Dear Friends:

If you are still reading this blog, it is probably only because you became a friend over the seven years it’s been published, probably only five of which really deserve the term, “published.” To call you friends is truly descriptive of the relationships we have developed over the years.

Over the last couple of years, though, I find that I really just haven’t had all that much to say here. I suppose that on some level I probably could have reinvented the blog, refocusing it as a political metablog with a Christian perspective, which is what it started out to be. But there seems to me to be plenty of that going around already. The place where we find ourselves culturally in the United States is a highly polarized place where we largely tend to talk to one another within our respective bubbles.

I have gravitated more in the direction of sharing articles and links that interest me through Facebook rather than here. Here, I had complete control of the content and how it was presented, but I find lately that’s just not all that important to the conversations I’m having online. In that shift over to Facebook, I’ve found that a number of my friends there have “un-friended” me because they didn’t care for the material I was sharing. Sad, yes, but true. Frankly, it’s not as though I’m saying anything different today than when most of us became friends, but somehow the fact that it’s being published in a semi-public forum and ending up in their status updates seems to have put them off. Some of them probably might have benefited from learning how simply to hide those updates and still stay in touch, but … whatever.

In either event, everything I used to do here I now do on Facebook and Twitter. It costs me $8.00 a month to keep this site up, and that certainly isn’t going to break the bank here. However, just to throw away even that pittance every month just on the off chance I might decide to publish something once every six to nine months here is bad stewardship, regardless of how you cut it. It’s like paying for a gym membership you never use but worse.

And so, with a certain sadness, I have decided to shut things down here at the end of February when the bill comes due again. Thank you to all of you who have followed and engaged with me here since June 2003. It’s been a pleasure and, dare I say it, a blessing. To those with whom I’ve developed long-lasting relationships, most of you are Facebook friends as well, so I’ll continue to look forward to seeing you there!

To him who is able to keep you from falling and to present you before his glorious presence without fault and with great joy — the only God our Savior be glory, majesty, power and authority, through Jesus Christ our Lord, before all ages, now and forevermore! Amen.

–Jude 24, 25

“What were the prophets and Jesus criticizing?  They were not against prayer and fasting and obedience to Biblical directions for life.  The tendency of religious people, however, is to use spiritual and ethical observance as a lever to gain power over others and over God, appeasing him through ritual and good works.  This leads to both an emphasis on external religious forms as well as greed, materialism, and oppression in social arrangements.  Those who believe they have pleased God by the quality of their devotion and moral goodness naturally feel that they and their group deserve deference and power over others.  The God of Jesus and the prophets, however, saves completely by grace.  He cannot be manipulated by religious and moral performance—he can only be reached through repentance, through the giving up of power.  If we are saved by sheer grace we can only become grateful, willing servants of God and of everyone around us.  Jesus charged his disciples: “Whoever wants to be great among you must be your servant, and whoever wants to be first must be servant of all’ (Mark 10:43-45).”

–Timothy Keller, The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism

Getting Retirement Numbers Wrong

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"Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented."

– Elie Wiesel

(HT: John Hawkins)

Just as I was noting that I had been posting stuff to Facebook instead of blogging, along comes this reminder—“Twitter is not a substitute for blogging.”  The money quote—“… the temptation is there to just tweet away and not do the skull work necessary to bring readers answers to the ‘so what’ questions.”

Or at least cleaned up the place a little.  I received a nice comment today from Jody Harrington, a  Presbyterian elder and a blogger at Quotidian Grace.  Jody has a column in my denomination’s magazine, Presbyterians Today, entitled “Best of the Blogs,” and this month she has included this blog.  I am at the same time both tickled and mortified—tickled because nearly every blogger loves to be linked by others, and the broader the audience the better, and mortified because the last post I had up here is  dated from July!

The general state of disarray comes not from slackness or tragedy that prevents me from doing what I have done here since 2003.  Actually, I have been writing less, but sharing and commenting on articles via Facebook instead.  Since the feed from this blog also posts on my Facebook wall, perhaps a return to this site is in order.  At any rate, thanks to Jody for the promo, and for those of you new to the site, welcome!  For those of you who are old friends, thanks for hanging in there.

To become neighbours is to bridge the gap between people. As long as there is distance between us and we cannot look in each other’s eyes, all sorts of false ideas and images arise. We give them names, make jokes about them, cover them with our prejudices, and avoid direct contact. We think of them as enemies. We forget that they love as we love, care for their children as we care for ours, become sick and die as we do. We forget that they are our brothers and sisters and treat them as objects that can be destroyed at will.

Only when we have the courage to cross the street and look in one another’s eyes can we see there that we are children of the same God and members of the same human family.

–Henri Nouwen

If I rent a beach house from someone, should I now expect to receive a $60 discount for my share of the owner’s insurance? Since my own home insurance sets me back about $800 a year, should it be $80 instead?  From The Observer:

NC House panel has beach insurance fix

North Carolina lawmakers have started grappling with how the underfunded Beach Plan would keep its insurance promises after a bad hurricane season.

The House Insurance Committee on Thursday began considering a proposal to cap insurers’ risks from a catastrophe, and shift remaining rebuilding costs to all North Carolina policyholders.

