Remembering Martin Luther King
Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King’s life was frozen in time for the whole world. His words keep living, his story keeps being told, and the events of his life are examined again and again. It is not that time any more. The pain is more diffuse, spread into new struggles for equality and justice.
It is worth marking the remarkable changes that have happened in that fifty years. We can go to any restaurant and drink from the same fountains. A lot of things are better, much better. But the pain he saw is still in the world–the pain of something not finished, a hope not yet realized, a brokenness needing mending.
The deepest wounds heal from the inside out, and only with the greatest of care. There will be setbacks and infections and discouragements, but there is still much reason to hope and keep trying.
I once attended the Unity Breakfast on Martin Luther King day here in Birmingham and heard Diane McWhorter, whose book Carry Me Home recounts the impact of those momentous days of the Civil Rights struggle on the world. Whenever someone “remembers” how something was, it invites us to remember it from where we were at the time. I remember the civil rights era in the South, but it was not from the vantage point of an adult in the middle of Big Issues, but as a child growing up in the South.
I remember going on a hot Sunday afternoon with my father to the home of an employee. She happened to be African American. Her family member had been killed in a train accident, and my father believed that the proper and respectful thing to do was to go by to see the family.
I remember waiting in the car while he went in, a little boy watching out the window to see people who also lived in Clarksville, Tennessee, but a very different Clarksville than the one in which I lived. I had never noticed that their children didn’t go to school where I did, or that we never ate in the same restaurants, or that we barely came across one another. This separation made my trip all the more startling. It was as though I had stumbled onto a hidden cave where an entire civilization hitherto unknown to me had taken residence.
I watched people come and go, just like in my community, bringing food, dabbing their eyes, dressed in their finest. Men tugging at their collars in the hot summer air opened the door for their wives in hats to go in with the bowl or dish. It was impressive, this little world to which I did not belong. People laughing, people smiling, people crying, just like us. But not with us.
I took in the strangeness, but something stirred even deeper in me. I saw my father speaking to them, as he did to everyone, with respect and courtesy and manners. I hear people telling tales from the sixties about marching and protesting. I have no tales like those. I was young and oblivious to the invisible walls of separation. But I do remember my father treating everyone the same, kindly, decently. His employees seemed to think they all counted the same with him. He never lost his temper that I knew of, or swore or cursed at people. Just treated them alike.
My examples were different from those dramatic and provocative ones. My family mostly watched the struggle on nightly television with the rest of the world. We worried, shook our heads, weren’t too sure how it would go. We were not allowed, though, to use
epithets and inflammatory words about other races.
It takes struggle and often conflict for change to begin. But there is also the task of taking change in and absorbing it, making it livable and practical and something that can happen every day without incident. It is one thing to change laws. It is another to elicit the consent of people to those laws. And quite another to live out their spirit every day. It means using words carefully, for the purpose of telling truth, not perpetuating our own version of it.
The whole world was changing before my eyes, in ways I did not understand and would not understand, but the example of my father’s kindness did sink deep in me. And I wonder about the eight year old boys and girls among us. What are they seeing? How are we doing? Is there something impressive enough in the way we are living life to sink deep in their souls and stay with them until they are adults?
In something as simple and apparently random as going by someone’s house to pay respects, in doing what is decent and right and good, you may be causing a quiet revolution in someone who is watching not only what you do, but how you do it. Someone is watching, always. So write the script you want remembered. It will live on after you for a long time, for good or for evil. I was one of those little white children that Martin Luther King dreamed about.
So I am going to do every little thing I can to not be afraid, to make friends, to pay my respects, and teach my children and grandchildren that there’s room for everyone at God’s table. Everyone.
I remember those times with a song I did on my first CD, “Lorraine.” It was inspired by my first visit to the Civil Rights Institute in Memphis, which ends at the balcony where Dr. King was murdered by fear and hate. But I like to remember what outlives fear and hate: hope and kindness and the hope of a better day.
Buy the song here
Lorraine
Gary Furr
An unfinished cup of coffee
By an unmade bed
Near the concrete balcony
Where a man of God is dead
Looking through an old window
See the painful past
Forever frozen at the last
Down the corridors of time
Different town, same old sign
Still bearing all the pain
In the halls of the old Lorraine
The sound of women weeping
The trickle of my tears
Join the moan of gospel singing
Wailing hope amid the fears
Looking through new windows
for possibilities
In spite of everything we still believ
Down the corridors of time
Different town, same old sign
Still bearing all the pain
In the halls of the old Lorraine
Driving through the city
With memories of that place
In that part of town that’s really gone down
I lock the door just in case
Looking through my car window
At a man who looks back at me
After all we’ve been through, we still can’t see.
