Let The Weeds Grow

Today Jana and I worshipped with the Second Baptist Church of Lubbock, the beloved fellowship I served from 1989-2001. I was the guest proclaimer, the third such privilege I have had in recent months.

My text was the gospel lection, Jesus’ parable of the wheat and the weeds recorded in Matthew chapter 13. In this story, the rule of God is said to be like a carefully planted field in which wheat and weeds grow together and are harvested together, with the angels (not us) separating the wheat from the weeds at the end of the age (not now).

It was a timely text for my visit.

This splendid congregation took a chance on me when they called me as a still-unformed 31 year old minister. In short, they had more weed than wheat in their inexperienced pastor. But, they embodied the wisdom of today’s gospel lesson in letting this weed grow along with the wheat. They were longsuffering and gentle with me, allowing me to stumble and blunder my way into pastoral development. As a result of this “tender mercy,” we had a marvelous journey together that we will always celebrate before God.

My oft-repeated refrain to my seminary students is this: it is good churches that make good pastors, and not the other way around.

I think today’s sermon was something of a self-coaching talking point for the way I hope to conduct pastoral ministry from this point forward. I am recognizing more and more that our faith communities are fragile entities, easily beset by fears and insecurities, not given to instinctive capacities for change and adaptablity. I have made my share of leadership mistakes by advancing agenda for congregational change that were simply too pungent for immediate implementation.

After the service, those beautiful people of God at Second B waited patiently in a receiving line to offer their blessing to me, to remind me that long ago they saw wheat instead of weeds in me, and to admonish me, as I reenter the pastoral ministry I so dearly love, to go and engage in this imaginative act of seeing too.

Broadway Baptist Church

The Deacon Body of the Broadway Baptist Church of Ft. Worth has voted unanimously to call me as Interim Pastor. I will begin my ministry with them on July 27.

They have graciously allowed me to fulfill longstanding preaching engagements before I begin.

In an interesting and unusually ironic turn, Broadway's superb pastor, Brett Younger, will succeed me as the preaching teacher at McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University in Atlanta. Brett is not only a fine preacher, but is a student of preaching, having earned a doctorate in homiletics. He will be a gift to the seminary in Atlanta.

Brett and many others speak affirmingly and tenderly of Broadway. As is often the case, media accounts of Broadway's present congregational situation are inadequately descriptive. It is very difficult for the press accurately to characterize sensitive and nuanced congregational dynamics that shape a community of humans making their life together. When they try, they invariably fall short.

Broadway's open hospitality and embrace of all of God's children is powerfully symbolized by the stunning stained-glass window facing the worshippers in their magnificent sanctuary. It is called the "invitation window" and depicts Christ standing with arms outstretched to receive anyone who will come to him. This invitational heart has been a core value for Broadway throughout its history, and Jana and I look forward to partnering for a season with them in this mission.

Our job will be to provide pastoral proclamation and presence during the season while Broadway is searching for a permanent minister. I am honored to serve this historic, city-center Texas church, and wish to extend an open invitation to all to pray for us, encourage us, and come alongside us to help build a bridge to a future full with high purpose for God's work in the world.

Martin Luther King Jr. International Board of Preachers

I was inducted today into the Martin Luther King Jr. International Board of Preachers at Dr. King's alma mater, Morehouse College.

We started the day with a lecture by Dr. Lawerence Carter, Dean of the King Chapel at Morehouse, on the influences shaping King's life and ministry. The Chapel halls are adorned with oil portraits of spiritual leaders who have advanced God's Kingdom of justice and love in the world, and Dean Carter (photo) deftly connected all of their stories and contributions together in a wonderful reminder of our "single strand of destiny."

Then, we moved to the chapel for the induction ceremony. The massive pipe organ sounded the keynote of the day with an improvisation on the old hymn, "Great Is Thy Faithfulness." The renowned Morehouse Men's Choir sang an a cappella rendition of "Everytime I Feel the Spirit." The Rev. Billy Kyles (photo), who with the now deceased Rev. Ralph Abernathy, was the last person to see King alive before his untimely death 40 years ago today, preached a powerful message, "I Was There To Be a Witness." Indeed, the sermon was more prophetic challenge for the future than historical remembrance of the past. I wondered not only about my witness, but that of the young students in the congregation, some of them my own from Mercer University. How will we fulfill our Lord's prophecy and charge to be witnesses to the uttermost parts of the world? Read more about Rev. Kyles' sermon at:
http://www.morehouse.edu/news/archives/001299.html

It was an extra pleasure to celebrate this occasion with my San Antonio pastor friends, the Rev. Carlton Allen and the Rev. Thuman Walker (photo). We remembered together our collaboration in the citywide Martin Luther King Jr. worship service we were privileged to host at Trinity Baptist several years ago, as well as our other joint projects of racial reconciliation.

