Racialism

On both Thursday and Friday I got a chance to watch one of the most provocative and productive social change-agents in the last quarter of the last century and the first quarter of this century. Who am I talking about? Oprah.

Oprah's subtlety and endearing staying power has given her a platform amongst both white and black Americas that is unparalleled. I do not know the demographics but suspect that women still form the vast majority of her viewership. However, Oprah is a phenonemon to be contended with. When she talks we all listen.

I don't know if it was a set of reruns or not, but Oprah hosted a twod-day "town hall" forum to discuss the whole Imus scandal. She amassed a number of movers and shakers in the black community including Stanley Crouch, Russell Simmons, India Arie, Common, Al Sharpton, Diane Weathers and Ben Chavis.

Everyone agreed that there is "a problem" but none of the representatives from hip hop were willing to admit that they themselves are in some way responsible for the mysogeny we hear in rap lyrics. Instead, Russell Simmons kept pointing a fingure at poverty as the real culprit. I agree to some extent that economic oppression fosters environments where exploitation takes root.

But as Stanley Crouch said, on the whole "I'm not buying it."

For too long black scholars and public intellectuals have been relunctant to speak out because they have been afraid of being accused of not understanding/supporting young black culture. In essence they have accepted a culturally/morally relativistic argument ("I'm poor and black and couldn't help but sing about what I know") because they have not wanted to be seen as further diving an already fractured community. This is what Cornell West calls "racialism" which basically means giving a pass to people because they belong to your race community.

No more passes. True black culture is not pimps and hoes and should not be represented as such. It is too bad it took a white man to show us that.

Preaching Ourselves

I just gave Irie Parker Palmer's book The Courage to Teach. In the inscription I wrote, "In honor of your courage to teach and to love."

I've enjoyed sneaking a peek at the book here and there. Palmer's thesis - that teachers must not only teach subject material but in some way teach their own lives also - is causing me to reflect some on the meaning, not only of teaching, but of preaching also.

Palmer says that good teaching takes a variety of forms, but invariably bad teaching can be pretty well summarized by the picture of a lecturer with a big bubble coming out of his mouth: Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah.

Bad teaching is essentially words abstracted from personhood. The heresy undergirding this is gnostic dualism. The false hope that ideas can save us.

I am realizing that as a preacher I cannot simply preach the text. "The Bible says. . ." Ultimately that leads to a flattened conception of both the text and of God. Instead as a preacher I must learn to stand in the gap between ideas (Scripture/text) and people. I have nothing but my own story and the witnessing story of the Church to stand there with me.

Palmer's book has many convergences with what John Claypool called "confessional preaching". The basic assumption of both these individuals is that words alone have no power to save. Words must instead be embodied. Words must be told through the character and story of the proclaimer. This is why Palmer says it takes "courage" to teach, because it is inherently risky business to offer one's body to the world.

It is inherently risky business when the word becomes flesh and dwells among us.

Nifong's Excuses

On his blog today one of my former professors Mike Broadway has an interesting quote from a Duke law professor who says that what Mike Nifong, the former district attorney of Durham, NC, did in the Duke Lacrosse case was really not that unusual for a district attorney.

Here is the quote from Duke U. law professor James Coleman:

Everybody wants to say that Mike Nifong is some kind of rogue prosecutor, but in
fact, what he did is not that different from what other prosecutors do on a
regular basis in cases out of the spotlight.

One of the things Nifong did that people are upset about is the way he came out and publically called the accused students a bunch of "hooligans." The thing is that these kinds of public statements are made all the time by district attorneys. And certainly those public comments do much to shape public opinion long before the facts are in.

But I'm not as concerned about what Nifong said as what he did not say. He was not forthcoming with DNA evidence that favored the defendants. NPR reported this weekend that Nifong blamed an overburdensome caseload. Of course, that excuse didn't hold water because this was THE Duke Lacrosse Case. But if it wasn't THE Duke Lacrosse case then the public may very well have accepted that kind of excuse without much question.

Which brings up another point. . .

