Spring Training

Baseball was big in our house growing up. we always had Sunday lunch with my Great Uncle Stanley and my Great Aunt Lois. In the spring and summer there was always lots of talk about baseball. Daddy and Uncle Stanley usually led the way, but my mother had an interest as well, and I joined in as I got older. The great Dizzy Dean was the announcer on the game of the week on TV, and often we would discuss that game and what Dean had said as he murdered the king's english while doing the broadcast. This was long before the Braves came to town. The local heroes were the Atlanta Crackers, considered by many to be the finest minor league franchise ever. I have warm memories of going with our family to Ponce de Leon Park, across from where City Hall East is, to see the Crackers play. Sometimes we would go by the Varsity for food on the way in. They dominated the old Southern Association, and I would listen to away games on WSB. My favorite major league team was the Yankees of Mantle, Berra, and Whitey Ford. I followed the standings religiously.

Part of what is important to me about baseball is waht it conveys about family for me, espaecially links with my father and my son. Daddy and I used to play pitch a good bit. It was one of the ways we bonded. The same is true for me and Josh. When he came home from the Army one of the first things we did was to get our gloves out. I tear up almost every time I watch Field of Dreams. It's big stuff for me.

I remember when the old Atlanta-Fulton County stadium was built. The Braves came from Milwaukee the year I graduated from high school, and friends and I began to go to games - you could get outfield seats for a dollar - and began the many long years of agony and frustration as the Braves lost enormous numbers of games. Somewhere around 1980 the Braves actually made the playoffs for the first time, promptly losing in the first round. It looked like they might have a team that could compete again the next year (a mirage it turned out), and I remember sitting on the den floor as their last game ended and counting the months until spring training began. (About 10 years later Atlanta would go wild when the Braves went from worst to first in 1991 and won the pennant for the first of 15 straight years. I have never seen anything like Atlanta in the fall of 1991.)

I've never been to spring training - one of my life goals is to make it some year - but it's a wonderful invention. The pace is slow. The earth - at least in this part of the world - is beginning to warm up and show promise of new life. There is promise and hope for every player and every team. It's spring and it's baseball. I can't imagine anything better. I like many other sports, but baseball will always be my first and deepest love.

Jimmy

In the garden

I think my daddy was a farmer at heart. He never made his living as an adult by farming, but it was in his blood. We always had a large garden at our house in Marietta, growing all kinds of fresh vegetables. (One result of this was that many of the vegetables I ate growing up were home grown and were wonderfully cooked by my mother, who was a great old style southern cook. I got spoiled. It is still hard for me to find green beans that I like cooked at a restaurant. They're just not like the fresh ones that my mother prepared.) All of us worked in the garden during the summertime.

One of the jobs that I was given pretty early on was plowing in the garden with a rotor-tiller. Not the most difficult job in the world, but hard enough, especially in the heat of summer. It goes pretty smoothly when the ground is fairly level and isn't too packed in. It can take some doing when the dirt has for some reason gotten hard and packed in and/or is uneven. But I did it enough to get fairly good at it. Julie and I bought a tiller when we were in Blairsville back in the early 80's. We have used it in several places over the years to prepare our own gardens, and somehow it is still running.

Last Saturday I cranked up the tiller and worke don part of the plot that will be our garden on the side of our house. We've grown in this area the last two summers and have added leaves and mulch to the ground to make it richer, so that now it is really good dirt and not too hard to plow. We got an area ready and Julie planted some carrots, cabbage, and broccoli for an early garden. One of the great smells in the world to me is freshly turned dirt in the spring. There is a pungency about it that is marvellous. And there is always the great mystery of life and food coming up out of the earth to nourish us. A marvelous mystery indeed, and a sign of God's creative power. A fruitful garden is not a given: it takes a lot of work, and the weather can turn sour on you or the insects not do their job of pollinating. ( something mysterious is killing honey bees in our country, a serious issue for our food production.) But there is nothing to beat eating fresh food from your own garden. Julie is a wonderful cook.

My father died when I was a week away from my 25th birthday. Working in the garden is one way I stay connected to him.

Jimmy

At the movies

Julie and I like to take in movies, but it seems like we never see as many as we would like. And they seem to come in waves of varying quality. There will be weeks when there is nothing showing that we are particularly interested in. And tehn there will be tomes - like now - when it seems like there is a pplethera of good films out there. We have recently seen The Queen and Little Miss Sunshine, both of which we liked. Though I liked Sunshine more than Julie did. And I would like to see Volver, The Last King of Scotland, Music and Lyrics, Wild Hogs, Reno 911, Amazing Grace and others out now. It seems to be a good time forr movies.

Last night we went to see Notes on a Scandal. It had been on our list for a while, and e finally made it. It is a powerful, sometimes disturbing movie that we thought was first class. All of the acting was good, but Judi Dench was superb beyond words. Just amazing. We liked her before, but this performance was just wonderful. She does mean and evil as well as anyone I have ever seen. We loved Helen Mirren in The Queen, and she had a very different kind of role to play, but it would be very hard for me not to give an Oscar to Judi Dench.

