.
The winners of the Olympic contests may be revealed after a quick and jagged ski run down a mountain, after a long and stylish jump off of a long ramp, or after a two-minute figure skating performance in an ice rink, but the fact remains clear that the contests are won in those long and grueling hours of physical workouts and mental periods of quiet preparation. The ecstasy of stepping up onto the "medals platform" for the winners is only the culmination and the end result of all the time and distance between the beginning place and the end result. All participants in the great sports of life know that preparations for a competitive life are a long period of dry wilderness with much purposeful time of training spent between the beginning place and the ending place.
The hardest rock and the densest matter of the universe are in essence similar to the sparse distancing of the planets in the outer space of our universe. After all, we call it “space,” not “clutter”. We might imagine that the sub-atomic particles of a piece of lead would be dense and close together when, in reality, this is actually filled with space and distance more than substance. We would imagine that a sub-atomic visit to the make-up of the hardest piece of obsidian would reveal a massive and dense core when, in reality, the real substance of this stone is particles distant and remote held together in space by a weak form of gravity. We imagine our life to be so dense, but in reality we actually exist in a state of being that is more with space than with substance.
We modern and prosperous people find it hard to imagine life without dense and abundant plenty. Our days are filled with excitement provided for us by local media that taps into human interest and cataclysmic stories from round the world. We have no lack of excitement at our fingertips in our day-to-day lives. And when media cannot provide real accounts of drama, then the sitcoms and “reality” TV fill in the void. We moderns do not like having distance and space between our emotional, excitable, and entertaining moments. We like noise, activity, sports conquests, unbelievable stories revealed in real time slathered onto our lives, so that we cannot know and hear the distant call to quiet and peace.
Even our diet, shopping habits, desire for stuff, addiction to euphoria, and symptomatic repulsion to down-time all point to this falsely expectant fantasy, our poverty and death of realization of what makes up a proper life. We have to be entertained, filled, and immersed in excitement every moment of our spacious lives, or we feel left out and depressed.
Moses wandered around for years behind the little animals before he turned and witnessed a burning bush that was not consumed. Our scripture writers give little space to the wilderness experience but give great attention and climactic energy at the crossing of the Jordan into the Promised Land. Forty years of wandering around in the wilderness by a massive tribe of faithful people is just as long as forty years of searching would be today. Jesus is in the wilderness for forty days, a painful heaviness of time where he is tempted, only to have the events of this grueling time in temptation summed up in one verse in the Gospels. Real life in the Lord is filled with lots of preparation, huge amounts of space, and great volumes of emotionally void time when absolutely nothing of excitement and notable mention takes place and where clear sight of the next moment of ecstasy is so distant that we are unable to see our next rendezvous.
We are created for times of quiet, spaces of distant wilderness journeying, casual periods when nothing notable occurs, and life that is not filled to capacity every minute of the day and into troublesome dreams of the night. We are created as creatures who need down time, silence, bland diets, and periods of fasting. We do not do well in arenas of endless excitement and in a life filled with plenty.
The Lord’s Kingdom may be the place where our reward is revealed, but real and sacred life is lived in the miniscule moments of every day where we are called to be responsive to the words of the Lord in faithful obedience, general contrition, quiet prayer, generous time to someone who needs a listener, or in an acknowledgment of our real presence in the distances between ecstasy and plenty.
A Holy Lent is a life being lived in the barren wilderness and between distant horizons, a sort of existence where faithful dependence on the Lord orders our lives in a holy piety neither orchestrated nor planned by man and our world. Only in the chaste barrenness of a holy time can we bounce off of our otherwise perplexing and way too busy lives. During a Holy Lent we are given permission to exercise large periods of our time so that we can find the Creator and Savior who owns and transcends all distance, space, and time.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
The Back Yard Glacier
.
I am going to put in a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics to take place in Hendersonville. The Winter Olympics are being held in Vancouver, and Vancouver is experiencing a lack of snow. Well, come on over here, and we will take care of the snow business. I have just filled one of those USPS single-priced boxes with snow and shipped it to Vancouver to help with their deficit.
