The Happiness Project: The People Who Make Peace

Matthew 5:9
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, July 25, 2004)

Back in the 1960s, a young Christian, a white Quaker from the North named David made a courageous decision. Aware that African-Americans in the South were daily subjected to the physical, social, emotional violence of legalized discrimination, he would go south and befriend African-Americans and whites. He would be a peacemaker.

One day, David and one of his African-American friends walked into a drug store and ordered two Cokes. In a moment, David felt something sharp and hard being pushed into his back. He turned to see the most hate-filled face he’d ever seen. It belonged to a man who was holding what David now saw was a knife. It was aimed at his heart. David looked into eyes full of contempt and said, “Friend, whether you push that knife into my heart or not is obviously up to you. I want you to know that in either event, I love you.”

How did the knife-wielding man react? His hand trembled a bit, he dropped his weapon, and he ran from the store. That man had come face-to-face with a response to violence he may have never seen before. Usually, we react to violence in one of four ways. We either fight, run, refuse to get involved, or we give in. But David evidenced a fifth response to violence. I call it the Jesus way. He stood his ground and refused to meet violence with violence. He had the courage to say in effect, “I’m not going to be a monster. I’m going to be a human being.” David truly was what Jesus calls a “peacemaker.”

Now, when Jesus and the New Testament writers talk about peace, they can mean three different things, often all at the same time.

First: They can be referring to the end of hostility between people, whether between nations or individuals.

Second: They can mean the peace between God and us that comes to those who entrust their lives to Jesus, Who died on a cross to bring that relationship of peace.

Third: They can also mean the peace of mind that comes to our lives when we know that through Christ, we belong to God forever.

The New Testament also makes it clear that all three of these forms of peace are gifts that come to our lives through Jesus Christ. That’s why the Bible says that Jesus “is our peace” and calls Him the “Prince of peace.”

But the peace of Christ is not some abstract concept achieved through advanced study or contemplation.

The peace of Christ is more like a disease---a good disease---that gets transmitted from one organism to another. And what are the cells that Jesus uses to transmit this good disease? You and I are. The followers of Jesus are the conduits by which peace comes to people.

And that, to tell you the truth, is precisely where I have always struggled with Jesus’ words in today’s Bible lesson.

Jesus says, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” I sure want to be called a child of God. Maybe you do too. I want everybody to live in peace. Theoretically, anyway. But, as David’s experience in that drug store demonstrates, being a peacemaker can be dangerous.

One thing that makes peacemaking dangerous is that we live in a violent world. Not only can we, in extreme circumstances, be threatened with physical violence, we can also be subjected to other kinds of violence. We can be rejected and snubbed. We can be ignored or treated as though we don’t even exist. There may be people here this morning who have been at the receiving end of that sort of violence. Frankly, I don’t know if I have the courage to be a peacemaker in such a world. And yet, this is precisely the kind of world that needs courageous peacemakers.

A Christian who was involved in the struggle for all people to be treated fairly back in the 1970s was once telling a group of people how important it was for Christians to make peace by being peaceful themselves, even risking responses like the one David evoked. Someone objected, asking, “Don’t you realize where advice like that might lead some of us?” “Yes,” said the Christian leader, “I know where it leads. Before you start down this path [of being a peacemaker] you better make sure you look good on wood.”

I wonder if this is what Jesus meant when He told us that anybody who follows Him needs to take up a cross first? If so, it scares me.

But peacemakers risk more than their lives. To this point, I haven’t mentioned something important in this series of messages on happiness that I’ve been doing on Jesus’ words in Matthew 5, verses 1 through 12. It’s this: In the balance of chapter 5, as well in chapters 6 and 7, Jesus expands on the portraits of blessedness or happiness He gives. And so, at one point, later in chapter 5 of Matthew's book, Jesus explains what it means to be a peacemaker by saying:

“You have heard that it was said. ‘An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.’ But I say to you, Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also; and if anyone wants to sue you and take your coat, give your cloak as well; and if anyone forces you to go one mile, go also the second mile. Give to everyone who begs from you, and do not refuse anyone who wants to borrow from you.”

These words frighten me too, because here Jesus is saying that once we throw in with Him, entrusting our lives and our futures to His hands, we need to be so secure and so certain of our destinies with Him that we willingly give everything that we have and everything we are to live with love for God and love for neighbor.

I find that difficult, to say the least. This past Tuesday afternoon, our son and I went to see the Reds play the Brewers. We had a great time. We ate lunch at the Machine Grill. We bought seats up near the top on the first base side so that we not only enjoyed the game, but also sat in the shade, soaking up gentle breezes and occasionally, looking out over the Ohio River, watching the barges and the speedboats pass by. It’s sort of what I imagine heaven will be like, folks.

But as we walked back to our car, a clean, respectably dressed man approached me. “Sir,” he said, “may I speak with you for just a moment?” He said that he’d recently lost his job and while he had put in three applications just that day, he didn’t know if any of those would pan out yet. “I just need a few dollars.” I cut him off and walked away.

Was the guy scamming me? Probably. But as the day wore on, I remembered the words of a woman, formerly a member of this congregation, who said that whenever she was confronted with beggars as she walked around downtown, she always gave them money. “If they’re lying,” she told me, “the onus is on them. But my conscience is clear. I do what I can for them.”

And Jesus’ words---”Give to everyone who begs”---couldn’t be clearer. It would have been easy for me to have pulled out a couple of bucks and handed them to the man who talked to me outside of Great American Ballpark. Instead, for the rest of the night, I wrestled with my conscience and offered a prayer of grief and repentance to God. I vowed to God that, with His help, I would live differently. I would be a peacemaker who gives love in all its forms to my neighbors in need.

And then yesterday, after the wedding, I was greeting people when an interruption came. Somebody told me, “There’s a young woman wanting to speak with the pastor.” I was introduced to a slight young woman. “I was just wondering,” she said, “if maybe my family could get some help. My father has MS and is unable to work any longer. Could you donate a few dollars to help us?” My heart started erecting new walls even as the young woman spoke. I hid behind them and said, “Our church doesn’t really have money set aside for things like that. We do give to organizations that help with such situations, but we don’t have the money.”

I don’t know if the young woman was scamming me, too. But that’s beside the point. I could have handed her a few bucks. The fact is that I was afraid---afraid of having less for myself, afraid of being played for the chump.

And fear, I have discovered, is the main reason we fail to be peacemakers. We’re afraid of losing our property, our lives, our positions. But the follower of Jesus Christ knows that everything we have---our very breath---is just a gift from God. Even when we give our lives away out of love for God and neighbor---exactly what Jesus did on the cross, the Jesus-Follower knows that God has more life and blessings up His sleeve for us. And He’s committed to giving those blessings to anyone who turns from sin and turns to Him for forgiveness and new life for all eternity. So, we don’t need to be afraid. I wish that I could remember that in the day-in, day-out living of life!

Holden Village is a camp in Washington State run by the Lutheran church. It’s a place where people often gather to talk about how they can be peacemakers. Once after a lecture, one man whose farm sat astride an Indian reservation, shared with the lecturer that some of the Native Americans who lived nearby to him kept stealing gasoline from his tank. A lock he’d installed was broken and removed. A spotlight failed to chase thieves away. The lecturer listened as this man struggled to understand what the Jesus way was through this problem. Finally, he suggested a solution to the man. Why not put up a sign that says, “Help yourself if you need gasoline”?

The farmer’s reaction was incredible. “Oh, would that be freedom,” he said, “to be able to do that and have the awful burden of protecting that gas tank off my mind!”

Real peacemakers, having totally surrendered to God, experience that kind of release, I think. They experience true happiness. I hope to be that kind of happy person someday. I can only pray that God will have patience with me until I grow up enough to get there. I will have to simply keep depending on His grace that accepts me as I am and that loves me too much to let me stay there.

“Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God,” Jesus tells us today. May we all learn to be Jesus’ peacemakers.

[The true stories of David and the farmer, as well as the quote from the Christian peacemaker about looking good on wood, all come from John and Mary Schramm's book, Things That Make for Peace. I am heavily indebted to that book for inspiration for this message.

[The summary of the New Testament's teaching about what peace is, comes from the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible.

[The list of typical reactions to violence appears in the Schramm book and summarizes insights shared by Lanzo del Vasto in his book, Warriors of Peace. I haven't personally read this book.]

Thoughts on the Political Conventions

While C-Span and the cable news outlets will give extensive coverage to both the Democratic and Republican national conventions, gone are the days of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the major networks.

There are good reasons for that. The problem with the national conventions--Democratic or Republican--is that the political professionals have bled the life from them.

Once upon a time, the conventions were places where people fought out in the open about policies, principles, visions, and candidacies. It was messy and it was riveting. Not messy and riveting in a Jerry Springer or Survivor-way, though.

Nor did the conventions display the sort of deliberately-impolite games of mutual assault that pass for news programming much of the time these days. No calculated pseudo-outrage. It was real. One only has to remember Abraham Ribicoff's speech at the 1968 Democratic National Convention, when he incited the wrath of Mayor Richard Daley of Chicago, accusing the Chicago police of practicing storm trooper tactics against the war protesters that had assemble there. The debates at past conventions were genuine and the stakes were authentically high.

