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Preaching to people's needs: 7-19-12

People who preach -- usually, but not always, clergy -- need to understand who the audience is and what members of (and visitors to) that congregation need.

PulpitOften that's tricky because of different needs of different people in the congregation. That's what faced me this past Saturday when I preached at the funeral of my wife's sister, Leslie Von Bargen, at the First Congregational Church in Springfield, Vt.

I knew some of the folks listening were angry at God. I knew some just wanted a word of hope and an expression of traditional Christian doctrine about resurrection.

So I'll let you be the judge of whether I met those and other needs. Here's the homily I gave that day, preceded by the scriptural texts I used.

Psalm 61:1-5 (New Living Translation)

Hear this psalm of David about the assurance of God’s protection:

O God, listen to my cry! Hear my prayer. From the ends of the earth, I will cry to you for help, for my heart is overwhelmed. Lead me to the towering rock of safety; for you are my safe refuge, a fortress where my enemies cannot reach me. Let me live forever in your sanctuary, safe beneath the shelter of your wings. For you have heard my vows, O God. You have given me an inheritance reserved for those who fear your name.

This is the word of the Lord.

John 14:1-4 (The Voice translation)

Jesus is speaking:

Don’t get lost in despair; believe in God, and keep on believing in Me. My Father’s house is designed to accommodate all of you. If there were not room for everyone, I would have told you that. I am going to make arrangements for your arrival. I will be there to greet you personally and welcome you home, where we will be together. You know where I am going and how to get here.

This is the word of the Lord.

Please pray with me:

Eternal God in Christ, we gather here today broken-hearted but full of gratitude for the life of Leslie Von Bargen. So in your mercy I ask you to take these inadequate words of mine and make them your word of comfort to us today, for I pray it in the name of your very word, Christ Jesus. Amen.

Thank you for being here. Your presence honors Leslie and celebrates her amazing life.

Leslie-V-BI’m Bill Tammeus, husband of Leslie’s sister Marcia, and like the psalmist whom we heard begging God to hear his prayer, I’m here under duress. I’m here because Leslie heard me lead her father Eric’s funeral in 2002 and she asked that I do that for her. I never could say no to Leslie Von Bargen (pictured here), and you couldn’t either.

You know and I know that Leslie was a gift to us. I would say even a divine gift to us, except that many of us are, at the moment, so angry at God that it’s hard for us to hear her described as a divine gift, given that she was taken away from us way, way too soon, as was her own mother, who died at age 47.

And, by the way, anyone who pretends to know why such things happen is fooling you. Theologians use the word theodicy to talk about the question of why there is suffering and evil in the world if God is good.

That question is the open wound of religion, for all theodicies fail. Indeed, no religion has an exhaustive answer to the question of evil and suffering. That doesn’t mean we should quit asking questions about suffering but it does mean we should be humble and tentative about the answers we think we find.

In the end, we can simply say with the psalmist, “Let me abide in your tent forever and find refuge under the shelter of your wings.”

Leslie’s death was a body blow to us and maybe even to our faith. We acknowledge that, but in Christianity we also say that God understands our anger and our doubt. That’s because God understands body blows. After all, the execution of Jesus was a body blow to the faith that God had in humanity.

So it’s true that God sometimes disappoints us, especially when God seems absent or, worse, indifferent. But I want you to know that despite all of that God is, in fact, head-over-heels in love with you just as God was — and, much more important, still is — head-over-heels in love with Leslie Von Bargen. And there’s nothing we can do about that.

Speaking of Leslie, I assume you’re aware — because many of you knew Leslie longer and better than I did — that when you look up the word extrovert in the dictionary you’ll find Leslie’s picture next to the definition.

That girl could bring life to a convention of undertakers.

No doubt almost everyone here thinks he or she was Leslie’s best friend. And, you know what? You were.

Leslie was a sister, a daughter, a wife, mother, cousin, daughter-in-law, grandmother (oh, how she loved that new role, despite how little time she had to fulfill it), a friend and a sister-in-law, which is what she was to me, though I counted her as nothing less than the presence of the grace of God in my life.

I reveal no secrets when I say that all of us are profoundly distressed at her death. But I think it helps to acknowledge that. So let’s recognize that reality and not shy away from it. We want Leslie here — alive, healthy, kicky, generous, funny — and offering us her fabulous food, her endless supply of good wine, good drinks, good company, good laughter, good insights, good counsel, good love.