The bill would allow every property insurance policy to rise by up to 10 percent if the Beach Plan’s payouts surpass about $2.4 billion. The insurance industry says that’s almost double what the Beach Plan would have had to pay if 1996′s Hurricane Fran came ashore now.

The Insurance Department estimates the average $600 homeowners policy could rise up to $60 a year to pay Beach Plan claims.

From Will Willimon’s blog:

I recently heard Marcus Borg of the errant “Jesus Seminar” chide us pastors for protecting our congregations from the glorious fruits of “contemporary biblical scholarship.” There’s a brave new world of insight through the historical-critical study of Scripture! Don’t hold back from giving the people in the pew the real truth about Jesus as it has been uncovered by contemporary biblical scholarship and faithfully delivered to you in seminary biblical courses. He implied that even the laity, in their intellectual limitations, can take the truth about Jesus as revealed by Professor Borg and his academic friends.

Yet it seemed not to occur to Professor Borg that contemporary biblical scholarship, because it is asking the wrong questions of the biblical texts, and even more because it is subservient to a community that is at odds with communities of faith, may simply be irrelevant both to the church and to the intent of the church’s Scripture. Sometimes the dissonance between the church and the academy is due, not to the benighted nature of the church, but rather to the limited thought that reigns in the academy.

(HT: Per Crucem Ad Lucem)

With cultural relevance being everything it is in the practice of homiletics and all:

(Kudos to Scott Bateman.)

Matthew Cooper had this interesting take yesterday on Mark Ambinder’s blog regarding why Obama’s poll numbers are dropping:

I have a slightly different spin on this, which is that it’s the spending and the modest success it seems to have brought in stopping the total collapse of the banking and financial system. If the economy felt like it was in the same free fall that it was a few months ago, he’d be doing better because there’d be less questioning of government spending and more calls to pour everything on the fire. But with the respite in the fall comes the freedom to question spending. Or, to put it another way: The firemen saved your house but now you’re pissed off about all the water damage in the den.

I ran across the following comment here that more or less speaks to the lesson I learned in college from David Dungan and in so many cases, my utter frustration in dealing with bureaucracies and political bodies in general:

The power of the group is not their ability to refute you. Their power is in their ability of ignore you.

Good thing I wasn’t counting on the money to feed the young-uns.  In the e-mail hopper this morning …

We regret to inform you that the North Carolina state legislature (the General Assembly) appears ready to enact an unconstitutional tax collection scheme that would leave Amazon.com little choice but to end its relationships with North Carolina-based Associates. You are receiving this e-mail because our records indicate that you are an Amazon Associate and resident of North Carolina.

Please note that this is not an immediate termination notice and you are still a valued participant in the Associates Program. All referral fees earned on qualified traffic will continue to be paid as planned.

But because the new law is drafted to go into effect once enacted – which could happen in the next two weeks – we will have to terminate the participation of all North Carolina residents in the Amazon Associates program on or before that same day. After the termination day, we will no longer pay any referral fees for customers referred to Amazon.com or Endless.com nor will we accept new applications for the Associates program from North Carolina residents.

The unfortunate consequences of this legislation on North Carolina residents like you were explained in detail to key senators and representatives in Raleigh, including the leadership of the Senate, House, and both chambers’ finance committees. Other states, including Maryland, Minnesota, and Tennessee, considered nearly identical schemes, but rejected these proposals largely because of the adverse impact on their states’ residents.

The North Carolina General Assembly’s website is http://www.ncleg.net/, and additional information may be obtained from the Performance Marketing Alliance at http://www.performancemarketingalliance.com/.

We thank you for being part of the Amazon Associates program, and we will apprise you of the General Assembly’s action on this matter.

Sincerely,

Amazon.com

Some thoughts regarding our Christian view of the future from Charles Mathewes, A Theology of Public Life (Cambridge Studies in Christian Doctrine):

Apocalypticism is fundamentally an epistemological attitude, a claim already to know.  The Greek word apokalyptō means “to unveil” or “disclose”; it suggests a mindset that basically looks to the future as an already determined and knowable reality.  On this definition, “apocalypticism” is a form of eschatological meteorology, of forecasting; in a weird way, to be apocalyptic is to be post-apocalyptic – to know already what is going to happen, and so to treat it as the past.  This is a deep human temptation, and illuminates how we seek to understand history.  Our desire to understand history is actually a desire to be able to say what it meant “in the end,” a desire to have it finished, over – so that this desire entails a desire actually to escape history.

In contrast, the eschatological imagination opposes all apocalypticisms, all temptations to anticipate the end of time.  The eschatological imagination is most fundamentally ontological, for the Greek word eschaton means “a limit,” “an edge,” or “an end.”  It is a way to refuse a false knowingness about the future, and hence to enable real knowledge by keeping us open to the future and to the “new thing” that God is always almost about to accomplish.  This imagination identifies the apocalyptic temptation as a temptation towards endings, and in response to this temptation most fundamentally enacts a resistance to our own sinful desire to end things.  Theologically speaking, this desire for endings is an attempt to avoid God – a way of escaping our actual responsibility to understand and act in response to God’s action upon us.  The world will end, for the eschatological imagination; but we will not be the ones to end it.  God’s will is not captive to our expectations.  The lesson of providence is not that history can be finally solved, like a cryptogram, but that it must be endured, inhabited as a mystery which we cannot we cannot fully understand from the inside, but which we cannot escape of our own powers.  To paraphrase Reinhold Niebuhr, history offers no progressive triumph of good over evil; if anything, its tensions accentuate over time.  We must not become too comfortable in any worldly dispensation, because we remain aware of its difference from our proper dispensation.

