Recently I was thinking of the many interests I have pursued for a short while that were interesting, but that somehow didn’t become lifelong passions.

I can remember thinking a lot about fishing during the late winter and early spring. Fishing opener was often Mother’s Day weekend and I would spend a lot of time at the local fly shops selecting the few flies that I could afford. Perhaps there would be a new reel or rod that caught my eye. Over the years I’ve invested a few dollars in fishing equipment, but there have been many years in my life when I haven’t even bothered to purchase a fishing license. I like to eat fish. I enjoy going to the lake. Somehow the passion for fishing just isn’t as strong these days as it was when I was a kid.

I was quite obsessed with flying airplanes when I was growing up. I began taking flying lessons as soon as I could, soloed when I was 16 and got my private pilot’s license when I was 17. For a while I assumed that flying would be my career. But I stopped flying completely while I was in college and graduate school. The combination of time, interest and financial resources put that passion on the back burner. I returned to flying in the first two parishes I served, owned an airplane in partnership with others, and flew my family on a few vacations and other trips. When the math didn’t work out - I simply wasn’t earning enough money to fly often enough to maintain my standards for safety - I stopped flying. I kept my membership in the Experimental Aircraft Association and the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association for at least a decade after I quit flying, but these days I doubt that I will ever fly as pilot in command again.

I grew up in a family that hunted for food. Fall was a time of regular trips to the mountains in search of antelope, deer, elk and other game. We were pretty good at keeping the freezer stocked with food. In high school I practiced regularly at the rifle range and participated in several shooting competitions. It never became a lifelong passion for me, however. I haven’t gone hunting for food even once since I completed my high school education. I’m not opposed to hunting, I just haven’t found it to be something in which i invest my time.

Photography is something that comes and goes in my life. When I was in seminary, I studied with a renowned photographer and purchased a quality camera and lenses. I’ve owned many different cameras over the years. There was a time, when our children were in their teenage years, when I was pretty much limited to point and shoot cameras. Once again I have managed to obtain a very good SLR camera and a few good lenses and I enjoy photography when I have time for it. I find, however, that there are weeks when I will take almost no pictures. My camera sits in its case without being exercised.

I’ve tried my hand at poetry and painting, but never developed significant skills in those arts. I never was committed enough to master skills at drawing. There are many other things that I thought I might do that somehow I’ve never really done.

Along the way there have been interests and pursuits that have been constant. I’m an avid reader and have been so since I first learned to read. I’ve always surrounded myself with books and enjoy reading immensely. I read a lot for work. My style of preaching is dependent upon reading the insights and reflections of others on a regular basis. I do much of my research online these days and through my alma mater, I have access to an excellent database of academic theology and Biblical research. Still, my office is filled with books and you can often find me reading there. Then, when I get home, I read for recreation almost constantly. Most of the time there are multiple books on the headboard of my bead and a couple of others lying near the most comfortable chairs in our home. I post reviews of books I read on the website, but most of the time I’m several months behind in my reviews. Many of the books I read never get reviewed. I just go on to the next book.

My passion for the church was no passing fancy. I became very interested in the church in my teenage years through camp and other church activities. I had the opportunity to preach while I was still in high school and I served as a licensed minister during college. I completed multiple internships during seminary and have been passionate about my vocation since my first days in the local parish. There are some things about the calling that challenge me and some that are not as much fun as others. But I can’t imagine a better life for myself than serving the church. I enjoy preparation for worship, especially writing prayers and liturgy. I enjoy leading worship. I enjoy visiting with families. I enjoy the wide variety of activities involved in doing my job.

Marriage and family are lifelong passions for me. From the time I proposed, I have never not wanted to be married. It is simply the right way for me to live. And the joy of being a father is something that sticks with me. I am as excited to talk to our son over the computer today as I was to meet him when he was born. He continues to amaze and surprise me. I am as in love with our daughter right now as I was the first time I held her. My friends know that I firmly believe that there is no down side to being a grandfather. I can’t imagine any of life’s gifts that is greater than family.

Life has given me both passing fancy and deep commitment. Both have added to the quality of my life. As I look forward to the years that remain I am delighted to know that I am still capable of developing new interests and passions. I am also overjoyed that some things will remain constant.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Back in 1942 two couples, Clarence and Florence Jordan and Martin and Mabel England formed a partnership farm based on their understanding of Christian principles. They studied the Bible, especially the book of Acts and tried to pattern their lives after early Christian communities. Other families soon joined the venture and many people came to live and work there as interns. They called their enterprise Koinonia Farm. It was located near Americus, Georgia.

There were hard times in the early years. The farm’s commitment to racial equality was criticized and even attacked by segregationists from the surrounding communities. The Ku Klux Klan and others tried to force the farm out of the area. They responded with prayer, nonviolent resistance and a renewed commitment to the Gospel. As they continued to pay equal wages to both black and white workers, eat a common meal at a common table, the violent attacks began to become less frequent. While they were establishing the farm and their way of life the country was changing as well.

Founder Clarence Jordan set about to translate a new version of the New Testament. Working from the original Greek, he penned versions of the gospels in the vernacular of south Georgia. the “Cotton Patch Version,” became popular and Jordan was sought after as a speaker and preacher across the nation.

Many people know about Koinonia Farm because of its connections to Millard and Linda Fuller, founders of Habitat for Humanity International. Inspired by Jordan and working with other Koinonia members, the Fullers took lessons that they learned working in Africa and applied them to the need for housing in Georgia. Their concepts of biblical finances caught on and the organization continues to grow worldwide with its dedication to provide simple, decent housing in partnership with those in need.

Jubilee Partners, a community that welcomes refugees from war-torn countries, was also formed.

My parents discovered the work of Koinonia farms sometime in my childhood, and began to offer small amounts of support from a distance. They made modest donations and discovered the mail-order for the farm’s products, especially pecans. They purchased pecans for use in our home and for gifts to others at the holidays. My father developed a taste for pecan pie that he shared with his family, one that I carry.

We always felt a small connection to this little community in the south, even though I have never lived in the south and have only visited there infrequently. My parents did have the opportunity to visit Koinonia farms once, but I have never made that pilgrimage.

That’s a fairly long story to tell you how I grew up with a taste for pecans. There is another nut that comes from the same area that I like that really isn’t a nut at all. It doesn’t grow on trees. It is a legume that grows in the ground that we call a nut: the peanut. We grew up with shelled peanuts in our Christmas stockings, peanut butter in the cupboard, and plenty of peanuts available for snacking most of the time.

During the time that Jimmy Carter, a neighbor of Koinonia farm, was the governor of Georgia, his wife served on the board of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill. That is where my father met her and first learned of her husband’s political ambitions. When Carter was elected president of the United States, my father, a democrat in a predominantly republican community, made a point of serving Jimmy Carter sundaes to all of his guests: vanilla ice cream with peanut butter and sometimes a bit of chocolate sauce to top it off.

I don’t have any stories about almonds. I just like to eat them. And I started out to write about them this morning, but it seems to have taken me more than half of my blog to get around to my subject.

What I wanted to say is that the price of almonds is falling. Prices are down about 25% in the last year. I was trying to cut back on almonds because of the high prices and because of the high water consumption of almonds. It takes more than a gallon of water to produce a single almond. California, source of 80% of the world’s almonds has experienced a drought. Less rain has meant less nuts. Shortages drive up prices. The farmers installed more irrigation to combat the drought, increasing the cost of production and the prices went up even more. At first we just paid the higher prices, and most other consumers seemed to do the same thing.

US markets probably could have sustained the price increases, with production decreasing slightly as prices continued to rise, but the strength of the American dollar meant that prices were rising much faster outside of the US. With around 70% of US almonds headed for the export market, mostly to China and Europe, sales started to fall. Exports are down by about 15% as we start this year. Decreasing sales means increasing supply and the price has gone down.

Still, I’m not sure that it is a good idea to consume too much of a product that requires so much water. It would be possible for the same land to produce other foods with a much lower cost in terms of water.

And the fact remains that I enjoy eating food that cannot be produced where I live. Part of the cost of nuts for us here in South Dakota is transportation. Of course I eat other well-traveled foods: apples from Washington, tomatoes from Texas, oranges from Florida and such. I haven’t given up eating spinach just because there is snow on my garden.

It is hard to determine which foods are best when trying to make responsible choices not just about nutrition and healthy eating, but also about responsible use of money and concern for others and for the sustainability of agriculture to feed the worlds ever-growing population.

I certainly don’t have the answers.

I guess I’ll get out the Koinonia catalogue and order some hickory smoked pecans to snack on while I ponder what I should do.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Over the years, I have spent quite a bit of time wresting with and worrying about budgets. I’ve probably worried too much, truth be told. On Sunday our congregation will vote on the budget for another year. It will be the congregation’s 137th budget and the 21st one since I have been pastor. This year’s budget is a very good document. We have an especially good Department of Stewardship and Budget, a long-standing, caring and accurate treasurer and enough combined experience to be accurate in our predictions of income and expense.

Like all good church budgets, the document is a statement of our faith. There are no guarantees. There are plenty of variables that we can’t control. We don’t know the exact weather to predict how many times the parking lot will have to be plowed or how much energy we will use to keep the building warm. We don’t know which of our new members will pledge or how much they will be inspired to give. We don’t know who in our congregation will come to the end of their life’s journey or have a major change in their life such as the loss of a job, an especially profitable business deal, a major health incident, or a child with extraordinary needs.

We believe that God will supply the things we truly need to be a faithful church. We pay attention to the things we believe that God is calling us to do and we try very hard not to be frivolous or wasteful with the resources we are given.

Over the years I have been witness to some incredible displays of generosity. I remember a day a quarter of a century ago when I was leading worship in our church in a different place when a young woman with two children took a seat at the back of the room. After worship she asked to talk to me and explained that they had just spent the night in a woman’s shelter, that they had a bus ticket to take them to the town where her sister lived and that they needed a ride to the bus station. I offered them a ride. As we drove the significant distance across town, I discovered that the bus ride was going to take more than 12 hours and that she had no money for food for her children or herself on the ride. As we stopped at the bus station I pulled out my wallet. I had $20 so I gave it to her for food on her journey. She asked me if I could wait, so I did. Less than 10 minutes later, she appeared, carrying one child with the other walking beside her. I rolled down the window of my car and she leaned in and handed me 2 $1 bills, saying, “Here’s my tithe. Thanks.”

I’ve been handed checks for more than $10,000 and pledges for more than $20,000, but I’ve never been handed a more generous gift than I received that day. My hands were shaking as I put the gift into an envelope and added it to the morning’s collection at the church. I am still amazed at her generosity all these years later. With that kind of generosity, I know our church will always have what is needed.

There are many other stories.

Yesterday I stopped to visit a family who has faced some really significant challenges. The household is home to a woman and her husband, a daughter and her boyfriend, and a granddaughter who announced to me yesterday, perhaps somewhat earlier than planned, that she is going to become a big sister. The husband has held a steady job since I’ve known the family, but the wife cannot work as a result of several health crises. She is on dialysis as she waits on the list for a kidney transplant. I knew from a conversation with her that the week had been stressful. Her mother is in the hospital and facing significant surgery today. I brought a bottle of laundry detergent and a package of toilet paper with me on my visit to help them stretch their resources through the weekend until payday on Monday. I sat at the kitchen table which was bare except for a bowl of carrots and celery sticks that had been set out as a snack for the granddaughter. After a few minutes of visiting, the granddaughter got up from her place, grabbed the bowl and came over to stand next to me. She offered me her treat. I was honored to accept on carrot stick and one piece of celery.

I could afford to supplement that family’s groceries every week without putting much of a dent in my personal financial resources, but they understand that teaching a four year old girl gracious generosity is important even when there are no extra resources.

As witness to such abundant generosity, I know I won’t be losing sleep over the church’s budget this year. There will be problems to solve, for sure. There will be things we’d like to have that we’ll learn to do without just like any other church. We may have to make a special request or two for funding. But I know the we can afford $600 per month to support the feeding program at our sister church in Costa Rica. I know we can afford a little extra to support Placerville Camp and United Campus Ministries. I know we’ll be able to keep the lights on and the building warm. I know that the people who work at the church will be provided with what they need to support their families.

I know that God will send incredibly generous people to our church and that we will benefit from their graciousness.

Every church budget is a statement of faith that is as dependent upon prayer as it is upon pledge cards. Some years our budgets are more accurate than others. God doesn’t demand absolute accuracy from us, only faith, hope and love.

And God supplies the faith, hope and love that we need.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Historically, the season of Lent carried with it a set of steps of preparation for Christian baptism and joining the church. The readings of Lent are designed to give an introduction to the scriptures, sharing major themes from creation, to the historical books to the Psalms and prophets, an overview of the Gospels and readings from the Acts and Epistles. The season also carried an expectation of physical and spiritual preparation. Fasting for both physical and spiritual health was encouraged and over consumption of food was frowned upon.

The process began with confession and an expression of a desire to change. The traditional day of confession was the Tuesday before Ash Wednesday, the official beginning of the season of Lent. The day came to be known as Shrove Tuesday. Shrove is derived from the word shrive, which means “confess.” Knowing that the confession was the beginning of six weeks of fasting and other preparation, it became a tradition to use the last day before Lent as a time to consume all of the rich and fatty foods that penitents would forgo during the season of Lent. Eating all of those rich foods gave another name, “Fat Tuesday” to the day. The French for fat Tuesday is Mardi Gras, a name that is used in many places to describe not only the day, but the entire season from the festival of Epiphany on January 6 to Ash Wednesday.

Carnival celebrations, parades, costume parties and other special events began to spring up during the season of Mardi Gras, many of which had their origins in traditional winter festivals that predate Christian practice. Those festivals and traditions were modified in the Christian era and vary widely depending on what part of the world they are celebrated.

Perhaps no place is as closely related to the celebration of Mardi Gras as the city of New Orleans. The city was multicultural from its beginnings and over the years has developed an ability to celebrate its diverse roots and people. There are seventy parades listed on the official New Orleans Mardi Gras calendar. The parades, along with other special events such as balls and costume parties are sponsored by krewes. The term krewe was coined early in gate 19th century and now has become the common term for any New Orleans Carnival organization. The term also has become associated with the Saint Paul Winter Carnival, the Gasparilla Pirate Festival and other spring celebrations around the country.

These pre-lenten celebrations seem to get bigger and more elaborate each year, with all kinds of events and activities that are loosely associated with things that might be frowned upon during the rest of the year such as public consumption of alcohol, over-eating, loud and raucous behavior and the like.

Even here in humble South Dakota, the city of Deadwood suspends its ordinance banning open containers on public streets for its Mardi Gras celebration. The consumption, and even overconsumption of alcoholic beverages is not only assumed, but encouraged as part of the celebrations.

And then there are the beads. The tradition of throwing beads is not as ancient as some other Mardi Gras elements. Sometime in the 1920s the practice of giving away inexpensive glass necklaces began to be a part of the Rex parade in New Orleans. A tradition was born and these the glass beads have been replaced with even less expensive plastic varieties that are mass produced, usually outside of the United States. Now beads are thrown in celebrations all around the country. According to the website of the Deadwood Mardi Gras Weekend, 100,000 sets of beads will be distributed this year. That’s a lot of cheap plastic jewelry that won’t be worn for more than a single evening’s celebration and soon will end up in the landfill.

I’ve never gotten much into Mardi Gras. I’m not opposed to parties and parades, but I don’t experience my faith as involving restrictions on my behavior. It is, rather a lifestyle that I freely embrace and which seems to support the mental, physical and spiritual health that I desire. I rarely “give up” anything for Lent. Rather I simply become a little bit more intentional about the faith practices to which I aspire for my entire life. Prayer and a lifestyle that is healthy are they way I want to live. I don’t have a desire to put on a mask and pretend I’m someone that I am not. Nor do I require a season of intentional sin in order to repent.

There are some things about the celebrations that do garner my attention, however. A lot of creativity, artistry and energy are invested in some of the parade floats and decorations. There are worthwhile charities supported by the generosity of celebrants. The music can be wonderful. There is a spirit of openness and acceptance of human differences. Some of the social barriers that separate the races and different economic classes fall away during the celebration of Mardi Gras.

I suspect that the historic tolerance of the decidedly secular festivities by church leaders was, in part, an acknowledgment that there is some good in the midst of all of the debauchery.

