“Community is not an organization; community is a way of living: you gather around you people with whom you want to proclaim the truth that we are the beloved sons and daughters of God.” – Henri Nouwen

“The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.” – Frederick Buechner

“By the power of our beliefs, we choose what kind of world we will live in — a porous world, full of glory doors leaking light, or a flat world where everything is exactly what it seems.” – Barbara Brown Taylor

“If you want to identify me, ask me not where I live, or what I like to eat, or how I comb my hair, but ask me what I think I am living for, in detail, and ask me what I think is keeping me from living fully for the thing I want to live for.” – Thomas Merton

“You live by shedding.” – Robert Frost

I just finished Tom Long’s provocative Preaching from Memory to Hope, which I’d recommend to every minister. (I know, I know, why am I still reading books on preaching? I can’t help myself!) Much of the book is Long’s material from his 2006 Lyman Beecher lectures at Yale Divinity School.

In the first section of the book (chapters 1 and 2), Long recounts the reemergence of narrative preaching — especially through the provocative messages of people like Fred Craddock, Barbara Brown Taylor, and Frederick Buechner.

But recently, there have been attacks launched against narrative preaching: from the right, from the center, and from the left. Curiously, Long’s example of an attack from the right is from James Thompson of ACU. Though James does raise some potential problems in Preaching like Paul, it hardly represents “an evangelical perspective.”

Nevertheless, Long admits that the critics have a point: not all narrative preaching is gospeled:

“What has been for the last thirty years called narrative preaching has too often devolved into a hodgepodge of sentimental pseudoart, confused rhetorical strategies, and competing theological epistemologies. Preaches have larded sermons with silly stories of their pets and their children, told anecdotes from the playground to illustrate Golgotha, told hundreds of stories about certain kinds of people and shut out others, and crafted shifty trapdoor plots to keep the listeners amused. If the effect of the recent critiques is to burn away this kind of story stubble, then burn, baby, burn.”

The answer, however, is not gimmicks or the wholesale rejection of narration:

“Some megachurch preachers have seemingly noticed, or perhaps intuited, an increased presence of episodic listeners and have, in response, begun fashioning ‘antinarrative’ sermons . . . sermons that are built as a series of stand-alone ‘bullet points.’ (We have perhaps returned in a digital age to the old ‘three-points-and-a-poem’ style, except it’s now ‘eight bullet points and a video clip.’ As one critic quipped, ‘When all you have are bullet-points, your ammunition is pretty quickly spent.’) Hearers are invited to browse these sermons as they would a Web page, skipping here and there as interest would allow. Such preaching is immediately engaging to many people, but it tends to reinforce the fragmented, nonnarrated character of contemporary life, and it works, at a deep level, against the gospel.”

What is needed, he insists, is narrative preaching that is “theologically smarter and more ethically discerning in its practice.” Messages where God is the main character, where we’re not just dispensing little bits of advice about parenting, balancing the budget, or being nice. “The presence of God is not a commodity to be packaged in a sermon. It is an even to which we give testimony.” Long goes on to help imagine what such preaching might look like.

The second section of the book (chapters 3 and 4) is a frontal attack on the neognosticism that Long says is plaguing the church. What is the response of ministers to the growing number of people who have left the center of the Christian message for other versions that are both new and old? He insists, as he responds especially to Marcus Borg, that he’s not on a witch hunt. But he’s convinced that “gnosticism today leads people, as it always has, into a theological, spiritual, and ethical cul-de-sac.” I thought Long was very effective in rebutting the revisionist history of Christianity that has been popularized by Bart Ehrman and Dan Brown that pictures powerful church leaders sneaking away at church councils to pull a big one on the poor commoners of the church.

