| CROSSING
THE BAR - XVII Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site. I heard a story about a kind and well-loved priest who had died and was standing at the gates of heaven. His love for God was shown by how well he had loved his people. St. Peter himself came to greet him, asking if there was anything special the priest would like to do, now that he was in heaven. The priest thought for a moment and then said, “Is there any place where the words of our Lord are written down just as he spoke them, word for word? I’d love to read them all, I have so many questions.” St. Peter told him that they were indeed all recorded and archived in the main library, and took the priest there. After not hearing from the priest for the better part of a year – he was enjoying himself so much – all of the sudden there was a loud scream coming from the Library… “Noooo…It can’t be. It can’t be!” Peter runs in and asks the priest what is the matter. “There’s an ‘r,’” he cried, “an ‘R’.” “What do you mean,” Peter asked? “It says “CELEBRATE,” not celibate!” My wife Nancy, her friend Kathy and our bartender Marsha were sitting at the bar at the Bull’n Bear talking the other day. I wasn’t there, so I can only give you a second-hand accounting of what was said. Apparently the subject of guilty feelings came up. Kathy said that you can’t let your life be run by guilt. Marsha responded quite matter-of-factly from her perceptions of what she had learned growing up Catholic that “if it wasn’t for guilt and being afraid of God’s punishment, everyone would just do whatever they wanted to.” Hmmm. Several weeks earlier, Steve (whom we call “buzzard” at the poker table), Rob and I were talking about Rob’s upcoming wedding. Buzzard – I mean Steve – took the conversation about who would be performing the wedding in an unexpected direction. “You should have Jim do your wedding,” Steve said. He then continued, “You know what I like about Jim? Jim isn’t one of those ministers who thinks you have to like totally dedicate your life to God. Are you Jim?” I immediately thought about Jesus’ many comments on the topic, then said “Well, it all depends on what you mean by ‘totally dedicated.’” And pretty much completely ignoring what I said, Steve continued, “I don’t think that even God wants you to dedicate your whole life to him,” he continued. Hmmm again. Marsha is under the perception that what God wants of us (right behavior) is coerced out of us by guilt and fear. More than that, God, through the Church, uses that guilt and fear as God’s preferred ways to “keep us in line.” Steve seems to think that even God isn’t all that concerned about our total dedication to God (by “total dedication” I think he means something like “Don’t do the 10 things you want to do, start doing the 10 things you don’t want to do, and then have fun.”). Rather than that, Steve thinks that God gives us, as we say in the west, “lots of rope.” Enter Kristine Walker Todd. How do I describe Krissy…? Krissy bartended for us a few nights a week at the Bull’n Bear a couple of years ago. She was full of life (nearly every bit of it) and loved to share it all around. She was also subject to terrific mood swings which would have her energizing any room she was in at one time, and suffering from brooding, dark thoughts and deep longings at another. I once described her as “a wonderful cross between Tigger (from Winnie the Pooh) and James Dean.” All laughed and agreed it to be true. One slow night while she was bartending, quite out of the blue, Krissy plopped down next to me on a bar stool, looked at me with her sparkling eyes and said “I believe in Jesus, you know!” She did this, I suppose, because her boss the bar owner was also her boss the pastor. She then told me that she had been baptized when she was little, and that she knew she belonged to God. (It made me wonder, by the way – especially later, if she had somehow remembered what the greater share of us “church people” have forgotten about life being lived “full up, shaken down and running over” safe in the knowledge of what Krissy knew, that is, that we belong to God.) In another of her “up” moods, after she and Rick had lived together for several years and after he had asked her several times, Krissy – quite out of the blue, according to Rick – decided it was time for them to get married. She also decided that I was to be the one to marry them. The wedding would be in the ballroom at the Bull’n Bear, all their friends and family would be there, with special emphasis being placed on their Harley-riding friends ‘cause Krissy and Rick both owned Harley’s and loved to ride. The day of the wedding Krissy was 40 minutes late – Rick just shrugged his shoulders and smiled as if to say “so what did you expect?”. When she finally arrived, and to set the service off a little bit from all else that was going on, I asked the guests to please set their drinks down for a bit and to take their seats. In the wedding sermon, after having read the creation story from Genesis 1 and the story about Jesus at the wedding in Cana at Galilee, I talked with them about God’s intention for them from creation, for God’s image existed in them still. I talked also about God’s desiring a continuing presence with the two of them as was exemplified by Jesus’ presence and very apparent blessing of another wedding like theirs by providing really good wine and lots of it when the first batch had run out. Krissy thought that the first of Jesus’ signs was a pretty cool miracle. She said so during my sermon. It was a wonderful day. The Genesis creation text that I read at their wedding – with God speaking and “it was so” and God seeing that what had been created “was very good” – is the same text I read two years later at Krissy’s funeral. “You can’t feel the wind through your hair if you wear a helmet” had clearly been her attitude toward riding. On a warm spring afternoon, after she apparently hit some gravel cutting a corner a little too closely, she lost control of her motorcycle and crashed head-long into a guard rail. These words were printed on the back of the funeral folder for Krissy.
