BRAIN-ZAP ME, JESUS

“So why doesn’t God just zap people’s brains, anyway?” asked an old friend seeking advice on how to deal with a stubborn spouse. She’d prayed and prayed that God would zap her husband’s brain so he would be easier to deal with. Now she couldn’t figure out why her prayers for this instantaneous personality transplant were going unanswered. She’d asked politely, and repeatedly, as the Bible tells us to do. So why wasn’t her husband suddenly attentive and considerate?

You can figure out why, right? What if God ever answered such a prayer, even once, for anybody? What if we could change other people’s personalities just by asking God nicely to do so? That would lead to a much more entertaining world to say the least. Most of us—okay, all of us—would probably change personalities two or three times before breakfast every day. Who would want to live in a world like that? Asking for an immediate change in someone else’s nature is one of those prayers which is best left unanswered, because chaos would result from any of us humans thinking we had that sort of power to change others on a whim.

Not that there aren’t times when such personality transplants would be useful, of course. But hidden behind my friend’s request is the reality of why we would ever ask for such a thing in the first place. Recall that she wanted him to change so that he would be easier to deal with. I’m sure she was sincere in her desire. But her concern was not for him—it was for herself.

So it’s even easier to see why God kept saying “no” to her request. It was selfish. Married people are supposed to want what’s best for each other, not for themselves. Marriage turns the ‘m’ in ‘me’ upside down and makes it ‘we.’ Or at least that’s what is supposed to happen.

Of course, it isn’t only married couples who seek to zap each other’s brains. If you had the power to warp somebody’s mind, who would you go after? Your boss? Your neighbor? Elected officials? Talk-radio hosts? Hollywood moguls?

Listen: it’s the easiest thing in the world to think that all your problems will go away and the world will be a better place if God just mind-blasts somebody else. It takes far more courage and humility to admit that you’re the one who needs to be washed clean. But whose prayer is more likely to be answered: the one who asks, “Lord, change them and make them more like me” or the one who asks, “Lord, change me and make me more like you”?

Do you really need me to answer that?

HAIL, INCARNATE ADEQUACY

There’s nothing quite like spending six hours in a Taurus with three small children who don’t want to be there, but that’s how I spent my Saturday afternoon. The Director of Operations was holding the wheel, which meant that she had full control of the stereo. She likes to listen to Christian music on the radio because of the positive lyrics . . . but when the signal peters out, she switches over to top-40 country. She’s in love with all those dead-grandparent/new-baby songs, even though they only make up about 15% of what’s on top-40 country radio these days.

For some reason the Christian radio signals were extra-strong this weekend, so I got six hours to listen to Christian music in between 90-decibel crying jags from the back seat. And I feel, more than ever, that Christian songwriters need to admit defeat and start working with lyricists. The state of Christian lyrics is simply dreadful.

Lots of things are “worthy to be praised”–certainly Jesus is, but so is the Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act. For that matter, the Double Deluxe at Culver’s is also deserving of praise. Whoever invented instant powdered infant formula–you, too, are “worthy of praise.” Get the point? Even if the whole concept of “worthiness” is all over the book of Revelation, making “worthiness” the main thing you’re going to say about Jesus is like saying he probably wasn’t shorter than average. It’s a pretty minimal distinguishing characteristic.

Yet there it is, over and over. How many Christian songs don’t include this cliché?

Does anybody in Christian music read any parts of the Bible besides Revelation and the Psalms? Where’s the great music coming out of Lamentations or Ecclesiastes? Or even First John? Is no one inspired by anything other than the Rapture these days? Because, listening to Christian radio, it certainly seems like we’re all just biding time until the Second Coming.

While I’m no traditionalist, it irks me to see a blizzard of substandard, uninspired and uninspiring music drowning out the great wealth of traditional hymns, songs which have something to say besides “Jesus? Yeah, he’s pretty good.” There have been a lot of good praise and worship songs written in the last quarter century that I’ve grown to love–”Shine, Jesus, Shine,” “Lord, I Lift Your Name On High,” and “He Is Exalted” to name just three. But to me they’re just appetizers. They whet my appetite to learn more, to know more, to say more about my faith.

Some people can make a meal out of appetizers. Bully for them. We know in the long run such a diet will leave you overfed and undernourished.

