Introduction

These are stories about Midtown. Aside from these, of course, there could be many others worth telling. But I will tell only these because I saw them happen.

All of these stories are true.

Chapter One: Welcome

It is January of 2005. Tim and Sarah and their kids visit Midtown for the first time. They decide this will be their home church. It is a momentous decision, and calls for some kind of ceremony, or baptism, or anointing. By way of making it official, Jake goes into the fellowship hall and barfs on the floor.

Chapter Two: Spiritual Warfare

Greg Belliveau crawls around on the Red Brick Church kitchen floor with a toolbox. He is taking apart a grease trap under the sink. The grease trap is full and has been festering for fifty years. It is overflowing with unspeakable filth. His tools make clanking noises as he prays or swears under his breath. Other church members are in the building for a cleaning day, and rumors of the grease trap’s horrors have spread among them: It is awful; it is stinky; it is gooey; Greg will never be presentable in public again. Fixing the grease trap is like changing Satan’s diapers.

Chapter Three: The Abyss

Under the sanctuary is a dungeon. Imprisoned there is a terrible monster. His body is made of iron and he weighs a thousand thousand tons. His feet are bolted to the floor as punishment for his evil deeds. Out of his head fat metal tentacles sprawl menacingly in every direction. He awakens and his eyes burn with smoldering rage. He guards his treasures: an industrial sink, asbestos roof shingles, a broken lawn mower, cans of dried paint, cracked plates. Grown men are afraid to go alone to fetch the mop bucket. He is Lord Octopus.

Chapter Four: Leaf Wars

Linda finds some kids playing in the leaves in front of a house on Stanton Street. By the time I walk up, all necessary formalities are completed, and everyone is on familiar enough terms to begin a leaf war.
These kids show no mercy. Handfuls in my hair, in my face. They attack Linda, who exacts revenge, throwing leaves, chasing, yelling. I retaliate against them. I pick up two little boys, one under each arm, and spin around, hoping to drop them disoriented and incapacitated on the ground. They shove leaves down the back of my shirt.
They yell and run and exult.

Somehow Linda gets them all to church. And the next door boys, too.
The next door boys want to see The Rock. I show them upstairs. They make subdued assessments of the coolness.
Downstairs, just before the service, we play some lively music. A girl, who is fourteen and knows more sorrows and burdens than she should, sways in the front row. She gives me a quizzical eye: Is this a good time for dancing?

Yes! Dance! Please!

She grooves a little in her seat, but chickens out. She knows about self-consciousness, and has too many reasons to let sorrow win out over joy.

Chapter Five: Lexi and Pudgy

Down the road and to the right, and down to Chestnut, is a ten-minute walk. All the kids are out today, on porches and and back and forth across the street. They have an agreement with passing cars: everybody ignore each other.
This is where I cross into a different world. They know nothing and care nothing of my life of career and credential and connection and privilege. They do not resent that I can cross in and out, and they must stay in. They welcome my arrival, and downplay my obvious shortcomings, and hang on my sleeves, and make me catch them as they jump off the porch.

But today in the neighborhood, fear.

Fear, because a man, a pedophile or similar species of predatory reptile, tried to abduct a child on this block. He failed but is feared at large. The mothers and aunts all arrange to walk their own kids home, and elicit promises from me that we will not let any of them walk outside after dark.
Lexi jumps off the porch so I can catch her. I catch her and pretend her momentum makes me spin away down the sidewalk. The adrenalin agrees with her so we do it again, three times, four times. Her hair clicks because it is full of beads.

Her sister is called Pudgy but is not. Pudgy is just a newer smaller version of Lexi, and harder to understand. I answer her questions mostly Yes, and sometimes Hmm.
They tell me about the dog who chewed some lady’s arm off. Lexi holds my hand while we walk. As we pass the fence where the dog is, she switches sides, and puts me between her and the fence, and holds my other hand. Her hand is small, and feels like she has been playing in the dirt.

Lexi has a dollar. Pudgy has a hundred dollars. Lexi has five thousand dollars. Pudgy has two hundred million billion dollars. And so on.

In church Lexi has to sit in the musician’s section, next to me. She reads a title from the hymnal: Jesus Loves the Little Children. I can read, she boasts.
Nicely done. He does, and you can.

She volunteers to pray for a complex need which she does not understand, and then covers her face with her hands. Someone out in the pews is thankful for a lung transplant, and to be alive.

I walk them home in the dark. Pudgy worries about dogs and makes me carry her the whole way. Most of the kids are worried about the creep. I tell them that I know some intimidating kung fu poses, and some withering insults too, and all shall be well.

Chapter Six: The Kingdom of God is All Music and Dancing

All the kids are seated on the floor, singing. The Kingdom of God is appearing among us, goes the song. When I ask for volunteers to hold the posters for verse two, six of them shoot their hands up, wide-eyed, mouths in an oooh-shape, sitting up ever higher because it is crucial to get the hand as high as possible in the air. It increases the odds.

Three girls from the neighborhood come in and sit on the floor. They have an air of gloom. They are teenagers, it is true, and gloom would be required of them under the best circumstances. But these kids, they carry some extra sadness. They have a pact, an understanding, that they hang together and bear their sadness together.

