Guest post by Chaplain Mike. Yawn…

We don’t have too many big snow storms where I live, in central Indiana. We are usually on the line between rain and snow, and therefore happen to miss both the drastic wind-chills and ginormous snowpiles of our northern neighbors and the early spring warmth and colors of those just to our south. We are ice and slush. Winters tend to be all gray and brown, and they are just long enough to give you cabin fever, just frigid enough to be miserable, just warm enough to make those of us who at other times in our lives dwelt in true north country miss a real blizzard.

However, we’re having a decent storm today, and I stayed home to work, glad I didn’t have to get my windshield squenched by one of our Hoos’yer good ol’ boys who relish the opportunity to show off their 4-wheel drive trucks in a pathetic attempt to scare their timid lower midwestern neighbors into a state of panic. This is a day when many middle fingers will be exposed to the elements.

Today’s weather got me to thinking about an article I read in the New York Times by Graham Robb a couple of years ago, about the way things used to be back in the old countries of Europe, when winter was truly dangerous and difficult.

Apparently, our European ancestors were much smarter than we are. They took the winter off.

No, really. For many of them, in winter, every day was a snow day. In order to conserve their stores of food and supplies, their energy, and their sanity, most of them simply went to bed and didn’t really awaken until spring.

Robb cites a British Medical Journal report in 1900 about peasants in northwestern Russia who:

“adopt the economical expedient” of spending one-half of the year in sleep: “At the first fall of snow the whole family gathers round the stove, lies down, ceases to wrestle with the problems of human existence, and quietly goes to sleep. Once a day every one wakes up to eat a piece of hard bread. … The members of the family take it in turn to watch and keep the fire alight. After six months of this reposeful existence the family wakes up, shakes itself” and “goes out to see if the grass is growing.”

It seems that some folks in France in particular embraced this way of life. A French civil servant who investigated the region’s economic activity in 1844 found that he was almost the only living presence in the landscape: “These vigorous men will now spend their days in bed, packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and to eat less food. They weaken themselves deliberately.”

In the Alps, they had a saying, “Seven months of winter, five months of hell.” The hell-months were the working months! Winter was what they looked forward to! Winter meant rest, inactivity, a state near to hibernation for many folks.

And if someone died, they just packed him or her in a cold place and waited until spring to have the funeral. Even the deceased took the winter off.

I was born in the wrong century, I guess.

I say, let’s bring this back. It’s time to fight for our right to hibernate during the winter! What do you think? Anyone else feel as strongly about this as I do?

I propose the complete cessation of work from, say at least November 1 to March 1 here in the Midwest and similar climes. During those long, cold, dark months, it will simply be “ma in her ‘kerchief, and I in my cap, all settled down for a long winter’s nap.”

Just think of the energy savings! Imagine how much longer our automobiles will last if we do not expose them to the elements and all that road salt. The money we’ll save! Forget buying those bulky winter clothes and all the paraphernalia we use to fight the weather and the mess. And what about the health benefits, the boon to our peace of mind and body? Think how productive we will be the rest of the year, having enjoyed such a profound rest.

Yep, there’s an idea.

Yawn…

I’ll work on it in June. See you then.

Support the monks of St. Meinrad, who make a great wooden casket/urn at a reasonable price. Will look much better under the tree

Stand by America, Wal-Mart is selling caskets. And urns. I’m not joking.

Any of you with a small funeral home in your community might want to consider two things: Just how far in advance you want to buy that pre-planned service and what is the meaning of the phrase “Some unanticipated future charges may be necessary.”

What Wal-Mart has done for Main Street USA in small town America it is now going to do for the funeral industry in those same towns: deliver what the public wants. irresistably heap. (If you know anything about casket prices, these are quite inexpensive.)

If you buy stock, I’d take a look at whoever made this deal. It’s a brilliant piece of 21st century capitalism. America is SO ready for the Wal-Mart casket.

If it bothers you to spend eternity in a box made by children in China, you might want to see if you can special order.

