I’ve read that music is stored in a different part of the brain than language. That is a good thing for those who have suffered stroke. What we know is that victims of stroke rarely lose all of their memories and functions. Many strokes involve relatively small areas of the brain. The bleeding creates pressure and damages some of the tissues in the brain, including interrupting the firing and reception of synapses. For those of us who are not neurosurgeons or neurological researchers, this means that one can have a stroke or other brain disease or injury that leaves us with a high degree of loss, but with also some things that are retained.

I have heard stories of musicians who were unable to speak, but still able to create beautiful music. I know one story of a very talented pianist and organist who lost the capacity to recognize even the closest members of her family, but somehow retained the muscle memory of years and years of practicing. When she returned to the keyboard, at first all they heard were scales and exercises. Later, however, she began playing entire compositions. The music was still inside of her and she was able to get it out and perform despite her other disabilities.

I’m not much of a musician. I dabble at the piano and played the trumpet through college and continue to play on occasion. I play rhythm guitar and know the chords. I love to sing, but have the voice and training for being a member of the choir, not a soloist.

Still, my head is full of musical memories. I love to listen to music, and I can recall many tunes and words. I suppose that might be a bit of a challenge for me, should I ever lose my language, because so much of the music that I can remember is mixed deeply with the words. I have come to love many songs because of their words. I use the combination of clever rhythm and clever words to remember hymns and show tunes and movie themes and many other songs.

I have such a clear memory of singing “Ever singing, march we onward, victors in the midst of strife. Joyful music leads us sunward in the triumph song of life!” through my tears at my father’s funeral. My eyes were too misty to have been able to see the words in the hymnal, but it was a hymn whose verses I memorized when I was quite young. That presents me with a bit of a challenge now that some of the words are different in the hymnal our congregation uses, but the hymn is planted deeply within my psyche and I doubt that I can recall all of the words without singing the tune.

The spiritual “Were You There” is so connected with Holy Week in my mind that I find myself humming the tune whenever I am thinking about, planning or journeying through this time of year. We rarely repeat the same hymn within a season, but we sang it last night and will sing it again on Thursday.

The anthem that our choir is singing for Easter is one that they have been rehearsing for several links. It has a dramatic piano and organ accompaniment and we have brilliant artists at both keyboards. It keeps running through my head, with all of the energy and enthusiasm of a great Easter anthem. The words are from a familiar hymn, but the tune is fresh and new. I find myself humming the tune and even thinking the words despite the solemnity of this week. Easter is like that. It breaks through despite our grief, despite our attention focused elsewhere. Easter is indeed irrepressible.

Music reaches deep within our souls. It is a great vehicle for expressing emotions, but it is deeper than that as well. It is a way of expressing the depths of our souls. Music and spirituality have been mixed since humans first recognized the presence of God. I know plainsong chants that have been around for more than a thousand years.

Tonight is our Holy Week blues concert. Jami Lynn, a member of our church who is a full-time professional musician and recording artist and who travels extensively and is often away from the church, will be with us, bringing a couple of her musician friends to perform. It promises to be an evening when we can just sit back, relax, and allow the music to enfold us. There’ll be no heavy liturgy. We’ve no candles to light or bulletins to print. Light refreshments and a place to sit around tables with friends invites us to just enjoy.

Somewhere around the end of the 19th century, in the deep south of the United States, African-American musicians were heard with a powerful fusion of spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts, chants and even a few folk songs thrown in. The form was dubbed “the blues.” Many blues forms, such as call and response, blend the singing styles of Africa with traditions of the church.

It has been said that the blues are the result of so many generations of suffering that the pain can’t be kept inside any longer and it “oozes” out in the fingers on the frets of the guitar and the gravel in the voice of an old man. That may be true, but after three centuries of public performances, the music has so infused our culture that a white girl from South Dakota can sing the songs and bring a tear to your eye and you don’t even know why you are crying. Thats the blues.

That’s why we invite artists to sing the blues during Holy Week. It is an opportunity to connect with a tradition and expression of grief that is not often associated with the church. It is also an opportunity to invite into our church folks who might not be exactly what we would call “regulars.” The folks who are out in the clubs and venues until the wee hours after Saturday night, who sleep in on Sundays, who aren’t comfortable with our traditions and rituals - they are invited along with our “regulars” to sit together and share an experience.

Because we all grieve, because grief brings together folks in unique patterns, because we never know when grief will enter our lives — for all of these reasons and more, the blues is part of our Holy Week journey.

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For years I tried to combine the Liturgy of the Palms with the Liturgy of the Passion into a single worship service. It is probably the most common way of observing Palm Sunday in mainline Protestant congregations. The basic ideas is that the majority of worshipers come to church only on Sundays and those who attend on Palm Sunday and don’t return until Easter Sunday never get even a glimpse at the depth of Holy Week. So the tradition developed of reading the passion story after the parade of Palms on Palm Sunday. And, as I said, I followed that practice int eh congregations that i served for many years.

Then I had a year in my own life when my brother, my mother and my father-in-law all died in the same year. Our congregation, as one would expect, was wonderful and very supportive at the times of the deaths. Two of the funerals were held in our church and the congregation does really know how to provide a supportive and loving atmosphere for those who are grieving. Then a few weeks went by and the services were over and I went back to work, but the layers of grief were deeper than I realized and I found that I wasn’t getting over it. Of course you never get over the loss of a loved one. I know that. I’ve been saying that for years. I’ve walked beside families through the journey of grief over and over again.

It is different when I am the one grieving.

I began to understand that grief is not something that you can rush. It is not something that you can compact. It is not something for which there is a shortcut.

I emerged from that process with two specific ideas for our congregation. The first was that we need to practice grief. Grief is a difficult process for us all and it is something that we all will one day face. It isn’t enough to minister to others when they are grieving. We need to get serious about practicing our prayers and our listening and our coping skills, because we, too will one day be immersed deeply in the waters of grief.

Secondly, grief is not something that can be rushed. It moves at its own sweet way at its own sweet pace. There is no timeline. There is no pattern that can be followed. There is no one-size-fits-all for our grief. We need allow grief to flow on its own.

And so, after consulting with the Department of Worship, our congregation began to pour a lot more energy into Holy Week. It is a week of Sabbath for our congregation. We offer worship every day, not just on Sundays. We encourage our families to take time off of work, to take time off from school, to give themselves time to focus their attention on the activities and events of Holy Week. Even if they don’t take their extra time to attend a service at church, we seriously challenge the families of our congregation to take time to practice grief - to take time out of the everyday routine.

When a real loss occurs, when a death happens to someone that is beloved, we all drop everything. We all take time to sit with our grief. We all take a sabbath. Our congregation offers a week of practice for those days every year.

Yesterday, we simply focused on Palm Sunday. We had our parade. We handed out the palms. We encouraged people to take them home. We listened to our children sing songs. Our choir and organist prepared triumphal music. We listened to the story and we focused our attention on the entry into Jerusalem. We even read a psalm of ascent - one that was repeated at the gate to the city in the days of the first temple.

Today we will experience the liturgy of the passion. This year our Gospel is Mark. At different phases of my life, I have had different favorite Gospels. At one time or another each has had special meaning for me. I used to think that John was my favorite. It is intellectual, poetic and musical. It challenges my thinking as well as tells the story. But these days, I am grateful for Mark. It is the shortest of the gospels, and perhaps the most to the point. Everything in the Gospel rushes to get to the high point of the Gospel: the crucifixion of Jesus.

There are scholars who say that the original Gospel ended with the burial of Jesus - that the resurrection stories were added at a later time. It is a cause for some debate at seminaries - at least it was at our seminary when I was a student. Can you have a gospel without a resurrection story? Is it a gospel if there is no report of resurrection. Is resurrection so much the entire point of Christianity that there is no Christian faith without the resurrection? Probably normal people don’t discuss such questions late into the night, but I used to do so with my friends.

I was too young and too inexperienced in those days to understand the crucifixion. I had not yet had enough experience with death in my life to begin to understand grief. Now I know what I could not understand in those days. It is precisely because Jesus died that we are able to bear the reality of death. It is because Jesus died that we are able to face our own death and know that we are not alone. There is no place in this life - not even death itself - where God is not willing to go to be with us. God is so intent on relationship with us that it is God on the cross. God knowing death. When we feel totally abandoned, when we are overcome with grief, when we have no words for our prayers, when tears are all we can see - we are not alone. God is with us.

I don’t dislike the resurrection stories. I just understand that it isn’t yet time. We are not yet ready. Today is a day to simply dwell with the stark reality that grief hurts - loss is real - tears overwhelm.

Tonight I will simply read the story of Jesus’ crucifixion from Mark’s gospel. It gets to me every time I read it.

I pray that I will be able to read it well enough to connect with someone else this evening.

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Jerusalem is a place that I have yet to visit, though it has long been on the list of places I would like to one day see. I have thought about the city a lot. It figures in the stories of our people in so many different ways. The establishment of Jerusalem as the capital city by King David so long ago was the culmination of generations of dreaming and a symbol that the days of slavery were over. The great temple, built by Solomon, turned out to be a problem for the people. What we thought we wanted - centralization of power and eduction and wealth in one place - became its own form of enslavement to a production-based economy that was not sustainable. The second temple, built after a period of exile and scattering and intermarriage that changed the nature of our people, was somewhat more modest. It never became quite the symbol of power or prominence on the world stage that the first temple had occupied, albeit for a short amount of time.

In a way, Jerusalem, has always been a dream that exceeded the reality. The name, itself, “City of peace,” contains the word Shalom. Shalom is more than just an absence of violence. It is complete well-being and wholeness for all of the people. We have a sense of what that might involve, but it remains beyond the grasp of human society.

One of the reasons I have never been to Jerusalem is that there are too many “schemes” for pastors to travel to that place. I receive regular offers to be a “tour leader” for a “free” trip to Jerusalem, which essentially are offers to become a salesperson for a travel agency where the reward for selling enough trips to members of my congregation is a trip for myself. I don’t see my congregation as a group of people to be exploited for the profit of a travel agency, and I don’t see myself as a salesman who works on commission. I respectfully decline such offers.

In a way, not having visited Jerusalem allows me to mix fantasy with reality. The modern news cycle makes it impossible for me to ignore the reality of Jerusalem, but like those who thought of the yet-to-be-established city as they wandered in the desert so long ago, I can continue to imagine it as a place dedicated to religious faithfulness and the pursuit of peace for all of the people of the world. It might be better to imagine myself walking through the streets and visiting the sites of the Bible story than to find myself on a crowded tour bus with the crush of crowds preventing me from seeing the things I came to view.

I guess that I have imagined Jerusalem for much of my life. Although going to church has been part of my Palm Sunday routine since i was an infant, I don’t have memory of too many early Palm Sundays. I guess that I was in Sunday School before the story of Jesus and the triumphal entry into Jerusalem began to seep into my consciousness and become one of those stories we always tell.

I’m pretty sure that our way of thinking about Jesus coming into the city is a mixture of fantasy and reality, just as my image of the city is a mixed-up combination of perceptions. Somehow I suspect that it wasn’t a parade with thousands of spectators, but a more modest procession with a handful of disciples and a crowd of curious onlookers who thought they might have a chance to witness a miraculous healing or perhaps even an encounter between Jesus and the religious authorities. If the latter was their hope, they didn’t have long to wait, but the day that Jesus came into Jerusalem on his las visit was not particularly marked by conflict. Luke’s gospel reports an interchange between a temple authority worried about the noise of the crowd and Jesus’ answer, “I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out.” Some emotions cannot be repressed. Some expressions of faith are beyond human control.

Jesus’ arrival on a donkey colt is a clear indication of the nature of the parade. He didn’t answer power with power. He didn’t come into the city, which was occupied by Roman legionnaires and had a Roman occupational government riding a white stallion as would be the case for a high-ranking Roman official. I grew up with donkeys in our pasture. A donkey colt isn’t big enough to carry a grown man and it is barely tall enough to keep your feet from dragging. The colt would have tired out before Jesus got a quarter of a mile. If the animal was more mature and more adult-sized, the ride is hardly luxury conveyance. There are a few steep trails, like those descending into the Grand Canyon, where riding a donkey can be a bit easier than walking, but those are the exception. On a city street, it is probably easier to walk than to ride a donkey. There is a kind of statement in that mode of conveyance. Perhaps Jesus, who had a pretty good sense of what was coming, had mixed feelings about this particular trip to Jerusalem.

The city and the temple are a disappointment to Jesus. The money-changers, the lack of understanding of the core values of the covenant, the seeking of comfort instead of justice are all features against which he is compelled to preach. The fickleness of the crowds and the desertion of even his closest friends must have been a painful pill to swallow.

Were I to visit Jerusalem, I think that the bit of the wall that remains from the temple would be interesting enough to visit, but it wouldn’t be the heart of my pilgrimage. What attracts me is the Garden of Gethsemane. That was the place of Jesus’ deep communication with God. It is a place worthy of a visit for a spiritual pilgrim.

I shall go there in my imagination this week.

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The United Church of Christ has two major ethical statements. My life has been framed by promises and covenants and i take my commitments very seriously. The Ordained Minister’s Code is an ethical code for those who are called to ordained ministry. Similarly, the Church Educator’s Code is for those called to teach. Since I find myself called to preach and teach the Gospel and since I am both an ordained minister and a certified educator, it makes sense to me that I am absolutely bound by both codes.

Both of these codes have the same line about care for our physical bodies:

“I will attend to my physical well-being and avoid abusive behaviors and abusive use of substances.”

I have been fortunate in that I have not suffered from addiction to alcohol, tobacco or drugs. Keeping that part of the code has not been a problem for me because I don’t suffer from those particular addictions. The substance that I am prone to abuse is food. I have struggled with my weight for decades. I was very careful with diet and exercise during my seminary years, and I learned back then, when I was in my twenties, that the tendency to overeat would be a life-long struggle for me. I’d been eating yogurt and apples for lunch for decades before it became popular. Still, I am overweight, and technically that other “O” word: obese. My doctor confirms that each year at the time for my physical.

As a minister, however, I don’t particularly stand out. As my mother once observed after attending a meeting of ministers with me. “The ministry certainly is a porcine profession.” We do sit a lot. We are offered a lot of food wherever we go. And more than a few of us are heavier than is healthy.

Playing upon our natural tendency for guilt, the health insurance program of the United Church of Christ, administered by Blue Cross-Blue Shield, has instituted a program labeled “healthy stewards.” The program offers very modest cash incentives for ministers to regularly report health statistics such as height, weight, exercise, and lifestyle choices. It is, like many similar programs offered by big insurance, not as the name might imply, a program to improve the health of ministers. Rather it is a very thinly-veiled data mining operation designed to lower costs for the insurance company. I have not been tempted to have more forms to fill out and more reports that are due. I also can’t understand a program that gives incentives for joining a gym and “working out” on a treadmill or a stair machine, but doesn’t pay any attention to how many times I go up and down the stairs in my home or at the hospital (10, count ‘em, 10 stories). There is no way for me to report a day of splitting wood with the Woodchucks or the simple fact that I shoveled, hauled in a wheelbarrow, spread and raked over 8 tons of gravel this week, working after I got off of “work” in the evening.

The real “kicker” that has kept me from enrolling is that the program makes no distinction between paddling a canoe and paddling a kayak. Heck, it doesn’t even have a place to register rowing a real boat, only rowing a machine.

I believe in working hard to be a wise steward of my health. I know that I promised to take care of my health, and it is a promise I take very seriously. Trust me, however, I am far more motivated by the promises I have made than by the insurance company’s program to cut their costs. Actually, so far it has worked out really well for the insurance company. I’ve been remarkably healthy over the span of my life so far. I must have inherited pretty good genetics and I’ve been fortunate when it comes to major illness. A couple of accidents cost a trip to the emergency room, but so far I’ve avoided hospitalizations.

I may have a big belly, but like other paddlers and rowers, I’ve got strong arms and my upper body strength is not bad for a guy my age. My back muscles are strong enough to roll a kayak and rotate my torso for a full reach brace in a canoe. As one of my river rat buddies says, “Not bad for an old coot!”

Beyond all of these things, the physical quality that is most important for my profession is endurance. I exercise for endurance. There are days - and next week will have seven of them - when 12 hours are a minimum. I can still work a 60-hour week past the age of 60. I’ve always been able to put in the hours.

I am not, however, as young, or as strong as I once was. I notice it when I put in the really long weeks and I need to take a day or so to recover. I used to be able to fall asleep in exhaustion, sleep 5 or 6 hours and get up and do it all over again. These days I can fall asleep, but a few aches and pains will have me up and reaching for the aspirin a couple of hours later if I’ve been over doing it.