The sadness is simply that life is hard and inevitable. (The free imagination of childhood allows escape for a time: for a few years they can imagine and believe that they will not become their absentee fathers and bedraggled mothers. But in the early teens they awaken, and their eyes clear, and they see how the cycle works, and despair.) The three of them don’t raise their hands. They sing maybe the most familiar part of the song, but softly and with eyes off to the side and downward.

Later, around a table, they draw and color. With patience and detail, with talent, they draw beautiful things. They make huge block letter signs and illuminate the letters extravagantly, like monks on a manuscript. One writes a note of friendship to another, and colors it and signs it Holla Atcha Grl.

In the sanctuary Jamie opens a violin case. Inside is a child’s instrument, with tape on the fingerboard to show where to go if you want to be in tune. Ten-year-old Stephanie stands and stares into the case.
She is silent, and listens to instructions about taking care of the violin as though they were words of catechism, or sacrament, or high divine calling. She looks at the violin with holy fear. Her eyes are wide and bright, standing out from her deep brown skin. Her hair is spiked out, pointing backwards, so she always looks like she is zooming along through the air.

Later she shows her friends, and one on them gently reaches out and plucks a string in admiration.

In the kitchen next to the stove a fourteen-year-old girl, one who came in all gloomy, hints that she dances. Her name is Andria. I tell her she should teach all the kids some moves for our song about the Kingdom. She hesitates, and demures. Sarah joins me in the project: Yes, you got the moves, you have to do this, they will love it. And so on.
Finally, she sings one line from the song, skipping her feet syncopatedly and swinging her arms. The Kingdom of God is appearing among us. Skip skip skip.

She is very good. She has energy and style. She tries another line. The Kingdom of God is all music and dancing. Skip skip hop hop swing arms round. She smiles. People egg her on. The Kingdom of God is all color and beauty. Skip swing hop hop.

Julie, a college student, walks up. I used to dance hip hop, she tells the Andria.
Andria turns, and smiles with her mouth and frowns with her brow, and stares Julie down, and says:

Show me your moves.

Chapter Seven: Impression of CJ at the Food Pantry

“Number 57! Take some potatoes. Cut that out unless you want me raising sand! It’ll be Katie bar the door! I need a lahge with a frozen thingie! Have a blest day!”

Chapter Eight: This is My Body, Broken for You

The four wildest boys are clearly not going to make it through communion time. It has only begun and already there is talk of a farting contest. I know something about trying to shush a farting contest during church. It is a losing proposition. Being the serious scolding grown-up only makes everything funnier. Defeated, I take them upstairs to The Rock.

Chris wants to play football against me on the video game machine. He informs me that I am the Steelers. I do not feel equal to this task. What are all these buttons for? He tells me what to push. Bewilderingly, I seem to be winning. I think I am the blue guys. On the next machine, Cory is playing the skateboard game, with a loud soundtrack. He sings along: Waiting for your modern Messiah to take away the hate. Those are the words. He knows them.

The girls get into the nail polish stuff but don’t know quite what it is. Thinking, I suppose, that they are dealing with lip gloss, Stephanie gets glue on her teeth. She makes a face and tries to pick it off.

Tim and I walk all the kids home because it is dark. Outside, we stick Wheat Thins in our mouths like fake teeth. We talk like Billy Bob. We find an old ball hat on the sidewalk. The boys keep sneaking up behind me and putting it on my head. I throw it as high in the air as I can. They run after it. It’s a game of fetch. Pudgy wants to be carried. Easy enough, as she weighs nothing. Whenever anything interesting happens, she screams. My ear rings a little.

Chris challenges me to a wrestling match. He is a stocky boy, almost a teen, but I can just sling him over my shoulder and spin him around until he is discombobulated. The other three wild boys demand equal treatment. Mark wants me to spin him around and then throw him into the bushes. Well, alright then.

We arrive at their houses on Chestnut. Tim and I leave. Chris follows us. He won’t go home.

High five me again. Wrestle me again. Spin me again.

Chapter Nine: Gary

Gary tells stories. They are mostly stories about his heroic deeds. I love these stories, and am coming to believe that some of them may be true.

Gary drove a truck, and to hear him tell it, the truck went roaring across America, devouring the asphalt like a roaring lion. The trailer, clinging on for dear life, bounced and careened like tin cans behind a newlywed car, while the truck made a speedboat wake, a giant sliced V, right through the landscape. He hit a speedbump in North Dakota and was airborne through most of Montana.

There are truck stories, and there are tough guy stories. In the tough guys stories Gary is defending his kids. Someone picks on them or threatens them, and when Gary gets wind of it, it’s time to head for the hills. The stories end with great one-liners. Some fool picks on Gary’s kid. Gary finds out. Gary exacts some street justice. Gary stands over the crumpled, humiliated evil-doer and warns him that next time,

“They find you stankin in the creek, butt-up with flies on.”

Chapter Ten: Unrooted

Steve limps down the stairs to the food. He tells me that he hurt his leg jumping off a train.

A what?

