My dad-in-law was 88--an age of sufficient decades and years that it tempts those who hear of his death to do what we all tend to do: we say or think, "Ohhh, wow, 88, hmmm" and what we mean by that is "Well, what did you expect?   That's an age at which people die so maybe we can blunt our sadness a bit."  I know I've thought that and so have resisted for some years asking too quickly "How old was your mom?" because I don't want to cash out even a little of people's deep grief.   In the case of Dad Apol, he was indeed 88 but was independent, active, vibrant, and profoundly happy to be alive (as he had been basically every one of his 32,300-some days).  Spiritually Dad was as ready to meet his Savior as any believer could be.  Physically . . . well, as he said to me after a brief illness a couple of years ago, "If the Lord were to ask me, I'd say I'd like to order up ten more years if it would be all right!"

Somehow given who Dad Apol was, the surgeon's words about his condition being "not compatible with life" struck me because for all of the nearly 27 years I have known him as first his daughter's suitor and then her husband, Dad Apol has been profoundly compatible with life.  You'd seldom meet someone who took joy in every oak leaf, thrilled to even the most common of birds at his feeders, and enjoyed his every meal with great good gusto and gratitude (and when it was my privilege to indulge my hobby of gourmet cooking and really whip up some good victuals for Dad, his reaction was identical to any kid in the ice cream shop being handed a cone: his eyes shined with delight and anticipation).

How can anyone like this end up in any way, shape, or form being "not compatible with life"?  Well and of course, it happens to all of us physically eventually, even as through the cruelty of others it happened to our Savior on the cross.   But if there is anything to those intuitions that so many people have had--the intuition that the uniqueness of human life itself argues for there being more than just the few fleeting years we spend on this earth--then that intuition was surely validated by someone like Ike Apol.  He was exceedingly "compatible with life" every moment of his 88-and-a-half years and if his lower extremeties caused a surgeon to declare otherwise last Thursday morning, that says nothing about the soul or spirit of the man.

That soul or spirit is what, after all, had all along been so very, very compatible with life.  God knows this.  That's why he had this plan called the Gospel.   Through our grace-given compatibility with the Savior, we each of us remain deeply compatible with life even though we die, which is pretty much what Jesus said to Martha in John 11 at her brother's tomb.   "Those who believe in me will live, even if they die."

That is the Word of the Lord, thanks be to God.   And on this rainy and stormy April morning in Michigan the day after Dad's funeral, it is the Word to which we cling in the sure and certain hope that our God-given compatibility with life goes on and on in our Father's bright kingdom.

Take last week: I met with a peer learning group of pastors for a day of conversation about preaching.   They had given me ahead of time a list of questions, most of which dealt with preaching to contemporary culture and what forms of the sermon worked best today (as opposed to preaching styles that may seem outmoded to folks in the pews now).   So I talked to these preachers about things we teach at the Seminary and some aspects of preaching that I believe to be vital.  Among the things I often emphasize is that too much preaching in the last quarter century has morphed from a proclaiming of Good News to a Dr. Phil-like dispensing of Good Advice (how else to account for sermon series about "Six Ways to Raise Successful Kids" and "Five Ways to Grow Your Business" and "Seven Ways to Realize Your Dreams"?).   I also talked about why avoiding moralism is so important and thus the need to avoid sermons that forever and again end with "To Do" lists of things people need to do in the week ahead to stay in good with God.    Moralism is not only not the Gospel of Grace it rather routinely props up the closet legalism that far too many people schlep with them into church every Sunday as it is.

The pastors in this peer group listened attentively, asked good questions, and helped create a lively conversation.   But then a couple of hours in, one pastor had the courage to ask the question that burned on all of their hearts when he said, "I agree with everything you have said but what are we supposed to do given that the very preaching you and the rest of us would deem to be bad is exactly what people seem most to want today?   We're all seeing people leave our congregations--sometimes in significant numbers--to join the popular mega-churches in our area where the preacher does nothing but trendy 'good advice' sermons that always end with checklists of ways to be more virtuous.   So what are we supposed to do to keep our people in our own congregations?"

The pastoral pain of these people was obvious.   Their question was not only a hard one to answer, it was fraught with disappointment and disorientation.   I wish I had an answer.   The one thing to say is that as a preacher you cannot, of course, compromise yourself or give in to people's "itching ears" without losing integrity and self-respect.  And, of course, we talked about ways to liven up preaching and pondered practices that all preachers could nurture in their sermons that would keep those messages inside the bounds of respectability but that might succeed in maintaining listener interest via what I wrote about on The Twelve two weeks ago in terms of letting narratives be vivid and engaging.   Will such advice staunch any outflows of members?   Maybe and then again, maybe not.

Probably it counts as something of a tired cliche to point out that the more Jesus preached the message of sacrifice and the cross, the smaller his crowds got, too.   And, of course, the sum total of Jesus' preaching--including all those parables we now love so much--succeeded in getting him crucified.   It's true.   Jesus never promised his under-shepherds a life filled with success as the world defines it (and this, too, loops back to recent blog posts here by Steve Mathonet-Vanderwell and yesterday from Jeff Munroe).   It's just that in a good bit of North America we've been raised to believe that hard work and faithfulness do always pay off in visible ways, and in the church, that usually means in growing congregations.