Reading the small print, there’s no return on this stuff, so if grandma calls and doesn’t like it, too bad. Wal-Mart won’t be doing refunds. Even if you wash it out really well. So I don’t think there will be any great deals on “refurbished” caskets.

I can only imagine what the job of the guy who has to enforce that “No Returns” policy is going to be like. He’ll have enough stories for a book in a few weeks.

Large caskets for large people are available. Catholic caskets? Yes. Just take a look.

Is there any reason we can’t hope for customization? Nascar? Disney? Favorite sports teams? Colleges and Universities. Even sponsored caskets. Cialis. Visa.

I can imagine that Fed Ex is about to have a great time delivering these to older Americans. Some of you can probably look forward to a Thanksgiving visit to the garage where dad shows you the casket he just bought from Wal-Mart. What a deal? Ol’ Jones down the street doesn’t have one of these!

And Christmas. Oh my. Won’t that casket look wonderful under the tree? (By the way Denise and family….the answer is NO.)

You have to wonder how long it will be before Wal-Mart takes the next step: Install a chapel, attached right next to the big box store, and staff it with funeral attendants and a minister.

Wal-Mart, if you are looking to hire someone in the Southeast Kentucky area, I’m available. Will I get a name tag? And an employee discount? I can do the greeter thing when business is slow.

Don’t forget about those urns. We can get Wal-Mart discount crematoriums right there next to the oil and lube shop.

What do you need ma’am? Cremate your husband? Bay 4. You have a coupon? Great.

So what will we put in those local funeral homes? Around here we always seem to need one more tattoo parlor and tanning salon.

I would say use them for start up churches, but if Wal-Mart goes into church planting…..now there’s an idea…..

[One other note: The ministry where I serve gets a lot of donated items from Wal-mart. We usually take it all and find some way to use or pass it on. So if a donated truckload of hot pink oversized Michael Jackson caskets shows up, I may have an on-line auction ]

I know this doesn’t happen….but this time it did.

I’ve been teaching Ethiopian Orthodox students for most of two decades here at our ministry. We have about 20 of them a year and I get all of them who stay through graduation in my Bible survey class.

I’ve met only a handful- far less than ten- who seemed to relate to their faith as anything other than an expression of Ethiopian culture. Ethiopian Orthodoxy is coptic, very ancient, tied in deeply to the stories Ethiopians believe about the beginnings of their nation. They are very loyal to their culture, but I’ve only met a handful that could have a handful about what their faith meant to them.

Until this year. I’ve got a very vocal young lady in my advanced Bible class. She’s kept things interesting.

Ethiopian orthodoxy doesn’t accept the two natures of Christ, and we’re studying the Apostle’s Creed. She’s been all over me about how Jesus is related to God.

Today we were having a discussion on atheism and she let me know quickly that it was very wrong for anyone to have questions about God. “God doesn’t like questions.”

But her favorite subject is Mary. She’s very big on Mary. The other day she brought me a handful of material from the internet on the Ethiopian Orthodox view of Mary. I’ve promised her she’ll get her opportunity to share what she believes.

She regularly- daily- reminds me that Mary was born sinless. I think she’s detected I may be a doubter.

But the first day this came up, we had just finished praying and she interrupted me. She wanted to discuss why we weren’t praying to Mary.

“Why should we pray to Jesus when we can pray to the Mary?”

I answered with my usual profound, “What?”

“Why should we pray to God or Jesus when we can pray to the Mary. The Mary is sinless and she is the mother of Jesus. She can take our prayers to him. It’s better to pray to the Mary.”

Not wanting to get snarky, Catholic friends, but I’ve been told several dozen times that there’s no danger of this ever happening, it’s a Protestant exaggeration, etc. Sounds to me like she’s got it worked out. Why pray to the Father or Jesus when Mary can take the call?

