Post-sermon visitation

One my concerns as a preacher has always been that someone who had actually lived through an event or experience I’d used as an illustration might approach me after the service and tell me I had it all wrong.

It almost happened last Sunday.

I was preaching from the letter of 1 John in the New Testament. 1 John says a lot about love. I had approached the subject of love by telling about a PBS interview I’d heard a few days before with a man who had survived the 1994 Hutu genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda. Emmanuel Turaturanye was 16 years old when the genocide started, but he somehow escaped and lives now in the US. In the interview he credited his ability to overcome the trauma he’d gone through to the love he had heard about and experienced in the church where his father was pastor. Love had given him the power to forgive (though he could not forget) and to move on with his life.

I was so impressed with the interview that I used Emmanuel’s story to illustrate what I understand 1 John to be saying about and claiming for love. Recounting the interview was a big chunk of my sermon, which ended with a exhortation to let love guide our own lives as it was guiding Emmanuel’s.

After the service, a woman and her young daughter approached me. She introduced herself as a survivor. I asked what she had survived. “The Rwanda genocide,” she said.

I did not know how to respond. I wanted her to say more before I dug myself deeper into some hole I perhaps didn’t realize I had spent 20 minutes digging for myself. I guess my next question was how old she was at the time. “Eight,” she answered. Again, I was silenced. I could not imagine.

We finally began to converse a little more freely. It helped me when she assured me that she genuinely appreciated hearing what I had said on the 30th anniversary of the horror. She showed me a old photo of her family, pointing out several who had been slain. She told me she’d been kept safe in “Hotel Rwanda” and with the help of a Catholic group. I think was struggling not to cry.

Today, she and her husband (who is also Rwandan, although they met after they both were in the U.S.) are parents of two young children, and she is an internal medicine physician in one of Cleveland’s major health systems. Apparently she and her family have worshipped at our church from time to time, though I did not recognize them.

That she was there that Sunday, when I preached that sermon, feels almost like a miracle of providence. That what I say seems to be have been okay with her, despite the pain it had recalled to her mind, is a sign of grace.

She gave me her phone number as we parted. I plan to call her soon. I have to figure out what I will say when I do. Maybe I will begin with thanks.

Like most Americans, I suspect, I know very little about Rwanda. I read some posts about it just before I started to write this, and realize that my sermon really did not provide any context for the story I made central to it. That historical and social and political context is complex, as most such things are. It would have overwhelmed the points I was trying to make.

One thing I did learn, though: Rwanda today is around 94% Christian. Assuming the percentage of Christians was about the same in 1994, and knowing that Emmanuel’s father’s congregation included both Hutus and Tutsis, I would not be surprised some of the violence that happened was Christian on Christian, maybe even justified as being carried out “in the name of Jesus.” I don’t know that, but how can it be otherwise? It’s not the way we beloved children of God are to be with one another.

Injustice and inequality that create distrust that morphs into hate can easily become murder, war, and genocide. People who consider themselves Christians cannot be sure they can never be lured into such acts by crowd psychology that urges them to hate groups who are different from theirs. We must resist calls to distrust and hate others the moment we hear them. I suspect most genocides begin in words.

When Emmaunel was asked what he had to say to us in our own contentious times, he replied, “When you see someone mistreated, say it. Don’t wait to find out how it will work out.”

Hate-filled words are potent weapons of mistreatment. They must not be allowed to take over our lives, our places of worship, or our nation.

Wars' oldest victims

I stood at an elevator door the other day and pondered what I would do and how I would fare if In case of fire, elevators will be out of service. Use stairs were to happen to me.

As an 81-year-old, 6’5”, 185-pound man who uses a cane, I am not sure I’d make it down the stairs in time. Neither am I sure anyone else should, or even could, really help me, especially in the crush of other people fleeing that fire. Lots of people could carry a small child to safety, and should. But me?

And if I used a walker or wheelchair, my chances of getting out would be near zero. I know first-responders search, if they can, for people like us, but that’s small comfort.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, my mind has been troubled by images of old men and women who are very likely dying helplessly in that war. The intense coverage of Israel’s war in Gaza has added to my horrific visions.