THE NEVER-ENDING MENU

I spent a while trying to read The Cheesecake Factory’s menu today. I’d always heard of its wonder, how whatever it is you want, they probably have it or something close to it. And clearly, they’re doing something right; the restaurant in Milwaukee is always busy and there’s usually a line going out the door.

You’ve got to figure the food is decent if people are willing to stand outside in Milwaukee in the dead of winter for it.

I don’t think, however, that we’ll be visiting there any time soon. First of all, I doubt I can afford four meals there right now. Second of all, while the menu is wonderful, I cannot even fathom how long it would take us all to figure out what we wanted. If we got there early for lunch, we might have it all figured out in time for a late dinner.

You can’t really blame The Cheesecake Factory for its Everlasting Gobstopper of a menu. There’s a certain value in throwing out a broad net. If nothing else, it makes you a good last resort for indecisive groups:”Let’s just go to The Cheesecake Factory; if you can’t find something you want there, you’re probably not hungry anyway.”

The real problem, though, is lurking in the shadows. How do you even start to choose when you can choose from anything? If there’s been a theme to my academic and spiritual life, that’s it. Life is a menu, and the waiter wants your order, so decide.

When I was in high school, I couldn’t figure out which way to go with my life. I knew I was bound for college and not the military or the job market, but that’s where the clarity ended. So I used to ask people what they thought I should do with my life. And I always got the same answer, more or less: “You should do whatever you want to do. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything!”

I go looking for advice, I get the Cliffs Notes version of “Up With People.” Thanks. I knew I could do whatever I wanted; the problem was, I didn’t know what I wanted. I wasn’t looking for someone to make the decision for me; I just wanted some opinions. Maybe somebody saw something in me that I hadn’t yet seen in myself. That’s what I wanted to know.

Nobody can make that sort of decision for you, any more than somebody can tell you what you want for dinner. And I was fortunate in that my parents would’ve been just as happy with me if I’d become a plumber as they were that I became a pastor. So long as I really wanted to be a plumber, that is.

But again: How do you choose when you can choose from anything?

Choice is good, but too much choice can be paralyzing. Too much choice leads to that downward spiral of analysis, overanalysis, information fatigue, and resignation. First you lose your desire to choose; then you lose your ability to choose; finally, you lose the possibility of choice and things are just chosen for you. Instead of engaging your life, your career, your family, or whatever, you wind up just letting things happen to you. At least that way, you don’t have to make a choice. But you never realize that you don’t get to make a choice, either.

In our post-modernist times (assuming we still live in them), ruling out possible choices has become a lost art. Nobody wants to close the door on anything. We don’t understand the reality of the opportunity cost involved in making decisions: If you pick the Southwest Pizza Fingers for your entree, you give up the chance to have the Cajun Stir-Fried Meatballs; if you spend four years of college studying video-game design, you won’t learn much about Keats or Wittgenstein or how to grow dahlias in a greenhouse. And vice versa, of course. You may hate this reality, but you can’t get around it.

Not that we don’t try to get around it, of course. Some people are like me: they look at the menu and try to figure out what gives them the most. The most what? Doesn’t matter! I just want muchness. Others will try to string four or five side dishes together into a meal of some sort, even though they wind up without a theme or a central defining work. Still more will simply refuse to decide in the hopes that later on they can go somewhere else where the possiblities are more enticing. (These last are the ones who wind up on the couch late at night, eating Raisin Bran straight from the box, deeply peeved that they never got their dinner.)

Blessed, however, is the one who can find one good thing–and then chooses it. They’re like the one person at every table who gets what everybody else wishes they had ordered. Bill Simmons has noted this phenomenon with regards to the reuben sandwich: you never think of ordering it yourself, but when it comes to the table, you always wish you had.

Sometimes we don’t make choices because they’re too obvious. Sometimes we don’t choose certain things because we feel they limit us too much. Sometimes we turn our back on some life choices because we feel like what we really want isn’t good enough for us; we should want more, even if we really don’t want more.

I read in a book once (I think it was this one) about a TV talk show where a diet expert put a lavish buffet out in front of the host and asked him to close his eyes, pick the one food that would satisfy him the most, and then eat it. The host was allowed as much time as he needed to make his choice. He closed his eyes for a couple minutes, then walked over to the buffet and made himself a roast-beef sandwich with mustard and mayo. The diet expert asked him if he really wanted more food, or if he was satisfied with what he had chosen. The host admitted that he was.