If Nifong was not prevaricating when he said he didn't have adequate time or staff to give sufficient attention to THE Duke Lacrosse Case, then what does that tell us about the kind of attention being given to less high profile cases?

Sobering.

I've Got a Fever and the Only Cure is More Farm Bill!

On Wednesday we attended a House Party hosted by our friend Debby and her friend Brendan (with yellow dog). We watched a PBS video about how US farm policy is having a detrimental effect in the developing world.

When I start talking about the Farm Bill and all that is at stake eyes begin to glaze over. I don't really think its that people don't care. They do by and large. Very few people I know are blatantly callous enough simply not to give a rip about people in the developing world going hungry.

But eyes do glaze over nonetheless. I think that is because we have been so trained not to have to pay attention that anything complex that comes along just goes right over our heads. After years of sitting back and taking in easy-to-consume television we just don't know how to pay attention.

And the dark principalities of this world love that because it means that their power can remain hidden.

So, if you care about people not being hungry here is a crash course in how US farm policy is contributing to global insecurity. Pay attention:

1. Our goverment gives lots of money to US farmers to produce crops like wheat and cotton

2. This creates incentives to produce lots. And I mean lots

3. We take what we don't use and sell it at basement prices

4. We sell our crops for less than it costs farmers in the developing world to produce theirs

5. This means they make next to nothing (like a buck or two a day)


So, that wasn't too bad. Now go and pay attention to the video to learn more.

The (Politcally Active) Christian Citizen; Or: "That's right, IceMan, I am dangerous."

The latest issue of the Christian Citizen has just come out. The Christian Citizen is a magazine put out by ABCUSA focusing on issues of justice and faith-informed social action.

In his editorial "The Church and Politics" Curtis Ramsey-Lucas writes, "Simply because politics is dangerous does not mean that Christians have the luxury of opting out of the Process." He points to various political movements in our nation's history - the Civil Rights movement, the struggle to end apartheid in South Africa, etc. - and underscores the fact that the Baptist denomination was intimately involved. (Of course, the Baptist denomination was intimately involved on both sides of the struggle for Civil Rights.)

What I find interesting is the fact that many who would say we ought not to "mix politics and religion" are oftentimes the very same people who will take great pride in the heroes of our faith who did just that. A case in point is the burgeoning interest in William Wilberforce and his role in putting an end to the British slave trade. The truth is that, when pressed, most of us will admit that the distinction between what is political in nature and what is religious is at best arbitrary and oftentimes altogether false.

I think that Ramsey-Lucas' statement about politics being "dangerous" may shed some light on what we as Christians really think. For something to be dangerous means that it may cost us something truly valuable - our job, our reputation and in some cases our very life. When we say something is "political" and therefore choose not to enter into the fray, what we are really saying is that we are not passionate enough about the cause to risk losing anything very meaningful.

Ramsey-Lucas closes his essay by saying that as Christians we have the "opportunity" to let our faith speak by asking those who want our vote in the 2008 election to tell us what they are going to do about poverty, hunger and educational inequality here and abroad. These are indeed the kinds of questions we as people of faith ought to be asking. But in order for these questions to be truly "political" in nature then we as Christian citizens are going to have to learn to ask them in risky or - to borrow a word from Ramsey-Lucas -"dangerous" ways.

I suppose this means that if we are going to ask a question that matters then we are going to have to put our own selves in the hot seat. We are going to have to ask these questions when others are telling us we ought to be asking or doing other things. It means we ought to ask them in a public forum when we could have gone home and watched reruns of "Friends" instead. It means we ought to ask them when it would be a lot nicer not to ask anything at all but just smile and get along and let the market do its thing.

The Power of an Indestructible Life

On Sunday we honored our two graduating high school seniors during church. It was a fun day with lots of smiles and a couple of stories and some very meaningful words spoken by parents to their children.

These girls were of course badgered with the requisite graduating senior question. "Now that you've graduated, what are you going to do with your life?" That is, of course, the wrong question. The question everyone ought to be asking is instead, "Now that you've graduated, who are you going to be?" It is the difference between being a fisher in the world and a fisher of men in the kingdom.