Today, conventions are set pieces, pep rallies with sound bites, occasions when everybody smiles for the cameras and tries to appear united for the fall campaign. It is good that the slovenly appearances of delegates to the early-television era conventions have been replaced by people who appear to have bathed, changed their clothing within the previous forty-eight hours, and seem not to be hungover. But media consultants have thrown the baby---democracy in action---out with the bath water.

The parties would do well to get rid of the conventions altogether, along with the expenses associated with them. After all, the free TV exposure they get from them isn't really worth their effort. A shrinking audience, composed of partisan devotees and political junkies (like me) are the only ones likely to be tuning in....and I can't even vouch for me this year.

Instead, the parties could purchase a series of live broadcasts in which the candidates interact with voters and answer their questions. Although I abhor living in this era of reality TV, such a format change might very well reach today's disillusioned voter.

[PS: This isn't the column on God's will that I promised to try and complete and post today. I hope to complete it after I preside over a wedding this afternoon. I originally wrote this post as a comment on Chip Taylor's Miscellany blog. I've made a few minor changes here.]

A Ramble-log Blog

Earlier this week, I sent an email notification to family, friends, and colleagues about a column I'd posted on this site and said that I'd planned on posting a number of new columns throughout the week.

I learned again the wisdom of Father Myke, the NYFD chaplain killed in the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center: "If you want to make God laugh, tell him what you're doing tomorrow."

His words echo those of James in the New Testament: "Come now, you who say, 'Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.' Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring...Instead you ought to say, 'If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.' As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil." (James 4:13-17)

Life is what happens while you're busy making other plans. (Thank you, John Lennon.) So, this past week, instead of stockpiling columns, as I'd planned, life happened and I wrote one column. (My other posts here this week weren't, for the most part, written for the column I write for the Community Press newspapers. They were posts written just for the blog, like this one.)

One of the reasons I wasn't as prolific as I'd hoped to be was the honest, prayerful wrestling I've done this week with the text on which I'll be preaching---God willing---this coming Sunday morning: Jesus' words in Matthew 5:9. There He says, "Blessed [happy, blissed-out] are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God."

The more I studied---in, among other places, commentaries by Lenski as well as Albright and Mann, Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, and the Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible---the more complicated and daunting these seemingly simple words from Jesus became.

The passage also sent me to a book I hadn't read in many years. To some, it may seem dated, but it spoke to me again and provided a hefty amount of inspiration for me as I prepared my message. It was John and Mary Schramm's 1976 book, Things That Make for Peace. If you can get your hands on a copy of it, this book is well worth the short amount of time it takes to read. It's nothing more than a journal, incorporating reflections on personal experience, reading, and current events. It is in many ways, a very political book and I don't always agree with its politics. But it is at root, a deeply spiritual book written by two people struggling to define how they will live their faith in Christ in the social, political, and economic spheres of life. The book is a period piece, in a way, recalling a time when "Christian political activism" was almost always associated with the political left, the opposite of today. But, in what could be a lesson for today's Christian political activists, right and left, the Schramms begin not from a triumphant, holier-than-thou perspective, but from the cross of Jesus, displaying a humble willingness to take Jesus literally when He exhorts His followers to "take up their crosses and follow Him." You'll see how this book influenced me again with this week's reading of it when I post my Sunday sermon in a few days---God willing.

Things That Make for Peace also referred me another book that has been collecting dust on one of my bookshelves, John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus. I did read it more than twenty years ago, but hadn't cracked it open in a long time. While I only had time to make a small dent in the process of re-reading it, I'm enjoying it too.

I also finished reading an interesting little book this week: Simple Matters: Almost Everything You Need to Know About Life, Relationships, and Knowing God by two guys who write under the names Bruce and Stan. (They're really Bruce Bickel, an attorney, and Stan Jantz, a PR guy for Berean Book Stores, a very good "in" for one who wants get published.) I like the breezy and frankly, simple, style of this book which was probably written to be a gift for high school or college graduates. But people of all ages might read (and re-read) it profitably.

With few exceptions, I like the advice they give on a variety of topics, ranging from "Stuff" to "Patience," from "Goals" to "Conflict." Their advice on "Common Sense" will figure in a column on which I'm working and hope---God willing---to complete tomorrow.

Before going to bed at night (or while waiting to see my physical therapist), I've also been continuing to read Stephen Ambrose's one-volume biography of Eisenhower. Ike has just started his first term as president in my reading. This is a really good book!

I will close now. God bless you...thanks for reading!

A Plea to End Over-Specialization

My son has forwarded a column by David Brooks to me. In it, Brooks discusses Charles Hill, one-time aide to Secretary of State George Schultz, and a class that Hill co-teaches at Yale.

But, inspired by Hill, the column ends as a plea for a different approach to post-high school education and it's one I endorse.

I have always felt that the primary goal of undergraduate education isn't to produce specialists, but people who know how to think. It's fine for people to have major courses of study during their undergraduate years. But during those years, they should also receive what we once called a "liberal" education, one that liberally exposes students to a range of human knowledge---be it in the Arts, the sciences, social studies and theory, theology, whatever.

It is partcularly important today that our colleges and universities produce generalists rather than specialists. For one thing, the accelerated rate of change is such in today's world, that people who become overly-dependent on a speciality can quickly be rendered obsolete.

For another, the issues with which we wrestle in today's world are insusceptible to single areas of specialtization. Creative multidisciplinary approaches are needed for us to deal with matters as disparate as finding a cure for cancer, defeating terrorists, feeding the world's hungry, or promoting compassion.

Confession time: As an undergraduate at The Ohio State University, I chafed under the requirements that I take classes in fields in which I had no interest. But like the inoculations I got as a youngster to ensure that I didn't contract things like polio or small pox, I know now how good it was for me to have taken classes in statistics, economics, and biology. (Even though I hated taking them at the time.)

More than that, I know now how good it is for societies that undergraduates emerge from their college or university experiences as well-rounded people with a broad sensitivity to what the human race does and doesn't know at the moment they graduate, to have a strong foundation of broad-based knowledge with which to face life, and at the very least, to be able to vote and participate in society responsibly.

One of the books I've been reading lately is Stephen Ambrose's one-volume version of his biography of Dwight Eisenhower. An often-overlooked period of Eisenhower's life is his brief and frustrating tenure as president of Columbia University. Ambrose records an incident from that period:

Columbia was an outstanding university with a brilliant faculty composed of highly sophisticated specialists who were dedicated to their research. They regarded Eisenhower as hopelessly naive. When one scholar told Eisenhower that "we have some of America's most exceptional physicists, mathematicians, chemists, and engineers," Eisenhower asked if they were also "exceptional Americans." The scholar, confused, mumbled that Eisenhower did not understand--they were research scholars. "Dammit," Eisenhower shot back, "what good are exceptional physicists...exceptional anything, unless they exceptional Americans." He added that every student who came to Columbia must leave it first a better citizen and only secondarily a better scholar.

Anybody familiar with the life of Dwight Eisenhower will know that when he spoke of being "exceptional Americans," he wasn't upholding a jingoistic, shallow patriotism. Ike was an internationalist and a small-d democrat. For democracy to function, he was saying, every citizen and especially every leader, must know how to think and have an appreciation for how the world and how democracy works.

At the very least, colleges and universities need to break up the musty air of specialization from time to time by bringing in people like Eisenhower at Columbia or, in the case of Yale University cited by Brooks in his New York Times column, somebody like Charles Hill. They can help students move away from the navel-gazing that inheres in so much scholastic specialization and introduce them to the essential life-skills needed for solid citizenship and effective, sensitive leadership in whatever field of life.

My Bible text for this coming Sunday is Matthew 5:9, in which Jesus says, "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God." Of course, this is a complicated text. As a Christian, I believe that real peace begins when we accept the peace between God and we human sinners that God offers to us through Jesus Christ. When that wall of enmity is erased, we have peace inside and we can be creative--even daring and bold--in sharing that peace with others.

But it also seems to me that we ill-equip our children to be peacemakers---whether in their families, communities, careers, or in the international community---when we consign them to specializations that render them insensitive to the thoughts, feelings, experiences, or knowledge of people engaged in other pursuits in life.

So much hangs on the question of how our colleges and universities will train our young. I hope that people like Charles Hill of Yale University are the harbingers of good things to come!

An Anniversary That Can Fuel Our Dreams

Today is the thirty-fifth anniversary of one of the most sublime and stunning achievements in human history: the landing of two astronauts---Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin---on the Moon. No one old enough to have watched these events on their television that July 20, 1969, will ever forget Armstrong's matter-of-fact pronouncement: "Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed." Even more stunning, maybe, was the moment when Armstrong, a native of Wapakoneta, Ohio, set foot on the lunar surface.

A wonderful symmetry attached to this son of Ohio being the first human being to kick moon dust. After all, it was two Ohioans, Dayton natives Wilbur and Orville Wright, who invented powered flight; it was Columbus native Eddie Rickenbacker, the one-time Indy 500 driver and later president of Eastern Airlines, who was America's first flying ace, during World War One; and it was John Glenn, of New Concord, Ohio a Marine hero during the Korean War, who was the first American to orbit the Earth.

