The Lord is Good to Me

Many nights at the Miller Manse dinner table we sing our grace. One of our favorites is one that many of you may know. It is called the Johnny Appleseed prayer. “The Lord is good to me/ and so I’d like to thank/ God for giving me/ the things I need/ the sun and the rain and the apple seed/ the Lord is good to me/ Amen. I’ve been singing that grace for a lot of years. You see, I learned that song in the summer between the fourth and fifth grades while spending a week as a junior camper at Bethelwoods Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center in York, South Carolina, just south of the North Carolina border.
I remember the beautiful wooded hills and the lake that rested in the middle of the camp, where we canoed. I also remember that my camp counselor was a college student named Ernest. We thought that was the funniest thing ever as that wasn’t long after the movie Ernest Goes to Camp had come out. There are a few other things I remember too, but mostly I remember that sung prayer that I’ve passed on to my kids.

I have also had the opportunity a couple of times to work with Mo Ranch Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center in Hunt, Texas out in the seemingly endless hills of the Texas Hill Country. For two weeks one summer I was a small group leader for their Junior High Jubilee Conference and then just this past summer I was the keynote speaker for one week of Junior High Jubilee. Both times I worked there I served alongside several college students and young adults who told me stories about how they had gone to Mo Ranch for summer camp and conferences since they were young elementary kids. They talked about how they couldn’t imagine summer without Mo Ranch. Many of them even referred to it as a holy place, as I’m sure it is not only for them but for hundreds or thousands of others.

In my three-and-a-half years as Associate Pastor for Youth at First Presbyterian Church in Norman, Oklahoma several of the youth I served spent their summers at Dwight Mission Presbyterian Camp and Retreat in Vian, Oklahoma. Many of them had gone to summer camp there as young elementary kids and went all the way through the
Leaders in Training and Counselors in Training Programs. Now that they are college students they continue to return as counselors, often volunteering when Dwight Mission cannot afford to pay more counselors. I even have one of my youth from Norman, a young woman named Jane Alsup, who is about to graduate high school who is going to work as a kitchen assistant at Dwight Mission just so she can play games with the kids in the evenings. FPC Norman supported Dwight Mission so well that one year our congregation even won an award from Indian Nations Presbytery for sending twenty-one kids to summer camp at Dwight Mission in one summer!

I am not going out on a limb at all to say that many of the young adults I have gotten to know who are most mature in their faith and most attached to the Presbyterian Church (USA) are those who got involved in Presbyterian summer camps and stayed involved through high school. I am absolutely convinced that Presbyterian Church (USA) camps are a big piece of the puzzle in getting young adults and young families involved in Presbyterian Churches again. Many families have quit sending their kids to Presbyterian church camps and instead send their kid to every sport or dance camp imaginable, which I think is a real shame. If we, as a congregation and as families, are serious about raising our children up in the Christian faith in a Presbyterian way then PC(USA) church camps need to be a priority for us once again.

There used to be a PC(USA) camp in Lancaster called Geneva Hills. Some of you may have memories of it. I am not sure if you are aware that the PC(USA) had to sell it because usage of it wasn’t enough anymore to make it financially possible to keep it. It still exists but it is now a non-denominational camp with no Presbyterian affiliation. How sad. Now the closest Presbyterian Church (USA) camp is Kirkmont Presbyterian Camp and Conference Center near Zanesfield, Ohio. It is officially in Miami Presbytery but it is now our Presbyterian Camp too. You have probably noticed the display I put up in our entry way on the Hinde Street side. I really hope that you will consider sending your kids or grandkids to Kirkmont this summer for camp or taking your family out for one of their themed family camping weekends. Kirkmont is just ninety minutes away. In late July my soon to be six year old son Wyatt and I are going together for three days to Kirkmont Kids Kamp, which is a summer camp experience for K-3 kids who aren’t ready to be away from their parents for camp yet. The parent stays there with the kid and the camp is designed for both kid and parent participation. I can’t wait! I keep slipping and telling Wyatt that he’s going to camp with me, then having to correct myself and tell him that I’m going to camp with him. Also, on September 10 I’m going to attend one of their Clergy Renewal days called “Cultivating Resilience in the Ministry.”

I really hope you will prayerfully consider Kirkmont this summer. You would be amazed at the drastic transformation that can take place in a congregation that is involved in camping ministries. As I mentioned above, kids who go to PC(USA) camps
are often more mature in their faith and they tend to love the PC(USA) and seem less likely to bail on our denomination when they go off to college. Plus, they learn tremendous cooperative, leadership, and recreational skills. It doesn’t look bad on a college resume either. Please take a look at this link at the summer camp opportunities for Kindergarteners all the way through Graduating Seniors. The Mission committee has already pledged money for scholarships or “camperships” and if they were to run out of money I am positive that I could talk to a few generous benefactors and help to send any kid who wants to go to Kirkmont. In twenty-five years I want my kids to be teaching their kids the songs and prayers they learned as a camper at Kirkmont.

