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.