Down the corridors of time
Different town, same old sign
Still bearing all the pain
In the halls of the old Lorraine
Remembering Martin Luther King
Fifty years ago this week, Martin Luther King’s life was frozen in time for the whole world. His words keep living, his story keeps being told, and the events of his life are examined again and again. It is not that time any more. The pain is more diffuse, spread into new struggles for equality and justice.
It is worth marking the remarkable changes that have happened in that fifty years. We can go to any restaurant and drink from the same fountains. A lot of things are better, much better. But the pain he saw is still in the world–the pain of something not finished, a hope not yet realized, a brokenness needing mending.
The deepest wounds heal from the inside out, and only with the greatest of care. There will be setbacks and infections and discouragements, but there is still much reason to hope and keep trying.
I once attended the Unity Breakfast on Martin Luther King day here in Birmingham and heard Diane McWhorter, whose book Carry Me Home recounts the impact of those momentous days of the Civil Rights struggle on the world. Whenever someone “remembers” how something was, it invites us to remember it from where we were at the time. I remember the civil rights era in the South, but it was not from the vantage point of an adult in the middle of Big Issues, but as a child growing up in the South.
I remember going on a hot Sunday afternoon with my father to the home of an employee. She happened to be African American. Her family member had been killed in a train accident, and my father believed that the proper and respectful thing to do was to go by to see the family.
I remember waiting in the car while he went in, a little boy watching out the window to see people who also lived in Clarksville, Tennessee, but a very different Clarksville than the one in which I lived. I had never noticed that their children didn’t go to school where I did, or that we never ate in the same restaurants, or that we barely came across one another. This separation made my trip all the more startling. It was as though I had stumbled onto a hidden cave where an entire civilization hitherto unknown to me had taken residence.
I watched people come and go, just like in my community, bringing food, dabbing their eyes, dressed in their finest. Men tugging at their collars in the hot summer air opened the door for their wives in hats to go in with the bowl or dish. It was impressive, this little world to which I did not belong. People laughing, people smiling, people crying, just like us. But not with us.
I took in the strangeness, but something stirred even deeper in me. I saw my father speaking to them, as he did to everyone, with respect and courtesy and manners. I hear people telling tales from the sixties about marching and protesting. I have no tales like those. I was young and oblivious to the invisible walls of separation. But I do remember my father treating everyone the same, kindly, decently. His employees seemed to think they all counted the same with him. He never lost his temper that I knew of, or swore or cursed at people. Just treated them alike.
My examples were different from those dramatic and provocative ones. My family mostly watched the struggle on nightly television with the rest of the world. We worried, shook our heads, weren’t too sure how it would go. We were not allowed, though, to use epithets and inflammatory words about other races.
It takes struggle and often conflict for change to begin. But there is also the task of taking change in and absorbing it, making it livable and practical and something that can happen every day without incident. It is one thing to change laws. It is another to elicit the consent of people to those laws. And quite another to live out their spirit every day. It means using words carefully, for the purpose of telling truth, not perpetuating our own version of it.
The whole world was changing before my eyes, in ways I did not understand and would not understand, but the example of my father’s kindness did sink deep in me. And I wonder about the eight year old boys and girls among us. What are they seeing? How are we doing? Is there something impressive enough in the way we are living life to sink deep in their souls and stay with them until they are adults?
In something as simple and apparently random as going by someone’s house to pay respects, in doing what is decent and right and good, you may be causing a quiet revolution in someone who is watching not only what you do, but how you do it. Someone is watching, always. So write the script you want remembered. It will live on after you for a long time, for good or for evil. I was one of those little white children that Martin Luther King dreamed about.
So I am going to do every little thing I can to not be afraid, to make friends, to pay my respects, and teach my children and grandchildren that there’s room for everyone at God’s table. Everyone.
I remember those times with a song I did on my first CD, “Lorraine.” It was inspired by my first visit to the Civil Rights Institute in Memphis, which ends at the balcony where Dr. King was murdered by fear and hate. But I like to remember what outlives fear and hate: hope and kindness and the hope of a better day.
