Primary Source
Stories
Object:
Contents
What's Up This Week
"Primary Source" by C. David McKirachan
"Doubt" by Keith Hewitt
"Pinko Liberals" by C. David McKirachan
What's Up This Week
In order to really understand what happened long ago, historians always try to locate and work with "primary sources," such as letters or other documents written by the people who were actually there. In this edition of StoryShare, David McKirachan ponders the importance of primary sources for our faith -- and how we need to be primary sources ourselves for the risen Christ. This Sunday's gospel text tells the story of "doubting" Thomas -- and Keith Hewitt takes us inside the head of Thomas, as he vehemently maintains that he never doubted the Master. But given the extraordinary events of Jesus' trial and crucifixion, Thomas needed to experience the primary source himself -- the risen Savior in the flesh -- to be able to grasp the earthshaking events that had unfolded. Finally, David McKirachan shares a personal vignette involving his parents and concludes that resurrection calls the church to radical action.
* * * * * * * * *
Primary Source
by C. David McKirachan
1 John 1:1--2:2
I teach public speaking at Monmouth University. The statistics show that people are less afraid of suicide bombers than they are of public speaking. But that's another story. One of the things I teach them is how to use evidence. There are three kinds of sources. Tertiary sources come from any form of media, books, journals, film, TV, and so forth. Using these gives the speaker credibility. Then there are secondary sources, which come from an interview or poll that the person putting the presentation together conducted. Using a secondary source gives the speaker an aura of expertise. Then there are primary sources. These come from the speaker's own experience, and they give the speaker emotional authority.
I worry about our culture. People tend to watch other people from a distance. They are less willing to strive and reach than they used to be. They go to national parks less. They use channel-changers the way we used to use cars to get places. They text and email each other rather than calling or visiting. I feel like yelling at them, "Get a life!"
How do you teach someone about faith when they've never lived? How do you offer them salvation when the major priorities in their life are comfort and convenience? How do you lead them toward love when they are the center of the universe? The other day a visitor to the church came out the front door, shook my hand, and said, "That was really dramatic. It's almost like you believed what you were saying." I took it as a compliment, thanked them, and left the church shaking my head.
The passion of the gospel is grounded on primary sources. It rises out of people experiencing the transforming power of the risen Christ. Some of them were there, saw him, touched him. But that power didn't stop flowing when he wasn't around. The experiences that formed the early church had to do with people caring and sharing and struggling and crying and laughing and offering new hope to a cynical, dark world. They experienced the Christ in their lives and their relationships. This wasn't something they read about or studied -- it was an experience, and they built their lives on its power and truth.
If we would preach and teach, if we would evangelize, we must be primary sources for the risen Christ. There's nothing wrong with credibility or expertise, but emotional authority reaches through all the layers of denial and distance and touches. We have been given a life, abundant life. Wanna see it? Turn off the TV.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Doubt
by Keith Hewitt
John 20:19-31
If you believe nothing else of what I tell you, believe this: I never doubted.
I never doubted the Master. During the time I traveled with him, the time I lived with him, and learned from him, I felt many things: confusion, hope, love, fear, even an occasional glimmer of understanding -- you name it and I probably experienced it some time during those three years. But I can honestly say I never doubted him. If you think I did, then you're buying into the spin.
To understand where I'm coming from, you have to understand what those last days were like. For months beforehand, Jesus had been telling us that the end -- his end -- was near. First indirectly, and then more and more directly as time went on, he told us that he would soon die. We put on a bold face for the world, but we fretted over that, talked about it among ourselves, tried to understand why he would say such a thing. We didn't understand how he could be so sure that he would be treated that way.
Then that Sunday, that glorious day, all those worries were swept away as we entered Jerusalem like peaceful conquerors -- he rode in to cheering crowds waving palm fronds, total strangers throwing their cloaks on the ground for his donkey to walk upon. We rode the crest of that incredible wave, with a man we convinced ourselves that we had misunderstood, that this was not a man on a path to destruction but a prophet on a path to glory.
