Faith

The Way Things Are Done

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My Column for The Elgin Review

June 10, 2020

In 1989 we hung our baby’s cloth diapers on a clothesline in our backyard on laundry day. Without fail, when Adam’s diapers hung in the sun, our neighbors across the alley lit their trash on fire in a barrel they kept on their side of the alley. Burn barrels were against federal and state laws inside city limits by that time, but in the small, county-seat town a lot of people still used them. “We’ve always done it this way.”

We walked around the block to ring our neighbor’s doorbell to introduce ourselves. They knew who we were. (It was a small town. Everyone knew we were the preachers). Kindly, we asked if they minded not using their burn barrel while the baby’s laundry hung on the line 30 feet away. They said they minded. They burned trash whenever there was trash to burn. They’d “always done it that way.”

The only air-conditioning in our big old house was two window units on the first floor. One hot day our windows were open while Adam napped in his crib in the nursery. The smoke detector went off in his room. A gray stench and haze from the neighbor’s burn barrel filled his room.

“Could we set up a schedule?” We asked when we visited them again. “Would you burn your trash on Wednesday afternoons and evenings and on Sunday mornings when all three of us are at the church?” “No.” they said. “We’ve always burned trash whenever we want to. We’re not going to change how we do things now.”

A call to the police to ask if anything could be done was answered with, “It may be against the law, but it’s the way we’ve always done things.” Attending a city council meeting with a dozen church members who were also tired of burn barrels in town received the same response, “we’ve always done it this way.”

That’s when hang-up calls started in the middle of every night. We had to answer. We were pastors– people expected to reach us in an emergency at all hours. After two long weeks of that, the police called us at 2:30 one morning. Could I meet them at the church? Something seemed amiss. They saw a light flicker inside the building. I dressed, drove to the church, walked around the outside of the building with the officers, unlocked the doors and did a complete walk through with them. Nothing was amiss.

It turned out, one of the policemen working the night shift was our back-alley neighbor’s son. It was the way things were done.

I believe our black, brown and indigenous neighbors who tell us of abuses of power by police in their towns and cities. I believe it is the way things are done. Not everywhere and not all the time, but, when police power was mis-used against me years ago, I lost sleep. Protestors across our country and around the globe are testifying in the court of public opinion telling us that when police power is mis-used against black, brown and indigenous people, far too often, they lose their lives. Too often it is the way things are done and it needs to stop.

Scripture warns against those “who speak peace with their neighbors, while mischief is in their hearts.” (Psalm 28:3b). Those who are sworn “to protect and to serve,” must pay attention to what is in their hearts. Ours will be a better world when that’s the way things are done.

**

Park Church is worshipping outdoors during the month of June. You are welcome to join us on the church lawn at 9:15 am wearing a mask. I love to hear from you. Beckyzmcneil@gmail.com and 402.540.5615.

 

Getting by with a Little Help from our Friends

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My column for The Elgin Review 5.24.2020

“Each of us is just one tragedy away from needing to rely on the goodness of others to get by.”

I was raised on good conservative values of hard work and self-sufficiency. I was a good student, I worked hard, I waited to marry until I had my college degree, I completed two more degrees, I waited to have children until I’d been married several years so we could provide for the kids, I lived within my means, I put money into savings, I drove carefully, I abided by the law, I voted, I saw the dentist twice a year, brushed my teeth twice a day and flossed (more often than not). Yet there I was in my therapist’s office wrestling with the truth that, for the sake of my sons, and myself, I had no choice but divorce. “I can’t possibly divorce.” I said. “I can’t earn enough money on my own to pay all the bills and he isn’t earning enough to rent a place of his own and then pay child-support on top. I can’t work full-time and take care of the boys. I live far from my family. I just can’t. I can’t stay married but I can’t divorce, either.”

That’s when my therapist said my sense of self-sufficiency was really only an illusion. We all need each other to get by. Maybe if we’re Bill Gates or Warren Buffett we’re not one tragedy away from needing the goodness of others to survive, but since most of us aren’t either of those two gentlemen, the truth is, despite all our hard work and good planning, life sometimes throws curve balls that leave us unable to do it all ourselves. That’s part of being human.

This past week I helped a friend who suffered a cascade of calamities. A job didn’t work out in a town she moved to just to take the job. Without the job she couldn’t afford her house. In the middle of looking for work she suffered a serious health problem—without health insurance, because that had been tied to her job. The health condition means she can’t drive the car she has a lease on that she can’t pay for because she no longer has a job, and she can’t get a job right now because of the health condition and so on. She found herself needing a ride to her home state to apply for housing assistance and to see if she can figure out a way to get on her feet closer to home.

