Welcome to the website of a retired United Methodist pastor! This corner of the Internet continues nearly fifty years of a weekly column in a church newsletter, on topics ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. The opinions expressed are the author's and represent no institution, although it is hoped that within these pages you will find a reflection of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, who, in his own borrowed words, insists that we love God with, along with all the rest of what we are, our minds. "Critical" as used in the title does not mean being nasty or grumpy; it means using intellectual faculties in the service of God. Your reactions, rebuttals, comments, and questions can be addressed to: BobHow9846@comcast.net.
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Recent Postings
June 9, 2009 - Personal Matters: House and Gardens
June 7, 2009 - Essays: Gifts, a Sermon and Prayer
May 14, 2009 - Essays: On Growing Old
May 2, 2009 - Essays: Meditation of an Only Child
Gifts
Gifts
A Sermon
(and a Prayer) offered Sunday, June 7th, 2009 at Grace United Methodist Church,
Valley Stream, New York
Seven years ago this past week we had a party at Plattedeutsche
Restaurant, shortly after which Barbara and I, Betsy and the boys, bade you and
Valley Stream farewell. I had some worries about retirement, whether there
would be enough to keep me busy (mostly, there is), how the money would hold up
(readily, so far), and if I would go to seed (probably I have and don’t know
it). What I have found is that retirement is a splendid time to rethink and
reevaluate where you’ve been and what you’ve done. So I have revisited old
haunts and havens, reaching as far back as my school years in Stamford, but not
neglecting my sojourns in Brooklyn and Valley Stream.
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And in my reassessment of my life and times I have come to an
unstartling conclusion, the same one which informs the popular book by Malcolm
Gladwell, Outliers, that there is no such thing as a self-made man (or
woman); that each of us, if we accomplish anything with the time we have on
earth, is the consequence of a lot of loving and guiding and, yes, nagging, from
the people around us, family especially.
You’ve always known that, right?
Pastor Howard is thicker than most; but on me too, especially in these
years of reflection, it has dawned that I am very much Evelyn and Harold’s
spoiled only child. That she came to these shores from Northern Ireland to
provide her offspring with a college education in preparation for the work she
assigned him, as “a minister of the Gospel,” to use Dorothy DeBeauchamp’s phrase
for my profession. I fought it, of course, that dream of Mom’s for me; but Dad
collaborated with her and I didn’t have a chance. Thank God.
Brooklyn Norwegian-American Methodists reinforced Mom and Dad’s
expectations; and a Long Island congregation sealed the deal. I am what you
made me. Of course, you may not want that responsibility. Flatter me,
nonetheless, by claiming you do. Life is a gift, in all the details, including
any expertise and success we might achieve.
Faith is too… a gift… as Paul the Apostle reminds us in that text from
I Corinthians 4 I’ve quoted beneath the sermon title. As I read the lections
for this morning trying to figure out what should be the sermon theme, I found
in that most famous of passages, surrounding John 3:16, Jesus’ midnight
interview with Nicodemus, the message for the morning about how we are beholden
to others for just about everything, including faith. I mean, where do we come
by faith? From above, Jesus explains. From God, from God’s spirit blowing
where it will and its blessed zephyrs find us. Which would seem to rule out any
disciple’s getting puffed up about how he or she found God. Faith is a
miracle. Faith is a gift. Faith is what Evelyn and Harold Howard nudged their
son toward until the blessed wind from above wafted his way.
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When you are old enough, say seventy or so, you will probably come to
the same conclusion about God’s way with you. And if you’ve already arrived
there, well, you’re years ahead of me.
Let me spell out a couple of consequences of this old man’s discovery,
the gift that faith (and most other important things) is. First, it requires
humility. You and I didn’t find God; God found us, more like he found Adam and
Eve in the Garden, hiding and blushing, than like Isaiah in the Temple in a
blazing vision (though, I know, I know, that may have been the experience of
some of you). Humility, for the absence of our own initiative; but humility
served with big helpings of wonder and gratitude… like the waves of good feeling
which sweep over me almost daily at the thought of my reconstituted knees and
the fellow who gave them to me, Dr. Schutzer… and he, not so incidentally, would
claim that his medical skills were a gift from above.
Humility, and patience. Patience with those who have not received the
gift of faith, and may even be hostile to the thought that there is a God, let
alone a God who scatters abroad with the wind knowledge of his power and mercy.
In these past seven
years I’ve stumbled upon another ministry, part time of course, to my classmates
from college, many of whom do not share Bobby’s commitment to Jesus Christ. One
frequent Email correspondent states emphatically that he is an atheist. Two
others with whom I am in conversation, either by regular mail or phone, style
themselves as agnostics. Do I try to persuade them otherwise? Never. Do I
listen to them? Lots. And I learn from them. I hear in their complaints with
the believing majority echoes from within my own soul. When asked, and
sometimes when not, I offer my take on the world we share, and it, that take, is
rooted in my commitment to Jesus. They don’t hold it against me. At least I
don’t think they do. The gift of their friendship and their patience with this
Critical Christian strangely arrives for me as evidence of God’s power and
mercy. But, please, don’t tell them!
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Seventy-seven and a half years and what have I learned? That the God
who so loved the world that he gave his only son, really loves the world, all of
it, including those who think God is a fiction, and those of us who say we
believe but behave often as if we didn’t. That if we are to boast of anything
it will be in the breadth of God’s mercy, even as we offer a prayer of gratitude
for the faith to behold the world and all of us in it held in the hands of a
loving eternity.
A Prayer for Better Discipleship
God of good surprises, who lifts up the fallen and brings down the mighty, heals
the broken and breaks the prideful, loves the loveless and softens the hard of
heart; God of all sorts and conditions of us, those of us with attitude and
those of us who could use some, who makes time for each of us in the solitude of
our souls, reach out to us, again, and again, and again, through the gracious
presence of Jesus that, like him and for him, we may spend our days making the
world around us a preview of his kingdom of lovingkindness. We have no yearning
for martyrdom or canonization; but we do seek an infusion of your grace to
enable us to bring sunshine into our shadowed world, tenderness into our
calloused relationships, and hope into a time and place battered by loss of
substance and spirit. Help us. With you we know, have heard, and believe, that
all things are possible, even that we may be disciples; if in small matters, so
be it, taking the mustard seed as our emblem and Jesus’ cross as our guide; that
he may at last commend us to you as those who have tried, tried to be true and
faithful, and all that that suggests, for you and the coming kingdom and world
without end. Amen.
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