Again, my perspective is a little different. I don’t find the disciplines of a life of faith to be restrictive. I haven’t felt a need to rebel. I don’t want to rain on anyone’s parade, but I do hope that celebrants will remember that the combination of overeating, overconsumption of alcohol, public displays of certain behaviors and other elements of the celebration can have some pretty catastrophic consequences. A fun evening can be destroyed by drunk driving on winding black hills roads. Too much of a good thing can lead to a trip to the emergency room or even a lifetime of dealing with a chronic illness.

Have fun out there people. Pour your creative energy into an exciting costume. Pile on the beads. Eat and drink and be merry. Just don't forget to be safe.

Then, when it is over, lets journey together through the season of Lent, looking for deeper connection and deeper meaning and growing a faith that is strong not only for sunny day celebrations, but also for the times of grief and sorrow and doubt.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

In this season of polls and politicians who seem hang on every opinion survey taken, I need to say that I am a skeptic when it comes to the value of polls as measures of popular opinion. It has been well documented that the wording of questions and how they are asked can have dramatic effects on poll results. When it comes to political polls, he pollsters are well-educated in what kinds of results are wanted and are strategic in getting their polls to reach pre-determined conclusions. If a candidate is willing to pay enough money, a pollster can come up with a survey that gives the results the candidate wants.

This is hardly scientifically accurate research.

Having said that, I don’t ignore the polls entirely. For many years the results of studies by the Pew Research Center have provided statistics on religion that I have not only read, but even quoted in speaking about trends in demographics and their effects on the practice of religion in America. Centerpiece of the Pew Charitable Trust’s initiative to increase citizen involvement in community issues, the Pew Research Center is nonpartisan and appears to be genuinely interested in the effects of religion on everyday life.

A recent survey by Pew, however, has left me scratching my head. On the surface, it seems to make sense to figure out the relationship between science and religion. The results of the poll roughly follow what I might have expected. While a majority of those studied (59%) believe that religion and science are in conflict, a much smaller percentage (30%) find conflicts between their personal faith and science. Perhaps more interesting is the finding that the people who are most likely to stay that religion and science are in conflict are people who attend religious services seldom or never. In other words, those who are least involved see the conflict as being more intense than those who regularly practice their faith.

Upon a deeper look at the poll, however, I am convinced that this particular poll gives us very little information that is useful to either scientists or religious leaders.

As they say, “to get good answers, you have to ask good questions.” The pew question, “Generally, do you think science and religion are often in conflict?” is not a good question. It is vague. What does it mean by science? Is it referring to specific theories or the practice of science in general? And does Religion refer to the beliefs of evangelical Protestants, secular Jews, Buddhists, or some other specific set of beliefs? Or does religion refer to the institutions of religion and the practices of the faithful? The question is not at all clear. That question, however, is at the heart of the Pew Research Center’s study.

My worry about poor polls is that rather than study public opinion, the polls themselves can play a role in forming public opinion. Instead of being objective, they can contribute to misinformation. The Pew Study, in my opinion subscribes to a very narrow view of religion and of science. This is compounded by a lack of educated reporters who seem to be unduly influenced by anything that claims to report truth. By practicing poor science, the study itself contributes to unnecessary conflict between science and religion.

Let’s look at what we do and what we do not know about the poll. Pew surveyed 2,000 Americans about their perceptions of the relationship between religion and science. They claim that their sample reflects that religious and cultural diversity of the nation, though what criteria was imposed to insure that diversity is not clear. Were the levels of involvement in religion of those polled similar to the general public? Should we turn to the general public for information about the relationship between religion and science? Would we not get more accurate information if the poll paid attention to the relative expertise of those questioned? How well are religious minorities represented in the poll?

The study was conducted over the phone using a list of simple multiple choice questions. Multiple choice questions aren’t the most useful ways to delve into theological understanding. People’s feelings and opinions about religion often shift greatly. They might believe one thing while they are sitting in church and another thing when they are in the midst of a business meeting. The study also assumes that people have pre-formed opinions on religious issues. Those who do not regularly participate in church may not have spent much time thinking about religious issues.

Consider this question, that was asked as part of the study: “Thinking about the use of biological engineering to create artificial organs for humans needing a transplant operation, would you say this is making appropriate use of medical advances OR is it taking medical advances too far?” An honest answer to the question might require nuances not available in the either/or choice. Furthermore, most people would need some time to reflect and think before arriving at an answer. information gained in a short telephone conversation would be, at best, incomplete.

Poll respondents were asked about five such complex questions every minute. Those polled are receiving questions so rapidly that they often have no idea whether they really give the right answer.

Another significant problem with the poll is what it does not tell us. We do not know the response rate. In getting 2,000 respondents, how many people simply refused to participate? What percentage of people called agreed to participate in the study in the first place. At our home, we almost always refuse to participate in telephone surveys. We have valid and important opinions, but we don’t hold much stock in that type of research. It remains unknown whether or not the subset of people who are willing to participate in telephone surveys are in anyway representative of the general population.

So I read the surveys with a combination of interest and skepticism. On the other hand, I read the reports about such surveys with less interest and my skepticism reaches close to cynicism when it comes to the media reports.

It requires more than a few telephone calls to arrive at the truth.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I grew up with mixed messages about pride. One the one hand, we learned the famous verse from Proverbs: “Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall. It is better to be of a lowly spirit with the poor than to divide the spoil with the proud.” (Proverbs 16:18-19). On the other hand, our high school held regular pride days and spoke of school spirit in relationship to athletic victories. We also were taught to be proud of our community, proud of our country, and often were in places where pride was spoken of as a positive attitude.

What I don’t think I learned as a child, something that took years to begin to discover, is humility. I guess that I discovered fairly early in my life that a bit of self-deprecating humor could be of value. However, a little bit can go a long ways. While well-timed humor can provide a release from tension, too much can sound like belittling or self flagellation.

Genuine humility is significantly different.

Humility is based in honest assessment, not in some kind of pretend, which is often the case with self deprecation. Humility is the opposite of exaggeration. Knowing one’s weaknesses as well as one’s strengths can give one an accurate picture both of one’s calling and of one’s abilities.

Humility has another quality as well. While pride tends to distinguish one from others, humility helps one to see similarities and commonness between self and others. Humility invites one into a community.

Humility, it would seem, isn’t a quality favored by those running for President of the United States. It also seems that it isn’t a quality that voters are looking for. Perhaps no one becomes President by making humility one’s major selling point. It certainly isn’t a quality that is associated with leadership very often.

The message of my childhood, a message that is still prevalent in our culture today, is that humility doesn’t lead to success. You have to have pride in order to succeed.

The insight that I have come slowly to understand is that personal success isn’t the most important type of success. While pride may help one achieve wealth or fame or even political office, it focuses on the individual. Humility allows one to see the value of community. Humility can be a great asset to a leader. I have had the privilege of being a part of successful and growing congregations because I have been able to see myself as a part of those communities. Knowing that we have much in common, that we are all human and make mistakes, and that the task is bigger than any one of us helps one to recognize that we are interdependent. We are all in this together and we need one another.

It was a basic insight of our Congregational forebears, who insisted that ministers belong to the congregations that they serve. In contrast to some other denominations, where ministers belong to a Presbytery, a Conference or some wider church body, our forebears insisted that ministers join and become members of the congregations that they serve. Local church membership is a basic requirement of the Christian life and a quality that is required for leadership.

There is no “us and them” when it comes to pastors and congregations. We all belong together.

While I may be called to a unique role in the community, I still am just one of many disciples in this place. We are all seeking to serve God together. We journey together. Our successes and failures are shared.

More importantly, it is important for me to remember that I am not somehow better than the people I serve. I am not more moral, more intelligent, more educated, or more of anything. I struggle at times just as the other members of the congregation do. Despite the attempts of some folks to place ministers on pedestals, we are not well-served by having too high an opinion of ourselves.

The gift that I seek is clarity of vision. When I am able to honestly see myself and honestly evaluate my strengths and weaknesses, I am able to contribute to the community in positive ways.

Unfortunately, most forms of pride are not as honest. Narcissism creates an unrealistic picture of self and the importance of one’s self in comparison to others. Hubris frequently leads to violence and other excessive behaviors. In the stories of the ancients, as well as in the Bible, these forms of pride eventually lead to loss of position, punishment, or some other form of correction.

These days I am cautious about pride, though I see displays of it all around me. There is nothing new or innovative about my caution. Literature is filled with tales of the ill effects of excessive pride. Milton’s “Paradise Lost,” Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus,” and even Shelley’s “Frankenstein” are classic tales of the dangers of excessive pride.

I wonder, however, if it is pride or humility that causes me to tune out and pay less attention to the current political campaign and all of the bombastic rhetoric that surrounds us today. I have caught myself saying things like, “I’m not going to sink to their level,” and “I’m not one of the millions who sit passively glued to the television set.” There is an element of pride in the way that I think about our culture and my relationship to it. I use “up” and “down” and “height” to describe my relationship to others.

The truth is that I am not above others. I am a member of the community, a citizen of this nation and as deeply affected by all of the rhetoric as anyone else.

Being humble, however, does not demand that we blindly follow prideful leaders. In my case, being humble means spending more time with those who are on the fringes of the community - the ones who have been told they don’t belong.

The media won’t be covering the work I do. That, my friends, is a good thing.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I’m not sure when they started naming winter storms. I was first aware of it when we experienced in blizzard in October of 2013 that brought about 30” of snow with high winds to our area. We lost a couple of trees from our backyard in the blizzard and it took us quite a while to get dug out. At the height of the blizzard we were without electricity for a couple of days, and pretty much snowed in. There was plenty to do during and after the storm and as soon as the winds abated some and the snowfall stopped, I was outside, blowing and shoveling snow and cleaning up the fallen trees with the chainsaw. We live in a protected part of the hills and didn’t have it bad. There were a lot of cattle losses on ranches in the area and people who were without electricity for much longer periods than we experienced.

Not every storm is large enough to get its own name. I don’t know how they decide which storms to name, but I think it has something to do with size.

The news back east, of course, is of winter storm Jonas. There have been several locations that received record snowfall. At least 27 people have died as a result of the storm. There are places where it is still going to take several days to get things dug out and back to business.

Meanwhile, we’ve had a few days of mild weather. Saturday was a good day for getting outdoors and enjoying it. We even cooked our evening meal on the barbecue. This morning we’ve got a dusting of new snow, less than a half inch, but it makes things look white and pretty once again.

I know that there are people who suffer from the winter weather. The shortened days and storms can have a psychological effect. Seasonal Affective Disorder is much better understood than was the case years ago and there are some treatments that can ease the effects of the condition.

We used to speak of cabin fever. I grew up with the understanding that it wasn’t good for a person to stay indoors all of the time. At our home the cure for cabin fever was to go outside to play. And we learned to bundle up so that we could go outside when the weather was cold. As soon as I was old enough I began to deliver newspapers, which gave me a reason to go outside every day. Even if school was cancelled, I had a task that took me outside. When the weather was severe, we occasionally got help from a parent, but we were expected to know how to dress appropriately for cold weather. We had snow pants and good mittens with woolen liners and leather outsides. There were plenty of snow masks and scarves to keep us warm.

I don’t know how it is for other people, but I find that I need to get out into winter in order to keep it from getting me down. My life is busy and there is a reason to go outside nearly every day. I am grateful for that busyness. I don’t know if it would be called cabin fever or seasonal affective disorder or some other condition. I just know that the way to deal with winter is to get bundled up and go outside. Deep snow can make hiking difficult, but here in the hills we get enough warm days between storms to make walking around the hills fairly easy most of the time. There are a few sheltered areas where the snow gets deep, but there are plenty of open places for a walk in the woods.

I do, however, do my rowing indoors these days. The lake is frozen. The boats are in storage. My Seattle Wooden Rower sits in my library and I try to get in a half hour or so most days. Like walking, rowing is a gentle exercise. I can go as fast or as slowly as I like. If I get tired, I can slow down. If I am feeling lethargic, I can pour on the coals and row strenuously for a while.

My body continues to teach me about my faith. Getting exercise affects my sense of the world. It has an impact on my emotions and my relationship with others. It is necessary for me to find some physical activity to deal with the realities of life. In theological terms we call this incarnation. Spirit taking on physical form. One of the core concepts of Christianity is that God, the creator of all that is, the One who is beyond all time and space, takes on human form. The infinite and the personal meet. Instead of seeing the world as a duality of “us” and “them” or of “body” and “spirit,” we understand that there is an intersection that yields a “both/and” instead of an “either/or.” The raw physicality of human existence - aching muscles and all - is the dwelling place of the spirit.

Yesterday we paused outdoors in a very beautiful part of the hills for the committal of a man who had died earlier in the week. After a brief ceremony and after military honors were rendered with care and precision, the family got into their cars and headed back to town. The honor guard packed up their flags and guns and drove off. Just the funeral director, the man from the vault company and I remained as the casket and vault were lowered into the grave. Our actions didn’t require words, so we worked quietly. Then there were a few minutes to wait for the tractor to be moved into place to fill the grave. I had been outside for maybe a half hour or so and it wasn’t very cold, but I began to feel the chill creeping in as I stood still on the hillside waiting. I could have sat in a warm car, but it was good to feel the chill as I remembered the unique man whose funeral we had just observed.

We’ve still got plenty of winter left around here. I’ll be fine as long as I make a way to go outside every day.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

One of the joys of my job is that there is room for constant innovation and change. Even though I have worked with the same lectionary - the same three-year cycle of scriptures - for all of my career, no two worship services have been the same. Even when we were doing two services each Sunday morning, there were variations and changes that occurred. I enjoy learning from experience and using that learning to make improvements. The congregations that we serve are constantly changing.

There is a joke about the minister who kept a file of old sermons and when there was no time for preparation a previously-used sermon was taken out of the file and repeated. Perhaps there are ministers who have done that. There may even have been a minister that used that practice too often. I can’t imagine such a practice. Each sermon is unique to a particular time and place and a particular gathering of people. I have kept manuscripts of sermons that I have previously delivered. From time to time I read one of them. I am almost always disappointed. I have moved on from the ideas I was exploring when the manuscript was prepared. I wouldn’t say things the way I did when I prepared that particular sermon. These days I keep my research notes, to which I refer from time to time, but even though the computer has made it possible to keep all of the manuscripts that I want, I find that I almost never read my old sermons.

The same is true with these blogs. I have archives on my web site that go back nearly a decade and I have a couple of years prior postings that aren’t available through my web site. The truth, however, is that I don’t read them. I suspect that no one else does, either. This year, there was a ‘glitch’ in the software when I closed out 2015. Some of the blog archives aren’t accessible from the web site. I’ve been working through them, but there are several months that don’t show up when you visit my site. No one has written me an e-mail noting the missing blogs. I keep thinking that one day I will go through all of the old bogs and edit a volume of essays, but that is a task I’m leaving to some future date. It is likely I’ll never do it.

The self-imposed pressure to say something new doesn’t, however, seem like a burden. The continuing creation of this universe gives me plenty of new material each day.

Yesterday, I was writing words that I will use this afternoon at a graveside committal service for a member of our congregation. A graveside committal is a brief ceremony. We don’t have the time and we don’t have the setting for an extended sermon. Our book of worship has beautiful words for the committal service - words that I use over and over. There is, however, a need to personalize each service. No matter how many funerals at which I officiate, each is a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the grieving family. And it doesn’t take more than a few minutes’ looking to understand that the person whose body we will bury today was a very unique individual. He wasn’t just like his peers. He didn’t imitate others. He was filled with so many passions and interests and hobbies and likes that it was difficult for his closest family members to keep up. Obviously this is an occasion that calls for specially chosen words.

It is relatively easy for me to write a 1,000-word essay. I do it every day. I often forget how difficult that challenge is for others. A couple of times, I have assigned personal essays to students and watched as they struggled with the assignment. Writing something much shorter, however, is a difficult challenge for me. I have to write then cut out words then re-write and go through the process several times. Furthermore, writing words to be spoken out loud is a different process than writing words to be read on screen or on paper. Spoken words require a certain rhythm - a sense of repetition and flow. Reading poetry has helped me learn more about this process. I read poetry out loud every day. Recently, I have been dwelling with what might be called minimalist poetry - poems that use very few words. Many of the poems of Robert Lax involve a single column of words, often less than three words per line, with lots of repetition. At first glance they look silly on the page, and they often don’t spark the sense of the poet if one does not read them out loud, being attentive to the line breaks and the spacing between the words.