The last section — and these are “sections” as I discerned them not as they’re laid out in the book — is about preaching and eschatology. To me, this was the strongest piece. I loved the opening paragraph:

“The comedian George Carlin, in one of his marvelous standup routines, expressed astonishment over those opinion polls on television networks like CNN and Fox, where some debatable question is posed and people are invited to phone in and vote their views. ‘Did you ever notice,’ Carlin said, ‘there’s always, like, 18 percent who vote “I don’t know”? It costs a dollar to make those calls,’ Carlin said, ‘ and they’re voting “I don’t know.”‘ Carlin imagined some guy seeing the question of the day on the TV screen and saying to his wife, ‘Honey, give me that phone!’ He shouts ‘I don’t know!’ into the phone and then says proudly to his wife, ‘Sometimes you have to stand up for what you believe you’re not sure about.’ Carlin went on to speculate that these same people probably call 1-900 numbers for $3.00 a minute to say, ‘I’m not in the mood.’”

So what does it mean to preaching eschatologically?

1) It means “to participate in the promise that the fullness of God’s shalom flows into the present, drawing it toward consummation.”

2) It means affirming “that life under the providence of God has a shape, and that this shape is end-stressed; what happens in the middle is finally defined by the end.”

3) It means “helping our people know that the eschatological and apocalyptic language of the Bible is not about predicting the future; it is primarily a way of seeing the present in the light of hope.”

Recently there was an article on ESPN.com (thanks, Flanders!) about Zack Greinke, pitcher for the KC Royals, following his 38 innings without giving up an earned run. It included these words about Gibson:

“While at least 25 others have matched Greinke’s feat, not surprisingly, five of those took place in 1968 (the Year of the Pitcher). We thought we’d look at some great pitching stretches, beginning with the most dominant run you’ll see:

In a stretch that lasted from June 6 to July 30, Gibby allowed a slugging percentage of .190. He completed all 11 starts. He threw eight shutouts. And there was nothing cheap about it — he allowed just three runs during the streak.”

Was anyone else listening to Harry Caray that summer?
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Frank Schaeffer’s apology for the death of Dr. Tiller. “Like many writers of moral/political/religious theories my father and I would have been shocked that someone took us at our word, walked into a Lutheran Church and pulled the trigger on an abortionist. But even if the murderer never read Dad’s or my words we helped create the climate that made this murder likely to happen.” The offense, he claims, isn’t the pro-life position, but the rhetoric of hatred that often surrounds the issue (on both sides).

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In the first quarter of the twentieth century, a Charlie Chaplin craze swept America. All over there were Charlie Chaplin look-alike competitions. Chaplin himself entered one in San Francisco. He didn’t even make the finals.

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“The point is to see the person standing right in front of me, who has no substitute, who can never be replaced, whose heart holds things for which there is no language, whose life is an unsolved mystery. The moment I turn that person into a character in my own story, the encounter is over. I have stopped being a human being and have become a fiction writer instead.”

Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

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Anyone been to a Tokens Show, hosted by Lipscomb Bible prof Lee Camp? Sounds fun!

I loved the comment by a doctor on The Today Show who said, “Take the goofy masks off. They don’t do anything.”

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Can anyone tell me why newspapers require full identification for a letter to the editor but they’ll let people say almost anything in their online comments anonymously? I thought the comments on the Abilene Reporter-News website were bad; but the last couple days I’ve been reading some articles in the Commercial Appeal. Apparently you can say anything there without having your comment pulled — as long as you don’t use profanity.

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With over 10,000 iPhone applications, it’s impossible to keep up with what’s out there. So here’s a chance for you iPhone users to tell us about a cool one or two that you’ve been using.

I really like TwitterFon, Showtimes, SportsTap, NYTimes, AroundMe and Keynote Remote.

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“This is wonderful news. I do not have to choose between the Sermon on the Mount and the magnolia trees. God can come to me by a still pool on the big island of Hawaii as well as at the altar of the Washington National Cathedral. The House of God stretches from one corner of the universe to the other.” Barbara Brown Taylor, An Altar in the World: A Geography of Faith

“There is more going on here than anyone can say. Preaching is finally more than art or science. It is alchemy, in which tin becomes gold and yard rocks become diamonds under the influence of the Holy Spirit. It is a process of transformation for both preacher and congregation alike, as the ordinary details of their everyday lives are translated into the extraordinary elements of God’s ongoing creation. When the drum roll begins and the preacher steps into place, we can count on that. Wherever God’s word is, God is — loosening our tongues, tuning our ears, thawing our hearts — making us a people who may speak and hear the Word of Life.”

