Category Archives: Faith

Forgiveness 360 – Moving On

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Moving on is hard and joyful at the same time.

Fourteen (14) days to retirement. Joyful announcement yesterday introducing Dean Seal, the next pastor of Shepherd of the Hill in Chaska. Dean is Executive Director and Founder of Spirit in the House and Forgiveness 360. A stand-up comedian, actor, director, producer, and event organizer, Dean is an ordained Presbyterian minister who teaches religion as part-time adjunct faculty at Augsburg College in St. Paul, Minnesota. Wonderful choice. I’m moving on more easily knowing that Dean is coming to Shepherd of the Hill.

Mysterium Tremendum et Fascinans

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This sermon was preached the week following guest preacher Tabitha Isner’s sermon that began with her singing and asking, “Church. What’s it good for?”

Please leave your story of terror and fascination here, if you care to share. Thanks for coming by Views from the Edge.

Existential Questions – Retirement

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Fifteen days from today I officially retire.

The new pastor has been appointed to the office that has provided definition, boundaries, routines, anchors, and the vocational sense of purpose and meaning that come from a job and being part of a team.

I’m saying to myself what poor Alice said to herself in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

“‘But it’s no use now,‘ thought poor Alice, `to pretend to be two people! Why, there’s hardly enough of me left to make one respectable person!…for it might end, you know,‘ said Alice to herself, `in my going out altogether, like a candle.‘”

Whenever retirement happens, it raises big questions – scary questions. About whether and how we will manage to live on reduced income, for instance, but, more profoundly, about what one’s life will be without the roles that have partially defined us. Who are we without the roles? What gives life meaning? Why are we here? For what do we exist? Existential questions.

There are moments when the pending retirement – the next chapter to which I’m looking forward – feels like jumping off a cliff into an abyss. I n those moments, the question becomes whether there is life over the cliff. Is what feels like a leap into oblivion a leap into nothingness, or is it a leap onto a trampoline we didn’t know was there before we leaped? Don’t know. Haven’t done it. As my dear retired friend in the memory care center said last Friday about my pending retirement, “You’re going to love it and you’re going to hate it. But eventually,” she assured me, “You’re going to love it!”

Worries about finances and can quickly turn me into Alice, plunging down the rabbit hole. Anxiety. Fear. But money isn’t really what’s unsettling.

Walking Barclay along the lovely wooded paths of the Jonathan Association yesterday, I remembered seeing a mole several years ago while walking our dogsMaggie and Sebastian (since deceased). The blind little mole seemed to be waddling aimlessly along the side of a dark tunnel. It was alone and kind of putzing along, oblivious to our presence, going who-knows-where for who-know-what reason. Fear feels like that. I sometimes feel like that. But the real fear underneath it all is death. For death is the obliteration of the self as we have come to know ourselves (the masks, the roles, the social networks, the reasons for living that come from outside ourselves).

Retirement is not death. It’s a precursor to death, but it is not the end of life. It’s a new chapter, a chance to finally BE and do what we want to be: the one and only person we have always been.

Aging doesn’t stop. It keeps going. Health is not forever. It declines. So, in part, the questions for me are what we want to do, what we “should” do (i.e., service to others and making a difference in this world), and what we can do to age gracefully, meaningfully, and joyfully.

In the year ahead my vocation will take the form of writing. Addressing the deeper questions. The existential questions. The faith questions. What Chaim Potok once called “the 4:00 in the morning questions”. But even more, I pray, retirement will bring a greater appreciation and enjoyment of the wonder of it all. As William Sloan Coffin put it at the end of his book Credo,  I want to live “less intentionally and more attentionally.”

So, in 15 days I turn the keys over to Dean, a wonderfully gifted colleague in ministry, confident that Shepherd of the Hill won’t skip a beat, and that Shepherd of the Hill, Dean, Kay and I are each and all in the good Hands of the unseen Trampoline just over the cliff.

Seeing God from the Back

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We do not get to see God face-to-face. None of us does. But we do see God’s back.

When Moses makes the request to see God, the Book of Exodus writer puts it this way:

But, God said, “you cannot see my face; for no one shall see me and live.”

