A couple of weeks ago I blogged about sorting Lego bricks. I’ve been dabbling with that project around the edges of my days since. I’m getting pretty close to being finished with the project. We have plastic tubs of legos sorted by color, ready for play whenever the grandchildren come to visit or transport whenever their parents want us to bring more of the toys to their home. At less than two years old, our youngest grandchild is still too young for the tiny bricks. They could pose a choking hazard. While she might be able to play with supervision with some of the larger pieces, there are plenty of other toys that are more suitable. Her brother, who is old enough to play with the legos, might choose to take some of the bins and dump them out on the table or floor as part of his play. The careful sorting is a temporary situation. In order to have fun with the toys, the colors and different sizes of bricks need to be mixed.

It is possible that all of the sorting was simply an exercise in adult sensibility that has very little to do with play. Most play involves a certain degree of messiness.

I remember visiting a distant relative years ago. Their home was beautifully maintained and well-organized. It was a model of hospitality and we were warmly welcomed. Like the residents of the home, we removed our shoes upon entry to help keep the carpets clean. We sat on the sofas, trying not to disarrange the pillows neatly placed in exactly the right positions. We watched the children playing with one toy at a time. When the child tired of a particular toy, he or she was instructed to put that toy away before getting out another. Later, as we sat for a meal, our hostess was so quick to clear the table after each course that she took away my plate before I had finished my meal. The house, however, was kept very neat and clean.

I remember having a conversation, after we left, about how unnatural the home felt. I’m sure it was comfortable for the homeowners and they have lived a meaningful life in their state of organization and cleanliness, but our life has taken a different course.

When our children were living at home we would at times devote an entire room to a game that involved lots of toys. Bedrooms might have dozens of stuffed animals. Sometimes we had stacks of books out. Just like I like to have several open books when I’m working at my desk, our children would bring stacks of books for reading at bedtime. Clutter sometimes got the best of us and we have had to employ some extra discipline just to get organized enough to welcome guests at times.

Just like my ability to feel at home amidst a certain level of clutter, I have discovered that I have a bit of clutter in my spiritual life.

Soren Kierkegaard’s philosophical masterpiece, “Purity of Heart is to Will One Thing,” may be a deep inspiration, but it would hardly describe my way of pursuing my relationship with God. Even when my goal is quiet contemplation, I have to dig through layers of other thoughts. I sit in the quiet of the church sanctuary to pray and begin by going through a couple of dozen prayers for others before I can begin to quiet my spirit and just focus on my breathing. Then a breath prayer will enable my mind to wander even further. I’m sure that no one would accuse me of order or neatness in my prayer life. It is as cluttered as my desk.

I have experienced disorder as a very common aspect of human life. It is easy to see in others. I am quick to identify inconsistencies and irrational though in the political philosophy of a candidate. It doesn’t take much training in logic to point out the errors in the thinking of virtually every public figure. We humans like to think of ourselves as rational beings, but in reality we are highly illogical. The problems and challenges of humanity are the products of our own behavior. War, climate disaster, political gridlock - humans invented all of these and more. Human history is a whole lot more like the jumble of thousands of unsorted lego bricks than the neatly organized bins of sorted toys. Contemporary politics more closely resemble the clutter and mess of my garage than the neatly organized home of our relatives.

Being human is messy.

It is a lesson that a newborn can teach a parent in the first diaper change. By the time that child is two years old, there have been days when the parents have had to change their clothes as often as the child. Before that child goes off to school, a health conscious and highly organized parent will take a half-eaten slice of apple from the child and eat it without giving it a second thought.

We are flesh and blood, muscle and bone, craving and disappointment. Humans are creatures that occupy bodies that are anything but neat.

I was reminded of the simple fact while visiting the hospital yesterday. The building is kept as clean and orderly as possible. Infection control is a part of the daily existence of every person. As I visited one patient, I scrubbed my hands, put on gloves, gown and mask then reversed the process on my way out of the room. I also noticed that the garbage can for the disposable items was twice the size of the garbage can in our kitchen. The hospital literally produces truckloads of garbage every day. It might be neat on the surface, but it creates a mountain of toxic waste.

Which brings me back to my spiritual disciplines. I am a Christian. I am a follower of Christ - God incarnate - God in human form - God in the midst of the messiness of this world. The only way I am able to contemplate the transcendent is to dwell in the immediate. I experience the spiritual in bodily form. The divine and human are so deeply intertwined that they cannot be separated.

Welcome to my mess. It could use a little more organization. But God can be found here in the midst of it all. Faith can grow in these very human circumstances. I don’t have to wait until I get everything perfectly organized in order to pray. For that I am deeply 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.

Yesterday was a day to take a trip down memory lane for us. We drove up to Hettinger, North Dakota, to officiate at a funeral. The service was held in Centennial Chapel, which is next door to the home where we lived for seven years. It was the home to which both of our children came as infants. We moved from that home when our children were two and four years old. It is always a time of remembering when we go there. Some things have changed. There is no longer a sand box in the front yard. The house has different siding and is a different color. The school across the street has a new mascot and new busses parked in the yard. Some of the businesses in the town have changed. Some things are just the same. The church is virtually unchanged. Even the carpet is the same. I sat on the same chair behind the pulpit. I remember the day we bought the piano that is in the sanctuary.

At the conclusion of the funeral, we drove to the neighboring town of Reeder for the committal. In the days we lived in North Dakota, we served churches in both towns, so the drive was very familiar. The wind at the cemetery was very familiar. After the committal, we gathered at the Senior Citizen’s center in town, a place that has hosted a lot of different gatherings over the years.

Along the way, we greeted old friends and remembered the good years that we lived and worked with those people.

Then we got in our car and drove back home. The drive, too is very familiar to us. In the days when we lived in North Dakota, we would make regular trips to Rapid City for shopping and medical care. The trip is slightly faster these days because we no longer have a national 55 mph speed limit. It was probably a bit quieter, too, because we have a newer and more comfortable car than was the case back then.

Back in Rapid City we picked up a friend who came to town as a part of her job with a company that supplies products to local grocery stores. We had dinner and another hour of conversation with her. She is from Boise, Idaho, where we lived for a decade between our time in North Dakota and our move to Rapid City. She was in the youth group at our church in Idaho. The evening was filled with more stories, more catching up and more memories.

It was not, however, a day of going back. All of the activities reminded us of how things have changed over the years. When we lived in North Dakota, we served two lively congregations. Both have closed their doors now. The towns are much smaller and there are fewer businesses open in both towns. The building where the funeral was held now belongs to a funeral home and is almost identical to how it looked as a church and serves a similar function as a place for funerals. We didn’t even go to the other church building, which has been sold. Each trip we make to that town there are fewer familiar faces. The drive back to South Dakota included conversations about the people we did not see while we were there.

The woman with whom we met in the evening is now married with children of her own. In fact, her eldest son is the age her brother was when we moved to Boise. Her parents have some health challenges. She brought stories of others who have grown and changed.

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus is reported to have said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” Change is a part of life and everything changes. It seems evident that this is the case every time we go back to visit places that remind us of our past. As we have grown and changed and gotten on with our lives, so to have those who remained in the places we left behind.

Sometimes in the church we encounter resistance to change. People come to church, in part, in search of the familiar and the comfortable. Their lives are filled with constant change and constant bombardment from media that forces them to encounter the change. They find comfort in the familiar and many of the rites and ceremonies of the church are familiar to them. But even the church is in the process of changing. New language and new songs are introduced. New ways of doing business come into play.

When we moved to North Dakota we had a manual typewriter. The church had virtually no office equipment. We didn’t need any. There was a mimeograph machine at the court house where we could duplicate our worship bulletins. In the years that we served those congregations, we started a newsletter, got a mailing permit, and purchased a small copy machine. An electronic typewriter found its home in the church office. When we lived in Boise that church made the change from typewriters to computers and upgraded printers and copiers many times. Now we work with wireless connectivity, a dependency upon the Internet for our cloud based applications and data services, and a full color digital printer.

It isn’t just the equipment that has changed.

People’s lives have changed as well. The constant connectivity of smart phones and other mobile devices means that we have all kinds of conversations that take place over various forms of media. We have all kinds of friendships that don’t involve very much face to face contact. We are bombarded by information, much of which is not useful and clutters our lives. Patterns of church participation have shifted radically. One thing that we often notice is that folks who were once really active in church, attending weekly or even more often, are less active these days. Part of the conversation we had last night reminded us that the woman with whom we met has not been to the church we attended in those days any more often than we. We live 950 miles from that church these days. She lives as close as she did 20 years ago.

Still, it is good to step into a familiar stream even though we know that both the water and we have changed. Yesterday was a good day to remember. Today is a day to move forward and discover new challenges.

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.

On a slight rise southeast of Reeder, North Dakota is Rose Hill cemetery. It really isn’t much of a hill, though the land isn’t exactly flat, either. And I don’t know where the name Rose came from. Perhaps there once were some wild roses growing on the hill. It is pretty much prairie grass and there are some years when there isn’t much moisture around for growing flowers.

The town of Reeder itself had a bit of trouble deciding on a location back at the beginning of the 20th Century when it was founded. Albert and Charles Leff founded a post office and a small store about one and a half miles east of the townsite, on the other side of Rose Hill in 1907. the new Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad was coming to the area and they knew where the tracks would be laid. However, when the railroad platted the town, it ended up at its current townsite, a bit to the west of where the Leffs had their enterprise. The name Leff didn’t stick, either, replaced by the name of the chief engineer of the railroad, E.O. Reeder.

After the railroad came the Yellowstone Trail, the first transcontinental automobile highway in the Northern United States. Now known as US 12, the road was marked by rocks painted yellow. Stories vary as to whether or not the yellow stones were a reference to Yellowstone National Park, which lies slightly off of the main route of US 12 in Montana.

The little town became a stop on the railroad and a provider of services to homesteaders in the land that was almost the last of the original buffalo commons of the midwest to be formally settled.

When I was a young pastor, trying to establish a youth ministry in addition to serving a congregation in Reeder, I planned a Halloween party for the youth of the town. There had been a few complaints about excessive vandalism on Halloween and too few activities for youth. I decided that it was an opportunity to teach about all saints day and give a little lesson about life and death while we were at it. The plan was fairly simple. The youth would be instructed on making gravestone rubbings using crayons and newsprint. They would be given a list of names and dates to obtain from the cemetery - a kind of scavenger hunt. Meanwhile, unknown to the youth participating in the Halloween party, a group of adults were enlisted to “haunt” the cemetery with a few surprises for the youth when they arrived.

I did think to notify the sheriff of our activities so that the deputy wouldn’t be caught off guard when there was a bit of extra traffic at the cemetery that evening.

I had pretty much left the plan for “haunting” to the adults. I had in mind a couple of people to hid in the cemetery and make a few noises or perhaps rise up from behind a headstone to startle the youth. Unbeknownst to me, the planning session for the haunting started a couple of hours before the event at the Office Bar on main street and continued with several trips to the homes of the haunters to obtain a portable sound system, costumes and other effects.

It turned out to be a grand success, but not without a few anxious moments for me, like when I had to escort one student to my car trembling with a bit too much fright. Everyone, including the adults gathered at the church afterward for cider, hot chocolate, treats and conversation.

Its been more than 30 years since that party and they still talk about it in Reeder. Participants in the party have gone on to contribute to society. One serves as a counselor and social worker in a larger city in the state. Another has served as a child protection prosecutor for the Attorney General of the state. Another made his home in Canada. One is now a teacher after having traveled the world. Another runs a successful television and Internet cable installation business in the oil fields. None, to my knowledge have suffered undue trauma relating to their experience in the cemetery that night.

It isn’t my only memory of Rose Hill Cemetery.

I’ve stood at the graveside as we laid to rest a small percentage of those whose graves now occupy the cemetery. There were some cold days when the frost level was deep in the ground and the digging was tough. There have been some windy committals with a small circle of North Dakota pallbearers standing in their Sunday best, without their parkas, pretending that they aren’t cold but nonetheless eager to get back to the church and have a cup of hot coffee. There was the day we placed the cremains of at least three family pet dogs alongside those of the owners in a hand-dug grave that now is marked with a rather nice stone bearing the names of the human owners. The names of the dogs will be remembered for a few decades more until the last of those who gathered for the burial have ourselves passed.

There isn’t much of the town left. The school has closed. The machine shop is closed. The body shop is closed. The grocery stores are closed. There is only one bar left on main street. To an untrained eye, the town is dying. And it is true that at some time in the future there will probably no longer be any homes or businesses left, though those days are at some indefinite place in the future. People hang on to their homes for a long time and every once in a while a new person moves into town.

The cemetery will remain. This afternoon we’ll add one more casket to the ground. It contains the remains of a man who was born in Reeder and who lived his entire life there except for the four years he served in the army during World War II. At 96, he personally lived about 90% of the history of the town. He was the owner of the Office Bar for nearly half a century and was behind the bar when the haunters planned their activities. There really is no other place than Rose Hill that would be appropriate. We’ll place him next to his wife of 66 years whom we buried in the fall of 2013.

It will be an honor once again to stand, if even for a short time, in that cemetery and recall all that has happened on that hill. It is a place to which we will return again.

And each return will flood us with memories.

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 love my job. I love the people with whom I work. I am constantly thinking of how we might change a worship service, improve the work we do as a congregation, start a new mission project, reach out to children and youth, and in general expand our mission and ministry. I like to lead worship. I like to plan worship. I like to work with musicians. I like to engage in Bible study with others. I like to think about God. I am incredibly fortunate to have such a wonderful way in which to earn my living and pursue my interests.

It would not be accurate, however, to say that I have the stamina for 24/7 ministry. I don’t mind a call in the middle of the night - most nights. I gain a sort of pleasure from the adrenalin rush of heading out to serve someone in the wee hours. But there are times, and today is one of those days, when I’m looking for solitude.

I’m looking for a place where the phone does not ring, where the demands are not placed, where I’m not required to listen carefully to another person. I’m looking for a place that is not cluttered with papers and books that must be read and problems that must be solved. I’m looking for a place without deadlines to be met and projects to accomplish.

I know where that place is.

I’ll be frank. The temperature is a bit cold for a canoe on the lake. The ice is out of the lake, but sitting in an open canoe requires a lot of layers of clothing to stay warm. It’s doable, but taking a canoe out for a paddle requires planning, a self-rescue plan, the right clothing in case of an upset, which, though highly unlikely, is not impossible.

Still the place is where I need to go.

Fortunately I have a kayak. When I stretch the sprayskirt around the coaming of the cockpit the enclosed bubble of air starts to warm with my body temperature. As I dip my simple greenland paddle into the water, the natural twisting of my body with each paddle stroke warms my trunk, which in turn warms the air around the lower half of my body. My stocking hat keeps my ears warm under the hood of my paddling jacket.

I’m headed for that place this morning. It is still a little dark, but the anticipation is building.

I was born to work with people. But some times I simply need some time alone.

Alone, my life begins to feel like a choice again.

I am well aware that I have come to this place in my life through a series of choices that I have made. I have pursued particular interests and let others slide. I have made marriage and family a priority and have not invested in financial success. I have chosen to follow my passion in terms of career instead of building my retirement savings. I don’t regret these decisions. But there are moments when I feel that I am kind of trapped in the decisions I have made. I need to develop and maintain the energy to work more years because early retirement is not a good choice for me. I need to pour my heart and soul into this particular congregation even when it feels like they demand more than I can give because I have developed patterns of leadership and of service that would leave gaps in the congregation if I were to stop doing some of the chores I pursue. I know that the “traps” are only ones I have set for myself. I know that I am not really trapped. I have more options than most people. But when I take time for solitude, I can gain the perspective to see that my life is a choice and that I am not trapped. Sometimes in the busyness of everyday living I go from chore to chore because it is what must be done more than because it is what I am choosing to do.

When I go to a place of solitude; when I find a place alone; my life becomes choice once again.

There may be some who are called to a monastic life of great solitude. Some days such a life seems appealing to me. Today is one of those days. But I know that If I simply give myself some alone time I will discover once again that the satisfying work of serving others is necessary in my life. I thrive on feeling loved and needed. But to get to that place there is a bit of soul work that needs to be done. I need to take the time to be alone. I need to sit in my boat and listen to the world. I need to get back in touch with nature and the harmony of creation.

So today I commit myself to the process of simply being and of making time to be alone. I suspect that I will discover, as I have in the past, that the recent times of intense busyness and activity have made me a little rusty at the work of just being quiet with God. I will find my mind wandering back to work, back to lists of undone chores, back to the demands of my usual everyday life. But I am resolved to release these thoughts and get back to the quiet. I am resolved to dive deep into the source of strength and energy for the other days of my life. I am resolved to give myself time for the quiet.

