Mr. Trump, tear down that wall

“Mr. Trump, tear down that Wall”

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            Presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to build a wall to help keep out immigrants entering the United States. There are other things he could build that might do a better job of minimizing immigration entering the United States from Mexico. The reality is that illegal immigration is fueled by a large gap in opportunity depending on which side of the American-Mexican border one lives on.

            We need to imagine different ways of addressing the illegal immigration issue. Imagine that you are living in Mexico. You don’t speak English fluently, but you know there are Spanish speaking people living in many areas of the United States who can help you learn the language. You live in a nation with mediocre infrastructure, high unemployment, and large numbers of people working for less than $5 a day. You learn that across the border there are cities where the minimum wage is $15 an hour. You are faced with a dilemma. You can try to enter the USA legally and probably will never be able to do so. You can enter illegally and maybe you will get caught and returned to Mexico, but you know many have made the illegal entry and have been able to stay and their children born in the USA have an opportunity for a stable life. Which is more important to your system of values? Is it more important that you obey American laws that seem to protect a huge wage gap between the USA and Mexico or do you try to provide a better opportunity for your children whatever might happen to you?

            Presently the goal of Presidential candidate Donald Trump is to try to build a wall to keep people from entering the United States illegally. That can be done but it will involve a huge cost of building the structure and a continual cost of providing enough people to guard the wall and keep it maintained. It will do nothing to address the reasons why people are willing to cross a border where they do not fluently speak the main language, where they will often be treated with disrespect, and yet they feel that they are giving their children an opportunity to live stable lives with their spouse and children. There will still be people who find a way to work around any wall to keep out immigrants who are entering illegally.

            But the other possibility we need to consider is if it might not be actually cheaper to build pieces of infrastructure in strategic areas within Mexico that might help to create within Mexico the hope that life will get better even if one remains in Mexico.

            To this end I wonder if instead of spending the money for building a wall between our nations, we built something like solar wind tunnels in the desert regions of both the United States and Mexico. There are actually two kinds of solar wind tower models to choose from. In past years solar wind tunnels were built using an updraft method. At the bottom of the tower, large tube structures have air forced into them which is then heated by the Sun heating the tubes. As the air heats from a number of tubes, then the hot air rises into a tower and is pushed by the heated air looking to expand and as the air flows upwards turbines placed throughout the tower are turned producing electricity. There is virtually no pollution in the process and the desert that covers much of Mexico as well as areas of our American West would be an ideal place to build these structures.

            A second kind of solar wind tunnel is now being developed with the hopes of building the first of its kind in the city of San Luis, a city along the border of Arizona and Mexico. You can read about this innovative solar wind tunnel that uses a downdraft instead of an updraft here. Instead of using tubes at the bottom to collect, heat, and force air upwards into the tower; the method used in this second solar wind tower pumps water across the top of the tower cooling the air around the top of the tower. The result is the cooled air naturally descends into the tower and then multiple turbines at the bottom of the tower produces electricity. The advantage of this method is that electricity can be produced at night as well as in the day using the cooling of air to drive the generators. The disadvantage is that it will require water but much of the water will be able to be recollected in the process and will for the most part not be polluted. The tower planned for building at San Luis will cost approximately $1.5 billion. The tower planned at San Luis is expected to produce an amount of electricity equivalent to that produced by the Hoover Dam. The cost of the electricity produced to consumer is projected to be about the same as the cost of natural gas produced electricity in present power plants. This is minimal pollution, tremendous amounts of energy produced at quite competitive costs.

            I wonder how much Mr. Trump’s wall will cost to build, man, and maintain. Will it produce electricity? Will it do anything to give the average Mexican laborer a reason to hope? We could build towers as part of a beginning to build a modern electricity producing grid capable of powering a 21^st century economy. The American electrical grid is in need of modernization. The Mexican electrical grid has been less than sufficient for its twentieth Century needs. Mr. Trump wants to get Mexico to pay for the wall he dreams of building, you know it will be a really great wall but how do we really think Mexico will pay for the wall. But these solar wind powers that will help create the power to make Mexican lives better, help energize increased productivity and help raise standards of living might be something that Mexico would be interested in contributing to the towers’ building.

            It is at least something worth considering. Maybe Mr. Trump or another person elected to the presidency can tear down the wall before it is even built.

