It has been 20 years since the United Church of Christ published the New Century Hymnal. The song book now has gained widespread acceptance in UCC congregations and is one of two hymnals that our congregation uses in addition to a supplemental hymnal. You can never have too many hymns, I suppose. It is a bit awkward having different hymnals and we have more than we can store in the pews, so we find ourselves switching out hymnals from time to time. Obtaining the “new” (now 20-year-old) hymnal didn’t diminish our love for the older hymnal, which had been the staple of our congregation’s worship for half a century.

No hymnal is perfect. Although the New Century Hymnal was controversial in some of the changes to the words of familiar hymns, there is nothing new about the controversy. I have a collection of hymnals, and one 19th Century Hymnal has an extended forward that discusses the editor’s choice of “old” vs “new” hymns and the reasons for changing the words in some of the traditional hymns.

What I have noticed is that the congregations I have served haven’t ever learned all of the hymns in their hymnals. Some hymns are challenging to sing. I often choose hymns by their lyrics. The organists with whom I’ve worked frequently have something to say about the tunes and their ease, or difficulty, of singing.

I believe that I’ve had at least five organists question my choice of Thomas Troeger’s “Silence, Frenzied, Unclean Spirit.” I have deferred to the organists, so we won’t be singing it this week in our church. But every third year, when we are in year “B” of our lectionary cycle, the thought of the hymn comes up when we get to the Fourth Sunday after Epiphany. The brief story of healing in Mark 1:23-26 is Mark’s introduction to Jesus as a healer. Like most of the rest of the Gospel of Mark, the story is told quickly with intensity and without much detail. Mark is quick to go on to the next adventure.

The hymn lyrics follow Mark’s text very closely and re-tell the incident in an unforgettable way:

“Silence, frenzied, unclean spirit!”
cried God’s healing Holy One.
‘Cease your ranting! Flesh can’t bear it.
Flee as night before the sun.”
At Christ’s words the demon trembled,
from its victim madly rushed,
while the crowd that was assembled
stood in wonder, stunned and hushed.

My friend Art Clyde, editor of the New Century Hymnal, is a bit of an expert in hymn meters and the selection of alternative tunes. Once, when I spoke with him about this hymn, he suggested that we simply go with an alternative tune. He suggested “ode to joy” Beethoven’s famous melody that is the setting for the hymn “Joyful, Joyful, We Adore You.” My congregation isn’t much for having the music on one page and the words on another even when the tune is very familiar. But my choice not to go with Art’s advice is deeper. The tue, though rhythmically a good fit for the words is emotionally all wrong.

It is one of the challenges of using contemporary music in the church. We have become attached to the things we know and we are often a bit unsure about tackling new challenges.

Troeger’s lyrics, written in 1984, present the modern church with a different dilemma. Trooper has so captured the spirit of the gospel text that the hymn invites us into the mindset of Jesus time, when the nature of illness was not understood. It is unclear what affliction the victim in the gospel suffered. Some have suggested that it was a seizure disorder. Others have suggested a brain disease with a more psychological manifestation. Mark, of course, doesn’t linger on it at all. He uses the language of his day. The man is possessed by an evil spirit.

That language isn’t found in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Orders (DSM), which is the standard for health care practitioners in diagnosing mental illnesses. I don’t think it even acknowledges diseases caused by evil spirits.

We, in our modern way of thinking, squirm a little bit at the image of being possessed by an evil spirit. “Just because we no longer believe in spirits,” Fred Craddock once said, “doesn’t mean that our world is free from evil.”

It is that dilemma that is addressed so well by the second stanza of Troeger’s hymn:

Christ, the demons still are thriving
in the gray cells of the mind:
tyrant voices, shrill and driving,
twisted thoughts that grip and bind,
doubts that stir the heart to panic,
fears distorting reason’s sight,
guilt that makes our loving frantic,
dreams that cloud the soul with fright.

We may not be the kind of public spectacle that the man healed by Jesus in Mark’s Gospel presented, but we, too, long for mental and spiritual peace. We’ve felt tyrant voices of to-do lists, overwhelming chores, overbooked schedules, and the relentless pace of our modern world. We know how our minds can be gripped by twisted thoughts and doubts. More than any sermon I’ve ever heard preached or any commentary that I have read, the words of Troeger’s hymn make the connection between the event of Jesus ministry so long ago and the contemporary reality of the lives we live.

It wouldn’t be hard to sing that hymn in our congregation. We have an excellent organist and a talented choir. They could teach the congregation the hymn. But somehow I just haven’t gotten around to it yet. I had it in the worship plan for this year once again, but the complexity of the service, with our contemporary singers and our balcony choir both singing, a milestones award for children, the sacrament of holy communion and all of the other dynamics of the service, it just didn’t seem to fit in.

After many years as a teacher and dean at Iliff School of Theology, Troeger is now professor of Christian Communication at Yale Divinity School. His life has been dedicated to teaching students how to become preachers. I never took a class from him. I’ve never heard him preach or lecture. But he has taught me a lot, nonetheless.

The hymn he wrote won’t be sung in our worship tomorrow. But his lyrics will be incorporated into our prayers.

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I’m not exactly a big sports fan. That doesn’t mean that I ignore sport entirely. I have some really good friends and loved ones who are really into backing their teams and following the game. They get to know the personalities of the coaches and players and find a lot of fun cheering their teams. For more than a decade we had a tradition at our church of a particular church leader serving as our lay liturgist on Super Bowl Sunday. I’d write a script that reflected on the teams and offered a mild bit of pseudo-religious commentary. It was all in fun and the congregation appreciated the creativity and laughed at the jokes. Those years required that I learn something about the teams and at least pay attention to the football playoffs.

And football is certainly in the news as we prepare for the big game this weekend. I just haven’t gotten into it this year. The teams of my friends and family members didn’t make it to the big game, though I do know a couple of Seahawks fans and Rapid City has a few residual Patriots fans left over from the days when Adam Vinatieri played for the team. But the Patriots eliminated the team Adam plays for this year. The graduate of Rapid City Central High School is a genuinely nice guy and a football legend. I met him on two occasions and he donated an autographed football to our Costa Rica project once. I could cheer for a team simply because Adam is playing on that team. But the Colts are out of the running, eliminated by Adam’s former team and number 4 won’t be kicking in the big game.

I haven’t even watched any of the commercials. Some years I had watched all of the commercials before the big game - even blogged about them. I guess that there isn’t that much I want to buy. Football commercials are pretty much about big money and not much about the brands that interest me. I’m not in the market for a car, and if I were, I’m not sure that Mercedes, Kia and Toyota are my brands. Am I missing something here? Wouldn’t you think that Chrysler, Ford and GM might want to advertise for America’s biggest game? Budweiser is back, of course, but Pepsi is surprisingly absent.

I may not be a big sports fan, but when it comes to advertising, I REALLY don’t know what I’m talking about.

I haven’t gotten into the hype about which team has cheated more often and which one has caused the most injuries among its opponents.

That is not to say that I haven’t made some big plans for game day. I think that we’ve got enough groceries in the house so that we don’t have to go to the madness that is our usual grocery store between now and the game. “Excuse me, sir, if you moved that cart one inch to the left, you’d have the aisle completely blocked so that no one could get through.” “That’s a cute sculpture you made out of cases of pop, but didn’t the fire inspector require aisles in your grocery store for some reason?” “Why, oh why did I think I wanted to pick up a couple of potatoes? There’s a whole aisle of potato chips between me and the produce section.”

I might even consider paying the extra $1.50 for a gallon of milk at the convenience store on the corner if we run out during the weekend.

Yes, I really have become as old and grumpy as my father used to be. Sigh . . .

I have been doing a limited amount of research about Kevlar cloth in preparation for the outfitting of the kayak I am building. The material is surprisingly strong and versatile. They make all sorts of things out of it. The use of Kevlar in football helmets promises to prevent some of the brain injuries that are possible with the game. Professional teams have followed the lead of college teams in providing Kevlar-fortified liners for their players’ helmets. I wonder if anyone has suggested to Kay Perry that she consult with a fashion designer to create a Kevlar costume for her half time show. I probably won’t be watching, but I’d sure hate to have to read about another “wardrobe malfunction” for months following the big game.

And while I’m on a rant, I could go on and on about the University of Phoenix. I understand that we live in a country where capitalism is the foundation of our economy, but after years and years of supporting the non-profit, church-related institutions of higher education from which I graduated, there is something that seems not quite right about a for-profit university. And the University of Phoenix is so full of online classes, certificate programs and other ways to squeeze tuition out of students that they set new records each year for the number of students who attend but don’t earn credits that transfer or degrees that are recognized.They will, however, get a lot of press attention because their Super-duper stadium with retractable field sides is the location of the big game. OK. I know it isn’t really “their” stadium. It isn’t as if students of the university get to play football in the giant home of the Arizona Cardinals (yea, the name still sounds funny to me, too.) The University of Phoenix paid $154 million to have their name put on the stadium for 20 years. I guess the business of for-profit education is a lucrative one. None of the universities and colleges I’m familiar with have $154 million sitting around for what is essentially advertising. Or maybe it is just a matter of priorities. The University did close 115 locations affecting 13,000 students after a 60% fourth-quarter loss for its parent company, Apollo Group, Inc. They weren’t exactly celebrated in the Senate report last summer that pointed out that their track record of students actually getting jobs is somewhat less than stellar - OK abysmal.

Fortunately, however, this is as close to a Super Bowl blog as I’m going to produce this year and if you’re reading this, you’ve probably endured it and are eager to get on to other topics.

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Maya Angelou was 86 years old when she passed away almost a year ago now. She was only 41 back in 1969 when she published her first autobiography, “I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” The book told of her life up to the age of 17. In all, Angelou wrote seven autobiographies. That’s right seven.

I realize that Angelou was an author of exceptional talent and power and writing was only one of her vocations. She got more than one thing right in this life. But one of the truths I have learned from her is that our lives are not a single story, but many. Angelou became a poet and writer after working as a fry cook, prostitute, nightclub dancer, performer, opera cast member, coordinator for the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and journalist.

She made a lot of mistakes in her life, to be sure. But she also got an awfully lot right.

Her poems say more in a few words than I am able to say in thousands. More than a poet, I believe that Angelou’s strongest skill was as an editor. I once read that when she was working on a major writing project, she averaged 10 - 12 pages of writing each day, which she edited down to three or four each evening.

It is a skill that i have rarely demonstrated. I do OK with producing the initial burst of words. I am less skilled at editing down to the essential. That is why you have to wade through an essay in my blog to find one or two pithy sentences worth remembering. If only I knew which words were the most important.

It is only recently that I recognized my tendency, at times, to look back far too much. I know it is the comfort of elders to look backwards. I know that looking back is exactly how Angelou produced some of her most important words, but I also know that my experiences as a young pastor in Rural North Dakota and my experiences in our Idaho church, while interesting and formative, are not road maps for the future of the congregation I now serve. The challenges that face us are unique.

One of the things we know about ourselves is that we aren’t going back to where we have been. There have been far too many funerals for us to think we might be able to do that. We may not have clarity of vision about the way ahead, but we know that the way we have traveled to get this place is not the way we will be going.

We are honing in on the design and preparations for the launch of a major capital funds drive in our congregation. We know that there is work that needs to be done. And we know that the drive will require faith and risk on our part. But we cannot avoid the conversations that demonstrate our discomfort with such an uncertain future. Last night at a meeting that I thought would be about the technical next steps that need to be accomplished, we couldn’t avoid the hard questions about where our church is headed. We have plenty of gray and white heads in our congregation. We have years when there are more funerals than new members. We watch our short-term growth be erased by factors beyond our control. And everyone in that room, attending that meeting, knows that the future in which we will be investing - the future in which we will be asking others to invest - is not the unfolding of our own stories. New church leaders will emerge who will lead the church in its own direction.

We could spend years in planning and trying to direct the institution’s path to the future and it would still go the way that God calls it to go. The leaders who will guide the next generation of faith in our church will belong to the next generation - not to our time.

Part of me is very excited about this opportunity that lies ahead. We are being given a way to invest in a story that goes beyond the span of our own lives. Life doesn’t often offer us the ability to get out of our own selfishness and truly reach for the future that is beyond our stories.

Part of me is a bit frightened. I’ve been around long enough to know that I am capable of colossal mistakes. I realize how foggy my picture of the future really is. Some days I am so unable to see the way ahead that I don’t even know if I am facing the right direction. “Now we see in a mirror dimly,” the Bible says. The problem with that is that we are riding a fast-paced institution with changes that come at an ever-accelerating pace. At some point, staring at the rearview mirror is not the way to be driving.

The answer, of course, is that God’s vision rarely appears to a single person with the clarity that can move an entire people. Jonah’s story is in the bible in part because it is unique. Never before and not yet again in the stories of our people have seven words (In forty days Ninevah will be destroyed) provided the inspiration for an entire group of people to turn from their ways and start a new life headed in a new direction. For most of the history of our people it has taken groups to see the vision.

Our faith is not determined by what I believe, but rather by what we believe.

I’m not content at this point in my life to be the old guy who always contributes to the conversation only reminiscences of the past, but I am close enough to that to understand the value of past experience. And I am close enough to it to keep my eyes and ears open for the new leadership that is emerging.

Unlike Angelou, I haven’t even started to write my first autobiography yet.

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If you read my blog, you will have noted that while I have political opinions, I rarely write on political topics in my blog. There are a couple of reasons for this. The first is that at my heart, I am more of a philosopher than a politician. I don’t think, talk or write in sound bytes. I am rarely swayed by slogans and “zingers.” I have more interest in complex arguments than in quick solutions. I suspect that many true politicians would find what I have to say to be boring. I find many politicians to be rash and shallow. Both judgments are possibly unfair, but they characterize a basic difference.

I believe that we are a part of something that is much bigger than ourselves. The flow of history, including political history, has antecedents that were set in motion long before we arrived on the scene and our actions are a part of a process that extends long beyond our lives - or even our “legacy” whatever that may be. As such, I believe that many of our human mistakes come from short-sightedness. And short-sightedness is something that is frequent in the cycles of politics. Representatives serve for two years, which means that as soon as they are elected, they are campaigning for the next election. It also means that they must be engaged in constant fundraising. It also means that they are looking for short-term fixes and flashy appearances and spend virtually no energy investing in projects and programs whose results are decades in the future.

I believe that centuries from now, the Supreme Court Case “Citizens v United” will be used as an illustration of one of the poorest decisions to come out of a deliberative body in the story of modern democracies. To explain my position, however, would take longer than several blogs. So, instead, lets take a short look at a bit of the history of philosophy. (Caution, politicians, I’m about to get boring.)

Back in 1840 or ’41 Alexis de Tocqueville published a book called Democracy in America. He concluded that one of the problems of modern democracies is their tendency to encourage individualism and corrode the citizen’s sense of true community. In America, he argued, people lose the sense that their fellow citizens have interests and concerns that are the same as their own. You would think that it might work the other way around, but the results, de Tocqueville are consistent.

The problem with Citizens v United is not what it says about corporations, though what it says is a bit bizarre, it is what it says about individuals. (Note that a true philosopher would disagrees at this point and point out the logical fallacy of using the 14th amendment - a part of Reconstruction that was intended to give full citizenship to freed slaves - to argue that corporations have rights and responsibilities as citizens.)

In contemporary America a corporation is a kind of circle where no one assumes responsibility. They are a system that allows for reward without obligation. The workers state they cannot be responsible for ethical action of the corporation, saying that they have to answer to their executives. The executives claim that they have to answer to the CEO and the Board. The CEO and the Board state they have to answer to the shareholders. The shareholders are often the customers, who are being taken advantage of by the products produced by the workers. It is a huge circle in which no one understands their obligation to assume responsibility.

Stating that corporations are citizens lets individuals off of the hook in terms of civic responsibility. In a corporation, no one sees him or herself as the ethical center of the organization. Corporations expect the government and its regulations to be their conscience. They feel free to do anything that is legal, thus handing off moral responsibility to the government.

Unfortunately too many citizens do the same thing. In conversation after conversation, I hear citizens of the United States speak of the government as if it were some outside entity - as if government by the people and for the people was about some other people - as if the government was something other than us acting together.

If we see the nation as something in which we are all in this together, we might restrain our own behavior because we care about others. We might refrain from seizing the maximum amount for ourselves, because we are motivated to care about fellow citizens. If we see the government at the enforcer of rules, we take every tax break we can find, we seek to maximize personal gain and don’t spend much energy deliberating the effects on others.