Mary Newsom has a post asking her readers for their picks for best places to stand in Charlotte.  My favorite place ever since the first time I drove by Queens University in 1982 remains anywhere on Stanford Place. The way the trees arch over the street there has always reminded me of a quiet, peaceful, Gothic cathedral.  It would appear that the drought of the past few years may have diminished the foliage at the time that Google took its Street View photo, but I suspect the trees are back in their full glory this year!

Ah, the suspense was killing us all, wasn’t it?  Governor Perdue announced last night that she would be in Charlotte today with GREAT economic news, and sure enough, here it is:

1,014 new jobs announced at Charlotte nonprofit

Gov. Bev Perdue is in Charlotte this morning to announce 1,014 new jobs at the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America, a nationwide nonprofit, the governor’s office said …

… Based in Boston, NACA is a national affordable lending program that focuses on low- and moderate-income families and properties. It offers loans with no down payments, closings costs or fees to customers.

The nonprofit’s leader, Bruce Marks, is a self-described “bank terrorist” known for holding protests against banks that the group deems to have poor lending records in minority and poor communities.

In that time-honored Southern aphorism, help me to understand … here is a group that specializes in making the very kind of stupid loans to ne’er-do-wells who won’t pay them back that have put the entire economy in the tank in the first place; why is their coming to a city that’s already on the bleeding edge of the comeuppance for making such stupid loans and "creating" 1,014 "new jobs" a cause for celebration? With apologies to Grameen Bank, we’re not talking micro-credit loans here. These are subprime loans, pure and simple.  The only difference I can see here is that these folks appear to specialize in the same kind of shakedown tactics that keep the race baiting industry alive and kicking.

Perhaps some smart guy or another who has shown time and again that he has a better grasp of these matters related to finance might help me out here.  Check out the NACA website and explain to me how I’ve gotten this wrong.  Perhaps some of the fine folks at the Chamber could enlighten me?

UPDATE: Jeff sent a little link love my way as you can see in the trackback below.  He also has some additional information on our new neighbors as well.

From George Will:

The president’s astonishing risk-taking satisfies the yearning of a presidency-fixated nation for a great man to solve its problems. But as Coolidge said, "It is a great advantage to a president, and a major source of safety to the country, for him to know that he is not a great man." What the country needs today in order to shrink its problems is not presidential greatness. Rather, it needs individuals to do what they know they ought to do, and government to stop doing what it should know causes or prolongs problems.

… when even your fan club begins to question what you’re doing:

There are two basic truths about the enormous deficits that the federal government will run in the coming years.

The first is that President Obama’s agenda, ambitious as it may be, is responsible for only a sliver of the deficits, despite what many of his Republican critics are saying. The second is that Mr. Obama does not have a realistic plan for eliminating the deficit, despite what his advisers have suggested.

The New York Times analyzed Congressional Budget Office reports going back almost a decade, with the aim of understanding how the federal government came to be far deeper in debt than it has been since the years just after World War II. This debt will constrain the country’s choices for years and could end up doing serious economic damage if foreign lenders become unwilling to finance it.

Who would have known that The Breakfast Club would be so economically prophetic back in 1985?

Richard Vernon: You think about this: when you get old, these kids– when I get old–they’re going to be running the country.
Carl: Yeah.
Richard Vernon: Now this is the thought that wakes me up in the middle of the night. That when I get older, these kids are going to take care of me.
Carl: I wouldn’t count on it.

For some time now people have been hacking into Facebook accounts and sending folks off to phishing websites.  I know that Darryl probably isn’t capable of doing this, but Mr. IT, a.k.a. Leighton, who thought he was so clever to mock me the day before yesterday, is now a very likely suspect.  LT, the RCMP should be knocking just any minute now, and in case you haven’t heard about my country’s all expenses paid trips to sunny Cuba, be afraid … VERY afraid.

In his Sunday column in the Dallas Morning News, Rod Dreher writes about a Dallas “leadership class” that sounds an awful lot like our own Downtown Pep Squad, “[obsessed] with building signature starchitect projects (e.g., bridges designed by Santiago Calatrava), while neglecting the plain-Jane quality of life issues that make a city truly livable.”

What does it say about Dallas that its leadership class gets giddy over grandiose projects, but – [my council member Angela] Hunt being an honorable exception – can’t be bothered to tackle the chronic dog problem? Council members will talk your ear off about how Dallas needs to be a "world-class" city, as if gee-whiz designer erections compensate for the embarrassing fact that people in parts of town can’t go outside for fear of a dog attacking them.

Maybe if somebody would propose commissioning a Calatrava dog pound, city government might start to care.

