When all of man’s rules are de-ratified
When society’s fully ex-stratified
Greed, un-gratified
Beauty, beatified
Will I wonder “Where would I be at if I’d …?”

Several of my favorite blog reads have been especially concerned of late about how to do church … Brian Burkett, Wade Hodges, and bartender “thewalrus” at thesecondchance (don’t belly up to this bar if you’re easily offended, though; the virtual drinks are served full strength and the language can be as salty as a margarita glass).

Plus a couple of others – one of them is david u and I’ve misplaced the other – have dared to wonder if items like the Apostle’s Creed and the Nicene Creed are as out-of-date as we might think.

It makes me wonder if I should put words to my own version: The Postulant’s Screed, if you will … where “postulant” is defined as “someone making a request, especially to enter a religious order” and “screed” is defined as “a long and boring piece of writing” and/or “a strip of something set as an architectural guide to making a straight line (orthodox).”

Maybe it would go something like this:

• I’m not sure I believe in the church anymore; after all, Jesus only mentioned it once or twice. But I do believe in the kingdom because He talked about it a lot, and so did the writers of the New Testament.
• The problem is, I don’t know how much the church and the kingdom overlap and I don’t have a good feel for any solid preference – let alone command – about size, structure, or procedure expressed in scripture. So do those things matter?
• I get the feeling that Jesus and his followers were much more concerned about persuading others to pursue a relationship with God through His Son … and right after that, taking care of each other’s needs as much as possible.
• I can’t help but feel that worship began, at least, on a daily basis and was virtually indistinguishable from service. I mean right at first; right after Pentecost.
• And something niggling in the back of my mind (it might be a verse of scripture, or maybe a song) convinces me that if I would just seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, that all the other things I worry about would be given to me as well.
• I mean, I know what I’d like to have in worship and in church if it was up to me … and I don’t see a lot of “thou shalts” and “thou shalt nots” connected to it (except that it comes from my heart, of course) … so maybe isn’t it more important for me to serve the needs of others in those contexts? Won’t God see to it that my needs are met, and maybe even choose to meet them through my sisters and brothers in Christ?
• Am I just crazy? Too simplistic? Need more scripture citations? (Well, the Apostles and the Council of Nicea didn’t cite book, chapter or verse!)

Okay, sorry that was long and boring.

But it just wouldn’t be a screed otherwise.

It’s the requisite first hearing. The charges against you are read aloud. They are lengthy. They are familiar.

Because you are guilty on every count. If convicted, the penalty is death.

You try to look up at the Judge, but you can’t. Finally, after the last of the charges and specifications is read, you hear His voice intone your name and ask, “How do you plead?”

Words fail you. Your Defender steps forward. “Your Honor,” He says – and His voice sounds peculiarly like the Judge’s voice – “I am authorized to enter a plea of guilty for the defendant, and to take full responsibility for the specified crimes. We have a contract to that effect.”

“Unfair!” screams your accuser. “Unjust! Nepotism!” – but he is silenced.

“So noted,” the Judge replies, and turns to you. “The case against you is dismissed. Your Defender is to be remanded to custody to serve the full measure of your sentence: death by hanging.”

You turn to see to see your Defender’s face as the gavel sounds its finality.

What language can you borrow? Would a thousand tongues be enough? Would you daily prove His love?

Would you give Him back the life you owe?

I have a yeoman’s knowledge of how things work on the Internet, so I was especially amused a moment ago while doing a Google search – just out of curiosity – for a key word in the theme of a HeartWorship item I’m trying to write for my church bulletin … and seeing an automatically-generated ad in the right column reading:

Guilt
Huge selection, great deals on
Guilt.
eBay.com

Man, trust eBay to get you the best prices on what you want most – or least, apparently!

If Google’s advertising autocompiler only knew the Price that had to be paid ….

Are there songs and hymns led at your church that are hard for you to sing? Not because of a strange key or peculiar musical intervals, but because of the lyrics?

I have trouble singing “All to Jesus I Surrender.” I want to mean what I say when I sing it. I’m not sure I can and still be honest with God, with myself, and with the people singing around me.

Same thing with the line “Take my silver and my gold; Not a mite would I withhold.” Well, a mite … maybe, since it’s not a denomination of our current coinage. (Still, it would be a valuable collector piece!) How about just “take my silver” and let me keep the gold?