Lorraine
Gary Furr
An unfinished cup of coffee
By an unmade bed
Near the concrete balcony
Where a man of God is dead
Looking through an old window
See the painful past
Forever frozen at the last
Down the corridors of time
Different town, same old sign
Still bearing all the pain
In the halls of the old Lorraine
The sound of women weeping
The trickle of my tears
Join the moan of gospel singing
Wailing hope amid the fears
Looking through new windows
for possibilities
In spite of everything we still believ
Down the corridors of time
Different town, same old sign
Still bearing all the pain
In the halls of the old Lorraine
Driving through the city
With memories of that place
In that part of town that’s really gone down
I lock the door just in case
Looking through my car window
At a man who looks back at me
After all we’ve been through, we still can’t see.
Down the corridors of time
Different town, same old sign
Still bearing all the pain
In the halls of the old Lorraine
Start Young
If you don’t know who Ricky Skaggs is, then you really don’t know anything about bluegrass and old-time music. It’s important to distinguish those two terms. “Bluegrass” technically didn’t exist before the 1940s. It was literally invented as a form by Bill Monroe, recasting the traditional old time music of his Kentucky and Appalachian roots with a new sound built around his unique mandolin playing. The mandolin took a new role as a centerpiece performing lead instrument in
Ricky Skaggs and Bill Monroe
Monroe’s vision. He was truly a unique American music phenomenon.
Monroe inspired an entire generation of musicians and his influence lives on in all the varieties of bluegrass, newgrass, swing, jazz and a hundred other variations of playing involving the mandolin, but no one has embodied that variety more than a kid from Kentucky named Ricky Skaggs. His father started him out with a mandolin around age 6 and before he was out of his teens, he played on stage with Monroe himself, with childhood buddy Keith Whitley, Flatt and Scruggs and toured with the Stanley Brothers.
Bluegrass and its predecessor, the “old time” music, that was originally the dance music and music played in homes and small communities of the South that had traipsed across the Atlantic from the border regions of Scotland through Ulster and Ireland as immigrants to the New World, settling in the mountains of the South. They brought with them the instruments of their folk music, and it underlay their common life for generations. Like all immigrants, their music was a powerful identity that helped buffer them against the hardships of fitting into a new and strange country that did not always want them.
Like all people, the love for their children motivated their work, way of life, and the sharing of their music. Today, like few other music forms, you will see men in their eighties at a bluegrass festival sitting in a circle jamming with teenagers strumming guitars and 6 year old fiddle and mandolin players. Ricky Skaggs was one of those children.
It gives hope to look at our children and imagine what they might do. They are not jaded yet by our own deep prejudices and ignorant opinions
about “how it is.” So today, I share this video I came across of little RIcky Skaggs, age seven, playing on television with Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs. Teach your children well. And maybe their elder’s failures will give way to something wonderful, unexpected and new.
Doesn’t conflict at this moment in Lent to me at all, when we are wringing hands, troubled in mind, struggling with hope and anxious to the gills, to pick up my mandolin at home, play a tune, and feel something lift out of the room. Wherever that sound came from (and as a man of faith, I think I know), it says, “There’s still something unexpectedly beautiful up ahead. Go on, and don’t give up.” If you don’t know any seven year olds, I suggest you enlarge your life and bit, get out of yourself, and look for hope in the strings and paintings and delightful voices of the young.
Dr. Gary Furr and Friends with Pat Terry in Concert
Next Thursday, I’ll be in concert, sharing the evening with my great songwriter friend, PAT TERRY. Joining me for my set will be DOn Wendorf on mandolin and tenor banjo, Mark Weldon on fiddle and cello, and Rachel Turner on bass and backup vocals. It will be a great evening of music–original songs in a variety of styles. I hope you can come out if you are in Birmingham or central Alabama!
7:30 pm, Doors open at 7
$12 per person
Moonlight on the Mountain
585 Shades Crest Rd Hoover, AL
(205) 317-4364
facebook @moonlightonthemtn
Pat is finishing a new CD and I’ve got some brand new songs to roll out.
More about Gary Furr & Friends
The Heart of Billy Graham
In the late 1920s. my mother told me, my grandfather, her daddy, Henry Price took his oldest daughter, Katherine, to the hospital. The doctor said that she had diphtheria and if he didn’t take her to the hospital she would die. Having no health insurance, Grandpa had to sell every chicken, cow and piece of equipment he had, as well as his his land and his house to pay the hospital bill.
