Luxury

What is the strangest sermon you’ve ever heard? I’ve heard some pretty weird ones: I heard a Christmas Day sermon all about Noah’s nakedness and an Easter sermon on how easy it was to go to hell. Robert heard a memorial service about how the parable of Lazarus and the rich man didn’t say a thing about riches. On the same note, I heard a sermon on Job, claiming Job only suffered because he didn’t trust God; he could have walked away if he’d only said the right words. Oh, and there was the sermon claiming that even though we couldn’t know the day or the hour that Jesus was coming back, we could know the year! That would be 1996. The strangest one of all was in a Mixtec village years ago when a visiting preacher claimed that in Russia there was a big hole, and if you let down a microphone on a wire, you could hear the people in hell screaming down there. That got their attention.

Most churches guard against strange sermons by vetting their speakers, but still, some strange ones slip through. Thankfully, we don’t shut down our pulpits to visitors in order to avoid such error, we just hold the reins. Once I was on a mission trip from college to inner-city L.A. and our group was standing around in a big Baptist church after the service, waiting for rides. Without thinking, I climbed up behind the pulpit and stood there with my hands on each side of the podium, staring out over the empty auditorium. I sensed power there. An usher walked up and shooed me out from the privileged spot—I was undeserving.

Power. It’s not always where we think it is. Although we might let the occasional deserving visitor speak, there is one thing in the church we hold onto even more tightly than preaching, and that is sacrament, the sign of the sacred, the holy ceremony, the outward mark of an inward grace. Strange. In the New Testament there is no sign anywhere that our sacraments were controlled by the powerful. People broke bread in their homes (no mention of pastors); people were sent to be baptized (Paul couldn’t even remember if he’d baptized anyone, and Jesus never did). These holy moments were not controlled because it was God who baptized and placed people in the church and Jesus who showed up in the bread and wine. The disciples were just witnesses. In conversation with a missionary in Guerrero once, we asked him what new baby churches did about serving the Lord’s Supper when they didn’t have the credentials to be labeled “church” (his denomination in Mexico holds a strict definition of the word). He said, “You have to control them somehow.” Many denominations in Mexico require that new baby churches send for the pastor of the mother church for sacramental times. Power. It’s just a serving of food and drink, just a bathing in clean water, yet sacraments are so rich in meaning and grace that people use them as reins.

Ironically, how wrong can you go in serving flat bread and grape juice? In dipping someone’s head under water as a sign that new life has begun, connecting them to everyone else in the room and to God himself? How wrong can you go? Can you change their doctrines of money, suffering or the second coming? Ah, but you can. You can teach all about power—who holds it, who doesn’t. Who gets to speak. Who doesn’t.

I think this power does not belong to us. We hold it at our peril, the peril of the body of Christ. If two or three have gathered in the name of Jesus to worship him, who are we to deny them sacrament? If a person has turned from wrong and clung to Jesus for redemption, who are we to hold them back from baptism? I think holding onto this power has cost us many, many baby churches in new places that have need of God. We here in Canada have such easy access to the sacraments. We don’t realize how, for some, it’s a luxury beyond their means.

Mystery

Robert and I live across the river from the city of Buffalo of buffalo wings (but not buffalo soldier) renown. The city has planted buffalo sculptures along the highway coming in from Canada in case you forget. It also has a cool car museum downtown with a life-size model of Frank Loyd Wright’s in-the-round gas station. The gas nozzles hang from clear tanks dropped from the ceiling. Although there are beautiful, quiet neighborhoods with old Victorian homes, there are also parts of town where you can buy a house for a dollar as long as you commit to live in it for a year and a half. Maybe Buffalo’s greatest claim to fame, at least because of its influence today, should actually be something everyone has forgotten, that the first meetings defining the fundamentalist evangelical movement took place in Buffalo in 1920 (a similar meeting took place across the river in Niagara on the Lake).

