Electric Circuit Rider

The world’s economy appears to be falling apart for a variety of reasons that have converged on this particular moment in history. The metaphors in Mark’s gospel lesson for the first Sunday in Lent illustrate the reasons why the economy is falling apart:

Wilderness, in the Bible is always a symbol of a place where there are no maps and no rules. The deregulation of banks and other financial institutions and the apparent disinterest of the Securities and Exchange Commission and other regulating agencies in enforcing the rules remaining on the books, made Wall Street and other financial centers into a kind of Wild West, where, as the Bible would put it, “everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

In the Biblical wilderness, whether it was the nation of Israel crossing to the Promised Land or Jesus preparing for His ministry, people were tested to see if they had a spiritual compass that would keep them faithful to what was right. Apparently our government believed that bankers, accountants, CEO’s of large investment firms and other financial giants were saints who did not need to be accountable to anyone else in order to remain honest – and that they were geniuses who completely understood the new and radically different financial instruments that were being developed for investors.

Satan, in the Bible is always the Tempter, the one who shows up in the wilderness precisely when we are at our weakest and attempts to sell us power, glory or success for the price of our souls. Satan was at work, not simply on Bernie Madoff or those bankers and investment managers who blithely took bonuses for losing billions, but also on the 22-year-old who maxed out her credit card, the 80-year-old lady who mortgaged her house to buy herself some jewelry, the young couple who thought that, if they stretched themselves, they could afford the mortgage payments until they were able to “flip” their house for a profit, and a nation that figured that their grandchildren could pay the credit card bill they were running up to fight two wars and giving the rich tax cuts.

Wild Beasts, in the Bible are always devouring the unwary. They are not evil, they are just natural. They obey the laws of creation. The sudden decision on the part of millions to rein in their spending acts as a wild beast on the retail sector. The fact that millions of loans are coming due acts as a wild beast on the credit market. The hunger of the newly emerging economies of Asia and Latin America for natural resources like oil acts as a wild beast on commodities.

So, our human economy is falling apart. We hope that the application of Keynesian economics will rescue us, but there is a real possibility that this convergence of wilderness, Satan and wild beasts is something new in economic history and that it has become resistant to the old economic antibiotics.

And yet, the solution is “at hand”. Angels stand ready to minister to us, if only we will believe in God’s economy. The word “economy” may work better for us than “kingdom” in this age when even great national alliances like the G-8 are impotent against the economic forces that swirl around them and through them.

A recent book tells us that the first reaction of the world’s central banks to the Great Depression was to try to maintain the value of currency by making sure that it was backed by gold. This would bring stability to the falling markets, they reasoned. Yes, everyone needs stability, but it can’t be based on gold. It needs to include all the colors of the rainbow. The beginning of God’s economy is trusting in the promises of God. Even if the Dow falls below 5,000, it won’t be the end of the world.

We are told that Jesus was ministered to by angels in the wilderness. The next step in living in God’s economy is trusting in the grace of God who feeds the birds of the air and clothes the flowers of the field, so why would God not care for our needs as well?

Finally, the wild beasts may take a chunk or two out of us, but if we follow Jesus, if we feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and welcome strangers (like immigrants), the wild beasts will lick our hands.

These words of Jesus: “Turn, for the Economy of God is near” call us to see that the world doesn’t have to be run by Wall Street’s rules or Pennsylvania Avenue’s rules. The world can be run by the rules of the New Jerusalem where the streets are paved with gold, because next to love, gold is worth less than asphalt.

The religious are a greater mystery to the unreligious than the unreligious are to the religious. In a series of sermons that Karol Cardinal Wojtyla preached before he became Pope John Paul II, he pointed out that the most insightful document on atheism produced for Vatican II was written by cloistered monks. These men who devoted their entire lives to prayer had looked into their own hearts, he said, and they found the roots of all atheism.

Recently, I’ve been reading short essays by scientists, many of whom assert that it is intellectually dishonest to be both a scientist and to affirm religious faith. The thing that I find striking about these essays written by some very smart people is how clueless they seem to be about why people are religious.

