Memory in an Age of Search

“Thy word have I hid in mine heart that I might not sin against thee.” That King James translation of Psalm 119:11 overrides any other translation. Scripture memory—KJV—was part of my childhood. I went to summer camp for a week because as a seven year old I memorized more verses than anyone else in my Sunday School class. Camp cost $23/week then. I also chose the context of this verse from Psalm 119 for the text of my senior sermon at Covenant Seminary. Psalm 119:9-16 is a joyful expression of a young man who loves the LORD and his words. I love the last verse of this section—“I will delight in your statutes; I will not forget your word.” (ESV)

I have used modern language translations since 1968, but my childhood memories of Scripture are King James. Shifting from translation to translation gives the opportunity – not always fulfilled – of  rememorizing our own cannon of Bible verses. Today new translations seem to come out as often as new cars. In 1999 I started online devotions, including Bible reading. I found I was in transition from memory to search.

“Information on demand” is the promise of search engines – they remember me and select links they think I will find helpful. Try this: type in a search, and then compare results with someone else on a different computer.  Our search culture includes our mobile devices and phones. More than 50% of adults in the USA use smart phones. It is handy. Questions can be answered with a quick search. As someone who both enjoys and studies cyber culture—why raise questions about our culture shift from memory to search?

Yes, this is a much larger question than one blog posting.

I raise this question because God raises it, especially in the Psalms. Scripture was written in oral cultures. People memorized what they listened to as someone else read. What the KJV translates as “hide,” the ESV translates as “store.” The words are to be in our hearts so we do not forget them. We, with the author, can both delight in them and keep our way pure. Take the time to read Psalm 119 slowly. If you can, listen to it as a complete Psalm. It is both a celebration of God’s word and a description of a love for his words. We hide the words to delight in his words and to have them shape the heart we store them in so they become a light for our daily path and because we do not want to sin against the one we love who loved us first.

A few observations for this blog, not the final word.

First, in the search world of Google, Bing, You Tube and others the value of words and information is lost in the overwhelming number of “results.” Scripture is a gift of finite words in an image age. Scripture is God’s word, given through people in different ages, but God’s word. These words can be translated into the “hearth” language  to be stored in the heart to shape the heart, transform and renew the mind.

Second, without the memory of scripture we cannot delight in God’s word. Another time I will explore the differences between short and long term memory. Today I want to ask you, when was the last time you delighted in God’s word? The Psalmist does not want to forget God’s word. You can only forget what you have made a memory. One of the ways we delight in God’s word is through meditation (yes, another blog). Meditation is lost on a search culture because it is time consuming and not egocentric.

Third, from my childhood memory and that seminary sermon, the daily life application is “that I might not sin against thee.” This verse is not about performance or earning approval and acceptance. This is about delight and desire. Sin is personal—it is against the LORD, the you of this verse. Sin, in part, comes from forgetting God’s words, listening to other words that are not God’s word. Sin is foremost about a holy God who gave us his word so that we would not sin. The default choice should be, “listen to the word you have stored up and make the choice not to forget the word or the one who spoke it.”

Enjoy cyber culture and search as a consumer, missionary or tourist. Remember to create long term storage in your heart so you can delight in God’s word. 

Redemptive Conversations & The African Queen

Many of us have seen what seems to be unprecedented rain this year.  Our lakes and rivers have been full – many to the point of intervention – or even evacuation.  One of my favorite river movies is that classic, “The African Queen.”  Here are some thoughts on that amazing cruise.

The African Queen is one of the best exodus journey films ever made. This 1951 film starring Humphrey Bogart as Charlie, a riverboat captain, and Katharine Hepburn as Rose,  a spinster missionary who is in Africa ministering with her brother, is set in pre-war German East Africa in August/September 1914. The Germans burn a mission village, herding off the people, and Rose’s brother dies. This event sets up the unlikely alliance between Rose and Charlie as they take to a riverboat and seek freedom on the other side of a lake that is downstream – past a German Fort, a rapids, and a German gunboat. The river as a character is both destructive and redemptive in the film.