This isn’t a liberal v conservative argument. It isn’t an argument about the size of government or any specific government program. It is an argument about individual responsibility.

What I am saying is that we can’t defer our responsibility, our obligations, our duty to corporations or to government. We are responsible for one another. What happens to those on the margins of society affects the whole of society. Our corporations are not somebody else - they are us. The government is not some amorphous independent agency - it is us.

de Tocqueville, however, observed that there is something in modern democracies and in the way that the United States was behaving in the period of time leading up to the Civil War that encourages individuals to fail to recognize their role in the community. Instead of taking responsibility for community, they walk away from others in a form of rank individualism that ignores the plight of the other - even when it is obviously in one’s own self interests to care for the other.

Note that I have fashioned this entire blog without once mentioning Jean-Jacques Rosseau. That’s the problem. I’m a philosopher at heart. The argument is way more complex than can be pursued in a thousand words.

A politician would read this and say, “but what does he want us to do?” And I remain less concerned with what people do than with how they understand themselves.

There is, after all, a long and complex philosophical explanation of why politicians behave the way they do.

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It appears, as I rise for a new day, that the predicted “worst blizzard ever to hit New York City” wasn’t. I don’t mean it didn’t snow. I just mean that the snowfall and wind speeds didn’t exceed previous records. There was less snow in New York than predicted. Up in Boston, it appears that they have a pretty good storm on their hands. It is supposed keep snowing throughout the day and coastal areas are been battered by heavy winds and high seas.

They did a pretty good job of keeping people from being stranded by the storm. Mayors and Governors up and down the eastern seaboard issued travel bans, declared states of emergency, shut down transit systems. Airport hotels began to fill up as flights were cancelled. Not everyone got to their destination, and many those who couldn’t make their trips ended up having to wait out the blizzard before returning to their homes, some of them, no doubt, in sunnier parts of the country.

It was hard for us to imagine the blizzard here yesterday with a high near 70 degrees. Today will be a bit cooler, but the high will still be in the mid-sixties.

Actually, things seem to be working pretty well from what I can gather from a cursory reading of headlines this morning. With electricity companies providing power to millions and millions of homes, outages to only about 5,000 seems like a small percentage. There were some accidents yesterday, but, for the most part people have kept off of the highways and streets. New York and Boston are basically shut down, but everyone needs a snow day from time to time and as long as they have food and shelter we won’t worry about them too much.

The New York Stock Exchange is expected to open and trade normally today.

Snowmageddon 2015 appears not to have been the end of the world.

I’m not very afraid of blizzards. We get our share, from time to time. We keep a pretty good stock of groceries and emergency supplies in our home. We’ve weathered multiple-day power outages in relative comfort. I cut things a bit too close once and ended up leaving the car in the neighbor’s driveway during the fiercest part of the storm, but the walk up the hill was no particular problem and the neighbor got his driveway shoveled for free as I waited for the snowplows to clear the street.

We have switched from Pennington County providing our snow plowing to Rapid City. Since the change, the city hasn’t felt it necessary to send any plows to our neighborhood, so we don’t know how long we’ll wait in the event of a major blizzard - probably longer than was the case with the county. Maybe we’ll get an extra half day off if we get a really big storm. My neighbors get cabin fever pretty easily and they have pretty powerful 4-wheelers with plows. Sometimes they dig us out before the official plows arrive.

What i could do without, however, is all of the hyperbole.

I realize that it takes strong language to get people to use common sense. I know that Governors and Mayors need to make public statements to get folks to stay home when a storm comes. I know that it can be dangerous when ill-prepared people venture out into inclement weather.

But the northeastern part of the United States gets winter every year. Using end of the world language is overstating the reality by quite a little bit. I liked the statement issued by Boston’s mayor about using common sense and common courtesy. On the other hand, Kevin Cullen of the Boston Globe might have hit the nail on the head when he wrote, “This is no time for levelheadedness. Blizzards are like roller coasters: they’re only fun if they scare the begeebers out of you.”

I’m not sure I know what begeebers are. If the urban dictionary can be trusted, some of us think that many of the residents of the big cities of the east have been full of begeebers for years.

Life goes on and the weather gives us something to talk about. We have a few blizzard stories under our belts and it is good to be able to dig them out from time to time and tell them to our grandchildren. I’m so old that I can remember a blizzard when I put the chains on all four wheels of our Montero and drove to the church to check things out and change the message on the answering machine when we decided to cancel services due to the weather. I’m pretty sure our grandchildren will never know a time when one has to go someplace to change a voicemail message. We wouldn’t have to make that trip these days. Of course if we lost electricity, our internet-based phone service would go out in about 4 hours and after that we’d have to use the car to charge the cell phone to call in and change the voice mail at the church. Somehow that doesn’t pack the same punch as driving a four-wheel car with chains in whiteout conditions.

My father used to tell how they tied a rope from the house to the barn so they wouldn’t get lost in the blizzard in the twice-a-day trip to milk the cows. And he had a story of the year when Christmas was delayed for a couple of days because the parents were stuck in town and the kids were taking care of the farm. There was an accompanying story about poorly timed comments about his sister’s pancakes and the lessons he learned. Their folks returned and they had Christmas and the oranges that the folks went to town to meet the train to get were delivered without being frozen.

They apparently didn’t suffer that much.

Think of those poor people in Boston, however. I’ve heard that the supermarkets were running out of bananas yesterday.

I wonder if the grocers were singing, “Yes, we have no bananas!”

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Steve Van Dam has been building one-of-a-kind custom wooden motorboats in his Boyne City, Michigan shop for over 30 years. His boats are often improvements of classic designs, equipped with modern engines and the latest in electronics. The boats themselves, however, are completely hand built from raw lumber. Each component of the wooden boats is milled, cut, planed, and fitted by hand. Some of the finest craftsmen in the United States are employed by Van Dam. A typical hull might have three layers of wood glued up for optimal strength. Two layers of cedar with the grain running at right angles followed by a layer of African mahogany with each piece carefully fitted. All of the metal components are custom made and fitted in the Van Dam shops as are the custom interiors and upholstery.

They don’t produce many boats each year and the boats they produce are strictly high-end.

The goal is perfection in every step of the process, from selecting the woods to applying up to 12 coats of varnish before polishing to a mirror finish.

Before being delivered to the customer, the Van Dam team all participate in water tests of each boat. Designer Michel Berryer, project leader Ben Van Dam and CEO Steve Van Dam all can be seen putting a sparkling new boat through its paces.

Steve reports that there are at least three major sensations that accompany each boat delivery: First of all there is a definite sense of relief. The boat has been completed. The expectations of the customer have been exceeded. Secondly, there is a sense of pride. The Van Dam team does exceptional work - the kind of work that perhaps no other manufacturer can match. And finally, there is a sense of self-criticism. No matter how much work is invested, no matter how much the customer is delighted, the real experts of Van Dam Boats are able to recognize tiny flaws in their boats. Each boat has things about it that they would have done differently. Each boat is a lesson in how to build a better boat.

Despite the frequent use of the word “perfection” at Van Dam boats, no boat is perfect. There is always something that could have been done better.

Of course, I am not in the league with the Van Dam boatbuilders. I have a garage and not a factory. I am not able to purchase wood in large quantities directly from the sawmills. I don’t own commercial saws and planers. I am not able to work at my boats full time. And I make a lot of mistakes that the folks who do this full time for a living avoid.

The difference, however, between a good and serviceable boat and a truly beautiful boat in the league in which I build is the patience that the builder devotes to correcting mistakes. When the glue has dried and I recognize a small gap in the fit of a plank, I have several options. I can ignore the gap. The fiberglass will provide sufficient strength to make the boat serviceable. I can fill the gap with a mixture of wood flour and epoxy. If I use sawdust from the same type and color of wood the filler will not be very visible. I can also cut and fit a new piece of wood to fill the gap. Sometimes this means cutting out part of the wood already glued in place. Sometimes this means fitting a new sliver of wood into the gap and sanding everything smooth.

When I get done I will be able to see the flaw, but it will be hidden from casual observers.

In life there are mistakes that can be avoided. And experience can be a great teacher in that regard. There are plenty of mistakes that I made as a young and inexperienced minister that do not need to be repeated. The same applies to my avocation. I once left a whetstone soaking in water overnight in cold temperatures and the water froze and broke the stone. I have no need to ever repeat that process. One evening I walked away from a boat with curing epoxy and then let the cat into the garage. A rather unattractive hair cut for the cat and several hours of sanding later, I was smart enough not to repeat that set of circumstances.

But there are also mistakes that get made despite our best efforts. I can proofread a document multiple times and get others to do the same and a mistake will still emerge when the printing is done. I can memorize perfectly a poem or passage of scripture and still get the words in the wrong order. On more than one occasion I have left part of a sermon out of a worship service because of a failure of memory.

Unlike Steve Van Dam, however, I don’t use the word perfection. I don’t even make it my goal. I am reminded of the stories that are told of “humility blocks” that are crafted into quilts. The legend is that some quilters would put a deliberate error into their handwork, perhaps a block turned sideways or a mismatched color in one place. The legend is that since only God is perfect, making a perfect quilt is prideful. Some stories attribute such actions to Amish quilters. The legend, however, is at least exaggerated. I don’t think that Amish quilters have to put intentional mistakes into their quilts. They are hand made. Enough mistakes occur in the process without the need of making them “on purpose.” On the contrary, a quilter strives to do her best with every quilt and avoid every mistake that can be avoided knowing that she is human and that some mistakes will occur. And every mistake that is discovered will be corrected. Expert quilters do a fair amount of ripping out stitches and re-doing work.

I don’t have to worry about approaching perfection. But I can take time to correct the mistakes as I see them. The finished product won’t be perfect.

My goal is to do the best I can with the time I am given.

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It is no surprise that I have attended a lot of congregational meetings over the course of my career. The annual meeting of a congregation is generally a pretty calm affair with few surprises. Even when there is a topic that engenders disagreement, the disagreement is usually evident before the meeting and the lines of debate are well known. Of course there can be surprises whenever human beings gather and over the years I have seen some very good new ideas emerge in such meetings. In general, however, calm and even a bit boring is my preferred mode.

At its core, the church is all about relationships. Relationships are best when pursued one-on-one, little by little, rather than in general meetings.

The tradition of congregational meetings, however, is an important part of church history and a key element in our heritage. Before departing the boat that brought them to the shores of Massachusetts, the Pilgrims crafted and signed the Mayflower Compact, a key document in the development of modern democracies. The governing systems of our corner of the church grow up with this country - and with the movement toward modern democracies in general.

How we make decisions in a manner that empowers the general membership and discourages a religious hierarchy is an important part of our identity as Christians. It is hard to separate our faith from our polity.


It is also hard to understand churches without some conception of politics. The flow and distribution of power is a fascinating study. it is not, however, my preferred topic.

I used to get worked up about church meetings. Over the years I have been an active participant in church meetings at the local, Association, Conference and National arenas of our church. I have debated resolutions, campaigned for candidates and deliberated budgets. I have made motions to amend documents and tried to participate in ways that were good for the long-term health of the institution.

And, since becoming a pastor, there have been many nights before a congregational meeting where my sleep was not as comfortable as other nights. I guess that in the mix of things there are lots of things that are worse than losing a bit of sleep and if one is going to lose sleep a cause like the future of the church is worthy of the cost. I’m not the first to lose such sleep and there are many signs that such lost sleep has brought forth important contributions to church and society. Henry Martyn Robert was an engineering officer in the Army who was asked to preside over a meeting at a Congregational church. It has been reported that he didn’t know what he was doing and was embarrassed over the results. He simply couldn’t maintain order. He tried to find books to help him learn how to better conduct meetings and ended up writing Robert’s Rules of Order, which has become the primary guide for running public meetings and meetings of deliberative and legislative assemblies.

My contributions to such meetings is far more modest, but I have learned from experience a few things that I have invested in planning and equipping leaders for their position of moderating such meetings.

Decades ago I belonged to a Toastmasters club and took delight in trying to confuse the chair of the meeting with little-known parliamentary proceedings. It was part of the club to come up with motions and challenges to the order to hone the moderator’s skills as a parliamentarian. Members of the club used to carry copies of Robert’s Rules of Order to meetings with the page corners turned down to mark a particularly obscure parliamentary maneuver that might slow the meeting and provoke an opportunity to show off what they had studied.

A call for the question is technically nothing more than a rude outbreak. A motion to suspend debate can be used to close debate. A motion to the order of the day can be used to move forward to later agenda items leaving the issue at hand unresolved. A motion to suspend can remove an item from the agenda either temporarily or permanently. A motion to suspend the rules is not an invitation to chaos, but rather a formal motion with specific procedures that allows for a temporary suspension of a particular rule to enable a specific action that is desired by the majority of the assembly. Motion to suspend the rules is most often appropriately used to allow voice to a guest, to change the order of a previously-approved agenda or some other action that the assembly clearly wants to undertake.

The use of rules of order to advance the cause of a minority by clever manipulation of the rules is never in order.

A good rule of thumb when making motions is “Does this enable us to accomplish what we want to do?” I often ask myself, “Does this make the meeting longer or shorter?” Parliamentary procedure is supposed to make the gathering more, not less, efficient.

I’m not worried about today’s annual meeting of our congregation. The Board and Departments have done their homework. The reports are clear and easy to read. The budget is balanced and has responded to previously-raised concerns. The slate of nominees is full and the proposed members of Departments and committees are all well-qualified for their service. The moderator is a proven leader with sufficient skills to handle whatever may come up.

Furthermore, we are in a good place as a congregation. We are not facing a major crisis. We have some big challenges and some big dreams that lie ahead, but today’s meeting is pretty straightforward.

Still, I can tell I’m a bit nervous about the meeting. That is my sign that it is important. I get nervous before worship as well. It is not just a time of routine, life-as-usual. It is an important moment in which my participation needs to be carefully planned.

The nervous feeling in my stomach is a sign that I really care. I do.

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The forecast calls for a high today in the 50’s with highs reaching the 60’s in the early part of next week. Temperatures like that make a paddler’s thoughts turn to getting out on the lake. Of course the lakes around here won’t lose enough ice to allow access to the open water yet, even with the warm temperatures. Still, as January heads toward February it is good to get a brief respite from winter and start our minds thinking about springtime. It probably is a good week to catch up on a bit of the yard work that has been hiding under the snow. At least I have some trees to water.

The kayak in the garage is starting to look like a boat. The hull is planked, which means that the shape of the finished boat is visible. It has beautiful lines and I keep running my hands over her and dreaming of how she will feel to paddle. Of course, she is a long ways from being finished. In fact, I am behind schedule and uncertain whether or not she’ll see the water this summer. The next phase of the project is shaping and sanding and going over the hull carefully to make sure that every gap is sealed. There will be a few small areas where I’ll have to cut out a bit of the wood to make room for an additional sliver of similar wood to get the shape and appearance I want. Then there is another week or so of sanding and fairing to get it just right before applying a thin coat of epoxy to seal and a single layer of fiberglass.

Epoxy and fiberglass like warm temperatures. I have a heater in my garage, but it isn’t the kind of thing I leave running 24/7. It runs on kerosene. At over $6/gallon, running that heater dramatically increases the cost of the finished boat. I’ll figure out a window of 4 hours when I can keep the garage over 70 degrees on a warm day and proceed.

After that, the boat gets turned over and things get exciting. Building the deck takes a bit longer than the hull because that is the part of the boat this is up when I paddle (most of the time) and it is the part I look at. So, I want it to be pretty. I’ve got my ideas about the design of the strips on the deck and the colors I want to use, but that is a lot of precision inlay and it will take a while to get things just so. After the deck is sealed and fiberglassed, there is a lot of outfitting, forming the hatch and coaming, installing the access covers and getting them properly sealed, etc.

This boat will get kevlar fabric on the inside. I’ve never worked kevlar before, but it works similar to fiberglass. The cloth is heavier (not in weight, just in thickness) so getting a good wetout with the epoxy will take some work. I want to have a full day with good temperatures when I do that - probably a summer day will be best.

And when all of that is done, I have to put it together, make my end pours, and outfit the boat.

By the time I get to varnish it is going to be late enough next fall that I will be thinking about temperatures I suppose.

Then again, the more a project looks like it can be finished, the more I get excited. The work does speed up on every boat project.

We’ll see. Taking my time is the only way to get the boat that I want. I think that this particular boat demands the patience that took me decades to develop. I’m glad I didn’t start it when I was younger.

