Reluctant Obedience

There is a courage born of faith that is irrational, world-changing, unfathomable, and rare enough to stand out in the sea of going along to get along and looking out for number one. But how does such courage happen? I want to start by looking at what would appear to be its opposite, but rather is often its beginning: reluctant obedience.

While Abraham, nee Abram, was not particularly a pinnacle of morality, his obedience to God’s call was immediate.

Now the LORD said to Abram, "Go from your country and your kindred and your father's house to the land that I will show you. And I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you, and make your name great, so that you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and him who curses you I will curse; and by you all the families of the earth shall bless themselves." So Abram went, as the LORD had told him; and Lot went with him.
Abram was seventy-five years old when he departed from Haran. (Genesis 12:1-4, RSV)

Abraham would have many faults, but one cannot say his obedience was reluctant.

What about Isaiah and Jeremiah and Jonah?

Isaiah is famous for many things: the readings of Advent and Lent, called by some “the Gospel of the Old Testament,” speaking peace to Jerusalem, being the best known of the prophets by the Christian church, perhaps as much for the song “Here I Am, Lord,” as for anything actually written.

When Isaiah receives his calling to be a prophet in the vision of the throne of God, he is struck by an immense dread (which may be as outdated a word as awe, but it is still a good one, and we ought to remember it).

He cries out:

“Woe is me! For I am lost; for I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!"

What happens next brings us to that famous agreement to go forth as a prophet:

Then flew one of the seraphim to me, having in his hand a burning coal which he had taken with tongs from the altar. And he touched my mouth, and said: "Behold, this has touched your lips; your guilt is taken away, and your sin forgiven." And I heard the voice of the Lord saying, "Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?"

Then I said, "Here am I! Send me." (Isaiah 6:5-8, RSV)

Then there is Jeremiah.

First the Lord says,

"Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations."

But Jeremiah, like Isaiah, is reluctant.

Then I said, "Ah, Lord GOD! Behold, I do not know how to speak, for I am only a youth."

Isaiah’s concern about not being good enough is echoed by Jeremiah’s fear of not being mature enough.

But the LORD said to me, "Do not say, `I am only a youth'; for to all to whom I send you you shall go, and whatever I command you you shall speak. Be not afraid of them, for I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD."
Then the LORD put forth his hand and touched my mouth; and the LORD said to me, "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant." (Jeremiah 1:5-10, RSV)

Finally there is Jonah, of a much smaller book, but far more reluctant than either of our other examples. Jonah is called and sent, but will not go. It takes fish-belly time before he actually goes to his work. However, not even successfully preaching and seeing Nineveh repent removes Jonah’s reticence.

The difference between Isaiah and Jeremiah on the one hand, and Jonah on the other, is not whether they go and do what god has called them to do. However reluctant they have been, they have each done as God commanded. But where Jeremiah and Isaiah each protested their calling, Jonah ran from his. In Jeremiah and Isaiah’s protests, they are touched by the divine and they become the prophets they are called to be. Even in this becoming, there are differences. Isaiah proclaims, “Here I am, send me!” Jeremiah laments “there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”

So there is no formula for obedience, reluctant or otherwise. There is, however, an interesting set of examples. We have Jonah, who is reluctant to the end, even to the point of lamenting his success. Isaiah and Jeremiah, whose experiences are both different and yet reminiscent of the other, each protest their calling and in that protest, in their vocal reluctance, there comes a moment of blessing, of burning away the barrier, of making it possible to see a way through.

So when we are reluctant about obedience in general, or more likely in the particulars, rather than running away, or silently lamenting our lot, we find that arguing with God can be far more productive. It may even be a prophetic form of prayer.

Unmetered Worship

In the great debates over worship, the words "contemporary" and "praise" get used so often, we may well forget that when Luther wrote it, "A Mighty Fortress is Our God" was contemporary, and full of praise.

When I ask people what contemporary and praise mean in reference to music during worship, I receive answers running the gamut from uplifting, face-paced, and lively to simplistic, dumbed-down and shallow. My mother responded, "I guess it means that there are drums." As good a summation as any.

It occurred to me that most hymnals have a few indexes in the back, used only by those who pick hymns for worship. One of these little known resources is an index of meters for the tunes. There is a great and long-lived tradition of hymns being metered poetry set to music.

You remember metered poetry, don't you? It was the iambic pentameter that bored you to tears while studying Shakespeare. It is also the reason that most all of Emily Dickinson's poetry can be sung to "The Yellow Rose of Texas," and "Amazing Grace" can be sung to such tunes as House of the Rising Sun, Gilligan's Island, and Hernando's Hideaway. They share the same meter, and so they will fit the same tunes.