The power of the story is in the redemptive relationship between Rose and Charlie. Bogart and Hepburn, two powerful actors, make you want to believe people can change in the midst of the chaos of war and nature, that love between two, so different, strong willed and courageous people can happen.   The spinster English missionary’s faith is part of the reason she is so courageous and keeps her virtue. In the movie she does not lose her faith but can see Charlie as someone whom she needs for this journey and her/their mission to blow up the German gunboat. They are married before the Germans try to hang them. The overturned African Queen and her homemade torpedoes blow up the German boat, and the newly-married couple swims off to freedom.

The African Queen does what film often does best. It gives viewers two people with an historical setting of good and evil on a journey against the odds, united by a mission to overcome evil. The people find love on a shared journey, an exodus from evil oppression to a promised land across water. It is the dialogue between two actors at the height of their craft that makes this story believable and memorable. The dialogue makes the redemptive relationship work.

As a Christian, a military chaplain and pastor, I have seen redemptive conversations between people in hard, disappointing life events. I have had redemptive conversations in the valley of the shadow of death in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have had redemptive conversations with families who have lost loved ones and with children wounded and confused by their parents’ divorce. God gave us his word in his son and in the text that we can speak into the lives of the wounded and broken to bring salvation and courage to face the chaos and confusion so many face each day.

Unintended consequences: a lesson in cultural context

The world’s more regular involvement with our Middle Eastern neighbors outside our borders and with internationals within borders makes us aware of – I hope – the matter of cultural differences we are a part of.  I recently was put in mind of a lesson I learned head-on over 20 years ago.

In the summer of 1988 I found myself in the south of Egypt on an Air Force mission. One day, we were taken off base to tour the local tourist sights. As we set out for the famous Valley of the Kings and the Temple of Luxor, we had in hand the famous AF box lunch – sandwiches, fruit, chips, water and two cans of soda with the warning note, “Don’t drink the local water.” At lunchtime we ended up sitting in the shade of a building, eating and drinking that lunch.

I looked up at some point and a young girl I judged to be about five years old was standing in front of me. She had big brown eyes, a smile, and her hand was held out toward me. I am a father of three daughters.  What was I going to do? Then a flash of generosity hit me and I gave her my unopened soda. She smiled and left, walking up the sidewalk. Then, as I watched in horror, the unthinkable happened –a group of older boys, maybe 10 years old, jumped her, pushed her to the ground and took the soda from her. As I rose to help, one of our local minders said, “You cannot intervene, you cannot get involved. You cannot give a girl a gift except through her father.”  As a further rebuke, he continued, “Your gift put her in danger.”

Still shocked, saddened, and angry as we were on the bus ride back to our base, I worked to process what had happened. First, I justified my actions. I only wanted to give her something, and her hand was out, after all.  Second, those boys had no right to steal the soda and push her to the ground. Third, why did the minder do nothing about this obvious gross injustice?

It was a lesson with many more to follow about my cultural norms and expectations.  The guilt of “your gift put her in danger” was burned into my memory. My generosity did not trump the absolute of the local street – “You cannot give a gift to a girl except through her father.” My expectations, ego, and lack of understanding of the realities of the host culture harmed the little girl. My motives were meaningless. It did not matter what I thought; I had broken a local moral absolute that I never would have thought of on my own at that point of my life. I learned to ask more questions of minders and other local people. I began to study and reflect on my default assumptions and expectations. They were by no means universal.  I never wanted to hear again, “your gift put her in danger.” 

Cultural Awareness and Context for August 28, 2013

Today – August 28 – is an anniversary in our country.  On this day in 1963 I was 13. I remember the March on Washington and the “I Have a Dream” speech by Dr. Martin Luther King. My memory was formed by television where I watched the speech. I do not remember if I saw the speech live or on the news, but the memory of my 13 year old self is how thankful people were because it was peaceful.