Today should afford me 3 or 4 hours to work on the boat. I have other obligations and I want to get to town to watch part of the young artists’ competition. I have a young friend who is competing and whose talent simply amazes me. With some young musicians, i listen and think, “I wish I had practiced more when I was younger.” With others, and my friend is definitely in this category, I realize that no amount of practice would have enabled me to reach his genius and artistry. With people like that, I just am grateful to have been alive at the same time so I can hear the music.

Competitions between teens, however, are unpredictable. Emotions run high and anything can happen.

So I hope to get another hour with the boat after i watch the competition and attend the awards ceremony. Boat building presents challenges, but, for the most part, you can tell what is coming. I think about each step of the process hundreds of times before I do anything. When I was fitting the final strips into the hull, I had imagined those moments so often that it felt very natural to grab a mallet and start tapping on my boat. At this stage, the boat is fragile and a hammer is the last tool one would think of employing. But when the pieces are just the right size and shape, a hammer helps to make the final bend in the strip. I get everything ready and dry fit then put the glue on the strips and place them. A bit of wax paper and a few taps with the hammer and everything went into place nicely. The fit of the final planks is better than was the case on some of the earlier strips.

I think that there is a metaphor for life or for ministry in the fitting of the planks. I wrote a blog post about the theology of clamps once years ago. But I’m not sure that using a leather mallet to tap things into place is a good practice for a minister. In our church, people do what they want for the most part. There’s no forcing them into the shape I want, like I can do with thin strips of wood.

I’ll have to think about that one.

And building a boat is a good place to think about the bigger questions of life.

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“Pastor, would you ever consider preaching about the Muslim situation?” It was an honest question in a comfortable conversation. But, as is often the case, it caught me a bit off guard and I didn’t have an answer. My mind raced to find something intelligent to say. My first instinct was to simply confess that I am not very knowledgable about Islam. I’ve read a few books and parts of the Quran (in English translation, of course), but my life has been devoted to the study of the Christian faith and when I preach I am addressing Christians about our faith.

Of course the questioner was thinking about the most publicized and dangerous acts of radical Muslim terrorists. The recent attacks in Paris have garnered a lot of attention in the media and caused people around the world to wonder how vulnerable they might be to attack.

At the moment I wished i had gotten around to reading Karen Armstrong’s book, out last year, about religion and the history of violence. I had heard an interview with her about the book and knew that her intensive scholarly research led her to the conclusion that relatively little of the violent attacks can be directly related to religion. I’m not certain, but I think she would assert that the violent attacks by Muslim terrorists have not arisen out of the core tenants of the faith, but rather out of relatively new converts who are by and large unschooled in the faith. She would assert that religion, whether Christianity or Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Confucianism, Daoism or Judaism is not the cause of violence, but rather the extreme corruptions of religious ideology.

My conversation partner could sense that I was searching for an answer, and I needed to say something. I spoke briefly about the difference between Europe and the United States in terms of the numbers of people of various faiths. I think I said something about the problem not being the increase in the number of Muslims in our country, which is currently only just over 1/2 of one percent, but rather the decline in Christianity, which has fallen from around 90% in 1990 to around 73% today.

It seems to me that my calling has much more to do with the decline in the number of Americans who identify as Christian than the comparatively minuscule number of people in my country who identify as Muslim.

The truth is that I haven’t studied the decline in Christian identification in the United States. I know that rise of the mega church phenomena - very large congregations with very low commitment required of members - has corresponded with the overall decline in the number of people who identify as Christian, but I have no evidence that there is a cause and effect relationship. I know that the overall decline in membership in mainstream churches has not been caused by other churches. People who drift away from mainstream congregations tend to simply not participate in churches. And I have witnessed the shuffle within congregations. There are plenty of Christian congregations who have experienced growth at the expense of other congregations - gaining virtually all of their new members from existing churches while not reaching out to the unchurched in any effective or meaningful way.

Fortunately, I have been blessed to serve stable and slowly growing congregations for all of my career. Even with the farm crisis of the 1980’s and the rapid decline in population in the counties where our churches were located, we were able to maintain a very modest growth rate in the churches we served. Here in South Dakota, the congregation I serve has experienced ups and downs, but has varied by less than 10% in either direction in the past 60 years. Interestingly, periods of decline in membership have been accompanied by the congregation growing younger, which indicates that the primary factor in decline is the death of older members.

As you can tell by reading this blog, my mind quickly wanders from making comments about other religions. It is a topic about which I have relatively little to say.

So I guess the answer to the question that I never gave in the conversation with a member of our church is, “Yes, I would consider it, but I’m not sure what I would say.”

I think it is a more honest answer than is being given by popular media. Watching television might lead one to believe that terrorist attacks against the United States are on the rise, which is not the case. In fact the past five years have been the least active in terms of the number of terrorist attacks in the United States in the past 40 years. The most active years in terms of attacks were 1987-1991, with a sharp decline in 1992. 2001 to 2004 saw an increase in the number of attacks, but the number of attacks has been at an historic low since 2009. Statistically it is not getting worse. But you wouldn’t know that from watching television.

As a pastor what concerns me is that what is on the rise is fear. And fear is not rational. The level of fear doesn’t always correspond to the level of danger. The rise of fear, however, is a sign of the decline of faith.

The Gospel message begins with a calming of fears. “Do not be afraid,” says the angel to the shepherds. Jesus, it seems, is constantly reminding people, “Do not be afraid.” It seems like I would be preaching the opposite of the gospel were I to try to stir up fear in my congregation - fear of Muslims, fear of terror, fear of any kind.

I would rather contribute in whatever ways I am able to the growth of faith.

On that score, I have another opportunity. The person with whom I had the conversation yesterday will be around tomorrow and many days to come. I will be granted opportunity for more conversations and more ways to share.

I may never preach a sermon about Islam. But there are a few things about Christianity that I still want to say.

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The annual report of our congregation is a big deal to me. I work hard to make it informative, attractive and a document that we are proud to place in the permanent records of the church. I read the annual reports of other congregations to learn about their ministries and to garner ideas about how we might be more effective in the work that we do.

I’m also a bit compulsive about our annual report. There are some members of our congregation who don’t believe that we need the expense of printing our reports in color. There are others who don’t really care much about the reports one way or another. They pick up a copy, read some of the articles - check out their particular interest and move on.

This year, with the urging of faithful members of the congregation, we produced our annual report so that it was ready for circulation a week before the annual meeting of the congregation. This gave members an opportunity to read the reports and be more aware of their contents before they get to the meeting. It was a good idea and about half of our total print run is now in circulation.

It also means that I have already found some mistakes in the report. One major mistake required reprinting some pages in the report. We now have some reports (those that were printed before the mistake was discovered) that have a supplemental page. There are also other reports, including the one on our web site and electronic versions, that have been corrected. About 50 copies of the fully corrected report will be available for the annual meeting.

We try very hard to avoid mistakes. Three sets of eyes read the reports multiple times looking for specific types of mistakes. But we are human and humans make mistakes. And we are a church - we are in the business of forgiveness.

Still, there is a vision inside of me of producing a mistake-free report and I am my own harshest critic when we fall short of that goal. To be clear. The report is the work of a lot of people. Me taking the report personally is as irrational as expecting it to be free of mistakes. I know all of that in my head. Part of my way of being a pastor, however, is loving the church so much that sometimes I take things way too personally. It is one of those things that I am working on. It is one of the reasons I need confession every week. I’m not prone to the kind of big, visible, career-ending sins that create scandal in the church. I seem to be more caught up in the small, irritating sins that require constant attention and small corrections in my course each week.

I don’t know if the average person in the pew would notice this or not, but our usual print runs in our office are run on standard copier paper which is a 20# paper with brightness factor of about 90. It has a slightly rough surface which makes it feed nicely in the copier and produces a readable document. For important documents, such as our worship bulletins, we produce a large-print edition that is roughly 1 1/2 times larger than the normal copies. It works well for general communication.

However, for our annual reports, i want something that is even easier to read. Instead of using the stock paper that the church buys, I personally purchase a premium 28# paper with a brightness factor of 96 and a smooth finish. I have been told by some people that they can’t tell the difference, but to my eye it provides crisper text, sharper graphics, and a better feel in the hand. (I told you I’m a bit obsessive about the annual report, didn’t I?)

The premium paper allows us to use a slightly smaller font size without sacrificing readability. This is important because the reports take a lot of pages. It is also important because we do not produce a large print version of the reports. Those who do not have access to e-readers but who have vision challenges have to use a magnifying glass to read. The toner spreads on the less expensive paper making it appear fuzzy when magnified. On the premium paper, lines are crisper and the text looks much better under magnification.

Sometimes things that are so small that they go unnoticed by the majority of the people can be important to a few people. And sometimes those few find themselves on the fringes of the community because their concern isn’t shared by the majority. Sharp, clear, easy-to read text and pictures that are easy to see are important in communicating the work of the church to the whole church. Sometimes I can’t tell the difference between my obsessiveness and my desire to make everyone feel welcomed and embraced by the community.

We strive very hard to build a community that recognizes and honors all people, not just those who find themselves in the majority. Young readers, struggling to decode their first words, adults with learning disabilities or other challenges that require special assistance with reading, persons with vision disabilities or simply the normal process of aging - all of these people are key parts of our church community. All of these people have a right to feel like the annual reports are for them and about them. And when, in decades to come, some other compulsive person like me comes around and reads those reports, I pray that they will see the people who sometimes feel like they are on the margins.

I keep a couple of vertical files on the shelf next to my desk that contain the 20 most recent annual reports of the congregation. I know how to access previous versions of the reports as well. I look at them from time to time to learn more of the story of our congregation. Paging through them I can see that we are making progress. Ours isn’t a static community, but one that is growing and changing. That is good to know.

I hope the next couple of decades reveal continuing growth and a community where all people, even those who find themselves on the margins, are welcomed, embraced, and served by the church.

To take a look at this year’s report, follow this link: 2014 Annual Report.

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In 1985 we moved to Idaho and shortly after our arrival, I visited our Association camp on Payette Lake. It was a gorgeous, pristine site on a protected cove of a beautiful alpine lake. The camp had four old fiberglass canoes that had been heavy to start with and had gained pounds through numerous paint jobs and repairs over the years. There was a small sailing dinghy that leaked so badly that if you were solo sailing, you had to hold the tiller with your left hand and bail with your right on a port tack. No worries, you got to switch hands when you turned to tack on the other side. And there was paddleboat that you pedaled with more than half of its rudder broke off. Even after I fashioned a new rudder out of aluminum, the boat steered poorly and the pedal bushings were so worn that it made a terrible screeching noise.

Over the next decade I worked with a team of dedicated leaders who developed a first-rate water sports camp. Our teens had a full day of water safety instruction including certification in CPR, a day of wind-surfing, a day of small craft sailing, a day of ACA certified canoe instruction and a half-day whitewater raft trip on the North Fork of the Payette River. In order to support the program I was personally involved in the purchase of four sailboats, three canoes and six wind surf boards. I brokered donations, bought used equipment and raised funds to support the camp.

Along the way, I made my first woodstrip canoe, a 17’ tandem canoe, made from plans with very few tools. Later I found a Sunfish hull on a boatyard scrap heap, rescued it, salvaged a mast and sail from another scrap yard, bought a used trailer, made a centerboard and rudder and sailed it for a couple of years. I came close to breaking even when I sold the boat for $150. Since those days, I have made two more canoes, two kayaks and rescued an additional canoe from the scrap heap. I restored an antique canoe for a friend. I also have purchased two plastic kayaks.

So I’ve been involved in buying and building enough boats to know a little bit about the process.

If you add up all of the money I have spent on boats in my life, including the funds I raised and invested on behalf of the camp and the money I have spent on my own boats, the total would be about the same as the purchase price of an Iridium satellite phone system for a yacht. That’s right, there are yachts in harbors with telephones that cost more than all of the boats I have ever been involved in purchasing. Over the next few weeks yacht owners will be assembling in several different locations to compete in Caribbean Regattas. Some of these will be class races, where all of the competing boats will be the same make and model. The buy-in for some of those yachts is in the $6 to $8 million range.

The people who own that kind of boat would be quick to say that I know nothing about buying boats. They also would be quick to point out that I know nothing about sailing. I certainly don’t have enough knowledge or experience to operate their boats.

But I doubt if there are any owners of those boats who have had as much fun in the water as I have had. I wonder if any of them have spent a week with a teenager who began the week afraid of the water and ended up laughing as she was splashed while riding a raft down a Class III rapid. I bet none of them have sat in a rowboat coaching a 14-year-old through the first raising of a windsurf sail. Do they know the joy of gunwale walking a canoe or directing a brand-new stern paddler through a course of floats yelling “the other left! Your other left!”

I’m willing to bet that I watched more sunrises from the surface of the water last year than most of those yacht owners.

It is simply true that you don’t get more enjoyment out of boating by spending more money. The ones who spend the most money aren’t the ones who ge the most joy.

And I’m pretty sure that subscribers to Yachting Magazine don’t get as much fun out of reading their magazines as I do from my subscription to Messing About in Boats. Each month I receive 60 pages of small print in a black and white magazine that wasn’t produced by a team of graphic designers, but has stories about boats by people who really enjoy them. I can’t imagine what kind of people own multi-million dollar yachts. I don’t know any of them. But I suspect I could really have fun with Johnny Mack, who built a “Fullly Cup Holdered, Low Impact, All Purpose, Expeditionary Slow Cruiser” out of salvage parts on a $250 budget. I know I’d rather take a trip on the Erie Canal with Johnny than crew one of the yachts racing in the Caribbean next month. In addition to not being an expert in sailing, I know nothing of proper vintages of fine wines and wouldn’t know how to buy a bottle for the yacht owner. I’d have no problem picking out a six pack of beer as a gift for Johnny.

I’m pretty sure that God never intended for me to be rich. What makes that work out is that I’m perfectly happy with that as well. I get a bigger kick out of going to the hardware store with $20 in my pocket than I would going to a boat show with a million dollars.

Besides, none of my boats seem to have need of a telephone. If you call me around sunrise on a summer morning, be prepared to leave a message. My phone will be in the car in the parking lot. Who wants a phone call to interrupt sunrise solitude on a gorgeous lake?

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Many years ago, when I was a young pastor in a rural community, I began working with the youth of the community. We hosted a few social events at our church, we promoted church camps and conferences, we organized a ski trip to the Black Hills and we began to build relationships with the young people. Many of those relationships turned into life-long connections. We keep track of those people and their families to this day. At the time, I was encouraged to work directly with the youth. It was a small town, so we also got to know the parents and the support of the parents was instrumental to our work. The school was the other major factor in the lives of the youth, but we rarely had any conflict with the school or school schedules. The regular meeting of our youth group was Sunday evening and the school didn’t schedule events on Sundays.

I remember one occasion where we had planned a trip to attend a statewide youth rally. Our weekend trip required us to leave on a Friday afternoon. The football coach had scheduled a “can’t miss” practice that day and one of the star football players was part of our youth group. When the youth approached the coach to see what would be worked out, the coach was insistent and said that if he missed the practice, he wouldn’t play in the next game. I spoke with the youth and told him that it looked like he had a hard decision to make. I couldn’t tell him what to do, but that we would back him in whatever decision he made. It turned out that the young man attended the church event, missed the practice and, in the end, the coach backed down and he was allowed to continue playing football.

But that is the only conflict that I can remember from seven years of ministry.

How much the world has changed! A decade later, in another town, the youth used to bring calendars to youth group planning sessions so that we could work on complex schedules. There were many school events that had to be considered and quite a few lessons, sports teams, and other activities that weren’t officially sponsored by schools that were important to the youth. We continued to maintain an active youth group, but we had to work hard to coordinate schedules and we learned to get the word out quickly when we learned of an event so we could get onto our students’ schedules before another event took their time.

Even that way of working with you seems “long ago” these days. When we plan a youth event, we have to keep in mind that the majority of the youth in our group don’t know their own schedules. They’ll say “That sounds like a good idea,” or even “I’ll be there!” when they have a conflict and are not able to participate. At first, when this started to happen, I thought that the youth were being dishonest, or at least inattentive. Neither is the case. They are simply so over scheduled that they can’t remember all of their activities.

Not long ago I was trying to schedule a rehearsal for a group of musicians in our church to sing and play for worship. One young member of the group got out a cell phone and began to scroll through the calendar. “I’ve got a 45-minute opening in two and a half weeks. I’m pretty busy.”