Thankfully, of course, many times that happens, too.   Many growing churches are doing so under the preaching of very faithful proclaimers of the Gospel.   It's also a point to grant that not everybody today yearns for the kind of trendy and moralistic preaching of which I've written here--there are still plenty of people who know true biblical and theological and pastoral substance in preaching when they hear it and they prefer it, too.

Still . . . being a faithful preacher is no guarantee that church members won't leave for what they perceive to be greener pastures.   Every pastor winces to see people leave.  Preachers today compete with so much else in the culture and from the entertainment industry and from the better-known rock star preachers as well.    Those on the front lines of ministry need a lot of prayer from the rest of us.   It's not an easy job but when it is done well, it remains God's favorite way of nurturing and sustaining (and generating) the faith of his people.

Hassler wrote many delightful novels including Staggerford, The Love Hunter, Dear James, and others.   My own favorite is North of Hope and so when I stood in line to have Mr. Hassler autograph a book, this was the novel I had with me at the time.  As he signed it for me, I said to him, "I loved this novel.   I hated to see it end.  In fact, for days after I found myself missing Frank and Libby" (who were the main characters in the novel, of course).    At this Mr. Hassler looked up and without guile and with no small amount of wistfulness he said, "Yes, Frank and Libby.  I think of them from time to time and I wonder how they're getting along . . ."   He then gave a barely perceptible shrug of his shoulders, finished the autograph, and handed the novel back to me.

He clearly had not been kidding.   Frank and Libby were in some fashion real to him.  True, he made them up out of the whole cloth of his narrative imagination.   And also true: Mr. Hassler did not have a mental disturbance and would acknolwege fully and freely if pressed that of course he was aware that these two people did not now exist (and had never existed) in the real world.   Still . . . he wished them the best.

Talk to writers long enough and you'll hear them talking about their characters as real people, sometimes expressing absolute surprise at what a certain character said or did.   "I had no idea he was capable of that" a novelist of my acquaintance once said of one of his own creations.   "Her reply to that insult really took me aback" I once heard yet another writer say.   What I want to say back to these people is, "But you wrote those 'surprising' things yourself because you invented the whole scenario.  How can you be surprised by something you yourself thought up?!"   Actually, I have said that to writers in the past but in response these writers have not said "Well, you know what I mean--I was just kidding you.  I was just using a figure of speech."  Nope.  They testify that their own characters quite literally take on a narrative life of their own and if it's true that the whole shebang of the story singularly belongs to the writer, that somehow does not prevent the story and the people who populate it from taking some unexpected turns.

Personally I find this both wonderful and weird.  It requires a certain suspension of belief on the part of writers to claim this about their characters--much less to wonder years later how they are getting along as Mr. Hassler did--but in many ways that suspension of belief is no different than what we all do whenever we read a great novel, watch a movie, or see a play.   We both know it's all staged and fictional and orchestrated and that it's somehow very, very real in ways we want to get caught up in.  When a story is told well--even a true story that we've all heard a thousand times before--we are able to enter into that story and let it surprise us, stimulate us, instruct us all over again as though for the first time.

That's one of the great powers of story and of narrative.   And we need a lot more of it in the Church and especially in preaching.   In his new book Imagining the Kingdom Jamie Smith does a great job making the case that we are all storied beings, "narrative animals" to borrow a phrase Smith quotes from David Foster Wallace.  Smith applies this to worship and liturgy generally but in a book of my own I am working on for preachers, I turn it directly to sermons.   Preachers have at their disposal a Bible that is rich with stories that are chock-full of intrigue, deceit, surprises, grace, and all kinds of other narrative wonders.    The key is to let those things shine.   Instead of drearily working through a story or dissecting the narrative to the point that what started as a story ends up being reduced to a bullet-point list of propositions, preachers need to draw in listeners by making them interested in and invested in the characters.   We should want to know what comes next (even though we already do) and have enough tension and drama built into the re-presentation of the story in the worship service and in the sermon that we eagerly tune in for the same reasons we re-watch movies or re-read stories or re-tell the great stories from our own families over and over.   That we know how it all turns out doesn't matter.

Someone once said that the best stories are both surprising and inevitable.   But when it comes to stories and characters we know well, we can reverse that: the story is both inevitable (because we know exactly where it's going in that we've heard it all before) and yet is surprising because if it's an engaging story told well, it takes on a life of its own in our imaginations and we are then caught up in it all over again.

Those are the stories that quicken our pulses.  Those are the stories that bring us joy all over again.  Jon Hassler didn't let their non-existence lessen the reality of Frank and Libby for him.  Good stories create a kind of reality in which one can immerse oneself.   But if that is possible in the fictional realm, how much more so with true stories of the faith?   Our knowing how they all turn out is no excuse to not let those stories live in our imaginations--and in our worship--in ways that properly startle and delight us every single time.

It was intriguing stuff and so perhaps we can all be forgiven for not spending as much time last week on another elevation of sorts when Fuller Theological Seminary announced its new president, Mark Labberton.  I suppose Mark can henceforth refer to his presidential announcement as having come in a highly historic week!   I've had the chance and privilege to know Mark a bit these past few years and congratulate him on his new post and the honor that rightly accrues to him by achieving this.