There are strengths, deep inside of me, that need to be reinforced - foundations upon which I can build the next phase of my life of service. But my service will be hollow and my work meaningless unless it is rooted in a deep relationship with God.

Soon it will be time to return to work and the busy pace of life.

Today it is time to be quiet and still and alone.

The words of Frederick Buechner come to mind:

The grace of God means something like:
Here is your life.
You might never have been, but you are,
because the party wouldn’t have been complete without you.
Here is the world.
Beautiful and terrible things will happen.
Don’t be afraid.
I am with you.

Today is a day to be alone in the world.

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.

Easter is the big moveable feast in our calendar. Yes, it is earlier this year than is often the case. Yes, you have to pay attention to several things in order to determine its date. Yes, the length of the season of Epiphany is also variable to accommodate the fixed date of Christmas and the changing date of Easter. On the other hand, celebrating Easter in the spring at least puts it in the same season as events in the life of the historical Jesus unlike Christmas which is celebrated on a date fixed by tradition, not by remembrance of an actual date. We’ve been pretty good at arguing about dates in the Christian Church, especially for the last 962 years since the Great Schism divided our faith into its Eastern and Western expressions.

Still it is important to remember that all of the dates in our Christian calendar are the product of a mixture of faith and simple politics. It was at the First Council of Nicea, in AD 325, a distinctly political event in the history of the church, that it was decided that Easter Day should fall on the first full moon after the Spring Equinox, and that it should always fall on a Sunday to represent the day of Christ’s Resurrection.

Don’t mean to burst your bubble, but it isn’t as if March 27 is the actual date of the event. After all Easter will be April 16 next year and , like 2014, 2017 is a year when Orthodox and Western Christians celebrate Easter on the same day. After 2017 that won’t happen again until 2025. The next time Easter fall sin March is 2024, when it is March 31.

We get Easter on April Fool’s Day in 2018 and again in 2029, at least for those of us who follow the western calendar. That is, of course, unless current conversations produce a change in the date. It is rumored that the Roman Catholic Pope, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, and the Archbishop of Canterbury will discuss such a change in an upcoming meeting, though the date of that meeting has not yet been set. It remains to be seen whether or not those three individuals constitute sufficient authority to change something that has such a long and ancient tradition. I don’t recommend holding your breath for such an announcement anytime soon. It might be a good thing to keep those charts that show the dates of Easter in future years.

The date of the celebration aside, it seems to be that our world is struggling with understanding the depth of meaning of the celebration. Consider the following:

We still hear the popular aphorism, “Might makes right,” even in the context of the current political campaigns in the US. Easter declares that this is not the case. The display of earthly power is meaningless in the face of God’s grace. The authority of Rome held sway in the ancient Middle East. Jesus death sentence had no avenue of appeal. He was killed by the might of an imperial government. Might didn’t make right; neither did it yield the ultimate victory.

There are more than a view voices in our world urging that we respond to violence with violence claiming that there are certain world problems for which the only solution is killing and more killing. This is thousands of years after Jesus demonstrated that sacrifice, not violence is the avenue to peace. Love really is stronger than death. The power to kill is not as great as the power of resurrection.

The teachings of Easter aren’t exactly popular on the world’s stage in our time.

A quick glance at the media might lead you to believe that Easter is about pastel eggs, bunnies, chocolate, wide-brimmed hats, lilies and daffodils and children baskets brimming with candy and presents. These symbols of the ancient spring rite devoted to the pagan fertility goddess “Oestre,” are nearly everywhere and frequently displayed not only in secular marketing, but also on signs and posters promoting church events.

For us, Easter is the celebration of God’s new covenant with the people. The new covenant does not engage the old covenant wherein God and the people promise faithfulness to one another. Rather it provides an extended invitation to all to participate in a relationship that is not dependent upon merit or inheritance or genetics or any other means of selection. The new covenant is offered freely to all. The presence of God is not restricted to the places of authority or special ceremony or a chosen priesthood. Rather the relationship between God and people is constantly available.

Love does not end with death.

It appears that the meaning and message of Easter is a challenge even for those of us who live our lives within the church. Resurrection is not the same as resuscitation. Living eternally with God is not the same thing as being exempted from death. Being a person of faith does not mean that you can avoid pain and suffering, sorrow, grief and loss.

In the lives of the faithful, Easter is less about a specific day and a particular celebration and more about a commitment to an entirely new way of living. That is why even in the convoluted mathematics of the historic Christian calendar Easter is far more than an single day. It is a season. 50 days, more than 10 percent of the year is devoted to the celebration of Easter and learning its deeper meanings. And we repeat the process every year as we add depth upon depth of meaning and layer upon layer of understanding of the mystery of life and death and resurrection.

I would be dishonest if I were to say that I don’t feel pressure about this morning’s sermon. The church will be quite full and since I don’t preach on Christmas Eve, it is likely the largest congregation I will address during the entire year. I want my words to be meaningful. But I also know that the true meaning of Easter doesn’t hang on what I say.

The true meaning of Easter lies in the lives of the people as they go forth from the church into their everyday lives.

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 often think of the Christian calendar as an annual journey through the life of Jesus. We begin with Advent and the anticipation of the birth, move on to Christmas and quickly into Epiphany. By Lent, we’ve gone through the early experiences of Jesus’ life and many of the stories of his ministry including the call of disciples, miracles and teachings. Lent focuses on the final trip to Jerusalem and the events surrounding his death. At Easter we celebrate the resurrection and on Pentecost Day we celebrate the beginning of the church and throughout the summer and autumn months as the long season of Pentecost unfolds, we read more stories of the teachings and events of Jesus. Each year we go through the cycle of learning and remembering.

It is no accident that the calendar has been organized around these events, but it was also created out of institutional needs and the process of organizing a growing institutional church. Lent and Easter, which are “anchored” in the dates establishing the Jewish Passover, are probably the most ancient of the Christian holidays. As the emerging church began to grow, a system was needed to prepare initiates for membership. Easter was a good time for the official ceremony to take place and a preparation period of six months was deemed to be about right to teach prospective new members the things that were thought to be important for them to know. The readings of the season of Lent were arranged to contain what were thought to be the most important parts of Jesus life.

From that tradition came the Great Vigil of Easter, also known as the Paschal Vigil. It is the first official celebration of the Resurrection of Jesus. During this service people are baptized and adult catechumens are received into full communion with the church. Officially, the great Vigil begins with sunset on Holy Saturday and ends with sunrise on Easter Day. Throughout the night there are four distinct phases to the ceremonies. The first is a service of light during which new fire is kindled and a candlelight procession emerges as the flame is passed from candle to candle. A fresh Paschal Candle for the new year is first lighted and special prayers celebrate the gift of light and Jesus as the light of the world.

The second is a service of the word. Beginning with the creation stories that open Genesis, selected texts are read to tell the flow of history, including the story of Exodus, the coming of kings, the words of the prophets, selected tests from the Epistles and finally readings from the Gospels. The readings are punctuated with Psalms and songs and periods of silence.

The third service is a service of baptism in which those who have not been baptized receive the sacrament and those who have been baptized repeat their baptismal vows and are sprinkled to remind them of their baptisms.

The vigil concludes with the celebration of Holy Communion - the first communion for the new members of the church.

In our contemporary setting, we no longer stay up all night and spread out the liturgy. Rather the four services are compressed into a compact liturgy that includes the highlights of the elements of the Great Vigil. We don’t even wait quite until sundown, preferring rather to start by the clock at a time that is convenient for worshipers and allows them to go home and sleep before the sunrise service the next day. Our actions are symbolic and remind us of former practices while acknowledging that we operate in a different way in the contemporary church. In our times, people join the church at many different times throughout the year and preparation for membership varies by the needs and understandings of those who are preparing for membership. The events of membership preparation don’t always occur in the same order and less emphasis is laid on the understandings of concepts and intellectual assent to dogma.

This shift in meaning and in the mode of celebration has resulted in the Great Vigil slipping from the services of many congregations a they focus on Easter services. Some contemporary congregations eschew Holy Week services while placing huge emphasis on Easter morning celebrations. At the same time, traditional churches are experiencing a return to Great Vigil services. Each year in our community one or two congregations that had not previously observed the vigil add a service. Once thought to be primarily the observance of Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches, the Great Vigil is celebrated in Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and United Church of Christ congregations among others.

One of the duties of my day will be the preparation of the Paschal Candle, which we do to prepare for the service rather than in the midst of the service as was the ancient tradition. Our candle came from the candlemakers already inscribed with its symbols. Each has a special meaning:
Christ yesterday and today is the vertical line of the cross.
The beginning and the End is the horizontal line.
The Alpha is cut into the candle above the vertical line.
The Omega is cut into the candle below the vertical line.
The four numerals of the current year are each cut into the candle with special prayer.

In some congregations, five grains of incense are inserted into the candle in the form of the cross. In our congregation we would have to insert the incense fairly high on the cross in order for the flame to burn down to them during the year. Even though we light the candle for all of our worship services during the year, less than a third of the total length of the candle is consumed. Still, it is rather dramatic to remove the old candle from its candleholder and place the new candle and recall how many services of worship the candle has witnessed and how much light it has given to our faith in the course of a year.

Today is a day of preparation, mostly, with a service in the evening to prepare for the events of tomorrow. It is hardly a vigil and yet it is a tradition that I enjoy greatly. There is much anticipation of what will come tomorrow.

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.

First of all a bit of calendar trivia that is probably not common knowledge even among faithful Christians who celebrate all of the holidays of the Christian calendar. The Annunciation of the Lord is a feast day that celebrates the angel Gabriel’s visit to Mary announcing that she had been chosen to be the Mother of Jesus. The day is a solemnity, which is the highest ranking of any feast in the Catholic liturgical calendar. Other solemnities include Easter, Pentecost Day, Christmas and Trinity Sunday. The feast falls on March 25, exactly nine months before the festival of Christmas on December 25. That is except when March 25 lands during Holy Week. When that occurs the celebration is transferred to the first open day after Easter Sunday. This year the Solemnity of the Annunciation will be celebrated on Monday, April 4. Don’t worry if that confuses you. We rarely make a formal observance of the Annunciation except when we read the story from the Gospel of Luke as part of our Advent and Christmas celebrations.

It is important for us that Good Friday stand alone, uncluttered by other distractions. As a day dedicated to the pain of Jesus and the grief of his family and friends, it makes sense to just take time to let it all sink in.

In reality, however, our thoughts are rarely perfectly focused. There are all kinds of distractions from the process of living that clutter our thinking. Even with a holiday from school and some businesses, Good Friday is often cluttered with plans for Easter, shopping, and the normal business of life. We attend a service at church. We spend time in prayer. And we get on with our lives. I remember my father’s policy as a small businessman decades ago. His employees were allowed time off with pay if they attended a Good Friday worship service at a church. He did not, however, close his business. It was staffed by employees who chose not to attend church services. I don’t remember anyone ever raising a concern that this practice wasn’t fair. It was a small business with only a handful of employees in a small town where Good Friday services were usually community services shared by several different congregations.

As we gather for services in our church today, I will be slightly less focused due to the realities of life in a parish. My thoughts will drift to a member of our congregation just back from Rochester, MN, where he received confirmation of a serious diagnosis and the outlines of a very aggressive plan of treatment that will occupy the remainder of the spring, summer and fall. And I will be thinking of a visit I made to the VA hospice in Sturgis yesterday, where I served communion to a man to whom I first served communion nearly 38 years ago. In this life nothing is certain, but it appears that it will be his last formal service of communion. Our next worship service with him and the circle of family that was gathered at his bedside will probably be his funeral.

It isn’t just that people get sick and die. There is no real surprise in that. When we are honest we all are aware, at some level, of our mortality and the mortality of others. In the case of yesterday’s visit, we are also aware of the dying of a community. After decades of funerals, the church was no longer able to remain open. We will celebrate the funeral in a neighboring town. And the crowd will be small. There aren’t many people left in the town these days. The school is closed. Most of the businesses on main street are closed. Some of the houses are empty. The way of life of that particular corner of North Dakota is passing away along with the people who populated its churches and cafes and bars and places of business.

We are “fixers.” We are attracted to doing something. We like to find solutions. And we live in a culture that is adverse to talking about death and rushes to get over times of sadness. Of the events of Holy Week, Palm Sunday and Easter are the big ones. Those are the days when there is a crowd at church. The mid week events are more sparsely attended. Of course we can worship God without large numbers. Wherever two or three are gathered worship can be meaningful. But there is something in every one of us, even those of us who attend every worship service during Holy Week, that leads us to the sense of resolution that comes with Easter. We long for the celebration of life.

But that longing must be the mood of this day. It is not yet time for the fulfillment. The journey is not yet over. As I sat with the family in that room yesterday, we all were aware that the passage from life to death takes place on its own timeframe. There was no acknowledgement of human clocks and calendars in the process of dying. It wasn’t a situation that could be predicted or fixed or changed. It has to play out in its own way and its own sense of timing.

Today is a good day to simply slow down and sit with the reality of death and grief. We know the story, but we will read the words once again. We are aware of the painful details, yet we will allow ourselves to experience that pain once again. There is no fixing, just witnessing.

I often joke that Holy Week is more about moving furniture than worship. We do move the furniture a lot as we go through the series of services, each with its own unique setting. But today there is very little furniture that needs to be moved. Today we are allowed to just sit with the Gospel story and the depth of the events. Today we can contemplate not only the reality of death, but the power of love in the presence of death.

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.

Maundy Thursday is the traditional day for a service of washing feet. The practice has been a part of Christian liturgy for many centuries. A formal foot washing ceremony is embedded in a worship service after the reading of the Gospel. The Gospel story of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples appears in John 13:1-17. Luke 22:27 makes an indirect reference without mentioning the actual washing of feet. In that passage Jesus reminds the disciples that in contrast to worldly practice, Jesus came among his disciples as one who serves.

The practice, in worship, is symbolic. After reading the story of Jesus washing the feet of the disciples from the Gospel of John, those who have their feet washed are taken to chairs prepared for the practice. They remove one or both of their shoes and stockings. The officiant pours water over their feet into a basin and dries the feet with a towel. In some ceremonies the shoes are not removed and the officiant simply wipes their feet with a special towel.

It is an awkward moment. We’re not comfortable with showing our feet in public. We’re not comfortable with having them washed while others look on. It was an awkward moment for Jesus’ disciples as well. Peter protested: “You shall never wash my feet.” Jesus’ answer was sharp: “Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.” Peter replies that it is not just his feet that are unclean, Jesus counters again. The recording of their conversation in the Gospel forms a permanent record of the awkwardness of the moment.

When we have offered an optional foot washing ceremony in our congregation, there have been very few who participated. Even though the practice is symbolic, there is discomfort about it. I happen to believe that discomforting myself periodically is probably a good practice. Clergy are assigned a role of authority in the church and in the community that occasionally needs to be questioned. But I’m not sure that the people I serve need to be made uncomfortable just to serve as a reminder to me of my role and place in the community.

The granting of a stole to an ordained clergy person has its roots in the ceremony. The stole is invested at ordination with the advice that it is to be worn as a reminder that the ordinand is called not to be placed above the people, but as a servant of the people. Clergy who follow traditional investiture procedures say a prayer each time they place a stole on their shoulders asking that they not forget their call to service.

The traditional day for the washing of feet is Maundy Thursday. It is also the day for the sacrament of communion, reminding of Jesus request that his disciples “do this in remembrance.” Maundy Thursday gets its name from the Latin Mandatum, which means “mandate.” The mandate from which the day gets its name comes from the story of Jesus washing the disciples feet, but the mandate is not about the specific practice of washing feet. Washing feet is not a sacrament like baptism and communion, even though Jesus did instruct disciples to wash each other’s feet: “Now that I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also should wash one another’s feet. I have set you an example that you should do as I have done for you.” (John 13:14-15)

The mandate comes from the words Jesus gave after washing the disciples feet: “A new commandment (mandatum) I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.” (John 13:34)

In the church we have surrounded the day with all kinds of activities and ceremonies. Tonight in our worship we will share Holy Communion. We will have a series of readings and extinguishing of lights called tenebrae. In monastic communities the last service of the day on the last three days of Holy Week contains the practice of successively extinguishing lights. This practice has been formalized into a service that is usually celebrated on Maundy Thursday or Good Friday in Protestant congregations. In our congregation one candle will remain lighted at the end of the ceremony. It is our Paschal candle, the candle that we first lighted at the Great Vigil of Easter the previous year. It will be the last time the candle is lit in our worship. Saturday evening, at the service of new light, a new candle will take its place to serve us for the new year.

