Comfable?
Stories
Contents
“Comfable?” by C. David McKirachan
“A Citizen of The Kingdom of God” by C. David McKirachan
“Candid Posterity” by Frank Ramirez
Comfable?
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 121
Every once in a while, I hear someone hold forth, “I had tickets to a baseball/football/soccer/basketball/hockey game and I didn’t go. It’s just too much hassle, with the crowd and the parking and all the yelling. Why would anyone go? It’s so much more comfortable to stay home and watch the whole thing on TV.”
My response is usually, “Next time you decide to be comfortable instead of going to the game, how about giving me a call. I’m a masochist. I’d love to be bothered like that.”
When Robert Schuller was starting his ministry, he did a poll among Christians who weren’t attending church. It was basically to find out why. The number one reason, now get this, the number one reason was… parking. So, he rented a drive-in movie theatre and had services there. People didn’t have to get out of their cars. They just used the speakers in their windows.
What is it with this comfort thing? I’ve coined a term, ‘comfable.’ That way you don’t have to use too many consonants. Less hassle.
One of the glories of being part of the worship experience is the gathering of the congregation, the unison prayers, singing the hymns. It stirs us in our middles (that’s a liturgical word meaning middle). I used to go to football games with an elderly gentleman who had season tickets to the Giants’ football games. He’d go early, always parked in the same area. So did the other people around him. They’d tailgate. The food was amazing. They knew each other from way back. They told stories of the glory days. They shared news about their kids, their grand kids, they laughed together and once in a while after the game they’d cry together.
In other words, they experienced community. It was a blast, even when the Giants lost. When you’re sitting in front of your 82” high definition TV in your sweats, somehow it’s not quite the same experience. You may be comfable, but you’re not at the game.
The 121st psalm was chanted antiphonally by pilgrims coming up the hill of the temple mount. Someone would start, and others would send the next lines back. These people, many of them from places where other languages were spoken, would be united, drawn together by this experience of knowing and sharing scripture that had been chanted by their parents and their parents. It bonded them, united them, and carried them into a shared experience of the presence of something bigger than they were, more important than their priorities, standing outside the ‘normal’ and the comfable.
Last time I looked there’s not a lot in scripture about comfable. There’s not a lot in scripture about convenient, punctual, or even parking.
The religious experience can be a moment of quiet and peace, a place of solitude and a still small voice. But even those moments are set aside, different, apart from the normality of our daily lives. Our congregational worship needs to be the same — set aside. We need to be inviting people away from their normal, scheduled, routine if they are to get any sense of the presence of a transcendent god. Otherwise worship is another appointment that hopefully they can get done with quickly, without too much hassle.
We who are called to lead God’s people are tasked with claiming that same vision. Our job is not to impress the crowd with giggles and special effects, it is not to stay current with what’s ‘hip.’ Our job is to be on the pilgrimage to the presence of God. To be reaching with arms to short to touch, and speaking with words too small to describe, to share our own journey with all the faithful who have come for something they’re not sure of, out of each of their daily routines, who are protected by excuses and cynicism and anxiety and fear. Our job is to call attention to our limitation and the miracles all around us. Our purpose is to teach them the traditions. Traditions that they can remember, and think about and use and look forward to sharing with others who come on the road to the place of worship. Our job is to start the song. To lift it up.
Winning and losing has little to do with it. Whether the budget is balanced or not. Whether we’re erudite or not. Whether we’re on time or not. This place is different. We come to experience the community that holds fast to the Lord of hosts, the God of justice and love, the God of our fathers and mothers in faith.
Start the song. And keep on truckin’ up the hill with all the others. Sooner or later some of them will join. It’s contagious.
