Epiphany Thoughts

I had high expectations when I entered seminary in Boston. I anticipated a place of great wisdom, soberness of discussion, and genuine Christian community. It didn’t take long to find out that seminary could just as easily be spelled, “cemetery.” If you didn’t have faith and knowledge of Christ before you got there it quickly dissipated. Theology and Biblical language study can be quite unexhilarating at best. Some of the upper level students were apt to try to lighten the search for wisdom, knowing that true wisdom isn’t found in books, it’s found in everyday life.

There were pranksters everywhere. For instance, on the first day of class someone switched the signs on the library’s basement restroom doors. They slid the plastic signs for the men’s and women’s restrooms and swapped them. That was sneaky and yet taught great wisdom. Another place for a search for wisdom lay in the classroom. I remember one class where we discussed endlessly what doctrinal camps we supported: Arminianism, Calvinism, pre-trib, post-trib, Pre-millenialism, Post-mil, and Amillenianism. I’m an A-mil, by the way. During one heated debate, one guy made the unwise assertion that he was no camp follower. He said that he was a Biblicist. His point was, in effect, “All the Bible scholars of the last two millennia are irrelevant. I understand God’s word without their help.” Sure, right, huh, huh.

Wisdom is built upon past traditions and present experience. The Wise Men, the Magi, were famous examples of this. They gathered information from past and present sources and acted accordingly. Too often what made seminary into “cemetery” was the disconnect between information and transformation. I remember being tripped up by this disconnect when a student of another denomination asserted to my pleasure that United Methodists would be the first to enter heaven when Jesus comes back. As I was smiling, wondering where this comment might be leading, he then added, “It’s in the Bible, you know.” I said that I didn’t so he then told me, “Yes, the Bible says clearly, ‘The dead in Christ shall rise first!’” He added, “I don’t know anyone as dead as you Methodists.” There’s a difference between a Wise Man and a wise guy!

The difference can be overcome by connecting our faith to our actions and words. “Seek wisdom,” Scripture does say but that wisdom includes sanctified “street smarts,” like surviving pranksters. True wisdom starts in heaven, like the star the Wise Men followed, but works at street level, too, where we bump shoulders with others. It isn't satisfied with information retrieval. You can't access wisdom by the megabyte. Wisdom is concerned with how we relate to people, to the world and to God. Wisdom is found in life decisions, not in computer chips, lexicons, or the number of textbooks read.

One day one of Mahatma Gandhi's disillusioned followers came up to him and said, “You have no integrity. Last week I heard you say one thing, and today you are saying something different. How do you justify such vacillation?” Gandhi quietly replied, “It is simple, really, my son. I have learned something since last week.” When Gandhi learned new information, he sometimes changed his mind and altered his position. One of my resolutions for the 2010 is to be open to change!

Bedlam to Bethlehem

I’m almost done with my Christmas pottery and glass making! I have 2 pie/quiche plates to glaze sometime today and 1 huge bowl (30 inch diameter). Last night we went to our last Christmas party, and tonight Cindy and I will celebrate our 34th anniversary. Getting married at Christmas seemed like a great idea back in 1975. It was a family tradition. My parents got married December 23, 1937, and my grandparents on December 25, 1910. I can’t imagine the pressure we put on our folks to have a Christmas wedding even though it shouldn’t have been a big surprise given the family tendency. It’s a crazy time of year, but worshipful, too – if we pause and ponder.

I know of and have been part of churches that have had live nativity scenes. I heard of one where everything was fine except for wayward goats. The whole thing was planned as a worship scene, a living tableau of Bethlehem’s manger complete with live animals. Unfortunately, it was too real. There weren’t any problems with the cow and the lambs. They played their roles well. Never mind that a camel couldn’t be found. After all, we reasoned that the Wise Men would have parked them out back anyway.

The goats were a different story. Hindsight is always 20-20. No wonder goats aren’t usually found in crèches. Jesus told the truth when he said that on Judgement Day the sheep ought to be divided from the goats. Together, they can wreck a nativity scene. The goats took off midway through the evening and headed down the main drag in town. You should have seen us trying to round them up!