Putting together a few brief paragraphs for a committal service while at the same time being faithful to the traditional prayers and words of scripture that carry deep meaning for the family was a daunting and time-consuming task yesterday.

And here is the “kicker:” It is unlikely that the grieving family will remember any of the words I have so carefully crafted and that I will deliver as precisely as I am able. The journey through grief doesn’t give one a mental state that is conducive to remembering details and individual words. What I need to convey to the family is a sense of caring, of confidence in the future, of hope, and of love. They may in fact be more touched by the tone of my voice than by the content of the words I say.

The experience is unique. The next funeral will require different words. Having come up with a service with which I am pleased and which I think fits the occasion has taught me almost nothing about how to select the words for the next unique situation. My life and my work carry so much variation and innovation that I almost can’t understand people whose jobs are boring and repetitive.

It is the right life for me. I have been blessed with work that is continually challenging and continually fresh.

Between now and the funeral, there is another sermon that must be delivered. I’ve still got a little time to make a few changes.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I have a friend from college days who is a mathematician. I can still remember quite clearly his excitement over doing calculus problems and thinking of mathematical challenges. At the time, my primary fascination was philosophy. We both were active in campus ministries and both took many classes in theology, Bible and Christian thought, but there was a significant amount of time where our brains were occupied with different challenges: his pondering the relationships of numbers, mine studying systems of organizing thought.

I’ve never thought of myself as much of a mathematician. I am competent with basic algebra and geometry and use math for a host of everyday purposes including balancing the checkbook, developing budgets and planning the amount of time it takes to travel particular distances. But I accept the math that others do when it comes to thinking about the distances between stars or predicting the presence of dark matter and dark energy. Increasingly, also, I rely on devices such as GPS and my phone to do mathematical computations for me.

There are, however, two basic numbers that represent a huge depth of meaning for me.

You might not think of one as a very significant number. It is the beginning of counting and is understood by very young children. But the concept of one God over all of creation was very long in appearing in human history. For generations and generations, when people shared religious experiences and thought about the nature of the universe, they assumed that there must be multiple gods. The glory of a sunset is somehow quite different than the miracle of drinking water. The vastness of the night sky appears distinct from the love of a parent and a child. Different places have different meanings. Different people have different needs. It seemed obvious to many of the ancients that there would be multiple gods.

In the stories of our people the realization of the reality of a single God came with the journeys of Abraham and Sarah. When they left the land of their ancestors to journey to a new place, they discovered that the same God traveled with them. The God they experienced in their old home was also with them as they traveled. That same God met them in foreign lands where people worshiped different gods. They were delighted with that God and subsequent generations spoke of the God of our ancestors: the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It took many generations, however, for our people to understand that there is no other god. The religious experiences of others are manifestations of the same God. The inventions of other religious systems are not the same as the God of all creation.

It sounds mundane in our generation after so many years of people pondering God’s nature, but radical monotheism is one of the great contributions of the Abrahamic faiths. It is not unique to the religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, but our faith has made unique contributions to the understanding of a single God over all of the universe.

In our generation, as scientific discoveries push our understanding of the nature of the universe and we discover that it is much larger and much more complex than our forebears could understand, we are challenged to enlarge our vision and develop a conceptual understanding of God is much bigger and much more vast than previously viewed.

We light a single Paschal candle each week in worship as a reminder of the single nature of God.

But two is also a critical number and part of the contribution of our corner of faith.

Even when we avoid religious language, two is essential for all of life. From a biological perspective every human being has two parents. It is the way that the vast majority of living things reproduce. The number two even figures into our understanding of God, because God exists for relationship. God is God in relationship with people. The same God who is creator of all that is takes a deep personal interest in each individual. Each of our relationships with God is deeply personal and unique.

I am no expert on world religions, having lived my entire life immersed in a particular corner of Christianity, but I believe that Christianity has made a unique contribution to religious thought in the understanding of Jesus as at once fully divine and also fully human. We light two candles on our communion table each week as a reminder of the dual nature of Christ and our understanding that God exists in relationship.

In my personal life, ones and twos carry deep meaning. Without extending judgement to other shapes of families or the reconfigurations of families that others experience, for me a single life-long marriage with one woman has been deeply meaningful. Each day brings a new depth of discovery of this partner who remains as fascinating as the day that we met. I know that there will be more to learn when the decades bring us to the end of this life’s journey. I thrive on the uniqueness of that one relationship. It doesn’t mean, however that there aren’t other loves in my life. I grew up in a large family. I have two sisters and two brothers who are still alive. We have two children and two grandchildren. Our children have spouses. We have formed deep friendships with others. I have been blessed to serve four congregations in three phases of my life. I have fallen in love with each congregation that I have served. Being committed to a single love in no way limits my capacity to love others. Rather, it expands my capacity to love.

I know that someone interested in numerology would talk of three persons of the trinity, of 12 disciples, of 40 days and nights of temptation in the wilderness, and of all sorts of different numbers. For me, however, pondering the significance of one and two offers enough complexity and wonder for a lifetime of faith.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Last night I got another reminder about why I am not cut out for a career in politics. I accepted an invitation to what was called a “meet and greet” between the mayor and church leaders in Rapid City. A lot of my colleagues were there and I enjoyed the first ten minutes of informal visiting with them. Then the meet and greet ended and for the next hour and a half, we sat in straight rows facing the front where the mayor outlined his vision for consolidating services for homeless people in Rapid City. He was not interested in our opinions or feedback and the meeting was carefully structured to avoid such. He wanted to give us his vision. I think he also wanted to make us advocates for his vision, but it is clear that he has little or no understanding of the distinctions between churches or why we don’t act or think with one voice.

The mayor still has a lot of lessons to learn.

Anyway, the evening was mostly about politics. The mayor tried a few references to scripture about compassion for the poor, but they weren’t particularly memorable or engaging.

Here are some things I think I got from the meeting last night:

The mayor wants the land where the rescue mission is currently located. He seems to also want to get the mission off of Main street. He’d like to bulldoze the mission for a much-needed new fire station despite the fact that the city has a different four-acre site that was purchased for the new fire station. It was also clear that the mayor wants a less expensive fire station than was originally planned.

The mayor is believes that if the rescue mission were larger and located at another address somehow the chronically homeless would be attracted to mix with the temporarily homeless who are currently served by the mission and a one institution fits all scheme would solve the problem of homelessness in our city.

The mayor thinks that Hope Center, a daytime drop in center for homeless persons should be in the same building as the Rescue Mission. He doesn’t understand the differences in theology or organizational structure between the two organizations and feels that if they were forced to combine he probably could get the Hope Center off of Kansas City street. He clearly doesn’t want too many services for homeless people too close to downtown businesses.

The mayor doesn’t like the annual drain that the Journey Museum makes on the city’s operating budget. He thinks that if the museum is forced out of its existing building into a less expensive location it might stand a chance of breaking even and not being an expense.

The mayor thinks that putting the Rescue Mission and the Hope Center into the current Journey Museum building will somehow magically create a non-profit that can afford the approximately 50% increase in operating costs to jointly operate a building that is currently a drain on the city operating budget.

They mayor hasn’t kept up with the sociological research about group homes and thinks that a group home would be a good step between the rescue mission and home ownership for the chronically homeless. He didn’t explain how he was going to get the chronically homeless to suddenly want to abandon their addictions and mix in with those already served by the mission.

The mayor isn’t ready to tackle issues of transitional apartments and the need for a separate shelter for women and children, so he simply isn’t addressing Cornerstone Apartments or the Women’s and Children’s Center in his proposal. After all, neither of those are located in downtown.

The mayor wants to get the jump on a city ordinance for tiny homes. He thinks if the city could own a dozen or so of them, calling them transitional housing, he can get an ordinance that bans composting toilets, off-grid water solutions and use of recycled building materials. Although the demand for tiny homes in other communities has nothing to do with homelessness, he thinks that he might be able to sell his scheme if he convinces churches that they are part of a compassionate solution to chronic poverty.

The mayor wants to get the jump on a city ordinance for community gardens. Those are hard to control. Some people have even proposed allowing chickens in and around community gardens. Some are taking water directly out of the creek instead of buying water from the city. Maybe if the city got into the community garden business and controlled a one-acre community garden, churches wouldn’t be proposing putting community gardens in residential neighborhoods. Of course he will call this compassion and give the food to the homeless who will be expected to provide free labor. The mayor seems to be really excited about volunteer jobs for the people in our community who have the lowest wages and the least amount of job skills.

The mayor doesn’t seem to like Habitat for Humanity. Maybe he has other jobs for their volunteers. He’d rather have a whole new home-building project, where homes are built on an asphalt pad and then moved to foundations. He believes that it will work as a job training program for the construction industry. After all a huge shortage of construction workers is a problem in our city. Why not ask the homeless to solve that problem in their spare time when they aren’t working in the community gardens while living in a group home? Oh, I forgot, some of them will be living in tiny homes where a no pets policy can be enforced. After all the tiny homes will all be directly plumbed into city sewers so the temporary occupants can get used to paying city utilities and won’t learn about off-grid living pursued by tiny home owners in other cities.

You see. It is a good thing I’m not involved in politics. It is clear, just from reading this morning’s blog post that I’m way too cynical for such a career.

I am however at least politically astute enough to know that it isn’t a good thing to propose a public-private social services agency and then refer to it as a “factory.” I’m sure the mayor didn’t mean to make that slip up in his presentation, but he had a pretty big audience when he made the reference.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Nearly a decade ago, in 2007, we attended the General Synod of the United Church of Christ in Hartford, Connecticut. After all of the speakers and meetings and worship, we had time for part of our summer vacation and the place I wanted to visit first was Mystic Seaport, a historic community and marine center, not far from Hartford. We arrived as the seaport was preparing for the annual Wooden Boat show and were able to see many of the displays being assembled in addition to the attractions of the seaport. There is a marvelous museum, a collection of ships models, a gallery with great art, plenty of historic vessels to view and tour, a cafe, a tavern, all kinds of attractions for children and a working boat shop. It was a Mystic that the reproduction of the slave ship Amsted was built. Many other boats of historic value have been built or reconditioned in the working shop at mystic. We were able to tour the whaling ship Charles Morgan and view a host of historic small craft at the John Gardner chapter of the Traditional Small Craft Association. There was too much to take in in the short time we had to visit. We were able to come back for part of a second day to wander the exhibits before we had to take off for the rest of our trip.

In the midst of the recreated historic village stands the Greenmanville Church. The white wood framed building with its steeple with a clock and a bell tower is easy to pick out. In a way there is nothing very remarkable about the church. The main level is a large conventional sanctuary with rows of pews, a pulpit, lecture and a communion table. In many ways it looks like an iconic New England church. As you travel around the United States, there are plenty of historic villages that include various churches. Old church buildings that once housed thriving congregations have fallen into disuse, been abandoned, and become available to be moved to reconstructed communities.

In the middle of South Dakota there is a tourist attraction called 1880 Town. It has more than 30 buildings that have been moved in to recreate the feel of a pioneer South Dakota village. There are props from movies and a number of other attractions. It has at least two churches that once were in use as active congregations that now stand empty as part of the displays of the old town.

On the one hand, there is nothing particularly interesting to me in visiting abandoned churches. The buildings are rather plain in their architecture. The goal was to create a big room where a group of people could gather. The real attraction of churches to me lies in the people, not in the buildings. I have spent enough of my time in trying to keep up with the demands of church buildings to know that my passion focuses more on relationships than on architecture.

Still it is interesting to think of the people who worshiped in these historic building. At Mystic Seaport, one has lots of opportunities to think of the sailors who headed out to earn a living for their families on the old sailing vessels that plied their trade from New England ports. Touring the whaling ship, we saw the tight quarters that were occupied by the sailors and thought of the hardships of the long tours of duty that were required to keep the country supplied with whale oil in the days before petroleum was our primary energy source. It wasn’t an easy life and it was filled with risks. Accidents took the lives of many a sailor in those days.

The life of the pastor of a seaport church must have been rather varied one as well. When the ships were in, the congregation that needed to be served was larger than when the ships were out to sea. I’m sure the sailors might attend worship when they were in port, but these were not men that were accustomed to the traditions and rituals of worship. They lived most of their lives with a blend of religious faith and superstition with a dash of fatalism thrown in. When they were in port, part of their activities centered around the tavern and having a good time. They would be paid and if the voyage had been successful, they would be temporarily rich and spend their money lavishly, knowing that food and board would be provided again once the ship set sail. Some of the sailors had families who remained in port and who made up the bulk of the congregations of those churches, coming regularly with fervent prayers for the safe returned of their loved ones.

The core of the pastoral image is loving the people that you are called to serve. Yes, we are expected to have some knowledge of the Bible and theology. We are expected to be able to deliver a cogent sermon from time to time. We have to be able to administer a small institution and keep the budget straight and the bills paid. We officiate at weddings and funerals and offer invocations at parties and banquets. We offer advice and counsel when asked and administer the sacraments on a regular basis. But at its heart, our vocation is about loving people. If you don’t love the people, you can’t be a pastor.

How strange it must have been to be called to love those sailors. I can understand the part of what the pastors did when the ships were in port. The excitement and hustle and bustle of loading and unloading the barrels and other cargo into the ships, the busyness of the chandleries as they provided the fittings and tools required for long ocean voyages, the rowdiness of the tavern crowds and the songs of the sailors all would be fun. It would be good to walk along the docks and visit with those who had traveled around the world and hear the stories of their adventures.

But one would also have to love them from a distance when they were away most of the time.

I have never lived on the coast. I have always served rather stable congregations. I know about falling in love with the good people of the heartland. I am among the most blessed of people. It is probably a good thing that I didn’t live my life as pastor to a seafarer’s church. My mind, however, sure can wander not only when I visit such a place, but even when I recall the visit years later.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I first grew a beard when I was 17 years old. It was a bit thin and scraggly, but I was a freshman in college and it was the early 1970’s and I wanted to distinguish myself from my childhood. I guess I thought that the beard made me look older - more mature. Looking at pictures from those days now, I think it actually made me look a little silly. Beards, however, were very popular among the students with whom I associated: the theater majors, the music majors, and the theology and philosophy students. I am sure that our small campus ministry group had a majority of males with beards.

I didn’t shave my beard all the way off during the first three years of college. Then, during the summer between my junior and senior years of college I got married (with a beard) and shaved off my beard a couple of days after our wedding in order to take a job at a bakery. I kept the beard off for the summer and worked at the bakery. In the fall, when I returned to classes I grew my beard back out. I was twenty years old. I haven’t been clean shaven since.

Our children and grandchildren have never seen me without a beard. None of the congregations I have served in my career as a pastor has seen me without a beard.

The beard has garnered a lot of different reactions over the years. My wife’s grandmother Amy, who never saw me without the beard, used to make a face and say, “I’m not kissing those whiskers.” She kissed me on my forehead instead. After we had been married for a decade I received a report of a conversation that took place in her church. It seems that there was a candidate to become their minister and a group of the women of the church were discussing the candidate. One of the women in the group made a comment about the candidate’s beard. Amy flew to his defense, saying, “My grandson has a beard and he’s a very good minister.” She took to calling me her grandson in her later years, once even introducing my wife and I as “my grandson and his wife,” much to my wife’s dismay.

She kept kissing me on my forehead, however.

I’ve been known to comment that I might shave off the beard, except that as it is I can look in the mirror and see my face and if I think I’m a bit ugly, I can always consider shaving off the beard. If I were to shave the beard off and look in the mirror and discover that I was ugly, there would be no quick solution to the problem.

As a person who has worn a beard for all these years, my skin is a bit tender. I trim the edges of my beard with a razor and if I get a bit aggressive, my skin is pretty sore. Trimming my beard for length is a simple job with electric clippers. From time to time I have a hair stylist trim everything up to keep it straight and neat. My beard grows at about twice the rate of the hair on the top of my head, which is getting pretty thin. I have to trim it every couple of weeks.

In defense of the the practice of wearing a beard, a recent study, published in the Journal of Hospital Infection might be of interest. In the study the faces of 408 hospital staff with and without facial hair were swabbed and tested for infectious substances on their faces. Hospitals have good reasons to see how infections are spread. After all hospital-acquired infections are a major cause of disease and death in hospitals. Previous studies have focused on hands, white coats, ties, and equipment. It makes sense that the hospital might suspect beards as places that might harbor infectious substances.