The primary emotion this anniversary evokes in me is wistfulness. I pine for what might have been. If we human beings could have spent a fraction of the time, effort, money, and intellectual capital we've spent on war and terror these past three-decades-and-a-half, and instead, built positively on the foundation of the first moon-landing, who knows what progress might have been ours? What new discoveries about the universe and ourselves might we have made? What new technologies and new medicines might have resulted? We'll never know because, to a great extent, we've remained earth-bound, literally and spiritually.

It boggles the mind that an event which Richard Nixon, then president, in a fit of understandable but exagerrated hyperbole described as the "greatest...since Creation," is so widely ignored today.

It's as though we've forgotten how to dream, to dare, to hope, to climb.

I hope and pray that we will learn once again to do these things. I hope that the people of the world will say, "We've been to the Moon. Let's go for Mars. Let's explore the cosmos."

From my perspective as a Christian, I believe that we have a sacred obligation to explore creation, to know it and by the knowing of it, gain a deeper appreciation of the One Who designed it all.

May the anniversary of the first Moon landing compel us to once more let our dreams take flight!

A Good Site to Check Out

The web site for the Dorado Covenant has been expanded. The covenant itself has also attracted many more Lutherans as signatories. This brief document is, in my estimation, a ray of hope that the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America of which I am a part, will find its way through the current crisis over the authority of God's Word, to true commitment to the Christ revealed on the pages of Scripture and amplified in the Lutheran Confessions. Check out the site and please consider adding your name to those who've already endorsed the Dorado Covenant.

There are other groups working to reform the church. Among them:

WordAlone

Solid Rock Lutherans

Why We Worship

Often, when I talk with people who have worshiped with us at Friendship Church, I’m told, “I get so much out of the service.”

I appreciate hearing that, of course. But the fact is that what we get out of worship is not nearly as important as what we put into it.

Worship isn’t really about us. The old English ancestor of our word worship is the word, worth-ship. When we worship God, we say how worthy He is of our honor and complete surrender. That’s what we offer God when we worship.

So, some may wonder, what’s the good in that? Is God such an egomaniac that He needs to exact praise from people? Actually, it turns out that we need to praise God more than He needs our praises.

A few years back, I read a true story from a pastor who was visited by a young man going through a tough time. The woman to whom he was engaged had broken things off. This had followed a string of break-ups of other relationships and friendships. He was frustrated because he just couldn’t seem to stay connected with people. It made him feel depressed and inferior.

At first, the pastor was surprised by the young man’s story because he seemed likable. But as their conversation wore on, something began to dawn on the pastor. The young man used the word “I” alot. He was totally self-absorbed.

The pastor got an idea. He told the young man to worship on each of the next four Sundays and then come back for another visit in the pastor’s office.

A month passed, the young man visited the pastor, and in the course of this second conversation, the pastor began to notice a change in the fellow. He was less self-conscious, more interested in others. In a year’s time, continuing this pattern of hour-long conversations with the pastor followed by four Sundays of worship, the changes in the young man were remarkable. In fact, by the end of the year, he had become engaged to another young woman.

Was it magic? No, it was as simple as this: Through regular involvement in public worship, the young man realized that he wasn’t the end-all and be-all of the universe. For one hour a week, He was compelled to focus on God and that influenced the rest of his week.

When we join others to worship God, things happen in us.

First: We get rid of the pressure to be our own little gods. We know that the job of “God” has been filled and we can rely on God to do His job well, including take care of us through thick, thin, life, death, and beyond. We’re also ready to take our marching orders from Him.

Second: Secure in our place in God’s kingdom, we can love others, listen to them, and be concerned for them, giving them the same love God gives to us.

Worship is more about what we put into it than what we get out of it. But because of God’s fantastic compassion for us, it turns out that the more that we put into worship, the more we get out of it.

The Happiness Project: The People Who See God

Matthew 5:1-2, 8
(shared with the people of Friendship Church, July 18, 2004)

For six weeks now, we’ve been looking at some words Jesus shared privately with His inner circle of followers one day on a Judean hillside. They appear in the fifth chapter of the New Testament book of Matthew, in twelve verses we call The Beatitudes. In them, Jesus talks about happiness. Interestingly, in the Beatitudes, He doesn’t give us a how-to manual. Instead, He presents a few word pictures of what happy people look like.

Today, He presents a sixth picture of happiness: “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.” It seems to me that happy people who see God have three main characteristics in common.

First: They give up. I don’t mean that they give up hope. The happy people I know have an eternity of hope. But happy people do give up something.

One of my heroes is the writer and scholar, C.S. Lewis. As a young man, perhaps because of his experiences during World War One and because as a little boy, he had seen his mother die in spite of all sorts of prayers said on her behalf, Lewis was a committed atheist. But in the 1930s, after his scholarship had exposed him to cultures, literature, and myth from throughout the world, he found himself wrestling with the possibility that Jesus Christ really was the God and Savior of the world. One day, while riding in the passenger car of his brother’s motorcycle, Lewis found himself suddenly realizing that he believed in the God we meet in Jesus. He called his coming to faith in Christ as being “surprised by joy.”

Lewis gave up his doubts about God for good reason. I’ve mentioned before the story of two men standing on a pier as a large cruise liner sailed into harbor. The one man tells the other, “You know, nobody made that ship. It just appeared in the harbor one day, every rivet, engine, and deck chair in place. All by itself.” The second man clearly thought that this theory was nuts. He knew that where there is a creation, there must be a creator. We all have doubts and questions about life. But the fact that you and I are living indicates that there must be a God.

And that has implications for our lives. Six years ago, three research psychologists reported in The Journal of Clinical Psychology that people with strong spiritual beliefs were typically satisfied with life, while those without such beliefs were usually unsatisfied with life. Happy people give up on the notion of a world without God.

They also open up. Back in my atheist days, I used to make the most horrible comments about God, about Christ, about people who believed. I couldn’t understand how they could believe in a God you can’t see, especially with so much tragedy in the world. But then, I met real-life followers of Jesus. They were people who had personally dealt with lots of tragedy in their lives--the death of children and spouses, nervous breakdowns, divorces, loss of health, property, income. And yet, they had the power to keep on believing. They had opened up to Jesus, allowing Him to be their Boss and God and best Friend. They knew that only a Savior Who has been through death and gone on to rise again can really be relied upon to help us through all the seasons of our lives. They made me want Jesus in my life, too.

Finally, one night in the study of the house we were renting at the time, I prayed as best I knew how. I told Jesus, “I don’t know everything about You, Lord. But I want to give my life to You.” Jesus didn’t magically answer all my questions about life and He certainly didn’t make me perfect. But for the first time in my life, I felt a peace in my heart.

In the New Testament book of Revelation, Jesus tells us that He is knocking at the doors of our hearts. If we will just open those doors, He will come and be with us forever. Happy people open up to Jesus.

Happy people give up, open up, and they get cleaned up. The word that Jesus uses for pure in the original Greek of today’s Bible lesson is katharismo, from which we get our English word, catharsis. People who undergo catharsis are those who purge themselves of bad things, so that good things can come to them. To be pure in heart is, quite simply, to be a person who lets Jesus Christ cleanse us of all our old emotional baggage, our destructive habits, our ill-advised ways of thinking, and all of our sins. He washes them away and because of His goodness and power, makes us fit to live with God forever.

The famous pastor of the Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller, once had a terrible weight problem. And it was getting worse because he was incapable of saying no to sweets. He knew that this was a spiritual issue. He knew that his body was a temple given to him by God. He knew that he was allowing himself to be led in life not by God, but by the food he constantly craved. So complete was his dependence on the god of food that Schuller began to doubt the existence of the God we know through Jesus Christ.

One night, he cried out to Jesus in desperation:

“Dear Jesus, I don’t know if You’re dead or alive. I don’t know if You are even real! I have believed it! I preached it! But I can’t prove it by my weight control. Jesus, if You are there, can You help me?”

A calm came over Schuller after he prayed that prayer and he sensed Jesus telling him, “I have snatched you from destruction.” Difficult though it was going to be, Jesus Christ had cleansed Robert Schuller of his reliance on food to make him feel good and fill the void in his soul tha can only be filled by Jesus. He knew that Christ was going to help him regain control of his body.

When we turn from sin--whatever our sin--and turn to Jesus Christ, His love cleanses the sin away and He gives us the power to live changed lives. When we invite Jesus’ cleansing power into our lives, that’s when we see God for sure!

In a nutshell, Jesus tells us today that happy people are those whose hearts and consciences have been made clean by the death and resurrection of Jesus. They’re the ones who have seen that life is too big and complicated to try to deal with it on their own. They see that a Savior Who died on a cross understands the sorrows and difficulties of everyday life. They understand that without Jesus stepping in to be our advocate, friend, and Savior, we would stand naked in our sin before God. They let Jesus cleanse them, washing away all the obstructions that would otherwise keep them from seeing God.

