Burnt offering

We finished our “BUT GOD” Lenten sermon series with this evening’s Good Friday service. (Today’s verse was Romans 5:8 “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”) At each service, people have been invited to write something down on a slip of paper and bring it up to lay before the cross at the front of the church, giving whatever it was to Christ. When the sermon was on fear (But God … has not given us a spirit of fear), we wrote down our fears to lay them down before Christ. Other weekly themes included giving Him our anxieties, places in our lives that feel empty, and things that we need to be forgiven for or someone we need to forgive.

People seem to appreciate the symbolic action of bringing something physically to the cross. When we first planned out the sermon series, someone suggested that at the end of the series we take it a step further, destroying all the papers rather than just putting them in the trash. Burning them was suggested, but doing it safely in the church service seemed rather iffy. (Would it set off any smoke detectors?) Someone suggested a shredder, but that would be a lot of small pieces of paper for someone to keep feeding into the shredder.

As it happens, one person in the congregation is a firefighter, so my husband arranged with him for us to burn all the papers outside (using a fire pit bowl). Having burned them hardly keeps us from again letting fears or anxieties begin to rule our thoughts and feelings, but the visual memory of burning them can be a good reminder that they have been given to God.

But God

This past Sunday we started a new sermon series at church, “But God…” We think this, but God says that. When the worship committee was planning it, a few weeks ago, discussing ways to increase the impact of the series on the congregation, I got this mental image of a black and white banner that says “BUT GOD.” I tried creating a sort of “BUT GOD” logo in Microsoft Word, then tried to find a way to transfer the idea to materials that could make a banner to hang up in church.

I was initially going to use paper and posterboard, but I really liked the idea of a fabric banner, which would probably last better if we wanted to reuse it another year. So I used Microsoft Word to create really large versions of each letter from my logo, bought some black and white fabric, and some EZ-Steam fusible material (so I didn’t have to sew the letters on), and started cutting and sewing.

My measurements when assembling the black and white panels must have been a little off, since the seam joining them is just a bit diagonal instead of going straight across. But I’m guessing I’m probably paying attention to those details more than other people are. On the whole it came out pretty well considering I had no pattern except trying to duplicate the logo I had made in Word.

The plate in front of the cross is for people to bring up slips of paper on which they have written whatever problem or attitude they want to bring to God and leave with Him, then taking home a paper with the BUT GOD verse to focus on during the week. This week was about being fearful, so we brought up papers with the things we are afraid of. (At the end of the series all the papers will be destroyed – method still to be determined.) And the verse we each brought home is:

Books I read in January 2022

With the start of a new year is the start of a new PopSugar Reading Challenge. This year’s challenge seems to be mostly categories that I have to intentionally look for books that fit, rather than just reading books and figuring out which categories they fit in. But some of the categories have been pretty easy.

I hadn’t really paid much attention to the movie previews when we went to see Dune in October (these days the previews seem to be mostly lots of fast movement and noise, which I do not find at all appealing, so I read until the previews are over), but I do remember one was based on one of Agatha Christie’s mysteries. A goodreads.com discussion of the prompt “a book becoming a TV series or movie in 2022” mentioned Death on the Nile, which apparently has had its release date changed several times, but is finally coming out in February 11.

I recently started listening to audiobooks on my smartphone, and I started with fairly short books that I was sure I could finish by the time they needed to be “returned” to the library. Death on the Nile easily fit that requirement, at only about eight hours. Like other Agatha Christie mysteries I have read, it was moderately interesting but not enough to make me eager to read more by her anytime soon. My biggest annoyance with this audiobook was the volume – either I had to keep it turned up high enough that sometimes I found it unpleasantly loud, or I would find that in other places it was hard to make out all of what was being said, especially by Poirot.

One of the books I had in my pile of books to read (a literal pile in this case, meaning I have already decided to read them in the relatively near future, though “relatively” is very flexible) was The Pastor by Eugene Peterson. It was a gift to my husband from someone at one of the churches he used to pastor, and as a pastor’s wife I thought it would be very interesting. Since I had read his book Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ last year, The Pastor would work well for “a different book by an author you read in 2021.”

