Random Thoughts at 100

According to my WordPress dashboard, this is my 100^th post. I started the blog three years ago shortly after retiring from active ministry in December of 2017. I was looking for neither fame nor fortune (needless to say), much less notoriety. I simply wanted to keep my hand in things.

Over that time I’ve been afforded the opportunity to pontificate in ways I could not while still working as a pastor. I have the freedom, that is, to say things more openly without undue concern for offending anyone. I’ve also been able to express built-up frustrations about the past and present state of the church – no small thing.

The blog’s overall theme, the connection between Christianity and culture, has long been an interest of mine. I am reminded of a quote attributed to the great Swiss theologian, Karl Barth: “We must hold the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other.”

I take this to mean that ignoring one or the other is a mistake. If we focus only on the Bible, we risk misdiagnosing how to effect the good required of us in our ever-changing, complex, disordered world.

It would be akin to a doctor misdiagnosing a patient’s symptoms and thus failing to treat the disease effectively – this regardless of the doctor’s sincerity or best intentions. The actions of Christians lacking discernment into the ways of the world can prove ineffectual if not downright injurious toward those they would seek to assist. No, we must be “wise as serpents.”

On the other hand, the danger of focusing solely on the newspaper is self-evident, or at least should be. With each passing day our increasingly secular culture exhibits mounting evidence of a creeping blindness. Unmoored from our moral and spiritual roots, we flail about trying to find honesty, decency, and simple peace of mind. Without God, society slides towards disorder and chaos. It appears we have lost the script.

Having limned (or beaten to death) this theme for the last 99 posts, and without any idea as to what else to say (at least for the moment), I decided to offer a few random thoughts on the occasion of my 100^th post.

The other day I had my blood pressure taken. I asked the nurse what the normal range is. After telling me, she volunteered, pointedly, that the “elderly’ have to be especially careful about such things!

This was two days before my 70^th birthday, so I guess chronologically at least I am “elderly,” though I’ve never really thought of myself that way. Life does creep up on you. In any event, it got me to thinking.

When I was starting out as an associate pastor, the church I was serving called a new senior pastor. From the start I knew he was the wrong fit. Talking to a colleague from a neighboring church, I mentioned that the new pastor had moved around a lot, having held positions in each of his churches for only about three years or so.

My friend’s response startled me. “In that case,” he shrewdly observed, “he really has only three years of experience.”

There is a lot of wisdom in that comment. Stopping and starting prevents us from learning and growing from our experiences, not least our mistakes. Looking back, I appreciate more fully how real progress takes time. Over the span of years we are better able to assess what is worthy of holding onto and what is not, so as to build on what is true, and modify, change, or even reject that which time has proven false.

Today, all too often, the past is dismissed as a worthless relic somehow best forgotten. Better to start from scratch, we are told. And yet my colleague’s words still ring true. Without the perspective of history we have no real experience at all.

Over the years I’ve also discovered how essential experience is in properly understanding my Christian faith. Some scriptural passages that at one time left me perplexed or in doubt, for example, today seem perfectly reasonable if not foundational.

Perhaps one example may suffice. Back in divinity school while working on my second master’s degree in pastoral counseling I did an internship as a hospital chaplain.

Every few days I was on-call in the event of an emergency. On one bitterly cold morning, at about 5:00 a.m. to be precise, my beeper went off (yes, we still had beepers in those days).

Its shrill sound jarred me out of a deep sleep, and awakened me to a decidedly unwelcome predawn reality. I called the hospital and was told that an elderly woman was dying and that her assembled family wished to see a chaplain.

So I scraped myself off my warm mattress and prepared to make the trek clear across town. I drove a bit tentatively through the dark, deserted city streets toward I knew not what.

I was scared, if truth be told, given how new I was at this. What would I say? How could I possibly know how to comfort them? I really hadn’t a clue.

But as it turned out, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. Walking into that sterile hospital room, I immediately sensed something extraordinary. The scene was not normal.

The room was filled with a powerful, palpable love. But there was more to it than that. There was something of the spirit there. It was holy ground.

I offered a prayer, as best I could, and talked briefly to the woman who at that point was non-responsive. I spoke with her family, all of whom were assembled in a circle around her bed. After maybe 15 or 20 minutes, she finally gave up her last breath, held to the end by the love of those who knew her best.

I have tried to describe this in the past, but words never seem sufficient. Somehow I had been drawn unawares into a Christian paradox, one otherworldly yet grounded in concrete reality. In fact, it was more real than what normally passes for real.

There were tears, of course, but also joy, both soft and gentle. Then again, as you can imagine, the moment was also quite intense, with all the senses heightened.

As a theological student, I already knew that Christian joy is not the absence of suffering, or pain, but a transcendent experience that connects the eternal with earthly life in all its fullness.

In that singular moment I truly understood the Resurrection, maybe for the first time. I had witnessed Christian doctrine in a new light. I felt its undeniable power. And if I’m not mistaken, everyone else in that room could feel it too.

The fact of eternal life had become more than hope-filled words written in a book. It was living reality. And where some might find only sadness and loss, this perfect stranger’s singular passage from life to death, and back again , had revealed a kind of divine light. The ordinary had become holy. Walking out of the room, I actually felt uplifted, elated even. It made no earthly sense.

The trip back home was equally eventful, but in a different way. Daylight having dawned, the morning rush hour was in full swing. As I joined the mad dash of those eager to get wherever they were so desperate to get to, it struck me as to how utterly absurd it all was.

Having just witnessed life distilled to its essence, witnessing life and death amid the sheer weight of God’s glory made eerily manifest, here I was with my fellow motorists mindlessly jockeying for position, trying to beat out the other guy when the traffic lights turned green – as if any of this had any real importance in the grand scheme of things. It just seemed so absurd, if not obscene.

With uncommon clarity, I was struck by how much of life is spent on pointless distractions, those that seem to take all our time.

Someone once said that the awareness of our own death is like elevator music, something we assiduously ignore most of the time. Yet when death gets real, as it will, it is as if someone suddenly turns up the volume so that we cannot not listen.

Perhaps the moral of this story, then, is how we tend to avoid acquainting ourselves with the things of the Spirit, things which, despite our studied pre-emptions, are always there, all around us and within us.

Amidst the routinized distractions that jealously command our attention, in other words, God’s still, small voice beckons us to a simpler and truer reality, one that offers that which we all too commonly forgo, the possession of simple hearts that know a blessed peace.