During the sermon I said that being a Christian is going to mean choosing a path which will often diverge from the status quo. As Flannery O'Connor wrote, "You shall know the truth and the truth shall make you odd."

When I graduated from high school someone said pretty much the same thing to me. "Being a Christian means you are different. It means you are going to have to live differently from your friends." I heard that and, whether it was intended or not, pretty much thought everything that was being said was referring to sex. "Being a Christian means not doing it till you're married," which would indeed mean being pretty odd in today's world.

Being a Christian certainly means our sexual practices should look very different from the world's (sadly, they often don't). But a lot more is at stake than just sex.

In Hebrews the writer talks about the "power of [Jesus'] indestructible life." Jesus lived such a profoundly counter-cultural life that he was able in death to transfigure the shame of the cross into the glory of the heavens.

As Christians we are to share in that profound power. Yet the only way to do so is to ourselves join in Christ's suffering.

As I write this I realize how domesticated my Christianity really is. I am richer than ninety-nine percent of all the people who have ever lived on earth. That is a daunting thought when I consider the Scriptures word for the rich.

The power of Jesus' indestructible life has laid a claim to all of me. Not just my sex life, but also my bank account and my free time. That is why being a Christian is so incredibly difficult and so incredibly, well, "odd".

So today, eleven years ahead of these girls, I am doing exactly what I hope they are doing. I'm wondering who it is that I'm going to be.

Mystery Meat Ministry

I've been kicking the story of Aaron and the Golden Calf around in my head for about a week now and have decided it is a great metaphor for the life of ministry.



Aaron is in charge because Moses has gone up the mountaintop to speak with God. Moses is taking longer than anyone is expecting, so the people start clamoring for Aaron to do something. "Make us some gods," they yell.



From a reader's persective it is pretty obvious that Aaron is just winging it. He really has no idea what he is doing. Anxious, and perhaps even a little scared, he goes with the first thing he sees. "Your earrings, give me your earrings," he says. The Hebrew women all take off their earrings and drop them in the cauldron Aaron is mixing up. Aaron then makes a molten calf out of the melted earrings. His eureka borders on the ridiculous: "This is the god, O Israel, that brought you out of Egypt."

Rrright.

The first casuality in a time like this is always intentionality. People want God or gods, whichever they can have right now. So, like Aaron before us, we wing it. I call it mystery meat ministry, because it reminds me a lot of whatever they served on Fridays in my elementary school - a mixed bag of whatever was available all thrown together and then nuked for safety's sake. This is how blended worship services and hydra-headed youth pastors and scary Jesus pictures made their way into the church. "This is what will lead our struggling little church out of Egypt. This be your god, O Church of America."

The alternative is of course much more unsettling. The alternative is to move slowly and carefully. The alternative is to attend to the ancient spiritual practices. To fast. To pray. To break bread with one another. The alternative is to wait on God.

I covet your prayers. Our church has come out of Egypt but we haven't quite made it to the Promised Land. And Moses is nowhere in sight.

Pray that we will resist the temptation to make ourselves some false gods. Pray that we will instead have the patience to wait on the real one.

More Farm Bill

Today the Burlington Free Press printed an Op Ed piece I wrote calling attention to all that is at stake in this year's Farm Bill.

Lurkers, I cannot stress to you enough how important this legislation is for rural America and for farmers in the developing world. Please write your congressmen and tell them that you would like to see change in this year's legislation. Go to Oxfam America or Bread for the World to learn what needs to be fixed.

Advocacy is a hidden, romanceless, thankless job. But it is how the world will be changed.

Food Stamp Challenge

When I was doing Young Life we would sometimes take off a week or two during the winter and go and work at Wilderness Ranch. We did the dishes for a hundred or so ski trip campers in exchange for a place to shack and a couple of lift tickets.

Hovering over the kitchen was the ultimate of dares called the Pit Challenge. Only the most courageous or stupid would even consider taking up the Pit Challenge. For those bold enough to accept the dare required one to scrape into a single glass all of the food (and God knows what else) from the bottom of the Hobart, add water and then chug.