Jumping out of the freight car as it rumbled through Springfield. Train didn’t slow. So he jumped at speed and bruised his heel. His triumphal entry was messy and manic.

Steve rides around the country in freight cars. He waits until the trains are moving slowly out of town and jumps aboard. He tells me that he travels for a living. He is an old-school hobo.

There is a rootedness that I thought was universal and necessary in people. Steve doesn’t have it. On summer evenings in my back yard I know a sense of occupying my right place in things. Perhaps the stillness I find on my land at evening he finds only as the freight car, doors flung open, rumbles slowly out of town. He tried on yet another town and it didn’t fit. He says he has had enough of Ohio.

He rode into Springfield because his father is in the Odd Fellows home, and he will visit. But after that, maybe Arizona.

The Chestnut Street boys are wild tonight. We send them home early. Once outside, they attack. They remember my special move, the one where I put them over my shoulder and spin them. Each needs a turn, and another turn, and they argue and fight about turns. I try to spin them so fast that they will be temporarily disoriented and compliant, but they recover faster than I can.

One boy, the wildest, outright assaults me. His name is Chris and he wants to fight. Where his father is, and what his father is, and whether his father is, I know not. Maybe he is in a freight car, rumbling across Arizona. There is a thing that fathers must do for their sons that has not been done for this boy, and he is left with an angry gnawing hunger.

So he takes a swing at me.

If he were taller he could break my glasses or bend my nose. But in the cold, with coats and layers and all, he is mostly harmless, if you keep your wits about you. I give him my standard gentle smackdown, and a few punches around the shoulders, and finish off by whapping him across the back of his buzzcut.

Now Chris wants a piggyback ride wee wee wee all the way home.

Along the way some of the kids stop at a friend’s house and make plans to roller blade. They have one pair and split it. The game is: one boy ride on his right foot and push with the left, and the other do the mirror image. They rumble around us in the dark on the sidewalk.

GK walks with me, his daughter high up on his shoulders. The boys negotiate with him for optimum candy next week.
We want three-foot strips of bubble gum. Yardstick bubble gum. GK looked in the store and couldn’t find it. OK then. We want three-foot Slim Jims.

I ask what kind of meat they use in a three-foot Slim Jim. A giraffe’s tail? Perhaps the thing is a snake, headless and spineless but otherwise whole?

No. Beef. Slim Jims are beef, I am told, with exasperation. Everyone knows that.

Maybe it’s Beefsnake, I say. I bet it’s Beefsnake.

Beef STEAK. Not snake. More exasperation. Big grown up idiot.

They rumble away into the dark, one foot wheeled.

Up on GK’s shoulders, his little girl wonders and exclaims when a motion sensor on a house lights up at our passing, then goes black as we round the corner. Such a thing has never been seen. She wants to live in that house.

She has a real bike now. She is done with training wheels. She is bigger now, and so very exalted on her father’s shoulders, which she rides with no hands, and she is competent on a two-wheeler, and the world is utterly radiant with color and promise, up there on her father’s shoulders.

Chris gets a piggyback ride the last ten yards to his house. There. Done. Like a pushpin in a map, I put him in the right place.

He doesn’t stick. He won’t be rooted. Off he goes again in the dark, unrooted, following us for a while, and rumbling with his friends.

Chapter Eleven: Frank

Dear Frank,

It took me a long time to understand anything you said. I have to admit that sometimes I answered you with a noncommittal “Mmmmm” when I had no idea what you were talking about. After a lot of practice it got easier. I really enjoyed our conversations over dinner. We often talked about good food, about hot dogs or pie. Everyone in the neighborhood knew and liked you, and called you Little Frank or Shorty. I have a picture of you with your friend Brandon, and I value it.

The last time I saw you was when Tim and I found you that day in your apartment. Lung cancer was advancing and you were retreating. I was worried that perhaps you did not grasp the seriousness of your condition, but it was perfectly clear to you: you had a few months to live, and you were ready to meet God, and the nursing aide who came to help once a day was good looking, so you didn’t mind too much. Then you coughed, and we knew that time was running out.

Sleep well, Little Frank.

Chapter Twelve: I Will Build My Church

Ben installs a new basketball hoop out in the parking lot, but the heat changes some minds, and the kids drift to the cool of the basement. Someone asks if there are art supplies.

Stephanie is drawn to the empty box from the basketball gear. She wants to make a new sign for the Red Brick Church out of it. She asks me to chop off the folds along the edge, leaving her with a perfect piece of clean cardboard, three feet by five.

Now the other kids get involved, and they need to raid the supplies from upstairs: scissors, tape, glitter glue, pens, crayons. I make them promise to put it all back. They promise and mean not a word of it.

Stephanie’s sign, in eccentric lettering, says “Red Brick Church People and 3 Animals”. She asks me to draw some people and animals on paper squares so she can glue them to the cardboard. I draw a fat guy with a combover. She wants him to have a matching wife. I draw a hillbilly lunkhead wearing a ballcap with an extra long bill. He is saying Duh. I draw a lady with Marge Simpson hair saying Grr.

Then I draw myself, which is easy: glasses and nose are the center of gravity, with a beard-rimmed frown below and some unruly hair above. Add a few consternated frowny lines to the forehead and the likeness is uncanny.