In all fairness, they are quoting a lot of religious people when they say we are religious because our mothers were, or “we’ve just always believed”, or “if people don’t believe in God they will be immoral”. Actually, such folks aren’t very different from those who are honest enough to admit that they remain unconvinced that God exists. These “believers” are the ones most threatened by honest unbelievers and they are usually most responsible for persecuting “unbelievers”.

Most religious people that I know base their faith on experience. And they remain as untroubled by atheists as someone who has sailed around the world is undisturbed by the Flat Earth Society. The problem is that this experience is of another world – another order – that, in its own way makes this world, and especially the values of this world, seem insubstantial and unreal. Another problem is that these experiences, for most of us, are relatively short-lived. We have the sense that we could experience them more often, but there’s something about us that resists seeing Reality and prefers this world’s illusions instead. That’s why we understand atheists better than atheists understand us.

Paul describes this in the Epistle reading for Transfiguration Sunday. He speaks of “the god of this world” “veiling” the minds of unbelievers. This isn’t an insult. He knows this from personal experience as do you and I. We’ve had just enough experience with seeing Reality to know that most of the time we are wearing blinders.

The stories of Elijah being taken up into heaven and of the Transfiguration of Jesus are graphic ways of understanding how another world, another order, exists not “up there” in space or “out there” in the future, but “at hand”. As dramatic as these stories are, they are recognizable to the believer because, even if we have not encountered this other world as dramatically, we recognize the other world from our own experience, just as a devotee of old Woody Allen movies would recognize familiar scenes in New York City, even if he or she had never visited the place in person.

Our experiences may fall into three categories:

1. We see, hear or feel things that cannot have been caused by anything in our normal experiential world. Whether it is Thomas Merton standing on a street corner in Louisville, KY watching the divine light shine out of faces of passersby one afternoon, or John Wesley sitting in a little chapel in Aldersgate Street feeling his heart strangely warmed, or St. Francis hearing a voice saying, “rebuild my church”; people have real experiences that register, if not on their sensory organs, then on the receptors for sound, sight and touch in the brain that change their lives.
2. We experience answers to prayer. These, of course, may be dismissed as coincidences, but as William Temple famously said, “When I pray, coincidences happen; and when I don’t, they don’t.”
3. We experience the truth that the laws of this other world are superior to the laws of this world. Right now, for example, we are watching the collapse of an economic system that was built largely on laws that place self-interest ahead of the neighbor’s interest, that permit lies in the interest of generating sales and profits – or the appearance of profits, and that create scarcity for the many by creating abundance for the few. These laws create wealth and power in the short-term. However, they clearly lead to disaster. On the other hand, laws like “love your neighbor as yourself” and “Do unto others what you would have them do unto you” may place their practitioners at a disadvantage in the short-run, but, when disaster strikes, at least these folks have some friends to give them a hand.

 I suspect that there would be fewer unbelievers if there were more of us who testify to having had experiences 1 & 2 who would actually practice number 3.

This will be the shortest post I’ve ever put on here. Back in the 70’s, I heard some Homiletics prof call for  a moratorium on the institutional sermon. That’s the kind of sermon we preachers preach about issues within the church that seem so important to us but our parishioners don’t give two hoots about. I’ve managed to observe that moratorium for 30 years or so, with maybe half-a-dozen exceptions.
But I’d encourage you to look at a blog that raises what I think is THE institutional question for the UM Church:Is the United Methodist Church Like the Big 3?

I am a big fan of the Edge – a website that contains some of the most challenging thinking that I have found.

This week’s edition focuses on two things I care about and a couple of things I didn’t even really know existed.

One of the things I care about is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  And like just about everyone else who cares about that, I feel helpless and hopeless. How can these irreconcilable differences ever find a peaceful reconciliation?