Happy are the people Jesus has made pure. They’re the people who give up on life without God, who open up and let Jesus enter their lives, and who get cleaned up, letting Jesus scrub away their sin. Those are the people who get to see God. No wonder they’re happy!

[The message received some inspiration from a chapter in the wonderful book, The Be Happy Attitudes by Robert Schuller. It's there that he tells of his struggle with weight control.

[C.S. Lewis talks about his conversion from atheism to faith in Christ in his book, Surprised by Joy.

[The 1998 study on the relationship between spiritual beliefs and happiness is cited in The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People: What Scientists Have Learned and How You Can Use It by David Niven, Ph.D.]

Overcoming the Culture of Character Assassination (The Column Version)

[I write a column for the Community Press newspapers. This is the column version of my essay on character assassination which I just submitted.]

Dick Ebersol, head of NBC Sports, recently met with President Bush about security arrangements surrounding the Olympics in Athens, Greece. They met one-on-one. Afterwards, at a gathering of the Television Critics Association, Ebersol said that Bush “really did know the facts” surrounding Olympic security arrangements. This observation evoked laughter from the audience, as though they thought the NBC sports chief was being ironic. He had to assure the crowd, “I’m serious.”

Ebersol’s experience of President Bush during his “face to face” didn’t conform to the media’s picture of Bush as an intellectual lightweight manipulated by his handlers. Because of that image, a roomful of intelligent people laughed at the different picture Ebersol painted.

In our media-saturated world, it doesn’t take long for public figures to be saddled with bad reputations, deserved or not.

And of course, the media heavyweights aren’t the only guilty parties when it comes to character assassination. Politicians themselves are facile in such assaults. President Bush, for example, authorized the recent production and webcasting of an ad that interspersed video clips of speeches by various Democratic Party leaders with one of Adolf Hitler, implying that there was a connection between the Democrats and one of the most murderous despots in human history. That's outrageous!

We can't control what people with their hands on the big media switches tell us about public figures. But we can control our reactions to the things we’re told about those figures. We need to be skeptical about assaults on character and wary of the ones doing the assaulting.

The public figures whose lives are sliced, diced, dissected, lampooned, and disposed of in the media are, after all, human beings. When their actions seem to violate good sense or cause harm, it’s absolutely legitimate to hold them accountable. But that’s not a license for character assassination.

One of the commandments God gave at Mount Sinai says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Martin Luther fleshed out the meaning of this commandment when he wrote:

“We are to fear and love God so that we do not betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the most charitable way.”

I can’t claim to keep this or any of the other commandments perfectly. I’m a sinner and I sometimes violate God’s will for my life. So, as horrified as I am by media-generated lynchings of people’s reputations, I can be guilty of character assassination, too.

My victims aren’t just celebrities, though. I can be cruel in my assessments of non-celebrities, the people who populate my everyday life. Maybe you can say the same thing.

But there’s hope. The New Testament book of First John says: “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous...” (First John 2:1)

For all of us who mar the reputations of others (for all who sin, period), Jesus Christ can be the road to our recovery. We can be forgiven and start with clean slates. When we turn from our sins and turn to Christ, God forgives and then, gives us the power to keep turning from sin...even the sin of character assassination.

Maybe we Americans ought to informally declare a National Clean Slate Day. On it, we'll grant forgiveness to each other for all our past slandering of others and then, we'll ask God to help us refrain from verbally assaulting anyone. We'll also ask God to help us to disagree with others without being cruel. We might even want to declare an International Clean Slate Day. Anybody interested?

More on the Bush Campaign's Desire for Church Rosters

Check out this article from a Christian news site about the reaction of a Baptist pastor to the Bush campaign's desire for church rosters.

I wrote about this earlier.

Overcoming the Culture of Character Assassination

Dick Ebersol, head of NBC Sports, was concerned. NBC is covering the upcoming Olympic Games in Athens and he wanted to make sure that strong security measures were in place to protect the people working for his company. He sought a meeting with President Bush for reassurance.

The president personally met with him. Afterwards, at a gathering of the Television Critics Association, Ebersol recounted the meeting. Bush “really did know the facts” when it came to the minutiae of Olympic security arrangements, Ebersol said. This observation evoked laughter from the audience, as though they thought the NBC sports chief was being ironic. He had to assure the crowd, “I’m serious.”

In this era of twenty-four-hour-a-day news coverage and instant commentary from cable news networks, web sites, and late night talk show monologues, it doesn’t take long for public figures to be saddled with bad reputations, deserved or not.

Ebersol’s experience of President Bush during his “face to face” didn’t conform to the media-generated picture of the President. That picture insists that Bush is as an intellectual lightweight manipulated by his handlers. Because of that image, a roomful of intelligent people found it hard to accept the different picture Ebersol painted.

Generally speaking, it seems that the media, voracious in its appetite for news and controversy, can be nonpartisan in trashing public figures. On the night of the Iowa Caucuses earlier this year, Howard Dean finished poorly in that first contest of the presidential nominating process. Concerned about the morale of his supporters, Dean decided to play campaign cheerleader. His “yee-hah” performance was shown repeatedly on TV. Supposedly serious people on news shows wondered whether the caucus-night speech indicated that Dean lacked the maturity to be President and speculated about how badly it would hurt his campaign. Dean was the victim of media-generated character assassination and it was wrong.

And of course, politicians themselves are often guilty of the most vicious character assassination. President Bush himself, for example, apparently authorized the recent production and webcasting of an ad that interspersed video clips of speeches by various Democratic Party luminaries with one of Adolf Hitler, implying that there was a connection between the Democrats and one of the most murderous despots in human history. That's unconscionable!

We can't control what people with their hands on the big media switches tell us about public figures. This comes as a simple plea for common people like me to pay heed to what we can control: Our reactions to the things we’re told about public figures. We need to be skeptical about assaults on people's characters and wary of those who do the assaulting.

The celebrities whose lives, accomplishments, mistakes, and alleged faults are so calmly sliced, diced, dissected, lampooned, and disposed of are, in fact, human beings. When their actions---particularly those of office holders---seem to violate good sense or cause harm, it’s absolutely legitimate to hold them accountable. But there’s no reason to assault them personally. There's no reason to fabricate destructive fictions under the guises of analysis or satire.

One of the commandments God gave at Mount Sinai--we Lutherans reckon it as the eighth commandment, others count it differently--says, “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” Martin Luther, in typical fashion, fleshes out the positive spin on this commandment when he writes in The Small Catechism:

“We are to fear [that means to respect and reverence] and love God so that we do not betray, slander, or lie about our neighbor, but defend him, speak well of him, and explain his actions in the most charitable way.”

Of course, I can’t claim to keep this or any of the other commandments perfectly. I’m a garden variety sinner and I sometimes violate God’s will for my life. So, as horrified as I am of media-generated lynchings of people’s reputations and how we all seem to blindly subscribe to what the media tell us about people, I can be guilty of character assassination, too.

My victims aren’t just celebrities, though. Sometimes, I can be cruel in my assessments of non-celebrities, the people who populate my everyday life. Maybe you can say the same thing.

If so, there is hope. The New Testament book of First John says: “I am writing these things to you so that you may not sin. But if anyone does sin, we have an advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ the righteous...” (First John 2:1)

For all of us who mar the reputations of others (and for all of us who sin, period), Jesus Christ can be the road to our recovery. We can be forgiven and start with clean slates. When we turn from our sins and turn to Christ, God forgives and then, gives us the power to keep turning from sin...even the sin of character assassination.

Maybe we Americans ought to informally declare a National Clean Slate Day. On it, we'll grant forgiveness to each other for all our past slandering of others and then, we'll ask God to help us refrain from verbally assaulting anyone. We'll also ask God to enable us to disagree without being cruel. We might even want to declare an International Clean Slate Day. Anybody interested?

The Happiness Project: What Mercy Does

Matthew 5:1-2, 7

(shared with the people of Friendship Church, July 11, 2004)

One of my favorite preachers is Dr. Gerald Mann. He tells a story about something that happened during his first year in seminary. He was the twenty-one year old, married, father of one. His little girl was profoundly deaf and in need of special attention she could only receive in Houston, Texas. And so, already pastoring a church part-time in Houston, he had to fly to the seminary he attended in Dallas four times a week for classes. As you can imagine, he was always on the brink of physical and emotional exhaustion.

One week, toward the end of his first term, wiped out, he remembered that he had a paper due in his New Testament studies class the next day. Two days out of the week, he roomed with a student specializing in New Testament and so he asked if there were any resources on the authorship of the New Testament book of Hebrews to which he could refer him. Yeah, the guy replied, someone in his seminar had presented a pretty good paper on that subject and he handed it to Mann.

Gerald Mann was impressed by the paper. It had been typed on an IBM Selectric (this was back in the Stone Ages). As the night wore on and Gerald Mann became more desperate, he decided to find an IBM Selectric, tear off the title page from the paper his roomie had handed him, and replace it with one bearing his own name. He turned it in.