But I note Mark's appointment on this blog because I see this as a curious trend of the last few years.  It began when Western Theological Seminary named Tim Brown as its president some years back and this was followed in 2010 by my own Calvin Theological Seminary naming Jul Medenblik as its next president.  Since that time Princeton Theological Seminary hired Craig Barnes after Iain Torrance retired and now Fuller has named Mark Labberton to succeed Rich Mouw.

The trend of which I take curious note here is that each of these four would likely self-identify as much as anything as a preacher, a pastor.   True, Brown, Barnes, and Labberton have all taught at the seminary level and Medenblik was an active member of, and then president of, the Calvin Seminary Board of Trustees for many years.   But if you look at the careers of all four, they made their biggest marks not in academia per se but in the church where the four have collectively many decades' worth of preaching experience.   Medenblik came to his presidential post directly from 16 years of being a church planting pastor of what is now a large congregation in Illinois.   Brown initially went to Western to teach preaching following also his long tenure as preacher at a very large Michigan congregation.   Barnes pastored several congregations over the years and was still serving as preaching pastor at a congregation in Pennsylvania when Princeton hired him.  And Labberton--although he has been teaching preaching the last nearly four years--spent the sixteen years prior to that as the preacher/pastor of a Presbyterian congregation in Berkley, California.

Four such appointments may not constitute a statistically significant trend, and both Western and Calvin are modest-sized seminaries in the grander scheme of schools in North America.  Still, might the appointment of longtime and highly experienced pastors/preachers signal an overt desire to convey to students a desire to focus on the practicalities of ministry?   Again, each of the four men I have highlighted here have academic credentials beyond an M.Div.: Brown has a D.Min., Medenblik a J.D., Barnes and Labberton both have Ph.D. degrees.   But they are people of the pulpit more than of the classroom, pastors who walked with people through life's varied valleys more than scholars who have devoted themselves to colloquies and meetings of this or that academic guild.  (But please note: I have nothing against career classroom teachers or academic guilds of various stripes--we need those people and those entities too.   Nor in noting this trend do I in any way wish to convey the idea that past presidents who were not longtime pastors did not also have a concern for ministry preparation for their students.   I am casting no stones here, just pondering these developments!)

As my own seminary has been going through a re-branding process, it is clear that seminary students today really do still want a top-flight theological education, and a student would indeed receive such formal training very well at all of the schools I've mentioned.   But when talking to students and prospective students, it becomes clear almost immediately that they hope to meet up with teachers of many different backgrounds but including those who have walked the talk by having been pastors themselves and who know what it takes beyond the formation of the mind to form the heart for active ministry in this hurting, broken world.   Especially in Homiletics, students gravitate toward those who understand from the inside the grinding hard work involved in making new sermons every single week, including in the same congregation over a long haul of ministry in which most preachers eventually worry "I think they've heard everything I have to say by now!"

Time will tell whether this trend continues as well as, I suppose, how the appointments of pastors/preachers as presidents shape these various institutions.   As someone who cares deeply and passionately about the preaching that takes place in the church today--and as one of great throngs of people who know keenly how much this world needs sensitive pastors to minister to people's hurting hearts these days--I am hopeful and optimistic about this "trend" such as it is.   And I hope the Lord will richly bless and keep blessing the presidential ministries of Tim, Jul, Craig, and Mark and many others beside as we and they all together keep on letting the Spirit use us to equip women and men for ministry in Christ's Church.

Aside from that . . . well, aside from that Mr. MacFarlane was crude.  Some loved it, especially the legions of MacFarlane fans who somehow find equal delight in his other work where women are routinely insulted for their size or height or where various female body parts are referred to the way middle school boys would talk.   As the evening wore on, Mr. MacFarlane's stock-in-trade humor and way of speaking about women clearly took hold as late in the show a staff member for the satirical newspaper "The Onion" let fly with a Tweet that referred to the 9-year-old Oscar nominee Quvenzhane Wallis with a sex-related word so awful I won't even obliquely refer to it here.   (It should probably be illegal to refer to a minor that way.)

Call it bad comedy momentum.   Or call it what it really is--and which is the only reason I am writing this particular blog--bad cultural momentum.  The next day "The Onion's" CEO released a letter of apology and, like many people, when I read it, I wondered "Is this a joke, too?"   When you spend your life crying wolf (or in this case making crude wolf calls at women), then when some day you want seriously to address a problem, well, it's hard for others to take you seriously.

Mr. MacFarlane's brand of humor--and the Academy Awards knew full well what they'd be getting when they signed this person--is so relentless in a certain direction that after a while it's no longer a joke.  It becomes the way people--especially young men--think.  Sure, they can still get their buddies at the bar to crack up when they use MacFarlane-esque language to refer to women but just below the giggles is a sadder truth: they no longer know any other way to talk.

Humor is a great gift--I would argue it is a great gift of God.  The Bible has more humor in it than we typically notice.   Used well, the human mind can make puns, spy irony, or give some situation a quarter turn that will bring legitimate mirth to other people (and laughter really is the best medicine a lot of the time).    But always there is that warning from Paul in Ephesians 5:4 about how in the Christian community there should be no "obscenity, foolish talk, or coarse joking" because, Paul says, these things are simply "out of place."   They have no proper place among God's people recreated in the image of Christ.

These days it becomes harder and harder to say to someone "You're out of line."   There is a sense of entitlement in our society that can be seen on most every Comment stream following articles in the NY Times or on CNN's website.  People let fly with any old thing they want to say on Facebook postings and the comments on such postings and to tell these people that their comments are "out of place" or that they themselves are "out of line" would likely incur just a blank stare.

