A Cup Overflowing - with Lectures

Now, I know that sitting through ten lectures and six sermons in six days is not a compelling thought for anyone. But this was the most stimulating part of the Chautauqua experience for me. Not only did we hear James Forbes every day, we also heard the following people in the morning lecture around the theme, The Ethics of Leadership:

David Brooks, The Weekly Standard chief editor and TV news analyst
David Boren, University of Oklahoma Chancellor
Cheryl Dorsey, Echoing Green president
David Westin, ABC News President
Nancy Gibbs, Time Magazine chief editor
Joseph Riley, mayor, Charleston, S.C.

Needless to say, I was impressed with every speaker, but was especially impressed with David Boren from the University of Oklahoma. His message was that Middle America is the largest group in America, but is not being heard because of the voices on the extremes. He maintains that Middle America does have great ideas and is doing great things.

I was also impressed with Cheryl Dorsey, the head of Echoing Green, an organization that provides start-up capital for Social Entrepreneurs. Social Entrepreneurs are those individuals and groups that have as their primary mission the improvement of lives. Two examples of this are micro-loans and building schools in Pakistan.

Joseph Riley, the mayor of Charleston, SC surprised me. For a person who has done such great things to transform and mend divisions in his city, I found him to be very humble and accessible. Bold! Very! How many Southern mayors do you know that would hire a Jewish Black police chief?

On top of that, at 2pm every day, we heard an interfaith lecture around the theme of Ethical Leadership. We heard representatives from Black Christianity, Fundamentalist Christianity, the Muslim community, and the Jewish community. Every lecture made you think and ponder your own faith.

What the week of lectures did most for me was to give me great hope for the future leaders of our faith and the nation. I am hopeful about the near and distant future and where God can lead us.

We Are Participants in Grief, Not its Objects

Actually the week began with my Communion Meditation/Sermon at the Disciples House Worship on Sunday morning. This was a part of my duties as Chaplin of the two Disciples Houses chaplain. I reprint my meditation below:

Think about the depictions of the Lord’s Supper that you’ve seen in your life. You know, with Jesus and the Disciples sharing the meal together. Where is Jesus sitting? Usually right smack in the middle. Truth be told, the table would not have been rectangular, but rather a triclinium, with three sides. And the participants would not have been sitting in chairs but rather reclining. Jesus would not have been in the center of the whole table but rather in the center of one of the sides. Why do we say this? Because Jesus was the host and that’s where the host sat. He was the one serving them, and he took this to the extreme by washing the their feet.

Why was Peter so adamant about Jesus washing all of him instead of just his feet? In part, I think it was because Peter couldn’t quite get his head around Jesus. Jesus seemed to always be saying that good was bad and bad could be very good. In Peter’s mind, he never quite approached the situation in the way it should be approached. In Peter's eyes, Jesus didn't seem to appreciate how important he (Jesus) was and didn't seem to understand how such an important person should act. Jesus broke the rules and ventured out to uncomfortable and unpopular places, engaging unpopular people.

My mother died two weeks ago Thursday. I debated whether I should do any travelling at all this summer while I’m on Sabbatical. The clincher is that my mother liked adventure, she loved trying new things, meeting new people, always believing that every new experience and every person she met was a blessing. So hard as it was, I progressed, in spite of my grief.

Donna, my wife, told me about her friend Beverly who recently went through the difficult process of losing her husband to inoperable brain cancer. At the beginning of the diagnosis, a friend asked Beverly: "You like adventure right?" Beverly affirmed this and the friend replied, "What an adventure!" Donna told me after talking to Beverly, a week or so ago, she affirmed that indeed the whole process was an adventure and that she gained so much from it, wouldn't trade it for anything.

If you’ve read Donald Miller’s book, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, you know that the author struggles with the question, What makes a good life? Or more specifically, what makes a good story for a life? He finds a definition of a good story that he clings to throughout the book: A good story is a person who strives for something and then must overcome great adversity in order to carry on.

