A few years ago, the Baptist Center for Ethics produced materials that could be used by local churches about this time of year to highlight the holy calling that our teachers accept when they offer themselves as teachers of our community’s children. For that project, they asked several of us pastors to offer something that could be used by other CBF churches. I was asked to write a prayer of blessing.

This coincided with the idea the Southern Baptist Convention was attempting to sell by encouraging Christians in all the SBC churches to withdraw their children from the “godless” schools where all manner of evil is taught. The ultra-conservatives in that misguided group intended that churches would withdraw their children and create Christian schools in their communities to ensure that their children would be safe from the secularism of the unwashed. They called it the Exodus Movement. Can you imagine what would happen to our schools if this were to occur? Can you imagine the long-term result our nation would experience if craziness such as the Exodus Movement were to gain traction in our churches? Fundamentalism thrives on a kind of anxious faith that puts up an enemy to hate. It’s not a faith of love and acceptance and immersion no matter how much they grandstand purporting themselves to be servants of God … it’s a religion of exclusion and withdrawal.

So I wrote a prayer. It’s inspired by my exposure to thoughtful teachers who also happened to be women and men of faith. They were coaches of my football and track teams, history teachers, elementary teachers, counselors and school superintendents whom I happened to know were people of faith. Their faith wasn’t shared like an evangelism rally, it was shared because they knew who they were as God’s children and acted like it by loving me and striving to share an education with me.

*

As one who has nurtured all of us on the journey of being and as one who has brought loving, influential teachers into our lives, bless the teachers this day, O God.

Bless the teachers who love and teach as though their work was holy enough to be a calling from God. It is holy work they do because God has created every child, making them in God’s image so they might grow to maturity and wholeness.

When the day seems long and the sounds of the classroom cause the mind to throb, give our teachers the stamina to “walk the second mile” so every child knows they are loved as persons of worth. Children are created as persons who express their deepest feelings, both in their noise and in their silence. God, help our teachers to listen to both the sounds and the silences and to respect both as the language children use in describing their inner world.

When the children appear as “sheep without a shepherd,” help the teachers love each child as Jesus did. When a child lives in a home of chaos and neglect, help them understand they are loved at school because they are the focus of a teacher who recognizes in them a person of value.

When a child’s parents are difficult to enlist as co-laborers in the shared task of education, bless the teacher with persistence. Bless the teacher who labors on in the work of education even when parents are too busy to pay attention to their child.

Even when some in the church seem to oppose the value of the teacher by questioning their skills and commitment, help each teacher understand that while others may not value what they do and question the merit of their work it is work that is important in the eyes of God.

Bless and keep our teachers this day, O LORD. Bless them with awareness of your abiding presence because they partner with the Eternal God of all children.

Amen.

While most Christians talk like they’ve heard from the Almighty, I can’t say I’ve ever heard the voice of God. I know the Bible tells of a few times when someone heard the Voice, but since I haven’t, I figure they were stretching the truth just a tad. But I can claim I’ve known the will of God on a few occasions and if that qualifies, I join the pious and wink when I say I’m one of those who’ve heard the Voice. I’m just being honest about all this, mind you. If you’ve heard God speak audibly, who am I to judge? Wink. Wink.

I’ve always admired how Birdie’s fully capable of questioning a thing down to its most essential parts while still loving it. I’ve learned she loves a thing most fully by letting her brain dismantle it and analyze how it works. She isn’t being unfaithful to it. She loves it in spite of its warts and hidden weaknesses because she understands it.

I could tell she was coming to see me because I could hear her coming. She popped in and asked, “Got time for a little road trip to get some coffee?”

“A road trip? Who are you kidding?” Such is the ministry … sometimes when it looks like we’re doing nothing at all we’re actually engaged in the good stuff.

When we settled into the booth at the coffee shop she looked me square in the eyes and said, “Okay, Reverend Smarty Pants, truth or dare, have you ever heard the voice of God?”

“No. Not once.”

“Tell me you’re kidding.”

“Nope.”

“And you call yourself a minister?”

I smiled my answer and added, “Ironic, isn’t it?”

“What about when you tell us to not be afraid to follow the will of God?”

“I say that because I mean it. Who said anything about hearing the Voice?

“Preacher, I’m confused. If you haven’t heard the Voice, how can you talk about doing the will of God? Aren’t they one and the same?”

“Not in my experience. Have you ever heard me say I’m one of those who heard the Voice?”

“I can see they’re not one and the same, but how have you known God’s will?”