DJ wants me to draw him. I worry because I do not know how to draw black people. He insists. I tell him I can only draw goofy faces, so he makes a goofy face with his tongue out. Deep breath and go: actually it’s not bad. DJ loves it and shows it to his friends. He takes it home.

Pudgy gets me to draw a dog. I draw a silly one which she takes and shows to my wife. Pudgy claims she did it herself. Big mistake: Linda knows my cartoon style very well, and calls the bluff. She excels at calling the bluff.

Stephanie glues the pictures onto her cardboard, but wants to work on it more later. It is unfinished. It will remain unfinished. It is a picture of the church, and it is good ecclesiology: most of us are cartoonishly silly, and some are animals. Stephanie does not know the word ecclesiology.

Time to go. Sure enough, they leave all the art supplies for someone else to pick up.

Chapter Thirteen: Some Names I Can Remember

Ray and his parents Bill and Nancy
Trent and Bailey
Karen, affectionate but also insane
Eddie and his dog Chico
Marcel, DJ, Quinn, Mark, Dante, Donnell
Floyd, who brought his guitar
Belinda, who could not afford her medication
Darrin, who suggested that we build a barn

Epilogue: For a Time

People file into the domed sanctuary. The room echoes with conversation. In the front, musicians are practicing. Suddenly all eyes are drawn to an energetic movement in the back of the room. A girl and her mother have come in, the mother slow and worn with care, the girl bursting with kinetic momentum. She charges away from her mother, braids flying, and finds a college girl whom she loves, and throws herself into a forceful embrace.
Disentangled, she runs to her second target, another student and another crash and embrace. Lastly, a slower walk back to her mother.

The sun sinks in the sky and the stained-glass window in the west floods the floor with golden light.

For a time, ordinary things glow. Ordinary people become, for a time, luminous: their hands are flames of fire, their faces a riot of glory.

THE END

Martin Luther King famously remarked that 11 am Sunday is the most segregated hour of the week. It seems that a change is in the wind.  Hats off to these folks in Georgia:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/22/us/22church.html?hp

HOMILY FOR THE BAPTISM OF MIDTOWN YOUNG PEOPLE

Exodus 32:1-14
1 Timothy 1:12-17
Luke 15:1-10
Psalm 51:1-18

Dear Maddie and Jake and Nick and Christian and Ian and Victoria and Jocelyn and Nate and Mitchell and Emma,

Tomorrow you are going to be baptized. I can’t promise you anything at all about the temperature of the water. It might be really cold. You might confess your belief in God your Father, Jesus Christ your Lord, and the Holy Spirit your Comforter and Guide through chattering teeth. In fact you might draw in a sharp breath when you first get in, and wonder if this was such a good idea after all. Who in his right mind hops into the cold water this late in the year? Sensible people would be staying dry and wearing sweatshirts right about now. Have you lost your common sense, jumping into the water like that?

You need to know that in following Jesus you have to do a lot of things that seem to go against common sense. You have to obey the teachings of a person you have never seen, but only read about. You have to give away some of your money and your stuff on a regular basis. You are not allowed to hurt people, even though you really want to. And if others hurt you, you have to forgive them. You have to help people who have no possible way of paying you back. You have to join a community of others who follow Jesus, and some of them are not very likeable, but you are stuck with them, and they are stuck with you.

So, if the water is a bit cold, that is not such a bad thing after all. Cold water wakes you up, doesn’t it? Your eyes pop wide open and your muscles tense up. And you need to be wide awake for what is to come in this life-long journey of following Jesus.

Because, as the reading from Exodus shows, something is wrong in the world. What is wrong? People were created to live in friendship with God and with neighbor, but the loyalty of the human race has quickly abandoned God and run off to serve false gods. Because God is more good than you imagine, and more loving than you imagine, he refuses to let that be the end of the story. So he has been organizing a rescue mission to the world. But as you can see, we live in a world which, on the whole, does not cooperate well with God’s rescue mission, but tends instead to serve false gods who make the problems of the world worse.

One of the difficulties of false gods is that they lie. They do not say, “Good afternoon. I am a false god. Follow me and do what I say. I will lead you away from walking with God, and bring sorrow into your life.” Rather, they are deceptive, and they try to pose as something attractive. Weirdly, when Aaron set out to build the golden calf in Exodus, he said that they were going to have a festival to the Lord. And maybe it started out sort of innocent and respectable, but pretty soon people were down in the dirt, acting like animals, de-humanizing themselves and others.

We do not have golden calves today. Not ones that people bow down to. But false gods we have aplenty.

We have the false god of thoughtless destructive momentary pleasure. That can mean foolish wasting of God’s money, or wrong use of the body he has given us, or addiction. All these things result in a very short time of pleasure followed by a very long time of pain.

We have the false god of getting lots and lots of money. Now, money is pretty cool. You can use it to get burritos, or put gas in the car, or buy someone a present. You can use it to bring relief to people who are suffering. But if you want to use it all on yourself, or keep it in big piles and get more and more, it becomes a false god, and you spend day and night worrying whether you have a big enough pile of money, and hoping nobody steals it.