Here’s the deal: Instead of signing up for the “Healthy Stewards” program with the insurance company, I’d be glad to host any insurance executive who wants to follow me around next week. In fact, we can start today. I’ll be on the lake before sunrise. I’ve got an extra boat I can loan. Then, after breakfast, I have a huge mound of topsoil that needs to have all of the rock picked out of it and then it needs to be raked and smoothed. Planting the grass and spreading the straw will be easy after picking and hauling all the rocks. Then there is a pickup to unload at the dump. That’s just Saturday. It’s on Sunday when the real work begins. Good news! We get to move the communion table and set up and take down the stage this week.

I’d love to see how “chipper” that insurance executive will be by the 6 am Sunrise Service on Easter. I’m thinking I shouldn’t plan on him wanting to preach the 9:30 service that day.

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I don’t spend much time on Facebook, but I have a Facebook page. I signed up to follow the journey of a nephew several years ago. He was traveling in Central America and would post pictures on his Facebook page when he found an Internet cafe. Our church has a Facebook page and over the years, I have added friends when I receive requests from people that I know. I’m not a big one for putting up pictures, but I often enjoy the pictures others post. I installed the application on my phone and take a look at the posts of my friends when I am waiting for an appointment or meeting or have a small amount of extra time.

In the last week or so, I have been thinking a bit about my growing up years because a member of my class posted our first grade class picture and then other members of the class began to post individual school pictures that they had saved. I didn’t wear glasses until sometime in the third grade, so some of my classmates didn’t initially recognize the picture of me that was posted. My initial reaction was amazement that anyone had saved the pictures. Then I was totally amazed that the same person was so well organized that the pictures could be found. I’m not saying I don’t have things like that, just that I’d never be able to find them in the chaos of my boxes and files.

The thing about growing up in our town in the 1950’s and 1960’s was that at least as far as we kids we concerned, our town was a classless society. In that first grade picture is the son of our town’s only doctor and children of prominent businessmen. There is also a daughter of a family who lived across the street from the city dump and whose income came from salvage of what others had thrown out. There were children from farm and ranch families and children whose parents went through many different jobs and had spent some nights in the jail drying out. We all saw ourselves as a part of the same group - the same class in school and played together without distinction between those whose parents were rich and those who were poor, those who were educated and those who were not.

I’m told that in polls Americans are most likely to report that they are middle class even if they are in the lowest or highest 20% in terms of family income. Still, it seems to me that our family was quite average for my class. We weren’t the best off. We didn’t often get a new car and we never took a resort vacation, but the roof on our house rarely leaked and we got new appliances when the old ones wore out. we shared rooms with our siblings, and so did our classmates. Our house was on main street, but that wasn’t much of a distinction in our town. It certainly wasn’t the biggest house in town. Most of us had been in the homes of all of our classmates over the years that we went to school together and we frequently invited our classmates into our homes for meals, to work on school projects, or just co “come and play.”

It was fun to remember those times because things are different in my home town these days. If you go up the valley from town, you’ll see million dollar homes on places that used to be hardscrabble farms with tar paper shacks. There are a lot of homes in the county that are recreational homes - the owners have multiple homes and the one in our home county is rarely occupied in the winter. They come for a while and then go to another of their homes. For the most part these are people whose children are raised. When they do have children, the children go to school in other places. The town no longer has a dump, only a transfer station for a regional landfill, and whatever recycling that gets done isn’t a job for a family any more. There are a lot fewer working ranches in the county these days. The few real cowboys that remain mostly take care of the stock of non-resident landowners. No one expects Michael Douglas to work his own cattle and Ted Turner isn’t exactly a ranch hand. Brooke Shields has a few horses on her place, but no one has ever seen her or any of her friends ever actually riding one of them.

There are a lot fewer businesses on Main Street. The shop that housed our family’s farm machinery and feed store business was a thrift store for a while now it is privately owned and used as a storage facility. The cafe right next to it has been for sale for the last 15 years. The women who own it, one of whom is a classmate of mine, have begun to realize that there will be no customers for it and when the finally quit it will cease to be a cafe. The town’s upper class shop in other cities and those with fewer means drive the 60 miles to shop at Walmart.

The acceleration of the gap between rich and poor has been widely documented in the media. During the years that I was going to school and college the distribution of income was gradually becoming more equal. Two world wars and the Great Depression had flattened the economic pyramid in the US. But when I came into my adulthood and entered the workforce, that equalizing trend reversed. By the 1980’s the top tier of American income earners began to pull away from everyone else and now the very top has pulled away from the top. In the quarter century between 1979 and 2005, average after-tax income (adjusted for inflation) grew by $900 a year for the bottom fifth of American households, by $8,700 a year for the middle fifth and by $745,000 a year for the top 1 percent of households. This is according to Congressional statistics quoted by Robert Putnam in his book “Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis.”

I don’t think that my class produced any 1-percenters. But it appears that there is little class distinction among us on Facebook these days and that is refreshing and brings back a good memory of simpler times.

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The idea of retirement is not new. It has been around for a long time. It was 13 B.C. when Roman Emperor Augustus began paying pensions to Roman Legionnaires who had served 20 years. According to Rank Eich, who, in 2009, wrote a history of pensions, Augustus’ plan was financed by regular taxes and later by a 5% inheritance tax. It is difficult to know, from the perspective of a couple of thousand years later, how big the impact of retirement was on the overall society. One place where I looked cited the average life-expectancy in Rome at the time around the age of 25. It’s pretty hard to get in your 20 years before the age of 25. This statistic, however, must be skewed by the very high infant mortality of the time. Legionnaires were, likely, in better health than the general population. They, of course, faced the risks of battle, which were lower than in the industrial age, say around 10 to 25% of Roman soldiers died in battle. Being a commander, or Centurion, would have reduced the risk of battle death. If the Legionnaire was appointed at 20, he’d have his 20 years in by 40 and then might live another ten or even twenty years if he didn’t die of STDs, dysentery, plague, or long-term effects of combat injuries. The 5% inheritance tax was probably sufficient to more than fund the pensions for the “retired” soldiers.

The concept of paying pensions to soldiers caught on early in the history of Europe. In most cases, these were motivated by high injury rates. Soldiers were not capable of working at some of the jobs that their peers without military experience did. By the 16th century, Britain and several other European countries offered pensions to officers and some offered pensions to general troops.

The practice of government paid pensions to disabled soldiers gained widespread support following the Civil War.

Eich’s history cites an official with the London port authority as the first civilian to be paid a pension. In 1864, the retired public servant was paid half of his salary, which was deducted from the pay of his replacement. Hmm. . . there are some obvious reasons why that system didn’t catch on. On the other hand, the life expectancy after retirement was relatively short.

The basic plan for most of the world’s history, however, was simple. Work for an income until you die or become disabled. That plan, true for most of the world’s workers for most of history is still the case in many societies around the globe.

My grandfather was the first in our family line who enjoyed something like retirement. His father had died while working the family farm. That was typical for his generation. In 1880, 78 percent of American men worked past the age of 65. When his father died, my grandfather took over the farm. He later sold it and bought a gas station, so he worked about half of his career as a farmer and half as a small business owner. He was able to retire because of the Social Security system, created in 1935. He lived long enough to draw Medicare benefits, added in 1965, for part of his retirement.

Of course my grandfather wasn’t totally supported by public funds in his retirement. He lived off of savings and the proceeds from the sale of his business.

Retirement was the expectation for my father’s generation. My father began to talk seriously about retirement at the age of 50 or so. He was an entrepreneur and small business man and he had several ventures that he carried on for 25 or so years. He was the principal operator of our airport and ran a flying service for 25 years before selling the aviation portion of his business. Alongside that, started several years later, he was a John Deere dealer and ran a feed store for a 25-year period. Most of that business was sold a couple of years before his death. My father didn’t live to 65. He died before his 60th birthday. At the time of his death, he was semi-retired, with income from savings, the sale of portions of his businesses and income from rental properties and a leasing company which owned all of the accounts receivable from his prior businesses. He did leave a widow, who drew his social security for three decades after his death.

I think that retirement will be quite a bit more “mushy” for my generation. Some of my peers are already retired, having been successful in their vocation, prudent in their savings, and with the support of the Social Security system. Others, like me, are still working and most of us don’t see anything particularly significant about the age of 65 as the point of retirement. Most of us can realize financial benefit by not drawing on retirement funds until age 70. Many of us have excellent health and can expect to live well into our 80’s or 90’s. Our motivation to retire at a specific age is not as high as those who have more fragile health conditions. I think that my generation will see retirement ages spanning over several decades of age.

It is very unclear what will be the case of our children. Our son-in-law is a career military person. I expect military pensions to continue and he expects to retire from his military career at around 20 years of service. He’ll be a young man when he has his 20 years in and fully expects to work at some other job for many years after beginning to draw his military pension, enabling him to save for a more full-time retirement down the road. Our daughter, his wife, is a civilian employee on the base and will have both Social Security and participates in a shared retirement savings plan with her employer.

Our son works for a large hospital corporation where, in addition to Social Security, he and his employer contribute to a private retirement savings fund.

But retirement isn’t only about money. It also has to do with meaningful work. There is plenty of work that is volunteer for which one doesn’t earn financial reward, so retirement can be a very meaningful time. On the other hand, working to support oneself can also be meaningful.

It seems that now is a good time to re-think the concept of retirement. Obviously, I keep thinking about the topic. Fortunately, I have the luxury of a steady job that gives me the freedom to think and plan and consider my options.

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When I think about it, there are a lot of things I believe in that don’t make sense. I’m pretty sure that this is true of a lot of people. Here are a few examples:

I believe in the Chicago Cubs. I know it doesn’t make sense. Just yesterday Edwin Jackson used Google Maps to drive to the Cubs’ spring training complex where he was scheduled to start in a preseason game against the Oakland A’s. The phone app took him to the old training complex, more than 3 miles away and then on a wandering route. When he finally arrived at Hohokam Stadium it was only 25 minutes from the start of the game. Blake Parker made a substitute start while Jackson warmed up. Jackson took over pitching in the 2nd, but the A’s collected eight runs on nine hits in just 1 2/3 innings. The Cubs lost 14-2. The Cubs lose a lot. They were originally called the Chicago White Stockings when they were organized in 1870. They became the Cubs for the 1907. The story of how Chicago’s other team became the White Sox is for another day. The Cubs are the country’s oldest professional baseball team, organized a full year before the Atlanta Braves. The Cubs won the World Series in 1908. They haven’t won a Series since. They haven’t even made it into the World Series in my lifetime - not since 1945.

But I believe in the Cubs. I believe that anyone can cheer for a winner. It takes a real fan with real dedication to back a team that faces setback after setback. I believe that one day the championship drought will end for the Cubs and they will have a wining season. It may not happen in my lifetime, but that day will come.

I know. It doesn’t make sense, but I believe in the Cubs.

I believe in Jeffersonian democracy. Specifically I believe in the phrase Jefferson penned for the Declaration of Independence: “All men are created equal.” I even take it one step further. I believe that every human being is created equal. The ideal which was present at the founding of the United States has never been achieved in institutional law. In fact we have lived with entrenched racism for all of our history. We began with slavery. Jefferson himself owned slaves. Slaves weren’t counted as full humans. We began with women denied the vote. We began without considering the status of the indigenous people of this continent. We have oppressed and held back and developed institutions of entrenched poverty and degradation for the entire history of this nation.

But I believe, in my core, that all people are created equal and that the goal of a society that offers equal opportunity to all people is achievable in human terms.

I know. It doesn’t make sense, but I believe that all humans are equal.

I believe in friendship. I’ve been a pastor and I’ve listened to other people’s stories enough to know that the person who knows you best is also the person who can deliver the most pain to you. Friends get to know your true flaws. Sometimes they exploit those weaknesses for personal gain. I know that friends betray friends. I know that friendships can fail. Business partnerships that start out as friendships can end disastrously. People betray their friends for financial gain, for social status, even to gain sexual partners.

But I believe in friends. I have friends who would do anything in the world for me. I have friends who accept me when I am far less than lovable. I have friends who would set aside their own agenda to help me.

I know. It doesn’t make sense, but I believe in friendship.

I believe in marriage. I know the statistics. I know that between 40 and 50 percent of married couples in the United States divorce. I know that there are marriages that don’t end in divorce that are far from healthy. I know that there are people who are married who are not happy in their marriages. I know that humans are not inherently more faithful than the critters I observe in my back yard. I have friends who have been divorced multiple times in their lives. I recently was looking at the profiles of some of my grade school mates on Facebook. I’m pretty sure the divorce rate is even higher among the people I know and call friends than typical. We live in a society of serial infatuation and prevalent straying from monogamous relationships.

But after more than 41 years of marriage, I know that I am happiest being married. I am sure, in the core of my being, that a single monogamous relationship with deep commitment and equally deep trust is absolutely the way I want to live my life.

I know. It doesn’t make sense, but I believe in marriage.

Since I have this propensity to believe in things that don’t make sense, there are a few folks who would expect me to add God to the list. There are skeptics who might think that belief in God doesn’t make sense. It is not, in my experience, at all the same thing.

My belief in God is very rational. I have studied logic and arguments and the history of philosophy. I am well aware of the relatively short history of scientific method in the story of human inquiry. I know how it fits into the wider picture of human thought and how lightweight it is in developing arguments about the existence, or non existence of God. I have observed how belief in God has dominate human rational thought in generations of doubt as well as generations of relative certainty. I tackle the sacred texts and the wider history of our people with an academician’s eye. I give the best of my rational thought to understanding the nature of God and the history of human understanding of God. I know how the arguments of the agnostics and atheists fit into the wider pattern of thinking about God.

I believe in lots of things that don’t make sense.

I believe in God because it does make sense.

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I did fairly well in college. After an initial struggle with a bit of homesickness, I made the transition to living on my own fairly smoothly. Of course, I had a lot of help. I wasn’t the best with laundry, but I was skilled at getting myself invited to home-cooked meals. I worried about grades and academic performance, but my worries kept my nose to the grindstone and I earned good grades. What I didn’t do well in college during my freshman year was roommates.

I grew up in a home with four boys. I was used to sharing a room. I was, in those days, a good sleeper and could sleep through a lot of noise. I could sleep with the lights on. I was an early riser, but I was skilled at getting up quietly an getting out of the room without waking my roommate. And, my work study joy was opening the college library, so I had a place to go and a place to do my work.

What I wasn’t good at was talking with my roommates. I seemed to lack the experience and interest to carry on meaningful conversations with them. At the time I blamed my roommates. They seemed to have rather narrow interests for the most part, at least from my perspective.

My first roommate was a football player. That meant that he had arrived a couple a weeks ahead of me and had had the room to himself for that time. Then I moved in. I got the side of the room he assigned, not that I needed much space, or even cared much about which side of the room. He pretty much had come to college to play football. He was taking classes, and we even had one class that we shared, but I was into homework and earning grades, things that weren’t high on his priority list. I didn’t follow college or professional football and I barely knew the names of the teams. I knew almost nothing about the technical aspects of the game. I played in the college band, so I went to every home football game to march at half time, and I cheered for our team, but wasn’t very good for the post-game analysis of my roommate. After football season, his major interest seemed to be beer, which was against the rules in our dormitory and for which I was underage and fearful of getting caught and thrown out of school. I was determined not to mess up, so when he and his friends decided that our room was a perfect place for late night beer parties, I studied up on the process for changing roommates.

My second roommate was at least known to me. I had met him at church camp, and although I didn’t know him well, we seemed to like the same kinds of music and he had a decent stereo system. We had a few more topics about which to converse, such as memories of church camp, movies that we had seen, and even a couple of classes that we shared. It seemed at the time to be a much better match than roommate number one. But if beer in the room had made me nervous with my first roommate, marijuana in the room pretty much kept me from sleeping. I was sure that the cops would burst into the room and arrest us at any moment. I started spending less and less time in the room in the hope that at least I wouldn’t be there when the big bust occurred.

Roommate number three was a quirky fellow, but he was quiet and we had some common friends. He didn’t seem to be interested in substance abuse as an avocation and he kept reasonable hours. He could be a bit compulsive, especially when he got an idea in his head. I had access to a car and he did not, which meant that he cooked up several schemes, including a springtime trip to Yellowstone National Park that involved my car and my gas money. We made it through the year.

I found the money for a private room without roommates for my sophomore and junior years of college. Marriage then provided me with an excellent roommate with whom I seem to be compatible.

I have observed, however, that aging and especially certain health conditions can land one with assigned roommates, however. I visit int he hospital and in nursing homes enough to know that dealing with roommates that one would never have chosen can be a challenge of recovery from major illness.

So I have been trying to expand my repertoire of available topics for conversation. I’m assuming that not all roommates would be comfortable discussing the nuances of sacrificial theology or my predictions about church politics in the 21st century. I know that I am able to bore most people when I get on the topic of canoes and kayaks and wooden boat construction in general. I visit enough people in their homes to know that I’m a bit quirky in my choice of magazines. Last time I checked, there were only two other subscribers to “Wooden Canoe” in the state of South Dakota and both of them live east river. I’m thinking that “Messing About in Boats” probably doesn’t send too many copies to our zip code, either. “Atlantic Coastal Kayaker” doesn’t show up in any of the waiting rooms of doctors offices in town.