At these meetings, evangelicals reaffirmed their belief in miraculous things like the resurrection, the virgin birth, the second coming, the inerrancy of Scripture, and the atonement of Christ. While many clergymen were preaching that everything about our faith can be explained by modern science (this was the height of the modernist era before war blasted to bits the idea that modern science could solve the world’s problems), there were some stubborn ones still clinging to miracles. These ministers rallied around the term fundamentals, claiming that our faith is founded on things supernatural.

I agree.  But in hindsight I wish those Buffalo preachers had held out for more. For one thing, they bequeathed to us a tendency to make our faith into a list. Fundamentalists today tend to say we’re “in” or “out” depending on fine points of doctrine instead of being in love with Jesus. For another thing, they left out some pretty key things—like the sacraments. The next time you take the Lord’s Supper at your church, listen to how the minister introduces the bread and the wine (what wine?). Sometimes he says, “This bread represents the body of Christ. It’s a symbol.” That’s modernism at work, undercutting the mystery of it all.

I once watched a circle of Baptist ministers in Honduras sharing the Lord’s Supper together during a workshop. The Honduran pastors were accustomed to using the words of Jesus himself  as they are recorded in the Scriptures, “This is my body.” Such simple words. Such powerful, controversial, paradoxical words. “This is my body. This is my blood.” Jesus got in trouble for using such extravagant words. Many of his fans left him when he told them to eat his flesh and drink his blood.  He claimed to be the bread of heaven come to nourish us and satiate us forever. There is a mystery here, some supernatural gift or measure that we can’t understand and can’t define with all our science. When Jesus said, “this is my body,” what did he mean? What did the disciples see with their eyes when they heard those words? Imagine the scene. They saw the bread; they saw Him, his physical body; and they saw one another, his body, too, his Body for all eternity. Jesus said rightly, “This is my body,” and we will take eternity to unpack his words.

Meanwhile, in the circle of Honduran pastors eating the Lord’s body, each took a piece of the bread and passed the loaf to the next person, repeating His words, “This is my body,” until the loaf reached a visiting American pastor. This pastor was waiting eagerly for his turn because he had a lesson to give, a correction to make: “This represents the body of Christ,” he said proudly. He had done his duty and demoted the mystery to an explainable object for an explainable moment.  “It’s only a symbol,” he said. Only a symbol. Can we say of anything that Jesus did that it was only…? Jesus took a familiar (family/daily) and sensuous event, with all its overtones of celebration, hospitality, grace, redemption, and nourishment and transformed it into a date night and a heavenly feast. And we say “only.” Let us not say “only.” Let us keep the feast. Let us keep the words. Let us keep the mystery. Let us remember that when we celebrate this feast, He is there, present in some way we cannot define nor even dare try. His body, his Body, is there in some way we cannot define nor even dare try. Let us remember that Jesus kept his identity hidden even while he walked and talked his way to Emmaus, but when he broke bread with his walking companions, they knew him. He had to show.

For the early church, the Lord’s Supper was the climax of their meetings. They broke bread together every time they met. Paul mentions having the Lord’s Supper every Lord’s Day. The first Christians never tired of welcoming the Lord’s presence through this celebration. They never got bored with it. Is it possible we have swallowed the modernist lie that everything can be explained by science and have forgotten that our faith is based on mystery…a virgin birth, a resurrection, a loaf that is a body, a cup that’s not just wine?

Difficult, not complicated

Today I went to get my dressing changed. Piece of cake, I thought, not complicated. Until the dressing came off, and I’m staring at a 9 inch red wound across my chest with a fat red tube sticking out the bottom, held on to my innards, apparently, with skinny blue sewing thread. Suddenly I was nauseous and light-headed and had to lie down. There is more to this than I was expecting. Not complicated. Just difficult.

Difficult. Not complicated. It’s good to know the difference.