The reward, we were told, was immortality.

Well, we young evangelicals have grown since then and now some of us are taking on more meaningful challenges. One of Bread for the World's regional organizers and her husband have accepted The Food Stamp Challenge.

Elise and Mark are limiting themselves to $3 a day in food expenditures - the average amount of assistance Food Stamps recipients actually receive. They have some great stories recorded on the BreadBlog.

I suppose the point of the Food Stamp Challenge is two-fold. First it is raising awareness about how little assistance Food Stamps recipients are actually receiving. (Here in VT the per meal amount is about 87 cents.) But more than that, The Food Stamp Challenge also shows us how much the rest of us actually overconsume.

I never felt bad about not taking the Pit Challenge. Other peoples' wet seconds was never my idea of a good time.

But it is only with a severe sense of discomfort that I look at what Mark and Elise are doing and say not for me. I have read the words of the prophet Ezekiel too many times for it to be any other way:

"And this was the sins of your sisters Sodom and her daughters: They had pride and excess of food and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and hungry."

Remembering the Anonymous

I came up to the church for a little while on Memorial Day and saw dozens of people coming to pay respects to their dead in the cemetary out back of the church. Quietly they would step out of the car as a family and carry a half dozen petunias past the gate into the church yard. Younger children would trail behind with a small American flag in their hands. I watched them from the window in my study as they would bend down on all fours and dig small holes and plant the flowers and then groom the earth. As I watched them I hoped that whoever it was that they were coming to see knows that they were dearly loved and deeply missed.

In response to that Memorial Day ritual, I thought that I might do a little remembering of my own. Pictured above is the tombstone for the Rev. Ansel Nash, the first pastor of our church, and his wife. "His wife". Now that I think says a lot about the tough job pastor's wives have had over these past several centuries. In life they are subject to a lot of gossip and carping and seldom if ever get recognized for the importance they played in keeping their husbands sane. Then, in death, they are served with the sentence of total anonymity.

"There were five thousand men fed that day, not counting women and children."

Well today women and children do count. So thank you Mrs. Nash. And thank you Irie. And thank you Gabrielle Zipporah. God will not forget the sacrifices that you have made for this Gospel.

New Baptist Covenant

I must have been no more than five or six. Mom was driving the Buick. We called it the Blue Bomb. I can tell you exactly where we were too. We were driving through Tech Terrace, right by Tom Sawyer's house. Somewhere out from the backseat came my question.

"If it were old timey days, would we have been on the Confederate side or the Union side?"

Mom's answer was the one I was hoping for and knew I would get. "I guess we would be on the Confederate's side," she said with some uncertainty in her voice.

A rush of warmth came over me. "Ahh, blessed assurance."

Twenty-five years later I know that my mom was right. Unless we had been bold abolitionists we would have been on the Confederate side. Even if we did not own slaves (two-thirds of whites did not) we would have agreed that the Southern way of life was being threatened. And as Baptists in 1845 we would most certainly have been in favor of withdrawing our covenant with northern baptists and taking part in the establishment of the new covenant between southern baptists which came to be known as the Southern Baptist Convention.
It is no longer blessed assurance that rushes over me when I think of what side of history we as a family might have been on in the years leading up to the Civil War. It is instead, pure, unalloyed holy terror.

President Jimmy Carter is putting together a new initiative to bring a wide body of Baptists - black and white, southern and northern, conservative and liberal - together. The initiative is aptly called the New Baptist Covenant. It is President Carter's hope, and the hope of many others, that this new covenant of Baptists will witness to the Christ who cares deeply about issues of race and poverty and the systems of economic injustice which continue to keep masses of people in de facto slavery even today.

As a boy raised in a Southern Baptist household I have to look honestly at my own history and admit that it was my forebears who broke the first Baptist covenant. And being even more candid and personal I have to admit that if I had been there I would have done the same. Now we have been given an opportunity to renew the covenant - to pick up the pieces of our earthen vessel and put them back togehter again. This New Baptist Covenant is a chance for southern Baptist boys like me to grow up and become more than southern Baptist men. It is a chance for us to grow up and become Christians.