            Three years later, in the winter of 1966 our family moved from Connecticut  to South Carolina. My regional high school in Connecticut had been 30% African American. My cultural awareness – connecting  the dots of life beyond my own – began  that winter and spring in high school in South Carolina as I watched African American students attend that school for the first time. For the one semester I was in South Carolina,  (my Dad’s job transferred us a lot!) I knew I would move again in June, so I was an outsider for that one semester, keeping to myself but watching my classmates.

            For my senior year of high school and first year of college in Southern California, I watched the summer of love unfold before my eyes. I witnessed hippies, drugs, sex and rock and roll, again as an outsider, a spectator to events and relationships I did not understand. A personal transition from observing to speaking out came when I gave a talk on Christian meditation at an Inter Varsity chapter lunch meeting following a speech by the Maharishi Mahesh Yoga  on our  junior college campus. Yes, I was over my head as I spoke to a room packed with over 200 fellow students, but it was a start of a lifelong love of presenting Jesus Christ to a changing world. That same year I read in English class Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail.” Then both he and Robert Kennedy lost their lives  at the hands of assassins. I began to pay more attention to the news.  

            In the fall of 1968 when I began to attend Covenant College, Francis Schaeffer and the faculty gave me a toolbox to work with to understand people in our changing world as shifts in our culture were shaking long-held assumptions, both in and out of the church. Schaeffer came to Covenant College each of the three years I studied there, then when I moved on to Covenant Theological Seminary he  taught a winter term class on evangelism. The take-away from that class – with no loss of validity after 40 years – is this:  listen for 50 minutes before you speak for 10. I must understand how a person is using words and what those words mean to that speaker. I don’t hear my definitions and assumptions in someone else’s words and context. Schaeffer taught us to look behind the curtain of culture to see the foundations – both religious and philosophical. “Always  listen to the person in the moment and do not project your profiled assumptions on someone,” Schaeffer said. It is about context, communication and caring for people because we have been loved by our Father through the finished work of Christ. Also during that time in St Louis I expanded my attention to the news to listen to NPR to give myself more exposure to mainstream media.

            One of the biggest cultural shifts in the western cultural journey is going from truth to facts to data as a basis for decision making, both in our personal lives and public policy. We manage risk and look for return on investment based on data crunched by algorithms. This being said, most people I talk with still use the word truth. Truth today is personal, their truth, created and shaped by their story. Truth by this definition is not universal, and certainly not eternal or revealed.  Commitments in a hook-up age are at best temporary, making a promise with your fingers crossed behind your back. Conversions are almost always suspect, except for “coming out.”
          We still have a long way to travel for the Dream of August 2013 to be fulfilled for people of all races in our nation that declared long ago,  “… all men are created equal.”  That check has yet to be cashed as the Reverend Doctor King said. I am still learning and have questions about “white privilege.” I still think Schaeffer’s  Listen 50/Talk 10 is necessary  today in conversations from race to social media to the effect of technology on learning and life to the words people use to tell their stories.

The Next Chapter: Major Transitions in Our Lives

In mid-January, I announced to the congregation of South Dayton Presbyterian Church that I would resign as of February 28. Last night the members who called me 2 years ago granted my request. Over this past year, God has been directing me towards a refocus. There have been painful moments in the process, but I have yielded to God’s leading, and now that I will soon be free from current responsibilities, we will be in high gear. Celeste is also choosing change, leaving her work as a University of Dayton adjunct faculty member in the Intensive English Program to come along and do what she does in another place.

Celeste and I are talking about our future together and possibilities for ministry after 42+ years of marriage, and for me, 37 years of ordained ministry in three churches and over two decades of Air Force ministry.

We will put our Dayton home of eight years on the market in March and move to Royston, Georgia to a fixer-upper of a home and outreach project. That property in Royston, which is near our middle daughter, will become our new ministry base.

