The Meyer Minute

The Meyer Minute for August 31, 2012

A wonderful woman named Erna Rubin told about her favorite childhood pleasures.  "One of my favorite activities was the church picnic the first Sunday in June.  The men played horseshoes and the women sat around and talked.  There were booths with different things, but my favorite stand was the one with ice cream.  Ice cream would cost 5 cents for one scoop, and I got to buy a cone with one scoop.  It was too expensive to buy it often.  I liked the pointed sugar cones so I could bite off the end and suck the ice cream out of the bottom” (p. 8).

Erna knew how to enjoy the good things of life, the simple, commonplace things like a 5-cent cone.  If you stop and think about it, these little common things are really the things that we treasure as we get older and hopefully wiser.  "You will eat the fruit of your labor” (Psalm 128:2).

Have a safe and relaxing Labor Day weekend, enjoy the simple things, and have an ice cream cone.

I'll be back on Tuesday.

The Meyer Minute for August 30, 2012

New students have arrived and are being oriented to life at Concordia Seminary.  A few faculty and staff were worried that the new students might up and leave when they heard the very first speaker, me!  I welcomed the eager students, asked them to jot down their purpose for coming to Seminary, and then shared what I think their purpose should be.  That is to grow in the love of God and love of people, based upon Matthew 22:34-40.  Love God, easily said but how do you grow in the love of God?  The answer is in the second great commandment, to love your neighbor.  To drive that point home, I read a quotation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  I share it with you as an encouragement to plunge into the problems of life.

“I remember a conversation that I had in America thirteen years ago with a young French pastor.  We were asking ourselves quite simply what we wanted to do with our lives.  He said he would like to become a saint (and I think it’s quite likely that he did become one).  At the time, I was very impressed, but I disagreed with him, and said, in effect, that I should like to learn to have faith….  I discovered later, and I’m still discovering right up to this moment, that it is only by living completely in this world that one learns to have faith.  One must completely abandon any attempt to make something of oneself, whether it be a saint, or a converted sinner, or a churchman (a so-called priestly type!), a righteous man or an unrighteous one, a sick man or a healthy one.  By this-worldliness I mean living unreservedly in life’s duties, problems, successes and failures, experiences and perplexities.  In so doing we throw ourselves completely into the arms of God, taking seriously, not our own sufferings, but those of God in the world – watching with Christ in Gethsemane.  That, I think, is faith; that is metanoia (repentance); and that is how one comes a man and a Christian.  May God in His mercy lead us through these times; but above all, may He lead us to Himself.”  (Letters and Papers from Prison, Collier; pp. 369-370)

 

 

The Meyer Minute for August 29, 2012

Imagine this, a jury trial where a cook is suing a pediatrician.  The pediatrician gives children shots and other unpleasant things but the cook?  Sugar and spice and everything nice.  And imagine that the jury is all children.  For whom will they decide, cook or doctor?

Imagining that scene is much like the way I’m watching convention speeches from both parties, if I can stay awake.  I did my Ph.D. dissertation in theories of Greco-Roman rhetoric, do a lot of public speaking myself, and am very aware of techniques that a speaker can use to achieve his or her desired result.  Persuade the audience by showing your trustworthy character?  Persuade by identifying with their feelings?  Or persuade with bald statistics and facts?  Those are standard ways to persuade your case but…but…are you using them in a true or untrue, an ethical way or self-serving manipulation?  Are you serving up cookies or medicine?

The imaginary courtroom scene is almost 2500 years old, written by the philosopher Plato in his dialog “Gorgias.”  Plato was worried about the manipulative nature of speeches, and I’d add sermons too.  Preachers are tempted to manipulate truth to serve their own human purposes.  St. Paul knew the problem too.  2000 year ago he wrote, “When I came to you, I did not come proclaiming to you the testimony of God with lofty speech or wisdom.  For I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  And I was with you in weakness and in fear and much trembling, and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.”  (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)  Paul was a top notch speaker.  His point isn’t about speech techniques; it’s about the point of the speech.  Sermons and convention speeches put similar moves on you but what is it that finally persuades you?   Cookies or medicine?  Human wisdom or the power of the cross?    

The Meyer Minute for August 28, 2012

For months and months the organizers have planned.  How many meetings did they attend, how many problems did they face as they worked toward the goal?  And not for months but for years candidates and campaign staff have planned and plotted, on the stump and in back offices, in trains, planes and busses, all straining efforts and money to go where?  Tampa!  “Oh, we forgot that there could be a hurricane.”

Is this an example of “Man proposes but God disposes”?

I don’t know.  There’s a passage in Proverbs chapter one that warns me not to wonder.  “I also will laugh at your calamity; I will mock when terror strikes you, when terror strikes you like a storm and your calamity comes like a whirlwind, when distress and anguish come upon you.  Then they will call upon Me, but I will not answer; they will seek me diligently but will not find Me.”  Whoa!  That’s God talking and there’s no evacuation route.  Why such a threat?  “Because they hated knowledge and did not choose the fear of the Lord, would have none of My counsel and despised all My reproof.” (Proverbs 1:26-29)

Conventions come and go but there are always many things in life that we’d like to attribute to God, “acts of God.”  Are they?  Maybe, maybe not; I just don’t know.  What the Bible does make very clear is that God has shown us sinners how to live, to seek His forgiveness, and to know that “for those who love God all things work together for good.” (Romans 8:28)  How sweet what God proposes; how sad when man disposes.    

