Eschew The Obvious

Today is another birthday, and I notice that after all these years I still haven't learned. I remember early in my life I read an evaluation of a person and the comment was made that his only trouble was that the had a tendency to "eschew the obvious." I did not know what that meant at the time and had to look it up. It means to avoid, to refuse, to stay away from the obvious. Now after all these years on another birthday, I look back and observe that I suspect that I have been guilty of the same thing. My comments on Facebook are never like the others. Some one posts a comment about a success, and all the rest say "congratulations." I tend to find some question or observation but seldom say simply "congratulations." People today have been sending "Happy Birthday" wishes. I never just send a "Happy Birthday" comment. I would tend to say something like, "Do you find the years have made life better?"

I have learned that there are times and there are moments when the obvious is good to say. There are words that are appropriate to moments and everybody knows them and says them. "Thank you" is a good obvious thing to say. "I love you" to those who are part of your family. "Happy Birthday" is an obvious that is good to say to those who have birthdays. "So sorry to hear about your loss" is an obvious that needs to be said. There are others. I should have learned to say them by now.

Sometimes in our religious debates and discussions we also tend to get away from the obvious and the expected. There is frequently a constant search for creativity and originality. The obvious gets overlooked. There is frequently the passion for apologetics that the obvious is overcome with the arcane. One of the "obvious" observations in the Old Testament is that there is "nothing new under the sun" and the passions and desires of human individuals and society are still pretty much the same and so that which was said for a thousand years about life in community, that which is obvious, probably has a great deal of truth in it. The obvious might be a good thing to remember.

Unintended consequences...

In Wake County, (Raleigh, NC) there is a nasty battle being waged in the Wake County School System. It is a results of the "unintended consequences." The Republicans supported a slate of four new members who won seats on the school board. With one Republican already on the board they suddenly had the majority. They immediately began making complete changes to the whole school system. Last week the Superintendent of the School System up and resigned. He says he cannot and will not be a part of the changes that "politicize the educational process." He has spent the last five years working and directing the board in the direction that the new board has completely reversed. He will not be a part of tearing up what he has worked to create. Now the Republican majority is considering firing him for "insubordination." And so it goes.

It seems to me that it is one of those "unintended consequences" of our zeal for a position that does not allow us to "compromise" or to "debate" positions. I think I first saw a clear example in talking with a middle-aged Baptist minister who had preached long and hard about "Family values;" "Christian Marriage;" "Faithfulness and Divorce." The only problem developed when his own wife left him and he ended up divorced. Then in a few years he met a woman and they decided to marry. Now he was a divorced, remarried, adulterer who wanted to be a Christian preacher. He found that none of his "kind of churches" wanted him as a preacher. He had "unintentionally" made himself unemployable.

A more moving story is told by Tony Campolo about the "unintended impact" of our doctrines and convictions which put us in conflict with our real lives. Tony Campolo is an evangelical preacher who is widely known and is a very exciting speaker. He also is an evangelical preacher who understands the consequences of his faith and so is open to conversations. He does not share the right wing religious exclusion of homosexuals or gays. He said one Saturday night about 10:30 he got a call from a very distraught woman. She said she had a very important question. "Does the judgment of heaven take place individually as people die, or is the judgment all together with everybody there at the same time?" Dr. Campolo said he was very tired, it had been a long week of travelling and speaking around the country. He said, "Lady, I don't know how you got my number, and I am very tired, but the way I read the Bible, the judgment takes place all together at one time. Everybody before the throne at one big meeting. Now, why did you call me up at this hour to ask that kind of question." She said, "Well, her son died recently with aids, he was homosexual, and she was hoping that at the time of judgment she was going to be able to stand next to her son and tell Jesus what a wonderful young man he had been."

We so often get so rigid and dogmatic in our doctrines and faith that we cannot see the "unintended consequences." The new school board members could not see that their agenda was an insult and destruction of what the Superintendent had been working on for years. The minister could not and would not see how his position on marriage and divorce was excluding and insulting people until it affected him, and many cannot see that their focus on the sexuality of a person excludes so many wonderful people from their fellowship of faith.

Can't End Nicely

This will not be pretty for anybody. As I read the story in the newspaper, a young teacher, either agnostic or non-Christian, has somehow gotten herself into a guerrilla war with her students. It has become public because she put some of her attacks on her Facebook page. That is one of the problems with our social network programs. We forget what is public and what should be private.

In reading the article it does sound like the young teacher has gotten herself into an adversarial relationship with her students. The battleground appears to be over religious activities. The story indicates that she has sent students to the Principal's office when they asked about God in the science class on evolution. She has disciplined students for reading the Bible in her class. She has told students to stop singing "Jesus Loves Me". The students have begun to taunt her and to retaliate by bring pictures of Jesus and putting them on her desk, by leaving evangelistic leaflets for her. The school system has suspended her for more information. It is certainly not an example of tolerance and coexistence of different faiths. I have no information to judge this situation.