Our prayer and plan is to go to Georgia in April and begin to fix up the home, be available for weekend preaching opportunities, and continue to apply to PCA churches that will consider pastors my age. We hope to create a conference/retreat ministry with content based in reaching people in the cyber culture with the gospel leading to their discipleship and spiritual formation. We want to bring the gospel to our generation, Boomers. Our ministry will focus on the gospel of grace and the power of the Holy Spirit. I envision old fashioned one-on-one personal relationship-building, evangelism, and discipleship. I want to pray and work with others who have a passion for revival, a movement of the Holy Spirit—not a replay of some Christian memory of past, seemingly better days.

Our plan is to form a non-profit ministry to develop the Royston property’s solidly-constructed barn. Upstairs we want to create a safe, hospitable space for those wounded in ministry and their families—one that we can offer for free. Downstairs we want to create an open space that can be used for group retreats/meetings. The location is convenient. If we draw a two-hour travel circle around Royston, we can be north to Ashville, NC and south to the other side of Atlanta. We are also are a short drive from many colleges and universities. There are two Christian colleges within a 20-minute drive. The location is less than 20 minutes from I-85.

How to pray for us:

Pray that each day we would find our joy and rest in our heavenly Father.

Pray that each day we would confess our brokenness and sins and receive forgiveness, assurance of pardon and peace because of the shed blood of the Lamb of God.

Pray that each day we live in the power of the Holy Spirit in union with Christ as we seek both the presence and will of our Triune God.

Pray for the sale of our Dayton home.

Pray for the move to Royston and the renovation of our new home. It is a foreclosure and has been stripped and vacant for a year.

Pray for weekend ministry/preaching opportunities.

Pray for my ministry at Covenant Presbyterian Church in Auburn, AL this weekend at their Missions Conference as I speak 3 times. I will look at the book of Acts and use Paul’s church plant in Ephesus to consider the context of the gospel, confronting idols, and the local church as community in Christ.

Fathers & Daughters: Family & Food - Tortilla Soup

This is the second reflection from my three-film essay.

Tortilla Soup is a film about a father and his three daughters. As a father of three daughters, I love father-daughter stories. This is a fun movie centered on a family, its flaws, its dramas, and its food. The 2001 film was not a box office hit, nor was it critically acclaimed. The NY Times called it “forgettable,” while another reviewer called it “fast food.”

The Mexican-America father is a semi-retired chef and restaurant owner living in Southern California who loves to cook large traditional Sunday meals from scratch. He is unusual as a chef because he lost his senses of smell and taste after the death of his wife. His three daughters want out of the traditional family home to live life on their own. The professional cooking show quality of the film’s meal preparation scenes (done by the Food Network, by the way) is just fun for those who love home-cooked ethnic food that is at the center of weekly extended family life.

The oldest daughter, a teacher, is an uptight evangelical Christian who left the family’s culturally traditional Catholic church. She elopes and marries a fellow teacher. The other two sisters, a businesswomen and a student, have affairs. All of this leaves the father feeling left out of their lives, so he wants to sell the family home. Any family movie will show the flaws and drama of family life, even the family of an up-from-the-bootstrap middle class Mexican-American restaurant owner. The second generation’s rebellion and drama is put into a sharper focus because of the Mexican-American context. “Don’t speak Spanglish!”

Some of the family meals in the film reminded me of when I traveled to Ybor City in Tampa to meet my wife’s Spanish relatives for the first time. Some had come by way of Cuba, but all the first generation came from the Northwestern Province of Asturias in Spain in the 1920s. My wife was third generation, but her Abuela taught her many of the traditional Spanish Sunday family food dishes. Abuela’s first meal for me was a tortilla of eggs, onions and potatoes fried in olive oil in a cast-iron pan. She wanted me to feel welcome – after all, I was going to marry her oldest grandchild even though I was a protestant, as was her son, my future father-in- law. Mix that culinary scene with my wife’s mother’s traditional American Southern country cooking and two tours in Germany and you can never tell where in the world the food will be from on our dinner table. Food is often the center of hospitality, of making people feel welcome in a home. We even have a McFarland multi-generation family CD of recipes, “Over the Lips and Onto the Hips,” with all the comfort food and traditional family food from all the branches of the family.

