October 2005 Archives

I apologize for not having kept up better with posting lectionary notes for each week. I'll try to do better in the future.

For this post, I'm including the text to the message I'll be preaching for the very first service I've ever conducted. I'll probably be making some changes over the next two days, as I have not read the entire message out loud yet, but this is linked to my editorial in tomorrow's issue of catapult, so I've got to get it online before I go to bed.

If you have any comments for me in the next day or so, please feel free to post them since, as I said, I'll be doing some editing yet.

Scripture Texts for October 23, the Twenty-Fourth Sunday after Pentecost

In the film American Beauty, there are two family dinner scenes featuring the Burnham family. The first scene hints at the tension that is building in this seemingly perfect American family. Carolyn, the mother, appears to be the success-driven, image-conscious glue that binds Jane (the rebellious teen-aged daughter), Lester (the defeated middle-aged husband) and herself into a pleasantly dysfunctional family--though no one viewing them from outside of their perfect suburban home would ever suspect there?s an undercurrent of dissatisfaction.

By the time the second dinner scene arrives, however, the dam that was restraining Lester?s rage has broken. Without consulting the family, he?s quit his flatlining job as a writer for a media magazine, blackmailing his boss in the process for a year?s pay. At the table, his newfound sense of empowerment and liberation collides with his wife?s efforts to suppress him with guilt. The inside voices ascend to yelling and the perfect etiquette deteriorates to throwing the asparagus, platter and all, against the tastefully decorated wall.

Later that evening, Carolyn tries to recover perfection by initiating a mother-daughter talk with Jane, who?s retreated to the calm of her bedroom. We, as third parties looking in, can?t help but hope for a revelation in this encounter that will lead to healing. Instead, she relays the following life lesson:

I wish that you hadn?t witnessed that awful scene tonight, but in a way, I?m glad?.I?m glad because you?re old enough now to learn the most important lesson in life: You cannot count on anyone except yourself. You cannot count on anyone except yourself. It?s sad, but true, and the sooner you learn it, the better.

She?s not lying or being sarcastic. This is the primary lesson she has learned and is learning and she feels it will bring some comfort and wisdom to her daughter, sparing her the pain of realizing the truth later.

I wanted to set up this situation as a foil to what we?re going to look at today. In the Matthew text, we have the hinges on which the whole Bible hangs. Jesus summarizes centuries of history and myriad books of law with two commandments: Love God and love your neighbor. This is a far cry from Carolyn?s lesson: You cannot count on anyone except yourself. Where Carolyn advocates survival through the restraint of relationship and self-preservation, Jesus tells us that living faithfully requires relationship and self-sacrifice.

Jesus? words are deceptively simple. While we are created for love by God, the practice of love can be difficult. As we are faced with daily choices, we often don?t even know what the most loving choice might be. Fortunately, our texts today provide us with three distinct examples of people who loved well in different ways and in different times: Moses, Jesus and the founders of the early church. Using their lives as examples, we?ll begin to explore what it means not just to love, but to love well.

To understand the implications of the second and equal commandment to love our neighbors, we must first explore the nature of the greatest commandment: ?You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.? Heart and soul and mind imply a desire for complete unity with God, an offering of the whole self, including the emotions, the will and the intellect. While Jesus? words do not lay out a particular plan of action for loving God, they give us a direction to face. The words affirm acts of worship and devotion as central to the life of the Christian individual and faith community. The words validate study and emotional experience as important ways of knowing God. The words guide us into a foundational right relationship with God that precedes and produces right relationship with others.

Though the Pharisees only ask for the greatest commandment (singular), Jesus exposes their restrictions as being too narrow when he goes on to name the second, which is inextricably tied to the first: ?Love your neighbor as yourself.? Frederick Dale Bruner writes,

Love for God is the greatest command of all, and it is the first command of all, out of which, as from a fountain, the equally important second command flows?.In Jesus? command, the love of God is the supreme responsibility, but this love?s reality and a large measure of its expression occur only in love of neighbor?. A neighbor-minimizing love of God is as reprehensible to the prophetic Jesus as a God-minimizing love of neighbor is impossible for the pastoral Jesus.

Bruner emphasizes the balance that these two paired commandments bring to the faithful life: Love is lived in both worship and service. One without the other can constitute idolatry, either of social or evangelical causes.