We have the beginnings of a glacier forming in our back yard. There are several small animals that seem to have disappeared from our yard, and we are fairly sure they have fallen down a crevice, permanently preserved until the great thaw comes at some unknown time in the future. When the thaw does come, I will miss the adventure of Anne walking the dog in the morning equipped with an ice ax, crampons, a rescue helmet, and a survival kit, all the while being belayed back to me and my figure 8 descender, in case she winds up falling into the darkness of a monster crevice.
We could have the premier 2018 Olympic contest of ice dancing, hockey, and short track racing right out in front of my house. Orleans Avenue would be a great place for the ski jump. The halfpipe could be performed on most any street with the snow piled up on both sides. I would also like to introduce a new sport called “ice demolition derby,” since we have been playing this very game on our streets for much of the past two months.
I am not sure, but I believe I saw some icebergs in the French Broad River the other day, probably broken off from a similar glacier as the one that is forming in my back yard. And I have spent the last five Saturdays in the office trying to decide whether to cancel, cancel partially, or not cancel at all, church services. Every decision comes with other decisions involving plowing, shoveling, phone calling, car pooling, substituting, e-news blasting, TV and radio station contacting, message-machine changing, First News changing, and muffin considerations for the Gettman Room. Probably of all the decisions to be made, the homemade hot and fresh muffins that are supplied in the Gettman Room are the most important Sunday decision to make. I believe muffins should be the outcome of almost every decision that is ultimately made.
Decisions, decisions! Can we ever get away from having to make so many decisions? And how do we even know which decisions are correct? Is it better to be on this side or on that side? The snows of doubt fall and fall, and there seems to be no end to choices amid drifts, treacherous icebergs, or hidden crevices. We wonder where we are to come down on the important issues that are perplexing to our doctrinal faith.
When the Christian faith was first getting off the ground, it was considered a non-religion. The Romans considered Christians “atheists.” This opinion was somewhat justified, since whenever the early Christians were asked, “Where is your temple?,” the Christians would shrug and proclaim that they did not have temples, since they met in houses. “Well where are your priests?,” the neighbors would ask, and the Christians would shrug and say, “We do not have any.” Then the neighbors would ask, “Well, where are your sacrificial animals that are smoked to appease the gods?,” and the Christians would double-shrug and say, “We don’t have any.”
The early Christians began as the most un-religious people ever known. All they could say was, “Jesus is our Temple, and Jesus is the only High Priest, and Jesus is the only sacrifice we need!” Who in the world would want to become a Christian if this is the way it was going? After all, good prospect followers would wonder “where will my daughter get married if you don’t have a sanctuary,” and “who will perform the service if you have no priests?”
The early church had some very snowy days of doubt that caused people to wonder if it might not be better to simply go along with the Roman culture and embrace the Roman religious ways. There were few clear-cut, tried and true paths that had been worked out by the forebears. All situations and every new day brought unexplored wilderness to be overcome and new paths to blaze.
With Ash Wednesday past and Lent squarely in our focus, it is time for the Church of Jesus Christ to spend a season exploring the wilderness of our soul while making hard decisions toward the Kingdom of God. Lent is our time to shake off the snows of indecision and to move to a pious and contrite relationship with our Savior.
This is the season to thaw the glaciers that are forming in the backyard of our soul.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com
I am going to put in a bid for the 2018 Winter Olympics to take place in Hendersonville. The Winter Olympics are being held in Vancouver, and Vancouver is experiencing a lack of snow. Well, come on over here, and we will take care of the snow business. I have just filled one of those USPS single-priced boxes with snow and shipped it to Vancouver to help with their deficit.
We have the beginnings of a glacier forming in our back yard. There are several small animals that seem to have disappeared from our yard, and we are fairly sure they have fallen down a crevice, permanently preserved until the great thaw comes at some unknown time in the future. When the thaw does come, I will miss the adventure of Anne walking the dog in the morning equipped with an ice ax, crampons, a rescue helmet, and a survival kit, all the while being belayed back to me and my figure 8 descender, in case she winds up falling into the darkness of a monster crevice.
