OK, it actually isn’t that rare. We use the phrase, “once in a blue moon,” to describe a rare event - some use it to refer to once-in-a-lifetime events. But blue moons aren’t all that rare. Tonight offers a good chance for a great view of a full moon around here and we call it a blue moon. The common contemporary definition of a blue moon is the second full moon in the same calendar month. Since full moons occur every 29.5 days, the position of the full moon on the calendar makes it possible for a blue moon to occur only when the first full moon of the month occurs early. It is, of course, slightly more common in months with 31 days, but possible in every month except February, where it can occur only in leap year. Over the next 20 years there will be about 15 blue moons. There was one last year. There is one today. There will be one in 2016, but none in 2017. In 1999, there were two blue moons in the same year. That phenomenon occurs about every 19 years, usually when there is a blue moon in January. If the second blue moon falls late enough in January and it isn’t a leap year, February can skip a full moon entirely and March will end up with a blue moon as well.

All of that, confusing as it may seem, is only the tip of the iceberg, really, because two full moons in the same month is the modern definition of a blue moon. There is an older definition that is more complex. According to the Farmer’s Almanac, the older definition goes like this: a blue moon is the third full moon in a season that has four full moons. That would make the full moon in May of next year a blue moon by the old definition.

And why would we want to identify the third full moon in a season with four full moons? That’s where Christian theology enters into the definition. At least Christian tradition, to be more accurate.

Stick with me for a moment.

Some years have an extra full moon - 13 instead of 12. Our common calendar is based on the movement of the earth around the sun. That is one way to measure time. The ancients, however, frequently measured time by the movement of the moon around the earth, counting the full moons. This “lunar calendar” differs from the so-called solar calendar. In a lunar calendar each month is 29.5 days. Since 12 months of 29.5 day months results in 354 days and a solar year is 365 days, the lunar calendar gets “ahead” of the solar calendar. If you follow a strictly lunar calendar, then, the dates of holidays appear in different seasons in different years, as is the case with the Muslim calendar of holidays.

The Christian calendar, however, seeks to maintain the same seasons for its holidays while using the cycles of the moon to measure the exact days. Easter always occurs in the spring, for example, but not on a fixed day. Easter can occur in March or April. The Paschal Moon - critical for determining the date of Easter - is one of 12 named moons in the Jewish calendar. In years when there are 13 full moons, there is no name for the 13th moon. The 13th moon gained the name “blue moon.” However, the holidays won’t line up with the seasons if the blue moon is always the last full moon of the year. Thus the practice of naming the third moon “blue” when the season has four full moons evolved.

If you are fully confused by now, no worries! So am I. I pretty much use the modern definition of the second full moon in a month for blue moon and I use the Internet or the calendar printed by the church to discern the date of Easter each year.

As a preacher, I’ve grown to appreciate the quirky calendar that give us liturgical seasons that vary in length. Some years Epiphany is short, other years it is long. The length of Pentecost is changed to offset that difference. That means that while the order of the seasons of our faith remains constant, the emphasis shifts from year to year. The number of sermons preached in a given season affects how much we think about specific topics or themes of Christianity. Since our faith is filled with surprises and fresh insights, the variability helps us to be open to newness within the structure of the year.

And, of course, the color of the moon tonight won’t be blue. Well, it is possible for it to appear a bit blue for us if there is enough smoke from the fires out west and up north to make the sky hazy. If so, it won’t appear blue at moonrise. When the moon is close to the horizon, it appears in the red-orange end of the color spectrum, for the same reason that sunrises and sunsets tend toward those colors.

Ash from volcanoes can also make the moon appear to be blue in color.

The Oxford English Dictionary says that the term blue moon is actually more ancient than the modern alignment of the various calendars. The OED cites a 1528 proverb as a possible origin of the phrase: “If they say the moon is blue, we must believe that it is true.”

Now that proverb doesn’t make any sense at all to me. People often say things that aren’t true. I remember hearing, as a child, someone say that the moon was made out of green cheese. Even as a child, I couldn’t believe that! It isn’t green at all. And why cheese? My father loved cheese with green in it and they called that cheese “blue.” It is an acquired taste. I love it as an adult, but didn’t care for it as a child. When it came to cheese, I didn’t trust people’s color descriptions.

Ever since the astronauts walked on the dusty moon surface and brought back moon rocks to the earth, I’ve been pretty much convinced that the cheese part was as bogus as the color.

I think I’ll just look at the moon tonight. Blue or not it is beautiful.

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Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann frequently points out that Biblical prophets were poets. Their words were carefully chosen and often delivered with a cadence and rhythm. He teaches that in times of great stress, poetry is able to say more than conventional prose. When Israel falls away from its covenant with God, something that happens so often that it is a Biblical theme, it is the poets who call for the return to faithfulness. His perspective is refreshing in the midst of other voices in the Christian community who read prophets as predictors of the future and claim to have foreknowledge based on their interpretations of some of the more obscure parts of prophetic writings.

The conversation about the role of prophets is a healthy conversation in these times in which we live.

I think it is fair to describe this particular time of history as hard and complex times. I remain unconvinced that ours is a pivotal generation as some scholars have claimed. Phyllis Tickle, in her book “The Great Emergence” argues that each 500 years or so there is a major event in church history that causes the church to reevaluate and refocus its ministries. She may indeed be right, but even so, it takes more than a single generation for the major changes in the story of the church to occur. I am a bit of a skeptic when it comes to those who proclaim our time as somehow more critical than other moments of history. We, in our country, are not suffering persecution for our faith. The church isn’t about to disappear simply because there are challenges for the institutions of faith.

Having said that, there are specific challenges for faith in our time. People live very busy lives with multitudes of competing interests. The temptation to place priorities away from their spiritual lives is great. The intensity of our over-connected lives, filled with cellphones and computers with their relentless demands for our attention, can be a source of great stress. Here in our country the increasing polarization in politics, combined with an almost unprecedented mean-spiritedness in political discourse, results in a sense of powerlessness for many citizens. Having the question, “What can I do?” doesn’t shield us from the sense that we should be doing something. Families are increasingly over scheduled with the demands of multiple careers combined with a society that offers a huge number of scheduled activities for children and youth. The intense competitive nature of some academic settings means that some families try to map and control academic careers for their children from preschool age.

All of this means that our times are complicated. And these times can be hard for people. We often do not give ourselves enough time to grieve properly when loss occurs. We rush to get on. And our communities are filled with fear. Fear of terrorism, fear of crime, fear of disease, fear of poverty, fear of the unknown - the list goes on and on and on.

It is in this world that the words of the poet can sometimes stop us in our tracks and invite us to slow our pace, think more deeply, and pay attention to the meaning of our activities.

On the day before President Obama’s inauguration in 2009, the poet Elizabeth Alexander was invited on to the inaugural stage for a sound check. The engineers wanted to make sure that they had the proper settings for her voice for the big event on the next day. She was alone on the stage as she stepped to the microphone. Although the area was filled with many people, no one was paying attention to the woman on the stage and the routine process of sound checks. Usually people count or read text for a sound check. Elizabeth Alexander recited a poem by Gwendolyn Brooks, “Kitchenette Building:”

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. "Dream" makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like "rent," "feeding a wife," "satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday's garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

from "Selected Poems" © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks. Reprinted with the permission of the Estate of Gwendolyn Brooks.


She was unknown to most of the people who were milling about the area, but hundreds of people literally stopped in their tracks to hear this unknown-to-them person recite a poem by someone unknown no doubt to most of them. They gathered into clusters and when the poem was finished they clapped.

Good poetry has the power to stop people in their tracks. And it has the power to get us to think in ways that we might not have previously thought.

For years I dismissed poetry. I thought that I didn’t have time to read it. But these days I feel that reading poems is important to maintaining my balance in life. After breakfast, as my cup of tea is brewing, I read poems out loud. I’m not standing in front of a microphone. I’m alone in my basement library. I don’t read for others, but instead read out loud to hear the music that is inherent in the words and seek the rhythm of the lines that isn’t always apparent when reading silently.

I am learning, albeit slowly, that ministry has much more to do with being than with doing. It is who I am that communicates the gospel even more powerfully than the tasks I accomplish. More importantly, I am able to do more when I am attentive to my need for contemplation and reflection.

I am dependent on the words of the poets to inspire me to become more than I have been.

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Patty and Mildred Hill were two of six children born to a Princeton-educated Presbyterian minister. Rev. Wallace Hill worked hard to make sure all of his children received university educations in an ear when many women weren’t offered such opportunities. The two sisters both became brilliant pioneers in their lives. Patty was an innovative kindergarten teacher who eventually became a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University. Mildred was an accomplished pianist, organist and composer who wrote about African American music and its influence on mainstream American musical literature.

Although individually brilliant, it was one of their collaborations that has touched the lives of most of us. In 1889 the sisters began to work together writing songs for children. Their book, “Song Stories for Kindergarten” offered songs that could be easily sung and remembered by young children that were, at the same time, of a higher musical standard than was common at the time. Patty wrote the words. Mildred wrote the melodies. Each song was field tested by Patty’s kindergarteners for the ability to be easily learned and remembered.

The song “Good Morning to All” was a 19th century version of what today might be a catchy summer pop song. The melody may have been adapted from a folk tune, but that is not clear. It was published in an 1894 in “Song Stories for Kindergarten.”

We know the song with a different set of words as “Happy Birthday to You.” Exactly how the new words ended up with the song is a bit unclear, according to George Washington University Law School professor Robert Brauneis. At one point, Patty claimed that the sisters had written both sets of words, though it isn’t clear that they ever published the words and tune together. Others claim that the children themselves came up with the words to the birthday song and sang it to the tune they had memorized as Good Morning to All.

Whatever happened, within 20 years, the girls had no control over the copyright to the song. Clayton F. Summy, publisher of the sisters’ book claimed the copyright. He sold it and it was passed to a series of increasingly large corporations.

In 1988, Warner Communications Inc. purchased the copyright to the Birthday Song as part of a $25 million deal for 50,000 songs. Today Warner/Chappell Music claims to own the song and collects more than $5,000 per day - or $2 million per year in royalties paid by singers, directors, filmmakers and advertisers.

In 1996 Warner/Chappell, through the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers (ASCAP) threatened to sue the Girl Scouts for publicly performing the Birthday Song. That suit, which was eventually withdrawn, raised awareness among some singers of the song and several popular restaurant chains substituted alternative birthday songs to avoid the possibility of being sued. For the most part, those who perform the song publicly either pay the royalties - commonly done by makers of movies and publishers of screenplays - or risk the threat of lawsuit.

The Civil Rights documentary, “Eyes On the Prize” had a fierce legal battle because it featured footage of people singing “Happy Birthday to You” to Martin Luther King, Jr. Copyright issues have plagued documentary filmmakers for many years with the prices escalating. The standard fee charged by Warner/Chappell is $1,500 for the use of the song in a documentary film.

That may soon change.

Jennifer Nelson, a documentary filmmaker is in the process of making a film about the history of the song. And one of the things she discovered in her process is that the Warner/Chappell claim is, at best, sketchy. Eventually her research led her to sue Warner/Chappell in district court. The case was nearing completion when this month Warner/Chappell turned in 500 pages of documents it said it had “mistakenly” failed to turn in last year. Among those documents was a blurred image of the Birthday Song from a 1927 publication called “The Everyday Song Book.” That led Nelson’s lawyers to look for an earlier version of the book. Deep in the archives of the University of Pittsburgh, a 1922 copy of the book was found. This copy is clear. The song was printed with “special permission” from Clayton F. Summy Co. - but no copyright was included.

It is pretty clear that Warner/Chappell doesn’t own a clear copyright to the song, though its lawyers claim that the “special permission” does not amount ot a waiver of its copyright.

A hearing has been set for next Wednesday before Judge George H. King.

However the outcome of that and subsequent hearings, It looks like Jennifer Nelson has all of the drama for a powerful documentary. I wonder if the judge will allow her to film in the courtroom.

The legal battle is obviously important to Warner/Chappell. Big corporations don’t let go of $2 million per year lightly.

But you have to admit that if it weren’t for the big money and the serious lawyers, the entire argument is silly. Claiming to own the song that children sing at birthday parties seems like a scam, quite frankly.

I’m all in favor of artists being fairly paid for their work. I think that original works ought to have copyright protection. But the originators of this song never saw any of the money. The big bucks have all gone to corporate interests who buy and sell copyright as commodities in search of even greater profits. And the song was meant to be carried in the hearts and minds of children, not in printed books.

In the hearts and minds of children is exactly where the song lives today. Warner/Chappell may be able to collect royalties from movies and famous artists, but they won’t stop the billions of children all around the world who sing the song in all different languages from singing it not only at their birthdays, but whenever thinking about a birthday makes them feel good.

Patty and Mildred Hill knew quite a bit about music and they knew quite a bit about children. It appears that they weren’t too astute about controlling intellectual property and making profit off of ideas. But they launched a classic.

Children will be singing “Happy Birthday to You” long after Warner/Chappell is forgotten. One day the lawyers may recognize what the world already knows: the song doesn’t belong to any company. It belongs to the whole world.

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From time to time I have the opportunity to have a discussion with a young adult that makes me remember being that age myself. A college environment is a great place for gaining information. There are plenty of books to read, research is encouraged and supported and the minds of young adults are brilliant and able to absorb and remember many different bits of information. I think that young adults are interested in many different subjects as well, which adds to that sense of having a lot of information. I am often amazed at the variety of topics about which a young adult can converse intelligently and the amount of information they carry in their conscious minds. Now that I am older, I sometimes have to dig a bit deeper for information and some of the information that I carry in my brain is obsolete, or at least dated. Frequently I can cite a statistic that is either based on old research or no longer relevant.

Possessing information, however, isn’t the same as knowledge. It takes more than a series of known facts to be able to use information and apply it to the solution of problems. I’ve known a few people in my life who never really develop basic common sense. They might be academically brilliant and possess a lot of information but lack practical skills for real-world problem solving. Sometimes these individuals make very good professors and teachers. And, with the right partnerships they can have very successful lives.

There are, on the other hand, individuals who always seem to be rooted in reality - able to do ordinary tasks with ease while accepting larger challenges. They have organizational skills that enable them to not only sort their information so that it is usable, but also to do tasks in the right order to accomplish real work.

I’ve long tried to be more than a person who possesses information. I often joke that I was at my most brilliant when I was 25 years old. I had earned my undergraduate and graduate degrees. I had read a lot of books. I had a title and a profession. Then, when I arrived in my first parish, people were impressed not with my titles and degrees, but with the fact that I knew how to drive a truck and operate farm machinery. They thought it remarkable that their minister changed his own oil and could make an acceptable tack weld. It was often my practical skills, earned through a lot of part-time jobs along the way, that impressed the people I served more than the books that I had read, the information that I possessed and the academic credentials I sported.

A complete life requires more than information.

Now, at this stage of my life, I often find myself thinking about wisdom. Wisdom is something more than information. It is something more than knowledge. Wisdom is the ability to use knowledge. It is, in part, born of experience. Having collected a lot of experiences, however, does not guarantee wisdom. I know people who have a “been there and done that” attitude about much of life and yet seem to have not learned much from their experiences. They seem likely to repeat mistakes.

Wisdom involves integration of information, knowledge, experience, understanding, common sense and insight. It is the integration part that is the most challenging. How do I use what I have learned and the experiences I have had to make a genuine contribution to the world?

I still have much to learn before I might be considered to be wise, but I have a few observations about myself that are interesting - at least to me.

I am slower to share information with others. These days I feel little need to prove that I am smart or that I possess information. I don’t need to spout facts or offer corrections as readily as was the case years ago. These days I am better at listening and a bit slower to speak than was the case. I don’t need to prove my expertise to anyone. As a result I am gaining the ability to discern which information is helpful and useful and which information is irrelevant or unnecessary. I have less need to bombard others with facts, many of which are trivial or not relevant to the situation at hand.

I am less likely to argue. Somewhere along my life’s journey the passion for convincing others of my opinions has become less powerful. I remember a self-righteous sense of being “right” and experiencing others as “wrong” combined with an urge to change their minds. These days I am more able to accept the opinions and ideas of others without having to be convinced by them or needing to convert them to my opinion or ideas. There are, of course, ideas and concepts that are worth defending and there is a place for reasoned argument. When people genuinely listen, debate can be an excellent tool for teaching and expanding the understanding of the community. These days, however, I am quicker to allow someone to have their own ideas and slower to enter into an argument aimed at changing those ideas.

