New Testament Ray is to my mind a brilliant scholar and teacher and all around good guy. He can tell you whatever you want to know (and some things you don’t) about the NT; he can probably answer 3/4 of your questions about the OT (since you gotta know that to understand the NT; both the testaments being part of our Lutheran Christian biblical canon). If you think you’ve made a biblical discovery, he’ll get as excited as you; batshit crazy observations are met by a thoughtful ‘I’m not sure I agree’. But I have to acknowledge with all due humility that I’m a better preacher than he is. I know this as a fact.

Because I preached his sermon on Sunday, word-for-word. I told the B’mont geezers ‘I’m gonna preach the sermon that Ray wrote’ and later in the greeting line received to my inquiry ‘don’t you agree that I’m a better preacher than Ray?’ a (nearly) unanimous yes. They knew him, too, because he’d spent a weekend with them a couple of months back doing his teaching thing.

I’ve never before preached another man’s/woman’s sermon. I’ve appropriated large parts of sermons, to be sure, as well as, say, focus points or outlines and occasionally stories. That’s part of the craft, ’specially when you’re running short of time and/or desire or you have a bunch of people chompin’ on your ass and/or are trying to raise money. I ripped off John (‘the silver-tongued’) Chrysostom for an Easter sermon; tried one or two of Luther’s—people get real edgy forty minutes in. Same for Thielicke, whose “Waiting Father” is one of the 20th century masterpieces—if you can handle 60 minutes without a commercial (followed by a 14-verse hymn singing the whole heilsgeschichte since the beginning of time while the preacher steals into the sacristy to chuff a smoke ‘let my prayer rise before you as incense’ just as the congregation gets to the verse about Jonah; hell have a cigar, it’s a long way to Jesus). I was never tempted to buy a prepared sermon subscription though there’s a ton of them out there because I’d look at the sermons and think what a bunch of pap, honey-coated sugar cubes. They ought to be payin’ me for my sermons. Generally I’ve never preached another man’s sermon because I don’t think them good enough (temptation defeated by arrogance).

Which is, I think, the way most preachers think, at least as evidenced by Matchmaker Don, whose job it is to make matches between pastors and congregations, and who has to work with these search forms invented by some unknown office in the Chicago headquarters, the ranking of preaching in the pastor’s gifts and the congregation’s desires: ‘It’s a useless question. We all think we’re the greatest preachers since Martin Luther, ’cause that’s what we’re mostly trained to do. And congregations think we’re back in the fifties looking for that wonderful voice on the holy time church hour radio. Who in their right mind would say, no, preaching is not my gift?.’ From the pastoral end I understand that: when you step into the pulpit, you better be believin’ you have the best possible sermon that could be preached at that time and place or you’re sunk before the first word.

That’s not to say that you in fact do have the best of all possible sermons, only that you believe you do; for how else could you stand before people and do that naked dance of David before the Ark? I’m not talking tv preaching here, but authentic preaching, ‘here I stand tryin’ to say something about God. shit.’ I used to pray Luther’s sacristy prayer all the time, something like ‘I am unworthy but you have called me.’ Now it’s more like, ‘Dude, whatever the outcome, I’m doin’ this for you,’ sometimes adding ’show me the mercy.’

I preached Ray’s sermon because he called me Friday from his new apartment in Chicago where he was freezing his ass off and looking for a swimming pool. I remembered that he’d preached on Christmas Day in L.A. at the Presumably Delectable Liz’s place on the same John 1 text we had coming up Sunday (you can never get enough of ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god’ at Christmas) so I asked him what he did with it and he emailed the sermon and the offer to use it however I wanted. I read it, liked it very much, and, being tinged with a degree of sloth stemming from a constipation of creative energy which makes preparing one of them akin to squeezing out dry turds, gruntin’ and strainin’ for each sentence, decided to preach it, overruling my more critical intuition that it wouldn’t work.

He’d caught very nicely the shift of theological emphasis I’ve been making from sin and the crucifixion to incarnation, a lá, the bigger story is not that Jesus gets us right with God by dying, but that God is incarnated at in all Jesus, and, consequently in us, as a sem prof started me understanding with his comment on a paper, ‘The incarnation didn’t happen just once in Jesus, but continues in us. That’s the real scandal of Christianity.’ Ray picked it up in a way that I’d have spent hours lumbering through (plus he knows stuff I don’t). So he starts by tying John’s ‘In the beginning’ with the Genesis creation story—that’s what God does: God creates. Then steps us through the Lady Wisdom reality of God behind the logos (Word) of John; then how that wisdom is incarnated in our lives; this in spite of the ‘crevasses of darkness’ (!dude) we know in our lives; he polishes it off with an unknown poem by an equally obscure poet, typical for academics. It’s a really nice, thought-provoking article.

But it ain’t a sermon. I know, because as I said I preached it.

We have here at our house somewhere a little plastic box that you wind up and set on the table. It vibrates across the table while a little high-pitched voice yells ‘kin someone? . . .kin someone?. . .KIN SOMEONE LEMME OUTTA HERE!!’ That’s what it was like preaching Ray’s sermon. By the time you hook into one new and brilliant thought, he’s off to another. I’m thinking ‘what? he’s preaching this in the barrio of L.A.?’ I can picture my brother-in-law Art The Mexican with the virgin mary tattoo covering his back who is a building trades supervisor out there after the service: what in the fuck was he talking about? This was confirmed Sunday by rough old Dorothy with macular degeneration and the first sergeant of the kitchen police over in B’mont: ‘that was awful. I ended up thinking about what I had to do this afternoon.’