And then… and then…
Then came the arrest at our place of refuge, when we scattered like frightened birds, hardly looking back to see what had happened, only to see if the guards were on our trail, too. That was followed by the night of terror for us, fear that the authorities would not content themselves with the root of the rebellion, but might come after the fragile shoots that it had nourished. Scattered, running when no one pursued, hiding with friends or in dark alleys -- always with an ear cocked to the night, waiting for the pounding on the door or the shout in the dark that would tell us our time had come, too.
There was the trial (if you call it that), where none of us came forward to defend him, or even dared show our face to the authorities. The one man who came closest to him that night, who almost stood with the Master in the face of overwhelming power, still denied knowing him when someone picked him out of the crowd and fled back into the darkness to nurse the knot of shame that burned in his belly. He found me that night and told me what he had done, though I could barely understand him through the sobs -- and then I held him for the night, cradling his head as he wept like a child, wept for the ordeal our Master would face, wept for knowing how he had broken and run.
Only one of us dared to stand by the cross the next day while Jesus poured out his life upon the rocky soil of Golgotha. Even so, it was not one of us who stepped forward that afternoon to claim the body, who dared to ask permission to take him down from that damned thing and give him a proper burial, rather than be left hanging for the crows and the dogs, or pulled down and thrown into the Valley of Gehenna with the trash.
We did not dare ask such a "favor," but hid and plumbed the depths of our own hells while this near-stranger stepped forward. We hid while the old man and the women took Jesus down and did him one last kindness. I would like to say that it wasn't so, but it was. We -- his disciples -- stood by and did nothing. Not even a week had gone by since we entered Jerusalem feeling like princes-to-be… and there we were, like rats in the dark.
Saturday was another day of torment, another day of questions, another day of waiting for our own personal worlds to end. By nightfall, we began to believe that maybe we would not be rounded up. We started to gather, in twos and threes, to tell each other about our own narrow escapes, to describe how close we came to the Master's fate, all the while knowing that every word was bluster, finally collapsing into shared misery, equal parts grief and self-pity.
That night, too, passed slowly. I was not with the group that the women sought out the next morning -- I was not there when they set hearts racing by suddenly pounding on the door before the light had penetrated to the deepest corners of Jerusalem, making all inside believe that their time had come after all. I was not there when the women babbled of an empty tomb, or when several of the disciples raced to that tomb to see for themselves what the women had seen… or not seen. I was not there, but I can imagine what a picture it must have been.
I can imagine the confusion, and the panic, and the disbelief that gripped them.
I wasn't there that night, in the safe house where most of my companions had gathered to discuss what had happened, to try to figure out where the Master's body had gone, because even then -- even with the women reporting that they had seen him themselves -- it was just not to be believed. Women, after all, were prone to hysteria, and under the circumstances they might believe they had seen anything. Leave it to the men to figure out: the men who had deserted him and hid themselves for three days.
They were still pondering this mystery when he appeared among them. I know that because they told me… they told me how one moment they were arguing among themselves, and the next he was there, standing among them. Instead of fear, even instead of shock, calm rippled out from his presence. He spoke to them, and they finally understood; he spoke to them, and their fears drained away; he spoke to them, and they knew that everything had happened according to plan.
And they spoke to me, and I wasn't ready to believe. They talked to me for days, told me how foolish I was, told me how wrong I was, but I did not believe. It wasn't until I stood in the room with them a week later and saw his glorious face -- when I saw those hands, and the scars on his body -- that I believed.
But you see, it's not that I didn't believe in the Master. When I look back now, I can understand quite a bit of what he had told us, understand that he was trying to prepare us to think about the unthinkable, endure the unendurable. He was telling us about a grand plan, when all we wanted to know was "What about us?"
When I looked back on the days of his arrest, and trial, and execution… the days we separated ourselves from him in fear rather than reaching out for him in love, I wondered. How could he have done so much, and we so little, and he would still come back to people like us?
I never doubted the Master, I just didn't understand why he would come back to us. It wasn't until that night, when I finally did look upon his face, when I saw the love in his eyes, when he reached out to me like an old friend back from a long journey that I understood.
I understood that it needed no understanding… that's what grace is all about.
And I wept once more.
Keith Hewitt is the author of NaTiVity Dramas: Four Nontraditional Christmas Plays for All Ages (CSS). He is a lay speaker, co-youth leader, and former Sunday school teacher at Wilmot United Methodist Church in Wilmot, Wisconsin. He lives in southeastern Wisconsin with his wife and two children, and works in the IT department at a major public safety testing organization.