We often turn our experience of Christ’s birth into a zoo. We mix our metaphors for Christ’s incarnation, blend the sacred and the secular, and end up with the goats and sheep butting heads. Our symbols and celebrations have become a hodgepodge of the commercial and sentimental. Santa and tinsel have overshadowed Jesus. Phyllis Diller said it well, “Santa Claus comes to us under many names: Kris Kringle, Saint Nicholas, Mastercard.” We have lost Jesus and replaced Him with a Coca-Cola image of jolly old St. Nick.

With Christmas customs and live nativities, Bethlehem can easily degenerate into bedlam. What began as an earnest attempt to make the Nativity of our Lord more realistic turned into a somewhat humorous disaster. But that’s nothing new. “Bedlam” often describes how we celebrate Christmas today.

The word “Bedlam” goes back to the 1400s when a London hospital named St. Mary of Bethlehem opened its doors to the insane. According to historians, it was a very noisy and unkempt place. People started dropping St. Mary from the name. Then they eventually contracted and corrupted the last part. Bethlehem became Bethlem and finally bedlam, a place of noise and confusion. A name that was first associated with the mother of the Prince of Peace became synonymous with disruption and despair.

Sounds like our hectic schedule of Christmas parties and commitments, doesn’t it? But, it doesn’t have to be this way. The celebration of Christmas need not become bedlam. Worship ought not cause confusion but peace, “For God is not a God of confusion but of peace” (I Corinthians 14:33). This season is best enjoyed in stillness and reflection. Let the hush of this holy season toss out the bedlam of overactivity! One week to go: reclaim the peace through the Prince of Peace!

Star to Scar

I was at one of the Columbia District churches yesterday and goofed on one of the verses of “Angels from the Realms of Glory.” The third verse reads: “Sages, leave your contemplations, brighter visions beam afar, seek the great Desire of nations; ye have seen his natal star…” I ended up singing “natal scar” instead of “star.” It wasn’t a bad mistake. As a matter of fact, it was appropriate in a serendipitous way. Sure the verse was about the Magi coming to Jesus’ birth; but Jesus in-the-flesh is more about scars than stars; humility over vanity; service over being seen.

Ralph F. Wilson, in “Burlap, Boys, and Christmas,” gets at the heart of the difference between Jesus-of-the-Stars and Jesus-of-the-Scars. About Christmas pageants he said: “Angels are clean. Angels are beautiful. They seem almost otherworldly, since girl angels always seem to know their parts better than do boy shepherds. The angelic satin stuff goes pretty well in most Christmas pageants. The problems come with the burlap part. Do you know what real-life shepherds were like? Townspeople looked down on them. “Herdsmen!” they’d huff derisively. Shepherds would work with sheep all day, sleep outside with the animals at night and then come into town dirty, sweaty and smelly. Like boys. Tradesmen in the marketplace would be polite enough. Shopkeepers would wait on them, but everybody was happy when they moved along. Burlap fits the part. It really does. Angels get clouds and the Hallelujah Chorus for props. Shepherds get a stable. Maybe cattle lowing has a bit of romance. But conjure up the smells and the filth. No stainless steel dairy palace this, but a crude barn, with good reason for straw on the floor. Not exactly the setting you’d choose for a birth if you had the luxury of planning ahead. Angels seem appropriate to the birth of God’s son. But straw and sweat and burlap do not. Why, I ask, would the Son of God Most High enter life amidst the rubble of human existence, at the lowest rung of society, in obscurity and at the stable-edge of rejection even before he is born? And as hard as I think about it, I come back to one truth. God wanted to make it explicitly clear that He came to save each of us. He comes to the slimy, dark corners of our existence, the desperateness, the loneliness, the rejection, the pain. He comes to unswept barns and cold nights of despair. He comes because he understands them. He knows them intimately and came for the very purpose of delivering us from those raw stables to real Life.”