If the love of God finds its expression, at least in part, in the love of our neighbor, what does a rooted love of neighbor look like? To find some insight into the practical means of loving our neighbors as ourselves, we can turn to the Word as it comes to us today from both Deuteronomy and Thessalonians. One of the major threads in these accounts is the sacrifice of self, which plays out in several ways. A first principle of loving well that we learn from the founders of the early Church is that of holding loosely to comfort, security and home.

Paul writes the first letter to the Thessalonians from Corinth, where he is the benefactor of Priscilla and Aquila?s hospitality. This transience for the sake of love is one that very few Christians practice today. In fact, to encounter such a wandering evangelist, many of us would assume him an addict or a fanatic or a professional con-man. But Paul and the early church founders choose this way of life for the sake of love. Paul writes,

So deeply do we care for you that we are determined to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you have become very dear to us.

Does love of neighbor necessarily imply this kind of wandering homelessness? Not for everyone, I believe, but love does require openness to such a call. Jean Vanier, the founder of The Arch communities for disabled people, explains the necessity of this openness, saying,

We who are rich are often demanding and difficult. We shut ourselves up in our apartments and may even use a watchdog to defend our property. Poor people, of course, have nothing to defend and often share the little they have.

When people have all the material things they need, they seem not to need each other. They are self-sufficient. There is no interdependence. There is no love. In a poor community, however, there is often a lot of mutual help and sharing of goods, as well as help from outside. Poverty can even become a cement of unity.

We who ?have? must serve others in need, just as those who have need depend on those who are willing to share--within this circle of giving and receiving lives the love of neighbor. Let us not deceive ourselves by

In addition to holding loosely to our tangible possessions, loving well also involves holding loosely to intangible possessions: namely, our desire for measured success and our self-centered reservations. Moses, as someone who lived and died for a goal he never personally saw realized, is a primary example of one who loved his neighbors well. Through plagues and disappointments and wandering, Moses lived for God?s promise of redemption for the Israelites. An ?unequaled? prophet, he died not of old age or illness, but ?at the Lord?s command,? after having a glimpse of that which he worked for, but would not see achieved.

Another prophet who is closer to our own time, Archbishop Oscar Romero, mirrored the selflessness of Moses in his willingness to live and die for the vision of justice for Salvadoran peasants. In his poem ?A future not our own,? Romero writes,

We accomplish in our lifetime only a tiny fraction of

the magnificent enterprise that is God's work.

Nothing we do is complete,

which is another way of saying

that the kingdom always lies beyond us....

This is what we are about:

We plant seeds that one day will grow.

We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future

promise.

We lay foundations that will need further development.

We provide yeast that produces effects beyond our capabilities....

We may never see the end results,

but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker.

We are workers, not master builders,

ministers, not messiahs.

We are prophets of a future not our own.

He recognized that a right view of ourselves as small, but significant players in an eternal story would lead to the sort of self-forgetfulness that allows us, in humility, to serve others effectively--or to love others well--within our time and place. Reversing that principle, when we exhaust ourselves in the attempt to achieve a defined goal, when we live with a sense that we will have failed unless we ?achieve? something quantifiable before we die, we make idols out of our particular time and place. In essence, we make idols of ourselves by refusing to acknowledge the value of what lies beyond our own experience. However, loving our neighbors with self-abandon means responding moment by moment to the voice of an eternal Spirit who may command the end of this life before the realization of the Promised Land.

The story of Moses also exemplified self-sacrifice in the surrender of self-centered reservations. The man who claimed God needed a more eloquent agent of redemption became the greatest prophet Israel has ever known.

Our reservations, like Moses? reservations, often come in the form of self-doubt. In false humility, we claim not to have the appropriate gifts or skills to approach the task that has been place in our path. Our reservations can also consist of unbelief or of excessive concern for right belief. Dr. Vincent Harding, a contemporary and co-worker of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., illuminates this possibility by revealing how right theology can be a barrier to the practical work of loving our neighbors. A simple principle by which he lives is that when love and theology conflict, love always comes first. Should we offer rides home to an alcoholic friend? Should we knowingly share communion with someone who abuses her children? Should we attend the commitment celebration of our homosexual neighbors? These are complex questions for which I do not suggest easy answers, but for which I do suggest that love and theology may have conflicting arguments.