That busy, over-scheduled lifestyle starts pretty young these days.

We have 10-year-olds in our church who are on traveling hockey teams that play out-of-town games as far away as 325 miles one way. The tournament will be over 400 miles away. Those kids practice multiple times a week to be ready for those long-distance trips.

Childhood, for many of the young people we know, is so different from the way I grew up that I wonder if I would be able to survive at such a pace. We used to build kites, skip rocks, make tree houses, go for long walks and skate for miles on irrigation ditches. We even had time to get bored from time to time. My father closed his business and locked the door for lunch hour, which took an hour at our home. After we ate, we sat and talked. And we had long and slow conversations with pauses and silences. It wasn’t natural for me to learn to sit at the table. I remember it being a bit of a struggle. But I never had any reason not to share quiet times with my family. And I knew that my desire to get to my games didn’t change the fact that eating together was what a family did - it was expected of us.

As I said, the world has changed. These days it seems that the societal standard for “good” parents is to over schedule them and fill their lives with so much stress and business that their lives are just like their’ parents’ lives. And, yes, today’s parents are as busy and over scheduled as their children.

I think we’ve become confused.

After all we call ourselves human beings, not human doings.

Part of my daily routine is to ask others how they are. I greet volunteers and church employees with, “How are you?” Often I find out a lot about their schedules and the list of tasks that lie ahead of them in the next hours, days, and weeks. I really am interested in the lives of other people. I want to hear more than how many items have been checked off of a to-do list. I long for genuine conversation.

And, I have found, I’m not the only one longing for genuine connection with others. A meaningful life, a sense of community, a balanced existence requires us to develop a new attitude toward our schedules - and probably to the devices we use to keep track of our schedules.

How is the state of your heart today? Take a moment. Put your hand on my arm. Look into my eyes. Let’s make a connection that goes beyond knowing what each other is doing.

After all, if you send me an e-mail, it might get lost in the shuffle. If you give me a gift of your time it will not be forgotten.

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It is about the time of the year when winter has taken hold and though we currently are not in the grip of a storm, we also know that winter is not over. It is at this point in the year that I begin to think about warmer weather. I wonder how many more days before the ice goes out of the lake and I’ll be able to take a boat up and get it wet. It is a bit early for the seed catalogues, but at this time of the year it works to plan a big garden knowing that the real work won’t have to begin today. And, of course, as our thoughts turn to warmer weather, it is never too early to plan summer vacation.

Actually, in recent years, we have taken vacation at different times of the year. Sometimes it is good to keep working through the summer, using the time when activities slow at the church to plan and prepare for the busier seasons of church life. And since our children are now grown, we do not have our lives dictated by the school schedule in the same way that we did when they lived at home. So we are free to take a week in September or October or even in December as we did this year.

I have not, however, forgotten those days when we planned around the summertime for our vacations. It takes a bit of planning to make everything work out. Although children get a break from school, there are plenty of other activities to take up time during the summer. By the time you figure in camps and summer jobs and other factors, it can be downright complex to find a time for a family vacation.

For some reason I was thinking yesterday about a family with a schedule that is busier than mine. President Barak Obama’s family have many demands on their schedules. Although their annual Christmas vacation to Hawaii receives a lot of publicity, they need to be getting their heads around their summer vacation plans.

After all they have a high school junior in their home. Maria is 16 and the summer after your junior year in high school means it is time to plan college visits in the search for the perfect campus for your four year academic and social career. I’m sure that the President and First Lady have a lot of other things on their schedules, but college shopping needs to be remembered in their family initially for this summer.

With our son, there was only one campus that he seemed to like. Fortunately, it was the one he chose and you only need one college. By the time he headed to graduate school, he was able to make the visits and decisions alone without his parents along.

I suppose Malia needs to include a visit to Occidental College in Los Angeles, her father’s undergraduate institution. A visit to her mother’s alma matter, Princetown is a closer jaunt from their Washington, DC home.

I’ve read that Malia likes tennis, so when she is in California checking out her dad’s college, she ought to take a look at UCLA and the University of Southern California, both top-rated tennis schools. Closer to home, The University of Virginia ranks well for tennis. I suppose she could check out Ohio State and Baylor as well. But I hope she doesn’t forget the University of Oklahoma. That one might escape her radar, but it is consistently ranked near the top in the lists of college tennis.

Of course, Malia’s career interest, which I’ve heard is filmmaking, might not be a strong suit for University of Oklahoma. On that score, the California universities might have more to offer.

But who knows what career they want to pursue at the age of 16? I don’t think I knew.

It was different for me. I didn’t shop around for colleges. My grandfather had been a college trustee. My father was a trustee of the same college. I guess I sort of assumed that I would attend that college. And I did. I never even applied to any other institution.

If Malia is planning on applying to several colleges, she needs to remember the cost. Application fees average a little less than $40 with some approaching $100. You have to consider those things when making your plans.

Maybe Malia might consider applying to Carelton College. It is a Forbes top ranked college and they have no application fee at Carelton. While they are in the neighborhood. St. Olaf has a good reputation and no application fee. Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where Steve Jobs attended, has no application fee. But they do have a reputation for high tuition. I actually don’t know anything about the Obama family’s finances, but I’m thinking that they will figure out some way to swing college tuition. After all they have only two daughters.

College tuition was a bit of a squeeze for our family, but it is an expense I have never regretted. After we got our kids through their education, i bought a new truck. The truck is showing signs of wearing out. The kids’ education seems to have been a wiser long-term investment. OK the college cost more than the truck, but still it seems like a good deal. And, for the present, the Obama family doesn’t need to worry about the cost of a family car.

So as we think about what we might do with our vacation this year, which probably will be pursuing the things we like the most - visiting children and grandchildren, I’m grateful that we are at a life phase where we don’t have a big decision like where to go to college looming over our family.

I wish the President and First Lady luck as they plan their summer. I’m thinking that Malia will have plenty to say about the choice of colleges. If they are smart, and I think they are, they’ll listen to their daughter as they consider their summer plans.

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People talk and think about the passage of time in different ways. My parents were a little less than seven months different in age. My father was the older of the two. As soon as his birthday was past, he would say, I’m in my . . . year. For example after his 50th birthday, he’d say, “I’m in my 51st year.” My mother spoke of her age in the conventional manner. I never knew if my father spoke about his age because that’s the way his family was or because he had done many things early in his life and there had been a time when he was considered “too young” by others or, more likely, because he got such a good response out of my mother. “Oh Walt!” she’d exclaim, “You’re not that old.”

I’ve known pastors who speak of their experience in the church in a similar manner. A colleague and I began serving in the same conference during the same month. When we were at meetings and introducing ourselves, he would always report that he had been in the conference longer than I. We served together in that same conference for more than 10 years. I always joked that he was the only one I knew who could cram 15 years of experience into 10 years and that he was accumulating years so quickly that he would reach retirement decades before I did. He did retire from the pastoral ministry at a young age.

In different cultures, the way that people count ages differs. There are many stories about situations that were created by the custom in some parts of Asia to count the age of a child from the estimated time of conception, not from the time of birth. As long as there is only one culture involved, there is no problem, but when a person spends time in a different culture, some minor confusion can arise out of the different ways of counting age.

I’ve been thinking about the passage of time in regards to my own life. There are things that I have done for relatively short periods of time. After living for 17 years in my home town, I lived for only 4 years in my college town and for only 4 years in my graduate school town. Our pastorates to date have been 7 years, 10 years and 20 years. Before that I had many jobs that lasted only 1 or 2 years, and several that were only a matter of months. There was a succession of summer jobs during our educational years. Some I did multiple summers, but if you add up several summers, it doesn’t count much in years.

Of course some things can be significant even when they are short in duration. We only spent a little over a month in Australia. Although it has been spread over several different trips, I’ve spent less than 50 days in Costa Rica. Both places, however, have become significant in my story and I have life-long relationships that have grown out of those experiences.

Things don’t have to be long in duration to be meaningful.

When I was young I was collecting experiences and there were many things that I did for a little while and then moved on. I did, however, make some long-term commitments when I was young. I was just a week beyond my 20th birthday when we were married. More than 42 years later, we’re still enjoying that commitment. 5 years later I was ordained. That seems to have stuck as well.

Now, however, I have reached a phase of life where some of my adventures need to be for shorter amounts of time. I am no longer young enough to make a 50-year commitment, as I have envisioned my career as a minister. These days I need to think twice about 20-year commitments. When I start new projects, I need to assess whether or not I have the energy or stamina to complete them.

We’ve been thinking in terms of 50 years around the church lately as we lay the foundation for a major capital funds drive that will make serious long-term investments in our building and infrastructure. At one meeting we were talking about our vision for the church a half century down the road. Of course I had to point out that most of us wouldn’t be around 50 years from now. I didn’t do so to dampen the excitement of the meeting, but rather to remind us that we needed to be careful about consulting with church members who are much younger than we as we talk and envision the future.

Perhaps the provence of those of us who have long years of experience is to keep our attention focused on the short-term. The funding for our 50-year projects needs to be raised over the next three years. Attention to details in the next three years will make a big difference for the congregation 20 years and more down the road.

The span of time that we measure in this life is pretty small when compared to the fast sweep of history. Biblical history goes back 4 millennia and more. That is just a blip on the span of geological history. When they start talking about the age of the universe, my mind tends to become confused. I have no idea what a million years is, let alone the 13.8 billion years that has been posited as a possible number for the age of the universe.

The Psalmist commented on different perspectives of time. “For a thousand years in they sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night.” (Ps. 90:4). What seems to us to be a long time is not the same from God’s perspective.

Our grandson, who is four, has to wait a quarter of his life between birthdays. For our granddaughter at six months her next birthday is a lifetime way. For grandpa, a year is a small fraction of the time I have seen.

Time and its meaning is elusive. Fortunately, we are blessed to be able to imagine beyond our time and when we have accumulated a few years of experience we are able to put some smaller amounts of time in perspective.

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There is a scene in the 1998 Movie “The Horse Whisperer” where the mother of a severely traumatized daughter stops at the Little Bighorn Battlefield as she travels with her daughter’s injured horse to Montana in search of healing for the horse and for her daughter. They arrive late and there are iron gates locked tightly keeping her out of the battlefield. It was one of many moments in that movie where I had to snicker. The gates shown in the scene, as well as the tall spruce trees, are at the cemetery of my home town - nearly 150 miles away from the battlefield. It didn’t take me long to recognize the gates, though I had never before seen them closed. In my town in the days when I was growing up, before the Interstate Highway was built, the cemetery was at the end of 4th street, an easy bike ride from my home. In fact, we used to ride horses in the field next to the cemetery road where now there is a museum.

There are other scenes in that movie that a local notices. For example, while the front of the Lazy J Motel is as the motel has appeared for decades, there is no horse corral behind the motel for the guests. There is no horse corral at all there. Those scenes were filmed at the fairgrounds. At the end of the movie when the woman leaves the ranch of the horse whisperer she is driving on the West Boulder Road and she is driving the wrong direction. In the direction she is heading in the shot there is nothing but a dead end. If she wants to get back East, she’ll have to turn around and that won’t be an easy job pulling a horse trailer on that road.

Movies are only one way of telling stories, and the stories we tell aren’t always completely true. I’ve know that for a long time. The funeral scaffold scene in the 1970 film “Little Big Man” was filmed from a very low angle so that you can’t see the house that is very close to what is pictured in the scene as a lonely hilltop looking toward the Prior Mountains. And, if you look closely, you can see an airplane on approach to Logan Field in Billings in the corner of one of the shots.

I’ve know stories of the Battle of the Little Bighorn for as long as I can remember. It was common to call it Custer’s Last Stand when I was younger and that was the name for the gas station and convenience store that have been at the bottom of the hill where Highway 212 now meets Interstate 90. When I was young we went there. I had heard of my friends hunting arrowheads and shell casings in the area, but we were under strict orders from our parents not to pick up anything. Even if we saw an arrowhead, we were to leave it where we saw it. Nothing was to be disturbed. The rolling hilltop and the slopes towards the creek where the cottonwoods grew were sacred ground. People had died there. The white obelisk at the top of the hill marked the burial place of some of the soldiers.

It is different if you visit the field today. The dirt path was graveled and a loop was added to the south to where Reno and Benteen and their men holed up after the unsuccessful attempt at attacking the encampment from the south. The road into the battlefield is now paved and there is a museum-visitor’s center. The evergreens have gotten tall and almost look like they were supposed to be on the hill that was once bare of trees. They have put white markers where the soldiers fell and red markers to show the places where Lakota and Cheyenne warriors died.

I don’t much like to visit the place. I’m no believer in ghosts or hauntings. It is just a place of so much death and it carries memories of a tragic part of our history. The cemetery at Wounded Knee feels much the same to me. But it is part of the history of the place where I live. It is about 250 miles from my home to the Little Big Horn Battlefield. Wounded Knee, between Porcupine and Pine Ridge, is about 90 miles in the opposite direction. You can cover the entire distance in a day without much trouble. Of course, it took the Lakota a longer time and they followed a different route than the modern highways. The agency Lakota went south of the Black Hills and then cut north between the Black Hills and the Big Horns to get to the large encampment where Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse and the other leaders gathered in the early summer of 1876. They called the area the Greasy Grass.

I have been thinking of those places lately because I received Joseph Marshall’s novel “The Long Knives are Crying” as a Christmas gift. It is a compelling read, even for one who doesn’t enjoy battle stories. Marshall is an excellent storyteller and I have enjoyed his other works, both fiction and nonfiction very much. As a native Lakota speaker he is one of the best contemporary interpreters of Lakota culture currently alive.

It is important, I believe, to hear and read the stories told from the indigenous perspective. Marshall tells the stories well.

I am glad that the official name of the battlefield has been renamed from its one-time monicker: “The Custer Battlefield.” There are still several things named after Custer in our area, including the town in the hills where he led an expedition to explore the hills.

The battle was never about Custer, though he made some incredibly poor decisions leading up to the decisive victory for Crazy Horse, Gall and others inspired by the vision of Sitting Bull. He barely merits a mention in Marshall’s telling of the story. The battle never was about him.

Of course we know that in the end, the overwhelming numbers of soldiers finally forced all of the Lakota to the reservation system. Crazy Horse died at Fort Robinson where he went to the Red Cloud agency in hopes of negotiating a reservation northwest of the hills, near the Bighorn mountains. He was stabbed by a soldier’s lance. They say that Little Big Man was holding his hands behind his back when he was stabbed.

It is a tragic story in the history of this place and the surrounding countryside. By the time I was born, the battlefield was near the place where the Crow and Cheyenne reservations met each other.

The battle, however, was never about Custer. It is a much bigger story.

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Although I have been privileged to travel a great deal and to see many wonderful places, there is still a long list of places that I would like to one day visit. Sometimes, when I am tired, at the end of a long day, I will spend a few minutes with a map or a quick Internet search and think about a trip that we might take.

One place, however, that I have no particular desire to visit is the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. I’m sure that there is plenty of valuable information that can be gained by looking at the displays that trace the history of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States from the 17th century to the present.

But I have no desire to visit the Lorraine Motel. I don’t want to look up at the wreath on the second floor balcony. I don’t want to peer into room 307. I don’t want to dwell on the events of April 4, 1968.

Before the establishment of the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday three decades ago, I remember his widow, Coretta Scott King and his children, Dexteer, Martin, Yolanda and Bernice urging us to focus not on the day of his death, but on the day of his birth for our observances. I know that there is an ancient Christian tradition of recalling death dates as the time when the beloved entered into eternity. Most saints’ days are on or near the time of the death of the saint, not their birth. But as we journey from Dr. King’s birthday yesterday to the official holiday on Monday, I can’t help but remember Coretta’s courageous admonitions to us to “celebrate his life rather than mourn his death.”

One of the places I have been able to visit is the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia. The Center is the place of the tombs of Dr. King and his wife Coretta. It has a reflecting pool and a fountain and outdoor space for quiet walks and meditation. But it is primarily a library containing the largest collection of primary source materials on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and the American Civil Rights Movement. Dr. King’s papers and those of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference that he helped to found are there as well as the official documents of other civil rights organizations and individuals active in the movement. The center also has a large collection of recordings of Dr. King and you can hear recordings of his voice and watch video of some of his speeches at the center.

He had an amazing voice. Dr. King understood oral speech and he had a sense of the rhythm and musicality of speaking to large audiences. For preachers and storytellers, it is a lesson and a treat to just listen to him speak.

His words ring so true today decades after they were spoken.