I wonder if in the Christian community we can take Paul's injunction on coarseness in our humor seriously enough so as to do a thorough assessment of whether it's right to let children--or to let ourselves as adults--watch MacFarlane fare like Family Guy or his crude movie Ted.   I wonder if we have the courage to say that many things are not only not funny they are so far out of place among us that if we don't draw some boundary lines, our own young people (and our own young men in this particular case) will arrive at the day when they find they can speak about some people or about women in no way other than out-of-place ways.

And maybe, despite my 35 year run in watching the Oscars, if they keep getting hosts like MacFarlane, I will need to turn that off, too.

It had been a long while since I got an immunization for anything but when the nurse sunk the needle into my one upper arm, I could still see the scar from a vaccine I got back as a child in the early 1960s (probably small pox).  This, in turn, reminded me of the amazing revolution in medicine that came about when Jonas Salk and others figured out the highly counter-intuitive fact that the best way to get our bodies to ward off certain diseases was to give our systems a taste of the real deal--not enough to make one sick but enough to get the antibodies to say, "We'll be more than ready some day if this disease comes knocking big-time."

Years ago--in an article and also sermon that many readers of this blog will remember--my friend Neal Plantinga pointed out that when Moses lifted up that bronze serpent in the wilderness as a paradoxical cure for snakebites--and when Jesus centuries later told Nicodemus that the lifting up of the Son of Man on a cross was going to be a similar spectacle for no less than the scourge of death itself--the very principle of immunizations/vaccines was being evoked.  Somehow like cures like.   Israelites got inoculated by God's grace by looking at an image of the very serpents nipping at their heels.   And in the longest possible Gospel run we all get inoculated against eternal death by dying with Jesus on the cross.  Jesus took death into himself--and in baptism gives us a portion of that death--as a way to immunize us against the death that is otherwise the wages of our sins.   Through tasting and passing through death, we find life.   When in this Lenten Season we cast our gaze upon the crucified Savior, we find once again God's ingenious way to rid his good creation of death once and for all.

Lent, of course, is not the only time in our Christian lives or in the life of the Church that we can or should ponder the great mystery of what happened to God's Son at the Place of the Skull two millennia ago.   But it is a mystery so profound, so strangely wonderful, that it is most assuredly worthy of as much joyful and awe-filled pondering as we can give it.  

If everything is working right--and I surely hope it is!!--something really quite astonishing has happened in my body since those four serums were injected into me a couple of weeks ago.   But in my soul and thanks to the power of the Spirit in my baptism, something far, far more amazing has been happening and continues to happen as the crucified and risen Christ now lives in me.

As the old hymn puts it, such wondrous love as that deserves . . . well, it finally deserves my all.

One theme we circled back to often had to with the use of social media in the preaching event.  Increasingly pastors are using Facebook and Twitter to promote conversations about a given sermon before the sermon is preached--soliciting questions or thoughts about the upcoming Sunday's preaching text--or after the sermon as the conversation continues.   Some pastors are, of course, doing both.  Many of us who were at the consulation had been pastors of congregations in the past and we admitted to each other that it's an odd thought to ponder someone in a pew Tweeting about a sermon even as we are delivering it.   I have been out of parish ministry for going on 8 years now and seeing as back then--and even up until just a few years ago actually--something like Facebook or Twitter was non-existent, real-time interactions with my sermon in such formats was never something I pondered for two seconds when I was preaching.

But now preachers are pondering it and wondering how best to tap into the social media phenomenon/explosion.   Part of me is much intrigued by this.  All  of us who preach have an interest in having our sermons reach as many people as possible with the Good News.   So if a Twitter feed or various Facebook posts drove more people to check out online recordings of our sermons--much less ended up attracting some actually to attend and maybe some day join the congregation--then there would be much to celebrate in all that.

And of course part of me feels vaguely wary of all this, too, and makes me wonder about the church's ability also to be counter-culturally critical of some of the ways by which people relate and communicate today.   If in the church we embrace sound-bite Tweets of sermons on a par with what celebrities observe as they Tweet from the Golden Globes ceremonies or what this or that commentator Tweets about the Super Bowl as it's happening, does this change the preaching event in ways we have perhaps not yet thought through?   Honestly, I am raising questions here to which I have no answers.   But there is something about the segmentation of our communication that social media has brought about that makes me wonder if slicing and dicing also sermons into status updates and Tweets might not over time influence both how preachers craft their sermons and how people listen to those sermons and I wonder if that influence has as much potential to be negative as positive.

Again, positively I see vast benefit in the pastor's using Facebook and the like to bring the congregation into the sermon-making process before the sermon is written and then to continue a lively conversation with people after it is delivered.   There are even pastoral care possibilities here that may be pretty wonderful.  What's more, we preachers need all the help we can get most of the time and should never want to be isolated from feedback or input.    But as users of Facebook (and to a lesser extent perhaps Twitter) know, the ease with which status updates can be made and the swiftness of the average Tweet has also contributed to the idea that everybody is equally an expert on most every topic and that there is no opinion or snap judgment that should not be put "out there" for all to see whether it's particularly informed by due consideration and deliberate thought or not (and let's face it, a lot of times it's the "not" that rules the day).

