Truckin'
Stories
Object:
Contents
"Truckin'" by C. David McKirachan
"Heretic or Saint?" by Frank Ramirez
* * * * * * * * *
Truckin'
C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 35:1-10
I had just arrived in Berkeley to start graduate school. I had finally made it to the left coast. It was 1970 and I was positive that the Age of Aquarius was just around the corner. But in the meantime there was a lot of work to get done. My course load was stupid. I was in a program to earn two master's degrees in three years, one of which involved a forty-hour a week internship. This was before the day of search engines and laptops. I was going to be living at the library and in front of my typewriter. I was pooped after a week. My food budget was somewhere between five and ten dollars a week. I didn't need to identify with the poor. I was the poor. I was hungry.
After a very short time I began to feel like a fool. Questions like, "What were you thinking?" and judgments like "You must have been out of your mind," were waking me up during the dark hours. It was a rough coming out. I felt like I was getting lost.
Now and then I'd spend a few dollars on entertainment. Someone more chronologically gifted had recommended this. I was listening to the local FM rock station one Saturday afternoon when I heard an announcement that the Grateful Dead would be playing at a movie theatre in Haight-Ashbury later that day and the next. Tickets were five dollars or two for four, no kidding, first come first serve. I collared a friend and we went and bought four tickets for eight dollars. We gave two away. Hey, who needed food? Not this fool.
The tickets were carnival tickets. It was a condemned building slated for demolition. It stank of poverty and dead dreams. We went right in. Threadbare would have been a diplomatic gloss for this joint. The place was filled with the typical crowd of "Dead Heads." Lots of long hair, beards, tie-dye, and a smattering of Hell's Angels. I sat down, making the seat moan. I breathed, trying to ignore the mildew smell. I wondered what my mother would think of all of this. I wondered again what I was doing here at all.
Then I heard a dog bark. Up on stage a large mutt with a bandana around his neck was playing with a kid, about four years old. A drum stick flew across the stage and the dog chased it. The kid giggled. His little brother toddled by, in a diaper and not much else, carrying another drum stick. He scaled the drum platform and started beating on the base that was part of one of the two sets on stage.
And I realized I was safe. Yeah, I know, I was a fool. I was in the middle of more federal violations than a block at San Quentin, and when the band began to play the roof on this dump was likely to come down during a chorus of Casey Jones. But I felt safe. There in the middle of that zoo with all its smells and wandering souls and even danger, there was something that allowed simple human life to be affirmed.
When I got home that night I was hoarse from singing and slightly sore from dancing for a few hours straight. I took a shower to get some of the smell off me and threw my clothes in the hamper. Then I had a bowl of brown rice (how else could I live on that food budget?) and outlined a paper on German Idealism and its impact on the social systems of Europe.
I slept that night without any questions or judgments. And I got up the next morning for my 8 AM Early Israel class, whistling.
I remembered why I was there. I was there to become equipped to "Prepare ye the way of the Lord." To build a highway through the wasteland of a broken world and help people, even fools to find something that was invaluable, "… a home where no one is a stranger."
I wonder how the stable smelled where Mary bore to us a Savior?
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Heretic or Saint?
Frank Ramirez
Matthew 11:2-11
This is the one about whom it is written, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you."
-- Matthew 11:10
Take a good look at any history of any denomination. The last thing most churches lay claim to is any sort of originality. They would not believe they were founding a new church but working to restore the original church. But how do you go about such a thing? You need a guide, a messenger, one who, like John the Baptist, goes before to point the way.
One of the best, and most forgotten, reformers who pointed the way, a true forerunner, was Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), who was born in Annaberg in Saxony. He is described in some church histories as a Radical Pietist, but the meaning of the word Pietist was simply one who believed in reading the Bible and following what it said. He was called a radical because he actually did this. The pietists made the institutional churches very uncomfortable because they suggested the institutions weren't all that important. What mattered was whether one loved God and followed God's word.