On August 16, 1967, Dr. King delivered his annual report tot he 11th Convention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference in Atlanta. A short excerpt from his report is good advice and teaching for the situation we find ourselves in today:

“And I say to you, I have also decided to stick with love, for I know that love is ultimately the only answer to mankind’s problems. And I’m going to talk about it everywhere I go. I know it isn’t popular to talk about it in some circles today. And I’m not talking about emotional bosh when I talk about love; I’m talking about a strong, demanding love. For I have seen too much hate. I’ve seen too much hate on the faces of sheriffs in the South. I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many Klansmen and too many White Citizens Councilors in the South to want to hate, myself, because every time I see it, I know that it does something to their faces and their personalities, and I say to myself that hate is too great a burden to bear. I have decided to love. If you are seeking the highest good, I think you can find it through love.”

We have seen too much hate in our time. We’ve seen too many terrorists pumping bullets from automatic weapons into people they perceive to be their enemies. We’ve seen the effects of bombs intended to destroy innocents in the name of hateful causes. We’ve seen too many attacks on police and grocery stories and almost any other kind of place where people gather. We know what hate looks like.

Once again it is time for a rallying cry for love. Dr. King was clear that he wasn’t talking about some soft, sentimental, emotional rush. He was not talking about a resignation of power, but rather the kind of love that is a force of integrity that can be encountered - love that is a soul force that brings change to the world.

Dr. King lived his life for a better world. He was concerned about justice and community and truth.

What made Dr. King’s message so important for us is that he never advocated violence. Another quote that Dr. King used in several different speeches says it better than I can:

“For through violence you may murder a murderer, ut you can’t murder murder. Through violence you may murder a liar, but you can’t establish truth. through violence you may murder a hater, but you can’t murder hate through violence. Darkness cannot put out darkness; only light can do that.”

Yesterday, as I remembered Dr. King in my private devotions, I reminded myself once again of my commitment to join Dr. King. I too, have decided to stick with love.

Those who spread terror may cause great pain and grief and anguish, but they will not build the future. The future will be built on love. No place is that more clear to me than in the story of Dr. King. A sniper’s bullet killed him as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. But his story did not stop there. His story will never end.

“For faith, hope and love remain - these three. And the greatest of these is love.”

The love of Dr. King remains. I’ll stick with the love.

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Here is a letter I’ll probably never send. It is cynical and probably shouldn’t even appear in my blog. I’m pretty sure a sitting governor who was reelected by a comfortable margin has no need of advice from someone like me.

Dear Governor Dugaard,

Now that your State of the State address has been delivered, I am sure that the legislature will get down to action on your proposals and priorities. After all the Republican super-majority legislature has seemed in the past quite content to follow your marching orders. There probably weren’t many surprises in your address for the legislators and the people of South Dakota - unless, of course, one considers what you didn’t say.

It was clear from your speech that roads and bridges are very high on your priority list. It is pretty rare for a contemporary Republican to call for tax increases, so when you call for roughly $50 million in tax increases, you got our attention. Maybe the only thing that seems more threatening than proposing new taxes is compiling with the requirements of federal funding. I haven’t read your proposed legislation and I’m no expert on laws and politics anyway, but I would like to propose a modest addition to your projects.

I hope that when all is said and done they select one of the new bridges and name it after you. The Dennis Dugaard bridge. A well-engineered bridge can last for a century and even more. If they were to select one of the best bridges to name after you, it would make a lasting legacy. Your name would be remembered for decades.

The second topic that garnered time in your speech was juvenile justice reform. After copying a Texas plan in the last legislative session that reduces the number of people in prison without reducing the number of people convicted of crimes it seems logical that you would try to apply the same kind of fix to the juvenile justice system. Instead of addressing the fact that more South Dakotans are convicted of crimes than is the case in any of our neighboring states by taking steps to reduce crimes, the legislature, under your leadership, decided to simply reduce the number of people in prison. It was a simple, short term fix.

Now you are proposing a similar approach to juvenile crime. Reduce the number of juveniles in detention and you can reduce the appearance of juvenile crime without investing in crime prevention or actually reducing the number of juveniles convicted of crimes. Again, a simple, short-term fix.

That is why I think that it would be a good idea to name a bridge after you. The bridge is going to last a lot longer than your so-called solutions to the reality that South Dakota convicts more of its citizens of crimes than any of our neighbors. Instead of looking into the criminal code or examining the reasons behind high rates of crime - most of which are nonviolent - tweaking the legislation can provide a change in the appearance. After all, with 416 people for every 100,000 in prison compared to the North Dakota rate of 226 per 100,000 or Canada with 117 per 100,000, it doesn’t make the state look too good. And prisons are expensive. It is hard to find money for other projects - including those roads and bridges you want to build - when you are spending all your money on prisons.

Now that you are in your second term as our governor, short term solutions are good enough for you. After all, it won’t be long before there is another election and it looks like your predecessor won’t be yielding his senate seat soon enough for you to consider that as your next job.

Then, of course, there are the things you didn’t mention in your speech. I guess those things just aren’t important to you. I guess you might claim to have addressed K-12 education because you made a brief reference to dual-credit courses, but to a non-politician, average citizen listening to your speech, it sure seemed like you were avoiding that topic all together.

I guess you can claim to be “pro-education” because you proposed a 3% increase in K-12 funding in your budget speech. You probably could have gotten by with 1.6% without violating the law.

Either way, it seems pretty obvious that the state with the lowest teacher pay int he nation doesn’t plan on changing that anytime during your tenure. After all it would take an additional amount of only about one tenth of the amount you are proposing in new taxes for roads and bridges to bring the state allocation for K-12 up to the per-student allocation’s previous high point of $4,805. That, of course, wouldn’t bring us close to the funding our neighbors provide for K-12 education, but it might be a small step in the right direction.

I know, I’ve heard your argument that quality isn’t dependent on funding and that money isn’t the only way to address educational problems. Fair enough. It only makes me more sad that you didn’t talk about those other ways. I live in Pennington County and our neighborhood was recently annexed into the City of Rapid City. I’ve been watching the systematic deconstruction of the Rapid City School District caused by a lack of adequate funding. I’m a veteran of a lot of conversations with really good teachers who have taken early retirement and moved on to other states in order to pursue their vocation in a place where their compensation is adequate for their living expenses. I know that there are excellent teachers who aren’t motivated by money. But they need groceries and rent as much as the rest of us do. I can’t blame them when they make the move to Wyoming or Minnesota for the pay raise. That exodus of talent will accelerate with this year’s budget woes in the district.

So that is I why I think a bridge named after you would be such a good idea. Perhaps, with a little luck, the bridge might last a century - almost as long as it will take to repair the damage caused by eight years of inattention to K-12 education by a governor who has other priorities.

Faithfully,
Ted Huffman

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In general, I am not a procrastinator. I like to face my work and get it done. I tend to turn in work ahead of deadlines. Occasionally, however, I am working to deadlines in ways that I did not expect. Today is one of those deadlines. We are in the midst of production of our church’s annual reports and my report is not yet finished. I have three different starts on the project and a list of ideas about what I might say, but the report is not written. For most of the 37 years of my career as a pastor, my annual report to the congregation has been completed in a half hour or so. It doesn’t take too long to summarize the work that has been accomplished. The year that has just passed is on the top of my memory and remembering what I have done isn’t hard work.

I am sure that people read annual reports with different expectations. Some are looking for the overall health of the institutional church. They are checking the financial figures, the reports of activities, and the words of ther pastor tor signs of mission accomplished and funds well managed. Others read the report for a sense of belonging. They want to see how they fit into the overall program of the church. They like to see their own name or picture in the report. Others read with an eye to changes that they would like to see in the year to come. They wonder whether or not the report is of business as usual and look for innovation and new programs and projects.

It is probably a product of my age and perhaps a bit of my experience, but I am no longer satisfied with lists of tasks accomplished. I am not as interested in results of my work as I am with faithfulness. What I would like to express to the congregation is my continuing search for wholeness in the ministry - the development of a spirituality that is not about me and what I can do, but about deepening relationships between God and the members of the congregation.

To put it in different words, I would like to report on the growth of the church toward the really big values of love, truth and justice. And those really big values are much deeper than a list of accomplishments.

A colleague recently commented that he has been focusing on his effectiveness as a pastor. He concentrates on what gets accomplished. While I respect my colleague, I know I cannot look at my work from that perspective. When a person becomes attached to “effectiveness” there is a continual temptation to take on smaller and smaller tasks because it is easy to get consistent results from the small tasks.

To put it in yet a different light: If I focus on tasks accomplished in an annual report, I have to speak of things that can be done in a single year. But the church is about long-term faithfulness. Do I really want to constrain a church that has 136 years of ministry behind it to looking head at only the things that can be finished in a year?

I find myself wanting to dream about what will happen 50 and a hundred years from now in the life of the congregation. And I know that I will not be the pastor for the majority of those years. The things that I really care about are much bigger than what I can accomplish.

Will our church be able to be a community of faith in the midst of an increasingly secular world? Will we speak out for justice when others are silent? Will we be a place of hope for those who find themselves on the margins of society?

What I want to report to the congregation is more than just what tasks I have accomplished. Indeed I have been busy. I have visited families, I have planned and provided leadership for funerals. I have preached sermons. I have taught classes. I have directed staff members. I have produced resources. I have attended meetings.

Whatever the outcomes of the work I have done, however, will stand on their own. The congregation doesn’t need me to report on these. They will be evident in the larger story of the church.

What I want to write to the congregation is about whether or not I have been faithful to my gifts. Have I responded to the needs I saw around me? Have I used my gifts to address the needs of others? Have I been faithful to the vocation? These are the questions that occupy my self evaluation.

Quite frankly, after all these years as a minister, the list of things I have done is a bit boring. What excites me is not what I have done, but who I am. Even more exciting is what our community is becoming. I am convinced that I am far less likely to meet the resurrected Christ in my reminiscences than in starting something new. No matter what words I find to put in my annual report, it will still be an index of what has happened and the exciting edge of our faith is not what has been, but what is becoming. God continually calls us to the future.

This doesn’t mean that the words I put in the annual report are unimportant. Who knows? Someday a few decades from now some historian might blow the dust off of our old reports (or more likely discover them in digital archives) and read the words we crafted for this year. Perhaps those words will give some insight into the work that God is accomplishing in our midst. More important than the “legacy” value of the words, however, is the power of an annual report to capture the excitement of the congregation about what is yet to come.

And now I have written more words about the process of writing an annual report than will be in my annual report and that report is still unwritten. There is still work to do and words to write. May I bring integrity to that work and genuineness to those words.

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Many years ago I was speaking to a forester who worked in the Boise National Forest. He was a bit frustrated with some of the policy decisions that were made by bureaucrats in regards to forest management. “The problem,” he said,”is that politics runs in two- and four- and six year cycles. A president who serves two full terms is only president for eight years. In the forest, however, the cycles are much bigger. The forest has cycles that last for hundreds and thousands of years, but nobody who is involved in politics can think in terms beyond a decade. So the policies change all of the time, while the forest continues to live at its own pace.

The challenge, of course, is different in the massive national forests of the west. Head up into British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska and there are even larger tracts of forested land. Here in the Black Hills, our forest is smaller. The hills are a kind of an island in the midst of the prairie, separated from other ranges, such as the Big Horns to the west. That doesn’t mean that our forest has cycles that are any shorter than those of larger tracts of land, just that we can see the effects of those cycles a bit more clearly because we are surveying a smaller plot of land.

There is a kind of cycle in the hills that involves heavy forestation, beetle attacks and outbreaks and fire. Then that cycle repeats. And we find ourselves in the midst of the the beetle attacks, though there are some signs that the intensity of the present attack is lessening.

It is our instinct to fight back when the beetles attack. We don’t like the sight of thousands of dead and dying trees on the hills. We are afraid of the fire danger that accompanies acres of dry dead fuels. We can accept the reality of fire as a part of the forest life cycle, but we feel different when we are talking about our own back yards and the forest recreation sites where we go for rest and renewal.

The hills have a long history of human intervention and management. It isn’t, however, really long from the perspective of the forest.This summer will be only been 141 years since the 1874 Black Hills Expedition surveyed the hills, photographed its tree-covered landscape, and discovered gold that forever changed the face of the hills. We do have pictures from that expedition. We do know that the hills had a lot less trees in those days. What we can’t tell is if that kind of more lightly forested landscape is in our future. We don’t even know 150 years of the story of the place we live, and the forest has cycles that are likely much longer.

Of course those who study forests know more about the history of the landscape. They have studied evidence in long-lived standing trees, evidence in the soils and rocks and even archeological evidence in the fossil record. There is some sense that the number of trees has increased and decreased over the years.

Theories develop and those theories are tried out. In a sense the entire area of the hills is a kind of forest experiment. Thinning the forest makes it safer from rampant fires. Cutting and removing beetle-infested trees seems to help slow the spread of beetles. As a result of all of this activity, the forest is filled with slash piles that need to be cleared up. So far this winter, though a bit colder than some winters, has been too dry in much of the hills. There isn’t enough snow to burn the piles. And when we do get a bit of snow, like happened a couple of weeks ago, the weather can play tricks on the slash pile burning. An inversion traps cold air underneath warm air and the result is that the natural rising and falling of the air - and of smoke - doesn’t occur. If you are close to the inversion line when you light a fire in your fireplace, the smoke won’t travel up the chimney and the fire just smolders. The same thing occurs when a slash pile is lit. A week ago, the inversion was so widespread that slash piles would not burn. Then a day later the inversion flipped and even green piles would burn.

If we knew how to predict the inversions, we could plan our lives a bit better.

Of course all of this is quite theoretical for me personally. We have a very small place on the edge of the forest. Our own property doesn’t produce slash piles. When we do have to remove a tree, the branches can be loaded into my pickup and taken to the yard waste recycling pile at the city dump. I am more challenged by the need to nurture young trees in a dry climate so that we can at least replace the trees we have lost over the years of living here.

But when the inversion traps the smoke close to the ground, it is no fun to live or hike in the hills. When it is smoky in the winter when there is no large fire, it can be a bit depressing. Inversions, however, are part of the natural cycles of the hills as well. I suppose that long ago before there were any permanent residents in the hills large fires that were extinguished by the weather slowed when an inversion set in to the hills and allowed the weather to slow and eventually extinguish the fire.

The forest is constantly changing. Our lives are long enough to appreciate the changes, even though we don’t live long enough to see the larger cycles. So we watch the forest from our limited perspective and we do what we are able to contribute to the health of the forest.

It is a bit humbling, and therefore good, to recognize that we belong to something that is much bigger than the span of our own lives.

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If you read my blog, you know that I don’t exactly sit on the edge of the latest news. I often tell stories of events that are long passed. I reflect on things that aren’t making headlines. My blog isn’t the place to turn to catch up on the news.

Part of this is that it takes me time to process the big events of the world. It isn’t that I am not paying attention. I try to keep up with the news. I read the headlines from BBC news, Haaretz, the Melbourne Herald Sun, the Tico Times, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times and our local paper every day. But reading the news isn’t the same thing as knowing what it means. I often need to reflect on the “latest” until it is no longer the “latest” before I have much to say about it.

The first response to any act of terror is grief. How terribly tragic it is that human beings can become so confused and misguided that they turn to violence as a way of expressing themselves. And grief is not an emotion that lends itself to clear, rational thinking.

So I am often silent when others are speaking. I listen and wait. And I grieve.

How else can we respond to the events that unfolded in Paris last week? Real people died and their deaths do not make sense. Stephane Charbonnier, Bernard Maris, Georges Wolinski, Jean Cabut, Bernard Verihac, Philippe Honore, Elsa Cayat, Michel Renaud, Frederic Bosseau, Frank Brinsolaro, and Moustapha Orrad were all employees of the satire magazine Charlie Hebdo. Ahmed marabout was a police officer who died protecting the cartoonists from the terrorists.

These were all living human beings, with families, and identities that were all their own. They weren’t saints. They, like us, were imperfect human beings, sometimes selfish, sometimes beautiful.

Human beings are, tragically, also, on occasion, capable of unspeakable atrocity. For whatever reasons brothers Said Kouachi and Cherif Kouachi became terrorists and slaughterers of their brothers and sisters.

If their intent was to uphold their religion, they sadly failed. The crime wasn’t about religion. Two of the victims, Copy editor Moustapha Ourrad and the police officer Ahmed Merabet, were Muslims who died at the hands of the terrorists.