A new minister

Thoughts on a New Minister

Written by Dan McDonald

 

          There have been a number of thoughts swirling about in my head lately. Some thoughts have been of hopes and dreams of future pursuits. Some thoughts have been of a close relative suddenly bed ridden battling and struggling with acute leukemia. Some thoughts have been of my tendency to procrastination and how I have so many tasks I have put off for far too long. Some thoughts have been of how I need to get back to taking care of my body with healthy eating and working towards an exercise regimen, which of course makes me think more about procrastination. In the midst of these swirling thoughts the church I am part of is getting ready to welcome a new minister. I want to be happy about it. I want to be excited. But part of me dreads a new minister. I am pretty sure the dread comes like shingles as an eruption of an old sickness not fully cured but simply suppressed until the time was rife for the illness to take over once after years of suppression.

            Many years ago I came to the church where I now am. I needed peace and quiet at a time when I felt as if my faith was nearly exhausted and depleted. I had been a member of a church where we had a series of ministers who took the Scriptures seriously and sought to proclaim their message with careful hermeneutics and application. But something happened along the way. We began to be a church that felt superior to other churches. We were sure we had the Biblical understanding that others needed. We began to imagine that if someone didn’t see what we had to offer it was probably their own lack of spirituality. We got in the habit of warning people who left from our midst because they were turning their backs on a church with Biblical order.

            Looking back I see things so differently than I did then. We were all too often pompous and arrogant believers who thought too highly of ourselves and too lowly of others. But we were really believers. I can look back and see how something Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote in his book Life Together captured the essence of what happened at that church. We had what he described as a wish dream, an image of an ideal we wished to impose on the people of our congregation. We imagined our ideals to be the best of ideals. To paraphrase a modern politician we were going to build a great church. But Bonhoeffer spoke of how the wish dream of an ideal to be imposed upon a church is in idol that God must ultimately smash into the ground. Then it happened, a family or two families at a time. People who thought of our church as some wonderful ideal church woke up one morning feeling disillusioned and perhaps even offended by the arrogance that we swam in. We would wonder at what had happened when people we thought were wise turned on us and wanted out. At the end there were only a handful of people and three families at the church. One day instead of choosing to keep going, an elder in our midst said “it’s over. We are going to close the doors.” Those of us who had been there for years all felt the same thing. It was over. We sold the church to a people excited about proclaiming the gospel from this building. We distributed the monies from the proceeds to varied Christian charities. Afterwards we all went to different churches. Over the years we would find people on Facebook that had been part of the experience. I think often there were similar experiences. While there were some close friendships that had been built in the aftermath of what went wrong, there were more situations where there was not great animosity towards others but there was a desire to keep others at arm’s length because our association with one another had left us feeling a sting of pain that was still alive in the dormant wounds of a disease that ran deep into our souls.

            I found gradual healing at the church I went to, where I am now. Our minister wasn’t a powerful preacher and often did not work hard enough to exposit the Scriptures to his ability. He saw himself as a fat preacher that could not be the reason why people would attend the church. Instead he would point to the table from which Holy Communion would be served. To him this was the focal point of the church, where Christ made his presence known to us in the body and blood, the bread and wine of the Eucharist. He could have been a better preacher. There were times when he prepared diligently and in those times his preaching was markedly different from the times he just winged it. I remained there despite his preaching. I remained there because he believed that God loved us in Christ and despite or perhaps through his weaknesses our minister helped us believe that God loved us in Christ.

            In my previous church we had learned that the world was dangerous. The world was not a friend to the Christian. I brought that perspective into my new church. I was given the opportunity to teach an adult Sunday school class. I had become a member of a church with a different tradition from my previous church. I asked my minister to supervise my teaching. I wanted to be sure it fit into the rich tradition I had entered. In the Anglican tradition we see the teaching of the Scriptures to fit into a tradition where for millennia the Church has proclaimed Christ, has received agreed upon creeds and have understood that Christ is present in the sacraments as well as the Scriptures. So I hoped my minister would watch me to see where I needed improvement. Instead he said, “I trust you. Just have fun.” Nothing could have been further from my understanding of how a teacher should approach teaching God’s people if that was what we were called to do.