Arnold studied at the University at Wittenberg and found himself in the city of Quedlinburg, a center of Radical Pietism. His book The First Love, That Is, The True Portrayal of the First Christians (1696) described the sort of simple fellowship that paid little attention to architecture, formality in worship, or structure among the clergy, the sort of church that would be very familiar to most believers today. The book influenced Christians of many different backgrounds, both inside and outside the established churches. Mystics, especially, found it alluring, but were profoundly disappointed with Arnold when he ignored their countercultural choice of celibacy when he married, and then took a job as a pastor with a court church. He insisted it was important to put one's faith into practice and pasturing a church kept him grounded in the real life problems of believers.
His Impartial History of the Church and Heretics (1699-1700) made the daring suggestion that those labeled heretics in previous centuries were, if one took the time to read what they had written instead of the libels written about them, actually those most faithful to Christ. Arnold startled many by suggesting that how one practiced the faith was a truer test of the church than what one said. He went on to say that the institutional church felt threatened by true believers and would respond by actively persecuting those who truly followed the words of Jesus. Though he is now largely forgotten, his work was tremendously influential on revivalists in many different countries.
Gottfried Arnold looked for truth wherever he could find it and promoted it regardless of the religious background of other writers. He lived in a tremendously sectarian age, when most people thought they belonged to the only true church, but he translated and edited the writings of everyone he thought important to read, including the early church fathers, along with both protestant and catholic theologians, Christians from any and all backgrounds.
Like John the Baptist who pointed the way, Gottfried Arnold believed most of all of pointing to Jesus as the way of life, and who also provided the way of life for us to follow. Unlike many church leaders of his day, he insisted that the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount were not just for a chosen few but for everyone, and that everyone, from the most to the least powerful, should turn the other cheek.
Frank Ramirez has served as a pastor for nearly 30 years in Church of the Brethren congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. A graduate of LaVerne College and Bethany Theological Seminary, Ramirez is the author of numerous books, articles, and short stories. His CSS titles include Partners in Healing, He Took a Towel, The Bee Attitudes, and three volumes of Lectionary Worship Aids.
*****************************************
StoryShare, December 12, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 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.
"Truckin'" by C. David McKirachan
"Heretic or Saint?" by Frank Ramirez
* * * * * * * * *
Truckin'
C. David McKirachan
Isaiah 35:1-10
I had just arrived in Berkeley to start graduate school. I had finally made it to the left coast. It was 1970 and I was positive that the Age of Aquarius was just around the corner. But in the meantime there was a lot of work to get done. My course load was stupid. I was in a program to earn two master's degrees in three years, one of which involved a forty-hour a week internship. This was before the day of search engines and laptops. I was going to be living at the library and in front of my typewriter. I was pooped after a week. My food budget was somewhere between five and ten dollars a week. I didn't need to identify with the poor. I was the poor. I was hungry.
After a very short time I began to feel like a fool. Questions like, "What were you thinking?" and judgments like "You must have been out of your mind," were waking me up during the dark hours. It was a rough coming out. I felt like I was getting lost.
Now and then I'd spend a few dollars on entertainment. Someone more chronologically gifted had recommended this. I was listening to the local FM rock station one Saturday afternoon when I heard an announcement that the Grateful Dead would be playing at a movie theatre in Haight-Ashbury later that day and the next. Tickets were five dollars or two for four, no kidding, first come first serve. I collared a friend and we went and bought four tickets for eight dollars. We gave two away. Hey, who needed food? Not this fool.
The tickets were carnival tickets. It was a condemned building slated for demolition. It stank of poverty and dead dreams. We went right in. Threadbare would have been a diplomatic gloss for this joint. The place was filled with the typical crowd of "Dead Heads." Lots of long hair, beards, tie-dye, and a smattering of Hell's Angels. I sat down, making the seat moan. I breathed, trying to ignore the mildew smell. I wondered what my mother would think of all of this. I wondered again what I was doing here at all.
Then I heard a dog bark. Up on stage a large mutt with a bandana around his neck was playing with a kid, about four years old. A drum stick flew across the stage and the dog chased it. The kid giggled. His little brother toddled by, in a diaper and not much else, carrying another drum stick. He scaled the drum platform and started beating on the base that was part of one of the two sets on stage.