But all of that is gone except for the memories, and as a result our spirits are distraught and our tolerance for the mysteries that God lays on our hearts is, today, minimal. We are frankly fed up with such mysteries.

We want life to go on as it was. We want Leslie back. And we want her back now.

The hard truth, however, is that she is gone forever and that in demanding her back we are kicking against an immovable boulder, injuring only ourselves. And yet, as I say, it’s important that we name our legitimate anger and the disappointment that move us to kick against that boulder.

But what was it about Leslie that revved the engines of our love? Was it her spunkiness? Was it seeing her zip around in her little red convertible? Was it her insight? The way she seemed to take the measure of people and look for what was best in them, what was strong and what could be made stronger?

Was it her profound devotion to family? It seems as if every place I looked in John’s and Leslie’s home here and up in their lake cottage I found photographic evidence of her love of family.

Photos of son John Eric and daughter Julie growing up, for instance, were everywhere. We couldn’t use the bathroom without a picture of one or both of the kids staring at us.

Photos of her brothers and sister, her extended family and, most recently, photos of her grandchildren filled the spaces. In fact, to be able to find the refrigerator in their home, you had to know that it was hidden somewhere behind what seemed to be a family photo gallery in the kitchen.

Well, it was all of this and much more that attracted us to this extraordinary, generous, insightful, loving woman. What I personally found most remarkable about Leslie was her capacity to love, her ability to draw into her circle people she didn’t know along with people she did and make them all feel special.

When I spoke with her on the phone from Kansas City the other day the first thing she wanted to know was how I was. Imagine that.

I myself was a stranger to Leslie once, but that condition lasted only about 12 nanoseconds. If I loved her sister — as I did and as I do — I was all right with Leslie.

Each of us has stories to tell about Leslie. We’re not going to do much of that as part of this service today. If we did we’d be here for a month. But I want to encourage you to tell your Leslie stories to one another.

Remember the good times and even the hard times. Remember her stunningly remarkable courage in the face of her cancer. Remember her laughter, her hospitality, her ability to help make things at the (Von Bargen) jewelry stores run smoothly. Remember her wonderful sense of humor, her infectious laugh, her dedication to John and her children — indeed, to all her family — and their unmovable devotion to her.

It’s when we tell those Leslie stories, when we talk about those memories that we honor Leslie’s life and how much it meant to us. So I hope that over the next days and weeks and months and years we’ll all be hearing Leslie stories that start out, “Remember the time that. . .”

In this way, you will be responding to the words of Jesus we heard from the Gospel of John today, words that told us not to let our hearts be troubled. Jesus said he has prepared a place in God’s mansion for all of us, so he welcomes Leslie there with the kind of hospitality we came to expect from Leslie herself.

Marcia and I were blessed to be able to spend 10 days in Israel this spring. And, as you may know, religious traditions have identified not one but two possible spots in Jerusalem for the crucifixion of Jesus and the tomb in which his lifeless body was laid — one inside the Church of the Holy Sepulcher and one in the so-called Garden Tomb adjacent to a hill believed by many to be Golgotha, or Calvary.

The truth is that no one knows whether either site is historically accurate. But what Christians do know — and what each of those sites ultimately testifies to and celebrates — is that Jesus Christ conquered death.

So even though we are deep in grief today, we need not fret about Leslie. For her, today, all pain and suffering have ended and she is even now being surrounded by the joyful and everlasting love of the God of hope.

The Eternal One, from whom all blessings flow, has welcomed Leslie home.

And yet that same God is present today with us to share our sorrow as we commit Leslie into God’s loving arms. May it be so. Amen.

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SOME SYRIA'S RELIGION

As usual, the folks over at GetReligion.org are helpful -- this time in drawing on various journalistic sources to explain some of the religious dimensions of the fighting in Syria. If you're not familiar with GetReligion.org, surf around on the site.


A fictional model for Christians? 7-18-12

While I was on the road recently to New England, I finished the classic novel Anna Karenina by the great Christian author, Leo Tolstoy (depicted here).

TolstoySomehow I had missed the book when I was younger, but with a free classic book app on my iPad -- an app that contians 80 (count 'em, 80) books -- I decided to see what it was about the Russian author Tolstoy that has stood him in good stead with Christian readers for well over a century. (Well, in a sense in good stead. In fact, the Russian Orthodox Church excommunicated Tolstoy for expressing non-traditional views.)