            But over the years at this church I began to feel greater freedom to push out from the harbor of my parish and to explore the world in which we lived. I began to listen to Christians from varied backgrounds and with diverse perspectives. After a while I began to rejoice in what seemed like an orchestra of many varied pieces. I could hear different sounds and similar notes. I knew there were dangers in voyages of exploration but I also had fallen in love with pushing out from the shore until the land disappeared and we were out at seas looking for new vistas. I am pretty sure I could have still used a shepherd who knew how to oversee my tendencies to explore the world. Sometimes I began to push against the boundaries and sometimes I no longer felt I knew where the boundaries were so I kept sailing. After more than a decade under this minister it came to an end because there is a time when after seventy years or if due to strength eighty years we return dust unto dust and this happened to my priest. But I was a changed man by this time. Now I was more afraid of never exploring than I was afraid of the dangers of exploring.

            This weekend I went to a movie and one line especially summed up for me what it means for a Christian to be able to explore the creation within our faith in the Creator. The movie was “The man who knew Infinity” There is a line that sums up so much of life and it is expressed in the trailer here. The line that I see expressing the wonder of a Christian life is the line which says: “We are merely explorers of infinity in the pursuit of absolute perfection.” This combines our place in the present creation with the expectations of the faith we have been taught by grace. We are presently wanderers in the infinity of our God whom we know only in part. We are wanderers in the expanse of a creation that sets forth in its tapestry the attributes and qualities of the invisible God who brought this creation into being. We are wanderers who like the one we call our father Abraham was a wandering Aramean who left his city of idols to seek a city and country built without hands. I am a wanderer. I am at times a wandering lamb in need of a shepherd to help me recognize the boundaries of my exploration.

            The relationship between a minister and his people is a mystery of simplicity combined with complexity. I know I need a minister. I know I need boundaries. I also know I need to explore. I worry we might not be on the same page, my new minister and I. I worry about a minister who will be more diligent than the preceding minister but will he make us feel that God loves us in Christ?

            There are different kinds of relationships in the world, but there are similarities to every meaningful human friendship. In every relationship there are different characters with distinguishing elements in their human composition, differing vulnerabilities, and differing strengths that need encouraged even as the differing vulnerabilities need understood and protected. In the end I suspect the ministry of our arriving priest will be established or destroyed by how we work together as priest and parish members. I feel a sense of the agony of my past but I look for something better even as I feel the agony of my past. I finish with the posting of an insightful meme that summed up what it is that makes a successful marriage partnership. It seems to me that there are similarities in how a successful ministry comes into existence between a congregation and its minister.

 

 

            I do look forward to a new minister. It will take work building the understanding. I need someone to help me recognize boundaries. I need someone who realizes we human beings are an adventurous lot who are busy merely exploring the infinite in search of absolute perfection. In the end the wish dreams we would impose on congregational life are dangerous not because they expect too much but because they blind us from the so much more that we are really offered and called to when God calls us to discover him in his Son, and we take up wandering with our crosses as we pursue a perfection beyond us but promised us in our destinies when one day we shall see him and be like him. We, therefore, are now wanderers and explorers in search of a city built by God. We are also weeping wanderers looking to a day when someone will wipe away our tears and the former things shall be no more. We have been stripped of at least some of our illusions but we are content to explore and know we need a shepherd in our explorations.

Book Review Christena Cleveland Disunity in Christ

Book Review of

Christena Cleveland’s

Disunity in Christ

Reviewed by Dan McDonald

 

            I write this review of Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ on a day set aside in my worship tradition as Trinity Sunday. I have known some ministers who find it difficult to preach on the Trinity. How do you speak of the Trinity without going wrong? There is one God and three persons. There are not three gods. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost have neither beginning nor end. There is only one God but the Father is not the Son is not the Holy Ghost. We realize the Trinity is a mystery we understand only in part, incapable of us understanding in whole.

            I have always figured the best way to speak of the Trinity is to say that even if we cannot describe the Trinity, we are made in God’s image. I hope you can begin to feel why Christian unity is so important. In our humanity, and in Christ, we are a multitude of persons, but we are members of one body in Christ. The body of Christ is meant to show forth the image of God. We are meant despite being an innumerable number of persons to be able to be seen as a unified body of Christ. I think most of us realize that right now the church could be doing a much better job of being a unified body in our reflection of God's love and glory.