The researchers, however, were surprised at their results. It was the clean-shaven staff who were more likely to be carrying something unpleasant on their faces. The beardless group were more than three times as likely to be harboring methicillin-resistant staph aureus on their freshly-shaven cheeks. MRSA is very common, but also very troublesome, as a source of hospital-acquired infections.

The researchers have offered several theories about why men with beards are significantly less likely to carry dangerous infections. One theory is that the micro-abrasions in the skin which are caused by shaving may support bacterial colonization and proliferation.

Dr. Adam Roberts, a microbiologist based at University College in London has another theory. He has been harvesting and colonizing bacteria found in beards. He has managed to identify over 100 different types of microbes from beards. Among the microbes are fungi that kill other bacteria. The substance, identified as part of a species called Staphylococcus epidermis, is especially effective at killing a form of E. coli that causes urinary tract infections. It is possible that there are microbes commonly found in beards that are effective at combatting MRSA.

Purifying and properly testing new antibiotics is so expensive and comes with such a high failure rate that it is unlikely that researchers will be harvesting beard microbes in the search for new antibiotics any time soon. There have been no new antibiotics produced in the past 30 years. The need for new antibiotics, however, is increasing. Antibiotic-resistant infections kill at least 700,000 people per hear and it is projected that by 2050 such infections will kill 10 million per year. The need for new antibiotics is evident.

Opinions about beards remain mixed. Alexander the Great banned his soldiers from growing beards, for fear that enemies would hold on to them in battle. The tradition of soldiers being clean shaven has persisted ever since. In Afghanistan, beards have been both compulsory and banned in recent decades.

For now, however, I plan on keeping my beard. Knowing that it might contain a disease fighting microbe just gives me one more reason.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Thomas Merton is one of those figures who has had a deep influence on a lot of other people. Part of his influence came from the fact that he was a prolific writer. He was only 53 at the time of his death, yet he wrote over 70 books and has been the subject of many biographies and reflections over the years since.

Both of Merton’s parents were artists, his mother an American Quaker and his father a native of New Zealand. He was baptized in the Anglican Church of England, and raised with a variety of religious experiences. His mother died of cancer when he was a young boy. His father re-married, but Thomas did not develop a close relationship with his step mother. He lived part of the time with his mother’s family before being enrolled in a boarding school in France. He later studied in boarding schools in England.

He enrolled in Clare College of Cambridge University, but was not diligent in his studies, spending more time in local pubs than at his studies. Details of this phase of his life are sketchy. He enrolled as a sophomore at Columbia University in New York. It was there that he began to take his studies more seriously and started a serious exploration of the Catholic faith. A course on Thomas Aquinas was deeply influential in his spiritual journey and he began to explore a vocation as a Catholic Priest.

There were many friendships in his life that were deeply influential, including those with Robert Lax and Ed Rice. It was through Lax that Merton learned about St. Bonaventure University, where Merton taught for a while before entering the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist monastery.

One of the best sources of information on the life of Thomas Merton is his autobiography, “The Seven Storey Mountain.”

It seems that there was a bit of tension between the leaders of the usually reclusive Trappist monks and Merton, who wrote prolifically and was constantly publishing books about himself, about Christian service, life and faith and a wide variety of other topics. I suspect that Merton was just a little too open and a little too public for the generally reclusive Trappists. Although Merton lived in a Hermitage and accepted the discipline of separation from he world, he seems to have spend a great deal of his time writing and communicating. He carried on extensive conversations by letter with Lax and other of his friends.

I don’t know the internal dynamics of the Trappist monastery, nor do I know the thoughts and intentions of the leaders who worked with Merton, but I suspect that his openness, especially his frank conversations about his struggles and shortcomings, presented an image that was different from the ideal to which the monks were striving. Merton was very human with a life of mistakes and shortcomings and an awareness of the gap between his ideals and the reality of his life. I suspect that the Trappist leaders prefer such struggles to be more private and less public than was the case with Merton.

Whatever were the dynamics, in his short life Merton produced a body of work that is wide and complex. Many of his books are readily available in bookstores. Some of his books were co-authored, such as “Contemplative Prayer,” written with Buddhist monk Tich Nhat Hanh. Others were collected from his unpublished writings at the time of his death by scholars such as “A Year with Thomas Merton,” collected by Johathan Montaido.

The popularity of Merton may well have to do with his human failings. Because he lived a life that was filled with struggles and imperfections, he may be more accessible than others whose failings are not quite so apparent. He was deeply serious about his faith and disciplined in his practice. He sought to connect with God in real and meaningful ways, respectful of tradition, but open to new avenues. He was very ecumenical in his approach to the practice of faith and sought to connect with deep thinkers and faith practitioners of other traditions. He was especially attracted by Eastern religions. Throughout his life he studied Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism, Jainism and Sufism in addition to his monastic studies.

He was far less concerned with doctrine or intellectual ideas about faith than he was with the experience of living with faith.

It was on a trip to Thailand to attend an interfaith conference between Catholic and non-Christian monks that he was accidentally electrocuted by a faulty electric fan while stepping out of his bath. It was possible that a preexisting heart condition contributed to his death from the electric shock. It was 27 years to the day of his entrance into the Abbey of Gethssemani, where he is buried.

Merton was far more interested in spiritual experience than in the ideas and concepts of religion. He wrote of Christianity’s Cartesian emphasis on “the reification of concepts, idolization of the reflexive consciousness, flight from being into verbalism, mathematics, and rationalization.” I don’t think that this meant, however, that Merton was disinterested in ideas about faith. He seems to have invested much of his life in the study of the concepts and doctrines of Christianity. His personal theology was what I would describe as mainstream Christianity. He seemed to enjoy the interplay of mind upon mind involved in the discussion of ideas and concepts. He was, however, always reaching for more, examining the connections between different faiths not on the level of belief or doctrine, but on the level of practice and experience.

In “Thoughts on Solitude” there is a prayer that particularly captures the life of Merton:

"My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following your will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing. I hope that I will never do anything apart from that desire. And I know that if I do this you will lead me by the right road, though I may know nothing about it. Therefore will I trust you always, though I may seem to be lost and in the shadow of death. I will not fear, for you are ever with me, and you will never leave me to face my perils alone."

Such a prayer is one that we all can pray.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There has been some discussion in academic circles lately of what is being labeled “effective altruism.” The basic concept is that people are often ineffective and sometimes actually do harm in their choice of the charities they support and other decisions they make about doing good in the world. Five years ago, the book “Toxic Charity” by Robert Lupton began to circulate in churches and it has spurred a lot of excellent conversation about how we help others and what organizations are most effective in helping others. He speaks of “the compassion industry” and the amount of money that is given by well-meaning folks that goes to creating dependency and destroying personal initiative. The book serves as a kind of checklist of criteria that people can use to determine which actions and which charities are most effective when trying to help others. He criticizes what he calls “religious tourism,” the practice of short-term mission trips. He contrasts short term change with effective and lasting change. The book is filled with a lot of good ideas and is worth reading for those who want to think about how and why they give and how to invest their time and energy in lasting change.

Another writer whose books and ideas have been disturbing our complacency is Peter Singer. His latest book, “The Most Good You Can Do,” challenges readers to be thoughtful and careful about their decisions to live a fully ethical life. Doing “the most good you can do,” from Singer’s perspective, involves evaluating the worth of the organization or individuals that one supports.

Probably the darling of the effective altruism movement at the moment is William MacAskill, author of “Doing Good Better.” MacAskill is an Oxford researcher and a real number cruncher. He has done the hard research on a lot of different charities and attempts to help other people. He reports statistics on how many lives have been saved and which organizations are likely to be most worthy of support. He goes beyond evaluating charities, however. He addresses vocational choices in terms of how much good they do in the world. According to MacAskill, working for a non-profit isn’t necessarily the most altruistic choice. A person can achieve more good over a single lifetime by taking a highly-paid job and donating a chunk of earnings to worthwhile causes. He also provides statistics that seem to argue against local charities, preferring organizations that focus on world development rather than local causes.

These books and others of their genre are worthy endeavors and it is important for us to consider how our attempts at helping others should be examined and what different choices we might make if we take time to consider a bigger picture.

It strikes me, however, that effectiveness isn’t the only thing to consider when living an ethical life. There are several things that are not addressed in the books. Even more than the effectiveness of our giving and actions to help others, I long for meaningful conversations that reach beyond the current popular debates:

I don’t see, in any of these books, a careful and considered argument about motivation. Why do we seek to do good in the world? Why do people give? Without that consideration, one ends up with what seems to me to be a sort of enlightened self interest: we need to help others because that is what is best for us. From my point of view, there is much more to the story. Being a Christian, I am guided by the Bible’s stories of Jesus, who didn’t, it seems to me, consider the worthiness of the recipient or even the comparative value of one act over another. In one story, he heals multitudes then turns an equal amount of time and energy to raising Lazarus. Would not another day of healing the crowds have accomplished more than returning a single friend to life?

From my perspective our need to give goes far beyond the need of the recipient to receive. Our giving stems not from the need of the world to receive, but our gratitude to God for the goodness of creation.

One thing that disturbs me about the books is the quick assumption that counting the number of lives saved is the way to evaluate the effectiveness of a charity. I don’t mean to be crass, but if a human life has infinite worth, how can you assume that it is not worthy of care and compassion even though more could be saved by ignoring the one? If it comes to a choice between spending a few hours consoling a bereaved friend or using that time to earn money to give to a good cause, I believe that William MacAskill and I might make different choices.

From my perspective, the measurements and statistics of these books are based on a mistaken assumption that the world can be “fixed.” Saving thousands of lives by distributing inexpensive mosquito nets is a wonderful thing, but rather meaningless if there isn’t enough support to feed and educate those whose lives are saved.

I even question the definition of saving a life. Is counting the number of days between birth and death the only measure of the value of a life?

I am totally lost by MacAskill’s argument that choosing a lucrative career enables one to do more good. I’m sure that Bill Gates would love his book, but I find it difficult to judge that even the enormous wealth and capacity for good of the William and Melinda Gates Foundation somehow has more value than Mother Theresa’s decision to live in poverty among the street people of Calcutta. The choice of poverty as a way of life has long been one of the principles of Christian vocation.

I don’t mean to be defensive simply because I chose to become a minister rather than a plastic surgeon. I genuinely believe that some of us are not called to focus only on how much money we earn.

As for me, I will continue to consider the value of relationships above the effectiveness of charity. I suspect that the effectiveness proponents will not understand. Still, I wish for them at least one genuine passionate love, at least one connection to another human being that goes beyond the numbers, at least one sense of connection that transcends formulas and checklists.

I still believe that one relationship can make all the difference in the world.

Of course, I also believe that the gift of the widow's mite was worth more than the larger contributions of the wealthy.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I attended a meeting in our community last week where people were dealing with issues about which they had significant feelings. The speakers were excellent, with meaningful information that was well presented. Some of that information took a little while for listeners to receive and process. The conversation was respectful and the meeting was well-handled. At one point in the meeting, a presenter asked for questions or comments. We were all sitting around tables quietly as we thought about what we had heard and no one immediately voiced a question. It was not an uncomfortable silence, however. We knew that we had shared a significant moment and were comfortable just sitting with that for a while.

After just a few seconds of silence, the person sitting next to me spoke up, offering a bit of information that didn’t seem to me to be necessary. I was momentarily irritated, thinking that the speaker was just trying to sound like an expert and needed to speak in order to inflate his own ego. Upon reflection, however, I have decided that the person who spoke up was uncomfortable with the silence in the room.

When we work with youth, especially with confirmation classes, I teach that silence and listening to God’s Spirit are learned disciplines. I tell the youth that they shouldn’t expect to be able to remain silent for long periods of time if they do not practice. We often practice in short increments, beginning with about 30 seconds and working our way up to five minutes or more. The quiet allows the youth to collect their thoughts and to think about what has already transpired. Youth tell me that they appreciate learning how to share silence with others.

In our public worship services we have a time that is called quiet prayer. I don’t use the word “silent” in worship bulletins very often, because the practice really isn’t completely silent. Our building makes sounds with its heating system. On windy days we can hear the wind outdoors. Children may make soft noises during that time. People may cough or sneeze. There can be the sounds of people moving or shifting in their seats. I don’t believe that total silence is required in order for us to pray. Sometimes the sounds of nature or of a child can actually remind us of our place in the world and provide inspiration for prayer.

American educator and Quaker Parker Palmer’s latest book, “Healing the Hert of Democracy,” has a section on silence, solitude, and the practice of “getting the news from within.” I think his reflections are very helpful. In a diverse society such as ours with multiple loud voices presenting what they claim to be “news,” but which is much more often opinion, it is hard to discover what is truth. Competing political viewpoints purchase huge media outlets to promote their opinions. Much of what is billed as “discussion” or “debate” on television is simply people yelling at each other without listening. If you want to be a critical thinker it is necessary to regularly turn off the media and listen to your own thoughts and instincts.

It takes time to consider who I really am and how I fit into the world around me.

I rise early in the morning and usually arrive at the church an hour or more before the next person arrives. I do so because I am grateful for the quiet. It seems that I need quiet to connect with the community I serve. I need to think about the people I serve. I need to connect with their deepest feelings. I need to look at the world from their perspective. This requires that I spend most of my day listening and being with others. But at the beginning of each day I need also to listen to the quiet and remember my connections with others.

A funeral sermon, for example, is born both out of visiting face-to-face with grieving family members and of sitting with silence and reflecting on the meaning of that life in the whole of our community. Families do not come to the funeral to hear me repeat what they have already said. They are looking to me to inspire reflection on the question of what their pain and loss mean.

My every Sunday preaching is not just reading the words of scripture to the congregation. They have access to those words in the privacy of their own homes. When we gather together, we search together for our common humanity and the ways that the words and traditions of our people connect us with those who have gone before and those who will come after our time on earth.

Opportunities to share silence with others are relatively rare, but they are potent moments. When we take time to stand aside from the rush and the heat of argument, we open ourselves to a fundamental change. Our lives begin to align with deeper values and with the lives of others. In the silence of the meeting to which I referred at the beginning of this blog, I was beginning to understand how the events of the previous days had touched the lives of the other people in the room. In some ways that room was nurturing the seeds of some important changes in our community and how we provide services to those in need. We weren’t writing policy or forming procedures. We were simply reflecting on our reactions to a time when policy and procedure didn’t serve us as well as they might have. It will take months for the changes to become evident, but the cannot take place until we share the moments of reflection that are required to move us beyond our own personal feelings and reactions to the larger question of what is best for our whole community.

Still, people fear silence. They feel awkward. They haven’t had opportunities to practice a discipline that requires practice.

When we live blindly and act thoughtlessly, silence is required to bring us back to our basics, to our senses, and to ourselves. Despite the awkwardness that is perceived by some, silence is required to sustain our lives, and our community.

May we find the courage to be quiet.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

The selection of dates for the celebration of holidays can be a matter of politics and controversy. When the Martin Luther King, Jr. Day holiday was instituted, it was important to his family and friends that it be a celebration of his life and his commitment to equality rather than a day of mourning. Therefore his birthday seemed more worthy of the celebration than the date of his death. A fixed date, however, moves around the week. The holiday was established as the Monday that is closest to January 15, the actual day of Dr. King’s birthday. Subsequent legislation now has the day set as the third Monday in January. That means that the holiday is around the date of his birthday. Fixed date holidays Make it easy to plan for the disruption of business as usual.

Some holidays, of course, are on specific dates of the calendar and can occur on any day of the week. Christmas is always December 25. Religious leaders were trying for the Winter Solstice and ended up with a date that is pretty close to the solstice. There have been some intense debates over calendars in the history of the church, some of which are not fully resolved to this day.

Easter is a holiday that always lands on a Sunday, but not on a fixed Sunday. How to determine what day Easter falls on is a mystery to most people. Church leaders have tried to align both the season of the year and the phase of the moon to correspond with the actual resurrection of Jesus. According to the Bible, Jesus’ death and resurrection occurred around the time of the Jewish Passover, celebrated on the first full moon following the vernal equinox. By the end of the 2nd century, there were differences in the date of celebration, with some churches celebrating Easter on the day of Passover, others celebrating it on the Sunday following Easter.

