The Pillow
Stories
Contents
"The Pillow" by C. David McKirachan
"Big Brother" by C. David McKirachan
"Waiting Patiently For What We Do Not See" by Frank Ramirez
The Pillow
by C. David McKirachan
Genesis 28:10-19a
The ladder in this story gets a lot of attention. It’s quite a ladder. I don’t know about you but anything over thirty feet gives me the willies, unless it’s construction or fire truck equipment, made to reach out beyond the limits of the aluminum jobs that I’ve used to paint peaks. It had to be more than the everyday extension ladder to reach that far and to carry the weight of the angels. There’s a topic for debate, how much do angels weigh?
So, you see the ladder and the angels are all stuff of the spirit. But the pillow? Now that’s something solid. Jacob had to rest his head on something. The rock was the right height and it was handy.
I was guiding a canoe trip once and we had a rain storm. A doozy, wind, rain, and twelve high schoolers with their tents blown over, their fires drowned, their sleeping bags soaked through. I finally lay down to rest. I couldn’t put my head down, water and mud in the mouth and ears tends to be uncomfortable. So, I put my head on a rock. Not just any bolder, it had to fit the necessary specifications. It couldn’t be too high, or too flat. It had to keep my head out of the water and mud, but it couldn’t lift me too high. Cricks in the neck are as bad as mud in the ear.
My moment of rest turned into a few hours of sleep.
Jacob was in a storm of sorts. His past was gone, cut off by the deal he’d made to rip off his brother and the deception he’d foisted on his father, taking advantage of both of them for his own gain. But rather than face their anger and own his deeds, he’d run, cutting his losses, leaving behind him hurt and separation. He couldn’t go back.
Ahead was a person he didn’t know, a distant relative. He had no idea what his reception would be like. He brought nothing but a trust in that tenuous connection. Trust? He’d betrayed his family’s trust repeatedly. Who was he kidding?
So here he was in the wilderness, alone. He lay down exhausted, confused, afraid. He propped his head up on a pillow he’d found, a rock. At least he could depend on that to keep his head out of the dust.
I think sometimes we work hard at offering people construction equipment to use on the projects of their lives or fire equipment to save themselves when they are used to the do-it-yourself versions. We offer them angels that they’ve never seen and know nothing about. We may as well be offering them formulae for the mathematics involved in moving themselves out of the storm they’re in. I think a rock would make more sense.
The old rites for funerals and for healing never made sense to me, until a young wife and mother died in my congregation. It occurred to me that these survivors couldn’t listen to words to be comforted. They needed to be touched. They needed to know that there was something in this world that was dependable. We did a lot of passing of the peace, we anointed for healing, and everybody came forward, touched the casket, and threw dirt into the grave. The tactile motions and rites didn’t heal them. They were in the midst of a storm of grief that was battering their understanding of how the world worked. But they needed something to keep their heads out of the mud long enough to breath.
They remembered all the touching, the down to earth connections with each other, and it helped them reach out through and eventually beyond their grief.
I like rocks. I have some big ones in my back yard. Some of them are standing stones. People are curious about them, but I think they’re afraid to ask what they’re about. Druids scare people. But it’s really simple. Rocks help me remember people and times in my life. And they remind me that through all the changes that may come, through all the storms that may pound on us, we can rely on the presence of our Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
* * *
Big Brother
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24
Having someone who knows what you’re going to do before you do it can be a cage of anxiety and fear. It locks you away from free will. It is the horror that George Orwell spoke of in his novel 1984. The people were constantly reminded, “Big Brother is watching you.” There is no comfort or security in this. There is only anxiety and entrapment. It is a technique to crush hope and create an environment without any sense of freedom. Is this the condition the Psalmist seeks, a relationship with an all-powerful stalker, bent on crushing hope and denying freedom?
The debate about privacy in our culture is a very real and present issue. Our technology has made it possible for so much of our lives to be known by others. Where limits should be drawn becomes an issue that intrudes into how and where we spend, communicate, read, watch, or make choices. Big Brother is watching us. Perhaps we as the church need to be ready to offer an alternative to Orwell or to 21st century cyber stalking, if we are to be an environment of freedom and hope.