            I finished reading Christena Cleveland's book this past week. I will need to read it again as I have so much to learn from what she writes in Disunity in Christ. It is easy enough to read, but I have spent a lifetime with people who were mostly kind of like me. I have some hard habits to break, and some different habits to make.

            She teaches us how we identify and categorize things as we seek to learn. This takes place naturally. But sometimes the process leads to ways of perceiving the world that are not so helpful. We categorize people by how much they are like us. The people like me become "we" people and the people unlike us become "they" or "them" people. We are comfortable with some and not so comfortable with others. Her book's first chapter is entitled “Right Christian, Wrong Christian” She introduces us to a view of Christianity that probably some of us have had, maybe in the opposite way as she describes her problem with a believer named Ben. He and she were the two single people in her church community. But she was more annoyed by him than anything. He had a preachy Conservatism, was an engineer type, and wore goofy looking Hawaiian-print button-down shirts. All of this description is paraphrased from page 11 of her book. She was riding on a bus wondering how she could avoid Ben when she had this thought of how Ben was going to be in heaven. The thoughts that followed she described in her book:

“And suddenly I was confronted with the idea that Ben was going to be in heaven”

“With me”

“For all eternity.”

“And I would never, ever be rid of him.”

She then thought about how she first felt about other Christians when she first began walking with Christ. She describes how when first walking with Christ “I felt an immediate and authentic connection with any other Christian who crossed my path. Orthodox, Catholic, charismatic, Lutheran, evangelical, black, white, Asian, Ben –didn’t matter. We were family.” (Disunity in Christ p. 12)

But often we find ourselves as Christians being more and more divided by so many different things. Some churches take up a very specific form of doctrine, and it doesn’t seem like there is room for people whose doctrinal viewpoints aren’t in line perfectly with the particular church’s teaching. Some are culturally attuned to a perspective seen as black or white, if you aren't the right ethnicity perhaps there is another church for you. There are churches that are liturgical and churches that are contemporary. There are churches in which almost no one has gray hair, and churches where almost everyone has gray hair. Perhaps most of us have read John 17 and know that Jesus wants us to be one as Christians. But we find that on Sunday our churches are divided according to the way we worship, the doctrine we affirm or reject, the race and ethnicities that can feel comfortable coming to our congregation, our political perspective tendencies, and the age group that attends our church. There are churches where everyone homeschools and churches where no one would imagine that any good could come from that. The reality is that churches often want to be welcoming to a diverse group of people, but building a church that ministers to a people from varied backgrounds ends up being more difficult than we imagined. We might imagine that diversity within a congregation is something that should simply appear by preaching the true Gospel. But the Gospel, while it is in many ways a simple message, always leads us into a life of following Christ which involves many everyday decisions following that initial response of saying our yes to Christ.

Christena Cleveland’s book provides us some insights into how to enter the work of making our churches capable of drawing people from different races, perspectives, and cultural backgrounds into our churches; and also how to build a church which can work to make people feel like they are a part of the church. It will likely require work. In Acts chapter 6, the early church faced a bitter problem. Jewish Christians and Greek or Hellenistic Christians found themselves at odds because some of the believers from a Hellenistic background were complaining that their widows were being overlooked by the Jewish leadership in the church. The Apostles who led the church prayed and sought the Lord about a way to work through the problem. They were led to create a new group of leaders to assist the Apostles. Most of these new leaders came from a more Hellenistic background than the Apostles who were from a Jewish background. Many believe that this was the beginning of the Christian office of the Deaconate. It began as a way of dealing with a problem of varied ethnicities in a church. The Holy Spirit led the church to realize that the creation and maintenance of a culturally diverse church could be aided by a culturally diverse leadership. It should not be considered a mark of failed leadership if the leaders begin to acknowledge that there are members in their church whose background is such that they need help in their leadership to see to that their needs are understood so that the church might better serve them. Struggling to meet the problem of diversity is not a new problem in Christ's church.

