The power of the storm was awesome. Here in the Midwest, the storms flex with all God’s terrifying power. And with all this open sky, you can even see them coming! Thinking about this jerked me back to a storm I experienced as a student at Baylor a hundred years ago …

I was home when the storm blew in. I remember turning on the radio when the emergency sirens started screaming. The radio stopped playing music it could relay the reports coming in from the storm trackers following a tornado just north of Waco. The sky was turning a greenish shade of gray and the trees were whipsawing back and forth. The voice of the storm tracker was excited as he described the storm he was followed.

“Now let’s hear a report from Randy, our weather tracker calling in from the excitable side of this storm… Randy, where are you?”

There was the distinct sound of wind blowing on the radio. A nervous voice jumped in. “This is Randy and I’m out by the old Connally Air Base. I can see the tornado bumping along Lake Shore Drive. Fortunately I can follow it along without getting in harms’ way. Man! You should see all the ruckus this storm is making!”

“Randy, Buddy here… What kind of damage are you seeing?”

“No houses but I saw it plow through a warehouse and it peeled off the roof like an Aggie barber gives one that’s high and tight. But there’s not too much in the way of housing out this way. But you and I both know that once the tornado climbs up the hill out by the Community College, it’ll hit a housing area and no telling what it’ll do then.”

I happened to live just up that hill and around the corner. I turned up the volume.

“Randy, tell me what you’re seeing right now.”

“Well, it’s spinning like one of those tops we used to play with as kids. It’s like a nasty, dirt-filled funnel going here and there and just when you think you know where it’s headed, it suddenly turns in a new direction as if it’s saying, ‘You can’t guess where I’m going cause I go exactly where I want to go and there ain’t nothing you can do about it!’”

When Randy said he could see the buildings of the community college just up the hill, I jumped up and looked out the big plate glass window of our little house. I could see the clouds hanging lower than ever. I could even see them swirling. On a normal day most clouds swirl around but always in slow motion, so slow you’re tempted to turn your head away before you notice its movement. Not this cloud. Not this day. I could see the clouds circling above. Lightning suddenly flashed and the trees blew back and forth as the storm approached. My breath grew short and shallow. My eyes widened.

Buddy jumped in. “Randy, where do you think it’s headed?”

“Danged if I know. Right now, it’s headed up the hill skipping over the treetops as it climbs …” Suddenly there was a long, silent pause. you could still hear the crackling of Randy’s open mic.

“Randy! You still there?” Silence.

“Randy?” Nothing.

While I could sit there and worry about Randy, I thought instead about me and the approach of a tornado storming down my street. My Daddy taught me to “be prepared,” so I did what any other scaredy-cat would do, I pulled the couch over on the floor and crawled under it!

Now please don’t write me telling me what a danged fool thing that was to do. I know the weather experts tell you to get to the hallway that’s lined with doors or to go down in your basement (something unheard of in Waco), or about half a million other better ideas than to turn your couch over and crawl under it. In the moment, of course, I couldn’t think of anything better to do than that. All I knew was the wind was picking up and the sky was greener than gray and the trees were bending so far the limbs scraped the ground. Then I heard Randy’s shrill voice yelling frantically, “Buddy, send the Calvary! That storm’s turned my direction! I’m a goner! Tell my wife I love her…” Then silence.

The sound of my office door opening woke me up, and I was sitting in my big leather pastor’s chair. Drool was running down my chin and the reality that someone who was rapping on my office door peeked in. It was Birdie.

“Pastor, you were napping, weren’t you? How sweet! I’ll bet you were dreaming some pastoral dream involving goodness and light and all God’s love for the sheep of your pasture.”

I wiped the drool off the bottom of my turkey neck before it hit my shirt collar. “Hardly, I was dreaming about how I need to confess my sins and get right with God.”

“Good! A pastoral dream suited for a man of your calling!”

Like most of you, I’ve watched too much television recently – most of it given to the Olympics from Beijing. My wife and I marveled at the opening ceremonies, at the technical expertise of song and dance, and at choreography of thousands of actors, dancers and drummers not to mention all the behind-the-scenes techies who made the show so spectacular. The Olympic architecture still takes my breath away even after first seeing these buildings two weeks ago. The buildings themselves live and breath as though they had come alive.