With few other options, he moved his young family down to Charlotte and got a job with a local dairy farmer delivering milk. He would go out to the farm every day and pick up his deliveries and do his route.
Image #: 32382121 Billy Graham held his first stadium crusade in Birmingham, Alabama on Easter Sunday in 1964 and insisted it to be integrated. AL.COM /Landov
Their daughter survived, and when she was 6 she would go with him and knew the farmer’s son, who was about 12 years old. She said he would pick on her. She would later say, “He was mean to me sometimes.” But that boy went to a revival and was converted to faith in Christ, and she would have never guessed that the farmer’s son was Billy Graham, would go on to preach to 215 million people in the world and whose body lies in state in the Capitol as I write.
Most of us around Concord and Charlotte watched his rise to fame and came to love and respect his preaching Ministry. My mother says that when I was a baby, she and dad went out to the Charlotte airport to pick up someone for his work, and there came Billy and a couple of his fellow ministers, walking up the terminal hallway. My dad walked over with me in his arms, and according to family lore, Billy rubbed my head and pronounced me a cute child. I did not notice at the time.
My grandmother sent him money all of her years to support the work that he did to tell others about Jesus Christ. As he grew older zeal gave way to wisdom and Read the rest of this entry
The Valley of Hinnom
In the book of 2 Kings 23:10 we read of a defiled valley in Jerusalem where child sacrifice had been practiced through burning. King Josiah, in his reforms, declared it a defiled place. According to 2 Chronicles. 28:1-3, King Ahaz had offered incense there and offered his sons as a sacrifice. It was considered accursed, a desecrated place. So, too, King Manasseh, the wicked King who turned his back on the faith by permitting the horrific practices of other religions (although leading the nation to a prosperous economy) to be allowed, including child sacrifice. occultism, witchcraft and sorcery, channeling and wizardry. This included burning his sons as a sacrifice in the Valley of Hinnom (2 Chronicles 33:6).
The prophet Jeremiah thoroughly condemned this practice in Jeremiah 7:31-32 as godless and unholy. In his prophecy at the Potsherd Gate at the edge of this same Valley, Jeremiah stood and prophesied the destruction of Jerusalem, declaring that God would bring such evil upon them that whoever heard of it, his ears would tingle, and he linked it in part to sacrifice of innocent blood. It would become a desecrated place where only those with no burial place, like criminals and outcasts, would have their bodies placed. An unholy and terrifying place.
By Jesus’ day, the valley of Hinnom was still considered a cursed spot. So when Jesus described hell as a terrifying place, an “unquenchable fire,” (Mk. 9:43), the term for hell is Gehenna, which seems to link etymologically with “hinnom.” Some scholars have said that this refers to the desecrated valley, which became a trash dump in Jerusalem in Jesus’ day.
It would have been a vivid metaphor in his hearer’s minds. Like most dumps, it smoldered continuously and was full of maggots (Mk. 9:48-“where the worm never dies and fire unquenched”). It was an unholy and evil place where only the most abandoned and forlorn souls ended their lives, bodies tossed shamefully onto the refuse of the city and decaying openly.
It is interesting enough that this was the image employed for the word “hell.” It is more intriguing to consider its beginnings as an accursed location. If you take a tour in Israel today, guides will tell this story and point out where it is thought to be.
That hell began with the sacrifice of a nation’s innocents, its children, while the powers that were sat by and tolerated it is astounding. It is horrifying to think of burning children on an altar. But then, I ponder—how do I live amid so much prosperity and yet so indifferent to the value of life—unborn, born, poor, neglected and otherwise?
How have we come to a place in which yet another school shooting numbs us? The same vapid paralysis will follow—the need for gun control and why it won’t matter, and ultimately, back to the same immobilized status quo. As my school teacher daughter sighed to me, “Dad, if we wouldn’t do a thing after a classroom of preschoolers were slaughtered in Newtown, we won’t do anything about this one either.”
And so we shrug, again. A disturbed 19 year old bought an assault rifle and did what it is designed to do—
kill by the masses. And nothing will change. And some day, tour groups may stop, and the guide point to the map and say of us,
This is the valley from which the name Gehenna comes, and it first became accursed because of its association with child sacrifice. They helplessly allowed their children to be sacrificed and to live in fear of dying in their streets and at school. The economy was strong, but still, they were cursed for allowing their young to be consumed without lifting a finger. They were conquered and destroyed, but long before, they rotted from within. And nothing good ever grew there and no one would live there ever again.