The Meyer Minute for August 27, 2012

I came across a little booklet by Richard Stevenson, “My Story, His Story.”  His story is that he grew up in an unchurched home on the south side of Chicago.  “I arrived home from elementary school that afternoon with a form to fill out.  Although the purpose of the form has disappeared from my memory bank, I do recall sitting at the kitchen table trying to fill in the answers to each question.  One of the questions puzzled me.  It asked, ‘What religion are you?’  Being stumped, I called out to my mom, ‘What religion are we?’  She gave me a one-word answer, ‘Protestant.”  I gave her a two-word response: ‘Spell it!’ Today, I fondly look back on that ad hoc conversation as my catechism – the sum total of religious education received in my childhood.”

When he was 15, Mr. Stevenson was invited to a party by his friend Chuck.  “As it turned out, the only person I knew at the party was Chuck.  Thankfully, by the end of the evening, I had made a dozen or so new friends.  Then came the big surprise!  The kids throwing the party—who seemed quite normal otherwise—were members of a youth group from a local church!  Not only that, they seemed to have no embarrassment about admitting that they attended church every week.”  And they invited him, he started going to church, went to Moody Bible Institute, and became a missionary to New Guinea.

I suspect that young people in grade schools and high schools today are doing the same thing, making friends, learning their stories, and introducing them to “His Story.”  Thank God.

The Meyer Minute for August 24, 2012

A lover might press a rose into a book; I put postcards and pictures and notes into my books. Looking something up the other day I came across a note from August 24.  I don’t know what year, probably the late 60’s.  What I found was my “order sheet,” the milk I had ordered for my deliveries when I was a college student filling in for the regular milkman, Gene DeLuca.  Most of the milk that the loaders put into the truck went to the Ford Stamping Plant in Chicago Heights.  On that August 24^th I unloaded 106 cases of milk, each one taken off the truck by hand…no hydraulic lifts back then.

 Life is made up of piecework, of countless little cases we do day-in and day-out.  Those are trusts to you from God.  “Whoever can be trusted with very little can also be trusted with much, and whoever is dishonest with very little will also be dishonest with much” (Luke 16:10).  Our media-minded society pays attention to the big things, the celebrity lives, the big stories.  But God looks at our little piecework.  “Does He who formed the eye not see?” (Psalm 94:9)

A little irony… I found that list for the Ford plant in a Greek dictionary under the word “anthropina.” “Anthropina” means “human.” How appropriate…human life under God is all about the little cases you and I have to lift every day.

 

 

The Meyer Minute for August 23, 2012

Next week new seminarians come to campus.  We still do it the “old way,” school starting after Labor Day.  Conventional wisdom says that seminaries are a retreat from the “real world” and similarly the homes and families of pastors are somehow more holy.  In my job I hear too often that is sadly not the case, moral failures, family dysfunction and pastoral sloth, because seminaries and parsonages are in fact places of intense but subtle spiritual warfare.  Read this from 19^th century pastor Karl Buechsel:

“Next to the church comes the parsonage.  The study window looks out upon the churchyard, and if the pastor wants to see the steeple near, he must raise his head and eyes higher than other people need.  The bell that summons to prayer has, too, a louder voice for him than for the rest of the inhabitants, and the graves speak in deeper tones to his ear. The parsonage garden runs along the churchyard wall, and a door opens out of it to the bench under the old lime tree, from which one can overlook both sides of the village.  Each one who passes up and down the street has an undying soul, and of each one the pastor must give account, as to whether he has sought, urged, and allured as a good shepherd should.  On that bench under the lime tree, how much silent intercession must, indeed, be poured out!  Nor is the intercession all.  The Lord said unto Moses, “Wherefore criest thou unto Me?  Speak to the people, that they go forward.”

“Outwardly, the parsonage is a house like others, but whenever the devil goes about the village, seeking his prey, and planning where best he can spread his net, he goes about the parsonage thrice, and looks into every window.  And most of all he rejoices if the door of that house be open to him and he cannot only make his way in accidentally, but rule there, and even hold his ground in the study, without being annoyed by prayer and the reading of the Scriptures.  Watching and praying are the only bolts this thief fears.  A parsonage is either a house of prayer or a very den of iniquity.  There is no peace, indeed, for any of the ungodly, but a minister who lives without prayer and struggle is the poorest and most miserable man in the whole village.  (My Ministerial Experiences, For All the Saints, II, 338ff.)