I seem to be more aware of my emotions. It wasn’t too many years ago that I would find myself surprised by the intensity of my emotional reaction to a particular situation. These days, I seem to be more aware when my anger is stirred or when I am overwhelmed with compassion. My emotions don’t surprise me as much as once was the case. As a result, I am better able to engage in a conversation without losing my temper and saying something that I later regret. This is a matter of degree. It isn’t that I don’t misspeak. It isn’t that I don’t have regrets about some things I have said. It is just that this is less common than it was a few years ago.

I observe great wisdom in others and I know that I have a long journey ahead before I might be considered to be truly wise. But I also see some progress. Advancing in wisdom may become even more important as I lose some of my ability to keep relevant information on the top of my mind. As I slow in mental processes, I hope that I can increase in discernment.

Who knows? Maybe I could yet develop the quality of sound judgment. It would have been very useful when I was younger, but I still have need for it.

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Back in the days before we all carried digital voice recorders in our phones, before people carried phones with them, before phones existed at all, before tape recorders and other mechanical devices, court reporters used shorthand to make accurate records of legal proceedings. Roy was a court reporter. He learned to listen carefully and record accurately and quickly the proceedings of the court in the years before Montana had obtained statehood. His assignment was the territorial capitol and he would sit with the judge as the court heard the claims and counter claims of miners and cattlemen and tried a few criminals, including rustlers and gunslingers.

Our family has quite a few stories about Roy, but even more about his wife, who was a member of W.C.T.U. and quite outspoken in her political opinions. One of the reasons that we don’t tell too many stories is that Roy came from a long line of keepers of journals and he recorded much of his life in pen and ink. His journals have everything from the temperature and other weather observations to transcripts of sermons that he heard at church.

Their daughter married a lawyer and became mother to five daughters of her own. One of those daughters suffered from heart disease and died as a teen. The other four all married and had children and had a wide variety of adventures from serving as head of office for a US Senator to flying small planes over the Rocky Mountains to sailing to serving as a farm educator in India and several South American countries. One bicycled in Sri Lanka, another rote an elephant. They were all adventurers.

The collection of stories is pretty long at this point. Not all of the daughters were journal keepers, but they all were pretty good letter writers.

By the time we got to the next generation - the children of the four granddaughters of the court reporter - we are a diverse bunch. There’s a railroad man, a lawyer, a nurse’s assistant, a fireman, an organic farmer, a paper mill electrician, a musician, a long distance cyclist, a couple of boat builders, and a dozen other professions, including a preacher.

Despite having pretty good records, our family certainly has a wide diversity of stories about our ancestors. I was always pumping my aunts for stories of ministers and preachers who were in our family or close to it. A pioneer Methodist Circuit Rider, Brother Van, was a close family friend. The court reporter was executor of his will and recorder of some of his story. There have been two books published about Brother Van and there are still a lot of stories about him floating around Montana. Brother Van believed that every town in the state would one day have a Methodist Church and that each church would have a pastor and when the pastor was found the church would thrive. He believed in that so much that he would often purchase land for a parsonage as soon as a church was founded - long before it had become large enough to support a pastor. As a result he ended up owning house lots in several of the state’s smallest towns.

Brother Van was, by all accounts, an engaging preacher. He could go into almost any venue and start holding services and the crowd would continue to get bigger and bigger until he had filled the hall with people who had traveled for miles to hear him preach.

My career hasn’t come close to that of Brother Van. Of course, the times are different, but I have never started a new church were there was none. I have never preached in a saloon. I have never gone from town to town on horseback in the middle of the winter. And I don’t have congregants using short hand to record my sermons so they can remember what I said at a later time. I never actually aspired to be like Brother Van in the first place.

But I did somehow inherit my great grandfather’s penchant for keeping a journal. I don’t fill up file cabinets with hand-written documents, but I do write an essay every day and I’m approaching nine years of not missing a single day. Like my ancestor, I think that much of what I have written will not be remembered - or even read a few generations from now, but I do have a few faithful readers who enjoy reading what I have to say.

Like those who have gone before me, I don’t write primarily because I desire readers. I write because language is a tool that I know how to use and I use that tool to reflect and process the experiences and ideas that come from living in the brief moment of history that I have been given. Who knows, I may even one day record a story that someone else will deem worthy of retelling.

And like the court reporter journalist of my heritage, I have been privileged to know some pretty remarkable people and I’ve had the joy of writing part of their stories as a portion of the words that I’ve managed to place in this blog.

Somehow time has passed so that there are no members of the generation of my parents left in our family. My first cousins, siblings and I are the elders of our clan these days. Most of us are grandparents and some are great grandparents. Future generations are taking their place in the family story and soon they will be the keepers of the stories of our elders - and our stories as well.

I’m well aware that my time of writing will not go on forever, but while it lasts, I do gain great meaning and a sense of purpose by beginning each day with writing. Once in a while I even come back and re-read the words that I have written. Sometimes, I even search for an old blog post so that I can share it with someone else.

We are the keepers of the stories and stories can only be kept if they are told. If we were to remain silent (or if I were to not write) the stories could easily be lost.

The words will keep coming.

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There’s nothing special about it, but our family is one of millions of families who have been asked to keep a Nielsen TV viewing diary this week. It isn’t the first time we’ve been on the list, so I am familiar with the process. My wife says that if they had gotten her on the telephone, she would have refused. I often refuse to participate in surveys, thinking that most of the so-called research is not very credible. Leading questions and push polls don’t provide useful information and the opinions of participants are easily manipulated to the advantage of whoever has commissioned the study.

But there is something kind of fun for me to take the detailed nielsen diary, fill out the basic statistical information at the beginning, write our names in the columns and then record “no television viewing” in each of the segments for morning, afternoon and evening for seven days. Then I seal up the diary in its return form and drop it into the mailbox felling a bit smug and hoping that in some way more people who don’t watch television will get that information to the advertisers.

I know that when my diary is received it is probably thrown away and that the company doesn’t do anything with the information. Their goal is to provide information to television stations about how many people are watching what programs on television so that information can be used to sell advertising. There is no market for data on how many people are not watching television. Still, I hope someone notices that there are some of us out here who have other things to do with our time.

We live in this intensely busy and very loud world. Recently I’ve been struck by how many places that once were quiet are now filled with sound. I visit in nursing homes and assisted living facilities and find them filled with large screen television sets, constantly on, and often with the volume turned up quite high because the viewers are hard of hearing. Doctor’s offices and waiting rooms in professional buildings now are filled with television sets. There are restaurants in our town where you can find dozens of television sets, often tuned to 5 or 6 different programs. I find it hard to eat in such a setting. As one who doesn’t watch television much at all, I get disoriented by two different moving images at the same time. It almost makes my dizzy and I can’t figure out which image to watch. I turn my head away and focus on the people with whom I am eating, but am soon distracted by the visual images. We don’t eat in restaurants very much, but when we do, we prefer those that are quiet and do not have television sets.

It isn’t very meaningful to complain about all of the noise of our world. We are surrounded by construction, cars, motorcycles, trucks, televisions, radio, computer-generated or recorded sounds and a million other sources of sound.

Despite this constant sound and the constant presence if not actual human beings, at least images of humans doing all sorts of activities, study after study reveals that we, as a culture, feel more alone and alienated than ever before. We are constantly bombarded by images of people and yet we feel more an more isolated.

Here’s the paradox. I don’t feel lonely when I am all alone in my canoe on the surface of the lake. Of course I’m rarely alone at the lake. The ducks and geese float about the surface of the water. The eagles fish from high in the sky above. The red-winged blackbirds flit from cattail to cattail along the shore. The heron silently stands on the trunk of a tree fallen in the water.

The bible reports that our people suffered when they were carried off into exile. They felt cut off from one another and cut off from God. It is remembered as a time of great trial. I think that all of the noise of our world is a kind of self-imposed exile for too many people. They fill their lives with sound and noise because despite the hunger to be connected, people don’t know how to re-connect with God. They live in exile.

Prayer is our way to to connect to the heart of God. It is our way to connect to the hearts of others who are praying. Gandhi said, “Prayer is not an old woman’s idle amusement. Properly understood and applied, it is the most potent instrument of action.”

The most important part of prayer is silence. God does not require our words. Sitting in silence and listening for God’s voice is essential to my ability to engage the world. I’m not sure that I am often in deep meditation, though there are many benefits of meditation. Most of the time, I am happy to just be quiet and still. I like to be out in nature, walking in the woods or paddling a canoe. Sometimes I just sit quietly in my canoe and go nowhere. Sometimes I just sit on a rock and don’t go at all. When I listen to the quiet of the natural world, I become aware of the breath of God that surrounds us all of the time.

Yesterday, I sat in my small boat and watched a heron. The heron was watching me almost as much as he was watching the water for a fish. He turned his head and stretched up his neck to see me. I knew that if I made any large movements, if I raised my paddle to turn my boat, he would take to flight in that marvelous almost prehistoric motion that herons have employed for millennia. Somehow, however, neither of us felt a need to move.

As I sat, I began to be aware that there must be many others sitting quietly. Perhaps a coyote was looking for a mouse or an owl for a rabbit. But also there were people all around the world - religious people in monasteries, faithful at worship, workers in gardens, mothers who rise before their children - all sharing this silence. My prayers were not alone, they were connected to the prayers of millions of others.

I may not be in the majority of those asked to fill out the Nielsen ratings, but I am connected to millions in prayer, and that connection is deeply meaningful.

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One of the joys of being pastor of the congregation I serve is the wide diversity of people with whom I work. When it comes to politics, you can find almost any point of view in our congregation. We serve people at many different stages of life. I often visit with a family planning a funeral of a loved one and another family to plan a baptism in the same week. At this time of the year we are preparing to send young adults off to college and military service and witness the launch of their adult years and we frequently get to welcome home people who have worked their entire careers in other locations who are now coming back home to retire.

Among the contrasts are the homes in which I visit. I might be invited into a tiny apartment for coffee one day and a family home for dinner another day. I might lunch with folks who frequently eat out in restaurants and in the same week attend an anniversary party in a legion building or fraternal hall. I’ve been invited into some of the most run down trailers in the obscure neighborhoods of our community and also into some of the very large homes with exclusive addresses. I’ve looked out at some of the best views in the hills and wandered around broken-down vehicles to get to a home where the curtains remain closed because the neighbor’s place is only a few feet away.

I can understand why some people choose to live in rural and isolated locations. When I head out to a lonely home that many would call “in the middle of nowhere,” I am invited by wide open spaces, the cry of the eagle overhead and the expanse of stars stretching from horizon to horizon. I’ve never been good at close spaces. Susan and I did live in an apartment in Chicago with locks at the entryway, locks at the stairwells and locks on our individual apartments, but I never got good at feeling at home in that setting.

What I have noticed is the graciousness of the people I serve. When I enter their homes they work hard to make me feel comfortable. They are generous in offering refreshment and food and attentive to my comfort.

Although I spend a lot of time meeting and working with people, I am not natural at social gatherings and have had to work hard and learn how to handle myself in those settings. I live for community and love the relationships I have with other people, but I can be quite happy all by myself. When I think of a relaxing evening, I am not immediately drawn to going out. I enjoy just being in my home, sitting in my library or heading to the lake with a small boat.

I sort of have to get myself up for an evening out with other folks. It often seems to me that others are far better in such settings than I. I worry about what to wear, how to present myself, whether I am talking too little or too much, and all sorts of other concerns. It is hard work for me to act like I’m relaxing in an unfamiliar setting. I know that the issue is my own attitude, but attitudes are hard to change.

Once, not too long ago, we sat at a beautiful table in a beautiful home. I remember thinking to myself that the table and chairs must be worth more than all of the furniture in my home. Then I thought that we don’t have any room in our home that is big enough for such a table. Then I looked down the big table and realized that conversations would have to be with those nearest to me. Even reaching to pass a dish from one side of the table to the next would be a stretch. No worries, the host had put serving dishes on both sides of the table. I was feeling just a little awkward and out of place as another guest, pulling out his chair and sitting down commented, “I love to sit at this table, it is always so inviting.” We were approaching the same table. We were being hosted in the same gracious fashion. But our perceptions couldn’t have been much more different.

On the other hand, it wasn’t long ago that I went with another church member to evaluate a possible volunteer project for some members of our church. We were invited into a very old trailer house that might be considered by some to be substandard housing, with plywood where a window used to be and a tiny kitchen table that our host had to clear of clutter as we sat down. I felt completely at home in that setting and was enjoying the relaxed nature of our host. The other church member who was with me was visibly uncomfortable and later, when we got in my car to head back to the church expressed relief at leaving the home.

We are just different in our comfort levels and different in our tolerance for particular settings.

The blessing of this particular congregation is that we seem to have all kinds of people. Some are not intimidated by the trappings of wealth. Some are not put off by the obvious effects of poverty.

I suspect that most of the time most people tend to socialize and live their lives among people who are very similar to them. They tend to hang out with folks whose financial means are similar to theirs. They tend to talk to people who agree with them. They tend to see only a slice of our community. Our congregation gives me the invitation to step out of my comfort zone and participate in the lives of folks who are very different from me. It is a blessing and a challenge at the same time.

Each time I rise to the challenge, I am able to see the blessing.

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Nearly 4 decades ago, we received news that a pastor friend of ours was getting divorced. It wasn’t the pastor of our church, but rather someone we had met at church camp. We didn’t know any of the details, but later learned that the pastor was getting married to a member of the congregation he served, who had also been recently divorced. At the time divorces were relatively rare among pastors and this was considered to be a bit of a scandal. I remember commenting to someone, “Well, it doesn’t seem like he traded up in the deal.”

One of the lessons of my life is that there are all kinds of things that happen - and all kinds of decisions that others make - that don’t make sense to me. People do things that I don’t understand. Friends and family members make decisions about marriage and divorce that I don’t understand. People make career choices that I don’t understand. I am still a bit surprised at how often people will vote against their own best interests.

If there is a lesson from observing other people it might be that there are all kinds of things that I don’t have to understand. I don’t have to understand the reasons for someone’s action in order to accept that person. Most of the time when I am feeling judgmental, the truth is that I’m not being asked to offer my judgement.

What I’m being asked is for my acceptance.

It reminds me, once again, of Reinhold Niebuhr’s serenity prayer: “God, give us grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.”

I am able to accept, sometimes even with serenity, many things that I don’t understand. I don’t have to get inside the head of another person and figure out what kind of logic that person employed in making a certain decision. I don’t have to agree with the choices that have been made. I don’t have to try to convince another to see things my way.

In my experience friends and family members don’t want me to offer advice on many of the details of their lives. They don’t want to think the way that I think. They don’t want to make the kind of decisions that I might make. They have their own thoughts and intentions and feelings and they make their own choices.

It is, however, still a bit surprising to me how much effort and energy people invest in trying to convert the thinking and decisions of those in their family. “Pastor, how can I get him to see things my way?” It is a question I’ve often heard. It probably isn’t reassuring to the person asking the question for me to say that really you can’t get another person to see things your way.

There is, of course, more to the prayer that Niebuhr wrote. In addition to the grace to accept, the prayer asks for “Courage to change the things which should be changed.” It also asks for “the Wisdom to distinguish the one from the other.”

There have been times in my life when I have lacked all three qualities asked for in the prayer; grace, courage and wisdom. I think that I assumed that these things would be somewhat developmental - that as I age, I would gain more grace, courage and wisdom. Perhaps there is some truth to that, but I’m not sure that I am more courageous than was the case when I was much younger. Some days it feels as if I was more courageous back then. And as for wisdom, it seems to come in relatively small doses compared to the significant problems and challenges of life. I hope and pray that I am growing in wisdom, but some days offer little evidence that this is the case.

I have observed that many people are often unhappy because they cannot change the behavior or decisions made by another. The genius of the serenity prayer, it seems to me, is as clearly revealed in its second half as in the first - and much more familiar - beginning:

“Living one day at a time,
Enjoying one moment at a time,
Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,
Taking, as Jesus did,
This sinful world as it is,
Not as I would have it,
Trusting that You will make all things right,
If I surrender to Your will,
So that I may be reasonably happy in this life,
And supremely happy with You forever in the next.”

