Ministry involves food. Feeding the hungry and breaking bread among the faithful are two irreducible elements of life in a faith community.

In 2019 that fact demands that ministers know what’s in the bread they’re breaking.

“Is this nut free?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

A lazy answer, a distracted answer, an inattentive and careless answer here is dangerous. Like, harming the people you’re called to care for dangerous.

Pay attention. Get it right. It matters.

With apologies.

I haven’t seen Hamilton, but I’ve heard hours upon hours of it in my living room from my 10 year old daughter, who has seen it. Three times.

I always identify more with Burr than with Hamilton.

His warnings against talking too much and too loud;

“You spit, I’ma sit; we’ll see where we land”

his commitment to delaying decision;

“I’m not standing still. I am lying in wait”

his ideological flexibility;

“I changed parties to seize the opportunity I saw”:

Burr’s defining character traits are maligned by Hamilton, but they seem to me underappreciated virtues, especially in an era of overheated rhetoric.

I spoke on the phone today with someone I’ve not seen for 15 years. We recognized one anothers’ voices instantly. A decade and a half: 15 years, gone like that, and here we are talking again, using office phones we weren’t thinking of before.

I spent the rest of the day dwelling on my world of 15 years ago and the people who were part of it yet have ceased to be. Most of them I never think about, just as I’m sure they don’t think about me. But there is one, maybe two, I frequently recall. Our lives make no contact anymore, yet small decisions I might have made here or there might have altered things and made us like the two guys from seminary I know who talk on the phone literally every day about what they ate for breakfast.

Instead we live isolated lives. We don’t call. We don’t email or write prosaic letters. I chose repeatedly not to.

I’m glad 15 years ago happened, back then, only once. Had it continued it might have been corrupted into something you have to maintain for its own sake, rather than something that feeds and nourishes you in a particular season only.

A refrain I’ve heard repeated in response to the Covington Catholic video last weekend: boys will be boys.

First it was spit with derision. Boys will be boys.

Then it was intoned as explanation. Boys. Will. Be. Boys.

Videos of my teenage boy self and his fellows are playing in my memory, trying to sort it all out. In one, we’re a couple of months post graduation, drinking and smoking up in a Phoenix hotel room with total strangers, dealers some of us met on the street and invited back to the room to play video games. We are loud, out of control, drunk on cheap beer and the abominable absence of adult supervision. We are a scourge.

Boys will be boys.

In another, my four best friends and I are careening around downtown Denver, running down alleys, climbing statues, ducking into doors left open. Alcohol free, drug free, powered by the communion we feel with and for one another, for this city, for these strangers we are high five-ing up and down 16th Street. We are young and alive and enthralled by possibility. We love everyone.

Boys will be boys.

A lot depends on how you say it.

The Ski Retreat won. And then it didn’t.

A big winter storm system came east across the midwest and blanketed our route from Chicago to south central Wisconsin with warnings of blowing snow and hazardous travel conditions. I read all the warnings and all the forecasts with my team of leaders, and then around noon I emailed the parents it was cancelled. Too risky to drive 20 teenagers through a winter storm, lofty theological sentiments about communion be damned.

Then I called the house rental, the van rental, and the ski resort and cancelled all our bookings. Even our Saturday night dinner at Upper Crust Pizzaria: cancelled.

There’s something simply doesn’t sit right about killing a ski weekend for . . . snow.

My life in faith began among predominantly white evangelical disciples whose piety seemed rooted and grounded in a close personal identification with the joys and sufferings experienced by the women and men of Scripture, chiefly Jesus. It is growing up, this life in faith, among predominantly white progressive disciples in the mainline Protestant tradition whose piety seems rooted and grounded in a passionate commitment to the justice and inclusion taught by Scriptural figures, mostly prophets, chiefly (again) Jesus.

No day exposes the gulf I experience between those two families of Christian disciples more than Martin Luther King Day here in the United States. We progressive Protestants elevate King’s call for political justice, reading from “Letter from A Birmingham Jail” and playing the “I Have A Dream Speech”; four years ago this weekend I took my students to see “Selma” as our youth group activity. Yet I don’t experience–and I don’t exactly lead–reflections on King’s deep personal faith in God, his piety, and his explicitly stated desire to be a follower of Jesus. I have focused more on his politics than his piety.