We could have the premier 2018 Olympic contest of ice dancing, hockey, and short track racing right out in front of my house. Orleans Avenue would be a great place for the ski jump. The halfpipe could be performed on most any street with the snow piled up on both sides. I would also like to introduce a new sport called “ice demolition derby,” since we have been playing this very game on our streets for much of the past two months.
I am not sure, but I believe I saw some icebergs in the French Broad River the other day, probably broken off from a similar glacier as the one that is forming in my back yard. And I have spent the last five Saturdays in the office trying to decide whether to cancel, cancel partially, or not cancel at all, church services. Every decision comes with other decisions involving plowing, shoveling, phone calling, car pooling, substituting, e-news blasting, TV and radio station contacting, message-machine changing, First News changing, and muffin considerations for the Gettman Room. Probably of all the decisions to be made, the homemade hot and fresh muffins that are supplied in the Gettman Room are the most important Sunday decision to make. I believe muffins should be the outcome of almost every decision that is ultimately made.
Decisions, decisions! Can we ever get away from having to make so many decisions? And how do we even know which decisions are correct? Is it better to be on this side or on that side? The snows of doubt fall and fall, and there seems to be no end to choices amid drifts, treacherous icebergs, or hidden crevices. We wonder where we are to come down on the important issues that are perplexing to our doctrinal faith.
When the Christian faith was first getting off the ground, it was considered a non-religion. The Romans considered Christians “atheists.” This opinion was somewhat justified, since whenever the early Christians were asked, “Where is your temple?,” the Christians would shrug and proclaim that they did not have temples, since they met in houses. “Well where are your priests?,” the neighbors would ask, and the Christians would shrug and say, “We do not have any.” Then the neighbors would ask, “Well, where are your sacrificial animals that are smoked to appease the gods?,” and the Christians would double-shrug and say, “We don’t have any.”
The early Christians began as the most un-religious people ever known. All they could say was, “Jesus is our Temple, and Jesus is the only High Priest, and Jesus is the only sacrifice we need!” Who in the world would want to become a Christian if this is the way it was going? After all, good prospect followers would wonder “where will my daughter get married if you don’t have a sanctuary,” and “who will perform the service if you have no priests?”
The early church had some very snowy days of doubt that caused people to wonder if it might not be better to simply go along with the Roman culture and embrace the Roman religious ways. There were few clear-cut, tried and true paths that had been worked out by the forebears. All situations and every new day brought unexplored wilderness to be overcome and new paths to blaze.
With Ash Wednesday past and Lent squarely in our focus, it is time for the Church of Jesus Christ to spend a season exploring the wilderness of our soul while making hard decisions toward the Kingdom of God. Lent is our time to shake off the snows of indecision and to move to a pious and contrite relationship with our Savior.
This is the season to thaw the glaciers that are forming in the backyard of our soul.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
John Wayne Rides a Giraffe
.
I grew up in a town with a very small movie theater. The theater did not have a wide screen, and the screen was flat. When “Panavision” became the norm, it became architecturally impossible for the theater to get the whole picture on the screen. The owners were aware of this problem and tried many ways to solve the problem. They did their best to develop lenses for the projector that would squash the movie together to fit on the screen. This did not work since the visual effect “squished” up the edges of the movie so that horses suddenly looked like giraffes, (imagine John Wayne riding off into the sunset on a giraffe), and round planets were suddenly shaped like surfboards.
The next corrective effort was to move the projector closer to the screen. However, the projector wound up in the middle of the theater, taking away some of the seats, and made so much noise that you could not hear the buffaloes snort nor the laser cannon as they would “schping” Godzilla. Also, even though the outer edges of the projected image were finally all on the screen, the movie was extremely small, and everyone got headaches from squinting to see the detail.
Finally, the owners and patrons just reconciled themselves to the fact that only the middle portion of the film was to be seen in this theater. Therefore, I will always remember going to this under-sized theater to see the great hit “ITANI”. This is a movie about a ship that hits an iceberg, (I hope I don’t ruin the plot with this spoiler information), and sinks. At the climactic moments of the film, I kept seeing people fall off the ship into the orchestra pit. I hope there was some water down there.
