Face to Face (July/September 2003)
Initial Thoughts
By Rich Brown
When Rebecca Chopp visited France last year, she and her husband were joined by another couple and their twenty-something daughter, Becky. Each morning Rebecca visited a different church, starting, naturally, with the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Becky, a passionate agnostic, accompanied her, their journey punctuated by good-natured, nonstop debate about God. By week’s end neither woman’s arguments had persuaded the other.
The final day, damp and overcast, brought them to the cathedral in Chartres. Their debate picked up where it had left off. But just as they stepped into the darkened sanctuary, clouds parted and sunshine streamed gloriously through the cathedral’s magnificent stained-glass windows. Bathed in light, both were speechless. Finally, Becky spoke quietly, “Oh…so that’s how you see the face of God.”
Indeed. This new journal is not about theological arguments, scriptural proof-texts, evangelism strategies, or doctrinal beliefs. It’s about letting in the light—or, more appropriately, “The Light.” It’s about peering into darkened windows and murky mirrors; then, mysteriously, everything comes into focus.
For forty years Herald House published Restoration Witness because people’s stories—the way God’s Spirit enters their lives—offer meaning and direction. That’s a good start but we need more, so Face to Face was born. In this case the light dawned more slowly than that morning in Chartres. Along the way others joined this publishing journey. Each added a special touch. In time I hope to share some of their experiences. But, to begin, I’ll offer my own.
Two years ago I was dying. Doctors named it “cryptogenic cirrhosis,” which is doctor-talk for “We don’t know why your liver is hardening and failing. It just is.” My only hope was a transplant—one of those modern-day miracles that has become almost routine. My name was added to the 18,000 on the U.S. waiting list. I wore a pager, tried to stay near a phone, lived one day at a time. When I looked in a mirror to shave, I worked hard not to notice how my body was wasting away. Perhaps that’s another way to “look through a glass darkly.”
Then, one Wednesday morning in May, my wife handed me the phone and a nurse said, “We have a liver for you.”
By the time I awoke in the hospital ICU the next morning it was clear the operation had not been a success. By nightfall my name was back on the waiting list. The good news: it was at the top. The bad news: it was there because I’d die within a week without another liver. On the third day a second “gift of life” arrived and was successfully transplanted. I still know nothing about either donor, but I’m grateful for their families’ decisions.
Countless prayers were offered, and thanks to my wife and e-mailing friends a prayer chain soon extended around the world. We spent the next two months at the transplant center waiting for me to heal. Eventually I did, and today I’m remarkably healthy. It’s been an amazing blessing. Many people call it a miracle; some even say I’ve been “born again.” But I can’t quite bring myself to agree.
I know that’s the term Jesus used with Nicodemus during their midnight talk (see John 3:3). My NRSV, though, uses “born from above” and “born anew.” I like those better. The message I read in Gospels, Epistles, and the Old Testament is that only God has power to bring life out of death: Elijah revives the widow’s child; despondent exiles in Babylon return to Zion; Jesus calls Lazarus forth; the tomb is empty on Easter morning; Paul preaches “new life in Christ.”
For years we’d talked about replacing RW. Now I felt a prompting, an urgency, a door opening. My vision for this journal is all about “life where there has been death.” Of course, it’s not just my vision but one “born anew” (born from above?) in others—something like stepping into a darkened room, only to have it transformed into a holy space by multicolored Light.
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Face to Face (October/December 2003)
Initial Thoughts
By Rich Brown
Standing there it was 1988 again as I relived the excitement of building our very own church home. Bare-stud walls and wooden rafters, concrete floors, exposed plumbing and wiring—they were signs of new life. We were certain this would be a house of prayer, of learning, of worship, of God.
But sweat from the mid-morning August heat brought me back to the future. I looked around: bare-stud walls and wooden rafters, concrete floors, exposed plumbing and wiring. Seven long months before, on a frosty January night, a burglar became an arsonist. My congregation became homeless.