Confounding Calculus

Last week on Speaking of Faith I heard George Ellis, a quaker from South Africa, speaking about the struggle against apartheid in his country. He says that what happened in South Africa "confounded the calculus of rationality." By this I suppose he means a miracle happened.

I was thinking about what it must have been like to be sitting in Sowetto in the mid-1980s or Selma in the late-1940s, having no idea that freedom was right at the doorstep. Then suddenly, the sound of many waters can be heard thundering its way through and the world is turned upside down.

It is the Saints who sit and wait in darkness and dare to imagine a new world where the rationality of our present calculus will no longer hold sway.

There are a few of those Saints at the United Church of Colchester - folks who sat and prayed through dark hours and just simply refused to let the doors be closed. There are a couple of those Saints beating the pavement on the east side of Lubbock High School in the name of Jesus the Incarnate - just daring enough to believe that being faithful is more important than being big. And there are a few Saints who gather every month in the youth room at First Baptist Church of Burlington to sing and pray and create a space for grace to work its way through the chinks of the panoply of a region at war.

The Saints teach me to confound the calculus of my own rationality and hope in the day to come.

Farm Bill 2007

Some of you know I have been working with Oxfam America and Bread for the World trying to raise awareness about what is at stake in the 2007 Farm Bill.

I have written an article at ethicsdaily.com.

I ask you to read it and then write your congressional representatives.

They actually read those letters!

Wonder

I look at this picture and think about what the Psalmist says about us being wonderfully made. I usually take that word wonderful to describe God's activity - God's creative action. But seeing this picture of my kid I have to think it describes more than God. It also describes us. Think about it. We were wonderfully made. In other words, wonder was on hand when we were being made in secret and woven in the depths of the earth. Wonder is a basic part of our genetic makeup. We are quite literally "wonder full".

Part of the tragedy of the human fall was our loss of wonder. When we ate the fruit, and began knowing things that only God had beforehand known, we grew smarter but lost that sense of absolute awe that makes us so giddy that we can do nothing but break out into doxology:

O the depths and the riches and wonder of God. Who has known his mind and who has been his counselor?

James Baldwin once wrote that the purpose of art is to lay bear the questions that have been hidden by the answers. Looking at this picture of Gabrielle I long for that lost womb of God's imagination, where I knew nothing and all was possible.

Dismas House

Saint Dismas

Last night Irie, Gabs and I attended the Dismas House of Vermont annual dinner. I delivered the invocation - which means that I provided the first awkward moment of the evening. "And now, let us pause from the fun we are having and remember that God is still watching. . ."

Our church has been sending a troop of six or so people over to Dismas every month or so for a while now. (Props to Mary Lynch for taking on the organization of that.) Dismas is a transitional home for people who are re-entering our community following a jail or prison term. I have had a great time every time I've gone and have discovered that I am willing to fight for dinner rolls just as much as the felon sitting next to me.

Olin Robison, professor emeritus of Middlebury College, gave the keynote address. That didn't impress me much. But the fact that he was a Baylor alumni made me think he might actually have something of substance to say. I'm glad I listened. His speech was shorter than I would have liked, but his thoughts imaginative.

Robison talked about the request by James and John to sit with Jesus, one on his left and one on his right, when he came into his kingdom. "That is not mine to grant," Jesus said. Robison made the point that James and John assumed Jesus would be draped in royal garments and seated on a throne of glory when he came into his kingdom. They were wrong. When he came into his kingdom he was hanging naked from a cross - not so very becoming for a king.

For whatever reason, James and John were spared the agony of having to die with Jesus. Instead, two common criminals held the places next to Jesus when Jesus came into his kingdom.

I think what Robison was getting at was this: It could have been James. It could have been John. It could have been them hanging naked next to Jesus. And except for grace, it could have been us too.

Catholic tradition has it that a man named Dismas was one of the two criminals next to Jesus when he came into his kingdom. It was Dismas who turned to Jesus and begged him to remember him when he came into his royal power. Dismas' request stands the request of James and John on its head. They were asking out of a desire for glory; Dismas was asking out of a longing for grace.