"I think one of the big reasons cities fail is that they don’t deal with the basics," urbanist Joel Kotkin has said. Well, you don’t get more basic than keeping dogs from roaming wild in the streets. In that regard, Dallas is a world-class city, all right – a Third World-class city.

Boring, middle-class families with boring, middle-class expectations of safety, order and governmental competence form the backbone of successful cities. Animal control and code enforcement are not sexy. No developers, businessmen or politicians stand to profit directly from them. But an inferior quality of life makes middle-class families leave for the suburbs, no matter how many starchitectural buildings, high-profile developments and brochure-friendly projects the city embraces. The time and money anxious Dallas elites spend trying to keep up with New York and Chicago would be better spent trying to stay on par with Frisco and McKinney. [Note: Two booming Dallas suburbs.]

"Dallas has an opportunity to be a great city to live in if we stop focusing on big, shiny, expensive things and concentrate instead on the basics," Hunt tells me, referring in part to the absurd convention-center hotel project.

She’s right. Nothing wrong with wanting to make Dallas a nice place to visit, but it’s more important to make it a nice place to live.

OK, so if you substitute “Charlotte” for “Dallas” and “Ballantyne and Steele Creek,” “Matthews and Mint Hill,” or “Huntersville and Cornelius” for “Frisco and McKinney” in this snip above, and if you substitute, oh, I don’t know, perhaps half a dozen different projects in Charlotte—the arena, the arts center, the NASCAR Hall of Fame, the Knights baseball stadium, the land swap to make all of this work, and yes, the Holy Grail of our boondoggles, light rail—Dreher’s point could be made just as easily about Charlotte.  We’re not yet to the point where we have a rampant “mean dog” problem as far as I know, but when you start looking at single-shot measures like the federal stimulus plan to fund the hiring of police, a core mission of government that cannot be outsourced (unless, of course, like my father, you’d be perfectly happy handling your own law enforcement), then government has clearly lost sight of its purpose.

What ever happened to the days when the Chamber of Commerce handled economic development in a community?  Or have the various chambers across the nation, ours included, decided that it was more effective simply to conduct a leveraged buyout of local government and make it a wholly owned subsidiary, bought and paid for with the acquisition’s own assets, i.e., the tax base?

(HT: Jonathan Brink at Missio Dei)

1 John 1:1-2:2

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life–
this life was revealed, and we have seen it and testify to it, and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us–
we declare to you what we have seen and heard so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ.
We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
This is the message we have heard from him and proclaim to you, that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.
If we say that we have fellowship with him while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true;
but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.
If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.
If we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness.
If we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.
My little children, I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous;
and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

John 20:19-31

When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you."
After he said this, he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.
Jesus said to them again, "Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you."
When he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit.
If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained."
But Thomas (who was called the Twin), one of the twelve, was not with them when Jesus came.
So the other disciples told him, "We have seen the Lord." But he said to them, "Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe."
A week later his disciples were again in the house, and Thomas was with them. Although the doors were shut, Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you."
Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe."
Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God!"
Jesus said to him, "Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe."
Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not written in this book.
But these are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.

We learn that at birth she was oxygen-deprived, which left her with some brain damage and resulting learning difficulties.  Because of this and because of her fuzzy hair she was bullied and mocked by other kids in her village of Bathgate, West Lothian in Scotland.  She would tell the teachers, but because it was more verbal than physical she could never prove anything.

A 47 year old spinster, she lives alone in the four bedroom house where her mother, Bridget, and her father, Patrick, raised ten children, sleeping in the same room she had as a child.  She’s never found romance or had a family of her own; she says she’s never even been kissed, although she has since said that this comment has been a bit overblown—her parents didn’t want her to have boyfriends, and she supposes she has accepted that it’s not likely to happen.  What she does regret is not having children, but she does have a cat named Pebbles.

Her father died about 10 years ago, and she continued to care for her mother until she died in 2007 at the age of 91.  She’s worked for a number of years in the local college kitchen and in other government training programs, but she is currently unemployed and volunteering in her local church.  When she was five, she discovered that she had a talent for singing, and over the years she found some solace in this talent, singing in local karaoke contests and other events and eventually taking some singing lessons.

After her mother’s death, she says she went through "a very dark time” and suffered depression and anxiety.  But her mother had often encouraged her to enter the Britain’s Got Talent contest on TV, so she took the risk and entered the contest.  The whole point of the show, like its American counterparts, American Idol and America’s Got Talent, is that for the most part people who really don’t have much talent or who are just a bit or even quite a bit eccentric go on the show and have their bubbles burst quite brutally.  So when Susan Boyle got onstage a week ago Saturday and was interviewed initially by the judges, Simon Cowell, Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden, no one was really expecting very much.

By our standards of celebrity appearance, Susan’s not really much to look at, and although she had dressed up for her appearance, her sense of fashion is … well, let’s leave it at this—she would have looked quite nice in the sixties, and it’s hard to say whether the audience or the judges were more dismissive of her.  That is, until she was about a half dozen notes into her rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables.  At that point, every jaw in the house dropped, both the judges and the audience—the judges were absolutely gobsmacked and unanimously voted for her to go on further in the contest.  One video of her appearance on the show has been posted online on YouTube, and this particular version has been viewed nearly 30 million times as of this morning; a number of other versions have been uploaded online as well as shown on various news and entertainment shows, so it’s no great exaggeration to suggest that this performance has been viewed online somewhere between fifty and a hundred million times.