* * *
A Citizen of The Kingdom of God
by C. David McKirachan
Genesis 12:1-4a
The story of Abram slams up against so many of our priorities as to be impossible to follow as an example of faith. It makes demands that are unreasonable, leaving home, leaving family, leaving nation all on the instigation of a promise from this unknown God. Abram’s father had left Ur, which gave the son some experience in moving on, but Dad probably made that move for the same reason people have been moving on since human beings were hunters and gatherers. Gotta go where the game is better. Gotta go where the job is. Gotta go where there’s opportunity. Gotta get away from the vice of normal expectations clamping down. At least Dad was gone. It would have broken his heart to see his son pull up stakes and wander away, following this will-of-the-wisp promise.
My ancestors left Scotland in the 1600’s to come to the new world. A friend of ours visited the ancestral turf and looked up the family. Evidentially they remember when my folks left. And the family in Scotland is still angry. I don’t know if they’re angry because we were irresponsible idiots because of something we’d done, or because we were seen as irresponsible idiots for leaving. Maybe both. Scots hold grudges. I’ll have to ask them when and if I go. Part of the problem could have been the perception that these people were leaving the known world, never to return. No more family reunions. No attending weddings or funerals. No more births to celebrate. No more family responsibilities. Gone. For some people that sounds attractive.
This passage only talks about men. I wonder how the women of the bunch felt. Mothers, sisters, maybe even grandmothers. I wonder if they were excited. Or did they go along because they had to follow the idiotic men, always looking to the other side of the fence.
The promise to Abram had to do with family, with the family’s future. But again, who was this spirit that whispered in the patriarch’s ear? Did the spirit present references? Show proof? Paul said that Abram showed faith. I don’t know if that shows faith or irresponsibility.
I have a sense that a lot of people who live in our brave new world are dissatisfied. The strictures of our cultures ‘advantages’ hem them in. And if we are willing to be honest, most of us would agree — exhaustion is an epidemic. We run to keep up with our technology’s advances, and to do so we submit to its demands. People take fewer and fewer vacations, even when they are mandated. When asked why the most common answer is that they’re afraid not to be indispensable. We run after our children, who run after their friends. And the pressures of population are burning down our world. Within us is an ache of incompleteness. As the confession says, “We live in a broken and fearful world.”
In Lent we are called to face ourselves, to look into the mirror, to see how we have wandered off the way our Lord walks. In some ways each of us is called to leave our homes, to venture forth into unknown lands, with no sure collateral. We’re called to give up winning. To let go of pride that points us toward striving for control. We are called to value relationships more than being right. With listening more than solving. To find those who live in the dawn, the twilight, and the shadows of life and work at valuing them, including them, defending them. To remember that Jesus never felt obligated to harmonize with the power brokers, or the wealthy, or the socially advantaged. To refuse to be silent in the path of injustice, no matter what it costs to tell the truth.
So, we see that to follow this guy demands that we become strangers in a strange land. It demands that we walk away from the conditions and expectations that place boundaries and walls to keep the ‘good’ people safe and the ‘unacceptable’ people in their place or in the cage of society’s demands.
Lent calls us to be like Abram. To leave our nice environments and follow the call of God.
Personally, I’d rather give up chocolate. The amount of negative feedback and condemnation and scorn I’d have to face to be like that is right over the top. But, don’t forget, it only lasts until Easter. Unless you find that your labor in this vineyard is more rewarding than the craziness where you used to labor. Unless you come to value some of the ‘least of these’ that you’ve discovered on your journey. Unless the honesty and integrity you’ve discovered is something you never want to give up. Unless once you find the flesh and blood investment that God has made in you, on the cross, somehow makes you richer than you could ever imagine.
Then you’re not on a sight seeing tour of this new country. You’re a citizen of the kingdom of God.
What are you, nuts? Well, nuts like a few others, Abram, Jacob, Rebecca, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, John, Peter, Paul …. They all left home and followed. Crazy freaks.
* * *
Candid Posterity
by Frank Ramirez
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17, Matthew 17:1-9
For what does the scripture say? "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." (Romans 4:3)
In the ancient world comets were a sign that terrible events were in the offing. The death of a king, the fall of an empire, a plague, a famine, any of these could be the reason a comet appeared in the sky. Since disasters are always at hand the comet’s role as a prophet of doom would be justified sooner or later.