Protestant hymnody has developed such a library of metered hymns that those in the know can speak of Finlandia, Ash Grove, and Cwm Rhondda and know that these are not locations (as the names might suggest) but are rather the tunes we usually sing "Be Still My Soul," "Let All Things Now Living," and "God of Grace and God of Glory."

Other tune names derive from Latin texts from which they were translated, or they are named after the composer's favorite musician, or even after the psalm that was originally sung to the tune.

In the index of meters, we find such arcana as S.M., C.M., L.M, perhaps with a D. or a Ref, or a string of numbers. These are short-hand for Short Meter, Common Meter, Long Meter, perhaps Doubled, so the meter in question is repeated, or with a Refrain.

Of course there have always been songs listed as Irr. Pushed to the back of the index, if they are listed at all, these are the Irregulars. Some of them are well loved and oft-sung, such as "Adeste Fidelis," the tune of O Come All Ye Faithful. But they don't fit the metered poetry of proper hymnody. The name lets us know what is normal and what isn't.

Along come the guitar masses of the Roman Catholic 60's and 70's, the introduction in Protestant churches of such (then favorites, now unfortunately somewhat passe) songs as Morning Has Broken and Lord of the Dance, the second adapted from the Shaker Tune "Simple Gifts." Meter was replaced for the sake of singability and a new sensibility.

More recently came pop inspired music that followed the influences of the radio more than the chancel and the modern revival concert more than the staid and stolid sanctuary.

We still haven't found a good definition for contemporary or praise music or worship. Perhaps it simply means that both the liturgy and the music are unmetered.

So what will we do when the tunes and the worship become unmetered? How do we start to learn a new set of rhythms, a new set of music, a new way of doing things which are so different than all that we have trained so long to do?

Two answers.

1. The new stuff can be awfully fun.

2. With God, all things are possible.

Narrative and Defragmentation

At the end of the first week of my sabbatical, I attended the General Synod of the United Church of Christ, the biennial gathering of delegates and visitors from the whole of the denomination, as well as guests from others. There were plenary sessions, amazing worship, as well as speakers and workshops and, of course, cookies.

Barbara Brown Taylor, one of our nation's most notable preachers and an Episcopal priest who now teaches at a small college in Georgia, spoke on "The Fate of Narrative in the Age of Twitter." No surprise, it was engaging, evocative, and thought-provoking. She listed three basic rules (from among a much longer list) regarding what stories she will allow to shape or influence her story, her narrative, her life.

1. Any story which she would allow to influence her story must honor and defend people not like her.

2. Any story which she will take to help make her story must allow her to argue with it. Those with prepackaged answers allowing for no deviation are unworthy of the task.

3. Any story worth being a part of her own story must level with her about the cost of love. It is not allowed to lie to her about the messiness of life.

As she related her take on narrative and the life-changing, life-giving and life-saving potential of narrative, including and especially Biblical narratives, she also related her forays into the world of e-mail, text, social networking and other new technologies. Through discussions with her students, she discovered the powerful connections they maintained with friends and loved ones through their cellphones. She soon discovered, whether a product of such technologies or her own "adult ADD," that so many technologies resulted in feeling personally fragmented, in addition to whatever benefit the connections provided.

As I was listening and taking notes, I jotted down in the margin of my paper, "Sabbath = defragmenting." If you are reading a blog, then you probably need no definition for defragmentation. It has come into our vocabulary through the ubiquitousness of the computer. We store our little bits of data, little parts of our programs, little pieces of our stories and our selves all over the place, and fairly soon we cannot retrieve all of them easily. Defragmenting is the computer's way of rightly ordering all of those bits, putting together those things which ought to be together, and gathering up the scattered.

Sabbath, resting, taking time apart from production and consumption, focusing on God, "sitting at the feet of the Lord like a cabbage" (as Julien of Norwich is credited as saying), playing, re-creating, these are ways of drawing the scattered and fragmented parts of ourselves back into who we are, so that we might be once again whole, and wholy present.

I then wrote the letters, "WCS" and an arrow to the words "Sabbath = Defragmenting." WCS is my own shorthand for "World Communion Sunday." Not that we need to, or can afford to, wait until the first Sunday in October to defrag ourselves, or even that communion is necessary for it to happen. But I will be back in the pulpit then, and one can never start too soon on a sermon idea.

Withdrawal

So I am two days into a 90 day sabbatical from ministry, and I am experiencing withdrawal. So far I have missed a building committee meeting, a clergy support group, a Rotary meeting and a Bible study. I don't know how many fire calls may have happened, because I turned off the pager.