Dr. Christena Cleveland is a social psychologist with a PhD from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her sociology training wed to a love of Christ in a family where she is a fifth generation Christian participating in full time Christian work, has helped give her insights to be shared with the church at large. She can help us see how we can move to not avoiding Ben to an appreciation of Ben. It isn't easy but the goal of the church is to help both Ben and Christena reach their full potentials in living in and with Christ’s people. It isn’t easy work but it is likely essential work. It is working out the faith in love to the honor and glory of God in Christ.

I found a couple of things stood out to me as I read the book. One is how we naturally see life in categories. We identify and compare ourselves using such words as I and then “we” for people we include as being like us, and words like “them” or “they” for people different from us. She uses many examples to show how such identifications are natural, but can become limiting, and then suggests how we can learn steps to build “we” relationships from the desolation of the problematic “us” and “them” relationships which so often divide us.

She also describes how poorly planned ecumenical get together groups can end up dividing as much as unifying Christians. The goal we seek in building Christian unity is not to destroy the reality of cultural diversity and multiple perspectives in the body of Christ. The goal is to learn how to foster a unity which sees the contributions of all, from the strongest to the weakest, so that the least among us is valued for their contribution and humanity as much as anyone else in our fellowship.

In the previous paragraph I am expressing a thought that grew to become important to me as I read Disunity in Christ. Church unity is not about creating a place where everyone will be comfortable because we have all discovered in our congregation the right doctrine, right style of worship, and the right perspective on cultural and political issues while somehow becoming a culturally diverse appearing congregation. The unity to be discovered and encouraged in the church is a unity which is discovered in following Christ and then working out our salvation together in Christ. The unity set forth in the New Testament Scriptures did not require Jewish Christians to become Hellenized nor Hellenized Christians to become Jewish; but Hellenized and Jewish believers were called upon to work together in following Christ in a church which was breaking boundaries when in following Christ a new humanity was being shaped which was destined to be presented in Christ unto the Father by the work of the Holy Spirit. Until then this marvelous new creation of a church composed of Jew and Greek, side by side was to be learning how to speak with a united witness to the world with its many cultural and linguistic formats.

That is why it seems to me that reviewing Christena Cleveland’s Disunity in Christ makes a lot of sense on Trinity Sunday. It does so because our one God exists as three persons. The Father is not the Son is not the Spirit and yet the three are one. There is but one holy God. We are created in his image. We are being redeemed in the Son by the Spirit to be received by the Father. We are to be given as one body in Christ and yet the strongest and the least among us will have been redeemed so as to arrive at our most perfect individual states within the whole perfected body of Christ. The least individual among us is not less important than the whole of the church being redeemed. Oh by the way, if you are interested in how she got to a point where Ben fit in her Christian life it happened during some wild fires that threatened Santa Barbara, where they lived at the time. Most everybody was trying to look out for their things and figuring out escape plans. Ben was acting differently. He was checking on all the different people in the church who might be in harm’s way. It didn’t matter their ethnic backgrounds, their political affiliations, their eschatological viewpoints. He was responsible to them because they were members of the church where he was a member. When a need occurred he was there, and who would have cared if he was a bit too outspoken at times, an engineer type, and wore dumb Hawaiian looking button down shirts? When the fires were threatening the people of their church, he was at their doorsteps to help those in harm's way.

I have to admit something. I will need to read this book at least one more time. The reality is I’ve never much known diversity in my background. I suck at it. I was seventeen before I ever actually met a non-white person, as I grew up in rural Illinois. I have lived a life of going to churches that were small and mostly homogenous. In my thirties, my church had a thirty-something appearance, and in my sixties my church resembles a senior’s get together group. I have always gravitated towards churches sort of like me, at least in the way they looked. I’m more and more reaching the conclusion that is not how it was supposed to be in the church. Dr. Cleveland has some ideas and suggestions for how we move beyond that kind of church, or as  importantly how we move beyond the attitude that seeks to find a church just like us. It probably won’t be easy to implement on either the individual or church level, but what she suggests should be considered by many of us.

A Living Treedition

The Living Treedition

Written by Dan McDonald

 

            We often understand life in metaphors with trees and flowers. A tree grows in Brooklyn.

 

 

                                              A rose grows in black in Spanish Harlem.           

It is the special one

It never sees the sun

It only comes up

When the moon is on the run

And all the stars are gleaming

It’s growing in the street

Right up through the concrete

But soft sweet and dreamy

There is a rose in Spanish Harlem

A rose in black at Spanish Harlem

-words sung by Aretha Franklin based on the song sung by Ben E. King

 

Aretha Franklin sang words based on a Ben E. King song

 

 

            Maybe we should be talking of a living Treedition.