Any of these reservations--about our preparedness, about our lack of belief, about the superiority of our theology--can inhibit our ability to love our neighbors and reduce an inclination to serve others to a need to nurture our own fears and flaws. Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddhist monk from Vietnam, instructs on the relationship between love and self-surrender, saying,

Let go, and respond to the immediate needs around you. Don't get caught in some false perception of yourself. There will always be another person more gifted than you. And don't perceive your position as important, but be ready to serve at any moment. If you can let go of who you think you are, you will become free--ready to love others. If you learn to see your impermanence, you will be able to live for the moment and not miss opportunities to love by pushing things into the future.

His words echo Stephen Mitchell?s adaptation of this morning?s Psalm:

You return our bodies to the dust and snuff out our lives like a candleflame.

You hurry us away; we vanish as suddenly as the grass:

In the morning, it shoots up and flourishes, in the evening it wilts and dies?

Show us how precious each day is; teach us to be fully here.

And let the work of our hands prosper, for our little while.

The inclination to surrender preservation of self in this way is not popular in an age characterized by a spirit of individualism. A natural question might be: If we are to sacrifice ourselves in order to love, what is our hope for being filled?

God, in grace, allows our love to be carried out in community. Moses not only carried out his work in community with the people of God, he was one of the few ever to have known the Lord ?face to face.? Jesus broke bread and ministered in the company of followers whom he called friends. Paul and his partners in ministry knew fellowship with one another as well as with believers throughout their region. Indeed, we?d be hard-pressed to find anyone throughout history who has been a model of loving God and loving neighbor who has not had the benefit of being rooted in a distinct community of fellow believers. Catholic social activist Dorothy Day writes,

We cannot love God unless we love each other. We know him in the breaking of bread, and we know each other in the breaking of bread, and we are not alone anymore. Heaven is a banquet, and life is a banquet too--even with a crust--where there is companionship. We have all known loneliness, and we have learned that the only solution is love, and that love comes with community.

In other words, our knowledge of love is in direct relationship with our capacity to experience true community (or communion) with God and with others.

This is the vision that Christ reveals for God?s people: loving the God who loved us first and loving our neighbors who may or may not love us back. In the shadow of the present, our self-sacrifice will involve suffering. But we can look with gratitude to a God who saw fit to show us in the person of Jesus Christ the way through suffering to eternal life.

For the ideal of love that we strive toward exists in perfection in the limitless God, whom we have the freedom to imagine and welcome. Imagine a faith community in which each individual, for the love of God, was actively loving his or her neighbors, within the faith community, within the neighborhood and within the world. What happens when we do the math? Rather than each individual serving him or herself in a one-to-one ratio, each individual is serving and being served by countless others. These others, in their love, will be the ones to give the individual permission for retreat when service has gone too long or become too difficult. These others will be the ones to provide food and pay the gas bill when financial resources are few. These others will be the hands and feet of God to strangers in their conscious choices to live with justice.

In the community we envision, let no one claim to have learned the lesson from experience that ?you cannot count on anyone except yourself.? Let them instead learn to count on everyone around them in mutual expressions of faithful love. But we should not wait for our communities to match the overflow of our hearts--the act of love begins with ourselves as soon as we are able, even for a moment, to forget ourselves. May God shape our hearts, our souls and our minds to fulfill the greatest commandments without fear. AMEN

Well, it appears as though this "column" will appear less often than I thought it might. Perhaps when I get into a writing routine, write more often. Even semi-regular readers can recognize that a "writing routine" might not ever happen ... but it's a goal to work towards, right?

Anyway, a lot can happen in the world of technology in two months and, indeed, a lot has happened since my last TechNotes--much of which will be reflected below.

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iPod, iPod, iPod

I'll get the bad news out of the way first. Last Saturday, while in a hurry to close the store so we could drive to Indiana for a family function, I dropped our iPod. And, as one might expect, it broke. It looks fine (it was in a case when I dropped it), but I'm pretty sure I trashed the hard drive. Every time I try to start it, I get the iPod screen of death (a file folder with an exclamation point on top of it) while the hard drive makes an ill-sounding clicking noise. Ugh.

We're still trying to figure out what to do about it; we've gotten very used to having it around. Indeed, it is an incredibly useful device for people who listen to a lot of music and travel a lot. But it's also expensive--expensive to purchase and expensive to fix. A new hard drive would run at least $150 and a new iPod is $300. I imagine we'll adopt a holding pattern on this one and do nothing until a solution presents itself. Grr.

On to better news: Apple has recently introduced the iPod Nano and the new line of iPods, which can now play video. Both feature color screens, the patented Apple Click Wheel and, of course, iTunes.