We have the false god of thinking that our kind of people, who look like us and talk like us and live like us, are God’s favorite kind of people. This false god tries to get us to forget God’s multi-colored love for all the people of the world, and his intention to bring them together in his kingdom.

When you go into the water to be baptized, you are dying to all these false gods. Let me explain.

Sometimes, like at school, we teach things to others by acting out a skit or a play. People can understand better if they see something acted out. Baptism is like a play, and you are the main character. What you are acting out is dying, being buried, and coming back from the dead. That’s why you go under the water and come up again. Of course you aren’t really going to die (unless Mr. Gombis holds you under too long or perhaps you freeze), so why are you acting out death and life?

You are doing it for three reasons. First, Jesus did it first, and for real. He died and rose from the dead. By acting it out, you are saying that you want to be like Jesus, to copy him and imitate him and follow him. You are saying that you trust him to raise you from the dead in the new world to come.

Second, you are telling all the false gods: “I will not serve you. If you want me for a slave, you can forget it, because as far as false gods are concerned, I am dead and buried. But where Jesus Christ is concerned, I am alive and ready to follow.”

Third, you are telling this church that your faith in God is becoming your own. When you were small you believed whatever your parents and teachers and big brother or sister told you, because little kids are just that way. When they told you about Santa Claus, you believed it. When somebody said there was a monster under the bed, you believed it. When your dad did that dumb trick where he pulls a quarter out of your ear, you believed it.

Those days are gone.

Just as you outgrew those childish ways of believing, you have also outgrown letting the adults be the only ones who know God. It is time for you to walk with God yourself. And in baptism you are saying to the whole church: “This faith is mine now; growing up in a Christian family does not make me automatically a follower of Jesus; I now choose it for myself.”

And when we follow Jesus, where do we go? Once we pick up the trail of footprints, where do they lead? I am sorry to tell you that following Jesus is a very unpredictable way of life. You just don’t know where you may end up. We do know, however, that as you follow the footprints, they will often take you to places where the world is in pain. This is not a mistake; Jesus has not gotten lost. Or rather, in a sense he has gotten lost. He goes on purpose to the places where lost people can be found. And he wants you to follow.

Remember the false gods? The ones you are going to rebuke and reject tomorrow? Well, they have gone about doing evil in the world, and left the world in pain. God is moved in compassion to answer and heal the world’s pain and forgive the world’s sin. When he calls people like you to become followers of Jesus, he is assigning you to his rescue mission to the world. Just look at the places Jesus likes to go: He goes where the least favorite people in town can find him and listen to him. He goes to places that ruin his reputation. He goes there because the joy of reconciling one person with God and with neighbor is so great that it causes cosmic parties to happen in the heavens. You will need to follow him there.

To be forgiven of sin and called to follow: they are the same thing. God does not say: “Your sins are forgiven. Have a nice day, and try to stay out of trouble.” He says: “Your sins are forgiven. Get up and walk.” Paul says the same thing in his own way: forgiveness and the call to follow are the same thing. And remember Peter, who had a very bad night during which he told everyone within hearing that he had never met Jesus. For him, the word of forgiveness and the word of calling were the same: Feed my sheep.

So it is with you: Your sins are forgiven. Follow Jesus.

Beloved young Midtownfolk, you are not doing this alone. Though you go into the water one at a time, and faith in Christ is now your very own, you are not alone. For many centuries people have been rejecting the false gods, receiving forgiveness, and following Jesus to the place of the world’s pain. You are not the first nor the last, neither the best nor the worst. You are just the next. It is like joining an enormous parade that stretches from the western horizon and out of sight to the east. You are very small, but you are part of something very big. And though he has millions upon millions of followers, Jesus Christ knows you particularly. With him you have no ID number or barcode. He knows you completely and loves you completely.

And for at least the next few years of your journey he has placed you here, among those who know you, if not completely, then pretty darn well; and who love you, if not perfectly, then about as well as can be expected. This little church, this unlikely gathering of people, is only one minor outpost among the mighty uncounted hosts of churches throughout the world and the centuries. It is small and a little bit shabby and not very important in the grand scheme of things.

But it is yours. We are yours. So we will walk with you. We will try to show you how it’s done, and set a good example, and all of that. One day your turn will come to lead, and you also will know the worry of making a mess of the Christian life in full view of your kids. So please forgive us when we don’t lead well, and learn from us when we do lead well. It is good and right that we are on this journey together. We love walking with you.

And now, we bless you:

+Your fathers bless you in the name of God the Father;

+Your mothers bless their daughters and sons in the name of Christ the Firstborn from the Dead;

+The whole church, filled and guided by the Holy Spirit, blesses you in the name of the Spirit.

Amen.

Ray gets out on Monday and all the jobs have fallen through. There are no living arrangements either. His almost-estranged father will probably not let him back in the house, not even for a couple days until he finds something.

He could, of course, take a tree service job in Springfield. Bad idea. All the old crowd would find him and offer him a smorgasbord of temptations from which he would, in all likelihood, never escape.

All job offers are welcome.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, please see this post and then this post and then this post and finally this post.

