what if I gave a sermon and nobody came?

A self-important minister got up one Sunday morning to discover that about six feet of snow had been dumped overnight on the town. He didn't have much trouble getting to church, of course, living in the attached parsonage, so he hurried over to prepare for the morning service. It was about fifteen minutes before service began and he looked out at the pews. There was only one person sitting there: Fred, one of those bachelor farmers of the area, and still bundled up from milking his herd.

The minister dawdled around in the back rooms until it was five minutes to service and then looked out again. Fred was still the only one sitting in the pews. No one else being there to do it, at ten o'clock the minister himself pressed the button that rang the bells in the steeple. They rang a little muffled but enough to be heard. A minute after ten he looked out. Still just Fred. At quarter past ten he looked out again. Just Fred.

Finally, at ten-thirty the minister stepped out from the back rooms and walked to the pulpit and said, "Listen, Fred, as you're the only one here, I suppose we ought to just cancel today's service."

Fred pulled down his muffler. He said, "Parson, when I call in my cows and only one shows up, I still milk her."

I'm sure I'm not the only one who's dreaded the empty church on a Sunday. A couple Sundays ago just such a thing happened which, if I was doing a sermon on it, I'd title "What if I gave a service and nobody came?"

For the past month I've been working at a pair of facilities for at-risk and troubled teenagers, one for boys and the other for girls. The boys' facility, with four units, is on the far end of the rim to the northwest of us; it takes me an hour and a half to drive there. The girls' facility, with two units, is a half hour drive to the southeast. I do the boys' service at four and the girls' at six.

As it turned out, the reason no one showed at the boys' facility was a miscommunication in the daily calendar for the units. But the lack of attendants got me thinking. I give a pared-down service, one heavy on participation and conversation, since each service is likely to trigger some response on their part. This below, for example, is the order of service for that day's chapel.

Sunday June 8, 2014

Welcome

Joys and Concerns

Reading: A Fable by Rumi

Song: “What’s Going On”, Marvin Gaye

Mother, mother
There's too many of you crying
Brother, brother, brother
There's far too many of you dying
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today - Ya

Father, father
We don't need to escalate
You see, war is not the answer
For only love can conquer hate
You know we've got to find a way
To bring some lovin' here today

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me, so you can see
Oh, what's going on
What's going on
Ya, what's going on
Ah, what's going on

In the mean time
Right on, baby
Right on
Right on

Father, father, everybody thinks we're wrong
Oh, but who are they to judge us
Simply because our hair is long
Oh, you know we've got to find a way
To bring some understanding here today
Oh

Picket lines and picket signs
Don't punish me with brutality
Talk to me
So you can see
Oh, what's going on
Ya, what's going on
Tell me what's going on
I'll tell you what's going on - Uh
Right on baby
Right on baby

Message

Minute of Reflection or Prayer (Music by Henry Saimo)

Congregation Dialogue

Benediction: Take courage, friends. The way is often hard, the path is never clear, and the stakes are very high. Take courage. Deep down, there is another truth: you are not alone.

Our altar is a simple affair. I cut some flowers growing around my house or on the nearby trail and put them in a glass vase, then set a small, flickering LED candle behind it. This is the message I wrote that was undelivered. It's about five minutes to deliver.

For people my age—for many of you I’m talking about your grandparents and for some of you I’m talking about your parents—1971, the year this album came out, is an important period in American history. All sorts of things were happening that no one had experienced before, much of it pretty bad. You hear some of it reported in the song. “Too many of you dying.” “Picket lines and picket signs.” In 1971, the US was years-deep into an unpopular war in Vietnam that would last another four years before the US declared itself spent and got out. The year before members of the Ohio National Guard at a college called Kent State opened fire on students protesting that war, killing four students. This wasn’t the first time American authorities had killed otherwise peacefully protesting civilians—the previous decade had seen many, many violent responses to demonstrations against the war or in favor of civil rights for blacks or better conditions for people in poverty. And the year after a burglary at a hotel called the Watergate in Washington, DC, would lead to the embarrassing resignation of President Richard Nixon and a cynical, distrusting view of government and politicians that, if anything, has only gotten worse in the following decades.