In one of my posts about church, I said that we should always be creating ways to worship and obey God in community with one another. I grew up watching this happen in Honduras, and more than anything, this has given me confidence that starting churches in new places might be difficult, but it’s not complicated.

When I was four, my dad took us to live in a small town in Honduras so he could teach at a Bible school there. When he arrived, he found eight young, single men living in a tiny brick building, and he set out to give them a few years of teaching at a junior high level. After they graduated, they planned to move into the city where established churches would hire them as pastors.  Meanwhile, thousands of villages, who lacked the money and status to hire these graduates, had no churches at all. Soon after he arrived, my dad realized the school model didn’t work in rural Honduras.

So, having heard about pastoral training by extension from a Presbyterian missionary in Guatemala named Ralph Winter, Dad took a risk and closed the Bible school, sold the property, and set up training through the local church. He began by mentoring mature, family men. He asked them about their contacts in the surrounding villages, and together they went to the homes of these contacts and led whole families to Jesus, right there in those thatched, adobe huts. Together they baptized the new believing families and taught them to reach out to their neighbors. Together they established the families as churches that met, worshipped God, taught one another, cared for one another, and grew. Soon there were dozens of these baby congregations. Then hundreds. Most of the pastors were only semi-literate, so they taught themselves to read their Bibles and their training booklets. (Such a push for literacy followed a burning desire to read the Bible, similar to what happened during the Reformation when the Bible first appeared in local languages.)

Then something sad happened. Some of the graduates of the Bible school became angry. They visited the new congregations and told them that they were not real churches and that their leaders were not real pastors because they were not educated. They even tried to get Dad expelled from the country.

Dad had a crisis on his hands. He went back to the Bible and studied. He came up with this idea. In the Great Commission, Jesus tells his disciples to make disciples, baptizing them into God’s family, and teaching them to obey “all the things I have commanded you.” If you stop and think about that, these commands are not hard to list. They can be summarized in a handful of key principles like Repent, Love, Disciple…etc.

My dad taught those baby Honduran congregations with their semi-literate pastors these basic commands of Christ. They realized that if they were obeying the “everything I have commanded you,” then they were, indeed, true churches, and their leaders were, indeed, true shepherds.

When I talk to new cross-cultural workers about starting churches where there are none, I borrow someone’s smart phone and lay it on the table. “Is there anyone here that can build one of these from scratch?” I ask. “Do you know what the parts are, and how they fit together?”

I think we have the impression that starting a church is like building a smart phone. But it doesn’t have to be. As one church planter put it, “If a guy can grill hot dogs and invite the neighbors over, he can start a group.” Because there it is. If leaders can practice hospitality and engage their neighbors, then they are on their way. It might have more to do with character, and less to do with expertise.

 I think church can be as simple as sitting in a living room and laying out wine and bread (or juice and crackers, or coke and tortillas) on a coffee table with the rest of God’s family gathered around.  It probably shouldn’t stick to that scenario, but it’s beginning enough. If “two or more” can guess at how to do the “all things” Christ taught us, I think that’s all it takes to start.  The “all things” might be difficult (that “love your neighbor” thing gets me every time”), but they aren’t hard to understand, not complicated. Isn’t Jesus a genius? He gets me every time, too.

Post surgery: listening

Whew. I’m home. Glad that's done. With surgery out of the way I have two stages of treatment down and two more to go. I feel ok and am up and around. I never needed pain meds. I can even lift my arm over my head. I could have gone home to eat supper the same day if I hadn't need my heart monitored for 24 hours. Thank you to God for bringing me this far, and thank you to his people for all the praying and messaging and emailing that has shown me so much care. With time to spare, a pad to write on, and Robert gone home to get overnight stuff, so I started writing.