By the way: I’ve often told the family that if we replaced that plastic box with a plastic tomb with a plastic cross on top, we could make a million bucks on Good Friday, closing the service in somber darkness, when a miniature earthquake takes place on the altar and a little voice calls out, ‘kin someone? . . .kin someone?. . .KIN SOMEONE LEMME OUTTA HERE!!’ Betcha the Catholics could turn it into one of the stations of the cross; the evangelicals would absolutely swoon—’$29.95 for the voice of the dead Jesus? I’ll take ten.’ Hell, the Methodists could add a life-size one there in the talking gardens at their headquarters in Nashville (though, regionally, ‘kin y’all lemme outta here?’).

In any event I have sympathy for Ray; when it comes to preaching, he’s the guy in the box, trapped into a crappy fifteen minutes, when that’s nothing more than the appetizer of delights to come with ‘in the beginning was the word and the word was with god and the word was god’. He wanted to share ‘em all, but had to move so fast there was not time to savor the trip, like the manic tour guide in Rome, rushing us along on a tight schedule—’keep movin’ no time to look.’ When your mind moves at warp speed, mere mortals have a hard time keeping up, ’specially when you’re trying to take them somewhere they’ve never been before. Ray’s used to the interaction of teaching, not the one-sidedness of proclamation; he gets time in classrooms in terms of hours, not the paltry pause for preaching between commercials we get during worship. The pulpit is not his natural element.

Of course, it could be that this particular sermon, being written on Christmas Eve after moving cross-country and dancing the posada parties for a week just wasn’t destined for greatness, being only as good as possible under the circumstances of dislocation and hangovers. Or it could be that Pickett doesn’t translate to Keene very successfully. On the drive home I was thinking about the experiment and kept hearing the phrase ‘preaching another man’s sermon is like sleeping with another man’s wife’ so decided ‘well, I’ve never do that. Again.’

From now on, I’m gonna preach my own sermons.

I sold my sailboat in December, after accepting the fact that the price it would fetch would leave me with a net loss of just a bit more than the 12 – 13 grand I spent learning about the currency market and what gifts I have not been blessed with. While awaiting the arrival of Ike I was grateful not to have to worry about that, recalling the miserable trip Gracious Gerald and I made down to the marina in preparation for Rita (or somebody) to get caught in the evacuation traffic on the way home, though sitting around after Ike I observed ‘dammit. The boat was insured for four times what I got for it.’ It’s all in the timing.
 
The darling and I are fiscally conservative people, in spite of the cost of the adventures I undertake to her rolling eyes, though she’s come to trust that I’ll not put the family future at risk in doing so. I’ve knocked around the idea of buying a nice catamaran for at least four years and spent hours, nope days and weeks, shopping on the internet. In one sense I could afford one. But I never became easy with how it compromised future finances—credit, of course, being a form of indentured servitude, learned about the hard way—so I don’t see owning one in my future, short of divine intervention. Fiscal discipline has been something we’ve had to learn over the years. Fortunately we were blessed by teachers—an angel of a financial advisor who taught and coached me over decades, and—get this—Jesus, who is forever (like, almost every Sunday in the readings) challenging the place of material things in my life and warning about becoming enslaved to the ‘ownership society’; as well as the spiritual discipline of the necessary professional pastoral integrity of tithing, which is, for you heathen, giving 10% of your income for the work of Jesus—you can’t very well preach about Biblical giving if you aren’t trying to do it yourself. It was particularly tough during the early years of minimal income, and, despite how much God claims to love a joyful giver, undertaken with the grumpiness of a diet. But after a spell it became a way of life, part of our self-identity. In the process we had to learn how to handle our money ever more wisely (she thinks I’m a financial genius, and I think she’s saved us bazillions), AND we’ve been comforted with the thought that should we ever get into really deep shit financially, here was a big wad available for the crisis. And actually, we’ve come to enjoy giving money away (within bounds, since the giving is also disciplined); hence, the ‘economic stimulus’ check from the IRS is going to the World Hunger Appeal, who need it more than we do. Something will be going out for hurricane response.
 
Back in my BVIG days when I had to deal with church finances and ’stewardship’ (fund-raising) programs I eventually realized first, that you can’t expect much help from new members, because if they happen to know anything at all about giving, they have no room to do it because they were living, thanks to credit, on 110% of their income. Then I learned it wasn’t just new pagan members, but the majority of the congregation. Then I realized that it wasn’t greed so much that drove them as ignorance—they had not a clue as to handling their finances. So I browbeat a stewardship committee into doing financial education classes, ‘Geez, if you’re gonna raise money in the name of Jesus, let’s at least learn how to handle personal finances in his name, too.’ It took some courage from the stewardship folks ’cause, you know, as much as people claim that all the church ever talks about is money, any real, truthful, and personal discussion of it is off limits; the topic–like the name of God in the Old Testament—was too holy to mention. Fixed that: I just laid out our personal finances and giving in a sermon occasionally. (Book title: The Preaching of Keene: Too Stupid to Ignore It.) So we did the classes, brought in experts and such for a number of years, and a number of chaotic families were put back together financially.
 
Didn’t help the perpetual budget shortage much, though, and the interest eventually played out. But I always thought that financial education and planning ought to be part of our new members’ class. ‘Nother idea received like a fart in a pup tent.
 