I had a big brother and he knew me top to bottom. He often reminded me that he had changed my diapers, so I shouldn’t get uppity. His instincts about what was going on in my head bordered on the clairvoyant, even at long distances. He used Orwell’s phrase to remind me that he was paying attention to me. So, watch it, kid.
But this didn’t crush my hope or put me in a cage without freedom. I’ve often wondered why. Looking at that relationship I think I can get a better handle on the Psalmist’s prayer.
I trusted my brother to be a defender of my freedom rather than wanting to reduce it. He would tell me a story about his own life, his own experience that strangely was very appropriate to something with which I was struggling. By so doing I realized that I wasn’t alone in my fear or confusion. This guy who worked with Martin Luther King was a real human being. He suffered too. It changed him from a monolithic law giver and advice giver into a person. And if he could make it through that stuff, I could too. That gave me authority, a big deal for a kid. But it’s a big deal for adults too. It’s exactly the opposite of crushing freedom. It creates an attitude of responsibility for our own selves.
He listened to me, one of the greatest gifts we can be given. I think a lot of people have no one who has ever listened to them. He didn’t try to solve my problems, or even give me nice neat solutions, but he would spend the time to listen to me.
A lot of people bring stuff to ministers. A lot of it is stinking ugly stuff. Some of it is nonsense. Some of it is full of anger or heart break. Our immediate reaction is to give them solutions, strategies, ways out of or through the jungle or desert through which they’re trudging. It’s so simple. You’re being ridiculous. Leave the bum. Hang in there, it’s a phase. But they don’t need a map, they need a friend. A friend is someone who listens. My brother listened to me.
My brother laughed, and he laughed with me. I remember moments of darkness filled with beasts who I was sure were going to have me for lunch and he would offer me a light in that darkness by helping me laugh. It didn’t make the situation less grave, the beasts were still there, knives and forks and teeth ready and willing to chew, but he helped me light a lamp of hope in the midst of my darkness. Once you can giggle, hope blooms.
This psalm is full of beautiful poetry. It seems strange to be writing beautifully in desperation. My brother loved the blues. His favorite hymn was Precious Lord. He’d sing that and expect me to put on a harmony. It’s not a giggle but it’s hard to be down when you’re singing. If we can’t laugh, we can sing.
Yeah, he was quite a guy. And he taught me what the word ‘brother’ really means. Every time I say or hear the phrase, “Brothers and Sisters in Christ...” he is there, helping me remember what that really means. I don’t mind Christ knowing me, reading me, watching me, he’s my brother. So now it’s my turn.
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.
* * *
Waiting Patiently For What We Do Not See
by Frank Ramirez
Romans 8:12-25
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:25)
Who knows how the fire started? Was it an accident? Was it the result of a raid by enemy forces? What we do know is that around fifteen hundred years ago the village of En-Gedi, located near the western shore of the Dead Sea, was engulfed in flame and destroyed, and with it the town’s synagogue, and with the synagogue the priceless parchment scrolls of scripture preserved lovingly over the centuries.
In 1970 En-Gedi was excavated. Among the discoveries was the Holy Ark of the synagogue, and inside were some small chunks of charcoal -- the charred remains of those parchment scrolls. They were all extremely fragile -- just touching them could cause them to disintegrate. Obviously they couldn’t be unrolled, they couldn’t be read, nor could they be simply thrown away. In the end they were lovingly stored away.
En-Gedi of course, wasn’t the only place in the ancient world destroyed by fire. One of the most famous natural disasters of the ancient world was the destruction of the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The library at Herculaneum was discovered in 1752. Much of that library was burnt, although some ancient scrolls were preserved well enough to be carefully unrolled and read. Many more, however, were in the same shape as the En-Gedi scroll, and for centuries there was no way to read them.
For the last thirteen years, Dr. W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist who works at the University of Kentucky, has been working on a way to “virtually” unroll and read the Herculaneum scrolls. CT-scans could be used to find the splotches of ink inside these charred relics, but nothing legible could be discerned. Seales invented software, which he called Volume Cartography, that could virtually unwind these little lumps of charcoal without actually touching them.
The first stage was to scan and read a series of tiny tiny triangles to recreate the pages of the document. The second stage is called texturing, which measures the intensity of each surface, allowing the letters to be clearly read. The final stage is called flattening -- keep in mind that the burnt scrolls are not actually flattened! -- which results in an amazing image a document once thought lost forever. Some early work on the Herculaneum scrolls showed promising results, but the first real success came when Seales was contacted by Dr. Pnina Shor, who headed the Dead Sea Scrolls project, about possiblity working on one of the En-Gedi scrolls.