Oddly enough, comets were not considered heavenly bodies. It was believed that comets were atmospheric phenomena. They couldn’t be part of the heavens because the stars were unchanging and perfect. True, planets moved against the backdrop of the sky — the word planet is Greek for wanderer — but they stayed in their preordained paths.
A comet that appeared in the year 60 AD caused many to wonder if this might mean the death of the young Emperor Nero. According to the ancient historian Tacitus, many began to speculate who might succeed Nero, as if he were already dead. Nero insured that if anyone important was going to die because of this comet it would be someone else, not him. According to Suetonius, another ancient Roman historian, he massacred the nobility, murdering anyone who might have the slightest claim to the throne, and then banishing their children from the capital city Rome, where they were either poisoned or starved to death. Nero survived that comet’s appearance, as well as one in 66 AD that we later came to call Halley’s Comet.
That same comet is depicted during its appearance in 1066 in the magnificent Bayeaux Tapestry. 224 feet long, it depicts the tumultuous events of that year in Great Britain, when William, the Duke of Normandy, successfully invaded England and dethroned Harold, the King of England, in the Battle of Hastings. In a famous scene from that Tapestry commoners and nobility alike point to the blazing comet in the sky, wondering what this portent means. Harold’s dethronement and death obviously meant the omen was meant for him, and not his opponent William.
Sir Thomas More, famous for his novel Utopia, about the perfect human society, insisted that the rational people of his ideal world would have nothing to do with astrology. As he wrote: “But as for astrology — friendships and quarrels between the planets, fortune-telling by the stars, and all the rest of that humbug — they’ve never dreamed of such a thing.”
Queen Elizabeth I was having none of this superstition, however. When a comet appeared in 1577 her courtiers tried to prevent her from looking at it and drawing bad luck. She disdainfully brushed them aside and looked through a window at the comet, stating, “The die is cast.”
Cast indeed! The eminent astronomer Tycho Brahe took measurements of that comet against the stars and determined by his calculations that the comet was beyond the orbit of the moon, and therefore a heavenly body, and not an atmospheric disturbance.
Enter Edmund Halley (1656-1742). Halley was interested in everything. He invented a diving bell that he himself tested. He captained two voyages in order to chart the magnetism of the earth. He took barometric measurements after climbing a mountain so he could find out how air pressure changed at higher altitudes. His weather observations were the results of complex charting, and he calculated the life expectancy of various groups of people. He became an expert, and perhaps even a founder, of several branches of science, but of course he is best remembered for charting the course of a comet he observed in 1682, comparing it with comets that appeared in 1535 and 1607, charting its orbit, and predicting its return in 1758.
Halley died in 1742, before that comet’s reappearance. He did not live to see his vindication, but he had faith in his calculations and wrote shortly before his death: “…if according to what we have already said it should return again about the year 1758, candid posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman.”
In December of 1758, with all of Europe scanning the skies, the comet was spotted by a Dresden farmer who was also an amateur astronomer. And, of course, that comet, which bears his name, Halley’s Comet, has since reappeared in 1835, 1910, 1985, and we have no reason to think it will not make yet another appearance in 2061.
Halley’s trust in his calculations gave him the calm assurance that his prediction of the comet’s reappearance would come true. And the apostle Paul assures us that Abraham’s faith in God’s promises was just as strong, and that though the patriarch did not live to see it, his descendants indeed number more than the stars in the sky and the land that was promised was inherited by his descendants in due time.
(Want to know more? See “The Comet is Coming” by Nigel Calder, Viking Press, 1980, and Tacitus citation and Suetonius citation)
*****************************************
StoryShare, March 8, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
“Comfable?” by C. David McKirachan
“A Citizen of The Kingdom of God” by C. David McKirachan
“Candid Posterity” by Frank Ramirez
Comfable?