We stood in the parking lot that night trying to make sense of it all. We couldn’t. We still can’t. Flashing lights from fire trucks and police cars pierced the darkness while the stench of smoke clung to everything. A firefighter came over to the yellow crime-scene tape and briefed Dave, our pastor. Fire, smoke, and water had gutted the interior. At least fire crews had kept the flames from burning through the roof and walls. The structure was left an empty shell. Except for some broken windows and doors, it still looked normal from the street.
A week later we began sharing the facilities of another congregation a few miles away. Our hosts have been gracious and patient—one of many blessings to come our way. Still, it’s not home.
Sometimes I wonder if familiarity with Bible stories leads me to make connections that are too quick and easy. Anyway, I began drawing parallels with the Jewish exiles, hearing their lament from beside the waters of Babylon: “How can we sing the songs of Zion in a strange land?” It echoed my congregation’s beginnings twenty years ago when its parent congregation was split in two. That “exodus” experience was, well, acrimonious. Enough said, perhaps.
We first worshiped in our new building on Christmas Day 1988. I preached that Sunday and struggled beforehand to find the right words. The Spirit blew, and I knew they were the right ones the moment I spoke them: “Free at last. Free at last. Thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.”
In my next breath I felt the Spirit challenging me to ask a question: “Are we freed from or freed to become?” Fifteen years later, we’re still looking for an answer. Now, though, our exile story is layered on top of the exodus one. Little children in 1988 are now in college (including my own two), succeeded by waves of new children and their parents.
It’s a tedious process to rebuild a church. Part of it comes from getting so many parties on the same page—local and denominational church representatives, insurance adjusters, city code inspectors, contractors and subcontractors. Before you can start rebuilding, you have to make an inventory, then clean up the mess. Meanwhile, people’s spiritual lives are disrupted. Nobody is ever ready for that kind of thing. Sure, it would make a terrific workshop exercise for any congregation. But who would want to?
Something else happened in the intervening months, something absurd and unimaginable to me. This summer my congregation elected me pastor—and I said yes. How do you rationalize a call from God, especially when it’s one that you really, really, really don’t want?
Other than weekends and evenings filled with meetings and phone calls, I don’t know what’s ahead. One thing I do know: God is bringing beauty out of ashes, replacing mourning with joy. Something powerful and wonderful is going on I can’t explain. It’s as murky as smoke on a winter night, as mysterious as my return to good health after liver transplants two years ago. There’s a lot of work ahead for a lot of people. But God is in it, and that’s reason enough.
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Face to Face (January/March 2004)
Initial Thoughts
By Rich Brown
I can thank Wendy Wright, profiled elsewhere in this issue, for some interesting insight into grace. In her new book, Seasons of a Family’s Life, she quotes Catholicism’s first native-born American saint, Elizabeth Ann Seton:
“[W]e must be so careful to meet our grace…if mine depended on my going to a place to which I had the most dreadful aversion, in that place there is a store of grace waiting for me.”
Born a Protestant and comfortably situated in proper New York society, she experienced a profound spiritual conversion following the tragic death of her husband and several family members. Four years after her baptism as a Roman Catholic on Ash Wednesday 1805, she took vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. Thereafter she became known simply as “Mother Seton” for her work with orphans. Hers was unquestionably a life lived by grace.
As much as the rest of us might want grace to be found in warm, comfortable, safe places, that’s rarely the way it works. Yet grace is still about hope and reassurance and saving power. There’s a hint of grace in some song lyrics that often run through my mind:
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes, you just might find
You get what you need.
Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones won’t ever achieve sainthood—unless you’re talking about the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But their message (at least in this song) fits well with Mother Seton. It’s worth pondering as we in the northern hemisphere bundle up for another cold, bleak winter. Meanwhile, out on the distant liturgical horizon, Lent awaits.