Sunday Robert and I went back to our other home for a bit. We found out Katie passed her Z license for driving 18 wheelers. Yay! Emily starts her full time job today. And Ben and parents are flying to Alberta this week for Marg's dad's wedding (he's in is mid-80's. Go Aaron!) Marg handed me a thick letter from the hospital, and I wondered what it could be because I knew it wasn't a bill (no more hospital bills in Canada!) Canadians might not be surprised by what it was, but I certainly was...a 95 question survey! I'm not even halfway through my treatment regime, and I'm filling out a 10 page survey.  (Maybe someone figured I needed something to do in the hospital.)  I finished the whole thing in a snap because every question was a variation of just one: is the medical staff listening to you?

Yep, they are. My surgeon came in after surgery to check on me and answer any questions. She acted as if she had all the time in the world. She is a calming person. When I was about to go under, she didn't ask me to count. First she took her mask off so I could recognize her. She asked me about my kids, and then when I started getting confused about Elai's age, she just looked in my eyes until I drifted away. When I awakened, the thing was done. I imagine heaven is a bit like that (minus the dizziness from the anesthesia), a sudden awakening, an awareness of events missed, an entry into a new stage of life. After answering my questions, my surgeon left but popped her head in the door a minute later to ask what level of Tylenol I wanted prescribed, two or three? I had no idea. Listening is all very well if the patient has knowledge enough to opine.

This much listening would not happen in Oaxaca, at least not in the public hospitals. They don't place a premium on patient input partly because many patients have almost no knowledge of modern medicine, so how do you include them in the decision making? This would be especially true of Indian patients, and then it looks like sheer racism. Our Colombian friends visiting last week told us about trying to get care for their son in a public Panamanian clinic. They adopted him from the Indian tribe they work with, and there is a noticeable difference in skin color. The doctor asked the mom why she was bringing in an Indian child and didn't want to treat him. Wouldn't touch him. She told him he was in the wrong line of work. I can't imagine facing illness, or worse, facing your child's illness, with those kinds of hurdles to jump.

It's hard for us in Canada to imagine racism this overt in countries with Indian minorities. Here we listen to patients a bit more, no matter their skin color. It probably wasn't always this way. I wonder how far back in the medical profession we'd have to go back to find doctors being authoritarian or condescending or downright racist. What has been the process to bring us to 10 page surveys and doctors asking patients what pills they want? It's a cultural thing. In Oaxaca, authoritarian leadership is often a preference, a safe place. It seems obvious to me as an outsider that Oaxaca should change that and be more like Canada, handing out listening surveys, but as an outsider it might not be my place to decide what Oaxaca needs to be changing right now. That might be someone else's business. I wonder what seems most obvious to Oaxacans that Canadians should change? I bet it's not so obvious to us.

I know! Let's send them a survey.

Surgery

Five months ago when Robert was leaving Mexico to go to Bakersfield for his back surgery, fellow team-member Phil came over for his last peer-to-peer mentoring session before the trip. Standing in the doorway, getting ready to leave, Phil asked, “So, are you nervous?” Robert had no idea what he was talking about. He certainly wasn’t nervous about the surgery and slept through the last night before surgery like a baby (not true after the surgery, of course, but that was a different story). At the dinner table tonight he asked me, “So would you know what Phil was talking about if he showed up and asked you the same question today?” My answer was, of course, YES! Fortunately this is not a competition to see who can be calmest before surgery. I lost already.

Strangely, it’s not the idea of surgery that bothers me most, or even the thought of joining the clan of one-breasted women, though I don’t look forward to that. Rather, it’s the drudgery of the long term side effects: that tingling in my feet (I was going to ask Dr. Blue and Brown about it in our meeting today, but instead I looked it up. I knew I was already in trouble for missing my Muga Scan last week, even though it was written in BRIGHT PINK on my calendar. It was right around the “Mom, I’m getting married,” time, so maybe I have an excuse, but I didn’t want to bother Dr. B&B any more than I had to. I was hoping the tingling was due to dead cells gumming up the system, an easily reversible effect like dead hair or nail cells (my nails are soft, white things)—bits that would grow back quickly now chemo’s done, but unfortunately it’s not. It’s due to damaged myelin sheaths around the peripheral nerves in my feet. The sheaths act like electrical insulators, preventing short circuits, so when they are damaged, the nerves send out false signals.) So, as I was saying, I dread the drudgery of side effects like the tingling, or the loss of sensation wherever the knife cuts, or the swelling where the missing lymph nodes can no longer process fluid adequately. I just want to get back to normal life. Anyone can put up with a short term renunciation—it’s when the loss turns into forever that you think twice. After today, some things just won’t be going back to normal.