Would we be talking about Jesus today if he hadn’t overcome great adversity, the greatest of all, suffering and death even? Probably not. That’s what makes Jesus’ story so utterly compelling. If he had stuck to Peter's agenda, we would not be followers of Jesus today.

Jesus even made his path through pain and grief something to be celebrated.

Loss and grief is the great universal human experience. All of us go through it at some point in life. Grief unites us, just as this table does. Christ took the posture of humility and servanthood and opened himself up to the life of adventure. In Christ, not only is life an adventure; even grief is the adventure of a lifetime.

Brigadoon

For years, I have heard pastors and laypersons alike talk about Chautauqua Institution in upper New York state. I had a couple of preconceptions about Chautauqua before I arrived. One was that the accomodations in the Disciples House were rather primitive with no air conditioning and shared bathrooms. This proved to true in this house that dated to the 19th Cenury. Nonetheless, it was quite comfortable, well-kempt, and with updates. I also had this idea that experiencing Chautauqua was like stepping back in time and resembled something out of the Music Man or Mayberry RFD. This was also generally true except that there were plenty of modern amenities mixed in with the hundred-year-old houses and facilities.

Chautaqua Institution was founded as a place to train Methodist Sunday School teachers. Within a few years, other churches including the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)discovered this wonderful summer retreat. Every year, since 1874, Chautauqua comes alive for nine weeks in the summer. It becomes a place of worship, music, arts, lectures and discussion. It reminds me a bit of Brigadoon which is the mythical village of musicals past where a little town came alive one day every one hundred years. Why do I say that? Because Chautauqua is blessed each winter with an average of 300 inches of snow. The Disciples House alone had EIGHTEEN feet of snow built up between the houses blurring where one house began and another began. Believe it or not, some people actually live in Chautauqua year round. I can't figure out why, but they do.

Every week of the summer has a theme and the worship and lectures all center around this theme. Our week's focus was Ethical Leadership. Every morning, we heard a compelling sermon by Dr. James Forbes, pastor emeritus of Riverside Church in New York City and President of the Healing of the Nations Foundation. He is listed on numerous surveys as one of the top preachers in the world. Using numerous Biblical texts, Dr. Forbes emphsized that God didn't give us the responsibility of leadership to perpetuate a spirit of victimization, a spirit that he says is rampant in the United States right now. Americans, who have never thought of themselves as victims of anything before, now see themselves as victims of terrorism, victims of the economy, victims of government and Christians aren't doing enough to counter this predominant mood of the nation. God didn't create us to drown in a spirit of victimization. Our nation wasn't founded on a spirit of victimization and it can't thrive there, said Forbes.

Northern Exposure

This the phase of the Sabbatical in which Donna, my wife, joins me. These weeks are times of renewal for me but also great nourishment for our marriage. This porton of the Sabbatical is highlighted by learning opportunities.

Two themes have arisen during this time which I am calling the Chautauqua portion of the Sabbatical. The first is the power of water, it's power to shape and change it's surroundings. The second is that of the rich diversity of religious expressions which infuse our world and enliven the human family.
Donna and I began in Chicago, which sits on the big toe of the Great Lakes. One of my lifelong dreams has been to experience the Great Lakes in person. I have delighted in experiencing Lakes Michigan, Eria, and Ontario. In the midst of these powerful water views are some equally powerful learnings.

Old Church New Church

I didn't expect to be in Rockwall on June 27. We dropped Tim off at FCC Rockwall for the Mission Trip presentation and then proceeded to worship at St. Matthias Old Catholic Church, which, if you didn't know, is the congregation that worships in our old sanctuary, now owned by the Rockwall Wedding Chapel. It was at the same time very familiar and excedingly strange. That's not just because I weeping mess during every song in the wake of my grief. It was familiar because of the pews. Besides that, the walls and ceiling were all remodeled. And here in the midst of the 1916 building, a Catholic liturgy was being celebrated. My good friend Todd Bell is priest/bishop of that congregation and he led what ended up being a healing balm for my soul. If you are unfamilar with the Old Catholic church, they are in no way a part of the Roman Catholic church and do not recognize the pope. They allow their priests to marry and allow all comers to particpate in the communion service. The blending of the old and comforting with the new and unfamiliar was the perfect salve for me this Sunday.