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 121
Every once in a while, I hear someone hold forth, “I had tickets to a baseball/football/soccer/basketball/hockey game and I didn’t go. It’s just too much hassle, with the crowd and the parking and all the yelling. Why would anyone go? It’s so much more comfortable to stay home and watch the whole thing on TV.”
My response is usually, “Next time you decide to be comfortable instead of going to the game, how about giving me a call. I’m a masochist. I’d love to be bothered like that.”
When Robert Schuller was starting his ministry, he did a poll among Christians who weren’t attending church. It was basically to find out why. The number one reason, now get this, the number one reason was… parking. So, he rented a drive-in movie theatre and had services there. People didn’t have to get out of their cars. They just used the speakers in their windows.
What is it with this comfort thing? I’ve coined a term, ‘comfable.’ That way you don’t have to use too many consonants. Less hassle.
One of the glories of being part of the worship experience is the gathering of the congregation, the unison prayers, singing the hymns. It stirs us in our middles (that’s a liturgical word meaning middle). I used to go to football games with an elderly gentleman who had season tickets to the Giants’ football games. He’d go early, always parked in the same area. So did the other people around him. They’d tailgate. The food was amazing. They knew each other from way back. They told stories of the glory days. They shared news about their kids, their grand kids, they laughed together and once in a while after the game they’d cry together.
In other words, they experienced community. It was a blast, even when the Giants lost. When you’re sitting in front of your 82” high definition TV in your sweats, somehow it’s not quite the same experience. You may be comfable, but you’re not at the game.
The 121st psalm was chanted antiphonally by pilgrims coming up the hill of the temple mount. Someone would start, and others would send the next lines back. These people, many of them from places where other languages were spoken, would be united, drawn together by this experience of knowing and sharing scripture that had been chanted by their parents and their parents. It bonded them, united them, and carried them into a shared experience of the presence of something bigger than they were, more important than their priorities, standing outside the ‘normal’ and the comfable.
Last time I looked there’s not a lot in scripture about comfable. There’s not a lot in scripture about convenient, punctual, or even parking.
The religious experience can be a moment of quiet and peace, a place of solitude and a still small voice. But even those moments are set aside, different, apart from the normality of our daily lives. Our congregational worship needs to be the same — set aside. We need to be inviting people away from their normal, scheduled, routine if they are to get any sense of the presence of a transcendent god. Otherwise worship is another appointment that hopefully they can get done with quickly, without too much hassle.
We who are called to lead God’s people are tasked with claiming that same vision. Our job is not to impress the crowd with giggles and special effects, it is not to stay current with what’s ‘hip.’ Our job is to be on the pilgrimage to the presence of God. To be reaching with arms to short to touch, and speaking with words too small to describe, to share our own journey with all the faithful who have come for something they’re not sure of, out of each of their daily routines, who are protected by excuses and cynicism and anxiety and fear. Our job is to call attention to our limitation and the miracles all around us. Our purpose is to teach them the traditions. Traditions that they can remember, and think about and use and look forward to sharing with others who come on the road to the place of worship. Our job is to start the song. To lift it up.
Winning and losing has little to do with it. Whether the budget is balanced or not. Whether we’re erudite or not. Whether we’re on time or not. This place is different. We come to experience the community that holds fast to the Lord of hosts, the God of justice and love, the God of our fathers and mothers in faith.
Start the song. And keep on truckin’ up the hill with all the others. Sooner or later some of them will join. It’s contagious.
* * *
A Citizen of The Kingdom of God
by C. David McKirachan
Genesis 12:1-4a
The story of Abram slams up against so many of our priorities as to be impossible to follow as an example of faith. It makes demands that are unreasonable, leaving home, leaving family, leaving nation all on the instigation of a promise from this unknown God. Abram’s father had left Ur, which gave the son some experience in moving on, but Dad probably made that move for the same reason people have been moving on since human beings were hunters and gatherers. Gotta go where the game is better. Gotta go where the job is. Gotta go where there’s opportunity. Gotta get away from the vice of normal expectations clamping down. At least Dad was gone. It would have broken his heart to see his son pull up stakes and wander away, following this will-of-the-wisp promise.