Then, in the time of Pope Gregory, the entire calendar was revised from the more ancient Julian Calendar. The new Gregorian Calendar contained leap years and was based on more accurate observations of natural phenomena. It has been accepted by most modern societies, but is not the official calendar in all areas of the church. Today we note the difference between the celebration of Easter in Eastern and Western churches as a generality.

Our congregation follows the traditions of the western church. In 325, the Council of Nicaea established Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon occurring after the vernal equinox. There are some exceptions to that rule, however. First of all, the council assumed that the vernal equinox always landed on March 21, and it doesn’t always fall on that day. Also, the council determined that if the full moon landed on a Sunday, the celebration of Easter is delayed for one week, except for a group of Christians who celebrate Easter on the day of the full moon when it lands on a Sunday. In those years, there can be three different dates for Easter: an Eastern date based on the Julian Calendar, the mainstream date, and the early celebration of the Quartodecimans.

Sometimes the various calendars align. In 2007, the Julain date was converted to realign the calendar with the solar cycle, so Easter landed on the same day in all traditions. The dates aligned agin in 2011 through the progression of both calendars.

If you’re confused by all of this, you’re not alone. I use official church calendars to look up the date of Easter. In our life as a congregation, the date of Easter affects lots of other celebrations. Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent is determined by counting backwards from Easter. All of the Holy Week Events - Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday and Good Friday - are determined by their relationship to Easter as are Ascension Day and Pentecost Sunday.

I kind of enjoy the variation in the calendar. Easter can fall as early as March 22 or as late as April 25. The super early Easter date is very rare, however, and I will never experience Easter on that date. The last time it fell on March 22 was 1818 and the next time it occurs on that date will be 2285. Late Easters are a bit more common. The last time it occurred on April 25 was 1943, before I was born, but it will land on that date in 2038 and I may be around for that celebration. It fell on April 24 in 2011, which was pretty late.

There are folks, however, who find the changing dates of Easter to be a disruption. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby, is leading the movement to get Christian Churches to agree on a fixed date for Easter. Technically, the Anglican Communion already has such a date. In 1928, the British Parliament passed a law allowing for Easter Sunday to be fixed on the first Sunday after the second Saturday in April. However, the church has never followed this practice. The Archbishop, however, has been engaged in talks with Pope Francis, Coptic leader Pope Tawadros, and Patriarch Bartholomew of the Orthodox church in an effort to established a fixed date for the holiday. He has even gone so far as to declare that the change will happen “in between five and 10 years time.” He has made the change one of the goals of his career. “I would love to see it before I retired.”

That would probably make it before I retire. Which would be fairly dramatic, considering the fact that the talks about the common date for Easter were begun in the 10th Century. I think that there have been more than a dozen official attempts to negotiate such deal. Some things don’t happen too quickly in the church.

So I won’t be holding my breath or making any predictions. The change may come in our lifetime. It may not. In the meantime, I’ll keep my calendars and check with others as we plan the life of our congregation.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

A couple of weeks ago I fell on an icy hillside. When I got up, there was a pain in my leg that stretched from my hip to my knee. I continued with the day’s activities, but the pain seemed to be getting worse. I checked out the basics: no swelling or discoloration, my joints moved in their normal directions, my leg could bear weight. I’m not a doctor, so I couldn’t make an accurate diagnosis, but decided that the injury must be either a pulled muscle or some kind of nerve damage. Things not getting better, I went to my doctor’s office the next morning, had myself checked out and learned that there was no major problem. “Rest, ice, compression and elevation,” recommended the nurse practitioner.

My life and routines weren’t disrupted other than the time I took to go to the doctor’s office. the prescribed pain medication was very inexpensive after my insurance paid its portion. Over the course of the next few days a bruise appeared, which, in a way was reassuring. I really had hurt myself, but it was the kind of hurt that heals. I ended up taking three of the pain pills that I was prescribed.

That’s three out of the fifty pills that are in the bottle. In a week or so I’ll take the remainder down to the sheriff’s office to the medical disposal deposit box.

I know that every patient is different and that it is difficult to judge the need for medication. I also know that the nurse was trying to be appropriately careful to make sure that I didn’t run out of medication in the middle of the night when the pharmacy was closed. But I think a prescription for ten tablets would probably have been more than sufficient for the situation.

We live immersed in a culture that is adverse to pain. We work hard to avoid pain. We try to treat every ache and pain and believe that excessive pain is a problem to be solved.

As a result, there are plenty of people who avoid things that they think might bring them pain. That’s probably a good thing when it comes to basic safety. I’m all in favor of seat belts and bike helmets and life jackets and appropriate gear for whatever sport you choose. I like physical training to learn to avoid twisting when falling. Back injuries are no joke. But we also avoid any sort of discomfort that might come our way.

Pain can be a good thing. It is our body’s way of telling us that something is wrong and that we need to make changes. Sunburn is a reminder of unhealthy exposure. Aching muscles tell us that we need to be reasonable in our exercise routines. Even my pulled muscle in my leg is a reminder to be more careful when walking on ice.

When we get in the habit of avoiding pain, our eyes can be closed to the realities of this world. If an argument with a friend makes us uncomfortable, we avoid the subject in the future. If meeting a homeless person on the street makes us feel guilty, we take a different route in the future. When the news makes us wince, we turn off the television (or channel surf - I confess I’m not much of an expert in television).

Our culture is so averse to pain that we attempt to hide the reality of death. We avoid talking about death and grief and loss. We panic at the prospect of having to consider our own mortality and so create artificial ways to deal with the pain of loss.

We get angry and defensive rather than admitting that we are hurting.

The result is that we miss some of life’s deepest meanings and decrease rather than expand the world of our experience.

Our faith calls us to a different path. The gospels don’t mince words when talking about Jesus weeping at Lazarus’ tomb, or becoming angry in the temple, or suffering pain at his crucifixion. There is no attempt to clean up the messy situations of conflict with religious authorities or frustration at the disciples lack of faith. Jesus becomes tired and over-taxed and ends up seeking off to a lonely place to pray. The best way to deal with pain, it seems, is to experience it.

At the same time we are called to address and alleviate the pain of others where we are able. The compassion of a nurse who writes a prescription for pain medication should not be ignored. That person is giving a professional opinion on what will make life more comfortable and doing what she is able to alleviate discomfort. My instincts to feed hungry people, to offer warmth to those who are cold and shelter to those who are homeless is not a bad thing. It is necessary for us to confront pain at times and to seek solutions that decrease the amount of human suffering.

I’m past the stage of my sore leg waking me in the night with pain. If I sit in just the wrong way or take a look at what is left of the bruise or am careless jumping in and out of the box of my pickup, my body will send me a reminder that I’m not quite fully healed. But with that reminder comes the reminder that I am fully alive. I am still capable of experiencing pain, of knowing the difference between good and bad, pleasure and pain. I can still engage the world without the need to withdraw from pain.

Increasing our awareness of pain doesn’t create more pain. When we strip away our denials and confront the realities of life we can recognize our fear of pain, our fear of death, or fear of change, our fear of letting go of our attachments. We can feel the discomfort of recognizing our human frailty and mortality. Then we are freed to engage the pain and suffering of others and begin to make a difference in this world.

A little pain can make us more aware of the blessings of being alive.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

In our community there are at least two organizations of good people seeking to serve others in our community that require participants to sign the Apostle’s Creed in order to become members. Since at the time that this requirement was made the two organizations shared some common leadership, I suspect that the requirement has to do with the concerns of one or two individuals. I’m not sure that I understand the concerns, but I have been told that the requirement was put in place to prevent non-Christians from becoming members. I don’t think that there is much danger of people who are not Christian taking over the organizations. Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists make up a very tiny portion of the citizens of our community. There are a few people who claim to be atheist or agnostic and a whole lot more people who gladly accept the title Christian but who do not participate in regular Christian worship or the ministries of local congregations. Those folk, however, are unlikely to suddenly want to become active in the leadership of these particular organizations. I’m fairly confident that the organizations would remain Christian both in name and practice whether or not the requirement of signing a particular creed was in place.

Furthermore, I am not sure what the risk would be if a person who didn’t give intellectual assent to the creed were to become active in either organization. South Dakota, like most other states, required loyalty as a fiduciary responsibility of board members of non-profit organizations. That means that those in leadership have to abide by the constitution, bylaws and mission statements of the organizations.

Still, there seems to be a fear that something bad might happen if, for example, a Jew were to become involved in the organization. I’m not sure what might happen, but I guess the leaders feel that the organization might be tempted to compromise its values or mission if it had a member whose theology varied too far from the Apostle’s Creed. I did have one conversation with one of the leaders about the fact that the requirement excluded participation of Unitarians, who would not agree to the trinitarian formulas of the Apostle’s Creed, and that leader thought that such an exclusion was probably a good idea.

I agree with the Apostle’s Creed. I like its use in worship, though I serve a congregation and a denomination that is very careful about using creeds only as testaments of faith and not as tests of faith. I say the words of the creed without hesitation. But I am uncomfortable with the use of any creed to exclude people from participation. I guess I fit in my congregation and denomination pretty well.

It seems to me that the requirement to sign the creed is focused on a kind of intellectual asset or agreement. Saying that a particular set of words expresses what one believes is not a declaration of faith, but rather giving agreement to a set of ideas. Faith is more than the ideas one holds in one’s head. It is a commitment to a relationship that goes much deeper than agreement.

To take it one step further, I treasure the fact that the congregation I serve contains people with different perspectives, different ideas, and different interpretations. I have enjoyed spirited conversation about ideas in our church where the participants have huge areas of disagreement. Still we are able to unite in the same congregation around the practice of worship and the mission and outreach in which we engage.

Let me offer one well-known organization as a contrast to the ones that require signatures of the creed. Habitat for Humanity is an organization that is clearly Christian in its founding and mission. It grew out of a deep religious experience of a Christian and it has attracted thousands of Christian volunteers. It does not, however, exclude non-Christians from participation at any level. Non Christians can donate, volunteer, serve on committees and become homeowners. Habitat for Humanity has specific non-discriminatory statements that prevent the use of belief as a filter to determine who does and who does not become a part of its programs. A few years ago our local Habitat affiliate benefitted greatly from a group of Jewish youth who traveled to our city and volunteered their time. I had the opportunity to work side-by-side with the work campers for several days. The core values of Habitat for Humanity, which are founded on Christian principles were in no way threatened by the gracious volunteer service of non-Christians.

I remain wary of the use of creeds as ways to exclude people from organizations. Discrimination in any form can lead to violence. In the case of the organizations in our community, I suspect that the requirement to sign the creeds has very little practical impact. The prominent use of the word Christian in the names of the organizations makes the beliefs of the leaders clear. I doubt if anyone who wanted to become involved has felt excluded because of an inability to sign a document. Furthermore, I suspect that most of the volunteers and members of the organizations signed the creed without giving it much thought at all. They recognized the words from their use in worship and thought, “yea, my church says that,” and signed without going through the creed word by word to make sure that they were in complete agreement. They participate in the organization for the work that the group does and the fellowship that comes from working with others.

It might be that it is no big deal at all.

Except I feel excluded from both organizations. I have joined neither, though I support the mission of both. It isn’t that I have a problem with the words of the Apostle’s Creed. It is that I have a problem with using this great historic document of our faith as a test to exclude those who might not agree. I am not attracted, in fact I am repelled, by the attempt to create an organization where everyone agrees.

I wonder if any Unitarians also feel excluded. Perhaps they just closed their eyes and signed the statement and didn’t give it another thought.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I am on mailing and email lists for lots of different individuals and organizations. I confess that I often toss mail unopened and move emails to the trash without reading them. Continual sorting has become a way of life for me. There is one advantage to all of the junk in my mailboxes, however. Once in a while I end up reading something that I didn’t mean to read. There are some clever tricks that are employed to get my attention and sometimes they work. That means that from time to time I read ideas and appeals from those who see the world differently than I do. They rarely convince me of their point of view, but it does no harm for me to try to understand someone who sees the world differently. If I were to surround myself only with opinions with which I agreed and people who think like me, I might become insensitive to the rest of the world.

The other day, cleaning out a few items from my mailbox that I had previously set aside I read an appeal from someone who was raising money for their group that purported to be strengthening families. It was clear that the group had a vision of the ideal family and were alarmed that there are many children who grow up in families that don’t fit their norm. The norm for which they were striving was two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. While I fit that description and our children grew up in that kind of family, I am aware that there are many different sizes and shapes of families in our community.

On the surface, the family in which I grew up was pretty much in alignment with the norm of the organization who sent me the letter. I was the middle child in a family with three sisters, three brothers and two parents. But if you were to look closer, you might realize that there were four adopted children in that family and the last two were biological children of the first adopted daughter. It’s rather complex and when I try to explain it to folks, I sometimes say, “If my brother’s uncle is my uncle than I am my own uncle.”

You don’t have to figure that out. It is simply the case that there are a lot of different kinds of families in our communities. When I look out at the congregation I serve, I see a young girl living with her mother. The father of the young girl died when she was an infant and she never knew life with two parents. I see a divorced mother struggling with two sons. I see a family that attends church together even though the parents are separated. I see children who come to church with grandparents, whose parents we barely know. I’ve been asked to testify at custody and child support hearings simply because I know the church attendance patterns of some of the parties to the disputes.

This isn’t just anecdotal evidence from my life. The statistics back me up. Fewer than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married parents on their first marriage. Nearly half (44%) of people ages 18-29 have a step-sibling.

So I can’t see the world the same way as the organization that assumes that it is the norm for children to grow up in any particular size or shape of family. From a statistical standpoint, our family with us in our first marriage of nearly 43 years, two children (one male and one female) who are both married, and two grandchildren (one male and one female), is the anomaly.

I spend enough of my time with people who are struggling with issues arising from family dysfunction to know that those struggles are real and the pain they experience is real and that no one should berate them because their family seems uniquely dysfunctional or, worse yet, that they don’t even deserve to be called a family.

I have decided that there is no “normal” or “typical” family. The children whose parents aren’t married are precious gifts of God and we celebrate their births and seek to support their parents. The reconfigured families with kids that are “his,” “hers,” and “ours” are one of the sources of the next generation of leadership of our community. The kids who have never known their biological father, including the ones who don’t get along with mom’s current boyfriend, have much to contribute to our life together. If your family is just you and your uncle with a beard so long that he can sit on it, your experience is just as valid and meaningful as people who live in neat houses with white picket fences and one dog and one cat. And if you get creative, the family stickers you put on the back of your SUV might be more interesting than most of the ones I see when I drive around town. Who knows? Maybe your uncle will teach you something about resiliency that will make you more productive in your life than those who have known other privileges.

Our faith carries with it a wonderful story from the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew in which Joseph questions whether or not he should marry Mary the mother of Jesus. With the paternity of her child in question, he considered a quick divorce. An angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph, calmed his fears and convinced him to proceed with the formation of his family. It is a story to which I refer, from time to time, when counseling with families facing unplanned births. We also have inherited the story of Ruth and the baby born to her and Boaz upon which the genealogy of King David and later Jesus depends. The Bible is filled with families that don’t meet the “norms” of the group who sent me the letter.

I decided to toss the letter and let them raise their funds from other sources. I’m more interested in the real families in our congregation than the “ideal” families they describe.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

There is an elementary school on the north side of our community that has been developed into a community center. General Beadle Elementary School is a public school with over 500 students. The building, however, isn’t just a place for classrooms and other school activities. It is home to a community health center, a branch of the public library, and has developed into a gathering place for community events and activities. Unlike some other school buildings that are used during the school year and sit idle during the summer, General Beadle school is a year-round neighborhood resource center.

I’m guessing, however, that if you were to visit the building today you wouldn’t find many people who could tell you very much about the person for whom the school is named.

William Henry Harrison Beadle was born in a frontier log cabin in 1838. The story is that his father offered him the choice of the family farm or $1,000 for an education. The son chose the cash for an education and graduated from the University of Michigan with a degree in civil engineering. He served in the Union Army during the Civil War and rose to the rank of brigadier general. After being discharged from the Army he returned to the University of Michigan where he earned a law degree.

In 1869 President Ulysses S. Grant appointed him surveyor-general of Dakota Territory. He drafted the school lands provision for the South Dakota constitutional convention of 1885, which was accepted by the United States Congress in 1889. His efforts led to the establishment and sustaining of school lands as a trust for future generations. School lands could be sold, but at their appraised value and never for less than $10 per acre. The basic concept established in South Dakota was replicated in the constitutions of North Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming.