It is important to remind ourselves, however, in the midst of all of the ceremonies and acts of worship, that we have taken on a mandate by choosing to be disciples of Jesus. We have agreed to love one another as Christ has loved us. You can strip away all of the pomp and ceremony, you can strip away all of the special liturgical clothing, you can strip away the titles and position of clergy and remain Christian. If you do, what will remain is the mandate to love one another.

I strive to remind myself of that mandate not only on Maundy Thursday, but every day. When I was ordained and the stole placed on my shoulders it was an act of love intended to perpetuate the love of Christ in my lifetime and beyond. The love of Christ is passed from person to person. As I have received, so too, I must give.

Sometimes the people I am called to love fail to behave in lovable ways. They, like me, are human. And we humans make mistakes. We can be cruel. We can hurt the feelings of others. We can behave in ways that make it difficult to love us. When I recognize the human failings of those I serve I need to redouble my efforts to be a person of love in their lives. When there is fear or pain or sadness in my community, I need to share the gift of love.

Maundy Thursday is yet another opportunity to serve the people of God. It is also an important reminder to me of my role in the community and the mandate to love others.

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 world in which I minister is vastly different from that of many previous generations of faith leaders. Compared to much of the history of the world, ours is a time with low infant mortality. In the Middle Ages it has been reported that as many as 1/3 of all children died before the age of 5. The death rate of women in childbirth was 5% in childbirth itself with a further 15% dying from infections that followed delivery. I those times if a person survived childhood, maintained good health and wasn’t killed in a war, life expectancy was somewhere in the mid forties. At least that would be the case for those in the highest class of society. Rates of death by accident and malnutrition were much higher among peasants.

The result is that we have a different level of experience with death, and perhaps a different capacity to deal with grief. It is a bit uncertain how our forebears dealt with grief and loss. There have been some that speculated a harsher attitude toward loss. There were societies and cultures where infants weren’t named until their health could be ascertained. But the lack of a name says nothing substantive about the bonds formed between parents and very young children. It seems as possible to me that there was a constant state of sadness and grief upon many families because of the high rates of loss.

Whatever may have been the case with those who have gone before, it is not at all uncommon for me to work with family members who are experiencing their first personal contact with grief when we plan a funeral. Not long ago I worked with a family on the funeral for an elder. Some of her children were born after the death of her parents and had lives into their late forties and early fifties without ever having experienced the death of a close family member. Everything about the experience was new to them. I have no way of evaluating whether that made the process more or less difficult than it is for those who have more experience with death. It is just different.

Holy Week gives Christians the opportunity to practice the skills involved with dealing with grief and loss. In this week we speak openly about death and the reality that none of us will escape death. Rather than treat death as an enemy, which is the case for much conversation about dying in our society, we explore our faith that death is not the end. Beauty, peace, meaning, faith, hope and love all are greater than death. Even though we will all one day die from this life the gift of life is stronger than death.There are important realities of human life that do not end with death.

It is important that we remind ourselves that our faith does not make us immune to pain or the sadness of loss. We grieve in a unique way because of the hope that we possess, but it still hurts to experience loss and we still need to allow ourselves to grieve.

In planning the Holy Week activities of the church we have taken special note of experiences for children that allow them to speak of death, loss and grief in the context of their families and the wider family of the church. This evening’s “wake service” is a complete meal with a structured conversation as we eat. We will tell stories of Jesus and speak of the events of his life in a way that will recall the stories that we have told throughout the year. Different members of the community have agreed to tell different parts of the story during the meal. As we share a meal we will recall the basic elements of the passover meal that Jesus shared with his disciples. Without recreating the actual meal and traditions of our forebears, we will recall the ways in which they ate with special ceremony as they taught their children about the Exodus from slavery in Egypt and God’s decisive intervention in human history.

Then, at the end of the meal we will celebrate the sacrament of Holy Communion, recalling Jesus last supper with his disciples and remembering the many times our people have shared that simple symbolic meal as we lived out our faith in the generations since the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

The meal also includes games and even a bit of laughter. It is a time of fond remembrances and sharing joy. But there is serious business in teaching our children about the reality of death, the nature of grief, and the ways in which our people have learned to share grief and loss. Just knowing that ours isn’t the first generation to have experienced grief is an important lesson to teach our children.

Not every family that we serve chooses to have a family service or wake. But every family that I have worked with in my time of serving as a minister has found the way to gather for a family meal in the midst of loss and grief. And those meals inevitably lead to conversation about the deceased. The process of telling stories and sharing memories is a vital part of the journey of grief.

Like a musician practicing over and over again or an athlete being disciplined in training, we practice our faith as a way of preparing for that which lies ahead. There are skills and techniques that can be learned. There are patterns and relationships that strengthen teamwork and allow us to be more adept and working on challenges that are too large to be accomplished by an individual. Whether you think of life as art or a contest, the value of practice is evident.

Tonight is yet another opportunity to pass down the practices of our faith to our children and the children of our community. Like all opportunities for teaching it is also an opportunity for learning. Like all practices, there continues to be room for more practice.

Our faith is a journey and when we travel together the journey yields deep meaning and great joy.

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.

Most music historians speak of the roots of the blues deep in American history, especially African-American history. A musicologist will tell you that the blues originated on Southern plantations in the 19th Century. The inventors of the blues were slaves, ex-slaves and the descendants of slaves. Africans who were seized and forcibly hauled from their home continent to provide labor for American agriculture, sang as they toiled in cotton fields and served as domestic servants. It is generally accepted that the blues evolved from African spirituals, African chants, work songs, field hollers, drum and dance music.

As the African slaves underwent their forced assimilation into a completely foreign way of life, they also picked up bits and pieces of Christianity from their slaveholders and from the wider culture. Influences of revivalist hymns and words from scriptures made their way into the music that they sang.

While the music we call the blues was certainly shaped by the African-American experience, however, it seems apparent that the roots of the genre lie even farther back in history. The slaves came from countries with their own musical traditions and brought with them melodies that were more ancient than the global politics that forced them into slavery.

When you think of the blues, you think about misfortune, betrayal and regret. These human experiences weren’t invented in a single generation. They are as old as humanity itself. Biblical scholars often cite the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonian king Cyrus in 539 ice as the source of many songs of lament. There are, however, songs of pain even more ancient in the bible. In 850 ice Judah was under attack from Ammon, Moab and Edom. Jehoshaphat called the people to prayers and songs of lamentation: “We are powerless before this vast multitude that comes against us. We are at a loss what to do, hence our eyes are turned toward you.” (2 Chronicles 20:12)

Our people have been singing sad songs for millennia. It is interesting to note that approximately 50% of the Psalms in our bible are songs of lament, expressing pain and sorrow and sadness.

Songs of sadness, however, are not popular in contemporary churches. Songwriter Michael Gungor wrote, “Approximately 0 percent of the top 150 CCLI songs are laments.” CCLI is the licensing service used by the majority of churches for their music. I think Gungor is exaggerating a bit, but it is definitely true that songs of sadness and lament are strikingly missing from contemporary Christian worship. That absence is a tragedy. Because the people of God experience real sadness and sorrow and loss. They become angry and frustrated at God. But those emotions are rarely expressed in public worship.

Sometimes, before healing can begin we simply need to express pain. And often, words fail us when it comes to the critical moments of our own personal experience. For faithful Christians we have the words of the poets - the lyrics of the ancient songs. We do not, however, have a common memory of the melodies. We know that at least one of the songs of lament might not have even had a melody. Psalm 137 begins:


By the waters of Babylon,
there we sat down and wept,
    when we remembered Zion.
 
On the willows there
    we hung up our lyres.
 
For there our captors
    required of us songs,
and our tormentors, mirth, saying,
    “Sing us one of the songs of Zion!”
 
How shall we sing the Lord’s song
    in a foreign land?


Biblical laments and American blues share more than a general theme. While the lyrics of both genres often deal with personal adversity, the music goes far beyond self-pity. Blues and laments are about expressing the deepest feelings humans experience, releasing frustration, and discovering the resources to overcome the pain of sorrow and grief and loss.

So tonight, in the midst of Holy Week, we move away from the traditional liturgies of the church and simply sit with the reality of the pain of the world. Once again our congregation will host a blues concert for the community. Showcasing the talents of local blues musicians, we will simply allow the music to minister to the pain and loss of our lives.

I know, Western South Dakota isn’t exactly the center of the blues scene. American blues grew up in the Mississippi Delta just upriver from new Orleans. Blues and jazz intertwined and influenced each other from the first formal concerts devoted to the music. The genre was mostly confined to a very small bit of geography until the 1930s and ‘40s when the music migrated up the river and into the cities. Chicago became the home of electrified blues and a host of other hybrid forms. Within a decade or so rhythm ’n blues and rock ’n roll began to evolve from the haunting chord patterns of traditional blues.

The music is so universal that it can’t be contained in a single form. It is a challenge to say exactly what the blues are.

It isn’t that we have many people who grew up with the field hollers and songs of the slaves and sharecroppers. It is that the themes of their songs are so universal that we resonate with the music even though our own experiences have different roots and our people have taken different routes to come to this place.

Tonight, however, isn’t a time for analysis. It isn’t an evening for a lesson in the history of music. It isn’t the time for technical lectures about 12 bar blues and specific series of blue noes.

It is a night to simply listen once again to songs by Son House, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Leadbelly, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson. It is a time to remember the gospel choirs and the solo guitarists who sang of sorrow and whose music stirs our spirits. It is not a night for answers or solutions or even overcoming grief.

The rest of the business of living will be put on hold for a while. It is a night to simply sit with the blues.

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.

When I am conversing with people who are dying and their family members, they often say something along the lines of “I’ve never done this before,” or “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” Of course none of us have ever done this before. Each human death is a completely unique experience. Each human relationship is unique. There is no experience that can fully prepare us for the experience of loss.

On the other hand, there are some things that can help us develop the skills to deal with death and loss.

I often say that Holy Week is about practicing for the events that will come into every life. Our lives are busy and filled with schedules and events. Families fill up their hours with activities. I often hear from families the list of events that compete with church and worship for the family’s time. There are sports programs that demand participation and conflict with worship. There are trips to visit family that take people away from their home church. There are lots of other things that people can be doing which compete for time. I have noticed, however, that when a death occurs, the family is able to drop everything, to suspend participation in all of the competing activities, and to give their full attention to a funeral service. Too often, however, when that event occurs it feels strange and unfamiliar for those who are grieving.

Holy Week gives the opportunity to set aside the everyday and to focus our attention on the big things of life and death. For those who give themselves the gift of time and attention to the services of Holy Week there is a unique opportunity to think about some things that will come for all of us. We will all experience grief. We will all one day face death.

The liturgy of the passion is a very simple service. Basically we simply read the reports of the last days of Jesus’ life that are in our gospels. We rotate through the gospels in a set three-year pattern. I know that there are four gospels, so the three year pattern is confusing, but this year we read from Luke for the liturgy of the passion. We’ll hear from other gospels on other nights. For most of the time that I have been pastor of this congregation, we incorporated the liturgy of the passion into our Palm Sunday worship. A few year ago, however, we decided to separate the two services and have discovered that there is a value in allowing the passion to stand alone. I have often read the passion narrative alone, practicing for dramatic effect. For our liturgy tonight we will have three voices to break up the story. We will sing a few hymns and allow time for quiet prayer. It is a very simple service.

For the singing, we will sing a single verse of a hymn, with various verses inserted into the liturgy at various points. Our usual practice is to sing an entire hymn, including all of the verses. Hymns utilize the power of poetry to communicate a complete message and giving attention to all of the words of a hymn can be important in receiving the intentions of the poets. There are times, however, when extracting a single verse gives emphasis to the words in a unique way and allows the hymn to speak freshly. This can are especially meaningful with hymns that are familiar and well known. Instead of simply singing the familiar words and allowing them to work behind the scenes in our conscious thinking, we extract a few words to pay special attention and give those words the opportunity to assume a new role in our thinking.

Part of my preparation for the evening’s worship will be to attend a community Holy Week service at noon. These services have been a lenten tradition for decades in downtown Rapid City. Interestingly, they focus primarily on the art of preaching. Each service has a reading of scripture, a sermon and a piece of special music. They are designed to take place during the noon hour, so are kept short so participants will have time to catch a simple meal and return to work. The preachers rotate with a different speaker each day. I am often intrigued by the variation in preaching. Some ministers are very heavy with their anticipation of Easter, others are more comfortable sitting with the texts of grief and sorrow, waiting for a while before approaching a resurrection theme. Some tell of personal experiences and share stories from their own lives. Others take a bit of an academic bent, teaching about individual words of the text and the context of the scriptural passage.

The variety in the services reflects the variety of human experiences when it comes to grief and loss. As I’ve mentioned previously in my blog, I attend a lot of funeral services and find a wide variation in the services that are presented at times of grief and loss.

The intense focus on grief makes Holy Week a bit of a heavy time for me. I spend more time with emotions that sometimes we wish to avoid. I tend to be a very cheerful person who is quick to tell others of the good things that happen in my life. I’m not much for talking about pain, sorrow and loss. I am more reserved and private about my experiences of pain than I am with experiences of love and joy. I would far rather tell you about the birth of our children and grandchildren than the death of parents and grandparents. I don’t think I am unique in my approach to life. As a result, however, a week of focusing and practicing for times of grief and loss is a more challenging spiritual discipline than a week of celebration. This hard work demands, for me, a bit more private and quiet time. I spend more time alone in the church in the early mornings. I take a bit longer for my personal spiritual disciplines and prayers. It isn’t that I avoid others, just that my time with others requires the reinforcement of time alone with God.

The journey is a challenge.

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 story of our people is one in which the concept of victory has been challenged over and over again. We get a vision of how we want our future to be and invest significant energy in working toward that future only to discover that the realities of life and our vision don’t line up. Following God often leads people in directions they didn’t intend to go.

Abraham and Sarah left the home of their ancestors in search of the land that God was going to show them. They did not possess that land. Their son Isaac did not possess that land, nor did his sons. The promise of God wasn’t something that took place in a single generation. It took a long time from the lives of Abraham and Sarah to David’s entrance into Jerusalem. And even then, the united monarchy was a very short period in the history of Israel.

Moses was a reluctant leader of the people of Israel and they were difficult to convince that a bit for freedom would be better than the life of slavery in Egypt. An entire generation of people remained that freedom was to be found in the possession of wealth. They formed a golden calf, they flirted with the religions of the wilderness. They tried all kinds of alternatives to the life of trust and faith that God offered. And more than a few of them spent most of the journey complaining about the fact that they had things better back in Egypt.

In the days of the prophets our people embraced an old ideology of exceptionalism, believing that as chosen people they could ignore the political realities of the world. They spouted rhetoric about their “right” to ignore the plight of widows and orphans and immigrants because God had chosen them. The prophets tried to warn the leaders about the dangers of their ways, but they led Israel down a path that led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the carrying off of many of the people into exile.

In exile the people had to struggle to hang on to their religion and their values. They were surrounded by Babylonian and other cultures that asserted that might makes right, that history is the product of a huge, violent struggle, and that the answer to violence was even greater violence. The story of a single good God who created a world and pronounced it good was a minority report in the midst of the Enuma Elis stories of the world being formed in a gigantic, ongoing battle.

Given our story, it should not have surprised us that the gift of the messiah wasn’t exactly the way people expected. A thousand years and more of anticipation and apocalyptic teachings had formed a vision of a savior who would come to Israel and deliver the people from the harsh realities of this life. Israel was hardly a world power, now under the crushing rule of Roman authorities with its own layers of Jewish bureaucracy complicating the lives of ordinary citizens. Justice was reserved for those who had more money, more power, and more influence. Our people longed for a sense of autonomy from foreign rulers. They envisioned time when they would have influence, respect, and political power. And they formed an image in their minds of what the coming of the messiah would be like.

Surely it would involve the display of power. They had seen the impressive military parades of Roman soldiers with their fine white horses and rank upon rank of armed soldiers. The reclaiming of Jerusalem in their minds would involve huge armies of angels surrounding the new messiah who would reestablish the temple as the center of all religion, power, wealth and learning. All the people of the world would look to Jerusalem as the center of wisdom, learning, faith, and justice.

Jesus on a donkey with a crowd waving palm branches wasn’t exactly what they had in mind.

A messiah who was defined by sacrifice instead of political victory, wasn’t what was expected.

The journey of Holy Week is a journey of expectations redefined, of releasing the old vision and discovering a new one. As Christians we repeat that journey every year because we understand the need of transforming our ways of thinking and opening ourselves to the way God works in the world, which isn’t the same as the way we wish things might be.