My ancestors left Scotland in the 1600’s to come to the new world. A friend of ours visited the ancestral turf and looked up the family. Evidentially they remember when my folks left. And the family in Scotland is still angry. I don’t know if they’re angry because we were irresponsible idiots because of something we’d done, or because we were seen as irresponsible idiots for leaving. Maybe both. Scots hold grudges. I’ll have to ask them when and if I go. Part of the problem could have been the perception that these people were leaving the known world, never to return. No more family reunions. No attending weddings or funerals. No more births to celebrate. No more family responsibilities. Gone. For some people that sounds attractive.
This passage only talks about men. I wonder how the women of the bunch felt. Mothers, sisters, maybe even grandmothers. I wonder if they were excited. Or did they go along because they had to follow the idiotic men, always looking to the other side of the fence.
The promise to Abram had to do with family, with the family’s future. But again, who was this spirit that whispered in the patriarch’s ear? Did the spirit present references? Show proof? Paul said that Abram showed faith. I don’t know if that shows faith or irresponsibility.
I have a sense that a lot of people who live in our brave new world are dissatisfied. The strictures of our cultures ‘advantages’ hem them in. And if we are willing to be honest, most of us would agree — exhaustion is an epidemic. We run to keep up with our technology’s advances, and to do so we submit to its demands. People take fewer and fewer vacations, even when they are mandated. When asked why the most common answer is that they’re afraid not to be indispensable. We run after our children, who run after their friends. And the pressures of population are burning down our world. Within us is an ache of incompleteness. As the confession says, “We live in a broken and fearful world.”
In Lent we are called to face ourselves, to look into the mirror, to see how we have wandered off the way our Lord walks. In some ways each of us is called to leave our homes, to venture forth into unknown lands, with no sure collateral. We’re called to give up winning. To let go of pride that points us toward striving for control. We are called to value relationships more than being right. With listening more than solving. To find those who live in the dawn, the twilight, and the shadows of life and work at valuing them, including them, defending them. To remember that Jesus never felt obligated to harmonize with the power brokers, or the wealthy, or the socially advantaged. To refuse to be silent in the path of injustice, no matter what it costs to tell the truth.
So, we see that to follow this guy demands that we become strangers in a strange land. It demands that we walk away from the conditions and expectations that place boundaries and walls to keep the ‘good’ people safe and the ‘unacceptable’ people in their place or in the cage of society’s demands.
Lent calls us to be like Abram. To leave our nice environments and follow the call of God.
Personally, I’d rather give up chocolate. The amount of negative feedback and condemnation and scorn I’d have to face to be like that is right over the top. But, don’t forget, it only lasts until Easter. Unless you find that your labor in this vineyard is more rewarding than the craziness where you used to labor. Unless you come to value some of the ‘least of these’ that you’ve discovered on your journey. Unless the honesty and integrity you’ve discovered is something you never want to give up. Unless once you find the flesh and blood investment that God has made in you, on the cross, somehow makes you richer than you could ever imagine.
Then you’re not on a sight seeing tour of this new country. You’re a citizen of the kingdom of God.
What are you, nuts? Well, nuts like a few others, Abram, Jacob, Rebecca, Moses, Joshua, Ruth, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Elijah, John, Peter, Paul …. They all left home and followed. Crazy freaks.
* * *
Candid Posterity
by Frank Ramirez
Romans 4:1-5, 13-17; John 3:1-17, Matthew 17:1-9
For what does the scripture say? "Abraham believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness." (Romans 4:3)
In the ancient world comets were a sign that terrible events were in the offing. The death of a king, the fall of an empire, a plague, a famine, any of these could be the reason a comet appeared in the sky. Since disasters are always at hand the comet’s role as a prophet of doom would be justified sooner or later.