So check out the summer camp schedule and descriptions of all the offerings at Kirkmont.

How Did We Ever Live Without It?

This coming Sunday you will see some new screens and projectors in our sanctuary. This has been a long time coming, having been in the works since before I was even a candidate for this position. I probably would not have made the suggestion for these technologies myself.
This is not because I don't like the idea--I very much do like the idea. I just know that decisions that deal with worship style need to come from within the congregation itself if they have any chance of working. Personally, I'm excited about the new opportunities this technology will open up for us but I wanted to touch base before it happens.

Churches have been using projectors and screens since the 1980's. So why has it taken us until 2012 to do this? Firstly, as far as I am concerned, we don't get the technology just because "everybody else" has it. In my opinion that is an adolescent reason. I can hear my dad's voice saying, "If every other church jumped off a bridge would you?" We are getting it because it makes sense for us now. In 2012 it makes sense for us. If other churches had it decades ago then good for them. For us, however, in 1992 and 2002 it didn't make sense. In 2012 it does.

I don't think there is anything wrong with being "late adopters" of certain technologies. Actually, I think that often it is the wisest and most discerning path to take. Every time a new version of the ipad or iphone comes out, people get in line outside of Apple stores days beforehand and camp out to get it. They must have the ipad 3. Their ipad 2 works just fine but it is worth $700 to them to replace it with one that has a few upgrades. They have an iphone 4 but they simply must have the iphone 4S because it talks back to you. Big deal. Maybe you should talk to your kids. They'll talk back to you too.

I've always been a late adopter of technologies. For years it wasn't by choice. When all my friends got a Nintendo, I was still playing the Atari because my parents didn't want to blow a bunch of money so I could play Super Mario Brothers on Nintendo when the original Mario Brothers on Atari was working just fine. I used to resent that but now I respect it. Most of my friends had a cell phone before I got one. Why? Because they got one when they wanted one. I got one when I needed one, when it made sense for me. I didn't get a laptop when they were new because I didn't need one. When I went to seminary it made a whole heck of a lot of sense so I did it. I didn't sign up on Facebook when I was pastoring a church of 80 year olds. When I changed positions and started working with 16 year olds I signed up. Why? Because it made sense. Being a late adopter gives you time to watch to see whether or not it is something that will be useful to you. It allows you the distance to determine if it is a want or a need, if it is a toy or a tool. I'm not interested in buying toys with our tithes and offerings. Even the ping pong table we just bought for the youth room isn't merely a toy. Have you ever tried to find out what is going on in the life of a 15 year old boy by sitting across from him and asking him how he's doing? You'll get more information out of a captured Navy Seal. But chat with him while you're playing ping pong and you've got a real shot at finding out that he's failing Algebra, his girlfriend just dumped him, and his parents won't stop fighting.

And let's be honest, if you are reading this blog post then you are not allowed to say that technology has no place in the ministry and mission of the church. You're participating in it as you read this sentence. But, you may say, it's different in the sanctuary. Technology doesn't belong in there. At one point in history Christians didn't think any song that wasn't one of the Psalms belonged in worship. At another time Christians didn't want a pipe organ in the sanctuary. What about microphones and speakers? That's technology. Do they belong in the sanctuary? Well, yeah, okay but that's just so people can hear and understand what you're saying up there. It doesn't do us any good to communicate the gospel if people can't understand what we're saying. Ah, now we're on to something here.

We are getting screens and projectors because we live in a visual age. Images carry more weight for a large part of our population than words. I am, myself a visual person. This may sound strange coming from someone who writes so much. But I visualize everything before I write it. I can see the movie playing in my head. Then I write it as I see it. I read recently in Larry McMurtry's (Lonesome Dove, Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show) memoir that he always watched his novels in his head as he wrote them. Give me written instructions on how to do something I'm in trouble. Tell me how to do it--even worse. Show me how to do it then I'm right there with you. The screens will allow us to communicate the gospel visually. Like the introduction of hymns, of the organ, of microphones, these screens are all about communicating the gospel so more people can encounter the message. They aren't toys; they're tools.