I turned 60 last week, celebrating another step on the banana peel to the grave by among other things checking out my retirement accounts, that money we’ve been putting aside these past 30 years for our dotage. Happy birthday! You just lost 20% of all of it. ‘Parently those wise and unbelievably well-paid stewards of our economic life fucked up. The house of cards they’ve been building is crashing down; their prestidigitation uncovered as mere illusion, along, I suppose, with my 20%. Oh, plus whatever I and my children and their children have to hand over as tax-payers to clean up the shit-pile they’ve made of people’s lives–once again using the poor and marginalized raped by the sub-prime loans—under the banner of the free market (‘what so proudly we hailed at our profit’s last gleaming’): ‘Gimme that old, razzle dazzle—razzle dazzle ‘em’ sings the lawyer (Richard Gere) to a nifty soft-shoe shuffle in “Chicago”.
 
And then as if out of some Twilight Zone incarnation they come shuffling over to Washington to the tune of ‘give us, oh, whatever, 700 billion to a trillion bucks and absolute authority on how to use it, and we’ll clean things up.’ Trust us. We’re the guys who got us into this; we can get us out. They take umbrage at the suggestion of oversight; they are incredulous at the mention of no bonuses for their performance. They oppose helping those poor bastards who were suckered into obscene mortgages in a 21st century rerun of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, where the poor are bilked into handing over their meager life’s savings for razzle-dazzle fraudulent deeds. What moral universe do these people inhabit?
 
Oh, yeah, the “self-regulating” free market: leave ‘em alone and they’ll naturally do what’s best for humanity; hey, there, Bo-Peep, leave ‘em alone and they’ll come home, wagging their tails behind ‘em (though in reality these guys strut like roosters in a barnyard). The free market as intrinsically moral. What utter nonsense. The only “morals” driving the markets are fear and greed; that’s common knowledge in the markets themselves. I spent that 12 grand learning that intellectually, and living it personally, discovering my own inner fear ‘n greed (far more exciting than sitting with a therapist). Fear ‘n greed. And, oh yeah, the herd instinct. How can a herd driven by fear ‘n greed stop its own stampede? So we’ve been given the old razzle-dazzle for the past eight years–a secretive, militaristic administration using fear (oh, and torture) to cover (and occasion) their greed and corruption. I read somewhere that fascism is the result of the union of government with corporate interests (ala, maybe, Mussolini’s Italy); say, corporations with military power. Whatever.
 
The bible movie playing out in my mind is the golden calf scene a la Cecil B.DeMille: everybody’s dancing and having a lasciviously good time around the golden calf god they have built themselves in Moses’ absence, and we’re living right in that moment when Charleton Heston shows up and delivers the judgment of God. The shit is hitting the fan. “We’ve” been nailed in this idolatry; worshiping at the golden calf of a human creation called the free market.
 
Not that there’s anything wrong with the golden calf itself. It was—and is—a beautiful human creation. It’s a way of commerce by which we share our lives with each other. We can tend to our material lives. I put a little of this day’s efforts aside in the form of investments, anticipating that they will accumulate and earn interest; that is, as a corporate friend once pointed out to me, “make a profit”; going on to explain that doing so was an ethical responsibility to we pension plan shareholders in the company. Part of the elegance of the design. I’m cool with that; I’ve enjoyed a nice life through it.
 
But when profit becomes the only ethical imperative—or the one by which all other ethical decisions are measured—then it has usurped its position. When profit alone is the measure of greatness, the elegance of the design turns hideous, because profit and greed are kissing cousins if not incestuous siblings. When profit is a sole measure of a corporate—as well as of course personal—life, then our human artistry becomes the god bowed to; the greediest of them are seen as the greatest (via, also, my interest earnings). The tool we created to use becomes the god we are commanded, enslaved to serve. That human institution which we created for the betterment of all is distorted to an end in itself, and thus becomes demonic, destructive of human life, as I recall Walter Wink sort of putting it in his book about the spiritual powers (and it seems to have a whiff of Paul Tillich, too).
 
And the universe ain’t gonna put up with it for long. God will not be mocked. Shit’s gonna fall apart. The razzle-dazzle’s gonna be revealed to be exactly that, with the song coming to an abrupt end. Which, natch, has just taken place in the supreme irony of these proud free-marketeers, these bastions of self-regulation and personal responsibility, these priests of the golden calf to come shuffling into Washington begging for a handout like a gambling addict crying ‘we got a plan! we got a plan!’ These guys, who despised “we the people” in our organized form (sorta, i.e., gov’t) now come to “we the people” to help ‘em. I’m thinking that God almost always judges through historical irony. (Cynically, one last good screwin’ before Jr gets gone; the final assault on a date by a fraternity thug.) As per Luther, it is God’s ‘cold wrath’ that does it: okay, follow your own god and see what happens. Listen to the universe chuckle like the mechanic at the garage, ‘Hey Charlie, this guy tried to fix it himself.’
 
And following the cartoonish behavior of our leaders in the week since I started this, especially Fibber’s mad dash to D.C. charging in with his minions like the Keystone Kops and creating as much chaos, it appears that “we the people” might have some say in how they behave Certainly “we the people” are covering their losses (with an attendant new phrase: privatized profit, socialized risk). So perhaps “we the people” could engage them in discussion if not enforce them by laws about corporate citizenship in the world. Perhaps another ethical imperative might be added to the list; are we the shareholders willing to accept lower returns? Am I willing to check my own greed for that?
 
Sparking, of course, a fresh round of razzle-dazzle.
 
‘Cause, you know: the soulless forces of fear ‘n greed are always at work out there. It is only we the people who can do compassion.