They are letting him go on the 27th.  He has received permission from his parole officer to live and work in Cedarville.  Essentially the state of Ohio is entrusting us with the care of this man.
This means that everyone goes into high gear to find housing and a job. Right now there are about two leads in each area.

Hey everybody who is connected with Midtown: we will all need to make some time to spend with Ray. Dinners at different houses (for those of us who have houses), hanging out in the evening, finding positive activities. Stuff like that. So please be ready to act when we call on you, because this is going to take the combined efforts of lots of people.

If you have no idea what I am talking about, please see this post and then this post and then this post and finally this post.

To understand this post fully, read this this post and then this post and finally this post.

If you make it through all that, carry on:

On the fourth try, the authorities say yes. Ray is granted a 6-hour release from the correctional facility, so that he may attend the Red Brick Chruch, see his family, and grill dinner for everyone.

Tim rides with me. We take back roads, partly because it is the most direct way and mostly because it is more scenic.

We arrive and drop off some new clothes at the control center. They cut off all the tags and inspect every pocket and seam for contraband. Then they tell us to wait by the back door.

Ray comes out looking like a million bucks, feeling the newness and sharpness of his clothes, clothes that are not the uniform of the inmate. He hugs us both and jumps into the van like an eager dog.

For most of the trip to Springfield we talk shop: what it is like inside, all the rules he has to follow (among a thousand other things, they must keep a pen in the right corner of the left shirt pocket at all times; sleeves are creased and pants are not; the cuff of the pants must not tuck inside the tongue of the shoe; there is a right and a wrong way to sit, stand, speak, eat, and think).

But Ray is not complaining. In fact he says, over and over, that he believes in the program with all his heart. It is all that stands between him and eventual dying in the street gutter as a crackhead.

There are many obstacles yet to overcome, not least getting him a job so he can be released in July or August. (Dear reader, if you know of work in Cedarville, please talk to me. Ray can do tree service, welding, carpentry, general maintenance, and probably anything else he puts his mind to.)

But today is not for fretting but for celebrating. So far so good. Clean since December 7, and planning to stay that way.

Some photos of the day:

Ray making good things happen on the grill. Tim at right.

Some neighborhood girls chow down on Ray’s hot dogs.

Some neighborhood boys.

Ray and his daughter Trisha.

Serving a piece of cake to Ian.

Acts 14:8-18
Revelation 21:22-22:5
John 14:23-29
Psalm 67

These passages are all about what it is like, and what it shall be like, when God makes his home with us.

If you think of being at home with God as being in heaven, living on the clouds and playing harps and wearing pretend wings, you did not get that idea from the Bible but from other places. Maybe you got it from illustrations in gospel tracts or Sunday School handouts, or maybe from Bugs Bunny cartoons, where the characters (on the rare occasions when the explosions and other accidents are actually fatal) float upward and get angel wings and strum a harp. They also become partly transparent, as if to suggest that we are only half-real when we go to heaven.

It is too long a story to explain where this idea came from–the idea that earth is not our home, that there is some disembodied spiritual existence awaiting us in the clouds of heaven. But the Bible does not teach this. The Bible teaches that God made creation, and earth is our space within creation, and heaven is God’s space within creation, and one day God will bring the two together, and that is when God will make his home with us.

The earth will not be destroyed but rescued and renewed. There will still be hills and forests and streams. There might even be Springfield; I don’t know. And yet the world will be wonderfully fixed from all that is wrong: injustice and pollution and death will be banished. So we cannot quite imagine it, exactly. It will be completely new and yet somehow as familiar as home.

When God comes to live with us and set the world right, that is called the Kingdom of God. We know a few things about the Kingdom of God because the Kingdom of God has a name and a face: the name and face of Jesus Christ, the Son of God and king of the world. We know a few things about what the Kingdom of God will be like because we know what Jesus is like.

Jesus is completely good. He went around healing people, and feeding people, and teaching them what is right. He touched the people whom no one else would touch, even people with frightening contagious skin diseases. He had dinner with people who had terrible reputations, whose bad reputations would rub off on Jesus. He seemed not to care.

He got in the faces of the powerful and rich, the ones who kept everyone else down. He warned them that God was against them, that they could not continue their destructive course.

So we have a pretty good idea of the kind of things that matter to Jesus, the kind of things that are important in the Kingdom of God.

The Kingdom of God is near, but it is not here in fullness yet. It is already and it is not yet. Sometimes you can really tell that you are meeting a bit of the Kingdom, like a little patch of rich lush plants in the middle of a dry parched field. When you find people who are living in the way of Jesus, that is a little sprouting plant of the Kingdom, like a seedling tree that is small and fragile now, but one day it will be 80 feet tall.

You also know it when you find a place where the Kingdom has not reached. Wherever people are enemies, where they escape through addiction or buying too much stuff or filling their lives with meaningless things, the Kingdom is not there yet.

It is possible to hope and expect to see too little of the Kingdom. It is also possible to hope for too much too soon, to hope wrongly. The odd and amusing episode in Acts depicts the silly people of Lystra, concluding that the gods have come today to live among them.

