Category Archives: Life

The Baseball Cap on Memorial Day

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I’m a baseball fan. I love baseball. I  turn on the TV.

It’s Memorial Day. My team, the Minnesota Twins, is wearing visitor’s gray. The Oakland As are wearing white. That’s tradition.

But today something’s different. Both teams are wearing the same baseball cap: military camouflage.

Why?

Memorial Day is not a salute to the military. It’s a day to remember the dead who have fallen in the service to their country. The Twins and the As are not soldiers, sailors, Marines, or special forces. They’re baseball players in different uniforms and different caps with different logos. They throw. They catch. They swing. They hit. They walk. They strike out. Nobody kills. Nobody dies. But Major League Baseball is big business that knows how to strike up the band and confuse civilian and military life. Not good. But it’s become the new normal.

A moment of silence followed by Taps would better fit the occasion – and the removal of all caps.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 30, 2016.

 

 

 

The Trinity is about Us!

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Click HERE to listen to Devon Anderson’s Trinity Sunday Sermon at Trinity Episcopal Church in Excelsior, MN. If you think sermons are boring… and you’re willing to consider the thought that sometimes humor is the closest thing to faith, tune in!

  • Gordon

 

For My Memorial Service Bulletin

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Steve is discussing with his family the following statement to be printed in his Memorial Service bulletin. He’s looking ahead. We hope far ahead, but he is accepting of death.

“The last few months of his life, Steve hired Rev. Rachel Bass-Guenneweg for weekly training in wheelchair Yoga. For the next 5 minutes, Steve’s gift to all present who will receive it, is a sample of this. You will not have to move from your pew, or touch anyone else. Simply follow the directions spoken by Rachel. Enjoy! (If you do not wish to try it, breathe slowly, and offer a silent prayer for others.)”

  • Gordon on behalf of Steve

Click HERE for more about the good Reverend wheelchair trainer, Rachel Bass-Guenneweg.

Verse – Vanity, Cancer & Chemo

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Well yes, I’ve lost weight in a flash,
But I’ve spent all my cash–my skin has a rash,
My Mother won’t feed me,
My wife doesn’t need me,
I’ve lost hair (pubic), beard, and mustache.

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 23, 2016

The Blues and a Balm in Gilead

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Otis Moss III, successor to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright as Pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Southside Chicago, is a rare national treasure. So is Blue Note Preaching in a Post-Soul World: Finding Hope in an Age of Despair, his latest contribution to the discussion of religion in America.

Steeped in the African-American tradition of Sojourner Truth, Martin Luther King, Jr., James Cone, Howard Thurman, Gardner Taylor, his father, and other black preachers, Otis Moss invites his readers to “sing the Blues” as a way of moving through the blues to the beat of the good news of the Gospel of the crucified-risen Jesus. Only when the Blues are sung — named and spoken or sung aloud in the moans of suffering — does the Gospel shout make sense.

In a world where the “prosperity gospel” ( the con-job gospel which promises that, if you just believe, God will make your rich and happy) and the exclusivist myopic forms of religion that blame, train, and maim in the name of God, Blue Note Preaching offers a Balm in Gilead to make the wounded whole.

As one who has preached primarily among the forlorn children of the Mayflower and former slave-owners, I find myself strangely envious of my African-American colleagues and the Blue Note communities among which they minister. Those who serve the congregations whose Christianity was born out of the degradation of slavery inherit something ready-made and ironically precious which the children of the Mayflower and the slave-blicks do not: a shared, conscious history of dehumanization to which the gospel speaks when it turns the blue history into the Blue Note gospel shout of joyful emancipation.

  • GordonC. Stewart, Chaska, MN, May 23, 2016

Verse – May Sunrise

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The sunrise painter’s palette
Today has pink and blue
With touches of white,
And is that purple and orange?

No rhyme, of course,
For that last word,
But also no clash
Of colors in nature.

The white hot sun
Will soon be hidden
By the massing clouds,
But colorful may yet be the day.

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, May 20, 2016

Blue Note Community

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Steve posted this today on his CaringBridge page:

Spent the last 4 days split between hospitals (prepped for chemo, but white blood cells too low, so sent home, echo-cardiogram test for heart irregularities), and being electronically in Chicago (via FaceTime) with 5 Seminary buddies having an emotional reunion. The latter was more fun. Caught up on everyone’s last year, read & discussed a current book on “Blue-Note Preaching” with the author, Rev. Otis Moss III, connected via Skype with Prof. Ted Campbell still sharp in his late 80s, and met Rev. Shannon Kirchner of Fourth Presbyterian Church. Wonderfull conversations!

 

I, Gordon, was among the five physically present in Chicago. Steve stayed with us the whole time by Skype Monday through Thursday.

The Rev. Otis Moss III succeeded Rev. Jeremiah Wright as pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ, Southside Chicago, the home church of the Obamas. He’s the real deal in every way. What a privilege to spend these days together! We have a case of the blues but we’re hearing the blue note gospel.

  • Gordon

 

 

 

 

 

Alerting all able sinners!

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Both of us – Steve and Gordon – recently received good news from publishers.

Last month Steve received word that Mayhaven Publishing will publish a collection of poems under the title “A Sin a Week: 52 sins described in loving detail, for those who have the inclination and ability to sin, but have run out of bad ideas”

Sinners can order the Steve’s book @ mayhavenpublishing@mchsi.com.

Yesterday Wipf & Stock Publications notified Gordon of its acceptance of  “Be Still! Departure from Collective Madness” to be published sometime in the next year.

Steve’s work is done. Gordon’s is not, which is the bad news, if work can be called ‘bad’, which both of us think it can’t, except when it becomes obsessive, which, in one of our cases, it often has been – one of the 52 sins described in loving detail perhaps!

We’re glad to report to Views readers that Steve is doing remarkably well with chemo treatments having stabilized or shrunk the tumors that by all early reports were expected to take him by mid-February. To the best of our knowledge, Gordon has no tumors but reports that the few remaining brain cells he still has are shrinking fast with age.

All in all, life is beautiful! Sin boldly, and if you’ve run out of ideas, order Steve’s book!

 

 

The FBI and Marmaduk

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As the FBI was placing the newly arrested Father Daniel Kerrigan, S.J. in the back seat of the FBI SUV, Marmaduke, the canine member of the William Stringfellow and Anthony Towne household on Block Island, walked to the passenger side of the vehicle, and – as if on behalf of Bill and Anthony and all things just – lifted his left leg on the front passenger side tire.

It was, said Bill, an act of God.

On this day, I join Marmaduke, the latter day prophet. Noting the FBI Director’s meddling in this year’s election campaign, I lift my glass to Mamaduke, the latter day prophet, and my leg to the FBI.

  • Gordon C. Stewart, Chaska, MN, November 3, 2016

Verse – Teenagers at the State Park, 1959

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Chigger_biteThe spring ground no longer was frozen.
We made out on a blanket we’d chosen.
Chiggers bit where elastic
Her Mom thought it fantastic:
“Well, at least you kept some of your clothes on!”

  • Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, April 29, 2016