Would that they had taken their faith seriously and studied the Qur’an instead of turning to violence. If they saw the cartoons published by the magazine as offensive, the Qur’an teaches how to respond: “repel evil with something that is lovelier.”

Bullets do not provide an answer to prejudice and offensive cartoons. The way to overcome these evils wi by embodying the qualities that transform society one person at a time.

Instead the shooters have demeaned people’s impression of the Muslim religion. The cartoons might have made some people laugh inappropriately at images that offend. The shooters have made the world associate irrational terror with a religion. They have brought no honor to their faith, only shame and dishonor.

Still, I do not know what the world has, or can, learn from this event. One lesson, as is the case in many events that garner the headlines, is that we pay attention to the things that make the news. On the same day as the Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris there was another terrorist attack in Yemen - that one claimed 37 lives. A suicide bomber rammed his explosives-laden minibus into a gathering of recruits standing outside a police academy in the heart of Yemen’s capital. It did not attract world attention. There are no #JeSuisCharlie campaigns for those victims. Those 37 dead and 66 wounded all have names, but I cannot find them in the news reports. They all have families. They all have those who mourn for them.

One cannot read the news without being plunged into grief.

And I don’t have intelligent words with which to respond to the overwhelming grief. Somehow we humans have found more ways to go wrong and to cause pain and terror to one another than one could imagine possible.

It seems to me that it is possible that the acts of terrorists lack meaning because they are so senseless. What can you say except that they are wrong, terribly wrong, tragically wrong?

I guess the answer is that we humans are also capable of doing right by each other. We are capable of bringing our best to this world and to one another. We can behave like brothers and sisters to all of God’s children - even those with whom we disagree. We can resolve our differences without violence and we can learn to live with differences that cannot be resolved.

We are capable of sacrificing ourselves for the sake of others instead of sacrificing others for the sake of our “causes.”

In the midst of all of this, we have been called to live meaningful lives. Doing so is not always easy. It does not involved rushing to quick answers and expedient explanations. We have been granted great freedom to express our faith by living lives of service to one another. Most of us will never face a violent attack like the one that occurred in Paris. We have almost learned to take our freedom from the menace of violence for granted.

But until everyone is free, no one is completely free. And too many people live in the shadow of the threat of violence every day. Living a meaningful life means working to end violence. It means constantly reminding everyone we meet that at the core of the events of the world are real human beings. It means learning the names of the victims and not forgetting who they were.

And it means treating all of God’s children - even those we have labeled enemy - with love. Loving those with whom you agree is not difficult. Loving those with whom you disagree is deeply meaningful.

And this world is sorely in need of people who have the courage to live meaningful lives.

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As far as I know, I am not descended from sea captains. There is no great nautical tradition in my heritage. Going back through the family tree, I find mostly farmers, with a lawyer, a court reporter and a handful of preachers thrown in for good measure. In fact one has to go back many generations to find any family members who lived near the sea. I guess we are people of the plains and mountains for the most part.

Water, however, plays a big part in my story. I am a child of the Boulder river. We spend our summers in and around the river, we skated on it in the winter, we fished it in the springtime, we floated down it in old inner tubes in the summer and chased leaf boats down the river in the autumn. I can hear the sounds of the rocks tumbling at high water in my dreams. I can feel the intense cold of the water and remember hours of standing in the water and floating grasshoppers on a line down to the holes where the big fish stayed. I’ve spent hours with a mask and snorkel exploring the river and what lis beneath it.

I don’t know of any family stories of boats prior to the present generation. My grandfathers on both sides of the family didn’t have boats to my knowledge. I did have one maternal uncle who lived on Flathead lake and owned a string of boats, mostly recreational waterski boats. He also owned one sailboat as he approached retirement. Our dad had a jet boat for a very short time, more a product of his love of making deals and accepting trades than his love of water activities. He also was partner with my brother on a rowboat that they took down the Yellowstone a few times and he provided some funding for a raft also in partnership with my brother.

I, on the other hand, own four canoes, a rowboat and four kayaks and I’m building another in my garage. It is not that I am obsessed with paddling and rowing, quite, but activities relating to boats seem to be the focus of much of my time. This passion has probably been more intense in the second half of my life than in the first half, which was spent without owning a boat. And I’m quite sure I would have fewer boats if I didn’t so enjoy making them. I’m well aware that I have too many and that I need to find ways to get rid of some of them, but that doesn’t stop me from trying to build just one more - a little better than the last one.

We all are shaped by water, even those who have no particular interest in boats and rivers and lakes and oceans. To be human is to be dependent on water. We can go without food much longer than we can survive without water. Our bodies are made of water.

It just makes sense that one of our two core sacraments is a sacrament of water. Sacraments, of course, do not create holiness, they recognize the holiness that is inherent in life with special ceremony. We do not make water holy by the prayers we say. Water is holy by its nature. We pray to remind ourselves of the truth that already exists.

Most baptismal prayers remind us of the many times water has figured in the story of our people. We remember that Moses led the people of Israel through the Red Sea on their journey towards freedom and our people crossed the waters of the Jordan to enter the promised land. We recall how Jesus, like every human being, was nurtured in the waters of his mother’s womb. We recall how Jesus became living water to a woman at a Samaritan well, used water to wash the feet of his disciples, and was anointed with the tears of a faithful woman. Water assumes a huge role in the story of our people.

Today, as is the custom of the church for generations, we will remember and celebrate Jesus’ baptism. John, the cousin of Jesus, was baptizing people in the wilderness as a sign of their decisions to turn away from sin and towards God. We all have moments of pride. We all make mistakes that we wish we had not made. We all have times of heading away from our relationship with God. John called on the people to turn around - to give themselves an opportunity to go in a new direction - to walk more closely with God. Then he used the water of the Jordan - the river that figures so largely in the story of our people - as a symbol of that decision to go in a new direction. When Jesus came to John for baptism, John was momentarily confused. Surely Jesus had no need of repentance. Jesus walked more closely with God than any human person before or since. Jesus didn’t explain to John. He simply asked him to “let it be so for now.” And John baptized Jesus.

It was an amazing moment. Everyone present was aware of God’s presence. Everyone heard God’s declaration of unconditional love. The gospels report a moment that was beyond the power of words to describe.

It didn’t mean that Jesus would never face tough decisions. It didn’t free him from responsibility. It didn’t make him avoid the temptation to turn away from God. In fact right after his baptism Jesus faced the wilderness filled with temptation. But his purpose was clear. And the love of God was clear. And that was sufficient for all that was to follow.

Being baptized doesn’t make Christians into perfect people. It doesn’t make us better than any one else. But it does remind us of who we are and whose we are. We belong to the community. We belong to God. And every drop of water everywhere can be a reminder of that miracle.

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As the oldest boy in my family of origin, there were certain rites and rituals for which I was the pioneer. These were observed with the younger boys, but perhaps with less intensity and intentionality. One of these rituals was my first pocketknife. It was gift on my 6th birthday. It was presented with a lecture on responsibility, care of tools, and a set of warnings about what would happen if I didn’t follow the rules. That was followed by a session of cutting, peeling and sharpening willow sticks that were used to roast hot dogs over the fire. A couple of days later I spent an hour or so with my Uncle Ted who taught me to use a stone to sharpen my knife. Uncle Ted was a master at sharpening tools and he had a feel for angles that did not come naturally to me. There is something very nice about the feel of a pocket knife in the right front pocket of a pair of jeans. I still enjoy that feeling to this day, though I only carry small knifes with me these days.

About six months after i received the pocket knife, at Christmas, I received a complete work bench with tools. My father had made the bench and it had a backboard with holes for screw drivers, a drawer with room for a hammer and mallet, a hook to hang a crosscut saw and a small vice on the corner. The tools were all real, though the hammer and saw were a bit smaller than my father’s tools. The most fascinating of the tools was a small block plane. It was wrapped in heavy paper in the drawer of the tool bench tied up with string. The body of the plane was painted with shiny black paint. It was small, so it didn’t have a front knob, just a place to put one’s thumb or finger to add pressure. My father explained the parts of the plane. The cap on this plane didn’t have a lever, like the large planes in my father’s tool box. The adjustment screw was built into the bottom of the cap. The iron rested on the body and was shiny and silver, as was the sole of the plane.

The firs thing we did was to disassemble the plane. With a piece of fine sandpaper on a large piece of hardwood, we worked the sole of the plane until it was perfect. Then we sharpened the iron on a stone, always pulling the iron and lifting the end slightly with each stroke so that the cutting edge would have a slightly curved bevel. We tested the sharpness of the iron on a sheet of paper. When it cut the paper easily we reassembled the plane. There really wasn’t much adjustment to the mouth. The depth of the iron and its angle were controlled by the screw on the cap. I learned to adjust the iron so that it protruded a very small amount through the sole, perhaps 1/16 of an inch. Then, with a piece of 1” pine in the vice, I made my first strokes with the plane. The feel was smooth and sweet. The wood came off in lovely white curls.

Caring for and adjusting my plane was beyond my skill at the time. I couldn’t resist fiddling with the adjustment screw and I kept thinking that I could get by with the iron protruding farther through the sole. The result was that the plane would gouge the wood and hang up. Sharpening the iron and truing the stone were skills that had been taught, but weren’t mastered.

These days nothing except the finest automotive sandpaper is used to true the soles of my plane and I use spray adhesive to attach it to a piece of glass and windex to float away the metal as I work the sole. My irons are sharpened on a high quality whetstone and stopped with polishing compound. But it took me years to learn the art of getting tools really sharp.

The years passed and I grew up and I went into a profession that doesn’t require the same kind of tools that a carpenter uses. After a dozen or more years of widowhood, our mother decided to move out of the big house to a smaller house near to my sister’s home. As we cleaned out the house and prepared for the move, I came across the drawer in the basement that contained my father’s and grandfather’s planes. They had a few small rust spots, but otherwise were in excellent condition. It was then that I realized that none of my brothers had been taught how a plane works or how to care for it. I guess I had come along at just the right point in our grandfather’s life and in the life of Uncle Ted and in our father’s life to have these elders to teach me lessons that somehow got skipped when the younger brothers came along.

Along with the privilege of this first-son position I assumed the privilege of becoming owner of the planes. These are not the super expensive Lie Nielsen or Veritas planes, but rather basic Stanley tools that were sold in hardware stores before the world of electric planers and power sanders.

I am not a finish woodworker. I never gained the skils of a cabinet maker. But I do build boats as a hobby. My current project is a strip-planked kayak. I start with strips of cedar that are milled to 3/8 x 3/4. The strips were also milled with bead and cove edges so they will fit together and follow basic curves. But the boat has some rather complex curves and angles, so the strips need to be planed to fit. This is no job for one of the big planes. I have a tiny finish plane with a 1/2” iron from my Uncle Ted, a basic Stanley with a 1 3/8” iron and my little plane from my childhood workbench. The planes, a bevel gauge and a pencil are all I need at this point of the construction. Well, I also need patience and wood glue.

There is something particularly pleasing about making a cut with that little plane. The wood curls pile up on the garage floor and the planks slowly take the shape that I need. Cedar, of course also gives you the gift of the most wonderful aroma.

Now I have become an elder and a grandfather. My grandson is too young for sharp tools, but I am keeping my eye out for one who might be willing to learn how to care for cutting tools in a world where that skill might be lost if we don’t pass it on.

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A couple of years ago the starter on our pickup failed while we were out in the hills looking for a Christmas Tree. We had stopped at a campground to use the pit toilet and when we got back in our truck it wouldn’t start. I tried what I was able to fix the situation, but I was unable to get it started. We knew it was about 8 miles to the nearest home and although we had warm clothes, I was uncertain about whether or not there were mountain lions in the area. We decided to spend the night in the truck. We would be warm and safe and we could have a fire in the campground and we would be able to walk out in the morning. By morning we had raised enough alarm by not answering our phones that our friends were looking for us. By the time we got to the phone they were on their way and would have found us even if we had stayed with the truck. We towed the pickup to a repair shop and even got a Christmas tree. All was well.

It taught me an important lesson. We are not invulnerable. Unplanned things can occur. We need to practice sound judgement and exercise caution. We become overly dependent upon the reliability of our vehicles. These days when we head out into the hills we make sure someone knows where we are going and when we expect to return. We carry a survival pack with a stove, food, coffee, tea, candle lanterns and other gear. We make sure we have sleeping bags with us. It just makes sense.

But not everyone is so careful. Not long ago I was in a line of traffic near one of our middle schools on a very cold morning and I watched as youth after youth hopped out of their parents’ cars and ran to the school without coats, hats or gloves. Some were wearing shorts. Were they to be stranded even for an hour outside there would be serious frostbite. They, of course, were not stranded. They went from a warm home to a warm car and from that car to a warm school. But things do go wrong. Cars do slide into the ditch. I heard a report that when school was cancelled due to bad weather recently in Sioux Falls, students were left at the school by parents who didn’t know of the cancellation.

We sometimes don’t think of the consequences of our behavior.

By every report Barry Sadler is an experienced snowmobiler. He has a good machine and has done a lot of riding. He considers himself to be an extreme snowmobiler, riding his machine places where no others go. That is what he was doing last weekend when he was side hilling. He was riding his machine along a ridge with one ski in the air and one in the snow in a very remote area of the Idaho-Montana border out of Mullen, Idaho. He was riding alone without any emergency supplies: no water, no avalanche beacon, no satellite locator. Snowmobiling alone in that area is definitely high risk behavior never a good idea. But Saddler had done it before - lots of times.

The snow under his machine gave way and he and the machine slid 3,000 feet to the frozen creek at the bottom of the slope. Saddler landed on the bottom, with the machine on top of him. He broke some of the bones in his hand, but otherwise survived quite well. But he had no way to get out of the creek bottom and now way to signal for help. He ran his snowmobile for heat until it ran out of fuel. Then he assessed his situation and realized that he was going to die. There was no way to get out and he was going to freeze to death. He wrote farewell notes to his children and wife on his phone. He put on his goggles so the birds couldn’t get at his eyes. And he prepared to die.

Saddler was lucky. He was rescued by friends who had been searching for 30 hours. They got lucky and found his tracks. After they found him and got him into warm clothes and wrapped him in blankets it was sill 5 hours to hike out of the ravine and an additional two miles to their snowmobiles. Then there was an additional 6 miles on the machines to safety.

They’ll have a story to tell for the rest of their lives. And they all know that Saddler came very close to losing his.

None of us will live forever. And the really important messages are best delivered face-to-face and in person instead of being entered into the memory of a cell phone hoping they might one day be delivered. So I’m trying to learn from Saddler and from the experiences of others. I still go out into the hills alone on occasion. And I still paddle alone on a very familiar lake. I’m just a person who likes to be alone and who enjoys being up when others are in bed. But I am very careful about my rescue plans. I make sure someone knows where I am going and when I expect to return. I have a dry suit that would give me an extra hour of survival were I to fall in the water - long enough to get out of the water where I paddle. I am cautious about the kind of paddling that I do when I am alone. I don’t paddle whitewater or even float down creeks without others along.

When I drive in the winter around here, I have plenty of warm clothes and survival gear in my car.

These things don’t mean I will live forever. They mean that I am aware that I am vulnerable and, like all humans, prone to accident and frail in severe conditions.

There are some experiences that I can live without. And some stories that I prefer not to have told with me as the central character.

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Different buildings have different sounds. Over time we become so adjusted to the sounds of the buildings we frequent that we have to stop and listen to be aware of them. Our current home has electric baseboard heat. That means that there are no air handlers other than bathroom and kitchen fans, which are generally off. Baseboard heat, however, is far from silent. It creaks and makes pops as the copper vanes expand with the heat. Once the room reaches temperature, however, the heating is very quiet. The result is that I am often aware of the sounds of air handling equipment when I am in buildings with forced air heat. The bigger the building, the bigger the blowers. Our church is mostly heated by hot water. Our offices have radiators which are very quiet. The sanctuary and fellowship hall, however, are heated by forced air units that blow air across grids of pipes carrying hot water. The result is that these huge units come to life and begin blowing when the thermostat calls for heat. The start-up of the fans makes a bit of noise, but the blowers are in a deep basement and most of the time they are very quiet - something that is most appropriate for worship space.

Our church underwent a big change last year when we installed new doors at the main entrance to the building. The old doors were frameless glass panels with poor weather stripping. Even when we installed plastic strips on the edges of the glass, plenty of air could pass through the doors. On windy days they would moan and whine as the air whistled through the gaps between the doors. The new doors seal and there is no more wind noise in the entryway of the church. You can stand there and hear the air passing through the ductwork in the walls, something of which I previously had been unaware.