Boiled to Perfection

One of the really fun parts of spending a week of learning on Washington Island was experiencing an American island culture. On signs everywhere, I saw the phrase, "You are now north of the tension line." In essence, they were telling all us urbanites and surbabanites to calm down, relax and just enjoy being away from it all. The last time I slept in a room in summer without air conditioning was when I served as a counselor on the creative side at our Athens church camp. The difference was that in Wisconsin, it was really cool and comfortable both day and night.
Washington Island is a blend of Scandanavian and German cultures, evidenced by the Lutheran church, the many sausage "wursts" and the fish boils. The church above is the Lutheran church where our sessions were held as well as their Norwegian chapel, the Stavkirke, built across from the Lutheran church inmeditation garden. On Wednesday evening, one restaurant held a fish boil. I thought I knew what one was but soon realized I had no clue. Great lakes whitefish are placed in a huge iron pot along with potatoes, onions,etc. along with spices. At some crucial point known only by the boiler, a can of kerosene is tossed on the fire to cause a "boil over." And then he runs like the dickens. The boil over causes the skin of the fish to burn off and separates the bones from the flesh. It was probably one of the best fish dinners I ever enjoyed.

Moral Therapeutic Deism

What in the world is Moral Therapeutic Deism (MTD)? Is it a disease? A social disorder? A new counseling technique? Needless to say, it sounds like one of those phrases that is more complicated than it needs to be. Strangely, it fits. MTD was key concept I learned at the Washington Island Forum.
Kenda Creasy Dean is the associate professor of youth, church, and culture at Princeton Theological Seminary, where she works closely with the Institute for Youth Ministry. Before this year, I was unaware of any professor of youth ministry in any seminary. Dr. Dean was the keynote speaker at the Washington Island Forum, an annual event for church leaders held every June on this beautiful land mass off the tip of Wisconsin’s thumb. The forum is sponsored by the Wisconsin Council of Churches. As I shared earlier, it was not easy to make the journey to Wisconsin so soon after my mother’s memorial service. When I heard what Professor Dean had to say the first morning, I knew that I was where I needed to be.
Dr. Dean shared with us results of a seven-year-study on the faith of teenagers. The first somewhat shocking conclusion she shared was that there is a new way to think about the timeline for becoming an adult. Whereas in the past, we assumed that a person reached adulthood in his or her 20s (Some would even say age 18), we now can think that one reaches adulthood around the end of one's first third of life. That would put the age one reaches adulthood anywhere from 25 to 35 years of age. The study revealed that the consumer culture allows young people to prolong adolescence and to operate perfectly fine within society without taking on the full responsibility of adulthood.
So what does that say about their faith. Dr. Dean says that young people, including young adults, have a "whatever" attitude about their faith. While they can clearly articulate their favorite musician's life, style of music and exactly why they like the music the musician makes, they are far from articulate about their faith. They often refer to their faith in terms of “faith stuff” or “that Bible stuff.” This is what Christian Smith calls Moral Therapeutic Deism. The tenets of this faith are:
1. "A god exists who created and ordered the world and watches over human life on earth."
2. "God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions."
3. "The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself."
4. "God does not need to be particularly involved in one's life except when God is needed to resolve a problem."
5. "Good people go to heaven when they die."
Many of us may look at this list and say, “So, sounds all right. I can affirm those things.” The problem is that there is no Jesus in this faith and no sense of discipleship. There is no grace and no salvation. Scripture is basically ignored. And if this is what the predominant belief, and studies show it is, then what will our children’s children believe and what is the future of the Christian faith?
Dr. Dean maintains that MTD is not just predominant among teenagers and young adults, but it is affirmed and modeled by parents. We fail to share with our children our own faith beliefs and neglect to tell them that we give and share and act based on our belief in Jesus Christ as Savior.

So MTD may be a disease, a disease of closed lips and disassociated actions. We now the antidote. Its a matter of sharing more fully, deeply, and honestly why we do what we do.