Many liturgies for the celebration of Palm Sunday involve a reading of parts of the passion narrative. The entry into Jerusalem is the first step in a week of trial, suffering and tragedy that ends with the death of Jesus. The fact that Jesus would die was a radical concept to the traditional thinking about the nature of the messiah. That he would experience rejection and betrayal by even those who were closest to him was unimaginable. Christian leaders have sought many different ways of telling the story in the two millennia since the events, but it isn’t easy to wrap one’s brain around the love of God taking on human form so completely that God experiences human death.

It requires nothing short of re-imagining the nature of life and death itself. Contrary to our usual way of thinking death is not the end.

Contrary to our usual way of thinking, the enterprise of God in the world of humans is not about a single generation. It is bigger than the span of a human life.

So it is with mixed feelings that I approach the task of leading worship on Palm Sunday. I like the extra pomp. I enjoy the special music. I look forward to children waving palm branches. But I also know that these don’t shield us from the reality that pain and grief and loss are part of our human condition. There is more to life and faith than feeling good.

I am aware of how difficult these lessons are for me and how much more difficult it is to teach them to others. As a pastor, I am aware that there are plenty of people who don’t want to talk about death. There are plenty of people who think that success is measured by numbers and the size of the crowd. I am aware that the message of our faith is distinctly counter-cultural.

In a short time I’ll be walking down the street and waving my palm branch in a crowd of faithful people. But I know that the week will also include times of quiet prayer in an empty place wondering where all of the people have gone.

Once again, the journey begins.

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 room that I shared with one of my brothers was at the top of the stairs in our home. It was long and narrow, so our twin beds were arranged along one wall footboard to footboard, leaving an aisle that led to a pair of reasonably sized closets at the far end. We had matching chests of drawers in our closets and the drawers were organized in a similar manner. The top drawer contained undershorts and socks. Since there were four boys in our home, we each had a distinctive color for the stripes on our white crew socks. My socks had one black stripe and one red stripe. The brother with whom I shared the room had one black stripe and one blue stripe. The second drawer was for t-shirts and a few other shirts that were kept folded. Mostly we had white t-shirts. There weren’t many colored ones and very few with logos on them. Most of our shirts hung on hangers, but we wore white t-shirts under them. The third drawer was for jeans. Good jeans on the left, play jeans on the right. The play jeans mostly had patches on the knees. Each year a couple of pairs of jeans were given the honor of becoming cutoffs for summer play.

The fourth drawer, however, was our own. It was a storage place for our special toys. We had some other places where toys were stored, but the drawer in the chest was reserved for toys that the other boys, especially our youngest brothers, were not allowed to play with unless they had special permission from us.

My drawer was mostly filled with erector sets and parts. The tiny nuts and bolts with their little screwdriver and wrench were in a metal box. There was an ample supply of girders that were loose in the drawer and eventually I got a wind-up motor and a plug-in motor with gears and pulleys to use in making cranes and other constructions.

My brother, a little more than two years younger, devoted his bottom drawer to lego bricks. He could get a slightly abused tone in his voice if you called them blocks, saying, “They aren’t blocks! They are bricks!” I was eight or nine years old when Samsonite began producing Legos in the United States, but my brother was just the right age to begin collecting the bricks. In those days most bricks were either red or white and they came predominantly in a couple of sizes, which allowed for the construction of buildings with windows and doors and other specialty parts. I did my share of playing with his bricks, as we shared a train set and often made structures to go with our train layouts.

When I grew up and our son was born, Lego was the most common and best designed of all construction sets for children. The bricks now came in many different colors and there were sets for constructing all kings of specialty projects. Some were themed around the popular star wars movies. Others were devoted to building castles. There were motors and wheels and other specialty parts that could be used to construct everything from boats to trucks and more. Both of our children enjoyed playing with legos, and I enjoyed playing with them. it wasn’t long before there were more Lego bricks in our home than would fit in a single dresser drawer. I built a special table with an edge rail to contain the bricks and provide a surface for building.

Our children have grown and our son has children of his own, but most of the Lego bricks remain in our home. We’ve given some of them to his son, but the tiny parts are a bit too small for our granddaughter at this age, so they have to be carefully supervised in their home.

When our children and grandchildren came to visit early this year, we devoted a table in the basement to Lego construction. Once again I realized the size of the inventory that was present in our house. After the visit, I read a couple of articles about Lego toys and different theories of how best to organize the toys for maximum play value. There was a sense that some organization, such as sorting by color, enhanced the creative play the was possible from the bricks. Some advocated sorting by size rather than color. There are even a few fanatic Lego fans who have complex systems to sort by color and size.

So, from time to time, usually at the end of a long day when I am very tired, I sort Lego bricks. For the last week or so, I’ve been sorting the parts that are used to make up little people. The figures don’t look very much like real people, but have tiny arms and hands that can be separated. The heads come off and can be interchanged. The legs can be removed as a pair and separated. There are lots of hats and capes and other accessories and a host of things that can be held in the figures’ hands. We have flags and spears and bows and guns and wands and lots of other tiny specialty parts. I found a few plastic boxes with compartments that were suitable for sorting.

I decided to leave some of the figures fully assembled, though the bins that stored the legos were filled with a lot of figures with missing parts. At one point, I got to laughing about the number of headless bodies in our basement along with a corresponding number of severed heads and limbs. I put a lot of the figures back together but then decided that having a few of the tiny parts unassembled made for creative fun for playing, so have now dedicated bins to head and arms and legs and other body parts that can be assembled when grandchildren come to visit. Sorting the Legos is a silly, but thoroughly entertaining task made even more fun by imagining the play that will come from the toys.

I realize that the task of sorting is a luxury for which parents can’t possibly have time. They do well to work with their children to get all of the bricks picked up and put into bins. Grandparents’ houses, however, can have luxuries of organization that come from the time between visits.

After all, grandpa still loves to play with Legos. He even plays with them when the grandchildren aren’t 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.

As pastor of a mid-sized congregation with a considerable number of retired and aging members I officiate at quite a few funerals. There are currently six chaplains serving the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office. Each year I officiate at more funerals than the other five combined. I also attend a lot of funerals at which I do not officiate. As a member of the LOSS team or in conjunction with my duties as Sheriff’s Chaplain I attend funerals in support of people who are not affiliated with my congregation. I also attend funerals in support of grieving families because of relationships I have in the community outside of the church.

As one who attends a lot of funerals, I have a general sense of what is meaningful and supportive of families and what is not. I have formed strong opinions about how funerals can be very helpful in the journey of grief and of ways that some things that happen at funerals can make things more difficult for those who grieve.

Funerals are distinct from other services of the church for the simple reason that the event of death seems to require ritual. Families who do not belong and who do not participate in churches, often come to the church for funeral services. Although it is possible to have the body of a loved one cremated or buried without any formal service, it is very rare. I don’t know if anyone has compiled an actual statistic on deaths where no funeral is held, but I guess that in our community it is less than 1%. Most services have some kind of religious or spiritual structure. Even those that are led by someone who would self describe as secular contain elements adopted from ancient religious tradition.

A funeral is a good time to connect with tradition. In the midst of grief it is helpful to be reminded that ours isn’t the first generation to have experienced death and loss. It is meaningful to know that others have survived the pain of loss and gone on with their lives. It is important to be reminded that this is not the end for the people who are overwhelmed with grief. Much of the traditional trappings of funeral services has to do with reminding people that they are not alone and that they belong to a multi-generational enterprise.

In the past week I had the opportunity to speak with family members who attended the funeral of a cousin in a distant place. I wasn’t able to get to the funeral, but got reports from relatives. I also officiated at a funeral yesterday. And the season of Lent is a time when we often talk bout death and grief and I have had several other conversations about funerals.

Both my experience in attending funerals and my conversations with others lead me to the conclusion that there are a a lot of really poorly done funerals. I hear horror stories of funerals where the deceased’s name was only occasionally mentioned and the service was impersonal and detached. I know of officiants who disrespected the occasion to promote their own personal beliefs in an attempt to make religious conversions in the midst of the service. I have experienced officiants who get their own egos caught up in the service and tell rambling stories about themselves even to the point of self promotion. It is very common for planners of funerals to attempt to cram far too much into a single service and end up disrespecting the time of the grieving family and community members.

Just attending the funeral of a loved one is an exhausting experience. The nature of grief is such that it is difficult to focus, to remember, and to concentrate on the content of a lot of words. It is frequently best to keep funerals short and to not expect the time to be one of intellectual processing. Instead of explaining, simply sharing time and space can be more powerful. A single song can be more healing than a long sermon.

Funerals draw together a community of different congregations and different religious traditions. Officiants at funerals are ministering to a far more diverse community than is the case at a typical Sunday morning worship service. Being mindful of the diversity of beliefs can be helpful in planning the service. Failure to understand this diversity can result in offending some of the grieving community members.

I believe that the most important thing for an officiant to do is to listen to those who are grieving. It is the quality of listening more than the quality of speaking that results in funerals that minister to the needs of grieving people.

My own path to becoming a minister involved four years of undergraduate education during one of which I served a small congregation as a supervised licensed minister. Then there were four more years and two additional internships as I earned my masters and doctorate. At the conclusion of my formal education I was directly informed that I still needed to accumulate at least four additional years of experience before I would be prepared for many ministry jobs. My education was based on rigorous intellectual training and intensive supervised experience. Now, nearly 38 years after my ordination and an intentional path of regular continuing education I am aware that I continue to improve my skills at serving families and officiating at significant moments including funerals.

But there are multiple paths to the ministry. I have colleagues who have no formal theological education, who have taken no college classes in psychology, who have had no supervised clinical education. I have other colleagues who assume they learned all they need to know in a couple of years attending an unaccredited bible college. Not all ministers bring the same education and experience to their work. It shouldn’t surprise us that there are huge variations in the quality of funeral services.

The midst of grief is no time to go shopping for officiants. Grieving families often simply ask whoever is available or closest at the moment.

I don’t want to get all preachy here. But I do believe that since everyone experiences grief it might be a good idea to occasionally attend a church service and learn something about the pastors in your community before you have to choose the one to officiate at the funeral of a loved one. Such an important event deserves a careful choice.

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 high school in a small town in a time when we were aware of the big wide world, but somewhat protected from it. My wife attended one of the largest high schools in our state where there were a few more options in terms of activities, organizations, and learning. Had I gone to her school, it is unlikely that I would have been in the advanced placement English track that she pursued so I probably would have had different experiences even if our schools had been the same. One thing we did share was that we had the same Shakespeare plays: one for each year of our high school careers. Romeo and Juliet is the freshman play. You get the picture. In her schooling, however, they read a Steinbeck novel each year as well. I don’t think I read anything by Steinbeck in high school. I discovered Steinbeck in her father’s library and read voraciously by borrowing books from him.

As a result there are certain gaps in my reading. I keep a list of American literature that our son got in high school by my desk. It claims to be the list of all those books every college student should have read. The list isn’t exclusively by American authors, but is a good introduction to literature for those who read all of the books. From time to time, I go down the list and choose a book that I haven’t read just to play catch up. Over the years, however, I have found that the list, while claiming to be comprehensive, is far from complete. There are a lot of other significant books that don’t appear on that list. These are books that play an important role in the history of literature, but are somehow often forgotten.

One of those “forgotten” books is Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” I normally reserve book reviews for another section of my web site, but I’ve been reading Kevin Bailey’s “the Western Flyer,” a book about the boat that Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts used for their journey of scientific discovery and so I needed to check out the log. If you aren’t familiar with the literature, there was a fervent intellectual culture surrounding Steinbeck. Influential in his thinking were a couple of friends, Joseph Campbell, author of “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” and Ed Ricketts, owner and operator of a biological laboratory. The three planned an expedition to the Sea of Cortez in the years just before the flow of the Colorado River was completely cut off permanently altering the marine ecology of the region. The study of ecology wasn’t well known at the time and the trio envisioned their trip akin to Darwin’s expedition upon The Beagle. The actual expedition was somewhat smaller than envisioned. Campbell didn’t actually go on the trip. Steinbeck and Ricketts made the trip in a much smaller group on a much smaller boat for a much smaller amount of time. Still, they did make quite a few discoveries and added to the scientific knowledge of the region. They published their work in a volume that was at least 50% lists of the marine animals they captured and recorded. Steinbeck wrote a kind of narrative, with additions by Ricketts that provided a day by day account of the trip. There was a World War going on and the book didn’t sell very well and Steinbeck was known mostly for the novel “The Grapes of Wrath.” A decade later, Steinbeck’s publisher brought out “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” which contained Steinbeck’s observations without those by Ricketts and a new essay on the life of Ed Ricketts by John Steinbeck. It was this latter volume that I recently read.

What is intriguing to me about the book is that it reflects long nights aboard a small ship in a remote location where the participants drank beer and talked about anything and everything. In this context, the concept of modern ecology began to emerge: the belief that everything is connected to everything else and that we exist not only as individuals, but also as members of communities. The participants speculated about how schools of fish can swim in unison and how the success of one population affects the rise an fall of another. These were big thinkers who used the opportunity to stretch their own imaginations. It reminds me of the late night conversations we used to have as theological students. We, like them, tried to put forward our theories of teleology.

Teleology is the philosophical study of the purpose or goal of something that appears in nature. Things do not merely exist, they serve a purpose. If we choose to eat chicken, then chickens aren’t just birds, they are connected to us as a source of food and strength for human living and thinking. The reason for a chicken’s existence is to provide calories for the brain that can speculate about the reason for its existence. We raised chickens when I was a youth. I’m pretty sure there isn’t enough space in those tiny brains to engage in speculation about the meaning of life. If there is to be a chicken philosophy, it must come from other creatures. We not only think about chickens, in a sense we think for chickens. Ah, but that is my speculation, not a conversation that Steinbeck engaged in with his shipmates - at least not one they recorded.

They did, however, speculate on how the various shrimps and even microorganisms of the Sea of Cortez are linked to all of human life. They observed massive Japanese factory ships that were stripping the shallow bottoms bare and discarding tons of animals in search of shrimp. They did speculate on how the diverting of the Colorado river to irrigate the farms of California were altering the ability of the sea to produce other forms of food. Eating a fresh California avocado has a direct impact on the number of shrimp available for human consumption.

The bottom line is that we are all related. As Red Green says, “We’re all in this together.” Fortunately, among us there are a few really expansive thinkers who challenge us to pause and take a look at the big picture from time to time.

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.

By some standards, I have lived a long and full life. I’m 62 years old and will turn 63 in three months. That’s older than my father was when he died. It is older than the woman at whose funeral I will officiate tomorrow. That is a good and gracious number of years. And I have had a wonderful life. I have not suffered discrimination or undue hardship. There have been some times of grief and some challenges that required a lot of me, but these pale in comparison to the trials suffered by many people. I have known privilege and freedom and the grace of a loving family.

But I can’t seem to get my act together.

Some theologians have said that one of Jesus’ core messages can be summed up in a simple piece of advice: “Do not worry.” The idea is expanded in Matthew 6:25-34:

“Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you shall eat or what you shall drink, nor about your body, what you shall put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit to his span of life? And why are you anxious about clothing? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin; yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which today is alive and tomorrow is thrown into the oven, will he not much more clothe you, O men of little faith? Therefore do not be anxious, saying, ‘What shall we eat?’ or ‘What shall we drink?’ or ‘What shall we wear?’ For the Gentiles seek all these things; and your heavenly Father knows that you need them all. But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well. Therefore do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day’s own trouble be sufficient for the day.


It sounds simple. And I have been a practicing Christian all of my life and have studied the Gospels faithfully and received an excellent theological education and have been privileged to serve amazing and wonderful congregations.

But I can’t seem to get the part about worrying right.

I lay awake for hours last night. And the things that were keeping me awake weren’t worthy of worry. Just like the scripture says, they were small things that could easily be left to God’s wisdom and do not require my action.

In the night I worried about a disagreement between my sisters. They are good people and there are easy ways to resolve the dispute. I worried about how to invite more open participation in congregational decisions. I work with people who care about listening to others and are not attempting to consolidate power. I don’t need to worry. Even if we don’t get every word of policy correct, the people involved are good and honest and will act faithfully. I worried that I haven’t done enough to promote Holy Week events. I don’t need to worry. Our faithfulness is not judged by the number of people who attend. Worship is worth doing even when numbers are small. I worried that some upcoming musical events won’t produce enough income to offset expenses. I don’t need to worry. The expenses are not a significant amount of money and there are good ways to keep things in balance.