You better not be some kind of aural slouch when it comes to worshiping in the Lutheran tradition, particularly when we come around to the Bible readings, of which there are four “assigned” by some ecumenical coven of liturgical gurus hidden deep in the bowels of Christendom for each Sunday, beginning with the cleverly-named ‘First Lesson’, followed by a chunk of a Psalm, then, surprise, the ‘Second Lesson’ and then hoorah the Gospel reading. For the liturgical illiterate, the first reading is usually something out of the Old Testament (with respect, ‘the Hebrew Scriptures’), which is also where the Psalms are to be found. The second reading is something from the New Testament, but not anything from the four gospels, the reading of which is reserved for, you guessed it, the Gospel Reading (for which we also stand and give a holy hip-hip-hooray for Jesus). Now, these readings may or may not have anything to do with each other. Or two of them might be connected while a third travels its own route, as in, recently, the second lesson has been a Cliff’s Notes read through of Romans. I pity the poor worshiper who actually tries to make sense of them as a whole, ‘What the hell’s going on?’ I’ve thought about axing a couple of them over the years, but decided I needed to trust the work of our liturgical wizards; toss it all out there, maybe something will stick. And besides, they provide a near infinite number of sermon themes. Give me four readings to choose from and I can preach about anything.

Which, let it be known, is a problem, because most of us preacher types can get lost to the wonderful universe of our own minds, thinking our grandiloquent thoughts. Left to our own devices, we are brilliant at theologically justifying whatever it is we feel like. Left alone, we are bedazzled by our own bull. That’s why we gotta hang around the company of preachers; we stay in tune and sort of accountable for our preaching. So for about a decade I’ve been part of a weekly pastors’ coffee klatch and lectionary debate. They keep me accountable through challenge. And vice versa.

It was my turn to vice versa last week in the midst of a rousing debate of Peter’s Wiley Coyote routine when he saw Jesus walking across the water in the middle of a storm; so excited became he that he jumped out of the boat and was four steps across the sea before he realized it, which, of course, by then was too late: a mad scramble to Jesus with a heavenly xylophone bonkety-bonking in the background. It was a loud and dandy argument, but I got tired of the male pronouns for the divine, thus shooting off my mouth after yet another ‘God. . .he’: ‘Hesheorit.’

The interrupted pontificator: ‘What?’

‘God. . .he, she, or it. Hesheorit.’

‘Yeah, whatever.’ with a roll of the eyes.

Of course we all know that God is beyond gender, but language matters—language defines. You use only male references to God, and in spite of whatever intellectual move you make, you end up with a de facto male God, the ‘Father of our Lord Jesus Christ’. I hope my pals are more careful in their sermons than they are in the heat of the debates; but if we’re not called on it, few of us preachers can pick up our blind spots. I got into a whole jag where I was just slovenly about pronoun use, and since nobody called me on it, I continued it too long. So: Hesheorit, even in my sermons.

I know, bubba: it’s the whiney sensitivity of friggin political correctness. But I’ll only accept the charge of (minimal) sensitivity, because it’s a spiritual matter to my mind: people are deformed by deformed images of God. And I gotta observe that God the Father ain’t gettin’ very good press these days; you know, that Higher Father to whom Georgie Jr. announced his accountability just before starting the war on Iraq; the loving Daddy demonstrated by the RC ‘fathers’ while accosting their children (and the ‘Holy Father’s’ unwillingness to take action against them); the ‘Fathergod’ of the Right who justifies misogynistic male domination of women’s bodies; the ghastly father of Mel Gibson’s passion movie who, enraged and insulted by us sinners, turns his violent abuse on his own son (‘yahoo! Jesus died for me’ being essentially ‘I’m glad Dad beat up my brother instead of me’). Yeah, to whom do the victims of this god turn?

Besides, what god does my daughter see at work in her womb creating her daughter Ryan? What god does she look to to see her own life as she mothers this child? ‘The father of our Lord Jesus Christ’? Gimme a break. I know enough about women to understand that while we may inhabit the same space, we do not live in the same world (a lá an ancient prayer, ‘I thank you, God, that you have not created me a woman’). So it seems that simple justice if not also compassion requires me to attend to that. For if God is beyond gender, we are free to talk about him as her, and, indeed, should as much as possible. Hence: Hesheorit.

God the Mother. The birthing one; the nurturing one; the life-giving one; the fertile one, growing creation. God the Mother to whom the children can turn who are more worried about today’s food than yesterday’s sin. God who sings her children lullabies and coos at them while cleaning the shit from their bottom and delights simply in their being, divine ecstasy breaking out when the smile is returned. God the Mother. God the Wife (the Bible never gives marital advice written by women, just men like Paul). God, whose heart is a feminine tenderness (and mystique, eh?), caring not a whit about her own honor but tending to the life of her children, marking not their perfection, but their growth. It’s good to worship God the Mother.

So long as we never forget who holds the real power.

The 100-mile drive from the church in Beaumont to my house along arrow-straight I-10 is at times lacking in stimulation beyond the negative excitement of dodging assholes yakking on their cell phones at 75 miles an hour; I get tired of chanting the mantra ‘hang up the goddam phone and drive,’ specially after being Pastor Gracious (an exhausting job) for the day. So somewhere around Anahuac I decided to give John of the Northlands a call because the traffic had slowed to a crawling 70 to see how he’s holding up. He’s the most current of my growing network of clergy pals to be savaged by the Mean Spirits which have infected so many churches, being informed the day after he got back from vacation that a “recitation of allegations” was being prepared against him, beginning with, near as I understand it, his refusal to let them worship the flag—doing the pledge of allegiance and all that crap on Sunday morning. So we gossiped about idolatry and the pastoral responsibility of guarding the public symbols of the faith and the assholes who do their work in darkness and secrecy—get ‘im while he’s on vacation (or in the hospital). The subject changed when he said, ‘I sent off my mobility papers yesterday.’
 
