| CROSSING
THE BAR - XX Click here to return to the Church Innovations web site.
Nancy and I went out to the bar last Friday night to “have a few” with our friends at the Bull’n Bear, which we sold last January after having run it for just over 15 years. The new owners had declared that night to be one of their “TGIF” party nights, had hired a band and even put out some chips and those little “cocktail” weenies bathed in BBQ sauce that smell way better than they taste. Shortly after we arrived, Cindy (one of our former bartenders) led over us to an older gentleman whom she introduced as her “former boss” Stan. As Stan and I were shaking hands, he looked me right in the eyes and said “I want to thank you for all that you have done for Cindy. You and Nancy have really made a difference for her.” Cindy, I later learned, worked for Stan shortly after her husband Bill – aka “Bubba” – had died of a sudden heart attack. He had apparently seen what terrible unruly waters she had been swept through with no understanding of God’s grace or the gospel to buffer the blows of the “boulders” she slammed into along the way. Our relationship with Cindy began a few Christmases before Bubba died. He and Cindy had come with her sister Stena her family (who were friends of ours), to one of our “Christmas campfires.” They stood together on that cold winter’s night, heard with their ears and sang with their lips about what God had done on that first Christmas long ago. I didn’t know it for a long time, but it had apparently come to be a very important memory to them. After Bubba died and Cindy moved from her home to Red Lodge and began working for us at the Bull’n Bear, she started – very haltingly to be sure – to ask some questions that had been forced to the surface by her loss of her husband. Soon after she started asking about “more campfires” and was actually one of those whose prodding helped get a regular schedule going, calling it “church by the river,” where we do the things one does in worship (with a few of our own necessary innovations, such as spend time talking about questions that need to be asked but seem to have no other place to find a voice.). Through it all, Cindy’s life has slowly and subtly changed directions as she has come to know the God Jesus described in the parables of the lost sheep, lost coin, and lost son – the “looking for the lost” God who is also the “finding and rejoicing” God. Her latest dilemma, stated to me after our last “church by the river,” was that she was worried that she would get in trouble with God because she didn’t think she could ever love God as much as she still loved Bubba… Think of that! I guess Stan was right, while Cindy still has all of her “Cindy-ness” to her, Cindy has changed. Again, at our last campfire while she was talking about how much she still missed Bubba – and without, I am sure, ever having read the opening sentences of Paul’s 2nd letter to the Corinthians – Cindy said “Well, maybe God can use me to help comfort others whose husbands die, ‘cause I know what it’s like.” • I still remember the look on Kathy’s face as “the lights came on” when we talked at one of our campfires about “sin.” Sin, as you might well imagine, isn’t all that popular a topic with “bar people.” After all, it is the perception of bar people that when church people talk about sin, the bar people are pointed at as the “object lesson” in the children’s sermon. (Okay, maybe it’s not that bad, but it does give a sense of the perception that exists.). You see, for people who have either never had any contact with the Church, or who had been significantly burned by it years before, a word like “sin” immediately brings to the surface the feelings a person gets when they sense they are “unacceptable” and “worth less” than those in the group viewing them. It’s a feeling that has been many times expressed to me with the words “They don’t want people like me there” when speaking of the church. So when I told our little group by the campfire that, in texts outside the Bible that were written at about the same time, the Greek word translated in the bible as “sin” (ha-mar-ti-a) was most widely used as an archery term which meant “missing the mark” or the “bull’s eye” and that it probably had a lot of that meaning in the Bible as well. When we started talking about what the “bull’s eye” in relation to our lives with God might be, you could almost see the lights going on above their heads. “Maybe the bull’s eye isn’t a bunch of rules at all, but was what God intended us to be when God made us,” I wondered out loud. “And,” as they say at the race track, “we were off.” Pretty soon the thought emerged from the group that perhaps God was talking about us, too, when those words were uttered in the creation story “and behold, it was very good.” Tumbling even further down from that came wonderment at the thought that what we are actually is of value to God, not just in a general way like “God loves everybody” but that we are of value to God. (By now we’ve tumbled from sin to creation