We all knew the Chinese were world-class designers of fireworks and it showed on opening night. But we’ve since learned some of the effects were computer generated and not every fiery explosion was really an explosion. Some of it was CGI enhanced - such as the helicopter fly-by that was choreographed with the fireworks. So much had been so mind-bending up to this point. It all seemed so plausible - why would they do that when they were so capable of taking our breath away with the real thing?

Then we learned the sweet little Chinese girl with the angelic face was not the same Chinese girl who actually sang the song – instead, she was lip-synching! Seems the beautiful voice was not coming from a child deemed pretty enough to put before the world to sing. What a tragedy! How will this little girl grow up knowing she could sing well enough for the world to enjoy but was deemed too ugly to put forward as the face of China’s children? Have our American television values been exported like a virus that’s infected the whole world? As we say at our house, “there are no ugly women on TV.” Enough said.

Michael Phelps was unworldly like a fish. All eight races won with gold; most of them for world records. Has there been another athlete with these kinds of gifts? Well, yes, say the historians who cite Jim Thorpe, an athlete capable of very similar acts of dominance over his peers along with bouts of extensive drinking at night between the scheduled events. But I still like Phelps’ chances of being the record-holder into old age with no one coming behind him to challenge the record … after all someone would have to win 9 events to break the record!

But the coup de grâce over the last few weeks was watching Rick Warren sit with Senators McCain and Obama on a balmy summer night asking questions folks from around the country had submitted. No trick questions and all asked equally of the two Presidential candidates. Make what you will of their answers, both handled the moment well and both gave very thoughtful answers leaving a nation with a lot to think about. Or was there more to the story?

Some have challenged the honesty of the evening as Warren assured the viewers that while Obama was on stage, McCain was sequestered in “a cone of silence” (whatever that is), when in fact, McCain had not yet arrived and was actually en route to the church. Did he listen in to what Obama was saying thus giving him an advantage or not?

On another front, the interviews have picked up criticism over the fact that any pastor would interview presidential candidates in a public forum with questions containing strong religious implications. There’s the schmarminess of two candidates pandering themselves to a powerful conservative pastor who has done some flip-flopping on his own about his involvement in politics. Warren has a scattered past on using his power as a pastor-author to encourage other Christians to vote on a particular candidate based on their moral views. Our democracy is set up where one’s religious views should be considered private and not to be scrutinized (no religious test) and that we choose our leaders on their ability to lead and on the covenants they make with the citizens to rule for the good of all and not just to the views of a few based on their religious views. The whole thing helps us see how our politics have turned into a form of prostitution serving lobbyists, corporate money for funding, and right-wing religion that compromises the system for the sake of votes no matter what the candidate really thinks or believes. We should do all we can to steer clear of this kind of faith-baiting.

Still, a lot was learned about the candidates and perhaps lessons were learned about the process whereby a well-known pastor would crawl in bed with the candidates about an election that should be about the candidate’s vision of leadership and not their religious views. These are interesting days and they make for fascinating television, don’t they?

By the way, have you registered to vote?

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Futurist Tom Sine writes what we’re all feeling and have scratched our heads over for the last decade or two … namely, we’re a small craft tossed and turned by “turbulent times.” He’s talking about the church. He’s talking about what it means to be Christian. He’s talking about people of faith who have moved out from the shadow of a sympathetic culture that has come to ignore those of us who move and have our being in what is known as the traditional church.

We first heard from Tom Sine, a Seattle-based thinker and researcher in the 1980’s when he published The Mustard Seed Conspiracy (1981). It’s not that Sine was paranoid and saw a conspiratorial anti-Christian culture developing like so many fundamentalists who think the world is cocked against them. It’s that Sine recognized what his eyes and ears and analytical brain was telling him: The days of Christianity as the dominant driving force in the world have ended.