This recognition is perhaps the highest honor of my pastoral career. It is a most moving occasion for both Jana and me, and a tribute to the loving and inclusive faith communities I have been privileged to serve throughout my ministry.

Pastoral Transition

One of the issues shaping the health of the churches today is pastoral transition: conveying the spiritual authority of the community of faith from one minister to another. Much of the time, it is being done exceedingly poorly.

As a pastor who has followed long leadership tenures both in Lubbock and San Antonio, I am in a unique position to give perspective on the matter. I have postponed commentary on the subject for over a year since leaving San Antonio in order to gain a measure of clarity and analysis about this complex, emotional issue.

In August, Associated Baptist Press did two pieces on pastoral leadership succession that merit your reading. I have posted the links below:

http://www.abpnews.com/2709.article
http://www.abpnews.com/2710.article

From Pulpit to Lectern

When Dean Alan Culpepper invited me to teach preaching at McAfee this past year, I had that curious mixture of anticipation and apprehension that attends any new challenge.

On the one hand, the proclamation of God’s Good News has been the compelling enterprise of my life for almost thirty years of pastoral ministry. There is nothing that captures a parish pastor’s imagination and energies more forcefully than preaching.

But, on the other hand, the extent of my teaching experience had consisted of substituting in the county high school of the western Kentucky rural community where I served my first pastorate. I feared that perhaps my pedagogical skills might have atrophied over the past couple of decades since those occasional forays into the classroom!

There is a world of difference between the practice of preaching and the instruction of it.

As anyone who has had to preach—or had to hear-- sermons can attest, preaching is an inexact activity, much more art than science. Subjectivity prevails. Intuition, interpretation, imagery, style, rhythm, and timing are key. There is no homiletical “right way,” and the idiosyncracies of human personality more than a little bit apply. How does one instruct such things?

I discovered early on in my pastoral career a piece of wisdom that I have tried to follow ever since: good churches make good pastors—not the other way around. That old saw had served me well for a long time. Lacking any better core procedural principle as I embarked on the journey from parish to academy, I took that one into the classroom with me: my students and colleagues would guide and teach me. The ones I’m charged to serve would show me how to maximize our time of learning together.

That hunch has, blessedly, proven abundantly true this past year.

The central feature of McAfee’s special life together is community. Professors and students enjoy a quality of personal relationship rare in academic culture. There is a character of collegiality to what happens in the learning environment at McAfee. Values such as partnership, dialogue, engagement, and practice are held highly and cultivated carefully.

The knowing/being/doing missional triad is more than a mantra at McAfee. It is the philosophical and operational template of this place of training. What is done with hand and felt in heart is just as important as what is thought in head.
This tripartite approach to learning is particularly critical in the area of preaching. The practice and the study go hand-in-hand. As every working preacher knows, each delivery of a sermon is the preparation for the next one! Therefore, we not only read and reflect and write about preaching. In our school, we do it! It is the doing that shapes our learning.

Once I located myself in this understanding, I found my sea legs. The rhythm of study and practice is invaluable for the ministry of proclamation: preaching in the churches on the Sabbath week-by-week on one hand; coming together for inquiry and discovery in the classroom during the week on the other.

The year has been a Providential season of growth and regrouping. These wonderful McAfee minister-professors and ministers-in-training have greatly enabled and encouraged me, and I am grateful for the opportunity to join them on this exploration.

Because of them, I’ve learned that the journey from pulpit to lectern isn’t such a long one after all.

Your High Calling

It is my delight to emerge from my cyber-hibernation these past three months and reenter the blogosphere with a strong endorsement for www.thehighcalling.org

The High Calling of our Daily Work is a ministry of my good friend and former parishioner Howard Butt. For decades Howard has been a pioneering advocate for the awareness and celebration of God's presence in the workplace. He and his creative team contend that God moves powerfully in our respective vocational contexts if we will but train our eyes and ears to see such activity.

Stands to reason. Seems to me that the forty-hour work week constitutes a setting at least as plausible for divine epiphany than our one-hour-a-week sanctuaries.