Don't worry, we are not going to get rid of our hymnals. We will use the screens for any song that we now print the lyrics in the bulletin. Most of our songs come from our hymnals and enough of our congregation can read music that having the music with the words is helpful for many of us. We will probably put the Doxology and Lord's Prayer on the screens instead of in the bulletins. We'll put the final benediction song up there instead of on overhead projectors that belong in a museum. There will be videos from the PCUSA about special offerings to help us understand where our money is going. We will make our own videos about Wednesday night dinners or of church members sharing why they love this church. We will purchase short videos that will help me make my point in sermons. Some of these videos really bring the scriptures to life. It opens up a world of posibilities!

So who cares about what other churches have been doing for years or continue to refuse to do. We're doing this because it makes sense for the ministry and mission of this church right now. It didn't make sense in the past and it doesn't make sense to wait any longer. We'll have some glitches at first and most of us will have moments when we think, "Did we do the right thing?" But be patient and openminded. Once we get the hang of it and once we get used to it, it will be like me with my iphone 4 that I waited years before getting--I don't know how I ever lived without it.

Finding Comfort at the Zoo

Looking back on the past seven or eight days or so, my family and I seem to have had an animal themed week. With Wyatt being on Spring Break, we took our first family trip to the famed Columbus Zoo. There must have been a pretty wild party the night before because the lions, pumas, brown bear, polar bears, and leopards were all asleep. The male lion was so conked out he was lying on his back with two of his claws hanging on to the chain link fence like he had just collapsed there. One of the brown bears had passed out lying across a large log like it was a barrel. Even the goats in the petting zoo area looked half asleep. Finally one of the elephants decided to put on a show by getting in a pool and spraying water. The little penguins were fun to watch too as they waddled around before diving into the water and playfully swimming around. The male gorilla was in top form too running back and forth and showing his teeth just on the other side of the glass from all the kids who were gathered there. Of course my kids thought the best part was that the gorilla kept pointing his rear end at the crowd. All in all it was a wonderful day and we even got sunburns—on April 2! As you can see from the picture, it tuckered us out.

On Easter day we had the opportunity to go out to Roger and Arlene Thompson’s place for Easter lunch and they invited our young yellow lab Eli to come with us. With six acres to play on we found out just how far he is willing to run to retrieve a ball and he tired himself out so much he climbed up on their back porch and just laid his face in the water bowl. After we got home we finally fulfilled a promise to Wyatt to get him a fish for his little one gallon fish tank. Wyatt’s new roommate is a beautiful blue Beta fish who Wyatt so originally named “Sponge Bob Squarepants.”

Another portion of our animal themed week was that we watched the movie We Bought a Zoo, which is an Americanized telling of actual events in the life of a family in England, which stars Matt Damon and Scarlett Johanson. We were expecting a silly and kid-targeted film, something like Mr. Popper’s Penguins, which is a cute, funny movie. But We Bought a Zoo didn’t turn out to be that type of movie. Don’t get me wrong, there wasn’t any violence or sex, and there were probably only three or four cuss words, all spoken at moments when most of us probably would let one fly. We Bought a Zoo wasn’t what we expected because it was really a very deeply moving film about a man and his two kids dealing with the death of their wife/mother just six months or so prior.

Benjamin Mee and his two kids, aged 14 and 7, have decided to get out of their apartment in the city (somewhere in California in this Americanized version) to buy a house out in the country. The reasoning for this involves all the difficult memories that are in their apartment and the fact that his 14-year-old son has just been expelled from school as a result of continued acting out in the months since his mother’s death. Target stores must have paid a bunch of money for product placement because the characters keep mentioning that their new house will be nine miles from the closest Target store. Oh, horror of horrors! When Benjamin finds the house that really calls out to him he is then informed that it comes with a zoo on the property. In defiance of his older brother’s advice and his 14-year-old’s protests, he blows his inheritance on the zoo. The film then becomes about the relationships between Benjamin and his new zoo staff, Benjamin and the animals, and Benjamin and his kids. It’s a movie about relationships in the aftermath of the loss of the person you loved most in the whole world.

There is a heart wrenching scene in which an argument finally explodes between Benjamin and his son. The boy feels that their new life is the result of his father’s selfishness, that his dad must think he’s the only one who lost somebody. The father, Benjamin, is worn out and frustrated, from grief and stress, and needs his son to start participating in life again, especially in relationship to the boy’s seven-year-old sister. It was interesting to me that I realized during the scene that for so long when I saw scenes like that I still related to the child instead of the parent. This time, finally, I related to the father. The sense of loss and desperate grasping for some sort of comfort in the scene ended with Danielle and I both having eyes filled with tears. There is a parallel storyline as well about a 17-year-old tiger that needs to be put down that Benjamin can’t bring himself to make the choice. Throughout the movie, the stories of the animals often parallel the emotions of the humans.