I suspect the elderly often are left behind in war zones. I read of us deciding to stay behind, to not try to flee to where it’s said to be safe, because we don’t want to burden others. But we also know that “fleeing” is not easy to do now that we are very old.

Accounts and pictures of children caught up in war tug at our hearts. Our focus on the youngest is completely understandable, and entirely appropriate. They are at once both the most appealing and the most vulnerable of us, and they are the future of every nation and people. Protecting them and saving them is perhaps the highest responsibility of those who are in a position to do so.

If a parent of a child were forced to choose between helping their child to safety and helping their parent to safety, whom might they chose? Who would we want them to choose? Who helps the elderly who are isolated from their families when their own survival is a moment-to-moment crisis?

There are less dramatic and visible ways in which the elderly are surely left behind. Who wins and who loses in a physical struggle for scarce food? Most of us need more medical care and depend upon more prescription drugs than we did when we were younger. In war zones, such resources, where they are available, will naturally go to those with the most immediate needs. I had cataract surgery last week. I am sure no one is getting that simple procedure in either Ukraine or Gaza today.

There must be many more elderly victims in Ukraine and Gaza than we tend to consider. Few counted for much in the calculations leaders made when deciding to start the wars there, or as they decide whether and how to continue them. We are relatively expendable, and we know it. Our dreams for our old age and our hope that we might die in peace are not all that important on the scale of things when it comes to war and peace.

We are the oldest victims of something that should never happen to anybody, ever, at any age.

Two great commandments for our election season

Wondering how to evaluate political candidates and policies during our long and divisive election season? Here is a paragraph from “The Last Week” by Borg and Crossan (2006) that offers guidance for Christians, and perhaps for people of other religious persuasions as well:

“[Jesus’s] twofold great commandment—to love God and love our neighbor—is so familiar to us that it has become a Christian cliché. But behind the familiarity is their radical meaning as Jesus’s summary of his message. To love God above all else means giving to God what belongs to God: our heart, soul, mind, and strength. These belong to God, and (to refer to a previous episode) not to Caesar. This is radical monotheism: if God is Lord, then the lords of this world—Caesar and his incarnations throughout history—are not. And to love one’s neighbor as one’s self means to refuse to accept the divisions rendered by the normalcy of civilization, those divisions between the respected and the marginalized, righteous and sinners, rich and poor, friends and enemies, Jews and Gentiles.”

The country I grew up in

The country I grew up in was mostly at peace, confident, and quite sure it was committed to a set of lofty ideals.

I viewed my country through the eyes of a boy and teenager growing up in a small town in rural Iowa. Nothing wrong with that, neither then nor now. It’s just that I did not personally know, experience, or see my country through the eyes of anyone who grew up somewhere else.

But I was raised in a family that was quite aware of and concerned about the world beyond our home town and county. And I had a feeling (which has occasionally been confirmed throughout my life) that we in rural Iowa knew more about city folk than city folk knew about us. Our news, our movies, our music, and most of the things we consumed were funneled to us through urban cultures.

The country I grew up in had come through a Depression that my parents and their generation remembered and would remind us of upon the least provocation. There were differences of opinion about what had been done by our government to get us back to prosperity, and heated debates continued about the role of government now that prosperity had returned. Through it all we remained personally cordial with those who saw things differently than we did and thought name-calling was very wrong, at least in public.

As the decade of global economic depression finally wound down, the country I grew up in had eventually led what was called the free world (ignoring our Soviet ally’s lack of freedom) in defeating Germany and Japan and their forces of tyranny, hatred, and racism. My country had followed up that victory by feeding our former enemies and by helping them establish democratic, rule-of-law governments. My country became the home of the headquarters of the newly-established United Nations in the belief that, if nations working together, the world would never again experience anything like the 20th century’s two World Wars.

The country I grew up in wondered what had gone wrong in Germany between those wars. How could one man take over one of Europe’s most enlightened and educated nations? There were very good explanations out there, but we were not much interested them because nothing like that could ever happen in our fair, free, ideal-driven, law-abiding, prosperous country, the leader of the free world.

It was easy for many of us to feel positive about all other people—Jews, Negroes, homosexuals, etc.—and to be idealistic about everyone getting along with everyone else because we hardly ever encountered personally people who were all that “different" from us, at least not that we recognized or acknowledged. Though some of us were poorer and others of us were better off, we could hardly imagine the extremes of wealth and poverty that divide so much of the world.