Pinko Liberals
by C. David McKirachan
Acts 4:32-35
It's always been hard for me to understand how Christians can get upset with talking about money in church. If you read just about anything in scripture and don't waste your time looking for loopholes, you get a very clear indication that if we're going to live according to what's there, we're going to have to get over any preoccupation with defending our own pile.
My parents were upstanding Americans in the 1950s, which meant if you weren't toeing and heeling the line, you were suspect. Dad was pastor of a tall pulpit in the homeland of Ike. And mother was the classic pastor's wife. She wore gloves on Sunday and taught the women's Bible class. If you read history you know that at the time there was a monster polluting the brains and spirits of this nation. It was fear -- and some in the political arena used it for their own purposes. I was a kid and knew very little of what was going on. But I wore an I Like Ike button and was roundly patted and appreciated as a "good kid." Even then I wondered what about that button made me "good."
Years later I was asking my then-retired parents about what it was like to live in that time. Did they have any misgivings about the attitudes and assumptions that demanded so much of people and condemned those that didn't follow the pack? They both got quiet, which is something neither one was wont to do when discussing politics or social movements. I said, "Okay, what's going on?" My mother broke the ice. "I voted for Stevenson." My father almost fell off his chair. She went on, "Twice."
I didn't put this in the "wow" category, but it was clear he was amazed. "You never said a word about this."
"I didn't want to make trouble for you."
He smiled at her and took her hand. "I did too. Twice."
After the laughter and the tears they had a new sense of alliance. They talked about their subversive foray into liberalism and its roots in a very simple source, scripture. They couldn't leave the poor outside the voting booth.
They taught me that no political party was godly. They taught me that if I was going to be Christian I had to let others have their opinion. But they also taught me that if anybody needed something, it was our job to do something about it.
I would hate to think that the resurrection would make the church liberal. I'm pretty sure it would make the church radical.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
**************
StoryShare, April 19, 2009, issue.
Copyright 2009 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., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
What's Up This Week
"Primary Source" by C. David McKirachan
"Doubt" by Keith Hewitt
"Pinko Liberals" by C. David McKirachan
What's Up This Week
In order to really understand what happened long ago, historians always try to locate and work with "primary sources," such as letters or other documents written by the people who were actually there. In this edition of StoryShare, David McKirachan ponders the importance of primary sources for our faith -- and how we need to be primary sources ourselves for the risen Christ. This Sunday's gospel text tells the story of "doubting" Thomas -- and Keith Hewitt takes us inside the head of Thomas, as he vehemently maintains that he never doubted the Master. But given the extraordinary events of Jesus' trial and crucifixion, Thomas needed to experience the primary source himself -- the risen Savior in the flesh -- to be able to grasp the earthshaking events that had unfolded. Finally, David McKirachan shares a personal vignette involving his parents and concludes that resurrection calls the church to radical action.
* * * * * * * * *
Primary Source
by C. David McKirachan
1 John 1:1--2:2
I teach public speaking at Monmouth University. The statistics show that people are less afraid of suicide bombers than they are of public speaking. But that's another story. One of the things I teach them is how to use evidence. There are three kinds of sources. Tertiary sources come from any form of media, books, journals, film, TV, and so forth. Using these gives the speaker credibility. Then there are secondary sources, which come from an interview or poll that the person putting the presentation together conducted. Using a secondary source gives the speaker an aura of expertise. Then there are primary sources. These come from the speaker's own experience, and they give the speaker emotional authority.
I worry about our culture. People tend to watch other people from a distance. They are less willing to strive and reach than they used to be. They go to national parks less. They use channel-changers the way we used to use cars to get places. They text and email each other rather than calling or visiting. I feel like yelling at them, "Get a life!"
How do you teach someone about faith when they've never lived? How do you offer them salvation when the major priorities in their life are comfort and convenience? How do you lead them toward love when they are the center of the universe? The other day a visitor to the church came out the front door, shook my hand, and said, "That was really dramatic. It's almost like you believed what you were saying." I took it as a compliment, thanked them, and left the church shaking my head.
