to be emotionally balanced or ethically correct. Christianity is about being physically, emotionally and mentally transformed from what we are to what we were created to be – to bring us into a real relationship with God in this life and beyond. That kind of religion isn’t satisfied with a legendary resurrection of Jesus. It’s not just the empty tomb, it’s also the eyewitness testimonies of actual, physical appearances of a living Jesus, and what happens to them after they believe.

The apostle Paul strongly disagrees with Borg, Sheehan, and other modernists. He wrote in 1 Corinthians 15: “Now, my dear friends, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are saved, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believed in vain.

“For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, and last of all he appeared to me also.”

“But if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile.”

Dr. Albert Mohler, another modern scholar, puts Paul’s letter in perspective for us today: “Paul sets himself – and the true Church – against all who deny or deride the empty tomb. Either the tomb is empty, or our faith is in vain. Paul wants nothing to do with the effort to find a spiritual meaning without a historical event, nor with anti-supernaturalism. Against modern skeptics, Paul cared deeply about whether the tomb was empty.”

I also like Dr. Mohler’s conclusions to this controversy of the Resurrection: “Why do so many people hate the very idea of the risen Christ? Because the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead is the vindication of God’s purpose in sending his Son for the redemption of sinners. A world full of degenerate moderns – who do not even see themselves as sinners – wants nothing to do with Jesus Christ as our sinless substitute, who shed his blood for the remission of our sins.”

The liturgy we use during Communion says the mystery of the church is this: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Science and history cannot explain it nor prove it. It can only deny it. What about you? What do you believe? Go to church Sunday and EXPERIENCE the Resurrection for yourself!

Monday, March 17, 2008

What's the Big Deal About an Early Easter?

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, March 14, 2008

Just in case you have been visiting your family off-planet somewhere, I’d like to officially inform you that Easter is only nine days from now! That’s right, this Sunday is Palm Sunday in the western Christian calendar, and the following Sunday – March 23 – is Easter!

I received several emails – actually the same email from several different people – highlighting the uniqueness of this year’s Easter timing. The email breathlessly announces that “this is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives!” Furthermore, “the next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228 (220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95 or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!).”

Now I am willing to join the hoopla of the earliest Easter I will ever see, but all this made me wonder how setting the date for Easter works in the first place. To find out, I had to go back to some of the earliest history of the Christian church. Back in 325 AD, church leaders gathered in a place called Nicea. They were there to hammer out agreements on quite a number of issues, including the process for determining when to celebrate the most important event in Christianity – the resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Leaders from the eastern side of the Roman Empire preferred to schedule Easter with the Jewish Passover. All four gospel accounts – Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John – agree that Jesus was arrested, convicted and crucified during the week of Passover. In fact, John’s gospel makes deliberate parallels between the sacrifice of the Passover Lamb with Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Western Roman leaders, however, were more concerned with eradicating pagan festivals than retaining ties to Judaism. Tying the Resurrection celebration to the arrival of Spring seemed the best way to stop the pagan celebrations.

The only thing on which the two sides could agree was that Easter should be celebrated on a Sunday. So for the next 200 or so years, Christians celebrated Easter based on local preference – there were MANY Easters every year! In the meantime, tensions between the East and the West accelerated, both politically within the Roman Empire itself, and in Christianity. The Empire split into two, and from that point on, Christian practices diverged along the same lines.

Finally, in 7th century, Western Christians adopted a uniform method for determining when to celebrate Easter. And you guessed it – it was based on the arrival of Spring. Easter was to be celebrated on the FIRST Sunday after the FIRST full moon AFTER the spring Equinox. Got that??

If you thought that was confusing, just wait – it gets better! The calendar in use for centuries was the Julian calendar, and it was too long. Each year, the calendar moved ahead of the sun by 11 minutes, 17 and ½ seconds. That adds up to a full three days over 400 years. Easter had to be adjusted accordingly. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII approved a reform of the calendar that took away TEN ENTIRE DAYS to correct the error. The day after October 4 was declared to be October 15!

Flashing forward to modern times, we still use the combination solar/lunar timetable for determining Easter. So, the Sunday of Easter will vary by as much as five weeks – that’s 35 days. The odds of Easter landing on any ONE particular day in those five weeks is pretty low – hence the tremendous passage of time between one March 23rd Easter and the next March 23rd Easter. But when you think about it, that’s true for ANY day within the range of possible days for Easter. It’s no more remarkable to celebrate Easter on March 22 as it is on April 22. We just make a bigger deal out of the early date because it is on the edge rather than in the middle of the range.

And when I stop to think about Easter more deeply, I realize that the REALLY early Easter is the one for which we don’t have a date – that FIRST Easter morning when a group of women went to a tomb, hoping to care for the body of the person they loved, admired, and even dared to worship. Imagine the breathlessness in which Mary Magdelene told John and Peter that the grave was open and she couldn’t find Jesus’ body! Imagine the fear and dread they felt as they went back to the tomb to investigate the strangeness of the situation.

