The Gate of the Year

We can never be sure what might come of something we write.

Minnie Louise Haskins certainly never expected the leader of her country to quote from a little poem she had written thirty-one years earlier.

But he did.  He read from one of her poems on a broadcast as the nation was entering a war.  That excerpt has been widely quoted over the past seventy-five years, and the entire poem is quoted below.

Ms Haskins didn’t think of herself primarily as a poet.  She taught philosophy and sociology in college, but she did publish two or three books of poetry.

She was born and educated near Bristol, England, in 1875 and had a lifelong religious anchoring.  She went out to India as a Wesleyan Methodist missionary, and she published some of her books of poetry to raise funds to make this possible.

Her health broke, and she returned to England, where she worked at various jobs before joining the faculty at the London School of Economics and Political Science at age forty-three.

King George VI read from her poem on Christmas Eve 1939 in a radio broadcast to offer encouragement to the nation shortly after England and France had declared war on Hitler’s Germany.

Ms Haskins, who was sixty-four at the time, didn’t even hear King George’s Christmas Eve broadcast when he read from her writing.  But the poem titled, “God Knows,” has been often quoted under the better known title, “The Gate of the Year,” words from the first line.

We want to think we are self-sufficient, and the poet wants that status as she asks for light.  She doesn’t realize, if the Man at the Gate of the Year should give light to her, she would be dependent on him, rather than sufficient in herself.

Many so-called self-made men and women attained their wealth and fame from family inheritance, government subsidies, or “lucky breaks” opened by sources other than themselves.

Regardless of our financial success or social standing, everyone, from Warren Buffet to the homeless man who sleeps in a box in the alley, faces an uncertain future.  We may have warm houses, CDs in the bank, and sturdy bodies.  But we have no guarantee that any of these benefits will hold in the year ahead.

"GOD KNOWS"

Minnie Louise Haskins

1908

And I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, ‘Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.’ And he replied, ‘Go out into the darkness, and put your hand into the Hand of God. That shall be better to you than light, and safer than a known way.’ 

So, I went forth, and finding the Hand of God, trod gladly into the night

And He led me toward the hills and the breaking of day in the lone East.

So, heart, be still!

What need our little life,

Our human life, to know,

If God hath comprehension?

In all the dizzy strife

Of things both high and low

God hideth His intention.

God knows. His will
Is best. The stretch of years
Which wind ahead, so dim
To our imperfect vision,
Are clear to God. Our fears
Are premature; In Him,
All time hath full provision.

Then rest: until
God moves to lift the veil
From our impatient eyes,
When, as the sweeter features
Of Life’s stern face we hail,
Fair beyond all surmise
God’s thought around His creatures
Our mind shall fill.

Miss Minnie is wise in recommending that we reach out in the gathering dark and put our hands into the Hand of God.

A Three-Inch Tall Jesus

When I was about twelve years old, the Sears, Roebuck store in Sweetwater, Texas, had a Christmas shopping display featuring a real-live Santa Claus who was just three inches tall.

He lived in a tiny, but attractive, house that sat on a table.  You could look in through the picture window and see the little man whom the store called Kute Kris Kringle.  He was sitting by the fireplace in his easy chair in his living room that was decorated for the holidays with packages under the tree.

At times, this Tom Thumb-sized Santa would get up and walk around the room.  He would look out and wave at those who watched him.

He had a tiny telephone on a table by his chair.  It was connected with a full-sized phone on the table where customers watched him.  If you wanted to talk with him, you could pick up the receiver and tell him what to bring you.

Parents would lead their kiddos to the display, point to the picture window, and get them to wave.  If the little folks were brave, they could pick up the phone and tell the Jolly Little Elf their hearts’ desires.

Because I had parted company with Old Saint Nick a few years earlier, I watched, trying to figure how Sears, Roebuck managed to set up the display and get the real-live man to look so small.

After a while, I noticed a walled-off section immediately behind Kris Kingle’s Little House on the Table.  So I figured the full-grown man was just on the other side of that wall on a movie set that looked like a living room.  My guess was that we were, in effect, looking through the “wrong end” of a telescope.

With the boldness of late preadolescence, I picked up the phone one day to talk to Santa.  That was OK with him .  .  .  the first time.  When I left the area and came back and called him several more times, the big man behind the three-inch illusion strongly suggested into his mouthpiece that I find something else to do.  Leave the phone line open for younger boys and girls.

As I think back to how the Sears people had managed to shrink Santa Claus to a manageable size, it occurs to me that we try to do the same thing with Jesus.  A three-inch tall Savior is much more convenient than the full-grown One who comes to life on the pages of the New Testament.

The Babe in Bethlehem with shepherds and angels and Three Kings make a beautiful scene on our Christmas cards.  The stable in the creche on a table top in the family room is a bit larger than the Sears house where Santa lived. But the Babe in the table-top manger may be just about three inches long.  There also are tree ornament versions of the manger scene, with the Holy Family, reduced to no more than three inches.  Then, when the season is over, we can pack them all up and get them out of our way without great inconvenience. 

There are other ways -- more serious ways -- of keeping Jesus small beyond confining Him to the creche at Christmas.

