From Great to Hate

The historic legislation about healthcare passed this week and the fall-out has started en masse. I am appalled at the news of broken windows and hate mail and other negative forms of communication that legislators have received. Everybody wants to be liked, but sometimes it's more important to do the right thing. As I think about appointing clergy it has occurred to me that friendships can be strained because the Cabinet has tried to look at the big picture and then it bites some of our colleagues and friends in a personal way. Being on the Cabinet can make for friends you never thought you would have, and make trouble for those with whom you have had a relationship for years. Sure, we would love accolades for doing for what we have thought to be in the best interest of all, but no one can please everybody in a connectional system. It takes faith that the Cabinet has prayed and looked over the landscape of the entire annual conference and has done the very best it can.

Of course, the scenarios from healthcare to appointment-making cause me to think about Jesus' last week, from accolades to cruxifixon. Gloria Swanson was one of Hollywood’s top actresses from the 1920s to the 1950s. She was very ambitious. Early in her career, Swanson was quoted as saying, “I have gone through enough of being a nobody. I have decided that when I am a star, I will be every inch and every moment the star! Everybody from the studio gate man to the highest executive will know it.” And Swanson made sure of that. Before returning from a trip to France, Gloria Swanson sent a telegram to her film studio informing them that she expected a grand welcome when she arrived in California. In the telegram she demanded that the studio have enough well-wishers on hand to give her a standing ovation when she got out of her car in Hollywood. An ovation was duly arranged.

Palm Sunday is when we celebrate Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem and the events surrounding His Passion. Jesus didn’t have to arrange his own ovation when he entered Jerusalem. Word about Jesus had spread throughout the countryside. Jesus had healed many. He had taught with authority using parables that both anyone could understand and yet they confounded the wise. He spoke of love and lived grace to rich and poor alike. He had become quite a celebrity when Palm Sunday arrived.

Unfortunately, He had become too much of a celebrity to suit the Jerusalem fat cats. So even as the crowd waved its palm branches in adulation, the shadows of the cross loomed in the background. Have you ever felt wrongly persecuted when you’ve done everything right that you know to do? And there’s only one thing more disappointing than having crowds of strangers turn on you when you’re innocent. After all, crowds are fickle. The worst thing is when your friends and family let you down.

That’s when it’s really tough to keep loving people. I don’t know about you, but when I feel betrayed, my first inclination is to cut my losses and move on. Who wants to “throw their pearls before swine?” The answer is, “Nobody,” right? But when we look at Jesus’ last week we see a loving Lord who washes his denying betraying disciples’ feet, and a Savior who looks down at his killers and says, “Father, forgive them, they know not what they’re doing.” Wow! In the midst of betrayal, Jesus summons enough grace to forgive.

This world would be such a different place if we could be that forgiving and patient. Jesus gave up his rights and put the rights of others before his own. In the Garden of Gethsemane Jesus let go of his will and said that God’s will was more important. This Holy Week, the same challenge is ours. Can we put aside the disappointment that fickle people offer and lay claim to God’s approval? Is it enough for us to be loved by God even when it makes us unpopular with people? Can we do the right thing regardless of public opinion? I pray so.

Appointments

Appointment-making in the UMC is a arduous task. We just finished the process of making the tentative appointments that will take effect June 30. Today I rested. In the morning I will be preaching at St. John, Columbia. Tomorrow afternoon I will call all the church Pastor-Parish Chairpersons and the clergy where a move is projected. One of the things that I will say over and over is how we bathed the whole process in prayer.

I feel extremely good about all of the appointments, and particularly good about the ones for the Columbia District. Monday morning I will meet with the clergy who are projected to move and give them a copy of the church's profile where they are anticipated to go. Monday afternoon I will give a copy of the pastor's profile to the S/PPRC chairs. Everyone has until next Friday morning at 10 am to give a written reason why the match won't work and ask for reconsideration. Then the Cabinet will meet April 5-7 and reconsider the appointments.

I started last week with a lot of anxiety, and feel great peace about each situation tonight. I know all of the churches and pastors are still feeling the uncertainty. My prayers are with them. I've been there. I was in my fourth appointment thinking I was staying when I got an unexpected call from the Bishop. It was after appointment-making was finished. Everyone knew who was moving, and I wasn't one of them, but a pastor died of a sudden heart attack. We loved where we were. Cindy had a great job as a Guidance Counselor in a school she loved. The church was thriving. The kids were great. Narcie was going into her senior year of high school. Josh was a rising junior, and Caleb the next fall would have been a freshman.