By the way, my explanation that I don’t pray to Mary because there’s no examples in scripture of anyone praying to Mary didn’t seem to make much of an impression. But then today I learned that the Ethiopian canon has 89 books, so I may be missing something.

When I first read this, it tipped my already leaning inclination to be highly annoyed at needless stereotyping and dividing of the Christian family by things that are neither significant nor truly divisive, but simply are the perceptions and caricatures of one team over another. We’ve come to the point where portraying emergent Christians as “useless idiots” is an approved form of bigotry, and it does positive harm. I posted at the BHT while I was steamed up, then decided to give DeYoung the benefit of the doubt, at least on this quote, and say he was simply having a little fun.

I’ll admit that DeYoung comes off like the witty kid who can make fun of the other kids without seeming to be all that mean, but the mean kids will find it hilarious for all the wrong reasons.

So turnabout is fair play, and perhaps a look in the mirror makes the point whatever way you want to take it: caricature, satire or humor. So courtesy of Adam Omelianchuk, author of one of the better explanations of why you don’t have to be a Calvinist to be a Christian, here’s the same passage, but with the gun sights aimed the other way.

After reading nearly five thousand blog posts of Reformed Christians, I have no doubt that the so-called “Young, Restless, and Reformed,” while loosely defined and far from uniform, can be described and critiqued as a diverse, but recognizable, movement. You might be a Reformed Christian: if you listen to Caedmon’s Call, Bob Kauflin, and Derek Webb’s She Must And Shall Go Free album (but never his later stuff), listen only to expository sermons through Romans, drink orange juice to the glory of God, and always use an Amazon Kindle to read publications from Crossway Books; if your reading list consists primarily of John Piper, John MacArthur, R.C. Sproul, J.I. Packer, D.A. Carson, Tim Keller, Mark Driscoll, Michael Horton, Wayne Grudem, Bruce Ware, Tom Schreiner, Kevin DeYoung, and Ted Kluck (not to mention Mahaney, Mohler, Dever, Duncan, etc.) and your sparring partners include Brian McLaren, Rob Bell, Greg Boyd, and Rick Warren; if your idea of quintessential Christian discipleship is John Calvin, Martin Luther, John Owen, John Bunyan, Jonathan Edwards, or anyone just named John; if you don’t like Barack Obama or conversations or contextualization or egalitarianism or Left Behind Christianity; if your political concerns are abortion, gay marriage, abortion, gay marriage, abortion, gay marriage, abortion, gay marriage, and abortion and not so much health care or the economy; if you are into singing Psalms, hymns, or Puritan Paperbacks; if you talk about penal substitutionary atonement and the sovereignty of God; if you lie awake at night having nightmares about all the ways Pentecostalism has ruined the church; if you love the Bible as a inerrant, infallible, verbally inspired book that can be used for psychiatric diagnostics and scientific proof of a young earth; if you search for unity with other believers but aren’t sure it can be found; if you’ve ever been to a church that teaches exclusively out of the ESV, has a large Reformed bookstore, promotes several conferences a year all with basically the same speakers; if you loathe words like story, narrative, relational, open, and seeker-sensitive and use words like God-centered, hedonist, regenerate, error, heresy, discernment, and authority; if you grew up in a Christian home that in retrospect seems semi-Pelagian, naive, and about works righteousness; if you forbid women in all levels of ministry, cater to white suburbia, and like your theology systematic instead of practically relevant; if you disbelieve that God really wants to save everyone; if you want to stop dating the church; if you long for a community that exercises church discipline, thinks criticism is a good thing, and doesn’t allow dating; if you believe the “loving your enemies” prooftext gets in the way of the Just War criteria; most of humanity is predestined to hell and no one can do anything about it; if you believe salvation has a little to do with responding in faith and repentance and a lot to do with sovereign grace and limited atonement; if you believe following Jesus is about being doctrinally correct but not necessarily walking as he did (because that’s impossible!); if it really bugs you when people talk about wanting to see heaven getting into people instead of getting people into heaven; if you disdain efforts to help the poor as liberal or supplanting the gospel; if you use the word “justification” in all your arguments against NT Wright–if all or most of this tortuously long sentence describes you, then you might be a Reformed Christian.