But I do know how life is in rural Southern North Carolina. I don't know what happens in other places but I know what I have had to sit through in a host of different public events. I cannot count the times that I have been at public meetings: Chamber of Commerce dinners, United Way luncheons, NAACP banquets, Political Rallies, and had to sit through aggressive evangelical presentations. The person who has been invited to entertain the group somehow feels it is an obligation to preach rather than to sing, to testify rather than play the piano, to "give God glory" rather than tell jokes. In our community it is not surprising that we have not ever had to sit through a Hindu telling us about her religion, or a Jew "testifying" or a Muslim preaching to us. There are almost none of those religions in our community. But I am absolutely convinced that if that were to happen, all "hell would break lose." Our City and County government sessions still start with prayers that are clearly Christian. All the invocations at most public events are Christian in nature.

The story of the teacher who apparently has found these aggressive presentations of the Christian faith a bit of a pain in her neck may be just one of those bumps in the road to the new reality that we recognize that we are not a Christian nation. We may talk about one nation under God or God bless America, but we have yet to officially define who God is and how God might be identified and worshipped. But in this story neither side has made a very attractive argument for one side or the other.

Another Plan?

Many years ago I was active in a group in Houston that was concerned about the flooding of the streets and often the flooding of the homes along those streets. Houston had decided to use their streets as drainage ditches. One of the consistent discoveries was that the engineers and the public works departments in both the county and the city were aware of the problems. They also had on their shelves a number of studies and plans that had been developed to deal with the problems. The plans were on the shelves and never got used.

I thought of that today when I read where the Economic Development Commission of Vance County was working on another plan for our area. The problem is not the lack of plans. Since I have been in this community, there have been three very expensive and well developed plans for our community. These plans have all said very much the same thing. The problems have not changed and the possible solutions have not changed. The problem continues to be that once the plan has been presented none of the authorities have had the courage and the will to follow the plans. We do not continue in our difficulties because we do not have a plan. We continue in our struggles because we do not have the will and the discipline to follow the plan.

The same lack of will, discipline, courage and determination are missing in our own lives as well. I do not need more lists of how to live healthier. I have seen more of those lists than I can remember. I just do not have the discipline nor will to follow them. Exercise more, eat less, eat better. It is not a complicated plan. But I can not keep to it.

Certainly in terms of religious and moral activities the same is true. There is no shortage of plans and guidelines to better living. There the Ten Commandments or The eight steps to Nirvana, or the Beatitudes, or the different ways of Yoga or the teaching of Confucius. There are lots of "plans" but we lack the ability to follow the plans very well. For some of us that is why the religious narrative that has a big section on forgiveness and mercy to those of us who fail is so important.

Some Observations

Two trips to New Orleans to work on "rehabing" homes does not make me an expert on anything. But in the going, working, and listening to the different discussions, there are a few dimensions to the problems of assistance that were new to me and made me a little more tolerant.

The great horrors of destruction, evacuation, lack of centralized authority, and "red tape" are not the only sources of evil in the community. Most of us were surprised by the suggested percentage of out and out scams that were conducted in the area right after the hurricane. People posing as contractors who wanted up front money to get the supplies needed to repair, took the money, and never returned.

Another level of difficulties were the wonderful, good hearted, eager to help visitors who worked hard, did the repairs necessary, only to discover later that they had not learned all that was needed about the geography and building realities of the local area. Contractors, for example, who knew that in their home area you had to dig deep footers(one foot by one foot) to get below the frost line, did not learn from the locals that in the high water table you did not need to go deep but you needed to build wide (three feet by three feet) to hold up the homes.

There are lots of people still out of their homes who had good contractors, who did good work, and who worked with the owner, but somehow the amount of work to be done and the money did not match, and the home is 85-90% done but the home owner has no more money to finish the job and so still lives in an apartment and worries about if he will ever get home.

After five years it also seems that there is turn over in the leadership of some of the recovery efforts and programs. Young, eager, good hearted people who, in working with the volunteers who are coming down to help, discover that they themselves need more experience to make sure the planning for the volunteers is successful. It is not as easy as one thinks to make sure that the right tools, with all the right pieces, and all the necessary supplies are in place when needed. Volunteer groups come and find there is no work for them to do on a rainy day because the house only needed outside painting. Other volunteers found that they could not finish their work because not enough molding had been ordered. Other volunteers did by slow hand methods a job that could have been sped up by a cheap tool, but one that the young people may not even have known was available.

Administratively for those who run these recovery efforts they are caught in the bind between trying to get one house done quickly and having enough homes under rehabing to keep volunteers busy. One group found it was taking an average of 17 months to finish a house when they had a number of homes being worked on. But if they reduce the number of homes and get a shorter turn around on each home, they end up with fewer options for volunteer groups to work on.

I suspect that the obstacles in New Orleans are the same obstacles for most recovery efforts from disasters. This is not intended to be critical, except for the scams, of any one. These are the kind of problems that exist as one group of humans attempt to help other humans. They will be even more in evidence in Haiti and the time to rebuild Haiti will be even longer than Katrina.

The people in New Orleans say that something like 80% of the people who left have not yet come back to the city. Recovery is a very slow process. But like so much in our lives maybe we are not called to success so much as called to be faithful in the continuous effort to make our own lives and the lives of others a little better than they were. As the saying goes, every 1000 mile journey is made by one step after another.