This doesn’t just work with food, although it does work beautifully with the buffet/overindulgence problem. It actually works with any choice you have to make, or at least it always has for me. When I couldn’t decide whether I was going to seminary or going after a PhD, I closed my eyes and wondered if I’d regret not making one choice more than I’d regret not making the other. I found that I would. That’s how I wound up at seminary–not because some flaming plant started talking to me, not because some giant fish puked me up at the corner of Como and Hendon in St. Paul, but because I knew if I didn’t try seminary first, I’d always wonder what life would have been like if I had. I could not see myself wondering the same thing about getting a PhD. (True to form, I’ve pretty much concluded now that I don’t really want one.)

Clarity does not come from looking at all possible choices equally. Satisfaction doesn’t come from keeping your options open as long as possible. Clarity and satisfaction come from realizing that the most important thing about any choice you make is that it has to be yours. Nobody else is going to eat your dinner. Nobody else is going to make your car payment for the next five years. Nobody else is going to be married to your spouse (at least not at the same time you are).

Nobody else is going to live your life for you. There are people who will be glad to make decisions for you–but they never have your best interest at heart.

And now, after all this time, I realize why nobody could or would answer my question for me back in high school. They did see something in me that I never saw in myself: They saw that I’d already made my decision; I just didn’t realize it yet. There’s more to that story, of course.

(Oh, and if you must know: Jamaican Black Pepper Shrimp.)

MULTIBLOGGING

I’ve spun off. I’ve created a separate blog, Coram Deo, to hold all my faith-related writings. Not every TBP reader is interested in my writings about matters of faith, while not everybody who would be interested in, say, an overview of Lutheran confessional orthodoxy wants to read Pickin’ On The Big Ten. (Yeah, I know; some of you are interested in both.)

Rather than let TBP become even less focused and more disorganized than it already is, I decided to Balkanize myself with a separate blog. If you’re interested, head on over; my first post is a sermon on Isaiah 51:1-6.

IN A GLASS, DARKLY

Now that we’ve got the facts out of the way, let me add my opinion here.

I feel that the assembly made the correct decision on all three recommendations. #1 was a “kiss your sister” non-aggression pact, while #2 had the full, continued support of our Conference of Bishops, who felt that it was not in the best interest of church unity to take an aggressive tack when sailing into these waters.

The third recommendation could’ve been seen coming from miles off. We ELCA Lutherans have recently been through an absolute catfight regarding our church’s relationship with the Episcopal Church of the USA. Many ELCA Lutherans (including this one) had big trouble with the terms of our clergy-sharing agreement with ECUSA, which required that future ELCA pastors would be ordained only by bishops (former practice allowed for any pastor to ordain upon approval of the appropriate authorities), and more specifically, required that all future ELCA pastors be absorbed into the ECUSA’s historic episcopate. Those in opposition to this practice won a major concession, by getting rules which permitted for “conscientious objectors” to be ordained outside that episcopate.

This was a more radical move than many people realized. Though these “irregular” ordinations are somewhat rare, the possibility of them represents a major shift away from centralized denominational authority and towards a more congregational polity. While the bishops of our synods still decide how ordinands get ordained, the mere fact that an individual can attempt to move outside the church’s standards is a shift of power, and probably made recommendation #3 inevitable. (In my most cynical moments, I think of it as an attempted quid pro quo, since many–but not all–of those who opposed the historic episcopate also opposed changing ordination standards with regards to sexuality. “If you get your exceptions, we get ours,” in other words. But that would require me to think that the task force was stacked, and I don’t think it was. We’ve been down a similar road once before, and all it got us was a bunch of bad publicity.)

But there is a difference of kind involved in the two decisions, just as there is a difference in kind between the question of whether to ordain women (which we and our predecessor churches have done since 1970) and whether to ordain non-celibate homosexuals. And yet, in the good Lutheran tradition of paradox, there also isn’t a difference.

There is a difference in that there is no place in the Bible where it can be claimed that it is a sin to be a practicing woman. (Many of the early church fathers probably wished there was, but there isn’t. The Gospel of Thomas doesn’t count.) Likewise, there’s nothing which conclusively states that being ordained outside the historic episcopate is or ever has been regarded as sin. But there are Biblical texts which deal with homosexuality. (Well, it seems there’s only one which deals with female homosexuality, but we’ll get to that later.)