What a surprise to discover no on there – then suddenly someone WAS there! Mary was so upset that she failed to recognize Jesus at first. But then, she realized Jesus was ALIVE!! Now that’s a big deal! Huge!! World-changing, even!!! And ever since, Christians have celebrated that day – the day that death was conquered, sin overturned, and fear turned into joy. If you want to get excited about an Early Easter, then go ahead! I’ll join you, no matter what the date!!!

Friday, March 7, 2008

The Power of Storytelling

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, March 7, 2008


One of my favorite old hymns is “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.” Actually, as far as hymns go, it’s not all that old. The words were penned by William H. Parker in 1885, and the music was written by Frederic A. Challinor in 1903. So that’s just over a century ago. “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing,” another of my favorites, was written by Charles Wesley back in the 18th century – almost 300 years ago!

What those hymns have in common is the quality of their story-telling. “Tell Me the Stories” mentions special moments of Jesus’ life: the gathering of the children around Jesus for blessing, the marching into Jerusalem waving palm branches as Jesus rode on the back of a donkey. Through this song, we are transported back in time, imagining ourselves in that place – receiving Jesus’ blessing on our heads, joining the crowd in shouting triumphantly that Jesus is King!

“Hark!” puts us in the shepherds’ fields as the angels proclaimed Jesus’ birth, telling us the story that resonates through the ages: “Mild he lays his glory by, born that man no more may die. Born to raise the sons of earth, born to give them second birth. Hark! The herald angels sing, ‘Glory to the newborn king.’”

Storytelling is powerful. I rediscovered the power of stories this week as I read a book given to me last Christmas: “Listening is an Act of Love” edited by Dave Isay. This book is a collection of stories recorded by the StoryCorps Project, a non-profit organization dedicated to recording the stories of ordinary Americans. With a portable studio-quality recording booth, StoryCorps travels around the country and lets people come together for a conversation. Generally, people come in pairs, grandmother and grand-daughter, father and son, close friends, etc., but occasionally a person comes alone. All of them come to StoryCorps to share their lives – telling stories of who they are and where they have been.

Some of these stories air on National Public Radio’s “Morning Edition” on Fridays, and they have become one of the most popular features of the most popular morning radio program in the country. Why are these stories so popular? Because they reveal to us aspects of the human spirit that cross all boundaries of gender, generation, class, and geography. Stories from New York City can resonate with folks like us in Appalachia. Our stories can ring true to people in the wilds of Montana and in the smog of Los Angeles.

Here is an example: Joseph Dittmar is from Chicago, but he was in New York City for business meetings on September 11, 2001. His meeting was with people on the 105th floor of the South Tower of the World Trade Center. He arrived at 8:30 a.m. At 8:48, the lights flickered. No one thought much about it – then a volunteer fire marshall for the company came into the room and announced that an explosion had just happened in the North Tower and they were being asked to evacuate.

Joseph Dittmar described the reluctance of the people to abandon their meeting. They were more aggravated than anything else. They entered the fire escapes and started walking down the mountain of stairs towards the bottom of the building. At the 90th floor, the fire escape door was propped open and people were walking out of the stairwell.

“It became pretty evident what people were doing,” said Dittmar. “It wound up being probably the thirty to forty worst seconds of my life because it was the first opportunity we had to see the North Tower in an unbelievable state of tumult. The plumes of smoke five, six, seven stories high. Flame redder than anything you’ve seen before, and the fire just spilling out of the building. It was a beautiful clear day, and we clearly saw through the smoke and flames the signs of the fuselage of a plane. We saw the paper and the furniture and the people falling from the building, and it was an unbelievably gruesome sight. And I thought to myself, ‘I’m not going to stay here.’”

Dittmar continues to vividly recall the rest of the events of that day – the heroics of the firefighters and police that they met around the 30th floor, the constant encouragement people gave to one another as they struggled down the thousands of steps, the shock of impact when the second plane hit the South Tower, the escape out of the building moments before it collapsed.

Reading Dittmar’s first-person account of 9/11 put me back in touch with my own feelings on that terrible day almost seven years ago. I felt his anguish, empathized with his unanswerable question: “why did I escape when so many others died?” The power of the story made those experiences real for me, even though I wasn’t there.

The stories of the Bible do the same thing for us. When we read about Elijah’s struggles with depression and fear as he ran from King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, we discover God’s presence in the midst of trouble. When we read about Jonah and great fish, we learn what its like to run away from God – and how God never stops pursuing those He loves. And when we read about Jesus’ agony on the cross, we are brought face-to-face with the God who goes beyond the pale in taking on the pain of sin and separation so that we can come home to God.