            I remember in younger days seeing a play and then the movie, “Fiddler on the Roof”. I was a Protestant, a Biblical Christian. Tradition – oh it was important in Judaism, but I didn’t imagine it had anything to do with me, a Christian. Over the years I have come to believe that a tradition, a living tradition is something essential to the Christian faith. If we understand a living tradition as if a tree growing near a stream or an unconquered flower growing up through cement we begin I think to understand the glory and beauty of seeing we are each and every person part of a living Treedition.

            1.  A tree, if it is alive, is growing. A living tree is always growing. Its roots spread beneath and along the surface of the soil providing nutrients to the whole of the tree. Above the earth a tree grows both upwards and outwards that its leaves might collect sunlight and rainfall. We sometimes think that tradition is a dead thing, the thoughts and ways of dead men from ancient times or living in seasons unconnected to us. But a living tree, like one sitting in front of a house, giving it shade – is a tree that once was little more than a twig barely sticking its top leaves above the ground. But in a short time it grows above a house roof and gives shade to homeowners following homeowners. The tree witnesses children growing up and growing older, playing in the yard, and then leaving home to pursue dreams. A living tree survives the many seasons, giving shade from generation to generation.

A tree growing in my neighborhood

 

            We might think of a living tradition as inferior to a sacred book. A Christian might think the Bible is so much better than a tradition that one should dispense with traditions and teach solely the Scriptures. But if we think that way, we have likely misunderstood the very genius of the Holy Scriptures we revere. For upon what did the Psalmist meditate to give him the wisdom and the piety to write the songs and prayers of the Psalms? He meditated on the Law and contemplated the words of seers who had written and taught in previous days. As he contemplated the Word of God, the Word of God took root in his soul. If we understand the Psalms, we will understand that the Psalms were part of a holy tradition, words of a man who loved the words of God. The sown word planted into a soul to bear fruit to become a seed in the reading and praying of a soul studying the words of the Psalmist. The Scriptures are layer upon layer of a living tradition, God’s Word sown, studied, inspiring and producing fruit containing seeds to give birth to faith in new generations of hearers. Prophets, who had their lives shaped by word upon word, and precept upon precept, watched as life progressed in their era, in their generation, that they might write and speak of what they saw. Then their insights and stories also were added to the growing living tradition which we find recorded in Holy Scripture. Perhaps the most mysterious of all realities from a Christian viewpoint is how Jesus, in his young humanity was shaped by the words of the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings. At twelve years of age he asked questions of Priests, Rabbis, and of the Scriptures. At thirty years of age, he began to proclaim the release of the captives based on his having come to understand that he was being called to fulfill the Scriptures. In his humanity he was a disciple of the Word even as he was to become the teacher of all future disciples. The Bible does not teach us to disregard tradition. It teaches us to desire to build something precious to be placed upon an already existing foundation of gold, silver, and precious stone. The Bible is not a repudiation of a Living Tradition but a prime example of the Living Tradition’s existence.

            2.  As a tree’s seeds can be planted in many different soils, locales, and climates so a tradition beginning in one place can be grown in yet another place. In Fiddler on the Roof, the people of the village of Anatevka had to carry their tradition to new places like Chicago, New York City, and Warsaw. The situations of life made rabbis ponder and as the branches of Judaism spread upwards and outwards there grew to be Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed branches within Judaism. In Christianity we have so many church denominations that they can hardly be counted. We often wish our traditions were simpler. But should it be surprising if as our number of branches multiply each branch comes to show forth certain individual characteristics? We can hardly expect uniformity when our living tradition has experienced such diverse settings as an agrarian past, the days of empires, feudalism, a growing merchant class during the Renaissance, the rise of science, the industrial age, and now a confusing digital age. Surely we might expect traditions to be marked by differing characteristics of survival in differing surroundings. But if we look close we might see that in each tradition there is a sense of some universals such as our call to love God with all heart, soul, mind, and strength; and to love our neighbors as ourselves.