Peterson has a way with words, he knows Scripture and theology well, and he clearly has the heart of a pastor. I had always thought of him primarily as a writer, however, until reading this book. I found his story fascinating, but the emphasis was never on his experiences, but how God shaped him for and in his vocation as pastor. And he writes not only of what it means to be a pastor, but to be followers of Christ, especially a community of followers of Christ. He criticizes the tendency of modern American churches to be too caught up in the consumerist mindset that afflicts America as a whole, too eager to work on what they can accomplish rather than what God is trying to do in and among them. But the focus is never on what’s wrong with them, but rather the need to relinquish that mindset and choose a better way of being the church.

Shortly after I started Peterson’s book, I was in the library to return books and noticed, in the New Books section, a book by Marie Benedict. Having just read The Only Woman in the Room in December, I decided to read Her Hidden Genius without even bothering to find out who it was about. If I hadn’t been reading the book by Peterson, this could of course have fit the prompt of another book by an author I had read last year. But this book turned out to be so new that it worked for “a book published in 2022” (the New Books section often has books that have been on those shelves for months, but I may have been the first to check out this one).

And it was a good choice. I liked it even better than the previous book. I found Rosalind Franklin a more engaging person, even if she lacked social skills. (I could identify with her in that, though over the years I’ve gotten better at it.) I was fascinated by her scientific work, but I also liked her enjoyment of mountain climbing. (I’ve always liked hiking but never done any serious climbing.) I was of course indignant at the way some of the male scientists treated her, with Watson and Crick taking all the credit for the discovery of the helical shape of DNA. I was disappointed to see her disregard for safety measures regarding exposure to radiation, but of course there was much less awareness of the danger then. And it was sad to see her dying of cancer – even knowing it was coming I felt a little choked up at the end.

Since I hadn’t heard of Rosalind Franklin before, it was surprising to find her mentioned on page 2 of the next book I read. (Of course, it’s possible I’d seen Rosalind Franklin mentioned before but the name meant nothing to me. Once you learn about something you start noticing it.) Someone on goodreads.com had suggested What stars are made of by Sarah Elisabeth Allen for “a book with a constellation on the cover or in the title,” and once I read a few readers’ impressions of the book I wanted to read it too.

It’s about a 7th grader named Libby who has Turner Syndrome, loves science and isn’t good at making friends, and comes up with an audacious plan to win a contest and use the money to help her family. But that synopsis doesn’t really tell what’s so great about the book. Libby is funny, she is brave, and she is very persistent. I didn’t care for the deals she tries to make with the Universe, but I suppose that’s how some 7th graders – and some adults – see life. It’s a book that is full of hope, not because the Universe will make things turn out the way we want, or because if we try hard enough we can achieve anything, but because there is a lot that is good in life and in people, and in spite of the disappointments and obstacles, there is a lot to be joyful about.

Allen’s book was written for young readers and was easy to finish in a single weekend, but the next book I finished had taken me over two weeks to get through. One of the prompts for the reading challenge is “an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner.” I hadn’t heard of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award previously, but I learned that this award, established in 1935, is to “recognize books that have made important contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.” I found several of these books that sounded interesting and went on my list of books to read. If I find a book that matches more than one category, I only “count” it for one category so that I read a different book for each prompt, but finding a book that could count for more than one is one way I prioritize books to read.

A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America by Ronald Takaki was an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award winner in 1994, but it also caught my attention because it fits the prompt “a book with a reflected image on the cover or ‘mirror’ in the title.” I found it interesting on the whole, though a lot of the history it covered was more or less familiar to me. It focuses on certain ethnic minorities, especially blacks, native Americans, and Mexicans. It also includes Japanese and Chinese, Irish, and Russian Jews. There are others mentioned but I don’t remember others that got entire chapters. There was not a lot that was new in the chapters on the blacks, in large part because of books I’ve read over the past two years. I knew somewhat less of the other groups’ history, but the only group that I had never read much about was the Russian Jews who came to America. With all of them, I appreciated the quotes from letters, newspapers, etc. but felt that there were often too many of them. One or two make the point and give the sense of what people thought and felt, but reading several on the same topic did not really teach me more about it. My other disappointment about it was that each group was dealt with as a separate group, up into the mid-twentieth century and the discussion of how WWII brought everyone together to fight a common enemy. I had expected to learn how each cultural group influenced and enriched the whole, but the book mostly focuses on suffering and oppression of each group. It’s important history to know, but I had expected the book to also go beyond that.