The Nano is impossibly small and sports flash memory, meaning it no longer relies on a mechanically based hard drive to store information. This is significant, of course, because, as I illustrated with my own iPod last weekend, hard drives are susceptible to impact-induced damage. Flash memory is far more durable in that regard and, because there aren't any moving parts, much faster. The primary downside to flash memory is that it doesn't have the capacity of hard drives--yet. So, for example, the Nano can hold up to 4GB while the iPod can hold up to 60GB. Even so, they're pretty amazing devices.

The new iPods improve on the previous model slightly, featuring a slimmer casing and larger screen. The big news here, though, is that the new iPod now incorporates video into the iPod experience. Users can download music videos or television shows from the iTunes Music Store (looks like they will have to change the name) to play on their iPod. The video resolution is 320x240--so it will only look good on an iPod or other portable device--and the current selection of television shows available is sparse. While certainly not a robust solution at the moment, it seems as though this could be a promising development for delivering video content digitally.

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Software

I have made significant changes to my workflow in the last two months. I recognize that I don't communicate as well as I need to do be an effective project manager. And, considering most of my work--World Fare, *cino, independent contracting--requires good project management, I am trying to rectify my communication deficiencies. Toward that end, I've started utilizing the following software solutions:

• After using Apple's Mail application for well over a year, I have switched back to Microsoft Entourage as my default e-mail program (Entourage is the Mac Outlook). The primary motivation for the switch was the new, fully integrated Project Center in Entourage 2004.
  

  Project Center allows me to identify contacts, notes, tasks and calendar items by project, meaning that all of these assets can be accessed in a single location. For example, e-mail--both to and from project contacts--is automatically added to a project in Project Center, making communication tracking easier. I can also choose a file folder to associate with the project, which is another helpful way to access all project-related material in one convenient location.



• Unfortunately, I lost the use of Mail.appetizer when I switched to Entourage. I immediately found that I missed this handy e-mail notification feature, so I went on the search for something that worked with Entourage. And I was pleasantly surprised ...
  

  Growl is a global notification system, so it works with several programs at once and provides unified notification delivery. Growl notifies me of new e-mails, the status of instant messenger buddies, the current iTunes song when it begins playing, the number of unread headlines in my RSS reader and a number of other things I forget about until I see a notification. The notification window is unobtrusive and appears just below the icons in the upper right hand corner of the screen. The only drawback to Growl is that it doesn't share the functionality features of Mail.appetizer--being able to delete e-mails directly in the notification window, etc. So far, though, the trade-in for global notification has trumped the loss of these features.



• Most recently, I've started using several online applications built by 37signals, a group of developers in Chicago whose tagline--"Simple software to help you get organized"--pretty much says it all. They build beautiful applications that do one thing really well. I've found two of their applications, Writeboard and Basecamp, particularly useful.
  

  Writeboard is a collaborative document writing tool that allows several people to work on a single document at the same time, complete with version tracking so you can see what has changed over the course of the writing process.

  
  

  Basecamp is a complete project management site. It includes Writeboard and features to-do lists, messaging, milestone due dates and file uploading. The project administrator adds people for specific projects and sets permissions for each person. For example, Bob can edit/write Writeboards, Joe can edit/add to-do lists, etc. Each person can then use the tools together with everyone else in the project. Several people can contribute to an ongoing revision to-do list, which tracks when tasks are completed. Someone can post a question message and others can respond to it, in much the same way blog commenting works. Basecamp is an extremely useful tool because it allows project communication to happen in one place. It even features an RSS feed, so that users can be updated when anything is added or edited on the project site.

  
  

  While Writeboards are free to use, Basecamp is fee-based and the fee is determined by the number of projects managed at one time. Currently, I'm using the $12/mo. plan, which allows up to three simultaneous projects, but I'm quickly moving towards an upgrade.

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Here ends the second installment of TechNotes. Once again, I hope, if you've read this far, you found my observations marginally useful. Until next time ...

Plenary Session III (10/1 at 10am): Kimberly Grimes, Made by Hand International

• Fair trade businesses are just like conventional businesses, but they care about all of the players.


• A new concept in business is the ?tri-line?, which encourages the consideration of social, economic and environmental costs (as opposed to the ?bottom line?.)


• ?Cooperation? should replace ?competition.?


• If we leave control in the hands of a few powerful corporations, we are not a democracy.