I remember first encountering this simple spiritual idea in seminary when Glenn Hinson required us to read a book entitled The Practice of the Presence of God by a medieval monk named Brother Lawerence. Lawerence made the astonishing discovery that God was just as present to him among the pots and pans in the monastery kitchen while washing dishes, than kneeling in the majestic cathedral at prayer. Indeed, he washed those dishes gloria Dei.

Martin Luther King, Jr had a similar spiritual breakthrough when he gave his working class congregations the charge to go about their daily tasks with a sense of dignity and self-worth. If you find yourself sweeping streets, Dr. King admonished, then "sweep streets like Michaelangelo sculpted statues, sweep streets like Raphael painted pictures, sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry, sweep streets like Beethoven composed music, and some day all the hosts of heaven and earth will say about you, 'There goes a great street sweeper!'"

Even a cursory reading of the gospels leads one to conclude that Jesus found God more fully on the streets than in the sanctuary.

Please take the time now to browse around this crisp, newly updated website. Wouldn't it be a good thing for us to learn to look for God in the everydayness of where we live and move and make our being? If Jesus is any indication, our God-sightings Monday through Saturday will be at least as frequent as those on Sunday.

Interim Pastoring

The folks of the Immanuel Baptist Church of Nashville have called me to serve as their Interim Pastor. I begin with this morning's worship celebration.

God is good to connect me with this community of faith. Immanuel has served as a beacon of creative, progressive ministry in the city of Nashville for over a century. I will take the mantle of leadership during this season of transition from David George, who has served this congregation with intelligence and distinction for thirty years. A search team is already actively at work to find the pastor God has prepared for this fellowship, and I have every confidence this happy discovery will be made expeditiously.

(In the God's Small World category, David was ordained as a young minister by none other than the Trinity Baptist Church of San Antonio! It is instructive for us to remember that the ancient celebration of the "communion of the saints" means that all God's people of all ages and in all places are wonderfully and intimately connected, far closer than the vaunted six degrees sociologists say separate the human family on the planet at large...)

We are learning that the ministry of the interim pastor, particularly in succession of a long-tenured minister, is strategic for the health of our churches. Pastoral bonds with a congregation are deep and abiding. There are complex dynamics of grief that must be processed in pastoral leadership transitions-- even when those transitions are timely and appropriate. Mature congregations are seeing the need more and more for carefully planned and executed interim seasons between outgoing and incoming senior ministers, during which these myriad emotions and dynamics can be confronted, examined, and understood.

Even as Immanuel has called me, Trinity is wisely embracing this "best practice" in the call of my friend Randall O'Brien, Provost at Baylor University, as Interim Pastor following my tenure there. Reports of Randall's ministry are already universally positive, and Jana and I offer him and Kay our ongoing prayers and support as they lead that special group of Christians who convene at 319 E. Mulberry in the Alamo City each Sabbath!

As I look out the window in writing this, there is a blanket of snow covering the ground here in Nashville. This lovely Belle Meade neighborhood where Immanuel is located has been transformed into something storybook beautiful.

Reminds me of the imaginative promise of Scripture: "All things are becoming new."

Dispatch From Germany, Part III

There is a stunning Protestant church in Trier, where we have spent the last several days, that was constructed upon the very edifice first consecrated to the Roman emperor. The power of the Gospel to convert that which is secular into something sacred always astonishes. Indeed, this church is yet another gorgeous structure of old Christendom, almost as high as it is long, and stands, as do so many in this country, as a testimony to Christ's transformative genius.

But, the inspirational story, like most human stories, has a dark side.

In 1930's and '40's, this congregation was deeply complicit in the Nazi regime of terror. Its pastors cooperated with the oppressive authorities, like most ministers of the Nazi era. In fact, there are photographs of young boys being confirmed in their Nazi youth uniforms. Not only did this church refuse band together with the several other courageous "Confessing Churches" (made famous by Bonhoeffer's witness) of the region to resist the cruel order, it ostricized those members of its own congregation who were critical of Hitler and his policies. Of particular horror was the stance of the church toward the Jewish people of their community.

The Allied bombing of April of 1944 severely damaged the church. The ornate wood chancel and altar were destroyed by fire, as was the organ. Everything inside the church was demolished. The only thing remaining were the rock walls erected by the Romans so long ago, perhaps a reminder that moral lessons learned by one epoch have a way of being strangely forgotten by successive ones.

When the fire swept through the church, townspeople say that the pipes of the enormous organ began mysteriously playing by themselves. As the local lore has it, the windstorm created by the destruction forced air through the pipes, creating a haunting dirge that could be heard throughout the city.

A divine recital of judgment upon the cowardice and betrayal of a Christian people who forgot who they were.

