Jesus Is Coming, Look Busy
Stories
Contents
"Jesus Is Coming, Look Busy" by C. David McKirachan
"A Steely Eyed Missile Woman" by Frank Ramirez
Jesus Is Coming, Look Busy
by C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
It’s almost impossible to preach with a political message, unless you want to be unpopular like the prophets. The average pastor is not called to be prophetic. We are called to keep the church running and comfort the members (not the afflicted). The problem is that we are supposed to preach sermons from the Bible, while avoiding the issues of race, war, money, immigration, the environment, minority rights, and morality that has anything to do with reconciliation, spiritual growth, and life changing encounters with something that is more important than money, nation, or tradition. Good luck. It amazes me that anything meaningful comes from the pulpit when we do so much dancing to stay away from the hot topics.
I had a parishioner who would walk out of the sanctuary if he saw a djembe (African drum) out in front to be used in worship. I asked him about it, in a wonderfully pastoral manner, and he told me that things like that didn’t belong in worship. I said that it was in the bible to praise God with pipes and drums (I think it is). He told me he didn’t care what the Bible said, he knew where that thing came from and he wouldn’t have it. I asked him why things from Africa would bother him. He told me that he knew I was liberal but that didn’t mean he had to be. I agreed with him but cautioned him that racism was probably one of the worst examples of evil in our world and I thought he should consider what Christ would think of that. He asked me who paid my salary, Christ or good Americans.
I’m afraid we kept using the djembe. There was a part of me that wanted to escort him out the door with glee. But I kept thinking “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
The prophetic church tends to leave some people out in the cold. It demands that we ‘seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our god,’ and that’s about it. If we’re not dealing with the poor, homeless, disenfranchised, widow, orphan, etc., etc., we’re not ‘letting justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ If we don’t keep the prophetic priorities central to our worship and our programs then just about everything we do is empty and dead.
I’ve told my congregations that my job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. But that’s not really true. My job is to let the Holy Spirit do that. My job is to equip the saints to do that. My job is to sow the seed of the Good News that God is present in this place and even the gates of Hell cannot shut that up. If we think we can get away with keeping everybody content and happy, we don’t understand the Good News.
But at the same time, Jesus, in the tradition of Isaiah, was the suffering servant, willing to go to the mat for these folks. And if I’m supposed to follow him then I have to realize that some of the ‘foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants...’ are not the ones who come from other countries, but are exiles from a law of mercy. They have never known their own sin and their own salvation. All they’ve known is fear and self-righteousness.
We are all sojourners, depending on the mercy and the grace of God to be anything but savages. When I feel enlightened or righteous, I also feel convicted in my self-righteousness.
I have been proud of the inclusive nature of the churches that were under my care. But at their core had to be a sense of acceptance of all kinds of folks. In worship, no flags got waved, liberal or conservative. There we are all citizens of the kingdom of God. There we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. He never said we had to like each other. He just said we had to love each other. If we want to have churches that are exclusive that do not proclaim the Gospel, we’ll stick to the ‘like.’ Then we can segregate ourselves from blue or red, liberal or conservative. Then we can be busy doing things and acting in ways that help us feel comfortable. And we can deftly dance past passages like this one that demand we pay close attention to the prophetic word. But if we insist on preaching the gospel of God’s salvation, then we’ll work with each other, partners in this strange shambling journey down through history.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. That long arc makes me antsy. But I hold fast to the bends toward justice, even when I get hit in the face by my own or others’ unwillingness to love one another.
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.
We’ve got some work to do. Jesus is coming, look busy.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. Two of his books, I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder, have been published by Westminster John Knox Press. McKirachan was raised in a pastor's home and he is the brother of a pastor, and he has discovered his name indicates that he has druid roots. Storytelling seems to be a congenital disorder. He lives with his 21-year-old son Ben and his dog Sam.
* * *
A Steely Eyed Missile Woman
by Frank Ramirez
Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28
But (the Canaanite woman) came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs (Matthew 15:25-26)."
An outsider like the Canaanite woman was an unlikely hero in the gospels. Margaret Hamilton, born in 1936, was also an unlikely hero who ought to get a good deal more credit for getting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back. But look her name up in the indexes of many books about the early moon landings and you’re unlikely to find her. Only recently has she begun to receive all the recognition she deserves.
Margaret Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, and graduated from Earlham College (located in Richmond, Indiana). At first she taught mathematics and French in a high school to support her husband in college. The family later moved to Boston so she could work on an advanced degree. At one point she took a temporary job at MIT and that led to her helping develop software for computers in order to predict the weather.
Words like stoftware hadn’t yet been invented. No one went to school to learn how to do these things. Hamilton, in one interview, said, “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it.” Margaret’s skill at programing led to her being drawn into designing software to detect enemy aircraft. And that in turn led to work with NASA.
This was during a time when it seemed that spaceflight was a man’s world. Supposedly only men had the “Right Stuff.” The ultimate compliment in those days was to say that so-and-so was a “steely-eyed missile man.” Women had no role models when it came to science. There were no words for what they were doing. Computer scientist wasn’t a thing yet. As more than one person has noted, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Margaret Hamilton and other female science pioneers gave the women who followed them someone to look up to.