One book I really enjoyed reading that I didn’t initially think fit any prompts in the reading challenge was Learning to Pray: A Guide for Everyone by James Martin. I didn’t recognize the author’s name when I put it on hold from the library, but once I was reading it I thought it seemed familiar, and when I checked my reading list from last year I realized that Between Heaven and Mirth: Why Joy, Humor, and Laughter Are at the Heart of the Spiritual Life, which I read in September, was also by James Martin. So that’s a third book that fits “a different book by an author you read in 2021.”

This was also an excellent book, perhaps even better than the one on humor. I can’t say there was a lot that was new to me in terms of ideas or methods regarding prayer, but I found it very helpful in terms of encouraging me to expand my prayer life rather than making me feel I had been deficient and needed to improve. I don’t know if it’s me (and my perfectionist tendencies) or the things I have read on prayer, but I usually find myself feeling that I haven’t been praying very well, whether it’s a matter of what I pray for or how often or how confidently or something else. One thing that I was somewhat familiar with, but hadn’t really thought of as prayer, is Ignatian contemplation, imagining yourself in a scene in Scripture and seeing how it connects with you in a way that may not happen simply from reading it. Martin also talks about how we may realize something important from emotions, memories, and desires that we become aware of during prayer. We often think of prayer as asking for things, whether for ourselves or others, and most of this book is about just getting to know God better. (I would have liked it if he had talked a little more about the asking part, though.)

Since I have been rereading the Narnia books, I guess these also count as “a different book by an author you read in 2021.” In January, that was Voyage of the Dawn Treader, The Silver Chair, and The Horse and His Boy. I enjoyed them all, though as usual there are parts of Voyage of the Dawn Treader that I find a little boring (my favorite part is when Eustace is un-dragoned). The Silver Chair and The Horse and His Boy are good adventure stories, but the fact that I know what is going to happen makes them less exciting than they were when I was young. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew, which I know just as well, did not give me that same sense of letdown – I think they depend less on the adventure aspect of the story to make them satisfying.

That leaves only one book I read in January that did not fit any of the reading challenge prompts – and wasn’t one that I liked well enough to want to read another book by the same author. I picked it primarily because it was short, and I just wanted an audiobook to listen to when driving to pick up my son from college, and then after dropping him off again. An Elderly Lady is Up to No Good by Helene Tursten, which is a series of connected short stories rather than a novel, was only around three hours so that worked well. I wasn’t sure I really wanted to read about an old woman who kills people and gets away with it, but it surprised me by being moderately entertaining. As one reader review pointed out, “It’s not really funny as some reviews promise but it’s hard not to like Maud because she is only getting rid of people who need to be gotten rid of.” Well, I can’t say they need to be gotten rid of, but Maud’s victims don’t generate much sympathy with the reader either.

Remote church

Unlike many people, I did not “attend” church via the internet in the early months of the pandemic. Not because we had in-person church services, but because as the pastor’s wife I was helping with the services being recorded to be later distributed on DVD or viewed on Facebook. Even if I wasn’t the liturgist (reading Scripture and leading in prayers), I was one of the two or three people in the pews – so that my husband felt that he was actually talking to someone rather than preaching to a completely empty room.

January tends to be a bad month for having church services in person, however, at least with a mostly elderly congregation. Even if the roads have been mostly cleared, the sidewalks and steps (and ramp) to get into the church can be dangerously icy, especially if one of the roads that hasn’t been cleared is the one used by the man who normally opens the church and clears the walks. We usually have at least one or two Sundays in January and February that church is cancelled due to ice and/or dangerous wind chill temperatures.

It used to be that meant simply missing church, but last year I realized that there were churches all over the country I could attend, thanks to the internet and streaming. Usually I end up watching a recording later, rather than watching the live stream. Last week I forgot that the church service I was planning to join was in a different time zone, and I joined near the end of the service – oops. So I waited until the recording had been posted. One nice thing about a recording is that you can pause it when you need to.

I hadn’t expected church to be cancelled this week because it wasn’t nearly as cold as last week. But the warmer temperatures yesterday had resulted in freezing rain and the roads were pretty bad (so I heard, anyway – I got home from shopping as it was starting and stayed indoors), so no church service.

I recently downloaded an app on my phone called Daily Prayer. I am not Anglican, but there are some wonderful, time-tested prayers in the Book of Common Worship that I appreciate, and the notifications on my phone at set times of day seemed like a good way to remember to pray more often. I really hadn’t thought much about who was behind the app until I got a notification inviting me to join online for worship. I hadn’t planned to, of course, because we have our own church service. But then this morning we didn’t.