“Accepting hardship as a pathway to peace,” and “taking . . . this sinful world as it is, not as i would have it” - those are significant challenges. We’ve been taught to overcome hardship, not accept it. We’ve been groomed to change the sinful world, not accept it as it is. There is a part of me that wants to rebel at these suggestions.

It is, I think, a prayer worthy of returning to again and again. That, of course, is true of many prayers. At least for a person whose brain works like mine repetition is essential to learning and one of the keys to deeper understanding.

God has heard the prayer a million times and more. God doesn’t need to hear Niebuhr’s words again. I, however, need to hear those words. And I need to offer them to God. The prayer is much more about shaping my attitude than affecting God’s will.

That would be true of all genuine prayer.

I try to begin and end each day with prayer - and offer prayers often during the day. Many of the prayers are with words from my own head and experience. Others are without words, simply taking time to be with God. But I am also deeply aware of the power of the words of others to provide a pathway for my prayers. Reinhold Niebuhr is just one of the writers whose prayers have become deeply meaningful to me.

Perhaps, in place of trying to understand others, I should simply try to pray their prayers with them.

For someone who has been around for as many years as I have, it seems that I still have an awfully lot left to learn.

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Growing up near Yellowstone National Park I have always been aware of visitors and guests to the place where I live. I admit that the seven years that we lived in Hettinger, North Dakota didn’t have big tourist seasons, but people do come to that area on their way to Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Medora, the Black Hills and other nearby destinations. They also come to the area to hunt and to look at the land where the last wild Buffalo herds grazed. Most of my life, however, I have lived in places where tourists come. Here in the Black Hills, just a short distance from Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse and not that far from Sturgis, we are used to having lots of guests and tourists in our midst, especially during the summer. The campgrounds and hotels are filled, the parking lots at the businesses catering to tourists are full and there are plenty of summer jobs for those who want to serve our guests.

We have been warned to brace ourselves for an estimated 1 million visitors during the height of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally during the first week of August. Of course none of us know what a million visitors looks like, let alone a million visitors intent on riding motorcycles. We have definitely noticed that there are more people arriving early for the event. The hills are already full of motorcycles and there are a lot of vendors who have set up tents and shelters and are already doing business in various parking lots and next to established businesses.

Some of us have established lots of little habits to help us deal with the influx of visitors. I plan driving routes to avoid left hand turns, especially at intersections that don’t have protected left hand turns. I make it a practice to visit the grocery store first thing in the morning if I need to shop, though we also make it a practice to stock up in the weeks before the rally to minimize the need to go to the store. When we need to purchase gas, we practice extra patience and try to be as friendly and polite as possible. If someone cuts us off, we try to concentrate on the positive impact of the tourists. They really are important to our local economy and rally-related jobs are important to a lot of people.

I’m not sure we were so kind to tourists when I was growing up. Although I never wore the t-shirts making fun of all of the tourists, I admit that I did laugh at them: “Welcome to Yellowstone. So far this year the score is Grizzlies 4, tourists 0.” “If we aren’t allowed to shoot them, why do they call it tourist SEASON?”

I guess this year in Yellowstone, the score is buffalo 5, tourists 0. There have been an unusual number of incidents of tourists injured by getting too close to the buffalo this year.

OK, I know that they aren’t really buffalo, they’re American Bison, but we’ve been calling them buffalo for as long as I can remember. I don’t pronounce coyote the Spanish way with the accent on the e, either. I’m from South Dakota, where the mascot of USD is pronounced the way we pronounced the name of the animal where I grew up. So much for that rant.

Tourists and buffalo, however, is a serious matter. The animals look a bit like oversize cattle, and people don’t understand how powerful they are. They also don’t appreciate how fast they can run. I’ve witnessed the buffalo roundup. I’ve seen a buffalo run full bore in 5 feet of snow. I know how quick the animals can be. And there are lots of warnings given. There are signs posted along the roads. There are articles in the park paper given to each car that enters. There are ranger talks. In Yellowstone National Park people are prohibited from coming within 25 yards of buffalo. That’s 75 feet - about a quarter of a city block.

Tuesday another tourist was tossed into the air by a charging buffalo. She turned her back on it at a distance of about 6 yards to take a selfie with the animal. The report from the Associated Press that I read didn’t mention what happened to her camera or cell phone or whatever device she was using to take the picture. Who knows? Maybe she got a shot of herself being tossed through the air. Maybe the buffalo stepped on the phone.

I hope she is a lot smarter and a lot more cautious the next time she sees a wild animal.

I was raised with a healthy respect for wild animals. We knew how to hike in bear country and what to do if we were to sight a bear in the wild. We hoisted our bear bags into the trees at night and made sure not to have any food smells in our tents when we went to sleep. We carried tin cups on our backpacks so that their rattle would alert bears to our presence as we walked. We also knew that we were assuming a certain amount of risk when we headed to the high country.

Yellowstone National Park isn’t an amusement park. These days you won’t see many bears in the park and if you do they will be a long way from the roads. They had to manage the bears to keep the tourists from getting too close. I’ve seen tourists trying to take pictures of their children with the bears. Now they may have to put up fences to keep the tourists away from the buffalo.

I guess all I am saying is that I wish people would use a little bit of common sense. It isn’t just the buffalo and bears that are dangerous. Riding a motorcycle on the roads of the hills involves quite a bit of risk. Add in 999,999 other tourists and perhaps a summer thundershower and it can be downright dangerous. The hospital is already experiencing an increase in accident traffic. We don’t want more people to get hurt.

Be careful out there. We’re glad you’ve come to visit. And we’d prefer to have you get back home without injury if possible.

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I was just a couple of years too old to really get into the Dr. Seuss books the way my younger brother did. I had already learned to read when the books started arriving at our house. I think that our parents were subscribed to a young reader’s program because along with the Dr. Seuss books there were other books to teach reading and encourage the love of books. It probably was a good thing, however, to have books around the house that were a bit below my current reading level. I think that I read all of them. I still have the original copies of “The Cat in the Hat” and “The Cat in the Hat Comes Back” that we had when we were children and they are well-used.

Now, as a grandpa, I love to read those books. Most of them are on their third go around, having read them as a child, read them to our children and now reading them with our grandchildren. Some of them, like Green Eggs and Ham, I have read so many times that I have long sections of the poetry memorized and can vary the pace of my reading to match the mood of the grumpy old character who does not like green eggs and ham, at least until he tries them.

We read stories with our grandson over Skype from time to time and Dr. Seuss books are among the titles that we read. We have a copy here for us to read and another for our grandson to look at. At four years old he isn’t reading yet, but there are many pages of the book that he has memorized and so he can “read” the page to us. One of our favorites is one of the books from the Dr. Seuss Beginner Books series, by P.D. Eastman, “Go Dog. Go!” It is a great book with lots of colors, actions, car chases and a surprise ending. I try to have several hats handy for the dialogue between two characters, now shared with our grandson:
“Hello!”
“Hello!”
“Do you like my hat?”
“No, I do not like that hat.”
“Goodbye.”
“Goodbye.”

So you can imagine my delight that in a little less than a week there will be a new Dr. Seuss book. It has been a quarter of a century since the last new Dr. Seuss book, “Oh, The Places You’ll Go!” came out. Theodor Geisel (Dr. Seuss’s real name) died in 1991 and we thought that the series of books had ended. However, among his papers at the time of his death was the manuscript and illustrations for a book that was never published and now (lucky us!) the book is coming out next week.

“What Pet Should I Get?” features the brother and sister from the 1960 book, “One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish,” so you know it is going to be wonderful. I’m hoping that the book contains the silly rhymes that make other Dr. Seuss books so much fun to read aloud.

I’m sure that the pet store in the book will have not only cats, dogs, birds, fish and rabbits, but also the wonderful imaginary creatures that inhabit the world of Dr. Seuss. And, for children and adults alike, what pet to get requires serious consideration.

Reading that the book is about to be released immediately made me think of my cousin’s granddaughter in whose home we visited last week. She first introduced us to her rather rambunctious dog that clearly delights the young owner with its antics, ball chasing and dashes into the river to swim. Then we met her rabbit and heard of her desire to get a guinea pig. It didn’t sound like she had made much progress in convincing her mother that this was a good idea. She does, after all, live on a farm with chickens and cows and several dogs and a yard full of farm cats. There is not immediate shortage of animals in her world and no shortage of chores to care for the animals. Still, just one more pet . . .

So it is easy to understand how the characters in Dr. Seuss’s book allow themselves to wonder if they might bring home one of each kind of pet in the pet store. The idea, however, will not work:
“NO . . . Dad would be mad.
We can only have one.
If we do not choose,
we will end up with NONE.”

Always a teacher, Dr. Seuss is helping young readers to learn of the importance of making choices. Learning to make up one’s mind is one of the challenges of growing up and Dr. Seuss is consistent in teaching about important issues without being overly preachy or moralistic. His playful way of struggling with real problems makes it a joy to consider the challenges of childhood and reminds parents that the problems faced by children are real.

According to the article I read in the Washington Post, the book also has several pages with photographs of the discovery of the manuscript and other interesting information about Dr. Seuss himself and how he went about creating his delightful books. There is also a note from the publisher noting that although decades ago pet shops were the common place to get an animal today’s recommendation is to adopt a pet from a shelter or rescue organization.

In typical Dr. Seuss fashion, I suspect that this book will delight children, parents and grandparents. I also suspect that it will inspire more than a few children to start their own campaigns to get a new pet for their family. After all if it is that much fun to read about looking for a new pet, the process itself might be even more fun. Dr. Seuss has that effect on people of all ages.

Of course I have pre-ordered the book: two copies. I can’t wait to read this one with our grandson. It’s OK, their family already has a dog.

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We are home from a week of vacation and today is the day to return to work. Our trip was a delightful break from the ordinary and we traveled 1285 miles without any mechanical problems. Our camper provided a good home on the road for us as we traveled. Family visits were renewing and a couple of days of solitude were refreshing.

It has been many years since we have spent a week away from cell phones and the Internet. We did check our cell phones for messages a couple of times during the week and I used my cell phone to publish this blog on Saturday.

So today I face a mountain of emails. I haven’t checked emails since a week ago Sunday and since I receive somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred emails a day, there will be a lot to sort. Of course it is like sorting regular mail. There is plenty of junk mail that can be discarded without reading it. Then there are the things that have to be partially read because it isn’t obvious what information it contains. Next are emails that need to be read for information, but do not require a response. Then there are the ones that require a response. Somewhere in there are a few that require a thoughtful response that takes some time to compose.

Of course all of those emails are in random order. I have to sort them out and deal with them. With a large number such as I face today, I’ll probably just take them in the order they appeared. I plan to divide the task into manageable chunks, dealing with other matters throughout the day to break up the job. Hopefully by the end of the day I will have gotten through the backed up emails.

The ease of connectivity presents a challenge for us when we want to take a vacation. It is very easy to remain plugged in and connected to others. We’ve taken many vacations where checking email has been part of our vacation routine and hasn’t been much of a problem. However, there are times when it makes sense to disconnect and there are places worth visiting where connection isn’t an easy matter.

In the past, when we weren’t so connected, we would travel and our families would expect that we would be out of touch unless there was a problem. This meant that they assumed that we were OK and didn’t worry unless they received a call. That has been turned around in today’s world. We need to keep our family members informed and they start to worry if we don’t check in. Yesterday as we drove back into an area of cell phone coverage, our phones began to sound off with text messages and Susan was responding to family members as we drove down the highway. We’re OK. We had a lovely time. There are no problems. But just a couple of days of being out of touch seem to set off worries in some family members.

As we travel, we experience that the places that are “off grid” are fewer and farther between. It just happens that we spend quite a bit of time down alongside the Missouri River in relatively remote locations on this particular trip resulting in several days spent out of the reach of cell phone towers. We know that when we return there will be more towers and phones capable of reaching greater distances.

It hasn’t been that long ago that a short drive into the hills resulted in being out of touch. We used to appreciate going to Camp and not having to deal with our phones. Those days are now gone. Cell phones work well at camp and there is a cell phone signal at the lake if I wanted to send a photo from my canoe. I’m not tempted to take my phone paddling with me so far, but it isn’t hard to imagine that I might at some point in the future.

There is a certain amount of stress that comes from having to be always available. I know my attitude toward my phone changed during this vacation. In my usual lifestyle, I use my phone as an alarm clock. I grab it as I slide out of bed and it is my constant companion throughout the day. Except when I shower, I’m always able to check the phone and receive a call or text. The weeks when I am “on call” for the LOSS team or Sheriff’s department require that I be near a phone at all times. I carry my phone on my belt and it goes with me wherever I go. During our recent vacation there were several days when the phone remained in a safe location as I headed out without it. I went hiking miles away from my phone. I ventured out without worrying about having to pause to deal with an important message.

And the world got along without me very well. I wasn’t reading the constant news feed and I didn’t miss much. I stopped by the church last evening to check to see if there were any crises that had occurred and were in need of immediate attention. There were none. I’m sure that there are reasonable amounts of undone work with which I will need to catch up, but things appear to have gone just fine without my constant participation.

It is a good reality check to be reminded that the world does not revolve around me. Others can take responsibility. Others can respond to need. Others can keep the church functioning without the need for my constant input.

One of my resolutions coming out of this vacation is to let go of the need to be constantly in touch. I’ll still be responsible when I am on call, but I am not going to be afraid to take a walk and leave my phone behind. I’ll set times to deal with emails and not feel a need to respond to each as it comes in. I don’t know how long I’ll be able to hold on to this new discipline, but it might just be the beginning of a better way to manage my time and connections.

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As is true of many places we have visited, we feel like we are just barely getting to know this place now that it is time to move on. Yesterday was a lovely day of paddling and hiking and learning more about this area. When I was growing up, I guess I had a negative bias about the dry country of northeastern Montana, but it is a land rich in diversity and wonder.

The Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge isn’t just a spit of land. It is 1.1 million acres on both sides of the river that stretch from the end of the Upper Missouri Wild and Scenic Area to the Fort Peck Dam. It is home to deer and elk, mountain lions, bighorn sheep and a whole host of other animals. It is also rich in ancient history.

The story is that paleontologist Jack Horner, who provided the scientific consultation to the Jurassic Park movies, traveled all around the world in the 1990’s looking for the best dinosaur-dominated ecosystem within a clearly defined time period in the rock layers. He found what he was looking for in his own state. The Hell Creek formation is rich in deposits from the Cretaceous Period and within three miles of where we are camped, paleontologists have unearthed many dinosaurs, including the first Tyrannosaurus rex, found in 1902 by Barnum Brown. Recently in the area, scientists have discovered multiple dinosaurs including Triceratops, Ankylosaurus and other well-known dinosaurs. The Hell Creek and Bearpaw formations are filled with badlands today but once were the shores of a huge Cretaceous ocean filled with fish, squid, ammonites and paddlefish. The paddlefish have endured and adapted and still are caught by anglers to this day. Roaming the seas were giant Mosasaurs, with four-foot long jaws. A very complete mosasaur is on display at the Museum of Geology at South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City.

It was in this area that the opening scenes of the movie Jurassic Park were filmed, with the rather eccentric paleontologist, modeled after the real life Jack Horner, digging up dinosaurs. There are active explorations and digs going on to this day. Had we more time, we might have gone exploring and gotten to where we might watch some of the research.

It is a land of deep contrasts. We paddled on the huge Fort Peck reservoir surrounded by millions of acre feet of water and we hiked on dry hillsides covered in cactus, yucca, sage and other scrub plants. It is a good place to have a supply of water with you whenever you hike and it makes sense to keep an eye out for rattlesnakes at all times. We didn’t see any snakes, but we were aware that we were the visitors in their territory.

It is a bit difficult to imagine this area as it was 68 to 65 million years ago, with sandy beaches alongside a deep sea and dinosaurs roaming the semi-tropical hillsides. The scale of the changes that have occurred make the size of human impact seem fairly small by comparison. The massive Fort Peck Dam, which was, at the time it was finished, the largest dam ever built and the reservoir backed up behind the dam are very minor occurrences when viewed in geological time. The lake will eventually fill with silt and the dam will be rendered useless at some point in the distant future. Through it all the river will continue to make its way from the Rocky Mountains to the Gulf of Mexico.

The effects of human action, including climate change and other global impacts seem very significant to us. Our lives span a few decades, at most a few years more than a single century. The scale of time in this place is so much bigger than our limited perspective.