Part of being a trailblazer was figuring out how being a working mother worked. That included taking her four-year-old daughter with her to the computer lab.
When she started her career computers were oversized machines that filled rooms, and often broke down. Diagnosis of problems was very difficult.
Under the pressure of the Apollo program computers got smaller, but the code got more elaborate to cope with the difficulty of orbital mechanics and complicated systems invented for doing tasks never before attempted.
There’s a famous photograph of Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT programming team wrote for the Apollo moon program. The stack of binders is taller than her.
Part of the problem was that computers were simply not fast enough to handle all the data that screamed at them. The computers could shut down in response to the overload. One of Hamilton’s greatest breakthroughs was designing software that prioritized the important data. The new software allowed the computers to postpone some tasks while bring emergencies to the attention of the astronauts, situations they needed to evaulate while making decisions whether to land on the moon or not.
All this paid off on July 20, 1969. Apollo 11 was descending towards the Sea of Tranquility on the lunar surface when an emergency alarm went off in Mission Control and in the lunar module, demanding a go/no go decsion. The mission was within seconds of aborting the first lunar landing, but thanks to the software designed by Hamilton and her team, the decision was made to go forward, and the landing was successful.
As Hamilton wrote later, “The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones.... If the computer hadn’t recognized the problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.”
On November 22, 2016, Margaret Hamilton, then 80 and still an unlikely hero, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. As President Obama noted, “Our astronauts did not have much time, but fortunately they had Margaret Hamilton.”
Frank Ramirez is a native of Southern California and is the senior pastor of the Union Center Church of the Brethren near Nappanee, Indiana. Frank has served congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Jennie share three adult children, all married, and three grandchildren. He enjoys writing, reading, exercise, and theater.
*****************************************
StoryShare, August 20, 2017, issue.
Copyright 2017 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
"Jesus Is Coming, Look Busy" by C. David McKirachan
"A Steely Eyed Missile Woman" by Frank Ramirez
Jesus Is Coming, Look Busy
by C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 56:1, 6-8
It’s almost impossible to preach with a political message, unless you want to be unpopular like the prophets. The average pastor is not called to be prophetic. We are called to keep the church running and comfort the members (not the afflicted). The problem is that we are supposed to preach sermons from the Bible, while avoiding the issues of race, war, money, immigration, the environment, minority rights, and morality that has anything to do with reconciliation, spiritual growth, and life changing encounters with something that is more important than money, nation, or tradition. Good luck. It amazes me that anything meaningful comes from the pulpit when we do so much dancing to stay away from the hot topics.
I had a parishioner who would walk out of the sanctuary if he saw a djembe (African drum) out in front to be used in worship. I asked him about it, in a wonderfully pastoral manner, and he told me that things like that didn’t belong in worship. I said that it was in the bible to praise God with pipes and drums (I think it is). He told me he didn’t care what the Bible said, he knew where that thing came from and he wouldn’t have it. I asked him why things from Africa would bother him. He told me that he knew I was liberal but that didn’t mean he had to be. I agreed with him but cautioned him that racism was probably one of the worst examples of evil in our world and I thought he should consider what Christ would think of that. He asked me who paid my salary, Christ or good Americans.
I’m afraid we kept using the djembe. There was a part of me that wanted to escort him out the door with glee. But I kept thinking “Father forgive them for they know not what they do.”
The prophetic church tends to leave some people out in the cold. It demands that we ‘seek justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with our god,’ and that’s about it. If we’re not dealing with the poor, homeless, disenfranchised, widow, orphan, etc., etc., we’re not ‘letting justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.’ If we don’t keep the prophetic priorities central to our worship and our programs then just about everything we do is empty and dead.
I’ve told my congregations that my job is to comfort the afflicted and to afflict the comfortable. But that’s not really true. My job is to let the Holy Spirit do that. My job is to equip the saints to do that. My job is to sow the seed of the Good News that God is present in this place and even the gates of Hell cannot shut that up. If we think we can get away with keeping everybody content and happy, we don’t understand the Good News.
But at the same time, Jesus, in the tradition of Isaiah, was the suffering servant, willing to go to the mat for these folks. And if I’m supposed to follow him then I have to realize that some of the ‘foreigners who join themselves to the Lord, to minister to him, to love the name of the Lord, and to be his servants...’ are not the ones who come from other countries, but are exiles from a law of mercy. They have never known their own sin and their own salvation. All they’ve known is fear and self-righteousness.
We are all sojourners, depending on the mercy and the grace of God to be anything but savages. When I feel enlightened or righteous, I also feel convicted in my self-righteousness.