Preachers who have grown up with "the new homiletic" have long known that the day of the "sage on the stage" whose authority was absolute and unquestioned is long gone.   Fred Craddock's landmark book title "As One without Authority" said it all in terms of the need today for preachers not to assert top-down authority but generate authentic authority for the Word preached by appealing to listerners as a fellow disciple whose messages experientially appeal to our lives together in ways that create community.   So my wariness about instant sermon Tweets or Facebook posts that could question what was said in a sermon does not stem from a desire for me as a preacher to be the sole voice of authority in all this such that no one else could possibly have anything to contribute.

No, but I do still see preaching as a Spirit-led exercise done by people both trained and gifted for this very specific, very vital task in the life of the congregation.  So in our day of "everyone's an expert" in which Facebook posts ballyhoo and reject the careful opinions of scholars and authors and--perhaps increasingly--also preachers and theologians I wonder if there is a possibility that something of the sacred, event-ful character of preaching could be eroded as the preacher's thoughts, too, could become easily dismissed or caricatured.

Again, I have questions and no answers.   But if upon reflection a given pastor or congregation decided it was well to suggest that the worship service was a great time to switch off the Twitter and unplug from social media generally so as to listen to the Word of God in the community gathered, would that be the worst thing a church could suggest?

Of course, it is fully possible to waste lots of time on computers.   Facebook, YouTube videos, emails from family and friends not related to the job, and games of all kinds apparently do chew up scandalous amounts of clock time for many employees, yielding in lower productivity for some companies than would otherwise be the case.   However, I will freely confess to playing solitaire now and again while I am in my office or when I am working from home but oddly enough for me--and I wonder if others have ever experienced this--sometimes doing that is clarifying and helpful in ways I am not certain I can explain.

That's why a few years ago I was gratified to read something similar written by Mike Graves in his helpful book "The Fully Alive Preacher."    The book's subtitle tells us that this is a book about "Recovering from Homiletical Burnout" and as such, the book offers lots of practical tips for how to keep the pastor's batteries fully charged and his or her mind and heart fully engaged in work that can become draining due to the constant need for fresh input and fresh, creative output week after week.  Graves notes that most preachers (and probably anyone who engages in creative writing) know that sometimes the ideas in one's head jumble and jostle and seem actively to resist coming together.   This is the moment of intense frustration when you know that something is brewing in your head but you can't quite get it down right.

At such moments Graves suggests the following: "In those moments of frustration, I have found that Handel's Messiah often helps.  You've probably heard those studies about classical music stimulating thinking, 'the Mozart effect.'  The results are debatable, but for me, Handel makes a difference.  So does a quick game of solitaire on my computer.  The spatial arrangement and sequencing required in solitaire often stimulate my thinking in new ways" (p. 122).

Honestly now: I am not making up an excuse for those times you may catch me in my seminary office playing solitaire or hearts!   But like Graves, I am often struck by how playing a few games really does dislodge for me whatever has gotten stuck in my head.   (A good brisk walk can have the same clarifying effect but it's not always practical to do.)   I don't know why exactly, and maybe it wouldn't work for everyone.  But when I am stuck in finding the right image or story or when I am flummoxed as to where to go next in a sermon I am writing, somehow doing something different for a few minutes works.  After a few games of solitaire--after several losing games typically--the image comes to me.  The transition that had been lacking becomes clear and so I can now add it to the in-progress message.   Like the proverbial shaking-out of the mental cobwebs, solitaire and the like helps.

The human creative process and the wiring of our incredibly complex brains are a constant source of wonder to me.  So the idea that the Holy Spirit might just be able to work through something as trivial as a brisk game of solitaire should perhaps be no surprise--our minds are fearfully and wonderfully made and the Spirit is endlessly nimble.   Still, the idea that solitaire can help me in writing sermons is surprising to me, but in a most delightful way.

Now if only I could win more than about 2% of the time . . .

This past Sunday Susan Jacoby reflected on "The Blessings of Atheism" and likewise noted that whereas religious people manage to find things to say to people who have lost loved ones to death, "Nones" and atheists generally sometimes struggle.  But since she has just written a book about him, Jacoby commended the 19th century atheist Robert Green Ingersoll who was known to tell people at the graves of loved ones to take heart because the dead, Ingersoll said, are perfectly at rest because they can no longer suffer.  Jacoby concluded her essay by claiming that President Obama could have better served the larger country if in his remarks at the Newtown memorial service on December 16 he had told us some version of the Ingersoll sentiment.   This would have helped the gathered mourners that night because "Somewhere in that audience, and in the larger national audience, there were mourners who would have been comforted by the acknowledgment that their lives have meaning even if they do not regard death as the door to another life, but 'only perfect rest.'”

These ideas properly give people of faith pause.   One cannot deny, for instance, the vital role that community plays in times of loss, grief, and outright tragedy.  Nor can one deny another point made by Jacoby in her essay: when faced with the need to say something in the face of great loss--when faced, in short, with the classic conundrum of theodicy--not a few religious people say egregiously awful things.  Too true.  I've heard them in many'a funeral home.  Like Job's miserable friends, some Christian folks need to learn the value of silence.   Of course, it's not as though the "She's in a better place" and the "God needed another angel in heaven" sentiments are all that people of faith have ever managed to say.   Better, more sensitive, more thoughtful ideas have been spoken in history by people who are not ever and only trying to--in Jacoby's phrase--"get God off the hook" for the bad things that happen in this world.