“ITANI” is only one of the movies I have seen in this antiquated theater. I also saw that great Civil War Classic, “ONE WITH THE WIN”. The burning of Atlanta pretty much extended down the side wall all the way to row 9 and included much of the ceiling. We had an IMAX experience in a rectangular room.
I was awe-inspired in Sherwood Forest when I saw “OBIN HOO,” and I will always love that classic movie about Dorothy from Kansas entitled the “IZARD OF O”. Somehow, putting the big screen productions on the small screen tends to underwhelm me.
We have all heard the parable of putting new wine into old wineskins. If a person tries to accomplish this feat, the skins will burst and both the wine and the skins will be lost. Too often, we try to live the radical, splendid, and transforming Good News of Jesus Christ while wearing the vision-limiting blinders of the Old Testament. We, like the Pharisees, find it convenient to legalize, compartmentalize, or ritualize the free flowing living water of the faith of Jesus Christ or the freedom that is found in the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we only get part of the picture. We get the rules and not the glory. We experience the dream, but we never wake up to the reality. We remain indebted to the distant Lord and are never embraced by the graceful sacrifice of a risen Savior.
Jesus challenges us to take off the blinders, free up the mechanism, and open the doors, letting life be the ritual and letting love be the power. Jesus is the panoramic movie that, if we are not careful, only gets shown on the small flat screen. So be careful. God may be showing us wonderful news, but we may only see “I om ha o a av if n av it or bundantl!”John 10:10b.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com
I grew up in a town with a very small movie theater. The theater did not have a wide screen, and the screen was flat. When “Panavision” became the norm, it became architecturally impossible for the theater to get the whole picture on the screen. The owners were aware of this problem and tried many ways to solve the problem. They did their best to develop lenses for the projector that would squash the movie together to fit on the screen. This did not work since the visual effect “squished” up the edges of the movie so that horses suddenly looked like giraffes, (imagine John Wayne riding off into the sunset on a giraffe), and round planets were suddenly shaped like surfboards.
The next corrective effort was to move the projector closer to the screen. However, the projector wound up in the middle of the theater, taking away some of the seats, and made so much noise that you could not hear the buffaloes snort nor the laser cannon as they would “schping” Godzilla. Also, even though the outer edges of the projected image were finally all on the screen, the movie was extremely small, and everyone got headaches from squinting to see the detail.
Finally, the owners and patrons just reconciled themselves to the fact that only the middle portion of the film was to be seen in this theater. Therefore, I will always remember going to this under-sized theater to see the great hit “ITANI”. This is a movie about a ship that hits an iceberg, (I hope I don’t ruin the plot with this spoiler information), and sinks. At the climactic moments of the film, I kept seeing people fall off the ship into the orchestra pit. I hope there was some water down there.
“ITANI” is only one of the movies I have seen in this antiquated theater. I also saw that great Civil War Classic, “ONE WITH THE WIN”. The burning of Atlanta pretty much extended down the side wall all the way to row 9 and included much of the ceiling. We had an IMAX experience in a rectangular room.
I was awe-inspired in Sherwood Forest when I saw “OBIN HOO,” and I will always love that classic movie about Dorothy from Kansas entitled the “IZARD OF O”. Somehow, putting the big screen productions on the small screen tends to underwhelm me.
We have all heard the parable of putting new wine into old wineskins. If a person tries to accomplish this feat, the skins will burst and both the wine and the skins will be lost. Too often, we try to live the radical, splendid, and transforming Good News of Jesus Christ while wearing the vision-limiting blinders of the Old Testament. We, like the Pharisees, find it convenient to legalize, compartmentalize, or ritualize the free flowing living water of the faith of Jesus Christ or the freedom that is found in the Holy Spirit. Therefore, we only get part of the picture. We get the rules and not the glory. We experience the dream, but we never wake up to the reality. We remain indebted to the distant Lord and are never embraced by the graceful sacrifice of a risen Savior.
