An Email Anecdote

As a young minister in Kentucky, I was asked by a funeral director to hold a grave-side service for a homeless man, who had no family or friends. The funeral was to be held at a new cemetery way back in the country, and this man would be the first to be buried there. I was not familiar with the backwoods area, and I soon became lost. Being a typical man, I did not stop to ask for directions I finally arrived an hour late. I saw the backhoe and the open grave, but the hearse was nowhere in sight. The digging crew was eating lunch. I apologized to the workers for my tardiness, and stepped to the side of the open grave. There I saw the vault lid already in place. 

I assured the workers I would not hold them up for long, as I told them that this was the proper thing to do. The workers gathered around the grave and stood silently, as I began to pour out my heart and soul. As I preached about 'looking forward to a brighter tomorrow' and 'the glory that is to come,' the workers began to say 'Amen,' 'Praise the Lord,' and 'Glory!' The fervor of these men truly inspired me. So, I preached and I preached like I had never preached before, all the way from Genesis to Revelations. I finally closed the lengthy service with a prayer, thanked the men, and walked to my car.

As I was opening the door and taking off my coat, I heard one of the workers say to another, 'I ain't NEVER seen nothin' like that before, and I've been puttin' in septic tanks for thirty years!

Church Fair

This past weekend was a busy one church-wise. Saturday there was a "Church Fair" which called for setup on Friday night and was followed by a special bluegrass gospel service on Sunday. 

Setup was a generally good time and gave me a chance to claim some junk before the hardcore bargain hunters arrived the next morning. You can debate the morality of my purchase in relation to my position as Ministerial Intern at the church, but I for one am extremely pleased with the set of margarita glasses I got for the low, low price of only two dollars. To preserve my reputation, however, I told everyone I was going to use them to practice giving communion to my friends and family. There's nothing like a little salt and lime with your blood o' Christ.

The fair itself was little more than a community garage sale that, in the end, amounted to a redistribution of junk between members of the church. Somehow though the selling of this, honestly put, crap, brought in about $1500 dollars for the church. That is pretty amazing. I appreciate it even more as I, being the youngest church member by 20 years and thus the go-to man for lifting anything and everything, personally handled almost every item that was sold and knew its exact "quality" all the better. Luckily there were church mothers there with crazy delicious baked goods to restore my vital energies. 

Sunday's bluegrass gospel sermon was truly a sight to behold. The preacher (also my professor at Harvard) apparently had a grandfather who was a southern baptist minister in Louisiana so was able to bust out a twangy sermon full of the AMENs and HALLELUJAHs one would hope for. He even went so far as to describe Jesus as a guy who "knew when to hold 'em and when to fold 'em." 

This is my kind of church. 

The Whacky Bible

While I knew that the bible was a work heavily edited while handed down over the years, I was not aware of both the historical and editorial extent to which it has been altered. i thought the whole interpretation and editing thing was a post- Jesus phenomenon. It was not.

Did you know that the Old Testament as we know it is actually the synthesis of about four separate documents that were oftentimes contradictory to one another? I sure as hell didn't. But it's pretty wild. 

For example, the editor (or more technically, the redactor), had two conflicting (at least for modern readers) accounts of the creation story. Rather than combining them, the dude just lays them out one after another in Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. However, for the flood story, he divides up two separate, conflicting accounts, and then mixes them together to make a single, cohesive story. Then elsewhere, he takes two versions of the same story and presents them as separate events, like the story of Mo-dawg (known as Moses in some circles) getting water from the rock (Exodus 17 and Numbers 20). Whoa.

And to blow little Tommy's mind even further, it turns out that the whole Christian conception of God as "master of the universe who at the same time is intimately concerned with the individual" does not rise out of a single community's encounter with God, but is rather due to this redactor guy's parsing job. One Jewish community understood God as a distant, cosmic, lawgiver while another community thought of God as being an up-close-and-personal kind of deity. Basically what happened was the redactor said, "Sweet" (that is a direct translation from the Dead Sea Scrolls) and combined the two views into the notion of God we hold at present. Whoa.

So then, one might ask, what does it mean to be authentically Christian in the face of learning that all the "knowledge" we have have about God handed down to us through our "sacred"scripture is largely the result of editorial decisions?

That, my friend, is a good question.

Sermon

So the sermon went as well as could be expected. It's really quite a strange thing to be in a room full of up and coming young preachers all nervous about giving their sermon. There was a lot left to be desired in the execution of my own, but I hope I can work on it to use it later on. Though I may regret doing it, here is the text from which I spoke:

 Low Interest, No Interest

I want to enter today’s text by way of an experience that most of us have probably had. So the other day I went to the Coop in Harvard Square. You know, I had some overpriced books to get for class. I find my books, grudgingly pull out my wallet, hand over debit card, and visualize my dollar bills evaporating by the second. Anyhow, I have my books in hand and am on my way home and on my way I pass a guy sitting on the ground with a cup in front of him asking for change. He’s obviously poor, in need of shower, food, and a lot of other things. And I am walking by and I think to myself, “Psshh. Dude, I can’t afford to you any money. You know how many loans I have to pay off.”

You see, it wasn’t so long ago I got out of undergrad.  $39,000 dollars a year. Before I even got to Harvard my brain was already worth $156,000 dollars, much of that funded by student loans and leaving me sitting on a big fatty pile of debt. This concerns me greatly as I’m told that ministry is not the most lucrative field out there – but I am told that these loans are the lowest interest loans anyone will ever see in the course of their life. I’ll still be paying a good amount when all is said and done, but comparatively speaking, I guess they’re low interest.