But in the relative short compass of this blog I want to engage just two of the thoughts raised by these articles.   First, is it really true that all atheists need to do is figure out how to become a community in order to "compete" with--or at least be a viable alternative to--a Christian congregation or the members of a Jewish temple?   Frankly, I doubt that would be enough.  Community is important.  Having a way to come together and to come around mourners is vital.   It's also a convenient way to coordinate the bringing of casseroles and the writing of letters and the visiting of those in grief.   But a community without a core message may still seem empty to at least some--and perhaps to many--who are in crisis.   After something like a 9/11 takes place, it's startling to see how well otherwise disconnected people can form communities of solidarity.  Neighbors, co-workers, even total strangers find a common bond with each other--we even become to some extent an extended national community gathered around TV screens as we together experience the same things in real time.

But people in grief need more.  They need a message.  They seek hope, comfort, even the future prospect perhaps to feel joy again.

So maybe that's where Ms. Jacoby's piece comes in to provide the message that a humanist community of "Nones" would provide by telling the grieving parents in Newtown that they at least can know that their 1st Graders are now "at rest" and that they cannot suffer anymore.   If an entire community of such like-minded Nones could surround those parents and say this, would that be what the grieving are seeking?    Perhaps.   But I think there is something finally hollow in the Ingersoll phrasing about which Ms. Jacoby makes so much in her essay.   The truth is that "rest" and a lack of "suffering" are meaningful only vis-a-vis beings that in some sense still exist.   The raw truth of what an atheist needs to speak is that the dead 1st Grader isn't really "resting" in any meaningful sense because that child and all her distinctiveness and everything that already at the age of 7 made her the joy of her parents' lives is inextricably gone.   The child is not at rest: she is annhiliated, extinguished, extinct.   The gunman took it all: past, present, and future.  No one beyond the handful of people on earth who knew her remembers her now.  Thus, once the last person on earth who knew that 7-year-old is also dead, the cosmos will never bear a single trace of that dear child's having existed.  

Good news?   Comforting words?  Some may find it so.  Me?  I wonder how many parents would be glad to know that their child winked out of existence in so irretrievable a way.   And it might not much matter if those same parents were surrounded by an entire "community" whose bottom line message was essentially that.

Most people have the need for more, sometimes even have intimations of more.   On the same day that the Times published the Freedman article, the New York Times Magazine published its annual "The Lives They Lived" series with obit-like reflections on the lives of some very well-known figures but on also lesser-known folks who died in the past year.   Most revealed the stunning uniqueness--the irreplacable and irrepressible features--to these people that made them worth remembering and recounting.   But one such figure, Maurice Sendak, conveyed a deeply felt conviction that a lot of people--even atheists like Sendak--have when Sendak said (from a radio interview some years before) "I don't believe in an afterlife but I fully expect to see my brother again."

Why is that?   The answers would fill many more blogs.   But the Ingersoll graveside sentiments--even if shared by a large community--would perforce chalk that up to an impossible dream.

What comfort or solace do the humanist Nones have to offer in the face of grief, loss, and intimations of something more?   I think I know the answer: None.

Note: I realize this post is far, far longer than the average blog here on The Twelve.  But my turn for blogging here falls on Christmas Day and since I doubt folks want typical blog fare on Christmas--if folks visit blogs at all on Christmas Day!--I thought I'd post a sermon from my days as pastor at Calvin CRC in Grand Rapids.   If you read it, I pray it will be a blessing.   ~Scott Hoezee

Text: John 1:1-18

"Are you going home for Christmas?" What question has been more commonplace in recent weeks? A little over a week ago while I was at Meijers, I was already pondering this sermon, including that opening line, "Are you going home for Christmas?" Startlingly, as I walked through the store, I heard some version of that very question over and over. A cashier glanced over to a bagger, "So, you going home for Christmas next week?" Two older couples met up in the dairy section: "Hey, Charlie and Doreen! Are your kids coming home for Christmas?" I was quickly passing by two women who were chatting by the Pop-Tart display and although I had no idea exactly what they were talking about, the two words I did catch as I zipped by were "Christmas" and "home."

Are you going home for Christmas? It seems like the question to ask, as well as the theme to play on. One major retailer has as its advertising jingle on TV, "There's no place like home for the holidays." The U.S. Postal Service has run an ad showing people in far-flung places opening mail to convey the idea that there's more than one way to be home for Christmas--send the right card, and maybe your daughter in the Army won't feel like Kuwait is so far from Kansas after all. Speaking of soldiers, most of us know the well-known World War II song, "I'll be home for Christmas, you can count on me. I'll be home for Christmas, if only in my dreams."

Are you going home for Christmas? Frederick Buechner has written that in mid-December 1953 he was in church one Sunday, listening to a sermon by his mentor, Rev. George Buttrick. Buttrick, too, related overhearing some people in the church narthex the week prior talking about Christmas and home. And when in his sermon that Sunday morning in New York City Buttrick asked, "Are you going home for Christmas," Buechner says the question was asked with such a sense of longing that tears leapt to his eyes.