Grace has happier connections with Advent and Christmas than it does with Ash Wednesday and Lent. But Lent draws us deeply, sometimes painfully, into Mystery. “Meeting our grace” in a place of “dreadful aversion” could almost define the Lenten journey toward the Cross.
Sometimes I encounter people who claim to be happily resigned to “God’s Plan” for their life. It’s as though they don’t have to be concerned with decisions anymore. God has their life all planned out; they just hop on board for the ride. Here’s the trouble I have with that: Remove God from the equation and “The Plan” begins to sound suspiciously like fate—“Que sera sera. Whatever will be will be….” I really do want to keep my mouth shut at such times, but I have trouble keeping my theological opinions to myself.
If God is not writing scripts or pulling strings, then what’s going on? Maybe what God does is more like making a map. There’s a whole lot of ways to get from Point A to Point B, and it’s obvious God doesn’t care for straight lines. Somewhere along the way we encounter those “places of dreadful aversion.” I know I’m treading on dangerous metaphorical ground here, but perhaps it’s a bit like Monte Hall offering what’s in the box or behind Door Number One.
I do know what it’s like in those places to discover a “store of grace”—or, as the Stones put it, to “get what you need.” Still, an annoying little voice in my head wants it all to be less unpleasant. That’s not part of the guarantee. Lent, like winter, hangs around awhile. Emmaus is a long way off.
Yesterday chilly November winds blanketed my yard with leaves, which must be raked before winter arrives. Right now even Christmas seems unwelcome, and Lent is unthinkable. But it will come, confronting us again with the reality that grace can be hard, that pain and deprivation and separation must be dealt with. We need those six weeks of introspection precisely so that Holy Week and Easter and Emmaus and Pentecost make sense.
This issue of Face to Face includes spiritual reflections for the first thirteen weeks of 2004, tied to Revised Common Lectionary scriptures used widely in worship and Sunday school. Our emphasis is neither preaching nor scholarship, but devotion. By the time you read this I don’t know where you’ll be on God’s map, or who or what will be grace for you. I believe in the promise, though: You’ll get what you need.
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Face to Face (April/June 2004)
Initial Thoughts
By Rich Brown
Buying a pickup was really my wife’s idea—well, not really all her idea. But Sally spotted the for-sale notice in the school newsletter: ’97 Nissan pickup, very low mileage. The owner, a high school coach, was reluctantly parting with it. His young family was growing; they were moving to a new house; something about a straw and a camel. The mechanic who checked it out for me offered to buy it if I didn’t. I took that as a good sign.
That same month our youngest child would graduate from high school, and by fall she’d be selling her car to help pay for college 400 miles away. But Beth would be home for a month-long winter break as well as next summer, and there are transportation questions looming for her in a couple years. Her older brother was about to spend one last summer at home before heading back to Boston for his final year of university, too. Obviously, reasons (or is it rationalizations?) can be found if you look hard enough.
Truth be told—I’ve wanted a pickup for a long time, whether I consciously realized it or not. Some might see “mid-life crisis” written all over this. Maybe, maybe not. It happens to some guys my age, and a very few end up quitting their jobs, abandoning wife and kids along with common sense, to drive off into the sunset in a little red sports car. Or they could just skip all that nonsense and buy a pickup. You be the judge.
Just what is so cool about driving a pickup anyway? Well, perhaps if you have to ask, then…. Let me offer one fascinating reason I never would have come up with on my own. I came across it while preparing to interview Tex Sample for this issue of Face to Face. About ten years ago he wrote a terrific little book, Ministry in an Oral Culture: Living with Will Rogers, Uncle Remus, and Minnie Pearl. It’s a great introduction to what Tex does now that he’s a retired seminary professor. In chapter one he mentions his neighbor Barry who offers this meaning of a pickup: “…in a pickup truck you can spit down on the top of any car—Mercedes, Cadillac, BMW, you name it.” While it would take a bigger pickup than mine to actually do that, I think I catch the drift. A pickup truck is a great equalizer. I don’t spit on other vehicles, but I could if I wanted to.
