SUnday Morning Meds--from Psalm 32

 

“Do not fret because of evil men 

or be envious of those who do wrong. . .”

 

The only fret I have is whether or not I do enough frettin’.  

 Take my mother, for instance—she’s sure that the world is slowly sinking toward a moral morass, some iniquitous black hole that will eventually suck most all of us in, until, gloriously, the Lord, in glory, comes again.  She frets about the life’s seamy appearances, and her continual frettin’ affects her mood.

 She’s old enough to deserve my respect no matter what her views or how much she frets; besides, she’s my mother.  But I’m not taken by the way she flirts with such obsessions because I don’t think she should spend the last years of her life frettin’.

 We live in strange times.  I don’t think it’s possible to locate an era in the last decade or so when spirituality in general and Christianity in particular was ever quite so popular.  The vast majority of Americans, unlike citizens of any other nation, claim to believe in God.  A significant majority go to worship frequently.  Crime is down, as is drug use, as is teen-age pregnancy.  Even abortion rates are lower than they were.

 On the campus where I teach, just about every student wears a t-shirt with a Bible verse.  Students flock to praise-n-worship gatherings voluntarily and exude a piety that existed only among the most devout just twenty years ago.  Lots of parents tell me their kids are far more spiritually mature at 18 than they were at that age. 

 Politically, the U. S. government is in the hands of Republicans, my mother’s party.  Many politicos and pundits claim the last Presidential election was a wake-up call to many opinion-leaders who never took Christians seriously.  Most major newspapers now concede that for too long they didn’t have a clue about what was going on in the hearts and heads of an huge segment of their own readership—American evangelicals. 

 It’s difficult to argue, I think, that we’re all going to hell in a handbasket, although sometimes I think my mother would like to think so.  Specifically, what troubles her is that this Christian nation is becoming secular, forbidding prayer and tolerating abortion, tossing the Ten Commandments and, in its place establishing, “political correctness.” 

 I think she’s frettin’ way too much.  She thinks I’m worse—liberal. 

 When Black Sunday came to the Great Plains, when clouds of dust arose from recently plowed Oklahoma land and swept all the way up into South Dakota like a murky blizzard, lots of good people presumed the world was at end.  Not long ago, a woman told me that she had a childhood memory of looking up at the preacher in the little country church she attended and, on Black Sunday, seeing only the preacher’s white collar.

When things got dark, good people thought we’d finally come to end times.  It’s understandable, but it didn’t happen.  Most believers I know plot out the trajectory of our lives in the same direction—things are just getting worse and worse. 

 Maybe not.  But then, as I said, maybe I just don’t fret like she does.  Maybe I will in just a few years.

 But I know this—both Mom and I can take heart from verse one of Psalm 37, which says, in a nutshell, “don’t do that.”  The enemy—whoever they are—aren’t worth my time or anxiety, nor are they worth hers. 

 Next week I’ll quote that verse to her.  Maybe it will help. 

 Probably not.  She’ll probably still think I’m a liberal.     

On political parties

It's a used car, not new, but it's our new car, as distinguished from our old Subaru. This one is a cherry red Buick, and it's become Barb's car. She's the one who drives it.

And she'd warned me: "there's not much gas in the Buick." Her warning stuck. I knew. What's worse, new cars won't let you forget: signs with warnings appear all over. What I'm saying is, I knew the Buick was low on gas; I'd checked the gauge myself. But the needle hadn't sunk to no-man's land so I figured I could get up on top the hill, hardly a half mile away.

And let me just say this. I have no idea if it's still a good idea or not, but the warning is there, permanently, in my mind. "Ya' should, really, run a new car out of gas so you know where the needle means it when it points below the E." I didn't make that up. It's the kind of thing that seeps into your psyche when you're flashing your first driver's license--KNOW when and where you'd better believe the needle!"

I didn't. I ran out. Well, the Buick ran out. 

At least it was in a convenient spot, an empty parking lot beneath a housing development that's not there yet--thankfully, in no one's way. 

Let me begin by saying this. We live in senior housing, a place where everything outside the condo is managed, which means I got rid of every last lawn implement before we moved here. Hence, I've got no gas can. 

I'm out of gas--sure--but I'm also shit out of luck, as we used to say.

"Go to WalMart," I tell myself. (We've got two cars.) "Buy a new gas can, stop at Coop or Casey's or wherever, fill up that new gas can, get back here to the useless Buick at the top of the hill. No sweat, and you can always use a gas can."

My dad used to start the charcoal out back by splashing a little gas over the coals before dropping a match. Not until one of my friends saw him do it, did I think of what he was doing as risky. 