Dispatch From Germany, Part II

We have made our way from Frankfurt over to Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a Disney-charming, remarkably preserved medieval village dating to the 12th century. It is ringed by the picturesque Tauber River, which we can clearly see from our hotel balcony, and nestled quaintly among the surrounding hills.

When the Thirty Years War of the 17th century devestated most of Germany, this place was fortunately spared, and, thereby, frozen in time instead of updated and modernized with successive waves of cultural development. Its cottages and cobblestones make an excellent setting for postcard-perfect German scenery.

But, I was shaken from this pastoral reverie with today's visit to a museum of medieval criminal justice. The museum houses one of the most extensive collection of medieval torture implements in the world. It's one thing to see this stuff in movies, quite another to look at it right in front of you. The cruelest and crudest devices for wresting confessions from suspects were on display for perfectly cultured and refined people like us to view: racks, ropes, cranks, pulleys, pinchers, gallows, stocks, belts, balls, chains. It was a graphic presentation of human barbarism, an ample justification for why historians refer to those ages in our human story as "dark." As we were all wincing and grimmacing, we were thinking: thank God we don't practice justice so primitively today.

Then, I got back to my hotel room and turned on CNN to see, once again, the now-famous cell phone footage of Saddam Hussein's final seconds, and realized that the continuum between what happened then and what happens now is not all that long, that our contemporary moral superiority isn't justified after all, and that eras like medieval and modern and post-modern may be different with regard to what we drive or how we dress, but not so different in how perfectly civilized people still insist on killing people who kill people-- even murdurous beasts like Saddam-- to show that killing people is wrong.

Dispatch From Germany

Last night's New Year's Eve celebration here in Frankfurt was a grand-scale spectacle unlike anything I've ever seen.

Jana, Cliff and I made our way around 8:00 p.m. to Sachsenhausen, the old part of the city south of downtown, across the Rhine. Walking to our restaurant, I was scared silly step after step by the explosions of firecrackers nearby.

The tradition here is to celebrate entrepreneurially: each brings his or her own fireworks to ignite on New Year's Eve. Forget controlled, orderly, safe, secure scheduled displays that are carefully choreographed to go off a few minutes before midnight. Rather, think merry mayhem.

After a wonderful Thai supper (the new world order means, among other things, that you can now eat anything anywhere) and a couple of lively German pubs, where we joined in songs we did not know in a language we do not speak, we walked to the riverbank a couple of blocks away. Despite a steady rain, tens of thousands were already lining the Rhine by the time we got there. We managed to stake out a good spot overlooking the river and facing the impressive Frankfurt skyline to the northwest, right across from St. Leonard's Church, one of the oldest protestant churches in the city, where the people of God confirmed Goethe's faith in the 18th century, and where one of the only existing stained-glass windows survived the Allied bombing in '43.

No sooner had we got settled into our vantage point than the show began. Slow at first, but then more and more, minute after minute, myriads of bottle rockets and Roman candles began to detonate all around us and up and down the river for over a mile, wave after colorful wave of fiery sprays in the chilly and wet night sky, a constant barrage of fireworks, made doubly stunning not only by their Rhine reflection dancing on the water's surface but also by the iridescent skyline framing them, and persisting with increasing dazzling fervor for well over an hour, until the final climax minutes before midnight generated yet a new level of ferociously streaming color and fire that culminated in a magnificent pyrotechnic piece de resistance just as the clock struck midnight and St. Leonard's bells pealed for a full half hour.

It was a happy apocalypse, surreal with the smoke and sulfur hanging over the river. Blessedly, we watched from the elevated sidewalk on the bank. The randomness of it all added to the adventure. Scared us at first (well, Jana and me, but not Cliff), but we soon got swept into the delight and magic of it all. The entire thing was splendid, glorious, with the impressive Frankfurt skyline as the backdrop. Shortly after midnight, it began to rain, which only seemed to lubricate the entire affair into a more adamant revelry. As we were climbing in a cab around 1:00 a.m., I turned to see a young policeman chugging down a beer... which bizarre sight I took as a sign that the party was over for us, and that if we wanted to live the 2007 whose advent we had just celebrated, we had better get to the safety and sleep of our hotel.

I got to see the July 4 fireworks on the Mall in Washington D.C. in 1977, but last night was even more amazing. People were mostly well-behaved, a miracle in itself. Everyone's personal participation in it heightened the sensation of the event, like some kind of ancient communal festival that bound all these complete strangers together. Lots of dancing, singing, hugging-- my kind of party.