It is a gift to come to a place like this and be reminded of the vastness of God’s creation that spans more years than our limited imaginations can conceive. Even when our perspective is stretched by the discovery of dinosaurs and the tools of scientific dating, we realize that what we can observe is just a tiny fraction of the great expanse of the whole of time and space.

That is not to say that our lives and what we make of them are insignificant. That is one of the great miracles and paradoxes of our faith. We are but a speck in the vastness of the universe but we are a speck that is deemed worthy of relationship with God. Our minds have the consciousness to peer out at the universe and behold its massive distances. Our brains have been given the gift of being able to learn about things that occurred long before our birth - long before there were any humans on this planet. We have been given imaginations that can speculate about the future and the possibilities of humans to travel to other places and experience other dimensions.

I rather enjoy the sense of feeling small in God’s universe. I like to paddle my boat on a lake that is too big for me to cross and to vast for me to fully explore. I like to hike in hills that would take decades for me to feel familiar with their various shapes and paths. I don’t mind the sense that I am a part of a universe that is far bigger than I.

So today we pack up and drive home. It has been a refreshing and varied week. The intensities of family dynamics and relationships, the revisiting of places of my childhood and ancestors, and the exploration of some new territory have made for an interesting and wonderful balance. The work that we do awaits and there are plenty of surprises that are just around the corner. I know that there will be piles of undone tasks and messages to sort through. But those are for tomorrow and today we start by driving down some of the roads less traveled.

It is indeed a luxury to explore this varied world.

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As we travel around, we often have conversations about the names of places. The Idaho Historical Society has published a book that has the contents of all of the roadside historical markers so that we can read them as we drive along without having to stop at each place. Of course roadside historical markers don’t give you much information about the names of places, so there is quite a bit left to speculation and perhaps a little more research.

Indigenous names are often obvious because of our inability to pronounce them and the way in which language shifts with location. When driving in the Pacific Northwest, we enjoy trying to pronounce the various names of passes and creeks and towns.

Some place names obviously have a story attached to them, though we often do not know the story. Otter Creek may have once been a place with plenty of otters fishing and playing. Wolf Creek may have been where someone sighted a pack of wolves or a lone wolf. Cottonwood Creek’s name is pretty obvious. Two Mile Creek, Dead Horse Creek and Froze to Death Creek also have stories that are easy to imagine.

Other place names come from the people who traveled by or make their homes in the area. McDonald Creek might be near the homestead of someone from Scotland.

Throughout the west there are hundreds of places with religious references, often negative ones. Devil’s Lake and Devil’s Tower probably got their English names from a misunderstanding of Lakota religious principles. When the Lakota spoke of spirits, the Christian settlers didn’t know what they meant and supposed them to be pagan and therefore of the devil. The fact that there was no personified evil spirit in Lakota religion didn’t stop the names from sticking to the places.

Other names, however, probably come from the difficulties of travel and the hardships experienced by the early explorers who came to this country. Hell Roaring Divide probably refers to the loud crashing of the water as the creek descends in a nearly vertical fall from the top of the peaks.

I do not know the history of Hell Creek State Park in Montana where we are camped on this lovely Sunday Morning. It is a very rare thing for us to not be in town and at a church on a Sunday morning, but the specific shape of this trip has landed us at this lovely campsite along the shore of the Fort Peck Reservoir at the end of 25 miles of gravel road north of Jordan, Montana. The town Jordan may be named for the famous river important to so many biblical stories, but there is no similar river to mark the townsite. In fact there is a dry gulch called Big Dry Creek right in town.

The drive out from Jordan is through sagebrush hills that give way to the Missouri River breaks scattered with badlands. I’m pretty sure that the explorers who traveled up the Missouri seeking adventure and furs and other things found the breaks hard to explore in this region. It was a matter of climbing one hill only to get a view of what seems like a succession of other hills stretching to the horizon. It took a big effort to make a few miles in the rugged, sagebrush and cactus-covered hills. I can understand why they might be tempted to name the region with a negative moniker.

It is also possible that some of the creeks in the area weren’t very good drinking water. The hills show plenty of alkali and the heavy mineral concentration might make for poor drinking.

The bottom line is that I don’t know why this place is called Hell Creek State Park. There doesn’t seem to be much information on the state parks website or here at the campground. For us on this visit there are no associations with the negative other than the distance from our community. We don’t have any family who live near here and we are here on a vacation day - a day away from our church community. We always miss the church when we are away and are looking forward to being back at work and in the midst of the community on Tuesday.

While we are here, we are very aware of the beauty of this place. There are meadowlarks, seagulls, geese and other birds in great abundance. The park is adjacent to the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, a place abundant in white tailed deer and thousand and thousands of birds. Located on the national flyway, it is host to many birds during the spring and fall migrations and is a place were dedicated bird watchers come to add species to their lists.

We are here in part to explore new territory for us. Because we drive back and forth from Rapid City to our family sites in Montana frequently, and we also lived in North Dakota for seven years, driving back and forth to our home places. This trip doesn’t involve very much new road for us. We’ve been to Jordan before on our way to and from various events and excursions. But we have never taken the time to drive the gravel roads to the shores of Fort Peck Reservoir. The way this trip turned out offered us a couple of days to stop and play in the water.

This morning’s paddle was a delightful excursion on a protected arm of the reservoir. I’m sure that out in the middle of the main lake there can be some fierce wind and waves at times, but here on this arm of the lake it is fairly shallow and easy paddling. Being a morning person, I was out and about before the fishermen to have my time of solitude on the lake before all of the motors were running and boats were heading out in search of the biggest fish. The lake is big enough that there is plenty of room for everyone even during the busiest parts of the day.

So this will be our sabbath for today. To pay special attention to God’s creation. To rest and give thanks for the many blessings of this life. And, just a little, to miss the community of people who are worshiping as I write this blog.

God is good all the time. All the time God is good.

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Montana is a very large and very diverse state. Growing up in Montana, I sort of took it for granted. Growing up with pilot parents, I had a bit of a sense of the state as a series of airports separated by forests and farm land. We lived where the plains meet the mountains, with beautiful and high peaks visible from town, but in the bottom where the wind blows and the plains stretch out to the east. Our valley was ranch country. There were a few wheat farms to the north of us, but most of the folks in our area raised alfalfa as their primary farm crop and earned their living raising sheep and cattle. The agriculture of our area was always marginal, with a few ranches able to produce a living for their families and many struggling with the problems of low prices for their animals and high prices for the supplies they needed. Once the farm crisis of the 1980’s hit, the area around my home town began a not-so-gradual transition from working ranches to hobby farms and vacation homes. The price of land went up so high that the concept of a family ranch was pretty much a thing of the past. A few historic families have hung on while neighbors sold out to wealthy outsiders.

That way of life wasn’t the only living to be earned in Montana. Much of the western part of the state was based on timber and mining. Logging, paper mills, mining and smelting were the big businesses. Those industries too have faded as the easily accessible minerals played out and the old growth forests were thinned and the market shifted.

Almost everything east of the mountains in the northern two thirds of the state was once a huge grassland covered with buffalo, but has been during my lifetime a production area for cereal grains, primarily winter wheat - the hard red wheat from which bread is made - and barley - grown both as animal feed and as malt barley for distilling. There are a few ranchers who have grown sunflowers and oilseed and a few other crops, but grains are the big crop. When I was a child, the usual practice was to rotate the land between a year of fallow ground and a year of grain. The land was divided into great strips and whatever land could be broken up was put into crops. While the grain was growing the farmers used tractors and tillers to mix the top of the fallow ground to prevent the growth of weeds and retain the moisture for the next year when it would be planted. Practices such as low till or no till, where the stubble was left in the field didn’t come into common use until the last decade of the twentieth century. Outside of the River Ranch, near the center of the state, we didn’t spend much time in the northeastern part of the state, and it was, to me, a series of giant wheat fields over which we flew when carrying someone or something to Glasgow or Wolf Point.

I have since made a few trips across that part of the state with memories of hot summers, windy days and fiercely cold winters with blizzards and limited visibility. There is a lot of open country in northeastern Montana.

Much of that country is now dominated by very large farming operations that are highly dependent upon petroleum-based fertilizers and broadleaf herbicides. Some of the herbicides are delivered with airplanes that are much bigger than the small spray planes that my parents used to operated. Some of them are applied with land-based sprayers. The biggest of the sprayers are computer controlled and remember where they have been. After the farmer drives the sprayer for the first round of the field, it decides where to go to deliver the herbicide in the necessary pattern. Combines remember fields and yields and provide instructions for drills to deliver fertilizer the next spring. Entire operations are based on very large and very expensive machinery and lots of computers to analyze, remember and control the machines.

The business is very different than was the case when homesteaders started with 160 acres and a couple of horses. It is very different from the days when I was growing up and a farmer’s ability to make field repairs was as critical as his ability to put in long days of near boredom driving the tractor round and round the field.

Today we will head out across the center of the state, heading East to the southern shore of the reservoir behind the great Fort Peck Dam. Fort Peck Dam itself is a major story in the shaping of this state. The massive earthen dam was built before the days of massive excavators and giant haul trucks. It required an incredibly large labor force in a place that had few amenities. People lived through -40 degree winters in tents and tar paper shacks in order to have the jobs offered by the construction. They worked in back-breaking conditions to move the rocks and dirt that formed the giant reservoir. Lives were lost. families were shaped. The process became an event in the life of the state that not only transformed the land by filling the breaks and gullies of the Missouri with a giant reservoir, but transformed the story of the state by providing off ranch jobs and sources of income for construction workers.

These days the reservoir is a place of recreation, though it remains off of the main routes. There are no Interstate highways that come close to this part of the state and we’ll travel about 25 miles off of the pavement to reach our campsite on an arm off of the southern shore of the lake.

We are big fans of remote camping, but we won’t be alone in our campground - in fact reservations are recommended for campers who want to stay and the cost for us out-of-staters is as high as the camping resorts in other locations. It is a way to connect with the land and driving across this part of the country is a way to remember the wide open spaces and the pioneers who crossed them.

I anticipate the adventure with joy.

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I suppose that every trip has its themes. Certainly one of the themes of this trip has been “succession.” At each stop so far, we have visited with family about the process of making the transition from one generation to the next. I was thinking that this might be a particularly difficult concept for our generation because it seems like we have really struggled with how to keep things going when our parents have died and we don’t remember similar struggle with the transition from our grandparents to our parents. Then I realized that it is just that we don’t remember the tensions of previous generations, and I said to myself, “Look again.”

The issue of succession is as old as the stories of our people. Cain and Abel can’t figure out how to get along. Conversation erupted into anger. Anger erupted into violence. Everybody suffered. One boy ended up a victim. The other ended up condemned to live with the result of a bad decision made in anger. We didn’t keep that story as an example of how to live, but rather as an example of what not to do.

The way the story is told, Jacob and Esau were born fighting. Jacob conspired with his mother to gain a greater portion of the inheritance and when he did he struggled with his conscience so much that he ended up wrestling with an angel on the way to a reconciliation meeting with his brother.

Elijah couldn’t give up his mantle of leadership until the very point of his death.

Saul’s son didn’t get to inherit his crown.

It took over three centuries for an effective prophet to arise from the priests that Solomon banished.

Jesus referred to Peter as the rock - a cornerstone of the next generation of God’s faithful people. The disciples didn’t envision the power and passion of Paul. Paul chose Timothy because he knew his mother and grandmother.

The stories go on and on and on. When you examine our history you discover that the problems of how to make a graceful transition from one generation to another is a major theme of our story. Our generation didn’t invent this tension and passion. We didn’t invent the sense of entitlement or the fear that the next generation wouldn’t be able to properly manage their legacy.

We have a tendency to think that the challenges of our time are ones that are new to us. It always seems like ours is the pivotal generation - the place where either everything comes to a bad ending or the future breaks forth in new ways. Reading the stories of our people, however, gives us a different perspective. It is unlikely that the entire future of the church has been placed in our hands alone. New leaders have always emerged in God’s time. God will provide what is needed for the next generation.

Often our job is to let go. And that is much easier said than done.

We care. We have invested time and energy and enthusiasm and passion in our vision of the future. We have enjoyed visions of what might be. We also have enjoyed the power of being in charge. And we do not yield that power and responsibility lightly.

Maybe our pride gets in our way. I know I have looked around and thought to myself that there was no one who is capable of doing my job. It doesn’t take much contemplation to realize that such thinking is far from the truth. When I let my ego do the talking, I deny myself the benefits of humility. The truth is that there is no one who will do my job the way that I do it and that my way is only one way that it can be done. The truth is that there are plenty of different ways for the future to unfold and I do not control the future.

The future belongs to God.

It is fascinating to me the ways in which going on vacation gets my mind to thinking about the work I am called to do at home. The change of perspective is refreshing. As I write I am beginning only my second full day without access to the Internet. I didn’t even go all day yesterday without cell phone access. For a while in the late afternoon I was where there was a signal. I chose not to check my email and not to make a phone call or send a text message. It is liberating to pull myself into the present and focus on the people in this place.

Such focus, however, does not make me more distant from the people and church I love and serve. If anything it reminds me of how important it is for me to remain faithful to that call. Perhaps, however, it also reminds me that I need to make room for new leadership to emerge. Since I have been reminded that the legacies we pass on travel in God’s ways and not our own and that we cannot control the future, I need to provide the kind of relationship with the church that makes room for new leaders and new styles of leadership - perhaps even for new directions in the life and ministries of the church.

And I need to read the stories of our people again with this fresh perspective and a fresh commitment to discovering the ways in which our forebears discovered the grace to pass on the mantle of leadership to new generations.

The ranch still produces grain that is made into bread that feeds hungry people. The river still flows by and carries its water to the ocean. The birds still sing and the deer still graze in the river breaks. These will continue. The land never was ours to own. Even though our great grandparents thought they could earn it, it was theirs only for a little while. We, too, are here for only a little while.

The story will continue long after we are gone.

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I have been thinking about settlers and nomads for a few days. Of course it is always a bit risky to divide people into groups and labels are never completely accurate. They don’t predict human behavior or personality type. But sometimes you can say that folks are more or less like one of two ends of a spectrum and use that way of thinking to explain some of their behavior and ideas. And when an individual, family or community tries to make the transition from one way of living to another it can be awkward and difficult for the people involved.

I know settlers. We’re visiting at the River Ranch, right next to the Missouri River between Great Falls and Fort Benton Montana. There is bench land, bottom land, and even bottom land on the other side of the river that are part of the River Ranch operation. It is a 100% Certified Organic farming and ranching operation. I spent the summers here when I was 14 and 15, learning how to work, getting a little space from my family of origin, discovering a sense of independence, and immersing myself in the larger family enterprise.

This land was settled by my mother’s parents and grandparents generation in the 19th century. They were among the early non-indigenous families to come to this area. Fort Benton was the end of navigation for the steam ships. Prior to settlement, this area was primarily hunting grounds for a couple of different tribes. There was some conflict between the tribes, but it was minimal in part because there was a lot of land, a lot of buffalo and not so many people.

These days the primary operators of the ranch are the children of my cousins. That makes them the fifth generation of our family since settlement. Their children are the sixth generation to live on the place. For part of our family, once they settled, they stayed put. We read about our forebears in history books. I have been reading Liz Carlisle’s “Lentil Underground,” a book about organic farming and sustainable agriculture in the United States, and there are more references to the River Ranch and my cousin than any other farming/ranching operation. My great grandfather’s journals are part of the historical archives of the state. My grandmother’s piano will be transferred to the Montana Historical Society later this summer. These people are part of the story of this place.

Although I have never lived at the ranch, except for two summers, it always feels like coming home to be here. These people are settlers. They are here to stay.

At the other end of the spectrum, when I try to trace my father’s family roots, I discover that there are many places. It is hard to trace too far in Germany because of difficulties with changes in the spelling of the name, but I know the family came from that part of the world. Our people were in Russia for a short time. Children were born there, but they moved on. They were in Pennsylvania for a short time, perhaps one or two generations and then they moved on. My father and his father were both born on the same homestead in North Dakota but my grandfather sold out and moved his family to Montana when my dad was a teen. I was born in Montana, but have lived in Illinois, North Dakota, Idaho and South Dakota in my adult life. My children are in Washington and Missouri. Sometimes when we speak of our family, and the amount of travel that is required to be with our children and grandchildren we sigh and say, “Well, at least they’re all on the same continent.” For two years when our daughter lived in England that wasn’t the case.