I must note that there are passages which state that women are to keep silent in church and are not to be permitted to have authority over men. The ELCA has opted to hear these passages as being Paul’s instructions for churches in a different time and culture. This leaves us open to the charge that we do not consider all Scripture to be inerrant and infallible; it is well to note that the ELCA makes no such claim.

The claim that same-sex unions can be blessed and persons involved in those unions ought to be eligible for ordination depends heavily upon finding a way around those troublesome passages. Two passages in the Levitical Holiness Code (Lev. 18:22 and 20:13) can be dealt with (theoretically) by noting that Christians, for the most part, do not observe this code. We eat shellfish, we wear poly/cotton shirts, and we are allowed to use flush toilets during time of war, for instance. The dietary restrictions are dealt with somewhat in Acts 4:11-18, in which God appears to Peter in a dream and tells him that these restrictions have been lifted. Many Christians have interpreted this to mean that the entire Holiness Code has been lifted, a claim which is not made by the text. So, in theory, a Christian can eat pork and still be regarded as a Biblical literalist, at least as long as he or she is not wearing a polyester/cotton shirt (viz. Lev. 19:19).

Paul’s letters, however, contain more passages which seem to suggest that homosexual activity disqualifies a person from being part of the Christian community, let alone being ordained. Romans 1:26-27, in the midst of a list of strange doings among Rome’s gentile community, discusses the issue by casting homosexual activity in a negative light, strongly implying that both male and female homosexuality is antithetical to the very concept of Christian sexual ethics.

Two words create considerable difficulty with regards to male homosexuality. They are the Greek words malakoi and arsenokoitai. The former is most literally rendered “the soft ones” and the latter “those who go to bed with men.” The problem is that malakoi doesn’t occur anywhere in the New Testament outside of Romans, while arsenokoitai occurs again in 1 Timothy (another discussion about sexual practices and church bondaries) but nowhere else in the New Testament–or, apparently, anywhere else in antiquity. This makes pinning down the precise meanings of these two terms, with any and all possible nuances, exceedingly difficult. (Aristotle used malakoi in reference to those who were morally weak, which doesn’t seem to help us much here. Romans 1:27 would be a strange place for Paul to add an aside about general moral weakness, however.) It would have been better for our purposes here for Paul to avoid using what seem to be euphemistic terms, but we have what we have.

The picture is somewhat less clear regarding female homosexuality, if you can believe that. Paul merely talks about women who have exchanged what is natural for what is against nature (para physein), and it is only by context that you can guess that he is discussing sexual behavior. Moreover, this is the only passage in all of Scripture which directly addresses the question of female homosexuality.

The seeming ambiguity of these terms has opened the door to a variety of interpretations. Many have come to the conclusion that Paul was condemning male prostitution; others have said that the real problem was pederasty. (The preceding link goes to a Wikipedia article which contains some graphic text and images. Consider yourself warned.) No scholars seem to state definitively if Paul’s comments on female homosexuality refer to prostitution, or some little-known analogue to pederasty, or something else.

The problem here, as I see it, is the desire to substitute a highly nuanced interpretation for the plain, facial meaning of these terms. Paul was not really one to mince words, as anybody who’s read Galatians in the original Greek can tell you. To claim that words and phrases like para physein, malakoi, and arsenokoitai mean something other than what they appear to mean on first glance is an extraordinary claim. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and I do not think such proof has been shown by those advancing the cause of ordaining homosexuals. Nor do I think it ever can be, unless some antiquarian finds a manuscript which shows that all these terms had specific non-facial meanings which were well-known in Paul’s times and places. In the absence of compelling proof that Paul meant something other than what it appears he said, the only wise interpretation is the most conservative one.

And this is why I feel there isn’t a difference between the question of ordaining non-celibate gays and ordaining women, nor between permitting conscientious objection to the historic episcopate and and permitting such objection to standards of sexual behavior. In the former case, we have Biblical women who were in leadership positions, who were actively involved in the act of proclamation. In the latter, you have the priesthood of Melchizedek, a priesthood which existed outside the Levitical framework. There is no evidence suggesting that the standards of sexual behavior are similarly porous. To misappropriate some Catholic language, even if we can craft an exegetical nihil obstat, we’re still a long way from getting an imprimatur. Thus, the ELCA Churchwide Assembly made the right choice on Recommendation #3.

VALLEY OF DECISION

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has just declined to make any changes in current policies regarding the ordination of non-celibate gays and lesbians. The measure, which required a 2/3rds majority to be approved, failed by a 49%-51% margin. More comment forthcoming.