A week or so later, Mann received the paper back. The grade: A+, under which was written, “Look inside.” Inside, his professor had written a note. “When I wrote this paper fifteen years ago,” it said, “I only got a C for it. But I always thought that it was pretty good. See me at your convenience.”

You can imagine the fear that Gerald Mann felt. Plagiarism--stealing what someone else has written--is no different from knocking off the local convenience store or sacking Enron. His professor had evidence sufficient to have him expelled from seminary. He went to his professor’s office and soon began to explain the pressures under which he was operating: his little girl, his job, his four-times a week commute between Houston and Dallas, his average of four hours of sleep at night, his last-minute realization that a major paper was due the next day.

As he told his story, his professor began to tear up and then, came around his desk and put his hand on Mann’s shoulders. “Listen,” he said, “you don’t need to cheat. If there are times when you’re up against it, just come and see me and we can work something out.”

Mann was taken aback by this, but still was concerned about what was to happen next. “What about my grade?” he asked. His professor said, “It’s still a good paper. The grade stands. We’ll just keep it our secret.”

The impact of that professor’s decision? Gerald Mann says that he never cheated again.

Jesus tells us in our Bible lesson today, “Blessed (that means: happy, fortunate, blissful) are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.”

All the different Biblical words---both those in the Old Testament and in the New Testament---tell us that to be merciful means more than feeling compassion for someone who’s experiencing pain or affliction. It also means acting on our compassion or sympathy. Sometimes it means to act sympathetically or compassionately even toward those who have wronged us. Jesus says that the happy people of this world are the ones who treat others with mercy.

That was a very tough fact for me to review and remember this past week as I prepared this message. I like the idea of being compassionate or merciful toward others. And I like it when other people think that I’m merciful. But to actually be merciful isn’t easy. Being merciful takes a willingness to put aside our own agendas and let the pain or needs of another person intrude on us. It means sharing others’ pain or giving them some relief.

Years ago, one of our Lutheran magazines had a tradition of printing the names and pictures of every person graduating from Lutheran seminaries in the spring. Interspersed with the pictures were articles by seasoned pastors, giving advice to these men and women about to become pastors. I’ll never forget an article that appeared one year in which a veteran pastor talked about his “theology of interruptions.” He advised that it’s all well and good for a person to have plans for their day. But when someone with a need comes along, we need to be willing to forget our agendas and instead pay heed to helping where we can.

That’s not easy to do! The late writer Erma Bombeck once told about a flight she was taking to Chicago. About thirty minutes before the plane was to take off, she settled down in her seat, craving some quiet. You see, just before she’d left for the airport, her son had engaged in some long monologue about a movie he’d just seen, replete with about 3000 “you knows.” And then, her cab driver rambled on about his own college-age son. Now, she thought, she could enjoy some peace and quiet.

But then she heard the voice of an elderly woman sitting next to her. “I’ll bet it’s cold in Chicago,” she said.

“Stone faced, I replied [Bombeck writes], ‘It’s likely.’ ‘I haven’t been to Chicago in nearly three years,’ [the elderly woman] persisted. ‘My son lives there.’ ‘That’s nice,’ [Bombeck said, her eyes now glued to a book she hoped the woman would see she was reading.]

But the woman went on: “My husband’s body is on this plane. We’ve been married 53 years. I don’t drive, you know, and when he died a nun drove me home from the hospital. We aren’t even Catholic. The funeral director let me come to the airport with him.”

Erma Bombeck writes: “I don’t think I ever detested myself more than I did at that moment. Another human being was screaming to be heard, and in desperation, had turned to a cold stranger who was more interested in a novel than in real life...She needed no advice, money, assistance, expertise...---all she needed was someone to listen.”

The actions of mercy can be as simple as listening to a person who is hurting. Mercy has many faces and many manifestations. But it always involves acting to help those in need, whatever their need and however limited our abilities. Once, when our son was about six years old, we were doing some Christmas shopping. He’d just bought a gift for his sister, from money he’d been collecting for awhile. As we left one store, we passed a Salvation Army volunteer, ringing his bell, seeking donations. My wife and I watched as our then-little boy dug into his pocket and put all that he had left into the volunteer’s bucket. I had tears in my eyes as I thought about how many times I passed the needs of humanity by, thinking that because I couldn’t do everything, I couldn’t do anything. At that moment, Philip taught me, that no matter how little we may think we have to offer, we can still be merciful to those in need. It’s a lesson I’m still trying to learn.

Jesus says, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Does that mean that if we’re kind and generous to people in their afflictions that God will be merciful to us? Does it mean that we can earn God’s forgiveness and love? You and I know better than that. The Bible teaches that there is nothing that you and I can do to gain God’s forgiveness and eternal life. Those things are free gifts to all who turn away from sin and surrender their lives to Jesus Christ. In fact, Jesus’ death on the cross is the greatest act of mercy in the history of the world. The New Testament book of Romans says that while you and I were still sinners---lounging around in the slop of our sins like pigs unaware that sin made us dirty and unfit for living---Jesus Christ died for us. God saw our need and took care of us before we even knew we needed His care. That’s mercy.

But here’s what Jesus teaches us this morning (and in lots of other places in the New Testament): Every time you and I fail to share His mercy with other people, we build up a wall between God and us. The less mercy we show, the bigger the wall between God and us and the harder it becomes for His mercy to reach our hardened hearts.

Jesus says that happy people are those who keep their hearts and lives open to God’s blessings by living mercifully toward those in need. Happy people are those who keep turning away from sin and keep turning to God and to others.

Being merciful to others can also tear down walls between us and other people. After the Korean War, a group of American soldiers rented a house in South Korea. They had a young Korean working for them and they treated him horribly, playing practical jokes on him all the time. Every time they did something to him though, he would laugh and go on with his business.

One day, the Americans felt so badly about it that they finally apologized and said they wouldn’t pull their pranks any longer. He asked, “You mean you won’t put buckets with water on the top of the door, making me wet when I open it?” “No” they said, “we won’t do that.” “No more grease on the stove knobs, making it hard for me to do the cooking?” “No.” “No more dirt on the floor so that I have to vacuum all the time?” “No, no. We won’t do anything like that any more.” “Okay,” he said, “then I won’t spit in your soup anymore.” When we’re merciful to the afflicted, that mercy has a way of coming back to us.

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.” Happy people gladly give away God’s mercy because they know God has a lot more mercy where that came from. In fact, the follower of Jesus Christ knows that the more mercy we give away, the more of it fills our lives.

Ask Jesus to give you the faith and the courage to be a merciful person, to share the mercy He has given to you. Ask Him to help you fill the needs of others in your own unique way. When you do, you’ll be on the road to true happiness.

[Erma Bombeck told the story of her flight to Chicago in a column appearing in the Chicago Sun Times on February 26, 1977. It and the joke about the Korean and the US GIs appeared in a very fine sermon by Pastor Will Pounds, written and delivered in 1999.]

A Good Blog

A wonderful blog I check often is written by Pastor Craig S. Williams, who is now on a sabbatical. I've never met Craig, but he seems like a gracious, authethic person who tries to live each day for Christ. Check out the latest posting on his site.

The Horrible Situation in Sudan...and What Can Be Done

This coming Sunday, I will be preaching on Jesus' beatitude: "Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy" (Matthew 5:7).

One of the striking things I've been reminded of as I've studied and prepared this week, is that the Biblical notion of mercy entails sympathy for those who are afflicted in any way. But it moves beyond a feeling to action. God has shown sympathy for us by becoming one of us, dying on the cross for us, and offering new life to all who will turn from sin and receive Christ as Savior. But, Jesus seems to be saying, we build walls between ourselves and God when we harden our hearts and refuse to be merciful, actively compassionate for those in need.

This is hard for me to know and think about because I am so comfortable in my middle class American life style. It is so easy to live as self-contained creatures here.

For some time now, I have watched and read about the humanitarian crisis in Sudan and not done much. The crisis is huge and it's easy to say, "Well, I can't do anything anyway." But as a Christian, I follow a Savior Who has told all of His followers that they would be empowered by His Spirit to do greater works even than He accomplished while on earth.

I'm a communicator and so, I want to use this platform to do several things:

(1) Inform you about the crisis in the Sudan;

(2) Ask you for your prayers;

(3) Encourage you to do what you can at your personal and local level, possibly contributing to relief agencies.

Below are links to stories about the Sudan crisis, as well as agencies and organizations to which you might wish to contribute. God bless you!

This article provides basic information on Sudan. It comes from the Division for Global Mission of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA).

This article, by a BBC reporter, gives her experiences traveling through Darfur province in Sudan.

This is a great Q-and-A about the roots and disastrous consequences of the terrors in Sudan. It also was produced by BBC News.

Information and the opportunity to contribute to relief efforts in Darfur, through Lutheran World Relief, the world's most cost-effectively operated charity, can be found here.

This link presents information and a chance to contribute to efforts by Doctors without Borders.

May we all learn the meaning of mercy. God bless you!