A lot of politicians and talking heads on TV earn their living by getting some people riled up about needing to be tougher on crime, etc. They make anyone who has ever served time out to be less than human. Its bread and butter for them.

But places like the Dismas House keep reminding me that convicts and felons are human also. I know that because I keep bumping elbows with them as we pass the dinner rolls around.

And I look up from my plate and think, "You know, it could of been me. But for grace, it could have been me."

Sinners at the Table of an Awesome God

"The Lord's Supper" Fritz Eichenberger

Pastors-to-be go to seminary and talk about the radical nature of Jesus' call - how he gathered the sinners and tax collectors. We decide that that is exactly the kind of community we are going to gather when we pastor.

It turns out, however, that Jesus has already gathered that community in the church. Misfits and miscreants and juvenile delinquents and alchoholics and gossips and holier-than-thou tax evaders are all there waiting for us in the pews.

The trouble for us in ministry is that we read a story like Jesus having dinner at Levi's house and pretty much put ourselves in Jesus' place. But the fact is we are a lot more like the sinners and tax collectors and are in constant jeopardy of being like the Pharisees - awfully surprised by who has shown up for dinner. At some point we have to come to the realization that we are not so much the gatherers, but rather the gathered.

I have been reading Eugene Peterson's book Leap Over A Wall. I love what Peterson says about the church in all of its rag-tag messiness. "For myself...I refuse to either apologize for the church as it is or attempt to improve its image. Apologize for David's crew-the distressed, the debtors, and the malcontents at the cave of Adullam? Improve the image of Jesus eating with crooks and whores?"

Like Peterson, I am not going to apologize anymore; and I am going to try and quit demanding apologies also.

A Confession of Faith, Bizzarely Stated

I believe we were made for God and each other. All of us. Male and female, God created us - to know and love God and to know and love one other. The sky was beautiful that day. In the tragedy of the human condition, however, we, like sheep, all went astray. The seamless garment of our humanity was ripped in two - then to pieces. A spell was cast. A deep, impenetrable darkness again returned to hover over the face of the deep and cloak the beauty of the world. We all put on masks, hewn out of fig trees. We could no longer bear the thought of anyone seeing us as we really are. We were ashamed.

Then a light turned on. The Light, really. The one Light from whence the sun got its burn and the moon its glow and the stars their twinkling wink. The Light turned on and there was a man standing at the door. His name was Jesus. It was all very surprising. He asked to come in and have dinner - with us. With me. He feasted lavishly and laughed a lot. A little too much for some. Someone asked what in the world he thought he was doing with us sinners. He looked at them incredulously, as if they had missed the whole point. "Who else would I eat with?" he asked. "I came to be with the sinners, not the righteous."

He came to other houses too. He healed people and talked about the coming of a new age. He taught with authority. He spoke with power. He was NOT boring. It was all good news. Someone asked him if he was the Messiah - the anointed one of God. He just winked. But I swear I saw the twinkle of the stars in that wink. Then they came for him. At midnight. Under the hushed cloak of darkness; the powers of a cruel world came and took him. But he did not resist. He told us to put away our swords. By that afternoon he would be dead - convicted on a bunch of false charges. He was executed as an enemy of the state.

The sun mourned. The moon cried. The stars lost all their twinkle.

Then, on the third day he rose again. From the dead. And not just his ghost. But his body. Tom touched his hands to make sure.

This changed everything. Death has been swallowed up by life. The darkness has given way to the Light. A whole new world has been born over. There is a new creation.

So what do I believe?

I believe that we are the bearers of the hope of this new creation. We have been entrusted to announce the coming of a new age where hatred gives way to love, sadness gives way to joy, strife is overcome by peace and death will one day, for all of us, give way to resurrected life. We have been graced to carry on Jesus' ministry and to be his ongoing presence in the world.

The Village Church

I love the village church. It is a sign of the faith of generations' past. I wrote an article about the history of our church for the Colchester Sun earlier this year.