I think that I have roots in both camps. Although my lifestyle has tended to be more nomadic, I have a deep understanding of the settlers in our family tree.

Unexpectedly, both groups - settlers and nomads - are passionate about the land. And that is a place where conflict can arise. When I engage in conversations with our Lakota neighbors in South Dakota, one of the things that I hear is that whites don’t have a sense of the sacredness of the land. We don’t understand it in the same ways that the Lakota do. There is truth to their claim. On the other hand, the Lakota were historically a nomadic people. It was the arrival of settlers, primarily European settlers, that forced the Lakota to make the transition from nomads to settlers. Their roots aren’t in just one place, but rather many places as they traveled across the land.

In our family the place that Susan and I left yesterday has only been owned by our people since about 1960. Our parents bought it as a summer camp for the family and invested both time and money to fix things up the way they are now. In 2011, when our mother died, the property passed to its second generation. I’m fairly certain it will be sold sometime in my lifetime. Too many of us are more nomadic than settler in personality and, frankly, there are too many children to jointly operate any one place. But the passion of my sisters and brothers and nieces and nephews for that piece of property is not in proportion to where they live. Some of those who live farthest away have displayed the greatest passion about what should happen with the land. The two sisters who live closest to the land are in such direct opposition about the management of the property that a strained conversation is about all they can muster these days. Both of those sisters lived out of state for many years and returned close to our home place later in their lives. My brother who has moved around a bit, but always lived in the state of our births, stays out of their arguments and didn’t come to participate in our recent conversations.

None of us have only one part of that spectrum. We nomads have some definite settler tendencies. Though I have been one of the nomadic siblings, I’ve lived in my house in South Dakota longer than any of my sisters or brothers have ever lived in a single residence.

Perhaps we are always in transition, struggling with our love of moving about and our desire to find a home. It is an epic story. In fact it is one of the great themes of the Hebrew Bible. It is a tension we won’t resolve in a single generation.

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Nearly forty years ago, I had the opportunity to take a photography course from Archie Lieberman, a famous photographer, who had made his mark with photo essays for Life Magazine. Among his projects was a coffee table book that contained photographs of a single farm family in Illinois taken over a 25-year period. His specialty was black and white photography and his camera of choice was a Nikon F-series 35mm camera. He was a big fan of Kodak Tri-X film and purchased it in 100-foot rolls, wound it into his own cassettes, and developed his film with a dark bag and a canister each night. For the class, each assignment was to produce a single 11x14 print, matted, but not framed and we set up an impromptu display in the class each week. The entire class shared the same darkroom, so you had to sign up for a time slot. Fortunately the darkroom was available around the clock and slots early in the morning weren’t popular, so I could usually find time to work. It took me quite a while to make my prints, choosing the cropping with the enlarger. The paper was expensive, so I didn’t want to waste prints. I learned to bevel-cut mat board and mount photographs with a hot wax roller. I learned to compensate for exposure mistakes with push developing and adjusting print exposures.

Most of those skills aren’t very useful in this day of digital photographs, auto-focus cameras, built-in light meters, computer editing programs and the like.

There is, however, a skill I gained in that class that I use nearly every day. It was a particular way of looking at the world. I never became even fractionally as proficient as Archie in portraiture, and I’m certainly no documentary photographer. I prefer landscapes and probably have taken more sunrise pictures than your average photographer. I’ve gained skill with taking pictures of water and, when I have time I can create some dramatic effects with adjusting shutter speeds and flowing water as well as capturing a bit of the world’s beauty with reflection shots on lakes.

Yesterday was a day when I didn’t take any photographs, but I was thinking of Archie and the class I took and one assignment in general. The assignment was to make a photograph of home place. I struggled with that assignment. Susan and I were living in a tiny apartment in Chicago - a place that never got to feeling like home to me. I was used to open spaces, not urban crunch. I was used to walks in the woods, not miles of city streets. I learned to enjoy our time in Chicago, but I could never think of myself as a Chicagoan and when people asked me where I was from, I’d always answer, “Montana.” I tried taking pictures inside of our apartment, of familiar items, such as mixing bowls and dishes that had been wedding gifts and reflected the love and support of our home community. I took a couple of pictures of my desk and books, that were my companions and a place where I could retreat from the city. I honestly don’t remember which picture I finally chose to submit for my assignment. It wasn’t very memorable to me.

There was, however, one picture that I’ll never forget. It was of a pair of old, but comfortable looking oxford shoes with frayed ends on the laces. It was perfectly focused and exposed and it was obvious that the photographer had made the photo of his own feet - the perspective was simple. While most of the class focused on architecture when asked to take a picture of their home and I had tried to focus on objects within my apartment, one person had simply documented that he was comfortable and at home in his own shoes. His feet were the foundation of his home.

Today is the last day of our brief visit to the place where I grew up. The downtown of our little community doesn’t much feel like home any more. The town is much more geared to tourists and those who have vacation homes than was the case when I was a child. I think that there are four or five art galleries plus a frame shop on main street. There were none when I was a kid. It’s obvious that the primary business of the county is no longer agriculture, but vacation homes. I think that there are at least four realtors on main street and at least three banks. There’s only one grocery store where there had once been three. There’s only one drugstore instead of two. There are no farm machinery dealers left in town and the hardware store is part of a national chain of home improvement stores. They don’t sell leather straps or harness rings or the kinds of specialty hardware we used to remember. There are no bins of open stock of nuts and bolts. You have to buy them in plastic packs of three or four at a time.

Our place by the river, however, seems to be pretty timeless. It feels like home when I walk over the rocks to the river or when I wander back into the meadow. It felt very much like it used to when I mowed the yard and when a thundershower broke overhead and the rain came in waves and sheets for a while last night. The buildings look very similar, though they are currently fixed up with all new roofs thanks to a hailstorm two summers ago.

But home isn’t really about buildings. The house in which I live in Rapid City is the building in which I have lived for the longest period of time of my life. My home is really in Rapid City, though this place still seems like home to me. I guess that I’m really very much like I was when I was in that photography class. I still don’t know how to make a picture of home place. I’ll probably take a walk with my camera this morning and do a bit more looking. Who knows, I might even finish that 40-year-old assignment to make a single picture of home place.

On the other hand, I’ve learned that it might just take a few more decades to figure that one out.

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It is fun to be back at the place of my childhood summers. You might say that there are three streams that flow nearby each with its own flow and traffic. The property isn’t quite square with the world, so its borders aren’t exactly on the compass directions, but I’m simplifying for the purpose of this blog post. To the south is the highway. The highway that runs along the border of the property is no longer the main road. After I grew up the Interstate Highway was built with its twin bridges about a mile farther upstream. The bridge that is at the corner of the place used to take a lot more truck traffic. We’d hear the jake brakes as the westbound trucks slowed to cross the bridge and enter the town. The eastbound trucks were accelerating, shifting from 7th to 8th or 9th gear as they crossed the bridge, making about 45 mph up the hill and going through the rest of their gears on the flat at the top. I spent some of my childhood hours under that bridge. I could cross the river by walking on the girders that support the highway. I could feel the vibration of the bridge as the trucks crossed. I could lower myself to the island int he middle of the river and explore it without getting wet.

I have a cousin for whom that stream defined a big part of his life. He spent many years and millions of miles driving big rigs on the highway. He can tell the difference between a Volvo 670 and 780 at a glance. He can discuss the merits of Peterbuilt, Kenworth and Freightliner. He can go on and on about his dislike of the Eaton autoshift and Volvo’s similar system that are, in his words, “ruining the profession and making it so that idiots can drive trucks.” It won’t be long, he says, and you can mark his words, before computers will be driving the trucks and there won’t be any jobs left for real people.

A mile downstream from the place to the north is the railroad trestle crossing the river. The engineers blow the whistle before crossing the trestle and each has a distinctive way of making the sounds. We could hear them in the night and also hear the rumble of the trains on the rails as they crossed the river. We were warned to never cross the river on the rails because you can’t outrun a train, but we did so on occasion when there was no train in sight or sound, feeling like we were undertaking a dangerous mission. We climbed on the trestle and floated beneath it on our inner tubes.

I have another cousin who was captured by that stream. He worked for the railroad all of his working career until he retired, mostly installing and repairing electronic switching equipment and later managing sections of track. He can tell you whether the train is carrying grain or coal or consumer goods. He knows the code of the cars in the train and can tell you who owns or leases them, where they are bound, and often what is in the containers. He knows why some wheat and barley from Montana travels by train and other travels by rail. He can explain how the coal traffic used to go east, but now heads west since the disaster with the tsunami and the nuclear plants in Japan. He knows about unit trains and the locations of the large loading and unloading facilities.

It is the third stream, defining the eastern edge of the property, however, that has defined my life. The boulder river starts in the high country with the drip, drip, drip of water coming off the edge of the glacier and melting from the snowpack, running into rivulets that run into streams that run into forks that become the river. The East Boulder joins the Main Boulder about 19 miles upstream and the West Boulder joins the combined flow about 3 miles later to make up most of the flow that runs by our place, with a couple of other creeks added in along the way. The river is a living entity that snakes and turns and moves. Right now it flows nearly 100 yards farther away from the building at our place than once was the case. The shape of the stream has changed, also with the sand deposits in different places and the deep pools where the big trout swim, changing location as well. It is, however, the same river, the mighty flow of millions of water droplets heading down to the Yellowstone two miles from our place - a mile beyond the railroad trestle. I’ve floated down that stream many times and fished it so many times that I am quite familiar with both banks - at least with the way they used to be. Lots of trees have fallen and new ones have sprung up over the years. And the river reshapes its banks at will. If you live by the river, you can hear the rocks clattering as they roll about and become even more smooth and rounded with the flow of the stream. We played, paddled, waded, swam, fished, fell, and generally messed about in the river all of our growing up years. It is the river that taught me that I am waterproof. Getting wet is not the worst thing that can happen. It was the river that taught me to go with the flow. You will always lose if you fight the river. You can run faster than the river flows on the shore, but in the water, you will go slower. The force of the river is great enough that you can’t stand in water up to your knees.

And ever time I come to the place it is the river that I hear the most. My ears have learned to filter out the sounds of trucks and trains and move them to the background. I’ve lived in other places for nearly five decades now, but each time I return, I remember that I am a child of this river and its music restores my soul.

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Dear readers: I am on vacation today through July 20. We are spending our time in Montana, starting out at the place by the river that was our childhood summer home. On Wednesday, we’re headed to the River Ranch, near Floweree, site of my great grandparents’ and grandparents’ homesteads. From there we are going to a Montana State Park on the Fort Peck Reservoir. That means a couple of things. One is that while on vacation I might not always write the blog first thing in the morning, and most days I don’t plan to write as early as I do when I am at home. Secondly, we are spending most of the week in remote locations with few people. Both the River Ranch and the Reservoir campground are more than 25 miles from paved roads. I won’t have access to high speed Internet during the week at all and I will only be able to publish the blog if I have a cell phone signal, something that is likely to be absent from the places we are visiting. I will upload all of the blogs by July 21 at the latest. Sorry for any inconvenience.

One of the things about being a minister and working with people for nearly four decades is that I sometimes find myself putting people into categories. I know that this can lead to misperceptions and misplaced prejudices. However, it can be helpful for me to remember a similar situation when confronted by a specific need or problem. For example, when I encounter someone who is in need of food, I have found it is a good general practice to see if I can share a meal with them as well as helping them with groceries. Sometimes, I can get a better understanding of what will be most helpful. When someone tells me a long story about why they need a specific type of assistance, I have learned to listen carefully and then ask pointedly, “What is it that you need the most.” Frequently I am unable to solve all of the problems - sometimes I can’t even solve the most pressing problem. All I am able to do is to contribute to the solution.

Over the years, I have learned not to be too surprised at the kinds of problems that arise in families. Terrible things happen to really good people. Illness makes no distinctions of class or race or gender. Tragedy can strike in the least expected places. There are days when people are completely shocked by what occurs. Sometimes people can be incredibly mean to one another - even to people they know and love - even to members of their own families. There is nothing about being a member of a church that makes a person somehow immune to tragedy. And some of the people who are active in churches can behave in decidedly un-Christian ways at times.

This way of thinking can be helpful to me as a pastor. But I’m not sure that it makes me a better brother or husband or father. I’ve been known to respond to family members as if they were members of the church - or even as if they were people I had not previously met. I’m pretty sure that can be very off putting. When presented with a family problem, I might try to do a little analysis, forgetting that any evaluation of a family situation that I might make is incredibly biased. I am, after all, a member of the family.

Remembering to keep an open mind and to give people a little bit of grace is as important in dealing with my family as it is in any other relationship.

So it is with a little bit of hesitation that I go into this vacation where I will be seeing a lot of family members. Like any other family, we have very different circumstances and very different needs. As my father often said, “Equal isn’t always fair.” And we need to be sensitive to those needs because we have some shared resources. Part of our parents’ estate was left in trust. And for better or worse, I am one of the trustees. That means it is my responsibility to manage those resources for the benefit of all - even when on individual might want special privilege or consideration.

I learned many years ago that there are some parts of being in a family that are very similar to the work that I do. When we were getting started in our careers, it was difficult for me to spend too much of my vacation time with my family. It didn’t feel like being on vacation. It felt like working. I was dealing with complex relationships, trying to mediate when people didn’t get along, solving problems that seemed to be similar to some of the problems that I encounter in my work. While some member of the family have work that isolates them from others, my work means being intensely involved in the lives of folk. Vacation, for me, is usually going off to a place without too many people and giving myself time to unwind and reflect. I prefer my vacations without too many intense conversations.

The reality, however, is that I need these relationships. I need to be a part of a family. Even when there are disagreements or differences of opinion, I belong to these people. Again quoting our father: “You can’t resign from a family.” Being a minister does involve specific duties and responsibilities. It is, in part, a defined task. It is what I do. Beyond that, however, being a minister is about being an integrity. It is about who I am. I can’t turn it off and on at will. I’m not somehow a minister when I am in my congregation and not a minister when I am on vacation. I am who I am all of the time and that means caring about relationships and people and trying to work for peace and justice.

It will be an interesting vacation. The first couple of days may feel quite a bit like being at work. At the end of the week, when it is pretty much just Susan and me and the Missouri River, I’ll get time to think and reflect and absorb the events of this end of the week.

Life is never boring.

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One of the thing that distinguishes humans from other animals is the way in which we process and use memory. There is evidence that other animals have a certain capacity for memory. A pet, for example, remembers and recognizes a family member and demonstrates that memory when that person returns after an absence. We humans, however, appear to be unique in our capacity to ruminate and draw meanings from our memories.

It is not just that we are able to process our memories. We need to do so in order to have successful and meaningful lives. That kind of deep processing of memory is a large part of my vocation. Not only do I work with my personal memories, but also with the collective memories of our people. Each week I take ancient stories of our people - ones that we have held and treasured for many generations - and use them to draw meaning from the events of contemporary life. A sermon is much more than expressing my opinion. It is an honest attempt to help worshipers see their lives in the context of the bigger picture of the story of our people. We are part of something much larger than a single life. Our lives take place in the context of the movement of many generations of people throughout a long span of history.

The English language has a wonderful word for this process: reflection. The word has two distinct, but related, meanings. To reflect is to throw back energy without absorbing it. When light rays hit a smooth surface they are thrown back resulting in the duplication of the image. We notice such images each day when we look in a mirror. I am especially aware of reflections when I paddle. When the lake is calm, it seems as if the trees, hills, sky and other features of the surrounding countryside are all reproduced on the surface of the lake. It is a source of unending fascination for me. This capacity to throw back energy occurs with other forms of energy as well as light. Energy and heat can also be reflected. We use smooth surfaces to direct heat into our homes and sound also bounces off of hard and smooth surfaces. Both of those phenomena are also apparent at the lake on a calm day. In the early morning on a windless day I can feel the warmth of the sun directly from the air, but I also will notice the warmth reflecting from the water’s surface. And sound takes on a different quality as it travels across the surface of the lake. Often I can hear sounds from the other side of the lake that I would not be able to hear were it not for the reflective qualities of the water. I’ve noticed a single red-winged blackbird in the rushes of the far side of the lake that is too distant for me to see, but whose sound travels clearly to me across the lake.

My canoe is a vehicle not just for this optical phenomena. It also is a way for me to separate myself temporary from the pressures of everyday living. I paddle away from the cell phone, the constant communication of email and text messages and voice mail and other interruptions. I allow my mind to remember what it will and follow lines of thinking that I might not otherwise pursue. In the midst of the busy flow of life, it is essential to allow time to think deeply, to consider, review and contemplate.