Wellspring Church (Englewood, CO) is not what I was expecting. There is Anglican liturgy, certainly – the pastor is even in the middle of a sermon series on the liturgy. But overall the feel of things, especially with the praise band and contemporary Christian music, felt much like at a Baptist church we attended for a while (when my husband was not actively serving as a pastor for a few years). One thing I had missed at the Baptist church was the liturgy I am used to as a Presbyterian, so I found this a very welcome way to “attend” church remotely. And there was something about knowing it was livestreamed that made me feel a bit more part of it than watching a recording.

Books: Elmer Gantry

I had some trouble deciding what book to read for the PopSugar 2020 Reading Challenge category “Read a banned book during Banned Book Week.” There are a number of classics on the list of banned/challenged books that I read in high school, such as The Catcher in the Rye, Of Mice and Men, A Separate Peace, and Slaughterhouse Five, as well as others I have read on my own before or since, such as Brave New World and Native Son.

Many of them were “challenged” rather than banned, however, and even the ones listed as banned were in some cases only banned in a particular school district. I question whether it makes sense to call a book “banned” if you can readily get it from a bookstore, just not the school library (or maybe even the public library). Many parents have challenged the Harry Potter series, worried that it promotes witchcraft, but my husband and I enjoyed the series and encouraged our sons to read them also, once they were old enough to deal with some of the darker themes.

Some books were banned in other countries but not in the U.S. It’s hardly surprising that Nazi Germany banned books for featuring Jewish characters, or that the USSR banned George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984. I could read the children’s book Ferdinand (one I’ve always liked), which was banned in Spain under Franco, or Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which was at one point banned in China. But I wouldn’t be reading any of those books because they were banned, but because they’re books I would want to read anyway and they happen to be on this list.

A common reason that books have been banned is sexual content. While that doesn’t necessarily decide me against reading a book, it certainly isn’t a draw for me either. Likewise, while I won’t refuse to read a book that has a lot of four-letter words, I will tend to steer away from such a book, unless I have a good reason to read it. So there were a number of books on the banned list that I was disinclined to read for the precise reasons they were banned.

I finally settled on Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis. I had heard of Sinclair Lewis but never read anything by him, and it seemed like a good time to finally read one of his novels. I was curious about a novel that portrayed religious hypocrisy in such a way that it was denounced from many pulpits. Was the critique reasonable?

Books: The House of the Lord

At a conference (for leaders of small churches) that my husband and I attended in October, one of the workshops was about the use of the Psalms in worship. That got me not only looking for ways to use them in worship (such as using them for the readings with the lighting of the Advent candles) but also to know them better personally. When the Bible study I lead finished a study on Jonah, we started looking at some of the Psalms.

So when I came across a book for sale about “inhabiting the world of the psalmist,” and noticed that the author was one of the keynote speakers from that conference in October,  naturally I was interested. In the House of the Lord: Inhabiting the Psalms of Lament by Michael Jinkins explores first the world of the psalms in general, and then the psalms of lament in more depth.

I have always been somewhat uncomfortable with the psalms of lament. How do I identify with someone who has gone through such suffering as some of these describe? And to the extent I do identify with someone crying out, “How long, O Lord,” how does that shared sense of anguish help me deal with it?

I’m not alone in that discomfort. Jinkins notes that mainline Protestant churches rarely use psalms of lament in their worship, and if they wanted to sing hymns based on them would have trouble finding more than a few in their hymnals. Many people go to church to hear positive messages, and interpret complaints addressed to God as contrary to faith and thanksgiving.

When I mentioned this in a Bible study recently, someone’s response was that when times are hard, you’re supposed to focus on the blessings in your life and on God’s goodness. Why would you want to encourage people to bring up complaints to God?

Because, Jinkins says, “praise and thanksgiving divorced from lamentation, divorced from heart-felt observation of social injustices and the cries of the oppressed, divorced from a critical assessment of our role in human society, become expressions of vanity.” And because they can mask the voids in our spiritual lives, and give us fewer resources for working through some of the really bad stuff, the stuff we don’t talk about in church.

I remember a few times in my life when I found it difficult to go to church, when I was dealing with grief and found it hard to express emotion without breaking down in tears. There were no hymns we sang that gave voice to my grief, and when I tried to sing songs like “There Is Sunshine in My Soul Today” or “O Happy Day,” the words stuck in my throat.