Since the Sun didn't post that article online I have decided to post the text myself. It is long, but worth the read I think. . .
My wife and I are celebrating our one year anniversary as Colchester residents. We moved here last February from North Carolina when I accepted the call to be the pastor of the United Church of Colchester. Ours is the brick church in the village with the tall, spired steeple. We share the parking lot with the Burnham Memorial Library.

One of my first tasks as a pastor in a new church and a new town was to familiarize myself with both the history of the congregation and the history of the community. Joyce Sweeney, a longtime resident of Colchester and member of the United Church, handed me Ruth Wright’s book Colchester Vermont From Ice-Age to Interstate. Wright includes in her book an excerpt from the diary of Rev. Nathan Perkins, a Connecticut minister who toured the region in 1789. In those days ministers were among the most highly educated in society and their surviving journals oftentimes provide invaluable insight into the temperament of a particular people at a particular time in history. I was hoping I could glean a little insight from Reverend Perkins’ experience and parlay it into my current context. His description of the topography, terrain, and fauna was just what I expected:
Moose plenty on ye mountains over against Jericho, Essex and Colchester – people hunt them – eat them in lieu of beef - & get their Tallow. Bear and wolves, plenty – timber, beach maple, – pine, hemlock, cherry-birch & some oak and Walnut – land extra ordinary good . . .

What I had not expected was Rev. Perkins’ account of the people of this area, which was altogether shocking:
[P]eople nasty – poor – low-lived – indelicate – and miserable cooks – All sadly parsimonious – many profane –yet cheerful and contended – the women more contented than ye men turned tawney by ye smoke of ye log huts – dress coarse & mean & nasty & ragged.

I often wonder if the construction of what is now the United Church of Colchester either precipitated or resulted from the end of all that meanness and nastiness. In either case the construction of what is now the brick church must have been quite an undertaking for such a “sadly parsimonious” group. Yet despite whatever personal difficulties they might have had, the Congregationalists and Baptists pooled their resources and ingenuity in 1838 and built themselves a fine church which outlasted Rev. Perkins and several other generations of ministers after him. The church is a grand building with a picturesque New England village church steeple on top. On occasion I will slip up into the attic just below the belfry and marvel at the construction. The lumber was all hand chopped and precision fitted. Only the sturdiest of pine and hemlock was selected. It is obvious that the builders intended to craft something that would last. In commenting about the construction of the building one person in our congregation recently said to me, “You know there was probably no blueprint at all for this building, but someone sure as heck knew what they were doing.” Indeed they did.

For twenty years the Baptists and Congregationalists shared the building until the Baptists raised enough to build their own white church down the street. Sixty years later the two congregations merged to become one single congregation – the United Church of Colchester. The United Church continued to use both buildings for several decades until the white church was sold to the town in the 1990s. That building now serves as the Colchester Meeting House.

When I was officially installed as the pastor last May I began thinking about what kind of footprint I might like to make over these next few years. I again turned to Ruth Wright’s book to see what kind of legacy the ministers before me had left. What I read there shocked me once more.

According to Wright, the first minister of the United Church, Stephen Talbot, knew how to preach a serious sermon. The congregation, however, was apparently more captivated by his young son Andrew’s attempts to escape the confines of a pew – by any means necessary. Rev. Delbert Donnocker’s sermons packed a punch but he was “more remembered for his wife’s culinary skills, and for his personal love of a fast horse.” These, and the flop of a clambake he proposed. (Perhaps things would have turned out differently had he solicited the counsel of his wife in the matter.) But my favorite has to be Rev. A. Ritchie Low, whose erratic driving apparently left a real impression on the hearts, minds and yards of the congregation.

After reading these accounts I was beginning to suspect Joyce Sweeney had acted with malice of forethought in not disclosing this book to me before I answered the call to come as pastor. But then I read a little more about Rev. Low’s tenure and realized that indeed I was called as pastor of the United Church of Colchester for a very distinct purpose. According to Wright, in 1929 Rev. Low “began working out plans for interracial fellowship at the child level.” An interracial fellowship at the child level in 1929? What that would have meant I do not even know. What I do know is that my wife Irie and I are expecting a little girl sometime next month. I am white and Irie is black and when that child is born a dream that was begun way back in 1929 will finally come true. We will have interracial fellowship at the child level at the United Church of Colchester.
I suppose that is the really wonderful thing about belonging to a church as old as ours. You are always living out someone else’s dreams.