Some people shrink Jesus to a manageable size.  They may say, He was a great teacher, nothing more.  Or they deny His miracles. When it comes to the New Testament’s greatest miracle, the resurrection of Jesus, some say those original followers wanted so badly for Him to come back to them, they believed He actually was raised from the dead.  

But if the resurrection is a delusion, how do we explain the millions of people across the centuries whose lives have been transformed through faith in a fairy tale?  The course of Christianity history cannot be so handily dismissed.     

Some people say they “believe the Bible from cover to cover.” (And they say they believe the cover, too, because it says "Holy Bible"). But they whittle Jesus down to size in the way they carry out Christmas.  

       A friend sent me an animated Christmas greeting through the Internet.  It was an attractive, colorful production that lasted about two minutes.  It was filled with trees and wreathes and reindeer, including red-nosed Rudolph.  There were lights and snowmen and elves, and a fireplace and candles and decorated lamp posts and bells.  And, by the way, they did manage to slip in a few religious symbols: manger scenes and an angel or two and an open Bible.  But it was mainly Santa Claus, sometimes flying off with his team of reindeer, sometimes resting peacefully after his hard night’s work.

The Santa Claus side of Christmas has overshadowed Jesus, not only in that animated Christmas card, but in real life.  As an example, I read this story on the Internet.   It probably didn't happen, but it could have:

There was a church that always put on their sign out front, "Jesus is the reason for the season." One lady had to pass the sign every day on her way to and from work. It really upset her, so she wrote a letter to the preacher and told him she didn’t appreciate the sign. Her final words in the letter: “I don’t think the church should try to drag religion into every holiday.”

Well, for all this cutting Jesus down to size, in St. Paul’s version of the Christmas story in Philippians, we see how Jesus trimmed Himself down to size: 

.  .  .   though he was in the form of God, [He] did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped,  but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men.  And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. 

       But then with the resurrection, the whittling ended, and Jesus was exalted to greater life :

        Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth,  and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.  

[Adapted from the story "The Three-Inch Tall Jesus" in my book, Once for a Shining Hour from amazon.com]

December 11: My Grandma's Birthday

December 11, 1888

Grandma’s birthday.

I was born in her little three-room house in West Texas.

So were my two sisters and three of my brothers.

Her farm was about nineteen miles from the Sweetwater hospital.

Our family had no car, so home delivery was the order of the day.

Mother’s mother’s farm was the closest thing we had to a permanent home.

For six or seven years, we moved three times a year, including a move back to Grandma’s.  All this within a twenty-five to thirty mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan County.

The three-pronged living pattern took us from her farm to the farm owned by Daddy’s youngest sister and her husband, Aunt Chessie and Uncle Jim.  Uncle Jim planted huge cotton acreage, and we were, in effect, migrant workers who came in each fall to harvest the crop.

When the boll-pulling season was winding down, Daddy would start his quest for a farm job.  I never learned the details of his search, but he would find a farmer who needed a hand and had a “rent house” for the farm hand to live in.

Each year, something would happen that Daddy disagreed with and wouldn’t put up with.  So he would tell the farmer what he could do with his nice farm and leave us with nowhere to live.

Grandma to the rescue.  

Robert Frost wrote, 

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, 

They have to take you in.”

Grandma may not have known Frost’s poem, “The Death o the Hired Man,” but Frost knew human nature.

I can only guess the logistics of getting us back to Grandma’s.  This was long before the cell phone era.  We had no phone.  Neither did Grandma.  So Mother probably wrote to her when she saw the end coming .  .  . Or maybe after the blowup, the boss let us stay until we heard from Grandma.

Daddy then must have hitchhiked to Aunt Chessie and Uncle Jim’s and prevailed on his brother-in-law to move us back to Grandma’s.

Then the cycle would begin anew.

Grandma was from a proud family of six sisters and a brother who trekked to Texas early in the twentieth century from their home in Mississippi, leaving one brother behind.

She apparently never approved of her only daughter’s choice of a husband.  I’m sure Mother did a lot of negotiating and praying — sometimes unsuccessful — to keep her husband and her mother from snarling at each other.  

I remember one night during one of our sojourns with Grandma: The three adults were in the kitchen with the door closed, while we five younger Webbs cringed in the big middle room.  The closed door blocked little of the yelling as mother-in-law and son-in-law hurled verbal rocks at each other. 
No doubt, these moments hastened our departure to the next location.

Despite such outbursts — which actually were few and far between — we seemed to live in relative peace as Grandma, like the farm couple in Frost’s poem, felt she had to take us in.

Two factors brought an end to our annual work in Uncle Jim’s cotton patch: First, Daddy’s two oldest boll pullers (my older sister and brother) grew up and got paying jobs on a year-round basis.  About that time, the Texas Legislature passed a law enforcing school attendance for children under sixteen.  That included me and my younger sister and brother.

Deprived of this source of autumn income, Daddy moved us to Sweetwater where he found fairly regular work with a cement contractor.  He supplemented this with occasionally assisting a man who ran a local moving company.