Beadle went on to serve as superintendent of public instruction in South Dakota and as president of Madison Normal School, the first school dedicated to training teachers in Dakota Territory. He continued to serve the college as professor of history until his retirement in 1912. For a few years the college was named General Beadle State College, but now is known as Dakota State University.

There is a bronze statue of General Beadle in the South Dakota State Capital. Actually the statue is a replica of an original statue which was donated by the State of South Dakota to the National Statuary Hall Collection at the United States Capitol. We also have a county in South Dakota named for him.

Maybe it is just a matter of history and of people who lived long ago who are seldom remembered, but the story of General Beadle is one that ought to be remembered. In a time when education wasn’t valued by many of the settlers of our territory he stood up for the concept of public education. He not only learned from his personal experience the value of education, he saw a connection between the trust of public lands and the obligation to educate all of the children of the state. His ideas weren’t always accepted by the general public. He had to fight political battles in order to establish the principles that have supported public education.

Public education is the foundation of our democracy. The commitment to educate not only our own children, but all of the children of the community provides the path to social and economic mobility in our society. People like General Beadle can arise from humble and modest means to provide leadership to the entire community.

In these times when our legislature is tax adverse and sees other priorities as rising above public education, it is important to remember our history. The principles upon which our state was founded included an absolute, constitutional commitment to public education.

Perhaps there is no more fitting memorial to General Beadle than the elementary school in our community that bears his hame. Very few, if any, of the 531 students in that school come from families that are able to afford private education. Many come from families whose access to other public institutions such as the library or community health center would be limited if it weren’t located in their neighborhood. The health and education of these students is part of the trust which we have inherited from the founders of our state who had the vision to set aside public lands for the support of the education of all of the students of our state.

It takes more than the commitment of our forebears, however, to insure adequate education for each generation of students. We, too, are called to make commitments of our time, energy, and our resources as an investment in the future of our state. Investing in education has a direct impact on the cost of a wide variety of public expenses in years to come.

North Dakota and South Dakota make an excellent study of these principles. We share the same establishment clauses for public schools in our constitutions. North Dakota, however, has a different funding structure for public education. This distinguishes their state from ours not only in the operation of schools and the compensation of teachers but also in the incarceration rate of our citizens and the cost of running state prisons. The contrast is stark. Failure to invest in education has direct and definite costs that are born by taxpayers.

I know that I’ve been on this topic for a couple of days and I have no intention of turning this blog into a political forum. But I do have a prayer for the members of the South Dakota legislature as they meet in session this winter. I pray that they will open their eyes and pay attention to their surroundings. I hope that some of them will take a look at the statue of General Beadle that is in our capitol and pay enough attention to check out who that person was and why he is so honored in that place. Perhaps they can be inspired by his story.

It is a story that should not be forgotten. It is a story that every South Dakotan should learn.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Our local newspaper, the Rapid City Journal reports that our Governor, Dennis Dugaard, is supporting the proposals of a Blue Ribbon Task Force that suggested a statewide 1-cent sales tax hike for education to fund higher pay for teachers. I’ve lived in South Dakota for more than 20 years now and I know how tax adverse many of our state leaders are, but the news sounds hopeful. Perhaps legislators will finally take a significant step to address the issue of teacher pay. I admit, however, that I am skeptical. This is Governor Dugaard’s fifth legislative session since he assumed the office in January of 2011. He’s had quite a bit of time to demonstrate support of education and so far teachers in South Dakota have come up short every session.

South Dakota consistently ranks the lowest in the nation in terms of teacher compensation. For the years we have lived in this state teacher pay has ranked 51st of the states (the District of Columbia is added to the 50 states in the rankings). Beyond the measure of financial compensation, polls such as WalletHub rank other factors such as stress, support, curriculum debates and other factors. Once again South Dakota comes out on the bottom of all of the states. It isn’t just that teachers in South Dakota rank at the bottom in terms of compensation and opportunity for advancement. Their academic and work environment is among the most stressful of jobs in the nation.

It is no wonder that there is a shortage of teachers in our state.

I’m no politician and I realize that it is a bit unfair for me to sit here rarely even visiting the state Capitol and criticize the work of our legislators and governor. I understand that we are the ones who have elected those officials. Still, I am very skeptical about the willingness of our governor and legislator to significantly address the lack of support for education in our state.

If South Dakota is going to be a leader in the nation, I would much prefer for us to lead in welcoming tourists, or sustainable agriculture. I am sad that instead we seem to be leading the nation in nonstop attacks against our K-12 teachers in our public schools. These attacks are simply unfair.

Yes, we have problems in public education. South Dakota, especially western South Dakota, leads the nation in childhood poverty. Nearly a quarter of the children in our schools are coming to school hungry. And hungry brains don’t work well. Instead of addressing entrenched poverty and seeking to solve the problems of neglected children, our legislators have chosen to blame the teachers. Punitive high stakes testing with the mistaken assumption that poor performance on tests is the result of poor teaching is combined in our state with legislators who keep adjusting the content of curricula without regard to academic research and knowledge of how children learn.

No wonder excellent teachers keep moving out of our state.

No wonder our children move out of state as soon as they obtain an education.

No wonder capable teachers take early retirement when they have much to give.

I understand that there are plenty of people who want to force failure on public education in order to make privatization a more attractive option. It is only natural that people will look at the combined totals of dollars that are invested in education and want to realize some of those dollars as personal profit.

I believe, however, that it is our obligation to teach all of our children instead of just some of them. I believe that the education of children living in poverty is just as critical to a balanced society as the education of children born into wealth.

I’m generally pretty hesitant about wading into politics in my blog, but it is time for we, the citizens of South Dakota to say to our legislators, “Enough!” The path that we have taken in the past two decades is crushing teachers and kids alike. It is failing not only our children, but the whole of society.

Dear Governor Dugaard and members of the South Dakota legislature: Stop evading the real issues. Lets deal with the problems of entrenched poverty, and discrimination in our state. For once, why not debate educational funding at the opening of the session instead of leaving education funding until all of the other expensive legislation has passed?

Instead of demonizing teachers, why not address the upstream problems over which teachers have no control? I realize it is easier to point the finger of blame at teachers than to buckle down and do your own work, but quite frankly, the problem isn’t with our teachers.

If one wants to blame, a good place to look is our state legislature. I’d like to see a day in every session that would require our legislators to listen to high schoolers debate the issues before the assembly. Perhaps our legislators could be taught the art of debate. Currently there is virtually no listening going on in our sessions. Grandstanding is not productive. Solutions do not come from lunches with highly paid lobbyists. South Dakota is particularly vulnerable to legislation that is written by out of state persons funded by deep pocket investors who want to try out their schemes in our state before moving on to other, more expensive states.

If we can’t get our legislators to actually write the bills upon which the act, how about requiring that they read them? If our legislators had to pass a reading comprehension test on the content of the bills upon which they vote, their scores would be considerably lower than the test scores they use to attack our teachers.

Enough ranting for one day. I am not the only South Dakotan who is frustrated. And I confess that I have been mostly silent in my frustration. And silence can be complicity in a democracy. I know the governor and legislators don’t begin their days by reading my blog. If I want to communicate with them, I need to choose a different format.

Perhaps the place for me to start is to express my appreciation and admiration for the teachers who put their lives on the line every day in our schools.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Our congregation is blessed to have a sister church in the Los Guido neighborhood near San José, Costa Rica. The relationship began in 1988 as the result of travels by a couple who were members of our congregation and has continued with the involvement of mission travelers ever since. It is time for Vacation Bible School in Costa Rica and we’ve had members of our congregation at our sister church participate in VBS in our sister church every year since the beginning of that relationship. For the last 15 years, we have sent the same couple to represent our congregation at VBS.

Today we commission them for another trip. It is no small thing that we do. In the book of worship of the United Church of Christ there is a service for commissioning lay workers for specific ministries. If you read the book of worship and the Manual on the Ministry, another official document of the church, you might think that commissioning has primarily to do with granting authority to do specific work in the life of the church. The history of this process does, in fact, have to do with the granting of authority, but there is much more to commissioning.

When we commission our representatives to visit our sister church, we are owning their work as ours. We are saying that their mission is the mission of the entire congregation. Our relationship with our sister church is far more than a couple of people who travel from our place to theirs and volunteer in their program. It is an acknowledgement that the mission of our sister church is also our mission. The work that our sister church does is indeed our work.

There are many examples of mission work that is carried out primarily through sending money from one place to another. Funding the work of our mission partners is an important expression of faith and our congregation participates in the major mission areas of our church. But a sister church is deeper than the exchange of funds. We acknowledge that the work of our sister church is an extension of our work. Together the two congregations share equally in a common task. In Costa Rica, feeding hungry children and providing resources to keep youth engaged in school is not just the responsibility of our sister church. It is ours as well.

I have been blessed to be able to travel to Costa Rica for four visits with our sister church. I count the pastor of our sister congregation as one of my closest colleagues and friends. I admire her dedication and faithfulness. I am honored to be associated with the work she does. I have been deeply privileged to share with her in christenings, communion, baptisms, weddings and other special events in the life of the congregation.

Our entire congregation is equally honored and blessed by the work that our commissioned ministers do in Costa Rica. We are transformed by their mission and ministry.

Throughout the history of the church we have understood that a pilgrimage undertaken on behalf of a congregation transforms not only the pilgrims and those whom the pilgrims meet on their journey, but also the congregation that waits at home for their return. We who are not traveling to Costa Rica this year are invited to invest our prayer and energy in the mission of Vacation Bible School. Praying with and for others changes our perspective. It establishes connections and deepens our understanding.

Because we Christians have divided into different denominations and congregations we sometimes think of ourselves as being members of only part of the church. In reality every Christian congregation is a part of one body. As they say, we’re all in this together. Paul’s letters to the Corinthians are among the earliest documents of our faith that detail the depth of this connection and interdependency. What happens in another congregation affects us as surely as the decisions that we make impact the lives of those in far away places.

Because we do it every year, the ritual of commissioning this morning will be familiar to many in our congregation. It may feel like we are repeating something that we have already done. In a life of sincere prayer, however, repetition is not boring. Rather it is a channel to new depths of understanding and meaning. The ceremony not only reminds us of who we are and what we are about, but it invites us to take another look to see the depth-upon-depth reality of long term commitments.

It is not possible to predict the future of our sister church relationship. Our congregation in Costa Rica serves in a tenuous position. It is difficult to see the source of leadership for the next generation. We are invited to move forward on faith, trusting that somehow God will provide. But we know that God’s primary focus is not the maintenance of institutions. Institutions come and go. Congregations live their lives and sometimes come to the end of their ministries. It is difficult for us to think of it, but we do not control the future. Instead we invest in the present and engage in ministry in the time that has been granted to us. Knowing this makes each trip precious in its own right. God’s world is constantly changing. Our roles in the ministry of the church are ours for a little while only. The time will come for new leaders and new relationships. Today we celebrate the history of our relationship and re-commit to the present and the short term future. Even though we are in this relationship for the long haul, we accomplish that one year at a time, one trip at a time, one relationship after another.

The next couple of weeks will be a time of intense prayer for our congregation. We will remember our sister church in our prayers every day. And we will be transformed by our prayers. For that we are grateful.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I believe in the power of words. I believe that great words have the power to inspire us to move beyond our present circumstances and reach for a better way of living. Among the great words that have inspired generations of people are the founding documents of this nation. The United States Declaration of Independence proclaims, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” That proclamation was an ideal that was not achieved for those who signed the document. They were thinking of restrictions placed by the government of the King of England when they wrote the words, but the ideal those words expressed eventually inspired changes in colonial America beyond independence from England. They inspired the freeing of slaves, granting the vote to women, and a host of later actions that help our nation move towards that ideal. Those words continue to inspire us and guide our actions and decisions as we seek to live up to them.

Great words, however, are always subject to interpretation. We often do not fully understand the words we read or hear. We often do not agree on their meaning. This, too, is true of our Declaration of Independence.

For example, consider the declaration that it is self-evident that among our unalienable rights is the pursuit of happiness. What does it mean that everyone has the right to pursue happiness?

I consider myself to be a very happy person. I have been granted more joy in my life than many. But I remain unconvinced that this joy is the result of any pursuit of happiness. In fact it seems that when I am intentionally seeking to be happy I am most likely to be disappointed. Happiness has come into my life as a gift, not as a goal I have pursued. I am happy because I have been blessed with a wonderful marriage and a life partner who is loving and caring and faithful. I am happy because two wonderful children have come into our lives and they, in turn, have brought their spouses into our family and we have been blessed with grandchildren. I am happy because the work I do gives meaning to my life. It is varied and exciting and there are always new frontiers to explore.

When I think of the things that bring me the most joy, it is difficult to see that they are the results of any kind of pursuit.

My granddaughter bringing me a book to read to her makes me happy. My grandson writing me a letter makes me happy. My daughter and son-in-law working on improving their home makes me happy. My son and daughter-in-law making the care and nurture of their marriage a priority makes me happy. These are not goals I have pursued, but rather gifts I have been given.

I will even take it a step farther. I think that there is often great disappointment when people make the pursuit of happiness a life goal. Part of the disappointment comes from the simple fact that people often conflate the pursuit of happiness with the pursuit of wealth. They genuinely believe that wealth will make them happy. This, sadly, is probably the opposite of the truth. But it doesn’t stop people from dedicating their lives to the pursuit of wealth, the display of wealth, and the desire for more and more wealth.

I have been reading Michel McGregor’s biography of Robert Lax. In an unpublished paper, Lax begins with the first of Jesus’ beatitudes: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” Lax focuses on the words, “Blessed are the poor.” He writes, “only poverty brings us close to that openness, that limpidity of the divine Persons.” I can’t do justice to his essay in this format, but it is a challenging idea. He believes that Christ promises happiness to his disciples and that the path to that happiness is poverty. “Blessed/happiness and poverty are thus from the beginning, from the first word, indissolubly allied.” It is not an idea the began with Lax. He wrote the essay as he was contemplating a conversion from Judaism to Roman Catholic Christianity. The Roman church has long required a vow of poverty of its leaders. The history of the church is filled with joyous persons who rejected the pursuit of worldly wealth for lives of service and in their poverty discovered happiness.

Unfortunately in contemporary America wealth and politics are so intertwined that no one can engage in the life of a politician without becoming beholden to wealth. The supreme court has allowed virtually unlimited spending on campaigns. The price of becoming elected is measured in the millions. Each campaign sets new records for spending. The result is the substitution of false values for the ideals of our founders.

From the perspective of Robert Lax and others who have deeply contemplated the connection between poverty and happiness, the presence of excessive wealth denies the pursuit of happiness. Only when one is freed from such wealth can happiness be discovered. I find myself in agreement with that mode of thinking. I believe that the ideals of our Declaration have been subverted by the presence of excessive wealth in our political system.

The great words of our Declaration remain great. They retain the power to inspire our highest ideals. But they can easily be corrupted and forgotten. They do not guarantee the pursuit of wealth. They may even guarantee just the opposite. I believe that our founders understood far better than our contemporary leaders that wealth is always obtained at the expense of others. Great wealth is linked to the poverty of others. Given that reality, it is more meaningful to stand with the poor.

When one is able to free oneself from the pursuit of wealth, happiness pursues you instead of the other way around.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

I can remember, from when I was growing up, the old guys who hung out at the barber shop talking about the big blizzards and severe winters of long ago. The town where I grew up wasn’t exactly noted for its mild weather. On the east slope of the Rockies, we were prone to a lot of wind and when you combine that with cold temperatures, you didn’t need a lot of snow to make things pretty miserable. We delivered newspapers and were expected to go out without assistance from our parents down to about -20f. I’ve delivered papers when it was as cold as -30, but we often got a bit of help from our parents when it was that cold. At -30, any exposed skin will hurt within a few minutes and frostbite sets in quickly. We had knit face masks with only small holes for the eyes, nose and mouth that worked pretty well, but with my glasses, it was always a challenge to see with such a covering. My glasses would ice up pretty quickly as the fog from my nose drifted toward the lenses. We were told that at -40, the newspapers would not arrive and we would not have to deliver, but I don’t remember that ever happening. I do remember learning that -40 is the same in fahrenheit as it is in celsius, a bit of trivia that isn’t often useful.