Everywhere kids like me turned, it seemed there was little point to growing up because society was shredding. Families were breaking apart, drug use was skyrocketing, cancer rates were spreading, as were crime rates and unemployment rates. Outside, the way we’d learned the country was a place of eternal beauty and resources was having the lie put to it. Our rivers and oceans were being polluted by industries that found it easier to dump poisons into the water than to pay for proper disposal, killing off fish by the millions. The fish not killed made it onto peoples’ plates, poisoning us. The pesticides intended to help farmers win the battle against harmful insects and agricultural diseases were also killing the birds that ate infected worms and pets that ate the birds or rolled on their carcasses, and the herbicides we relied on to keep corn and wheat and apples healthy were killing our lawns and fields and burning trees from the inside out.

Something we hope for as humans is that things that are bad will eventually get better. Have things improved in forty-one years? It’s hard to tell, sometimes. Late last month a young troubled man not much older than you posted a very angry document on the Internet blaming women for his problems and then went out to shoot several people, eventually killing nearly 10, including himself. America is still fighting two wars, one of which has lasted longer than all other wars we’ve ever fought. Last week was the 25^th anniversary of events in China’s Tiananmen Square where the military suppressed a student-led demonstration so forcefully that at least hundreds, and maybe thousands, of people died. We argue whether the world’s climate is changing for the worse and whether people are responsible for it. Our reserves of coal and oil are rapidly depleting and some scientists say will disappear in the next 20 or 30 years and the companies that make money from coal and oil discourage development of other resources. Little is being done to change these circumstances, and the next generation, which is you, is being left to either come up with a solution or learn to live with the consequences.

This is an important weekend celebrated by two faiths, called Shavuot by Jews and Pentecost by Christians. Both celebrate the same thing: a time when god gave them the means by which they could live in the world they found themselves in. Jews celebrate the day Moses came down from Mt Sinai with the Ten Commandments, the holy laws that explain in short form how by not killing or stealing you can live a righteous life, and Christians celebrate the emergence of the Holy Spirit among them, helping them see through the minor differences between them like language or the way they look to see each person’s inner Christ.

How do we live rightfully in a world where people are killed indiscriminately by wars or new diseases or angry people with guns, where because of greed the world changes before our eyes while the people responsible for the changes deny it, where jobs and careers are disappearing and the ones that remain pay so much less than the ones they replace that it’s hard to live at all on what they pay? Jews say the answer is to do justice, to be merciful, and walk humbly with God. Christians say it is to love God with your heart and soul and love other people as much as you love yourself. Those are both very good answers. It’s hard, though, to understand how to do that on a daily basis.

But make no mistake, there are very good things happening in the world too.  People are being born and falling in love and taking care of one another all the time, and just to make it personal and specific, between Bar None and Avanti there were four successful discharges just this last week. People in treatment are getting better and you know some of them. Good things happen all the time all around us, often in very small, very personal ways. In the midst of the painful stuff happening in the world, how do we keep from forgetting the good stuff?

It is, I hope, a teen-friendly and especially fidgety teen-friendly type of service. While they're very curious about traditional religion and ask questions about it all the time, they're also distrustful of traditional answers, traditional ceremonies, church, or anything sounding like piety.

But here is what I got to thinking about. After about twenty minutes, when I realized no one was coming, I started cleaning up around the old chapel where I hold services. I looked out at the late spring afternoon and saw boys canoeing, fishing, playing frisbee, and just walking around. If I were them I wouldn't want to spend a beautiful day in Minnesota indoors, either. I started toying with the idea of holding chapel on a weekday evening, at least during the summer and fall months, when there's more to do on the weekend. Another idea playing around my brain is taking chapel to them. One of the arguments for holding services in the chapel, besides the rather nice rustic charm of the old spare building, is that it gets the boys off the unit for an hour. But when I go to the units to hold groups I have much better attendance that I suspect is both from nearness and from interest in what those who don't start out with us hear from their rooms. It may be, too, that my service format, already scaled-down to take from twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on their interest in talking, needs even further paring. I'm open to doing that if it means greater participation.

And it may be, too, that the idea of chapel is so foreign and even repellent to these kids, who may have been forced to attend their parents' churches in the past, that there is no amount of change in how it's done or on what it focuses that can get them past that resistance. From a purely mercenary perspective that's not an issue for me: I'm paid for having been there whether anyone attends or not. But I'd rather think I am accomplishing something.

 

 

sabbath is god's gift

“SABBATH IS

GOD’S GIFT”

I’m old enough to remember when BlueLaws were in effect. Blue Laws were so-called because they were the leftovers of a Puritan-like prohibition against Sunday commerce and were supposed to be the thinking of blue-stockings (the nickname for Oliver Cromwell’s excessively moralistic allies) to the effect that, similar to the thinking of some Pharisees of Jesus’ time, commerce ought to stop on the Sabbath. When I was growing up in the 60s, there were still laws in New York forbidding stores and other businesses from being open on Sunday, the implication being that the public was better served by everyone focusing on God and religious ideas and family instead. (I vaguely remember gas stations being exempt from this since people still had to drive to church or to visit.)