There is still a glimmer of hope. The prophets warned Israel to repent and turn, while there was yet time. This is still a democracy, not a monarchy. There is still time. There is still a nation of citizens, a constitution, waiting for the will and united resolve to galvanize us to seek our better common life and the well-being of our young. We are not yet past the point of no return. But it is getting late.
Parables as Mind Openers
Dr. Tom Wright, the New Testament scholar, calls the parables of Jesus “open-ended stories” in his brilliant book, Jesus and the Victory of God. They are also stories of the coming Kingdom. In these teachings, he argues, Jesus does four things—he issues an invitation, a word of welcome, words of challenge, and words of decision and calling
Last week, during my Wednesday morning Bible study, I told about two kinds of thinking that we do about things that matter. One is convergent thinking—we move toward narrowin
g down to a solution, a focus, to eliminate the options and get to the core issue. It looks like this:
But there is also divergent thinking.It begins from a point, and drives us out into more and more possibilities. It “opens up” something else, like a brainstorm (even though a lot of brainstorm exercises are often more like a drizzle!). Instead of narrowing down, it widens our thoughts, deepens, and inspiration belongs here. It looks like this:
Both kinds of thinking are necessary for life. The parables brilliantly seem to do both—push us out into the kingdom, great thoughts, “opening up” as well as back to decision—“what must I do now that I have thought about this?” Over the season of Lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday communion tomorrow evening, we will look at and listen to Jesus speaking to us and teaching us—pushing our boundaries, but also calling us to new fixed points and hard decisions to be disciples. In the Tuesday luncheons and the Sunday worship all the way to Easter, Jesus will tell us, as my late friend John Claypool described them, “stories Jesus still tells us.” Come gather round together, as the family tells the stories of Jesus, and as he invites us to new places in our lives.
One of the delightful gifts to Vickie and me in recent years is a little collection of hymn texts from our own Dr. Milburn Price based on the parables of Jesus. The idea was inspired when he wrote a hymn text for my 15th anniversary at the church (ten years ago!). What resulted was a lovely little book called Lord, May Our Hearts Be Fertile Ground: Singing a Response to the Parables. We will be actually singing some of these hymns Dr. Price wrote in our morning worship and at the luncheons. Copies will be available if you want one, and they will help to connect us to the stories as our thinking comes back from “opening up” to “making commitment” each week. It should be a time of reflection and joy!
Wed Feb 14 Ash Wednesday “To Pray and Not Give Up” Luke 18:1-8
Sun Feb 18 “Sowing and Reaping” Matthew 13:1-8, 13-23
Sun Feb 25 “Kingdom Building” Mark 4:30-34
Sun Mar 4 “Seeing Jesus” Matthew 25:31-46
Sun Mar 11 “Inheriting Eternal Life” Luke 10:25-37
Sun Mar 18 “Who Was the Prodigal?” Luke 15:11-32
Sun Mar 25 Palm Sunday “Leaving the Ninety-Nine” Luke 15:1-7
Sun Apr 1 Easter “The Sign of Jonah” Matthew 12:38-40
I love the parables. I never tire of thinking about them. They challenge me, as stories always do, in a way that statistics and news reports never do. They open the world up, and open me up. There are about sixty parables of Jesus in all. They are still vital all these years later.
It’s Simple: Buy Some Music, Help Mothers and Children in Alabama
For every album download sold during J
anuary-March, I will give $5.00 to the Coalition toward its project of an app for mothers and children to use for help! For every single sold, I will give .50 cents! Enjoy some music and help out a great project! Tell a friend and help us fund a project
Buy link: GARY FURR MUSIC
I am spearheading a new Alabama Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children. The coalition, formed in 2016, is comprised of a group of healthcare, medical, faith, academic and para-health organizations and leaders who seek to collaborate their efforts to better serve the needs of mothers and children in Alabama. The Alabama Coalition for Healthy Mothers and Children offers a robust networking system for better efficiency of programs through partnerships and support as well as a powerful force for advocacy for these families. We seek to be a voice for those who are often disconnected from help, and build partnerships across the usual lines of specializations, religious affiliations and other ways that sometimes lead to isolation or lack of awareness.