Now here’s the ironic part, while I am walking by this guy, moaning about these low interest loans keeping me down, this guy on the road is suffering from a much greater problem, no interest. If we were talking about no interest loans, he wouldn’t be sitting on the cold pavement, he’d be up, clicking his heels and in the Coop with rest of us buying Harvard paraphernalia. It would truly be a beautiful thing. But we are talking about a different kind of no interest. The kind of no interest in which a good probably 500 people walk past this dude during a day, and out of those 500, maybe 2 or 3 people pay him enough notice to give him a dime. They have no interest. He’s been on the street for years now, addicted to drugs, addicted to alcohol, with no access to facilities to help him break this cycle of abuse that is killing him and leaving him destitute on the street. The government has no interest. I am on my way to get a Harvard Divinity School sweatshirt that costs around half a year’s tuition itself and pass by this guy thinking I have no money. I have no interest. We think we suffer from our low interest loan payments; this guy is suffering from a no interest existence.

But today’s text, however, points us in a much different direction than most of us are walking. 
It does not say give alms to beggars.

It does not say to cloth the naked. 
It does not say give food to the hungry. 

This verse differs considerably. Read it with me one more time.
It says, “if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noonday.”

This verse commands us not to spend our money, nor our food, nor any of our other material resources. There is any number of other verses that will direct you as such. Here, however, the prophet Isaiah commands us to something much more. We are not to give just of our money, not just of our food, but here he calls us to give of our of souls… “draw out your souls to the hungry.” We must spend ourselves, our physical, mental, and spiritual energies on those afflicted by the injustices and cold inattention of this world.

         In other words, we are called to be a high interest people. We are told we should have our interests so highly staked in the downtrodden of this world that we can be said to be drawing out our souls. Now here is where the metaphor gets really good because I know that there is someone saying “With all this drawing out of my soul, the credit line of my heart will be tapped about a week’s time.” Now take a look down at verse 11 it says: and the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not.” What Isaiah is saying here is that when you give of your soul with such generosity and good will, with such interest, when you invest in those lower down on the economic and social ladder than yourself, God will keep your dividends coming. God’s economy of love operates on a philosophy much different than our current failing capitalist economy. It’s not a plus minus proposition. If you expend love on the afflicted it does not mean you will have less love or energy to expend elsewhere, rather, through God we have an infinite surplus of love. God throws our sense of economy on its head, proclaiming that the more you give, the higher your interest, the more you will have to give.

What does this mean for you as you walk down Mass Ave? Well, you do have loan payments and may be living off of pinto beans and rice and may not actually have a lot of money to spare. Instead I ask you, as you go on in whatever form of ministry you choose, be it in a parish, NGO, or branch of the government, to spend yourselves, to draw out yourself to those in need. We don’t need people to just give dimes to those in need, we need people to draft laws, head institutions, create programs, and increase interest in the have-nots of this world. That is to say, we need people willing to change ours into a high interest society… for ours is a high interest God.

 

First Sermon @ Haavaad

Tomorrow I will be giving my first sermon as a Harvard Divinity School student. It's for my "Preaching for Social Change" class and has to be a social gospel sermon. The social gospel, for those of you who like me before last week have never heard of it before, was an intellectual movement in the Protestant Church in the early 20th century which emphasized social salvation over personal faith. That is to say, one can sequester oneself away and pray all the live long day but it doesn't do a bit of good unless one goes out and does something with that faith to combat social ills like poverty. It's really good stuff.

Anyhow, I will be preaching Isaiah 58:9b-11 from the King James version which reads: 

9b If though take away from the midst of thee the yoke, the putting forth of the finger, and speaking vanity; 10 And if thou draw out thy soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul; then shall thy light rise in obscurity, and thy darkness be as the noon day; 11 And the LORD shall guide thee continually, and satisfy thy soul in drought, and make fat thy bones: and thou shalt be like a watered garden, and like a spring of water, whose waters fail not."

I thought these verses were interesting in that they don't say to feed the hungry or cloth the naked or anything of the like. I find the whole "give thy soul" concept fascinating. Let's just hope the prof finds it equally as intriguing. 

Achoo!

You know you're in seminary when...

...you sneeze in class and every person in the room, including the prof, responds with a "Bless you." 

This is a true story.

Thank you for listening.

Internship

After a couple frustrating weeks of phone calls, interviews, and impatient waiting, I finally found a spot to do my field education placement at! From this past Sunday on, I am the official Pastoral Intern at the North Prospect Union UCC in Medford, MA. The church has about a 70 member congregation and is located a quick 10 minute train and 20 minute walk from my apartment.

At this point, you, being a person not of the cloth (does that make you naked?), may be wondering what exactly it is that a Pastoral Intern does.

Well you see my bare-bottomed friend, in the position of Pastoral Intern one simply interns pastorally. That is, he partakes of all things all things pastoral/ministerial in nature. So, during the course of any week I may be preaching, leading worship services, assisting with communion (in a capacity other than finishing off the leftover Blood of Christ mind you),  organizing bible studies, helping set up for church events, making pastoral visits to hospitals and retirement homes, or even giving children's sermons (in some circles known as contributing to the delinquency of minors). 

Basically, I will get a crack at all aspects of being a minister with the exception that I don't get to wear one of those fancy collar things :( Despite that sad fact, the people at the church seem friendly and have been gracious about having a large-schnozed young minister-wannabe in their midst.