So I’ve been checking out the NCAA bracket as we move into March Madness so that I can at least know which teams are still in the tournament and which have been eliminated. This wasn’t UWyo’s year, I guess.

What has really got me worried is that I don’t watch television and unlike my years in college when there was a television in the lounge down the hall, there is a television in every hospital and nursing home room these days. With my luck, I’ll probably get a roommate who turns the thing on.

I wonder if I could memories the location of all of the circuit breakers in the various institutions of our community.

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I’m sure that regular readers of this blog are already up to speed on all of the events happening in Leicester this weekend and into next week, but if you are not a dedicated royal-watcher, and if you don’t make it a practice of keeping up with the ever-busy schedule of the Right Reverend Tim Stevens, Bishop of Leicester, you might have missed the story. It hasn’t garnered much press in the United States. I don’t watch television, so don’ know of CNN or Fox is devoting full-time to coverage of the events this week, but something in me says they probably don’t have it in their schedule of programs.

To fill you in, you need to imagine that you are in Bosworth, a bit to the northwest of London. That’s were yesterday’s ceremonies took place. It is, in case you don’t know, a funeral procession for an English royal. The coffin was made from English oak from a Duchy of Cornwall plantation by Canadian carpenter Michael Ibsen. The coffin has been sealed. The funeral procession began at Fenn Land Farm, near the spot where the death occurred. Ceremonies were held as the cortege travelled through the county at Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Center. The funeral cortege entered the city of Leicester by the historic Bow Bridge after touring landmarks in the country in a funeral coach. At the bridge, after additional ceremonies, the coffin was transferred to a horse-drawn hearse to proceed through the crowds who threw white roses atop the coffin as it passed. Knights in full armor led the procession through Leicester.

Historians in Tudor costumes processed through the field ahead of the coffin’s arrival at the University of Leicester where the university’s chancellor led a short ceremony before the cortege departed for Leicester Cathedral, where it will be on display for the public to view the coffin Monday through Wednesday before the final burial ceremony on Thursday, which will be presided over by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby.

It isn’t the first time King Richard III has been buried. Richard III, the last of the British Royals to physically lead troops into battle died and the battle was lost in 1485. Richard was only 33 at the time of his death. His first burial was likely accompanied by much less pomp and ceremony. In fact, subsequent generations of British royals sought actively to discredit the king. Shakespeare depicted him as evil, cruel, bent and frightening. For centuries, no one even knew the exact place of his burial. He was forgotten to history until his remains were discovered, buried under a parking lot.

It took no small amount of modern day sleuthing, including DNA tests of his descendants, one of whom is the carpenter who made his coffin. The original lead-lined coffin preserved his bones well enough that there is a skeleton available for his final reburial, which will take place with most of the elements of a British state funeral on Thursday.

You’d think that after 530 years a person’s place in history might be pretty well set, but historians are discovering much about the King that leads us to believe that prior histories contained mistakes and inaccuracies.

This week’s ceremonies won’t change history, but they might change how we interpret history. Richard III may well have been one of the victims of the well-oiled propaganda machinery of Henry Tudor, who became known as Henry VII. Stories circulated by the Tudors included a report that Richard was a freakish individual who was born with teeth and shoulder-length hair after having been in his mother's womb for two years. They claimed his body was stunted and distorted, with one shoulder higher than the other, and he was "slight in body and weak in strength”. Richard was also blamed for the murder of Henry VI. There were also claims that he poisoned his own wife.

It has been too many years to accurately prove or disprove the stories that have been circulated, though the physical evidence of his skeleton seem to at least discredit the reports of freakish physical appearance, a hunchback or one shoulder being radically higher than the other. There was some curvature of his spine, but to what extent that came from five centuries of being a a coffin that was too short for his frame is uncertain.

As for me, I won’t be attending the funeral. I don’t plan to watch the live coverage on BBC. I don’t even plan to check out CNN or Fox to see if they cover the events. What is most interesting to me about the week of ceremonies is that people are able to change their opinions - and gain a fresh look at events that occurred over five centuries ago.

We tell many stories of the 15th and 16th centuries in the church. The Protestant Reformation was a major event in the way that we interpret the story of the church and how we align our loyalties in this day and age. Depending on which part of the modern church you find yourself, the ways that you interpret the stories - and the stories that you tell - might be very different. We like to think of the past as fixed and set and unchangeable, but the reality is that we know so little of the past that a seemingly insignificant bit of new information can make a big change in how we interpret the events of our past. The way we always thought things were might not be the complete story. The way it was taught in our history classes, may not be the only perspective on the events.

The events in England are a bit over the top for my sensibilities. I doubt if I’d attend even if I were in the area. I think the poor king deserves a quiet burial with dignity after having been dug up, examined and photographed over and over again.

Though I’ll never gain the world’s attention as did Richard III, I think I’d rather not have my descendants making me a new coffin every 500 years or so. Return the elements of my body to God’s creation. Once will be enough. I trust God to take care of whatever physical remains there are.

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According to the calendar, the first day of Spring was Friday, and our weather cooperated with the mood of the season. With highs in the 60’s it is easy to get spring fever. We’re noticing more birds and the trees seem to be alive with their activities. So it just made sense, when I had a bit of space in my schedule, to watch the sunrise from the lake yesterday. It is a bit higher at the lake, so i bundled up, knowing it can be chilly in the morning. I wasn’t disappointed. The grass was covered with frost and there was skim ice on the lake as i set my boat into the water. I was paddling a kayak in anticipation of the cooler temperatures. Kayaks are warmer because the deck creates an enclosed space that is warmed by body heat. I fitted my spray cover around the cockpit coaming and paddled out. I was using a greenland paddle, which drips a little more than western paddles with rubber rings that keep the water out on the tips. After a few paddle strokes, I noticed that the drips were freezing on the deck of the kayak. No worries, I’ve paddled in colder waters.

After a short paddle, the sun began to make its appearance and before long I could feel its warmth. The geese were complaining vociferously about my presence, Mostly they just squawk and swim away from me, but occasionally a bird will head out in front of my boat going the same direction that I’m paddling. I don’t chase the geese intentionally, but my pace in a boat is a bit faster than their normal pace, so I tend to catch up to them. When I get too close, they take off with great noise and splashing and fly a few yards before gliding back down to the water’s surface. A kayak with a human paddler doesn’t leave such a wake in the water as a goose flapping its wings. The commotion is intensified with the noise. Geese aren’t prone to doing anything quietly.

I was surprised that there were several campers in the campground. I could hear the hum of generator motors as I approached. There was even one party sleeping in a tent. Their tent looked like a good and well-insulated model, but they were huddled around the campfire in the early-morning hours. The RV campers appeared to be still in bed, or at least still inside.

In the little coves and pockets around the lake there was still some ice. It seems incredible to me that there could still be that much ice on the lake, but when you think about it, there is a lot of ice to to melt on the surface of the lake. It wasn’t that long ago that the fishermen were driving their 4-wheelers and dragging their ice shacks across the surface of the lake.

A few fish were rising, I think mostly in speculation of the possibility of insects rather than responding to actual bugs above the water. At least it seemed a bit cold and I didn’t notice any insects flying around as I paddled.

I am well aware of the fact that I live in South Dakota. We can still see blizzards, well into May. In fact, I hope we do get some significant spring snow. Things are too dry in the hills and we need the moisture. But it is unlikely that we’ll see any weather that keeps me off of the lake for an entire month.

So the tally for the winter of 2014-15 is just a little over three months. I paddled in early November, but was off of the lake for December, January and February. That’s not bad for someone in a northern clime. Folks in Maine aren’t on the water yet and might not be for at least another month. We can have open water in any month of the year and I keep my eyes open simply because I’d like to be able to say I paddled in every month.

But I need winters for building. The pace of my work always slows when I can be out paddling. I guess at my real core, I’m more of a paddler than a builder. Building boats is, for me, one step in the process of paddling. There is no feeling quite like that of paddling in a boat that you made with your own two hands.

This is the season of waiting. We know that summer is coming, but we also have lived in this country long enough to know it is too early to put out the tomatoes. We’ve seen too many spring blizzards to believe that it is time to put away the snowblower. But that knowledge doesn’t keep us from wanting to spend time out of doors. We open up all of the windows and air out our houses and drive with our windows down in our cars. It is still early enough that we can feel a bit chilly and that feeling is one to be savored. We know that we won’t be able to remember what chilly feels like when the hottest days of summer set in.

I will keep looking for opportunities to head to the lake and mornings to watch the sunrise from its surface. There is a glory in paddling into the sunrise that attracts me no matter how many times I’ve been there. There are always new things to discover about the lake even though it is small and very familiar to me. The geese need to be reminded that it’s OK to share and the beaver needs to be reminded that he is not alone. In a few weeks, I’ll need to count the goslings and not long afterwards the ducklings. The fish will find flying insects and be rewarded for their trips to the surface. And I need to be reminded that there is beauty beyond human imagination available every day.

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I have been a Christian all of my life - longer than that, actually. My parents were Christian. My mother is descended from a long line of Methodists that includes a number of preachers in the extended family tree. Perhaps the most famous of the Methodist relatives on her side of the family was Dr. Franklin Little, who was a scholar and leader of improved relations between Christians and Jews in the wake of the Holocaust. He is the author of “The Crucifixion of the Jews.” Mother’s parents and grandparents were very active in the church. Her father attended national Methodist gatherings and her grandfather was recorder for Brother Van.

My father grew up Presbyterian, and that followed family wanderings that included roots in Pennsylvania Amish and other Protestant groups.

I was baptized as an infant and have never thought of myself as anything but Christian. I am at home in my faith. I don’t ever remember wanting to be a person of any different faith. I am not tempted by or even very interested in atheism.

I am, however, interested in the faith of others. I have studied the practices of other religions, I have read the sacred writings of Judaism, Taoism, Confucianism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism and other world religions. I have invested many hours in listening to sacred stories and learning about parts of Indigenous American spiritual practices and traditions.

In the country where I grew up, before the time of settlers, young men sought their vocation by going on a walk. Crow men prepared by participating in sweat lodges and listening to the prayers of elders. They then took off on a walk, usually into the mountains. They walked and walked, eating little or no food and drinking very little. They stopped along the way as needed and then walked some more. They waited until an animal brought them a message about their vocation in life. Many sought the high country and received their vision from birds. Eagles and hawks are prevalent in the area. Some saw elk or deer or bears. I’ve hiked up to the caves in Lionhead Mountain and I have seen the pictographs there that record it as a sacred place for many generations of people.

I didn’t walk, but the place where I first began to be aware of my vocation is in that same valley, 20 or more miles farther up the valley from Lionhead. That special place is a church camp called Miminagish, which is the Crow name for the river, “singing waters.” I went to that camp every summer of the first 25 years of my life, including being taken there by my parents when I was only a couple of months old. It was there that I got to know ministers that I admired and sought to emulate. It was there that I first began to think of the ministry as a possible vocation for me.

In our traditions it is other people, more than the animals, who help one discern one’s vocation. Before I was ordained, I needed to become equipped for ministry by graduating from college and completing a Master’s Degree. In my case I also completed a Doctorate. Then, with my seminary education completed, I worked with a Committee on the Ministry and prepared my ordination paper. I was examined by an ecclesiastical council of lay and clergy church leaders to determine my fitness for ministry. My paper, which I had to be prepared to defend, contained the story of my journey and my experience of being called to the ministry. For us vocation is not self-chosen, but the result of a careful process of discernment undertaken with the members of the church.

People of European Christian backgrounds don’t have the same relationship with other animals as Native Americans. We are not as likely to refer to them as siblings or to attribute to them powers of speech or discernment. So I don’t know how to answer when I am occasionally asked who my ‘spirit animal’ is. I’m not sure that I have a spirit animal. My faith and my religious practices are not exactly Native religion.

When I am in other moods, however, I have said that my spirit animal might be either a bullfrog or a beaver. The bullfrog comes from a single incident when after paddling at night, I turned my kayak over in the grass and went to bed. The next morning was chilly, so I turned over the boat, placed it in the water, crawled in and sealed up my spray skirt - all without ever really looking into the boat. The bullfrog who had sought shelter in the boat overnight was probably groggy with the cold and waited until I had paddled well out into the lake before he made his presence known. I nearly rolled the boat as I pulled my feet back from the creature, imagining that I might have a snake on board. We achieved a truce, him staying in the bow of the boat and me paddling with my knees tucked up between the coaming with the spray skirt off, until we reached shore. Shortly afterward, we both abandoned the boat. I inspected it with a flashlight in hand before taking it on the next paddle.

Beavers, however, have had a more constant presence in my life. When I was a child at Mimanagish, I used to love to hike the mile and a half or so up to the beaver ponds. I said I was looking for moose, and perhaps I was, but I rarely got a glimpse of the big creatures. Mostly I watched the bevers at work swimming with branches in their mouths, occasionally chewing on trees on the shore. I was less bothered by mosquitoes than my fishermen brothers and would sit still and watch more than they. I got to know individual beavers by appearance and even learned a bit of their individual traits.

As an adult, I have often paddled close enough to beavers to get the warning slap of the tail. The first time it happened to me when I was paddling a canoe I was startled at first. These days, I usually see the beaver before the tail comes out of the water. I’ve learned to paddle close, but keep my distance, so I can watch the beaver for a while. I know several of the beavers at the lake and in the inlet by appearance and the way they swim. Each year I go paddling to get a glimpse at the kits, and to see which lodges are growing and which have been abandoned.

Recently I read that among the tribes of the Pacific northwest, the appearance of a beaver in a vision quest indicated that the young man seeking a vision would become a canoe builder.

I’m quite comfortable with my vocation as a minister, but perhaps my friend the beaver has influenced my choice of avocation. Building canoes has proven to be a good hobby for me.

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The indigenous tribes of the Pacific Northwest have different stories of the origins of their people. Some stories tell of long journeys - perhaps over a former land bridge across the Bering Strait. Some stories tell of journeys by canoe. Some stories report that the people arose in the land as a part of the creation of the land. On the west slopes of the Cascade mountains, where the rivers run down to the sea, four giants of the forest have stories that are tied to the story of the people.

The old ones tell of the oldest of trees. The one called “spruce” in modern languages is often known as the grandfather tree. There is a story of two brothers from the days of the beginning of the earth who grew to become the spruce and the hemlock. Other stories tell of the hemlock as the grandmother and the spruce as the grandfather. Spruce roots are amazingly pliable and very strong. They can be used to make baskets and to bind together the parts of a canoe. The wood of the spruce is straight grained and relatively easy to work. It is the best wood for making paddles and is also used for the gunwales or rails of the great canoes. The old people wore hats woven from spruce roots that kept their heads dry and sent the rain away from their bodies.

The inner bark of the hemlock, which has no relation to the poisonous plant from Europe that shares its name, can be ground into flour for cooking. The leaves and twigs yield oil that can be used for flavoring. The hemlock also gives red dye for face paint and coloring baskets and other items. People chew the pitch of the hemlock as gum for flavor, and pound the bark for medicine. If you are burned, the leaves can be chewed for a poultice to ease the pain and speed healing. Eating with a spoon carved from hemlock is said to be a key to a healthy life.

The real medicine tree of the northwest is called in modern language the Douglas fir. It isn’t a fir at all, but names stick. You can use the needles to make tea for aches, or the bark to make tea for stomach pain. The pitch makes a gum for chewing and a sealant for making baskets water-tight to haul liquids. The roots make baskets and can be used to bind up all sorts of things.

If you grew up Samish, you would know that the greatest tree of the land where the rivers run down to the sea is the cedar. In the old days the Samish made the best canoes there ever were. The Samish lived in homes that always faced the river or the sea. They were a people of the rivers and the sea. Their infants slept in cradles shaped like canoes and their departed loved ones were placed in the trees in canoes for their final journey: dead souls resting in canoes hoisted into the south wind. And their boats - all of their boats - were made of cedar.

Their houses, where many families lived together, were made of cedar. It is said that there were once houses that were a thousand feet long. In front of the houses they would stand the trunks of cedar trees carved into the stories of the people. Oh how they could tell stories! On rainy winter nights when the world was out of balance and the stories were the only thing to connect the past to the future the old ones could tell a story for ten hours or more. The stories of children are green. The stories of women are blue. And the stories of men are red. If you learn enough stories about starving, you will go to the land where there is no starving and the joys are as numerous as the birds on the wing.

The Samish but all sorts of canoes, from tiny ones for duck hunting to enormous ones for long journeys on the open ocean. They could sit fifty or sixty people in one big canoe. Sometimes they would sail the big canoes north or south after seals or whales. Sometimes the big canoes would go out for days and days at a time.