A Biography of the Other Adams

Book Review:
John Quincy Adams by Robert V. Remini (New York: Henry Holt and Company)

The historian is to be more than a regurgitator of facts and figures. The historian’s art involves the interpretation of facts as well as the surfacing of patterns and connections between people, events, and trends. It’s a subtle art that demands that, even when the historian’s ideology, passions, or convictions are engaged, she or he make fair judgements about the truth and its meaning. Historians must do this without intruding on the events they record and interpret.

Some who write history can’t seem to get this right. They either veer off into the error of personal intrusion or they play it safe, producing works that recount facts without attempting to make sense of them.

One prominent historian/biographer for example, has recently torn off in each of these errant directions in two different best-selling biographical works. In one, he intruded on history by creating a fictional character who ostensibly was a life-long friend of his biography’s subject, thus manufacturing fake history and distorting the story. In another, he recounted the day-to-day life of his subject over an eight year period with virtually no interpretation of that life at all.

The historian must strive to interpret while being accurate and fair.

But even with that goal in mind, two historians can look at the same people and events---even the same primary sources (things like letters, diaries, memos)---and playing the role of fair interpreters, derive markedly different conclusions.

One of the most striking things about historian Robert V. Remini’s new biography of John Quincy Adams, our sixth president, is the interpretation he offers of Adams’ parents and upbringing. It presents a stark contrast to the portrait of John and Abigail Adams and their parenting style that we find in David McCullough’s masterful biography of John Q. Adams’ father and presidential antecedent, John. In John and Abigail Adams, McCullough found two loving parents, persons of deep faith, great intelligence, and extraordinary resourcefulness---and not a little prickliness---who presided happily over their family. But Remini sees John and Abigail as distant, demanding, and moralistic. He is particularly critical of Abigail. He even approvingly quotes biographer Paul Nagel’s conclusion that Abigail was “a calamity as a mother.”

Whether Remini or McCullough are correct about Abigail Adams, it’s clear that the former feels that Abigail’s alleged deficiencies as a parent explain much about the career of John Quincy Adams. And in fact, there is much that needs explaining. Like his father, John Quincy was a one-term president. That may be attributable in part it seems, to deficiencies as politicians shared by the father and the son: They lacked the ability to incite allegiance, but were facile in creating animosity. Both were highly principled, which made their occasional dalliances in hardball politics--it seems fairly clear that J.Q. Adams made a deal with Henry Clay in order to secure election in the U.S. House of Representatives following the inconclusive 1824 presidential election, for example--seem more deplorable.

Remini’s book makes it clear that John Quincy Adams as president was dogged not just by a cold, aloof personality and a tin-ear as a politician, but also by a rather unscrupulous demagogue for an opponent in Andrew Jackson. (In this, Jackson played the same role first played by the similarly unscrupulous and demagogic Thomas Jefferson vis-a-vis the elder Adams.) From the moment Jackson lost the presidency to J.Q. Adams, he set out to thwart the president at every turn and to stack the deck for his own ascendancy to the White House in the subsequent election.

But Remini’s book, part of the new American Presidents series, published by Henry Holt and Company, under the general editorship of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., does have something in common with McCullough’s book about his father: It demonstrates that the most interesting, consequential, and illustrious part of this Adams’ life, like John, occurred before and after his one unhappy term as president.

Before the account of the younger Adams’ presidency, Remini makes a stunning claim:

John Quincy Adams is arguably the greatest secretary of state to serve that office.

There are compelling reasons for that argument. First of all, there is Adams’ pedigree. His parents saw to it that he was groomed throughout his life for service to his country, particularly as a diplomat. He in fact, did serve as an effective and often, imaginative emissary for his country prior to being tapped as President Monroe’s chief diplomat.

Adding to Remini’s argument is Adams’ actual performance as secretary of state. It was he who formulated what came to be called the Monroe Doctrine, a strong foundational principle that has guided US diplomacy in the Western Hemisphere for two centuries.

In his post-presidential years, Adams’ political career was given a resurrection. Voters in Massachusetts saw fit to elect him to the House of Representatives. There, as an elder statesman who sometimes employed shrill rhetoric, sometimes soared beyond his natural gifts as an orator, he fought the institution of slavery. While he wasn’t necessarily all-out against the peculiar institution and may have been, as Remini suggests, politically motivated, seeking revenge against the southern Democrats who sabotaged his administration as president, he played an important role in the development of opposition to slavery.

I loved reading Remini’s biography of Henry Clay several years ago. His expertise in the history of the period of Clay’s, Jackson’s, and Adams’ life is clear. In spite of the brevity of this text, he successfully evokes the feeling of the period and his take on the life and character of John Quincy Adams is well-founded. While one may disagree or have reservations about his interpretation of events, this is a fine book written by a great practitioner of the historian's art.

My Cackling Metabolism Thingy (The Column Version)

[Below is the column version of my recent essay on my weight gain. I hope you enjoy it.]

It started shortly after my forty-ninth birthday. Until then, I’d been able to eat baked goods with impunity. I “breakfasted” each day on four slices of wheat toast, along with OJ and a banana. Sandwiches were a usual part of my diet. I loved occasionally stuffing slices of dry bread into my mouth. Cookies, sweet rolls, specialty breads, and other baked goodies have all been perennial favorites.

I was able to eat this stuff and keep my weight under control. I never even thought about how much I weighed. From age thirty, I stayed at about 159-pounds.

Then my brain issued orders to my metabolism thingy---that’s the technical term I use for it. The order: Get older; slow the process by which you break down and process all those baked items. My metabolism thingy obeyed.

At first, I didn’t notice because just as this order was issued, my wife came home from work with news. She and her fellow employees and their families had been offered a special deal for membership at a local gym. I was enthusiastic about the idea of joining. We checked the gym out and got a membership. Being a cheapskate, I decided not to pay the extra money for a few sessions with a personal trainer. Later, I realized that the sessions would have helped familiarize me with the torture devices there and ultimately, prevented problems. But I didn’t know that then. The music videos playing in the gym kept me from hearing my metabolism-thingy laughing at my ignorance. I’ve come to recognize its cackle since.

Because I’d never really worked out regularly, I knew that I needed to ramp my exercising up slowly. That’s why one month into hitting the gym for an average of four days a week, I was only doing 200 crunches a session.

“That’s Britney country!” my doctor’s assistant told me the day I went in for my appointment, complaining of some “mysterious” pain in my groin. It shouldn’t have been a mystery: I had herniated myself. That’s when I first noticed the cackling.

It was a mild hernia. The doctor said that I should lay off lower-body exercises for awhile. I focused on my upper body. But I would take it slow!

I thought I did. One night though, using weights, I felt a crunching in my neck and shoulder. I ignored it. I shouldn’t have; I was damaging my neck and rotator cuff. I’ve been in physical therapy ever since. For the first few months of that process, I wasn’t allowed any exercise.

That’s when the cackling got really loud. It came because my metabolism thingy saw an opening to full implementation of its orders. It came because another habit I’d developed in the months I’d been working out was devouring every baked good in sight after I returned, famished, from the gym. No longer engaging in the habit of exercise, I nonetheless kept on with the habit ot eating to excess. I ballooned. One morning, I weighed myself and found that I was now 179 pounds! Half my pants no longer fit and the other half are a stretch.

I’m still in physical therapy, improving. But I weigh too much. I walk a lot and I’m going to the gym about three times a week to work on the elliptical walker. I’m cutting down on the baked stuff. One week into this new regimen, I’ve lost a two-pounds-and-a-half.

I figure I owe it to God to get into better shape. The Bible says that our bodies are temples of God, not dumping grounds for cinnamon bread and Ho-Ho’s. I owe it to my family, too; I want them to be able to stand looking at me. And I owe it to my pants, straining under the added pressure from my midsection.

Those are good reasons for losing weight. But mostly, I want to stop that incessant cackling from my metabolism thingy.

A Good Read for Pastors...Veterans or Rookies

During my recent trip to Disney World, I was able to read several books and start reading two others. In this post, I'll comment on one of the books I read. In my next one, I'll review the other. And I'll shut-up about the other two until I've actually finished reading them.

One of the books I read during the trip is one I'd already read, really.

Among the reasons I like to keep books is that, especially as I grow older, I don't always get as much out of them the first time through as I might were my mind a fresher slate. Second and third readings often hammer points home for me that I missed before.

Besides, I've always regarded good books as good friends. The thing about good friends is that no matter how much time passes between your visits with them, you can pick right up where you left off and still have those feelings of closeness you so value.

Back in 1986, I read a simple little book by two Lutheran pastors. It was called The Penguin Principles: A Survival Manual for Clergy Seeking Maturity in Ministry. At the time, I'd been a pastor for about a year-and-a-half, wrestling with the enormity of the task of leading a church and feeling some frustration that the reality didn't match my previous ideals. (And I had those feelings in spite of the fact that I still think my first congregation was and is among the very best churches I've ever experienced or known about!) The good humor and common sense of authors David Belasic and Paul M. Schmidt came as gusts of fresh air and reassurance for me. The Penguin Principles was a reality check and a confidence booster.

For some reason, my wife also read the book back then and told me, "You should read this little book once a year." Being a typical husband, I heard what she said, but didn't heed it.