 

The Meyer Minute for August 22, 2012

Meditating on Psalm 111:10, “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

Fear of the Lord is something missing in many versions of modern American Christianity.  Praise is present as many Americans worship, their hands uplifted, singing hymns that “just praise the Lord.”  Self-fulfillment is a strong emphasis as well.  The preacher takes a measure of the Bible, mixes it with a measure of psychology, and puts before worshippers the hope of feeling better about their lives.  Even when the message is very traditional, “we’re sinners and Jesus died for our sins,” it can be delivered in a way that does not evoke fear of the Lord.  How often do we carry out of church the feeling of the malefactor, “Don’t you fear God since you are under the same sentence?  We are punished justly, for we are getting what our deeds deserve.  But this man has done nothing wrong.” (Luke 23:40-41)

 

The fear of the Lord is akin to our other fears, fears about health, finances, relationships, and what have you.  “What’s to become of me?” haunts the anxieties of daily life and it takes an effort in self-delusion to keep fear, malefactor type fear, out of our thoughts about God.  While there are similarities, the fear of the Lord transforms our anxious moments.  It is focused on the Lord, not just our feelings directed at various causes of fear.  The fear of the Lord engages the mind and meditation in addition to feelings.  “All who follow His precepts have good understanding.” (Psalm 111:10b)  You can’t fear the Lord without a Bible close by and when you do, you come to a trust that “God is for us, who can be against us?  He who did not spare His own Son, but gave Him up for us all—how will He not also, along with Him, graciously give us all things?”  (Romans 8:31-32)  The fear of the Lord is awe that the eternal and mysterious gives us hope in place of dread.  “I tell you the truth, today you will be with Me in paradise.”  (Luke 23:43)  “The Lord is my light and my salvation—whom shall I fear?  The Lord is the stronghold of my life—of whom shall I be afraid?” (Psalm 27:1)  There’s nothing wrong with praise and fulfillment in worship and life but you can’t get there by a short cut.  You have to die with Christ, “the power of God and the wisdom of God.” (1 Corinthians 1:24)

“Wisdom’s highest, noblest treasure, Jesus, is revealed in You.  Let me find in You my pleasure, and my wayward will subdue, humility there and simplicity reigning, in paths of true wisdom my steps ever training.  If I learn from Jesus this knowledge divine, the blessing of heavenly wisdom is mind.”  (Lutheran Service Book 536, 3)       

The Bible beckons, “Come, my children, listen to Me; I will teach you the fear of the Lord.” (Psalm 34:11)

The Meyer Minute for August 21, 2012

“You have one new voice mail.”

So I punch “P” to play the new voice mail.

“Hi, Dale, this is Fred or Sally or whoever. Sorry I didn’t catch you.  What I’m calling about is such and such.”  And Fred or Sally or whoever goes on and on, telling you about such and such.  Then, more often than not, it ends this way: “You can reach me at 618-555-7145 or my cell phone, 314-555-2076.”  Huh?  You said it so quickly that I only got a couple numbers.

So you go back and listen to the same message again… “Hi, Dale…” and this time you get a few more numbers, but still not enough to return the phone call.

“Hi, Dale, this is Fred or Sally or whoever…” and now you’re listening for the third time.  It’s like the movie “Ground Hog Day,” same thing over and over and over again.  Maddening!

Just because you’ve said it, doesn’t mean I’ve understood it.  Oral communication is more than just making your point.  That works in print where a reader can pause but successful oral communication needs slowness and repetition.  “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” (Matthew 7:12).  That might help communication in many areas of your life, not just these confounded voice mails!

 

 

The Meyer Minute for August 20, 2012

“On this day when the work of our calling begins anew” begins an old prayer of the church.

Yesterday I began reading a new book by Ross Douthat, “Bad Religion” with the subtitle “How we became a nation of heretics.”  In our own life times we are seeing a remarkable decline in the institutional church in America.  Mr. Douthat compares it to a river.

“A chart of the American religious past would look like a vast delta, with tributaries, streams, and channels winding in and out, diverging and reconverging—but all of them fed, ultimately, by a central stream, an original current, a place where all the waters start.  This river is Christian orthodoxy.  Not the orthodoxy of any specific Christian church, whether Lutheran or Presbyterian or Roman Catholic, but the shared theological commitments that have defined the parameters of Christianity since the early Church.”  “But, for the last five decades, with the decline of institutional Christianity, the river of orthodoxy has gradually been drying up.”  (6, 8)

I was invited to say a few words last evening at Peace Lutheran Church in St. Louis.  About 150 members of the church came together to make advance commitments for the building of a new church sanctuary.  What I had read in “Bad Religion” was in the back of my mind as I saw these church members engaged in strengthening their congregation for the future, an exception to the decline in America’s institutional church.  Here were headwaters for Mr. Douthat’s “river,” and when we’ve gone on to eternity God will be blessing people through this part of the institutional church.  For any of us connected with the institutional church, the question must be asked, “on this day when the work of our calling begins anew,” what are we doing now to reverse the decline of the institutional church in America?  I don’t ask the question out of a defensive, circle-the-wagons mindset but out of a desire that those who follow us will have the same rich congregational life that many of us were blessed to experience.  

“Almighty God, merciful Father, who created and completed all things, on this day when the work of our calling begins anew, we implore You to create its beginning, direct its continuance, and bless its end, that our doings may be preserved from sin, our life sanctified, and our work this day be well pleasing to you; through Jesus Christ, our Lord.  Amen.”