Dittmer described his homecoming back to Chicago: “I called my wife for the thousandth time and I said, ‘Where are you?’ She said, ‘I’m just getting ready to go to church because they’re having a service. I’ll just wait for you if you’re getting close.’ I said, ‘No, no, today’s a good day to go to church. It’s a good place to be. I’ll meet you there.’

“I walked into the back of the church and opened the door into the sanctuary. This place was just packed. These hundreds of people in the church were all staring back at me because they knew what just had occurred. I looked over to the right – to the pew where we always sit, and there was my wife, and there were my kids and my family and my friends.

“My wife’s real non-demonstrative, real quiet, and she jumped over the back of the pew and ran to the back of the church and gave me this gigantic hug and kiss. And I knew that I was home. I was home.”

I invite you to come to church and hear again the power of stories. Let’s discover anew that we are home together through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Thursday, March 6, 2008

Is God Funny?

First published in The Daily Sentinel, Friday, February 29, 2008.


“Hi, I’m Pastor K, and I’m an internet joke junkie.” Chorus of “Hi, Pastor K.”

How many of you could belong to my 12-step group for Internet joke collectors? I get jokes sent to me by email. I have a collection of “favorites” – websites that post clean jokes. I even have a couple of honest-to-goodness books of jokes, too. Why am I addicted to jokes? Because I can’t tell them very well, so I need all the help I can get.

For instance, take today -- please! (cue: drum-slap) It’s February 29th! A day that comes along only once every four years, and we’re treating it just like another day! Now I think that’s funny! Couldn’t we make Leap Day a mandatory world-wide holiday? C’mon, can’t we afford one day out of 1461 days to just have fun?

But wait a minute, Pastor K, aren’t you forgetting something? You’re a pastor – and EVERYBODY knows Christians – especially pastors – aren’t supposed to have fun! Shame on you! Show me in the Bible where God has a sense of humor. Ask the folks from Sodom and Gomorrah if God has a sense of humor! I didn’t think so…

But don’t tell that to comedian Anita Renfroe. She’s become a huge sensation in Internet-land.Some of her video clips were posted on YouTube, and word began to spread: here’s a really funny lady – and she’s a (collective gasp!) CHRISTIAN!!!! The New York Times Magazine recently wrote about Renfroe, and they couldn’t believe it either. They headlined the story” Did You Hear the One About the Christian Comedian?” And here’s one quote from the article: “ ‘I have a good time almost all the time,” Renfroe said. “But I do feel a little bit of pressure.” That’s understandable given her most important task: proving that being a Christian comedian is not an oxymoron.”

I want you to pay careful attention to that quote. Renfroe didn’t say she was under pressure to prove that a Christian comedian is not an oxymoron, that’s what the New York Times IMPLIED from her statement that she is under pressure. The Times can’t quite believe that “Christian” and “comedian” can belong together.

So that’s made me really curious. Do most people think you can’t be a Christian and tell funny stories at the same time? Am I really in trouble because I love Jesus AND I like to laugh?

I turn to my Bible and read about Jesus in the gospels. Here’s some of the ways he is described: filled with compassion, angry, indignant, consumed with zeal, troubled, greatly depressed, very sorrowful, grieved, sighed, wept, groaned… Those don’t paint a very funny Jesus, do they? But wait – there’s more: surprised, amazed, rejoiced greatly, full of joy. Hmmmmm, seems that Jesus was much more complicated in his emotions than we first thought. In fact, I would venture to say that Jesus’ humanity was complete in ALL his feelings. He knew the full range of human emotion – from deep sorrow through physical pain, quiet satisfaction through can’t-sit-still excitement.

I can imagine Jesus pulling all kinds of harmless practical jokes on the disciples as they lived and travelled together for three years. How can you live together like that and not have some fun?

I am willing to go even further in my speculations. I think God CREATED humor, and then like all of God’s good gifts, this gift was spoiled by human sin. Just as sexuality has been turned into promiscuity and lust, good food has been turned into gluttony, hard work into drudgery – humor has been turned crude and shocking.

But none of those good gifts have to be turned into bad things. We can still enjoy sex in the right context, food in the right proportion, work in the right setting, and humor in the right frame of mind. And that’s what’s so refreshing about Anita Renfroe – she’s able to see the funny side of every day life and describe it without crude language, sexual innuendo, or outrageous hysterics. She’s so good at it that ABC’s “Good Morning America” show is signing her up to be a regular contributor.

And that’s the way I think Christians ought to be “in the world, but not of the world.” Jesus’ prayer before he went to the cross was this: “My prayer is not that you take them out of the world but that you protect them from the evil one.” (John 17:15) Christians should be fully engaged with our community, but engaged with a difference: showing the rest of the world what life can be like when we truly follow God. So many people think Christian comedian is an oxymoron because not enough of us have shown God’s sense of humor. But I know God has one, because God gave us an extra day every four years just to keep our clocks straight. Now that’s funny!!