“Now that’s a great question … I just know, that’s how. When it comes down to it I just know. I can’t really tell you how, but when God wants me to know, I know. I’ll admit I haven’t known much about the little stuff, but when the big stuff comes along, somewhere in my bones I know it has to be a certain way and nothing else matters. It was true when I had my first date with Wanda. I had dated a lot but when it didn’t work, I moved on. Some girls I dated longer than others, but when I met Wanda, I had an intense and scary attraction that I had come home.”

“Well, there are plenty of ways to analyze that, if you know what I mean,” Birdie added with a knowing look.

“Doesn’t matter, Mrs. Freud. I still knew. Think all your smarmy thoughts. I’ll admit it was a convoluted sense of knowing, but you can’t talk me out of it. I was smitten and looking back, I can honestly say God was in it.”

“I also knew when it came to my calling as a minister. I knew through a series of circumstances after my freshman year of college. I know when I went back to school I knew something I didn’t know three months earlier when I went home for the summer. Since then, I’ve gone through two distinct seasons when I had to rework that sense of calling and sign on for an extension of my original contract. Both times surprised me when I had to reaffirm things but I did.”

“Here’s the test: How’d you know for sure?”

“I did what my college roommate told me. I jiggled a few doorknobs. What he told me was I needed to think about life as a long hallway lined with doors. In that scene, I could see they were all closed but not all locked. So, part of my job was to go around jiggling doorknobs. Most were locked, I soon realized. That was actually a good thing because some never were meant to open. But some of them were unlocked and I learned those were the ones to pay attention to. The next level of knowing was to recognize those unlocked doors might be a sign I need to go through those doors. I had lots of help from my Bible, my friends and the Spirit. I learned later that some of those doors opened onto other hallways with other doors. In the end, I realized God was a part of all this by unlocking doors along the way and wanting me to be curious enough about wanting to do God’s will to jiggle a few doorknobs.”

“Preacher, you don’t always make sense but today you’ve scored points.”

“Must be God’s will, Sister.”

“No, God’s will is that you pick up the tab for our coffee.”

Like everyone else, I daily receive forwarded email messages from friends and acquaintances. Whenever it says at the bottom, “Pass this along to ten of your friends and keep this message alive,” I immediately determine I will not pass it along no matter what the threat may be in ignoring the warning.

However, in the midst of an election year, forwarded political messages have become problematic. There has been a marked increase in messages we receive as forwards that have that high-mileage, heavily-passed-along look, that are in fact campaign smears against one or the other presidential candidate.

Admittedly, some of these messages are meant to be humorous. They are meant as jokes even though there’s an unmistakable personal barb in them. Political satire has long been a vital part of the American political system. Late night comedians thrive on the economy of the misspoken word or social gaffe and we citizens love to take our politicians down a notch or two whenever possible. This week’s The New Yorker magazine cover illustrates how even political satire can be deadly. Are the characterizations by cartoonist Barry Blitt true? It doesn’t seem to matter as he has lampooned a common perception fueled by these anonymous email forwards.

These messages are sinister because they allege certain secret facts about a candidate that have inexplicably gone unnoticed by untold thousands of professional political reporters who are gunning for the candidates in order to scoop these same kind of hidden secrets before any other reporter can get hold of them. Professional reporters have well-established ethical codes that tether them to the responsibilities they have as reporters. In those codes, they must verify the facts and identify themselves as the authors of their own reports. But with email, these so-called facts are presented as if no one else has the courage to unmask them or as if there is a conspiracy to keep these facts from the public who deserve to know the truth. With email, we somehow suspend the need for ethics and allow messages with no identified author to have the same merit as those messages we receive from actual reporters.

So what do we do with these anonymous messages passed along virus-like from one person to another? When one uses one of the several urban legend search engines, more often than not the content of these mysterious email messages are discovered to be fabrications. They are vicious, destructive lies with racial or anti-religious biases. They question a candidate’s motives and challenge their patriotism. Why would anyone wish to tell blatant lies about these candidates? What motivations do they have that these messages would originate, then be given an unending life on the Internet passed along by both the malicious and the naïvely zealous?

When I discover the forwarded message is not true and is instead a thinly veiled personal attack on the candidate, my anger expectedly wells up at the one who passed it along as fact. Since there’s no one else to be held accountable, I point my anger at the only name I recognize that is usually someone I know personally: ironically a fellow church member, a friend, or someone else I know. I wonder, why they would participate in this hateful way of communicating?