God's Grammar For the New Year

At one time or another you will break up, break down, lose out, go broke, give in, get sick, be sad. Life happens.

(Please click on www.thehighcalling.org to read the rest of this article.)

Staying In Christmas

We can’t stand Christmas for very long.

For the brief 36 hours or so starting around dusk on December 24, we slow down long enough to let the Christmas mystery settle on us. If we don’t kneel at the manger, at least we pause before it. Our hearts tell us in our Christmas Eve services to take the sweet glow of candles and communion with us throughout the week and into the new year. We know it would be right and lovely to do so.

But come the morning of the 26th, and we are ready to get busy again. I have observed this back-to-business compulsion in three busy airports this week—Dallas, Atlanta and Frankfurt (where we are visiting our son Cliff who is stationed nearby). Our highly frenetic society simply can’t stay in Christmas very long. The liturgical calendar calls for us to rejoice in Christmas for a spell, but the vaunted Twelve Days of Christmas is something we experience only in song and never in actual celebration.

We start gearing up for Christmas absurdly early. By Halloween, the American retail machine is in full crank, indoctrinating us on the catechism of materialism, the real American religion. That is, we spend money we don’t have on stuff we don’t need, didn’t know existed shortly before the time of purchase, and will soon no longer want. Our cathedrals are empty and our malls are teeming, thus confirming where our real temples are located. It takes a certain kind of altered state to engage in this orgy of acquisition-- this temple sacrifice-- which is why those saccharine carols play over and over again until we are sufficiently stupefied.

The irony is thick: two months preparing for a feast we hardly take a day to enjoy. It is no surprise that many folks are depressed this time of year. How can any normal human aspire to the ridiculous level of holiday cheer and consumption the popular culture calls us to?

American theologian Howard Thurman wrote something years ago entitled, “Work of Christmas Begins.”

When the song of the angels is stilled,

when the star in the sky is gone,

when the kings and princes are home,

when the shepherds are back with the flocks,

then the work of Christmas begins:

to find the lost,

to heal those broken in spirit,

to feed the hungry,

to release the oppressed,

to rebuild the nations,

to bring peace among all peoples,

to make a little music with the heart…

Then the work of Christmas begins.

Instead of thinking about the new year ahead, let’s get back to Christmas. We should never have left. Let’s focus less on resolutions we make today and more on those Jesus made 2000 years ago.

That's the kind of Christmas we can celebrate for twelve days. And a whole lot longer.

Living Well, Dying Well

As you have sensitively gathered, I have spent this past month in the actual saying goodbye to my daddy, rather than in the reporting and reflecting on it. Thank you all for your plentiful love and prayer for me and my family in this journey. It means more to us than we can possibly convey. That “great cloud” so beautifully described in Scripture has encompassed us in the most comforting witness of love, and we are grateful to you for being a part of it.

Now the right time has come to write again.

My father died as he lived: with dignity and grace. Largely incommunicative during his last three weeks, his presence nevertheless centered us, just as it always had. Unable to tell the stories that have so profoundly ordered our lives, our way of living, we told them for him. Unable to express the sweet affection he always had for his wife and four boys, we tried our best to find that voice in his stead, to replicate that quality of love for him and for each other.

I don’t think I have ever known a man whose impulses of hospitality were so instinctive. He drew you to him, told you convincingly that you belonged, that you had a place. Even the Hospice nurses, whose familiarity with dying and all its hard and holy stages is a daily one, were drawn to Dad. Once, having driven in late from Atlanta, I arrived at the Hospice residence around midnight, and opened the door to my daddy’s room to find a young nurse quarter my daddy’s age bending over him, caressing his forehead. She looked up through moist eyes, and said, “He is such a sweet man.” She was not working, it was not her shift. She simply came by to commune with this sweetness.

Indeed, there was a holiness all around Dad in those last days, an invisible field of sacred energy. You just wanted to be there in that sanctuary with him. Was he praying? Was he remembering? Was he listening to someone else we could not hear? Was he here or somewhere else? We entered this space fearfully and wonderfully. I’ve never known a stillness like this. Dad’s breath was so slight and soundless, and the whole world so reduced and clarified and refined.

About a week or so before Dad died we were together in one of these reveries, when all of a sudden the cloud of unknowing parted. Dad looked up at me with those clear blue eyes that had sparkled with delight for so long and with such abundant pleasure, and said, “Hey boy!” just as he had so many countless times before. The recognition only lasted for a second, then receded back into the neurological fog. But it was more than enough.