I haven’t mentioned the effects this impermanence had on our education.  It meant that we missed two months or more of school each fall, and we almost always were in two different schools each year.  One of the schools almost invariably was the tiny Divide School in the village about four miles from Grandma’s farm.  Our irregular attendance and shifting from school to school took a terrible toll, with my older sister and me the only two who finished high school.

We moved to town at the end of my sophomore year.  Though Mother was relieved to be freed from packing our meagre belongings for three moves a year, she was concerned about Grandma living alone all year long.  

Because I was familiar with Divide School and many classmates I had known since first grade, Mother got Daddy to agree to let me stay with Grandma for my junior and senior years.  Though I frequently hitched rides to town and back, this living arrangement provided some sense of stability for Grandma and me.  I was the high honor boy in our Class of 1951.

If Grandma had not opened her home to her daughter and family across the years, who knows what might have happened! We might not have survived as a family unit. Daddy might have drifted away, or we might have been sent to foster homes, or .  .  . 

       Forget the "What If's," and Thank God for Grandma.

“My mama was a cotton picker and My daddy was field hand."

“My mama was a cotton picker and

My daddy was field hand.

My mama had the face of an angel and

My daddy was a mighty man.”

I googled those lyrics again and again before they finally came up in a Twitter. I needed the words because they are a good poetic description of my parents. 

And yet, these words are not just poetry. They are literal. 

Well, not quite literal. When I was growing up in West Texas, my whole family spent the fall months in the cotton patch. This meant my brothers and sisters and I missed most of first semester of school — however long it took to harvest Uncle Jim and Aunt Chessie’s crop — but we didn’t pick cotton. We pulled bolls. The end result was similar: We filled Uncle Jim’s trailer with the white fluffy stuff. But the process was different.

When you picked cotton, you plucked the cotton out of the burr or boll. When you pulled bolls, you broke the boll off the stalk with the cotton in it, removing the stems and the leaves, and put the boll and cotton into the sack. West Texas gins had an upfront process that separated the cotton from the burr.

        Everything about manually harvesting cotton — whether picking or pulling — has disappeared with technology. It’s all gathered by machines, and I’m not at all nostalgic about “the good old days.”

Of course, if the harvest had been mechanized in the 1940s, Daddy would have had to find some other way to scrape out a living for his wife and five kids, probably involving all seven of us in that endeavor as well.

Another way the words to the song aren’t literal: We never called our female parent “Mama.” She was always “Mother.” In retrospect, it seems odd that the softer, more outwardly loving parent had the more formal appellation, while we called our sterner parent the softer name. “Father” would never have worked. He was “Daddy.”

Some of the lyrics to that song fit our family to a T: 

Mama in the song wore a skirt made from a flour sack. So did Mother and my two sisters. My brothers and I wore flour-sack shirts — all made on a foot-powered sewing machine — with our overalls.

Another line from the song hits home: “I still draw strength from my daddy’s strong back and my mama’s sweet face.”

Daddy was not big and muscular, but he was strong. In the cotton field, owned by his youngest sister and her husband, Daddy moved quickly along three rows at a time, straddling one and working the one on either side. He did that while we toiled over one or two rows, depending on our level of physical maturity.

He quit school when he was thirteen or fourteen, probably because his mother or daddy one too many times told him what he was supposed to do. To show them, he left home and was on his own the next fifty years. Along the way, he was no more disposed to taking orders from the men who signed his paychecks than he had been with his folks back home.

He never learned a trade, but he was good with his hands, stacking feed, chopping cotton, driving a John Deere or Farmall tractor on somebody else’s farm, or pushing a wheelbarrow of cement for a building contractor.

We lived in a string of different communities, most within a thirty-mile radius of Sweetwater, the county seat of Nolan, County, Texas, as Daddy moved from farm job to farm job. But we frequently returned to the small farm belonging to Mother’s mother. 

Robert Frost, in “The Death of the Hired Man,” said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”

Grandma was always ready to take in Mother, her only child, and us grandchildren, but she probably felt a case of “have to” when it came to her son-in-law. 

Daddy had a quick mind. If he’d had the patience to learn chess, he would have been a master. In card games, checkers, or dominoes, he could anticipate his opponents’ moves and what cards or dominoes were in their hands.

Texans play “Forty-two,” a bidding game with dominoes. I’ve seen him get, literally, fighting mad when his partner in Forty-two made what he considered a dumb play. Once, with a nephew as his partner, Daddy jumped up and almost knocked over the card table in his effort to hit my cousin.

Though he owned no house, he was the head of any house he lived in, other than Grandma’s. You argued or disagreed with him at your peril. As the eight of us (Grandma, Mother, Daddy, and five kids) were at breakfast in Grandma’s crowded kitchen one morning, I was seated next to Daddy. I expressed my opinion about something, and he said, “I don’t care what you think.” In return, I said, “And I don’t care what you think.” Before there was time for another thought, I found myself in the back yard, he had his belt off, and my back end was stinging under my overalls.

He and Mother struggled financially all their lives, living in rented apartments or farm hand houses and buying their first car after I was out of college and seminary.

