Writings
In the southern Appalachians, at the corner where North Carolina, Georgia and Tennessee meet every morning for coffee, there is a little hospital where a colleague once spent several more days than he wanted, going from sick to well, worse to better and broken to whole. And to relieve the monotony of his medical incarceration, he initiated conversation with any and all who entered his room, including the lady who came daily with mop and bucket to clean his floor.
My stepfather, who is closing hard on his 90th birthday, informed me with great glee that he had been served a jumbo, juicy, jelly donut with his breakfast yesterday morning. I explained that the occasion was sometimes known as Fat Tuesday and went on to connect it with Ash Wednesday, reminding him that people in Europe often used up their cooking fat on the day before Lent, the better to prepare for the culinary leanness of the season. Which explanation he accepted, whereupon he laughed and said: “I think we should have Fat Tuesday every Tuesday.”
If you were present at last Tuesday’s meeting of our Administrative Council, you heard me talk about a strange little phrase, “Paying the rent.” Which, when I use it, has nothing to do with dollars that are mailed to the landlord, but everything to do with expectations that are satisfied for the congregation. “Paying the rent,” in this instance, has to do with preachers and the degree to which they are willing (or unwilling) to tailor the work they do to the tasks the congregation wants to have done.
Although, as a pastor, I have kept many a death watch, I have never been on a death march….my own, or anybody else’s. I have never done the “dead man walking” thing. Although, like many of you, I have seen the Dead Man Walking movie. Twice, however, I have been to Dauchau, a scant thirty miles from Munich, where I have walked from the barracks where the dead men lived (and no, that is not an oxymoron) and walked to the chambers where the dead men died.