Seales agreed to try, and was sent a scan of a scroll by Shor. The scan was made by a machine normally used on biological tissue. Seales received the scan, and was surprised at how well the process worked as he digitally unwrapped the scroll. The clarity of the Biblical scroll was startling.
It was, according to Seales, “the first severely damaged, ink-based scroll to be unrolled and identified noninvasively. What the scientists saw were several lines of the first two chapters of Leviticus. And although the synagogue itself was destroyed fifteen hundred years ago, study of the style of writing made it clear that this particular scroll may have gone back as much as five hundred years earlier, making it one of the oldest texts of Leviticus to survive. Parchment scrolls, after all, are made of animal skins, and can last for centuries.
The team of biblical scholars who studied the text were also surprised to find that the ancient version of Leviticus was the same text as the accepted Hebrew text in use today. It suggested that over the span of twenty centuries copyists had faithfully preserved the text of Leviticus at least that far back.
It has taken patience to wait decades to begin to find out what was in the En-Gedi scrolls, and centuries to begin to unravel the Herculaneum scrolls, but there is hope that what we do not see we will see!
We’ll see!
Want to know more?
“The Invisible Library,” by John Seabrook, The New Yorker, November 16, 2015,
“Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable At Last,” by Victoria Jaggard, The Smithsonian, January 20, 2015.
“An Early Leviticus Scroll from En-Gedi: Preliminary Publication,” by M. Segal, E. Tov, W.B. Seales, C.S. Parker, P. Shor, V. Porat, Textus 26, 2016.
“From Damage To Discovery via Virtual Unwrapping: Reading the Scroll from En-Gedi,” William Brent Seales, Clifford Seth Parker, Michael Segal, Emmanuel Tov, Pnina Shor, Yosef Porath, Science Advances, 21 September 2016.
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, July 23, 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.
"The Pillow" by C. David McKirachan
"Big Brother" by C. David McKirachan
"Waiting Patiently For What We Do Not See" by Frank Ramirez
The Pillow
by C. David McKirachan
Genesis 28:10-19a
The ladder in this story gets a lot of attention. It’s quite a ladder. I don’t know about you but anything over thirty feet gives me the willies, unless it’s construction or fire truck equipment, made to reach out beyond the limits of the aluminum jobs that I’ve used to paint peaks. It had to be more than the everyday extension ladder to reach that far and to carry the weight of the angels. There’s a topic for debate, how much do angels weigh?
So, you see the ladder and the angels are all stuff of the spirit. But the pillow? Now that’s something solid. Jacob had to rest his head on something. The rock was the right height and it was handy.
I was guiding a canoe trip once and we had a rain storm. A doozy, wind, rain, and twelve high schoolers with their tents blown over, their fires drowned, their sleeping bags soaked through. I finally lay down to rest. I couldn’t put my head down, water and mud in the mouth and ears tends to be uncomfortable. So, I put my head on a rock. Not just any bolder, it had to fit the necessary specifications. It couldn’t be too high, or too flat. It had to keep my head out of the water and mud, but it couldn’t lift me too high. Cricks in the neck are as bad as mud in the ear.
My moment of rest turned into a few hours of sleep.
Jacob was in a storm of sorts. His past was gone, cut off by the deal he’d made to rip off his brother and the deception he’d foisted on his father, taking advantage of both of them for his own gain. But rather than face their anger and own his deeds, he’d run, cutting his losses, leaving behind him hurt and separation. He couldn’t go back.
Ahead was a person he didn’t know, a distant relative. He had no idea what his reception would be like. He brought nothing but a trust in that tenuous connection. Trust? He’d betrayed his family’s trust repeatedly. Who was he kidding?
So here he was in the wilderness, alone. He lay down exhausted, confused, afraid. He propped his head up on a pillow he’d found, a rock. At least he could depend on that to keep his head out of the dust.
I think sometimes we work hard at offering people construction equipment to use on the projects of their lives or fire equipment to save themselves when they are used to the do-it-yourself versions. We offer them angels that they’ve never seen and know nothing about. We may as well be offering them formulae for the mathematics involved in moving themselves out of the storm they’re in. I think a rock would make more sense.