For the uninitiated, ‘mobility papers’ are the church’s organizational equivalent to résumés for job hunters. The various synods (‘districts’) coordinate the search by matching ‘congregational profiles’—which the congregation searching fills out—with clergy mobility papers. It’s about as effective as eHamony.com, but you gotta start somewhere. My buddy Matchmaker Don earned that moniker because he does that for our synod. He matched me up with Beaumont, even though I refused to fill out mobility papers and substituted instead a not quite one-page piece of my own creation. Dude, I’m not filling all that shit out; I’m going in as the interim, not the called pastor; and I’m going in at the most two days a week, for what? Maybe nine months?
 
The mobility papers are a real piece of work. The current version is 19 pages long. There is, of course, the regular information to be gathered—education, work history, and such as that. Then there are the more theological and spiritual questions (why do you like Jesus?). Then there are all these responsibilities for which you are to provide examples of ‘work or exerience’, a lá, “Administer Holy Baptism and Holy Communion” and “Provide Pastoral Care” and such as that. Oh, and of course, ‘What are your best leadership skills?’ and similar. Okay, like I said, you gotta start somewhere in the matchmaking, so maybe this is the best we have and must simply endure it. But it doesn’t end there. There is the legalese. There has to be, of course, because of the church’s own experience about keeping its house in order Thus a series of questions to provide the necessary legal cover:
 
“Have you ever engaged in, been accused of, charged with, or convicted of illegal conduct or a crime? Explain.”
 
“Have you ever had your driver’s license suspended or revoked? Explain.”
 
“Have you ever engaged in, been accused of, investigated for, sued, or charged with sexual molestation, sexual harassment, substance abuse, child or spousal neglect or abuse, or financial improprieties? Explain.”
 
“While on the roster, have you ever engaged in, been accused of, investigated for, charged with, or disciplined for any conduct proscribed in Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline? Explain.”
 
“Are you living in accord with Vision and Expectations and Definitions and Guidelines for Discipline for rostered persons in the ELCA and do you intend to continue to live in compliance? Explain.”
 
“Have you ever engaged in any behavior or been involved in any situations that, if they became known to the church, might seriously damage your ability to continue in ministry? Explain.”
 
“Have you ever engaged in a wet dream?”
 
Well, okay, I added the last. But my god who the hell came up with that—Joe McCarthy’s grandson? “Have you ever engaged in any behavior?” and either yes or no must be marked. I wonder if that includes the incident with the goat at scout camp in 7th grade? How about the hookers in Vietnam? What about those speeding tickets? What about the young newly-ordained guy who as a high school dumbass posted naked pictures of himself on the web? (That’s sure to come.) Or, say, any actions now regretted? I know, let’s ask the question, “Do you have any secrets you want kept private? Explain them here.” Of course it’s the church covering its legal ass in, say, plausible deniability, “Wull, he never told us.” But, my goodness, these guys would make Orwell proud. Here’s one for them: “Have you stopped beating your wife?” How do you answer questions like that with any integrity? Northlands John, ‘Well, there you go. Not even St. Paul would make the cut.’
 
And even if you told the truth, how could you do that in less than 1000 pages?
 
But wait, there’s more. These questions come in a section called “Personal Information for Synod Bishops.” Right. There is personal information about me which is appropriate only for the bishop especially of the “have you ever engaged in ” sort (and I have some on him, too). You share information with the bishop expecting the confidentiality of the pastoral office. But that’s apparently not quite how it works, because there’s a caveat: “The information on this form may be shared with call committees (depending upon synod practices).” So as I understand it, I am asked to provide personal information about behaviors I have ever engaged in over my whole life on the “Personal Information Sheet for Synod Bishops”, which, however, might be made public to a group of people I’ve never met, people, for example, like those currently savaging John. That’ll pretty much guarantee my honesty and openness, don’t you think? So you answer it the way you’re supposed to and hope you don’t get caught, though knowing that if you do, perjuring yourself on a form will probably be the least of your problems. Still, it does the spirit no good to be forced into signing such a thing.
 
I recall from my VBIG days that the balance between prudence and paranoia is delicate—you take reasonable measures to protect all involved, but shit can still happen. Enough stories of that go around, and people become afraid to do anything because of the law, that once upon a time something happened. All my bishop pals have told me that they were scared witless after the ELCA attorney did their first multi-day orientation. Took ‘em awhile to get over it. Yep. A lot of weird nonsense out there, and the attorney sees it all. In fact, that’s all he sees (by the discipline of his gift). He’s gotta have great stories.
 
But paranoia slips in when you try to protect yourself from the invisible. I know, I’ve been doing it for years. It’s one thing to ask about arrest records and public charges; even to ask about living in accordance with the ethical and legal requirements of the profession. It’s quite another to ask if you have ever done anything in your whole life, whether known publicly or not. The former is prudence; the latter paranoia. And since paranoia begets paranoia, we answer the questions as expected. Only a fool would tell the full truth.
 
And fear, of course, diminishes us all.

In the 1960’s there was this British guy—Donald Crowhurst—who dreamed big dreams with the ability to suck his family and friends into them. He’d been raised among the British ruling elite in India until that country’s independence (1947) sent the family back to England, where they tumbled from the privileged upper crust of society to the menial labor class. He was a brilliant electrical engineer, inventive (natch), and a businessman who almost, but not quite, made it big; though he never gave up, convinced as he was of his own superiority, as in, “Crowhurst believed he had something important to give the world, and he was constantly striving to find it”; a great line from Peter Nichols’ book, A Voyage for Madmen. Crowhurst was also a weekend sailor (like me, eh?) who, in 1968 decided to enter the first ever Golden Globe Nonstop Solo Around the World sailing race.