My family was Seventh-Day Adventist and our church met Saturdays, so Sundays for us were sort of the icing on the cake. I remember my mother being glad when the Laws were rescinded so she could grocery shop Sundays, but my own memories of dull, home-bound Sundays were actually pretty content. This might have been the result of being a kid and when you're a kid anything beyond your immediate needs being met is unnecessary. My Sundays began about 5:30 or 6 with a heaping bowl of cereal in front of the TV, whose day was also just starting. (This was another result of the changes in society: radio and television operating 24-7 were a decade away.) I was a regular watcher of Davey and Goliath and other kid-centered, vaguely religious programming which were the only programs on Sunday mornings. Our church services had been the previous day so my parents spent their morning sitting around talking. My dad would drive to visit a former neighbor, a widowed Italian immigrant, and when he came back he'd bring gifts from Pop-Pop: a box of jelly donuts and the Sunday paper. Those days the comics pages were actually up to ten pages long and printed large and there were more than fifty strips, funny animal and adventure and holdovers from the heydays of the 30s like Polly and Her Pals and Mutt and Jeff. I learned from an episode of Buzz Sawyer that you could swim safely among piranha so long as you didn't have any cuts or scrapes.

            Sabbath as we understand it has probably been observed since prehistory.  All three Abrahamic scriptures refer to it as a long-held observance.  It’s likely that in the earliest experiences of people there was a period, perhaps a portion of midday when the sun was hottest, when exertions halted for rest.  This would eventually become a full day and then the same day each week and then its existence attributed to the local creator god.  Sabbath is given specific times in the Abrahamic scriptures, during which worship of the Creator is emphasized as well as emphasis on rest in appreciation of the cosmic Rest taken by the Creator.

            Jews, of course, are the first of the Abrahamic tradition to recognize the Sabbath.  Tanakh reads, “On the seventh day God finished the work that He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day from all the work that He had done. And God blessed the seventh day and declared it holy, because on it God ceased from all the work of creation that He had done” (Genesis 2:2-3).  Tanakh recognizes Saturday, the final day of the week, its placement a holdover from the Babylonian calendar which the exilic Jews would have been forced to use, as a time of especial importance.  MonfordHarris calls it a period of covenantal intimacy.  The

Sabbath is God’s gift to Israel…[It] is particularly associated with Exile.  It is during the long Exile that the covenant had to be strengthened and confirmed.  Exile can weaken Israel’s sense of the covenant, for Exile can corrode the faithfulness of the community…Sabbath guarded the Jews; for Sabbath strengthened Jewish covenantal faithfulness.  (10)

Harris emphasizes a person’s senses to bring him or her closer to God during Sabbath, noting the particular importance of taste, touch and smell.  “Sabbath is necessarily the most sensuous time, since it celebrates the creation of this sensuous world, and it is the senses that appropriate the world” (12).  This glorification of the world’s sensuality is reflected in the book Song of Songs whose place is “as an allegory for the pining of the people of Israel or perhaps the human soul for God…” (Chaim Rabin in Harris, 13).  Harris, whose repetitive emphasis on the appropriateness of sex on the eve of Sabbath manages to seem both progressive and creepy, expands Rabin’s argument that “Sabbath is intimate time between God and the covenantal community” (17). 

            Christians appreciated this emphasis on special worship of God and a time of rest, but altered the day to Sunday, the beginning of the week, their newer testament alluding to its importance by attributing a miraculous act by Paul to that day. 

On the first day of the week, when we met to break bread, Paul was holding a discussion…; since he intended to leave the next day, he continued speaking until midnight…A young man name Eutychus, who was sitting in the window, began to sink off into a deep sleep while Paul talked still longer.  Overcome by sleep, he fell to the ground three floors below and was picked up dead.  But Paul went down, and bending over him took him in his arms, and said, “Do not be alarmed, for his life is in him.”  Then Paul went upstairs; and after he had broken bread and eaten, he continued to converse…until dawn; then he left.  Meanwhile, they had taken the boy away alive and were not a little comforted (Acts 20:7-12). 