It appears that it might not be impossible – theoretically. In the article, “How Words Could End a War”, Scott Atran (an Anthropologist) and Jeremy Ginges (a Psychologist) summarize their research with people on both sides of this terrible war. They offer “commonsense” solutions. For example, to Palestinians, “give up your claim to land in
Israel and accept $10 billion each year for 100 years from Western nations”, but the Palestinians are insulted by that kind of deal. However, if Israelis would apologize for Palestinian suffering in the 1948 war, they might consider withdrawing some of their own demands. If Palestinians and their Arab allies would really guarantee Israel’s right to existence and rewrite their textbooks to reflect that commitment, Israelis would be willing to return to their pre-1967 borders.

Another thing I care about is science and religion. Clearly, I have a commitment to religion. I also have an undergraduate degree in experimental Psychology and really believe in the power of empirical research to advance human knowledge. On the Edge website you can find a debate raging among scientists around the question raised by Dr. Jerry Coyne, Professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolution at the U. of Chicago.

In an article in the New Republic, Dr. Coyne asserts that Religion and Science are mutually incompatible. He asserts that even though a great many scientists are church-goers and a great many church-goers do not find Copernicus’ theory about the earth revolving around the sun, Darwin’s theory of Evolution, or Einstein’s theory of Relativity inimical to their faith; the truth is that they are just holding completely contradictory ideas in their mind the way a married man who is having an affair would say he believes both in marriage and in his love for his mistress.

I particularly appreciated this observation by Kenneth R. Miller, Professor of Biology at Brown University:

Coyne’s entire critique, then, is based upon an unspoken assumption he expects his readers to share, namely, that science is the only legitimate form of knowledge. To Coyne, any deviation from that view is an adulterous contradiction of the sacred scientific vow to exclude any possibility of the spiritual, not just from one’s scientific work, but from the entirety of one’s philosophical world view.

With all due respect to my distinguished colleague, that is nonsense. One can indeed embrace science in every respect, and still ask a deeper question, one in which Coyne seems to have no interest. Why does science work? Why is the world around us organized in a way that makes itself accessible to our powers of logic and intellect? The true vow of a scientist is to practice honest and open empiricism in every aspect of his scientific work. That vow does not preclude the scientist from stepping back, acknowledging the limitations of scientific knowledge, and asking the deeper questions of why we are here, and if existence has a purpose. Those questions are genuine and important, even if they are not scientific ones, and I believe they are worth answering.

Last week, we looked at the kind of demons who go to church. This week, Jesus drives out even more demons. The scene, in the gospel for this coming Sunday, in which Jesus heals Peter’s mother-in-law and then spends half the night healing the sick and casting out demons, was, I think, powerfully portrayed in the stage version of Jesus Christ, Superstar. In one scene, the lights from the front of the stage go out and there is just a backlit silhouette showing hands raised in supplication to Jesus and he is responding as fast and furiously as he can.

Tonight, all over the world, people are crying out to Jesus and he is answering their prayers. In hospitals and homes, mothers are praying for their sick children and the sick themselves are crying out in fear and pain for Jesus to heal them. But in an even deeper darkness, men and women saddled with addictions or suffering from violent rage or deep depression are crying out to Jesus to be saved from the demons that are destroying their lives.

These prayers are moments of clarity in an all-enveloping madness. When even your  will is enslaved by a desire to hurt yourself or someone else, it’s a real miracle to be able to pray for deliverance. The demons themselves often control the prayers of the people they inhabit and they pray, as the one in last week’s gospel prayed, not to be destroyed. But there will come a day when the human race will not only be delivered from the outward violence of man and nature, from wars and famines, earthquakes and conflicts, but also from inner storms and psychic desires for some form of slow suicide. 
 We see the early signs of that day’s coming when we see people who once were lost in a nightmare of drugs, abuse, hatred, or self-destruction who now meet in church basements around a coffee maker and a card table telling each other how many hours, days, weeks, months and years it has been since they had their last drink, smoked their last joint, turned their last trick, hit their last child, gambled away their last dollar.

And they all trace those transformations to a cry for help uttered to some “higher power” who had mercy on them and restored them to sanity.

Sure, it doesn’t always take place in a 12-Step group and some of the demons aren’t named “Rum” or “crack” or “the Lottery” – they may not even have names, but people who have had those demons don’t read these passages as mere artifacts of an ancient and more superstitious time.