My first reaction to the book, which rang to 1,423 pages in the e-version I read, was that Anna Karenina herself was not the main character and certainly not the most interesting. She was, rather -- at least she seemed to me to be -- a good example of someone with a narcissisticly bent mental illness (maybe bipolar?), the final result of which was her suicide.

It may sound cruel to say, but I did not miss her after she finally threw herself under a moving train. I felt for her only a diffused sort of pity because of a misspent life.

Rather than Anna herself, it was the endlessly confused and morally struggling character Konstantin Dmitrievitch Levin who arrested my attention because of his searching, his timidity, his bafflement about the meaning of life and, in the end, his generous orthodoxy, to borrow the title of one of Brian McLaren's books about the Emergent Church Movement. Critics say Levin is, in many ways, Tolstoy himself.

The endearing thing about Levin was that he was perfectly willing to admit to himself -- and sometimes to others -- that he had no idea what the purpose of life was supposed to be. He was nearly always at sixes and sevens about life's mysteries, but there was within him a core decency and a willingness to engage the eternal questions.

As he moved through life in pre-revolutionary Russia he found himself an often-reluctant critic of much that the culture took for granted. And thus he found himself feeling constantly out of place, even after he finally found his love, whose nickname was Kitty.

It is this sense of being out of sorts with the culture that I think Chrisitans should feel more often than we do. Instead, there's a tendency to baptize the vacuous pursuits -- especially in the entertainment field -- after which the broader culture lusts.

Levin might be a good, if unexpected, model for Christians today -- especially in his expression of willingness to leave to God the question of whether only Christianity can be "right."

There's a lovely passage near the end of the book -- too long to quote here -- in which Levin essentially comes to faith. It's a joyful but puzzling scene in which -- like Job at the end of the book that carries his name in the Hebrew Scriptures -- Levin simply yields to God and no longer needs to question everything. It's worth the long read to get there.

Anna Karenina was not my favorite book ever. But I came to appreciate the Christian sensitivity and sensibility of Tolstoy (no matter what the Russian Orthodox authorities said), and my guess is that the Christians among you would, too, if you, like me until recently, have never read the book.

A movie based on the book is set for release this fall. I both anticipate and fear what it will turn into. We'll see. The trailer -- no surprise -- focuses entirely on Anna and her doomed affair with Count Vronksy. But, then, trailers are always about sex.

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ORDAIN YOURSELF, IT'S LATER THAN YOU THINK

Gotta love Emergent Church guru Tony Jones, who has developed an iPhone app that lets you pretend to be ordained in the religion of your choice. Thanks, Pastor-Rabbi-Imam Jones.


The trees of scripture: 7-17-12

NORTH SPRINGFIELD, Vt. -- Right after my wife's sister died here the other day, one of her good friends sent over the Bloodgood Japanese Maple tree you see in the center of the photo here.

It's a gorgeous young tree and a wonderful tribute to Leslie's remarkable life of giving life to others.

And it got me to thinking about the many times trees show up in the Bible. The page to which I've linked you in this paragraph will tell you a lot about biblical trees, starting with Genesis.

As a Christian, it always has fascinated me that the story of humanity starts in a garden but does not end there in Revelation. Rather, it ends in a city -- the new Jerusalem.

And yet I know, having just spent time in Jerusalem this spring, that that city is full of trees and flowers and flowering bushes, so some of what humanity first experienced in the Garden of Eden -- whatever and wherever that was, if anywhere -- people also will experience when history comes to its fruition.

For Christians, of course, the most meaningful tree in scripture is the one on which Jesus was crucified, the "old rugged cross," as the hymn puts it.

But throughout both the Hebrew scriptures and the New Testament, trees play an important role. Because the experience of humanity tends to cross much common ground, it should not come as a surprise to you that trees play a big role in the sacred text of other religions, too, including Islam's Qur'an. For some intriguing information about that, click here.

And remember to plant trees as a gesture of love, even if you never will sit in the shade of what you plant.


Lessons from a Vermonter: 7-16-12

North Springfield, Vt. -- It's been an amazing journey for my sister-in-law, Leslie, who died a week ago after a long struggle with cancer.


We bid her farewell Saturday with hymns and prayers and words of remembrance spoken in her church in nearby Springfield. It was an amazing 2-hour service at which, at Leslie's request, I gave the homily.

