Confessions of a Curmudgeon

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The other night I told my dear friends in our Life Group that I have decided to stop being the Church Curmudgeon.

As is typical of our laid back group, this led to several minutes' discussion about the fact that nobody except my wife and I (the old people of the group) know the meaning of the word curmudgeon.  And so I offer the graphic definition above, for their education.

I told them that I am a cynic in regard to the church.  None of them gasped in surprise.  These people know me.

They have all heard me say that I go to the church that I find least annoying.  While I consider this to be high praise for the congregation that has won this honor, most folks don't see it that way.

I also told my friends that I expect I will always be a cynic.  I will likely always find things about the programs, the methods, the priorities or the preaching that nag at me like a cockle-bur down my sock.

But I am resolved to no longer allow there to be a direct lineage between the cynic in me and the curmudgeon hiding behind the cellar door.

Toward that end, I'm trying something new.  I'm resting my curmudgeonly finger on a different sort of trigger, if you will.

Whenever I'm sitting in church and the cynic threatens to transmogrify into full curmudgeon mode, I will press the pause button and try to think of some way, some action requiring effort on my part, to get involved in the very thing I'm inwardly grumbling about.

Which is why I'm sitting  here in our church building at 2:15 AM writing this blog post, having spontaneously volunteered this past Sunday to be the midnight-to-5 AM "security guy" who is letting people into the building every half hour or hour for the congregation's 24-hours of continual prayer on the National Day of  Prayer.

This is my penance.  

I'll keep you posted on further acts of anti-curmudgeonly cynicism.

Psalm 119 Heth: God Seeks You

You are my portion, LORD;

I have promised to obey your words.

I have sought your face with all my heart;

be gracious to me according to your promise.

I have considered my ways

and have turned my steps to your statutes.

I will hasten and not delay

to obey your commands.

Though the wicked bind me with ropes,

I will not forget your law.

At midnight I rise to give you thanks

for your righteous laws.

I am a friend to all who fear you,

to all who follow your precepts.

The earth is filled with your love, LORD;

teach me your decrees.

There's a new book out titled, Man Seeks God: My Flirtations With the Divine (Eric Weiner, Twelve, 2011)

In the end, Weiner didn't come away with something entirely new to believe in. Instead, what he found is what he calls an "IKEA God."

"Some assembly required," he says. "[The] idea is that you can cobble together your sort of own personal religion, a sort of mixed tape of God."

What he concluded is that you need a foundation. In his case, that foundation was Judaism and Kabbalah.

"But on top of that foundation, you can add all kinds of things," he says. "So I'm sort of in perpetual seeker mode, but I think that's OK." (npr.org, 12/5/11)

At first glance, this section of Psalm 119 could bear the same title: Man Seeks God.

When David says God is his "portion" he's saying that God is all he needs out of life.

He seeks Him with his whole heart.  He examines his life and lives intentionally for God.  He hurries to learn and live out His commands. No matter the situation, no matter the time of day, he is eager to seek God and honor Him.  He begs to be taught more.

We need to notice, though, that woven into David's story of seeking God, we see the parallel tale that God seeks us.

The very fact that God has entrusted us with His words should reveal that He cares enough to communicate His will to us. As David acknowledges, God has made promises to be gracious toward us - something He is under no compulsion to do. All of those commands and laws and precepts were cataloged for our benefit, and for the purpose of drawing us back into a close relationship with Him.

To many, God is a being of wrath, someone to avoid. Or they see God as a capricious, indifferent or elusive deity.

But God has reached out to us, has made a connection with us "at sundry times and in diverse ways".

The earth is filled with His love. He not only reaches out His hand to grant us the spark life, as pictured in the famous painting. He continues to reach out his hand toward us, eager for us to reach our hands back to him in fellowship.

He seeks you.

Lunatic Fringe

It could be that our faithlessness is a cowering cowardice born of our very smallness, a massive failure of imagination.  Certainly nature seems to exult in abounding radicality, extremism, anarchy.  If we were to judge nature by its common sense or likelihood, we wouldn't believe the world existed.  In nature, improbabilities are the one stock in trade.  The whole creation is one lunatic fringe.  If creation had been left up to me, I'm sure I wouldn't have had the imagination or courage to do more than shape a single, reasonably sized atom, smooth as a snowball, and let it go at that.  No claims of any and all revelations could be so far-fetched as a single giraffe.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Psalm 119: Teach me

Praise be to you, LORD;
teach me your decrees.

Psalm 119 Beth

Purity is learned the hard way, through the hard parts of life.