Susan, of course, seems to be taking it all in stride, at least as much as anyone can when you have people all around the world paying you a backhanded compliment and commenting on your below average appearance.  She’s kinda frumpy, but boy, she sure can sing!  She sure showed them all!  The whole story has that of Cinderella about it, and I’m sure that it’s one that’s being discussed in pulpits all across the nation this morning since after all, the height of homiletic relevance is to have a good, current sermon illustration from contemporary culture.  For us in the church, it’s a perfect follow-up to Easter, isn’t it—another case of a tragic story with an unexpected and triumphant conclusion.

Easter is a great story, isn’t it?  How can you preach about Easter and screw that up?  The biggest challenge with preaching on Easter Sunday is that you might not be original enough or inspiring enough in the pulpit to live up to the high expectations we usually have for that Sunday.  Is it any wonder that so many preachers take the next Sunday off?  It’s kind of become my stock in trade over the last seventeen years—I don’t get to preach on Christmas or Easter very often, but I rarely have a year go by that I’m not booked for the Sunday after Christmas or the Sunday after Easter.

But what do you say on the Sunday after Easter?  The liturgical calendar says it’s still Easter for six more weeks until Pentecost, and then it’s weeks and months of “ordinary time” until we get to Advent.  The obvious temptation, then, is to try to keep the momentum, the excitement of Easter, going for at least a few weeks afterwards, to keep people coming to worship services even if we’ve already had the grand finale and now we’re moving on to the summer repeats.
Because that’s the reality of the lives we lead, isn’t it?  We have a few high points here and there, and those are offset by the valleys here and there as well.  But for the most part, there’s a certain sameness to most of our days, boring in some ways by virtue of the routine and yet comforting in others.

Therein lies the real challenge of Susan Boyle’s life, and it’s one that a good number of commentators have picked up on, namely this—what if Susan Boyle had simply met our expectations rather than exceeded them?  We’ve gotten a number of object lessons in ugly ducklings and what our mothers always told us about not judging a book by its cover, how it’s what’s inside that counts out of her story …

But what if she had, like hundreds of other contestants who have gone before her, not had this beautiful voice?  What if, as one person wrote, she had simply gotten up there and squawked like a duck and made a fool of herself?  Then her only consolation might’ve been that at least she’d only been humiliated on a national stage rather than an international one.

What would have been the difference between Susan Boyle, the 47 year old frumpy, slow girl from a little village in Scotland who stayed home to look after her elderly parents and lives by herself with her ten year old cat in complete obscurity and neglect and the one who knocked everyone’s socks off last Saturday?  In the midst of listening to her fabulous voice, did we not hear the irony of the words she sang amidst the cheering?

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I’m living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.

In a like manner, I have to ask—what’s the difference between last Sunday and this one?  Let me venture a guess—I say that this Sunday it’s just a bit more obvious, if we stop to think about it, that if liturgy is worship, and all of our lives are supposed to be given up to the continual worship of God through our living of them, then our lives are a whole lot more filled with “ordinary time” than even the calendar gives us credit for.  We’re more familiar than we care to admit of the words of Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. Omitted, all the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat. And we must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures.

This is the state of affairs, our reality, the church’s reality, to which John refers in the scripture passages for this morning.  John writes to a church that struggles to hold its own in a time of persecution, a time when, like our own in this respect, its influence on the surrounding culture seems to be minimal.  It’s probably not Easter when John is writing these early Christians, and so he finds himself having to draw them back to remind them of the core of their belief:

We declare to you what was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the word of life—

He hearkens back to a day in time, years, decades ago when he and the other disciples of Jesus were in hiding and in fear for their lives, crushed and destroyed, having nothing whatsoever to hold on to other than each other, the threat of arrest and execution for sedition and some dubious stories about an empty tomb they’d heard earlier in the day.  In his gospel, he remembers that evening when Jesus came and stood among them and said, "Peace be with you," showing them his hands and his side, and he remembers how the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.  He reminds his readers how even then Jesus told them that as the Father had sent him, so he was sending them, breathing the Holy Spirit upon them and telling them if they forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven them; if they retain the sins of any, they are retained.

Ah, but Thomas.

Doubting Thomas, child of the Enlightenment, the modernist’s modernist, the one to whom we always used to point as the exemplar of our unbelieving Western civilization, the one who wouldn’t believe until he saw it himself and laid hands on the whole scene himself.  Although, if we read John carefully, none of the others particularly believed the story either, but then they saw the wounds in his hands and side themselves and believed.

But Thomas was not with them when Jesus came, so when the other disciples told him they had seen the Lord, his response was that until he too saw the wounds, he would not believe either, and it was not for another week before Thomas had his revelation as well.  What makes Thomas unique, then, is not that he saw the wounds and believed the resurrection.  What singles him out was that unlike the others, who like him were exceedingly joyful to have seen their Lord, only Thomas appears to have taken it to the next level and recognized what all this implied, namely, Jesus was not only a teacher and a great prophet, but in fact, he was God himself in the flesh.