A father gives a son one last blessing of belonging before the ship sets sail.

My Daddy Is Dead

Francis Johnson
1918-2006

Francis Johnson, age 88, went to be with the Lord on Thursday, October 26, 2006, after an extended and courageous struggle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases.

He was born on August 27, 1918 in the family home of his fathers at Franklin, Alabama and enjoyed this Alabama River community as an avid outdoorsman throughout his entire life. After graduating from the Monroe County High School, he worked on his family farm until July of 1941, when he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. He served throughout the remainder of WWII as a Staff Sergeant in the 24th Combat Mapping Squadron in the China-Burma-India theatre of operations. Upon returning, he attended Auburn University, after which he opened and operated an agricultural supply store in Monroeville, Alabama. He married Carol Brown of Repton, Alabama in 1950. In 1956, he joined Liberty National Life Insurance Company, serving for twenty-five years until his retirement in 1981.

He was a faithful member of the First Baptist Church of Pensacola where he was active in the homebound and hospital visitation ministries.

He is survived by his wife, Carol; his four sons, Langdon of Mobile, Alabama and wife Cheri; Francis of Mobile and wife Rose; Charles of Atlanta, Georgia and wife Jana; and Dennis of Louisville, Kentucky and wife Tracy; eight grandchildren, Chad, Cliff, Will, Peter, Chris Anne, Langdon, Nathan, and Anabeth; brother Foster of Franklin, Alabama and sister Lillie VanRoy of Montgomery, Alabama.

Memorial services will be on Saturday, October 28, 10:00 a.m. in the Pleitz Chapel at the First Baptist Church of Pensacola, 500 N. Palafox Street, with the Rev. Dr. Barry Howard officiating. Graveside services will be held later that day at 3:00 p.m. in the River Ridge Cemetery of Franklin, Alabama.

Pallbearers are Glyn Brown, Rusty Corcoran, Dr. Robert Howard, Buck Laird, Ray Lynch, and Dr. Robert K. Wilson.

Memorial gifts may be sent in lieu of flowers to the Joyce Goldenberg Hospice Inpatient Residence, 10075 Hillview Road, Pensacola, Florida, 32514.

My Daddy Is Dying

When I reported this to my seminary community in chapel worship on Tuesday as we shared our joys and concerns, it was as shocking for me to say as it was for our young students to hear. Death is not a category immediately accessible to creatures in full commencement of their lives.

For the first time in this years-long slow sink, Dad no longer recognizes Mom. Those clear blue eyes have now clouded. He forgets how to swallow. His brain can no longer tell his tongue to lick the trickle of drool descending down his chin. He has been sucked into a watery unwaking. Mom wonders if he will ever emerge.

Where does he go? Is there some alternative world into which he descends? Does he know others there? Is he awake in this place in a way our wakefulness cannot detect? Is he aware? Happy?

The doctors cannot say with exactitude, but my father is nearing death. Medical professionals are understandably reluctant to forecast such mysteries, but, when pressed, one finally ventured only a matter of weeks remaining.

Dad got ready to die a long time ago, long before neurological disease calcified his brain cells. Rarely have I known a person to live with greater readiness. Cavalier or wise, who's to say, but he always had a wry insoucience about what lay ahead.

I carry an early childhood movie in my head of an approaching hurricane, the neighborhood in panic, folks scurrying and scampering to protect themselves against the coming storm. In the midst of this frenzy of boarding up windows and packing up cars, my father reclines on the porch swing, gently rocking, his head laid back in calm as he draws on a cigarette. "Daddy, aren't you scared?" a wide-eyed little boy asks as he climbs up in his father's arms. "No, son. We'll be fine. Just fine," my father says, smiling, as he bends down to pick me up, his Marlboro dangling between his lips.

And, of course, we were. With him, we always were.

The National Weather Service warns us about such people, and with good reason, as recent weather events indicate. I'm not suggesting such stoicism is smart. Only interesting for a small child looking for clues about how to act in the face of fear. (No wonder my oldest brother rode out '04 Hurricane Ivan at his bayside home in Mobile, his wife Cheri having evacuated to stay with her mother in the relative safety of inland Montgomery, but Langdon stubbornly staying, declaring he would rather ride out a hurricane than spend the night with his mother-in-law!)

Now, the darkening cloud is settling in on my daddy. We know it will soon carry him away. No greatness of spirit will be able to prevent it. If he could speak, he would say those familiar words, "It will be fine, son. Just fine."

Come, cloud, carry.