I have a choice: Will I let God purify me through trials? Or will I let Satan drag me down through trials?

Meditation Metaphor: 4 Hours

Over a shared meal with my wife at the romantic venue of Wendy's, I found myself reading the carefully composed verses on the side of the small chili bowl.

So-so chili simmers for 2 hours
Good chili simmers for 3 hours
Our chili simmers for 4 hours

Wendy's chili is very good, I must agree.  I can even say it's better than it was the last time I ordered their chili, a few years back.

I was disappointed with the chili on that prior occasion because the meat in the chili consisted largely of broken-up pieces of Wendy's hamburger patties.  I spent the entire time wondering if the patty pieces were left-overs from the day before {not a particularly appetizing thought), burgers that were rescued from the floor (not at all appetizing), or - charitably - simply the result of convenience, all the ground beef ingredients for Wendy's menu coming from the same packaged and delivered source.

But this chili, the current cardboard bowl of chili in front of me, contained no pieces of patties, but has been made from loose ground beef, providing a more pleasurable - and less distracting - dining experience.

And the long simmering of their claim is no doubt true.  The flavors of meat, stock, sauces and spices present themselves as a single flavor, the result of prolong intermingling and absorption of one another's essence.

Wherein lies the Meditation Metaphor.

Occasional times spent reading small sections of the Word, quickly read and quickly done, are of some benefit.  They're certainly preferable to no Bible time at all.

The longer we spend in the Word the better, obviously.  But also, the more we vary our diet in the Word the better.

We all have our pet sections we can never get too much of, whether it's the Psalms or the Gospels or those great Old Testament stories of kings and patriarchs.  But our meditation on the Word will e richer, more filling and satisfying, if we spice it up with a few Proverbs or add in a particularly meaty but obscure section of the minor prophets.

And spending "quality time"  in the vast variety of the scriptures is like letting the recipe simmer in the mind and heart.  The sundry and diverse flavors and varieties of His Word begin to blend together, to absorb characteristics from one another, until what we are tasting and allowing to transform our lives is a unified experience of the full-bodied nature and character of God Himself.

I did make one mistake in my approach to the bowl of chili tonight, though.  The young man at the counter asked if I wanted hot sauce with my chili.  Being in a mood for muy caliente, I said Yes.

But when I added the small packet of hot sauce into the chili after the first few spoons-full, I found that it distracted from the good taste of the chili.  You see, the hot sauce hadn't been included in the 4 hours of simmering, and it therefore stood out distinctly from the well-blended presentation of the perfect Wendy's chili experience.  It somewhat overwhelmed the other flavors.

We risk doing the same to our absorption of God's well-rounded Word when we take it upon ourselves to top off a session reading the Bible with a too-hasty and too-distinctive dash of reading the opinions in our Study Bible notes or a separate commentary.

We will learn and absorb the character of God best by spending hours simmering in the very Word itself before we reach outside the scriptures for other flavoring.


Either by happenstance or by the providential nudge of His finger, just a couple of hours after we finished our meal at Wendy's, a friend of mine came to our house for the monthly "Guys' Night" portion of our Small Group, and brought with him his supper, which he had picked up on his way.  A bowl of Wendy's chili, of course.

Guys' Night turned out to be just Steve and I on this night - due in great part to deer season.  But we had a good talk and prayed together.

After the prayer, I pointed out to Steve that his chili bowl had a great spiritual lesson - a meditation metaphor - written on the side.

He looked at the bowl for a moment, and then smiled.

"Rich & Meaty!" he exclaimed.  "That's what I'll tell my wife when she asks how Guys' Night went.  It was Rich and Meaty!  And then then I'll lick my lips."

Let the word of Christ dwell in you richly as you teach and admonish one another with all wisdom, and as you sing psalms, hymns and spiritual songs with gratitude in your hearts to God.
  Colossians 3

Read beyond your borders

Reading has given me fluency in the language of sorrow, the grammar of grace, experiences that unite us across borders and time zones.

Marita Golden, The Word

I believe that it's the duty of of every truly free citizen to read, especially to read beyond your borders.

Edwidge Danticat

In the beginning was the Word

"If you open up scripture, the Gospel according to John starts: "In the beginning was the Word." Although this has a very particular meaning in Scripture, more broadly what it speaks to is the critical importance of language, of writing, of reading, of communication, of books as a means of transmitting culture and binding us together as a people "

- Barack Obama, then US senator from Illinois speaking before the annual conference of the American Library Association, July 23, 2005

copied from The Word, edited by Marita Golden, Broadway Paperbacks, 2012