The gift of quiet is a significant gift in a church.

I do, however, frequent buildings where the air handling equipment is much more evident. The Pennington County Jail, the annex and the public safety building all have giant air handlers that give the buildings a kind of low rumble pretty much all of the time. When the units aren’t supplying warm air for heating, they are moving cool air for cooling. You aren’t aware of the movement of the air in most of the buildings, but when you sit quietly, you become aware of the sound of the equipment that moves the air through ducts that are hidden in the walls and ceilings. Most of the time, these buildings are filled with activity and when I visit, I don’t spend much time in quiet contemplation.

It must be different for the prisoners, however. They have plenty of time on their hands to sit quietly and meditate. They have plenty of hours to listen to the rumbling of the machinery deep within the building. I imagine that it might be hard to learn to sleep in such a setting.

Compared to some animals, we humans don’t have a very refined sense of hearing and we are often not as in tune with our surroundings as some other creatures. Past generations learned to take advantage of their animals. After they had become used to horses, Lakota warriors used to sleep with their horses very close by, especially when they were away from camp. Horses have very sensitive hearing and use their ears to protect themselves from predators. The stirrings of the horses gave them warning of the presence of an enemy and they could take precautions to avoid danger.

I’m not sure how comfortably I would sleep with my horse’s hooves close to my head, but then again, the warriors out at night probably didn’t sleep all that well in the first place. They probably had to maintain an alertness that allowed them to doze occasionally, but most of the night they had to avoid deep sleep that would take time for them to rouse themselves.

People havre been studying sleep and sleeplessness for generations. Contemporary researchers have found some significant connections between sleep patterns and the overall health of their patients. Studies have found connections between insufficient sleep and serious diseases such as heart disease, diabetes and obesity. People who get sufficient sleep tend to experience less pain and have a lowered risk of injury.

I’m vaguely aware of these studies because I have never been a very good sleeper. I often wake in the night and rather than toss and turn in bed, I have a tendency to get up and read a book. Reading is relaxing for me, so it often helps me return to sleep, but there are nights when sleep is elusive and I cover a lot of territory in my books.

More worrisome to me is that lack of sleep can lead to fuzzy thinking and poor decision making. There are plenty of studies that demonstrate that a lack of sleep can make one substantially worse at solving logic and math problems and more prone to mistakes.

Mistakes in my line of work often result in hurt feelings. I try to get enough sleep so that I can at least avoid the mistakes that cause others pain or discomfort.

Recently we visited our daughter and son-in-law. Although he had a few days of vacation when we were visiting and was following a normal schedule, he often has to work late shifts and sometimes needs to work nights. To compensate, they have worked to make their bedroom an excellent place to sleep whenever sleep is available. They have dark blackout curtains on the windows and the room is very quiet. The home is set back from the road enough to diminish the sounds from neighbors and passing cars.

I, on the other hand, like a room where a little natural light comes in. My bedroom isn’t completely dark in the day. Whenever the weather allows, I have my window open so I can listen to the wind in the trees and, when I am lucky, the coyotes singing in the hills.

I guess I’m somewhere between those Lakota braves half-sleeping as they listened for their horses’ movements and my son-in-law sleeping in quiet darkness.

And something tells me I don’t want to try sleeping at the jail. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be good at that.

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As we drove across South Dakota on Monday we were commenting to one another how winter weather can turn the state monochromatic. It isn’t that the state becomes uninteresting when the clouds descend, the snow falls and visibility is limited. It is just that there is less color than we experience when driving into an autumn sunset or viewing our state in the throes of springtime. Dick Kettlewell, a photographer who often has his work published in our local paper, says that winter is the season for black and white photography and he has a lot of very dramatic photos of the hills and the animals to prove his point.

Black and white and gray was a good description of the day yesterday. Police and fire crews responded to multiple accidents as commuters got going a bit too fast for conditions. I suppose that a few others didn’t fully scrape the ice off their windshields and allow their cars to warm up before heading tho work. It isn’t just that the colors change in the winter around here. Things take longer when it gets cold. We haven’t had it as bad as some other places, but lows in the single digits and highs below freezing means that the snow and ice stick around.

In November, when I was still paddling on the lake in the early part of the month, I thought that this might be a winter when I could add to my paddling season. Even though the lake had a bit of open water in early December, paddling was out of the question because the areas where I could access the lake were iced over. Now it looks like it will take an extended period of warm weather before the lake is liquid enough for paddling. There are some pretty impressive chunks of ice in area creeks as well.

Variation in the weather and the scenery, however, is one of the blessings of living in this place. I can get part of my exercise from shoveling snow. I do, however, tend to stay indoors more and we are drawn to hearty meals, so one has to be careful not to add too many pounds during cold weather. I’ve been known to comment that my body type seems adapted to the snow and cold of winter. I have the layers of fat that bode well for winter survival even in conditions much more harsh that we have around here.

The times, however, are changing. Even though the solstice wasn’t that long ago, the days are getting longer. We’re gaining about a minute and a quarter of daylight each day and by next week we’ll be gaining a minute and a half. We have just over 9 hours of daylight each day. If you are a careful observer, the change is fun to watch.

That doesn’t mean that winter is over - far from it. January and February are typically the coldest months of the calendar for us and we can get spring blizzards well into May around here. That is one of the joys of living in this place. The weather has the capacity to surprise every month of the year.

Today, however, looks to be one of Dick Kettlewell’s days for black and white photography. Although it is currently overcast, however, the forecast calls for clearing skies. Clear skies mean dramatic shadows at this time of the year. The low sun angle means that we all cast long shadows even at noontime. It doesn’t look like there will be much precipitation this week, so the snow should get cleared off and the road conditions should return to reasonable travel conditions. I’m hoping for good roads so I can attend a funeral in Pierre next Monday. So far we’ve been pretty lucky with our winter travel this year. We did delay one firewood delivery, but were able to get it rescheduled within a week and the rest of our trips have gone off without too much trouble on the road. We know we’re not invincible and travel with good equipment and plenty of emergency supplies in the winter. If we were to slide into the ditch and become stuck, we’d be able to wait for help in relative comfort with plenty of warm clothing, a little stove for heat, some food and water and other supplies and good flashlights. Of course I carry tire chains and a shovel whenever venturing out in the winter.

Part of what we do around here in the winter is wait. And waiting has its own value. Of course we don’t live like the indigenous people who spent their winters wrapped in heavy buffalo robes in tipis venturing out only for as long as necessary. We have it much better than the early settlers who became stranded for weeks and even months in remote and isolated homesteads with little for entertainment besides their own wits. Winter doesn’t keep us in all that much. We have good clothes and reliable transportation for all but the most severe weather events. And when the weather does turn really bad, we find ourselves safe in a warm home where we don’t suffer even if the power is lost.

Pico Iyer wrote in a little book that “In an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.” Perhaps winter waiting is a gift in the midst of a world that is changing at a pace too intense to take in. Maybe slowing down and taking more time to do the things we usually do without any thought is an opportunity to focus our attention on the beauty that is always with us. Black and white days can give us the ability to look more closely and recognize colors better when they return. After all, you have to be paying attention to recognize that the days are getting longer when all we are gaining is a minute and a few seconds each day.

Stay warm. Spring is coming at its own pace. Enjoy the gifts of winter.

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When it comes to the visit of wise men from the East to the infant Jesus, there is probably more that we don’t know than what we do know. The story is reported in only one of the Gospels: Matthew. The other Gospels are silent on the subject.

We don’t know how many there were. The Bible reports three gifts, and it is probably from this report that the tradition of three wise men arose. In Eastern Christianity, it is common for pageants and religious art to depict more than three. In Syriac churches, there are often twelve.

We don’t know how soon after the birth they arrived. Many of our traditional nativity scenes depict the magi arriving at a stable with Joseph, Mary and the infant. Often there are angels and shepherds present as well. Matthew reports the event at an unspecified time, mentions that they entered the house, and notes only the presence of Jesus and Mary at the time of their visit.

We don’t know their roles in society. Tradition pictures them as kings. That probably comes from a reference in Psalms: “May all kings fall down before him.” Matthew doesn’t say any thing about kings. The word used in the gospel is mags, a word derived from ancient Persian. In Persian the word refers to the religious caste into which Zoroaster was born. The Latin “Magi” refers to the priestly caste of Zoroastrianism. Zoroastrian priests paid special attention to the stars as part of their religion. Since Matthew’s gospel reports that they had “seen his star at its rising,” it has been assumed that they were students of the movements of stars. Were they kings? Probably not. Were they wise? It is unknown.

Traditions in the Western church, however, have given much more detail to the magi. They have been given names and regarded as saints. Melchior is said to have been a Persian scholar. Caspar is to have been a scholar form India. Balthazar is known as a scholar from Arabia. In some parts of the church they are depicted as the kings of their three respective countries.

In the Syrian church the Magi are named Larvandad, Gushnasaph, and Hormisdas. These names have a far greater likelihood of being originally Persian, though that does not mean that they are the names of those who visited the Christ child. Ethiopians name them Hor, Karsudan, and Basanater. Armenians have named them Kagphga, Badadakharida and Badadilma. In China, where Christianity is currently experiencing an explosion of growth, the tradition is that one of the magi was from China.

Just as tradition has added detail to the wise men themselves, tradition has also assigned special meanings to the gifts. While not traditional gifts for the birth of a child, gold, frankincense and myrrh would all have been acceptable offerings to be made to a king. The value of the precious metal, gold, has long been recognized and in many areas the possession of gold was seen as a sign of nobility. Frankincense was used as a perfume and was employed to mask any number of unpleasant smells that were common in the days before centralized sewer systems and modern waste management. Myrrh was an oil, commonly used for anointing. It could have been used as an anointing oil for the coronation of a king.

We have added layers of meaning to those gifts as well. Gold is the symbol of earthly kingship, frankincense is a symbol of the deity of the Christ child, and myrrh is an embalming oil and symbol of death. The three gifts thusly are interpreted to demonstrate the understanding that Jesus is an earthly ruler, fully God and subject to human death.

The three gifts are mentioned in earlier texts as gifts to a king. Thus it is possible that Matthew was aware of other occasions on which the gifts were presented and used those gifts in his gospel report as signs that those outside of the Jewish tradition were aware that the Christ child was the long-awaited messiah. The acknowledgement of outsiders might have added weight to Matthew’s religious argument about the role and reality of Christ.

Today is the day that has emerged in the Western church as the day to celebrate the arrival of the magi. In some traditions Christmas gift giving is reserved for the feast of the three kings, also known as Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from a Greek root meaning “to appear.” It is often associated with a sudden appearance, a surprise or a fresh awareness. The word is used in the bible to refer to Jesus’ birth, his appearances after his resurrection and also to his second coming.

Ancient and modern liturgies for today’s celebrations include themes of illumination, manifestation and declaration. Jesus is celebrated as the light of the world. Illumination enables us to see more clearly. Jesus is the manifestation of God in human form. Our response to the illumination and manifestation is to declare or proclaim Jesus as Lord.

Special meals, pageants, dramas, gifts and music are all part of the celebration of Epiphany. As is true with other significant celebrations of the church, Epiphany is not a single day, but rather a season. Epiphany begins after the 12 days of Christmas on January 6 and continues until Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent. The length of the season varies because the date of Christmas is fixed on the modern calendar whereas the date of Easter (and therefore the timing of the six weeks of Lent) moves about the modern calendar in response to the phases of the moon. It can be confusing. Even more confusing are the traditions that have grown up in various parts of Protestantism. Presbyterians, for example, do not observe Epiphany as a season, but rather a day. The same is true of Pentecost. The days between Epiphany and Lent as well as the days between Pentecost and Advent are observed as “ordinary” time.

Our particular denomination has roots in both the traditions of ordinary time and in the traditions of extended seasons, so practices vary congregation by congregation.

However we designate the season, we acknowledge that life moves on and the days of celebration give way to days of work and preparation for even greater things that are yet to come.

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We have had a marvelous celebration of Christmas this year. It has been a wonderful season of celebrations within our family. We began, of course, as we always do, with worship and the celebrations of our church family. Then, we had a week of celebrating with our family. Our daughter and son-in-law hosted as we gathered in their home. Our son and his family flew in from Olympia, Washington so we had grandchildren and all of the fun of a great family gathering. Of course there were special dinners, a visit to Legoland and the aquarium in Kansas City, a special trip to a shopping center with a Build a Bear franchise for some treats for the children, late night games, and plenty of story telling and catching up.

One of the joys in my life is that I have somehow, without any particular talent or effort on my part, become the patriarch of a marvelous family. Our children have become adults with wonderful gifts of hospitality, great generosity of spirit, and delightful and interesting careers. I got to play hide and seek with my grandson one moment, talk about corporate ethics with my son, hear about the latest in aviation technology from my son in law, play a silly card game, hug my daughter, and rock the baby to sleep - and all of that was just the first evening.

Each time we sat together at the table, we went around the table so that each person could say the things for which they were grateful. There were thanks for each other, thanks for the ability to travel so freely, thanks for presents given and received, thanks for the weather that was mostly cooperative, thanks for the good food, thanks for good jobs, and many other things. Indeed we have so much for which to be grateful.

Our son and his family arrived safely at their home last evening and we are about half way home and have an easy drive on reasonable roads for today. The worst roads we encountered in the entire trip were icy conditions with a lot of accidents and very slow traffic through the Kansas City area yesterday while driving to the airport. But we had allowed enough time for the delay and got through all of that without too much problem.

The twelfth day of Christmas is a day of transition for us and a day of transition for all Christians. Tomorrow we will be back at work with a huge workload that has accumulated in our absence and the regular business of a very lively church. We have a newsletter to get out, a budget to finalize, annual reports to publish, meetings to attend, pastoral concerns in need of response and a lot more. It will be a very busy week with a few long days.

Like our personal transition, the church undergoes a very important transition on Epiphany as well. For the season of Christmas we have focused internally. We have celebrated the gift of the Christ child, contemplated the wonder of the incarnation, read the traditional stories and sung familiar carols. We have celebrated with worship that was comfortable and familiar and for many had a sense of homecoming. Tomorrow and Wednesday we celebrate of Epiphany and remember the visit of wise men from the East. The wise men were from outside of our faith family. The first visitors to the Christ child were Jews - all children of Israel and of a similar faith heritage. Now people from a far distant country - and a different religion came to the child. Remembering their visit is a reminder to the church that the message of Christ and the joys of our faith are not to be kept to ourselves.

Our primary responsibility is outreach to others.

We exist for the purpose of taking the good news we celebrate at Christmas to those who have the deepest need. It is always true that we communicate more with our presence and our actions than with our words. The evangelism to which we are called has less to do with having the right words to say and more to do with actions of love and service for others.

During the season of Epiphany we take a whirlwind tour of Jesus life and ministry by reading portions of the gospels. This year our primary focus is Mark, whose rapid pace and almost breathless telling of Jesus’ ministry lends a sense of urgency to our reading. The season and the reminders of our shared story lead us to recall all of the places we are called to serve.

In our congregation it is time to touch base with all of our firewood partners. We have had a fair bit of cold weather and we need to make sure that everyone has a sufficient supply of firewood. We’ll be making some deliveries to our partners in the next few weeks. It is also time to remember our special sister church relationship with the Community Christian Church of los Guido in Costa Rica. Preparations are underway for Vacation Bible School there and soon we will be commissioning our mission partners who will travel to Costa Rica to share in that important week of teaching, learning and community outreach. Our annual meeting provides our congregation with the opportunity to examine our priorities and set a budget to support the many different outreach programs and ministries of the church. This annual meeting will be our 136th. We have a rich history to celebrate and we are reminded by our look back that our church has always been in the business of serving our community. There are many other organizations in our community who are worthy of our support, both financial and volunteer.

As wonderful as is the season of Christmas celebration, it is only a prelude to a year of dedication, service, hard work and outreach.

Today one season ends and another begins. We are ready. We have been renewed and restored by Christmas. It is time to share the light of Christ with the whole world.

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The second Sunday after Christmas doesn’t appear on the Christian Calendar every year. If Christmas Day falls on a Sunday, Monday or Tuesday, there is only one Sunday between Christmas (December 25) and Epiphany (January 6). Then, just to make the Christian calendar a little more complex, the second Sunday after Christmas is observed as Epiphany Sunday every year in England and Wales and a few other countries. Here in the United States, the observance of Epiphany Sunday varies depending on which denomination. There are even variations within individual denominations. It can be very confusing.