I can tell it is withdrawal because I know exactly how many things I have missed, and I miss them.

I am still in that part of the journey where I am looking backwards, which is very different than looking forward or being centered where I am.

I suppose this is a part of the process.

My Brain is Full. So is My Heart.

So Monday and Tuesday, I spent 16 hours in a classroom with 30 other fire chaplains, trying to figure out what it means to be a fire chaplain.

So at the end of two days I have a new training manual, a new certificate (for the sake of those who thought I was certifiable, now I have a certificate!), and a brain full of stuff that will only start to make sense as I put it to use on scene.

One of the things I learned is that I am not the only one who feels overwhelmed by the calling to chaplaincy. There were 31 learners in that room, all of whom had some level of experience in ministry (some with much, much more than me), all of whom faced the uncertainty of the pager, the difficulties faced by those in the fire service, and the power of a calling.

The first lesson they started teaching us was that in order to be a chaplain one must have the heart of a servant.

The next lesson was the three qualities required for chaplaincy: kindness, compassion and forgiveness.

What amazes me is that the first lessons were not about techniques or protocols or theories of chaplaincy, but qualities and callings.

What amazes me is that the qualities of a chaplain are in fact the qualities Jesus asked (asks) of each of his followers: to have the heart of a servant; to practice kindness, compassion, and forgiveness.

Travelin' Mercies

Tomorrow and the next day, I have 16 hours of chaplain training with the Federation of Fire Chaplains just outside of Indianapolis.

(I keep wondering when I will get over the feeling of "wow, this time last year, I didn't even know this existed.)

So I drove down to Indy on Friday, where I am staying with my wife's sister and her husband.

(Since I started with the parenthetical commentary, might as well continue. I married the sister of a college friend. This friend had herself married another good friend from college. So my in-laws are a class reunion of sorts. As Ms. Stewart would say, it's a good thing.)

On my way down here, I stopped in Ft. Wayne to get gas and a refill on the caffeine. After pumping the gas, I turned the key, and the starter did its thing, but the engine did not follow suit. Crank, crank, crank, nothing. So I called the Mrs., who is still up in Michigan, she gets me some pertinent numbers, and I called for help.

In the meantime, I am busy praying for some help, because I am stuck halfway between home and where I am headed, and this training isn't happening in a reasonable driving range again anytime soon.

The short version of the story is that the crankshaft sensor on the car was bad. Which means the timing on the valves and the pistons was off a bit, so that is why the mileage was down and the car was a little rough lately. When it gets bad enough and the engine is hot, the car shuts off so as not to damage the engine. It could have happened while driving, apparently. So being in a gas station was not a bad place to be. After it cooled off, I could start the car and get to the local dealership.

The cool thing about this story is trying to jump start the car before I knew what was wrong. I looked around for someone who might have a set of jumper cables. Lots of commuter types were pulling in and out of the station. But one gentleman caught my eye. He was a bit older than me, driving a pick-up truck, wearing a well-weathered "First Armored Division" shirt, and pumping gas into a plastic gas can. I went up and asked if he had jumper cables. He did, and pulled around to my car and we tried those.

As the cables were not working (because that wasn't the problem), another guy, younger, African American, and with an accent I couldn't place (it might have been Caribbean, might have been African), drove up with a jumpstart pack and offered it for my use.

I had two good Samaritans who helped me out. Unfortunately, I didn't know what the real problem was, so I was asking for help with stuff that had little to no effect. I still had to get to the dealership and still had to write a check much bigger than I had wanted to. But in the midst of economic downturns and all sorts of other troubles, two people were more than willing to help a stranger who was stuck halfway to where he was headed.

God is good. As are lots of people.

To Blog or not to blog....

So several readers have gently nudged me with the question, "When are you going to post to your blog again?"

I have been thinking about starting a second blog, so there is one for chaplaincy and one for ministry. But if I can't get around to blogging on one, I have no business starting up a second one.

I was going to name it something like "Signal 7," which is the old radio code for "Return to Station" in our department. I liked it. It had something to do with everybody getting back from the scene safely, and it is often after we return to the station, after the accident or fire or medical call is over that I am chaplain to the fire fighters. But there is a band and a media company and a movie by that name, so it was already taken on blogspot. And if I am having trouble keeping up with one, I certainly don't need more than one server.

So instead, I am going to keep on plugging away at this one, combining local church ministry, chaplaincy, and other observations.

And I might get around to actually posting more often one of these days.