In this year’s presidential election, there are hateful religious and racial overtones claimed falsely about Senator Barack Obama. Senator McCain gets off lightly but still must deal with the issues of ageism although there is a marked difference in the way the two candidates are unfairly vilified. Four years ago, a new term, “swift-boating,” came to mean an unfair attack on one’s distinguished military service as if to reduce that service to a sham that had been contrived for purely political gain, even though the truth of that person’s service had been noble and self-sacrificing. It was the epitome of turning truth into a lie. Nevertheless, the damage was done and no one suffered much for passing along the original lies unless you consider John Kerry’s character as having been sacrificed on the altar of dirty politics. To that end, I suppose we all suffered at the sacrifice of our need for personal and public integrity.

The Bible has plenty to say about the sins of gossip and lying and condemns both forthrightly. Our legal system also condemns both slander and libel as character assassination. It’s slander when you say it and libel when you print it. So what happens when you forward libelous emails where the author of such lies hides behind the cloak of anonymity … is there no guilt for that as well?

It’s been a busy couple of weeks for what James Thurber called, “the war between men and women.” Thurber didn’t begin the war, mind you, but he spoke and wrote satirically about how women and men have traditionally been at odds with one another for power, sexual politics, and marital commitment. In his defense, some things are so important they must be lampooned in order to save us from ourselves.

The latest skirmish came recently after Professor Bruce Ware of Southern Seminary preached a sermon at the Denton Bible Church commenting on how some women bring their own spousal abuse upon themselves and suffer because they rebel against God and God’s supposed choosing of men to be the authoritarian figures in the family (Cf. www.ethicsdaily.com “Southern Baptist Scholar Links Spouse Abuse to Wive’s Refusal to Submit to Their Husbands”). You understand that male dominance is considered a central teaching of the patriarchal understanding of the family and assigned sex roles as pronounced by a fundamentalist/literal reading of the Bible.

Does the Bible present a patriarchal view of male and female roles? Yes, but only if you read the Bible literally. Does that mean God intended this to be the way of things for all time? I don’t think so. There’s a lot in the literalistic Bible we’ve turned away from and now see as archaic for its day or as metaphors that point us toward truth that guides our lives rather than legalistic rules that dominate us punitively. For the literalist, does plucking out the offending eye make sense or was it simply a metaphor?

Miguel de la Torre, theologian at Iliff Seminary in Denver, cites biblical examples of male dominance over women in his essay, “Show Me a Sexist; I’ll Show You a Racist,” on today’s Ethics Daily website. De la Torre reads from the Bible a variety of ways men should have power over women:

* Seeing women as property that can be bought or sold (Exodus 20:17)

* Owning concubines (I Kings 11:3), sex slaves (Deuteronomy 21:10-14) or to enjoy the occasional pleasure of a prostitute (Genesis 38:15)

* The bride who was discovered to not be a virgin on her wedding night should be executed (Deuteronomy 22:13-21)

All these he cites satirically as evidence of “the good old days” … the days when men ruled the world unchallenged by women. He also insightfully correlates how this same male dominance over women is the same power directed toward minorities to suppress them as well.

There are two major schools of thought about how women and men are to relate to one another according to the teachings of the Bible. The Bible seems to support them both depending on how you think about the Bible in literal terms or whether you allow there are metaphors that demand interpretation. If you lean toward a Bible that’s literally true, then you might lean towards a patriarchal understanding where God speaks to men and the men pass God’s intentions along to women. In that kind of relationship, men and women may be created equal but with assigned sex roles: Men have gender roles they must play and women likewise also have gender roles they are to play. This view is called a complementarian view of gender roles.

Belief in a literal Bible, however, presents a good deal of trouble as you can see above. According to a literalist viewpoint, some of you wouldn’t be reading this because your parents might have taken you out to the gates of the city and stoned you to death for disobedience (Leviticus 20:9). I know some of you well enough to know it is the grace of God that such biblical punishment wasn’t meted out in your case. Bill Leonard rightly observes that the only true literalists are the snake handlers!

But it’s not hard to imagine that the Bible came to us from a pre-scientific world and it’s teachings must be culturally interpreted in its original context. Common sense seems to point us toward this viewpoint.

In addition to the obvious cultural boundaries from the ancient world, the Bible also has great metaphorical value demanding thoughtful interpretation. Therefore you might understand that the Bible is not locked into an archaic male-dominated world and that it also values an egalitarian understanding of being male and female.

Both male and female are equally a part of God’s creation and both are blessed by God because we’ve been created in God’s image (imago Dei). Both are free to serve God as God has given them gifts and as God has called them into action. God is the one who gifts and calls and who are we to limit or monitor God’s activity and wisdom?