The passion of the gospel is grounded on primary sources. It rises out of people experiencing the transforming power of the risen Christ. Some of them were there, saw him, touched him. But that power didn't stop flowing when he wasn't around. The experiences that formed the early church had to do with people caring and sharing and struggling and crying and laughing and offering new hope to a cynical, dark world. They experienced the Christ in their lives and their relationships. This wasn't something they read about or studied -- it was an experience, and they built their lives on its power and truth.
If we would preach and teach, if we would evangelize, we must be primary sources for the risen Christ. There's nothing wrong with credibility or expertise, but emotional authority reaches through all the layers of denial and distance and touches. We have been given a life, abundant life. Wanna see it? Turn off the TV.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Doubt
by Keith Hewitt
John 20:19-31
If you believe nothing else of what I tell you, believe this: I never doubted.
I never doubted the Master. During the time I traveled with him, the time I lived with him, and learned from him, I felt many things: confusion, hope, love, fear, even an occasional glimmer of understanding -- you name it and I probably experienced it some time during those three years. But I can honestly say I never doubted him. If you think I did, then you're buying into the spin.
To understand where I'm coming from, you have to understand what those last days were like. For months beforehand, Jesus had been telling us that the end -- his end -- was near. First indirectly, and then more and more directly as time went on, he told us that he would soon die. We put on a bold face for the world, but we fretted over that, talked about it among ourselves, tried to understand why he would say such a thing. We didn't understand how he could be so sure that he would be treated that way.
Then that Sunday, that glorious day, all those worries were swept away as we entered Jerusalem like peaceful conquerors -- he rode in to cheering crowds waving palm fronds, total strangers throwing their cloaks on the ground for his donkey to walk upon. We rode the crest of that incredible wave, with a man we convinced ourselves that we had misunderstood, that this was not a man on a path to destruction but a prophet on a path to glory.
And then… and then…
Then came the arrest at our place of refuge, when we scattered like frightened birds, hardly looking back to see what had happened, only to see if the guards were on our trail, too. That was followed by the night of terror for us, fear that the authorities would not content themselves with the root of the rebellion, but might come after the fragile shoots that it had nourished. Scattered, running when no one pursued, hiding with friends or in dark alleys -- always with an ear cocked to the night, waiting for the pounding on the door or the shout in the dark that would tell us our time had come, too.
There was the trial (if you call it that), where none of us came forward to defend him, or even dared show our face to the authorities. The one man who came closest to him that night, who almost stood with the Master in the face of overwhelming power, still denied knowing him when someone picked him out of the crowd and fled back into the darkness to nurse the knot of shame that burned in his belly. He found me that night and told me what he had done, though I could barely understand him through the sobs -- and then I held him for the night, cradling his head as he wept like a child, wept for the ordeal our Master would face, wept for knowing how he had broken and run.
Only one of us dared to stand by the cross the next day while Jesus poured out his life upon the rocky soil of Golgotha. Even so, it was not one of us who stepped forward that afternoon to claim the body, who dared to ask permission to take him down from that damned thing and give him a proper burial, rather than be left hanging for the crows and the dogs, or pulled down and thrown into the Valley of Gehenna with the trash.
We did not dare ask such a "favor," but hid and plumbed the depths of our own hells while this near-stranger stepped forward. We hid while the old man and the women took Jesus down and did him one last kindness. I would like to say that it wasn't so, but it was. We -- his disciples -- stood by and did nothing. Not even a week had gone by since we entered Jerusalem feeling like princes-to-be… and there we were, like rats in the dark.
Saturday was another day of torment, another day of questions, another day of waiting for our own personal worlds to end. By nightfall, we began to believe that maybe we would not be rounded up. We started to gather, in twos and threes, to tell each other about our own narrow escapes, to describe how close we came to the Master's fate, all the while knowing that every word was bluster, finally collapsing into shared misery, equal parts grief and self-pity.
That night, too, passed slowly. I was not with the group that the women sought out the next morning -- I was not there when they set hearts racing by suddenly pounding on the door before the light had penetrated to the deepest corners of Jerusalem, making all inside believe that their time had come after all. I was not there when the women babbled of an empty tomb, or when several of the disciples raced to that tomb to see for themselves what the women had seen… or not seen. I was not there, but I can imagine what a picture it must have been.