- Barbara Brown Taylor, Preaching Life

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Between doubleheader games yesterday — a visit with Van and Tatum, cousins who now live in Coppell.

Driving home after the second game from Weatherford.

There is an interpretive history that makes Peter a hero for his attempts. The other eleven stayed in the boat; at least Peter got out. As John Ortberg wrote, If You Want to Walk on Water, You Have to Get Out of the Boat. It’s a wonderful book on faith, courage, and risk-taking.

I’m just not sure about using this text.

Here are some reasons:

1. Read carefully and you see that it wasn’t Jesus’ idea. He’s coming to his frightened disciples, out in the dark, enduring a storm in a Galilean fishing boat. Jesus doesn’t say, “If you have courage, come to me”; rather, he’s going to them.

2. This is the first of five stories that will focus on Peter. Those stories don’t tend to tilt in his favor! (Think: “Get behind me Satan!”)

3. Peter says, “Lord, if it’s really you . . . .” Later Jesus challenges his doubt. The interpretive tradition is that this refers to his sinking. But perhaps it refers to that original doubt: If it’s you! As Barbara Brown Taylor has written, Peter needed to take a couple steps to cure his doubt; then he needed a noseful of sea water to cure his pomposity!

4. The point of most of Jesus’ miracles wasn’t for the disciples to repeat the miracle but for them to recognize who he is and to respond to him. The goal of the water-to-wine story isn’t to produce lots of disciples who can repeat the sign; the goal is to recognize the one who did it, to believe in him, and to find life in his name. There’s no indication that the early church thought that water-walking was a sign of faith, courage, or discipleship.

The high point of the story is Jesus’ coming. It’s not about Peter; it’s not about US. He comes to them in their terror. And when he gets in the boat, they worship him.

One Messiah is enough. He can walk on water. He’s coming to you.

Having a tough period with the economic downturn? Facing challenges with your children, with your relationships, with aging, with depression?

“Surely I will be with you always, even to the end of the ages,” he says in the last words of Matthew’s gospel.

Stay in the boat. You don’t have to walk on water. He can. And he’s coming to you.

He immediately imagined what it must be have been like for her to lose her adult daughter. He wondered if this daughter had her own children and perhaps grandchildren.

“I’m so sorry. How long ago did she pass away?”

“Sixty-two years ago,” the woman replied.

Yes, grief is like that. She’d never forgotten that precious three year old who’d been struck by a disease that today could have been treated routinely.

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“Every Sunday I preach to at least three people who are dying of something. My general rule of thumb is this: any sermon I preach has to be worth the time they are giving to it.” Barbara Brown Taylor

“At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.”

“Having tried as hard as I knew how to seek and serve Christ in all persons, I knew for sure that I could not do it. I was not even sure that I wanted to do it anymore, and I felt increasingly deceitful saying that I would. Feeding people was no longer feeding me. While I remained constitutionally incapable of walking past a hungry baby bird, it was the wild geese that were calling me. When I heard them coming, I hurried to the window, straining to see them through the branches of the tall pines overhead. Sometimes all I caught was a beating wing or an outstretched neck, but even that was enough to set me weeping again. No thoughts went with the tears. The tears simply fell out of my eyes, and it was not until the geese were gone that the words formed in the empty air. Take me with you.”

“After I left him in search of food [at a pool party], I wound up with a couple I had always thought I would enjoy but whom I never really got to know since they did not serve on any committees and were never, as far as I knew, in crisis. We sat down in adjacent rocking chairs with plates full of lobster and corn balanced on our laps, laughing so much that I spit food clear across the porch. I did not wonder why I had not sought them out earlier because I already knew the answer. By my rules, caring for troubled people always took precedence over enjoying delightful people, and the line of troubled people never ended. Sitting there with corn stuck between my teeth, I wondered why I had not changed that rule sooner.”