Sometimes a canoe would come back without any people in it. It was said that those people went to live in the sea. What that happened, they would make a new canoe of cedar and color it red with the juice from berries. Then they would load it down with fish and berries and hoist it high up into a spruce tree near the water. The canoes would stay in the tree for a long time, sometimes for years and years until one night in winter a wild wind would come and take the canoe back to the water for the people who had gone to the water to live.

I once made a kayak out of spruce cut into thin strips for a framework and covered it with cloth. It is long and narrow and designed for long journeys, though i have never paddled it for more than a few hours at a time. It is made in the way of the people of a different place in the north - Greenland - measured to the parts of my body to fit me for the journey.

I am not Samish, but I think they are right about cedar, however. It is the best wood for canoes. I have made three canoes and a kayak out of cedar and the kayak that is coming into being in my shop these days is cedar. I have strips from Eastern white cedar and Western red cedar and the colors are arranged in a pattern to make the boat look as fast as it will be. My kayak will be used for journeys only, not for hunting or fishing. The Samish knew of decked kayaks, but they preferred open canoes for fishing. There are stories of salmon bigger than the canoe and halibut as big as houses. The biggest fish had to be towed to shore because they were too big to hoist into the canoe.

The four trees: hemlock, Douglas fir, spruce and cedar still grow along the rivers that run down to the sea. I take a little of the spruce and a little of the cedar to make boats. Like the Samish, I hope to repay mother earth in stories. May the stories be as valuable as the trees that gave the wood for the journeys.

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Recently a group of us were having a conversation at a continuing education event with an officer of the Pennington County Sheriff’s Department. It is an officer that I have known for more than a decade. I’ve been with that officer when he had to make death notifications to families. I’ve seen him in his role as an investigator in some difficult situations. I’ve taken classes that he has taught. I know him to be a very professional, competent, and caring person. He is the kind of person that we want to have as a law enforcement officer.

I don’t hang out with cops a whole lot, but as a Sheriff’s chaplain, I do spend time with patrol, corrections and warrant officers. I understand the structure of the Sheriff’s Office and have a sense of the scope of their work and the duties of the officers. I am honored to call some of those dedicated public servants my friends.

It could be that I’m being overly sensitive lately, or it could be the pressures of this particular time in the story of our community, or it could be the large amount of negative press that law enforcement officers have been receiving after incidents in Ferguson, Brooklyn, Rapid City, Los Angeles and a dozen other cities have demonstrated some of the imperfections of our very human system of justice. Like other institutions, there is entrenched racism in some law enforcement agencies. Like other systems, there are ways of doing business that are based not on the primary service objectives, but on expediency and more than a small amount of human greed and even laziness. In the midst of this mix, I also know that there are some really good people who are dedicated, professional, loyal servants.

There was, however, something in my conversation with my friend that I keep mulling in my mind. At first I thought that he sounded a bit harsher than he had before. In the course of the class, he demonstrated the skepticism that makes him a good investigator. He reported that he has seen too many really bad things done by people with good reputations and community position to remove anyone from his suspect list until he has carefully examined the evidence. That is as it should be. Investigators need to be aware of their biases and look past them. They are charged with looking for the truth and going beyond initial appearances. On the other hand, our system of justice is based on the presumption of innocence. We aren’t well served by officers who start to see everyone as a potential suspect.

We know that our system is imperfect. I’ve read the stories of innocent people who have served decades in prison. This Innocence Project has worked within the US system of justice to use DNA evidence to look at cases where people have been wrongly convicted. At the latest count they have participated in the exonerations of 329 innocent people who have served an average of 14 years in prison for crimes they did not commit. In addition, they have produced the evidence to lead to the conviction of 140 real perpetrators.

There are a lot of things that can lead to unjust results in the criminal justice system. Eyewitnesses can misidentify suspects. Forensic science can be improperly used. False confessions or admissions occur when people are under extreme stress. Officials engage in misconduct when the pressure is on to obtain a conviction. Informants have criminal motives to give false testimony. Accused people often receive inadequate defense in the court system. I know all of this. I also know that we have some really good people in the system who work hard every day to make sure that justice is properly carried out, that laws are properly enforced and that innocent people are protected.

What concerns me more than the errors and imperfections of our system is its effects on the people who work within it. I know young cops who are idealistic and energetic and who love their work because they feel that they can make a difference in our community. I also know cops who started out that way but now are burdened by the brokenness they see every day and put in their time counting the days until they can retire. Dealing with some of the ugliest sides of our community can wear a person down. Looking at crime scenes and responding to devastating accidents can take a toll. It isn’t the first time you see something that is bloody or unnatural. It is the cumulative effect of years of looking at things that people ought not to see. It comes from steeling yourself not to become overly emotionally involved with the people you serve. Then one day the victim happens to be the same age as your daughter, or you’ve looked at one too many gunshot wounds, or you’ve seen one too many drunken fights, or you’ve inserted yourself between one too many combatting couples and something in you becomes a bit less idealistic than you once were. Something inside you becomes a bit more hardened. Something in you starts to expect to see ugliness wherever you turn.

I don’t want to live in a community where everyone is a crime suspect. I don’t want to be seen as a crime suspect. And I don’t want my friends to see the world that way, either. I need good, professional cops who look not only for guilt, but also for innocence. I need prosecutors who can recognize innocence and care for victims as well as be tough on perpetrators. I need judges who understand the awesomeness of their power and recognize their humanness and the possibility of mistakes.

If I had the power, I would try to find a bit more vacation time for my officer friend. I’d try to find a few more opportunities for him to get away from his work and enjoy being with people he can trust. I’d remind him of his idealism when he was a young officer and I’d get him to tell some of the funny and pleasant stories that come from decades of working in law enforcement.

We all would do well to take care of the people who take care of us.

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OK here is a blog topic that has been on my list for weeks and weeks, and I’ve never gotten past the title. But I really have nothing rational to say about the reelection of Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel or the visit of the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall to Washington, DC, or the protest-turned-riot in Frankfurt, or the banning of Pennsylvania State’s Kappa Delta Rho fraternity for their secret Facebook page. I suppose I should have something to say about the Rapid City School District and the potential opt out vote or the visit of Tim Tebow to the Civic Center, but I really don’t. Some days the news feels a bit random to me and I can’t think of anything very meaningful to say about it all.

You know the game: Rock, Paper, Scissors. Two people square off, count down and offer their hand gestures. The same three gestures can be chosen by either opponent. An extended fist is “rock.” Rock beats scissors. A flat palm is “paper.” Paper beats rock. The forefinger and middle finger extended with the other fingers curled is “scissors.” Scissors beats paper. Two players means that a tie is possible. If a tie occurs the game is repeated. With each repetition of the game, the player gains knowledge of the choices of the opponent, and, sometimes, insight into what might be played next. Therefore the game isn’t really random. Depending on one’s perception, memory and insights into human behavior, there is a degree of predictability that can come and a strategy that can be pursued.

The game, however, doesn’t really involve very much skill.It works for deciding trivial matters such as who goes first in another game, or who gets the last brownie. Famously, the game was used to decide which auction house, Christie’s or Southerby's would be allowed to sell the $20 million art collection of Takashi Hashiyama. The game was played “sudden death” with the victory in the first round, and the auction business, going to Christie’s who played “scissors” against Southerby’s opening bid of “paper.”

I’m not sure I would enjoy that level of risk over a hand game, especially one that involves so little option for strategy. Then, again, there are a lot of ways that one might think about the game. Americans tend to like positions of strength and leading with “rock” seems to be leading with strength. But one has to consider not only one’s opening move, but that of one’s opponent. Perhaps knowing that “rock” is a strong position, and thereby likely to be chosen by one’s opponent, one might lead with “paper” to counter the “rock.” However, if you try to think it through, you’ll realize that your opponent might be thinking the same things as you and employing the same strategy, thereby making “scissors” the answer to the opponents’ expectation that you will lead with “rock.” If you think that is the strategy employed by Christie’s, you might be right, but the version of the story that is often reported has Christie’s art director consulting his 11-year-old twin daughters who suggested the “scissors” strategy.

If you play the game multiple times, the real mind games begin as soon as there is a tie. What are the chances your opponent will offer the same choice in the next round? You can probably predict how the opponent will change, if change occurs. For example, if both lead with “scissors” your opponent is likely to change to “rock” in anticipation of you not changing. Ah, but what if your opponent doesn’t change? Or what if your opponent expects you to change and therefor offers “paper” to counter your expected move to “rock,” in which case, you’d be ahead to stick with “scissors” in your second attempt?

I used to try to make myself unpredictable. If I led with “scissors,” I would offer “scissors” a second time, then repeat that same process again early in the game. Perhaps I would even do it a third time so that my opponent would begin to think that my strategy is predictable. That’s when I could lower the boom and offer “paper.”

More than a hand game, the real game is a mind game. I’m sure that there are algorithms that can be developed that consider the odds of choice and play a strategy that is a frequent winner. There are multiple web sites that offer the opportunity to play the game against a computer. Some have computers that offer truly random selections that favor the development of a bit of strategy. There are more sophisticated sites where the computer “learns” the moves of the human player. Actually it simply has a perfect memory of each move and uses its algorithm to choose its next move. If the human player shows any consistency or pattern, the computer can exploit that pattern.

I’ve never played more than five or six rounds against a computer. It is absolutely boring to me. With a human opponent, I can employ some thinking about human nature. Playing against a computer doesn’t offer any possibility of strategies that seem worth my time.

Perhaps all of this talk about a simple game has already become boring to you. Perhaps you’d be more interested if you knew that the United States Rock Paper Scissors League (USARPS) holds sanctioned tournaments, sponsored by a beer company, with prizes in the tens of thousands of dollars. I’m not basing my retirement strategy with the hopes of winning those competitions. I have no intention of entering.

Perhaps someday, when I’m fresh out of topics for the blog, I can write a commentary on “rock, paper, scissors, Spock, and lizard.” In that game there are two additional gestures: lizard is forming a hand puppet shape, with your thumb and forefinger making an opening circle (lizard) and the Spock gesture, opening a v between your middle and ring fingers. Spock beats both paper and rock; lizard beats both Spock and paper. Rock beats scissors and lizard. Paper beats rock and Spock. Scissors beat paper and lizard. You get it. Same game, more complex.

Who would have believed I could produce a thousand words on such an inane topic? I may not be able to conquer boredom, but I may be able to cause it.

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At dinner with friends last night the conversation drifted in and out of many different topics. We never are at a loss for things to talk about. We spoke briefly of our church and of what shape leadership might take in the future. We’ve all been involved in the church long enough to know that some projects and missions rise to prominence for a while and then fade as priorities and leaders change. We know that the church of the future will have a different shape and require different leaders than our current configuration. At the same time, there are things in which we have invested a lot of energy that we’d like to see continue into the next generation and we wonder about the leadership that will emerge.

I’ve never had a gift for accurately predicting the future. Sometimes I make wild speculations about what might happen and often as not things turn out in a completely different manner. It isn’t as if everything in life is unexpected, but there are still plenty of surprises ahead.

It was, however, an easier conversation than some that I have had with church leaders. There are conversations that are more tainted with worry and fear about the future. The changes that we have witnessed lead us to a certain level of anxiety about what it next. In the past few months, I’ve had a number of conversations with church leaders about the occasional thoughts I have of retirement. Reactions have ranged from “I don’t want to talk about it!” to “We need a succession plan!” I suspect that the church will find its future somewhere between those reactions. It is prudent to be realistic about the simple reality that none of us go on forever. In a multiple-generation adventure such as the church, we know that leadership changes. To pretend that we can go on as we have always gone is unrealistic and naive. But part of the nature of leadership and the church is that we always need to allow for the movement of the Holy Spirit. When we try to tightly control the future, we find that there is so little that we can control.

Here is what I know. God has always provided the leaders that the church needs, even when it seems like there are no new leaders in sight. God will provide the leaders that our church needs in the future. Investing time and energy in a “succession plan” seems like a waste of time and an invitation for disaster.

I’m fairly confident that I’ll have energy for more adventures as pastor of this congregation, but there are no guarantees. Every hour that I live I stand closer to death than I did the hour before. But unless a serious accident or illness comes along, I’ll continue to be fairly unaware of the span of my time. I’ve been around enough people who have died to know that the timing of the end of life and that way it is embraced vary widely. Some die with fear and trauma. Some die with expectation and anticipation. Some feel that the end has come too soon. Some feel like death was too slow and lingering was too prolonged.

When I speak with people about life and death, I try to remind them that these are things with which our people have wrestled for millennia. Abraham and Sarah were surprised and overwhelmed by the events of their aging years. The future took a long time to become clear and both died without fully understanding the promise of God that was yet to be fully fulfilled. Moses, that incredible workaholic who provided dynamic leadership for an Exodus and four decades of wilderness wandering, could not go on forever. His style of leadership wasn’t what our people needed as they made the transition from nomadic to settled lifestyles. David might have united the monarchy, but was the wrong leader to build the temple. Solomon consolidated wealth and power in Jerusalem, but left too many of God’s faithful people on the margins of his consumer society. The story of our people is a story of leadership that comes and goes and new leaders that emerge - sometimes in unexpected places. Jeremiah himself believes he is too young for the role to which he is called. Jonah tries to run away from the responsibility and when he does succeed in his mission he gets depressed and pouts.

We are an institution of humans and that won’t change even when our time on this earth has become a distant memory.

And our memories are far from perfect. We tell the old stories, but we keep discovering new meaning in words that we have known all of our lives. Some of the truths of our stories only reveal themselves after years of trying to understand.

We come from a mystery that is not fully understood. And we will return to mystery as well. Between those mysteries are the moments of our lives - many filled with delight and beauty. I still wake with anticipation for the events of the day. I can sense that there are things that are worth investments of time and energy. I have unfinished projects that command my enthusiasm.

In a few months I’ll have another birthday. We count the years and are easily able to report our age until our memory starts to fail us. But that is only one kind of a measure. For the number of years ahead are harder to count with any sense of accuracy. I’m fairly certain that I won’t add 100 to my present age, but 30 is within the range of possibility.

Thirty years is 10,930 blog posts. At my current rate of writing that is nearly 11 million words - certainly enough to bore even the most faithful of readers. Since I am already prone to repetition in my writing, it is a bit hard to say which of those words will be fresh and meaningful.

At this point I’m comfortable with now knowing how the future will unfold. For now it is sufficient to find delight in the present and trust the future to God.

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After all, yesterday was only the 15th of March. A week ago, Sheridan Lake had enough ice for ice fishermen to venture out for a little spring catch. But it was 84 degrees in town yesterday, with a light wind. It was a bit cooler at the lake, but I couldn’t resist it. In the middle of the afternoon, I loaded up my new royal canoe and headed to the lake. I had purchased a new canoe over the winter - this one a specialized creek boat. It has tons of rocker and almost 15” of freeboard. I outfitted it for solo whitewater paddling and have places for air bags in bow and stern. It will be a wonderful boat for running rivers.

The problem with purchasing a boat in the winter is that you can’t check it out and even though there are a few creeks running, I needed to get in a couple of paddles on calm water to get the boat properly outfitted. Knee braces need to be glued in just the right position and once they are glued in, they can’t be moved. The same goes for toe blocks for paddling in a semi-kneeling position. There is a kneeling pedestal, glued on the center of balance, and thigh braces so you can really control the canoe when paddling. To get those knee braces and toe blocks in just the right place, however, I needed to paddle and make some turns in the boat.

I couldn’t resist yesterday.

I wasn’t the only one who headed to the lake. There were lots of people on the shore and three or four kayaks in the water.

It isn’t quite accurate to say that the ice is out of the lake. Large sheets of ice continued to float about the lake, but there was plenty of open water. Playing with the ice turned out to be a great entertainment.

But first about the canoe. This is the only new canoe that I have ever purchased. In the past, I considered canoes to be beyond my budget and have made all of the canoes I own except for one which was a repair/restoration of a canoe that was literally headed for the dump. But a really tough river canoe is beyond my ability to make. I’ve done a lot of dreaming and shopping. Whitewater canoes are made out of fiberglass, Kevlar and Royalex. I have some experience with fiberglass layup, but not enough to make an entire boat without a wooden core. I know how to shape wood. Using a foam core and vacuum bonding is beyond my manufacturing experience. Kevlar is very expensive - too expansive for mistakes and first-time builders. I will be using a layer of Kevlar and carbon fiber composite cloth on the inside of the expedition kayak I am making, but a whole boat of the material didn’t seem like an option for me. In the end I decided upon Royalex. It is tough and durable - not the lightest material, but definitely the strongest. Royalex has an outer layer of vinyl over ABS with a foam core. It has to be manufactured in a factory with specialized air bags to put even pressure on the laminations during their cure.