Home. What is it really that we mean by that word? What do retailers and the postal service want to conjure by the word "home"? Is it a scene from a Norman Rockwell painting, all soft colors, crackling fires on the hearth, wide-eyed children whose eyes sparkle in the light of the Christmas tree? Is that home? Is it the sense of "Home sweet home" counted-cross stitched and framed over the mantle, or Dorothy clicking her heels together three times and saying, " There's no place like home"? Is that home?

Is it finally actually a place? Or is home more a longing? Or maybe I can put it this way, how many of us over the age of 20 feel like we are really "home" right now? Isn't it true that "home" for us summons up, as often as not, a whole battery of things that are past and that cannot, as a matter of fact, be retrieved? Maybe "home" is the house you grew up in but that now belongs to some other family. But it's not really that house, either, is it? Yes, that place, that locale, those four walls, are all important. If we concentrate, most of us can still take a kind of "virtual tour" of our childhood homes. In our mind's eye we can still navigate those corridors, staircases, and rooms; we can still smell the mustiness of the cellar, the mothballs in the front-hall closet. Through an act of imagination, we can still open the door to mom and dad's room and when we do, we know where every bottle of mom's perfume will be on the bureau, where we'll find dad's plaid work shirts in the closet, his favorite hat on the edge of the dresser.

That's home, but it's still not just that. A skilled Hollywood set decorator could probably re-create our childhood homes based on photos and our descriptions. But even if someone could re-make that physical place, few of us would believe that just going there would be like going home again. Truth is, "home" is as often as not a whole set of longings, it's a set of special people, an array of feelings that combine to make you feel safe and loved. It's like that untranslatable German word, "Gemütlichkeit." If something is "Gemütlich," it's cozy and fitting and warm and right and, well, I don't know but if you find a "Gemütlich" place, you'll know. You just will. You'll feel it in your heart.

Home is like that. That's why "home" could be experienced most anywhere so long as the right people were around. "Home" could happen in a hotel room where your family gathers because the heat is broken at the house. Many of us know full well that stabbings of home can hit you while talking on the phone with your sister just as surely as they can bubble up were you actually to journey to some piece of real estate back in Iowa.

Are you going home for Christmas? You could say that this is just another piece of sentimental doggerel, the very type of Hallmark hoo-ha that lards over Christmas and obscures its deeper meaning. "Home for the holidays" may have as little to do with the gospel as Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. A theological Scrooge could say, and with some biblical justification I might add, that whatever the gospels tell us about what we now call "Christmas," it has precious little if anything to do with being "home for Christmas."

It's partly right to say that: in terms of the gospel, "Christmas" and "home" don't have much to do with one another. But seen from the right angle, those two things may have a lot to do with each other after all, and this morning I'd like to wonder aloud with you about that connection. Maybe even the soaring opening chapter to John's gospel has something to do with this. And so I'll ask again, "Are you going home for Christmas?"

We'd maybe all like it if we could, but mostly we cannot. We can't go home because it doesn't exist anymore. Not just the physical place but the sense of the place, the ambiance, the people above all. We can't go home because mom and dad are dead now. Or one of our parents is gone and nothing has been the same for any of us since. Or we can't go home because maybe we don't want to. For a few of us perhaps, "home" was never that fine a place to begin with. Home was the place where mom and dad argued all the time until finally they split up, and then for the rest of our lives all we ever heard from other people was how sad it is that we come from "a broken home." Or "home" is the place where we wished mom would have walked out on dad but she never did, and meanwhile he beat the living daylights out of her and us a couple times every week.

Are you going home for Christmas? Maybe in some real sense we still can do this, and maybe today we are doing it. And maybe for some of us it's wonderful, but if so, then it is likely also true that for others of us it's strained. We'll all be home today all right but after we leave later on, mom will cry buckets of silent tears because she knows, as only a mother can, how much is wrong in our various relationships with each other. And whether she's right or wrong about it (because who, after all, can finally know such a thing?), mom will wish to high heaven that her kids and grandkids were more like Verna's family because they all seem just golden and why can't our family Christmas parties be like Verna's?

We long for what was but is now lost. We long for what never was but should have been. We rue what was as well as what is. And so in a thousand ways we find now and then, here and there, an unsettled part of our hearts and whatever else we make of that ache, that longing, that sense of sadness, we think we maybe should cover it over because it doesn't have anything to do with Christmas. It ruins Christmas, spoils our fun, curdles our eggnog. Today is not a day to feel bad about things related to home. Let's try to be happy instead. We even prayed that we would be. At least for today. For the kids. For mom. For ourselves. We should at least pretend all is well on the home front, past and present.

Or maybe not. Listen: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God." With God. The Word, the Son of God, the one we now hail as Christ and know as Jesus: he was with God. That's just as well because, as John's opening verse goes on to say, that Word just was God, too. In the beginning. Way back when, even back when technically there was no "when." Once upon a time and before time; once upon eternity the Word was with God. The Word was, well, home. When God was all that there was and all that there had ever been--and even after God made a universe such that there was something other than just sheer divinity around--even still for the Word of God, to be with God was to be home. In the beginning the Word was home. With God. Home.

But by the time you get to verse 10 of John's prologue you read, "He was in the world." In the world. That's different than "with God," isn't it? If you tell me that when you were little, you grew up with your parents in Sheldon, Iowa, then I'll know where home is for you. But if you later tell me about that time when you were "in Vietnam," I'll know that during that time of your life, you weren't home. Not by a long shot.

