CHRISTMAS WITH THE GOAT MAN

CHRISTMAS WITH THE GOAT MAN The well traveled road upon which my childhood home is situated, bore witness to me as a boy, that people are always headed somewhere. Night and day it mattered not, determined travelers were constantly making their trek. Their passing vehicles would often give me pause to wonder who they were and where their pilgrimage was taking them. One Christmas, a different kind of traveller made his way through our town and he found his way on the path in front of our home. His chariot was not splendid, but it mattered not to me as I heard his approach heralded with the clanking of bells and a chorus of whining sounds. The Goat Man set up his encampment within a throw of our front yard. As his goat pulled ramshackle wagon found its resting place, he stepped down dressed in an animal skin coat looking like the shepherds in the dime store manger scene I’d admired at Darling’s 5 and 10. I was sure he would smell like them too. His greying beard came to a point somewhere around his navel and he had obviously missed his Saturday night bath. The twenty two goats infused the chilled December air with his same scent. Bible in hand, I watched as he tacked a sign on one of the tall slender pines next to the road. The sign pronounced to those slowing down to take note of the sight of him and his entourage, PREPARE TO MEET THY GOD! After nailing the placard in place, he stood up on a stump. He then proceeded to open his tattered Bible and as he channeled the words of John The Baptist, he read “Prepare ye the way of the Lord!” By now onlookers had pulled off the road to form a congregation of curious witnesses. Many in the crowd muttered under their breath like they new who he was. The bleating goats offered their chorus in glad reply to his proclamation, forming his amen corner. His fiery message was not like any Sunday sermon I had ever heard at First Methodist. He offered not only his message to us, but a taste of goat’s milk which made the Welch’s Grape Juice served at the communion rail at my church pale in comparison. Situating myself close to the iron wheel of his wagon, I could see its contents. Looking closely I spied a paperback copy of one of my favorite books, Robinson Crusoe. “Read that book boy?” he quipped. “Yes sir I shyly replied. “ “ I got Crusoe’s itch for wandering . My goats and me want to see all 48 states, and Alaska and Canada. All them places better get ready to meet the Lord. He’s a coming soon and next time it won’t be as as little ole baby. These here goats will recognize him sooner than a lot of these here people in brick houses that go to them tall steeples on Sunday morn. I’m just gonna keep on wandering every where I can til he gets here.” ‘Where you from?” I asked. “Oh all over the place, but Twiggs County is where I hung my hat the longest. But I got to keep moving till He comes back. I had to admit to myself that there was a secret longing in me to join up with his band, to hitch my wagon to his. That night as I pulled up the quilt on my bed, I could see his kerosene lanterns illumining that chilly night through my bedroom window and the goats were bleating a lullaby that soon lulled me to sleep. The days waned fast and my own wanderings found me in Macon, Georgia as a robed and collar clad preacher. Those days had receded in my memory, although when I ran up on John the Baptist in the Bible, clad in animal skins and living off locust and honey, something would take me back to that December day. I had heard that in 1970 Charles McCartney known as The Goat Man had been attacked by three young men while he slept in his cart. Two of his favorite goats were killed. The Goat Man had retired to Jeffersonville. And then on another waning December afternoon I found myself serving communion to residents and members of Mulberry Street Church at a local nursing home. After praying over the communion elements, I began to move around the circle of wheel chairs serving the gathering one by one, when before I could intone the words ‘The Body…The Blood of Christ” a blue haired messenger whispered to me, “That’s The Goat Man next to me.” And there he was. Shorn of his beard. Goatless. Made respectable in a flannel shirt, yet his dog eared Bible in his lap, I bent toward him. Before I could speak a word his eyes though aged with cataracts looked into mine and as if I were being transported back to that December afternoon of my boyhood , I heard him say “He’s coming back.” And he was right. You see, that December afternoon He had for me.