I lay sleepless in bed and went through a group of mental and relaxation exercises. I’m fairly good at centering prayer and breath prayer and other techniques that free the mind from worry and allow the release of those petty thoughts that sometimes dominate. But I couldn’t make things work out last night. My mind seemed to defy control. It seemed to refuse simple relaxation.

Then, of course, I remembered some articles I have read about sleep deprivation and its effect on heart health. Recent studies have shown links between shortened sleep duration and increased risk of heart disease. So I allowed my mind to wander to my own health and began to worry that my sleeplessness was affecting my health and could cause a problem for my family and vocation, both of which deserve my careful stewardship of my health.

That has to be one of the silliest reasons to toss and turn in bed at night. I’m worried that I’m not sleeping enough and that is causing me to lose sleep. I may be aging and a bit less brilliant than was the case when I was younger, but even I can see that my thinking is convoluted and crazy.

“Just go to sleep!” I commanded myself. My brain, however, refused to cooperate.

“Ah!” I thought, “I know what I can do. I’ll think about a topic for tomorrow’s blog. That’ll take my mind off of the things that don’t matter that are keeping me from sleep.” I tried that for a while. I didn’t sleep. I did feel the urge to get up and start writing this blog.

Which, as I am sure any casual reader can tell, is a bit of nonsense that is barely worth reading and certainly not an important contribution to the thinking of others. In reality it is just another sign of my crazy thinking. Like I said, I’m nearly 63 years old and I can’t seem to get my act together.

In all of this there is a bit of good news. First of all, the ill effects of a lack of sleep are long term, not short term. The increased risk of heart disease from a lack of sleep is not something that shows up the next morning after a sleepless night, but rather the cumulative effect of long term patterns over decades.

Secondly, and most importantly, one of the best cures for insomnia is tiredness. If you get tired enough, eventually you will sleep. Based on the amount of sleep I got last night and the amount of work I need to accomplish today, tonight is looking good for sleep.

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 conversation with friends brought up the topic of mysticism. One friend asked us to define the term. I hesitated, listening to how others were responding. There are mystical traditions in many different world religions and one might assume that the practices, beliefs, institutions, texts and other aspects of mysticism might vary from one expression to another.

I chose not to respond, but I suppose that if I were pushed, I would say that mysticism has something to do with the belief that there can be a union between the divine and the human. Using that definition, there is a strain of mysticism at the core of Christianity. We believe that in Jesus the divine and the human fully meet. To use the words of the prologue to the Gospel of John, “The Word became flesh.”

In Christian practice, the term mystic has often been applied to a particular group of practitioners of liturgy and spiritual disciplines. Mystics are those who devote their lives to disciplines and practices of prayer, study and worship that lead to a deep connection with the divine.

I am not, however, comfortable with the term. At least I don’t consider myself to be a mystic.

In the first place there is nothing secret about my practice of Christianity. I don’t appreciate secret rites or mysterious traditions that are shrouded in any kind of special knowledge. I believe in practicing my faith in public. And there is nothing about my experience of God that is special or unique to me. Others can easily share similar practices and obtain a similar sense of communion with God in Christ.

There is another term, however, that I do like, when thinking about experiences of the divine. That word is transcendence. Simply put, transcendence is going beyond the limits of ordinary experience. It is reaching for that which is beyond.

Yesterday morning I had an ordinary experience that had a transcendent quality.


I rose early, while it was still dark and went to the lake with my kayak. The ice is all out of the lake now, so I set out with a wooden kayak and my preferred greenland paddle. I carried a small light that I could turn on for recognition if another boat were to be on the lake, but since I was alone, I paddled out into the middle of the lake in the dark. I stopped to wait for the sunrise.

Sitting still on the lake in the dark, one quickly begins to learn several things. First of all, it isn’t completely dark. Even with the clouds, there were some breaks where stars could be seen. There were a couple of yard lights at the marina and campground that gave a sense of dimension to the lake. The sky was starting to lighten in the East and the outlines of the surrounding hills were visible. After my eyes had time to adjust I could see the bow of my boat and the texture of the water. I could sense the shoreline even when I couldn’t clearly make it out.

Secondly, it is not as quiet as one might expect. Of course at this time of the year the geese are quite noisy. Even though they were quite a ways from my position, they were murmuring and yammering and I could even hear the echo of their loudest squawks. The ducks are back this week and i could hear them as they flew and called out to one another. Back in the trees on the south side of the lake an owl was crying out its “Whoo whoo whoo whoo.” The water, stirred by the geese and my passing was lapping on the sides of my boat and ripples were hitting the shoreline. I could ear the whine of tires on the highway in the distance and occasionally a motor would be loud enough to echo through the hills.

Those are the usual, the normal, the ordinary. But there was more. First of all as I sat on the lake waiting for the sunrise, I was sitting with my own memories. There have been other mornings waiting for the sun to rise. I used to do so regularly with my father as we prepared an airplane for a dawn flight over the forest to check for fires. We also waited for the sun to come up when we were hunting in the fall. I have watched the sunrise from this lake for so many years that I feel like I know the creatures. If the owl isn’t the same one I listened to last year, it is likely a descendent of the old bird who has been keeping watch over the lake for years. A beaver swam by about 20 feet from my boat. It was likely the kit of a beaver that I used to watch regularly a couple of years ago.

I was aware that I am a part of something much bigger than just one morning in a tiny boat on a little lake in the hills of western South Dakota. The rising of the sun is a phenomenon that has been a part of this planet for millions of years. Even before there were human witnesses the sun rose. There were generations of people who believed that the sun was God, or at least one of many gods. Then, when our people began to understand the transcendent nature of a single God, it took generations for us to formulate our ideas into beliefs that we could share with others. How many of our people have watched and waited for the sunrise? We’ve been doing this since before Jacob wrestled with his angel or Moses listened to the voice from the burning bush.

I may not be a mystic, but there is mystery in every sunrise. The particular interplay of light and cloud is unique with each new day. There are no repeats. The days that I don’t look at the sky, I miss something that is well worth seeing. The days I rise early to greet the sun, I am greeted by more than the sun.

Perhaps I won’t ever feel confident to offer expertise on mysticism. But I can tell the stories of water and air and sun and the gift of a new 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.

Umberto Eco was an Italian novelist, essayist and philosopher who passed away last month. It would be impossible, and perhaps even misleading to attempt to summarize his contributions to literature or to philosophy in a single blog post, but there are some quotes and concepts that have been stirring in my mind recently.

Last week I re-listened to a recording of an interview with Eco in which he was speaking of the art of fiction. I won’t get an exact quote but he said something like the following:

We sometimes think that the difference between forgery and fiction is in the intention of the writer or speaker. We think that because it is partially true. If the intention of the writer is to mislead the reader than what is produced is a forgery. But there is another level to the process. The failure to distinguish between forgery and fiction often lies in the prejudices of the reader. When an untruth reinforces the prejudices that the reader brings to the work the result is an even more serious kind of forgery.

He cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This fabricated text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for global domination was known to be untrue very shortly after the time of its publication in the early years of the 20th century. Yet the fabrication persisted. Henry Ford funded the printing of a half million copies distributed throughout the US in the 1920s. This turned out to be among the worst kinds of forgery because the lack of truth was evident. The plot that it purports to report, of course is something that never has and will never come to pass because there was no such plot. Yet people have used this text as the basis for discrimination, violence, and genocide. The forgery led to violence of the worst kind.

This kind of storytelling is not merely fiction. It is not a literary art. It is a forgery and the worst kind of the abuse of literature. It is impossible to know for sure the motivation of the writers of the document. What we do know is the result of its publication and dissemination. Violence and genocide based on a lie reveals a forgery that played on the prejudices of those who read the book and who paid for its distribution and dissemination.

One of my favorite Umberto Eco quotes is this: “When men stop believing in God, it isn’t that they then believe in nothing: they believe in everything.”

Read that line again and allow it to sink in.

The job of religion is to encourage people to seek clarity of what they believe in part because the failure to know what you believe in leads to the capacity to believe in destructive lies. If you don’t know what you believe in you become vulnerable to forgeries of the worst kind. You might find yourself swept up in the response to a danger that does not exist. Violence in response to a perceived but nonexistent threat is still violence. Killing in the name of an untruth is simply murder. There is no virtue in such an action.

Eco was born in 1932 in Alessandria, Italy and his philosophy was forged in the embrace of authoritarianism that swept Europe and led to the Second World War. He knows by personal experience and by the tragedies and violence of the 20th Century the danger of embracing such ideologies.

Unfortunately not enough people have read his serious works, let alone his novels. I say that because there are still plenty of people who are responding to their fears by embracing authoritarianism. Exaggerated threats give rise to fear. It isn’t just in foreign countries where democracy is under threat from within. When candidates for office in our country engage in intentional lies for their own benefit, promote mass deportations, fail to renounce associations with KKK leaders, encourage violence against protestors, claim that the world’s 1.5 billion muslims all hate all Americans, and stir up anger to promote their own political aims, it is clear that there is a forgery in process. There is intent to mislead people and draw them away from the truth. But, as Eco warns, the forgery is far more dangerous because it plays into the prejudices of those who listen.

I am not usually one to try to convince others to change their political opinions. I feel blessed to be a member of a community with a wide range of ideas and opinions, where I can have civil conversations with those who disagree with me. But as a person of faith I know that it is important not to sit by in silence. Too many Christians were silent when Hitler rose to power in Germany. Too many Christians failed to speak up when genocide erupted in a so-called modern state. There were, however, a few courageous voices. I have always admired Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s dissidence and courage in the face of Nazi fascism. I have wondered if I would have his courage to speak up were I to have lived in his time. What Eco reminds us of is that each of us must speak when confronted with the realities of ideologies that are forgeries based both on the intent of the speakers and the prejudices of the listeners.

I do not know for sure, but I wonder if the days aren’t approaching when once again Christians of conscience will be required to speak up in defense of those who are wrongly targeted by authoritarian leaders who are more interested in their own power than in justice for all of the people and who manipulate the fears of others to enhance their own grandiose ambitions.

I am not yet ready to make large public statements. I prefer to watch and study and observe and think. I am more of a philosopher than a political commentator. Still these are perilous times for American democracy and times that will require courage and vision from our leaders. These are times when we all would do well not to accept the speeches of the politicians on face value or the enthusiasm of crowds on the amount of noise they generate. Careful critical thinking and conscientious moral action are required of each generation.

We are no different than our forebears.

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 the days when we lived in Chicago there were quite a few police officers in that city with Irish-American ancestry. Most also had Roman Catholic religious roots as well. It was rumored in those days that anyone wearing a clerical collar, Catholic or Protestant was safe from receiving a fine for a minor traffic infraction, “Aye, father, we were hoping that you might be willing to slow down a wee bit, and won’t you be saying a prayer for the boys in blue while you’re at it.”

In those days we had a friend, John, who was raised in Boston. John believed that Boston had a better St. Patrick’s Day celebration than Chicago, but he was the only one we knew who shared that opinion. Chicago was pretty good at getting into its March 17th celebration. One year while we were living there a group of us had taken a trip to Wichita, Kansas to staff a church retreat. We had driven a rental car and I was selected to return the car. With my usual concentration on the business of student life, I had failed to notice that the day to return the car was St. Patrick’s Day. It took two hours to get from Lake Shore Drive to the rental agency in downtown Chicago, driving a convoluted route to get around the various street barricades and spending most of the time stalled in gridlocked traffic.

It was said, in those days, that the corner of State and Madison was the busiest intersection in the world. It was in the heart of downtown Chicago, the zero point of the Chicago street numbering system. It was the location of the giant Marshall Field’s department store. So, of course, the intersection was the ideal place for a St. Patrick’s Day parade. Chicago didn’t just host a parade for the day, however. There was the matter of repainting the stripes in the street green to match the colors of Ireland. Then there was the process of dyeing the Chicago River green. Mayor Daley himself - not the recent one, but his father who served as Mayor for 21 years - donned his green sash and led the parade, walking with other politicians down the street.

Ah, but that was then and this is now, as they say.

They held the Chicago parade and dyed the river green yesterday, March 12, 2016, instead of waiting for the 17th because it is easier to provide traffic control on a Saturday when things aren’t quite as busy in downtown Chicago. That kind of a consideration wouldn’t have happened back in the days when we lived there. But then, I’m getting old and old people tend to reminisce about the days gone by.

Patrick, the patron saint of Ireland, lived in the 5th century. We know more about him from legend than from actual history. It is said that once, when he was holding a 40-day fast on a hilltop, he banned all snakes from Ireland forever. The feat seems less impressive considering the fact that there is no evidence that there were ever any snakes in post Ice Age Ireland. It is probably more likely that he actually did use a three-leafed Shamrock as in illustration of the Christian trinity, though in that case, three was already a very significant number to Irish people and he probably didn’t have a hard time with that particular lesson. In pagan Ireland, three was considered to be a sacred number. There were many triple deities and that fact is said to have aided Patrick in his evangelical efforts. The concept of trinity was already engrained in the people’s minds. As to the legend of his walking stick turning into a living tree, I have no particular information. The legend is that at Aspatria it took so long for the people to learn the dogma that he was teaching that his stick, which had been stuck into the ground, sprouted roots.

All of that was in the 5th century. The 20th century was nearly three-quarters past when we were in Chicago. You didn’t have to be Catholic and you didn’t have to be Irish to be offered a glass of green beer and invited to celebrate on March 17. It was, in those days, Chicago’s biggest spring festival. If you’ve spent a winter in Chicago, you can understand why they need a spring festival. The occasion of St. Patrick’s day gave the city an excuse to clean up all of the sand and salt from winter plowing and freshen up the city in preparation for Easter, though it could be argued that St. Patrick’s Day was a bigger celebration than Easter in Chicago in those days.

Times have changed, but I guess the parade was still a lot of fun yesterday with bands and gymnasts and Irish dancers and plenty of flag twirlers. And they did dye the Chicago River green for the occasion. I watched an Internet video of the event. The bagpipers were even playing Dropkick Murphy’s “I’m Shipping Up to Boston.”

I'm a sailor peg
And I've lost my leg
Climbing up the top sails
I lost my leg!

I'm shipping up to Boston whoa
I'm shipping up to Boston whoa
I'm shipping up to Boston whoa
I'm shipping off...to find my wooden leg

It probably makes more sense after a wee bit o whiskey, but Chicago is still Chicago and they were having a good time in Chicago yesterday.

One of Chicago’s most famous Irish immigrants was Catherine O’Leary, owner of a cow who is said to have started the Great Chicago Fire of 1871:

Late last night when folks were all in bed
Mrs. O’Leary took a lantern to the shed
And when the cow kicked it over, this is what she said,
“There’ll be a hot time in the old town tonight!
Fire! Fire! Fire!”

Our friend John’s opinions aside, Chicago does a pretty good job with its celebrations and this year they’re more than a week ahead of Boston, where the Annual St. Patrick’s Day Parade won’t be on March 17th, either, but rather March 20. I guess Bostonians don’t mind combining Palm Sunday and St. Patrick. After all they both involve showing a bit of green.

I wouldn’t know for sure. Although I never made a point of it when we lived in Chicago, I’m thinking that my Irish ancestors would have been wearing orange.

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 are lots of things about contemporary culture that I don’t understand. I grew up in a town where our high school sports mascot was an old sheepherder (really). We didn’t have an oversized costume or anyone dressing up like the old herder. There were a few cartoonish pictures of the old guy and his pipe painted on the walls of the gymnasium and someone was always able to come up with a suitable drawing for the high school yearbook every year, but that was about it. We moved to Chicago four decades before Clark, a “young, friendly Cub” was introduced as the official mascot of the Chicago Cubs. Clark got his name from the street where Wrigley Field is located (at the corner of Clark and Addison). The connection seems nice to me since the church I now serve is on Clark Street. Well, it isn’t actually on Clark Street. The neighbors across the street are in the 1300 block of Forest Hills Drive, but the church address is 1200 Clark Street - a story that probably could take up its own blog.

Anyway, virtually every professional and college sports team now has a mascot portrayed by a person in what appears to be a very hot costume.

Since my 50th birthday, I have been the owner of a gorilla costume, so I’m pretty aware of how hot those things can be. Most of the sports mascots have oversized heads, which must make wearing the costume awkward and tiring.

Still, I sort of understand a sports mascot. Their role is to entertain and stir up the fans, to encourage cheering and in general make the arena, park or stadium a place with lots of enthusiasm for the home team.