I hope to resume regular blog postings soon, but in the meantime let me leave you with some of the messages of Leslie's life:

* Love life, even when inexplicable things happen.

* Family can get you through nearly everything, including family.

* Dance when you have a chance. God might be clapping in rhythm.

* If you aren't giving yourself away to others, you're just stingy.

* If you laugh at you own suffering, sometimes it will get confused and leave. And sometimes it won't. Laugh at it anyway.


Still in Vermont: 7-14/15-12

North Springfield, Vt. -- I have been in Vermont since the Fourth of July, anticipating the death of my wife's sister here. Leslie died Monday evening at home and in peace after battling cancer for three and a half years. I will be doing (or already did, depending on when you read this) the homily at her service on Saturday afternoon at the First Congregational Church in Springfield.

Thanks for your patience.

My plan is to return to KC on Monday and begin regular postings here soon after that.

Bill

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Continuing in Vermont: 7-13-12

North Springfield, Vt. -- I have been in Vermont since the Fourth of July, anticipating the death of my wife's sister here. Leslie died Monday evening at home and in peace after battling cancer for three and a half years. I am to do the homily at her service on Saturday afternoon at the First Congregational Church in Springfield. Thus, I will post regular material here only as I have a chance.

Thanks for your patience as I and our family prepare for what promises to be a standing-room-only crowd on Saturday. To read Leslie's obituary in the Rutland Herald, click here.

Bill

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Continuing in Vermont: 7-12-12

North Springfield, Vt. -- I have been in Vermont since the Fourth of July, anticipating the death of my wife's sister here. Leslie died Monday evening at home and in peace after battling cancer for three and a half years. I am to do the homily at her service on Saturday afternoon at the First Congregational Church in Springfield. Thus, I will post regular material here only as I have a chance.

My plan is to return to KC on Monday and be posting normally again by Wednesday.

Thanks for your patience.

Bill

* * *

P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column posted yesterday. You can find it here.

 


Some time in Vermont: 7-11-12

North Springfield, Vt. -- I have been in Vermont since the Fourth of July, anticipating the death of my wife's sister here. Leslie died Monday evening at home and in peace after battling cancer for three and a half years. I am to do the homily at her service this weekend. Thus, I will post regular material here only as I have a chance.

Thanks for your patience.

Bill

* * *

P.S.: My latest National Catholic Reporter column posted this morning. To read it click here.


The kingdom of God today: 7-9-12

As I prepared the other day for a trip to Vermont I picked off my bookshelf a 1993 volume I'd previously only scanned.


Interwoven Destinies: Jews and Christians Through the Ages is a collection of essays edited by Eugene J. Fisher, then director for Catholic-Jewish Relations for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB)

It represents the state of Jewish-Christian relations 20 years ago -- and does so with clarity and insight, which is what I've come to expect from Fisher.

But in an essay by Jesuit priest Daniel. J. Harrington, I found what I think is an understanding of Jesus' words that may be at least partly off base.

Here is what Harringrton, then a New Testament professor at Weston School of Theology, wrote:

"Along with other Jews of his day, Jesus looked to the time when God would intervene in his people's history and when all creation would acknowledge the sovereignty of God. This decisive moment in human history, or rather the end of human history as we know it, is what is meant by the expression 'the kingdom of God.'"

I believe Harrington misses Jesus' main point when the author says that the kingdom of God describes what will happen at "the end of human history as we know it."

What was so poignant about Jesus' words was precisely that he was telling his Jewish listeners that they could exprience the kingdom of God right here and right now.

The kingdom, or realm, or reign, of God can break into human history today, Jesus said, if only people would adopt and begin to live by kingdom values today.

What are kingdom values? Well, love, mercy, compassion, justice, peace and did I mention love?

Yes, of course, when the kingdom of God comes in full flower these values will be experienced and lived out by all.

But, Jesus said, you can live out these values today and at least demonstrate to others what the kingdom of God will be like in the end.

Also, when Harrington talks about a future time when God would "intervene in his people's history," he fails to mention that that's exactly what Christians think happened at the birth of Jesus.

(The photo here today is one I took in April at the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where Jews, Christians and Muslims, plus Bhai's and even others look for God to break into human history.)

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P.S.: I think I failed to give you a link to my latest Presbyterian Outlook column the other day. To read it click here.