With his harsh exterior, “loving” was nowhere near the top of my list of adjectives for Daddy. But with hindsight, I can see, even as he lived with pressures of holding a job and keeping Sears, Roebuck and Piggly Wiggly at bay as they pressed for payment, he found ways to express his love:

• When he and my older brother Lee Roy and I would hitchhike into Sweetwater on Saturdays, he would buy us hamburgers and give us enough change to see Gene Autry, Johnny Mack Brown, or Roy Rogers in a movie. 

• He expressed affection by getting me or one of my brothers in a headlock with his left arm and raking his right-hand knuckles across the scalp in a “Dutch rub” or a “dry shampoo.”

• If any of us got sick, Daddy left the nursing to Mother, but he kept close watch to see whether it was anything serious.

• When we made good grades or received recognitions, we would get a hug or a pat on the back.

• When I went forward during a revival meeting to “accept Christ as my personal Savior,” he wasn’t there to see it because he wasn’t much into church in my pre-college years. But he was visibly moved when we came home and my older sister told him and Mother, “Lawrence professed this morning.”

• When any of us got recognition in school, he and Mother went to see us. When I was in high school plays, he was there. When I graduated from high school, they were there. 

• When I publicly declared my sense of calling to the ministry, he expressed his joy, and he was there to hear my first “sermon,” all three minutes of it. When I started to college to study for the ministry, he told me he was proud of me as he apologized for having no money to spare that he give for financial support.

• He was on the edge of tears when I told them I was going to the seminary in Kentucky, rather than the one much closer by in Fort Worth.

Both he and Mother readily came to love my wife Pansy, with good reason. They were always glad to see us come back for visits, and they loved our sons. The last time I saw Daddy alive, he was heavily sedated and in and out of wakefulness. Shortly after I arrived, when Mother said, “Lawrence is here,” his very last words to me before he sank back into sleep were the question, “How are Russell and Jonathan?”

Today, thirty-five years after his death, I think of positive examples he left me:

• A deep desire for honesty — even though it often cost him a job because he was too quick to speak his mind

• A determination to work hard — leaving me in the dust when it comes to manual dexterity

• An unembarrassed, unapologetic love for his wife — often finding ways to get her small gifts, a box of handkerchiefs or inexpensive perfume for no special occasion

So, though he and I didn’t often say it in words to each other when he was alive, I’ll say it now: I love you, Daddy.

Space Available

College dorm rooms often have assorted placards and signs, a mixture of the serious and frivolous. A suite I shared at Hardin-Simmons University long ago with two other freshmen had a religious message next to a sign filched from a parking lot. A fellow student came to our room, looked around, and read the two signs aloud as if there were one:

"Only one life, 'twill soon be past, Only what's done for Christ will last.  Park here."

Similar incongruities sprout on billboards and business marquees, especially in times of national crisis:

• A hamburger chain had a facsimile of the United States flag just below the company name. Under the flag were these words: "Satisfy your craving. Bacon, Mushroom Melt."

Wow! Show you are a loyal American by eating a Whopper with bacon, mushrooms, and cheese.

• That same company had another sign at Christmas. The flag was still there, but with this statement: "Jesus is the Reason for the Season."

A respectful reminder: there is no logical connection between patriotism and Jesus and eating burgers.

• A gas station had these two statements that read like one: "God Bless the U.S.A. Cigarettes as Low as 99 Cents a Pack.”  Does God also bless inexpensive cigarettes?

• For years, car dealerships have been festooned with flags by the dozen. 

While it is certainly appropriate for a merchant to express loyalty to country if he or she chooses, there is no obvious connection between patriotism and eating a hamburger or smoking a cigarette or buying a car. The car dealership’s flags may be sending a mixed signal.  After all, many cars sold in this country were manufactured overseas.

• On the ad space in front of a shopping center, a couple of merchants had their ads in strip signs, but not all the slots were rented. To encourage others to advertise, the ad agency put a message below a religio-patriotic message. When the messages were read in continuous flow, the effect was as follows:

"In God We Trust.  

        United We Stand.

Space Available."

With this sign, I saw a positive reminder: As we declare, "In God We Trust," we should leave space for all who care to join us. Not all Americans trust in God. Among those who do trust in God, there are many different understandings of God. While sincere believers cannot endorse competing understandings of God, we must endorse our fellow human beings who follow other paths. We must insist that they be able to take advantage of "Space Available" with the same freedom we enjoy.

Current suspicion of all things Arabic and all things Islamic recalls a similar attitude toward German-Americans in World War One and toward Japanese-Americans in World War Two.

In the First World War, everything German was suspect. For example, in Wisconsin and other states with large German-American settlements, many school systems stopped teaching German as a foreign language. People of German ancestry were pressured to buy war bonds and make large contributions to the Red Cross to prove their patriotism, under the threat of being tarred and feathered if they refused. Lutheran congregations, who historically had conducted services in German, were forced to forsake their heart language and have their services in English.

In World War Two, some one hundred ten thousand people of Japanese ancestry (including seventy thousand U.S. citizens) were rounded up and forced to live in barbed wire and machine gun-enforced camps. Their only crime was their Japanese heritage.