to God valuing what God created - these are “bar people,” remember, sitting around a campfire with drinks in their hand.) “But we screw it up – maybe that’s what ‘sin’ is. We don’t want to be what God made us to be, Kathy said. “And it’s killing us,” I add, “That’s why we need a savior.” So on we tumble, now to the foot of the cross and the opened tomb; to what God has done about our being at cross-purposes with what was intended for us in the first place. And so it goes. Eddie, who upon first meeting me referred to me as a “damn fool preacher” like all the others he had encountered, suffered the death of his adult daughter Mary over 5 years ago now. We had, by then, gotten to know each other pretty well, but when I tried to offer the hope in which we trust, he flatly stated that “There is no hope. Little Mary’s dead, and I’ve just got to get used to it.” It cut me to the bone to see my friend in such pain, and utterly without the hope I took for granted. A month or so went by before we talked more, and through it all, Ed began to wonder about resurrection in terms of re-creation (he had often said that “any damn fool knows that there is a God – you can’t see a calf being born or a ewe lambing without knowing that!”). If God created a first time, I had asked him, why couldn’t he create a second time? Ed thought about that; I think he’s still thinking about it, because later on, he decided it might be time for him to start paying more attention to those “letters in red.” And now, since his recent heart attack and having to be “shocked back to life,” he is wondering if maybe God might want him around for some reason – if maybe he’s got some un-finished purpose. • And there are others. Mickey, a former Marine (though it appears to me that one never stops being a Marine) has been taking chemotherapy for intestinal cancer, and was invited to the little church by the river where we worship together and pray for him. Just like we pray for Peg, who has cancer of the liver and is fighting it with all that she has. Peggy wonders about things that everyone there wants to talk about ‘cause everyone there wants to know about what God is up to in all of her tumbling. “John” kicks against God at every opportunity, often expressing his anger at God. And still he comes to the river to worship nearly every time we meet. Terri was baptized just last Easter; she and Richard were married last August, and are reveling in the new direction their lives have taken. After decades of not worshipping (I’ll tell you sometime about Richard’s journey, which had left him deeply antagonistic toward anything “church”), they now invite – usually in the bar – more people to come with them to worship than anyone I have ever known, either when I was a pastor or in the 20 years since. My wife Nancy has no idea how important her hospitality has been to the advent of the Kingdom of God in this place, and she’ll no doubt object to my saying anything about it in this writing, but it is wonderfully true, and has made a huge difference in the work – the mission - that God is doing here. • Now, if you had told me in an earlier season of my life that it would be a part of stories like these, I’d have taken away your drink and told you you’d had enough. But life does tumble us to places we might not have thought we’d go – often to places we absolutely did not want to go. But we do not go alone. That is part of the wonder of the missional church, I think: going places where Jesus himself intends to go; or perhaps, saying it another way, finally understanding that Jesus intends to go with you where you already are! That He has intended to go there all along, and that you and I are privileged to be along on such a journey, participating in God’s mission and in God’s life among us. • Rock Creek (which, like all “rock creeks,” is aptly named) provides the east border of our property and is also the backdrop for our little church by the river. Every once in a while, when the spring run off from drainages in the Beartooth mountains that were filled with snow the previous winter is running hard and high, even the large rocks will start tumbling from the force of the current. When this happens, they make an almost indescribable sound – like distant artillery fire - from deep beneath the water as boulder crashes against boulder, causing yet another and then another tumbling to take place. As often as not, after a few of weeks of boulders tumbling and the stream bed itself has been changed as a result of it all, one can see sometimes gentle, sometimes dramatic shifts in the direction and flow of the river, leaving new places to ford, new holes, runs and riffles to fish. It’s hard to imagine that a single, gentle snow flake that fell the previous December had a part in all of this new creation, but together with others, it most certainly did. Jim Johnson is a Church Innovations consultant, a former pastor and the former owner of the Bull ‘n Bear Saloon in Red Lodge, Montana. |
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