If I were as rational as Robert, I probably wouldn’t think about the surgery at all unless you asked. I try to keep my mind occupied with other things, and for the most part, I succeed. But perhaps I should just admit the sense of loss and mourn it. We’re not just rational. There are other bits buried deep in there somewhere.

I’m glad God isn’t just rational. He mourns the losses. Even when mine is small next to the great losses of the world, making mine look utterly insignificant, he knows. He hears. I remember when my kids were little and they suffered some loss—a broken toy or a getting left behind—I would think, “But this is nothing to cry over. It’s such a small thing.” But I realized even then  their grief was real no matter how small the cause. I don’t feel much fear now, just some nervousness about waking up to pain. And then there is a sense of loss. It’s a small loss, really, but nonetheless, it’s probably best to own up to it. Women in my life who have been through this have assured me in these days that it’s doable, and I admire their courage. I know God will help me get through this, too. I know Robert is far more relaxed about this kind of thing, and that’s fine: God made both of us and handed out rationality and feelings by some logic of his own, and he’s ok with both of us.

I’m glad Robert will be there when I wake up. Then we’ll see how rational everyone is.

Train of thought

Thursday I went for my pre-op visit, a quick in-and-out so the nurse could check my blood pressure and tell me how long I’d be in surgery (I’ll be getting out the same day!) I’m always amazed at how nurses can go through the same process, time after time, with one new face after another, with the same good cheer and patience. I’m grateful, because for me it’s my first time. How often we sit at opposite sides of some desk or table, one experienced and one not, and we forget how differently the other person feels. Maybe this will help me remember as a teacher when I have some new student sitting across from me on her first day of junior high.

I have begun to feel twinges of uneasiness, especially if I wake up in the middle of the night. I know the surgery is not long or dangerous, but it is irreversible, a forever change, with a long list of possible consequences. I make myself think of other things, reciting Longfellow’s “The day is done, and the darkness falls from the wings of night…” or even his “I heard the bells on Christmas Day…” anything strongly rhythmic to change the train of thought, (though anyone with trains in their back yard knows that changing a train of anything from its nailed down route  is not possible. Maybe it means passengers changing trains. That’s not what first came to mind because, honestly, how many of us do that? Today we get in a car and stay there till the journey’s done. Maybe “change the plane of thought” would work. That we’d understand. Have I changed your plane of thought yet?)

I also feel time marching inexorably toward Tuesday 11:15. And the thought crosses my mind to simply blow it off and not show up. But I won’t. I’ll walk in and lie down and let them put the IV in and just wait for it to happen. How much we wait for things to happen. Robert and I watched a movie about a Jewish family during the holocaust that just stood up against a wall, waiting for the bullets. A woman in the background watched. This is not comparable, of course, but it has the same sense of taking steps of your own toward an inevitable end, of acquiescing to a process you’d like to stop.

Enough morbidity. The new place is full of windows and green lawn and Robert’s mom’s pictures on the wall, and fresh, juicy tomatoes from Stella’s garden, and fresh, juicy peaches from the Walls’ peach farm, and a borrowed lathe in the garage (!) and a Group of Seven straggly pine calendar in a prominent spot, and Gabriel’s cow slippers that go mooo (his parents are Colombian missionaries visiting us for a few days, and they accidently left his good shoes on the counter where the immigration officers ask to see your papers), and a jacuzzi and the occasional rumbling train in the back yard. It’s cool and sunny outside, so I don’t need Longfellow to change my plane of thought.