 

And the LORD continued, “See, there is a place by me where you shall stand on the rock; and while my glory passes by I will put you in a cleft of the rock, and I will cover you with my hand until I have passed by; then I will take away my hand, and you shall see my back; but my face shall not be seen.”

We see God [YHWH – the Breath – “I am Who I am”/ “I will be Who I will be”] from the cleft in the rock. Rudolf Otto said it differently. We experience the Divine as the mysterium tremendum et fasciinans, Latin for the fearful and fascinating mystery.

Rudolf Otto is best known for his work The Idea of the Holy, first published in German in 1917, translated into English 1923, in which he analyzes the human experience that underlies all religion. He calls this experience the “numinous,” (from the Greek work “pneuma” (i.e. spirit), which has three components.

First and always, it is mysterium.- beyond human grasp, control, or knowing. It is, he says, Wholly Other.  It elicits a tremble. It is powerful beyond human power, experienced as an overwhelming power, the likes of which we glimpse in the terrifying explosion of an hydrogen bomb. We experience it as mysterium tremendum. At the same time, the numinous evokes a fascination the way a magnet draws iron to itself. Something in us knows we belong to it. The “it”, according to Otto, is the divine mystery’s mercifulness and graciousness.

We can only come at it through the back door, by hints and suggestions and stories that suggest its presence in daily life.

Consider, for instance, Steve Shoemaker’s verse posted earlier on Views from the Edge.

Driving Blind

 

The highway is straight

and smooth, only one lane

in each direction…

no barrier in the center,

no guard rails on the sides…

nighttime, no white lines

mark the edges of the road…

no streetlights…

all that can be seen

is the oval puddle of light

from the headlights

of my speeding car.

 

I jerk awake as I feel

the left tires bounce

on the shoulder of the road…

I have crossed

the wrong lane…I know

my wife is beside me, but

I cannot open my eyes…

I cry out, but her seat belt

holds her too tightly

for her to reach the wheel…

my eyes open for one second,

then all is dark again…

I cannot stay awake…

I whimper and shudder.

 

The terror remains

even after I realize

we are in our own bed

and I have been dreaming.

A reader responds to the posting:

I’ve been there.  Only in my dreams I’m in the back seat of a speeding driverless car and can’t get to the front, not even to press the brake.

Another reader, Carolyn, a dear friend since kindergarten, writes:

Try having something similar happen when you are awake with your eyes open! A big contributor to my retirement at the time I retired.

Carolyn goes on to describe her problem with double-vision – seeing two on-coming cars and four lanes when there were two, having to decide which was real and which was a product of her double-vision. A near accident on a winding road in Gulf Mills, a road with which I am well familiar, helped her make the decision to retire.

Mysterium tremendous et facinans.

I’m retiring. Two more sermons at Shepherd of the Hill and I’m done. Any misgivings I might have had about the decision to retire were quickly set aside by watching the YouTube video of Tabitha Isner’s sermon the Sunday I was out of town. So alive, so young, so wise, so full of energy and creativity! It reminded me what my mother kept telling my father about the need to retire. He was getting stale.

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Then, I’m thinking of my father when a phone call comes from San Francisco asking if I am the son of the Chaplain on Saipan during World War II.

I am. He’s doing research for the past three years on the 330th Army Air Corps based on Saipan. Googling my father’s name – Kenneth Campbell Stewart – up popped the Views from the Edge post about the Cincinnati cop who threatened to arrest me for hitch-hiking on the Interstate at 3:00 A.M. before he learned I was the son of his chaplain on Saipan, “Red Stewart”. I was like a chicken waiting for its head to get cut off before mercy struck.

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

I know very little about that chapter of my father’s life. I’ve always wondered.  The caller wants to hear any stories and see any pictures or papers I might have. I dig back through the briefcase containing the packed away photos. The caller sends photos of Dad preaching from an ammunitions box on the freshly-cut cane fields following the invasion of Saipan. I shudder and wonder how he could preached the gospel from a Bible on a cartridge box.

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

The next day I serve as a chauffeur for a an aging friend going shopping for a recliner for his ailing wife now in memory care at a retirement facility. I provide the wheels. He does the shopping for the right chair that will help his wife recline and rise to a near standing position at the push of a button. We come back to visit with her in the memory care center. She greets us both warmly, as she always has. I tell her I’m retiring. She responds: “You’re going to love it; and you’re going to hate it.”