I’ve passed the age where I will be running Class IV an V rapids, so a little 8’ Esquif or Bell is a bit beyond my physical conditioning. I opted for a 13’ boat as a good combination. We no nah, a Minnesota manufacturer is well known for the quality of their boats and their customer satisfaction. After consulting with friends in the business, I chose a We no nah Recon. It was designed by Dana Henry, the son of the founder of Mad River Canoe. It seems to be a good compromise of stability and maneuverability. And all of that rocker means that it will be a relatively dry ride with no need for sprayskirts. I can add air bags for big water and that will be sufficient for this aging paddler.

Ah, but that extreme rocker! It paddles like nothing I’ve ever used before. Where my other canoes make gentle turns, it pivots on the center point. I can paddle it sideways in both directions. I can pull the bow or stern several feet with a single brace.

It was a perfect boat for paying with the ice yesterday despite the knee braces moving around and no toe blocks installed. I kept stopping to make pencil marks to remind myself where the various parts should be installed and to make adjustments to the thigh braces. I can see that when I get this boat outfitted it will maneuver like a whitewater kayak, simply attached to the lower half of my body. When I turn my lower torso, the boat will turn.

Obviously with ice floating on the water the water is still cold despite warm air temperatures and I wasn’t wearing a dry suit yesterday due to the hot weather and the fact that I was just tooling around the edge of the lake to get the feel of the boat and mark placement of various pads and braces. As a result I didn’t heel the boat over very much, but it has little bulges near the gunwales in the center of the boat, almost like tiny sponsons, that make the boat look like I’ll be able to lay it over all the way until water starts to run over the gunwale and right it with almost no effort.

Every boat is a relationship and it takes time for us to get to know each other. And I got a new paddle for the new boat. I’ve always paddled with wooden paddles, but decided to go for a modern carbon fiber paddle. It is extremely light and the blade seems to be really big. It is very effective, but takes a bit of effort to turn the blade in the water. I’m thinking that whitewater paddlers probably don’t do a lot of Canadian style paddling. Still, for draws or braces, the paddle turns just right to glide on recovery.

I have lots of chores that need to be done, and I have to be careful with my time management, but I’m thinking that the lake will be calling today as well.

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One of the natural phenomena of aging is the perception that time is speeding up. The example that is often given is that for a two-year-old, a year is half a lifetime. To a 62-year-old, the percentage of his experience in a single year is much smaller. I am not immune to this effect. There are all kinds of things that make it seem like time is passing at a very fast rate. I think that this sensation is exacerbated by the increasing rate of change in our world. It isn’t just that I have gathered more experiences and have memories of more days, it is also that the amount of time that it takes for a new technological advance or another change is decreasing. It is a bit like riding in a vehicle that is accelerating. The faster you go, the faster you are able to go.

Time, however, is more fascinating than that. The sensation of the passage of time is not constant. Because time is an arbitrary measure, a product of human ingenuity and observation, our sense of the passage of time varies by circumstance. In general the way we measure time is based on the observation of the movement of our planet in relationship to the sun. It takes 24 hours for our planet to make one rotation and 365 days for it to make one revolution around the sun. Except, of course, our measurements aren’t quite accurate. Since the Earth travels such a long distance with each revolution the perceived year is a bit longer than 365 days. And, because the motion of the earth is gradually slowing, a day is slightly longer now than it was millions of years ago and slightly longer than it will be millions of years from now. Most of us aren’t sensitive enough to notice those subtle changes.

Our perception of time is different depending on our activity. Waking from sleep, for example, we have a sense that the night passed quickly. An example I often give is that 15 minutes playing with a grandchild feels like a different amount of time than 15 minutes sitting in a waiting room. Our activities influence our awareness of time and our sensation of the rate of time’s passage.

The season of Lent has many layers of meaning piled upon each other. Long ago, in pre-Christian times, and even before the institution of the Passover as a reminder of the Exodus from Egypt, there were spring festivals, observances and festivities. The English word we use for the season, “Lent” comes from an Old English name for the season that means “lengthen.” People in the northern hemisphere noticed that the days get longer in the spring. There is more daylight and less darkness as the seasons change. Right now, in Rapid City, we’re gaining a little more than 3 minutes per day as the season changes. That’s enough for even a casual observer to notice. Of course we “mess” with the time by instituting daylight savings time, so one has to pay attention to see the change, but it is definitely there.

For a person of faith, there is more going on than the lengthening of days, however. A season that involves thinking about the mortality of humans every day takes on the double sense of being aware of the shortness of our time on earth, but also a certain sense of drudgery. By the fourth Sunday of Lent, the novelty of the season has worn out. There is always a part of me that wants to “fast forward” to Easter Celebrations. At the same time, I know that the anticipation is part of the season and that there is a richness in waiting. The novelty of Ash Wednesday is gone. It is easy to make a change for a day. The hard work of making permanent lifestyle changes takes more time and there are days along the way when our resolve falters.

The new spiritual disciplines I adopted for the season are starting to become a bit routine. I no longer have to rely on my phone for the additional services we added for the season. I know they are in my weekly routine and I expect them. Even so, four weeks isn’t enough to make it feel like something we’ve always done. I am aware of the newness of the change.

It is at this point in the season for me in most years that the reality of making permanent change begins to set it. The long haul really is long. The temptation to go back to my old ways is quite real. Like most of my peers, I am uncomfortable with certain types of change. I long for constancy. A life of service to others, however, is a life of constant change. The people I serve range from young adults who rarely bother to check their mail to members who know exactly what time the post office delivers their mail each day. There are people who respond to a message left on voice mail as soon as they hear it and others who never check their voice mail. There are folks for whom the best way to communicate is an e-mail and ones who respond best to Facebook. All of these communication technologies haven’t yet resulted in our communication being somehow more instant or genuine. We still long for face-to-face interaction with those for whom we care. To be a caregiver in this world means being able to adapt to change and “roll with the punches.”

So we sit and we watch and we learn to change, sometimes quickly, sometimes less so. The spring equinox comes this Friday and the new moon the next night. Our next full moon will be April 4, making the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring Equinox, April 5. That’s Easter and it is that date from which we counted backwards to measure the six weeks of Lent. It’s complex even for those of us who have been paying attention to it for many years.

For now, we’ve passed the mid point of the season. Much is behind us. Much lies ahead. And we know that when Easter comes it will seem to us like the weeks have flown by very quickly.

Our prayers continue.

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We’re a little jumpy in the hills. There hasn’t been a lot of moisture in our winter storms and the hills are dry. We’ve had a week of wonderfully warm temperatures, which have invited us back outdoors and make walking in the woods fun, but it isn’t a typical March walk. The snow is gone and all of the moisture has been sucked up by the ground. You don’t come in with muddy boots, which is typical for this time of year. And the ground crackles under your feet. This doesn’t bode well for summer. So we are eagerly awaiting our spring storms. April, May and June can be wet months for us and we’re hoping for rain.

It is rummage sale week at the church, a time of amazing feats of volunteer labor, impressive generosity of spirit, and a good time for a few casual conversations with some wonderful church leaders. I haven’t been around as much this year as typical, with a few too many meetings and a bit of a head cold that saps my energy, but I have had a few good conversations with folks thanks to all of the activity at the church. One of our faithful church leaders is a wild lands fire fighter and he was telling us a little bit about the fire west of Custer that burned about 60 acres on Tuesday. The black hats were out working the fire and by Wednesday they had things under control, mostly cleaning up a few remaining hot spots.

Of course fire season is most intense in late summer and fall and to get to that season right now, you have to go to the southern hemisphere, where Chile is experiencing devastating fires. The port cities of Valparaiso and Vina del Mar are being threatened. According to BBC news, 4,500 people have been evacuated and another 10,000 more are likely to be moved today. Over the years I’ve looked at enough pictures of fires to know that they often are taken with very long lenses that make it look like the flames are closer to buildings and other objects than they appear in the picture, but the photos on the Internet are alarming. It certainly looks like the fires are really bearing down on populated areas. The reports say that some of the area’s most impoverished communities are most threatened. That could mean large numbers of people who have few options about where else to go.

Along with those threatened by the fires in Chile, my prayers are with those trying to recover from the South Pacific cyclones. It has been a year of particularly intense storms all along the East coast of Australia and out into the Pacific. There is a lot of open water in the Pacific and sometimes big storms rush through the area with little impact on human life. Then, from time to time, a really big storm takes a direct path across an island and leaves devastation in its wake. That is what happened on Vanuatu. Vanuatu is a collection of 65 islands between Australia and Hawaii. It is home to more than a quarter of a million people. And it took a direct hit from Cyclone Pam, packing heavy rains and winds up to 170 miles per hour.

People emerged from storm shelters in the capital, Port Vila, to find their homes destroyed. Streets are littered with roofing, uprooted trees and toppled power lines. They have just begun to discover the impact of the storm on human life. The death toll will continue to rise over the next few days as they are able to get out into the rural areas and discover what has happened. With all communications systems down, it is impossible to know what happened to folks living in low lying areas in rural communities. Entire villages are expected to have been destroyed.

By comparison, things are relatively calm here in the northern hemisphere.

Reading of these disasters, however, is a reminder of another thing about which I’ve been praying this Lent. On Sunday our congregation will join with many other congregations in receiving One Great Hour of Sharing. It is a special offering that allows disaster relief agencies to have funds and resources available in advance of disasters so that response can be quick when it is most needed. If we wait until disaster strikes and then turn to folks for help, there is no less generosity, but the time it takes to raise the money means that the response is slow. And in a disaster slow response means lost lives. One Great Hour of Sharing funds also help with development and other important ministries, but it is the disaster response component of that offering that is so important.

We are reminded constantly that life can be unpredictable. We often think of disaster as something that occurs to other people in other places. It has been a long time since the 1972 flood devastated our city. We know that we are not immune to natural disaster, but we don’t spend much time thinking about it. From time to time we have some small disaster preparedness meetings and drills and practices, but we don’t often think about what a really big event would mean.

And that brings me back to the rummage sale. The church leader with whom I was talking about the recent fire in the hills spends a lot of time preparing for the big fires. In the off season, when he isn’t out their on the front lines fighting the fires, he is training, preparing equipment, getting things ready. His equipment is loaded on his truck and his truck is pointed in the right direction to save time should the phone call come. His life is about being ready to respond when the need occurs.

I am honored to know people who have chosen such a path of service to others. I am inspired by their dedication and sense of service. There are some genuinely tough challenges in this world. And there are some wonderfully dedicated people who are prepared to meet them.

With all of my prayers of concern, I know I must also offer a prayer of gratitude. We have been blessed with some genuinely incredible people and I have been blessed to meet some of them.

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There are people in every community, of every economic status, of every racial and ethnic group and of every age who have gone through a life-changing experience. Each person’s experience was unique, and yet there are enough similarities for them to understand that they belong to a common group.

I will not go into the deepest details of their stories, for their stories are not mine to tell. And there are parts of those stories that involve so much pain and, yes, ugliness, that it is not appropriate to tell them. Some things are best left unsaid in the public arena.

For each of these individuals there is a specific moment that they will never forget. It might have come in the form of a phone call from a family member or friend. It might have come in the form of a visit from a law enforcement officer. It might have come in the form of opening a door and entering a once-familiar room. Each received the message in her or his own way, but it is an event that is seared into memory forever.

For some there was intense drama and trauma at the event. They walked up their own driveway dazed in a blaze of flashing lights and the presence of more law enforcement vehicles than they could ever remember seeing at the same place before. Or perhaps the sound of a gunshot followed by a deafening silence is etched forever in their memory. For some there was the panic of trying to cut a rope or belt while simultaneously trying to dial 9-1-1 on a phone. For others there was a calm acceptance of the obvious before any response.

In some cases there had been many warning signs. For some there had been threats and even attempts. For others their moment crept up with no sense that it was on its way.

May carry visual memories that are beyond the capacity of words to describe. They have seen more than they ever would have wanted to see and once a thing has been seen, it cannot be unseen.

On average, in the United States, this group gains new members every 12.8 minutes.

I am referring to suicide. After cancer and heart disease, suicide accounts for more years of life lost than any other cause of death. Suicide takes more lives than war, murder, and natural disasters combined. Suicide is more prevalent among active duty military than death to accidents and combat duty.

And this is the season. For reasons that are not fully understood, suicide rates tend to be highest in the spring months, peaking in April.

Although we know that not every suicide can be prevented, we know that death by suicide is not inevitable. 90% of those who attempt suicide and survive go on to live full and meaningful lives and do not die bu suicide.

And before I move away from the statistics there are more grim realities. Suicide is especially devastating when the victim is a young person. Suicide is the second leading cause of death for ages 10 - 24 and the third leading cause of death for youth aged 12 - 18 and for college students. More teenagers and young adults die from suicide than from cancer, heart disease, AIDS, birth defects, stroke, pneumonia, influenza and chronic lung disease COMBINED. We are talking about 5,400 attempts by youth in grades 7 - 12 every day in our country. 5,400 families thrown into turmoil.

We live in one of the nine US states with a suicide rate in excess of 18 per 100,000 people. That is nearly double the overall national rate. South Dakota is the eastern most of the extreme suicide rate states, with higher rates than our neighbors North Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa and Nebraska. The states with the highest rates, Alaska, Montana, Utah, Wyoming and New Mexico all lie to our west. States with similar rates, Idaho, Nevada, and Colorado all lie to our west. It is a rough life out in the wild west.

One more thing: those who die by suicide are more likely to be male than female. The suicide rate among men is about 4 times higher than among women.

But statistics tell only part of the story.

Every suicide produces a huge number of victims. Those who have lost a family member or close friend to suicide are more likely themselves to die by suicide. It is a simple reality. Once you have suicide in your mind, you can’t get it out. Those who ask, “Why?” and “How?” gain information that cannot be erased from memory. Think about the topic long enough and try to figure it out and you will have more than enough information.

For 20 years now, our congregation has been the meeting place of a regular suicide support group for our community. It may be among the most important things that we do. Suicide survivors come with stories that must be told and yet are very painful to tell. The last thing they need is to have to start over again and again. An atmosphere of trust and support is essential for feelings that have been suppressed to come out. Despite the prevalence of suicide in our community, there is still a social stigma that makes it a very difficult topic for survivors to broach.

I have decided that it is a topic about which I will not be silent. I may sound like a broken record to my friends, but I have vowed to do what I am able to overcome the social stigma and bring the conversations about suicide out into the light of public awareness. I have been active in SAVE (Suicide Awareness Voices of Education), AFSP (American Society for Suicide Prevention) and our local Front Porch Coalition. I serve on our county’s LOSS (Local Outreach to Survivors of Suicide) team and there isn’t a week that goes by without some of my time invested in outreach and prevention.

So my question for you is simple: “Are you OK?” If not, give me a call, but don’t let me be the only one who knows. Reach out. Help is available. Remember this number 1-800-273-8255 (273-TALK). Memorize this number. Give it to your friends. It is a lifeline.

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This seems to have been a season of thinking about sacrificial theology for me. I am well aware of circumstances and situations where that particular way of thinking leads to mistaken notions about the nature of God. The bottom line is that despite what we say, when we get into thinking about sacrificial theology it leads us to the notion of a god who demands sacrifice - and this is not the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. It is not the God of Jesus.

At the core of the prophetic message of the Bible is a call to people to turn away from their mistaken notions about God and how God works. When we imagine God to be different than God is, we also get mistaken notions about who we are and our role in the relationship.

Central to my theology is the simple, yet confusing, belief that Jesus is fully God. Different from any other theology of which I am aware, Christianity looks to Jesus on the cross - to God at the most extreme point of human suffering. It is not God who demands Jesus’ death. It is not God who calls for the sacrifice. Rather it is God who is on the cross - in the midst of the suffering - present at the point of death.

I know this can seem like a gruesome thought. But it is important on multiple fronts. It is important because despite there is immense suffering in this world. I realize that my writing of suffering is a bit theoretical. I haver not been the victim of the worst kinds of violence. But I have been a witness. In my work as a suicide first responder and law enforcement chaplain I have seen things that should not be described in this blog - or elsewhere. I have been witness to agony that no human deserves. I have seen people suffer beyond the limits of any reasonable boundary. There is deep pain in this world and violence beyond the gore depicted in movies and video games.

God is not the author of this suffering. Any theology that places God on the side of the cause of this suffering is inadequate for those who have endured it. We human beings are the cause of intense cruelty. We have even committed great violence in the name of religion. But to blame God for the violence is to fail to see God. God is always with the victim. God always takes the suffering.

There is more I can say on this subject, but I also need to go one step further in the light of what is unfolding in the news headlines today. The theology of sacrifice not only produces a mistaken notion of the nature of God, it produces a mistaken nature of the nature of humans - and provides justification for a dangerous mis-application of justice. If one believes that God demands suffering, it is a short intellectual step to believing that humans are justified in causing suffering. It is the appeal of retributive justice. The concept is fairly simple: those who commit wrongful acts, especially serious crimes, should be punished even if punishing them would produce no other good. Punishment should “fit” the crime. People who cause others to suffer should themselves suffer.