And there’s the final verse “None of self, and all of Thee.” Can’t quite sing it with all my heart. Wish I could.

Sometimes I have to stifle a verse with a cough. Or just drop out and clear my throat. Or, more honestly, I just don’t sing.

Am I being more harsh in judging myself than God would be? Does He see me the same way I saw my little ones when they used to proudly bring and give me some precious thing they had found … something that was already mine?

Are there songs that are hard for you to sing?

It’s no wonder we leave church and can’t wait to get in line at the cafeteria or get seated at the restaurant or gather around the dinner table at home.

We’re sublimating for what we really lack. We’re empty.

We’ve been emptied out by worship.

It isn’t supposed to fill us up. It’s supposed to empty us out.

We brought our handful of grain, our libation poured out, our dove or lamb or bullock and offered them on the altar. We left without them.

Oh, maybe we left with a crumb of bread and a taste of grape in us. Just enough to tingle the senses and ignite the salivary glands.

But we left our songs, our prayers, our smiles and hugs and tears and needs. We left our hopes and our pains. We gave them to God.

It’s no mystery that it never seems like it’s enough. It isn’t. It can’t be. What we bring can never measure up to what we’ve been given. Our sacrifice can never match His.

No matter how good the singing, the preaching, the devotion and fellowship can be, it will never been sufficient; never equal to what our Lord deserves. Deep down, we know that. A thousand tongues would only be a tiny fraction of what there should be.

What there will be. In heaven. That’s the feast we anticipate. That’s what we’re hungry for: to join the voices of millions upon countless millions.

For now, a few dozen will have to do. That, and the comfort of knowing that, just maybe, the same Spirit inspired worship leaders to lead the same song at the same time in the same key at the same tempo in a dozen different churches that morning, and that God heard them all at once and it was closer to what it should be.

Or that He heard the cacophony of all the different songs and keys and tempos and it was music to His ears, like the giggling of toddlers at play is to us.

So we long to see with His eyes and hear with His ears.

And we leave church starved.

Because we’re supposed to.

He met her online, through her blog, actually … so he never really met her. Never even saw her picture, but it didn’t matter. He was sure she was lovely because she wrote beautiful posts.

She wrote poetry, and music. She put her perspective on history. She told wonderful stories of how things were and could be and should be.

It was obvious that others were enchanted with her, too, from their comments. She had done sweet and thoughtful and sometimes extravagant things for them.

He put some friends onto her blog, just to be sure he wasn’t reading too much into it. They were all quite taken with her, too.

He contacted her by e-mail, and the relationship began. He wanted to meet her, and it would have been fine with her, but he never asked for a date or time or place. Finally, she did. And she offered to drive and meet him where he was.

The promise elated him for days. But the day came … and went … and though he checked his PDA’s e-mail record from her to ensure he was at the right place at the right time, she wasn’t.

Heartbroken, he sent e-mails that were not returned. Her blog entries stopped; she was a consistent – almost daily – blogger. It wasn’t like her. He feared something awful had happened, and his suspicions proved true when a search engine turned up her obituary.

And her story. The article quoted witnesses say that she had seen a semi-tanker rig plummeting driverless down a hill at a truck stop and slammed on her accelerator to interpose her car. It deflected a collision with a busload of elderly tourists, saving them from fiery doom.

He mourned. His friends supported him. They supported each other. They talked about her often. They found other groups online who did the same. They wrote blogs about her. They pored through her archives. They remembered.

Sometimes they wondered whether she had been a teacher, or a doctor or a counselor, because she had written about teaching and healing with obvious experience and passion. Sometimes they wondered if all her entries had been written by her. Because some days she seemed to have been in a different mood and had been writing in a different style. He did a careful language study, counted the characteristic words, and published his controversial findings.

Other times his friends quibbled with her other fan clubs about the blogs they had written about her. She had never mentioned anything but vocalists among her favorite music, and yet some were convinced she must have liked instrumental music too. He became a strong proponent for one of the views.

The quibbles became online slugfests, and more time and pixels were spent arguing than remembering … or doing any of the things she had enjoyed doing … or helping any of the people she had loved to help. He was taking and delivering potshots in the fanblogs and by e-mail and it was just all emptiness to him.