So why do I bring up We Bought a Zoo? It wasn’t a “Christian” movie in any sense (I usually don’t like those anyway as the screenwriting and acting is often quite terrible) and I don’t think God is mentioned once. But as a Christian, I cannot help but think of God when I watch a movie about relationships in the aftermath of devastating loss. A good friend of mine was killed in a car accident when he was only 26 (I was 21 at the time), and as I mentioned a few Sundays ago my Granny died back in 2005. But I have never experienced the loss of someone as close to me as a spouse or parent. I know some of you have, and I cannot even imagine what that must be like.

In 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14, the Apostle Paul writes, “Brothers and sisters, we do not want you to be uninformed about those who sleep in death, so that you do not grieve like the rest of mankind, who have no hope. For we believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him.” We need to notice, however, that Paul does not say that we do not grieve; he says we do not grieve in the same way as those who have no hope. We grieve in a way that still holds on to hope.

In the film, Benjamin and the others finally realize that there are times in life when you simply must play with the cards you’ve been dealt in life. They could not keep their beloved wife and mother from dying (it isn’t mentioned how she died), but they could find a way to go on living in the aftermath of her death. What finally gives Benjamin and his family hope is a new sense of purpose in restoring and reopening the zoo, and a new sense of family not only with one another but with the zoo staff, Benjamin’s older brother who finally gets on board with the zoo, and with the animals. There is even a bit of a muted love story between Benjamin and the zookeeper, which isn’t really explored too deeply, which I was happy about. The emphasis remains on his relationship with his late wife and with his children. But it is the power of community and the power of purpose that bring them through. As a Christian I would add the comfort and hope of God in Jesus Christ, but I think quite often that comfort and hope is manifested in those around us and with the reclaiming or revising of our purpose in life.



If you are looking for a good movie to watch and you don’t mind about four cuss words, I would encourage you to watch We Bought a Zoo. Although it is out on DVD and Blu Ray, it won’t be available in Red Box until May 1. We watched it on Time Warner On Demand. The non-HD version was actually free until April 24, so if you have access to Time Warner On Demand you might check to see if you can watch it for free in the next couple of weeks. If you do watch it you might want to have a box of Kleenex along with your popcorn.

Happy Easter season! Christ is Risen! Christ is Risen Indeed!

Holy Week in the Future-Perfect Tense

I’ve been writing over the past couple of weeks about eschatology. As a reminder, “eschatology” is the “study of the ‘last things’ or the end of the world. Theological dimensions include the second coming of Jesus and the last judgment.” Eschatology is an essential aspect of the Christian faith that we polite Presbyterians seem to have given up years ago in embarrassment, ceding the topic to the loonies who claim that every natural disaster is the end or that they know the exact day when it will happen. But hope in Christ’s promised return goes back all the way to Jesus himself; it is a part of the gospel, the part that draws us forward. Dr. Thomas Long, a PC(USA) pastor who is a renowned preacher and professor of preaching at Candler School of Theology, writes, “If Jesus is Lord, if Jesus is raised from the dead, then this puts eschatological pressure on the present. All that damages human life is obsolete, passing away, and the preacher can stand up there bodly speaking in the future-perfect tense.” Just a friendly grammatical reminder: the future-perfect tense is the tense that indicates an action that will have been completed at some point in the future. For instance, if I was to say, “In January, 2013, Danielle and I will have been married 12 years.” It hasn’t happened yet, but our faith is that it will.

Everything we do now as Christians is done in light of what will have happened in God’s future. We do everything drawn forward by this statement, “We live this way because through Jesus Christ all things will have been made new at some point in the future.” Again, Dr. Long writes, the “eschatological and apocalyptic language of the Bible is not about predicting the future; it is primarily a way of seeing the present in the light of hope.” Whether we’ve ever realized it or not, when we observe the Christian Calendar (also called liturgical or church year) the way it was designed, it points us toward Christ’s promised return in the “future-perfect” tense. It isn’t just about telling the story of what was; it is about telling the story of what is to come and living in response both to what has been done and what will have been done in the end, or more accurately the new beginning.