This notion makes victims not only of those who are convicted of crimes, but also of those who must carry out the punishments. Families who have lost loved ones to murder sometimes give up the rest of their lives in search of revenge. Entire communities and countries are destroyed in cycles of ever-increasing violence. Witness northern Ireland. Witness Palestine and Israel. Witness Somalia. The list can go on and on and on.

I have no doubt that there has been institutionalized racism and injustice in Ferguson, Missouri - and in Rapid City, South Dakota. But making more victims will not solve the problem. Shooting officers in Ferguson makes the problem worse, not better. You can count on that much.

From time to time I hear people try to make the distinction between the two volumes of the Christian Bible saying things like, “The God of the Old Testament is the God of vengeance and the God of the New Testament is the God of forgiveness.” That isn’t accurate, in and of itself. When Romans urges believers not to seek vengeance, it is quoting Deuteronomy: God says, “Vengeance belongs to Me; I will repay.” It is an important concept - trust God to be the author and source of justice. We don’t need to try to make things even out in our own imperfect human ways. But it presents the image of God seeking revenge.

The way that God brings justice is not to seek revenge, but to never take the side of the oppressor. God always stands with the victim. God is always present in the midst of suffering. It is God up there on the cross.

As a Sheriff’s chaplain, I do not carry any weapons. I do not wear a Kevlar vest. And, quite frankly, the patrol officers are quick to shield me from any risk of violence. I don’t investigate the crimes or gather evidence. My role is not to be the attorneys who argue it out in court or the judge who decides on sentences. I am there to witness. And I am there to stand with the victims and remind them that they will never be left alone.

When I became a pastor, I knew that I would be called upon to officiate at funerals. I didn’t realize then what it would mean to officiate at the funeral of someone I had known for decades, but I have learned to walk through those moments, knowing that I do not walk alone. What I didn’t know, and couldn’t imagine, was how often I would go to the funeral of someone I had never met to sit as a witness and a support to those who grieve. It is a small role. It is a very little thing. But I do it frequently. Last Friday. Next Tuesday.

I am absolutely convinced that God sits with the mourners. God stands with the victims. God weeps at the suffering our human failings cause. But God remains God. The creator of the universe - the source of all that is - shares the pain of those who suffer. We, who seek to serve God, do well to sit with the mourners as well.

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Back in 1998, fishermen discovered the wreck of a ship in the Gelasia Straight off of the coast of Belitung Island in Indonesia. The ship turned out to be filled with the largest single collection of Tang dynasty artefacts found in one location. Over 60,000 pieces of Chinese ceramics, many still intact, were on the ship. The cargo in the wrecked ship helped to establish its age. This was a very old wreck, indeed. The ship was believed to have sunk in 826 AD, centuries before the Great Schism divided Eastern and Western Christianity. The date of the wreck is based on the age of the Ceramics, and the ship contained coins that were considerably older, showing evidence of well-established trade.

There are many interesting facts about this wreck. The boat was an Arabian dhow. Wood for the boat had come from both India and Africa. The keel came from the area of modern Zaire, far inland. The fact that the ship exists at all establishes the extensive trade and shipping that was taking place between the two continents in the first millennium. Blasted with lead ingots, the hull was stitched together with palm fiber cordage.

The ceramics on the ship were packed in jars from Vietnam and there were spices on board the ship that are native to China and other Southeast Asia regions. The ceramics are from Hunan provence, which is inland. The colors and motifs on the ceramics indicate they were destined for the Abbasid Caliphate of the Arabian Peninsula in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates valleys.

There is nothing new about a global economy. World trade is not a modern invention.

Analysts are still mulling the cause of yesterday’s sell off in US financial markets. The Dow ended the day over 330 points down. The Nasdaq was off by 83 points. The S & P dropped into negative territory for the year. Meanwhile, markets in London and Tokyo were up. To say that the markets were mixed is an understatement.

There are lots of theories. Interest rate fears have been the talk of investors since Fed vice chair Stanley Fischer said that a rate hike this year is highly probable. The dollar strengthened on world markets. One article, in Bloomberg suggested that the strength in the dollar over the Euro and Yen was prompted by a sell-off of the New Zealand dollar, or “kiwi.” Apparently dairy producers in New Zealand received threatening letters, plunging their currency markets into a sell-off.

Everything from the price of gas at the fuel pumps to the price of milk in New Zealand is affected by world markets. What happens in one part of the world has an impact on what happens in another place. And this has been going on for a long time.

The discovery of an ancient ship and the careful examination of its cargo and origins stands as clear evidence that the price of hardwoods in Central Africa and the price of spices in China were related long before the advent of modern communications systems, convenient international travel, or computerized trade markets. We are inexorably connected to all of the people in the world. We’re all in this together.

And in our own little corner of the world, voters have rejected a plan to borrow more than the city’s legal limit to finance the expansion of the civic center. Despite the fact that proponents of the plan outspent opponents by over 10 to 1, the voters, a rather small turnout, rejected the plan. There are still significant problems at the Civic Center that need to be addressed, and a new plan will have to be made, but the gigantic borrow-and-spend plan won’t be the chosen solution.

We might think that this is a purely local decision. After all, you had to be a citizen of the city in order to be able to vote. At our polling place, there was some confusion, as some of our neighbors, whose homes are just outside of the city limits, saw that the polls were open and tried to vote. Clearly they had an opinion, but the voting was reserved for city residents.

The proposal was based on travel and trade, however. Proponents of the plan believed that lots of people from outside of the city would come to events at the Civic Center and help pay for the greatly expanded building. Tourists do spend a lot of money in our city, and they do pay a lot of sales tax. I have seen estimates that tourism accounts for as much as 20% of South Dakota tax revenue. I’m not sure of that number, but it is clear that our visitors do leave some of their money behind when they are in town. Obviously, there is some doubt as to whether they would spend enough to cover the costs of a $180 million expansion that could cost an additional $300 in interest. Chances are the new plan will have a lower initial cost and perhaps it will have a more reasonable method of borrowing the money and a lower interest rate.

The bottom line, however, is that what we do affects our neighbors. We might not be able to make markets rise and fall like dairy farmers in New Zealand, but our decisions have impact far beyond the circle of our immediate family and friends and far beyond the span of our lives. There were plenty of voters in yesterday’s election who might not live as long as the repayment of the debt was projected.

This Sunday we will receive the One Great Hour of Sharing offering at our church. It is a reminder that we are not an isolated community. We are connected to people all around the world. Disaster in a far away place affects us. Our generosity can have an impact on reducing suffering of people we have never met face-to-face. As we receive the offering, we will be reminding ourselves of something that has been true all along.

We’re all in this together.

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Several years ago, when the dinosaurs roamed the earth (well maybe not that long ago), I noticed that there was a change in the young people coming to camp. They started to arrive with cell phones. In the early days of teens having cell phones there was no cell phone service at camp. And the cabins at camp, while comfortable, weren’t exactly bursting with plug-ins to charge the phones. I didn’t see this as a problem. We needed the campers to be engaged in the program of the camp. We provided the information that they needed and if there was a reason to communicate with parents or others outside of camp, the regular phone in the camp office worked just fine.

The campers, however, discovered a problem right away. If they turned off their phones, the phone didn’t know what time it was when it was turned back on without being connected to a signal. And the campers were using their phones as their only clock. I remember taking a half dozen cell phones on a trip to town to pick up supplies so that they would find towers and find out what time it was.

Again, it wasn’t a real problem at camp. We rang the bell to announce meals and events and we played taps and reveille to let the campers know when it was time for lights out and when it was time to get up in the morning.

Back in those days, when I traveled to a meeting in a distant city, I had a small portable alarm clock to make sure that I woke at the appropriate time in a different time zone.

Ah yes, I remember the good old days.

I confess that I do use my cell phone as an alarm clock these days and the travel alarm is not a device for which I have any use. If the cell phone service were to go out, I’d be left without an alarm clock.

I would, however, still know what time it is. I wear a watch all the time. In fact, since I used to wear my watch as an alarm clock, I sleep with my watch on my wrist. I use it throughout the day and often in the night to find out what time it is. I’ve worn a watch since I received my first watch for an 8th grade graduation gift. Over the years, I’ve worn a lot of different watches, often the least expensive model available. I’ve worn digital watches, but they don’t suit my personality as well as a face with hands that go around. I don’t really wear my watch to know exactly what time it is, but rather about what time it is. As a result, with a digital clock, I’ll look and see 3:58 and think, “Good, it’s not 4 yet!” Whereas with a watch with hands, I am more likely to process the information quickly and know what it means.

So you’d think that I might be the kind of customer who is itching to buy a new Apple Watch. But I’m not leaping at the opportunity right now. In the first place, my current watch does what I want it to do. It tells me what time it is. It doesn’t report my health statistics to my insurance company. It doesn’t track my bank balance. It doesn’t send or receive text messages.

I’m vaguely interested in the digital alternatives to credit cards. I did OK in the days of checks and cash, but since my debt card has replaced my checkbook, I find that particular technology to be a bit frustrating. Mine gets used a lot. It never lasts as long as the span of time between expiration dates. I have to order a replacement card when the magnetic strip on the back gets worn and I keep rubbing the security code off of the card, rendering it less useful in some situations. I’m not a fan of cards, thought I use them a lot. The idea of not having to carry the card and having the ability to immediately turn it off if someone steals your watch is appealing.

But that brings up a problem with the watch. I lived in Chicago for four years and no one ever attempted to steal my watch. When you don’t wear an expensive watch the crooks don’t want your K-mart blue light special watch with the home-made watch band. So the thought of spending $350 for a watch doesn’t appeal to me. And that is the most basic model. I’ve heard that there are versions of the watch that will sell for more than $10,000. I’m not a likely customer for one of those.

And the youth in our church youth group aren’t likely customers, either. They don’t wear watches. And they never put down their smartphones.

I remember a short time when I carried a cell phone and a digital calendar and address book. My palm pilot was an additional device that I had to carry. When those two devices could be replaced with a single device, I jumped at the opportunity. I prefer fewer devices, not more. I wonder how many people will feel the need for a watch, a phone, a notebook and a computer that all talk to each other and yet each occupies a niche that makes it not easily replaceable by other devices. I don’t think people will begin reading books on their watches anytime soon.

Another thing about wearable technology is that it tends to be brutally honest. A wearable device records exactly how many steps you take, not how many you say you take. It measures your real blood pressure, not your ideal. The thing about smartphones and computers is that they allow users to create versions of themselves for Facebook and other sites that are, well, a bit imaginary, and if not that, at least a bit exaggerated.

It will be interesting to see who finds a need for the latest gadget. I’m quite a gadget guy, but I think I’ll wait and see.

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And here we have it, sports fans! As I write we are less then ten hours away from the start of the big race. And this year promises to be a race to remember.

But first a bit of history: Back in 1925, the most famous dog in the United States was Rin Tin Tin. Rin Tin Tin was rescued from a World War I battlefield by American Soldier Lee Duncan. After making the trip to the United States, Rin Tin Tin went to work in the silent film industry. He was an immediate box office success. Soon German Shepherd dogs were the most popular breed in the country and Warner Brothers studio was on its way to unprecedented success. In 1929, Rin Tin Tin received the most votes for the first Academy Award for Best Actor, but the Academy determined that a human should win.

Rin Tin Tin never had any serious challenger for his fame, but there was another hero dog that claimed the public attention. Alto, a jet black Siberian husky was the lead dog in the final leg of the 1925 serum run to Nome. This wasn’t movie material for many years, but a real-life drama. In the winter in those days, Nome was cut off from the rest of the world. After the ice made water transport impossible, the community was isolated until the ice broke up in the spring. In the middle of the winter the community’s only doctor noticed a pronounced increase in tonsillitis. But it was only the first sign of a more serious condition. A potentially deadly diphtheria epidemic was poised to spread through Nome’s young people. The only possibility of saving lives was to get serum. And the serum was in Seward, nearly a thousand miles away.

Several options for getting the serum to Nome were proposed, including flying it in with airplanes. The airplanes available were open cockpit. There was little chance that the pilot could survive the -50 temperatures. With limited daylight and no navigational aids, using airplanes seemed to be doomed to failure. In fact after the first batch was delivered, there was an attempt to deliver a second batch by air. The first attempt was scratched due to a radiator problem. The second attempt produced a frozen radiator. The third attempt left the plane grounded as well. But that is a different story.

The serum was delivered by an amazing relay of dog sled teams. 20 mushers and nearly 150 seed dogs covered 674 miles in five and a half days and the serum was delivered. Balto lead the last time on the final leg of the run.

The story is part of the lore of Alaska. In 1964, when Alaska was preparing to celebrate the centennial of its status as a US territory, (the centennial was in 1967), work was begun on preserving the Iditarod trail. The Centennial race covered only 56 miles between Knick and Big Lake in 1967. That course was repeated in 1969. The modern Iditarod race was first run in 1973. The full run to Nome was won by Dick Wilmarch, who took nearly 3 weeks to complete the run. The course of the run is a reconstruction of the freight route to Nome. Since 1973, the race has been run ever year and has experienced lots of ups and downs. After several years of following the northern route, a second, more southerly route was added and the race now typically alternates between the two routes.

2015 was supposed to be a year for the southern route. And the promise that the Iditarod would be run every year regardless of the weather will be kept as the start of the race is set for today.

But 40 degree (above zero) weather and constant rain in Anchorage means that the start of the race had to be moved to Fairbanks. It looks like the weather is more cooperative in the northern city. Four inches of new snowing and lows in the teens promise a good start for the run. On Saturday, crews trucked snow into downtown Anchorage for a kind of ceremonial start, but it was melting so fast that it was mostly just a slushy mess. As it is the Fairbanks race start had to be moved off of the Chena River because the ice has been determined to not be strong enough to support the race activities.

Back in the ’70’s no one could have imagined that the Iditarod might be forced to cancel due to warm weather. Say what you will about climate change and global warming, there’s something different about the race this year.

They aren’t ready to give up on dog mushing in Alaska any time soon, however. The 1,000 mile Yukon Quest International Dog Sled Race, is considered by most mushers to be even more grueling than the Iditarod. The race runs between Fairbanks and Whitehorse in the Yukon Territory and runs one direction on year and the other direction the next. And there are lots and lots of other shorter races in Alaska every year.

I won’t be racing this year. I don’t have any dogs. And back home in South Dakota we are expecting highs in the sixties and seventies all week long. It may be too warm for dog sledding, but there is hope of open water to paddle before too many more days pass. Chance of snow is predicted as 0% for the week as we begin the marathon of rummage sale week. Good weather promises to make it a bit easier for the crews doing all of the work and should bring out the customers as well. We won’t be averting any potential disasters or epidemics, but there will be a lot of work done in a very few days around here, all of it motivated by a spirit of community.

I’ll pay attention to the Iditarod via computer and dream of the adventures of the mushers and the dogs. And I’ll pay attention to the dedicated volunteers who will not make the newspaper with their efforts, but who will nonetheless be contributing to the vitality of our community. Like the sled dogs, it isn’t hard to get our volunteers going. It takes practice to get them to slow down and take a break.

Adventures won’t be limited to Alaska this week. We’ll have our share in South Dakota as well.

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Sorry folks, I guess yesterday’s blog was a bit of a downer. I didn’t mean it that way and I think that the ideas behind the blog are potentially uplifting, but it is Lent, and for me, it is a time worthy of tackling big ideas and mulling them. As a pastor, I know that resurrection is a difficult concept. Easter doesn’t come easily to our way of thinking and part of getting our minds wrapped around such a big concept is examining everything we know about life and death. And, as a pastor, I am continually speaking with people who wrestle with ideas and concepts without knowing how their struggles relate to the larger story of our people. Often when people are suffering and struggling with concepts, they fail to recognize that they are not alone. Our people have wrestled with big ideas for generations.

The past couple of weeks have been tough for some of my friends in public service. There have been several deaths that strike a bit closer to home, a fireman and the son of a fireman. There have been ambulance crews that have had to respond to a death of a homeless person and a couple of deaths of victims of what appear to be accidental shootings. These things happen, and our public servants are no strangers to death and tragedy. But there is a bit of a cumulative effect and there are moments in their work when they need to talk about what they have seen. They are, for the most part, particularly tough people who are very good at putting on a tough face and going on to the next situation, but we are all human and there are times when you’ve seen a bit too much and you need to let off a bit of steam.

Along the way, I’ve had the usual number of phone calls and conversations with people that come the way of a pastor. Someone facing surgery looks at their mortality in a new way and needs to go through their life and confront their guilt and fear. Most people I know have a few regrets and their lives have a few situations where they made moral choices that they have later questioned. Grief and loss also bring out the need to talk through some of the big questions of life.