So when the forecast calls for cold weather around here, I don’t worry much. In the time I’ve lived in the hills, we haven’t seen many days when the temperature stayed below zero for a whole day and when it did happen, it wasn’t -30. I think it got down to the -20 range once or twice, but the cold didn’t last. People are talking about “intense cold” settling in over the weekend, but the forecast is for a high around 10 above on Sunday with a low of -2. I think we can endure those temperatures without much problem.

The real issue is that the years have passed and I have become an old man from the perspective of many people. And I remember days when it was much colder than it seems to be these days. I really don’t want to become one of those old guys at the barber shop who sounds like he is exaggerating every story he tells. I certainly don’t want to become one of those people who is constantly living in the past.

In the present we seem to be well equipped for the cold temperatures. Modern cars have fuel injection and electronic ignition that makes them much easier to start than was the case in the days of carburetors and fuel systems that were prone to ice if there was any moisture in the system. Our cars don’t even have heaters that plug into an external outlet. We can rely on them to start after a day outside at work without fail. We do have a heater on our pickup and a hour or so of being plugged in makes for an easy start no matter how cold it gets. Our homes are better insulated than was the case years ago. We don’t get ice on the inside of our windows and our heating systems operate smoothly with a simple adjustment of a thermostat.

Not all of our neighbors, however, have it so easy. In the past couple of weeks, I’ve visited one family whose home doesn’t have electricity and is heated by firewood. Fortunately we were able to deliver a pickup load of firewood to help with their heating. I also visited with another family who had a window broken out of their car on our end of the state and had to drive to the other end of the state with the broken window. I tried to get them help with getting the window fixed, but they chose to make the trip with only plastic covering the space. I did convince them to take an extra blanket with them on the trip. It reminded me of a trip we took from Chicago to Montana in the winter in a car with a heater that didn’t produce enough to keep us warm or to keep the ice of the inside of the windshield. I did, however, refrain from telling the story. As I’ve said, I don't want to become one of those old men who is only living in the past.

The bottom line is that we are blessed to be living in a place with excellent living conditions. I read of the wildfires in Western Australia, the mudslides in California, the floods in Missouri, and a host of other weather extremes experienced in other parts of the world and it feels pretty good to live in a place that is so comfortable as our home. 2015 brought above average temperatures and above average precipitation to our home and the result was a very comfortable year.

The predictions of dire consequences of global climate change are hard to take in when the everyday experience of living in our home is so comfortable. It is easy to say that we probably wouldn’t notice a couple of degrees of temperature change. Of course, I’ve read about the larger impacts of increased desertification, decreased food production and other consequences of those changes and I don’t mean to be ignorant. It just seems to me that using the enlightened self interest argument probably isn’t going to motivate people to make the changes that are necessary to live more responsibly.

So I pay attention to the weather. I notice when it is particularly cold or particularly warm. I feel very fortunate to live where I do. I try to be responsible in my living, not consuming more than is necessary and being aware of the needs of my neighbors. But I also don’t turn on my television set to the weather channel for their nonstop diet of weather disaster.

I’m old fashioned enough to prefer to check the weather by going for a walk.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We often think of the Christian calendar in terms of festivals and holidays. We go from Advent to Christmas to Epiphany to Lent to Easter to Pentecost. There are, of course, many days that fall between the festivals in which we are invited to live our faith in our daily journeys. There are two large blocks of time that have come to be called ordinary time. The season of Epiphany is marked by festivals at both ends: The baptism of Christ is celebrated on the Sunday after Epiphany and the transfiguration of Christ is celebrated on the Sunday before Ash Wednesday. Both of those festivals are occasions for white vestments and paraments in churches. Between those festivals are weeks that we call ordinary time. Our paraments and vestments are green during ordinary time.

Ordinary time returns again after Pentecost as well. 50 days after Easter we celebrate the birthday of the church at Pentecost. Pentecost Sunday is a time for red vestments and paraments, The rest of the season of Pentecost, until Reign of Christ Sunday just before the beginning of Advent is also treated as ordinary time and our green vestments and paraments return.

As a liturgical practice, ordinary time is the discipline of living as a disciple of Christ in each day of one’s life, seeing Christ in the small things, practicing love of neighbor and following Christ in the small things of life.

I am thinking of ordinary time today because our lives return to ordinary today with the departure of our children and grandchildren to their homes. After a glorious week of visiting and enjoying each other, it is time for them to return to their homes and jobs and school and the everyday activities of their lives. We, too, need to return our attention to the business of being pastors of a busy and exciting church.

Of course, there is little that is “ordinary” or “routine” about the vocation of a minister. Today we have a very significant funeral in the life of our church. The nominating committee is ending its annual task of securing leadership for the next year of the church’s life. We have an annual meeting with reports that need to be prepared. We are commissioning our missionaries for their annual trip to Costa Rica. There is a baptism on Sunday. The church is continually filled with surprises and wonderful opportunities to respond to the ever-changing nature of the congregation.

Part of what makes the special events of our lives meaningful, however, is that they aren’t our everyday diet. Today’s funeral is an example. Yes, we have plenty of funerals throughout the year in a congregation of our size. I have notes from hundreds of funerals at which I have officiated. But today is a unique, once-in-a-lifetime experience for the immediate family who have lost a wife, mother and grandmother. It is different from other funerals for the close friends of the woman who has died. It is different from all other funerals in the history of our church because of the uniqueness of this particular member. There is nothing routine about what we do today. It is the contrast between this event and the other events of our lives that makes it stand out.

It is not quite the same thing, but part of the depth of joy when our family is together is that we know that the experience is limited. For much of our lives, we live in three different states with different types of jobs and different responsibilities. We participate in different communities and worship in different locations. Occasionally, however, we are able to come together and share the same house and have common meals and worship together. When that happens it stands out from the other experiences of our lives.

Today is one of many days in our lives, when we are invited to embrace the ordinary. We will say goodbye at the airport and trust the judgment, intelligence and capabilities of our children to live their own independent and meaningful lives. We will turn to the tasks of this day and the coming weeks with energy and enthusiasm for the life and work of the church. We will remain close and continue to contact each other, but we also will pursue independent interests and activities.

The process of church growth and the sharing of faith is dependent upon ordinary time. Yes, it is nice to have a full sanctuary for the festivals of Christmas and Easter. Yes, we enjoy showing off the beauty of our music programs and the joy of our celebrations. But the real business of keeping the church healthy comes from us doing the best we can at being a healthy congregation in ordinary time. The Sundays which are not special occasions when some of our members are tempted to sleep in and skip a worship service are as important to our life of faith as are the holidays when we put up special decorations and expect the church to be full.

The real faithfulness of our congregation is shown when we are scattered as much as it is when we are together. Ordinary acts, such as kindness to a neighbor or helping a stranger - ordinary acts, such as honesty in the workplace and generosity ini civic life - ordinary acts, such as responding to others’ grief and listening with care - these are expressions of our faith that make a difference in the world. We are Christian every bit as much in the ordinary times of our lives as we are in the festivals and celebrations.

There is still one more day of festival before we enter ordinary time. We celebrate the baptism of Christ on Sunday and we’ll have another baptism in our congregation, a wonderful addition to a string of baptisms with which we have been blessed in recent weeks. Even after the celebrations of Advent, Christmas and Epiphany, this service will be deeply meaningful to our congregation.

But we will be filled with joy on the ordinary weeks as well, when we don’t have a baptism or a reason for special vestments. May we blessed with joy in the ordinary.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

The dictionary defines epiphany as “a sudden, intuitive perception of or insight into the reality or essential meaning of something, usually initiated by some simple, homely, or commonplace occurrence or experience.” Because we celebrate Epiphany as a feast day that launches a season of stories about the life of Jesus, we have gotten into the habit of thinking of the revelation of Jesus as something that happened quickly and easily. Wise men from the east see a star and follow that star to the place where the Christ Child was. Upon entering the home they fell on their knees and worshiped him.

The reality is that there was little about the spread of Christianity to the gentile world that was sudden or instant. It took centuries for the emerging religion to gain widespread acceptance. Our understanding of Jesus’ unique revelation of the nature of God also was a slow process. Generations passed as faithful people struggled with understanding. It is easy to understand, from reading the Acts of the Apostles and the various letters that make up the majority of the New Testament that the early church did not share a common understanding of Jesus or a common interpretation of the events of his life, death and resurrection. The understanding that Jesus is the messiah long promised by prophets was accepted by only some Jews.

In our contemporary world, there are still plenty of disagreements over interpretation of the events of Jesus’ life. Even after millennia of Christian practice, we do not tell the stories of our history or interpret the tenants of our statements of faith in the same manner. The incredible diversity of denominations in the world reflects the wide differences in understanding that are a part of the contemporary church. We who claim the title Christian shouldn’t be surprised that outsiders have trouble knowing what that title means. We certainly are not of one idea or a common agreement within the church.

Today we celebrate and remember the visit of the wise men. In some traditions it is also the day of the celebration of the baptism of Christ by John the Baptist, though many congregations, including ours, wait until the first Sunday after Epiphany for that particular observance. It happens to be convenient for us that Epiphany lands on a Wednesday this year. We already have special family programming on the first Wednesday of the month so a festival with food, crafts, games and activities fits right into the rhythms of our congregation. It is likely that the timing of most of the traditional feasts of the church have similar origins. The tradition of twelve days of Christmas before the festival of Epiphany is more of a reflection of the practical realities of institutional life than a record of the actual span of time in the life of the infant Jesus. As I have often noted in the blog, the story of the wise men is only reported in one of the four gospels and it is hardly a major theme in the development of the New Testament. At the same time, it is one of the great treasured stories of our people. While we wonder at the fact that the other gospels don’t contain a record of the visit, we are compelled to take the story seriously if for no other reason than the fact that our people have treasured and kept that story alive for so many years. We’ve been telling that story to our children for more than 2,000 years.

Thinking of the development of our faith as a multiple-generation enterprise is very engaging for me. If it took so many generations for our people to come to the understandings we now have of our faith, we can be content for the new ideas and concepts we have to take similar lengths of time to become rooted in the life of the church. Much of what we do as people of faith is invest in the long term.

Knowing that not everything in the relationship between God and the people of God hinges on our time and place is reassuring. We, like previous generations are allowed to make mistakes. We are invited to learn from the history and traditions of the church, but also encouraged to be open to the movement of the spirit in our time and the fresh insights and understandings that come to each generation. Our faith is a work in progress, not a possession that we ever could fully own.

We are given a season to consider the revelation of Christ to the world. The season varies in length, depending on the date of Easter. Epiphany lasts from January 6 until Ash Wednesday, meaning it can be longer or shorter depending on the timing of the season of Lent since we use a hybrid calendar that considers both the phases of the moon and the movement of the earth around the sun. For many years the church celebrated a differently regulated season, with Christmas and Epiphany taking exactly 40 days, as is the case with Lent (excluding the Sundays). This practice however, created other anomalies in the calendar and our current practice has been long accepted with its season that varies in length from year to year. This year we get five Sundays, just a little over a month, for the season of Epiphany. Some years we get as many as seven Sundays. As a result, we need to be efficient with the use of our time and the telling of our stories. We have a lot to say and a short time to process the information.

Fortunately, we are not required to achieve complete understanding in a single celebration of the season. Epiphany comes around every year so that we can continue to wrestle with its ideas, contemplate its questions, and consider its importance in the overall life of faith that we share.

I wish you a blessed Epiphany. May you sense the presence of the light of Christ in your life and may this season bring to you new revelations of the meaning of our faith.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

It is always interesting to observe new parents with their children. 2015 was a year with many births in our congregation and the response to those births took on many different forms. Some new families, reveling in the intimacy and joy of the new person stayed at home for weeks. I suspect that some of them were afraid of the many different viruses and infections that seem to run around the community every year, trying to keep those precious young infants isolated from potential harm and disease. But there is more going on that fear of infection. There is a delightful joy in just being family. A newborn is fascinating enough to entertain and just watching a baby is enough to make one want to do more of it. In today’s busy world, families are often going from one thing to another and the coming of a new baby is a wonderful opportunity to slow down and stay home.

Other young families are out and about with their children as soon as they are born, bringing them to church the first or second Sunday of their lives, allowing us to pass them around during the fellowship hour, delighting in our joy at the arrival of the new ones. There are a few babies in our church that my first opportunity to hold the child is at their baptism. Others have become at home in my arms before the day of celebration.

I was thinking of the many differences in how families react to their children as I have been pondering these twelve days of Christmas. Because no matter how you measure it, no matter how you count the day or weeks or months or years, the truth is that our children are not “ours.” They come into this world and into our homes for a little while. Being a parent is primarily missionary work. We prepare our children to go out into the world and to make their own contributions to the lives of others. They develop their own style of independence and discover their own way in the world. And the journeys of our children often take them a long way from us. None of this changes the closeness we feel to them. None of this makes us love then any less intensely or passionately. But every parent realizes at some point that the lives of their children stretch beyond the reach of the parents. It is the way of the world.

So we come to the end of the 12 days of Christmas - the days of keeping the Christ child to ourselves and our own small community. Of course we know that Christianity has now reached every country on the globe and there are millions of others celebrating in their own way in their own places. But the celebration of Christmas is often a quiet and intimate time of getting to know, once again, the depth of God’s love and the power of incarnation - God with us in the form of a child. Then the twelfth day come and we remember once again that the Christ child comes to the whole world. We cannot keep this good news - this precious child - to ourselves. Our faith exists to be shared. Sharing outside of our immediate community is part of the natural course of events.

The good news of the Christ child is simply too good to keep to oneself.

Epiphany is, in part, the celebration of the acknowledgement of the coming of the messiah beyond the immediacy of the Jewish community. Gentiles, too recognize the child. The savior came to the whole world, not just to a single religion, a single ethnic group, a single family. And no matter how quiet and humble the circumstances of the birth were, pretty soon the wise men from the East come and it become apparent that the news of this birth will not be kept secret or private.

Christmas is a delicious, joyous, and wonderful season and it is coming to its own end. The real work of Christmas - sharing the good news with others - is just beginning as we take down the decorations and prepare for the next season. Epiphany will rush by quickly. Ash Wednesday comes early this year, on February 10. Before we have time to adjust to the season of light, we will fall headlong into our time of preparation.

It is a reminder of how short and precious a single human life really is. The time passes and we soon enter into eternity. Focusing on the shortness of life, however, is seldom the way to live fully. Dwelling in the present without undue regret of the past or fear of the future is the vocation of all who would draw close to God.

In my own life, I’m not sure how it came to pass so quickly that I have become a family elder - the patriarch of a small clan - the grandpa who doesn’t always keep up with the fast-paced action of the grandchildren. I don’t remember growing old. I simply lived.

Our life of faith can also seem a bit fast-paced. We celebrate communion and peak of Jesus death during every season of the Church year, including Christmas. Even as we marvel at the baby in the manger, we foreshadow his suffering and death. The journey from Christmas to Good Friday always seems like a whirlwind of moving too quickly even after having traveled that road every year for a lifetime.

Tomorrow is the feast of Epiphany and we’ll be gathering as a church family to remind people of all ages of the joy of following the star to discover what it is that God has to show us.

But for today, I am just a little bit like the new fathers and mothers with their new babies who are in no rush to get out into the world. They are content to stay at home and watch and marvel at the miracle in their midst. They know that the child will soon grow out of infancy and before long take steps on journeys that lead them far from home, but for a few days it is enough to just enjoy the presence of the infant.

On this last day of Christmas, may you find time to simply marvel at the miracle.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

We had a wonderful 95th birthday party at the church yesterday. One of the daughters of the woman whose birthday we celebrated has a gorgeous soprano voice and has sung in our church many times. When she visits, she will often sing the descant on one or more hymns, adding dramatically to our hymn singing as a congregation. I love her visits, and I know I’m not alone in that feeling. In conversation with someone who sat near her in church, I heard the phrase, “She’s got quite a set of pipes.” We use that phrase to refer to someone with a beautiful singing voice, but the origin of the phrase is not, I believe, a reference to vocal capabilities. To say that someone has a “set of pipes,” is a reference to a class of musical instrument, aerophones, using enclosed reeds fed from a constant reservoir of air in the form of a bag.