Communion of the Saints

Recently, Jana and I were invited back to the West Point Baptist Church, my seminary pastorate of a quarter-century ago-- how's that for dramatic time measurement?-- to help celebrate their 150th anniversary.

West Point is located in the Kentucky commmunity of Matanzas, which has yet to find its way onto any state map of Kentucky I have ever seen. It is located on the Green River (remember that old John Prine song: "Mama won't you take me back to Mulenberg County/Down by the Green River where Paradise lay?"), 5 miles west of Centertown, pop. 300, which is 9 miles west of Hartford, a town of "2000 happy people and a few soreheads," as the sign at the edge of town reports.

I became pastor the 32nd pastor of West Point in September of 1981, having passed the simplest theological examination in the history of Christendom. "Brother Charles, do you believe this book?" even-then-old Deacon Foster James asked, not accusingly like an inquisitor ready to pounce on apostasy, but gently, while cradling his well-worn, black leather-bound King James Version like a mother holding a child.

My affirmative response, however tentative it was for a beginning seminarian, must have been acceptable. I served the church for three years by weekend commute from the seminary in Louisville 120 miles northeast, traveling every weekend in a beat-up 1967 Volkswagon beetle which local farmer Rex Igleheart declared he wouldn't drive to Hartford, much less back and forth every week from Louisville.

After I completed my Masters of Divinity in 1984, I fully relocated to the rural community, ministering full-time. More than a few of my family, friends and professors thought it was a strange career move to remain at this tiny country church two more years after my seminary training. I took ribbing that among my close circle of fellow students, after graduating from the seminary with their basic divinity degree, Greg went to Harvard to pursue Ph.D. studies, Chuck to Princeton, Michael to Emory... and I to the West Point Baptist Church of Matanzas. My father, ever supportive even when he didn't quite understand the vocational strategy, would ask, "Son, are you sure the Lord knows where you are?"

Those two years proved to be intensely formative for my pastoral identity. I learned what Carlyle Marney called "the ethic of identification" with those wonderful country folk. I hauled hay and stripped tobacco and pulled a calf or two (ask a rancher to explain). Still single, I took most of my meals in the homes of the churchfolk, indeed some of the most masterful eating I have ever done.

Stories abound. We rehearsed them at the 150th. We laughed and cried and remembered. Those passed on, like Foster James, were as present that day as a witness. I swear to you I shook his wrinkled hand at that reunion. I swear it.

Cliff Is Out of Iraq

Last night, Jana and I received the call we have been waiting for: Our son Cliff is out of Iraq and has returned to his base in Germany.

He has been stationed at Camp Victory in Baghdad for the better part of the past year, and is now back at the Hanau Army Airfield outside of Frankfurt. He is in the 320th Engineer Company charged with surveying the land for logistical support and construction. You may read more about his unit's return on the base's website, www.hanau.army.mil

As many of you know, Cliff is our second son to serve in Iraq. Our oldest, Chad, parashuted (I'm never sure of the past tense of that word, so let me put it the way the soldiers do: "jumped out of a perfectly good airplane!") at midnight on March 26 in 2003, right after the war started. His unit, the 173rd Airborne Infantry Division, secured the Bashur airfield near Kirkuk, and prevented the basically stable Kurds from retribution against their oppressors.

I will express my feelings about our continued involvement in Iraq in a future blog. For now, we are very proud of Cliff, inexpressibly relieved that he is out of harm's way, deeply grateful not only for the service he has rendered in Iraq, but also for his amazing maturity and growth, and earnest in our unceasing prayers that this war stop soon.

War makes a young man grow up fast. We have twice seen this sad, sobering reality.

Learning and Limitation

"When I finished medical school, I thought I had learned a lot," the young cardiologist told me. "We studied hard, digested a huge body of information, really got after it."

"Upon graduation, we were let loose on the world. Ready to heal. Primed to fight human disease with our massive arsenal of medical knowledge. 'Knowledge is power,' someone has said, and we felt invincible."

"Not long into my practice, I was summoned to the hospital emergency room to attend to a man who had just had a heart attack. I rushed to the hospital feeling strong. I was going to save a life, perform a healing!"

"But, after examining my patient I realized I was not going to do anything of the sort. The man's heart had ruptured. There was absolutely nothing I could do. No sophisticated procedure mastered in a medical school clinic was worth a thin dime now. None of the hundreds of medicines I knew like my own name would work. I was helpless to heal."

"My patient was going to die. And did."

"At that moment, I learned just how much I did not know, a medical lesson not routinely taught in my school. For all my training and knowledge, that man died. His heart literally broke, and all I could do was idly watch that muscular pump quit working, as life and breath left him."