As I work with people I frequently run into old strains of sacrificial theology. It isn’t uncommon for people to have an image of God as a harsh judge with a tendency to hand out eternal damnation on a fairly regular basis. It shouldn’t surprise us that people think that way. The institutional church has done much to promote those ideas. There has been a lot of preaching, over the centuries, that was at least a bit misguided, and more often that we’d like to admit included intentional emotional manipulation to get people to support the institution.

As much as I have tried to devote my life to preaching about God’s love and acceptance and desire for relationship with people, there persists, in the minds of many people, an image of a harsh and judgmental God who is quick to anger and who responds to every human error and foible with eternal punishment.

There is a strain of theology that contains a strain of forgiveness that leaves people with a mistaken notion of God. Sacrificial theology often misleads people in exactly this direction. The basic notion is that people are inherently bad and that this evil in humans has angered God and people deserve eternal punishment. You can see how some people have gotten this idea. Just look at all of the truly evil things that happen in this world. Most of those evil things come from bad choices that humans make. Given the state of the world, in this type of thinking, God stands ready to condemn everyone to eternal punishment in the horrors of hell which are beyond our capacity to imagine, but that doesn’t keep us from imagining torture and distress.

Ah, but there is a savior. At the last hour, Jesus came to this world and though he was innocent, he took all of the sins of the world upon himself and therefore had to suffer the most terrible of torturous deaths in order to save all of the other people from their sins. Therefore God took all of the anger that was meant for the sins of regular people and focused it on Jesus. Jesus dies a terrible death and we’re off the hook, so to speak.

God demands sacrifice, Jesus gives himself, we don’t have to be sacrificed.

While there are elements of truth in this belief, the image of God that is portrayed is inaccurate.

God isn’t itching to punish people. God isn’t filled with vengeful hatred. God did not cause his own son to be tortured on the cross.

God is all about loving and forgiving people. God lives for relationship with us. Forgiveness is not difficult, it is freely offered. Peace and reconciliation are the modes of God’s relationship with the people of God.

Jesus didn’t die to settle a score.

Jesus lived and died a completely human life to demonstrate that there is nowhere in life or death where we are removed from God’s presence. Even when all seems lost. Even when Jesus recites words from the Psalms from the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” God is not absent.

I know. I haven't seen the gates of hell. I don’t have special insight into what happens after we die. But I have seen hell on earth. I have sat with parents as they wrestle with tough end-of-life decisions as they sit by the unconscious body of their child who cannot recover from self-inflicted wounds. I have delivered the news of the death of a husband to a widow who has loved faithfully for more than half a century. I have cried with a mother who is at the end of her energy and resources who has to bury one child while keeping watch with another who lies precariously close to death. I have seen hell on earth.

And God isn’t absent. Even there God seeks in tender mercy to bring love and hope and peace. God doesn’t give up on us when our world turns awful. God doesn’t abandon those who suffer pain beyond description.

And that is why I stay in this business. That is why I pray with those who are weeping. That is why I explore some of the darkest corners of life in my Lenten reflections. Because even in the darkness, God is present. Lent is not a season to be avoided. It is a journey that we never walk alone.

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The Old Testament book of Leviticus has a complex set of instructions for a wide variety of human actions, including specific explanations of five different types of offerings that are to be made to God by faithful people. To understand those offerings requires knowledge of the context of the law that arose in that period of wandering under Moses’ leadership and the period of judges that followed. The roots of our people, like those of many others, are distinctly tribal. Abraham and Sarah come from tribal backgrounds and began their journeys and wanderings by leaving their families, but taking with them a small band of people who were family to them. Two generations later, when Jacob wrestled with an angel on the eve of a partial reconciliation with his brother, the name Israel was granted as the name of a family. It was, at that point, simply the name of the descendants of one man. Later, through generations of births and adoptions and marriages, it became the name of a people, and, as God promised, the name of a nation.

All of this is to say that our people came into the season of laws with lots of prior customs and traditions. Some of those customs and traditions were incorporated into the law. Others were excluded as the people had to learn how to live as free people. The specific descriptions of offerings in Leviticus, were, among other things, a complete rejection of the concept of human sacrifice. In the stories of our people, there is a faint memory of a time when the tribe practiced human sacrifice. Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, however, is the foundational story of our people in which the idea of human sacrifice is categorically rejected. Whenever we tell that story we remind ourselves again that we belong to a people who do not engage in that practice.

Here is what we offer to God:

Grain offerings (minchah): out of gratitude to God for the bounty of the earth and the power of crops to sustain life, a voluntary gift of some of the harvested grain is offered back to God. In the days before the temple, the offered grain was burned. Later portions and then all of the grain was given to sustain the priests who served in the temple.

Sin offerings (chataah): When people unintentionally committed sins and guilt dominated their life, an offering was made to free the individual from that guilt. Often an animal was offered by a priest, with the blood, inner organs and some of the fat consumed by fire as an offering to God.

Trespass offerings (asham): When the guilt was towards another person as well as God and restoration was required a ram was offered, with a portion of that ram going to make restitution. The ram provided food for those gathered in the court of the tabernacle.

Peace offerings (shelem): One of the best animals of the flock was given for a communal meal as a sign of thanks to God.

The fifth type of offering later became a stumbling block and required specific additional instructions from prophets. It was the burnt offering (olah). In Leviticus, the burnt offering is always a voluntary act, given as a sign of complete surrender to God. The offering, often a bird, ram or bull, was completely burnt until all was consumed by the flames and the smoke rose up and out of the temple.

In the days of Solomon’s temple, these offerings became excessive displays of wealth and little more. Instead of being used to demonstrate surrender to God, they became signs of wealthy patrons of the temple, that they had more than enough to care for themselves and their family. They could afford to make regular sacrifices to God that were denied to their less wealthy neighbors. The prophets, speaking for God, rejected these offerings. Micah, for example, points out that such offerings when justice is not present are meaningless, hated and despised by God.

Still, it was hard for our people to give up their ancient practices and sometimes selfish ways. The allure of wealth and the consumer society was in constant tension with the call to become people of God. Some even believed that they might be able to purchase God’s favor out of their accumulated assets instead of living justly with their neighbors. You don’t have to read far in the Bible to see the consistent rejection of such a notion.

Those ancient ideas, however, persist. The very language we speak has remnants of ancient ways in its vocabulary. The word holocaust has “olah” at its core. As horrific and repulsive as that concept is to God’s faithful people, the word we use to speak of the unspeakable terror and torture of God’s people is derived from the same word as the Levitical code used to establish the offering of surrender.

The word shows up also in an English word borrowed from the French adaptation of a Latin term borrowed from Biblical Hebrew. Immolation, has “olah” at its core and it is the English word for death by burning. Anyone who has ever witnessed an immolation, or its aftermath, can understand the loud rantings of the prophet Amos:

“I hate, I despise your feasts,
    and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies.
Even though you offer me your burnt offerings and cereal offerings,
    I will not accept them,
and the peace offerings of your fatted beasts
    I will not look upon.
Take away from me the noise of your songs;
    to the melody of your harps I will not listen.”

—Amos 5:21-23

Every fibre of our being wants to reject immolation in every form.

It is a gristly topic for my blog this morning and I apologize for it. But there are times when we must name the evil that persists in our world and remind ourselves how deeply it is ingrained in our story. And we must put our voices with those of the prophets and work to remove it from our vocabulary, even if it only exists in the twisted irrational thinking of mental anguish and brain disease.

God has seen too much pain of misguided offerings. God’s anger has turned to tears of pain.The message of our faith is clear:

“No, O people, the LORD has told you what is good, and this is what God requires of you: to do what is right, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God.” — Micah 6:8

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I’m not the greatest at falling-out forms. Over the years, I have filled out job applications, school applications, and I have gone through several different generations of pastoral profile forms. I haven’t filled out income tax forms. A couple of times we have had professional accountants fill out our tax forms, but more commonly Susan does the hard work of getting the right information on the right line. I assist by doing research, going through our records for the various lists of checks and payments for deductions and other items, but she does the hard work of filling out the forms.

Back when we were serving small churches, with no secretary, I filled out the annual reports to the denomination. In those days the forms were legal length carbon sets that could be filled out by hand or by typewriter. I usually compiled hand notes on another pad and then copied the numbers to the forms with a typewriter. Most of the information requested on the forms came from our annual reports, so it wasn’t the biggest job in the world.

However, I haven’t filled out those reports for the last 30 years. I have had administrative help in the church office and the task has fallen to someone else.

Now is the time that people around me are working on filling out the forms. At work Julie is completing the forms for the annual report to the church and at home Susan is gathering information to begin the process of filling out the forms to meet the April 15 tax deadline. With Easter falling on April 5, there won’t be much filling out of forms the last week of the month as we journey through Holy Week. So she is working ahead to get things ready.

I can remember that when we were children, I had a brother who loved to fill out forms. He’d retrieve old subscription forms from the garbage can and fill in the name and address questions. I think my folks were pretty good at keeping those old “return postage paid” cards from getting to the mailbox, but I’m not completely sure that we didn’t occasionally get a few weeks of an unintended subscription because he was constantly filling in forms.

I managed to get my name on the papers for school and answer the questions on tests, but I never found it very interesting to fill in the blanks on a standardized form. My vocation has placed me in a position where there aren’t all that many forms that need to be filled out.

These days, with computers, things are different. There is no longer the adjustment of paper in the typewriter to make sure that the X’s end up in the boxes. Many of the forms and questionnaires we fill out are online and we accomplish the task with a few points and clicks of the mouse and an occasional typing of a short amount of text.

It is also the case that most of the forms are never “read” in the traditional sense, either. Computers scan the forms and retrieve the data to be included with other data. I am sure that the IRS still has buildings full of auditors who look for mistakes or fraud in income tax filings, but the computers check the math and discover that kind of error. I’ve never visited an IRS processing facility, but I’m thinking that rows of accountants with green eye shades and sharpened number 2 pencils isn’t an accurate picture. I’m pretty sure it is mostly rows of computer screens with people reviewing the data and machines processing the forms and looking for the kinds of mistakes that are statistically most common.

That fact that I really don’t fill out too many forms hasn’t kept me from occasionally complaining about all of the forms in the world. I virtually never fill out customer satisfaction surveys unless the reward for doing so is something I really want. It is getting to the place where a free cup of coffee is expensive enough for me to fill out the form, but not quite.

I do know that most reviews are produced by professional reviewers. Companies pay individuals to write favorable reviews of their products and disparaging reviews of their competitors’ products. When I read product reviews, I avoid the ones that give a product either the highest or lowest rating. I assume that those have been submitted by the professionals who have a financial stake in sales and that the only chance of getting an honest review is to read one that has both good and bad things to say about the product. Of course the professionals are probably already on to people like me and know how many stars they have to put on their product to get me to read the review. It is a tricky business at best.

I took a course in sociology once and created questionnaires for my research. When the questionnaires were returned, after being disappointed at how few I got back, I went through the answers and started to analyze the data. The problem was, however, that the questionnaires didn’t provide enough information to draw any conclusions. Some people reported things the way I expected. Others did not. The results were varied and didn’t seem to follow any particular overwhelming trend. Of course I wasn’t a professional sociologist and I knew next to nothing about designing questionnaires to get the desired information, but I did learn from the project that it is hard to get accurate information, even when you have a hunch about what the answers will be.

As a result, I don’t put much faith in the power of questionnaires or forms to get reliable information. If you want to find out what people think, the best way is to talk to them. If you want to find out how they’re going to vote, the best way is to wait until you see the election results.

And, as is the case with taxes and annual reports, it is helpful to surround yourself with people who are good at filling out forms.

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I know that the paddling season is coming. Yes, winter is unpredictable in the Black Hills. Yes, we get more moisture from spring blizzards than we do from winter ones. Yes, I was here for the May blizzard. But from here out, we get these periods of nice weather between the storms. The ten day forecast calls for highs above freezing every day for more than a week. We could see highs in the sixties early next week. It will take quite a few days of sustained warmth at the lake for the ice to go out of the lake, but it is coming up on the time of year when I start to pay attention. Even when there is some ice in the lake, there can be some shallow paddling around the edges. It is the time when a durable plastic boat can be fun in the what open water there is, playing with the edges of the ice as it breaks up. Plenty of other factors, such as wind, make a difference as well.

I suppose that anticipation is part of every adventure. I’m one who enjoys the sensation of thinking about things to come. And I’m particularly susceptible to spring fever. The germans call it "Frühjahrsmüdigkeit" which means spring tiredness, but I don’t experience it as tiredness at all. I tend to be more lethargic and tired in the winter. When spring comes, I feel like my energy is renewed. If we need to change our clocks, a phenomenon whose necessity I’m not sure I see, at least we do so in the right direction. In the spring, I’m itching to get up in the mornings and the early rise this Sunday won’t bother me at all.

I’m pretty much one for rising in the dark year round. Sunrise is couple of hours after my normal rising time at present, so I can take the three-hour wait Sunday morning without a problem. For a little while, I’ll be driving to work into a sunrise again instead of the brilliant low-angle sun right in my face. Predawn and early sunrise are exceptionally beautiful heading east from our home, so I get treated to that twice each spring as we move our clocks and invest the hour that will pay off with longer evenings when we get to mid summer.

I guess I should be an evening paddler, but that isn’t likely to happen. I don’t mind paddling in the evening, but morning is my time at the lake and my preferred time to be on the water.

For now, however, there is a bit of waiting that needs to take place. My kayak building project is on hold, waiting for warmer weather before mixing epoxy in my unheated garage. There is a partially-rigged canoe in my storage unit, just itching to get into the water for a few water trials before gluing down the knee and ankle pads and making the final adjustments. Those glues need several hours of warm to dry as well.

And it is good that the lake has ice and the weather is a bit cold for a few days, because Lent is not exactly a calm time in terms of work and the preparation for a major capital funds drive is a big effort that consumes my days. Having to spend a chunk of time getting an old computer cleaned up to continue to do its work for a bit longer ate up a few of my hours yesterday as well. There is always something. And the “something” is usually different than the day before. That’s good. My job doesn't threaten to ever become boring.

I confess, however, that my mind does turn to the lake and to the rivers and to the waters of the Puget Sound, near our son’s home. When your passion includes human paddled boats, you begin to evaluate every puddle or creek or big body of water in terms of its potential for paddling. Over the years I’ve acquired quite a few boats, so there is one for almost any kind of water, from a tiny creek playboat to an expedition kayak. Although there are big waters that extend far beyond my abilities in an open canoe, I can paddle almost anywhere that there is water. And when the water is frozen solid, I can dream about paddling.

One of the joys of being the age that I am is that there is a fair body of collected memories. I feel attached and connected to the past. Since I spend many days studying ideas whose origins come from long before I was born, I have a sense of being connected to the past. But when I have a few spare moments, I find my mind wandering to the future. I think of things that are yet to come - of visits with my children and grandchildren - of lakes and rivers I have yet to paddle - of the adventures that will take place long after my time on this earth has passed.

I don’t know if such a sense of being a part of time that is far longer than the span between birth and death is unique to humans. I don’t even know if other humans spend much time in similar memory and anticipation. What I do know is that being rooted in a long line of history and anticipating an exciting and challenging future leaves me in a good place in the present.

Unlike the fear mongers and doomsayers that seem to occupy prominent places in popular media, I seem to be quite content to turn off the television and sit back and imagine a brighter future than they proclaim. Unlike the revisionists who spend large amounts of energy reinterpreting history to convince themselves that their opinions were shared by their forebears, I find it exciting to do real historical research and to be surprised by what I discover.

While I wait, I can grasp the grip and throat of a paddle and imagine the feel of plunging it into the water. I can run my hands over the rocker of a boat and imagine its performance under my knees. I can read stories of the great adventures of Inuit, Aleut, Iñupiat, and Yupik peoples and wonder if I would have the mettle for such journeys.

It isn’t just that spring is coming. Visions of paddles dance in my head and they made the cold morning bearable and the desk work worth the effort.

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In my early grades, I used to get good marks for penmanship. I can remember practicing rows of letters on tablets marked with dashed lines between the solid lines to indicate the height of upper and lower case letters. I memorized the heights of the letters that extended below the line, such as y and g and the lower case letters that reached above the dotted line, like t and h and the dots on my i’s. When we got to cursive, I practiced rows of o’s, trying to make each circle round and connect them with consistent lines.

When I was in the fifth grade, I happened to be at a meeting that my father was having with partners in an airplane. There was some document that needed to be signed and I watched as a doctor, a dentist and my father made their signatures. I couldn’t read any of them. None of these men, whom i considered to be among the most intelligent men I had ever met, had what my teacher would grade as good handwriting. I made a conscious decision to be more like them and even practiced copying my father’s signature, with upper case letters that extended way above the line and lower case m and n that were indistinguishable.