The one I grabbed off the shelf is a gas can, all red, cherry-red and round, but it's affixed with a spout that, for the life of me I can't operate. I'm an old man. I've been lighting charcoal fires for more than a half century, never with gasoline. I mean, I know there's danger; but this brand new gas can features safety apparatus which appears to be dysfunctional. I can't get the dumb thing to open the spout. It's obvious that it's there on the spout for safety sake. I get that. I can't lug a gallon of gas back to the Buick because I can't operate the gas can--are you kidding me? I can't do it.

 I put gas in the can by removing the whole spout and pumping a gallon in at the Coop, but when we get back to the Buick (now my suffering spouse of 54 years is here too), I can't get that gallon into the thirsty Buick because I can't operate the doohickey on the spout of the bright new gas can.

And neither can Barb, who's far more mechanically-inclined than her writer/husband, and neither can some other retired guy who's just arrived up on the hill to get his early afternoon walk in. I recruit him to try, offer him a kind of 'good Samaritan" thing. 

Some words were spoken that shouldn't have been--not as many as I uttered in London a decade ago when driving from the left side of the car was just as confounding as figuring out what on earth a roundabout was when you're in it. 

Frustration, sheer frustration creates a climate in which a few naughty words are tolerated, I think--or hope. 

We take the Subaru back to Coop, where Marv smiles befriendingly and lends us a great black funnel, which means we get the Buick going again.

But that blasted doohicky still pisses me off because it won. 

Now I'm normally proud to be a Democrat, even though as such I'm hen's teeth in the neighborhood. I can guess at the story of that doohickey on the gas can's spout. Some Democrats determined that a gas can without some safety mechanism risked bodily injury and even death, turning people like my dad, years ago, into a pillar of flame. "So let's just create a safety feature and make it mandatory on every gas can sold in this country," some lousy do-gooder told his lib buddies.

The whole story makes me think seriously about wandering over to the Republicans, where, rest assured, they're all as angry as I am about too many gal-durn safety regulations.

Anybody need a gas can? Used only once. . .

Missouri River, 07/06

The longest American river isn't all that far away. I've been playing around in its history for years now, developing stories from its treasured history. No matter where you go up and down its banks, it's stunning in its quiet beauty.

But all that beauty makes it difficult to photograph. No matter what you shoot, the Missouri River is bigger, and all that bigness doesn't easily fit in a camera, no matter what lens you're carrying. 

No matter how or where you shoot, what you go home with is small potatoes. I never learned my lesson, no matter how often I tripped the shutter: if there's any here, I click away.

On a day in July, a decade ago, beauty was all around, and I was arrogant enough to fire away, trying to get some of it on my memory card. Nothing here comes close to the level of stunning witnessable that day, all around.

Real actual beauty is legendary, always out of reach of the camera, but I'm thankful for what I can take home.

Sunday Brunch

Take it from an old man, it's just plain easier to look back when there is so much of it behind you, so much more than what's out front. Trust me on that point--I'm aging. Whether or not I'm "aged" is, even in my mind, in dispute. 

I've been writing for fifty years, and what's clear to me these days is that there is far more "back there" than there is out front. 

So for years already I've putting together a couple of books from things I wrote years--decades!--ago. One is a collection of short stories from back yonder; it's presently with a publisher. And another is a collection of short short stories (I mean it that way) about worship, little stories I wrote on request, stories that appeared long ago in a magazine titled Reformed Worship.   

It's been fun to go through them again, like meeting old but dear friends. 

"Brunch" is a good example. Like the others in the collection I'm putting together, it has duel aims: it intends to be a good story first of all, but the magazine's readership is sharply defined as church members who think about what we do when we worship: it has to flirt with the way we worship.

Here's "Brunch," the whole thing. It's Sunday dinner at the home of Pete and Sandy. The kids are long-ago out of the house. Pete is a member of his congregation's worship committee.

*

“So, on a scale of one to five, what’s my Sunday dinner rate, Mr. Eminent Critic?” Sandy said, leaning back in her chair.

“Three-and-a-half stars. An anemic four maybe,” Pete said, one eyebrow cocked, while spreading what Sandy considered too much margarine on the last piece of coffee cake.

“Sunday brunches are very in, sir,” she said. “I got docked because I didn’t make potatoes and gravy.” She picked the last piece of pineapple from the fruit dish and placed it daintily in her mouth, as if they were dining at the Waldorf. “I confess,” she said, holding up both hands, “I simply cannot make big Sunday dinners.”

Outside, the sun was beaming the way it’s supposed to do on a Sunday afternoon. “This may come as some surprise, but I’m not shocked at your confession,” Pete said.