The plot revolves around an affair a married school teacher has with one of her students. But I think the movie is really about the deep human need to be in relatonship with other humans, and the desperate, tragic actions we sometimes take when we are overcome by lonliness and isolation. Both the main female characters struggled to find ways to deal with their lonliness, and in both cases it played out tragically. Much to think about in terms of how we were created to be
in relationship with one another, and the need to find healthy ways to fulfill that need. Excellent movie.

Jimmy

Emergency Room

A week ago today I got a call at lunch from the nurse at Julie's school that she had been having some strange and scary symptoms at school, and that they were going to take Julie to the emergency room at Emory. The symptoms were the kind that could be associated with something like heart attack or stroke, so we were clearly concerned. I met Julie at Emory about 1:30. By 4:30 she had had a battry of tests, all of which came back clear. Because one of the symptoms had been some trouble forming words, and because the doctors were not certain what was going on, it was decided to keep her overnight in the 23 hour unit. We felt this was a good idea, and so she stayed. More tests were also clear, and she got out by lunch on Tuesday. This was good news for us, because it is a frightening thing to go to the emergncy room with such unsettling symptoms. We were greatly relieved that the really scary physical possiblities were ruled out, but we were left then with a mystery. What had led to these symptoms? We now believe that it was brought on by stress. Julie is taking some very good steps to reduce stress, and we hope that we will not have this kind of scare again.

A side note. The week before I had been to a luncheon meeting about the readiness, or lack thereof, of our country to respond effectively to a pandemic. The speaker was from Emory and is a nationally recognized leader in the field of emergency room issues. He said that not only were we not prepared for a pandemic, but that we do not have the facilities to handle what comes to the emergency rooms today. If you call 911 today, there is a chance you will be told that there is no ambulance available because they are all in use. If you do get an ambulnce, you may have to go by one hopital, sometimes two, before you can find an emergency room with space to take you. I thought of that when Julie and I got to Emory, and there were patients on beds all up and down the hallway because the rooms were full. The nurse said it was pretty much like that every day. This is an issue that affects all of us, and one that we need to talk to our representatives about. The situation is aggravaterd by people with no health insurance who use emergancy rooms as their primary care providers.

Jimmy

A Gift

My son, Josh, fought for a year in Afghanistan beginning in April of 2004. About 10 days ago when he was at our house he gave me a book he had just finished and said I might be interested in it. The title is My War:Killing Time in Iraq. The author is Colby Buzzell, a soldier who fought for a year in Iraq. The book comes from his journal and from a blog he created while he was in Iraq. Josh got my attention when he said that if I read the book it would be almost like reading his journal. He said the accounts in the book were right in line with his experiences. So I stayed up late a couple of nights and read the book.

It's a powerfull read. Not as graphic as I expected, but powerful. Starting with the recruitment pracess and basic training and going all the way through uintil his return to the US. It is an account of the deception practised by at least some recruiters, the tedium of much of life in a combat zone, and the thrill and horrer of being in a firefight. One of the tough things for me to process in terms of Josh was the description of how the Army takes young men and women and turns them into killers. The book was also powerful in talking about the difficulty of coming out of the Army and trying to find your way in the now strange civilian world. Buzzell was cleqar at the end that he would not encourage persons to enlist, but the pull of the community of the Army was very evident in his story, and he does not regret serving.

The most significant thing to me abiout the book was the fact that it gave me new ways to talk to Josh about his service and new opportunities to learn from him. We have already had some substantive conversations coming out of my reading the book, and I expect there will be more. I am so grateful he put me in touch with the book.

Jimmy

Last on Emergent Confernce

A few closing thoughts on the Emergent Conference at Columbia, especially from the comments of Brian McLaren in the closing session.

Criticism makes you either bitter or better. Criticising never makes you better, so McLaren suggests never criticizing anybody. Let thousands of flowers bloom. Think us-us, not us-them. Let your circle of love include those who define themselves over against you. Sounds like Jesus.

Move away from thinking about saving the church and think about the presence of the good news of the presence of the kingdom of God. Move from theory to action. Join God at work in the world God loves.

Find some friends to be with. Going outside the boundaries, living through change is so hard, so demanding, you need friends for the journey.


If you can start something new, do it. You don't need permission to serve God.

Support experiments. Expect failures. Adaptively imitate success.

Emphacize first order practices such as prayer, loving your neighbor, practicing hospitality, and giving to the poor. Most of our problems, he suggest come from 2nd order practices such as theologies.

Hope against hope. Ask, what if this works "exceedingly abundantly beyond all we can ask or think". (Eph. 3: 19 - 20)

What especially draws me to this is what I have spoken to before: the willingness to be in dialogue/relationship with those who differ from you; the attempt to get beyond the institutionalism that marks so much of our church life; the focus on first order practices and being at work with God in the world. McLaren and the Emergent community are inviting us to think creatively about new ways of being church in the 21st century. For me, evocotive and helpful.

Jimmy

More on emergent

Observations about the folks leading the Emergent movement:
- Thay are smart, well read, and articulate;

- They are very funny. The tone reminds me a lot of The Daily Show with John Stewart;

- They are serious about what they do, but there is a humility about their work. They do not take themselves too seriously. They do not believe that they know everything. They are open to dialogue with those who hold other views. I greatly appreciate this aspect of their approach.

