Wading Through Quicksand

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
This column has been slow in coming. Grief does that. It slows time down. Sometimes ploughing through the “valley of the shadow” is like wading through quicksand. Movement is difficult and exhausting when pushing against the suction of tears.

My dad died a year ago this June 27th after a long and debilitating illness. He spent his last year mostly bedfast and in perpetual pain and discomfort. In many ways, his death was a blessed release, not only for him, but for those who knew and loved him. As a believer, I know he is in a “better place.” Most days, I am in a “better place.” But sometimes, the unfinished grief sneaks up and taps me on the shoulder.

It happened this week when I saw an ad touting Father’s Day gifts. The pang of remembrance tugged at my soul as I realized I wouldn’t be buying a Father’s Day gift this year. In some ways, that’s a relief. My father was impossible to buy for, a “don’t worry about me” kind of dad. Eventually, I learned to ship him a box of chocolates from a world-class candy company in California. That was a hit. But what pleased him most on gift-giving occasions was a donation in his honor to the Salvation Army.

What I miss most about my dad was his plainspoken, take-no-prisoners honesty and commonsense. He kept me grounded. He kept me from taking myself too seriously. Once years ago, I signed something I had written, “Bob Setzer.” He didn’t like that at all. “You’re not Bob Setzer,” he told me sternly. “I’m Bob Setzer. You’re Bob Setzer, Junior.” Never again did I sign my name in such a way as to usurp his place in the world. These days, I sign Bob Setzer, Jr., proudly. The “Jr.” reminds me of where I came from and the unpaid debts I owe.

One morning this week, I discovered I was out of powdered creamer for my coffee. I looked in the fridge for a substitute, but 2% milk is not much of a creamer. Then my eyes lit upon a pint of whipping cream. “Now that would be an unhealthy, decadent delight,” I thought. Normally, I would push the whipping cream aside but for some reason--that particular morning--I used it to turn my coffee into a enticing milky white concoction. My coffee never tasted better. As the aroma filled my nostrils and the whipped cream bathed my tongue, a memory of my father slipped unbidden into my mind: He always put whipped cream in his coffee.

Yes, most days I am in a “better place,” as is my dad, but grief still demands its due. I don’t run from its tap or recoil at its touch. Mostly, I welcome grief as I might embrace an old friend who reminds me of good times, now past. We share a few laughs, maybe a few tears, and then part to live into God’s future where someday, I will see my dad again. He will nod in recognition, give me a hug, and say, “Welcome home, Junior.”

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E-Etiquette and Jesus-Free Zones

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
Email etiquette. First, don’t believe everything that comes in your email. Just because someone has written it in cyber-script does not mean the report or allegation is true. Sometimes it seems otherwise smart, sophisticated adults suspend their critical faculties when reading--and forwarding--emails. Just for the record, Madeline Murray O’Hair (long deceased) is not circulating a petition to ban all religious programming and President Obama is not the love child of an alien from a planet of Muslims living in a parallel universe.

Second, email forwards. Please don’t send them en masse, at least not to me. Chances are sixteen other people have already sent whatever email ditty is currently making the rounds. Instead, tell me why this particular anecdote or inspirational offering touched you. Tell me why it matters to you and then it will matter to me. But making folks one of a thousand on somebody’s “blanket email” list is not a way to win friends and influence people.

Third, when angry or annoyed with someone, email is a very poor medium for communicating that frustration. For some reason, people feel free to be curt and rude in emails in ways they would never be in person. Further, while electrons reportedly move at the speed of light, email does not provide for instantaneous communication. Email allows for an instantaneous monologue or rant, but real communication requires a face-to-face or at the very least, a phone-to-phone, encounter between two people. Remember, when Paul wrote “don’t let the sun go down on your anger” (Ephesians 4:26), he lived in a world where people still talked with one another instead of firing a snippy email to a co-worker two cubicles over.