Given the current political atmosphere, we need to remind ourselves that not all Arabs are Muslims and not all Muslims are Arabs. We also need to remember violent Muslims are no more representative of all Muslims than murderous church members represent all Christians. The analogy has often been made that it would be as logical to identify all professing Christians with Timothy McVeigh, who was executed for the Oklahoma City bombing, as to identify all Muslims and Arabs with those who destroyed the Twin Towers.

"In God We Trust. United We Stand."

Those are wonderful words. But our unity has always been unity amid diversity. Under the Stars and Stripes, Americans of all stripes have insisted on defining patriotism and unity on their own terms. 

Over the past decade, I have received an identical email message from several people in different parts of the country who probably don’t know each other. The bottom line can be summed up this way: You are entitled to freedom of speech as long as your speech agrees with mine and you say nothing critical about our country. The article concludes with this in-your-face advice:

"Our First Amendment gives every citizen the right to express his opinion about our government, culture, or society, and we will allow you every opportunity to do so. But once you are done complaining. . . . I highly encourage you to take advantage of one other great American freedom, the right to leave . . . ."

That ultimatum raises several questions:

• Who are the "we" who say, "we will allow you every opportunity" to express your opinion? No group has the right to tell you, in the words of the old song, "Hit the road, Jack, and don't you come back no more!"

• Why should you be invited to leave this country because you express displeasure with aspects of government? Why is it unpatriotic to criticize our government leaders? "My country, right or wrong" is an unthinking slogan. "Love it or leave it" is arrogant.

• Where is a person supposed to go? The first advice may be, Go to the devil.  A second suggestion will probably be the country currently considered the worst place on earth--Germany or Japan in World War Two, the Soviet Union in the Cold War, Afghanistan and Iraq in the war on terrorism.

Most U. S. citizens stand united in love for our country, though not always in how we express that love. Sometimes deep affection leads to a lovers’ quarrel.

Another sign from my college days back in Abilene, Texas: One of the janitors at Hardin-Simmons had this message on his pickup: "You are welcome to Abilene, but come in quiet." 

This sign was intended to amuse us who read it. But those who equate disagreement with disloyalty often are noisy as they tell others to be quiet. If we seek to silence those who disagree with us when we are in the majority, we should realize this is a two-edged sword that can cut against us when our viewpoint is not in the ascendancy.

The Golden Rule applies here: "Grant unto others the same freedom of expression you would want granted unto you." Love for our country, respect for one another, and, especially our love for God, should enable us to hang out the "Space Available" sign, welcoming those with whom we disagree.

I knew he was going to ask for money.

He was about my height (six foot) and heavier than me (considerably bigger gut), dressed in jeans, a jacket, and a woolen toboggan.

My wife and I had gotten out of our car and started walking toward a little church.  He was walking in the same general direction, several steps away on our left.

I looked like an easy touch in my solid black preacher suit, heading to church on a chilly November Sunday morning.

Taking the initiative, I spoke first, “Good morning.”

“Mornin’.”

“Are you going to church?”

“Thinkin’ about it.”

“We’re visitors here.”

He mumbled something that sounded like “Two dollars?”

I said nothing.

More clearly this time, he said, “Could you give me two dollars?”

“Don’t give people on the street money for food.  If you have the money, take them to a cafe and buy them something to eat.”  Daddy was speaking to me, as he had since I was in grade school.

“I don’t think so.”

We kept walking.

He kept walking past the church building.

We had hardly found our way into a pew before I realized I had forgotten something important to tell the man.

The church we were visiting is called South Main Chapel and Mercy Center, and one way they show mercy is by providing a free lunch every Sunday after the service for anyone who cares to stay (as well as another meal or two during the week).

I blew it.

I let an opportunity slip by.

But .  .  .

Did the man want food .  .  .  or money?

I’ll never know the answer.

I had several singles in my pocket, so I could have given him what he asked for.  But maybe he was asking for something more substantial than two dollars.  Maybe he wanted me to share myself with him.

Before I retired from college teaching, I took a couple of courses one summer at Columbia University in New York City.  There, I was approached daily by homeless and hungry people on the street and on the subway.  Without Daddy’s instruction, any day, I could have spent every dollar I withdrew from the ATMs around Manhattan.

Often it was easy, to shake my head or simply keep walking without acknowledging the person asking for money — and not worrying about it.  

Every time I left the central campus at Columbia, I passed a grocery store near my dorm.  One day, as I rounded the corner for my room, a man called out, “I need some formula for my baby.”

I couldn’t ignore that call.  

“Let’s go in the store here, and I’ll buy you a case.”

“They don’t have the brand my baby needs.”

“I’m sorry.”

Did he want formula or money?  Did he even have a baby?

I’ll never know the answer.

Many years earlier, I met a homeless, hungry man who didn’t let me off as easily as the man at church or the man who asked for money for formula.  

I was at a religious convention in New Orleans in the years when delegates to such a meeting wore suits and ties.  

One afternoon, I skipped the convention and went down to the French Quarter and found my way to the Cafe du Mondé, intending to enjoy some beignets, their famous powdered-sugar, deep-fried dessert.