She expressed concern about a fair trade retailer talking about being in competition with another fair trade retailer, saying there?s no such thing as competition in this work because we?re all working toward the same goal. This idea was met with some criticism during the brief Q&A time. It?s an interesting question--is World Fare in competition with local churches who are selling fair trade coffee to congregants at the wholesale price through their denominations? Interfaith Coffee program? Or are we all just working toward the same goal?

Plenary Session II (10/1 at 10am): Joan Neal, Catholic Relief Services

• All members of the human family deserve to be treated with dignity and respect.


• John Paul II wrote a lot about global solidarity (commitment to the common good of all).

Nothing very new to me in this session (which is perhaps why I didn?t take as many notes as I should have). It was good to see Catholic Relief Services and Lutheran World Relief represented in an official capacity as organizers of the conference. I hope there will be more denominations and faith organizations involved next year?

Plenary Session I (10/1 at 10am): Pedro Haslam, CECOCAFEN Organization, Honduras

• There are approximately 125,000 coffee farmers in Honduras.


• Communities that don?t sell their coffee through fair trade networks are suffering because the family units break up when members are forced to seek work in the cities.


• Fair trade allows self-sufficiency.


• Fair trade farmers invest back into their communities and experience solidarity (not charity) with consumers.


• We do have the power to transform the market.

It was good to hear throughout the conference from producers and people working directly with producers. The firsthand witness offered was incredibly valuable--we need to find more ways to tell these stories.

Haslam said fair trade allows self-sufficiency which, in a way, it does because it empowers people with discretionary income that they can put toward food, education, home improvements, etc. Fair trade is very different in this sense from charity. However, there is also a dependence on people in the U.S., Europe and Canada to make principled purchasing choices. There is a fragile beauty in this symbiotic interconnectedness that is not present when buying choices are made based on cost alone, when the consumer becomes the end of the line instead of one participant in a circle of good.

Keynote Address (10/1 at 9am): Pauline Tiffen, Fair Trade Federation

?If you?re not outraged, you?re not paying attention.?

• The lie we?re being told is that the market is neutral (?free trade?) because no one controls it and therefore it is a force for good.


• Free trade doesn?t really exist because when one person wins, another person has to lose (zero sum).


• We need to focus on cultivating the relationships represented in the marketplace


• The market changes all the time--why? Economic reasons, trends, fashions, regulations/prohibitions, dumping, etc.


• The variety of products we have access to is a myth because they are controlled by so few companies (ex. the ?big 3? in chocolate of Hershey, Nestle and Cadbury)


• Even a representative from Nestle, when confronted by Tiffen, said his company was too small to make a difference.


• A business can respond to changed in the market without compromising values and mission.


• The success of fair trade in having a positive impact proves our interconnectedness and the far-reaching effects (positive or negative) or our everyday actions.


• If we are going to overcome ?the dark side of the force? (big sci-fi fan) we need to be more urgent, set goals, realize ourselves as both consumers and producers, and provide real alternatives for every product.

Tiffen was both hopeful and realistic. Unfortunately, her thoughts on the bias of the market would be perceived as mere rhetoric by those who believe the market is neutral. But I believe she?s right--the market needs guidance. The market does not exempt us from our individual responsibility.

Well, here we are in the grand ballroom of the Holiday Inn in downtown Chicago, which appropriately enough is right across the street from the monolith of consumerism, the Chicago Merchandise Mart. We're gathered with 715 fair trade advocates, consumers, store managers, students, etc. Today's schedule includes two keynote addresses and two workshop sessions, along with a gathering in the evening featuring the Chicago Afrobeat Project.

Last night's opening address was so...satisfying. It's amazing how much it resembled a worship service in an evangelical church, with songs, a "sermon", video clips, powerpoint and lots of clapping. It's interesting that the Church struggles with questions of how to get more young people involved and how to achieve a higher degree of diversity--a large portion of the people in attendance are under 30 and the attendees come from 17 different countries. I'll let you draw the conclusions.

The keynote address last night was given by Kwabena Ohemeng-Tinyase of Kuapa Kokoo, an organization of 47,000 cocoa farmers in Ghana who united to receive a fair price for their beans. The co-op is also part owner of Divine Chocolate company, which gives them a say in the processing and marketing decisions that directly affect them. The most important statment he made was that "for people in our part of the world, fair trade is the solution to poverty." This is coming from the son of a cocoa farmer who represents small-scale farmers in a developing country. We are--the Church is--obligated to listen.

Well, this morning's activities are about to start. More later...