The old rites for funerals and for healing never made sense to me, until a young wife and mother died in my congregation. It occurred to me that these survivors couldn’t listen to words to be comforted. They needed to be touched. They needed to know that there was something in this world that was dependable. We did a lot of passing of the peace, we anointed for healing, and everybody came forward, touched the casket, and threw dirt into the grave. The tactile motions and rites didn’t heal them. They were in the midst of a storm of grief that was battering their understanding of how the world worked. But they needed something to keep their heads out of the mud long enough to breath.
They remembered all the touching, the down to earth connections with each other, and it helped them reach out through and eventually beyond their grief.
I like rocks. I have some big ones in my back yard. Some of them are standing stones. People are curious about them, but I think they’re afraid to ask what they’re about. Druids scare people. But it’s really simple. Rocks help me remember people and times in my life. And they remind me that through all the changes that may come, through all the storms that may pound on us, we can rely on the presence of our Lord, our rock and our redeemer.
* * *
Big Brother
by C. David McKirachan
Psalm 139:1-12, 23-24
Having someone who knows what you’re going to do before you do it can be a cage of anxiety and fear. It locks you away from free will. It is the horror that George Orwell spoke of in his novel 1984. The people were constantly reminded, “Big Brother is watching you.” There is no comfort or security in this. There is only anxiety and entrapment. It is a technique to crush hope and create an environment without any sense of freedom. Is this the condition the Psalmist seeks, a relationship with an all-powerful stalker, bent on crushing hope and denying freedom?
The debate about privacy in our culture is a very real and present issue. Our technology has made it possible for so much of our lives to be known by others. Where limits should be drawn becomes an issue that intrudes into how and where we spend, communicate, read, watch, or make choices. Big Brother is watching us. Perhaps we as the church need to be ready to offer an alternative to Orwell or to 21st century cyber stalking, if we are to be an environment of freedom and hope.
I had a big brother and he knew me top to bottom. He often reminded me that he had changed my diapers, so I shouldn’t get uppity. His instincts about what was going on in my head bordered on the clairvoyant, even at long distances. He used Orwell’s phrase to remind me that he was paying attention to me. So, watch it, kid.
But this didn’t crush my hope or put me in a cage without freedom. I’ve often wondered why. Looking at that relationship I think I can get a better handle on the Psalmist’s prayer.
I trusted my brother to be a defender of my freedom rather than wanting to reduce it. He would tell me a story about his own life, his own experience that strangely was very appropriate to something with which I was struggling. By so doing I realized that I wasn’t alone in my fear or confusion. This guy who worked with Martin Luther King was a real human being. He suffered too. It changed him from a monolithic law giver and advice giver into a person. And if he could make it through that stuff, I could too. That gave me authority, a big deal for a kid. But it’s a big deal for adults too. It’s exactly the opposite of crushing freedom. It creates an attitude of responsibility for our own selves.
He listened to me, one of the greatest gifts we can be given. I think a lot of people have no one who has ever listened to them. He didn’t try to solve my problems, or even give me nice neat solutions, but he would spend the time to listen to me.
A lot of people bring stuff to ministers. A lot of it is stinking ugly stuff. Some of it is nonsense. Some of it is full of anger or heart break. Our immediate reaction is to give them solutions, strategies, ways out of or through the jungle or desert through which they’re trudging. It’s so simple. You’re being ridiculous. Leave the bum. Hang in there, it’s a phase. But they don’t need a map, they need a friend. A friend is someone who listens. My brother listened to me.
My brother laughed, and he laughed with me. I remember moments of darkness filled with beasts who I was sure were going to have me for lunch and he would offer me a light in that darkness by helping me laugh. It didn’t make the situation less grave, the beasts were still there, knives and forks and teeth ready and willing to chew, but he helped me light a lamp of hope in the midst of my darkness. Once you can giggle, hope blooms.
This psalm is full of beautiful poetry. It seems strange to be writing beautifully in desperation. My brother loved the blues. His favorite hymn was Precious Lord. He’d sing that and expect me to put on a harmony. It’s not a giggle but it’s hard to be down when you’re singing. If we can’t laugh, we can sing.