The country I grew up in really believed that all people were created equal. Every single person deserved a shot at life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But my country was often so idealistic about that ideal that it blinded us to our realities. We liked the idea that everyone in our country should be able to chart their own path, but we were seriously concerned that some people wanted to start walking that path before the time was right for them to do so. They should be patient. In a strange but earnest balancing act, we tried to stoke the fire of our ideals with the waters of not yet.

The country I grew up in believed in the rule of law, not the rule of men. We believed that no one was above the law, and that those who were elected to lead us had actually been elected to serve us and our laws, from the Constitution on down. We absolutely believed that our elections were fair and honest (up north, anyway, except in Chicago), and that those who lost them would always graciously give place to those who had won them.

In the country I grew up in, a bill became a law just the way the little chart in the civics text showed it did. We knew of lobbyists, but we also knew their impact was countered in the minds and hearts of our lawmakers by their solemn commitment to the people who had elected them.

Those legislators also knew that they they had been elected to serve all the people living in their state or district, not just the interests of those who’d voted for them. Those who had not voted for them did not lose access to them just because of their vote. And anyway, who really knew how anyone had voted in the privacy of the voting booth? You might even win over someone who disagreed with you if you showed real interest in and respect for them. It was how our government worked in the country I grew up in.

I could write more, but I hope by now my point is clear: the country I grew up in is far different from the country I am living in 65 years later. We are much inclined to isolationism, to taking care of ourselves first and last, to communicating only with those who agree with us anyway, to serving party interest over national interest. A sizable number of us hope to entrust our nation’s future to a man who is openly disdainful of democracy itself, who wants the United States to rule the world through fear and threat, not lead the world as first among equals. Our ideals are largely in ruins for many, hammered from both the right and the left. We seem to be in survival mode, terrorized by the very hopes and ideals that helped us become who we are.

Six decades of living from west coast to east and since 1989 back to the middle again have taught me I will never again see my country through the mid-20th century rural Iowa eyes I grew up with. At the same time, I can never see my country without some influence by those youthful lenses. They’re still in my head somewhere.

The country I grew up, imperfect as it was, is being replaced by something far worse: a country that is tense, driven by fears, unsure of itself and its democracy, and cynical about ideals that hold promise for all.

Can we somehow get back to a wiser version of what we were in the country I grew up in? I sincerely believe we can if we are willing to try to renew our mutual trust and work together at it.

Waking up

It seemed to me that I awoke suddenly, without prompting. I had not heard the gently-yet-insistent calling of my name (“Dean, Dean”) that I remember from previous experiences of being awakened from anesthesia-induced sleep.

One moment I was aware of nothing; the next, everything seemed more or less clear. I was in one of Hillcrest Hospital’s operating rooms, surrounded by four or five medical pros carrying out various important responsibilities on my behalf. Never have so many women gathered to watch me awaken from a deep sleep.

I was in that room for a rare procedure aimed at alleviating the symptoms of something I suspect you’ve never heard of. I had worried more about this surgery than about my previous ones, perhaps because I’d never heard of it and hardly knew how to explain to myself what was about to be done, much less explain it to anyone else. What if my surgical team were literally practicing medicine on me…literally learning how to do it? I even wondered if I might not wake from the surgery.

I’d fallen asleep just as quickly as I would wake, probably surrounded by the same watchful crew. I remember being wheeled into the O.R., and staring up at the large lamps above their heads, lamps that I knew would soon shine bright upon my stomach. My surgeon ran through a check list that sounded like a pilot’s preparing for take-off, while one of the anesthesia team held a mask above my face. (Maybe I was about to take off to somewhere out there?) She told me she would slowly lower it to fit over my mouth and nose. I can only assume she did just that because hers were the last words I remember before giving in to sleep. They had also told me that they would run a tube down my throat. The raspy voice I had for about a day afterwards testified to that having happened.