If you read the comments at the Challies post, you will notice how many of his regulars found themselves in the emergent quote. They like U2, drink lattes, etc. I think it does us all good to realize that while the poster boys for our teams might be purists, most of us aren’t.

Yes, many of you read Wight and Piper. You have an ESV and an NLT. You like Over the Rhine and old Derek Webb. You aren’t actually a pacifist, but you read Anabaptists. You read Merton and Paul Tripp.

You ought to be ashamed of yourself. How can you say that Rob Bell’s last Nooma (the one on Job) was outstanding and still call yourself reformed?

It’s a big goof. Resist those who try to make us line up in teams and play the game according to their rules. Like Merton said, combine in yourself all those supposedly irreconcilable opposites.

In the following paragraphs, I am going to rescue those of you in ministry from the feeling you have that no one could ever be as bone-headed as you. From the annals of my own life and ministry, I share with you now the following true stories meant to encourage you to start tomorrow with a smile, saying “I may be an idiot, but I’m still way ahead of Spencer.”

As a bit o’ background, I was a youth minister- mostly- from 1976-1988. Then I pastored four years, but also did a lot of youth ministry in that church after the youth minister quit. NONE of the incidents recounted below happened where I’ve served since 1992.

BTW- in order to protect the innocent, I will change a few facts here and there, but I assure you that what you are reading is not fiction. 100% true.

1. I love hayrides. Ours got rained out, so smart guy here gets the church bus (used for senior adult trips), fills it with bales of hay and drives the kids around for a couple of hours. I’m not sure that bus ever was clean again. I got yelled at, deservedly.

2. I showed a movie to a large mixed group of families that had a flash of a woman’s breast. Everyone gasped. Of course I didn’t preview it.

3. I took my youth group to see the movie “Darkman.” I just didn’t realize that it was rated “R.” No sex or language, just a lot of intense violence, much like the average meeting of our junior high ministry. This one did not go unnoticed by a parent, so she arranged for a called deacon’s meeting and read the schedule of every movie ever played at that theater for the last couple of years. It was the closest I ever came to being fired and I totally deserved it.

4. Two of my deacons made a big deal about me taking the a.m. service ten minutes too long two weeks in a row, and they humiliated me in front of the rest of the deacons over it. No affirmation of my preaching at all. Just p.o.-ed that I had gotten them to the restaurants a bit late. I was angry; really angry. The next week I preached for 12 minutes total and dismissed the service at 15 minutes till noon. The reaction was predictable. I actually consider that one of my finer moments. If your view of preaching is “How soon do I get to dinner?” you deserve to be accommodated.

5. I scheduled a concert on a Friday night after football season was over. Well sortof over. It was the Saturday of the state championship game for our division, and our town’s team had been 0-11 the previous year. So what were the chances? Turns out pretty good. They made it all the way to the state championship. I had to cancel the concert and eat the deposit personally. (To soothe the pain, my kids took all the posters and plastered them on the walls, ceiling, floor, desk, etc of my office. Then stuffed the room with crumpled up posters that fell out when I opened my office door. Never say kids don’t care.)

6. We played soccer in the sanctuary. I think. I blanked this out. No one ever knew. I think a dog was in there, too.

7. A few of my students apparently used mission trips as an opportunity to get to know each other in the Biblical sense. I didn’t know it at the time of course, but several have told me about it since they’ve become adults. While I thought we were doing backyard Bible clubs, some of these little church angels were fellowshipping like bunnies at the first opportunity. I wasn’t totally unaware of this though. During a Christmas play rehearsal one year, I took some kids to a room to practice and walked in on two kids (not working with me) practicing something unrelated to Christmas in a Sunday School room.