I have been proud of the inclusive nature of the churches that were under my care. But at their core had to be a sense of acceptance of all kinds of folks. In worship, no flags got waved, liberal or conservative. There we are all citizens of the kingdom of God. There we are all brothers and sisters in Christ. He never said we had to like each other. He just said we had to love each other. If we want to have churches that are exclusive that do not proclaim the Gospel, we’ll stick to the ‘like.’ Then we can segregate ourselves from blue or red, liberal or conservative. Then we can be busy doing things and acting in ways that help us feel comfortable. And we can deftly dance past passages like this one that demand we pay close attention to the prophetic word. But if we insist on preaching the gospel of God’s salvation, then we’ll work with each other, partners in this strange shambling journey down through history.
Martin Luther King Jr. said that the arc of history is long, but it bends toward justice. That long arc makes me antsy. But I hold fast to the bends toward justice, even when I get hit in the face by my own or others’ unwillingness to love one another.
Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.
We’ve got some work to do. Jesus is coming, look busy.
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. Two of his books, I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder, have been published by Westminster John Knox Press. McKirachan was raised in a pastor's home and he is the brother of a pastor, and he has discovered his name indicates that he has druid roots. Storytelling seems to be a congenital disorder. He lives with his 21-year-old son Ben and his dog Sam.
* * *
A Steely Eyed Missile Woman
by Frank Ramirez
Matthew 15:(10-20) 21-28
But (the Canaanite woman) came and knelt before him, saying, "Lord, help me." He answered, "It is not fair to take the children's food and throw it to the dogs (Matthew 15:25-26)."
An outsider like the Canaanite woman was an unlikely hero in the gospels. Margaret Hamilton, born in 1936, was also an unlikely hero who ought to get a good deal more credit for getting Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon and back. But look her name up in the indexes of many books about the early moon landings and you’re unlikely to find her. Only recently has she begun to receive all the recognition she deserves.
Margaret Hamilton was born in Paoli, Indiana, and graduated from Earlham College (located in Richmond, Indiana). At first she taught mathematics and French in a high school to support her husband in college. The family later moved to Boston so she could work on an advanced degree. At one point she took a temporary job at MIT and that led to her helping develop software for computers in order to predict the weather.
Words like stoftware hadn’t yet been invented. No one went to school to learn how to do these things. Hamilton, in one interview, said, “When I first got into it, nobody knew what it was that we were doing. It was like the Wild West. There was no course in it. They didn’t teach it.” Margaret’s skill at programing led to her being drawn into designing software to detect enemy aircraft. And that in turn led to work with NASA.
This was during a time when it seemed that spaceflight was a man’s world. Supposedly only men had the “Right Stuff.” The ultimate compliment in those days was to say that so-and-so was a “steely-eyed missile man.” Women had no role models when it came to science. There were no words for what they were doing. Computer scientist wasn’t a thing yet. As more than one person has noted, “You can’t be what you can’t see.” Margaret Hamilton and other female science pioneers gave the women who followed them someone to look up to.
Part of being a trailblazer was figuring out how being a working mother worked. That included taking her four-year-old daughter with her to the computer lab.
When she started her career computers were oversized machines that filled rooms, and often broke down. Diagnosis of problems was very difficult.
Under the pressure of the Apollo program computers got smaller, but the code got more elaborate to cope with the difficulty of orbital mechanics and complicated systems invented for doing tasks never before attempted.
There’s a famous photograph of Hamilton standing next to the navigation software that she and her MIT programming team wrote for the Apollo moon program. The stack of binders is taller than her.
Part of the problem was that computers were simply not fast enough to handle all the data that screamed at them. The computers could shut down in response to the overload. One of Hamilton’s greatest breakthroughs was designing software that prioritized the important data. The new software allowed the computers to postpone some tasks while bring emergencies to the attention of the astronauts, situations they needed to evaulate while making decisions whether to land on the moon or not.
All this paid off on July 20, 1969. Apollo 11 was descending towards the Sea of Tranquility on the lunar surface when an emergency alarm went off in Mission Control and in the lunar module, demanding a go/no go decsion. The mission was within seconds of aborting the first lunar landing, but thanks to the software designed by Hamilton and her team, the decision was made to go forward, and the landing was successful.
As Hamilton wrote later, “The software’s action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones.... If the computer hadn’t recognized the problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.”
On November 22, 2016, Margaret Hamilton, then 80 and still an unlikely hero, was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom. As President Obama noted, “Our astronauts did not have much time, but fortunately they had Margaret Hamilton.”
Frank Ramirez is a native of Southern California and is the senior pastor of the Union Center Church of the Brethren near Nappanee, Indiana. Frank has served congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. He and his wife Jennie share three adult children, all married, and three grandchildren. He enjoys writing, reading, exercise, and theater.
*****************************************
StoryShare, August 20, 2017, issue.
Copyright 2017 by CSS Publishing Company, Inc., Lima, Ohio.
All rights reserved. Subscribers to the StoryShare service may print and use this material as it was intended in sermons, in worship and classroom settings, in brief devotions, in radio spots, and as newsletter fillers. No additional permission is required from the publisher for such use by subscribers only. Inquiries should be addressed to permissions@csspub.com or to Permissions, CSS Publishing Company, Inc., 5450 N. Dixie Highway, Lima, Ohio 45807.