The darling and I have been playing a game called Gotcha for about the length of our marriage. The point of the game is to prove oneself more noble—and thus more deserving—through martyriological one-upmanship. I learned early on I could never defeat the maxim she inherited “a man may work from dusk to dawn, a woman’s work is never done!” and set out, of course, to prove. An 80-hour work week could not out-tired her, who had the kids all the time and you don’t know what tired is; she always beats me at collecting saint’s points. That’s because I’m not a natural at the game, it having come to us by way of her family lineage; my family taught us different games. Ain’t no sense in takin’ ‘er on—she’s been raised in that stuff. And she’s passed it on to our kids, in each to a measured degree, though no one has refined the game to such a degree as Soccer Saul, who outplays her 75% of the time, while the rest of us watch, awestruck. That’s what she gets for letting them argue with her when they were little. But I’m glad she did, because I was a discussion, deliberation, pronounce the verdict guy; and they had to learn how to argue for themselves. And besides, after 34 years of losing, it’s gratifying to watch my son beat her in the martyr-off.

Acknowledging that I am eternally and infinitely behind in saints’ points is not to say that I never score a Gotcha or that she never shoots herself in the foot. So walking into the bedroom the other night I discover her sitting on the edge of the bed swearing at the remote unit for the overhead fan, an 80-pound Sears behemoth with a remote control of about 15 buttons she got me for Father’s Day that year I’d wanted a gas barbecue. While the blue language sputtered, “Yep, sure am glad you got me that fan, aren’t you?” Once, I remembered our anniversary and she didn’t, and that was wonderful. In fact, that was the year I discovered that Gotcha was a game. Up until then I took it seriously, which cost a bunch in counseling fees over the years and a lot of arguments. (Though I would observe that she might not have known it was a game, either. We are blind to our own myths, as it is said.)

We are at that stage in life where it’s the thought of the holiday more than the gift (since we can personally afford whatever we decide on), so a couple of years ago decided against exchanging “major” Christmas gifts, ala, “If you want, get me a book”. That took the stress of performance off, but then quite incidentally I encountered a gift of the “major” category and just wanted to give it to her. Christmas morning was wonderful with her totally taken aback by how thoughtful and considerate a husband she has, and I scored some big time points, though that is not what I set out to do. But, you know, it’s in unintentionality that you score the best points, as in, say, Mt. 25 (Lord, when did we see you. . .? etc.).

The same thing sort of happened this past Christmas, with the same no gift discussion ahead of time, but then a sudden gift revelation, while sitting in the family room reading one day, noticing all the crumbs and shit all over the carpet like bugs on a windshield, thinking what a drag it is to vacuum even though I only do it about twice a year. Then I remembered the robotic vacuum cleaner I’d seen at a friend’s house, jumped online and ordered a Roomba as my Christmas gift to her in helping with the household chores (doing justice without personal effort, so to speak). It was a big-time hit at Christmas, and scored me major thoughtful saint’s points, though again that is not what I set out to do. But let’s face it, I’m gettin’ better at this game.

The cool thing about Roomba behind the thought it that it actually works: turn it on and it heads all over the house vacuuming for about an hour. About the size of a bathroom scale, it does this by running into things then changing course; has a bunch of wire antennae sticking out like a cockroach, twitching, spinning. It’s like having R2D2 on the loose in your house. The darling fired it up one day while I was working on a sermon, then went to the store. Blew me away a bit when Roomba came motoring into the office, looking around like a stranger in the house, acting like he owns it. I like the idea that it does its works by banging into things; it helps me see my own life a bit differently: a lot of the direction of my days has been set by the things I’ve banged into. In another vein, Roomba’s mistress settles into the recliner with a sigh, “Ah, it’s time to vacuum.” And I know I scored big time on the saint’s points, even though she was ready for me.

That is to say, she’d gotten me a gift of the “major” category as well, probably thinking that there was simply no way she was going to be caught flat-footed again. It was a high-pressure water sprayer, which will be handy, we know, to clean the flagstone and the deck and the brick on the house she’s wanted done for these last, oh, couple of years. Yahoo. Merry Christmas. Another project. But that’s okay, because I do have to do that, though I didn’t going tearing into the box like it was a Red Ryder Rifle or something. I’ll open it when I need it, which is not in the middle of winter, even if this is Houston, though the darling complained I did not appreciate it. The box sat there unopened, pretty much in the same spot it was when we had the tree up.

Until last week, when I went to get it to start on the deck and flagstone and house and it wasn’t there and upon inquiry learned that “I” loaned it to Wil With One L, the son-in-law. “You gave my Christmas gift away?” “No. I loaned it.” “But it was still in the unopened box! It was still virginal.” “O boo-hoo. You had your chance.” It doesn’t sound to me like she’s ready to cede any points there.

But we both know the truth.

Roomba rules.

And our love dances.

In between preaching, camping, fishing, and family stuff, I’ve been cranking out papers for this interim ministry training certification I’m doing up at the seminary (Luther, MN) through the National Association of Lutheran Interim Pastors (NALIP) or whatever that professional crew is called. And, natch, the old student habits have kicked in, i.e., wait until the last possible moment to do the writing, instead of casually writin’ ‘em up as the months pass. Well, this isn’t just a student thing, since I spent at least half a decade putting my sermons on paper at, oh, 3:00 am Sunday morning. Apparently I require a certain degree of anxiety in order to create (and substantial silence, which in those days of a big church and a houseful of teens was, say, not overabundant). In any case, our class is getting together soon, so I have been plugging away at this useful though tedious task.
 