Thomas and the other disciples had been reduced to nothing, rendered completely without hope by the crucifixion, but out of nothing, out of the numerous nothings God had created something that was actually quite a bit.  He had created his church, and as John relayed to those who would subsequently read his words, Jesus told them they had not seen anything yet—had they believed because they had seen him?  Imagine how blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe.

Those are the people to whom John then was writing.  Not to give them a comprehensive historical narrative of everything Jesus did in the presence of his disciples, but so that those who read them might come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing we may have life in his name.  So that we also may have fellowship with those saints who have gone before us, those who walk with us today, and those who will come after we have gone, so that we may truly have fellowship with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ and have our joy made complete.

John writes to people who are living in darkness and yet need to know that among them a great light has shown.  To know that God is light and in him there is no darkness at all.  We live among people who do not know the God who has revealed himself to us in Christ, and it is a deep struggle at times to remain in the light, so John reminds us that if we say that we have fellowship with Christ while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true; but if we walk in the light as he himself is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus his Son cleanses us from all sin.

If we say that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us, but if we confess our sins, he who is faithful and just will forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness; if we say that we have not sinned, we make him a liar, and his word is not in us.  John writes these things to remind us not to sin, but also to remind us in our fallibility that if we do sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous, and he is the atoning sacrifice for our sins, and not for ours only but also for the sins of the whole world.

Not every day is like Easter when we have the truth of the resurrection brought to the fore of our consciousness.  Most days are pretty ordinary, a lot like this Sunday, and sometimes they’re nearly unbearable.

I think of a colleague at the plant who was working on night shift to address a problem, had a massive heart attack and died there at work—certainly nothing that any of us would likely aspire to be doing when our time has come to pass.

I think of another colleague at the plant whose wife suffered a massive stroke and died at a young age back at Thanksgiving.  She’d had a number of years of serious health challenges.  He’s getting ready to sell their house and try to start his life anew in a place with better memories.  Then his mother passed away last week after a fight with cancer, a woman who herself had experienced a number of trials with caring for a special needs child and then a husband who also had had a stroke.  To cap it all off, he spent the night before his mother’s funeral in the emergency room when his daughter fell ill and thus missed his mother’s funeral the next day.  Needless to say, he has a deep faith in God, but it’s being tested pretty hard at the moment.

Many of you will have heard of the 45 year old choir director at Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church and her two year old daughter who were killed a couple of weeks ago as they were headed to church when their vehicle was struck broadside by another vehicle whose driver was drag racing down Highway 49 at an estimated speed of 90 miles per hour.  She and her husband had been unable to have children for many years, and this child had been a blessing to them and to that church.

How do you preach the resurrection in a context like that?  It’s not my desire to send you home feeling worse than you might have felt before you got here.  Yes, it’s hard to preach the resurrection in a context like that, but we still have to preach it—the pastor at that church did.

I think the answer lies in the words of a contemporary Christian song:

I am not skilled to understand what God has willed, what God has planned.  I only know at His right hand stands One who is my Savior.

We are not skilled to understand that magnitude of suffering.  We are not skilled to understand even the mundane and ordinary, even boring times of our lives.  That is why we have been placed in this world, not as individuals left alone to sort all this out albeit with God’s Spirit to guide and direct us.

When Jesus rose from the grave, he gave new life, not only to each individual in the life yet to come, but to an entire community of fellow followers in this present life that is a foretaste of that life yet to come.  We have been placed in the midst of a community of faith, not only that we might have fellowship with him but with one another.  Not friendship, although there is that—fellowship.  A journey through life with fellow travelers.

Because sometimes the sheer enormity of the burdens we carry, the evil we see and experience is simply more than any one of us could possibly bear, and we need a community to absorb it all with us lest it overwhelm and destroy us.  The words of that song, like John’s words to the church, remind us of God’s greatness, his holiness, his grace, and we sing God’s praises together rather than alone to keep the darkness at bay.

My Savior loves. My Savior lives. My Savior’s always there for me.
My God He was. My God He is. My God is always gonna be.

We are more than the sum total of our “nothingnesses.”

We are more than conquerors through him that loved us.

UPDATE: I’ve added a photo of Cindy and Mackie below.  Also, if you wish to read other people’s remembrances, check out this link on The Observer website.

I learned this morning that my friend and church colleague, Cindy Furr, an Assistant Professor of English at Winthrop University and the choir director at Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church, was struck broadside as she pulled out of the RiverPointe neighborhood where she lived by one of two vehicles that were drag racing down the final stretch of North Carolina Highway 49 before the Buster Boyd Bridge crosses over into South Carolina.  The racers are said by some witnesses to have been going in excess of 100 miles per hour down a stretch of four lane highway where the speed limit is 45 miles per hour.  Cindy was killed on impact, and her young daughter, McAllister Price (news accounts vary as to whether she was two or three years old), was resuscitated at the scene but died later at the hospital.