Nobody thinks it's a great idea for their rising senior to move, but Narcie thrived in her senior year at the next school. Josh did great, and Caleb adapted though the move was probably toughest on him. There was no local job for Cindy in education so she ended up as a Guidance Counselor in a North Carolina Elementary School. Such is the price of itineracy. In the UMC, we are a sent ministry, whether lay or clergy. As a District Superintendent one has to look at the big picture, put the needs of the churches first and send our clergy to where they are best needed.

Ordained clergy wear a stole symbolizing this whole process. The stole reminds us that we are under orders as we wear the yoke of Christ. The stole is like the yoke on oxen or the reins on a horse representing God's tug in one direction or another. I feel this week the whole Cabinet felt that yoke and are being used by God to send our clergy in the best directions possible. That's my prayer and hope on this tired but exciting Saturday night.

The Voice of Truth

Well, yesterday I got hearing aids. I’ve had a hearing problem for much of my life due to encephalitis as a child. For years I have compensated well because one ear did well with high tones and the other with low ones. But, alas, age creeps up and after going to three specialists, here I am with both ears amplified, and the world is very different.

This morning I went for my usual one hour prayer walk and heard things I’ve never heard, like the interstate traffic, Ft. Jackson’s bugle, and the birds. I thought I was in Hitchcock’s movie, “The Birds.” Above the cacophony were crows with their distinctive “caw, caw!” It was overwhelming. I’m learning when to take them out, like when I go walking, even though I heard a car coming well ahead of the danger of being run over. You know they say it’s not the first car that gets you; it’s the second one that you didn’t hear. I’ll risk it.

Trying to position a phone at the right angle and distance next to my ear is weird, to say the least. So I’ll use my better ear and take the hearing aid out of that ear. Now I can hear everything my secretary says, the toilet flushing is like Niagara Falls, and all of a sudden I can hear the refrigerator, the squirrel scurrying over the roof, and water pipes creaking and moaning. It’s a new world and I didn’t know how much I was missing!

My fear is whether or not too much hearing ability will cause me to miss God’s “still, small voice.” As we are about to go into our intensive week of clergy appointment-making, it will be wonderful to catch all the names and nuances without wearing myself out reading lips and faces ad infinitum but, who knows, maybe it’s being a blessing not to hear some things so I can tune into God alone. Having the world I’ve been missing come in loud and clear may actually prove to be distracting.

Don’t get me wrong. I am thrilled to hear again, but my brain has to relearn what the world sounds like. That’s exciting, but I don’t want to forget the voice that hasn’t changed and never will!

Same Seasons Same Reasons

Someone once said that God’s incarnation in Jesus was just as the Apostle John phrased it in his Gospel, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” and theologians have been trying to explain it away ever since. If Christmas is beyond the ability of human language to explain, then Lent and Easter are totally beyond us: How could God-in-the-Flesh suffer, die, and return to life? Our feeble attempts to explain the unexplainable detract from the Christ’s poignant Passion and the miracle of his resurrection.

About Easter, St. Francis said, “Listen, my child, each year at Easter I used to watch Christ’s resurrection. All the faithful would gather around His tomb and weep, weep inconsolably, beating on the ground to make it open. And behold! In the midst of our lamentations the tombstone crumbled to pieces and Christ sprang from the earth and ascended to heaven, smiling at us and waving a white banner. There was only one year I did not see Him resurrected. That year a theologian of consequence, a graduate of the University of Bologna, came to us. He mounted the pulpit in church and began to elucidate the Resurrection for hours on end. He explained and explained until our heads began to swim; and that year the tombstone did not crumble, and, I swear to you, no one saw the Resurrection.”

Therefore, let’s leave Lent and Easter as they are: the most marvelous mystery imaginable. It is beyond our comprehension that God suffers with us and that death can be conquered, that evil can be overcome, that justice can roll down like a river, and that peace will someday reign. But, we believe in spite of our grief, our frustration, our lack of empirical evidence, and the gnawing fear in our gut that faith is but a sham.

Jim Harnish, a pastor friend from the Florida Annual Conference told the story of a little boy who was, “not exactly happy about going to church on Easter Sunday morning. His new shoes were too tight, his tie pinched his neck and the weather was just too beautiful to be cooped up inside ... As he sulked in the back seat, his parents heard him mutter: ‘I don't know why we have to go to church on Easter, anyway; they keep telling the same old story and it always comes out the same in the end.’”

