Today I went to hear Alan Roxburgh at the Leadership Institute, a pre-meeting of the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in Charlotte, North Carolina. I’m constantly bumping into the ideas in the “missional church” movement. I find the ideas somewhat interesting, but rarely do I experience them as dramatically innovative. Usually I walk away from such engagements feeling mostly skeptical. So I decided to take another opportunity to listen in on a presentation and see where it led me.
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I’ve been contemplating the many “parents” that have shaped and formed me this weekend. I’m grateful for the parents who gave me birth and brought me up in the world. I’m especially grateful for my dad who sticks with me and always tells me he’s proud. He’s recently retired from more than 40 years of teaching. For a long time I resisted that family inheritance. Lots of of my great aunts and their children were also teachers and school administrators. But eventually I saw that it was my calling, too. And in the last 10 years I’ve embraced the role with joy.
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On Sunday night I had one of those privileges of a life time. I heard Dave Brubeck play live at the Blue Note Jazz Club in New York City. He was my second jazz crush (after Louis Armstrong) about a dozen years ago. Brubeck, who turns 90 this year, sounded amazing, and was charming as he told a few stories. As I watched his hands move over the keys I was amazed at how he creates a kind of sound from the piano that for me pretty much defies description. Each note is clear, yet together a sound rises up that goes beyond the individual notes.
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“When we see the world as an end in itself, everything becomes itself a value and consequently loses all value, because only in God is found the meaning (value) of everything, and the world is meaningful only when it is the ‘sacrament’ of God’s presence.” – Alexander Schmemann, For the Life of the World
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Within the last week two wise elders who have influenced me in very different ways have died. Here is a very brief thanks for each one. Academic Legacy: A Generative Thanks for Don Browning and Practical Faithfulness: A Joyful Thanks for Alma May Scarborough
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I spent the summer of 1990 in Birmingham, Alabama. Like most summers in the deep South, it was hot, sweltering and sticky that summer. I had completed my first semester of seminary, and wanted to get some “field work” under my belt. So I applied to be an editorial assistant at Woman’s Missionary Union. I’d grown up on a steady diet of missions literature and practice which came out of Birmingham, so this was a bit like going to the holy city for me. Like most pilgrimages it had its moments of awe and its moments of disillusionment. It also held moments of learning and friendship, which have deepened across the years.
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A Peach is Worth a Thousand Words. Summer time is here with a blazing fury. Temperatures up. Windows rolled down. Rolling along with blues on the radio. Somehow that low steady beat underneath and all kinds of fun and mischief floating across the top of it suits me just fine this morning.
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Learning to Cook: Last night I attended a cooking class at the Chef’s Gallery in Stillwater, Minnesota. And as classes go it was fun, entertaining, informative and useful.
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Three days in a row I found myself sitting with three different circles of women. We gathered around food, friendship, stories, laughter, tears, outrage, and promise. The occasion and purpose for each circle was different, yet they shared some things in common. Conversations took turns through work, love, grief, friendship and gratitude.
Read MoreEaster IX
Tomorrow Pentecost begins. The birthday of the church! At my church we’ll wear red and celebrate the coming of the Spirit with wind and fire and bells. But right now it is the last day of Eastertide. On Good Friday, April 2, our family and some friends spent a good portion of the day putting in a quarter acre garden. The Great Flood of Nashville hit a month later May 1-3. We suffered very little damage to personal property. With the exception of the garden. It was under eight-to-ten feet of water for most of two days. And it was pretty well destroyed.
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Healing Part III: Honest Music
I’ve found myself in the past couple of years in search of music that speaks to life. Really speaks to life.
So much popular music is mainly the girl meets boy (or boy meets girl) variety of sentimental or sensual romance. I’m not totally against this. It just has limits. I’m looking for the kind of lyrics and musical composition that goes deeper than feelings and hormones.
Easter XII
BIG Apple Here are some pics with highlights from my first trip to New York City. I’ve passed through by the NYC airports and even on a youth group bus, but this was the first time I’ve been for a…
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Healing
Part II: Trees
One of this Sunday’s passages is Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20-21.
As one commentator summarized it: “The conclusion of Revelation has seemed to many interpreters to be a bit choppy, a barely-held-together conglomeration of leftover pieces, stumbling toward the close of the book.” I’ll say.
Earlier this week I heard a sermon which dealt with the morass of endings by focusing on one image from the text: the tree of life. Just that phrase took me like a hyperlink to one of the most healing images of my own life time . . . . the tree of life.
Read MoreEaster X
I’ve wanted to start a series on healing for several weeks now. But every time I get plans underway it seems something new crops up that needs healing . . . like discovering how many files are really unrecoverable from my defunct hard drive, or seeing our drowned garden, or finding myself living in a city experiencing its worst devastation since the Civil War.
Read MoreEaster IX
This week’s floods in Nashville, Tennessee have been overwhelming to many and devastating to others. So much has been lost . . . lives, homes, livelihoods. In comparison to the magnitude of losses that others have felt, my family has mostly been inconvenienced. Still I am struck by the sheer force of it all. Water has such incredible power for both good and tragedy. Reading this week’s lectionary texts, water is at every turn. You’ll hear echoes of those scriptures in this short poem . . .
Read MoreEaster VIII
Bye Bye “Bye Bye” said the sweet blonde boy. He waved each time. “Bye Bye” he said more insistently. As we stood in line to board the airplane for a second time this morning, the friendly little guy wanted everyone…
Read MoreEaster VII
A Decade of practice: This year feels like a series of milestones in a way. Why do we think that 10 years makes a difference? Why not nine years? or 12 and 1/2? Nonetheless. It was during the last few months of 1999 when my full-time work in and for a congregation came to an end. And a new vocation, or really a revised longer-term vocation, began to take shape. I started graduate school in the fall of 2000 and began learning the practices of becoming a scholar. This is scholarship that I understand to be for the sake of the church.
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It has been 16 years since Costly Obedience was published by Judson Press. It was the first published collection of sermons by Southern Baptist women. Now comes a long overdue next incarnation of sermons by Baptist women across a much wider swath of Baptist life. It is important for lots of reasons. It includes sermons by more than 30 women on a wide variety of topics and texts. It lifts voices and delivers messages that need to be heard beyond the local congregations and events where they were first offered.
Read MoreEaster V
Almanac: Tonight a half moon is shining (or more technically, the first quarter). We’ve had no rain to speak of in the last week. Less than three weeks since we planted the farm . . . On Good Friday we put in beans, yellow squash, onions, corn, turnips, cucumbers, zucchini, butternut squash, watermelon, potatoes, garlic, and more squash.
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Today my family and I gathered with most of our in-laws and outlaws and had an Easter egg hunt. And enough food to feed a small church. About 500 eggs, give or take, were hidden. And most were found. Well, my father-in-law came up with 22 strays. The mower will no doubt turn up more. But kids ran around the lawn with abandon scooping them up.
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One of the best gifts we can give to people is to ask them “How did God’s presence get you through that tough spot in your life?” This was the advice of sociologist and self-described “immigrant in practical theology” Nancy Ammerman. Nancy gave the opening key note address at the Association for Practical Theology last Friday evening.
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