Cindy and I first met about 25 years ago when she was a student at Queens College (now Queens University).  We reconnected when my family and I moved back to Charlotte ten years ago and was invited to preach at Pleasant Hill, and we had worked together over the years whenever I was invited back.

Usually I would feel compelled to opine about theodicy and how senseless all of this is, and it most assuredly is senseless.  But this afternoon I want to tell you about Cindy, a woman with a wicked good sense of humor, just as smart as they come, and someone who was the epitome of hospitable.  Here’s how Cindy described herself on the Winthrop University English Department faculty page:

I spend my days supervising English interns, teaching British Literature courses, working with freshmen in composition courses, and instructing kickboxing for the Physical Education department. As advisor for the Winthrop NCTE affiliate, I focus on helping teachers become aware of educational issues and offer guidance in direction in hopes of building strong, effective, and successful teachers. My recent presentations include papers at NCTE and SCCTE on gender equity in the English classroom and inherent problems with teacher-student dialogue in the classroom. Away from campus, I spend time directing music and my church, teaching kickboxing and katana at the YMCA, and enjoying time with my family and many animals.

Be it known that this kickboxing/katana-teaching 45 year old woman could have handed you your head without so much as breaking a sweat.  Michelle Obama only wishes she had this woman’s muscle tone.  The other thing that caught your eye about Cindy was her long hair, flowing all the way down her back.  But all of that aside, the thing that truly struck you most about Cindy was that incredible, beaming smile, just like the one in the picture above.  I’m not talking about one of those plastic, church lady smiles.  I’m talking about a smile that came from an indescribable inner joy.  This woman loved Jesus. Yes, Jesus loves her, and a lot of us say we love him.  This woman really did!  Today she is in Paradise with her Lord, and frankly, I’m not at all certain you could tell the difference in how she is acting in his presence.

When you are a guest preacher in someone’s church, usually if they have a choir, they ask you to pray with them before you all go out to lead the worship service.  When I was filling in at Pleasant Hill, I always left it to Cindy because my prayer might not get past the ceiling, but I knew without a doubt that God was listening to her.  For every bit that I’m an Ecclesiastes 12 kind of guy ("Vanity of vanities," says the Preacher, "all is vanity!"), Cindy was a Philippians 4 kind of girl (Rejoice in the Lord always; again I will say, rejoice!).

I only got to see McAllister twice during her brief life, once at Pleasant Hill when she was a tiny baby in a carrier, and then just a few weeks ago.  My wife and I ran into Cindy and her husband, Steve Price, and McAllister at Target one day.  McAllister was just the most darling little girl, typical of her age, hiding behind her momma’s legs but poking her head around them to smile at us.  I cannot begin to imagine how Steve is even able to make his lungs work today, but if you happen to think of it, please offer this man up in your most heartfelt prayers that God might sustain and bless him and hold him in his merciful care.

Cindy, I hope that when I see you and that precious baby again in the life to come that you’ll teach me how to praise God just as naturally as most of us breathe.

In an article in this morning’s Observer, Mr. Sunshine Law himself, a.k.a., City Attorney Mac Mc Carley, shares some shocking news (SHOCKING, I say!) regarding a 2007 information request by Jay Morrison, former CMS BOE at-large candidate and the Downtown Charlotte Pep Squad’s bête noire during that year’s transit tax repeal referendum, at least up until they accelerated his implosion by conveniently doing The Observer’s investigative work for them.  Yes, it would appear that Mr. Morrison’s request cost you, the taxpayers of the City of Charlotte, an estimated $61,014.91.  Estimated, that is.

And do you know what else?  Well, I’m gonna tell ya cuz they told me.  Mr. Morrison never even showed up to collect this information he had requested!  And had he shown up, he would have been charged $5.80 for the cost of the electronic media on which this information was stored.  Mr. Mc Carley, ever the patient defender of the public interest, tried to negotiate the scope of this broad-brush request down to a “realistic” size, but Jay, ever the poster child for unreasonable “harassment” of hardworking government employees everywhere (no, really, I couldn’t make this crap up if I tried … go read the article, as well as my post linked above, to see Mr. Mc Carley impugn the motives of persons seeking public information regarding our public governance, both then and now), would have none of it.

Now … in The Observer’s defense, they do a pretty evenhanded job on this, in my opinion (humble or not), interviewing a number of open government advocates who throw the BS flag on Mr. Mc Carley’s estimates as well as his position regarding the provision of such information.  However, having begun by shellacking Mr. Morrison for seven paragraphs, even though no one has heard or seen hide nor hair of the man for nearly a year and a half since The Observer colluded in derailing his efforts (yes, the pun is intended, and yes, I believe they colluded in assisting the Pep Squad in their efforts because even I, obtuse and out of the loop as I am, knew it was coming nearly a week before it hit the newsstand, and they neglect to mention in their article that maybe the reason Jay never showed up to collect the data was that after they finished gutting him publicly, what was the point of collecting the data), the story nonetheless does not begin to present that case until long after the average schlub will have quit reading.