So I have no idea why a local income tax preparation service pays teenagers to parade up and down in front of their building in a sort of makeshift Statue of Liberty costume. The costume doesn’t really make the person look like the Statue of Liberty. There is a green crown with spikes and a long green gown with a sash. I think that in years past there was also some kind of torch or lantern held by the character, but I haven’t noticed it much this year. In fact this year the characters have frequently foregone the crown, which makes the connection with the statue of liberty even more of a stretch of the imagination. I try to recall my teenage years, when I had the usual amount of questions about body image, developing sexuality and typical teenage angst. I think having a job parading up and down the street in a green dress would have been humiliating. I’m pretty sure there is no way I would have agreed to the job, even if it had been available. There are some things I won’t do for money. Besides I could get paid for sweeping out the feed warehouse and tipping cans into the back of the garbage truck, both preferable in my mind to the jobs offered to some of the teens in our city.

There is the guy with the big arrow who dances in front of the pizza place, and a few others who are trying to attract interest in various businesses, but the one who garners the most sympathy from me is the guy in the dress in front of the income tax preparation service. I keep wondering how much it would take for him to be able to quit that job.

Another form of advertising that doesn’t seem to have much of an impact are all of the various flag-like items that appear along the street. They are usually made from sailcloth mounted on fiberglass rods or poles and often have a single word or short phrase attracting attention. Some simply say “SALE.” The other day I drove by a local plaza that has a bank on one corner. Placed around the bank on two corners were flags advertising another shop in the plaza. They said, simply, “Vapors.” I think that the store being advertised sells some form of electronic cigarettes. The signs, however, made no sense to me as I drove by on the street. What do vapors have to do with banking. Do they have the ability to sniff out potential customers who might default on loans? Are they describing the interest they are willing to pay on a CD? Are they hinting that doing business with them will make your money evaporate? I couldn’t help but think that if I were working at the bank I’d be tempted to take down the flags, or at least move them farther away from the bank.

Someone told me that our city makes the distinction between permanent and temporary signs in its sign ordinance. I don’t have the desire or the patience to read the ordinance, but it makes sense that it might be so. After all a construction company placing a temporary sign to tell what is being built and advertise their company is different from a business erecting a permanent lighted sign. I did learn when we updated the sign on the corner of the church yard that the ordinance makes the distinction between a symbol and a sign. The sign that gives the name and phone number of the church is a sign. Our cross is a symbol. The cross is also a much better way of giving directions to the church. By the time you can see the sign, you know where the church is located. The cross is visible from several blocks away. If I had to choose between the two, I’d opt for keeping the cross. But I like crosses anyway.

So if our church were to hire a teenager to parade up and down the street to attract people to our building, what costume should we provide? Most pictures of Biblical patriarchs and prophets show relatively long beards. Paintings of Jesus usually picture him with a beard. I guess our costume should include a beard. We could provide a robe, I guess. Robes seem to recall bible pageants.

But a robe might be suspiciously like a dress, when you think of it.

I’m thinking we should stay out of the mascot business for now.

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 privileges of the work that I do is being invited into some of the most intimate moments in a family’s story. I am allowed to go into homes where a family member is near to death to pray and participate in the events of a particular kind of saying goodbye. The events of the endings of lives play out in many different ways in many different settings. Our community has a large regional hospital with most advanced diagnostic and care options. There is also a small hospice house that is dedicated to palliative care. Both institutions have dedicated staff and provide support for families as they walk the first steps of a journey of grief.

For many people, however, the preferred place for dying is their own home. Family members will go through a great deal to make that possible, trying to be sensitive to the wishes of their loved one. In-home hospice services are often much less expensive than in-patient care and our community has a dedicated hospice team that helps families with the process.

We Americans are fond of gadgets and devices and just as is the case with other phases of life, dying offers a wide array of specialized equipment. Special hospital beds, oxygen generators, bathroom adaptations, and other appliances and accessories can be brought into a home to make caring for a loved one easier.

It seems that for many the biggest challenge is managing pain. When the pain becomes intense there are a lot of medical options, but sometimes the amount of pain becomes the driving force behind a decision to move from the home into a hospital setting.

More interesting than the equipment or the place of dying, however, is the process of people and relationships. It isn’t uncommon for me to visit with individuals whose pain and grief of loss makes the process very difficult. Often it seems to the participants that the process of dying is occurring at too rapid of a pace. There is a longing and a bargaining for more time, more conversations, more opportunities to share special events and activities.

Still, there is also a kind of relaxed pace about end times. In many cases, as a person nears the end of her or his life the sense of time is sort of suspended. A few minutes can seem to be a long time. There is so much anticipation of the drama of final moments, including a sort of curiosity about what the final breath will be like. When a loved one slips from consciousness some people are comfortable to simply be sharing the space, others need to leave the room for a while and don’t want to watch every moment. There is no set pattern to the process.

I’ve walked through the process a few times with members of my own family, now. I know a bit of the difference in perspective that is granted to different experiences. I’m not sure that being a minister and having attended a lot of deaths and even more of the final days of lives was much help when the time came for the deaths of my loved ones. In fact, I’m not convinced that any amount experience is sufficient preparation for the next situation. Each person is unique. Each family has different needs and wants.

What I bring to the places of dying is not based in equipment. I do have a prayer book and a small bottle of oil for anointing. But those are minor accouterments. Mostly what I have to bring are words that have been handed down through many generations - a connection with the stories of other times when our people have experienced grief and loss - and a confidence that comes from the knowledge that death is not the end.

Most of what I do when I am in those places, however, isn’t about the words I say. I spend more time quietly listening and praying without words. I can be a presence without the need to talk.

This, I have come to believe, is the true meaning of witness.

Christians often think of witness in terms of giving testimony - of telling stories of faith and the presence of God. I have no problems with testimony, but I know that there are times to speak and times to be silent. Simply being can be a deep gift to those who are grieving. Much of what I do is to offer my presence and to witness what is going on.

This much I know: God is never absent from the places of dying. There is no requirement for a certain kind of intellectual assent. One doesn’t have to believe a particular creed. The debates over theology and philosophy are not required. It is a simple truth that God is always present at the interface of life and death.

I have been granted the privilege of being invited into those places and witnessing what is occurring. God would be present if I were absent. God doesn’t abandon people when I leave the room. There are, however, sacred times and sacred places where God’s presence is so obvious that no searching is required.

Celtic Christians often refer to thin places. Eric Weiner defines those spaces as “those rare locales where the distance between heaven and Earth collapses.” What I have learned through the experiences of my life is that we are not, first of all, a people of places. We are a people of history. Any place can become a thin place. The closeness of heaven and earth is not dependent on geography. A cathedral is not more sacred than a bedroom. Secular institutions have no power to keep God out of any place.

this week has been another time of experiencing the privilege of the invitation to enter into sacred space. I know that these are not easy days for those who are grieving. I know that they will not remember these times the same way as I do. Still, what we have shared has been significant and deeply meaningful.

It is clear that the story of our people does not end with the passing of a generation.

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 our early purchases when we were newlyweds was a small stereo receiver. I already had a set of bookshelf speakers and a turntable and the used receiver gave us the ability to listen to AM and FM radio as well as play records. That set, with the turntable traveled with us to Chicago for graduate school and from there to our first job in North Dakota. We had collected a small box of record albums and once in a while I’d crank up the volume and listen, enjoying sounds of the Chicago symphony at something like I imagined the volume one would experience in orchestra hall. Over the years, we have had a variety of different stereo equipment. At one point I paid a bit over market value for a large set of speakers, with 12” woofers because a member of my youth group wanted to upgrade and selling his old speakers to me was a way of getting some of the cash he needed. Those huge old speakers have long since been sold on a rummage sale and when I think of the amount of space they occupied, they really seem like dinosaurs in today’s world.

It was 1982 when we got a car that had a cassette deck in it. I collected soundtracks to musicals for a while and had a box that held a couple of dozen cassettes to which I would listen over and over as I drove around the state to meetings.

These days our car stereo receives signals from my cell phone and plays digital music from my phone account. I also have a small speaker for playing tunes from my phone in the house or garage.

We’ve never owned musical equipment that would impress the folks at the stereo shops. On the other hand, our lives have been filled with wonderful music and I feel grateful for the many sounds that we have been able to hear.

I think it is typical for someone my age to occasionally complain about the volume of the stereos in other cars on the street, and I’m no exception. I’ve had the experience of thinking my car was experiencing a maintenance issue just to find out that it was the thump, thump, thump of the bass in another car on the street. I have no doubt that there are many cars in the high school parking lot whose stereo systems cost more than the value of my car. Not long ago I was visiting with a young man who opened the trunk of his vehicle to reveal that all of the cargo space was consumed with stereo equipment and speakers. While there was a bit of fascination with the technology of sound in that car, I didn’t have any desire to own such a piece of equipment.

I know a lot of people who have spent a great deal of money installing surround sound systems in their homes. Especially popular are audio-visual systems that create a theatre experience in homes. Technology advances have resulted in spectacular sound from smaller speakers, but the real subwoofers still take up the space of a piece of furniture and create vibrations that can be felt when the ear can’t even quite perceive a tone. I guess it would be something to have such a system if you watched a lot of movies.

I think our neighbor has such a system in his home. Although previous neighbors who owned that home invited us in and I have a sense of the layout of the home, I’ve not been inside since the current owner bought the place. There are times, however, when I am aware of the bass rhythms of whatever it is he is listening to. That is fairly impressive given the fact that we live in a subdivision with a minimum lot size of half and acre and my house is set very close to the opposite edge of my lot. It isn’t uncommon for me to wake in the night and listen, at first not being sure that I am really hearing sound, more that I am aware of the rhythm of the bass. And, yes, I’ve gone outside and stood on the deck nearest his home and listened to determine the source of the sound.

It wouldn’t qualify as a noise ordinance violation. And I’m sure it involves no intention of bothering the neighbors. Our neighbor just keeps different hours than we and he is watching a movie unaware that the process would have any effect on anyone else. Most of the time I can go right back to sleep without a problem. Having figured out what the sound was, I can tune it out once I know that it isn’t something I left on in my basement or a problem with one of the systems in my home. OK, I’ll admit it, once I went to the basement and checked my water softener in search of the source of the sound before determining that it was coming from the outside. It may be that my hearing isn’t as sensitive or as accurate as once was the case. It may also be that I’m not very rational when I wake up in the middle of the night.

Somehow my neighbor’s stereo system got me to thinking about what the neighbors of the church might think. Except for the tolling of the church bell at midnight on Christmas Eve, we don’t make our music late at night, but that big bell in the steeple is capable of making vibrations you can feel in the choir loft and the bottom rank of 16’ organ pipes produce sounds that are more intense than the subwoofer in a teen’s car. I wonder if our neighbors can hear the music we so enjoy. I wonder what they think of it.

I guess, if we are lucky, one of them might get interested enough to wander in and check it out some day.

In the meantime, I can entertain myself by trying to figure out what movie my neighbor is watching in the wee hours of the morning.

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.

Fairly early in my career as a pastor, we visited my family while on vacation. There was a kind of mini family reunion going on with cousins and aunts and uncles and other relatives gathered at my parents’ place. There were meals to prepare, chores to be done, people to be greeted. There were games and conversations, and, it being my family, discussions of politics. It was very normal and typical of family gatherings. At one point in the weekend, I sort of snuck away to get some time to myself. A cousin sought me out to try to get me to participate in a game. I refused. The cousin couldn’t understand. I ended up trying to explain, though probably wasn’t very articulate. Later that evening I complained to my wife that being with my family was exactly like being at work. There was no vacation at all if we spent our time off with my family.

Now I understand that it was an over-reaction. But I also know that a church is a lot like a family. We are a complex web of relationships and our goals and aspirations sometimes conflict. Our visions of the purpose and function of the institution differ. There are different styles of leadership and different expectations. The congregations that I have served have been small to mid-sized, so we really aren’t very big institutions. There are politics in the church, but they aren’t marked by the big time power plays that are present in larger and more powerful institutions. When I compare the dynamics of the congregations I serve with the internal politics of the local school board or the board of directors of our hospital, I realize that the issues with which I deal are mild indeed.

Still, there is something about working in the church that brings out both the best and worst in human nature. On the one hand, I am allowed to witness great amounts of generosity. People give freely of their time and resources to support the church because they genuinely believe in helping others. When people become captivated by the church’s mission they can be incredibly generous and are willing to place the needs of others before their own.

However, because people genuine care, they also have strong opinions about how the work of the church should be done. And churches can become entrenched in tradition and “the way we’ve always done it.” I remember a time, years ago, when a relatively new member of a congregation volunteered to serve refreshments after the worship service. It is something we do every week and there are a lot of things that are done the same way each week. There are instructions for brewing coffee, doing the dishes, and other chores associated with the task. The new volunteer was getting the job done, but not doing things quite the same way as they often were done. A well-meaning member of the congregation stepped in with instructions on how to do the job. By the end of the morning, the new volunteer tearfully informed me that she would never again volunteer for the job. “No matter what I did, I got corrected.”

It is easy to dismiss such an incident as a case of over-tender feelings or an over-zealous old timer, but the dynamics are actually very complex. The person who was giving instructions was motivated by good intentions. That person probably wasn’t even aware that feelings were being hurt. So too, the new volunteer took on the task with the best of intentions, unaware that small changes would affect anyone’s sensibilities.

Enough time has passed that we are able to look back on the incident and laugh and the two people went on to develop a friendship and genuine care fro one another. Hurt feelings occur all the time in the church. When they are expressed and responded to they do not need to lead to bitterness.

We all know, however, that bitterness does develop in the church. Something about which people care so deeply can also be the source of a great deal of pain when things go wrong. It isn’t uncommon for conflict within the church to erupt into members leaving the institution. It is always a tragedy when a church loses a member. It is an even greater tragedy when a family loses a church. The source of support in times of grief, the community of the faithful, the place where you belong - all of these are rare and precious and when the relationship breaks down it is a deep loss.

It is a worthy investment of my time when I am able to intervene and help to heal some of the broken relationships that come with hurt feelings. I’m not always successful, but I have learned that face-to-face contact, careful listening and persistence can help to move people beyond their hurts and open the door for restoration. One thing I say often, that most people who have been around me for any amount of time have heard me say is “In the church we don’t solve problems by getting rid of people.” I am proud of the times when we have been able to work through conflicts and keep the parties engaged in the church. I have put in long hours on several occasions keeping both parties in a divorce engaged in the church through the break up. More than once I’ve need to swallow my pride and set aside my hurt feelings to reach out to someone who needs the church far more than I need to win an argument.

Occasionally, however, someone moves on from a particular congregation. In that case I pray that they will find a new community of faith that can nurture them through the next stage of their life’s journey. And I always try to keep the door open so that if an attempt to return is made there will be a warm welcome.

It is a lot like family because it is a family. And our family of faith is important to us. And sometimes I need a sort break. On those occasions it is good to remember the times when Jesus “went off to a lonely place to pray.” (Mark 1:35; Luke 5:16) Like Jesus, sometimes I need to get up early in the morning to make that happen.

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 proverb says, “March comes in like a lion, and goes out like a lamb.” This March, however, didn’t come in either like a lion or a lamb. I’m not sure what kind of animal we’ve had. The first half dozen days of the month have been unseasonably warm, perhaps like a tiger or maybe more like a dragon. One thing that you can count on is that when the temperatures rise above 70 degrees, my mind goes immediately to boating.

I knew that there would be a lot of ice left in the lake. It only makes sense. It hasn’t been that long since they were driving their four wheelers out on the lake and hauling their fishing shelters to whatever area they thought might bring them the most tasty fish. But the lake thaws from the edges toward the center, leaving the ice in the middle with a channel all around the lake that is good for paddling. And yesterday morning was especially calm, which might mean that the ice melt from yesterday had stayed somewhat centered on the lake and I’d be able to take a long paddle. All the way around the lake is a good distance for the first paddle of the spring.


The geese objected. They can be quite vocal when things aren’t going to their liking. First they didn’t want me on their shore, but couldn’t do much about my walking down from the car with a kayak on my shoulders. So they abandoned the shore for the open water. When I put my kayak into the water, they opted to climb out on the ice, from which vantage point, they were safe from my following and yet able to cry at the top of their lungs so that all of their friends and neighbors would be aware of the injustice of having their territory invaded by the crazy guy with the yellow boat. After all, doesn’t he know that March is too early for paddling?

I didn’t. I’ve paddled in a lot colder ambient temperatures. And besides, the ice in the center of the lake forced me to stay close to the shore which meant that self rescue would be a matter of standing up and wading out of the water. Not much risk in the daytime.

I was simply enjoying being on the water and feeling the boat underneath me. Never mind that I didn’t want to risk scratching one of my good wooden boats against the edges of the ice so was paddling a plastic boat. Never mind that I grabbed the wrong paddle and the one I had was too long for a guy as short as I. Never mind that the spray skirt didn’t seem to want to stay stretched on the cheap coaming of the plastic boat. I could feel the water underneath my seat and the motion of my boat and hear the sound of the water.