I can imagine the confusion, and the panic, and the disbelief that gripped them.
I wasn't there that night, in the safe house where most of my companions had gathered to discuss what had happened, to try to figure out where the Master's body had gone, because even then -- even with the women reporting that they had seen him themselves -- it was just not to be believed. Women, after all, were prone to hysteria, and under the circumstances they might believe they had seen anything. Leave it to the men to figure out: the men who had deserted him and hid themselves for three days.
They were still pondering this mystery when he appeared among them. I know that because they told me… they told me how one moment they were arguing among themselves, and the next he was there, standing among them. Instead of fear, even instead of shock, calm rippled out from his presence. He spoke to them, and they finally understood; he spoke to them, and their fears drained away; he spoke to them, and they knew that everything had happened according to plan.
And they spoke to me, and I wasn't ready to believe. They talked to me for days, told me how foolish I was, told me how wrong I was, but I did not believe. It wasn't until I stood in the room with them a week later and saw his glorious face -- when I saw those hands, and the scars on his body -- that I believed.
But you see, it's not that I didn't believe in the Master. When I look back now, I can understand quite a bit of what he had told us, understand that he was trying to prepare us to think about the unthinkable, endure the unendurable. He was telling us about a grand plan, when all we wanted to know was "What about us?"
When I looked back on the days of his arrest, and trial, and execution… the days we separated ourselves from him in fear rather than reaching out for him in love, I wondered. How could he have done so much, and we so little, and he would still come back to people like us?
I never doubted the Master, I just didn't understand why he would come back to us. It wasn't until that night, when I finally did look upon his face, when I saw the love in his eyes, when he reached out to me like an old friend back from a long journey that I understood.
I understood that it needed no understanding… that's what grace is all about.
And I wept once more.
Keith Hewitt is the author of NaTiVity Dramas: Four Nontraditional Christmas Plays for All Ages (CSS). He is a lay speaker, co-youth leader, and former Sunday school teacher at Wilmot United Methodist Church in Wilmot, Wisconsin. He lives in southeastern Wisconsin with his wife and two children, and works in the IT department at a major public safety testing organization.
Pinko Liberals
by C. David McKirachan
Acts 4:32-35
It's always been hard for me to understand how Christians can get upset with talking about money in church. If you read just about anything in scripture and don't waste your time looking for loopholes, you get a very clear indication that if we're going to live according to what's there, we're going to have to get over any preoccupation with defending our own pile.
My parents were upstanding Americans in the 1950s, which meant if you weren't toeing and heeling the line, you were suspect. Dad was pastor of a tall pulpit in the homeland of Ike. And mother was the classic pastor's wife. She wore gloves on Sunday and taught the women's Bible class. If you read history you know that at the time there was a monster polluting the brains and spirits of this nation. It was fear -- and some in the political arena used it for their own purposes. I was a kid and knew very little of what was going on. But I wore an I Like Ike button and was roundly patted and appreciated as a "good kid." Even then I wondered what about that button made me "good."
Years later I was asking my then-retired parents about what it was like to live in that time. Did they have any misgivings about the attitudes and assumptions that demanded so much of people and condemned those that didn't follow the pack? They both got quiet, which is something neither one was wont to do when discussing politics or social movements. I said, "Okay, what's going on?" My mother broke the ice. "I voted for Stevenson." My father almost fell off his chair. She went on, "Twice."
I didn't put this in the "wow" category, but it was clear he was amazed. "You never said a word about this."
"I didn't want to make trouble for you."
He smiled at her and took her hand. "I did too. Twice."
After the laughter and the tears they had a new sense of alliance. They talked about their subversive foray into liberalism and its roots in a very simple source, scripture. They couldn't leave the poor outside the voting booth.
They taught me that no political party was godly. They taught me that if I was going to be Christian I had to let others have their opinion. But they also taught me that if anybody needed something, it was our job to do something about it.
I would hate to think that the resurrection would make the church liberal. I'm pretty sure it would make the church radical.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. He is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
**************
StoryShare, April 19, 2009, issue.
Copyright 2009 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., 517 South Main Street, Lima, Ohio 45804.