Finally, he decided that he was was wasting his time; he should forget all of his misguided friends and forget her and get a life.

Tomorrow I will not blog.

Tomorrow I will be thinking of my dad.

Twelve years ago tomorrow he breathed his last in this world.

Norman William Brenton was the very definition of meekness. His picture should appear next to the word in illustrated dictionaries. He was the third-most humble person, I believe, to walk in this world. Though he was never tempted to strike a rock rather than speak to it, nor to overturn a moneychanger’s table, he did once get out of the car and scold a drunk driver who had hung up his ride on a high curb after nearly hitting ours as we drove to church. Yet for that instance, there were probably a dozen in which he warmly greeted a tipsy, rheumy-eyed visitor to our inner-city church and escorted them to the benevolent room for a fresh change of clothing.

Dad had some sort of coronary episode on the first day he died. Mistaking it for indigestion, my mom dashed to the store for milk. She found him dead when she returned. EMT medics resuscitated him, but his brain had been starved of oxygen too long.

He remained in a coma on life support as the family gathered. We faced the worst. We prayed for the best. For a miracle. We knew he had a living will and we knew what it said, yet my mom and older sister and her husband could not find it in the safe at home, even after looking several times.

This may have been an instance of that peculiar phenonmenon called “hysterical blindness.” It has little to do with out-of-control emotions; it describes the suppression of visual information due to shock.

(I experienced it once, having happened first on the scene of a single-car accident; an old station wagon driven recklessly by a young woman who had just passed me too close on the expressway then plowed through a guardrail and rolled her car several times down an embankment. When I peered into the upside-down car, I couldn’t see her. Another fellow walked up. “Is she already out of the car?” I asked. “Could she be under the dash?” He looked at me like I was crazy: “Man, she’s all over the place.”)

Though my family didn’t see Dad’s living will in the safe, I found it in moments. It said that he did not wish to have any heroic measures taken to prolong his life in this situation. We prayed again. We asked for him to be removed from artificial ventilation, but to retain intravenous nourishment. We put it in God’s hands.

Dad breathed on his own for a couple of weeks, never stirring from the coma, and at last expired. Twelve years ago tomorrow.

It gave time for all of us in his family to get used to the idea that he would be gone.

I don’t know whether his Lord gave him that choice when coming for him the first time, but I know what Dad would have said.

The very different tragedy currently playing out within the family of Terri Schiavo has brought all of these memories fresh to my mind. (You can read a fine recap of the situation at Believer Blog.)

I’m reminded that I have a responsibility to my family that I need to attend to. I have checked the little box on my Arkansas driver’s license that expresses my desire to be an organ donor. I’ve told my family about it.

But I don’t have a living will, spelling out what I would wish for them to do in catastrophic circumstances.

Yet.

Could it be that – when it comes to the matter of my own demise – I have a case of hysterical blindness?

i’ve got one of those miserable garzonguous headaches again and i’ve just woken up from a nap where i dreamed i was my friend david u getting back from arizona or maybe one of my other met-or-unmet friends getting back from abilene later this week or from winterfest in gatlinburg and i’m catching up on the blog entries i’ve missed while i’ve been gone and finding myself permanently three days behind in this nightmarish twilightzonish separation where there are people with ideas and heartaches and joys that i can’t share because i’m always going to be three days apart out-of-sync from them in this unreachacrossable great gulf of discontinuity and i wonder is this how god felt when he went for broke in the fullness of time and there was no alternative but to send his only son because he had lost it all every precious soul he had created and loved and cherished and wept over since the beginning of time and he’d promised them he’d get them back no matter what they did and he set the deadline and there was no getting around it and that son had to die so he could have just a few of his children back so he went for broke and rolled the dice and his son said please father now send me it can’t wait and he did and the entire universe came to a screeching squealing fishtailing halt when the nails went in and the veil of the temple tore and then he waited and waited and waited an eternity three days a glimmer of hope forty days and some words by peter and the rush of his spirit and then the results started trickling in like election returns here are some back! one, twelve, three thousand a tiny fraction a drop in the bucket and the days crept on while he watched and waited from the edge of his throne a few more turning their faces homeward here and there until years have past and decades and centuries and he still waits as if nothing else matters in the cosmos but reaching across that almost unbridgeable three day chasm to the ones he has loved and lost my head hurts my head hurts my heart hurts