Our job, the job of the church, is to live out a loyalty, an allegiance, to Jesus as king of the world. Our job is to be one of those seedling trees or one of those green patches in the middle of the dry field. Our job is to be a sign that the Kingdom of God is a real thing, and that it is starting to happen here and now, with the hope of more to come.

To live as a servant and friend of Jesus, who is king of the world, means that we cannot live as servants or friends of all the fake kings of the world. And there are many of these, frauds and posers who try to get our loyalty and obedience. All through the Bible the message is clear: their time is short and they will not be king forever.

Money is not king of the world. We all need money to live, but money has a way of climbing out of its proper place as a servant and trying to be king. The best way to keep money from being king is to give some of it away without any hope of being paid back.

Addiction is not king of the world. Addiction is an evil slave master who wants to take us captive and grind the image of God, which we bear, in the dirt. Addiction promises escape from the sorrows we face, but it never delivers on its promise. It provides a momentary escape following by a lifetime of slavery and degradation. And so we must fight against addiction by helping those who are enslaved to get free. Jesus is king of the world and addiction isn’t.

There is another fraud king that would try to deceive you. It is called living for the moment. Now, it is good to enjoy the moment. But there is a destructive way of spending anything and everything, of doing anything and everything, without any thought for tomorrow. If you spend all you have on silly pleasures today, who will pay the bills tomorrow? If you eat that and drink that and smoke that today, where will your health be tomorrow? If you give in to the temptation to be angry and destructive today, who will repair the damage tomorrow? But Jesus can teach us a better way. Jesus is king of the world, and living for the moment isn’t.

We must do our work in the Stanton Street neighborhood saying, with our actions, that Jesus is king of the world. How shall we do this?

We are still trying to learn and understand what Jesus wants to do in this neighborhood, but let me suggest a few things that should be of central importance to us as a church. These are ways that we can live out loyalty to Jesus as king of the world, and show that he intends to make his home with us.

First, I have been surprised to learn that, with some exceptions, this neighborhood is not a neighborhood. I mean, the neighbors often don’t know each other. It is true that the kids who run around the streets and alleys have a pretty good network, but the adults often have not met the people a few houses down. Our work here can include helping people become neighbors and friends.

Next, there are continual physical needs here. People run out of food, or they need an appliance. This is why we spend so much effort on the food pantry: to give away food and ask nothing in return is a sign of the Kingdom. You can tell people that God loves them with a sign, or a commercial, or a pamphlet, or a billboard, and maybe they will believe you, or maybe not. Tell them with spaghetti sauce and you get the job done.

Meeting physical needs must continue at the center of our ministry here because that is the language of the neighborhood. It is the clearest way we have to show that Jesus is king of the world.

And speaking of showing the world a thing or two: Sometimes I encounter Christians who are interested in honing their skills of debate and apologetics. In fact the building where I work is at times filled with hundreds of them, having conferences. The ultimate purpose, I suppose (beyond the obvious: studying the art of rhetoric and hoping to get a good job as a lawyer, politician, or cultural gate-keeper), is to defend and articulate the gospel, demolishing the flimsy and specious arguments of the unbeliever.

True, there is such a thing as a flimsy and specious argument, and perhaps it ought to be demolished. Yet it seems to me that just as the Christian sub-culture has perfected its apologetics show, the audience has left the building. No one is listening. The theater is empty. The culture is too weary to pay attention.

Lesslie Newbigin pointed out that the only apologetic that carries any weight in the current culture is a community of people who actually live out the way of Jesus. Think about it: someone can make a find-sounding argument, and yet we find it unconvincing because, in spite of its apparent logic, we find the person’s whole life, his whole way of being, so dissonant and unattractive that we make no room to believe the argument.

We say to ourselves: If I believe like you, I will be like you. I do not want to be like you, so I will not believe like you.

Quietly enacting the life of Jesus in a neighborhood is slow and difficult. The neighbors are far, far more interested in what we do than in what we say…

Ray has listed some friends and me as his pastors.

He had to fill out a form when he was taken from jail to court-ordered rehab, and on the form there is a space to list legal counsel and clergy. No doubt he listed his court-appointed lawyer as the former, and needing pastoral care so badly that he did not check credentials or bother with minimum standards, listed us as the latter. After the fact, he informed us that we have been hired, or called, or drafted.

Pastoring Ray has involved, so far, this conversation and then this conversation. Thirdly it involved a visit to jail, where he had to be taken back and and processed before going to rehab.

Tonight at the Red Brick Church pieces of paper are laid out on empty pews, perhaps twelve sheets. The people know about Ray and are invited to write to him in rehab. We hope for twelve letters and get twice that many, and some rather colorful crayon-work besides. Monique writes that she was on crack and is clean ten years now. A ten-year-old girl, a professor’s daughter, lets him know that she has seen some hard times too. Some write prayers for Ray, addressed directly to God, and put them on the stack. Ray will read what people say about him to God.

In the basement I wait for conversations to finish so we can go home. Lexi and Pudgy burst in, 90 minutes late for dinner, and demand something to eat. These girls, sisters from the neighborhood, have known us for over a year and are on completely familiar terms. For them, familiar terms include the right to demand cookies at inconvenient times.