In our congregation, we generally observe Epiphany on either a Sunday or a Wednesday, depending on which day of the week is closest to January 6. That means that some years the Baptism of Christ and Epiphany Sunday are the same day. Because part of our tradition was a downplaying of the liturgical calendar and some of the minor feast days, we don’t have a strong history of observances of the Baptism of Christ or Epiphany Sunday. However, in the last couple of decades, we have become more aware of those days and more likely to include special observances in our liturgies. This year, we will observe Epiphany with a special celebration on Wednesday, January 7 and the Baptism of Christ on Sunday, January 11.

So today is a sort of unique observance, as we celebrate Christmas for a second Sunday.

The Gospel for today is the prologue to the Gospel of John: “In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was God.” The prologue is so lyrical that some have speculated that it may have its origins in early Christian music. The German New Testament Scholar, Rudolph Bultmann, believing that the prologue had roots in Gnosticism and the community that grew up around John the Baptist, did an extensive search in the literature for any gnostic poems, hymns, or other documents that might be antecedents of the prologue, but never found any conclusive evidence of an earlier document.

From our perspective, the prologue and the Gospel belong together. We’ve read it that way for so many generations that it is nearly impossible for us to think of those words in any other configuration. I tend to agree with those who say that while the words are lyrical, they just don’t come out in the form of a hymn. I can’t quite imagine ever singing those words, even though they are certainly different in English than in the original Greek.

In Greek, the key concept is Logos - most generally translated as “Word” in English. It is important to note that the translation confers on the term certain meanings that were not a part of the original. When we speak of “word” in a gramatical sense, we are closer in meaning to the Greek term leis. Although logos and lexis are derived from the same root, they evolved to have different meanings. Logos was used by ancient philosophers in different ways. The sophists used the term to mean discourse. Aristotle used it more in the sense of “argument.” Stoics spoke of logos in the sense of the divine animating principle of the universe. So in a sense the use of the term in the prologue to the Gospel is more in keeping with stoic philosophical traditions.

The Gospel, however, takes a twist in meaning that no prior philosophy does when introducing the concept of incarnation. “And the word became flesh and dwelt among us.” After introducing Jesus as Word, the prologue also speaks of life and light as important descriptive images for Jesus.

This beautiful and important description is just one of the ways that Christians have communicated the deeper meanings of our faith over the centuries. For those of us who love language and poetry, it is a glorious dance of images and metaphors. Of course no words contain the complete reality of God. We speak of God, but we are unable to say exactly what God is. We have an idea and a concept, but the idea and concept falls far short of the reality that is God. There real poetry in the attempt of the prologue to use the word “word” to describe something that is beyond the power of words to describe.

It is one of those places where it is clear, from reading the Bible, that while we can talk about God and think about God, our rational thought is only one way of encountering God. The relationship with God is more than just an intellectual exercise. But if we want to pursue God intellectually, God is complex and interesting enough for a lifetime of study and more. Generations of brilliant theological thinkers have tried to put God into words. Volumes and volumes of words have been published and still we have to admit that we are not even close to a description of God.

That doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try. Just that we know our efforts will be incomplete.

So I appreciate the opportunity provided by a second Sunday of Christmas to invest time and energy in just thinking about God and about what it means that God comes to us in human form. Perhaps that is a good investment of the eleventh day of Christmas: a day to just think about God.

Both Deuteronomy and Numbers contain prayers that begin with “Hear, O Israel.” The prayer, often called the “Shema” for the first word in Hebrew, is a commandment and the commandment is to love God with all your heart and soul and mind. That commandment is quoted by Jesus in the Gospels as well. Loving God with all of your mind means that we are invited to engage in an intellectual pursuit worthy of the best of our rational thinking. Religion does not have to be irrational or ethereal. Solid, rational thinking is a wonderful way to express devotion and engage in a relationship with God.

So as the days of Christmas near their end, today is a good day for thinking. May we find clarity as we pursue the complex idea of God.

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There are scholars who have devoted their entire lives to the study of numerology in the Bible. They comb through the Bible and note each time that a number is used. Some believe that there are specific symbols attached to numbers that import secret or hidden meanings. Most theologians, however, believe that the Bible is not a coded book. Its meanings are contained in its words and no special message is hidden within some kind of secret code known only to a few people. Still, there is numerical symbolism in the Bible. Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation all contain numbers that convey part of the meaning of the story.

There are many problems with trying to read too much into the numbers that are found in Biblical literature, however. First is is important to remember that the Bible did not come to us in a single form, all in the language that is most familiar to us. Rather, the Bible has arisen from a complex network of cultures, languages and traditions. In modern English we use what are commonly called Arabic numbers. Our base ten system is probably more accurately labeled Hindu-Arabic, referring to the origins of our numerical system in early Indian mathematicians. This system was adopted throughout the Middle East and was developed and refined by Arabic scholars.

The Old Testament of the Bible was originally written with the Hebrew number system, which assigned numerical meanings to the letters of the alphabet and used the same characters to convey numbers as were used to convey other words. It sounds more complex than it is in practice, but it takes some knowledge of the language to translate ancient biblical texts into meaningful prose in our language.

It is likely that most of the interpretations of the meanings of the twelve days of Christmas are not inherent in a particular set of days, but rather are meanings that have been added on over years of celebration in the traditions of our people. In other words, the original 12 days following the birth of Jesus weren’t days of special significance other than the normal adjustments that come to any family with the birth of a new child. A couple of millennia of tradition, however, have given us deep layers of meanings that have been assigned after the fact to the days of Christmas.

The number 10 is used a lot in the Bible. Like some other numbers, it is sometimes used to refer to completion. Numerologists, who spend a lot of time counting things, report that the words “God said,” appear ten times in the first chapter of the book of Genesis. The passover lamb is to be chosen on the tenth day of the first month. The tenth day of the seventh month is set aside as the day of atonement. There are ten plagues visited upon Pharaoh and Egypt in order to obtain freedom for the Hebrew slaves. And Moses receives 10 commandments from God to give to faithful people of all generations.

Ten is an easy number for humans to remember. We have ten fingers and ten toes. Our fingers can be used as memory devices to assist in remembering lists of up to ten items.

So it makes sense, in a kind of backwards way, to devote part of the tenth day of Christmas to a reflection upon the ten commandments even though they come from the Exodus story of our people and Jesus represents a new chapter and a new way of God’s extending of freedom to people.

The song about the twelve days of Christmas, referred to often in this series of blogs, comes out of the late 18th Century. It is possible that the origins of the song are French, but the common versions are in English. The song is simply one of many carols. It understands that the tradition of celebrating Christmas for 12 days and the assigning of the visit of the magi to the 12th day of Christmas is a Christian tradition. It probably was not developed as a teaching device with carefully thought-out lessons for each day of Christmas. Still, we tend to add meanings to our traditions with hindsight as often as the meanings are inherent in the traditions.

There are many different versions of the song that emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries. Not all have the same gifts for each number. There are versions with 10 pipers piping, 10 ships a sailing, ten lords a leaping, 10 drummers drumming, 10 cocks a crowing, and 10 asses racing. Most of the various items appear associated with different numbers in different versions of the song.

Thus the tenth day of Christmas, whether with lords or pipers or ships or drummers or whatever, seems like a good day to reflect on the ten commandments which provide an excellent guide for a life of freedom. If the “true love” of the song is God - certainly a true love for all humans - then recalling gifts that God has given us each day for twelve days of Christmas makes sense and one of those gifts is the commandments that provide the basic rules of the lives of free people.

It seems to me that one of the benefits of devoting a dozen days to careful contemplation of God’s love in the gift of Jesus is that it gives us time to recall many different ways in which God seeks meaningful relationship with people of faith. God stuck with our people when we strayed away from God. When we were enslaved by our own ideas and mistakes, God provided leadership for an Exodus. When we were wandering aimlessly in the wilderness, God provided basic rules for lives of freedom. When we confused money and power and privilege with the true blessings of God, God sent us Jesus to remind us of the unending call of love and service. Ours is a story of God’s persistence in the face of our tendency to stray from our true calling.

So ten times “Merry Christmas” to you today. May the tenth day of Christmas remind you of God’s unending love and commitment to you.

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In part of of the Christian tradition, the ninth day of Christmas is the day to reflect on the angels who took the news of the birth of the Christ Child to the shepherds. The Gospel of Luke reports that when the shepherds were out in the fields at night an angel of the Lord appeared to them and the glory of the Lord shone around them. They were afraid. But the angel calmed their fears and reported of the birth of the Savior. Then it reports that the angel was suddenly joined by a multitude of the heavenly host.

I don’t know how the tradition was started that there were nine choirs of angels, but it seems to have persisted. Having dealt with church choirs for most of my career, I’m aware that there can be some interesting personalities and tender feelings among such a group of talented musicians. I have been known to comment that there are two types of church musicians: the ones who aren’t very musically talented but have gentle and kind personalities and the the ones who are musically brilliant and have quirky personalities. Given the choice, I’ll go for the quirky personalities every time. Of course this is an exaggeration. I’ve also known exceptional musicians who have exceptional personalities. And we have been blessed with some really great musicians in our time in the church. But I’ve also invested my share of time in soothing hurt feelings and engaging in conflict resolution with church choirs. Like many blessings, choirs come with a certain maintenance cost.

So I can’t imagine having to deal with nine choirs.

But that is the tradition.

In the song, “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” the gift for the ninth day of Christmas is “nine ladies dancing.” They are supposed to symbolize the nine choirs of angels. Just as dancers are swift and graceful in their movements, so too the angels of heaven are said to be swift and graceful in doing God’s bidding.

I guess whoever made up that part of the tradition had never been a “ballet dad.” I loved the part of my life when part of my responsibilities were giving our daughter rides to and from ballet practice and providing rides for all of the special rehearsals and ballet performances. I was a proud father when I sat in the audience and watched the dancers on stage.

But art comes at a cost. Ballet dancers have to practice and practice. They get stiff and sore and experience injuries. Inside of those toe shoes are bruised feet and there are days when those graceful dancers get grumpy. “Dad you are here to drive the car. You don’t have to talk to my friends. And you don’t need to come into the studio. You can drop me off in the parking lot.”

I got it then.

I get it now. There is a cost to art and one of the costs is that the support team needs to remain invisible and keep from demanding attention.

Nine choirs of angels probably create a huge amount of robe cleaning that needs to be done. Some choir robes can be washed in a washing machine. Some have to be dry cleaned. And woe to the person who forgets the difference. Then there are the stoles that the choir members wear.

And don’t get me started on music! Choirs always want to buy new music, and the cost of music can be substantial. And they always believe that they need at least 25% more music than the members of the choir because the choir might grow or because it takes a choir of 35 in order to have 20 singers show up on a given Sunday. Then the music gets put in the singers’ folders, but they never remember to turn it in. Prices of music keep showing up months after that anthem has been sung. The choir room is a constant mess of stacks of un-filed music. And even after a work day to put all of the music away, the folders will have different numbers of pieces of music. The next time the choir sings the anthem, there will be a request to order 5 more copies, which is better than the years when choir directors might make six illegal copies of music for every anthem and I lived in constant fear of a lawsuit emptying the church coffers.

While I’m on the subject, one of the reasons that church electricity bills are so big is that all musicians are afraid of the dark. The angels might have calmed the fears of the shepherds when they appeared in the middle of the night, but I’m thinking that the only reason they were able to do their work is that they were surrounded by the glory of God. Our choir needs to have every light on for every rehearsal. If it is dark, all of the hallways have to be lighted because they use the restrooms. The sanctuary needs to be fully lit, because some of its light might help in the choir loft. The lights to both stairways need to be turned on as well as the lights in both cloak rooms. And when the rehearsal is finished and they have all left, then we need to go around and turn off all of the lights. If I am out of the building when they depart, the lights get left on. Even if a choir director reports that she or he has turned off all of the lights, I’ll find at least four or five left on. After all you have to turn on the lights to see which direction to turn the switches.

Our corner of the church has never been big on angelology. I don’t know much about angels at all. But I think one might have to be God Almighty to have enough patience for nine choirs. I’m pretty happy with just one.

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Throughout history, the conferring of a name has been a time of special ceremony and meaning. Names are seen to be both descriptive and proscriptive. They identify the unique characteristics of an individual and they become the way that the individual is known in the community. Working in a building where more than 80 3- and 4-year-olds come for preschool, we get to know a lot of different names Over the years, we have observed which names are popular and which are uncommon. We have also encountered many unique, one-of-a-kind names and more than a few creative ways to spell names that might otherwise be more common. In our culture names are generally the choice of parents and parents differ widely about when in the process of expecting a child that they announce the name.

Of course the ability to know the gender of a child before it is born is something that has only been the part of the current generation. Just a few years ago, it was not so common to know whether the child who was coming was male or female. Couples frequently had two names in mind when they went into the delivery room, prepared to name a child either way.

We know parents who didn’t have a name for a child at the child’s birth and so it was a bit of a scramble to come up with a suitable name in time to fill out the birth certificate.

But these days we know parents who have announced the name of their child months before the birth.

With Jesus, it was different. According to the Gospel of Luke, the angel Gabriel came to Mary in the sixth month of her pregnancy and told her that she was to name the child “Jesus.” Matthew reports it slightly differently. In that Gospel, the angel appears to Joseph and the exact timing is not identified, but the name is the same and it is given to Joseph with the same sense of authority and demand. There was no discussion, no debate. The name was simply given to Mary and Joseph.

Still, all proper ceremony had to be observed. In the traditions of the people at the time, a week was to pass following the birth of a baby. On the eighth evening, at sunset, the mother and the child were to be presented at the temple. The mother would undergo a purification rite. The child would be named in an official naming ceremony. Luke reports that these traditions were fully observed for Jesus. He also reports of the wisdom and vision of Simeon and Anna, elders who were in the temple at the time of Jesus’ presentation and naming. Simeon and Anna recognized the child as the long-awaited messiah. Their vision of what the child was to become has been remembered as one of the central themes of the story.

And so, January 1 each year, in addition to being celebrated as the first day of the Roman Calendar, is the feast of the holy name of Jesus. Christians in many different communions and traditions all set aside a day to remember the stories of Simeon and Anna and celebrate that powerful connection between a name and the person who bears the name. In many contemporary churches, feast days are assigned to Sundays, so the presentation of Jesus is commonly held on the first Sunday after Christmas, which is before January 1 unless Christmas lands on a Sunday. Most of us get a couple of different days to reflect on the process of conferring a name.

It isn’t immediately obvious from the first reading of the Gospels, but when one looks closely, one can determine that the naming ceremony was one that Mary and Joseph were to go through several times. Jesus was, of course, the firstborn son and so the naming ceremony would have had special significance for the new parents. Both Mark and Matthew, however, report that there were siblings to follow: James, Joses (or Joseph), Judas and Simon were Jesus’ brothers and there were sisters as well, though their names aren’t reported int he Gospels. Since sisters are reported in the plural, however, it means that the family had at least seven children.

I know about a family with seven children. The names are unique, but there can be confusion. I grew up in a family with seven children. I sometimes say that I used to think that when I was growing up I thought my name was BeverlyNancyLoisTed, because sometimes our mother had to go through all of the names to get to mine. I can only assume that my youngest brother was, on occasion, referred to as BeverlyNancyLoisTedVernonDanielRandy! When we were growing up the confusion over names was sometimes a source of irritation and sometimes a source of fun. I didn’t like it when neighbors or friends couldn’t remember my name. If someone called me “Vernon,” I could get quite indignant as I would say, “Don’t you know my name is Ted!” There were other times, however, when the confusion was just fine. Our neighbor across the street didn’t learn our names until we were well into our teens and his inability to correctly identify individual brothers was just fine with me, even if it did mean that occasionally I got blamed for something one of my brothers did.

We have been taught to think of Mary as a gentle and meek person. The Cherry Tree Carol includes this description in its lyrics: “Then Mary in her meekness, Then Mary what was mild, so mild . . .” But I have got to believe that a mother of at least seven had to occasionally raise her voice. I’m not sure that the words “gentle, meek, and mild” are the only ones that her children would have used to describe this woman. We know from the Biblical record that she was incredibly strong, that she could stand up to social pressure and that she didn’t shrink back for difficult and even painful situations.

Greetings on this eighth day of Christmas: the day of the holy name of Jesus. May your thoughts and prayers be filled with the significance of names and the power of the name that was chosen for the one who was the bearer of God to the world.

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