8. I rented and showed Bambi Vs. Godzilla at a mid-week Bible study. This was back on reel to reel. I have no idea what I was thinking.

9. I used Van Halen music as a wake-up call for a Baptist youth camp. Quite a few complaints, but I thought Dancing in the Streets was a good choice.

10. When I was in my first regular preaching gig at age 18, I tried to preach on the prophecy of Daniel’s 70 weeks. An old man stood up about half way through and said, “We have no idea what you are talking about, son.” Thanks to that man, I abandoned dispensationalism.

11. I had Jesus try to quit a Passion play I was directing. He said it was just too intense for him. (Totally true.)

12. One of the Oak Ridge Boys- I am not lying- crashed a revival I was preaching and demanded to be able to sing in the service. I said no and the guy said, “Do you know who I am?” and left cussing me. He had great hair and a hot wife.

13. I was hired to be a summer youth director only to discover there was a lay couple there, loved by the kids, busy doing great ministry for the past ten years. The pastor neglected to tell me he didn’t like these people. (He turned out to be a jerk no one could work with.) So I did nothing for two months but hang around while kids kept asking “Who is that guy?”

14. I brought in a band to do a concert, and the lead singer told such incredible, explicit drug use stories that the pastor pulled the plug on the show and sent everyone home.

15. I have attempted to work with a host of people- I mean several in various churches- who were all determined to fire me and I knew it. After working with one for weeks on summer recreation leagues, he brought me into the pastor’s office and promised to personally build and fund a new youth facility if the pastor would fire me immediately. He didn’t. I asked the guy for Reds tickets the next month. (I have a strange attraction to my enemies. It’s bizarre.)

16. I once hired a guy as an intern who spent the next three months trying to consolidate support to take my job. I kept asking him what he was doing and he’d say nothing. I finally got the nerve to fire him and he left the church and the faith. He married one of our youth group girls in a few weeks. He eventually became a lawyer, so he was in league with the devil.

17. I let some kids watch a movie on HBO (long ago) in my office. Listen folks. Don’t ever do that. I had more angry parents than I could count, even though the movie was harmless. I don’t know how I made it through that one. (I have problems with movies. Have you noticed?)

18. I once took our kids on a mission trip that we’d planned for months. Our contact was a local director of missions, not the pastor we would work with. All seemed fine. (Can you see this coming?) When we arrived, the pastor had no idea who we were, had no housing, no places for us to work and DIDN’T WANT US THERE. So we negotiated with him and he agreed to let us sleep in the church basement, feed ourselves and find our own places for Backyard Bible Club. He wanted nothing to do with us. The next morning was pouring rain, and there we were, on the streets, door to door, asking for homes to do Bible clubs for the area kids. This was not an area that liked Baptists, by the way. By noon, we had four places, none connected to the church. We had a great week, though the pastor treated us like a disease. When we were leaving, three of our boys were mooning him in the bus windows. I was almost angry at them. Almost. Lesson: ALWAYS make an advance trip yourself.

19. My first mission trip (1980) was worse, but it makes me look like such an idiot that I can’t tell you the whole story. It’s amazing my kids didn’t starve. I’ll just say that the two other youth leaders I worked with took me aside and had a talk with me at the end of the week. I got the message, and eventually became very good at mission trips to the inner city and Appalachia. And much better at planning.

20. Yes, I drove off and left a kid at a rest area once. Are you happy now?

21. Oh yeah. I was the lowest paid guy on a church staff where I worked, and the parents thought I did a good job, so they commandeered a business meeting, amended the budget and gave me a big raise. This was back in the day when $16k + benefits was normal for a new, full time, youth guy. I won’t tell all of this story, but I was counseled, for the good of the staff, the process, etc., to turn it down. And guess what? I did. I went before TWO morning services and declined the raise. I look back on that now and I hang my head in shame. Mama and Daddy did not bring up a boy to be that dumb, I promise. But that’s what church work will do for you. I think God has kept me poor ever since because “Well, OK…if you don’t want it…”