This reminds me of a book I read recently about the Battle of Gettysburg. It is a revisionist history of the battle by Newt Gingrich, of all people. Author Harry Turtledove has other revisionist histories of the Civil War that are also interesting, but what made Gingrich’s Gettysburg so fascinating is that General Robert E. Lee acts decisively and wins. That’s a switch for any Southerner who has visited this site of such abject defeat. I have a love-hate relationship with visiting Gettysburg. I had ancestors who fought there, and I know they left defeated and broken. My Great-grandfather, Daniel Byrd McClendon was there and then a year later on July 9, 1864, 25 miles down the road at Monocacy Junction outside of Frederick, Maryland, he was shot in the back of the head and captured, treated by Union doctors, and then survived a Union Prison before making his way back home. He went through abject loss in the battles of Gettysburg and Monocacy, plus the ruin of the South after the war.

Nevertheless, no matter how many times I visit both battle sites I know the outcome. I know what happens and I am still drawn back to those hallowed grounds. Sure, it’s easy to know how things turned out in both battles. There are a lot more Yankee monuments than Southern ones at both places because the winners usually have more reason and more money to do such things. Nevertheless, even though I know how Gettysburg and Monocacy always come out, the trek is worth it. Both battles were pivotal in my personal and our national narrative. By the way, Monocacy is known as the “Battle that Saved Washington, D.C.”

Similarly, I keep coming back to church for more of the same at Lent and Easter. The message, though always the same, is one that I need to hear, some years more so than others. This is one of those years. I have a lot on my mind. I’m tired and weary with the weighty issues that face our district churches and our denomination. Our family has been through so much since last year’s Lent and Easter, too. Cindy’s mother’s illness and death were and continue to be cause for reflection for us all. So I desperately need this Lent and Easter this year. These are days that are the penultimate hinges in history, cosmically and personally. Thank God it always ends the same. That’s a sameness that I can bank on year after year, day after day, and minute after minute, and I am grateful.

"Stained Glass Ceiling Unfair to Clergywomen"

I have been traveling to all the churches in the Columbia district that are anticipating clergy moves. Unfortunately, even in this day and age, I continue to hear gender bias and the dreaded phrase, “Some of our people won’t accept a woman as their pastor.” The church has long caused clergywomen to hit the “stained glass ceiling” of serving smaller parishes with lower salaries. As a justice issue, we should all agree that equal work should result in equal pay.

The church hasn’t always been this way. In the early church, women earned positions of prominence. During Jesus’ life it was primarily the largesse of working or wealthy women that provided the support that Jesus and the disciples needed (Matthew 27:55-56; Luke 8:2-3). Women were the first to hear the news of the resurrection. Women were there at the prayer session in the Upper Room that led to the birth of the church at Pentecost. Phoebe was a Deacon in the church at Cenchrea that Paul greeted in Romans 16:1 and the four daughters of Philip the Evangelist prophesied/preached (Acts 21:8). And where would the church be without Mary, the mother of Christ? Paul sums up the equality of Christian community in Galatians 3:28: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave or free, male or female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It was also Paul who reminded St. Timothy of the source of his faith, “which first lived in your grandmother Lois and in your mother Eunice,” and, how “from infancy you have known the holy scriptures (2 Timothy 1:5; 3:15).”

Therefore, if women were so indispensable at the beginning of the church, how can we imagine women being left out today? Unfortunately, the early church acceptance of women dissipated all too rapidly into an enculturated male-dominated entity. We have sadly experienced 2000 years of allowing the secular world shape the sacred. All the more reason to celebrate, rather than disparage the influence of women in the church. If it weren’t for the faith of my mother, grandmother, wonderful female Sunday School teachers and mentors (I never had a male teacher in grade school or at church), my faith would have either been nonexistent or desperately inadequate. Women are the core-supporters of many churches. United Methodist Women are invaluable as leaders in ministry and mission. I thank God for what they do in the Columbia District, the Annual Conference, and General church!

We need more women leaders (men, too, for that matter). Thank goodness the United Methodist Church has long supported the call of women into ordained ministry. Still, however, clergywomen are a minority and there are those who wish to keep it that way. Here’s my response to churches that don’t want a female pastor, “Get over it!”

Gender issues and discrimination should be a dead issue in every profession. We have made great strides, but there is room for growth. In 1888 there were only 5 laywomen and no clergywomen at the United Methodist General Conference. After approximately 90 years of almost no representation, in 1976 there were 10 clergywomen and 290 laywomen out of 1000 delegates at General Conference. In 1992, it was 81 clergywomen and 303 laywomen out of 1000. In 1996, it was 107 and 328 respectively. In 2000 the numbers were 112 clergywomen and 212 laywomen. In 2008, of the 996 delegates, 148 were clergywomen and 220 were laywomen. Forty percent of the total delegates were female. The church certainly has more than 40% women despite the number of those elected. It seems that the gospel hasn’t caught up with us yet in the church. The secular world has laws and changing attitudes in its favor, but we have something even greater - God’s Spirit! The Church should be the leader, as it was in the beginning, in women’s rights!