Wow! It is a miracle that God desires to enter this world. Thank you, Jesus, for taking my scars; all the pain. The old Appalachian folk hymn is running through my mind, “I wonder as I wander out under the sky, How Jesus the Saviour did come for to die, For poor on’ry people like you and like I.” The glorious meaning of Christmas is God’s unconditional grace spread across creation. It is perennially profound just as Frederick Buechner put it, “Year after year, the ancient tale of what happened is told raw, preposterous, holy and year after year the world in some measure stops to listen.” I’m listening.

Christmas and Family

Our first Christmas together was right after our wedding that occurred on December 20, 1975. After honeymooning in Gatlinburg and enjoying its perfect Christmas atmosphere including snowfall and St. Bernard puppies for sale, we went back to Cindy’s Nana’s house to celebrate the 25th with extended family of Godwin’s and Burch’s.

I was adopted by a wonderful family. Christmas with Cindy’s family has been made rich with memories of gift swapping, carols sung, games played, all-night barbeques, and tons of sweets. But, by far, the best thing about my in-law’s and extended family is their gift of relationship. They exhibit love on a grand scale but without pretense. The gifts aren’t elegant or measured one against the other. The main gift that is passed from one to another is family.

This is key for me! I also dearly love my own biological family and have marvelous memories of Christmases past when we all gathered at our house, which, by the way, was also home to my grandparents. We cousins and kin celebrated on a huge scale. After all, December 25 was my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, and my own parents were married on December 23. Nevertheless, with all of its hoopla, Christmas with my family of origin hasn’t compared with the reality of familial love that I’ve witnessed with Cindy’s relatives.

Maybe part of the problem is that my parents were older when I was born, fortyish, and might have been too tired for a newcomer. They even let my two brothers have the honor of naming me, I surmise to help extend my life. My first name “William” was my maternal grandfather’s name. My middle name, “Timothy,” came from the bear in the “Dick and Jane” books. My brothers and I are eight years apart in age. When I was two, my oldest brother went off to college. I really don’t remember living in the same house with him. He was a celebrated visitor. My middle brother was just becoming interesting when he got hooked on cars and girls. So I became another one of the independent agents of our household, fending for myself, except for the gracious tutelage of nursemaids and kind aunts. The yo-yo between closeness and distance has been a family trait. My family has always been a three-ring circus with everyone going off in his or her own direction. Therefore, maybe it was the whole family’s penchant for doing your own thing that led me to give much of my Christmas holidays to selling fireworks in partnership with one of my uncles.

Therefore, learning to do family has occurred mostly after marriage for me, and I haven’t been the greatest student of the art. It is an art to be in relationship with other people. The eagerness to be with family and the Christmases we have shared is what makes Cindy’s family so dear to me. They haven’t just adopted me. There’s a host of others who have been included, too. The inclusion of so many is what makes Christmas, or any other time with them, so special. Rather than a disjointed make-an-effort family system, theirs is as natural as breathing.

As much as I miss my deceased parents and desire to have closeness with my living McClendon kin, I made a choice a long time ago. I’ll always love my brothers and their families and my extended Jackson cousins from my mother’s side, but for all practical purposes I belong to another family now, my wife’s. I love them, and they have taught me how to love better. I just wanted to say, “Thanks.” With Cindy's mother's death a couple of months ago, Christmas will not be the same. Our parents are all gone now and that reality hits me in my gut sometimes. My folks have been enjoying Christmas together in heaven for years now, but this will be the first time in 9 years that Mr. and Mrs. Godwin will spend it together. They will be in our hearts all day, too, and we will forge new family traditions, but after it's all said and done, it will be Ganny and Gandaddy's life and love that will hold us together.

Always On The Field

Christmas is just around the corner and I'm pondering "Santa Claus Is Coming to Town." I love the movie "Elf" and the last scene when Jolie sings about Santa and he shows up with Will Ferrell in tow. Listen and you'll hear... "He knows who's naughty or nice, he knows who's been bad or good, so you better watch out..." Well, in good old South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford dodged an impeachment effort and will be slapped on the wrist with just a censure; and who's not tired of Tiger Woods' silent treatment. I like listening to Sports Radio and enjoy the banter of 107.5 "The Game." They have been going back and forth on the whole Tiger saga. One of the commentators suggested what I did not want to hear about Tiger: his off the field behavior is no big deal if it doesn't affect his on the field results. My answer: Malarkey!