Right now we are undertaking to create an app to be given away in our state that helps young mothers with infants and young children find the many organizations that stand ready to encourage them and give assistance to give their child the best start possible. We are raising funds for the creation of the app and for the internships to gather the information. There are two ways you can help. First, if you’d like to simply give something, you can donate through our PayPal button. Second, for the months of January, I’m offering to give all income from my songs to the Coalition to help spark our drive. Go to my downloads here and buy a song for $.99 or a CD for $6.99-8.99 and $5 from CDs and .50 cents from songs goes straight to the cause. You can help me by asking a friend to “buy a song for kids.” Read the rest of this entry
After the Election
The fight is over, the election is done. All the signs and calls and facebook debates have to be taken down and put away.
We’re not used to so much attention. Usually people just stereotype our state
Without knowing how beautiful it is, or how loving its people are
People who work hard, love their children and care about each other.
All of a sudden, we’ve gone viral, and celebrity isn’t what it’s cracked up to be.
The talking heads were here, the news shows, and all the big names
Flown in for decision and then leave. No matter what side we took,
we are proud of the towns and crossroads and cities where we live and
Tomorrow, we’ll prepare lunches and get in car pool line.
Tomorrow we’ll take our neighbor who lives alone for her chemo.
Tomorrow we’ll go on that date night with the spouse
or watch our little cheerleader at the game
We’ll wave to the neighbors, call the plumber, rake the leaves
Get ready for the company party, mail the cards, call mother to check on her Tomorrow they’ll all be gone and we’ll still be here, working next to the guy
Who roots for the Tide if we’re War Eagle.
Tomorrow we might go to prayer meeting, or out to eat
Meet the new person moving in. Do volunteer work.
They’ll all be gone and miss the best part of living here which is, well, living here.
The election will be done
and we can stop talking and things will go back to normal.
But we’ll still be here, and glad to live here, together, all of us, neighbors, friends
Opponents and disagreeable cusses. And we’ll still be people of faith
They’ll go home and remember the beauty and our hospitality
and how great the food is,
And we’ll hope they really SAW us, not just a stereotype.
Lord, after the election, that’s our prayer today: that we’ll keep seeing one another
For who we are, real people, families, see each other’s needs and struggles,
Understand a little better, forgive a little more, hope a little harder,
Try and fix what we broke, listen longer, trust each other.
That’s where you always are, where those things happen.
That’s our prayer: to see you and love you, see one another with our hearts
And with kindness, see a future together and see one another’s kids
We want to be the Alabama that we touch with bare feet and summer breeze and the laughter of our grandchildren
Despair is always presumptuous, someone said.
We’ll get up. There’s work to be done. Amen.
Abide With Me
Henry Francis Lyte was an Anglican priest who originally intended to be a doctor, but then entered the ministry. 
He was a prize-winning poet during his university years, and best known for his elegant hymn, “Abide With Me.” He continued to write religious poetry through his life. He was born in 1793 and died when he was only fifty-four years of age. The first verse captures a transcendent and haunting mood:
“Abide with me; fast falls the eventide;
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide.
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”
It is uncertain when he penned this text. It has been connected to the death of a fellow clergyman, of which he said
“I was greatly affected by the whole matter, and brought to look at life and its issue with a different eye than before; and I began to study my Bible, and preach in another manner than I had previously done.”[1]
Regardless, it’s reflective and somber tone nearly always takes me to a melancholy mood. It is often sung at funerals. In one of the eight original verses is the line “Change and decay in all around I see.”
Ian Bradley, a leading scholar of Victorian hymns, names his book on this subject, Abide with Me: The World of Victorian Hymns. He notes, “John Bell, the leading contemporary Scottish hymn writer, has pointed to the damage done to the cause of reform and moving on in the life of churches by the deadening effect of [this line] from ‘Abide with me.’”[2]
Nevertheless, the end of life is a serious and inevitable matter. In the ministry, we deal with it all the time. There are other things to talk about in life, joys and pleasures, work, goodness and family. We cannot long live in the valley of the shadow. But when it comes, it is good to know that we are not there alone.
Our church sits atop a mountain, a beautiful garden behind the sanctuary perched on the edge, looking out across the southern suburbs of Birmingham. It is a view that invites meditation and deep thoughts. Once, while there with a friend, a retired missionary and a man of great kindness and compassion, I asked what he was thinking about. He pointed to the hospital below, in the valley. “I was just thinking about all the human suffering contained in that place, every single day, and that Christ dwells with them there.”