OCTOBER LIGHT

OCTOBER LIGHT Summer’s solstice has ended and October’s light gives us all a chance for new perspective. Even as that light brings a fresh clarity to my thinking, it also foreshadows what the Apostle Paul characterized as “the partial passing away.” The passing away of much that seemed permanent but was only partial has been accelerated in this world where that we thought was built to last is actually an illusion. The One who sits on the throne in The Revelation given to Saint John announces “Behold I make all things new!” We would do well to look to how nature’s patterns echo that promise. Summer’s excesses are pared down as her days wane and just as the harvest is gathered in so we have need to gather up what the waning year has shown us. Most of our days are consumed with the now. What was fulness to us ,what seemed so complete was actually only the partial, for as Paul so aptly puts it “now we see through a mirror dimly, then we shall see face to face.” How can we be shed of that? Autumn forces us to confront in nature’s dance of shedding her clothes an ending that bespeaks a new beginning and the promise of the complete. As the poet Keats aptly puts it in his poem To Autumn, “Thou (Autumn) hast thy music too.” How we need to stop and listen to it! Even as we wind the back roads and circumnavigate the high places on desperate pilgrimages to glimpse the colors of autumn leaves, we know they will soon be driven and tossed by the wind. In a flurry of color, the trees will release their foliage without hesitation. For us this seems the dreaded end. But, we see only the partial. Looking out the picture windows on the front of my home as a child , I would watch the trees on our front lawn in their Fall litany. The leaves would change from green to yellow. Finally, the day would arrive in late October when my brother and I, rakes in hand, would pile the frosted brown leaves on our front lawn while the air hung heavy with the incense of burning leaves in our neighborhood. The smoke would send its signals heavenward, as if we needed to let the Creator know we knew winter was soon upon us. But the falling leaves were not indiscriminately sacrificed. They met their end as a gift to the very earth that gave them life. As Lewis Thomas the biologist and writer reminds us , “we have always had a strong hunch about our beginnings, thus we took the word for earth humus and came to know our selves as human” and one might add, hopefully humble ones at that. It is in these patterns of Autumn that we can see our own life patterns and humbled we must be. As a pastor and hospice chaplain I am a witness every day to the truth that “to every thing there is season.” Our souls need and require this time of gathering in . As nature knows her time has come to settle in, we should know by now the sign when that Fall morning arrives a little sharper and we greet with gladness the woodpile mom remembered to have stacked up beside the house. And so we build the fire, we sip the cider, and we settle in so all can be made complete.

BEYOND THE PEW

BEYOND THE PEW The gurus are scrambling. The recent Pew Report documenting the decline in our nation’s Christian population from 78 per cent to 70 percent is sure to stir up those who busy themselves crunching the numbers and pushing the paper work. My generation of clergy were dazzled by the pyrotechnics of the church growth gurus who admonished us as we approached the new millennium that we needed more mocha with Messiah and Cappuccino with Christ and less doctrine and dogma. So we built believing they would come. The mega church outfitted with all of its technology and pleasure dome aesthetics was the new Oz. Church architecture became about erecting structures that demolished tradition and embraced entertainment. Sacred spaces were stripped of their symbolism and the dominant concern became where do we put the projector and screen. Worship was severed from its historical roots and hymnody displaced by what one church growth specialist called a “soundtrack” for worship “that is determined by what the worship guests listen to on ITunes.” What should cause all of us to set up and take note is what The Pew Report reveals about “generational change.” Many of the shifts outlined above were seen as being necessary for our churches to attract children, youth, and young adults. I myself am a survivor of the “worship wars” that resulted in countless of our congregations dividing their congregations up and defining them as “traditional” and “contemporary” worshippers. As one growth specialist advised “where a congregation is aging and possibly declining it might be best to create two kinds of service, one of them traditional and the other “culturally relevant.” But it is among the population characterized as requiring “cultural relevance” that the rise of “nones” is taking place - those who are less likely to belong to any Christian (or other religious) body. The failure of our churches to pass on the faith to the next generation has to be at the heart of this trend. Worship life and teaching spaces within our faith communities cannot bypass the substance of Christ’s teachings and be driven by the values that define popular entertainment. The exhaustion and burnout seen in many of our clergy and worship leaders is directly tied to their continual quest to remain “culturally relevant.” Spiritual formation takes a back seat to insuring that the image of our churches is “relevant.” Could it be that the decline of the church might be due to our younger generations seeking something beyond what they find at the Apple Store? In our branding of the Church as a commodity that must compete with Silicon Valley, the young who are trying to find the meaning of why we are all here might well be looking for what makes the church different from their I Phone. In the techno driven world they are inheriting might they be craving authentic community versus simulated reality? Jesus chose a real body (the church) here, imperfect and human to carry his message and he assured us that with the Holy Spirit we had everything we needed to do just that. The truth of the Gospel will never rise or fall because of institutional growth or decline. It will live and breathe in and through us or in spite of us and it will never power down. Tweet that.