What is your view on these issues? Do you believe men have certain work to do and women have their own work and that neither should venture over into the other’s world? Do you think both men and women are bound by biblically assigned gender roles and men trump women every time in a tilted world where God has ordained that men control the women ala the patriarchal view of headship?

You might already know I am an egalitarian and not a complementarian. I don’t believe in a literalistic reading of the Bible but see it as the word God has given to guide us in life and that the Bible demands our thoughtful submission to its metaphors and images for divine truth. We study and learn from it but we do not deify it (perhaps another article for the future?).

Back to Professor Ware and his sermon on the rebellion of women against God … this viewpoint of male domination over women is apparently common at Southern Seminary. Remember, this is the seminary where a “full quiver theology” is espoused (couples submit to God’s fruitful blessing of children unhindered by the couple’s use of birth control). It’s also where professors have taught that young adults should get married as young as possible so they can have babies in abundance. To do otherwise is labeled by them as “sin.” All that causes me to ask: Why is there such a deep interest in such things? This past week I wrote an essay about these issues for the Ethics Daily website and labeled their interest in such things as obsessive.

I think it matters greatly what we think about how we relate to one another. I believe God has given each one of us certain gifts that are to be made available to the calling God might have for us … whether we’re male or female. To arbitrarily limit those gifts or to hamstring God simply because of one’s genitalia might be okay if you teach theology at Southern Seminary, but that way of thinking seems foolishness to me and a great limitation on what God might want to do with us and through us to bless the world.

The funeral home was packed because “Uncle Jimmy” was a man people counted on in life. He was a well-respected leader in the community and the community gathered in droves when he died.

Uncle Jimmy was a true salesman. He entered the diner and had to go around to nearly every table before he could sit down. He seemed to know everyone and often had a hearty “Hello” to offer them all as if they were his best friends. People loved him for his friendliness. He sold cars down at the Buick house thus explaining why LeSabres and Regals dominated the streets in town.

Birdie and Earl had known him when he was a young man and had helped him get started. It was widely known that Birdie respected some men more than others. Uncle Jimmy earned his respect because he was equally respectful of both men and women. Most men are obvious in the way they insult women by being sugary sweet to them without offering them the same sense of respect they offer freely to men.

Birdie was dressed for respect. She wore an elegant black dress appropriate for the level of respect she felt for “James” as she called him. Even the faux pearls and matching earrings were in sync because they picked up the silver-blue highlights of her hair. As she passed by Uncle Jimmy’s open casket, the highlights of her hair glistened in the blue and pink lights that shined down on him like a divine light.

“James deserves a good send-off,” she whispered to me as she passed by on her way to her seat in the back. While some might have thought she was encouraging me to do a good job, I understood her to mean she looked like a million bucks in his honor.

The somber-serious funeral director escorted the family to their seats as the time to begin the funeral neared. The entrance of the family was like the maestro stepping up on the podium. It was the theater of small-town drama at its best.

What was obvious was that Uncle Jimmy was not going to be around to see the birth of his first great-grandson. Jimmy’s oldest granddaughter was so pregnant with child she waddled gingerly down the aisle and carefully lowered herself down to the folding chair that groaned under her bulging weight. When the gravity of her body seemed to relax and settle, so did the crowd. She was full with child and the whole town seemed to hold its breath when she made her way into the room.

This granddaughter was the one who lit up Uncle Jimmy’s world. The first couple of grandkids had been boys and while grandsons were nothing to sneer at, when Jennifer was born, she became his favorite. Uncle Jimmy loved her and she loved him back.

Jennifer grew up and got married. Uncle Jimmy bought them a car for their wedding and off they went in it when the rice was thrown at their big send-off. What they didn’t know as they drove out of town was that Uncle Jimmy’s doctor had given him a medical report that included cancer.

So while he was laughing and making a fuss over his granddaughter’s wedding, he was holding back a piece of sadness that only he and his wife knew.

Months later, he was unable to get to the car dealership. He was too tired, he said, and the loss of weight had made him gnarly and weak. Unlike some who suffered the same, Uncle Jimmy never lost his hope or his quick wit. He may have been hurting but he never let on that he felt bad. He always had a good word to share with the many people who stopped by to see him.

Jennifer came by after the honeymoon. The day she told him she was pregnant, he mustered up the energy to take her down to the diner for a celebration. They sat in the booth in the back so they could have a little privacy. Uncle Jimmy was never happier, he told her. It was then he broke the news that he was sick unto death.

