Electric Circuit Rider

Bruce Weigl breaks my heart with his poetry. Maybe it’s because he was born about six months after I was a few miles north of where I’m writing this right now. .

In one of his poems he describes pumping gas and washing car windows, while a cold wind blows in off from Lake Erie. 

He says

I pumped gasoline from five to midnight
for minimum wage
because I had a family and the war
made me stupid, and only dead enough
to clean windshields.
When you clean the windshields of others
you see your own face
reflected in the glass.
I looked and saw only enough hope
to lift me car to car and in between
I breathed the oil smell and the fly strips
and the vending-candy air. (“Mercy“)

“Only enough hope . . .”

Advent, which begins this Sunday, is supposed to be the season of hope. Christians use the time to recall how the ancient prophets promised a Messiah who would bring a day when swords would be beaten into plowshares and spears into pruning hooks (Is.3:2-5)

It’s not quite like that, is it? Instead it’s a world where we breathe “oil smell, fly strips and vending candy air” and the cold wind blows all the time.

The Messiah we Christians believe in is just a very small baby – only enough hope to get a homeless couple through a long, cold night. And, if you believe the stories, maybe just enough hope to pull some shepherds out of the hills and some astrologers out of some unspecified far country.

And, for those who at least sort of believe the stories, maybe only enough hope to make some room in their hearts and their wallets for the homeless and the hungry.

Maybe we get only enough hope to tell someone we’ve been taking for granted just how much that person means to us.

Maybe we get enough hope, if only enough, to get through another year of “wars and rumors of wars, earthquakes and famines in various places” (Mark 13:7-9).

Maybe we get just enough hope to sing a few verses of “Joy to the World” in a world that knows too little of it.

Weigl describes what our Advent hope is like when he writes that in the cold night of impersonal service at the gas station there would be a moment when the driver would roll down the window and then . . .

Only a second when our eyes would catch
and the wind shows some mercy.

I almost never go to church.

Given that I lead two worship services every Sunday morning and an occasional Saturday night service and things like funerals and weddings, I probably need to explain that statement.

What I mean is that I never “go to church” the way most of the people who read this probably do. I don’t sit in the pew and pray and listen and sing and – well, worship in quite the same sense that most people do when they “go to church”. That doesn’t mean that I don’t pray, listen and sing – it’s just different when you are leading worship rather than being led.

But this week, Thanksgiving week, I went to church twice. One was Elyria’s Community Thanksgiving Service and the other was a service on Thanksgiving morning at my wife’s church, St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Cleveland Heights.

In both services the preaching and the music were outstanding. There was a real sense of seriousness in worship that was at least as good as I try to have when I am leading worship. In both situations, however, I came up against things in myself that reminded me that worship is not a performance before a passive auidence. It’s something we all do whether we are behind the pulpit, in the choir or sitting in the pews.

The Community Service was at 7:00 PM Tuesday evening. Exactly 12 hours earlier, I had been in the holding area of a hospital’s surgical ward praying with a patient who was about to undergo a very long operation and the day had been filled with meetings. I was tired. The music was great, and the preacher was one of the best in town. Her Pentecostal tradition, however, teaches her that a “sermon” should be at least 40 minutes long. They were forty very enthusiastic and meaningful minutes, but I admit my attention flagged during the last half.

Then came the pastoral prayer. I heard, “let us pray” and closed my eyes. The next thing I knew, the congregation was praying the Lord’s Prayer. I think I fully came to on “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them who trespass against us.” – probably a Holy Spirit moment for a preacher who has, too often, seen his parishioners fall asleep during his sermon and taken it personally.

On Thanksgiving morning, I found myself wanting to hurry through the service. It wasn’t long. The whole service, sermon, and Eucharist lasted less time than the sermon I’d heard on Tuesday night, but I was still feeling anxious. I had no commitments I had to get to. My invitation to dinner was hours away.

I finally realized that I had been working so hard this week, trying to get things done so that I could take the holiday off, that my internal motor was still accelerating.