We're always on the field in the game of life. Integrity means everything about us is connected to a common core, no loose ends or loose cannons allowed. There has to be consistency in our public and private lives or else not only do we end up on Santa's Naughty List but God's. It's Advent season and the Judge is Coming so I better watch out and remember I'm always on the field.

Great Expectations

With so many of our WWII vets dying every day and remembering well the HBO Series “Band of Brothers” and their travails during the winter of 1944 in the Battle of the Bulge, I can’t help but think about the sacrifice paid by so few for so many. Brave soldiers with their families back home, and persons in support industries mobilized an unsurpassed effort to defeat fascism and tyranny. We can’t say, “Thank you,” enough to all from every conflict that have acted on behalf of our freedom.

I remember a church member in a previous church who was in the Battle of the Bulge as a tank gunner. His name was Elbert MacDougald. He carried with him the physical and emotional scars of being caught in that tank as it took round after round of small arms fire while it was stranded. He said he could still hear the plinking sounds hour after hour until relief arrived. The tank’s tracks had been immobilized. Its turret and cannon could only fire in one direction. I remember the horror on his face as he recounted his story. In one attempt to fire at the attackers, the tank’s cannon was loaded, but in the process of loading the shell, Elbert’s hand was caught between the seal and the rifled tube holding the round. The only way to be set free was for him to fire the gun. When he did it, half of his hand was obliterated in the recoil.

With every bit of news from Iraq and Afghanistan about brave soldiers losing limbs, I think about Elbert and others like him that have given so much, regardless of the politics of war and our theology against it, to make us free. I listened to president Obama’s speech with keen ears. I hope another surge works and we root out the Taliban and Al-Qaeda, plus make his overly optimistic timetable. It will take great sacrifice by the families of our service personnel and the entire country.

Being a disciple of Christ demands no less a sacrifice. Christian martyr’s dying bravely for the faith turned the Roman Empire upside down. Discipleship isn’t for the fainthearted. It takes bravery, devotion, and decisive action to do God’s will in a hostile environment. Cheap talk of being loyal to Christ isn’t adequate. Henri Nouwen, in his book, With Open Hand, prayed, “God, give me the courage to be revolutionary as your Son Jesus Christ was. Give me the courage to loosen myself from this world. Teach me to stand up free and to shun no criticism. God, it is for your kingdom. Make me free, make me poor in this world; then I will be rich in the real world, which this life is all about. God, thank you for the vision of the future, but make it fact and not just theory.”

What a prayer! Christianity needs more practitioners, not theorists. In the United Methodist Book of Discipline there is a list of what are called “chargeable offenses” for clergypersons and laypersons. The list includes such things as immorality and crime as grounds for dismissal or trial. In the 1996 AME Zion Book of Discipline, there is a glaring typographical error. In the section on “Chargeable Offenses,” the first numbered chargeable offense of clergy is this: “Immortal Conduct.” Can you think of a better “chargeable offense?” When is the last time someone could have charged you with this offense? That’s a question I’m thinking about today. With all of the hoopla over Tiger Woods’ indiscretion and auto accident, I’m afraid that we have become a country that has double standards. We expect our military to be excellent and our celebrities to be less than mediocre. I think a good dose of Jesus will straighten us all out!

Christmas Tree Merry-Go-Round

We don’t have our Christmas Tree up yet. It has been musical chairs or trees for us. With Ganny’s death Christmas preparations have changed more than a bit. Oh, we’ll still barbeque a hog and gather at her house, but she would have already wanted Narcie, her official Tree Decorator, to have already put everything up. So… plans change. Without anyone at her house and fear of a fire if the tree isn’t watered consistently we’ve decided to switch some things up. Narcie and Mike get our tree with colored lights so Enoch and Evy can enjoy the myriad colors, and Ganny’s house gets Narcie’s tree with white lights and no need for watering. She and some of the students from Winthrop Wesley will go down this weekend to set it all up, and I’ll go to Lowe’s or Home Depot to find a tree for us. We’re the odd tree out, but that’s okay. Simple problem, simple solution. Decorating for Christmas is a joy not a burden. The same should be true for all of our Advent/Christmas preparations.