I suspect that most folks think of pastors in terms of religious generalists who are, beyond personalities, largely interchangeable; say along the old lines of you start in a rural parish and work your way up to the big city. That might once have been the case. But it ain’t so so no mo’, Joe. Since urbanization and development of the suburbs following WWII the church has studied and learned a whole lot of stuff, with the result that as we live in the 21st century, the training of pastors has become more specialized, with everything from workshops, papers and books, to advanced degrees like Doctor of Ministry (DMin) offered in, say, rural ministry, or transformational ministry, or mission development, or congregational development, ad not quite infinitum. It’s similar to doctors engaging in specialties after medical school. Pastors come together to learn, deepen their knowledge, hone their skills, and participate in the specialized dialogue of their arena in order that the church might carry out its work of the gospel most effectively. In fact, the policy of the ELCA requires pastors to do that through a certain amount of continuing education each year. Of course, it’s like an unfunded mandate, and cash-strapped congregations are rarely generous with the costs, ala, “Here’s a quarter, kid. Now beat it.” Nonetheless the pastors I know put out a considerable amount of their own money for continuing ed (and not in order to make more money, Bubba, ’cause the church just don’t work like that).
 
In any case, interim ministry—working with a congregation through the transitional time between the ending of one pastorate and the beginning of another—is one of those specialties, and I’m doin’ it. I debated long and hard about entering the program, since it cost a few grand and I get no continuing ed money. I also wasn’t sure I wanted to put that much effort into it, since the most I’ll ever be able to work is two days a week, and that limits the nature of churches where I might work. Not do I particularly need the income, though it’s nice. In fact, even on the flight back after the first session I wasn’t sure I’d continue it, though that was under the influence of the hand-sawing incident just two weeks prior. But I decided I owed something back for my life, and however limited it might be, it deserves the best I can offer. Here’s a thought: I can be most helpful when I actually know what I’m doing and am in some way professionally accountable.
 
Besides, if I couldn’t preach I suspect I’d wither into a spiritual dust bunny.
 
So now I’m writing papers about my work at Bethlehem, among them being “Critical Incident Reports”, which are about as much fun as the verbatims we had to write in hospital chaplaincy training during seminary (“Write word for word the conversation when you visited the young mother with terminal cancer” and we’ll all discuss your behavior towards her and why). But it is also fascinating, because you’re dealing with a community that’s in transition; hence, people are anxious. And you gotta get them ready to call their next pastor. So you gotta figure out who they are and how they live together and what’s also going on beneath what they say is going on. So among other things I (being who I am) do is push and prod until there’s some kind of emotional reaction, because it’s there that you begin to discover the personality of the body. You learn what matters to them, and—especially—how they react with regard to the pastor. Then you can together take a look at it and talk about it in preparation for a new permanent pastor, who will undoubtedly stumble into the emotionally reactive side of the body, too. I enjoy the work because I am free of worrying about the long-term political consequences that a permanent pastor must consider (ala, “I’m outta here in 6-9 months, and can be outta here in two weeks”). Still, it calls for a nifty ballet of comfort and affirmation and critique and challenge with respect, which in my case might bring to mind the dancing hippos in Disney’s “Fantasia”.
 
The major trick in all this after praying is maintaining, as we say in the lingo, a “non-anxious presence” in the midst of an anxious community. So there’s hilarious irony in it because everybody from my family to my psychiatrist knows “non-anxious” is not part of my psycho make up. I rated extreme in the anxiety department at the skink’s last evaluation. My pastor buds all break into laughter whenever I mention being a non-anxious presence, “Keene, anxiety swirls around you like the dust and dirt around Pig Pen in the Peanuts strip.” And it’s true that I had elevated anxiety to a via dolorosa of salvation: the more you worry, there more you will be saved, or something like that; though with the help of the meds and such, I don’t so much any more. These days I live with a bit more of a shrug. In any case, when I do my professional work, I gotta control my own innate anxious reactivity to situations with the knowledge people’s reactions are revelations about themselves. It ain’t about me (ala that great quote: “Your life ain’t about you.”), in spite of the broiling anxiety that wants to make it about me.
 
Which brings me to the theme which incidentally developed when NT Ray and occasionally EZ (cum Matchmaker) Don went camping a couple of weeks back, wanting to be he-men in the wilderness while we read our books by the lake and had out biblio/theo/philosophical ramblings, taking off on this (maybe Oprah) book Ray was reading by a self-reflective depressed guy who, the moment before committing suicide because he could no longer live with himself, was given the question, “Who is this ‘I’ with whom I can no longer live?” So we pondered the days away wondering about the ‘I’ who is I, the ego (Greek: ego = “I am”, etc, ala Yahweh at Moses’s burning bush). Who is this ‘I’ who is experiencing this minute, anxious about the next?
 
And what in the hell was St. Paul talking about when he said “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”?
 
The same one who said, “Therefore, do not be anxious about your lives.”
 
He also said, “welcome one another as Christ has welcomed you,” and I’m thinkin’ it has something to do with putting my ‘I’ aside long enough to invite the other to tell her story; because we all live merely in an interim.