When the Bible says, “he cast out many demons”, it is talking about people you know.

So, what was that demon doing in church?

In this coming Sunday’s gospel lesson, Jesus casts out an “unclean spirit” from a congregant while he is teaching in the synagogue in
Capernaum.

If the spirit was “unclean” what was it doing in a holy place on a holy day? “Unclean”, in the Bible, is the opposite of what is Holy. We know the Holy Spirit is present when there is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, faithfulness and self-control. “Unclean spirits” usually aren’t like that - and, on any given Sunday, a lot of us who show up for church may be filled with spirits that are anything but loving, joyful, patient and kind.

I can think of three possible angles for preaching on this gospel passage:

1. Knowledge that “puffs up” is an unclean spirit and love that “builds up” is Holy Spirit.

Note that the unclean spirit in Capernaum’s synagogue “knows” Jesus is the “Holy One of God.” Something no one else seems to know.

In the reading from first Corinthians for 4^th Sunday after Epiphany, Paul talks about the difference between love, which builds up, and “knowledge”, which “puffs up”. Love, since it is of God, is by definition, holy. Knowledge that makes us feel superior to others, even if we really are right and they really are wrong, is not holy. Therefore, in a sense, it is demonic.

One of the demons that come to Church is the demon who has all the answers, but no compassion; the one who knows every book in the Bible, but doesn’t love his neighbor as himself. I’m pretty familiar with that demon. He’s driven me to church on many occasions. Indeed, there are times when I think I went to seminary in order to be able to win arguments in Bible studies.

I have come to respect people who think Moses sailed an ark full of animals, but whose good hearts fill them with a kindness that I receive a lot more often than I give.

2. The second demon who often comes to church is the one that “fears” God like the Israelites at the foot of Mt. Sinai. In the reading from Deuteronomy, the people say to Moses that, if they ever again see the fire and feel the earthquake that marks the presence of the Living God, they will die.

The demon who cries out in the man in the Capernaum synagogue asks Jesus if He has come to destroy them.

We often resist Reality in worship. We are a little afraid of taking our religion too seriously. This demon who comes to church often manifests itself as boredom. It’s not that the Holy Spirit isn’t present; it’s that there is something in us that resists opening to God because it knows that no one can really encounter God and not be changed. The ego, especially, wants to preserve itself. Let the preacher take God seriously. Let the old ladies take God seriously. I’ll just sit here and think about how tedious this all is (and then I won’t be changed!).

3. Sometimes the demon is in the congregation as a whole. “Unclean” was a social category. Anyone could become unclean sometimes. Women were unclean during menstruation. A man could become unclean if he touched a dead body – which was sometimes necessary. A woman or a man could become “clean” again usually through a ritual bath in enough water to get completely immersed. (It was this bath that John the Baptist gave people in the Jordan to get them ready to meet the Messiah).

But some people could never get “clean”, like people who had the skin diseases loosely classified as “leprosy”. Shepherds were usually unclean, because they could never be sure that their animals were not “stealing” someone else’s grass. It goes without saying that prostitutes and tax collectors and other “sinners” could never be clean.

Sometimes people enter our church and they make everyone else uncomfortable. The rural community in which I grew up could be easily divided into people who went to church – or who would certainly be welcome in church if they came – and people who did not go. The second were often what Tex Sample calls “Hard Livers”.  Some of them had faces that my mother-in-law used to say, “Look like 40 miles of bad road.”

It would make “church people” uncomfortable if one of these folks showed up in church. It would be even more scandalous if that person stood up in the middle of the service and started talking to the preacher.

Congregations exclude some people because they believe those people will somehow infect the rest of the congregation with their sinfulness, or their craziness, or their sexual orientation, or even their physical illness, like AIDS.

Jesus was not afraid of being “infected” by the man with the unclean spirit. Instead, Jesus drove the unclean spirit out of the man (or out of the congregation).  That’s the way Jesus was. His spiritual, emotional and physical health wasn’t threatened by other people’s illnesses. His health threatened and destroyed the spiritual, emotional, and physical illness around him by infecting them with His wholeness.