Next thing I knew I was awake, attended by many, and feeling a bit of pain where the work had been carried out. Someone asked if I’d like something for that pain, I thought why not and muttered yes, my mouth so dry it felt as if a desert wind had blown through it for days. I think she shot something into the I.V. port in my left arm while I, though feeling awake, wandered about in the pale reaches of my mind and of that room. I think I asked how surgery had gone and heard something like beautifully, though that’s probably not the exact word. Whatever she said, her answer was beautiful to me, and I relaxed into my waking.

Then, as my physical and emotional pain relented, I began to sense a gratitude that I have no good words to describe. A profound, freeing sense of well being, of “all shall be well.” I wanted to leap from that bed and hug everyone around me and yell in their faces, thank you—-thank you for all you did and are doing to wake me up, once again, to this world and my life in it.

Of course, I could not do that physically, though I enjoyed imagining it. Perhaps I stage-whispered it to the gathered care-givers. All I know for sure, three days later, is that for a few moments I was in a place I have rarely before been in my life, a place of resigned dependency and trust at simply being able to breathe on my own once again.

As I type this, my sense of gratitude continues, but it sadly comes from a more reasoned and rational place: Of course I got through the surgery and the anesthesia! The vast majority of operations end as mine did! Medical science has this thing down pat!

Of course I got through it…but that’s not all there is to it. My sense of gratitude for those few moments touched something far beyond the medical arts and sciences, yet something that nourishes my continuing wonder at life itself.

Today my belly sports four small incisions covered with a glue that protects their healing. My abdomen is a bit tender to the touch, but all internal systems seem to be working as they did before surgery. On every level I am grateful—except at that exalted level where I rested in those few moments after I emerged from anesthesia.

What if I woke up every morning with so deep a sense of gratitude as was gifted to me last week?

NOTE: The condition for which I had the surgery is Superior Mesenteric Artery Syndrome (SMAS), which may affect about 0.13 to 0.3% of the US population. Many who have it suffer far more from it than I have, but when it hits, it is extremely painful and debilitating. The procedure I underwent is a duodenal ligament release, often referred to as the Strong procedure after the surgeon who developed it.

Our pastor choked up when she read...

Yesterday morning, while reading from John 1, our pastor choked up as she finished the line that claims that we can become “children of God.”

…to all who received him (Jesus the Word), who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God…

I am very sure her choking was unplanned (she’s not given to theatrical moves), and she did have to pause a moment to clear her throat.

I, too, choke on those words when I let them get to me.

I…

who claim to have received and accepted Jesus the Word…

who desire to trust him for all that he is…

who is at best a wayward, careless child, and at worst a rebellious, indifferent one…

who daily squander the power that can give me true strength…

...I choke on those words. They stop me cold, if I let them.

Child can mean a young, still-dependent, not fully-matured person. Child can also mean an offspring of full age age and independence. Either way, they are born from and always and forever will be the flesh and blood of those who gave them life. I think the author of John had both conceptions of child in mind.

Here’s a New Year’s Resolution worth considering: I will become a more resilient, trusting, and—yes—obedient child of God by practicing peacemaking. As the man himself put it:

Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called children of God.

Can you and I make some—however small—peace this year within ourselves, with those closest to us, with and in our communities and our world?

A peacemaker…as in a healer, reconciler, truth-seeker, lover, uniter, and, when possible, compromiser.

It is rarely easy to make peace, and the making of lasting peace does not come automatically. Learning peacemaking is necessary to doing peacemaking. Sometimes we even have to make some “good trouble” along the way.

But we can make peace somewhere with someone if we will commit ourselves to it, clear our throats and our hearts of the phlegm choking them, and give it a try. And thereby become, in the process, who we’ve been from our conception: children of God.

I wish you Christmas

I came across our 1976 Christmas letter last week, and was struck by the following Jane Merchant poem with which it ended. It’s just as appropriate as ever as my Christmas greeting to you.

 

 

How strangely, thoughtlessly unnecessary

It often seems to me that we should say,

“I wish you merry Christmas.” How can merry

or any other adjective, convey

A wish for greater gladness for our friends

More than the one word, Christmas, all alone,

The singing, shining word that comprehends

The utmost grace and glory [we] have known?

I wish you more, much more, than merriment;

All faith and hope and love and holy peace,

All quietness and radiant content

With blessings that continuously increase.

And when I say the simple words and small,

“I wish you Christmas,” I have wished you all.