She looked at him as if deeply aggrieved. “For all these years I’ve thought of it as my secret sin.”

“Why don’t you pass me the rest of that bacon?” he said. “That reminds me--did you notice anything strange about the worship this morning?”

Sandy shrugged her shoulders.

“About the confession of sin?” A hint.

“I’m sorry to say I don’t remember,” Sandy said.

Pete reached for the bulletin he’d left near the phone. “Mind wandering again, eh?” He opened the bulletin and pointed to the order of worship.

Sandy took the sheet from him and followed the lines with her fingers, read it twice, then looked up and shrugged her shoulders. “I’m not supposed to like it, I take it,” she said.

“I just wondered what you thought,” he said.

She sat there, the bulletin in her fingers, waiting for him to explain. Pete sipped loudly on his coffee. “Well,” she said, “what’s the beef?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“It’s not ‘nothing,’ my dear, or you wouldn’t have asked.”

“Maybe I’m overreacting. Just forget it.”

“Pete, don’t do this to me,” she said. “What’s the gripe?”

He broke a strip of bacon with the side of his fork. “I wondered if you thought that new confession we’re using is a little--how-do-you-say-it?--maybe a little heavy, a little too ‘wretched’?--kind of ‘I’m-way-too-full-of-sin’?”

Sandy looked back at the lines: “Lord,” it read, “we have sinned. We have sought our own desires while forgetting our neighbors’ needs. We have searched for fulfillment in things and despised the promptings of the Spirit. We have gloried in our law and neglected your Word--”

“Pretty bleak?” Pete said.

Sandy spooned up the last few ounces of fruit juice. “I don’t particularly like to admit it, but all this on the list may be true.”

“Come on,” Pete said.

“Really.”

“I didn’t know you were so full of sin, you old Calvinist.”

“We all are.”

“That much?”

Sandy looked again at the words. “Yes, that much.” She picked up the kids’ silverware and laid it on their plates.

“Reading it bothered me. I just don’t feel so miserable about myself, I guess.” He pulled the sheet away from her. “Is that wrong?”

“Maybe it is--”

“Sandy--”

“No, I mean it. You know what it says in the Bible: ‘If we claim to be without sin, we deceive ourselves and the truth is not in us.”

“Sandy, for pity’s sake--”

“I don’t think the Bible says ‘except for Pete Baker, who’s not a half-bad Joe’--”

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly. We’re all full of sin, aren’t we? Even the great dinner critic?”

Pete looked miffed. “Where does it say in the Bible that we have to walk around all day with our chins in the gutter?”

“That’s not the point, Mr. Perfect.” She poked a piece of banana and held it up to his mouth. “Here, sweeten up a bit.” Reluctantly, Pete opened up. “The point is that we have assurance that we’re forgiven. Here, read this.” She reached over and pointed at the assurance printed with the worship. “You got any more bacon?”

“Am I your slave? What do you say?” she said, dropping the worship sheet back near the phone.

“Confucius say, ‘Pretty lady no cook but sharp cookie.’”

“Talk about anemic,” Sandy said.

“Now tell me,” Pete said, cleaning out the last of the scrambled eggs. “How do you get so smart when you don’t even listen in church?”

“I’m the one who listens. You didn’t even hear the Assurance, did you?

Peter grimaced, as if he’d just taken a bite of bitter herbs. “Got me again,” he said, “but it’s a dietary problem with me. I’m not getting the right foods, and it’s affecting my mind--”

“Aha, the old ‘the woman-thou-hast-given-me’ thing. Now, that’s ‘original sin.’”

“I’m sorry,” Pete said.

“And you’re forgiven.” Sandy grabbed the rest of the dishes from the table. “By the way, you remember it’s your turn to cook tonight, don’t you?--what’re we having?”

We're out

If you're so perfectly sure that same-sex marriage is an abomination before the eyes of God, then what went down at the synod of the church to which I have belonged for my entire life, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), makes sense, I suppose.

What happened, or so it seems, was that the CRC Synod of 2026 decided to leave a worldwide association of Reformed churches, an association the CRC had a significant role in creating just ten years ago on the campus of Calvin University (MI). There is some irony there, of course; the CRC played a major role in creating the union of churches that, a decade after its birth, we have now walked out of.

The reason for our hasty departure, as you might guess, is the "liberal" positions taken by the organization we played such an important role in founding--read "same-sex" marriage and associated issues below the belt. "Delegates to synod expressed concern over some of the organization’s statements on moral, theological, and social justice issues," the denominational magazine said.

Feels a bit like understatement.

So, we're out. We'll quit the group we started because we can't be associated with sinners who don't condemn abortion or make unholy allowances for same-sex marriage.