Monday marks the beginning of the Chinese New Year, which, as anyone who ever ate in a Chinese restaurant knows, is marked by a sign from the Chinese Zodiac. This New Year will be the Year of the Ox. But this last year was the year of the Rat, and I am one of them.

It’s tough to be a Rat. Every time I’m in that Chinese restaurant, I scan the placemat hoping that this time they will have made a change and my birth year will no longer be the year of the Rat, but, no, there it is. I’m still a Rat.

This, supposedly, isn’t as bad in China as it is in the U.S. According to the Wikipedia article about the sign of the Rat, we Rats are “leaders, pioneers, and conquerors” who are “charming, passionate, determined, tenacious, intelligent, etc., etc. . . . the most highly organized, meticulous, militaristic and systematic of the twelve signs” – hmm, maybe I’m not a Rat, after all.

I mean I can own the “charming, passionate, intelligent” stuff, but “well organized?” I don’t think so.

Right after Christmas, I noticed on a friend’s coffee table a hilarious little booklet entitled, How to Become a Psychic”. Among the tips, it advised the would be psychic to always give people descriptions of themselves that they could identify with. For example: “You are thoughtful and very private, but there are times when you can be the life of the party.” I think horoscopes work the same way.

Nevertheless, if I’m honest, I can recognize my heart of darkness in the description of the Rat: “Power and control are two things a Rat both needs and wants, and it is impossible not to be struck, and even impressed, by the sheer ruthless, unapologetic and shameless way in which they may pursue their ambitions.”

The Bible has an ambivalent attitude toward astrology, which apparently has been practiced from time immemorial. The Magi or Wisemen, who come to visit the baby Jesus, say that that they “have seen his star in the East”. That may mean that there was some kind of supernova, a comet or some other spectacular phenomenon in the sky. But it could have been an astrological sign, perhaps the conjunction of Jupiter and Venus in Leo, which was associated with the Tribe of Judah in 3 B.C.

On the other hand, the Book of Deuteronomy recommends stoning for those who “bow down to the stars”. That does not mean that there are not spiritual powers at work in our world. Ephesians 6 speaks of “principalities and powers in the heavenly places”, but these do not have the final say over our lives, nor does our DNA or the environment in which we were raised. My DNA has determined that I am hard of hearing, but I can still choose to wear a hearing aid. My upbringing may have taught me prejudices against people who are different from me, but I can choose to be open. And being born a Rat may mean that I am capable of doing anything to get my own way, but I can choose to act ethically and fairly instead.

This is one of the many things we mean when we say, “Christ has set us free.”

I’m writing this just before the inauguration and less than a week after Airbus A320 crash-landed safely in the
Hudson River, and I’ve been thinking a lot about competence.

Analysts are saying that the passengers on Airbus 320 benefitted from the fact that their pilot was:

• The best aviator in his Air Force Academy class.
• A certified glider pilot
• An expert on airline safety.
• And he had almost 30 years of experience as an airline pilot.

Furthermore, the flight crew consisted entirely of women in their 50’s who had decades of experience as flight attendants.

One of the ferry boat captains who helped rescue the passengers said she did not have to issue any orders to her crew because they had trained and trained in rescue operations through the years.

As I look at the people President Obama is appointing to his cabinet, I note that he is placing a Nobel Prize winning Physicist in charge of the Department of Energy, which is responsible for America’s nuclear energy, among many other things that are also highly technical.

I spent a few days after Christmas visiting our friends Jim and Cathy in Key West. Jim is a retired pastor and journalist, although you can tell that journalism has always been his real vocation. I am always astonished at how perceptive are the questions that Jim asks when we talk, as we so often do, about the meaning of life.

Although my wife, Jacquie, no longer practices law, is nice to be married to a lawyer, not because she is going to sue people who bug me, but because she has been trained to spot problems and figure out ways to avoid them.

In Exodus 31, God tells Moses to choose Bezalel and Oholiab to oversee the creation of the Tabernacle, because they have both God’s Spirit and the skill required, this is one of the earliest incidents of what we call the “Wisdom” tradition in the Bible that finds its culmination in the Books of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes and Job, but many of the other books express an appreciation for those who are not only good-hearted, but also highly skilled.