And I realized I was safe. Yeah, I know, I was a fool. I was in the middle of more federal violations than a block at San Quentin, and when the band began to play the roof on this dump was likely to come down during a chorus of Casey Jones. But I felt safe. There in the middle of that zoo with all its smells and wandering souls and even danger, there was something that allowed simple human life to be affirmed.
When I got home that night I was hoarse from singing and slightly sore from dancing for a few hours straight. I took a shower to get some of the smell off me and threw my clothes in the hamper. Then I had a bowl of brown rice (how else could I live on that food budget?) and outlined a paper on German Idealism and its impact on the social systems of Europe.
I slept that night without any questions or judgments. And I got up the next morning for my 8 AM Early Israel class, whistling.
I remembered why I was there. I was there to become equipped to "Prepare ye the way of the Lord." To build a highway through the wasteland of a broken world and help people, even fools to find something that was invaluable, "… a home where no one is a stranger."
I wonder how the stable smelled where Mary bore to us a Savior?
C. David McKirachan is pastor of the Presbyterian Church at Shrewsbury in central New Jersey. He also teaches at Monmouth University. McKirachan is the author of I Happened Upon a Miracle and A Year of Wonder (Westminster John Knox).
Heretic or Saint?
Frank Ramirez
Matthew 11:2-11
This is the one about whom it is written, "See, I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way before you."
-- Matthew 11:10
Take a good look at any history of any denomination. The last thing most churches lay claim to is any sort of originality. They would not believe they were founding a new church but working to restore the original church. But how do you go about such a thing? You need a guide, a messenger, one who, like John the Baptist, goes before to point the way.
One of the best, and most forgotten, reformers who pointed the way, a true forerunner, was Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), who was born in Annaberg in Saxony. He is described in some church histories as a Radical Pietist, but the meaning of the word Pietist was simply one who believed in reading the Bible and following what it said. He was called a radical because he actually did this. The pietists made the institutional churches very uncomfortable because they suggested the institutions weren't all that important. What mattered was whether one loved God and followed God's word.
Arnold studied at the University at Wittenberg and found himself in the city of Quedlinburg, a center of Radical Pietism. His book The First Love, That Is, The True Portrayal of the First Christians (1696) described the sort of simple fellowship that paid little attention to architecture, formality in worship, or structure among the clergy, the sort of church that would be very familiar to most believers today. The book influenced Christians of many different backgrounds, both inside and outside the established churches. Mystics, especially, found it alluring, but were profoundly disappointed with Arnold when he ignored their countercultural choice of celibacy when he married, and then took a job as a pastor with a court church. He insisted it was important to put one's faith into practice and pasturing a church kept him grounded in the real life problems of believers.
His Impartial History of the Church and Heretics (1699-1700) made the daring suggestion that those labeled heretics in previous centuries were, if one took the time to read what they had written instead of the libels written about them, actually those most faithful to Christ. Arnold startled many by suggesting that how one practiced the faith was a truer test of the church than what one said. He went on to say that the institutional church felt threatened by true believers and would respond by actively persecuting those who truly followed the words of Jesus. Though he is now largely forgotten, his work was tremendously influential on revivalists in many different countries.
Gottfried Arnold looked for truth wherever he could find it and promoted it regardless of the religious background of other writers. He lived in a tremendously sectarian age, when most people thought they belonged to the only true church, but he translated and edited the writings of everyone he thought important to read, including the early church fathers, along with both protestant and catholic theologians, Christians from any and all backgrounds.
Like John the Baptist who pointed the way, Gottfried Arnold believed most of all of pointing to Jesus as the way of life, and who also provided the way of life for us to follow. Unlike many church leaders of his day, he insisted that the ethics of the Sermon on the Mount were not just for a chosen few but for everyone, and that everyone, from the most to the least powerful, should turn the other cheek.
Frank Ramirez has served as a pastor for nearly 30 years in Church of the Brethren congregations in Los Angeles, California; Elkhart, Indiana; and Everett, Pennsylvania. A graduate of LaVerne College and Bethany Theological Seminary, Ramirez is the author of numerous books, articles, and short stories. His CSS titles include Partners in Healing, He Took a Towel, The Bee Attitudes, and three volumes of Lectionary Worship Aids.
*****************************************
StoryShare, December 12, 2010, issue.
Copyright 2010 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.