            3. An old tree usually has scars. There are many reasons trees have what appear to be flaws. A tree once starved for sunlight may have grown crooked at some point in its life after it grew in a way to reach for the available sunlight reaching its leaves. A scar emerged from where the tree was struck with lightning or fought off disease or pestilence. A tradition is not to be venerated as a perfect history to be worshipped. A tradition is something to be remembered as the story of a God who loves us and preserves us despite our own weaknesses in difficult seasons and times. For example I am an Anglican. In my tradition I like to remember figures like Donne, Hooker, Jewell, Lady Huntington, Newton, and Wilberforce. But I also know that Scots Presbyterians and Irish Catholics have good historical reasons to see in my Anglican history treachery and evil. We value our legitimate traditions not because they are perfect but because they are the backgrounds into which we came and lived the Christian life. Perhaps a story that recently was told on the internet can bring out this reality.

            A wife wished to give her husband a photograph of her as an anniversary gift. After looking at the photograph, the wife asked her photographer if the photographer could remove her flaws from her body. She wanted an enhanced photograph to show her husband what she wished he could see instead of the flaws which embarrassed her.

            The husband looked at the photograph and wrote a letter to the photographer. He explained that he understood she only did what his wife wanted her to do with the photograph. Then he explained why the photograph disappointed him. He told her that for one thing when she removed the stretch marks she removed marks that reminded him of what they did together in bringing their children into the world. He understood that life had been at times rough on them. As a result she no longer had the young woman’s figure and freshness of complexion she had when she was a young bride. But they had aged together and he had learned to see in her aging skin and imperfect features how those features told the story of a relationship treasured through thick and thin by the two who walked it together. He realized seeing the wife’s enhanced looks that he had come to realize that her beauty worn by age, sorrows, disappointments and also successes and a happiness of their being together had made all the things that are counted as flaws to be beauty marks of a deep and abiding relationship. When we look at our varying traditions it is not to see an idealized perfection but to see scars and to know that our God has been good to us in days of abundance and days of affliction.

            As traditions like trees are transplanted beyond their original boundaries they seem to grow differently and look differently than in their original settings. The story was told of John Chapman who ventured into the lands west of the Appalachians and discovered there were no apples in the lands cradled between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River. He took apple seeds and began planting them in the lands. He became known as Johnny Appleseed. The story loses a bit of its romance I guess when we discover that Chapman also sold real estate in the lands. Already planted trees could be a good selling point to attract new settlers to buy the plots of land you were selling. That said the Christian faith tradition has been carried from old lands into new lands time and time again.

            At one time, a Christian was thought of us probably being someone from a small sect, almost exclusively from the regions we today call Israel, Palestine, and Syria. The Christian faith was planted in the Middle East and then taken to Europe, the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Throughout its history it has been moving and being planted in new soils and affecting endless tribes and cultures. Some of us imagine Christianity tied to our particular tradition as if our tradition is the entire Christian tradition. But the truth is the Christian tradition is discovered as if growing like a tree in Brooklyn, as a rose in black in Spanish Harlem, as prairie grass or grain fields in the Midwest, as palm and Redwood trees in California, as bamboo in southeastern Asia, and taking root in differing locales and cultures across our globe.

            On Twitter, I follow a young woman who shows a love and excitement for the Scriptures. She has expressed openly a thankfulness to be the grand-daughter of a prominent African-American minister of a former generation. C.L. Franklin’s name is one with which I was never familiar in my particular Christian heritage. A lot of us did know and listen to his daughter Aretha sing those words about a rose in black growing in Spanish Harlem. A tradition is a heritage that is alive and stirs up memories of faithfulness in lives from before we were ever born. Our traditions have an impact on us in the lives transformed that speak to our own lives. I don’t think we can fully trace how much we owe to a living tradition which impacts our lives through lives impacted for generations because one human being entered a community and had an impact on that community in life and word.

            Finally, let me add something that ought to be obvious. We are probably each seated along a certain branch of the Christian tradition. Each of the branches of the Christian tree of tradition has grown from a seed and has stretched forth in its own peculiar way. Yet each of our limbs are connected to a tree that is connected to its roots and we live as a whole tree feeding on the nourishment of being connected to the roots which nourish us. There will be differences from one tradition to another, but where Christ has been planted in the life of humanity there will I sing and rejoice in the glory given to his name.