Every profession and craft develops a certain kind of competence – even a way of thinking – that cannot be acquired without a lot of work and time. It takes longer for someone to move from apprentice plumber to master plumber than it takes someone to move from his or her freshman year in college to earning a master’s degree. That’s because it takes a long time to learn how to think like a plumber or a lawyer or a physician.

Where I come from, men would sometimes finish a job that they knew wasn’t quite up to standard by saying that it was “good enough for government work”.  That attitude certainly has pervaded public service for a good many years. It has always been far more important to appoint political supporters and their nephews to positions of responsibility in government than it has been to appoint people who actually knew what they were doing. The invention of the Civil Service was a reform that was supposed to fix this, but, as we know from the way FEMA handled New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina, even a professional organization can’t overcome the handicap of having a polo-playing political appointee at the top.

The church needs to think about how to develop and honor competence in its volunteers as well as its clergy and paid staff. Here are some of the competencies we need to develop:

• The ability to listen to God. This means both developing a spiritual life and being immersed in the Bible. Without this perspective the church is just another organization – and one that doesn’t really have much purpose.
• The ability to listen to people. Those who are leadership positions in the church need to be able to listen to people, to sort out varying viewpoints and to remember that God speaks through others – often through the most unlikely people.
• The ability to organize people. This requires being able to communicate what needs to be done and how to do it. It means being able to mesh the work of different people and different groups of people into a larger project.
• The ability to let go of the past. As important as tradition and roots are to our religious heritage, we need to be able to let go of those things that no longer have any meaning or purpose.
• The ability to face the future without fear. The biggest mistakes churches and church leaders make are always made out of anxiety and fear.

Repentance has become an ugly ritual in American politics. The politician drags his wife to the podium (I can’t think of one woman politician who has dragged her husband) and says that he wants to briefly address a private matter. He takes full responsibility for his actions, but is somewhat vague about what his actions were. He then promises to devote himself to rebuilding his closest relationships.

Is that what Jesus was calling people to do as he began his ministry?

How about the calls for America to turn back to God, Guts and Guns – our core values according to some. Is that what Jesus was talking about when he said, “Repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand?” The Aramaic word that he probably used did mean “turn around”, but did it mean to return to the [nostalgic] past without any close examination of what we have done or why we have done it?

Jesus was a Jew and so we look, first, to a Jewish understanding of repentance. In an interfaith dialogue with the Vatican, Rabbi David Blumenthal, a professor of Judaic Studies at Emory University gives five stages or characteristics of repentance:

1. Recognizing one’s sin as sin. That is, I realize that what I did was truly wrong. It wasn’t a “mistake” or an “oversight” nor was it “inadvertent”. I sinned. I violated God’s law and my own standards.  
2. Feeling remorse. This goes beyond saying, “I’m sorry”. It means really feeling sorry for what I have done. It may even involve feeling that I have abandoned my own moral principles and feeling some despair about myself.
3. Deciding to stop committing this sin. This isn’t a feeling; it’s an action. Whether we are talking about robbing banks or ridiculing children, I just don’t do it anymore.
4. Making restitution.  I pay for the broken window. I go back to the people I’ve told lies to and say, “What I told you about Joe isn’t true.” I let my wife know where I am and what I am doing 24/7.
5. Confession. This is both ritualistic and personal. I avail myself of my religious tradition’s means of making confession to a priest or a minister or in the prayer of confession in worship. And in my most private moments of prayer, I come to God admitting that I have committed this particular sin. This deeply personal and spiritual process, when done sincerely, creates real humility similar to that of the tax collector in Jesus’ parable.

But there is an even deeper meaning of “repent” in the New Testament. The New Testament writers choose, more often than not, to use the Greek word “metanoioeo” when they translate Jesus’ call to repentance.

You know that a caterpillar undergoes a metamorphosis in order to become a butterfly. You probably also know that “Morpho” means body or “shape”. “Nous” means “mind” or “soul”. So “metanoioeo” is as radical a change of mind as a metamorphosis is a radical change of shape.