This reminds me of what former CBS News Anchor Dan Rather writes in his book, I Remember, about watching the Flying Valentis while growing up. He writes, “Walking past a vacant lot on our way to school early in the morning, we would come across the Flying Valentis practicing in their long tights and tank tops.” The Flying Valentis were a troupe of circus acrobats who traveled and performed throughout the United States.

“Although we were used to their art,” Rather recalls, “the Flying Valentis never ceased being the wonder of the neighborhood. Every morning it was like getting invited to a great show without having to buy a ticket. They did triple somersaults above their practice nets and caught each other by the forearms while swinging from the trapeze. We’d gasp when they missed connections and fell into their nets.”

From watching this family work out, Rather and his friends discovered that practice meant a lot of hard work. It might have looked like a lot of fun, but it was work. Rather writes, “From this hard-working family with its specialized brand of togetherness, we learned that even life in the limelight was no cakewalk. When we traipsed back from school in the afternoon the Valentis were still swinging away from their nets, and when they returned from a tour looking banged up and limping with limbs in casts we could see that a price had to be paid for fame.” Rather learned a valuable lesson from watching the Flying Valentis, “Their vicissitudes would have been good preparation for survival in the acrobatics of network television.”

Advent is our time of holiday preparation. It is a time when we look back, examining Israel’s expectation of the long-awaited Messiah. It is also a time to look forward to the day when Jesus will return. We do not know when that long anticipated event shall occur, but we try to stay prepared. Like flying a trapeze, Advent/Christmas season often looks like a lot of fun with all of the tinsel and lights. However, without the disciplines of reflection and preparation, this season can make us end up looking as battered as working without a net.

Advent season gives us the spiritual net to help us survive the hurriedness of Christmas. With great panic we can either say that there are only 4 Sundays until Christmas Eve and we’re not ready, or with the right amount of spiritual preparation we can say that we’re looking forward to it. With adequate reflection, we can celebrate this special season with all the wonder and poignancy that it deserves. Don’t miss the net!

A Good Thanksgiving

What a great Thanksgiving and beginning of Advent! We went to Rock Hill to see our two grandchildren and have Thanksgiving Dinner with our son-in-law's parents and grandmother. Caleb went with us, but Josh and Karen were in Greensboro with her folks. It was a good day, and after a few hours we came back to Columbia. Of course we miss Ganny since her sudden death in August. This was our first Thanksgiving with all of our parents gone, but in the Communion of Saints they were still with us is so many ways.

For instance, on Friday Cindy and I went to the movies to see "Blind Side." It is a great movie! It reminded me so much of my mother who became the legal guardian for an African-American man who was mentally challenged. The authorities had threatened to send him to a state institution. He hung out and helped people with their groceries for years at my grandfather's country store, but his mental condition deteriorated, and his family had basically abandoned him. His name was Frank Arthur. He lived with us, had his meals with us. My Dad shaved him and cut his hair. Any way, the movie "Blind Side" brought buckets of tears to my eyes thinking about my mother's big heart and bravery in doing what she did for Frank in the 1950's when race was a worse issue than it remains today.

So around the Thanksgiving table and all weekend I sensed the presence of so many: Ganny, SaSa, Papa Mac, Gandaddy, Papa, Grandmother, Uncle Lee, and many more. On Saturday the Gamecocks beat archrival Clemson and that would have made most of my deceased relatives very happy. Sunday was an even better day! We celebrated Evy's first birthday and her baptism at St. John's, Fort Mill. Everything was simply wonderful. Narcie's sermon was outstanding and Mike's music and the Praise Band were superb. Cindy and I both were filled with tears of gratitude in how God is using our children. Josh and Karen are doing great in ministry and Nursing School. The Rock Hill Herald newspaper had a wonderful article about Josh's ministry with the homeless yesterday. Check it out http://heraldonline.com/front/story/1775436.html. God has blessed us and we're thankful.