I’ve come to the conclusion that you’re never too old not to be weirded out by how people behave; never too old not to be yet again appalled by the functioning of the reptilian brain. I figured that, given my own extensive life history in Bizarro-land—including (but not limited to) being an Army trombonist in the occasionally hot zone of the war we lost, working with an insane and evil associate, lying naked in the hospital hallway after heart surgery, and attending the 2000 presidential prayer breakfast where the darling and I were scared half to death by the militant national self-righteousness of the Jesus-in-a-flag gang gathered if not to worship, at least to fawn over Mr. Uniter, the Compassionate Conservative and the Victory of their Churches; that having been through two major congregational conflicts with people standing up and walking out at the beginning, middle, or end of the sermon, depending on how they chose to show their snit, not much else could throw me.
 
I was, of course, wrong. I have, for the first time in my 40-year public speaking career been disinvited to a church after they heard me. Tom Pynchon was right: “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you.”
 
It’s a pretty good tale. E Z Don’s last day at his ex-church was May 31st, and the congregation was desperate for pulpit supply a couple of Sundays later. No preacher was to be found. So I agreed to cover at his ex-church while E Z handled things down at Grace. I’d spoken there on a number of occasions, and was familiar and comfortable with the place. In the meantime I was also asked by the ex-church to say some things at his you’re-outta-here bash, which I did, doing a “remember the good old days” shtick. Thus, “Geez, remember the good old days. Remember when your house was raided by customs and you were indicted and the council had to put you on administrative leave, and we all went to federal court together? Gosh! We had FUN!” Then went on to mention that I had admired how both the congregation and E Z had handled that. And did other stuff like that. Went home thinking that I’d helped make the day good.
 
A couple days later I got an email that said, “We won’t be needing you to preach.” Hmm. Apparently somebody thought the old days weren’t good enough to be mentioned, though it took me more than a day to figure that out (social subtleties—not to mention graces—not being my forte).
 
Naturally, once I caught on to it, self-recrimination set in: my God! What have I done?! So I worried about not being liked, and did the old introspection thing for a number of days, searching my heart, as the psalmist says, for the sin there, re-examining my motives, my choices in doing it the way I did. Trouble was, I couldn’t find any (with regard to this particular incident). What I ran into instead was relatively surprising: somebody has to speak the absolution. Forgiveness means you can’t improve the past; you can only notice the redemption at work in it. The absolution breaks the power of sin to hold us in its shame. And shame gains its power through secrecy—”We dare not ever speak about that.” So the absolution has to speak exactly about that in order to absolve; otherwise, we live with the fear that our secret will be exposed. Better to name it than to be haunted by it.
 
Which is where I come in, being genetically incapable of not calling a spade a spade (though being routinely accused of calling it a ‘fucking shovel’). I blame this on my father, who also was unable to control his—as N T Ray so graciously puts it—”authenticity” in social settings. My mother, who is very socially refined and ever alert to the feelings of others, was as often mortified by his behavior as she was glad to be with him (as recalled in my memories of them returning home from events, ala, after the party, Dad’s going to get chewed out). I inherited many of her social sensibilities, and they served me well in the VBIG days (I wouldn’t have gone where I went without ‘em). But the longer I live in Bizarro-land, the more my dad’s DNA gains the upper hand (yes, egad! we become our parents). Thus, ecce homo: the mouth who roars about the elephant in the living room. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it. (And his spouse, like my mother, also knows a peculiar mortification.)
 
It’s not like the one who does it can choose not to do it. It’s not like during the four hours I spent preparing for E Z’s congregational eulogy, I wasn’t aware that I might be stepping on some toes. You put three hundred or so folks in a room playing church, you have the whole gamut of human experience and psycho-spiritual maturity (and otherwise), which, of course, confines what can be said “safely”. All preachers are aware of that (we hope). All preachers know that a transgression of these boundaries can result in substantial personal pain springing out of the reactivity of whoever’s toes were stepped upon (in extreme cases, say, the loss of their job; usually it’s more subtle, though: phone lines burning behind the scenes, little comments here and there; the loss of popularity; secret meetings; such as that). The problem for the mouth that roars the absolution is that to speak anything less than full honesty is to participate in an enslaving deception, pretending that that which has been, has not been; declaring that a shameful secret and living in fear of it. “Ain’t no forgiveness where there is fear,” says the mouth that roars, even if you get hurt speaking it. (Ala Martin Luther on preaching: “You throw a stick into a pack of dogs, and the one that gets hit is the one that howls.”) Besides, you can’t outrun DNA; it could be that I’m just an ontological asshole.
 
In any case, I spent many days in the agony of rejection, seeking the balm of the soothing words of friends, ala Marlin the Wise (and Elderly), “Don’t let them get to you, Larry. I appreciate what you say.” Later, “But you do have a way of poking people in the eye.” In fact, gripped by the fever of rejection, I probably turned what was merely a pissy situation with Sue (her fault) into a full-blown shitty situation (mea culpa). It’s not that I’m not used to people disliking something I’ve said (or even me myself, for that matter), but this was a rejection by the whole congregation; the three hundred people in that room and more: “We don’t want you here.” So amid the days E Z Don comments, “Hey, I got the lowdown on your talk.” “Oh yeah? How many people’d I piss off?”
 
“Two.”
 
“One of ‘em was the wrong one.” Welcome again to the world of congregational politics.
 
On the other hand, I was honored when a couple I knew many moons ago flew in from another state seeking my assistance through a marital catastrophe, and have been thanking me unmercifully: “You are an angel! The answer to our prayers!” The words are like water to the soul in my desert of rejection. And it gets me to thinking again of Brother Martin and his anthropological summary: simul ustis et peccator; we are at the same time a saint and a sinner; one man’s asshole is another man’s angel.
 
So take heart, fellow assholes of the world; God has probably made you an angel to someone.
 
Somewhere.
 
Somehow.