For instance, during my first Advent at my first church, I started talking about how the season of Advent is really about looking toward the Second Coming of Christ. It is not merely a retelling of the nativity story. One of my parishioners, a woman in her eighties who had been a faithful member of the church since birth, said, “Great, you’ve ruined Advent for me.” When I dug deeper I found out that she was scared to death of the idea of the Second Coming so she just plain ignored it. More often than fear, what I usually hear is embarrassment. We Presbyterians are too cultured and educated to believe in that stuff, right? Plus, we don’t want to be identified with the loonies I mentioned earlier. Trust me, I don’t want to be identified with the loonies either, but a Christian faith without an eschatological thrust to it is an incomplete and unbiblical Christian faith. That church member thought I’d ruined her favorite part of the church year, just because I’d talked about what it was actually pointing to. She’s probably not the only one who was thinking it, either. She was just the only one willing to say it. The same could go for Holy Week. So with all this in mind, on this our first Holy Week together, I want us to look briefly at Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday in terms of what they mean eschatologically.

Maundy Thursday, through reliving the event of Jesus’ Last Supper, marks a few different occurrences. The main three are the institution of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, Jesus’ act of service to his disciples by washing their feet, and Jesus’ final commandment (or mandatum from which the word Maundy comes) to his disciples, “Love one another. As I have love you love one another.” The Lord’s Supper is replete with eschatology. About the Lord's Supper our Book of Order states:

“In this meal the Church celebrates the joyful feast of the people of God, and anticipates the great banquet and marriage supper of the Lamb. Brought by the Holy Spirit into Christ’s present, the Church eagerly expects and prays for the day when Christ shall come in glory and God be all in all. Nourished by this hope, the Church rises from the Table and is sent by the power of the Holy Spirit to participate in God’s mission to the world, to proclaim the gospel, to exercise compassion, to work for justice and peace until Christ’s Kingdom shall come at last”

Every bit of that is eschatology. That is all about living in the future-perfect tense, living now in the hope of something that will have been accomplished by God in Jesus Christ in the future. I would also say that the only way we can truly “love one another” as Jesus has commanded is by doing so in eschatological hope. So, you see, Maundy Thursday has a great deal of eschatology in it. We are not just remembering the Last Supper, just as we are not just looking forward to the Messianic banquet of the future. Those two meals may be at each end of the long table, but this Thursday night we sit in the middle of that table, communing in the present, in memory of the past, in the hope of the future.

I am always surprised when I hear that so many congregations do not hold a Good Friday service. To me, Good Friday is as important a day for us to mark by gathering to worship as Christmas Eve or Easter Sunday. I agree with Methodist pastor Adam Hamilton when he writes, “We cannot really appreciate Easter until we have been to the cross.” I also agree with PC(USA) pastor Dr. Scott Black Johnston that “Christians who skip over the events of the Passion--arcing from one celebratory Sunday to the next--will develop a warped faith.” Good Friday may be dark; it may be a downer; it may be tough to bring yourself to give up a Friday night after a hard week of work to hear about the crucifixion; Good Friday, however, is at the core of the gospel of Jesus Christ. As the Apostle Paul wrote, “We preach Christ crucified.”

There have been entire books written on the eschatology of the crucifixion of Jesus so this is not the venue (nor am I the person) to get too terribly in depth on seeing Good Friday in the future-perfect tense, but I do want to echo one point that Joan Chittister makes about it. She writes, “Then, the darkness sets in; the quiet overwhelms us; the waiting—the interminable waiting—for the Second Coming descends into the middle of our souls too.” Good Friday isn’t just about how Jesus was crucified 2,000 years ago. It is about that, but not completely about that. It is also about how through the events of Good Friday God has “[torn] down the curtain that separated humanity from God.” Through the cross, “[Jesus] offered us, by his death, reconciliation and atonement with God.” (Adam Hamilton) In other words, we wouldn’t have a future hope if it wasn’t for the cross.

There haven’t just been books written about the eschatology of Easter; there have been many multi-volume sets of the longest books you’ve ever seen written about it. Of the three days discussed in this post, Easter should be the easiest one for us to see in the future-perfect tense. The resurrection of Jesus is the beginning of the new creation, the first fruits. Dr. Ted Wardlaw, president of Austin Seminary used to say, “The resurrection of Jesus is the ‘hinge’ of history.” The resurrection is when the scales tipped toward the victory over evil, sin, and death. Easter is filled with the eschatological promise of the resurrection of Jesus that through being “in Christ” or “putting on Christ” we will get to participate through being raised ourselves, as will heaven and earth. In essence, through the cross God has built a bridge for us to cross to God and through the resurrection God has thrown open the gates for us to remain with God and to live in God’s future.

So as we worship together on Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter Sunday let us do it in the future-perfect tense in light of our hope that in God’s future “all things will have been made new through Jesus Christ.” But let us not only worship on those three days in that hope; let us live every day of our lives in that hope.