Our two days away to celebrate our 25^th changed our plane of thought. It seems to me that after a while we get wound up and lose our ability to see things from the other’s point of view, and we understand the person across the table a little less. When that happens, it’s time to slow down and just be together, walk around town at a slow, low-red-blood-cell rate, do something fun (watch Carousel), snuggle on the couch to admire Banksy’s Wall and Piece, and agree on things (we didn’t like the message of Carousel that women should just take whatever their fella hands out, and everyone should just BELIEVE!-- but it was well performed). It’s cool how we can watch our plane of thought take off and take measures to get off at the next stop and switch planes. I can somewhat control my route though the destination stays the same.

Ugly places

When I was just out of college and working in a refugee camp in Honduras, our employer flew groups of us into the city for a break every six weeks. We would eat salads and burgers and would gather in the evenings, eager for some relaxation after the isolation and harsh living of the Mosquito Coast. One night several people in the group ordered drinks (we were not a drinking or carousing crowd; just a young and energetic one, happy to be laughing or eating or dancing together). I had a drink, maybe two, though I doubt it; my tolerance for alcohol is alarmingly low. As soon as I could feel any effect at all, I stopped. I didn’t like the feeling that something was getting to me, affecting my brain, manipulating me. When one of my friends urged, “Ah, have another one,” as if this were funny, I reacted because it angered me. Why would anyone pressure a friend to do something that affected her brain? What was up with that? When I feel pressure, manipulation, I resist (as any passive aggressive introvert does). Isn’t that true for us all? Recently I felt that pressure, that manipulation, distinctly, and it bugged me just as much. But this time it was in the heart of Toronto at Dundas Square.

Our last day together with Mikael and Elai, we were driving back home through Toronto after visiting family in Coburg. We dropped the two of them off in Cabbagetown, so Elai could show Mikael around, and we kept going on to the Peninsula (it’s more of an isthmus, but that is what the Niagara region is called because it has a lake to north and south and a river cutting off the east end at the US border) and picked them up later from a bus station. Cabbagetown was once the home of immigrants to the city, especially Irish, who, as legend has it, were so poor that they planted cabbage in the tiny patches in front of their homes. Today it’s the home of the largest stretch of Victorian homes in North America. Immigrants plant their cabbage elsewhere.

At one point we drove right through the heart of Toronto, some wide intersection that is probably one of the most traveled and expensive spots in the country.  I realized that rather that looking up at the sights, I wanted to put my head down because all I could see was advertising. Right in front of me as we drove was a building-sized woman in a slinky dress and high heeled shoes wanting me to buy something—I don’t even know what—perfume, vodka, jewelry, shoes? All around me, it was the same thing. All the buildings wore signs, most of them flashing LED and LCD screens, and all of them selling something.

The day before, we had come from an art gallery, where I’d been impressed with what Canadian artists could do. Here I was in the heart of the country, and it was repulsive. I’d probably feel the same in Time Square.  Recently Oaxaca has been putting up those LED screens at busy intersections of the city, and I find them irritating and distracting. Why would a city allow this? With all the beauty possible in these countries, why waste hot space on ugliness? Of course, consumerism runs our economy, and if people don’t keep buying, our countries are in trouble. But what I know is that the manipulation, being forced to look at a giant flashing screen with a scantily clad woman selling who knows what, feels like a “friend” handing me an unwanted drink. The passive aggressive in me says, “Oh, no, you don’t.”  I’m told that advertisers are just as happy with a negative response, so they have us both ways. I guess I just keep my head down and think happy thoughts.

I'm not as brave as Banksy who wrote,
        Brandalisim
        Any advertisement in public space that
        gives you no choice whether you see it 
        or not is yours. It belongs to you. It's 
        yours to take, re-arrange and re-use.
        Asking for permission is like asking to
        keep a rock someone just threw at
        your head.