I bought several of the little delicacies along with a cup of their chicory coffee, then made my way to an outdoor table.  But I can’t say I enjoyed my afternoon snack.

A smallish, dark-haired man with a sunburnt face invited himself to my table.  Though he could tell without asking, he did ask, “Are you a preacher here for the meeting?”  I was one more among thousands of my counterparts who were roving the city between sessions.

“Yes, I am.”

Could you get me something to eat?”

“Yes.  Would you like one of these cakes?”

He studied the beignets, paused, then took one.

I lost no time devouring one while he simply nibbled on his. 

“I can’t eat this,” he said after a bit.

“He’s going to ask for money,” I said to myself.

“There’s a place around the corner where I could eat something.”

“OK, let’s go around there.”

He obviously had been there before.

“What’re you doing here?” the man behind the counter asked, not kindly.

“My friend here is hungry,” I said as we seated ourselves on the stools.  “Fix him whatever he wants.  I’ll pay for it.”

“I want a hamburger with lettuce and mayonnaise and tomato and onion.”

The counter man nodded quizzically at me:

“Nothing, thanks.”

My newfound companion devoured the burger in a few huge gulps, washing it down with iced tea.

I had done my Christian duty after sharing my precious powdered-sugar pastry and buying him a burger.  Hadn’t I?

He didn’t think so. 

“I will be praying for you,” I promised as I headed toward my hotel, hoping for a bit of rest before the night session at the convention center.

“Reverend, do you love me?

“Yes, I do.”

And I did.

“I don’t have a bed for tonight.”

“Where can we go to get you a bed?”

He mentioned a place, and we began walking the several blocks to a “flop house.” I inquired at the desk.

“Do you have a room for my friend for tonight?”

“I’m sorry, sir.  All our beds are taken.”

“Where else can we go?”

He named another.

And another.

And another.

Each of the others was blocks and blocks removed from the previous one as the June afternoon grew hotter.

On each new leg of the journey, as my legs were tiring, I prayed more earnestly for the Lord to open the door and provide a bed for this man at the next place.  I felt like the importunate widow with the judge in Jesus’s parable.  But it seemed God, unlike the judge, was unmoved.

The sun was traveling quickly toward its nightly siesta as we came to yet another cheap hotel.

My partner of the afternoon looked around, nervously, then stepped inside just ahead of me.

“What the hell are you doing here?” a harsh voice cried. “I’ve told you not to come back!”

“It’s OK, sir.  He’s with me.  I’ll pay for his bed for tonight if you have any available.”

The clerk didn’t look happy to see me, but, in a softer voice, he quoted the price of the night’s lodging.

I paid the three or four dollars and watched as he called out a room number.

I shook my friend’s hand and patted him on the back:

“God bless you, sir.”

“Thank you, reverend.”

I never saw the man again, but he stayed with me every night in my more expensive room a few blocks away.

Likewise, the man at the South Main Chapel and Mercy Center did not leave me just because he chose not to go into the church with us.

Thoughts from 1971 and 2002 for Independence Day 2014

I’ll start by doing a little namedropping.  

A decade or so ago, I wrote a few essays for “Sightings,” a website connected with Martin Marty.  One of the pieces pertained to Independence Day.

In case I dropped his name in vain, let me introduce Dr. Marty. As a longtime professor of American church history at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he is highly respected among many Protestant leaders.  He wouldn’t remember my name and couldn’t pick me out of a police lineup.  But I was honored for some of my writing to appear on his website.

My article on July 3, 2002, was titled, “Revisiting Independence Day, 1971.”  The opening sentence said this: “I recently rediscovered notes I had scribbled in church on a bulletin dated ‘Independence Day, 1971.’" 

I can reconstruct what I wrote for “Sightings” because they keep an archive, and I found me by typing in my name under the “Author” heading.

At some point, my concern over activities in that 1971 church service caused me to tune out what was being said and sung so I could jot down enough thoughts to fill the back side of the worship order.  And the paper was still in a file folder thirty-one years later.

I’m writing this article for Independence Day 2014 for two reasons: First, I think some of what I said in 1971 and 2002 is worth repeating.  Then, too, I remember a little flap with the graduate student who edited the “Sightings” materials.

  Here’s what I wrote in 1971:

"Going to church on Independence Day proved to be a strange experience. In the service which included patriotic songs and the pledge of allegiance to the nation's flag, I had mixed emotions. My boyhood training of national pride and idealism welled up. But those emotions kept getting tangled with darker feelings. I kept thinking of those whose freedom is abridged in our land -- the blacks who as a people have not known liberty and justice -- and of those in high places who seem to be trying to suppress such basic freedoms as freedom of speech and freedom of the press. We all too readily sing 'My Country, 'tis of Thee' and say the Pledge as if these express realities rather than ideals toward which to strive. In a comfortable, all-white, middle class congregation, we can convince ourselves that these things are so and that God is guiding and blessing America on a predestined course as holy nation---one nation under God." 

The young editor was exercising his editorial prerogatives, making changes in my comments from 2002, and I didn’t argue with that.  Experienced writers and editors — of whom I am one — need to be edited.  