You’ve got it. People were talking about bagpipes. When we think of bagpipes, we are often thinking of the Scottish Great Highland bagpipes. You know the musical instrument to which I am referring. It is played at parades and funerals and often is associated with firefighters, police and other first responders. There are, however, many other forms of pipes. Bagpipes have been played for centuries (and continue to be played) throughout large parts of Europe, Turkey, the Caucasus, around the Persian Gulf, Northern Africa and North America.

Eleven pipers piping would be a fairly expensive proposition. The average price for fully combed and beaded blackwood pipes is about $1200-$1600. Multiply that by 11! I suppose, however, that you could do better by shopping for used bagpipes. I think that there are always a few for sale on eBay - usually offered by disgruntled family members rather than by an actual piper. Some are offered for purposes other than playing: appropriate for decorative wall-hanging.

As a quick aside, I’m never sure whether or not we are supposed to use “bagpipe” in the singular or in the plural. Is one instrument a bagpipe and several bagpipes? Or is a single instrument bagpipes because there are several stems with reeds fed from the same bag? It is the multiple stems and the ability to play more than one tone at a time that gives the pipes their distinct sound.

It is, however, an acquired taste. Not everyone would consider the gift of eleven pipers piping to be their favorite Christmas memory. Among other things eleven pipers piping would create quite a bit of volume, perhaps more suitable for an outdoor venue.

Outdoors has been a good place to be the last several days here in South Dakota. Yesterday afternoon we took our family out to Placerville Camp, a favorite place for all of us. We have been eager to share the camp with our grandchildren. Our grandson did visit once when he was a baby, but I am sure he has no memory of that particular visit. Yesterday however, there was snow for sledding and a few games inside of Mayflower Hall for a quick warm up before we headed home. A friend who is an accomplished photographer took family pictures for us that I am sure will be treasures for years to come.

The twelve days of Christmas are quickly passing. Epiphany Day is Wednesday. There is always a bit of confusion over how the days of Christmas are counted. I count the twelve days beginning with Christmas Day as number one, arriving at the 12th day on December 5. Others, however, count the days after Christmas, which makes January 6 - Epiphany Day - the 12th day after Christmas. However you count, the days pass quickly and the season as celebrated in the church is fairly short. Short and sweet leaves us wanting more each year, which isn’t a bad feeling. As Roy Blount Jr. one said, “’Tis better to have been good and over than rotten and gone on too long.”

I’m thinking that we won’t have any bagpipe playing at our house today. We’ve been going pretty much full steam ahead since our children and grandchildren arrived and I noticed that folks were pretty tired when it got to bedtime last night. But what a wonderful visit we have had! And we still have several days of celebration and visiting ahead of us. There will be time for several more important conversations with children and stories with grandchildren and games and toys that were received as gifts are still so new that each time they come out is a fresh excitement. And we’ve no need of bagpipes at our house. Our little granddaughter is strong-willed and possessed of an independent spirit and perfectly capable of making her desires known. As they say, “she’s got a set of pipes on her.” I’m sure that she is capable of testing her parents’ patience at times, but grandpa has a different perspective and finds her to be continually delightful. There will be no confusing her with her brother when they get to be school age.

Eleven is a special number in our way of counting if, for no other reason, it is the first number that repeats the use of digits in our written form. The combination of two of the same digits continues with 22, 33, 44, etc., but 11 leads the way. For me it is yet another sign of the extravagance of God’s abundance. We don’t stop at ten, but continue beyond ten when we are counting the blessings of the season.

Of course for the schoolchildren who are returning to their classes today and the workers whose schedules resume their normal pace, today is a return to the usual and not viewed as a holiday. We have the luxury of Monday being our usual day off and have saved some extra days off to spend with our family, so our pace won’t be too intense this week though we will soon be into the finishing of budgets and preparations for the annual meeting of our congregation.

For today, however, we remember the pipers and enjoy the celebration. Christmas continues!

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

The cycle of readings that is used for worship planning, known as the lectionary, is filled with strange quirks. I have been a lectionary preacher for all of my career, which means that I do not make the choice of scriptures for worship, but rather accept the choice made by an ecumenical group, known as the consultation on common texts. This means that our congregation follows the same texts as other congregations, sharing biblical themes simultaneously with other Christians. It also means that I am not tempted to dwell only on the texts that I happen to like, or to choose texts to illustrate the theological points I want to make. But it also means that sometimes I do not fully understand the reasoning for the choice of particular texts.

The lectionary follows a three-year cycle, and we are currently in the third of those years. In general, the first year follows the gospel of Matthew; the second the gospel of Mark; and the third the gospel of Luke. There is no year dedicated to the gospel of John, but the second year has more Sundays focusing on John than the other two, in part because Mark is the shortest of the Gospels. This week, however, even though we are in the year of Luke, our reading is the prologue to the Gospel of John. I love the poetic and theological strains of John’s gospel, and the prologue is challenging. In it, the writer outlines the theological themes that are more fully developed throughout the gospel. You can tell from the first sentences that this is not the same kind of story telling that is found in the other Gospels. It isn’t concerned with reporting the same kind of details upon which the others focus. And it uses symbolic language: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

“Word” is a pretty good translation of the original Greek, “Logos,” but there are nuances that don’t convey exactly the same meanings. That is true of all translations. A word, of course, is a unit of language, a particular set of sounds or written symbols that conveys meaning. By speaking of Jesus as “Word,” the gospel begins with a commitment to the idea of the messiah - the essential meaning precedes the physical person. The word exists before it becomes flesh. It is a heady and philosophical thought.

It is not, however, the most challenging idea of the prologue. The entire text challenges our way of thinking about God and about ourselves.

For this year, I believe that one of the great challenges of the prologue to the Gospel of John comes in the 16th verse: “And from his fulness have we all received, grace upon grace.”

We have all received - past tense - already have grace upon grace. That is, there is already abundance for all. Jesus Christ shows us who God is, and we have received from his fullness, "grace upon grace." This phrase sets a tone for this new year 2016, especially when so many of our neighbors are still struggling on our way out of deep economic troubles, unemployed or under-employed, so many still caught in the web of poverty. It may be secular heresy to see plenty right now, to see abundance, to see fullness even in a time like this. However, if we can claim that there is more than enough of everything we need most – forgiveness and reconciliation, grace, life, truth, joy, generosity, healing, justice – perhaps we can also believe that there is more than enough of what our bodies need to live on: food, water, land, clothing, and shelter. Enough that we might share, and share generously.

Perhaps our greatest challenge is to understand this abundance as something meant not just for us, or for those strong (or lucky) enough to have it already, but something that God intended to be shared, from the very beginning of creation, with all of God's children. Might this even be a first step on the path to peace, if we truly believe there is more than enough for all? What dreams of peace might a new year, a new beginning, bring, if we could share this abundance personally, communally, and even globally, with all of the people of the earth?

If you listen to the politicians, pay attention to those who are campaigning to become President, you might become convinced that we live in times of scarcity - that there isn’t enough to go around. There are fears of immigrants, fears of refugees, fears of others who might take from us the possessions we have. Politics may be the art of stirring up fears and getting people to vote “against” instead of “for,” but it seems to me that the Gospels challenge the very foundations of the political process. I don’t expect any of the candidates to begin making major speeches in which it is declared that we have more than enough and that all that is lacking is our ability to share.

That, however, is the foundation of the gospel message. We all have received grace upon grace. There is no need to invest our time in whining about what we do not have or our energy in trying to obtain more for ourselves. We live in an abundance of God’s grace.

Despite what the world around us may say, Christmas is not over.

The ideas of the season, the Word, is too expansive to process in a day or a moment. After the weeks of Advent preparation, we now are invited to linger for a few more days in the power of the reality that is the gift of Jesus Christ to the world. The word has become flesh and dwelt among us and we have received grace upon grace. The abundance of God is not something that lies in some other time. It is not an ancient story of our past, nor is it a yet unfulfilled promise of the future. It is for us here and now.

All we have to do is to learn to share.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

The stories about the birth of Jesus that are most often told in churches and other public places are usually composite stories taken from multiple Gospels. When one reads the Gospels individually, it is interesting to note what the individual Gospels do and do not say about Jesus birth. Matthew’s Gospel is the sole source of the stories of the visit of wise men from the east. That Gospel works hard to make several important points about the birth of the messiah:

First of all, the Gospel establishes that the Messiah was born into a Jewish family with a lineage that can be traced all the way back to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Gospel begins with a genealogy that establishes the family of Joseph and Mary. At the same time, it isn’t concerned with Jesus’ genetics. It is clear, in the first chapter, that Joseph is not the biological father of Jesus. That poses no problem for the Gospel writer. Biology is not the critical defining factor of which family to which one belongs. Jesus is clearly of the house and lineage of David because of the genealogy of his father despite the fact that he is not the biological child of Joseph.

For Matthew, Jesus stands in the lineage of Abraham and Isaac and Jacob both because of the genealogy of Joseph and because of the fulfillment of the prophetic vision. He offers the quote of the prophet as the explanation for Joseph’s acceptance of his role as father. Once Joseph accepts that role, biology is no longer important. Jesus belongs to his family and his lineage.

The second chapter of Matthew’s Gospel is the only report of the visit of wise men in the Bible. Matthew uses a different anchor for the timing of Jesus birth than does the writer of the Gospel of Luke. Luke writes, “This was the first enrollment, when Quirin′i-us was governor of Syria.” Matthew says, “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea in the days of Herod the king.” Neither author engages in a debate about whose sense of timing is accurate, though people living in those times would have known that Quirinius was appointed governor after Herod had died. The point of neither story is not the establishment of a specific time and date for the birth of Jesus, but rather to establish that he came out of the dark days of Roman occupation and cruelty. Jesus is born to a family that lived among the people who were oppressed by an occupying government.

Matthew goes on to report the visit of “Wise men from the east.” It does not describe those scholars as “kings.” The royalty of the visitors, their clothing, and crowns, are all part of the traditions that have grown up in the telling of the story, not from the actual Gospel report. Perhaps they were called kings because they were accepted by Herod as peers. Their titles, and roles in government weren’t important to the telling of the story for Matthew. What is important is that they were from outside of the Jewish community. Jesus was born to a humble Jewish family, but his birth was recognized by those outside of the community. The birth of the messiah is clearly presented by Matthew as an event that is bigger than just an internal Jewish affair. It affects the whole world, and gentiles as well as Jews.

Matthew invests a significant amount of text to the telling of the conversations between the wise men and Herod and how they ended up not making a report to Herod on their return. In doing so, it is established that the messiah is a concern to the governmental leaders, but they are left in the dark about his birth. Humble Jews of the family of Joseph know about it. Wise men from the East know about it. Herod and his counselors remain in the dark. The messiah is not sent to the governmental leaders. In this unique twist of storytelling, the Gospel writer establishes that there are some people who recognize the messiah and others who do not. And it is the governmental leaders who remain the most clueless about this important, world-changing event.

I’m not sure how the tradition of calling those wise men kings was established, but I have a sense that despite the humble surroundings of the mother and father and baby in a common home in a crowded city, despite the presence of the manger and hay and commonness of the setting, there was something about the child that made the visitors feel special. Their gifts offered, they humbled themselves and worshipped. They had a very important experience.

Perhaps there was something about the child that made them feel like royalty.

I know that is the way I feel when I am honored by parents who allow me to hold their precious children.

Our whole family is gathered in our home. Our daughter and her husband arrived on New Year’s Eve and our son and his family arrived yesterday. As I sat at our dinner table, with all of the leaves in it, surrounded by children and grandchildren, I felt like the luckiest person in the world. No king or president or governmental official has it better than I. No one has greater privilege than I was experiencing as my family gathered and shared the laughter and joy of the children. We marveled at their intelligence. We laughed at their jokes. We smiled at their antics. It was such a feeling of being so fortunate to be in this place at this time. It doesn’t matter if others recognize royalty in my person. I felt like I had been treated royally by my family. They honored me with a visit.

Messiah is not king in the sense of government. Jesus’ reign over the world is not a matter of governmental authority. His authority comes from another source entirely. So call them kings if you like, or call them wise men. It matters not. What is important is not the title, it is the baby that made everyone feel the depth of God’s blessing.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.

Sydney, Australia harbor fireworks. Photo from sidney-nye.com

For many, 2016 began with a lot of fireworks. It has become the custom, around the world, to stage elaborate displays of fireworks as part of public celebrations of the new year. Here in Rapid City, there were at least two public fireworks displays. Living in the national forest, and having endured several years of drought, we no longer have the big fireworks displays in celebration of Independence Day in July. There is just too much risk of an out-of-control fire. The only city-sponsored fireworks event of the year happens on New Year’s Eve. Another advantage of a display so close to the winter solstice is that it gets dark much earlier in the day. A fireworks display at 7 pm is simply more family-friendly than one for which you have to wait until 10 pm before it is dark enough to begin.

I enjoy fireworks, and I have been blessed to have seen some really impressive displays. Part of my New Years celebration most years is to watch the video of the fireworks display that the Australians hold in Sydney Harbor each year. Because of the difference in time zones, midnight in Sydney is 6 am here, so I can watch the celebration at my leisure during the day without having to stay up late for the show. Since we were privileged to visit Sydney a decade ago, the harbor bridge and opera house are sights that bring fond memories to mind and I enjoy watching the celebration.

I can remember being a child and wanting to stay up until midnight to ring in the new year. It was allowed in our household. Though we usually had a pretty set routine for bedtime, the rules were suspended on New Year’s Eve and we were allowed to get ready for bed but remain up as long as we were able. I’m pretty sure that I didn’t make it all the way to midnight very often. I have always been a morning person and I fall asleep easily in the evening. Waiting several hours for the rather undramatic event of the clock reaching midnight didn’t seem like it was worth much effort. I’m still that way. I tell people that when the ball drops in New York City, which occurs at 10 pm in our time zone, that is good enough for me.

The truth is that new years is a different even and a different mood in my thinking anyway. In the Christian calendar, the new year begins with Advent. Waiting, patience and expectation are the moods of new beginnings for our faith. Although I live submerged in popular culture and I acknowledge that for most of society New Years is January 1, I rather enjoy the sense of a more quiet and less public beginning. I like the idea of preparing for the new year with personal devotion. Advent is a good time to assess the year that is past and contemplate changes that will make life more meaningful in the year to come. I don’t have many regrets in this life. I don’t look back with a heavy heart. But I also know that I participate in the suffering of others through my own selfishness and lack of compassion and there are always a few things that I can consider as I look forward. I am learning to be less of a consumer and more of a contributor. I am growing in my relationships with others.

Unlike the prophets of doom, I live with a general sense that God is still doing wonderful things in our world. Despite the pain and sorrow and suffering of the world, there is more that is yet to be revealed about the possibilities for human existence. Advent is always a season of hope for me. It isn’t just that I have expectations that the outcomes I desire will come to past. In a deeper sense, I find my hope renewed in the simple presence of the power of forgiveness and the ability of humans to make genuine and meaningful changes in our lives. We read the Advent stories of John the Baptizer and his call to all of us to repent - to change the direction of our lives. Those stories present a challenge because I know that there is a connection between the privilege I experience and the suffering of others. There is need of repentance. But the stories also are the source of deep hope because they remind me that change is possible.

Hope is just the right mood for a new year. It doesn’t inspire fireworks, the consumption of large quantities of intoxicating substances, or the overconsumption of food as is often the mood of New Year’s celebrations. I’m at home without those things. A gentle celebration and a quiet build up that eases me into the new year is just right for my age and stage in life.

Make no mistake about it, however, there is genuine celebration in our home. Our daughter and son-in-law arrived for a visit last evening. Our son and his family will arrive at the airport this afternoon. We’ll have our whole family together for several glorious and wonderful days. There has been plenty of grocery shopping, gift buying, menu planning and other events to prepare. We are more than a little excited with the anticipation of the events that we enjoy most in life.

We have neighbors to the south of our home that we don’t know by name, but we have gotten used to their fireworks. They were celebrating by igniting some pretty impressive bursts last night. On the other side of the house, we could see the city fireworks off to the north. It was kind of fun to know others were celebrating as our hearts were filled with excitement and joy at the safe travel of our family and the reunion with people we love so deeply.

The fireworks in my heart are even more impressive than the rocket bursts in the night sky.

Copyright (c) 2016 by Ted E. Huffman. If you would like to share this, please direct your friends to my web site. If you want to reproduce any or all of it, please contact me for permission. Thanks.