A quote attributed to Albert Einstein says: “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

Whether we are talking about the mess we make of our relationships or nuclear war, real change will only come when our thinking changes as radically as a caterpillar’s body turns into a butterfly’s. One example of such a change is the fact that human slavery no longer makes any sense to us. Our ancestors couldn’t imagine a world without slavery. We, on the other hand, recognize that slavery not only is immoral, but it doesn’t even make good economic sense.

The documentary Promises follows seven children on both sides of the Israeli/ Palestinian divide in Jerusalem. These children hate and distrust each other until they are brought together by the filmmakers. Then they begin to recognize that the kids on the other side are human, too.

Maybe you rememeber times in your own life when some experience completely changed your mind about something - or someone.

As they wrote their gospels, the early Christians were trying to convey the difference that Jesus made in their lives.
He didn’t come just to point out how sinful they were and make them feel sorry for their sins; to stop their sinning and make restitution for their sins. He came to transform the way they think.
He doesn’t call us to simply grit our teeth as we reach out to shake hands with our enemies, he offers us new minds and hearts that can really love our enemies.
He doesn’t come to give us cold showers. He comes to give us new minds and hearts that really don’t lust after other people to whom we might be attracted.

Leo Tolstoy, once a playboy celebrity writer in Imperial Russia, underwent this kind of radical change of mind and became a humble, simple person dedicated to bettering the lives of the peasantry with whom he lived out his life. He said of his conversion: “It was like going on a journey and deciding before reaching my destination that I no longer had any reason to go there. So I turned around and came home. The things that were on my right on the outward bound journey were now on my left and the things that were on my left were now on my right. In other words, the things I used to love, I now hate; and the things I used to hate, I now love.”

People often call a change of mind like this an “epiphany”.

As the new year begins, I’d like to thank all of you who read this blog – for reading it! I frankly never believed that anyone would.

In the Prairie Home Companion Halloween program several years ago, a no-nonsense librarian goes down the stairs into the dark basement of the Lake Woebegone Library at the end of the day on Halloween and is confronted by the ghost of an author of one of the books that is stored in the basement. He begs her to put his book back on the shelves. No one has read it since 1906. “A Reader”, he cries, “What I need is a Reader! I can’t exist without a reader!”

That’s why Victorian authors often addressed the people who picked up their books and articles as “Dear Reader”.

You “Dear Readers” keep writers writing.

I majored in Psychology in college. As every Psych student soon discovers, the discipline at that level is not about why and how your parents warped your psyche, it’s a lot more about why and how rats learn to run through mazes.

What a guy named Skinner discovered is that if you reward a rat for doing something like approaching a string hanging from the roof of a cage, you could eventually teach him to do very complex things like ringing a bell or opening a door. He also discovered that the learning lasted longer and worked better if the rat was not rewarded every time he did what he was supposed to, but maybe every third time – or even randomly.

I admit that years of preaching have accustomed me to almost instant feedback for what I write (for better or for worse). And I’ve very seldom been able to sit down and write things for which I probably will not get any feedback at all.

A blog is an interesting medium for a writer, however. The good folks at Blog.com provide their writers with a cleverly designed bar graph showing how many people visited the site in the past week. It’s cleverly designed because even two or three look like a lot. But even people who land on the site by accident and immediately click off encourage me.

And every once in awhile someone will actually tell me that he or she read something on my blog; I am deeply grateful for that. Thank you.

I’d also like to thank my friend Ron Dauphin, Sr. Pastor of
Olmsted Community Church, who encouraged me to begin this blog and gave me insight about how and why to do it. Also, my niece Sarah Dopp, whose blog never fails to be interesting and challenging, and who is always offering ways to make things better. I need to go to her school more often. I also get encouragement from my colleague Dianne Covault’s blog, whose musings on ministry open my eyes to the meaning of what we are doing and why. Finally, thanks to my friend Larry Poelma whose note at the bottom of his Christmas letter will keep me blogging through 2009!