All The Way

This week I am headed to New Orleans to help with the rehabilitation of another home in the 9th Ward. This is my second year of going down to work on a house. The report I heard recently was that 80 percent of the people were still not back in their homes. This is five years since Katrina hit that community. I am not sure that the 80 percent figure is true for all of New Orleans. But I do know that five years after the storm there is still an amazing amount of work that needs to be done. The Federal Aid has been slow finding its way to help. I know of another group of people who go every year to help along the Mississippi coast with rebuilding. Recovery takes a long time and it is hard to stay with it to the end.

The work of restoring New Orleans and the time it takes makes the thought of rebuilding Haiti seem almost impossible. In many ways the destruction has been so much worse or different. The leadership of the country rivals the leadership in New Orleans for incompetence. The number of people affected seems so much greater and the physical damage to people has been much more severe. If we are still five years and working on New Orleans, it is hard to imagine how many years work will be needed to done to rebuild Haiti. One has to wonder if the international community has the will and the commitment to stay with the effort until the work is done.

It seems to me that there is a ambiguous attitude towards that kind of total commitment within our culture. We do have slogans like "Quitters never win, and winners never quit." but I also know there is the attitude, "If at first you don't succeed, quit before you make a fool of yourself." A preschool teacher told me that that was the biggest change she had seen in children in her thirty years. When she began teaching, if she gave a child a puzzle to work, they worked at it until they got it done. When she retired thirty years later, the child would try a couple of solutions and then quit and wait for the teacher to show her.

Certainly our divorce rate has something to suggest about our attitude towards commitment and working all things to the end.
Politicians present interesting studies as so few things get accomplished or finished that it is hard to tell whether any of them see an issue through to the end. I think that was the last temptation given to Jesus: to give up the fight, to say that he had made a good effort, and it had not worked and he could just go into retirement and live with Mary and raise a family. But as he said "It is finished" he had stayed with it to the end.

The rebuilding of New Orleans is not finished, but it has dropped off the major radar of work that needs to be done. The rebuilding of Haiti is now being talked about and people are commenting about how long that work will have to take and whether or not we have the commitment to see it through. There is within the Christian story a thread that speaks of a love that has that kind of tenacity.

Lessons Retold

Recently I had an opportunity to return to a previous congregation I had served as Pastor for a Supply preaching assignment. They have an interim and he was on vacation and he invited me to come back to preach. One of the things I had hoped to do in retirement was to retrace some steps in my life and how things were in the places I have been. So this was a perfect opportunity.

It turned out to be a real reminder of what are the important things in ministry. Nothing that was said or done was new, but in the brief span of one day of worship with that congregation, I got a very clear reminder of what is at the very heart of a good pastoral relationship. I am not sure how it fits in with theology of ministry, but I heard the demand from two very distinct directions. The members of a congregation what to know that God is concerned about them and they want to know that the minister is attuned to their lives.

At the lunch table after worship there was much talk about the church and its ministers. They have had several since I left. The consistent complaint was that the minister did not show any interest or concern for the members. In previous ages it was about the minister visiting personally at the homes, but they were not that focused, A phone, an email, a post card, a thank you note, a brief conversation at the Post Office, "Hi, how is the family? Has Mary's cancer responded to the treatment?" would have been enough. Visits are still expected at critical times, but the complaint was that the ministers were not aware or attuned to when those critical times happened.

I remember once in my training that a minister observed that he found his brief time at the door after worship to be a great sounding opportunity. As the congregation came to shake hands his subconscious would remind him of who was absent. As they came by he could ask a brief question to see if the husband had a job yet, or the baby had gotten a tooth, or something. As they came buy, he could look at them and see if they looked well. At the back door was a great place to get signals that would need to be followed up. Monday he could call on the phone or in person on all those whose absence worried him. A new cane or walker would be another sign for some attention. When a member asked the minister how was another member she expected him to have more current information than she did.

But it was not only in the conversation. At the contemporary worship service that evening which consisted of six songs done by a praise band with the congregation of about 20 singing when they knew the songs and a sermon all of the praise music was focused on Jesus and his love for "me". The focus of the theology of the songs is what a Great God who loves me, who saved me, who suffered for me. Jesus and I have a personal relationship. The songs were not written by local singers so this emphasis must have a larger following. The hunger is for Jesus to know and love "me." "For God so loved the world" may be true, but that is not the important piece. "The Whole world groans and waits the revelation" is okay, but Jesus saves "me."

Both events indicated that the people in a congregation are hungry to know that Jesus and his servant the minister love "me", pay attention to "me", care what happens to "me".

Certainly one can respond that this is a self-centered selfishness that ought not to be encouraged, but I am only reporting what was said and why this congregation has fallen to less than 300 members from a high of about 700. People have left because they did not believe that the pastors cared about them. They were not told that Jesus loves them. Obviously, a social justice theology talks about systems and agencies and groups and programs. Such a gospel maybe true but it is not directed at scratching the itch that these two events suggest is primary to a pastoral relationship with the congregation. The mega churches claim to be high touch and high demand certainly has half of it right as people want to be "high touched."