How does Tortilla Soup end? The newly extended family is in a restaurant run by the middle daughter, around a restaurant table eating an updated fusion of traditional and modern recipes. The remarried father whose new wife is expecting gets his senses of smell and taste back after sampling his daughter’s fusion food.

            I love the way Luke’s gospel takes us on a tour of the dinner parties and tables Jesus shared with outsiders, sinners and strangers. Families share tables and flaws, but grace can turn them into a banquet. Conversations with our neighbors and their families often can begin with food, as Luke shows us Jesus doing.  Tortilla Soup is a banquet of film about a flawed family, fun, and food.

A 21st-century look at sermons and their illustrations: Orphan Heroes

Lately, my life has been like Jimmy Buffett's song "Simply Complicated." I have been jumping through hoops and haven't had time to blog. Let's get back at it.

Long ago and far away in ministry years, I preached a sermon from the Old Testament book of Ruth, and in the sermon I made reference to the film Ordinary People to draw a contrast between the responses of two mothers to tragic loss. A listener expressed concern that I was willing to use movie illustrations in my sermons. Today, some pastors build sermon series around films or use film clips to illustrate a sermon point.  I do neither, but that is another blog.  Films show and tell stories on a grand scale in a short length of time.  Films are not novels – as anyone who has ever read a book and then seen the movie will tell you – but they have dialogue with the grandness of background and music and storyline. 

 Ironic that after that 30-year-ago experience I recently was asked to compose an essay about my three favorite films. I share the first part of that essay today – in 2012 – when I happily write for the 21st-century church of God – a church that must embrace all of the means of modern communication in your quest to make 21st century disciples.  As I planned to write the essay, it was difficult for me to choose three films.  My daughters say it best.  “Daddy can see creation, fall and redemption in any movie.”  I finally chose Peter Pan, The African Queen, and Tortilla Soup, and I’ll begin with Peter Pan. The others will come in later entries.

Peter Pan was my introduction to “orphan-as-hero” films.  Batman, Superman, Spiderman, James Bond – all are orphan film heroes. Further, Little Orphan Annie and Anne of Green Gables are two redhead orphans who captured the imagination of readers from different generations. Charles Dickens, an orphan himself, gave us a whole series of orphans, from Ebeneezer Scrooge to David Copperfield. The most recent orphan to capture the imagination and devotion of a generation would be Harry Potter. Along with the boy Peter Pan, we have Snow White and Cinderella as girl orphans from fairy tale literature. From the printed page, the film maker Walt Disney took many of these mental images and gave us the colors, swirls and music that cemented the stories in our hearts and minds.

In Peter Pan, a child sees freedom, power and problem-solving in a dangerous, life-or-death world. Read that as “adult” world. Peter Pan is where a child outsmarts the dangerous adult world. Peter builds his team, a social network of Lost Boys, but needs Wendy to read to him and restore his shadow. Wendy’s home is not Peter’s. He comes to visit in the end but does not live there. Peter does not want to grow up. He does not want to be an adult.

Orphan stories ring true to young people because they feel alone and alienated, even in strong families who raise them to leave. They see the adult world as dangerous, fallen and full of powerful destructive evil. Children want the freedom to fly and fight their pirates with swords or wands.

The inner lost boy or girl, the loneliness and alienation, those orphan feelings are early evidence of the lostness of those living outside the first garden needing to be adopted by the creator, to be born again by the grace of the Father who sent his only son. Jesus said, “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.” (John 14:18 ESV)