So here: in the beginning, "with God"; then, "in the world." That's not home. The Word had crafted that world, true, but it still wasn't home. The proof was in the fact that no one recognized him. If people had seen the Word of God when he was at home, when he was dwelling in light inaccessible, crowned with glory and radiant with luminescence, well, they would not have failed to recognize him then. Not when he was home. But when he was "in the world," he wasn't home, and so he blended in as a face in the crowd. They didn't recognize him. They didn't receive him.

Small wonder, because John has more to say about the Word's journey from home. Verse 14 famously tells us that this very Word who in the beginning had been at home "with God," this Word became flesh. Actually, what it says is that the Word was made meat. The ethereal, eternal, divine Word of God became as meaty as a t-bone steak, as fleshly as you or I or any other person, cow, horse, or dog on the planet. The Word was made meat, flesh, skin and bones, and once that happened, he pitched his tent among us.

Literally in verse 14 John says he "tented" among us. He went camping. Camping is, after all, what you do when you're not home. You pitch a tent and camp. When you go camping (and now I mean real camping and not the thing you do when you drive a WonderLodge with indoor plumbing and a satellite dish), but when you are really camping, you know it. None of the conveniences of home is there and that's why this can rightly be called "roughing it." If it rains, you're damp in the tent. If it's hot or cold, so are you. When you camp, you're not anywhere near "at home" in the usual sense and that's why people either love camping or they hate it.

In the beginning the Word was with God. He was home. Then he wasn't. He was in the world. No one recognized him because he was one of us now, living on a kind of extended camping trip, and not a day went by when Jesus didn't sense this. After all, if you are deep-down the eternal Son of God, then even the most plush mattress from Sealy Posture-Pedic must feel hard as a rock compared to living on clouds of glory with the Father and the Spirit. The Word was made meat, and he went camping.

Maybe that's why, even many, many years later, when someone said to Jesus, "I'll follow you anywhere," Jesus replied, "Foxes have holes and birds have nests, but the Son of Man has no home, nowhere to lay his head." Maybe that's why when mother Mary came to fetch Jesus and pleaded with him, "Son, come on home now to your family," he said, "I don't have a home or a family, except for these disciples who travel with me now." In the beginning the Word was with God. So long as he was in the world, he could never be duped into thinking he was home.

Are you going home for Christmas? An odd question when you realize that the One we tout as "the reason for the season" created Christmas precisely by not being home. Christmas is about the homelessness of the Word. Christmas is about the One who knows as keenly as anyone ever has what it means to have a longing for home, to have reason to feel displaced. "He was in the world. He made every person in the world, but they didn't give him the time of day." That's what Christmas is all about.

Are you going home for Christmas? He didn't. The Word of God did not go home for Christmas but created Christmas by letting himself get exiled from home. Theologians sometimes make a big deal about saying that although Jesus was a human being who was always in just one place at a time the same as the rest of us, the divine side of Jesus was still able to be everywhere at once. But that's not what John says. The Word was made meat and he pitched his tent, he made his dwelling here, among us. Jesus was not nursing at Mary's breast in a cattle shed and at the same time sitting on a cloud chatting amiably with the Holy Spirit. He was there, all there, because that's what it meant for the Word of God to come down here. He wasn't home. That's what it was all about.

And that's why there is hope on this Christmas Day for every one of us who knows he or she isn't home yet, either. To varying degrees each one of us can or cannot get back home today, or ever. Sooner or later we all lose our homes on this earth. Parents die or are exiled to the nursing ward. Children fly the coop, leave the nest, strike out on their own. In short, they leave home, and they take a little bit of home with them when they do. They wave goodbye, go off to establish their own homes, and parents may take joy at that, but at the same time are stabbed with the realization that because little Joey is now married with a home of his own, mom and dad's own home is the less for it. Or, as I said earlier, maybe you never had a good home to begin with and so although in one sense you've got nothing to be nostalgic about, at the same time you sense you were robbed of something all along. Somebody somewhere owes you a good home, and that sense of something lacking in your life makes you either angry or despairing, or maybe both.

Are you going home for Christmas? It doesn't matter how you answer that question, it still evokes some longing in your heart. But if you can't go home or won't go home; if you can go home only to regret how much it's changed or if you're still basically at home but you know it won't last forever--whoever you are and whatever your circumstance, the news of Christmas Day is that the One we call Jesus understands. If he didn't, we would not have a Christmas to celebrate to begin with. But we do.

Because the One who left home for our sakes came down here. He was meaty and fleshy and undeniably human. He lived his life like an extended camping trip, replete with all the inconvenience, dirt, and mess of it all; replete even with death. And yet he lives. He's alive. And so we, John says, have seen his glory. We've seen that the homeless one of Nazareth was full of grace and truth. And what is the result of that grace, what is the core of that truth? That for those of us who believe, he has given us the right to be called "children of God." Children. Of God. He has given us a Father, and children belong with their Father. If you are the Father's child and he loves you the same as you love him, then the day will come when the Jesus we know as "Immanuel," "God with us," will reverse the formula to allow "us with God." With God. The same as for the Word in the beginning. With God.

Are you going home for Christmas? Because Jesus did not go home for Christmas, one day we all will. With God. Home. As it was in the beginning, so forevermore. Home. Amen.