These words sink deep.

“The call to serve God is first and last the call to be fully human.”

“I guess you could say that my losses have been chiefly in the area of faith, and specifically in the area of being certain who God is, what God wants of me, and what it means to be Christian in a world where religion often seems to do more harm than good.”

“On the subject of divine guidance I side with Susan B. Anthony. ‘I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do,’ she once said, ‘because I notice it always coincides with their own desires.’ Having been somewhat of an expert on the sanctification of my own desires, I try not to pin them on God anymore. At the same time, I recognize the enormous energy in them, which strikes me as something that God might be able to use.”

“As hard as I have tried to remember the exact moment when I fell in love with God, I cannot do it. My earliest memories are bathed in a kind of golden light that seemed to embrace me as surely as my mother’s arms. The Divine Presence was strongest outdoors, and most palpable when I was alone.”

“As a general rule, I would say that human beings never behave more badly toward one another than when they believe they are protecting God.”

“I know that the Bible is a special kind of book, but I find it as seductive as any other. If I am not careful, I can begin to mistake the words on the page for the realities they describe. I can begin to love the dried ink marks on the page more than I love the encounters that gave rise to them. If I am not careful, I can decide that I am really much happier reading my Bible than I am entering into what God is doing in my own time and place, since shutting the book to go outside will involve the very great risk of taking part in stories that are still taking shape.”

“Once I had begun crying on a regular basis, I realized just how little interest I had in defending Christian beliefs. The parts of the Christian story that had drawn me into the Church were not the believing parts but the beholding parts. ‘Behold, I bring you good tidings of great joy . . .’ ‘Behold the Lamb of God . . .’ ‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock . . .”

“The easiest thing was to tell [her friends who asked why she resigned from ministry] that I had always wanted to teach college, which was true, but behind the answer lay truths harder to confess. My quest to serve God in the church had exhausted my spiritual savings. My dedication to being good had cost me a fortune in being whole. My desire to do all things well had kept me from doing the one thing within my power to do, which was to discover what it meant to be fully human.”

“With so much effort being poured into church growth, so much press being given to the benefits of faith, and so much flexing of religious muscle in the public square, the poor in spirit have no one but Jesus to call them blessed anymore.”

“Once, when I attended a workshop on teaching religion, a presenter talked about how he took his students on wilderness trips to give them a taste of life nearer the edge. Whether they went hiking or white-water rafting, the point was to step outside their high-carb comfort zones long enough to encounter the untamed holiness of the wild. ‘Excuse me,’ a member of the audience said, ‘but are there predators in those places who are above you on the food chain?’ ‘Well, of course not,’ the presenter said. ‘I wouldn’t put students in danger like that.’ ‘I wouldn’t either,’ the man in the audience said, ‘but don’t lull them into thinking that they have experienced true wilderness. It’s only wilderness if there’s something out there that can eat you.’”

(Barbara Brown Taylor, The Preaching Life, p. 80)

First, Barbara Brown Taylor:

For all the human handiwork it displays, the Bible remains a peculiarly holy book. I cannot think of any other text that has such authority over me, interpreting me faster than I can interpret it. It speaks to me not with the stuffy voice of some mummified sage but with the fresh, lively tones of someone who knows what happened to me an hour ago. Familiar passages accumulate meaning as I return to them again and again. They seem to grow during my absences from them; I am always finding something new in them I never found before, something designed to meet me where I am at this particular moment in time.

The word of God turned out to be plenty strong enough to withstand my curiosity. Every time I poked it, it poked me back. Every time I wrenched it around so I could see inside, it sprang back into shape the moment I was through. In short, the Bible turned out not to be a fossil under glass but a thousand different things — a mirror, a scythe, a hammock, a lantern, a pair of binoculars, a high diving board, a bridge, a goad — all of them offering themselves to me to be touched and handled and used.