My doctor friend reminded me all over again that one of the major objectives of any enterprise of learning is the realization of how much we do not know. Any authentic course of inquiry will put the student squarely in touch with her finitude.

My Old Testament teacher in seminary would open his classes on the first day by looking over his half-glasses to survey silently the fresh faces before him, finally offering the observation, "Ladies and gentlemen, there is a God... and you are not he."

Limitation is a rude awakening for young physicians fresh out of med school, and for young seminarians ready to cut loose on the church.

As well as for a middle-age pastor whose tenure on the planet should have taught him better.

But it comes barging in to bear that rarest, most blessed virtue: humility.

With humility we are kept from indulging the pangs of omniscience that hungrily beckon us to violate our boundaries.

Without it, we suffer, like Pharisees old and new, that untold ignorance of being too sure.

Prayers

It surprises even me, who has spent the better portion of his life assuring prayers to and for people in need, to note what impact of love these simple expressions deliver.

We had hardly gotten Dad settled into the Hospice residence before our family's church in Pensacola cranked into action with calls, visits, food-- indeed, fleshed-out prayers. Perhaps we tend to de-value these seemingly small caregiving gestures. We shouldn't. These reminded Mom at a tough moment, when her sons had to return to Mobile and Atlanta for their weekday responsibilities, of that most critical piece of information: you are not alone.

First thing Monday morning, I received a call from my pastor who was already marshalling forces of love on our behalf. Take it from one who has made thousands of such phone calls over the past twenty-five years: it touched me. Hearing the voice of my pastor assure not only his own prayers but also those of the church located me in instant spiritual solidarity.

Being on the receiving end of these electrical charges of love reminds you of why it's so important to keep vigil at your post on the giving end.

Hard business dealing with these end-of-life issues, no two ways around it. But, in the midst of it all there is provision at every turn. The word is from the Latin, pro-video, meaning not only to "see ahead," but also to "see for." There is One who sees ahead of us on the journey, who, according to our Leader, knows what we need before we ask. But, this One also sees for us, that is, on our behalf, in advocacy, paving the way for us.

Example? When Mom finally reached that place last week where she knew she could no longer supervise Dad's care in the home, there was a place available the next day in the Hospice residence, as if it had been waiting for him all along. One can feel the force-field of compassionate care upon entering the place. The miraculous merits of Hospice I will celebrate later.

Dad was a little more lucid yesterday, which is always a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he can commune sweetly with his lifelong companion, but on the other hand, he knows more fully and sadly that he is no longer in his own home.

Like driving through a mountain fog, things will be clear for a brief moment, then back into the haze. He must wonder: can't I linger in this lovely clearing just a little longer?

Hospice residence is designed only for temporary care. We are now searching to find a competent facility for Dad's ongoing care. There was a place available months ago, but Mom simply wasn't ready. She is the chief decision-maker; we follow her lead.

Thoughtful prayers are the best gifts these days as we do this difficult dealing. Thank you for them.

That Inevitable Day

Many of you know that my father has suffered from Alzheimer's disease for years.

Recently, health care providers have added two words to this diagnosis, "end" and "stage." End-stage Alzheimer's is the clinical way of saying that Dad is dying. He has a degenerative disease for which there is no cure.

The Alzheimer's Association website explains that something called "amyloyd plaque" builds up around the outside of nerve cells in the brain, prohibiting healthy brain function. Researchers know that this material is made up of protein, but they don't know yet how it impedes normal cell activity.

Such a microscopically small thing means that my father has forgotten how to button a shirt, buckle a belt, tie a shoe. The simplest procedures of daily dress and personal hygiene have been daunting for some time now, and would long ago have been impossible to negotiate were it not for Mom's transcendent courage and patience.

But, the inevitable, long-forecast next step has finally come. Dad can no longer be cared for in his own home. We moved him to a temporary Hospice residence this weekend, and will soon place him in a residential care center.

It is hard to see this once robust man now so slumped and crumpled. No measure of stoic bravery can shield his four sons from the awful realization that dementia has robbed them of their bigger-than-life daddy.

Even Mom, who has tenderly noted every single minute graduation of this disease's progress, was not prepared to see her husband in yet this new state of reduction.

Aging ain't for sissies. Browning must have been on drugs the day he wrote that ridiculous thing, "Grow old along with me! / The best is yet to be, / The last of life, for which the first was made."

I guess denial is a fine invention as long as it works. It no longer did the trick for what I saw this weekend.