Three people: Marsha (who would understand herself as a “church person”), Steve and Krissy (who are pretty solidly “bar people”). Each with their different views about what it is that God intends for our lives. Each exemplifying something I learned early on in this business. There is great confusion, it seems to me, both inside the Christian community and outside of it, as to what it is that God our creator, savior, and counselor; our heavenly father-and-mother (!) intended for us from the beginning and wants of us now (which is the same thing, isn’t it?). Marsha speaks for multitudes both within and without the Church when she says it is about our behavior – about obeying the law. For if there is one perception that the church universal seems to have been successful at promoting it is that God cares really a lot about what we do and don’t do, making sin, and the forgiveness thereof, as something seen in relation to our doing wrong things, rather than being about “missing the target” of being who God created us to be, of living out God’s preferred future for us all. Though I need to talk with him to find out, Steve doesn’t think God cares too much about all of that. Beyond that, I don’t think that he has gone so far as to wonder about what it is that God does want for us. It all makes me wonder if Krissy wasn’t on to something as she virtually exploded into life being the best “Krissy” that she could be. I have no doubt that she knew that she, like all of us, needed the forgiveness of her sin. She told me so. She also knew that Jesus freely granted that forgiveness simply because He loves her. She told me that too. But I also wonder if she didn’t rest in something that most of even the best of the rest of us have forgotten – that this grace of God, a grace which every one of us readily proclaims as freely forgiving every sin when someone has died (and that without condition!) is not grace only for when we are dead! It is also to free us, each and every day, to be freely and fully alive – to be who God always meant for us to be. Not in fear or with guilt (which some have called “the gift that keeps on giving), but in love for others, and with a joy for life that any father or mother worth the name would want for any and all of their children. This grace not only allows us to rest in peace when death occurs, but allows us peace for our lives now as well, giving us permission to be who we were made to be in the first place. When you think of Jesus coming to “seek and save the lost,” and his call to all of us to “go and make disciples…” what difference do you suppose it would make to the “bar people” in how they view the Christian community if “church people” seemed to be grateful more for who they are created to be than they care about how they – and the bar people – are supposed to act? I bet you already know. And so it is that I think that this year, when our friends from the bar come to our home on Christmas evening for our annual “Christmas Campfire…” after we sing the carols together and after the Christmas story is read from the Bible… and after we’ve talked about the gift that Jesus is at Christmastime…that I’m also going to mention what we seem so often to forget, even at Christmas. And what is that? That one of the gifts that God has come to give back to each of us at Christmas… is ourselves! The wonder of everything that God in love created and intended us to be. The freedom to explode into God’s life for us because, after all, if God had wanted us to be someone or something other than who we are, God wouldn’t have made us as we are. We obviously have great value to God. Christmas veritably screams the fact right out loud! And as our Christmas service ends, if it is true, as one of my professors (Gerhard Forde) once said, that Jesus was in one sense “the only true man who ever lived, because he didn’t try to be anything other than who he was,” I think that this year, when we pray around the Christmas campfire, that my prayer for each one there is that we, too, will seek to be nothing more, and nothing less, than who we are created to be. It does, in the end, seem to be the clearest answer of them all as to what God wants of us, and for us. Jim Johnson is a Church Innovations consultant, a former pastor and owner of the Bull ‘n Bear Saloon in Red Lodge, Montana. |
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