Mysterium tremendum et fascinans.

Life does both things. It makes us tremble; and it draws us to itself. The Mystery beyond all controlling inspires both trembling and ultimate attraction.

We’re all driving blind. We are all, like Moses, peering out from the cleft in the rock. We do not get to see God face-to-face. We see God’s glory from the back, and that’s good enough for me.

 

 

If I second guessed

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the decision to retire November 7, this sermon by guest preacher Tabitha Isner last Sunday at Shepherd of the Hill convinced me my time is up. Wonderful sermon.

 

For World Refugees

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“How can we sing the Lord’s song
in a strange land?” Psalm 137:4

This is not our city
This is not our land
These are not our people
Those are not our words
Your songs are not our songs
Your food is not ours
These clothes do not fit us
Those trees have strange shapes
This water has an odd taste
This dirt is not good soil
Our families are far away
Is God still with us

– Steve Shoemaker, October 15, 2014

 

An American Confession

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A Psalm of Confession

We have been at war too much.
We have been too quick on the trigger.

Our weapons factories hire lobbyists.
Our lobbyists hire congress.

No matter who is President,
the military calls the shots.

The world weeps when we arm.
Nations cry out in alarm.

Terrorists have killed thousands,
Americans have killed hundreds of thousands.

I am not a pacifist.
I believe in self-defense,

but to be just and fair
we must not drone on and on.

We must not call dead children
collateral damage.

Selah

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, October 9, 2014

Editor’s Note: Here’s a LINK to an interesting article on the history of a weapons factory.

 

I may have to get arrested

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“What are you going to do in retirement?” asks a friend who knows I will retire from active pastoral ministry in a few weeks.

“I’m not sure,” I answer. “I may spend the rest of my life getting arrested to help stop the rush to the cliff that is climate change.”

I won’t, of course. I’m a chicken. But being in large groups and protest marches have always made me squeamish. I’ve had the sense of losing my self. I’m uncomfortable with crowds, even the best of them. At this age, I’ve come to realize that I’m an introvert, an outsider, more observer than activist. Observing…reflecting…writing…preaching…connecting the dots are my thing.

Yesterday an estimated 300,000 ordinary citizens like you and me gathered in New York City for the People March on Climate Change. This week the Secretary General of the United Nations will convene a group of international leaders for a one day Climate Summit.

The problem with standing at the edge observing is that, without action at the lowest and highest levels of society across the world, the Earth as we know it will go over the edge, over the cliff to massive population displacement, mass starvation, mass death, extinction of species, death of nations and peoples, and an exponentially worse wealth disparity between the one percent and the 99. I tell myself that publishing what I observe is its own kind of action. As a minister of the gospel, I believe in the power of the Word – the power of speech.

But I may have to rethink and act on my off-the-cuff answer to the questioner. Climate change is the overarching issue – the developing dark global spiritual and moral cloud – under which all other ethical questions fall and pale by comparison. Everything else must be examined under this umbrella. To think otherwise is to be distracted and out-of-touch with the Lord and Giver of Life. “The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof,” wrote the psalmist. It does not belong to the one percent, big oil and coal, or any one nation. While greed reigns, I just may have to get arrested.

A Poet’s Breathing Prayer

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Breathing Prayers
8 syllables in, 8 out:

Mysterious Divinity:
Show us what we can know and do.

We have left the path, lost our way:
Forgive us, O God; set us straight.

Loving God, you create, sustain:
give us dreams, energy and skill.

Your grace and love surround us, God:
Help us be grateful, loving, kind.

— — — —

Gracious God, Jesus Christ, Spirit:
Give me (us) peace, patience, joy and love.

Jesus Christ, Child of God, Savior: (teacher)
Have mercy on me, your sister.
(on me, your brother) (on us, your siblings.)
(Have mercy on me, a sinner.)

Holy Spirit, Comforter, Fire:
Mold us, move us, keep us alive.

Our life will soon be over, God:
Remember us in paradise…

– Steve Shoemaker, Urbana, IL, September 22, 2014

Click HERE for information on the history and practice of breathing prayer and the Jesus Prayer.

Owe No One Anything – Sermon

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