I sometimes wonder if email is a net gain or loss for me in my work as a pastor. On the one hand, I spend about an hour a day processing email, a task that didn’t exist when I started in the ministry. On the other hand, email allows for effective collaboration on projects that without it, would require a lot more paper and meetings. But on the whole, I am working to spend less time on email--and other forms of cyber-communication--not more. So it’s nothing personal, but a Facebook “friend” I’m not and as for “Twitter,” don’t even ask!

Feel free to send an email telling me what you like most and least about email. Just keep it short, keep it personal, and keep it nice. Because for Christians, there are no “Jesus free” zones of communication and conduct. Even in using email, the ordinary rules of courtesy, Christian grace, and civility still apply.

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Divine Comedy

by Bob Setzer, Jr
Since I’m not much of a television fan, I have no idea how Conan O’Brien will fare as the new host of The Tonight Show. Personally, I prefer Jay Leno, but if the studio execs are to be trusted--and generally speaking, they’re not!--that says more about my aging tastes than the relative merits of these two comics. But there is one way in which I readily identify with Mr. O’Brien, and that is in his acknowledgment it is far easier to actually do a show than wait for it to start.

In a Parade Magazine interview regarding the start of his new show, Conan O’Brien likened himself to a thoroughbred aching to start the race: “I’m a little bit like a horse—you know, when they load those horses into the gates to run the race. I am being loaded in, and I am kicking and tossing the jockey off and smashing into the sides, and they’re saying, ‘You can run . . . June 1st.’ I’d like to go. The doing of it is how you find it.”

For me, preaching is like that. The preparation is the hard part: the study, the mulling over of the text, the pastoral conversations that shape what I listen for and hear in the Scripture, the search for imaginative material that gives the sermon tenterhooks. But even when the sermon is done, or mostly done (it’s never really done until it’s preached), there is still the tense countdown to the actual preaching of it. Let’s just say I’m not good for much on Saturday nights. Saturday nights are devoted to the preacher’s nervous wondering, “How will this go? How will I do? Any chance the congregation might actually hear a word from God through all this feeble chattering?”

Sunday mornings aren’t much better. Butterflies start doing aerial acrobatics inside my stomach. I work at memorizing the essence of my remarks, while my weary brain rolls its eyes and says, “Enough already!” I watch the hands of the clock slowly but relentlessly ticking toward the high and holy hour.

But most Sundays, when I step into the pulpit to preach, a refreshing wind starts to blow. The Holy Spirit shows up and meets me in the act of preaching. Very shortly, the worrying and fretting is gone and in its place, a calm and joy that comes from God.

It’s a little like two friends agreeing to meet at a favorite old haunt. Maybe they haven’t seen each other for a while, but when they meet, it’s like they never parted. They are at home in each other’s presence.

Jesus promised, “I will not leave you orphaned. I am coming to you” (John 14:18). On the wings of the Spirit, he comes to vanquish the loneliness and fear of life without him. And he does that not just for Preachers in their hour of need, but for all who count on him to help them do what they would not dare attempt without him.

I don’t know how Conan O’Brien does what he does, but that’s how I do what I do.

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Bird Watching

by Bob Setzer, Jr
My home study is on the second floor of our house. The window by my desk looks out into some trees. The one nearest the window is a holly tree that has pushed skyward across the years. Its lush, green leaves are speckled with bright, red berries. The birds love that tree and so do I.

In fact, often as I gaze out that window, a robin hops along the branches of the holly. He walks the slender branches in the upper reaches of the tree as they bend and quiver beneath his delicate dance. After looking over the delectable berries, the robin picks one, snatches it with a quick strike of his beak, and then flutters away, satisfied.

But sometimes, the robin notices me staring at him through the window pane that separates my world from his. He stops his hopping, peers back, and edges toward the window to take a closer look. Often, he cocks his head--first to one side and then the other--as if he’s trying to figure out what a normally earthbound creature human like me is doing up high, where he lives. With rapt attention, we size either other up, if not in mutual understanding, then certainly in mutual respect. Usually, the robin tires of the staring match before I do and gets backs to work, snatches a berry, and is gone. I am left with only the sound of the chirping that tells me others like him yet hide in the green wonderland that is his world.