Pudgy jumps into my arms and insists on being lifted up, as is her habit. She is seven now. Seven. She looks straight into my eyes. Seven. Be impressed. Lexi, exasperated, confirms that this time the numbers are true. Usually Pudgy lies about her age. Pudgy grabs my face with both her hands and makes a weird noise. It is probably a gesture of affection.

Lexi has grown, and is almost a teen, and is starting to understand gloom. Her exuberance of previous months is muted now. Still, she is not shy and manages to bilk milk and oreos out of Rebecca, even though the kitchen has already been cleaned. So we sit and form an Oreo Club.

The rules of the Oreo Club are:

1. Sit in chairs

2. Eat Oreos

3. Milk dunking optional

Lexi tells me that the best thing that happened to her this week is that she got a Captain Underpants book at a book fair. I tell her that I like Captain Underpants too. She accidentally drools Oreo crumbs on my jacket and then smears them around while trying to wipe them off. I try to clean it up with a tissue, which leaves little tissue fragments all over my sleeve. Lexi is pleased that the mess I made is worse than hers.

Oreo Club meeting adjourned.

At home, late at night, the phone rings. It is a collect call from Ray. He has had a good week in rehab, and has been promoted with new responsibilities and freedoms. He wants, above all, visits and letters, and makes me promise to call his mother and daughter. He wants to finish his program, and work, and help in the food pantry, and counsel young kids away from drugs.

Tomorrow night he will call once again.

At the request of some students I recorded a little speechy thing I did last night. The student honors club, TDK (Tau Delta Kappa? Toned-Down Karate? Trash Da Klan?) asked me to speak on some area in which I have experience faking expertise.

Ergo this podcast is called Ecclesiology-Shaped Music.

It was the first time I have used the recording software so the mic was too sensitive and thus the sound has some annoying distortion every time I made an emphatic point. But I think the words can all be understood.

It’s about 12 MB in mp3 format, mono. Length about one hour and change.

Some time ago I met Ray.

Here is the story of that meeting.

The musicians are practicing for the service at Midtown and someone taps my shoulder and points to the back of the sanctuary. Is that Ray?

I remember a bald head, and this fellow has a concealing knit hat, and a beard I don’t recall, and is blocked by a woman’s hairdo. Maybe Ray, maybe not Ray.

In the basement for dinner, there he is. He remembers me, vaguely at least. We eat together.

Ray will tell you about himself without much coaxing. Crack cocaine has not been a merciful master this past year. He started as a marijuana addict at fourteen, but moved on to crack because it stays in the metabolism for a shorter time span and is easier to hide from the drug tests. He is now thirty-eight. Crack has not been merciful: it began as a friend, elevated itself to master, and now is exalted to goddess. In fact she has been a bitch goddess, and his servitude has claimed everything except his life. She was about to demand that as well when the cops got him.

When we last spoke Ray was proud that his addiction was under control, that he could work his job and keep the crack within appropriate responsible good citizen limits. He did sneak off to the bathroom at work a lot, just to smoke a little rock. People started to notice. Even better, his wife worked third shift, so he could stay up and do rocks all night when he should have been sleeping. By the time she got home in the morning his eyes were unable to shut, staring and twitching. Time to get up and find some money for another hit.

He quit his job to devote his life to full-time addiction, and started stealing. He lost his marriage and then a subsequent girlfriend, and had to sign guardianship of his children over to a friend. At the time it was a great solution: instead of renting a whole house he could get a little squalid corner for sleeping, and use the difference to serve the goddess. She would be so pleased, and perhaps bless him.

In December the cops got him.

He did fifty days in jail, and was sentenced to a residential rehab program. Now, at the table in the basement, he talks about the rehab program like a distant oasis. If only he can get there without dying first. They may not have an open bed for a month.

In rehab they practice a military discipline. No facial hair. Strict accountability for every moment of the day. No freedoms. Ray speaks of it like the promised land: It is all that stands between him and death.

Ray has ironworking skills, and loves to work with his hands. He dreams of working, of having dignity, of making his children proud of him. Out of his pocket he pulls a hand-written letter on notebook paper. The writing is in rounded girly teen script, from his daughter while he was in jail.

Even for a near stranger the letter is hard to read. Why, dad? Why did you do this to us? You ruined mom and me and the boys and everything. I love you and am lost and alone and ashamed of you. I hate my whole life. What is it about the drugs that you love them and hate us? Drugs are the f—– devil, dad.

Ray had to try three times just to read it through, sitting there locked up in a cell.

He hopes to stay clean until they can take him into rehab, so he goes to AA every single night. He does not care that the others are alcoholics and he is a crack addict; it still helps. Anything, anything, to stay off the street where the goddess will find him, seduce him, flog him, enslave him all over again, and demand sacrifice.

So he comes to the Red Brick Church because there is nowhere else safe for him on Saturday between five and eight o’clock.

A college student has created a small worship station off to the side of the sanctuary. Anyone who wants can write down a problem, a fear, a catastrophe, on a post-it note and stick it to a small wooden cross. Ray sits down and takes a pen.

God please take my addiction away. Signed, Ray.

+Lord have mercy. Christ have mercy.+