Furthermore, when I’m in my truck, the world looks different. Not to overstate this, but I’ve sensed an unspoken bond among pickup owners that’s just not there with cars. It’s subtle, but that little shift in perspective has its own domino effect. I don’t know if a butterfly flapping its wings really changes much, but I can accept the possibility that one more guy (OK, person) driving a pickup may indeed shift the universe a tiny bit.
When my daughter was home for winter break she drove our compact car exclusively (the truck has a stick shift and a clutch). Soon after she returned to college we got a big snowstorm, so I put the pickup in the garage. Even with four, sixty-pound sandbags in the bed, its rear-wheel-drive traction is no match in the snow for the car’s front-wheel drive.
That first morning I turned on the car radio and the pre-set buttons took me to places I’d never been before. To her credit, Beth kept my basic two intact: classic rock and NPR. Maybe she’d been setting me up for this moment at Thanksgiving when I’d driven her back to Peoria and she had introduced me to her favorite group, some Canadian guys called BareNaked Ladies. I must admit they are pretty good. Anyway, after I got over my initial grumpiness with the pre-sets, I decided to wait awhile before changing them back. The jury’s still out, but I haven’t redone them yet. In fact, I even switched a couple in my truck to match the car. I fear the universe is shifting again.
It’s moments like this, when I think I’m just minding my own business, that I come to realize the Holy Spirit has dropped by for a visit. Or, as Tex would see it, to pitch a tent and stay awhile: Suddenly I find myself in God’s story, and the ground underneath doesn’t seem quite as stable. Oh, well. Maybe we’ll just ride around town in my pickup, listening to BareNaked Ladies CDs or whatever’s on pre-set number six. I better drive; the Spirit will have to ride shotgun.
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Face to Face (July/September 2004)
Initial Thoughts
By Rich Brown
A country song keeps running through my mind, and it just won’t go away. Now that’s something I never thought I’d say.
I suppose it all started a year ago when I became a pastor and began to listen intentionally for God’s voice in unexpected places. Or maybe when I cautiously ventured beyond the familiar sounds at the other end of my car radio preset buttons. Or, who knows—maybe it just comes from driving a pickup. But, country music—oh my!
The song is on the new Rascal Flatts CD, Melt. Here’s the refrain:
I miss Mayberry
Sitting on the porch drinking ice cold Cherry Coke
Where everything was black and white
Picking on a six string
People pass by and you call them by their first name
Watching the clouds roll by
Bye, bye
Mayberry, that perfect little southern town that existed first on black-and-white TV forty-some years ago and ever since in the imaginations of Americans, never has been or can be real. Like most “golden eras,” though, that really doesn’t matter to most folks. Sheriff Andy and little Opie, Aunt Bea and Barney Fife are real in perception and in the widespread wish for a better, purer, simpler time.
It’s easy to find fault with that kind of simplistic thinking. Certainly it paints a prettier picture than our hectic and troubled modern world. I was all set to preach just that to my congregation in May, using the song as an example of the wrong model for congregational vision. Anyway, that was the plan, at least up until noon on Friday when I first felt the gentle breathing of the Spirit. Before long it turned into a “still small voice.” By Friday night I knew I had the right song but the wrong sermon. It’s a good thing my lawn needed mowing on Saturday; I’ve always done my best thinking behind a mower.
Sunday morning, at the tail end of a solid but uneventful Communion service seasoned with traditional hymns and familiar routine, I stood at the pulpit: “And now for something completely different….” A bulletin insert offered the song lyrics so everybody could follow along with Rascal Flatts. Country music is like a foreign language to some people, and I wanted everybody to see as well as hear the words. Afterward, I resumed my place at the pulpit, shared my little weekend detour, and opened my heart.
