Excess is Not Enough ...

This is a blog from a sermon the notes on which I found quite by accident whiel penning a trifle on simplicity of European life. As the sermon, Pastor Mick's, was one he gave back somewhere beteween December 2009 and February 2010, I'll only leave here the gist of what I heard. I think the thoughts are timeless.

In America, we do not or no longer know the word moderation. We do not know the meaning of moderation in our work, We consistently bring it home. Ask my wife if I'm guilty here ...
We buy clothes when the closets are full; toys when the kids already had too many; groceries when the refridgerator is full (only to see too much end up as refuse). We have an interesting phenomena in the US that is patently absent in Europe: storage locker facilities! ... full of more of what we arguably could go without. We "need" or act thus ... th elatest iPod, cellphone gadget, GPS and Blackberry, the newest model car or toy.

At Christmas, we are shopped to our limit and we shop to the tune of Michael Jackson's "Don't stop 'til you get enough." A former co-worker of mine one described his life as a youth spent honoring his personal bumper sticker/credo/mantra:

Excess is not enough.

But moderation is truly more Christian than excess ... ref: Psalm 63

Do we hunger for righteousness, do our stomach's growl (if not from physical hunger) for helping the marginalized in our society. We fedd our pangs for travel, Packers tickets and NASCAR. But where is our "gusto for God"?

Faith, in one sense, is not the restraint from ALL things, but restraint from "the right things". The things that do not satisfy ... the soul. As Psalm 63 sings, joy is not the absence of suffering; it is a delight in God's presence, it is hearing the songs of His creation in the birds each morning as I now walk kilometers over dirt paths to catch a bus to catch a train to walk 15 more minutes to a simple, but adequate desk ...

Europeans seem to have still retained some more measure of a handle on "enough". At least more than Americans seem to remember froma time seemingly past. There is still palpable here "the exhiliration of the wide-eyed" as the Psalm says. As Pastor Mick shared:

God gives each of us "a little faith" (we need only the size of a mustard seed) to stir our own brand of restlessness. We are human. We want good things, but often in bad ways. We want a house, not for the true ability it offers to keep us dry and safe and warm, but "for its own sake" and what it can "say about us". This seems, if not patently aabsent in Europe, at least a concept that they often have to struggle to relate to. Life is simpler, houses are simpler (but homes are just as warm), possessions are fewer, but seemingly more meaningful in and of themselves and are not measured in number or quantity. Or so it seems to a sojourner passing through, but one who stayed long enough to observe.

We are searching for a new Pastor. May they be someone of moral charcter with the vision to ask us to possess "a gusto for God", may they "have loving life down through their fingertips", may they task us and challenge us to "extend our reach beyond our grasp".

From a small nation in Israel rose the tide that rolled far beyond its borders.

From a small discontent, we can change the world (read Three Cups of Tea!!)

God works with what we give Him, with what He sees in us ...

Let's trive to do one meaning ful thign each day. As Mother Teresa is known to have said and lived: You need not do great things, but strive to do small things with great love.





If you want to hazard a look at the extent to which we have segregated our society between the haves and have nots, go to the library and borrow Nickeled and Dimed: On Not Getting By in America by Barbara Ehrenreich. It's an eye-opener and, if its not a heart-opener, then we've become Tin Men, Dorothy.

Git Busy Livin'

Easter Sunday April 4, 2010
Preacher: Pastor Anika Neindorf

It is said when you first visit the Lincoln Memorial in an otherwise quiet moment, away from the clicking of tourists’ camera shutters, when it is only you and ol’ Abe, when you’re first told his hands hung over the mighty marble chair on which he’s perched form the American sign language for the letters A.L., his initials ... it is then that you talk to Abe and maybe you thank him for being the visionary rebel that he was, one that stands little chance of ever being elected in today’s America. I’ve heard it said people talk to him. I know Carmen placed her hands in the crevices of the etched marble walls towering above her head to “feel” the words he orated at Gettysburg or his famous 2nd inaugural address.

Although held in perhaps different esteem, I eflt something akin to this aura when I entered The Castle Church, the very place on the planet where Luther, the rebel, posted his 95 theses.