But can they be separated? Probably not without doing damage to both.

So I am spending today praying King’s prayer and dreaming his dream at the same time.

“O God, we thank you for the lives of great saints and prophets in the past, who have revealed to us that we can stand up amid the problems and difficulties and trials of life and not give in. We thank you for our foreparents, who’ve given us something in the midst of the darkness of exploitation and oppression to keep going. Grant that we will go on with the proper faith and the proper determination of will, so that we will be able to make a creative contribution to this world. In the name and spirit of Jesus we pray. “

Amen.

Man did I judge the youth ski trip. I didn’t do youth group as a teenager, so the first I heard of it was in seminary. Churches use valuable staff and financial resources to send their teens skiing. Do they work on a service project while they’re skiing? Do they evangelize their slopemates? Do they at least read a common devotional over the weekend?

No. They ski.

As a 24 year-old prospective pastor, the ski retreat seemed the height of wrongheaded, self-serving, privileged church programming. At 40, I was called to a church that does one.

Tonight I leave on my third ski retreat, and I feel nothing but anticipation about it. I’ve had a few years now to experience what my judgmental junior self had not experienced and could not have appreciated, that, for a group of 6th-12th graders, the opportunity to spend two days with their peers and a group of adults who care about them, away from home, away from school, away from the considerable strain of their daily life, is a valuable gift and a ministry investment that needs no further justification. Though a short (less than 48 hours) excursion, the ski retreat will minister to these young people in unique, tangible ways: they will bless their house upon entering it; they will pray with and for one another; they will hear testimony; they will break bread together.

Oh, and they will ski.

All are welcome. Let’s go skiing.

“If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if fifteen minutes, three days; if half an hour, two days; if an hour, I am ready now.”

Woodrow Wilson

For those of us whose work involves talking in front of groups, brevity is the hardest thing. I used to think the opposite, that the hour-long keynote and the 45 minute sermon were products of weeks filled with grueling preparation by an expansive mind. But I find now that talking for a long time makes me less nervous than talking for a short time.

A short address requires many, many more decisions by the speaker than a long one, which might make it a very useful appraisal of leadership. After all, that’s what we asked you here to do: make decisions.

Daughter got it in her head to try competitive cheer last summer, an inclination her mother and I readily allowed, especially after she so easily agreed to trading this new activity for the one she’d been spending four hours a week on for nearly two years, gymnastics. Nothing against gymnastics, but that choice indicated her seriousness.

You just don’t know the things your kids are going to be into, and Daughter is forging new family territory at the gym. Her mom was a gymnast, at least, which is more relatable by degrees than her father’s baseball, which seems dull by comparison, but neither of her parents have any first hand experience of all-day cheer meets. So while Daughter is learning pyramids and leapfrogs, we’re learning meet schedules and makeup. Oh, and there have been makeup tutorials. Makeup. Tutorials.

I’m warming up to it. For the first few months, whenever I spoke of competitive cheer I quickly added that it wasn’t my choice and that it’s a completely foreign subculture for me. Like I needed to apologize for my daughter’s preferred leisure pursuit because it’s not soccer or dance or basketball. That hangup died last week as I watched her and her team pant their way over and over again through a program of running, lifting, rolling, and jumping that is more rigorous than anything I could have been talked into at 10 years old. And, yeah, they do it in makeup.

So now I rock a “Cheer Dad” T-shirt I got for Christmas and write blog posts from the parent room in the gym at 9:00, because practice ended an hour ago but my leotarded 10 year-old can’t be dragged from the trampoline.

My neighbor went to grad school with a famous actress who visits him at his home when she and her family are in town.

My friend plays tennis with an executive for a major league baseball team.

Someone at my church went to high school with the mom of a legitimate rock n’ roller.

Proximity to greatness is one thing. Proximity to proximity to greatness is another.