Minister

There are three basic views of ministers:

1. Ministers are nice people. They'll take a drink if you offer them one, and when it comes to racy stories, they can tell a few right along with the best of them. They preach good sermons, but they're not like those religious fanatics who think they've got to say a prayer every time they pay a call. When it comes to raising money, they're nobody's fool and have all the rich old parishioners eating out of their hands. They have bridged the generation gap by introducing things like a rock group at the eleven-o'clock service and what they call rap sessions on subjects like drugs and sex instead of Sunday school. At the same time they admit privately that, though the kids have a lot going for them, they wish they'd cut their hair properly. They're big on things like civil rights, peace, and the environment. They send their children to private school. They make people feel comfortable in their presence by showing them that they've got their feet on the ground like everybody else. They reassure them that religion is something you should take seriously, but not go overboard with.

2. Ministers have their heads in the clouds, which is just where you should have your head when your mind is on higher things. Their morals are unimpeachable, and if you should ever happen to use bad language in their presence, you apologize. They have a lovely sense of humor and get a kick out of it every time you ask if they can't do something about all this rainy weather we've been having. They keep things like sex, politics, race, and alcoholism out of their sermons. Their specialty is religion, and they're wise enough to leave other matters to people who know what they're talking about.

3. Ministers are as anachronistic as alchemists or chimney sweeps. Like Tiffany glass or the queen of England, their function is primarily decorative. Although their various perspectives are admittedly limited, rapists and rape victims, drug addicts, victims and perpetrators of child abuse, and the like are all to be listened to for their special insights. The perspective of ministers, on the other hand, is so hopelessly distorted and biased that there is no point in listening to them unless you happen to share it.

The first ministers were the twelve disciples. There is no evidence that Jesus chose them because they were brighter or nicer than other people. In fact the New Testament record suggests that they were continually missing the point, jockeying for position, and, when the chips were down, interested in nothing so much as saving their own skins. Their sole qualification seems to have been their initial willingness to rise to their feet when Jesus said, "Follow me." As Saint Paul put it later, "God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong" (1 Corinthians 1:27).

When Jesus sent the twelve out into the world, his instructions were simple. He told them to preach the Kingdom of God and to heal (Luke 9:2), with the implication that to do either right was in effect to do both. Fortunately for the world in general and the church in particular, the ability to do them is not dependent on either moral character or IQ. To do them in the name of Christ is to be a minister. In the name of Christ not to do them is to be a bad joke.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Miracle

A cancer inexplicably cured. A voice in a dream. A statue that weeps. A miracle is an event that strengthens faith. It is possible to look at most miracles and find a rational explanation in terms of natural cause and effect. It is possible to look at Rembrandt'sSupper at Emmausand find a rational explanation in terms of paint and canvas.

Faith in God is less apt to proceed from miracles than miracles from faith in God.

~originally published in Beyond Words

Money

The more you think about money, the less you understand it. The paper it's printed on isn't worth a red cent. There was a time you could take it to the bank and get gold or silver for it, but all you'd get now would be a blank stare.

If the government declared that the leaves of the trees were money so there would be enough for everybody, money would be worthless. It has worth only if there is not enough for everybody. It has worth only because the government declares that it has worth and because people trust the government in that one particular although in every other particular they wouldn't trust it around the corner.

The value of money, like stocks and bonds, goes up and down for reasons not even the experts can explain and at moments nobody can predict, so you can be a millionaire one moment and a pauper the next without lifting a finger. Great fortunes can be made and lost completely on paper. There is more concrete reality in a baby's throwing a rattle out of the crib.

There are people who use up their entire lives making money so they can enjoy the lives they have entirely used up.

Jesus says that it's easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God. Maybe the reason is not that the rich are so wicked they're kept out of the place, but that they're so out of touch with reality they can't see it's a place worth getting into.

~originally published in Whistling in the Dark and later in Beyond Words

Morality

It is no secret that ideas about what is right and what is wrong vary from time to time and place to place. King Solomon would not be apt to see eye to eye with a Presbyterian missionary on the subject of monogamy. For that reason, a popular argument runs, morality is all relative to the tastes of the time and not to be taken any more seriously by the enlightened than tastes in food, dress, architecture, or anything else. At a certain level, this is indisputably so. But there is another level.

In order to be healthy, there are certain rules you can break only at your peril. Eat sensibly, get enough sleep and exercise, avoid bottles marked poison, don't jump out of boats unless you can swim, and so on.

In order to be happy, there are also certain rules you can break only at your peril. Be at peace with your neighbor, get rid of hatred and envy, tell the truth, avoid temptations to evil you're not strong enough to resist, don't murder, steal, and so on.

Both sets of rules are as valid for a third-century Hottentot as for a twentieth-century Norwegian, for a Muslim as for a Methodist bishop, for the emperor Nero as for Marilyn Monroe.

Both sets of rules-the moral as well as the hygienic-describe not the way people feel life ought to be, but the way they have found life is.

~originally published in Wishful Thinking and later in Beyond Words

Moses

Whenever Hollywood cranks out a movie about Moses, they always give the part to somebody like Charlton Heston in fake whiskers. The truth of it is he probably looked a lot more like Tevye the milkman.

Forty years of tramping around the wilderness with the Israelites was enough to take it out of anybody. When they weren't raising hell about running out of food, they were raising it about running out of water. They were always hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt and making bitter remarks about how they should have stayed home and let well enough alone. As soon as his back wasturned, they started whooping it up around the Golden Calf, and when somebody stood up and said he ought to be thrown out, the motion was seconded by thousands. Any spare time he had left after taking care of things like that he spent trying to persuade God not to wipe them out altogether, as they deserved.

And then, of course, there was the hardest blow of all. When he finally had it all but made and got them as far as the top of Mt. Pisgah, where the whole Promised Land stretched out before them as far as the eye could see, God spoke up and said this was the place all right, but for reasons that were never made entirely clear, Moses was not to enter it with them. So he died there in his one hundred and twentieth year, and after a month of hanging around and wishing they'd treated him better, the Israelites went on in without him.

Like Abraham before him and Noah before that, not to mention like a lot of others since, the figure of Moses breathing his last up there in the hills with his sore feet and aching back serves as a good example of the fact that when God puts the finger on people, their troubles have just begun.

And yet there's not a doubt in the world that in the last analysis Moses, like the rest of those tough old birds, wouldn't have had it any different. Hunkered down in the cleft of a rock once, with God's hand over him for added protection, he had been allowed to see the Glory itself passing by and, although all God let him see was the back part, it was something to hold on to for the rest of his life. And then there was one other thing that was even better than that.

Way back when he was just getting started and when out of the burning bush God had collared him for the first time, he had asked God what God's name was, and God had told him, so that from then on he could get in touch with God anytime he wanted. Nobody had ever known God's name before Moses did, and nobodywould ever have known it afterward except for his having passed it on; and with that thought in his heart up there on Pisgah, and with that name on his lips, and with the sunset in his whiskers, he became in the end a kind of burning bush himself.

~originally published in Peculiar Treasures and later in Beyond Words