The little plastic boat I was paddling turns on a dime and though it doesn’t edge like a creek boat, it can certainly take a lean and is very easy to steer. If the channel were to get tight, which it turned out to do, turning around would be no problem. I headed west from the beach and around the shallow marshy area at that edge of the lake. The slab of ice, however, had shifted right against the shore on the northwest side of the lake. It wasn’t what I would have expected because our winds usually come from that direction, but I don’t really know much about ice and it is possible that it got cold enough in the night for some new ice to form as the shelf of old ice sat with a very narrow gap to fill. I can break through small amounts of ice, but this was too thick. Once I’ve driven my boat up onto the surface of the ice, there is no where for me to go. My paddle is useless as a means of propulsion. The surface of the ice is too wet and too cold to use my hands for an extended period of time without getting my gloves all wet. And the sound of the plastic boat on the ice is loud enough to rob me of the gentle reverie of being out in nature. I backed off the ice and when there was room turned around and went the other way.

I got quite a bit farther heading in the opposite direction. There even was a short stretch of skim ice that i could break through with the boat. I wasn’t exactly the captain of an ice breaker, but I made a wide path through the ice with little effort. the sound of the cracking ice was satisfying and when I reached out with my paddle, I could send a crack spreading across the skim.

I finally ran into an obstacle paddling in the other direction, and soon it was time to head back to the beach, take out my boat and load it onto the car. I drove around town for most of the rest of the day with the boat on the roof, a sign that spring is coming.

This year afforded me one of the earliest “first paddles” of recent years. I’m still hoping for a bit more snow this winter. The woods sure could use the moisture. I don’t care if it comes as rain, but it would be good if we could get things really wet before heading into summer.

In the meantime, the ice is melting. Once there is open water all around the lake, the ice is floating directly on the water, which, being liquid, is warmer than the ice. Heat rises and the ice melts. Wind can help to break up the ice. I don’t know how much opportunity I will have to paddle. Holy week is coming and that is a time when all of my energies need to be focused on activities at the church. Yesterday was a great break in the pace of the season. A short private paddle made my day and reminded me of the joy that lies ahead.

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 lived in Chicago for four years pursuing graduate degrees. In those days, Sir George Solit was artistic director of CSO. Orchestra Hall in Chicago is a relatively small venue, holding just over 2500 people. In a city of three million, that meant that orchestra programs were often repeated for several performances. Thursday night there were discount tickets for University students. 2500 seats in that hall also means that there really are no bad seats in the house. It was years ago, but I still remember the thrill of listening to one of the world’s great symphony orchestras live, with stunning power and emotionality. I have heard a few of the world’s premier orchestral performances.

We have friends who have season tickets to the Black Hills Symphony Orchestra and they were unable to attend Saturday night’s performance. They gave us their tickets and we were allowed to be there for a concert entitled “Pictures at an Exhibition.” The concert opened with the Ravel orchestration of the famous Mussorgsky piano piece. This is what I sometimes call a dangerous piece for a community symphony orchestra to tackle. It is dangerous because everyone in the audience is familiar with the music. It is featured in every music appreciation course taught. We have heard recordings of several great orchestras play the piece with perfect balance, intonation and rhythm. We know this music. As an audience, we are frequently less critical of music with which we are less familiar.

If the music critic of the Chicago Tribune were to write a review of Saturday’s concert, you might read words like, “muddy,” “mushy,” “imprecise,” and maybe problems with “balance,” “intonation,” and “tempo,” and perhaps even a complaint about the trumpets overblowing and sounding “blatty.” Those criticisms might be leveled, but such a criticism has no place in our newspaper and it would totally miss the point of the concert.

Don’t get me wrong. They are good. They are very, very good. But it isn’t technical perfection.

You see, this is not the CSO. It is not the Berlin Philharmonic. It is not the Boston Pops. And we don’t expect it to be. We don’t want it to be. This is our community orchestra. And each performance is much deeper and a much more important artistic presentation that could be captured in a musically critical review.

Allow me to explain.

This is our community orchestra. These are people that we know. We know that Bruce is the artistic director, but we know that he is also a teacher. He plans his concerts with an intention of teaching us as an audience. He also can’t resist pushing his orchestra. He wants them to improve. He sets his tempos right on the edge of their abilities. He calls for more from them than they have previously produced. We like this. We want him to be a teacher. We value his energy and his passion for improvement.

We know Tony from the piano gallery. We admire his passion for his bass, but we also trust him to make sure that the big Yamaha piano is properly moved when it is needed. We know and love Carol the concert mistress and Liz the first Cello. We want them to shine. Back in the trumpet section, Milo has been a part of the music in our town for generations. We recognize and adore his sound. When Nancy plays the English horn, we remember the times she has played her oboe in church. And back in the last row of double basses, we can’t take our eyes off of Alex. We’ve known him since he was a baby. We watched him grow up.

You see we have a covenant, those of us in the audience and the orchestra. We want them to shine. We want to enjoy the evening. We want to admire their talent and artistry. We want this evening to be memorable.

A music teacher once told me that the first half of every concert is for teaching. It is a time to push the musicians and the audience. Before the intermission, we enjoyed the familiar piece with its bombastic and triumphant ending. Some in the audience thought that the orchestra deserved a standing ovation after all of that. I, on the other hand, was waiting for what was going to happen after the intermission. I knew that for me that was when the magic would occur.

I was not disappointed. Noah had won the Young Artist Competition and part of his prize was his moment on the stage with the symphony. His selection was a Chopin Larghetto. This would not be a technical challenge for the orchestra. There would be no temptation to rush the pace. Furthermore, everyone on the room wanted Noah to shine. And shine he did. As we waited for the final tone to fade from the piano we all wished that the music could have continued. It was a magical moment before we erupted into applause.

The three movements of Russell Peterson’s “Between Two Cultures” provided a distinctive conclusion to the evening. The drum group was new to me and new to the symphony. We knew before we got to that point how deeply it was going to affect us. The audience was already more diverse than typical for a performance of our symphony. The attraction of a traditional drum group playing with the symphony was worthy of note. And what a drum group they were! Amazing! We were mesmerized. They earned their standing ovation and we were glad to give it.

It was what we expect of community orchestra. It was what we expect of our orchestra. Our agreement with our orchestra is different than you would find in a city with a professional orchestra. Our agreement is that they will do their best each time they perform together and we will support music that is greater than our performers and our audience. We are, simply, very fortunate to have an orchestra in a town the size of ours. We are eager to share the beauty of music performed live. And we are grateful for our orchestra.

It was, in short, a delightful evening.

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.

This Lent I have been leading a series of discussions roughly based on a small volume Walter Brueggemann published a couple of years ago in which he discusses three urgent prophetic tasks. Drawing a comparison between the ancient destruction of Jerusalem and the attacks of 9/11, he looks for the prophetic voices that are carrying God’s message in our time. The discussions in our church have been a bit less focused and a bit less pointed than Brueggemann’s book, but they have nonetheless been helpful.

The three urgent prophetic tasks outlined by Brueggeman are these: To be a voice of reality in a culture of ideology; To be a voice of grief in a culture of denial; and To be a voice of hope in a world of despair. It is not difficult to see that those tasks are needed in contemporary American culture.

We have no shortage of ideologues, who are quick to offer their rhetoric. Their proclamations of how they wish the world might be - or of how they want the world to be - are often received as if they are speaking the truth. Yet it is obvious, upon examination, that they have placed their ideologies over the simple facts and realities of our world. While the politicians argue over their ideologies of immigration, the fact is that the world is experiencing a refugee crisis. While the politicians argue over their ideologies of gun control, the fact is that gun violence is rampant in our nation. The current cycle of presidential politics has been rife with ideologies, and short on realities. Politicians seem to have no problem whatsoever making promises upon which it would be impossible for them to deliver. While everyone is arguing their ideologies, the truth is that no one has been able to motivate our divided congress to engage in actual legislation and the fulfillment of their constitutional duties.

We have no shortage of denial. There are many ways in which our culture has experienced dramatic shifts. Some of the old ways are forever gone, and we are grieving their loss. The denial of the loss and the claim that we can simply go back is not helping. Our nation once was one where the majority of the people lived in rural communities. The family farm was not only the center of the production of food, but also of the care of the land. Those days have passed with the increasing urbanization of the nation and the growth of corporate farming. And we grieve the changes. The loss of those family farms is real. Denying that loss is not ministering to the needs of the people. There have been dramatic changes in the family in a single generation. The average age of first marriage has gone up by nearly a decade. Most young adults live through a series of relationships and break-ups before they marry. Children are born later in their parents’ lives. It is common for children to experience one or two major reconfigurations of their families in their lifetime that include the coming of stepparents and step siblings and major changes in the place of residence. We grief the loss of the simplicity that was experienced by earlier generations. Denying that the shift has occurred, however, denies the care that is needed for the children growing up in the reality of today’s culture. Our people need leaders who are able to grieve their losses of family with them, not ones who preach some alternate reality that is inaccessible to them.

And, I believe, the most urgent task of this generation is to carry the message of hope amidst the despair. It isn’t hard to find a politician who makes extensive lists of what is wrong in the world today. The simple message of as recent campaign as the 2008 Presidential election is now listed as one of the signs of the things that have gone wrong by some. It seems that if one wants to gain attention and votes all that is required is to have a constant stream of anecdotes that illustrate the adage, “the world has gone to hell in a handbasket.” What we need are more voices willing to counter this expression in the fashion demonstrated by the English preacher Thomas Adams, who in 1618, referred to “going to heaven in a wheelbarrow” in “God’s Bounty on Proverbs.” Actually Adams’ message was pretty similar to the voices of despair, but the impact of that message was that a new expression entered the discourse.

The core of the Christian message has always been hope. And, as I have often said, hope is not an ideology. The word is often used as a part of the expression of an ideology, but genuine hope is not found in stating what you want or wish might happen. Hope is not wishing that bad things will not occur. Genuine hope is found in the deep revelation that in the darkest hours, when the words you can imagine comes to pass, you have not been abandoned by God. There is one to stand alongside you in the most difficult and painful experiences of this life.

That is a radically different message than the one spouted by the candidates. Hope doesn’t lie in the promise that you will have to pay fewer taxes. It lies in the assurance that you will not be abandoned by society when you experience financial failure. Hope doesn’t lie in the notion that walls and weapons and laws can isolate you from those who are different and who might seem threatening to you. Hope lies in building community and learning to live with our differences. Hope doesn’t lie in crushing your opponents. It lies in loving your enemies.

I’m no prophet. The Biblical prophets are few and far between. I’ve been called to be a pastor and stand alongside the people I serve more than I have been commissioned to deliver messages to them. Still, I have been called to preach to the community that I serve and I hope that I can at least be faithful to the Gospel in the words that I choose.

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 wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I now know that I was raised in extraordinary privilege. By the time I entered the family, my parents already had three daughters. As the first son (three more followed), I was granted great amounts of time and attention by my father. From as early as I can remember, I was allowed to go with my father as he went about his daily activities, hanging out at the airport, having the run of the entire place, rinding along when he went flying, going with him on sales calls, and joining him in his hunting expeditions.

My father was blessed with extremely good vision. He didn’t wear glasses until he was into his fifties when a bit of farsightedness entered his realm. I, on the other hand inherited my mother’s nearsightedness and astigmatism and wore glasses early on. Before I got my glasses, however, my father taught me a lot about looking and seeing. He taught me to polish plexiglass and glass windows until they virtually disappeared and allowed the most amount of light to enter. He taught me about using my peripheral vision to look for animals. A rabbit will freeze and remain motionless in the grass, and you might not notice it if you look only with the center of your vision. If you scan with gentle head movements and focus your attention at the edges of your vision you are more likely to recognize the animal. The technique works for antelope and deer as well. It also works for birds in the trees. He taught me to narrow the field of vision to extend its range. By holding my thumb and forefinger together and looking through a small hole, I could concentrate my vision on a smaller field and sometimes make out something that had previously remain unseen. He taught me to look for fish by concentrating on contrasts of motion rather than contrasts of color. Water only goes upstream in eddies. If it is moving against the current, it is a fish.

There is a sad irony in the fact that the brain tumor that was listed as the official cause of my father’s death was first recognized by its effects on his vision. He was completely unaware that there was a problem when an ophthalmologist, in a regular examination, discovered a decrease in his peripheral vision. Father had taught himself to scan when looking and to use the turning of his head to see what needed to be seen. As such, the doctor had to physically hold his chin still to illustrate the change in vision to him. He had lived his life looking carefully at the world and he had invested incredible energy in teaching his son to compensate for vision deficiencies that he was able to make his own compensations for decreasing eyesight without being aware of them.

Seeing and learning to look closely and carefully have been very important parts of my life. I’ll never forget the incredible clarity of my first set of glasses. I can remember as if it were yesterday lying on the rocks next to my father and using a magnifying glass to examine orange lichens that appear as tiny gardens under the magnification of the lens. I thought I was the possessor of secret knowledge when he showed me how to use the magnifying glass to look at snowflakes on my jacket sleeve. The dark green John Deere uniform jacket was a perfect background for the exhibition. I didn’t know anything about cyborgs and bionics in those days, but I understood that a pair of field glasses was an incredibly valuable and precious possession as he taught me to focus them correctly to scan for elk on the mountain across the valley.

I was thinking of my experiences with seeing last night as I sat in the balcony of the church with my eyes closed. I was in a place where seeing was fine, but it wasn’t the sense that was lighting up my life at the moment. The 52 voices of the Dordt College Concert Choir were filling the room with a glorious sound that was so rich and enveloping that I didn’t need to look to know that I was in the presence of the glory of God revealed right in front of me.

They sang mostly in English, but a few songs of Latin, Greek and even Norwegian were intoned. I don’t speak Norwegian, but no translation was required for me to know it was a lullaby revealing the powerful love of a mother for her infant. Like gymnastics and mathematics, such singing is a young person’s sport. While singing in the choir is a pleasure of us elders and one we can continue for decades, the purity and clarity at the top of one’s vocal range is preserved for breath from the powerful lungs of athletes flowing across tight, young vocal cords.

It was, simply, magnificent.

Vision is indeed a gift of immeasurable value, but so too is the ability to hear.

Earlier in the day I sat in conversation with a friend who was born with cerebral palsy and didn’t learn to walk or to talk until he was much older than the average child. His speech is still affected by his disability. He has plenty of volume, often too much volume for my tender ears, but not every pronunciation is crystal clear to my listening. I have to listen carefully in order to get his words. It is an acquired skill and I don’t need to interrupt to have him repeat very often these days. Just like learning to spot game in their natural environment, learning to really hear another person is an acquired skill. We have a tendency to blame the speaker for failures of communication, but often it is a listening disability that is the problem.

I have, however, as I said, been blessed with incredible privilege. I have been taught not only to look, but also to listen. As I age and my natural abilities fade, I am grateful that the senses work together seamlessly.

Listening to the choir last night, I could picture with my eyes closed the exact position of the soloist so that when I opened my eyes, I was not surprised by what I saw. My ears had told me exactly where to look.

I’m still learning to trust my eyes to tell me exactly where to listen. Sorting sounds is more difficult for me than sorting sights. Both sight and sound have provided me with exquisite moments of wonder and memories powerful enough to last a lifetime.

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.

Three seemingly unrelated experiences in the last week have gotten me to thinking.

A little before 8 am yesterday, I took my car to the shop to have some repairs. I decided to wait for a few minutes for a diagnostic machine to be connected to the car so I had a sense of what the repairs would be before getting a ride back to the church. I wandered into the waiting area in the car dealership. I sat on a stool and checked my email on my phone. As I did so, I thought about how pleasant the room was. There were a couple of other customers chatting and looking at magazines. An employee came through and got a cup of coffee. I had plenty of peace to do my business. I later commented to Susan about how pleasant that room is when the television is turned off.

The second was a minor outburst at a church meeting. The way an issue was raised by one member of a committee offended another member of the committee. Tempers flared. A few harsh words were said. Then people calmed down and the meeting proceeded. Checking in with the involved persons the next day I know that it isn’t a major incident in the church’s life, just one of those things that I wish could have been handled a bit more smoothly. The incident took me by surprise, even with my experience in the church, I didn’t see it coming. It will not affect the running of the church and we will move on to more important business.

The third experience came yesterday afternoon. I was visiting in the hospital. The television in the room was on, but the patient lowered the volume during my visit. Still, I’m not used to watching television, so I found it a bit distracting as I listened to the patient and offered my prayers. It certainly was an everyday kind of experience. I didn’t think of it much at the time. On my way out of the hospital, I stopped by the emergency room to check on an unrelated item and passed through the emergency waiting area where there were two different televisions blasting with two different channels. I thought as I walked through the area that I would find it very difficult to have to wait in such an environment.