UPDATE: As promised earlier, here is more on the decision.

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) has, from its 1987 inception, been tormented by issues of human sexuality. Well, okay, that’s overstating it a bit. The ELCA has been tormented by the question of how the church ought to deal with the issue of homosexuality as it relates to society, as it relates to our parishioners, and as it relates to ordination.

The 1999 Churchwide Assembly of the ELCA directed the church’s Division for Church and Society to come up with some recommendations for consideration at this year’s assembly. The Division came up with a document called Journey Together Faithfully which explored (in what I thought was a fairly evenhanded fashion) a variety of opinions related to the question of homosexuality as it relates to Scripture, doctrine, and the life of the church. The task force which crafted this study solicited responses from both individuals and congregations which were then used to help craft the task force’s recommendations for action.

After taking the church’s temperature, the task force found, to the surprise of no one, that there was deep division within our church on this issue, although, overall, most respondents seemed to be in opposition to changing current policies. They came back with a threefold recommendation regarding the issue of homosexuality:

1. Given the deep divisions and high level of emotion involved in the debate, we should pledge ourselves to live in unity, since there are forces right now tending to break the church’s unity.
2. The church should not at this time grant blanket approval to same-sex unions throughout the ELCA, even though some of our 65 synods currently permit this.
3. No changes to our standards for ordination (which state that ordained ministers who are “homosexual in their own self-understanding” should refrain from sexual relationships) should be made, but the church may opt not to discipline those who refuse to comply with these standards and may even allow for an alternate process by which exceptions to those standards could be granted.

The first of these was fairly non-controversial and passed easily, but not unanimously. The second was approved by a 2-1 margin, but a motion to reconsider that decision remains on the floor of the assembly. The third was far and away the most controversial of the recommendations. (It required a two-thirds majority to pass because it amended the church’s bylaws; the other two recommendations required only simple majorities.) Recommendation #3 failed by 49% in favor to 51% opposed. While there were only fourteen votes preventing this recommendation from getting a simple majority, it fell far short of the 66%-plus-one needed for approval.

Caution should be taken in interpreting these numbers. It is possible (though, in my opinion, not likely) that a significant number of those in favor of ordaining non-celibate homosexuals voted ‘no’ on this recommendation because they felt it didn’t go far enough.

Again, more coming later, albeit under a separate post.

(BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM for August 12, 2005)

THE LUTHERAN’S LUTHERAN

I did not need to wake up to this news this morning:

Gerhard Forde, a retired Luther Seminary professor and one of the world’s leading Lutheran theologians, died Tuesday of pneumonia in St. Paul after a lengthy battle with Parkinson’s disease. He was 77.

Forde taught theology at Luther Seminary for more than 30 years before retiring in 1998.

Calling Dr. Forde “one of the world’s leading Lutheran theologians” is sort of like calling New York “a prominent American city.” The man taught me what I know about the theology of the cross, the doctrine of the atonement, justification by grace through faith, sanctification, and just a couple other minor things I use on a daily basis.

Praise God, Dr. Forde left behind a nice pile of books so his teaching will outlive not merely him but also his students. I count myself blessed to be among the latter.

RECEIVE THE BENEDICTION

If you’ve been reading this blog long enough, you know I’m Lutheran, and you would correctly deduce that therefore the election of a new pope is not a tremendously significant event in my life. Like many commentators, I’ve been more amused than bemused at the number of people who seem genuinely shocked that Benedict XVI comes to the papacy with a reputation as a doctrinal conservative, one given to the defense of traditional faith.

Just how, exactly, do you think you get to be pope, anyway? By promising to spit in the holy water? Or by trying to sell the actual Virgin Mary to GoldenPalace.com?

Equally amazing is this breathless missive, in which some surprise is expressed that a 78-year-old man with a history of stroke believes that his life expectancy may be measured in years, not decades. I dunno, seems pretty reasonable to me.