I wondered how many people sit through the services I lead, frustrated and uneasy because the rest of their lives are lived so frantically that the slow sonorous notes of the organ, the rituals of prayer and offering, and my closely reasoned, step-by-step, theologically astute sermons all seem like watching paint dry.

The thing is, I can’t do anything about that from the pulpit. I can put more energy into preaching, but even one of the most energetic preachers I’ve ever seen couldn’t keep me awake on Tuesday night.

I can make sure the service never runs over an hour, but even a 40-minute service seemed too long on Thanksgiving morning.

If people are going to worship, something really has to happen in the pews. The folks who come to church also need to do their half.

By the middle of that Thanksgiving Day service, I had slowed down enough to really worship – and after my nap at the Community Service, I also worshipped!

Go and do likewise.

Last February, I was visiting with Pete in the hospital when he told me about how, toward the end of his service with the 8^th Air Force in England , someone gave him a card that certified that he was an official “Lucky Bastard”.

My guess is that when Pete told me that story, he didn’t think I would begin his funeral sermon with it. But the story conveys three really important things about Pete. One is his gentle and usually justified profanity. The second is that he had the greatest self-deprecating sense humor I’ve ever heard. The other is the way he looked at his life. He was a really lucky guy.

He went on to tell me about how, at age nine, he was in downtown Lorain when the Lorain tornado hit. At 17, he was on the prow of a motorboat on the Black River that struck a log and he went flying into the river. At 25, he married a wonderful woman named June Harrison. At 28, he was drafted. He survived 35 bombing missions as a gunner on a B-17. He came home, built a great career with Prudential. Did quite well financially. Retired, maintained his ties with other members of his crew – he was the oldest, by the way, and on the day he told me this story, he was one of the only two still alive. Yeah Pete was a Lucky Bastard.

Except that he was born into a generation that spent its childhood in the Great Depression and then just when other generations were settling down and having families, his generation was drafted to fight on the other side of the world for 3 to 5 years. He was in the 447^th Bomb group, which lost almost 40% of its planes. He was a waist gunner, which meant that he was almost twice as likely to be killed in action as anyone else on his plane. He lost his only child, Shelley, in a tragic accident just as she was on the cusp of adulthood. Then June died. And, since he was pushing 92, he had seen a lot of his close friends die, too. And he was sitting in a hospital bed with heart monitors squiggling in the background and he was telling me how he was an official Lucky Bastard – and grinning – Pete was the only person I ever met who really did grin from ear to ear. In fact, on the day before he died, when he felt worse than probably any other day of his life, he still grinned at me.

Pete was clearly a man who could have gone either way in life. He could have spent his life bitterly complaining that the economy had cheated him out of some of the joys of childhood, Hitler had cheated him of some of the best years of his life and given him nightmares to last a lifetime, God had taken away the two people he loved the most, and now his health was failing.  But he didn’t complain. He grinned ear-to-ear and called himself a lucky bastard.

It’s Thanksgiving. Go and do likewise.

Sometimes, the benediction is what you give to someone you have to include in the service, but you really don’t want them to say very much. On the other hand, it’s always good to have the last word. I got to say the benediction at my daughter-in-law’s installation service on the first weekend in November.
She, Rabbi Rachel Goldenberg, was installed as the new Rabbi of Temple Beth Shalom Rodfe Zedek in Chester, CT. http://www.cbsrz.org/our_rabbi.htm

The last word in this case was a benediction from the Franciscans:

May God bless us with discomfort at easy answers, half-truths, and superficial relationships, so that we may live deep within our hearts.
May God bless us with anger at injustice, oppression, and exploitation of people, so that we may work for justice, freedom and peace.
May God bless us with tears to shed for those who suffer from pain, rejection, starvation and war, so that we may reach out our hands to comfort them and turn their pain into joy.
And may God bless us with enough foolishness to believe that we can make a difference in this world, so that we can do what others claim cannot be done.
Amen.

http://epistle.us/inspiration/franciscanbenediction.html