So you can probably see where I’m going with this blog already. Regular readers of my blog will know that I’m not a big fan of television and that I don’t invest much of my time watching it. There’s no surprise there.

As I walked to my car in the hospital parking lot, reflecting on the events and activities of the week, it occurred to me that there is a relationship between what we see in the media and the way we treat one another. Even though I don’t watch much television, it is hard to avoid. There are televisions is most waiting rooms in our city. Once quiet doctors’ offices are now invaded by television soundtracks. I still take a look at our local newspaper in the quiet of our kitchen, but most of my news comes from reading online versions of national and international newspapers, which often have clips from television embedded in the stories. It is obvious that the tone of the headlines is steeped in angry rhetoric.

The lead article on the Washington Post website this morning reports how last night’s Republican debate included “ferocious sparring and name-calling.” Other lines on the front page include: “Trump’s jabs negate any pivot to statesman mode.” “The more he talked, the worse he came across.” “Things turn awkward.” “A Texan who called Obama a gay prostitute.”

You know what I mean. Civil discourse seems to be a thing of the past in the public arena. People don’t think twice about hurling personal insults, attacking public figures with no respect for the office, name calling, and even boldface lies to tear down their opponents. And we are subjected to that tone of conversation with every trip to a place of routine business. There is even a television blaring in the pharmacy where we pick up our medicines. I could write an entire blog about the big screen televisions in every nursing home and assisted living facility in our community, and the inappropriate choices of programming that go on in those settings.

We have listened to so many insults and aggressive behaviors that we have come to accept them as normal and everyday. There are people who aren’t even surprised to hear that kind of talk in church meetings. I know that churches have politics. I’ve become somewhat at ease navigating those politics. But I refuse to accept the ways of the wider society as “business as usual.”

In the church we are called to be different from the society. In many ways we are a counter-cultural institution. The feelings of others matter. It is not acceptable to advance one’s cause by attacking another. We are called to practice hospitality in the midst of disagreement.

Having said that, I know that I have to cut the participants in the church meeting some slack. It isn’t all about the tone of politics on the television. People see things from different perspectives. The insult that was felt was not intended. Participants in the meeting have difficult lives. There were people in the meeting who have immediate family members struggling with terminal illnesses. There were others who have recently lost family members. Like all churches, we are a gathering of wounded people. We don’t expect perfection. We need to be practiced at forgiveness. In pursuit of that aim, I know that there are several people who I need to visit and to whom I need to listen before the next meeting of that particular committee. We are a church. We are in the business of forgiveness. We know that pain can be healed.

Still it wouldn’t hurt if we simply turned off the television sets more often.

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 podcasts to which I listen that often contributes to my ideas for the blog and sermons, is “On Being,” an interview show about spirituality and religion hosted by Krista Tippett. Tippett is a masterful interviewer whose calm questions elicit deep responses from those with whom she speaks. I’ve heard interviews from leaders in many different religions and in other fields. It is typical for her to begin the interview with a question about the subject’s religious and spiritual upbringing. The answer to that question often sets the tone for the interview that is to follow.

This week I have been inspired by her interview with Dr. Robin W. Kimmerer. Kimmerer is Distinguished Teaching Professor at the State University of New York’s College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York. She serves as founding Director of the Center for Native Peoples and the Environment whose mission is to create programs drawing on the wisdom of both indigenous and scientific knowledge. She is a botanist, whose scientific research subject is the ecology of mosses.

As a teacher, Dr. Kimmerer has taught courses in botany, ecology, ethnobotany, indigenous environmental issues and a seminar in application of traditional ecological knowledge to conservation.

She is an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation.

What was so fascinating to me about the way she came across in the interview with Tippett was her words about the restoration of relationships. She spoke passionately about how we have become disconnected from the ecosystems that sustain our lives. Children grow up with the ability to identify over 100 corporate logos knowing how to identify less than ten plants. She mourns the fact that we aren’t teaching our children to pay attention to the world in which they live. We go through our lives without making connections to the plants that support us. We eat without understanding the food that we place in our bodies.

Science, she states, is very good at understanding some of the mechanisms of plants, but often ignores relationships. There are, in nature, many symbioses where plants excel in groups and in relationship to other plants. Understanding these relationships not only helps to understand the plants, but also to inform human life and relationships as well.

In the interview, Dr. Kimmerer recalled entering the forestry school at the age of 18 and stating that the reason she wanted to study botany was because she wanted to know why asters and goldenrod looked so beautiful together. The depth of their beauty revealed to her something about the order and harmony of the universe. She was told by her teachers, however, that beauty was not an appropriate inquiry for science and that art school was the place to study beauty. She persisted, however, and discovered that even in the scientific arena where emotions are set aside in pursuit of objectivity, there is a good biophysical explanation for why those plants grow together. It turns out that the purple and gold colors together attract far more pollinators than if the two groups were to grow apart from one another. It turns out that there is significant science behind the nature of relationships. It also turns out that aesthetic beauty is a factor in the way plants and animals develop and evolve.

I’m no scientist, at least not in an academic sense. Even my few inquiries into psychology, sociology and anthropology fall far short of being rigorous in academic terms. My fields have been philosophy and theology that once were considered to be chief among all of the sciences, but in the modern university are considered to be less scientific and more speculative in their approach. I am, however, deeply concerned with relationships. My theology is very relational. My understanding of God is based in relationships. My christology is deeply relational. I see relationship as critical to meaningful human existence. Perhaps that is why I responded so well to Tippett’s interview with Dr. Kimmerer.

In her book, “Braiding Sweetgrass,” Dr. Kimmerer writes: “We are all bound by a covenant of reciprocity. Plant breath for animal breath, winter and summer, predator and prey, grass and fire, night and day, living and dying. Our elders say that ceremony is the way we can remember to remember. In the dance of the giveaway, remember that the earth is a gift we must pass on just as it came to us. When we forget, the dances we’ll need will be for mourning, for the passing of polar bears, the silence of cranes, for the death of rivers, and the memory of snow.”

In the interview, Dr. Kimmerer spoke of her sense of grief at some of the wounds and scars that humans have inflicted on the natural world. She mentioned clear cutting forests, mountaintop removal, and other processes that we have used to extract the resources we need to sustain our lifestyles. She spoke of her grief over our overconsumption of the earth’s resources and the need to restore balance. As she spoke, this acclaimed and widely recognized scientist was treading in territory that is very familiar to a theologian. The relationship between grief and restoration is a theme that has been the story of the people of faith for millennia. Walter Brueggemann has written extensively about Old Testament themes of ideology replaced with reality, denial replaced with grief, and despair replaced with hope. From this point of view, the grief Dr. Kimmerer expressed is evidence of a spiritual maturity that demonstrates she has traveled a long way down the road of relationship with God. As a pastor, I know that grief is not the enemy. It is, in fact, a step in the journey towards hope and restoration.

The interview concludes with a statement by Dr. Kimmerer that reveals the depth of her understanding of this process: “And so one of the things that I continue to learn about and need to learn more about is the transformation of love to grief to even stronger love and the interplay of love and grief that we feel for the world. And how to harness the power of those related impulses is something that I have had to learn.”

In the universities of the renaissance, theology was considered the queen of the sciences. It was believed that any other scientific exploration would eventually lead to the big questions of the nature of the universe, the reasons for human existence, and our relationship with God. Krista Tippett’s interview with Dr. Robin Kimmerer certainly reinforced this view for me. A botanist who really takes her study of moss seriously will find in the moss lessons about the nature of the universe, our relationship to that universe and the source of all creation.

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 much of a movie-goer and I don't get excited about the Oscars, but there is a prize awarded at this time of the year to which I always pay attention.

In 1972 the late philanthropist Sir John Templeton inaugurated an annual prize to honor a person who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming the spiritual dimension of life. The first prize was awarded to Mother Teresa in 1973. Last year the winner was Jean Vanier, founder of L’Arche, an international network of communities where people with and without intellectual disabilities live and work together as peers. Along the way there have been many winners whose names have become household words: Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Charles Taylor, Desmond Tutu and the Dalai Lama. Some winners, like the Czech priest and philosopher Tomas Halik, were less well known at the time of winning the prize.

It has just been announced that year’s prize winner is Rabbi Jonathan Sacks. Lord Sacks served as the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013. As chief rabbi of Britain, he was a leader in efforts to promote interfaith understanding. His vision of a better world and his “future-mindedness” were listed as key reasons he was chosen for the honor according to Jennifer Simpson, chair of the John Templeton Foundation Board of Trustees. “After 9/11, Rabbi Sacks saw the need for a response to the challenge posed by radicalization and extremism and he did so with dignity and grace,” said the statement announcing the prize. “He has always been ahead of his time and, thanks to his leadership, the world can look to the future with hope, something we are very much in need of right now.”

His most recent book, “Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence,” Sacks writes specifically of the need to counter extremism: “Too often in the history of religion, people have killed in the name of the God of life, waged war in the name of the God of peace, hated in the name of the God of love and practiced cruelty in the name of the God of compassion,” he said. “When this happens, God speaks, sometimes in a still, small voice almost inaudible beneath the clamor of those claiming to speak on his behalf. What he says at such times is: ‘Not in My Name.’”

It is important to note that Rabbi Sacks was nominated for the prize by Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey. A prominent Christian leader wholeheartedly nominated a Jew for a million dollar prize for many reasons, and one of those reasons I understand deeply. Rabbi Sacks gives hope to all who truly care about the future of religion.

In this era of declining attendance and increasing numbers of people who claim to be secular and who distance themselves from religious institutions, it is easy to get down on the future for religious leaders. There are prominent voices in the world who believe that religion will continue to decline and one day die, with all of the people in the world becoming either secular or agnostic.

Of course those predictions have not come to pass. And those of us whose lives are engaged in the practice of religion every day know that they won’t. We get to speak directly with those who find religion to be important vital and deeply meaningful. We are allowed to enter into the lives of others at critical moments when they discover their need for a deeper understanding of life.

Rabbi Sacks reminds us of the reason we do the work that we do:

"There are three questions any reflective individual will ask in the course of a lifetime: Who am I? Why am I here? How, then, shall I live?" he says.

"Those questions can't be answered by science or resolved by technology, or dealt with by market economics and the liberal democratic state. They're questions about meaning - and ultimately they are religious questions."

Jonathan Sacks is a leader of my generation. He is just four years older than I. And he is a model for the kind of leadership to which I aspire. He is intellectually brilliant, a clear and articulate writer. But he doesn’t just live in his head. He is a passionate man of spirit who lives his faith in many dimensions. That combination of intellectual intelligence with spiritual depth allows him to articulate a vision that goes beyond the sound bytes and aphorisms of our time.

He reminds us that history is filled with secular revolutions and secular nationalisms that promise prosperity and freedom and fail to deliver on either. In many generations, religious leaders have allied themselves with those secular philosophies and allowed the name of God to be used to promote ideologies. When religion becomes allied with the pursuit of power, tragedy is always the result. Ideologies, however, are always trumped by reality. At some point, the truth will emerge, even when it seems that evil has prevailed.

The answer to contemporary religious extremism and sectarianism is a careful and deep commitment to education: "The only thing you can do is to develop a counter-idealism that speaks to the real passions of young people today. Many of them are searching for meaning," he says. "They don't find it in a culture that's terribly materialistic: they want ideals, and we have to make sure that the messages that deliver a set of ideals about inclusiveness and tolerance and respect for the other are as powerful and altruistic as the hate-filled messages that are hitting young people through the internet all the time."

Perhaps one of my favorite quotes of Jonathan Sacks is this: “The God who created the universe in love and forgiveness asks us to love and forgive others.”

I am not a Jew and I will never be a Jew. My course in this life is framed by my Christian faith. But there have been several Jews whose contributions to the world have enriched my life and ministry. Jonathan Sacks is one of those people and I celebrate his winning of the Templeton prize. It is an honor that is well placed and well deserved.

"No Jew who is mindful of Jewish history can be an optimist. But no Jew worthy of the name ever gives up hope.”

Jonathan Sacks continues to renew hope for the whole world.

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 know it isn’t polite to spy on one’s neighbors or to speculate about their lives, but sometimes I just can’t risk the temptation. When you have neighbors like ours, it gets difficult to ignore them. We get along quite well with our neighbors, so there is no problem. But I do find myself staring at them out of my kitchen window. I’ve been known to grab a set of field glasses or a camera with a long lens to get a closer view. It’s not exactly what one would expect of a minister, I know.

We have fascinating neighbors. Yesterday there were times when we had as many as twenty or more of our neighbors in our back yard.

Being the 29th of February, the weather couldn’t quite make up its mind. It was a little chilly in the morning, though not unusual for this time of year. When I went outside do do a few chores, I donned a hooded sweatshirt, but didn’t need a parka. A couple of hours after breakfast it started to snow lightly and the snow continued. There were areas of warmth on the ground, so it took a while for the snow to build up, but at times during the day it got to a couple of inches. It was melting as it fell, so the snow settled quickly and barely covered the grass by late evening, though a little more fell during the night. The weather left us in the mood to stay indoors most of the day and we had plenty of chores to keep us busy. I did venture out for a run to the grocery store, but that was about it.

I did, however, take time to spy on our neighbors, especially when they congregated in our back yard. They weren’t too active during the day, either, spending much of it idly browsing for food and lying down to chew their cud.

You did know I was talking about whitetail deer, didn’t you? We have human neighbors as well, but they were all off at work or engaged in activities in their homes and we didn’t pay much attention to them yesterday. The deer, however, are a different matter. Unlike some of the residents of the hills, whitetail deer are relatively static. A deer’s home range is usually less than a square mile. That means that the deer that sleep in the tall grass that adjoins our property are the same ones that were sleeping there last year. Some of the young ones were the fawns that we watched last spring. They are nearly adult-sized now and their colors have become the same as the adults. The coats of all of the deer are garish brown in the winter as opposed to the lighter tawny brown of springtime. There is white on the throat, around the eyes, on the stomach, and, of course on the underside of the tail. They raise their tails when startled and the tails make quite a show when they are running.

Before we humans moved into their neighborhood, the deer population was controlled mostly by predation of wolves and mountain lions. In severe winters there is some winter kill, but the deer are remarkably adaptive. Their complex digestion system allows them to eat a wide variety of plants. When the grass is completely covered with snow, they can survive by eating bark off of trees and chewing leaves and other forage from low lying branches. As people moved into the hills, they didn’t enjoy the company of wolves and mountain lions that much and those species were hunted. There are a few mountain lions in the hills, but they rarely venture into our neighborhood and wolves seem to exist only in rumors in our area. I’ve heard of coyotes or even domestic dogs occasionally killing a young deer, but that isn’t frequent. The main control on the population of deer in our neighborhood is cars on the highway. dozens die as a result of car strikes every year on the stretch of highway running between our home and town. You might think that there would be a bit of natural selection in the process. Those with less street smarts are less likely to survive while those who become road wary live to produce offspring. However, it doesn’t appear that judgment regarding the speed of approaching cars is a family trait among the deer in our neighborhood.

Mostly the deer have adapted to our presence in their hills. Occasionally, when I go out to get the paper in the morning, an adult deer may stomp its hooves and snort at me, but they never have displayed any threatening behavior. They’ll keep their distance, but the adults will allow me to come surprisingly close as long as I don’t make any sudden movements. They can easily outrun me if they want and there is no hunting allowed in the immediate neighborhood. Most of the deer we see in our yard have never known the threat of hunters.

We mostly see does and fawns in our yard. The bucks are apparent only for a short time in the fall. The rest of the season, our neighbors are a community of females. Male fawns leave, sometimes with encouragement of their mothers the summer following their birth. Female fawns often linger with their mothers for a couple of years at least.

I’ve heard a lot of stories about their white tails. One is that raising the tail makes it easy for a fawn to follow its mother when running through the woods chased by a predator. It is true that they little ones are able to follow every twist and turn of a running mother at a very young age. But that is also true of mule deer, with their somewhat smaller tails with black tips. I’ve also heard that the marking keeps the attention of the predator away from the head of the deer, making it more difficult for the predator to know which direction the animal will turn. Whatever the reason, the white flags add to the fun of watching the deer.

So far, we seem to get along with our neighbors pretty well. They have been fenced out of our vegetable garden and we do occasionally complain about their tendency to browse in the herb garden and taste flowers next to the house. Still, it seems like we’ve found a balance that allows us to live peacefully with them. And they are a lot of fun to watch.

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.