Reflecting on the events of life is not just a matter of recall - it is a process of discovering the meaning in those events and lifting up those meanings for others to see. In graduate school, where we were open in our love if big words, we studied the process of phenomenology - the study of the structures of consciousness. Our question was, “How to lived experiences become deeply held meanings?” That process is a mental process. We think about the experiences that we have had.

The first step in the process is simply telling the story. Recalling the details of the experience with the feelings intact is a learned process. Our forebears used to tell the stories over and over again as they sat around a fire in the evening. Sometimes the stories were repeated so often that many generations could tell the same story in exactly the same words.

Once the story is recalled and told it needs to be connected with other stories. We look for patterns in the experiences of life that are not only reflective, but also predictive. When I touch a hot surface, it causes pain. If I do this often enough, I will learn not to touch the hot surface - I will be able to anticipate what is going to happen because I have processed previous experiences. We process both pleasant and unpleasant sensations and experiences.

Once I have sorted my experiences into groups and patterns, I look to the wider stories and experiences of our people to see how my personal experiences fit into the whole of human experience. Knowing what causes me pain, for example, can enable me to feel empathy when another experiences pain. I can begin to understand that my actions and decisions affect others.

Humans have the capacity to take those experiences even a step farther and draw from them artistic expressions. We reflect the experiences of our lives in music and picture and sculpture and all sorts of other artistic media.

A canoe is a tangible art object crafted out of the combined experiences of generations of humans who want to travel over the surface of the water. The shape of canoes has evolved gradually in response to the needs and experiences of people over many generations. The Wee Lassie canoe I paddled yesterday is a design that traces its shape to the 19th century designer Henry Rushton. While Rushton came up with this particular shape, he did not start from scratch. Greenland and Inuit boats, designed for easy paddling in a an upright position had been around for hundreds, perhaps even thousands of years. Those shapes combined with traditional North American bark canoes to produce an elegant craft. That shape, in turn, has been reproduced using modern tools and materials to form the lightweight boat. My boat was built from plans and experiences of others. It reflects a long heritage.

We all need time for reflection. And a small canoe is a perfect vehicle for such a journey.

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Yesterday, while driving across the city, I saw a car in the lane to my left with a sign on the door that was topped with the words, “God’s 10 Commandments.” The rest of the print was too small for me to read the individual words, even though our vehicles were pretty close, but I’m pretty sure that they were the 10 Commandments from the bible, or at least shortened versions of them. It didn’t appear that they were very different in length, which is the case in Exodus 20:1-7 and Deuteronomy 5:4-21, the two places where the commandments appear in the bible. It is common to shorten the second and fourth commandments about not making idols and remembering the sabbath day.

I did not now the person who was driving the vehicle, nor his or her destination, and it is possible that I won’t see the vehicle again. I didn’t happen to notice if it was local or from outside of our area. However, as I continued my drive, I imagined several scenarios where I might talk to the person who was driving the car. These are some of the conversation starters that I will never use:

“Nice graven image on the door of your car. Did you make it yourself or have it made for you.” The term “graven image” comes from the Deuteronomy version. In Exodus the term used is “idol.”

Or perhaps I might say, “Are you like the guy in the story about Jesus who knew all of the commandments, but lacked one thing?”

Maybe, I could lead with, “Is that sign in honor of you mother or your father?”

Or, “I see you’re into the work of evangelism. Do you remove the sign on the sabbath?”

A variation on the above: “It sure is hard to read the fine print on your sign - do you give readers Sundays off?”

Perhaps, I could say, “Oh I see you haven’t memorized the commandments yet. Good luck as you work on them.” or “Romans and Hebrews speak of God’s commandments being written ‘in our hearts and on our minds.’ Is your car your heart - your one true love - or your mind - the thing you think about every day?”

How about, “Good to know you wouldn’t steal my parking place. Heck, you won’t even covet it.”

Actually, I have no problem with a person posting the commandments on the door of her or his car. It isn’t a hazard to traffic. It doesn’t offend or hurt other people. And maybe it is a form of personal spiritual discipline to be reminded of them every time you get into your car.

I do, however, wish that people wouldn’t take them lightly. There is much more in really living by the path of human freedom outlined in the commandments than just putting up a sign. Always keeping God first - in every action and decision - is actually hard to do. We make gods out of all sorts of other things that are far smaller - we work for money and privilege and power and recognition and a host of other things. And the final commandment - the one about not coveting the possessions of others - that’s pretty hard to achieve in such a status-bound society.

I’m a minister. I go to church every Sunday. But I wrestle with the commandment about the Sabbath all the time. I have a real struggle with shifting my focus away from work. And I know that the members of the congregation I serve do, too. There are all kinds of things that pull them in other directions and make demands on their time. Setting aside a whole day for rest is a challenge.

In some Orthodox Jewish communities, where the commandments are taken very seriously, you will see devout people walking to worship because operating a car is considered work and they don’t work on the sabbath. I’m told that in Jerusalem on Saturdays the elevators stop on every floor so that they can be used without pushing the buttons - operating the machine by pushing the buttons would be considered to be working.

There’s no need to get into the argument about which day of the week is to be set aside as the Sabbath. Make friends with a member of the 7th Day Adventist Church if you want one perspective. They observe the Sabbath on Saturday as do most Jews. In fact Jesus would have observed the Sabbath from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday. There have been all sorts of arguments and dissertations about the exact days of the week that Jesus died and was resurrected, but our observance of Sundays as the first day of the week and the day for worship is based on a theory that Sunday was the day that the women went to the tomb and found it empty - the third day that Jesus promised when he would be raised.

I don’t have any signs on the doors of my car. I do have a vanity plate on my pickup that says REV TED. The plate is appropriately named - it is all about vanity. But it is an expression of my identity. And when I stop at a rest area or am parked in a lot and a stranger approaches me and asks if I am a minister, I’m not ashamed to say, “I am.” I used to have quite a few college stickers on the window of my vehicle. In the days when our children were attending college, I displayed the stickers of their colleges. But the stickers got old. So did the car, but I still drive it. One day I removed the stickers that were starting to peel off anyway and I haven’t replaced them. I decided that I am far more proud of my kids than I am of the institutions they attended.

We never had little stickers representing our kids, pets or hobbies in the back window of our car - they became popular after our children were raised. I don’t imagine I would have been inclined to put them on the car anyway. We always wanted to have room for extras when we were raising children. Various exchange students, friends and other children were always included in our family. And what about the years when we cared for our parents? I’ve never seen a car with a couple of adults and a couple of people who use walkers for mobility.

I guess if you really want to know what I believe, you’d have to have a conversation with me. That, of course, is also true of the person with the 10 commandments posted on the door of their car.

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In the midst of the usual busyness of my day yesterday, I had some time to sit with my colleagues in my office and catch up. It has been a busy summer. Our Minister of Christian Nurture has been going non stop, with her son’s marriage at the beginning of the summer, shortly followed by the death of her mother. After taking care of the business and making appropriate plans for worship and care, there was time for a couple of Katherine stories. Katherine Musgrave, mother of our colleague, was an amazing woman who lived to the age of 95 and remained very active throughout her life. She was in her late 80’s when I met her and I was immediately charmed. We had planned to stop by her home while on a vacation in Maine for a short visit. The short visit grew into dinner, breakfast the next morning, attending church together, a short tour around the community a picnic and time for a short paddle at their lakeside camp. Along the way we were thoroughly charmed by this amazing, energetic woman who was interested in so many aspects of life.

Of course it would be impossible to tell her story in the blog and I only know small parts of the story to begin with, but a couple of snippets might give a bit of a picture of how she provided inspiration to so many.

Katherine lived fully up to the end of her life. Quick to speak of the “evils of retirement,” she simply never did. She taught at the University of Maine, became an online educator at an age where many of her peers avoided computers, did nutritional counseling in conjunction with a local clinic, and had a regular spot on a local radio station where she advised people on healthy eating and healthy living.

Among the papers that her daughter was sorting were notes from a lecture on nutrition that she gave Thursday evening. She died the following Saturday. She lived a pretty good testament to her theories about not retiring.

Thinking about Katherine and her life got me to remembering Erik Erikson’s developmental theories that I studied when I was in my twenties and to which I have returned in some of the classes I have taught over the years. Basically, Erikson developed a developmental model with eight stages of human life. Each stage features a conflict in need of resolution. The first stage is Trust vs. Mistrust. In the first couple of years of life a child needs to learn to trust and much of the child’s energies are focused on testing how trustworthy his or her world is. At the other end of the scale, Erikson’s model proposes that the late adulthood task is Integrity vs. Despair. He says that the challenge for those of us in this stage of our life is to take a realistic look at the whole of our lives and figure out how all of the different experiences relate to one another. This task requires great honesty. If we are not able to accept all we have done and been, we drift away from integrity into despair.

Of course this is a gross oversimplification of Erikson’s theories and even if I spent more time explaining it, there are problems with the theory. All developmental psychology assumes that humans undertake life challenges in sequence, and the sequence isn’t always followed. In real life, we are often dealing with multiple stages at the same time and people don’t always accomplish tasks in the same order. Often we need to go back and visit a psychological challenge that we have mastered because new realities and new experiences challenge old concepts. Trust isn’t something that is achieved and held forever. It is, rather, earned over and over again throughout one’s life. This is true of all of the stages.

Still, there is much truth in looking at our lives through Erikson’s model. In that model, I’m somewhere near the end of the challenge of Generatively vs. Stagnation and entering into the stage of Integrity vs. Despair. Looking back at my life, I realize that it, like the lives of so many others, has been a long and varied journey. The little boy who loved climbing and being up in high places, who spent his summers in tree houses, who used to go to the library and check out as many books as they would allow each week, and played in the icy cold river at every opportunity somehow grew up into a grandfather who writes essays and preaches sermons and administers a mid-sized church. It isn’t that the little boy somehow disappeared. It is part of who I am. There was a phase in my adolescence where I was so focused on learning to fly an airplane that the process consumed much of my every waking hour. I hung out at the airport on the possibility that if I couldn’t get a lesson, at least I might get a ride and if I couldn’t get a ride perhaps I could wash a windshield or help tie down an airplane. I mastered the skill and earned my private license at the earliest possible age. But flying never became my career and it didn’t become my life’s passion. When the demands of raising a family became a higher priority than flying, we sold our share in our airplane and I have never regretted that decision. Still, that part of my life is a piece of my identity and has contributed to the whole of who I am.

My passion for canoes and building boats wasn’t caused by my love of airplanes and flying, but somehow it grew out of that love. When I built my first canoe, one of my goals was to teach myself about woodworking so that I might one day build my own airplane. I no longer aspire to build an airplane, but the joy of building something with my own two hands has never left me.

I’m just beginning this task of integrity. There is much work that remains. It seems a bit like sorting through the accumulation in my library. It has got to be done, but I’m easily distracted from the work. For now the challenge is to honestly and lovingly embrace all of who I am while I search for the harmony and hidden wholeness that pulls all of the different pieces together.

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Yesterday I was working in the office before my Wednesday morning Bible study when I discovered a small glitch in our computer network. For some reason, the computer in my office was having trouble finding the networked printer. These kinds of problems are routine in our office and the solution usually involves rebooting a computer or other network component. Occasionally some of the settings of a computer need to be adjusted. Because we are a very small office with only a few computers and operate with a slim budget it usually doesn’t make sense for us to pay for someone to come in to make those kinds of adjustments. Often when we do pay for a professional to come in the first hour or more of those professional services involve repeating things that I have already tried. I used to believe that technicians don’t trust me when I tell them what I have done, being suspicious of me because I don’t have an engineering or computer background other than the practical experience of working with computers for much of my career. These days I think that the reason they listen to what I have done and then repeat those steps is because they undertake their investigations as a set order of tasks and they only know one order in which to do those tasks. They can’t start partway through their list, but rather have to begin at the beginning.

Whatever the reason a computer network problem that I can’t solve nearly always costs the church more than $100 with the first $60 to $75 being a repeat of things that I have already done. So I am reluctant to call a technician. The church has far more important things to do with its money and often waiting will allow me to think of a new approach to solving the problem.

So I was content to keep working knowing that I couldn’t print directly from my computer. The one document that I needed to print before my study group was placed on our server and printed from another computer. I would solve the problem later, after I had done other tasks.

As I left for my study, I checked the headlines on my phone and found out that United/Continental Airlines had grounded its entire fleet of airplanes temporarily because of a computer problem. Long delays were exited throughout their system all day long. My computer problem wasn’t any near as serious as theirs.

Then, after my Bible study group, I found out that computer problems had shut down trading on the New York Stock Exchange. I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t balk at the cost of a technician to work through their computer problems.

I joked to others in our office that there must be some distinction in having computer problems at the same time as big businesses, but that it was reassuring knowing that there was no way our problem could cost as much per day as theirs was costing per second.

By the end of the day the airlines were carrying their passengers somewhat frustrated because of the delays, trading had resumed on the stock exchange, and I was able to print directly from the computer on my desk. We’ll all see computer problems in the future and occasionally the same problem comes up again and it easy to solve because we can remember what we did last time it happened.

More interesting to me is how dependent we have become upon computers and related technologies. A couple of decades ago our church didn’t have a network. If a computer wasn’t connected to a printer by a cable, it couldn’t use that printer. Our copy machine only made copies. It was not also a network printer, scanner and fax machine. I had a laptop computer, much bulkier and heavier than the slim notebook I use these days, but it had no wireless capabilities. We hadn’t quite envisioned that we would have routers in the attic of the church that allowed for wireless Internet connection anywhere in the building. What is more remarkable is that we didn’t even know that we would someday want those things. I prepared for Bible study by reading my Bible and consulting printed commentaries that were books on my shelves. I kept my sermon notes in folders in the file drawers in my office. We had a cabinet with previous years’ worship bulletins when we wanted to see what hymns we had used in previous weeks.

Of course the church, like any other institution, can’t stay in the past. While I still revel in printed books and I greatly prefer reading the Bible from a book I hold in my hands, I am not exactly a luddite. I know how to compare a dozen different versions of the Bible, check translation notes and access a variety of commentaries from my phone. I’ve been known to do a quick google fact check while listening to a speaker who makes claims I don’t quite understand. I even know, in case you are interested, that all of Jesus’ beatitudes are less than 140 characters. That’s right - you can tweet the beatitudes one at a time. The ten commandments, on the other hand, don’t work so well. The second and fourth have to be greatly shortened and abbreviated to get down to the maximum number of characters.

So far I haven’t started to use a tablet computer for my worship notes. I still use paper for them. I do, however, have colleagues who use their iPads exclusively for worship leadership, including hymns and scripture readings. One, who has vision problems, is delighted that the size of the text can be adjusted while he is reading and makes very good use of the device. I recently attended a funeral officiated at by a colleague who used an iPad exclusively for his worship resource. It did not detract from the meaningful service in any way.

It makes me wonder, however, what happens when there is a glitch in that system. Does worship have to be delayed due to computer problems? I’m not looking forward to that day.

For now, we’ll be worshiping at 9:30 on Sunday morning whether or not all of our technological devices are functioning. I’m delighted to report that we can pray without batteries. Our external power supply for prayer has never failed us.

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I have grown up with a lot of privileges. Many times I was unaware of how privileged I have been. I just took it for granted that I had an intact family with parents who were loving and generous and very present in the lives of their children. My father never experienced unemployment. We always had enough food in our home and always had new clothes when we needed them. We had time for play and lots of adventures. there were occasional vacations and a number of opportunities for travel.

I don’t know exactly what age I was when I became aware that there were others who didn’t share our privilege, but it was definitely in my childhood. When I was ten our family participated in a program called “friendly town” and hosted children from inner city Chicago who came and stayed in our home for a week so that we could get to know them and they could experience our lives. The children who stayed with us had known hunger and had learned to hoard food. That surprised us. The next year we hosted a family and got to know adults as well. I remember that the mother couldn’t understand our summer camping lifestyle. “If you can afford to live in a house with modern appliances and luxuries why do you spend your summers cooking around a campfire?” It made no sense to her. I, as a kid, couldn’t understand her perspective at all. I loved getting away from our school year lifestyle in the summer.