Paul’s diffidence may be attributable to his certainty of his work in service to the Lord, but it may also be that he knew a 3-story fall—about 15-20 feet at that time—was unlikely to be fatal to a young person, putting his continued conversation in the face of the boy’s “death” in a slightly different light.  In addition, in his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul directs them (as he says he has the Galatians) to “put aside and save whatever extra you earn” (16:2) for the first day of each week.  Interestingly, despite the tradition among Jews of both worshipping and resting on the Sabbath, Hoyt Hickman notes that, while “Sunday stood out above all other days because it was the weekly anniversary… [commemorating] the Lord’s passion, death, and resurrection…”, it was not a day devoted to rest “until an edict by the Emperor Constantine in AD 321” (18).  Farmers were excused from enforced relaxation. 

            Finally, Islam, which Karen Armstrong characterizes as a very practical religion, building on the faiths of the other People of the Book, again relocated the Sabbath day, this time to Friday, pointing to Sura 62 of the Quran, itself named “Friday:”  “Oh you who believe! when the call for prayer is made on Friday, then hasten to the remembrance of Allah, and leave off trading…[When] the prayer is ended, then disperse abroad in the land and seek of Allah’s grace, and remember Allah much…” (:8-9).[1] 

            HuseyinAlgul writes, “’Friday is the measure of the week, Ramadan the measure of the year, and the hajj the measure of one’s lifetime’…[If] one prays Friday prayer in full consciousness of all that it means, then one is more likely to experience for a whole week the abundance and blessings that arise from it…” (22)  Again reflecting Islam’s identity as a particularly practical faith, Algul emphasizes

It is considered a good action for a Muslim to take a full bath (ghusl) on Friday, to clean the parts of the body that need to be cleaned, to brush the teeth, to put on a light, pleasant scent, to wear clean clothes, and to smile and be pleasant…Muslims should cleanse themselves both spiritually and physically, becoming completely clean…Muslims who make wudu (ritual washing for prayers) carefully and go to the mosque to pray on Fridays, who listen carefully to the sermon, and pray on two successive Fridays, would be forgiven the sins they had committed in between.  (22)

This vision of God as a stern disciplinarian out of a 50s educational film on physical hygiene is reinforced by the insistence in several Suras against transgressing against the Sabbath, going so far in Sura 7:163 as to blame a poor fishing day on it:  “[Ask the unjust] about the town which stood by the sea; when they exceeded the limits of the Sabbath, when their fish came to them on the day of their Sabbath, appearing on the surface of the water, and on the daly on which they did not keep the Sabbath they did not come to them; thus did We try them because they transgressed.”    This is not, of course, limited to Islam.  Harris notes “It has long been noted that Sabbath is richer in prohibitions than in positive acts…[They] are massive and detailed, broad and minute…[They] are intrinsic to the Sabbath…Sabbath is not a natural reality…[It] is different from other days; it is blessed by God.  The prohibitions are aspects of the personal” (14).  And Christians, particularly Protestants, in America long advocated Sunday Blue Laws (apparently without recourse to Scripture since many also insist in a literal reading of Matthew 12:8 that “The Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” rather than, say, local zoning boards).    

            My family has never been big dinner people so we didn't celebrate Sunday with chicken or roast beef feasts. Lunch was usually a sandwich or soup, and then we'd visit someone, usually nursing home residents my folks knew for decades or the widowed members of one of their fraternal organizations. I was always bored and brought a book with me. Afterward we'd drive just for the sake of motion and novelty.  There was a security sitting in the back seats of those cars, the rarely-used seatbelts clanking emptily against the exposed steel of the doors. All was right with the world or at least my part of it was. I had few demands outside those long, dull visits with people I never really knew except the demands of homework before a bath and bed. Sundays were quiet days when naps were allowed and music played softly from the TV or the car radio, gospel punctuated by isolated shouts from the congregation.

There is something to be said for the religious requirement of there being nowhere to go and nothing to do outside the home except visiting friends or spending the day in a park or the forest or on the road, acquiescing to the enforced demands of worship and rest. My wife and I have regular Sabbaths during which we do nothing except read together, preferably outside.  There is an ease to life shredded by the personal need to shop.  Silence in the absence of TV or radio signals (or even of the internet if that was possible), while I suspect it would drive many—including me—crazy, would also press us to rely on ourselves and our friends for conversation and news. There is an argument to be made that there is secular benefit to reining in the demands of contemporary life by making certain everyone had the day off (outside necessities like law enforcement and hospitals). To avoid showing favoritism it needn't be Sundays or even another weekend day.  It could be midweek providing nearly everyone with same day off, the lack of outside electrical entertainment and commerce making nearly everyone reliant on one another, an enforced companionability. It probably wouldn’t work, at least initially. But there is nonetheless a certain peace had by having nowhere to go and nothing to do.