So Sine did what many would not have done … he went small. He recognized that God’s movement in the world was what Robert Capon described as God’s love of those who are least, lost, last and little. God is often most active in the small and not as the brassy power of the dominant world. Sine understood that God is not into signs of power as in the thunder and the lightning but instead often sensed best falling on us in the form of a gentle rain, often unnoticed and unrecognized by us. God is in the tiniest mustard seed working quietly -seeding the ground with those things that will eventually bless the world.

So Sine wrote an epistle to the church encouraging us to be at work in the world doing just as much in our little ways. Being faithful. Laboring quietly like the farmer, dropping seeds into the ground that God waters with grace blessing the world around us knowing that God will produce a crop in another season.

Likewise, we’re to pay attention to the little acts of kindness. We’re to faithfully attend to the little habits of being. We’re to be as we’re called, “little Christs” in the world doing what Christ did as demonstrated by the humility of his sacrificial death.

Sine’s newest book is titled The New Conspirators and falls into the form of his earliest theme of mustard seeds and God’s affinity with small but significant faith. In his introduction titled, “Traveling Into Turbulent Times,” he draws a quote from Alan Roxburgh: “We are all in the early stages of a massive transition … We cannot return to the past like some nostalgic That 70’s Show, nor can we jump over to the present to go bravely where none have gone before, like some kind of Star Trek series. We are more like the strange, motley crew of creatures struggling to make sense of their situation on board the space station Babylon Five.”

His big idea is that God is doing what God has always done by finding in each generation those who are welcoming of the work of the Spirit - faithfully tending to the kingdom of God in their own creative “little” ways. He contends that while we can bemoan what’s happening to the form of the traditional church and can translate those losses as the failure of the young to pick up the habits of the old, we cannot ignore that God is still quietly stirring in this younger generation by igniting a flame of passion we who are of the older generation have yet to demonstrate or experience.

I’m overwhelmingly impressed with the spirit of our sub-30’s. They want it real. They want their faith stripped of pretension. They want a sense of adventure. They want to be alive in God’s Spirit without the judgment of the older generations who see the world through generational eyes. Sine’s new book is a blessing on those he calls the “new conspirators” as they bring their passion and fire to the work of God in our time. He calls them conspirators not because they are conspiring with the culture for the demise of the church, but that they are conspiring with God to find the new wineskins of faith by which God’s Spirit will welcome the future.

God bless our New Conspirators! May they invade our thoughts and our tired habits of faith bringing the new wine of what God wants to unleash in our time, in our hearts, and in our community.

Father Richard Rohr’s Center for Action and Contemplation has created a place where those who value the social justice tradition can merge their activism with a contemplative model of faith.

In my own rendering of this, I’ve described the pattern of our lives to be “the gentle movement from experience to reflection, back and forth as a cycle of life we need to attend to.” I’ve contended that we move back and forth from work/action/event to our need to reflect upon those things we learn from experience. Back and forth we rock, adding understanding to our experiences in life. We process and integrate what we learn from the events that occur in our lives.

There’s a great paradox to that movement we must take into account as we are persons trained for action and pushed away from the need to reflect. We must do something, we think, rather than making a place for us to think about what’s happened and to sit with the need to make sense of it. “What does this mean?” is a powerful question for us to consider. “How does this add to my life or take away from it and what must I do to integrate what I’ve learned?” are versions of this kind of reflective thinking.

I receive a daily meditation from the Center for Action and Contemplation taken from some of Richard Rohr’s previously published books. Today, Fr. Rohr draws upon Meister Eckhart the notion that “the spiritual life has more to do with subtraction than with addition.” He points out that our western tradition has suggested falsely to us that in order to climb higher on the spiritual ladder of success, we must necessarily be in the process of adding. We consider subtraction as a negative experience that is a sign of loss and regression.

“What we should do,” he adds, “is get ourselves out of the way! Then God will be evident. Then we can easily welcome Christ.”

The contradiction of subtraction as a means to being fully alive to God gives us manna to think upon in light of how we’ve been raised. It breaks through the hard-packed crust of ground worn smooth by our need to be work and strive for more which form the resistance we put up to God. For more of Father Rohr’s insights or to receive his free daily meditation, contact: www.cacradicalgrace.org]