Jesus challenges us to take off the blinders, free up the mechanism, and open the doors, letting life be the ritual and letting love be the power. Jesus is the panoramic movie that, if we are not careful, only gets shown on the small flat screen. So be careful. God may be showing us wonderful news, but we may only see “I om ha o a av if n av it or bundantl!”John 10:10b.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com
Tuesday, February 2, 2010
A Good Day to Organize the Washers
.
We had a little snow up in the mountains the other day. It piled up deep, was icy, and was made hard by the cold wind of the night. It was a bad day to be out, and the cat refused to even look out of a window. Our cat often gets depressed when it snows. The cold is not a huge problem, but the limited availability of fresh ground makes the cat all jittery or lethargic, the obvious symptoms of what I have self-diagnosed as a bipolar feline. You might remember, this is the cat that has one eye. The cat is supposed to have two eyes and it has one, and one “polar,” and it has two. Of course, the cat does have four paws and one tail, and that counts for something. Cats are pretty strange creatures. Anyway, I digress. The yard was full of snow, the streets were covered over, there was a crisp bite to the air, and the inside of the house was warm. It was a great day to go down to the basement and count the washers. I have cans and cans of every imaginable size of bolts, nuts, washers, lag bolts, carriage bolts, lock washers, wing nuts, lock nuts, galvanized bolts, wood screws, mechanical bolts, set screws, sheet metal screws, stainless steel screws, cotter-keys, sheer pins, roofing nails, glue coat nails, rivets, pop rivets, and a Canadian penny. (I did not know about the Canadian penny until much later in the story, but I list it here just to warn you ahead of time.) Anyway, there was nothing to watch on TV, no way to get to a job, no need to go out and get anything, no need to encourage the cat to go out, since she had an indoor scratching place, and nothing to do, so I went to the basement and counted my hardware.
For the life of me, I do not know how it is that I have so many quarter inch washers. I must have over 400 of them. (Actually, I know that I have 409, since I counted them out and put them on 13 quarter-inch bolts and secured them safe and orderly with 13 nuts). Now they are all organized and counted out. I also organized all of the other hardware I mentioned above and placed the variant group into peanut butter jars, coffee cans, coffee cups, zip-lock bags, and plastic film containers. I am not sure what to do with the Canadian penny. I probably can’t spend it around here. I will put it in a special drawer and keep it until I next go to Canada. If any of y’all are going to Canada in the near future, come by the house, and I will give you the penny.
Some days are only good for counting washers. I had one of those days last week. I took great pride in getting my previously unorganized hardware organized. I now have nice, neat, stacked magic marker-labeled cans and containers of particular lengths, sizes, and configurations of just about any hardware I might ever need. Of course, you know that when I begin my next project, I will be short one 5-cent nut, requiring a drive to the hardware store in order to complete the project.
There is something cathartic about organizing previously unorganized things. This must be something we have inherited from our divine Creator. The Lord has a tendency of organizing all chaotic situations and making them into an ordered creation. This is how we all came to be. Out of the blackness and formless void, the Lord made all that we know, see, and touch.
Even now, when the days get long and all the creation is at peace, the Lord looks down and thinks about that woman who had ten coins and lost one and then looked and looked and looked until she found it. All ten were finally all stacked up nice and neat, and there was peace and order again. Then the Lord thinks about that shepherd who had 100 sheep until one traipses off to the nether regions, and that shepherd looks and looks and looks until he finds that lost sheep and takes it back to the other 99, just like it was the “onliest” sheep he had. The thought of all the sheep together again makes the Lord feel happy.
Sometimes, the Lord thinks about that boy who fled his family with half of his daddy’s fortune, only to later squander it away on low-life friends and corn dogs. That lost boy wound up wanting to eat pig slop and finally stole back home where his father let him be a part of the family again. The Lord is happiest when lost and broken families come together again.
On a good day, the Lord daydreams of how happiness is a good feeling, and how there is great joy when the chaos of this world is organized and everything that has lost its place is found again. We have great evidence that the Lord will do just about anything to get us back where we need to be. That is home, in God’s Kingdom, where all lost things belong.
Rev. Dan Martin is pastor of First UMC, Hendersonville. He can be reached at moose1953@hotmail.com
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