The CRC has been on a tear in recent years, trying its Sunday best to remain clean and pure in the face of the abominations a culture all-too willing to transgress any and all attempts at remaining pure in a sinful world.

Thank you, but we'll have none of that. Even talking with such sinners is an abomination. No more. "They (the worldwide association we quit) have had a corrupting influence on us," one delegate, arguing for severing the bonds said on the floor of the recently concluded denominational synod. "We have not had a preservative influence on them.”

I suppose that's one way to judge our lives--on the basis of what we're not; but for some time now we (CRCNA) have been flirting with the worst of the ancient and negative presentments associated with the word "Calvinist." This summer we've proven ourselves to have earned anew such associations: "We're Calvinists! Just ask us, the truly righteous, if you want to know the truth about God."

That some people leave that kind of fellowship is understandable. That others take joy in such positions, to me seems much less so.

Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 121

 

“The LORD will keep you from all harm—

he will watch over your life;. . .”

 

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t because my knowing it would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

 

One part of his job was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

 

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

 

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that church elders should be Godly statesmen and women, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elder-ly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I held the office, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

 

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from thugs who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, the two of them were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

 

I knew them. I’d walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I knew that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some species of the evil they’d perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that some Sabbath morning they’d be in the northwest corner of a state called Iowa doling out the body and blood of Christ? Amazing.

 

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

 

Amazing grace.  

Ubi Sunt

For one semester--and for reasons I've long ago forgotten--I lived in college housing in a basement apartment beneath a brick apartment building, downtown Sioux Center, Iowa. First semester, junior year it was, I believe, right downtown, just an alley between us and the offices of the mayor of the village. 

I don't know that I ever met him personally, although I'm quite sure had I run into him on the street, he would have smiled to acknowledge me. The town mayor lived an odd life for a resident of this cow town on the prairie. Most of his life--we were sure--was lived in his next-door office, not around a fireplace at his home. He was the mayor, very highly respected, acknowledged to be the major mover-and-shaker in his town. Most histories would agree that he hustled the town into becoming thriving little burg it has become.

His strange, off-hour comings-and-goings from that downtown office only increased our estimation of his character--and his mystery: that the man lived to lead Sioux Center seemed perfectly obvious. To the college guys who lived next door, downstairs in those basement rooms, the Mayor seemed town royalty.

But back then he wasn't the only potentate. There was another too, the man who had quite single-handedly chosen Sioux Center, Iowa, as the home of a new college to be created by people from the same tiny denomination, the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC) as he and his congregation. That college was and is Dordt College (now "university"). Together, the Pres and the Mayor were the town royalty--they shared the throne and, at least to our 20-year old perceptions, got along royally.

The Mayor's Office is now a laundromat, but the apartment building looks just about exactly as it looked fifty years ago. Sioux Center is probably twice as big as it was in the late Sixties, and the college the Pres carved into existence now enrolls twice as many students, a majority of whom are not members of the CRC. Things change.

Yesterday was the funeral of a daughter of the Pres, not the oldest child but the first of what was once the royal family to pass away. But today most people around town don't remember anything of  her regal birth, or of the royal family from which she came. What ordinary folks know is that she was a long-time elementary school teacher, that her husband is a fine man, a good father. They  may also know that the two of them had three children, each of whom is married, the oldest of which has reached "middle-age."

A small crowd will be gathering, I'm sure. Whatever royal status her father (and her mother) had achieved a half-century ago won't be visible at the ceremony. People are sad, friends and relatives are mourning, but the funeral itself will not be royal. 

Cancer took her. Death, not a respecter of persons, came too early, as it often does. 

It's an old, old story, retold in every town and village on Planet Earth, isn't it? Crowns tarnish, storied lives turn to dust--after all, life is fleeting, memory is all we have, all achievements are temporary. It's one of the oldest songs we sing.

Sometimes when I go past that brick apartment building, I wonder whether anyone still lives in that basement apartment. I wonder if I'd be really polite, I could bargain my way in sometime just to look around, just to remember. 

It's a bargain with truth, isn't it?--because try as we might, we can't go home again. The only rest is eternity. "I am not my  own," the creeds beg us to promise. Death is the final seal.

An old friend, daughter of a preacher, once told me her father used to say that when he did a funeral he learned to just get out of the way. "Just read a psalm," he used to remind himself, she said, "just Psalm 90, no more: "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom."

I don't know that I'd really like to see that basement apartment where, just about sixty years ago, we used to live. It can't possibly be the same. Nothing is.

Ubi sunt--one of the oldest themes in human literature, comes up effortlessly on days like today, one of mankind's oldest lamentations--"where have all the flowers gone?"