Cardinal Ratzinger may not have been the preferred choice of the punditocracy, and he certainly wasn’t the choice of many American Catholics, because, as one Catholic theology professor put it, ‘Ratzinger is the one who “basically said no” to further discussion of hot-button issues such as the ordination of women, priestly celibacy, birth control and homosexuality.’ There is, of course, no greater sin in the secular/ecumenical world than refusing to discuss these issues, preferrably until one reaches the correct opinions. But even non-ecumenical American Catholics are not thrilled with Ratzinger’s elevation. Heck, almost a decade ago, Andrew Greeley’s novel White Smoke ended with the hateful, putrid Ratzinger caricature losing out to a youngish, progressive Latino cardinal . . . whom I believe chose the name Benedict, though I may be wrong. So it really wasn’t supposed to be like this; with the end of John Paul II’s papacy, the Roman church was supposed to enter a new, more progressive era.

Right concept, wrong direction, and wrong end of the papacy.

In fact, I think John Paul II’s papacy gave tremendous credibility to the notion that Christianity itself is growing more conservative as the distance from both Vatican II and the tremendous societal upheaval of the 1960s increases. JPII’s papacy wasn’t the end of an era, but rather the beginning of one–one in which the Roman church would care less and less about the world’s approval. This change made strange bedfellows of the Roman church and conservative American protestants, as the two groups found they had more in common with each other than either group had with the great mushy middle of American Protestantism and the last twitching remnants of European Christianity. Consequently, it’s fair to say that the social-justice-based ecumenical movement, which has been with us for about fifty years, got completely overshadowed by an ad hoc coalition of disparate religious factions. The Catholics and evangelicals have created more true church unity than the World Council of Churches could ever dream of–this despite the fact that the Catholic/evangelical alliance hasn’t produced any formalized agreements like we mainline Protestants are fond of.

Benedict XVI may, by his own admission, be a transitional pope, a placeholder who keeps the throne of the fisherman warm while the next pope passes through the refiner’s fire. But we need only look to his election, and John Paul II’s papacy, as signs that modernism and postmodernism are both dead within the church. Global Christianity is not behind the times, but rather ahead of them. What is needed now in church leadership is theological clarity, but not merely that; as we are increasingly able to accept that the ages have not been wrong about everything, the quality of continuity becomes more useful. It will not do to question authority just for the purpose of questioning authority. Today’s world has demonstrated that the only people who still say “don’t follow leaders” are the ones who want to lead you themselves.

‘TWAS THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS

So I got home from our candlelight service about quarter to midnight last night. I got ready for bed and I got in. Paula turned to me and said, “Hi, honey, how was worship?” and I said, “Fine, lots of people,” and I started to drift off to sleep. The bed was comfy, toasty warm, and I was nearly on my way to those visions of sugarplums. The alarm was set for 6 AM so I would have plenty of time to get ready and grab a good breakfast before our 9 AM service this morning.

My eyes are closed and I’m drifting in and out of consciousness when, out of nowhere and apropos of nothing, Paula turned to me and said, “Honey?”

And I said, “Yeah?”

And she said,”Did you turn off the space heater in your office?”

Suddenly I wasn’t so tired any more.

So I laid there for a little bit thinking to myself, “Don’t be ridiculous, Mark. Of course you turned off the space heater. You turn it off when you run to Kwik Trip to get a cup of coffee. Why wouldn’t you have turned it off when you were leaving on Christmas Eve?” But if I was so sure I turned it off, why couldn’t I call up the memory of having done so? Still, I had the feeling I was just being neurotic and silly.

Yet my mind’s eye kept seeing the headline in the paper: PASTOR BURNS DOWN OWN CHURCH ON CHRISTMAS EVE.

I knew that if I got up to go check, I wouldn’t get back home until at least 2 AM. That would have left me with just four short hours of sleep before the alarm went off. So there I was, in bed, weighing the options: Sleep like I need to, or burn down the church?

I gotta tell you, sometimes I really hate having a conscience.

I didn’t want to part with my sleep–I was really tired. I finally hit on a compromise: Why not just take a pillow and sleep in your office? After all, I’ve got an alarm clock there and everything. Sure, my office is lacking in amenities, like padded furniture and blankets, but hey, anything that still held out the possibility of a good night’s sleep was OK by me at that point.

So I grabbed my pillow off the bed and got dressed and bundled myself into the car, where there was nothing on the radio but “Holly Jolly Christmas” and “Grandma Got Run Over By A Reindeer.” I drove the half-hour to the church and ran to my office.

Was the space heater turned off?

Would I even be telling you this story if it wasn’t? In fact, it was so cold in my office, there were penguins frolicking under my desk.