The closer she got to the due date, the weaker he got. They were headed in different directions it seemed. She grew larger and he withered away.

Uncle Jimmy died on a Friday and Thelma, his wife, planned his funeral for the following Monday. Jennifer’s doctor had meanwhile determined she should deliver by Caesarian and they set the date for Tuesday. Uncle Jimmy’s big departure was on one day and Little Jimmy’s arrival was the next day. Jennifer had no question about what the baby’s name would be.

Life in a small town is a sampler for the whole range of emotions one can feel. There’s no place to hide and no secrets kept for too long. As I stood to “say words” over Uncle Jimmy’s life, I knew there were two strong tugs on both ends of the spectrum of life.

I read the words as if they were penned just for this occasion. “I am the Alpha and the Omega…”

I first wrote a few stories about “Back Row Birdie” seven years ago. Birdie’s a fictional character who sits on the back row of church where she can keep her eye on things in her church. From that elevated perch, she watches everything! She watches the drama of church and she’s alert to all the under-the-surface movements of the church as it worships God week by week.

Because of the interest from my congregation back then, I submitted those articles to four editors of publications I admired and asked them if they thought this kind of writing could be useful. I suggested there were other stories I could write using my relationship with this imaginary woman living in my brain. Soon, I heard back from John Pierce, editor of Baptists Today, who offered me a monthly column - one page, 850 words, due on the first of the month [check it out @ www.baptiststoday.org].

Johnny and his associate editor Jackie Riley are very cool to write for. They make no demands other than to observe the word count and writing deadline. They let me do my own editing with very few exceptions and impose no controls on content or make suggestions as to subject matter. Our relationship has been simple: I keep sending them stories and they keep publishing them. And eighty-two columns later, here we are!

All of that’s true with the exception of the one time a story was rejected. I kid you not, “Voting the God Ticket,” the article for the October 2004 issue was rejected because what I had written might be considered offensive to some of their more conservative readers (I know you’re shocked at that!). So I wrote a second story they subsequently published in its place.

That unpublished semi-fictional story was about a well-known SBC pastor who preached a July 4th sermon titled, “The God Ticket,” about the political platform God would promote if God could tell us how to vote. It was a simple sermon about those issues in our nation God would want us to adopt. Of course it was eerily similar to the platform of the Republican National Party! Coming from this pastor, there was no surprise as he was eager to be considered one of God’s “up and comers” among the Moral Majority crowd of preachers competing for national recognition. The narcissism of that kind of political posturing and self-aggrandizement was amazing.

None of that, however, was overly unusual; it was expected from this pastor that he would preach the Republican Party platform and call it “Christian” preaching. What was stunning was as soon as he mentioned the words, “the God Movement,” the Jumbo-Tron above the choir began flashing a montage of slides of President Bush for the church to view while he preached. Never did the pastor mention the President’s name but who else were they to think of as the pastor preached so eloquently about the God Ticket?

Even I recognized that if you preached on the God Platform, it’s required you also preach about the Anti-God Platform (those things God would want us to vote down in the next election). You can see this one coming a mile away, can’t you? This über-conservative pastor preached on all those issues God would have us vote down and of course they were all the issues on the Democratic ticket for the fall. Every Democratic platform issue was named on the Anti-God Ticket.

Worse, when the preacher mentioned “the Anti-God Ticket,” the slide show changed to showing slides of Senator John Kerry in a variety of scenes. Never did the pastor identify the Senator by name; only the visual images were shown but they were shown with the sermon-soundtrack implying God wanted all us faithful children of God to vote for the President’s re-election and to make sure this Anti-God candidate was sent home emptyhanded.

I am a writer of stories and you may think I’m making all this up … but we all the know the weirdest stories are usually true.

Baptists have long advocated a separation between God and country for the simple reason the church is never strengthened when it gets in bed with the government and the government has never been better when it endorses a faith as the only faith its constituents can have. “Separation of Church and State is Good for Both,” the Baptist Joint Committee reminds us.

We are not a Christian nation because only people can become Christians; governments are simply tools the people use to help make for themselves a better life.

Happy Fourth of July! Shoot off all your fireworks and fly your American flag with all the honest and sure admiration you have in your heart. We are a wonderful nation when we do right and see our place in the world as one of the countries where God is at work … but not the only country where God works and not even God’s chosen country because God’s love is not limited by national borders.

On Sunday when we worship, our job is to worship the God of Creation who made the world and watches over all of us. That’s enough.