Yeah, he was quite a guy. And he taught me what the word ‘brother’ really means. Every time I say or hear the phrase, “Brothers and Sisters in Christ...” he is there, helping me remember what that really means. I don’t mind Christ knowing me, reading me, watching me, he’s my brother. So now it’s my turn.
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.
* * *
Waiting Patiently For What We Do Not See
by Frank Ramirez
Romans 8:12-25
But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience. (Romans 8:25)
Who knows how the fire started? Was it an accident? Was it the result of a raid by enemy forces? What we do know is that around fifteen hundred years ago the village of En-Gedi, located near the western shore of the Dead Sea, was engulfed in flame and destroyed, and with it the town’s synagogue, and with the synagogue the priceless parchment scrolls of scripture preserved lovingly over the centuries.
In 1970 En-Gedi was excavated. Among the discoveries was the Holy Ark of the synagogue, and inside were some small chunks of charcoal -- the charred remains of those parchment scrolls. They were all extremely fragile -- just touching them could cause them to disintegrate. Obviously they couldn’t be unrolled, they couldn’t be read, nor could they be simply thrown away. In the end they were lovingly stored away.
En-Gedi of course, wasn’t the only place in the ancient world destroyed by fire. One of the most famous natural disasters of the ancient world was the destruction of the towns of Herculaneum and Pompeii after the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD.
The library at Herculaneum was discovered in 1752. Much of that library was burnt, although some ancient scrolls were preserved well enough to be carefully unrolled and read. Many more, however, were in the same shape as the En-Gedi scroll, and for centuries there was no way to read them.
For the last thirteen years, Dr. W. Brent Seales, a computer scientist who works at the University of Kentucky, has been working on a way to “virtually” unroll and read the Herculaneum scrolls. CT-scans could be used to find the splotches of ink inside these charred relics, but nothing legible could be discerned. Seales invented software, which he called Volume Cartography, that could virtually unwind these little lumps of charcoal without actually touching them.
The first stage was to scan and read a series of tiny tiny triangles to recreate the pages of the document. The second stage is called texturing, which measures the intensity of each surface, allowing the letters to be clearly read. The final stage is called flattening -- keep in mind that the burnt scrolls are not actually flattened! -- which results in an amazing image a document once thought lost forever. Some early work on the Herculaneum scrolls showed promising results, but the first real success came when Seales was contacted by Dr. Pnina Shor, who headed the Dead Sea Scrolls project, about possiblity working on one of the En-Gedi scrolls.
Seales agreed to try, and was sent a scan of a scroll by Shor. The scan was made by a machine normally used on biological tissue. Seales received the scan, and was surprised at how well the process worked as he digitally unwrapped the scroll. The clarity of the Biblical scroll was startling.
It was, according to Seales, “the first severely damaged, ink-based scroll to be unrolled and identified noninvasively. What the scientists saw were several lines of the first two chapters of Leviticus. And although the synagogue itself was destroyed fifteen hundred years ago, study of the style of writing made it clear that this particular scroll may have gone back as much as five hundred years earlier, making it one of the oldest texts of Leviticus to survive. Parchment scrolls, after all, are made of animal skins, and can last for centuries.
The team of biblical scholars who studied the text were also surprised to find that the ancient version of Leviticus was the same text as the accepted Hebrew text in use today. It suggested that over the span of twenty centuries copyists had faithfully preserved the text of Leviticus at least that far back.
It has taken patience to wait decades to begin to find out what was in the En-Gedi scrolls, and centuries to begin to unravel the Herculaneum scrolls, but there is hope that what we do not see we will see!
We’ll see!
Want to know more?
“The Invisible Library,” by John Seabrook, The New Yorker, November 16, 2015,
“Ancient Scrolls Blackened by Vesuvius Are Readable At Last,” by Victoria Jaggard, The Smithsonian, January 20, 2015.
“An Early Leviticus Scroll from En-Gedi: Preliminary Publication,” by M. Segal, E. Tov, W.B. Seales, C.S. Parker, P. Shor, V. Porat, Textus 26, 2016.
“From Damage To Discovery via Virtual Unwrapping: Reading the Scroll from En-Gedi,” William Brent Seales, Clifford Seth Parker, Michael Segal, Emmanuel Tov, Pnina Shor, Yosef Porath, Science Advances, 21 September 2016.
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, July 23, 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.