- They are postmoderns, and very adept in their uses of technology;

- They are not parochial in their concerns;

- They are passionate about God, about Jesus, and about living lives that look like Jesus

The leaders of this movement are pretty blunt in their assessment of how we have been doing church, at least in terms of how they and many of their peers have experienced it. Tony Jones said, "The way we're doing church doesn't work." He spoke of the "lifeless, meaningless experience" he had in church growing up. What they are seeking to create are communities of faith that join God in God's work in the world, communities that form what was termed virtuoso Christians. Their focus is not on orthodoxy (right belief) or orthopraxis (right behavior). Rather it is on ortho-paradoxy, living creatively in the tension of various and competeing beliefs that marks postmodern life. There is a great focus on our inter-connectedness and on the importance of friendship.

What is compelling to me about what the Emergents are saying is that it touches on my own concern that we are missing the boat in the larger church with what we are doing. We are so focused on ourselves, and on the needs of the institution. Brian McLaren said on Thursday, "If the church is focused on saving itself while th e world is going down the toilet, how can God be pleased?" It is a good question. More later.

Jimmy

Emerging

A few years ago my son in law, Philip, introduced me to a Christian writer named Brian McLaren. McLaren comes out of an evangelical background and had become the most visible face and voice of a movement in American Christianity called the Emergent Church/Village. (www.emergentvillage.org) I picked up a couple of his books and was moved by his writing, especially in the first of his books that I read, The Church on the Other Side. I have since seen his work in more and more mainline periodicals and seen him speaking at more and more mainline events. I was struck by McLaren's openness, his humor, his genuine humility, and his love of God and the way of Jesus. I wanted to learn more.

This past week Columbia Seminary in Decatur sponsored a three day event called Mailline Emergent/s. It was an opportunity for mainline pastors to dialogue with and learn from leaders of the Emergent movement. McLaren was one of the speakers. I knew when I learned of it that I had to go. I was not disappointed.

I love the United Methodist Church. In Emergent language it is the "tribe" that has formed me and that put me in touch with God, starting so long ago. I have tried to serve it faithfully across the years. And I still think the Wesleyan way is a wonderful path for those seeking a rich and meaningful relationship with God. But in this latest season of my life and ministry questions keep coming up that won't go away and that concern me about our great church. Most critically I wrestle with why so many of us United Methodists - and I include myself - don't look more like Jesus as we live our lives. The larger church seems mired too often in institutional concerns and is regularly torn asunder by petty bickering. And we seem to be either unsure about what the Good News might mean for folks or confused about how to share it effectively. These conccerns are not new, but they have become more critical for me recently. (maybe it's my age - today is my birthday.) And it turns out they are similar to many of the issues that lead to the formation of the Emergent movement in the late 1990's.

Emergent practitioners ae folks who are solidly grounded in the postmodern world. They feel that the church traditions that many of them grew up in - mainline and evangelical - do not address the questions they are wrestling with in their lives. The polarizations that are such a part of my daily life are deemed unhelpful and irrelevant by Emergents. McLaren quoted a French Roman Catholic Bishop from a few years back: "the Church is a disaster. The future of the church is in people's homes and in restaurants". They are interested in a missional church that speaks to the new world that has emerged since the 1960's. As the week unfolded it was clear that there is in the Emergent movement an appreciation of gifts that remain and are active in the older tratitions. But the movement seeks to use those gifts in new ways, with a new focus.

Regular members of the Emergent movement might wish to challenge or add to my interpretation here, but I think I have a basic sense of what it is about. And I am excited about what it offers to me and to the church. I'll share some specifics from the conference in my next post.

Jimmy

The Cycle of Life

Last Sunday we babtized Cannon Joseph at church. Baptisms are on of my favorite things to do. Usually there are family and friends present to support the parents and there is a joyful feeling in the room. With infants like Cannon it is a time of hope and promise and grace. Our focus in the liturgy is on the grace of God, the claiming by God of the one being baptised as one of God's own. Those of us in the congregation plegde our prayers and support for the infant and for the parents as the journey of faith is begun. It is a good, rich time, flush with the fullness of God's
love and the promise of a life just beginning to unfold.

That afternoon I went by a nursing home to visit one of our members near death. he wasn't really able to talk, and in fact slept most of the 30 minutes that I was there. John knew tht he was dying and had been able to talk about his coming death with some close friends. Many of us are not that brave and fortunate. He was as ready for death as I think you can be. The word came the next day - John died early in Monday afternoon. the funeral was today. The sermon was given by an Eppiscopal priest who had known John well over many years, and it was supurb. there was grace evident in John's death and funeral every bit as much as there had been in Cannon's baptism. The gift of being able to talk honestly about his dying. The gift of friends who stood by, loving John in these last days. The gift of a moving service. The gift of God's presence in the midst of it all.

It is good that we are known and loved by God from the begining of our lives to their end, and beyond. We have experienced that remarkable steadfast love this week.

Jimmy