Pierced Darkness

PIERCED DARKNESS “He thrown everything off balance. If he did what he say he did, there’s nothing for you to do but to throw away everything and follow him. If he did’t, then enjoy the minutes you have left the best you can.” From A GOOD MAN IS HARD TO FIND, Flannery O’Connor William Styron the novelist and author of Sophie’s Choice suffered a crippling depression that he thoughtfully chronicles in his memoir Darkness Visible. On the eve of a contemplated suicide attempt he finds himself sitting in his home in the darkness of what seems an interminable night when the music of Brahms pierces the darkness: “this sound which like all music-indeed all pleasure- I had been numbly unresponsive to for many months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys this house had known …All this I realized was more than I could inflict on these memories, and upon those, so close to me with whom those memories were bound. And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself….” Styron had dared to face the darkness and lived on because he did. The Gospel of John records the story of a depressed Mary Magdalene going to the tomb of Jesus early on the first day of the week, and then John tellingly says, ”While it was still dark…” Mary the dedicated follower had not abandoned him. But putting one foot in front of the other she forced herself to face the darkness. She had witnessed his miracles and heard the cruel words of his enemies. She had seen love lavished upon him when he entered Jerusalem as well as the lashes unleashed on his burdened back. She had stood in the shadow of his cross and heard his final words. And now she came to honor him with a proper burial….”while it was still dark.” As the poet Milton put it , “no light but darkness visible.” Mary in facing the darkness was actually profoundly living into her faith in a way that my friend and truth teller Barbara Brown Taylor speaks to in her latest book Learning to Walk in the Dark. She dares to ask, “When we run from darkness, how much do we really know about what we are running from? If we turn away from darkness on principle, doing everything we can to avoid it….isn’t there a chance we are running from God?” What will happen next? Mary had to be thinking. Or is there a next? And then reaching the tomb she finds it empty. In the darkness , isn’t it enough to face her loss and now to know that His body is absent?! Is it not enough that he suffered the most degrading of deaths, now his grave has been robbed? She had heard of others who had claimed to be messiah. They too were no more. Like the stone cold memorials of the Roman gods, his tomb was silent and empty. She turns and runs in the darkness to the disciples so they might share in her sadness. Running to the tomb as the light gradually illuminates the scene , John and Peter see what Mary had been unable to see in the darkness. And to her surprise they rejoice. Mary still weeping finally through the blurred vision of her tears and the light of the new day sees Jesus’ garments and two angels sitting where he had been laid in the darkness. That darkness had been pierced by God working even when Mary could not see and could not know. God had thrown death off balance in the shadows. She turns with the angels’ words “He is not here He is risen” lifting her feet from ground only to meet Jesus face to face. The darkness in Mary’s heart has been pierced and her life transformed as Jesus appoints her to preach the good news to his followers: Death is no more… don’t be afraid of the dark! Easter you see means throwing it all away….all our fears….and following him, even in the darkness.

Forty Shades of Purple

FORTY SHADES OF PURPLE Love hurts. At least that seems to be the message of the day. As I write this column the culture is being inundated by a film based on a book that’s subject matter a decade ago would have rarely seen the light of day much less the top of the New York Times Bestseller list. The media frenzy surrounding the film’s release has meant that watching the Today show in the presence of your mother isn’t advisable. A British hotel recently replaced their Gideon Bibles with the bestseller as more suitable reading for their guests because quoting the manager “What ’s the sense of providing a book that no one likes and no one reads.” Underneath this “phenomenon” are deeper issues. In a world daily marred by brutality and violence, we are increasingly numb and desensitized. Violence has become the new pornography in our terror torn world. Those who terrorize us heap upon us that which we seem to pleasure ourselves with the most. “Love” has taken a brutal battering in this society and tragically the very people who bear the scars for it just can’t seem to get enough. Perhaps this is a teachable moment that the Church must not ignore. The love at the heart of the Christian faith has many shades, but none of them are inclusive of domination and violence. Even as the misuse of religion throughout the world’s history and unto this day is obvious, the way of love as seen in Jesus is the way of true liberation. As Christians who have marked the beginning of the season of Lent this week, let us remember that Jesus’ death and passion are not at the hands of an abusive Father/Creator God, but are reflective of God’s giving up of his own heart for the loveless and the unloved. The excesses of violence that debased the truth of Jesus’ death in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ graphically proclaimed that love hurts. This grace through gore approach is not unlike the love through pain message currently being embraced. The theologian Jurgen Moltmann reminds us ” by the cross of Golgotha, God’s being and God’s life is open to we the human.” So to love as Christ loves is never about diminishing another but liberating and elevating the other. The power of this love is the power of new life. To embrace domination and brutality is to dishonor that love and sicken the soul. Lent, the forty days prior to Easter has historically presented the believer with a season of reflection and self discovery in the context of Jesus’s journey to the cross. Lent from an olde English word meaning “spring” corresponds to the forty days of Jesus’ trials and temptations in the desert prior to the beginning of his ministry. Traditionally the season is marked by devotion and fasting. Perhaps the best fast for many of us is a fast from all depictions of brutality and violence. To turn away from viewing violence is not to deny its reality but to deny its power to shape the way we see others and the world. Not coincidentally these forty days have their own palette :The grey of winter gradually gives way to the profusion of spring’s brilliant hues. While we wait in the mean time, purple and its many shades might best color our point of view. You see the color purple has traditionally been associated with mourning and royalty. And it was the color that the Romans dressed Jesus in with their attempt to mock and humiliate him. But, it certainly makes for a better statement than grey.