There are churches that use the psalms of lament much more, and Jinkins explains that these are generally made of of people in the lower socio-economic strata of society. They can identify with the psalmist when he speaks of suffering oppression, of being treated unfairly, of anger at seeing people prosper from their wickedness and of longing to see justice done.

For me, those are abstract ideas that I can understand but not really identify with from my own experience. (Not that I’ve never been treated unfairly, but not in any ways that significantly changed the course of my life.) Perhaps greater use of psalms of lament would help to identify with those parts of the body of Christ who do suffer in these ways.

Depending on how one classifies the psalms, forty to fifty of them are considered psalms of lament. So nearly a third of them. They include expressions of faith and praise and thanksgiving, but these are arrived at by going through the complaint and the grief.

We often find that spiritual growth comes that way in our lives, by going through trials and troubles. So why not have our worship services make more use of such psalms, as the ancient Israelites evidently did? As I am on the worship committee at church, this is more than just food for thought, but something to look for practical ways to use sometimes neglected parts of Scripture.

Books: Slow Church

When my husband and I signed up to go to a “Slow Church” retreat, we had little idea what it was about. Obviously, it must be something to do with not being in a hurry. But beyond that, the phrase meant nothing to me.

At the retreat, we each received a copy of Slow Church: Cultivating Community in the Patient Way of Jesus, by C. Christopher Smith and John Pattison. Chris Smith led the retreat, going over the ideas presented in the book he had co-written.

Books: The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass: Adrian Plass and the Church Weekend

Looking at my 2016 Reading Challenge, I had wondered how I would find “a book guaranteed to bring me joy.” There are books by favorite authors that I know I will enjoy, but that’s different from books that bring me joy.

As it happens, I had already ordered the latest book in Adrian Plass’ Sacred Diary series, as a Christmas present for our whole family. We’re read – and re-read – all the previous books in the series, and I was happy to discover he had written a new one.

If you haven’t read Adrian Plass before, you might want to start by reading the previous five books, starting with The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass Aged 37 3/4. Some reviews say his latest is not as laugh-out-loud funny as some of the earlier books, but you wouldn’t know it from listening to my husband while he was reading just the first chapter.

I find it more quietly amusing – but then, I rarely laugh out loud. What I appreciate about Plass’ writing is how well he weaves together humor with wisdom and with a view of God who loves us more than we can imagine.

A lot of what passes for humor these days is just making fun of people, but while Plass gently pokes fun at human foibles, it is always good-natured fun. People do such foolish things, but it’s not a reason to despise or disdain them. (Though I don’t think I could stand spending much time around Minnie Stamp, a new character in this volume.)

There is always an assurance that we are loved by a God who not only loves us but actually likes us. I know I find that hard to accept, though I’m not sure exactly why. Because I don’t think someone who knows all there is to know about me would like me? Because I think I need to want to work hard for God’s approval, otherwise I’d take it easy? Or because so few Christian books seem to convey that same message?

If I tried to convey what Plass’ books are like, I’m sure I’d fall far short. So if you have a chance to read some, find out for yourself.

Books: Barchester Towers

I picked up this audiobook some time ago and was intrigued by what I read on the back cover about it. But it said it was a sequel, so I figured I ought to read the first book first to properly enjoy it. And the library didn’t have the first book on CDs.

A few weeks ago, though, I was chatting with my friend who works at the library (and leads our monthly book club), and she was suggesting books on CD I might enjoy. One she suggested was Barchester Towers, and she assured me that it didn’t matter whether I had read the first book, and that this one was better anyway.

Books: Vanishing Grace

Almost twenty years ago I read a new book by Philip Yancey, What’s So Amazing about Grace? It was one of the best Christian books I had ever read, and I wrote a review on the website of an internet bookseller I had recently discovered (but most people had probably not heard of), amazon.com. Since then I have enthusiastically recommended the book to others.

So when I saw recently that Yancey had written a follow-up, Vanishing Grace: What Ever Happened to the Good News?, I was eager to read it. I chose to request it from the library, however, rather than order my own copy, as few books have turned out to live up to their glowing reviews as well as What’s So Amazing about Grace?

And while I wanted Yancey’s new book to be as good as the other, I just didn’t find it nearly as compelling. It asks some good questions, and could start some good discussions. But if I wanted to help someone understand grace I’d still recommend the first book. And if I wanted to lead a discussion I’d recommend the first book, and then ask some of the questions raised in this book, without necessarily spending a lot of time on Yancey’s answers.