At my next report card, my mother asked, “What happened to your penmanship?” I had slid from an A to a C-. I told her that I was pretty sure that penmanship wasn’t a skill that I would need and that I wanted to be like my father’s partners.

In retrospect, it was the beginning of a period of focusing less on the expectations of my teachers and turning to the subjects and activities that interested me more than the official subjects of school. My grades were more mixed from that point until i entered college.

I didn’t give handwriting much more thought until I began to learn about manuscript study when I was in seminary. I went to graduate school in the days before personal computers. Virtually every document we read in school was either printed or in the 12-point courier type of a standard typewriter. We all wrote with typewriters and learned to read typewritten pages.

At about the same time, Steve Jobs was taking a calligraphy course at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, that was to have a direct influence on the availability of multiple fonts and elegant computer printing that we take for granted today.

Meanwhile I was learning about fragmentary manuscripts, manuscripts that were written without distinction between upper case and lower case letters, manuscripts written without spaces between words, and a whole world of ancient texts that were challenging to read and sometimes inaccurately rendered by those who copied them. I began to understand the challenges of reading and understanding ancient texts.

What we now have as the New Testament was compiled from many different documents, many of them called minuscules, not because of the shortness of content, but because of the type of writing of the Greek alphabet that was employed. Greek, like English has some distinctions between upper case (majuscule) and lower case (minuscule). These distinctions weren’t yet standardized in the time that the texts upon which the New Testament are based were written. Because all writing was done by hand in that time there is plenty of room for interpretation about the exact words and meanings in the texts.

All of this information came as a bit of a revelation to me. I had come to think of the Bible as a fixed document that had never changed from the beginning - words that had been printed and handed down from generation to generation from the days of Jesus. The paths of our words and their meanings are far less fixed than I had assumed them to be.

Scholars continue to pour over ancient texts and to learn more about their original letters and meanings while, at the same time, our language continues to evolve. New words and new meanings for old words emerge constantly as we use the language. The terms “upper case” and “lower case” for our letters, for example didn’t emerge for about 1,600 years after Jesus. They come from the way type was arranged in early printing presses. The presses used specific reversed letters which were set into rows one letter at a time in preparation for printing. The cases of majuscule letters were stored above the cases of minuscule letters, thus the terms “upper case” and “lower case” referred to the storage location of the letters.

The letters were reversed so they appeared correct when stamped by the press, thus making it very difficult to distinguish between minuscule p and q - giving rise to the expression “mind your p’s and q’s!”

By the time printing was available as a technology for transmitting documents that were standardized, Biblical texts had been copied by hand over and over again. The scholars who copied the texts hadn’t studied the Palmer method. And, to make things more complex, the original languages had been largely abandoned in favor of Latin in the fourth century, so the texts that were being copied had been translated, with varying levels of accuracy. There is no small amount of discussion among scholars about which contemporary words communicate best the original meanings. And there are plenty of scholars who believe that it is impossible to get all the way to the original meanings because there are no complete original texts to use for a basis. Even so, the evolution of language would make it impossible to be completely certain about meaning.

So whenever we read the Bible, we are reading not only the words of the ancients, but also layers of the history and tradition of the institutional church. We are learning as much about how our forebears saw the gospel as we are about what Jesus actually said and did. Those traditions and the story of our church are important, however. They are well worth reading and studying and learning. Our faith has been shaped not only by the original words and actions of Jesus, but also by generations of faithful followers who contributed layers of meaning and understanding to our mission and ministry.

So when I get hung up on minuscule (or miniscule - even the spelling is not fixed) details of the texts, have patience with me. I’m just trying to discover more truth and light.

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There have been dozens of scholarly (and a few less scholarly) works that use the formation of migrating geese in flight as a metaphor for how humans should work together. Back in the 1930’s before the outbreak of World War II, the flying geese paradigm was proposed as a model for Southeast Asian development. The proposal by Japanese scholars proposed that Japan would lead the way as other nations fell behind, but operated closely in terms of economic and industrial development, creating an economic force that would both assist less industrialized nations to join the “first” world and maximize the advancement of the economies of all participating nations. The idea was reinforced and revived in the 1960’s when an article in the Journal of Developing Economies proposed the flying geese paradigm as a model for developing countries in other parts of the world.

I’ve heard many different people speak of flying geese as a lesson in teamwork that humans should imitate.

While geese do fly in large v formations when making long migrations, anyone who has been around areas where geese linger for a while has also seen about every other formation imaginable. The joke I heard was, “Why do geese fly in a V?” “Because it is easier to make than an S.” But I’ve seen geese flying in modified s formation as well as random formation and v with one side longer than the other and a strange line with multiple birds serving as leader.

The use of the patterns of geese in migration for human teamwork are based in elements of truth. Yes, geese do gain some economy by flying in formation. There is a slight reduction in drag produced by flying a little behind and slightly above another bird. And geese do share leadership, with different birds flying at the head of the v at different times. It is not true, however, that the effort of flying alone makes the trip impossible for a solo bird. There are documented cases of lone geese making the migration when they have become separated from the flock.

Commentators or human motivation speakers who equate the behavior of geese with human logic however, are pushing things a bit far. Geese aren’t engaging in strategic thinking or planning the most efficient ways to fly. The formations formed by geese are the results of a long period of evolution and deeply ingrained instinct. Len Wilson, in a fairly recent blog on the topic wrote, “Sometimes people playing on teams will drop out of the group and try to accomplish goals on their own. However, like the geese, they usually discover that they miss the synergy and energy that comes when they are an active part of a cohesive team moving toward their destination, and want to return to the group.”

What?

Geese discover they miss synergy? Probably not.

I’m fairly certain, given the differences in brain size alone, that human thought processes are significantly different than geese.

It is true that an entire group following a leader can sometimes meet with disaster. After the Berkeley Pit in Montana was abandoned as a mine, it began to fill with water. A flock of migrating snow geese saw the water in the pit and dropped down for a landing. 342 carcasses were recovered from the water. At first, ARCO, the mind owners, claimed that the geese died from having ingested grain fungus earlier in the day, but Montana State lab tests showed the birds were filled with sores from exposure to high concentrations of copper, cadmium, and arsenic. I’m no biologist and certainly no expert on the exact cause of the death of the birds, but whether they ate tainted grain or drank tainted water, it is clear that the entire flock met the same fate.

I’ve never heard a motivational speaker refer to the snow geese in the Berkeley pit as an example of how humans should cooperate.

One writer I read also noted the honking that accompanies a flock of migrating geese. The speaker speculated that it was constant communication between the geese, encouraging slower birds to keep up with the others and giving information on the locations of other birds to keep the flock moving together toward their common destination.

I’ve heard geese in flight. It seems to work for the geese, but I wouldn’t suggest that it is a good example for humans. Everyone making similar noises at maximum volume at the same time, not waiting for another to finish before chiming in may work for geese, but for humans it doesn’t enhance communication. It is frequently the case with humans that those who are quiet and listening have the most knowledge of what is going on.

I’m sure that there are all kinds of lessons that we can learn from our animal and bird neighbors, but there are also challenges that we face that are uniquely human which require the best of our creative thinking rather than imitation of patterns of the way things have been done in the past. Technological innovation is not the product of doing the way things have been done for generation upon generation. It comes from trying something new, that has not been tried before.

It doesn’t seem likely that I’m going to become a motivational speaker anytime soon. Unlike those folks, I am drawn to speaking to the same group of people over and over, developing long-term relationships and discovering the expertise of the community rather than taking on the role of the visiting expert who is off to another audience tomorrow night.

However, if I were to be such a speaker, I think I’d see if I could develop a “walking turkey paradigm.” We have plenty of turkeys in our back yard to observe. Sure they have very tiny heads and very big bodies. There isn’t a lot of brain in those birds at all. And sure, they are very inefficient in their movements and actions. And sure, they will look for food in places where there is none over an over again. And sure, they are consumed with showy displays that accomplish nothing. Still, they provide a bit of entertainment for those of us who watch them.

And I’m thinking the flying geese paradigm is overused and perhaps the timing is right for the walking turkey paradigm. Then, of course, no one has actually asked me to give a motivational speech - they seem to like the guys who talk about geese.

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It might just be the kind of articles that I am drawn to read, or it might be a reflection of the times in which we live, but it seems to me like I’ve read quite a few articles lately on learning to say “no.” The basic just of most of the articles is that in our fast-paced society people become over committed and fill their lives with too many activities, events, committees, commitments, projects and the like. The solution, from the point of view of these articles, is to learn to say “no” more often, to make fewer commitments, and to take on less work.

It is true that I often find myself over-committed, drawn to more projects and commitments than is practical. I am fairly practical when I approach problems that need to be solved. I often evaluate things in terms of what is the most efficient in terms of time. There are some folks who say that I don’t delegate effectively and I’m sure they are accurate in their assessment. I’ve been known to do a job or accomplish a task by myself because it simply takes less time to do so than it would take to get someone else to do it. It can be a problem for me when I get myself off balance and find myself short of time for my life’s biggest priorities and commitments. But in general, I don’t find that saying “no” is a solution to my problems.

So, in the face of all of the articles like “Five Ways to Say No Gracefully,” that I’ve been reading lately, here are a few ideas about saying “yes.”

My life has meaning because I have said “yes” to some really big projects. There were times, in the midst of having young children in our lives, when I longed for more time for sleep, or reading, or quiet contemplation. Our lives were filled with demands, many of which came from the small voices in our home. But I have never regretted that commitment. Looking back from this vantage point of my life, I think that the experience was worth more than sleep. The relationships with our children are still at the core of my life and being with them is always time well-invested.

I have said “yes” to other big projects. I’ve worked through capital funds drives with churches I’ve served. I’ve helped find solutions to community problems. I’ve taken on the role of chairperson of some complex organizations. Although I’m not especially a fan of meetings, I’ve been through seasons when my life filled with meetings and I’ve invested the time and energy to develop relationships and participate in directing organizations.

I have said “yes” to long-term commitments. In a vocation where the majority of my colleagues have changed which church they serve or even changed their entire career, I have found it most meaningful to stick with a call for longer periods of time. There have been only three calls in my nearly 37 years of being an ordained minister. Each of those calls has involved sticking with congregations through rough times, tackling projects that take a long time to accomplish, and going through periods of refocusing work and relationships. Unlike some other careers, there is no “ladder” to climb in the pastoral ministry. Many clergy moves are lateral - from one place to another or from one set of problems to another. I’ve found that sticking with a congregation produces as many opportunities for meaning and growth as moving to a new call.

The life-long promises I have made including marriage, ordination, and the vows at our children’s’ baptisms continue to be sources of deep meaning and vitality for me. I’m as committed to those things today as I was on the day I made the original promises.

It is meaningful for me to continue to say “yes” to hands-on activities. Our church has janitors and they work hard, but there is nothing wrong with me replacing the toilet paper or cleaning up a spill. When I see a bit of litter bowing around the church yard, i stop and pick it up. The connection with real work is always meaningful for me. The jobs that some find to be less attractive give me time to think. I’ve found that in general that the jobs some others think have less dignity are sources of great dignity for me. I move a lot of furniture in the course of a normal week. I’m always schlepping tables or loading chairs onto a cart to move from room to room. I have colleagues who try to avoid such tasks, but I find that I can pray and carry a table at the same time and sometimes my prayers are more meaningful when my body is engaged in work. I do plenty of desk work, but if that was all I did, I would be even less efficient than I now am.

My life has benefitted from being able to say “yes” to jobs that are way bigger than I am. When I tackle a cause or concern that can’t be solved in my lifetime, that requires me to connect with people and resources that are beyond the scope of my expertise, and that push the limits of my endurance, I discover that I am not alone in my passion and commitment. Along the way I am reminded that there are very few things that I can accomplish alone and a whole universe of worthy endeavors where I contribute, but don’t need to be in charge.

I’m sure that there are thousands of nos in my life. Sometimes saying “yes” to a particular project means saying “no” to others. Contrary to the articles I read, however, I don’t find much energy or joy in saying “no.”

One thing that you can count on. If you call my phone to recruit me for another job and you get my voice mail, it isn’t because I’m avoiding your call. It is because I’m engaged in another relationship or activity. Leave a message. You never know, I might be getting ready to say “yes!”

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Mathematics wasn’t one of my strong suits during my educational career. I did family well with algebra and a little better with geometry. I learned some practical mathematical skills that I use in my daily life. These days the computers do more of the math for us than used to be the case, but I still am able to compute the area of geometric shapes and understand of reducing and enlarging things by percentages. I am reasonably skilled at basic math functions and can add, subtract, multiply and divide in my head well enough to figure change when making a purchase or estimate sales tax or a tip at a restaurant.

I was really focused on philosophy and theology during my college years, with just enough French thrown in to accomplish a minor in that subject. Truth be told, I was reading French in part because it gave me original language access to some existential philosophers. Two fields of study in one book - not bad. But our college required at least one math course for a degree and the fit for me was logic. Logic was offered as a math course and taught by a mathematics professor. It was a small class, which meant that I got individualized instruction and I could follow the study easily. Being a mathematics professor, the teacher used standardized tests, mostly multiple choice, so that she could compare her students from one year to another. I learned the material and easily passed the tests.

There was little actual manipulation of numbers in the course and in a way it was a study in the history and philosophy of science as much as it was a course in mathematics. That part of the course was very interesting to me. What are the classical forms of argument? How can we spot an error in reasoning? What are typical fallacies that are presented in arguments and how are these fallacies countered?

Since those days, I have come to understand and appreciate more about the study of math and although I am certainly still rather weak in that area of my education, I am less intimidated by math than once was the case.

Along the way, I had a close friend who was a double major: Christian Thought and Mathematics. He would frequently espouse the similarities of the two disciplines. In both disciplines he was most drawn to the sides of the disciplines that study entirely abstract concepts. He was good at abstract thought. He was less interested in how mathematical concepts applied in the real world, and more interested in the intrinsic nature of numbers and how they interacted. In those days, there was a bit of a division between “pure” mathematics and “applied” mathematics. These are not concepts that I fully understand, but I think that “pure” is generally an unfortunate choice of a moniker.Actually numbers can be as abstract as nearly any other form of thought.

Yes, I know the argument that mathematics are constant, that numbers follow set rules and that when applied correctly, answers are uniformly consistent. Therefore mathematics can be used to study the ancient past, as in astronomy, or predict the future. Since one plus one is always two, we know that this will be the case in the future as well.

The problem, of course is that not all math is as simple as one plus one. Ten times ten is one hundred, of course, but that is assuming that you are using a base ten system. And it assumes that you are using the Hindu-Arabic numeral system that is common in our part of the world. If you use an alphabetic numeral system, such as ancient Hebrew, or a base twelve system favored by some because it is a more interesting composite number, the results vary. Well, that isn’t completely true. The results are consistent within the system, but challenging to compare between different systems.

And we haven’t even begun to discuss imaginary numbers, which are not fantasies at all, but rather numbers that produce “real” negative numbers when squared.

It would be better if the person writing this blog were a mathematician who really knows what he or she is talking about. Alas, you’re stuck with me. And I really wanted to talk about theology anyway. What is clear to me is that the desire for a completely logical universe where the same rules apply in every situation has uniformly lead physicists and astronomers to areas a great speculation. “If we could see a distant planet, that would explain the slight dimming of the star that we can see. Therefore we assume that there is a planet in that particular solar system.” “If we build a particle accelerator that is large enough we might be able to prove or disprove the existence of the Higgs-Boson particle.” Sometimes, as with the Higgs-Boson, the theory proves to be correct. Technically we haven’t proven the existence of those distance planets, but it appears that scientists are likely correct with that theory as well. There are plenty of other scientific theories that don’t pan out as successfully. Sometimes these theories are off base because of mistakes in mathematics or the inability to accurately measure very large or very small parts of the universe.

They may have proven the existence of the Higgs-Boson, but it isn’t “the god particle,” and no, they haven’t provided evidence, either pro or con about the existence of God.

What I am saying is that even with all of the imprecision and limits of language, mathematics, while more precise on some levels, is filled with as many untested assumptions and speculative theories as any other field of study. Mathematicians and some of us lay people like, on occasion, to speak of math as being very consistent and logical and universal, but that is hardly the case. It is common, these days, to hear scientists talk about the limits of thinking of a universe, since current theory supports the existence of many universes - or a multiverse. There is even speculation about universes where mathematics operate by different sets of rules.

It is all very confusing.

I think I’ll stick to the study of God, which, from my point of view, is far less speculative. At least in theology we can come to limited agreement about what previous generations said and believed.

No, I’m just kidding, we have little common agreement. Still the pursuit of understanding others is a worthy enterprise.

Maybe my friend had it right: theology and mathematics are very similar fields of study.

I wrote this. If you want to copy it, please ask for permission. There is a contact me button at the bottom of this page. If you want to share my blog a friend, please direct your friend to my web site.