WORKS CITED

·         Algul, Huseyin.  2005.  The Blessed Days and Nights of the Islamic Year.  Somerset, NJ; The Light, Inc.

·         Berlin, Adele, and Marc Brettler, editors.  2004.  The Jewish Study Bible.  New York, NY; Oxford University Press.

·         Coogan, Michael.  2007.  The New Oxford Annotated Bible (NRSV).  New York, NY; Oxford University Press.

·         Harris, Monford.  1992.  Exodus and Exile:  The Structure of the Jewish Holidays.  Minneapolis, MN; Augsburg Fortress Press.

·         Hickman, Hoyt, Don Saliers, Laurence Stookey, and James White.  1992.  The New Handbook of the Christian Year:  Based on the Revised Common Lectionary.  Nashville, TN:  Abingdon Press.

·         Shakir, M.H., translator.  2004.  Quran.  Elmhurst, NY; Tahrike Tarsile Quran, Inc.

·         Yuksel, Edip, Layth Saleh al-Shaiban, and Martha Schulte-Nafeh, translators and annotators.  2010.  Quran:  A Reformist Translation.  [Unknown]; Brainbow Press.

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[1] Interestingly, a note in Edip Yuksel points out that, while “The traditional understanding [of Jummah] consider it a reference to…Friday…the Arabic word could be a description of any day picked by a group of people for assembly prayer, [or] for a public event with political, social, and spiritual purposes” (Yuksel, Sura n062:009). 

sunday music

in preparation for a final essay for one of my classes this semester, I've been doing a lot of thinking about sabbath, mostly reflecting on my experiences on it, but in the past few days I've given some thought to what sort of music one should listen to on sabbath.  I'm not a big gospel or religious music fan, if by religious music we mean stuff that not so subtly sings praise (although put me in a tent revival with swinging and clapping and hipshaking and I'm there).  the music I've been thinking about is more relaxed, downbeat, big on instrumentation and soaring solos.  if I was a musician I'm sure I'd know the right terms. so if I can't explain it in words I'll have to explain by example.  what I mean is this, and this, and this, and this, and this.  I'm aware they're all 80s and early 90s songs, and yours will differ, because I suspect what they reflect is music I heard when I had an image in my mind of gentle, long days with nothing necessary to do except brunch and crossword puzzles and sips of wine, watching the sun flow across the wall.  and I didn't have such days then.  I suspect, like the argument that the music that means the most to us reflects the period of our lives when we made the most emotional advances, the music we want for sabbath listening reflects that period when we most yearned for sabbath. 

alternatives to church (2)

I thought I remembered a book by stormie omartian that came out some decade or so ago, but the internet isn't backing me up, so it's obviously by someone else. but when I was at buns & noodles and in charge of the religion section, I used to reliably see a book cover of a title something like "what to do when your husband doesn't believe." the cover had a drawing of a man mowing the lawn and the presumption was that he was doing this instead of, say, going to church on a sunday morning. I remember my wife noticing it once and saying of it, "she's lucky her husband mows the lawn on sunday."

that's in my head today because I opted not to go to church but to stay at home and mow the lawn instead. this has got me thinking, of course, because it's the sabbath, or the day I regularly celebrate as the sabbath (as well as its being mother's day), and my practice is to do as little as possible on the sabbath. but here I am, sweetly smelly and sweaty with the odor of cut grass and dandelions and a trifle burnt from the sun, and feeling very, very good about it.

this has been a long, eventful week, and it has rained a lot, so the grass has gotten tall and I like to keep it at a length at which I can see things in my path. that's not to say I couldn't wait until tomorrow, presuming it doesn't rain, to mow, or later in the week for that matter. but I opt to mow on this day not in spite of the sabbath but because of it. I'm as in favor as the next guy of keeping my sabbath idle, but work is a holy activity too. when I am teaching or listening to someone or planting or walking dogs or mowing I am taking an active part in the universe, thanking it by paying attention to it. zen masters say that when one mows the lawn, one should mow with one's whole being. well, they should say that.

but when I am doing something as trivial as mowing and I am in my groove, it is an act as delightful to reality and god as any words of contrition or praise. I am in the place I ought to be in and doing the thing I ought to do. we must take heed, after all, of jesus when he reminds us "the sabbath was made for people, and not people for the sabbath."