A lot can be learned by visiting a world one doesn’t normally inhabit: snorkeling in the crystal blue waters of the Caribbean; floating above cotton candy clouds in an airliner; peering into the night sky at teasing, twinkling stars; sitting all alone in a quiet place, listening to the silence. One of the great losses from childhood is losing our sense of exploration and adventure: we quit climbing trees.

But sometimes, God surprises us with a heavenly moment, slab-dap in the midst of our down-to-earth world. Sometimes Jesus’ prayer, “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven,” is answered. Sometimes, even on terra firma, the robins and the angels sing: times when we notice someone we ignored before, listen to someone we dismissed before, and welcome someone we excluded before. In those moments, the divide between heaven and earth is breached, God’s Spirit breathes new life into our feeble attempts to be the church, and we discover the wonder a world where everyone speaks the same language: the language of a radical, reckless Christlike love.

Such moments are the gift of Pentecost. And Sunday is the day the Spirit-wind blows, the dove and the fire take wing, and the church is born anew.

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Life Ends; Love Doesn't

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
In Mitch Albom’s, The Five People You Meet in Heaven, the lead character, Eddie, meets up with his wife, Marguerite, who was snatched away from him much too young. Marguerite seeks to comfort Eddie by saying, “There was a reason to it all.”

Eddie lashes out at her suggestion. As far as he is concerned, there is no justifiable reason for his crushing loss.

Taking Eddie’s hands in her, Marguerite says, “Love lost is still love, Eddie. It takes a different form, that’s all. You can’t see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when those senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurture it. You hold it. You dance with it."

“Life has to end,” she concludes. “Love doesn’t.”

Yes, memory is a precious gift. Memory allows us to hallow and treasure the people now gone, whose loving touch is forever imprinted on our souls. But memory, like a surgeon’s scalpel, cuts even as it heals. The deeper the love, the deeper the ache--the agony, the emptiness--of the loss.

Monday is Memorial Day. It’s a day for remembering those men and women who made the ultimate sacrifice in the service of our country. A time of solemn remembrance and thoughtful gratitude is the minimum due from every American. But for those who lost a son or daughter, husband or wife, or other loved one or treasured friend on the field of battle, this loss is personal and profound. And for all such heartsick mourners, memory is not enough. They need something more. They need hope. They need to know this wrong will be righted and their numbing pain vanquished when they see their loved one again.

On Sunday of this Memorial Day weekend, Christians celebrate Ascension Sunday, the day Jesus returned home in triumph for his own heavenly reunion (Luke 24:50-5). But Jesus’ victory was not his alone. His victory was for all those who trust in him with earnest love and longing. The New Testament proclaims that in his resurrection and ascension, Jesus “took captivity captive” (Eph. 4:8-10), “disarmed the rulers and authorities” (Col. 2:15), and “abolished death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” (2 Tim. 1:10). Now he reigns at the right hand of God where he holds in trust all those who revel in his glory and dance in his grace. And no one--not even Death--can snatch them from his hand! (John 10:28).

Yes, memory is a wonderful thing but if memory is all we’ve got, death wins. We need more than memory; we need hope. We need more than Memorial Day; we need Ascension Sunday. We need more than a “reason” to make the hurt go away; we need a holy, healing presence and the promise of seeing loved ones lost again. We need more than sentiment; we need Jesus.

Faith robs memory of its awful finality and cracks it open like an empty tomb.

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Baptism Wading

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
Somewhere, years ago, I read a sermon by Fred Craddock about the “other side of the pulpit.” The sermon was about all the discarded bulletins, paper cups, lost reading glasses, and other stuff that collects on the shelves inside a pulpit, a sign, Craddock suggested, of the ordinariness of much holy work.