Growing up in country that in earlier years had been part of the original Crow Reservation, we knew quite a few of our native neighbors. We visited regularly in reservation homes and I knew that the luxuries of space and modern conveniences and reliable transportation were not afforded to all of the people in our state.

One of the great privileges of my life was the encouragement and support of education in our family. I had jobs from the very beginning of my college career, but never had to work so many hours that it interfered with my education. There was no question of the support of my family for my education and I received financial support all the way through graduate school. The privilege worked in a couple of different directions. I think my parents had very good instincts about this. I never had excess during my university years. There were times when we were just scraping by. We did borrow some of the money for our tuition and fees and graduated with a modest debt that took about five years to repay. But I always knew that there would be support if there were an actual emergency. I knew where to turn if I were to be in trouble. There was privilege in knowing of my parents’ support, but there also was a blessing in their choice not to give too much. They understood the need for me to have to work hard and to learn to live with limited resources.

Other privileges were more subtle and harder to recognize. I was never the victim of discrimination because of the color of my skin. I was never excluded or ostracized because of my accent. I’ve never failed to be hired for a job or been denied housing because of overt racism. I have never received lower wages than my peers because of my gender.

Call it an accident of birth or the luck of the draw or whatever you might like, but when people speak of white privilege in the United States, I’m pretty much the beneficiary of that privilege. It isn’t something that I caused to happen. It isn’t something that I earned. It isn’t something that I somehow deserve more than others. It is just who I am. It is how I was born and how I was raised.

I have no need to pretend that I am other than I am. I do, however, feel an obligation to share what I have with others and to be a carefully listening participant when conversations turn to injustice and racism and sexism. I have tried to avoid whining and complaining when things don’t go the way I want them to go. I have tried to be gracious and quick to support others in their aspirations and efforts.

The results so far have been a joyous life. Growing up in a strong family, I had good models for successful marriage and was fortunate in discovering my made early in my life. There has been much joy in my experience of family raising children and becoming a grandfather. I have had a career path that did not lead me to the accumulation of wealth, but rather a path of service that has been meaningful and rewarded me with experiences that are worth more than money. I don’t seem to have the need to be the biggest or best or most powerful and am comfortable with others climbing the ladder while I seek a path of service. I have a safe and warm home in which to sleep and food to sustain my life. In fact I’ve struggled with a tendency to eat too much for most of my adult life.

Living with an abundance of joy, however, has not isolated me from other experiences. I’ve know compassion for those who are less fortunate in their lives. I’ve been blessed to form friendships with people whose lives are very different from mine. I’ve walked the journey of loss and divorce and family reconfiguration with the people I have served. I have formed partnerships and engaged in sacred conversations on race with people who grew up without privilege. I am aware of the pain and injustice that are a part of this world and I have been given a few opportunities to participate in making changes.

There is much that remains to be done, however. There is more sharing that is needed. There are more injustices that need to be addressed.

This I know, however: The solution doesn’t come from me denying who I am or pretending to be what I am not. My role in this life is to be myself and be open to encountering others who are also free to be themselves.

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25 or more years ago I invited a friend who is a professional watercolor artist to spend a week at our waterspouts camp teaching the youth to express themselves in his artistic media. He had me buy inexpensive watercolor paints and brushes and a copious supply of watercolor paper. The camp I directed in those days focused on teaching Christian community in the midst of a fairly intense week of outdoor activities. All of the campers were taught basic water safety and received their CPR certification on the first day. Then there were three days with rotating focus, with one group learning basic canoe paddling, one group getting an introduction to windsurfing and a third group learning small craft sailing. The groups rotate activities each day. The fifth full day of camp was a whitewater raft trip down the north fork of the Payette river. We began and ended each day with worship designed and led by campers. With all of the other activities, there wasn’t much time for the campers to paint. Each camper had an hour of small group instruction during the week and access to the watercolor materials during their free time, which was only about an hour a day.

I was amazed at the incredible paintings that were produced by the creative hands of the youth who participated in the camp. A little more than half of the campers had ridden a bus from Portland, Oregon to attend the camp. Most of them were from the city. The high mountain country of Idaho meant a dramatic increase of altitude for them and the intense outdoor activities meant that they were pretty tired when they headed for their cabins each evening. The days were long and intense. But somehow they found time to produce some incredible paintings.

I’m no artist. I’ve tried my hand at painting, but never developed skill as an artist. Still, I appreciate painting very much. Since our seminary days, when we had access to the Art Institute of Chicago, I have had the opportunity to view many incredibly well-done paintings. These days, the Black Hills Watercolor Society meets in our church and I enjoy visiting with the artists and viewing their work. I have several paintings by those artists as well as a couple from others. There is one painting by my Idaho watercolor artist friend that has been in our home for more than two decades.

Yesterday I began the day with what seemed like a return to those waterspouts camps of long ago. This time, instead of working with the youth and looking at their paintings, I went paddling in a watercolor painting. I paddle in Sheridan Lake 30 or more times each year and I know the lake very well. But yesterday it surprised me with a new mood and a delicious new beauty.

It had rained the night before and the day dawned with low clouds hanging in the hills. I left home around 5 am and was at the lake a little before 5:30. Although it was nearly 60 degrees, the morning felt chilly and a bit cold, so instead of paddling an open canoe, I unloaded a kayak from the roof of my car and slipped into a spray skirt. The geese were all on the bank and they set out into the water as I walked down with my boat.

It was absolutely calm as I began my paddle. I was almost hesitant to make the quiet sound of dipping my paddle into the water because it was so quiet. The geese weren’t making any noise. There were no other birds singing. The campers were all asleep. There were no fishermen out yet. I paused in the middle of the lake to take pictures, and I got enough photos to remind me of the paddle, but they don’t do justice to a world that is painted with water vapor. It was an amazing blend of blues and grays and greens. The camera tends to cut through the mist a little bit, whereas your eye can detect both the water vapor in the air and the distant hillside. With the flat water there was a perfect reflection of the world above the water on the surface of the water. It was as if I were sitting on a giant mirror. Even as I write this paragraph, I know that my description falls as far short of the reality as do my photographs. I can’t describe the beauty that surrounded me.

All living beings are water. Our bodies are about 60% water by weight. the percentage is even higher when measuring volume. The tissues of our brains and muscles are composed of about 75% water. We cannot survive for very long without water. It is no mystery why the oldest and most deeply held sacraments of religion involve water. I know that it sounds a bit corny, but I’m convinced that I need to spend time close to water in order to maintain my sense of awe and wonder. Awe and wonder are important elements in the administration of the sacraments. And sacraments are at the core of my ordination. It is not just what I do. It is who I am.

Indeed it was an incredible gift yesterday to again be surprised by the water of life. Like all gifts of life it was fleeting. By the time I had paddled for a half hour a gentle breeze was starting to blow, the wind stirred the water and the glassy smooth surface became vibrant with texture. The sun began to burn through the mist and the clouds began to raise. The view was distinctly different as I paddled back towards the shore and loaded my boat onto the car for the trip home. Those who were launching their boats as I left the lake completely missed the experience that I was given - an experience shared with the geese and ducks, but with no other humans on that lake yesterday morning.

Sometimes words are insufficient to describe glory.

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Her Royal Highness Princess Charlotte of Cambridge was baptized yesterday. The ceremony was private but hardly secret. Several thousand well wishers lined the street leading up to the Sandringham Church, as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge pushed the princess in a pram while Prince George walked alongside his father. The princess is now nine weeks old. She was baptized by the Archbishop of Canterbury. Of course the Queen herself was in attendance.

I enjoy very much the role of officiant in baptisms. I love to hold the precious children and witness the love and dedication of their families. I’m a huge fan of celebrating the gift of life in each child and making public the commitment of the entire community to the love, support and nurture of the child and parents and they live and grow together. When couples come to us seeking baptism of their child, our response is always, “Of course! We’d be honored! When is good for your family? We’re open every Sunday and there is room for a baptism in every service.”

There were, however, some accouterments present at the royal baptism that we usually don’t have in our services. For example, they used the Lily Font with its special pitcher to hold the water of baptism. The font, which has been used for other royal baptisms, isn’t exactly an item for everyday use. It normally is kept with the crown jewels in the Tower of London. We use our everyday font that has served our church since it was built in 1959 and continues to be a wonderful bowl to hold the waters of baptism.

Following the service, the duke and duchess hosted a tea at Sandringham House where guests were served slices of christening cake, which is a tier from their wedding cake. I don’t remember ever being served part of the wedding cake at a baptismal celebration, though occasionally we are served slices of a sheet cake from the Safeway bakery on baptismal Sundays.

Princess Charlotte had five godparents. We usually get by with two, or sometimes no specially designated godparents.

Different, too, is the water.

Like her big brother, Princess Charlotte was baptized with water that was flown in from the Jordan River. The Jordan, of course has special significance in the stories of our faith. It was the river that Moses was not allowed to cross. Joshua led the people across after four decades of wandering in the wilderness. It was in the Jordan River that Jesus was baptized by John.

The river, however, is rarely accurately depicted in songs, paintings and poems. It is a rather unimpressive, shallow and muddy stream. It is also a border between Jordan and Israel, complete with an area of no-man’s-land right in the middle. Water rights in the Mideast are hotly contested and the water of the Jordan is no exception. In addition to its religious uses, the water is critical for irrigation in a semi-arid region of the world.

There are lots of ways to get water from the Jordan. You can find it on eBay. It sells for $22.50 for 6.8 oz. with gift box and certificate and is eligible for Amazon Prime shipping.

Actually the Jordan River water that is sold commercially, and probably that used for the royal baptism bears little resemblance to the water flowing in the actual river. The water of the Jordan is polluted by sewage and industrial effluent. Those being baptized in the actual river ad advised not to swallow the water or let it get up their noses. The bottled Jordan River water that is exported for baptisms has been filtered and treated. Most of the bottled water is sterilized and given a blessing. Often is is diluted with water from other sources. After all, it comes from a river where water is already in short supply.

I am reminded of a conversation with a Benedictine nun a couple of decades ago. We spoke of the holy water that is used to remind worshipers of their baptism upon entering the sanctuary. “Not everyone knows is,” she told me, “but every drop of water is holy.” Of course that is what we believe. All water is made holy by God’s grace. It doesn’t have to be from some special source. It requires no special prayers or holy words. Every drop of rain that falls, every tear that is wept, every melting snowflake is holy. Water is a miracle that sustains all life.

It doesn’t take many powers of observation to see the differences between the baptism of the Princess of Cambridge and those of the precious little ones who are presented in our church. It also takes no special insight to see the similarities. Children, beloved by their parents and extended families, are presented in the church. Sacred vows are made as we all acknowledge that the gift of a child and the responsibility of its nurture is an awesome trust. We understand that parents and godparents need the full support of the wider community of the church. We celebrate new life and we commit ourselves to sharing love and support as a community in the wonderful process of growing together.

I’m not envious of Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury. He might have had the honor of conducting the baptism of the princess, but I get to hold children who are ever bit as precious and I suspect that I get to conduct more baptisms than the archbishop. It is likely that I get to spend more time with the people I serve and that I get to watch the little ones grow up into adulthood. This spring we honored a young man at his high school graduation who I had baptized when he was an infant. I’ve been privileged to watch him grow up from infancy to adulthood. I continue to be in touch with his parents and grandparents. He is a man of faith and integrity.

It seems that water from Rapid Creek and Pactola is just as effective as water flown in from the Jordan. And the font of our church fosters at least as much faith as the one that lives among the crown jewels.

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If I have counted accurately, yesterday was the ninth time I’ve mowed my lawn this year. That isn’t much, if you compare it to people who live in places with wetter climates and longer growing seasons. But it is a bit unusual for me to be cutting more than in inch off of the grass in July around here. The hills are green and lush and beautiful. I paddled up the stream that feeds Sheridan Lake early yesterday and noticed that it is down quite a bit from its highest point this year, but using the beaver lodges as a measurement, which is challenging because they’ve added to them this year, I’d guess that it is still at least a foot above normal and the current in the inlet, usually rather gentle, gives me a good workout as I paddle upstream.

It has been a record-setting year when it comes to rain in the hills. June produced 7.12 inches of rain. That followed May with 6.86 inches. That’s pretty impressive for a place with an average annual rainfall of 18 inches.

There are places in the country that are dry, however, In Wenatchee, Washington flames roared into town just last week, burning a dozen homes and forcing hundreds to flee. Wenatchee is on the eastern slope of the Cascades, right where the high plains desert meet the mountains. It is normally an arid place, but in years of normal snowpack, there is plenty of water in the rivers and streams that flow out of the mountains. It is a great place for growing grapes and other fruit. And through that high plains desert flows the mighty Columbia River. As it travels through the deep gorge it refreshes the aquifer and provides water for irrigation. The rich volcanic soil yields a a lot of grain and other crops with irrigation.

But with virtually no snow in the high country and temperatures ranging in the 100s, the rivers and streams are all running at record low levels. Governor Jay Inslee has issued an emergency proclamation that allows quick response to wildfires, but things look grim with so much of the summer and fall lying ahead before they can reasonably expect the rains and snow to begin again.

It isn’t just Washington. Alaska is experiencing record wildfires as well. Add in Western Canada, especially British Columbia, which has been suffering for years from a devastating outbreak of pine bark beetles killing huge swaths of forest and providing dry fuel for the fires, and the smoke cloud that covers this continent has been reaching as far as Tennessee. We’ve had our share of smoky days, though we are wise not to complain because it isn’t our hills that are on fire this year. We are fortunate.

Our plans for the summer include an August trip to Washington. Our son and his family live there and the pull of those grandchildren is incredibly strong. With the busyness of their family with two adults with professional careers, doesn’t give them the same flexibility that we have. Besides we love to load up our camper and hit the road. There is a beautiful town in the Cascades, Leavenworth, just 175 miles from where our son lives, where we love to camp. That allows us to reach their home by lunchtime the next day. We had planned to go that route because we have a friend whose company has just purchased a campground in Leavenworth. To get to Leavenworth, we like to take U.S. 2 from Spokane. We’re not much for interstate driving with our camper. We rarely go above 65 miles per hour and enjoy the slower roads. Taking that route, we’ll drive right through Wenatchee. Leavenworth is just 20 or so miles up in the hills from where the fire was raging last week. If things continue the way they have been, we know that we can count on unseasonably hot and dry conditions. Somehow, I don’t expect that camping next to the icicle river to be enough to keep us cool, especially with the river running so much lower than its usual flow.

The dry conditions, however, aren’t really affecting us. Although we have a personal story connecting us to the places where there have been fires, the route of our vacation trip can be adjusted. We’ve got lots of different ways that we might go as we travel to and from our son’s family. And our hills are enjoying such lovely weather so far this year.

We’ve lived here long enough, however, to know that the rains can stop suddenly and that the end of spring rains can bring hot temperatures and dry conditions. As moist as it is, as lush as the hills are now, it is possible that things could turn dry. If they do, the fire danger will go up quickly because there is so much fuel on the ground. The lush grass, growing tall, can turn dry quickly and will provide plenty of fuel should a fire get going. Add to that the reality that the west is a bit short of resources to fight fires which means that our firefighters and equipment may be battling blazes in other places.

All of that, however, is speculation. We don’t know what the weather will bring. Weather forecasts, while growing much more accurate in the short term, continue to be a challenge for long term predictions. We live in a world where there are plenty of forces that are beyond our control. Keeping aware of that simple reality can be a valuable life skill.

So we start another beautiful week in the black hills. With nearly 1500 out-of-town guests in a single encampment not far from our home and lots of other visitors, the hills are full of people enjoying our beautiful weather and gorgeous scenery. The cool mornings and evenings make it a pleasure to be outside and there is much to see and do.

Perhaps a few people from Alaska, Washington, and British Columbia might enjoy a week or so in the hills. It’s a good year to visit.

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It isn’t uncommon to hear pundits and people with political agenda claim to know what was in the hearts and minds of the founders of our nation. The exact meaning of the words of the Declaration of Independence or of the Constitution are subject to intense debate. We have, of course, the Supreme Court to assist with constitutional interpretation, but it isn’t uncommon for people who are displeased with a particular ruling of the court to say that the court itself has reached beyond the intentions of the writers of the constitution.

I do not claim to be an expert in the meaning of the documents that contributed to the founding of this nation, but like my fellow citizens of this land, I have been a student of its history and am interested in its present. It is interesting, on this 4th of July, 2015, to look back at the story of the past 239 years and consider some of the wisdom that has been revealed in our experience as a nation.