Much has changed since the Baptists and Congregationalists first dreamed of building themselves a church in the early 19th century. The moose in these parts have disappeared. And so have the log huts. The poverty, though not completely eliminated, is much diminished.

But for all that has changed about the context of our ministry, one thing remains the same. We are still working to create a place where others can come and find grace. That is what it meant to be church when the brick building went up in 1838; and that is what it continues to mean all these many years later.

In that sense you might say we are still building the “brick church.” There are still no blue prints. We only have the dreams of those who came before us. And our dreams as well. And faith that someone knows what the heck they are doing . . .

Green Step

Our friends Annie, Michael and Sam live across the street from the church and have just begun a weekly email that lets others know what kinds of things can be done to conserve energy and reduce pollution around the house. The email is called Green Step and gives us one small step a week to make a difference.

With absolutely no permission from any of them, I am pasting a copy of step 1 below. To receive other steps email green.step.email@gmail.com.

Green Step 1: Unplug the power vampires in your house

Since a number of people read our invitation letter and asked why we
unplug our cell phone charger, we thought we'd start by passing along
what we've learned about household power drains. Many appliances that
appear to be officially "off" are actually consuming energy. Although
some folks blandly refer to these as "standby power appliances," we
prefer the more intriguing names of "vampire power" or "phantom
loads."

Any device that has a big plug (known as a wall pack or more aptly as
a "wall wart") is a power vampire, using energy when merely plugged
in. An appliance that continues showing a light or clock when off,
anything with a standby feature, or one with a remote control is too.
Here's a quick list of assorted vampires: cell phone chargers,
computer chargers, ipod chargers, Game Boys, televisions, vcrs, cd
players, battery chargers, flashlight chargers, hairdryers, power
tools, printers, baby monitors.

Although these items seem like small energy drains, they add up, both
in your electricity bill, and in their contribution to global warming
pollution. Wasted energy adds up to 10% of your bill, and as An
Inconvenient Truth's website reports, "the energy used to keep display
clocks and memory chips working accounts for 5 % of total domestic
energy consumption." While that number may seem small, it is
responsible for sending out "18 million tons of carbon into the
atmosphere every year." Or as worldwatch.org puts it: "vampire-like
standby devices…suck 26 power plants' worth of electricity every year
in the U.S. alone. That's 26 power plants spewing pollution and
disrupting our climate just so the vampires can sit at our beck and
call."

What can we do? Be vigilant about vampires at home: unplug any
appliances you aren't using right then and there; unplug chargers when
they are done; plug your tv and vcr into a power strip connected to a
wall switch and turn the switch off when you are through so the whole
unit is off; use the sleep mode on your computer and turn off your
computer and monitor when not in use.

What else can we do? Tell a friend, tell a colleague, tell your
roommate. We're taking this quote from Goethe to heart: "It is not
enough to take steps which may someday lead to a goal; each step must
be itself a goal and a step likewise." We hope this step has helped.
If it has, please pass it on or pass along our email address. Thanks
for being a part of this effort to share information. If you have any
suggestions, questions, or ideas, please let us know. We hope you'll
be in touch.


Peace,
Annie, Michael, and Sam
green.step.email@gmail.com

Tony Two

I've been in a conversation regarding my last post about Tony Campolo. He took a lot of flack for ministering to Bill Clinton during the whole Lewinsky thing - as did Bill Hybels of Willow Creek. Too bad that isolated them from some evangelicals. But I have found it interesting in recent years that secular media just latch onto the fact that they did what they did. I can't figure out if it is a part of the cult of personality that surrounds Bill Clinton or if, down deep inside, there is something that is telling them that if an evangelical Christian could stand by the side of a guy who did what Clinton did then maybe what I thought about the message of Jesus might be worth listening to again...for the first time.