Oddly enough, comets were not considered heavenly bodies. It was believed that comets were atmospheric phenomena. They couldn’t be part of the heavens because the stars were unchanging and perfect. True, planets moved against the backdrop of the sky — the word planet is Greek for wanderer — but they stayed in their preordained paths.
A comet that appeared in the year 60 AD caused many to wonder if this might mean the death of the young Emperor Nero. According to the ancient historian Tacitus, many began to speculate who might succeed Nero, as if he were already dead. Nero insured that if anyone important was going to die because of this comet it would be someone else, not him. According to Suetonius, another ancient Roman historian, he massacred the nobility, murdering anyone who might have the slightest claim to the throne, and then banishing their children from the capital city Rome, where they were either poisoned or starved to death. Nero survived that comet’s appearance, as well as one in 66 AD that we later came to call Halley’s Comet.
That same comet is depicted during its appearance in 1066 in the magnificent Bayeaux Tapestry. 224 feet long, it depicts the tumultuous events of that year in Great Britain, when William, the Duke of Normandy, successfully invaded England and dethroned Harold, the King of England, in the Battle of Hastings. In a famous scene from that Tapestry commoners and nobility alike point to the blazing comet in the sky, wondering what this portent means. Harold’s dethronement and death obviously meant the omen was meant for him, and not his opponent William.
Sir Thomas More, famous for his novel Utopia, about the perfect human society, insisted that the rational people of his ideal world would have nothing to do with astrology. As he wrote: “But as for astrology — friendships and quarrels between the planets, fortune-telling by the stars, and all the rest of that humbug — they’ve never dreamed of such a thing.”
Queen Elizabeth I was having none of this superstition, however. When a comet appeared in 1577 her courtiers tried to prevent her from looking at it and drawing bad luck. She disdainfully brushed them aside and looked through a window at the comet, stating, “The die is cast.”
Cast indeed! The eminent astronomer Tycho Brahe took measurements of that comet against the stars and determined by his calculations that the comet was beyond the orbit of the moon, and therefore a heavenly body, and not an atmospheric disturbance.
Enter Edmund Halley (1656-1742). Halley was interested in everything. He invented a diving bell that he himself tested. He captained two voyages in order to chart the magnetism of the earth. He took barometric measurements after climbing a mountain so he could find out how air pressure changed at higher altitudes. His weather observations were the results of complex charting, and he calculated the life expectancy of various groups of people. He became an expert, and perhaps even a founder, of several branches of science, but of course he is best remembered for charting the course of a comet he observed in 1682, comparing it with comets that appeared in 1535 and 1607, charting its orbit, and predicting its return in 1758.
Halley died in 1742, before that comet’s reappearance. He did not live to see his vindication, but he had faith in his calculations and wrote shortly before his death: “…if according to what we have already said it should return again about the year 1758, candid posterity will not refuse to acknowledge that this was first discovered by an Englishman.”
In December of 1758, with all of Europe scanning the skies, the comet was spotted by a Dresden farmer who was also an amateur astronomer. And, of course, that comet, which bears his name, Halley’s Comet, has since reappeared in 1835, 1910, 1985, and we have no reason to think it will not make yet another appearance in 2061.
Halley’s trust in his calculations gave him the calm assurance that his prediction of the comet’s reappearance would come true. And the apostle Paul assures us that Abraham’s faith in God’s promises was just as strong, and that though the patriarch did not live to see it, his descendants indeed number more than the stars in the sky and the land that was promised was inherited by his descendants in due time.
(Want to know more? See “The Comet is Coming” by Nigel Calder, Viking Press, 1980, and Tacitus citation and Suetonius citation)
*****************************************
StoryShare, March 8, 2020 issue.
Copyright 2020 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