Let’s say Mr. Mc Carley’s cost estimate is spot-on accurate—heck, it’s printed there right down to the penny, so there must be some supporting journal entry in the City’s books, right, something like “$61,014.91, miscellaneous discretionary spending, C. Walton?”—nonetheless, this “huge” expenditure (which is no doubt considerably less than the City spends each year to feed the Council members and miscellaneous hangers-on prior to their meetings) pales in comparison to the more than a quarter billion dollars in cost overruns on light rail construction that spawned the 2007 transit tax repeal initiative in the first place.  The Observer’s headline asks, “What’s the true price of public records?”  I ask you—what’s the price if we don’t ask?

Now, for the sake of argument, I may have Mr. Mc Carley all wrong.  He may be the most innocent lamb and the nicest guy in the entire Piedmont Carolinas, and I am grievously attacking this poor soul.

Nah.  Get real.  Nice guy or not, Mr. Mc Carley makes the same mistake that every government attorney I’ve ever known makes, and that is this—he thinks those folks sitting around the dais in the Government Center Meeting Chamber, i.e., Curt Walton and the Council, are his clients.  They are not.  You and I are, and when Mr. Mc Carley resists the legitimate and even the illegitimate [sic!]requests of the public to obtain full disclosure of government activities, he fails in his obligation to us as his clients to serve our interests without passion or prejudice.

It is said that every form of government inevitably tends towards oligarchy, and that is why it is necessary to change out the oligarchs every once in awhile.  That, dear readers, is why we have the First Amendment.  That is why a free press and free religion are so vital to the democratic enterprise.  Neither organ is perfect, especially here in the Queen City, but they are the only elements in society that, having an appeal to transcendent ideals apart from the state, are able to stand before the state and bar the door to the worst of the state’s efforts to make itself all and in all.  Christians on both sides of the divide may alternately rejoice or bemoan the current state of civic affairs, but now as much as ever, it is imperative for the church in its post-Constantinian Babylonian exile to recover its fundamental assertion, the one that got it persecuted for over 300 years, and that is that there is one and only one true Oligarch, and his name is not Caesar.

… The two main questions we keep asking are: “Is this the world we want to have?” and “Is X worth the cost?” Typically, our answers are no to both, and because we say no we are said to be doing nothing more than pining for a lost past. It’s as if someone threw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater, and then mocked you for your “idealistic” concern for the baby or, better yet, your nostalgic attachment to the bathwater as if the baby had never existed. This would be a mildly amusing diversionary tactic, if it weren’t so painfully obvious that we are almost always talking about the present predicament and what we owe to those who will live in the future …

– Daniel Larison, Front Porch Republic, “No Going Back…So Where Are We Going?”

Whether or not you believe Krugman it’s undeniable that there has been little, if any, attempt to rigorously identify the problems with the [financial] system — what I’ve called the processes which corrupted its information store — before restarting it. I’ve compared this to bringing a database online before fixing the problems which caused it to crash. Now Krugman says they haven’t addressed the housing bubble. Well why not get Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd and Rahm Emmanuel to do it? Why not get Barack Obama to critique “affordable housing”? Because it isn’t going to happen. The foxes run the henhouse. Krugman is asking himself all the right questions in all the wrong ways. Now “despair” is not quite the same as depression. Technically it is worse. “Dante passes through the gate of hell, which bears an inscription, the ninth (and final) line of which is the famous phrase “Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate”, or “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here” Before entering Hell completely, Dante and his guide see the Opportunists, souls of people who in life did nothing, neither for good nor evil.” And doing nothing had its cost.

– Richard Fernandez, The Belmont Club

Jeromy Johnson, author of A Mending Shift, is seeking photos of pastors who have left “the ministry” (a distinction I appreciate very much) as part of a coming to terms with some stark facts:

Over 1,700 pastors left the ministry every month last year.

Over 20,000 pastors left the ministry last year.

In order to help place a “face” to this staggering problem, we have a simple request:

• If you are a paid pastor or full-time church minister who has left the church ministry, please send a photo of yourself (name can be withheld). If you’d like, you can also send your story of leaving.
• If you know a paid pastor or full-time church minister who has left the church ministry, please have them send a photo or ask their permission to send their photo.

Our goal is to collect 1,000 photos (or 5%) of actual pastors humans who have left paid full-time church ministry. But we can’t do this alone…we need your help in getting the word out.

So, if you blog, twitter, or facebook, or have other networks, please get the word out to your network for paid pastors or full-time church ministers who have left the church ministry to send a photo. Feel free to copy all or part of this post.

Our purpose is to create a collage using multimedia to help put a “face” to the staggering problem. Speaking as one of the 20,000 a year who leave ministry, out of respect and protection, all photos and stories will remain nameless.

Can you help?

Photos can be emailed to Jeromy or Jonathan. We have also set up a facebook group where you can upload the photos directly. Here is the group URL once you log into facebook: http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=58564093110 or simply search for the Faces of Pastors Who Have Left “The Ministry” group within facebook.

I’d count myself in that classification were it not that I’ve never served full-time with the exception of my summer internship in 1988.  Unlike many I have known to leave the pastorate after serving full-time, I took the detour right out of the chute coming out of seminary because I knew I wouldn’t survive doing it full-time.  As they say, help the brother out.

AIG CEO Letter to Geithner