That, at its best, is what faith can do. Today, while my own dear mother is taking her second chemo for stage IV cancer, I pray for her and for the millions every day who make the journey along the cliffs of suffering and disease. Perhaps these lines sit well here for us all:
When other helpers fail and comforts flee,
Help of the helpless, O abide with me.”
LISTEN to the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sing Abide with Me, arr. Mack Wilberg.
[1] Darrell St. Romain, “History of Hymns: Abide with Me” https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/resources/history-of-hymns-abide-with-me
[2] St. Romain.
Short Takes…and Dogs, Again….
We Could Use Brother Dave Now.
Brother Dave Gardner anticipated our current moment years ago. The self-avowed redneck comedian of the 1960s was a regular listen for me in the only album of his my Dad bought (Brother Dave called them “ablums”). My favorite story was of a promoter who “went around promoting shows.” Somehow it seems to fit our reality TV, bizarro news, political circus sideshows of the moment. Listen and laugh. Any resemblance to current politics or media frenzies are purely worth thinking about.
Thank You, Ethics Daily.
Ethics Daily asked to do a short bio about Yours Truly so here it is. A number of pieces from this blog have wound up in the Ethics Daily website. It was started by my late classmate and friend, Robert Parham. It’s worth your time to go there.
Profiles in Goodwill: Gary Furr
“Healing in the Shadow of Iniquity” A piece written in the aftermath of the Las Vegas Shooting.
“Being Thankful, Even in Times of Great Adversity” A piece that originally appeared on these pages.
Dogs Still Have a Leg Up On Humans, Metaphorically Speaking
Baptist News Global carried a recent piece on the virtues of dogs. At the end, they reference my well-liked piece titled, “Do Dogs Go to Heaven,” that was picked up in a newspaper or two and on various websites. You can read the original here. I agree that if the world is going to the dogs, it would be a step up, not down.
In an article (one of the kind preachers and scholars read and that laypeople would never find, nor would they want to), a professor writes an entire piece on what the apostle Paul meant when he told the Philippians, “Beware of dogs. Beware of evil workers. Beware of the mutilation.” (NKJV) Since mutilation is a reference to circumcision, it came to be seen as a swipe at Jewish people and in most of history interpreted, apparently, as a reversal of Jews calling Gentiles “dogs,” which were “unclean” animals. Besides that being part of a whole ugly history, it is one more blind spot in the human self-assessment.
The author says that the reason for this negativity about our four-footed friends is understandable:
Because dogs parade about naked, defecate, conduct sexual behavior,
and generally carry on without regard for human conventions of modesty
or prudence, they are characterized to be shameless in terms of the
prevailing social terms for proper conduct in human society (Nanor, Mark, “Paul’s Reversal of Jews Calling Gentiles ‘Dogs’
(Philippians 3:2): 1600 Years of an Ideological Tale Wagging an Exegetical Dog?”)
However, that had to be prior to this year, when modesty, respectful language and couthy-ness (opposite of uncouth?) went, well, to the dogs. Dogs, in their defense, are neither circumcised nor require it for one another to be acceptable as a canine. While they travel in packs, their tribalism would never lead them to call one another names like, “Crooked Dane” or “Lyin’ Terrier.” And they NEVER tweet at one another, since high frequencies bother their ears. They don’t send drones to kill each other anonymously, have no nukes, never imprisoned a single one of their own and could care less about money. Don’t do drugs, booze or snuff and don’t go to the doctor ever without a human making them.
No, good old dogs have a lot to commend them. Yes, they have fleas, and they are a bit oblivious about public behavior and have a deplorable lack of potty training. On the other hand, they defend their pups to death, and don’t gossip, hack websites, or spread fake news. I think we owe them an apology. And while we’re at at it, maybe we could say I’m sorry to one another, that we don’t seem to be able to rise to the level of a dog in our treatment of one another, public or private.
When the poet Francis Thompson wanted to characterize the haunting love of God that will not let us go, what image did he choose? Not a person. It was “The Hound of Heaven.” “Hound of Heaven” is about a man running from a hound, pursuing him. No matter where he goes, he hears the steps behind him. In the second stanza, he hears that the hound is not out to get him, but is the very One he seeks.
But just that thou might’st seek it in My arms.
All which thy child’s mistake
Fancies as lost, I have stored for thee at home:
Rise, clasp My hand, and come!’
I’m sorry, Paul. You should have found another metaphor.