Eighteen years later, I decided to re-read the book and I have to say what most husbands probably should get around to admitting eventually: My wife was right. Reading it as a seasoned pastor serving my second parish, I can says that The Penguin Principles, is still a reality check and a confidence booster.

Early on, Belasic and Schmidt say:

The Penguin Principles are the results of many failures and a great deal of "slow learning" to determine what actually works in the parish ministry as it is. Through the years the Penguin Principles became the means by which God gave us a new maturity and joy in the ministry.

I like the honesty in that statement and the implicit recognition that we learn and grow more from our failures than we ever do from what are regarded as successes.

The principles in this book--six in all--are rooted in the assurance that no matter how things look, God is still in control of the Church, God loves imperfect people (including pastors), and that over time, no matter the indications to the contrary, God's will is done. The two-thousand-plus year history of the Church seems to confirm Belasic's and Schmidt's notions.

The principles include the following.

(1) The Five Percent Principle:

Despite the pious things we say, at any given time, less than five percent of any group of people in the church is operating with purely Christian motivation. The other ninety-five percent is asking, "What's in it for me?"

Stifle your horror for a second. This principle is nothing more than a simple recognition of the Biblical doctrine of original sin. We are born in sin and those of us who receive Christ are never anything more than recovering sinners. Any honest pastor will acknowledge that they are sinners--forgiven sinners, but sinners nonetheless. So, it should never come as a surprise to pastors when their parishioners act from less than pure motives. (Nor should it surprise us when we act from less than pure motives.)

Rather than horrifying me, this principle causes me to stand slack-jawed before the Lord when I realize how many wonderful things He accomplishes through imperfect pastors and church folks. That's clearly attributable to what we Christians call "grace," God's undeserved favor and acceptance.

(2) The Inverse Insight Principle

Most of the time, in the world of the church, things are not what they appear to be.

Belasic and Schmidt explain, "People don't always say what they mean! If you watch what they do, you will have a better idea of how they really feel."

Does that mean that people are liars? Not intentionally so, no. But people have good intentions and because of their humanity and the circumstances that can push all of us around, they don't always do what they intend to do.

Years ago, a couple came to our congregation, anxious to get involved. Their intentions were good and I was excited. They were capable people, full of enthusiasm and great ideas. They were with us for about six weeks. But right after their child was baptized, we never saw them again. They weren't liars, just human beings. My guess is that they'd really wanted to be involved with our congregation, that they were earnest in their desire to take part in its mission. But having missed a few weeks and then a few weeks more, the chances are they felt a sense of embarrassment about not returning. That's sad. But the worst thing I can do as a pastor is villify people struggling already with embarrassment and guilt. I can pray though, that the experience of grace and love that good-intentioned-but-poor-performing people experience in our congregation will incite them to want to know the God Who loves and accepts imperfect people. Maybe it will even incite them to find another congregation where they can confidently enact some of their good intentions.

(3) The Ecclesiastical Friction Principle

There is a friction in the church that burns up enormous energy, consumes endless hours, smothers creativity, impedes progress and often creates little heat.

The local church can be a cumbersome machine, a Rube Goldberg-concoction that seems devised to prevent the fulfillment of Christ's mission for the church. Church members are usually well-meaning. They have notions of what the church should be and shouldn't be. New ideas, however rooted in Scripture, throw them off. And Belasic and Schmidt imply that the more the church tries to organize itself, the more paralyzed it becomes.

Again, the wise pastor is the one who rejoices when good things do get done by the church.

Say Belasic and Schmidt:

Despite human efforts to impede it, the church seems to plod onward at God's own speed. It pays not to take human efforts too seriously. It's the "shove from above," not the "blow from the below" that makes God's churches go!

(4) The Creative Ignorance Principle

In the ministry it is better not to know some things, even if you have to forget them forcefully.

Recently, I was chatting with the volunteer youth minister of our congregation, a dedicated Christian who wants to serve Christ and the church. From my perspective of twenty years as a parish pastor, I lectured him---lovingly, I hope---about the importance of not doing everything in the church.

The fact is, just as surely as we can always find people who do things better than we can, there are also others who do things less ably than us. Just because people are not as capable as we are at certain tasks doesn't mean that we pastors shouldn't recruit them to do them. I love what Pastor Rick Warren says: "Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly."

When pastors and other church leaders do everything, it leaves the rest of the church with nothing to do. We turn our congregations into spectators, rather than fellow servants of Christ. In spite of incessantly proclaiming that through Christ, God accepts us just as we are, we pastors seem to undermine that proclamation by playing omnicompetent super heroes (without the tights). We leave no room for others to exercise their gifts from God. We deny people the opprtunity to do the one thing that will most help them grow as followers of Christ: to fail.

Belasic and Schmidt say that it's particularly important for pastors to be less-than-good at things that aren't central to their duties. They write:

Being selectively dunce-like is important and very healthy in the long run. Parish Penguins stand tall. You were not called to your profession to know it all or to do it all!

(5) The Tweaking Principle

They'll only do it to you if you let 'em.

Pastors tend to be "pleasers," nice gals and guys. We confuse being Christian with being nice. We forget that the Bible counsels us with advice like, "Be angry...but do not sin." It tells us to "Speak the truth in love." Jesus assumed that people might disagree in the church. That was why He gave us, in the Gospel of Matthew, guidelines for handling disputes.

But we pastors usually bend over backwards to avoid conflict. Say Belasic and Schmidt:

Short as he is, the penguin stands straight with dignity. A courageous way pastors can stop others from treating them unfairly is to stand tall with dignity and "ask for what they want."

(6) The Pastor Principle

The ultimate principle for pastors is "tough love" that looks beyond the irritation of the moment and in the strength of Christ loves people as they are.

If there are times when pastors must tell their churches what they want, they mustn't be selfish and they must always remember that the people of their congregations are children of God who, above all, need love.

To achieve anything worthwhile, pastors must exercise patience. This has been the hardest thing for me to learn in my twenty years as a pastor. And I've learned also that the only way God can teach patience to us is to force us to be patient.

This is a wonderful book! But why Penguin Principles? Belasic and Schmidt explain:

The more we studied about penguins and their life in the Antarctic, the more apt the comparison seemed to be.

Penguins seem to have that unique dignity that many people expect of the pastor. Yet, as dignified as penguins seem to be, they look so ridiculous as they waddle around on the ice. Something of that same absurd dignity applies to the pastor's ministry as it really is. The task is so "glorious," but we are so laughable as we blunder through in the work of the kingdom!

Re-reading this book brought me back to my work with a renewed patience with myself and others, a renewed commitment to love others as I am loved by my Savior, and to do my work with humor and goodwill.

The Happiness Project: The Diet That Will Make You Happy

Matthew 5:1-2, 6

(shared with the people of Friendship Church, July4, 2004)

Keith Miller was successful in the oil exploration business in Texas. He was married and had two beautiful daughters. But in short succession, he was forced to deal with one terrible event after another: his father suddenly died of a heart attack; his brother was killed in a plane crash; his mother contracted cancer. While helping his mom through the final stages of her life, Keith, who'd seemed capable of handling everything with unflappability, suddenly found himself overcome by anxiety.

This really threw him for a loop. As a boy whose father had by and large ignored him, Keith had tried to prove himself, first to his dad and then to himself and lastly, to the world. He’d been a confident conqueror as a student, an athlete, and a businessperson. He thought that he really could handle anything. But now he doubted himself. He couldn’t face all that life had thrown his way. That was when something happened to Keith Miller. He writes about it in a book called, A Hunger for Healing:

...finally, on a roadside in the tall pine woods country in east Texas, between Tyler and Longview, I turned to God in a desperate moment and offered Him my life. As soon as I did, I was relieved of my sense of shame, fear, and failure and was given new meaning in life: to tell people that there is hope if one will surrender to God as revealed in Jesus Christ.

For the next few years, Keith Miller experienced the peace of Christ. He began to help others know Christ’s peace too. He left the business world and took on the direction of a conference center where ordinary Christians and those exploring Christian faith could come and open themselves to Christ the way Keith had done on that Texas roadside. He even became a best-selling author, helping others to experience God’s goodness. But slowly, without even knowing it, Keith Miller found the old habits and motivations taking over his life again, the old dependence on self instead of God. He was more of a workaholic than ever, still driven to conquer. As a result, he spent less and less time with his family. “I neglected my family,” he writes, “just as my father had neglected me. Because I was doing it for Jesus [or so he thought], it was hard to criticize.” Complimented constantly and enjoying success as an author and speaker, Keith began to suspect that he was “a special and gifted person.” He couldn’t understand why his wife and family weren’t as happy with his “success” as he was.

An afterthought in Keith’s life, his wife convinced him that their marriage must come to an end. Keith was devastated. What made things worse is that with the exception of a few people, church leaders from around the country who had, just a short time before endorsed and applauded him and been close to him, were now ignoring him. He realized the truth of one observer’s words: The church is the only army in the world that shoots its wounded. He began to become bitter until one day, during a time of prayer, he sensed that God was speaking to his heart:

“Keith, quit blaming the Church for your sins. You’re the one who behaved sinfully [ignoring your family and thus, breaking up your marriage]...You deal with your own sin, and I’ll take care of the Church!”