I’d discovered that the song is not about reliving Mayberry, however you might define that idea as a town or a family or a church. That’s plain from the lyrics:
Sometimes I dream I’m driving down an old dirt road
Not even listed on a map
I pass a dad and son carrying a fishing pole
But I always wake up every time I try to turn back
It’s a powerful thing to take this idea and create a brand-new world where people come first, where principles matter, where people known by their first names work out life’s complexities, where everybody knows the difference between simple and simplistic. And so I challenged my congregation that day to grow both bigger and smaller, to take time for one another and still be open to the new people and experiences God would lead us to, to wrestle with complexity while knowing clearly who and whose we are. I told them it’s our job together to figure out how to do that. After all, I’m the pastor, not Mr. Fix-it.
Mayberry is not so much a retreat into the past as a potential gateway for ongoing transformation. It’s about breathing and listening and paying attention and wrestling. The answers are out there somewhere—and maybe inside us, too. Meanwhile I think I’ll go find a porch, listen to some banjo music, sip a Cherry Coke, and watch the clouds roll by.
I miss Mayberry. Thank you, Jesus.
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Face to Face (October/December 2004)
Initial Thoughts
By Rich Brown
A good friend once told me she used to like people a lot—until she moved to Toronto and was surrounded by swarms of them from morning till night. I thought about her this summer while trying to get from one end of New York’s Times Square to the other.
My wife and I had a great vacation in the Big Apple—one of the best we’ve ever had, actually. But then, how can you not like sitting four rows from a Broadway stage while watching, hearing, and feeling dozens of tap-dancing feet move through big-production numbers? Or stretching out on Central Park’s Great Lawn with 35,000 others to listen to the Philharmonic play Rimsky-Korsakov and Mendelssohn? Or laughing at David Letterman’s jokes during a taping of his show? Or sailing by the Statue of Liberty on the Staten Island Ferry? Or meandering through lower Manhattan neighborhoods as different from my Midwestern suburban hometown as they are distant? Or fighting back tears at the memorials in Saint Paul’s Chapel across the street from ground zero?
I’m no expert on New York, just a first-time observer (arguably a foreign one at that). It’s an exciting place to visit for a week, but living there full time—hmm, I don’t think so. But like Billy Joel sings, we’d slipped into a “New York state of mind.”
Our hotel was about a block from Grand Central Station, and we spent a fair amount of time on the Number 6 subway line going downtown and uptown. It was a novelty for us; obviously, it wasn’t for the locals. I suppose if people, thousands of people, are constantly in your face, you need a place to cope with it all, to zone out, to decompress—OK, sometimes just to sleep, too. The subway serves that purpose for a lot of folks.
Our son is there now that college is behind him. Where he works (a Park Avenue black tower) and lives (an East Village apartment in “Alphabet City”—certainly one of the city’s most, uh, eclectic and interesting neighborhoods) are worlds apart. We went to his place for dinner one evening, walking from a subway station with underground access to a K-Mart, of all things. My wife and I felt as out of place as, well, somebody’s Midwestern parents on their way to visit their twenty-something kid on the lower east side of Manhattan.
The subway transports him back and forth between home and work. It does more than that, though; it’s a bridge between the incredibly jarring contradictions of his life. It helps that he’s young. It’s said you need to be either young or rich to live in Manhattan. Both would be better. It occurs to me that I’m neither.
There’s an obvious energy driving the city—a spirit, perhaps? I looked out my hotel room window at 4:30 one morning. Even from the thirty-second floor I could tell that although the streets weren’t busy, the city wasn’t really asleep. Just taking a breather. It’s not my world; never will or can be, I suppose. It belongs as much to taxi drivers and garbage men and tap dancers and my son and his friends as it does to Donald Trump and Mayor Bloomberg.
I’m convinced God is there, too, along with all the visible expressions of modern-day evil—poverty, greed, racism, violence, inequality, despair, boredom. People just trying to make it through another day. People with dreams and plans—sometimes big and impressive; other times desperate and futile. I guess it’s a lot like home after all.