Thinking Ostern Sontag (Easter Sunday) would be “a madhouse” packed Church, I took a walk with Carmen on the evening before and we visited the Church and Luther’s grave within and The Door:

The original door was unfortunately lost in the fire of 1760. King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia had the door replaced with a bronze door with all 95 theses are inscribed. The painting above the door depicts Luther with the German Bible on the right and Melanchthon with the Augsburg Confession on the left. You can see the city of Wittenberg in the background.

We rubbed our prayer shawl knitted at Mt. Zion on the bronze door across the engraved words of the rebel and his cause. I rubbed my Bible into the bronze as well.


It simply felt otherworldly. I recall it felt too simple and quiet to be “the place” where it all “began” or, if not began, “reformed” and changed. I recall visiting India over 25 years ago with a graduate school classmate. He took me to the very site where Gandhi began his Salt March to the Sea. There wasn’t even a sign, I said. My friend, Suresh, laughed. He said, “You Americans don’t think anything could have happened unless there’s a sign, a tour bus and little trinkets you can buy!” I think he may be right, or at least I’m guilty as charged. Anyway, what I was getting at is that there’s something surreal about feeling the dirt on the road where the Salt March took place, just as there’s something surreal in being alone with Abe Lincoln or Martin Luther.

It’s actually surreal to me as I write this that these three moments in my travels all came to mind as I wrote this in stream of consciousness, and yet, Martin Luther King, named for the rebel, read and followed through on the writings of the Mahatma and the promise of Abraham nearly 150 years past. These are the signposts and markings of history whether there is a wooden sign proclaiming it or not.

Sunday morning was also surreal. Jesus rises from the dead and The Resurrection conquers all. But what stuck with me was that there were empty pews, empty pews on Ostern Sontag Morgen!! Wow! I was told by a German student that “there are only the people here who normally go to Church every Sontag”. Well, it made for a beautiful service. Punctuated, as it were, by the most beautiful hymns! The Easter hymns, some penned in German over 500 years ago were moving ...

And as the preacher climbed the stairs to the preaching loft, her hands extended along its lanky wooden frame as old as the ages, I heard her voice, but perhaps not her words. In a stream of consciousness, as in a movie, where the character mouths words and her voice drops to only a backdrop audio, my thoughts or “what I was hearing” drawn into the louder foreground for “the viewer” to hear. And this is what I heard:

Get busy livin’ …… or get busy dyin’

It’s a GREAT line from the movie The Shawshank Redemption, delivered stream of consciousness by Morgan Freeman (as only he can do), reading from a letter from his inmate chum who escaped “the death” and “hoplessness and futility” of “life” at Shawshank prison.

“Get busy livin’ …”, he says, for the alternative is to “git busy dyin’ …”

Never say never, as the ol’ James Bond movie (and Pastor Gary Johnson) used to say. “Never” is the proclamation of “git busy dyin’ …”

We’re in the throes of real change at Mt. Zion and, in boldly choosing new leadership and accepting and, yes, even embracing, the ultimate and necessary changes that will ensue, we have been tasked to “git busy livin’ …”

Change is life’s blood. As Jesus said himself. Look I make a new thing. Sometimes change is thrust upon us in the guise of tragedy … with many unanswered questions as Good Friday reminds us. He even told His disciples, “I must leave you now …” This change is necessary for the seeds of new growth to take root, as in the passing of the seasons.

This entire trip has reminded me daily, even hourly, that change and pruning are good even when they’re naturally seen as disruptive. Routine can be good, in ways, but also stifling.
The preacher’s mouth continued moving, in German, of course, and I continued to hear something different than what she was saying …

Git busy livin’ … or git busy dyin’

Jesus died on a cross … presumably at the age of 33, a 3 followed by a Biblical 3, the number of days a butterfly, after rising from the apparent death of the cocoon lives furiously and fully before expiring.

Given my documented recent propensity for loose translations, I accepted that God might be re-issuing his understanding that “they preached each in their own tongue and others heard in theirs”. Upon returning to the stone floor above Luther’s grave, I told the pastor, “Dank, fur das gute predigt” .. Thank you for that good sermon.

I’m not sure what she said, but I am sure what I heard …

Git busy livin’ …