I threw my pillow on the floor, pulled my coat around me, and slept as well as a pastor can on Christmas Eve when he’s sleeping on the floor of his semi-heated office, underneath a parka, with his head resting on a pillow propped up by three old textbooks.

So anyway, I hope you’re having a merry Christmas, everybody. I feel pretty confident that most of your Christmas mornings were a little better than mine.

(Gone to play in the Beltway Traffic)

TBP CLASSIC: INCLUSIVE TO THE nTH DEGREE

From October 2000.

Got a funeral tomorrow morning. Nice old man, lived just down the road from St. Peter’s, didn’t really know him at all. I met with the family this morning to soak up some details about his life. We had the usual discussions–what was he really like, would he have wanted a big fuss made over him, what Bible pasages should I use, et cetera. Through the discussion, I determined that the best passage was from John, chapter 14 (”In my Father’s house are many rooms . . .”). I determined this because, basically, there are only four Bible passages ever used in funeral sermons: that one, the one from John 11 where Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead, the 23rd Psalm, and Ecclesiastes 3 (a/k/a the “Turn, Turn, Turn” passage). Sometimes a pastor will slip in something else just to prove that he or she is not a sockpuppet, but 85% of the Christian funerals you attend will have at least one of those four passages read, I guarantee it.

About a year ago I wrote what I thought was a pretty decent funeral sermon on that John 14 passage and what it means to somebody who has endured long suffering. Since then, I’ve subtly reworked it three or four times, altering it just enough so that it’s not quite recognizable. I know, I should start from scratch, but every time I do I just wind up saying the same thing I wrote back then. And, in talking to the funeral directors in town, it turns out that I’m the exception in having three or four basic
funeral sermons. Most of my colleagues down here only have one. And the funeral directors know them by heart.

So, anyway, I actually cooked myself a meal tonight (pot roast, no less; I love food you can throw in a pot and ignore for a few hours) and, after I got the dishes washed, I sat down at the computer and pulled up the John 14 sermon. A little tweak here, a little tuck there, and now we just have to repersonalize it. I hit ‘Replace . . .’ and told the computer to change every “Evelyn” to “Ed”. No problem. But Evelyn was a she and Ed was a he. So I also had to replace every “her” with “him.” I knew I’d have to go in and change a few “him”s to “his”es, but that’s not such a big deal. So, I confidently clicked on “replace all.” Then I started to read the sermon, looking for pronouns to replace. And how did the first line read?

“Brothims and sisters in Christ, grace, mercy and peace from God our Fathim and our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.”

OH FORK RYAN OAT LOAD! Why didn’t I *think* of that? It doesn’t look for the word “her,” it looks for the letters “her” and replaces them. I felt ten different kinds of stupid. Until I got to the passage where I talked about what the Luthiman Church had meant to Ed during his life, that is. Then I thought it was pretty funny.

I’ve always been a bit of a language geek, I guess. One of the funniest things I’ve ever heard was Victor Borge’s “Inflationary Language” where he tells a story but increases all the imbedded numbers by one. So the sentence “I ate a tenderloin with my fork” becomes “I nined an elevenderloin with my fivek.” My favorite part is when the Air Fivce lieutelevenant tells his date, “My darling, you look twoderful threenight.”

That got me to thinking: There’s a big debate in some churches right now about inclusive language–mostly avoiding excessive use of male pronouns. Some pastors I know never use pronouns of any sort to refer to the Holy One. Others try to incorporate more female imagery. I got to thinking, “What would it be like if we switched the genders in every word?”

I’m not sure I’d ever warm to the idea of being a Luthiman pastor. I couldn’t get used to watching Bill Mahim on “Politically Incorrect.” Nor would I ever get used to the idea of chermney sweeps. Herstory would repeat itself. You could tune in the high-numbered TV channels if you wanted to see faith shealing. (Assuming you’re not the sort who girlcotts those channels, that is.) I already call the mailman the personperson. But now, instead of needing a male-to-female adapter for my stereo cables, I’d need a female-to-male adapter. I could probably pick one up the next time I’m in St. Josephine, seeing as how there’s no longer a Radio Shack in Richarddaughter County. That would mean a trip into Misterouri, though. And I’d probably have to put it on my MistressCard. But I could shop for a smen pool while I was down there, maybe even grab a bite at Crackhim Barrel. (The budget would suggest Burger Queen, Taco Beau, or Long Jane Silver’s, however.)

No way would I take this idea to the chimch, though. You ever seen what they do to himetics?