And then this wonderful story from Kathleen Norris’s Amazing Grace. She tells of a Saturday evening when she and her husband were eating at a local steakhouse and struck up a conversation with “an old-timer, a tough, self-made man in the classic American sense.” They had known him casually (”he knew us as oddball writers, misfits in the region”), but this evening, probably because he was about to enter chemotherapy, he was more talkative.

Out of the blue, Arlo began talking about his grandfather, who had been a deeply religious man, or as Arlo put it, “a damn good Presbyterian.” His wedding present to Arlo and his bride had been a Bible, which he admitted he had admired mostly because it was an expensive gift, bound in white leather with their names and the date of their wedding set in gold lettering on the cover. “I left it in its box and it ended up in our bedroom closet,” Arlo told us. “But,” he said, “for months afterward, every time we saw grandpa he would ask me how I liked that Bible. The wife had written a thank-you note, and we’d thanked him in person, but somehow he couldn’t let it lie, he’d always ask about it.” Finally, Arlo grew curious as to why the old man kept after him. “Well,” he said, “the joke was on me. I finally took that Bible out of the closet and I found that granddad had placed a twenty-dollar bill at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, and at the beginning of every book . . . over thirteen hundred dollars in all. And he knew I’d never find it.”

We laughed over this with Arlo, and he began talking about the interest he could have made had he found that money sooner. “Thirteen hundred bucks was a lot of money in them days,” he said, shaking his head.

“Contrary to the medical model, we are not entirely at the mercy of our maladies. Even within a fallen creation, we still have pockets of God-given freedom. However impoverished our circumstances, however badly we may have been used, we may still choose–for good or ill–how we will respond to what has happened to us. We may learn how to live with our tragedies or we may spend all of our time dying from them. We may decide to forgive our enemies or we may allow them to run our lives by continuing to hate them. In theological language, the choice to remain in wrecked relationship with God and other human beings is called sin. The choice to enter into the process of repair is called repentance, an often bitter medicine with the undisputed power to save lives.
Contrary to the legal model, sin is not simply a set of behaviors to be avoided. Much more fundamentally, it is a way of life to be exposed and changed, and no one is innocent. But that fact need not paralyze anyone with fear, since the proper response to sin is not punishment but penance. . . . The essence of sin is not the violation of laws but the violation of relationships. Punishment is not paramount. Restoration of relationship is paramount, which means that the focus is not on paying debts but on recovering fullness of life.
. . . Sin is our only hope, because the recognition that something is wrong is the first step toward setting it right again.”

- Barbara Brown Taylor

Congrats to John Lackey, who grew up at Highland, for his two-hitter last night. Watch out, A’s and Red Sox — the Angels are making their move. The Cardinals don’t have to make a move. They’re whippin’ everyone. They have three players who’ll be in contention for MVP!

Enjoy these wonderful words by Barbara Brown Taylor: “By the power of our beliefs, we choose what kind of world we will live in — a porous world, full of glory doors leaking light, or a flat world where everything is exactly what it seems.”

I know too many people living in the spiritual flat-earth society.

“When I was a little girl, like many little girls I took ballet lessons. The paraphernalia was fascinating to me: the satin slippers, the stiff net tutu, the pink tights. It would have suited me to spend the whole hour admiring myself in front of the mirror, but my teacher kept insisting that I come away from there to learn the basic positions essential to ballet. Under her tutelage, I learned to bend my feet this way and that, sometimes straining so hard I feared my knees would pop from their sockets. I arched my back, I held my head up, I made perfect O’s with my arms. I stretched and sweated over the positions until my bones ached and my muscles yelled out loud. Then one day I got to put them all together, bending and rising and sweeping the air like someone to whom gravity no longer applied. I got to dance.

“That memory sustains me in worship, where I practice the basic positions of faith. They are named gloria, kyrie, credo, sanctus. They are named the prayers of the people, the peace, the breaking of the bread. Each one requires my full attention and best efforts; each one teaches me a particular way to move, so that when God invites me to put them all together, I may jump with joy to join the dance.”