Well, someday I may write a sermon about the other side of the baptistry. There is no more awesome or thrilling moment than standing with a new believer in the welcoming waters of God’s goodness and grace. Indeed, one reason I could never stop being a Baptist is knowing how profoundly moving and transforming a believer’s baptism by immersion can be.

But the mechanics of baptism are another story. There is a large pool that must be filled with lots of water heated just so, by an aging, cantankerous heater in the church basement. There are the minister’s waders, bought at the Bass Pro Shop no less, that lack a certain liturgical class. There are candidates, fearful of water, who resist the downward dip and come up spitting and gasping for air. There are wringing wet robes and towels that must be quickly laundered lest mold ruin the symbolism of a perfectly white gown. Quite apart from arcane theological debates, it’s not hard to understand why tenderly dabbing a wet sign of the cross on a baby’s forehead passes for baptism in so many churches: It’s so much easier!

When I was a boy, a friend taught me how to snag a bass and land it in a boat, but nobody ever taught me how to baptize. It’s one of the many things they don’t teach you in seminary. Perhaps for lack of training, but for no lack of trying, I’ve never learned how to baptize someone without getting wet. Usually it’s just my left arm that gets wet, the arm that supports the candidate while lowering him or her into the water. But sometimes I have to stoop low enough while baptizing someone that water pours into the top of my waders. Then considerably more of me gets wet than just my arm.

I used to resist this unintended dousing and resolved to “do better” next time but with the years, I have come to glory in the getting wet that goes with baptizing another. It is a revisitation of my own baptism, that time long ago and far away when the welcoming love of God embraced and blessed every part of me and washed my sins away. Now when I preach following a baptism, and feel the cool wetness of my left arm or the clinging coldness of a damp trouser leg, I am aglow with gratitude and joy. Because the wetness is a holy reminder that no matter how big and grown up I get, I am still God’s child. And my loving, gracious Heavenly Father yet has a hold on me.

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The Swine Line

by Bob Setzer, Jr.
When I was a child, my mother didn’t teach me to live in mortal fear of airborne diseases that might do me harm. Instead, she taught me to wash my hands after going to the potty and before meals. She taught me to cover my mouth when I sneezed. She taught me to eat right and get a good night’s sleep, then throw myself into the joys and challenges of the day without fear or foreboding: "Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might!" (Ecc. 9:10).

When I was a child, my mother didn’t teach me to be afraid of strangers. She taught me to be cautious about people I didn’t know who approached me with unusual requests and certainly not to get in a car with someone I didn’t know. But she also taught me the world is full of fascinating people, most of whom are a delight: "Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some have entertained angels unawares" (Heb. 13:2).

When I was a child, my mother didn’t teach me to shrink from people who showed up at the door trying to peddle strange religious ideas. Instead, she taught me to greet them with both Christian civility and candor, with an open Bible in hand, ever ready to "give a reason for the hope that is within you" (1 Peter 3:15).

When I was a child, my mother didn’t teach me to fret unduly about financial pressures. Instead, she taught me to put my extra money in a piggy bank, to give ten cents of every dollar to Jesus and the church, and to trust God to "supply all your needs according to his riches in Christ Jesus" (Phil. 4:19).

In short, my mother taught me I was not alone in the world. Yes, there would come a time when she could no longer guide and protect me, but my life was in stronger, more able hands than hers. Yes, there were real perils and threats to be faced, but such challenges could be met in the confidence there was nothing Jesus and I couldn’t handle together: "I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!" (Phil 4:13).

From the recent swine flu hysteria to the next alarmist news buzz of the week, I grow weary of people--even the well-intentioned--trying to scare me into buying their product, join their movement, or share their jaded view of the world. Instead of cowering in fear, my mama taught me to trust and live Jesus’ promise: "In the world you will have trouble, but be of good cheer. I have overcome the world!" (John 13:33).

Children don’t need to grow up scared to death. They need to grow up with the faith to live their dreams. My mama taught me that. And so on this Mother’s Day in the year of our Lord 2009, I "rise up and called her blessed" (Prov. 31:28).

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