That became the trigger for Keith Miller to begin taking honest stock of himself. He realized that even while he’d been busy telling others about the God Who is big enough and loving enough to take all of our burdens—all our sins, all our hurts—and give us new lives, Keith had still been trying to be a conqueror. He’d been worshiping himself, trying to get the whole world to join in lifting him up as a master of the universe. He so hungered for a sense that his life mattered that, in spite of the faith in Christ he professed, he was still caught in the trap of trying to prove himself to the world, to God, and to himself.

We all hunger for what one pastor calls the cosmic okie-dokie. We all want to know that we’ve arrived, that we’ve achieved some sort of success in the game of life. Each of us is born with a hunger and a thirst to know that something about our lives has mattered. That appetite for significance can drive us to measure our lives by how much property we accumulate, how many sex partners we’ve had, how much knowledge we pile up. The possibilities are endless. And it should be said that there is nothing wrong with trying to achieve things in life. God gives us talents and abilities. And it is a sin not to use the abilities that God gives to us in the ways God leads us to use them. But, as Keith Miller’s experience demonstrates, nothing that you and I can achieve through the use of our talents can ever truly satisfy the hunger we all have to know that our lives matter, that we are valued, that our existences count for something.

Jesus says: “Blessed, happy, fortunate are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be filled.” The happy people are those who hunger for righteousness; they’re the ones who get the cosmic okie-dokie. But what is righteousness exactly? Righteous people are people who are right with God. They’re not perfect. They’re forgiven. They’re reconciled to God. They’re empowered to live the best versions of their lives possible. They live in confident anticipation of eternity.

Jesus once told the story of two men who went to the temple in Jerusalem to pray. Both of them were hungry to know their lives mattered. But each fed themselves in different ways, one on junk food and the other on God. The first was a member of the religious group called the Pharisees. They were spiritual workaholics. They believed that if they abided by certain rules, they would be right with God. They fed themselves on holier-than-thou spiritual pride. The Pharisee in Jesus’ story prays: “God, I thank You that I’m not like other people. I obey Your rules, make the right offerings, and really, in every way, I’m a holy guy. I especially thank You that I’m not like that sinner standing over there a few feet away.”

The interesting thing about the man the Pharisee pointed out is that he would have agreed. He’d come to see himself as a sinner who needed to change. He was a tax collector, which in those days was a profession for extortionists. They were like mobsters running a protection racket. The Romans gave them franchises to collect a designated amount of taxes in a certain area and the tax collectors would shake down the area residents for lots more, threatening them with foreclosure and imprisonment if they didn’t pay up. The tax collector had tried to feed his hunger with the junk foods materialism, power, and other sins. But he regretted it all. He cried out to heaven, simply, “God, have mercy on me, a sinner.”

After laying out those two vignettes, Jesus says that it was the tax collector and not the Pharisee who left the temple justified. The first of two brief Greek lessons, because the New Testament portion of the Bible is written in Greek: That word, justified, is the verb form of another word, righteous. What’s the point? The tax collector who regretted sin and hungered to be right with God was right with God, at the very moment he asked for mercy. He had the cosmic okie-dokie. He could face life in the knowledge that he was right with God. Those who hunger and thirst to be right with God will be satisfied.

But what about the rest of his life? Did the tax collector ever sin again? Did God’s mercy so fill him that he didn’t ever need to confess another sin or worship God or read God’s Word? Was his hunger for rightness taken care of forever? There are times when I get a real hunger for junk food. There are other times when I want good things. I think that as long as I live on earth, I will have to choose which diet I’m going to use: the one that’s bad for me or the one that’s good for me. This is exactly what Jesus is telling this morning about being right with God and experiencing happiness. The verbs hunger and thirst that Jesus uses today, are in what the grammarians call the durative present tense. That means that “hungering and thirsting” for righteousness isn’t a one-time thing. Our appetite for the cosmic okie dokie, the sense that we are accepted and okay, is with us every day. Keith Miller’s roadside cry to God brought him peace. But it didn’t banish sin completely from his life. Nor did it spare him the temptation of filling that hunger up with spiritual junk food—the applause of others, success. Instead, he had to begin to learn to choose his diet.

If we’re to maintain a right relationship with God, we need to keep hungering and thirsting for it. Our relationship with the God we know through Jesus must be the central object of our lives. We must, in that phrase of Luther’s, live in daily repentance and renewal, feeding on Christ and His love and power every day!

It’s a funny thing about God. He is the Master of universe, its founder and the One Who one day will bring it to an end. But even with all that power, He never forces Himself on us. We must cry out to Him and invite Him to be in our lives for it to happen. And that brings up a funny thing about us: God will fill us with Himself; but the more He fills us, the more we want Him with us all day, every day, 24/7. Keep hungering for God and no matter what life brings your way, you will always be happy!

My Cackling Metabolism Thingy

I suppose it really started about six months after my forty-ninth birthday. All my life up to that point, I’d been able to eat breads and baked goods with impunity. For years, I’ve “breakfasted” on four slices of wheat toast--two with butter, two with butter and jelly. Sandwiches have always played a big part in my diet. And if I ever grew famished in the middle of the day, I happily stuffed a slice of dry wheat bread down my pie hole. Cookies, sweet rolls, specialty breads from fancy bakeries , and various other baked goodies have also been perennial favorites.

For forty-nine and a half years, I was able to eat all this stuff and keep my weight under control. In fact, I never even thought about my weight.

From age thirty, I stayed at about 159-pounds. Even at that, my doctor would occasionally issue mild warnings about my spare tire. But I suspected that he wasn’t that concerned.

Then it happened. My brain decided to issue orders to my metabolism. The message: Get older; slow the process by which you break down and process all those baked items. My metabolism thingy--the technical term I use to describe it because my knowledge of human physiology is virtually nil--apparently set to work (or, ore accurately, set to slow) with a vengeance. It had a mission and was determined to succeed.

At first, I didn’t notice. You see, at about the same time as this order was issued, my wife came home from work with news. She and her fellow employees and their families had been offered a special deal for membership at a local gym. I was enthusiastic about the idea of joining. We went, checked the gym out, got a membership, and being a cheapskate, I decided not to pay the extra money for a few sessions with a personal trainer. The music videos playing in the gym prevented me from hearing my metabolism-thingy laughing at my ignorance. But I’ve come to recognize its cackle in the months since.

Of course, because I’d never really worked out regularly, I recognized that I needed to ramp up slowly in developing an exercise regimen. I knew that people can get hurt if, at the start of a regular exercise program, they push too hard.

That’s why one month into hitting the gym for an average of four days a week, I was only doing 200 crunches a session. “That’s Britney country!” my doctor’s assistant told me the day I went in for my appointment, complaining of some “mysterious” pain in my groin. I guess it shouldn’t have been so mysterious: I had herniated myself. That’s when I first noticed the cackling.

It was a mild hernia. But the doctor said that I should lay off any lower-body exercises for awhile. That was okay with me. I decided to focus on getting my scrawny upper body buff. But I would learn the lesson of the crunches, I said. I would take it easy.

And so I did. Or I thought that I did. One night, I was using flyweights and felt a kind of crunching in my neck and shoulder. “No big deal,” I thought. “I’ll just finish my workout; probably just some stiffness and the exercise will do me good.” Wrong! Whoever invented the admonition, “Play through the pain” is unfamilar with the truth, “Pain is an indication that something is wrong.”

That crunching I heard was me damaging my neck and rotator cuff. I’ve been in physical therapy ever since. For the first few months of that process, I was not allowed to do any physical exercise.

That’s when the cackling got really loud. Though unable to exercise, another habit I’d developed from my nights at the gym continued. Back then, arriving home sweaty and hungry, I filled up on whatever caught my eye in the kitchen. At the time, I could afford it: I was sweating off calories. Not so now. But the feeding frenzy continued.

Then, one morning, fresh from the shower, I tried to push my way into a favorite pair of blue jeans. I couldn’t do it. Perplexed, I did something I’d rarely done in my life: I weighed myself at home and not at the doctor’s office. I couldn’t believe what I read! I had ballooned to 179 pounds. Literally half of my pants no longer fit and the other half are something of a stretch.

I’m still in physical therapy, gradually recuperating from injurues caused not just by my workouts, but by the amount of time spent writing and working at the computer. I walk a lot and I’m going to the gym about three times a week, just to work on the elliptical walker. And I’m cutting down on the bread. One week into this new regimen, I can report that I’ve lost a whopping two-pounds-and-a-half. I’m down to 176.5 pounds, according to my digital scales.

I figure I owe it to God to get into better shape. The Bible says that our bodies are temples of God, not dumping grounds for cinnamon bread and Ho-Ho’s. I owe it to my family, too; I want them to be able to stand looking at me. And I owe it to my poor pants, straining under the added pressure from my midsection.

Those are good reasons for losing weight. But mostly, I want to stop that incessant cackling from my metabolism thingy.

News stories of interest...

Dealing with the issue of the Bush campaign's desire to get church membership directories for political organizing purposes, check out and this one also.