But then, in a phone conversation, he suggested a change or two in that paragraph from 1971.  I told him I didn’t want to change anything in that section.  Those are the exact words I wrote in 1971, but this young man doing graduate study in church history — of all things — wanted to “improve” the wording of a document from the past.  

That paragraph had little historical value.  But it said what I was thinking that day in church, and it was said the way I said it in 1971.  I’m sure the editor and I could have improved on the wording.  But I didn’t — and don’t — think we should have.  And we didn’t.  

He acquiesced to my stubborn resistance to his effort to make me look better.  I don’t even remember what he wanted to change.  You probably could edit that paragraph and help me, even now.

To me, this would change history.  The piece probably isn’t worth the to-do I’m making twelve years after the fact.  But if you’re willing to change an insignificant paragraph from the past by a relatively unknown essayist, where do you draw the line?   Do you delete obscene or untrue or undiplomatic words from a past president?

*****

Whatever you make of that little dust-up, I’ll close with further words from 2002. They probably could stand some editing.  They still may have relevance for Independence Day 2014:

“As I look back, I am struck by how little things have changed [since 1971]. If all are equal in this land of the free, some are still more equal than others. Today many African-American children attend schools that are separate and unequal. In the past nine months  [since September 11, 2001], Arab and Muslim Americans have received governmental and non-governmental scrutiny at odds with Constitutional guarantees and the lessons of American history. 

“Another troubling aspect of that 1971 church service is still with us. In many churches on the Sunday closest to Independence Day, it is difficult to tell what, exactly, is being worshipped. Patriotic songs replace Christian hymns, and the Pledge of Allegiance is recited almost as if it is a creed or confession of faith. 

“As a Baptist, I am fiercely loyal to both my nation and my church. I am equally dedicated to keeping a respectful distance between them. When my Baptist ancestors in some English colonies refused to pay taxes to support state religion, they were jailed and, in some cases, killed. The principles for which they struggled -- free exercise and disestablishment -- are now codified in the First Amendment of the Constitution, and have long been a hallmark of Baptist groups.”

A Wedding On the Air

I recently performed a wedding that was broadcast on the radio.

I teach the weekly Baraca Radio Sunday School Class from the First Baptist Church of Anderson, South Carolina.  A couple who had been attending the broadcast at our church early Sunday mornings asked me to marry them.  The lesson each week is available 24/7 on the church's website: www.andersonfbc.org/baraca.

We followed the usual schedule for the broadcast, with a shortened lesson/sermon along with a vocal soloist and the wedding as the only deviation from our regular Sunday morning radio ministry.

The transcript of the lesson follows:

This is a distinctive morning for the Baraca Radio Sunday School Class, focusing on Christian principles of love and marriage, and culminating with the actual exchange of vows between Teresa Ross and Jack Abraham after our lesson.
A few weeks ago, Teresa came to me, worried about “love, honor, and obey” in the traditional vows. Was I going to call for her to obey Jack?  I told Teresa, that idea of the wife obeying the husband went out with the kerosene lamp.
When Pansy and I married, nearly forty-nine years ago, we both were mature Christian adults.  We never asked who was going to be the human head of the house.  We both had heads, and we both intended to use them.
Some years ago, when one of my nephews was getting married, I saw the absurdity of the husband being the head of the house simply because he is a male.   Terry was a handsome fellow, every bit of twenty years old.  He stood there with his beautiful bride, Denise, who also was twenty.  As I sat listening to the call for her to obey him, I thought, 
“What maturity, what wisdom does this boy have that gives him authority over this sweet girl that makes her promise a church full of relatives and friends that she is going to obey whatever he tells her to do?”
The codes of Bible times definitely favored men. In the time of Jesus, for example, a man could divorce his wife if she burned the toast. She had no recourse.   But the great biblical principle of marriage is in the first chapter of Genesis.  God created both the male and female in His own image. Because both are created in God’s image, they have equal standing before God.
All through the first chapter of Genesis, God as God makes the various elements of the heavens and the earth, He says each part of it is good.  
God made the sun and the moon and the stars, And God saw that it was good (v. 18). 
God made the simpler forms of life that inhabit the sea and the air, And God saw that it was good.  And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the cattle according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.
After God made the first man and woman, God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good.
But let’s go back to the creation of that first couple: So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.
First, it says God created man in his own image. But then it says male and female he created them.
That first reference is to what we traditionally call mankind, or humankind.  But the writer wants us to know humans include male and female.  He made both to share His likeness.  Bottom line: He created both man and woman in His image.
He gave them charge over the rest of creation.  So the image of God means we are superior to the other life forms.
But it also means we are spiritual beings.  The image of God doesn’t mean we look like God, physically.  God is Spirit, not a physical being.   The second chapter of Genesis has God walking around in the garden like a farmer looking after His land.  But that is poetry.   
The New Testament says, God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.
So when God made male and female in His image, it meant each of us shares God’s essential qualities.  We share that with God, and we share it equally with each other.
I’ve presided over weddings in various settings.  My first wedding ever was for college mates at Hardin-Simmons University out in Abilene, Texas.  I still keep in touch with that bride and groom, Freddy and Maxine Blalock.
  Probably my most beautiful wedding location was at the foot of Toccoa Falls when I was one of the ministers at the First Baptist Church in Toccoa, Georgia, back before the terrible 1977 flood.  
I’ve done weddings at Anderson University,  at Table Rock State Park up in the South Carolina mountains.  I did a wedding in the back yard of a farm with live music by cows just across the fence.
  I did the honors for Phil Marett Junior and his wife Lynn as I stood by a hot air balloon and the couple stood in the basket.  They ascended after the ceremony.
My most unusual wedding experience was in Scotland.  Pansy and I were witnesses for a couple we met only minutes before the ceremony, in the village of Gretna Green — in a blacksmith shop, of all places. The story behind that goes back to England in the seventeen-hundreds. You had to announce your wedding at least two weeks in advance and had to be married by Church of England priests.
Scotland had no restrictions.  A couple could marry simply by declaring their intentions before two witnesses.  So the Old Blacksmith Shop in Gretna Green became a popular place for elopers. 
About all it took was for the officiant to ask, “Will you?”  The couple would say, “We will.”  Then the official would say, “OK, then you are.”
England has relaxed its marriage laws, and the fire no longer burns in The Old Blacksmith Shop, but thousands of couples with the fire of love in their hearts still exchange vows over the original anvil where the blacksmith once performed ceremonies for run-away Englanders.
Pansy and I went to Gretna Green, thinking we would tour The Old Blacksmith Shop. But just as our guide was getting us started, the man doing the weddings came in and asked us to be witnesses for Becky Barnett and Mark Jones, from Liverpool.
The secular ceremony called for faithfulness of one man and one woman to each other as long as they live.  Mark and Becky, both in their early thirties, also repeated the familiar vows "for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, for better or worse."  Then, as the wedding official struck the anvil with a hammer, he declared Mark and Becky to be husband and wife. Then the four of us signed official papers, documenting what had just happened.
The newlyweds invited us to a restaurant in the wedding complex for tea and "biscuits"  -- we call them cookies. So, over tea and cookies, we discovered a mutuality and have kept in touch.
Mark and Becky are both creative artists in Liverpool:  she a visual designer, he a musician.  
They had lived together about ten years before they finally got married.  They laughed at marrying as just doing what the culture expected. 
Mark said, when they decided to go ahead and marry, he didn’t think marriage would make any difference.  But it did.
They both began to sense a commitment they did not have, could not have — outside of marriage.  It put a secure flooring under their relationship.  This from a couple who had laughed at conventional morality. They had lived together for ten years.  They had a non-religious ceremony.  But they came to see the need for a permanent, loving commitment.
I’ve talked at length about casual settings and casual attitudes toward marriage.  Love often just means the excitement of the physical.  Too often, what we call love is selfish: What’s in it for me? 
The way they spell love, it has an “I”right in the middle of it.
I went along with those unusual settings because I wanted to help the couples.  But I wonder whether these settings reflect the desire to keep a safe distance away from the church building, for the generation that has rejected church in large numbers. But novel locations make great pictures. 
We have pictures of our grandchildren in a little corner next to our family room.  Jonathan and Vicky sent the pictures three or four years ago, and I had them framed as a birthday present for Pansy.  The pictures are sweet.  They caught Ethan at age eight and Addie about five.  But our grandkids have moved on beyond those pictures.  Ethan is pushing toward twelve and Addie has hurried past eight.
There’s usually a photographer at a wedding, recording the soloist’s magnificent song.  The bride’s dozen red roses.  Her gorgeous wedding dress.  The wedding pictures bring back memories of the ceremony.  But life moves on beyond that day.  Much like my grandchildren, we change.
Sometimes, the wedding never turns into a marriage.  Something goes wrong.  The song is a mere echo on the backroads by the rivers of your memory and aren’t necessarily gentle on your mind.  The one remaining rose is pressed between pages of a Bible that’s never open.  The bride gave the lovely wedding dress to Goodwill and cut the groom out of the picture but still admires the dress.  We’ve seen couples like that.
But every wedding is a sign of hope.   As pastor in New York’s Hudson River Valley, 
I re-married a couple in the parsonage.  In that community, I also married a couple in their eighties.  Talk about hope! The groom’s first wife had died, and he was marrying her sister.   On a snowy Sunday afternoon, I stood in the archway between the living room and dining room — a step away from the table, richly laden with the wedding feast.
We’ve come today to the marriage vows for a mature couple who didn’t run away to Scotland. Teresa and Jack have been planning this wedding for months.  They came to me, a Christian minister, asking the blessing of God and the church.
Genesis 2 gives the basis for marriage: Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.  Jesus quotes that.  So does Paul.  
The example of Christ does not permit any person — man or woman — to be harsh and demanding, especially toward the marriage partner.  It’s not easy to be harsh and demanding in a sweet, loving spirit.
In First Corinthians 13 (vv. 4-8a), Paul spins a poem about the greatness of God’s kind of love. 
Love is patient and kind; love is not jealous or boastful; it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right.  Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.  Love never ends; 
So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
The challenge for each Christian, especially each wife and husband, is to model God’s kind of love.