It seems evident that the Declaration of Independence, the document that we celebrate today, was an expression of the excesses of Colonialism. the British Empire, represented by its king, was, in the opinion of the signers of the Declaration, overstepping reasonable authority. Of the 1337 words of the Declaration (just a shade longer than one of my typical blog posts), 690 are dedicated to list of complaints against the British king and his overstepping of his authority. The argument against the king is based on a series of assumptions which the Declaration declares are “self-evident.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

Of course, like people in all times, our forebears were far better at imagining an ideal community than living out their ideals. Despite declaring it self-evident that all men are created equal, the 13 colonies didn’t, in fact, afford equal rights to all of their residents. The right to vote (reserved for men only) was restricted and denied to people on the basis of race, land ownership (or lack thereof) social status and education (or lack thereof). There were plenty of people in the colonies, not the least of whom were slaves, who were denied basic human rights. The declaration that all are created equal didn’t translate into a society where all were treated equal. The declaration that all have unalienable rights didn’t stop the colonies, even centuries after their declaration, from denying rights to some of the people of the country. We are always better at imagining our ideals than we are at living them out.

Despite these realities, I suspect that the signers of the Declaration of Independence were not, for the most part, a group of wild-eyed idealists. I think that among them were some realists who knew that founding a new nation would not instantly result in solving all of the problems of society. They understood that building a better future is a multi-generational enterprise and would not be surprised that we, 239 years later, still face major challenges in our struggle to establish a democracy on this continent.

As a member of the United Church of Christ, I understand how the history of our church and the history of our nation are tightly intertwined. a quarter of the signers of the Declaration of Independence were Congregationalists, one of the predecessor denominations of our United Church of Christ. It was a Congregationalist church, after all, that hosted the Boston Tea Party, despite the rhetoric of a small group of right-wing extremists who know as little about the realities of our church today as they do about the history of the rebellion that was staged, not against the principle of taxation, but rather against the use of monopoly to restrict free trade and control prices.

One of the challenges of any anniversary is to be faithful to the history of the even we celebrate while at the same time being realistic about the realities of the present. Or forebears rebelled against empire and exceptionalism. we do them no honor to use the might of our nation to promote empire and exceptionalism. Our forebears declared the basic rights of all human beings, we do not honor them by restricting the rights of our neighbors.

There is much of the hoopla that is associated with the celebration of Independence Day that I often avoid. I enjoy watching fireworks, but don’t feel a need to be the one lighting the fuse. We don’t try to put on our own fireworks show, and it is hardly necessary with all of our neighbors blasting away in the evening hours for a few days around the holiday. I enjoy cooking outdoors and having a picnic, but I’m not a big fan of excessive alcohol consumption. A beer is a nice treat on a warm day. Drinking to excess just doesn’t appeal to me.

Because much of my work involves being in the public eye, I tend to seek out quiet places rather than crowds when I have time away from work. I’m sure this colors the way in which I celebrate the holiday as well. I’m comfortable leaving the crowds to others, thought I like music and this afternoon there is an opportunity to hear the U.S. Air Force Academy band in downtown Rapid City. We may just take in a bit of the concert. I’m sure it will be worth joining with others who want to hear the performance. Although it is near by, we didn’t drive out to Mt. Rushmore to hear the band’s performance last night. We had a nice barbecue in our own back yard, ate out on the deck and made it an early evening.

It is a day worth celebrating, but I pray that part of our celebration can be a reminder of the dreams of old that have not yet been achieved and a day of recommitting ourselves to the ideals of our forebears and the work that remains undone.

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Last night we ate our super on the deck. It was a very pleasant evening with a little breeze to keep things cool. There is a bit of smoke in the air, but nothing like the day before when smoke from the Alaska and Canada wildfires drifted into the hills and hung like smog in a city. The wind cleared things out yesterday and it was pleasant to take our salads and ice tea out to the deck to eat.

We were somewhat entertained by our neighbors getting ready to head off for their July 4 holiday weekend. We assumed from all of the activity next door that they had today off from work, because they were definitely getting ready to head off on an excursion. Vehicle #1 is their 35 foot motor home. It is a large and impressive vehicle that leaves little room for anything else when it is in the driveway. This isn’t a problem for our neighbors who don’t seem to mind parking their vehicles on their lawn (and occasionally on mine) and cutting across their front lawn to access their back yard, which is a general parking area for dune buggies, lawn mowers, extra trailers, 4-wheelers and other items. Their home has a rather steep driveway with a level area in front of the garage, but the motor home is too long to get completely level in their driveway. It took them a couple of days to get the motor home packed and ready to go. They spent the evenings carrying things to and from the motor home and opening various storage compartments to make sure they had what they would need for the weekend. It seemed to me possible that the motor home was being over loaded. I don’t know the weight capacity of such a vehicle, but it starts out heavy and they aren’t exactly designed to haul a large capacity. The motor home left Wednesday evening and we noticed that it was followed by a car that returned later, so we assumed that it was taken to a campground, perhaps within an hour or an hour and a half’s drive and left there.

The second vehicle in the fleet left around 6 pm last evening. It was a 4-wheel-drive sport utility vehicle pulling a heavy duty tandem axle trailer with a four-wheeler, a side-by-side off-road vehicle, two plastic kayaks, several gas cans and a few other things piled high and held on by quite a lot of ratchet straps. The trailer seemed a bit large for the tow vehicle. I pull that size trailer with my 3/4 ton pickup, but the mid-size SUV seemed a bit small for the load.

Vehicle number 3 left about an hour later. It was their Hummer H3 pulling their big water ski boat. I think the boat is about 25 feet long. It rides on its own tandem axle trailer. There were four people in the hummer, which was packed full of suitcases, food and other supplies. I noticed that they were also packing several items into the boat once the Hummer was full. It, too, was probably over loaded. Hopefully they don’t have far to go.

Off they went, joining a whole lot of other people who are heading to various lakeshore campgrounds throughout the hills. We have a lot of people who will be celebrating Independence Day in the hills. We are, after all, a tourist destination and people love to come to see our attractions and enjoy our beautiful scenery and peaceful forests.

I don’t blame them. I love the hills and feel very fortunate to live here. Who knows? Maybe my little Subaru isn’t properly loaded with a kayak and a canoe on the roof. I probably look like a tourist to most of the other tourists.

As we sat on the deck we saw pickups pulling 5th wheel trailers with a boat on a trailer behind the camper. We saw lots of people heading out with a whole lot of gear. There are a lot of people whose July 4 plans don’t involve traveling light this year.

But I know something that the majority of the tourists and even most of the locals don’t know. You can have a lake to yourself in the hills if you get out before 6 a.m. I did it yesterday and I’m going to do the same thing today - perhaps tomorrow, too. I like to paddle and I need the exercise and though I certainly don’t mind sharing the lake with others, it is rather nice to experience the peace and calm that reigns when there are no jet skis or motorboats on the lake.

Yesterday Sheridan Lake was glassy smooth and the mist was rising off of the water as the full moon set and the sun began to peek out between the hills. The warm glow would soon disperse the mist, but for a few magical moments, I was able to paddle directly between the full moon and the promise of a cloud-free sunrise. With a wooden boat and a wooden paddle, I can be very quiet. The geese ignore me and the great blue herons allow me to come much closer than they would tolerate a motorized vehicle before taking to the air with their prehistoric squawk. Even though the lake is very familiar to me, I can feel like a first-time explorer when I am out on the lake alone in the wee hours of the day.

I’m guessing that my neighbors won’t be out before 6 this morning, based on how hard they were working at 7 last night. Their style of a weekend off looks like a lot of work to their neighbors. But then I don’t own a boat that I can’t pick up and load by myself. We have a very nice camper, but it doesn’t require the attentiveness of a bus driver to head out into the hills. And we can turn it around in our own driveway.

The thing is that I don’t need more equipment to enjoy the good gifts of this life. A little canoe and a paddle are enough. I guess I’m just too into relaxation to go to all of the work required of our neighbor to spend a few days off in the hills.

Happy July 4 to all!

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If you read my blog from time to time, you know that I am prone to occasional spouts of opinion in matters about which I have no particular expertise or knowledge. Today’s post may be one more in that series. I don’t know much about economics in general. I don’t understand all of the nuances and dynamics of the eurozone. I don’t know much about the history of modern Greece (although I do know a bit of its ancient history). I don’t know the rules of the European Central Bank.

Furthermore, there are plenty of pundits and economists with a lot to say about Greece. You can find out a great deal more about Eurogroup and IMF and VAT by reading other writers.

Here is what I do know: I have worked with a lot of people who have very little money who have gotten themselves behind the curve to creditors. I have enough experience to know that blaming the debtor is rarely a solution. I have seen enough cases to be suspicious of those who call for austerity.

Here is what happens in our neck of the woods. People with very small incomes run short of cash. That’s pretty easy to do. The purchasing power of a minimum wage job has gone backwards at a pretty steady pace since 1980. There are plenty of people who are working two or more jobs and still don’t have enough income to make ends meet. They might have enough for rent and groceries, but then something happens - a car repair, a trip to the doctor’s office or the emergency room, a family funeral that requires travel out of town and missed days from work - and suddenly they don’t have enough money to meet their obligations. Because of the low income, they don’t have a line of credit and don’t qualify for conventional borrowing. So they turn to a pawn shop if they happen to have something of value that can be pawned, or to a car title lender if they happen to have a car title, or to a payday lender. These lenders charge exorbitant interest rates which means that it is nearly impossible to get them paid off.

Another scenario: a furniture store in our town regularly advertises “0% interest, $0 down, 3 (or 4) years to pay.” The fine print in their contract has all kinds of interesting penalties, however. If the loan isn’t repaid in full on the day due, the entire amount of the loan is subject to more than 20% interest. That’s right, if the people owe $1 on the last day of the term of the loan, the next day they’ll find they owe thousands. And it is easy for them to end up owning money because there are loan origination fees and other charges built into the loan which means that the final payment is higher than the previous payments. People believe in good faith that they have met the terms of the loan only to find out that they had signed a contract with terms of which they were unaware.

Banks charge outrageous overdraft fees. I’m not condoning writing checks when you don’t have the money. But I know that banks routinely set up lines of credit for their credit-worthy customers, or create auto transfer systems for checking accounts for customers who have multiple accounts. The ones who get stuck paying the high fees are almost always the ones who can least afford to pay the penalty. Lenders often justify this upside down system by saying that there is more risk involved in loans to people who have less income. However, micro lenders report that in fact the poorest people not only borrow the smallest amounts of money but are far less likely to default on loans that those who are rich.

You can say what you want about all of these things - and mostly you should understand that there are terrible ways to borrow money - but the bottom line is that people who get caught in these schemes usually feel that they don’t have other options. They find themselves backed into a corner and unable to have the things they want or need and try to figure out how to solve their problems.

As someone who occasionally listens to the stories of the people in these situations, I know that it isn’t the wealthy in our community who are taken in by these plans - they have access to reasonably priced credit when they need to borrow money. In our town it is the people who are barely getting by - often those described as the working poor - who end up paying the high fees that make the money lenders even more wealthy.

This isn’t a new problem. It was an issue in Biblical times. In the book of Ezekiel, charging interest is closed as being among the worst sins. Ezekiel calls it an abomination and portrays usurers as people who have shed blood.

I don’t know if any of this applies to the credit woes of Greece. But I do know that in any society austerity measures work to the advantage of the richest in the society and the disadvantage of those who have the least. Years of austerity measures virtually always results in a widening of the gap between the rich and the poor. The solutions being proposed virtually all share one thing in common - they aren’t good for the poorest of Greece’s people.

It is certain that the rulers of Greece and the bureaucrats of the European Union and international financial institutions will not be turning to me for advice on this situation. I don’t think I have answers if they did. But it seems to me that it would be good for business for potential customers to have enough money to make purchases. Giving more money to the rich isn’t going to make that happen. A little relief for those who are least able to pay would be better for the economy than increasing the benefits to the most wealthy.

FINAL NOTE - Don’t turn to your minister for financial advice. There are those who are much more qualified!

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There is another round of suspicious fires in African American churches in the south. Last night’s fire at the Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church in Greeleyville, just north of Charleston, South Carolina, got my attention. While the cause of the blaze remains under investigation, it certainly is suspicious. It was just 20 years ago that the congregation’s previous building was burned to the ground. That time it was arson. Two men were arrested and convicted of that crime. Both were members of the KKK at the time. When the church was rebuilt in 1996, President Bill Clinton spoke at the dedication of the new building (the one that burned last night). He presented the church with a plaque that read, “We must come together as one America to rebuild our churches, restore hope, and show the forces of hatred they cannot win.”

20 years ago there were more than 670 suspicious fires at churches. The federal government formed a National Church Arson Task Force to investigate the fires and prosecute the arsonists.

Now it seems as if the senseless violence has started again. In the two weeks since the brutal murder attacks at Emmanuel AME in Charleston, at least six African-American churches have been set ablaze. Three of those fires have been determined to be arson.

Since the early 19th century, church arson has been one of the weapons used by racists in their war to try to stop civil rights. After the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Acts in the 20th Century, church arson spiked. Racists who couldn’t prevail in the civil arena turned to crime as a way to express their opinion.

In the days of slavery, the formation of a black church was considered to be an act of rebellion. The gospel was inherently opposed to the institution of slavery and offered hope to the slaves through the preaching that all people were equal before God and that justice would prevail.

Charleston’s Emmanuel AME Church, the scene of the shootings two weeks ago, was itself razed by city authorities in the 1820’s after a purported slave plot. The building was not rebuilt until reconstruction.

There is an important reality that the arsonists and proponents of hate can’t seem to understand: a church is more than a building. You can burn a church building to the ground, but that doesn’t stop the gathering of people for worship, prayer, praise and listening to God’s call. When states adopted draconian laws intended to shut down African-American churches, the churches simply went underground. Black congregations have remained an important spiritual force in the history of this country even when the buildings are burned and the institutions are banned.

The church remains at the core of the life of African Americans. And its gospel of love is simply stronger than the words of hate fomented by racists. Its gospel of love is simply stronger than the fires that destroy buildings. Its gospel of love is simply stronger than the bullets fired in hatred and anger.

Love never dies. You can read about it in the Bible. And these churches aren’t afraid to proclaim the words of the Bible.

In the course of teaching the Bible to their members African American congregations were centers of literacy training. People learned to read in churches. Between 1870 and 1900 literacy among African American s leapt from 5 percent to 70 percent. The center of the teaching was the church. The commitment to education wasn’t just a southern phenomenon. W.E.B. DuBois went to college with funds raised by First Congregational Church in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Our forebears in the church have always advocated education as a vehicle for promoting and extending the reach of the gospel.

It is no mistake that so many of the great leaders of the civil rights movement were ministers. It is no mistake that churches have been the centers of organization advocating for the rights of all human beings.

Being centers of organization also makes churches targets for those who seek to oppose the progress and hope they inspire.

The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, jr. in his speech, “It’s a Dark Day In Our Nation,” quoted Theodore Parker: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

Those who light fires in an attempt to stem progress toward justice will not succeed. They cannot halt the flow of history. They do not have the power to control “the arc of the moral universe.” It may take a long time, but justice will prevail.

One of the sad parts of the story is that the anger is directed in entirely the wrong direction. After 50 years of stagnation in wages for the majority of white American men, their frustration is understandable. I understand the frustration. I am, after all, a white American man. But income stagnation is not caused by minorities. It is not caused by immigrants. With virtually all of the benefit of the growth in the economy being absorbed by the upper 1% of the population, the wages and hopes and dreams of the majority are being consumed by a privileged few, many of whom did not earn their wealth, but inherited it. The system is unfair, but the cause of the injustice is not racial diversity.

Of course these topics are too big for a blog post. There is much more conversation that is needed as we work towards justice in our society. We human beings live broken lives. We make mistakes. We need forgiveness. We make messes that need to be cleaned up.

So I will return to the conviction that lies at the core of this morning’s reflection: it takes more than a fire to destroy a church. The arsonists don’t have the power to destroy the gospel. I think the fires are terrible. I wish they would stop immediately. But no matter how many fires they light, the truth of the Gospel will shine forth. The church will continue to worship, pray and study.

The lesson has been clear since the awesome power of the Roman government was brought to bear in the crucifixion of Jesus. Life is stronger than death. Love is stronger than hate. God’s work in this world cannot be stopped.

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