She reached out to me out of the blue. I hadn’t heard about her cascading calamities. Why did I drive as far as I drove, wearing an N-95 mask for hours on end (because she couldn’t survive COVID-19 on top of everything else) to help a friend I hadn’t heard from for over a year? Because she needed help. Just like I needed help years ago when I had no choice but to divorce my husband and raise our boys on my own. Except, I didn’t raise them on my own. I raised them in a community with great neighbors and great friends and a congregation and my brother and a whole host of others who helped us. Helping each other is part of being human, too.

During these difficult COVID-19 days, let’s all look for ways to help our neighbors. And, when we need it, let’s not be afraid to reach out for some help for ourselves. Chances are, anyone you ask for help has needed help themselves, too.

**

Park Church is still worshipping via Zoom. You are welcome to join us for worship at 9:15 on Sunday mornings. Contact me for the connection information at beckyzmcneil@gmail.com or 402.540.5615

A Very Present Help

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My column for The Elgin Review, March 17, 202

God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. Therefore we will not fear, though the earth should change, though the mountains shake in the heart of the sea; though its waters roar and foam, though the mountains tremble with its tumult. The Lord of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. (Psalm 46:1-3,7 NRSV)

What a strange and disquieting thing it is to live on the front side of a silent, invisible disaster. Last spring, when the floods came to northeast Nebraska, the waters roared and foamed, the ice creaked and cracked in our rivers and our eyes could see the devastation unfolding around us. There was evidence of the danger at hand.

This spring Covid 19 threatens to roar over us like a world-wide flood, not of waters, but of disease and we cannot yet see it. Trucks whir past our houses down the highway. Children laugh and goof around on the sidewalks. Calves frolic in the fields. Everything feels so normal, and yet not. I don’t know about you, but the pit of my stomach feels funny.

Here in Antelope county, life around us goes on almost like normal for now. For my kids, living in other places, the spread of the virus and its threat is more real.

My son in New York City has been working from home since last week. He texted us his current fear is catching cabin fever. Usually he works on the 39th floor of one of the World Trade Center buildings. Now, his “office” is his large computer monitor in his very small bedroom in his small apartment shared with two roommates. He may be working from there for the rest of the spring.

My daughter-in-law just started working from home in Minneapolis instead of in the big corporate office where she usually writes software.

My son in Pittsburgh, PA drives Lyft for a living. He wonders how long he will be able to or want to continue to drive in close quarters with strangers who may be carrying the disease. He doesn’t want to get sick, but even more urgently he doesn’t want to become a vector for the spread of Covid-19. What if he gets it from one of his passengers, and before he knows he’s sick, spreads it around the city by driving people where they need to go? But, what will he do without income?

Last spring, when Nebraska flooded, we knew what to do. We looked out for our neighbors. We did what it took to rescue strangers. People worked hard to help each other out of harm’s way, and when the devastation was done, people helped with the clean-up, comforted those who grieved and helped each other get back on their feet.

With faith in God, and trust in our neighbors, we weathered the 2020 floods.

I’m confident we’ll do the same with Covid-19. Wash your hands. Keep your distance. Cancel your gatherings and trips and celebrations. Prepare but don’t hoard. Check in on your older neighbors. Hunker down at home. It won’t be forever, but forever God is with us.

If you’re feeling unsettled by this pandemic, if social isolation leaves you feeling sad, know that your neighbors at Park Congregational United Church of Christ stand ready to care for you. You can reach out to me at beckyzmcneil@gmail.com.

Walking with Jesus

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My Column for The Elgin Review 3.4.2020

For the first 199, 900 years of human history, give or take a few, we humans traveled, at our fastest, behind good carriage horses, about twelve miles per hour. Or, when walking, somewhere around five miles per hour. It’s only been in the past 120 years since the proliferation of the automobile that traveling sixty-five or seventy miles per hour is normal.

Think of how much more information we are asking our brains to take in and process now than humans ever had to process for almost all of human history before us.

And, for the first 199,950 years of human history, give or take a few, we humans saw and took in only what was around us in the natural world, or what we read on scrolls, or, after the invention of the printing press on a printed page. It wasn’t until the 1950s that we began watching moving images every day on tv, and not until the 1990s that we began to take into our brains mega pixels of information, sometimes for hours at a time, on our computers and smart phones.

Is it any wonder so many of us feel unsettled, harried and stressed much of the time? Is it any wonder Attention Deficit Disorder is rampant in our kids? Maybe in another hundred years our human brains will have time to adapt to the amount of information now being thrown at us, but right now, our evolution hasn’t really been given much time to catch up with our inventions.

For the past 1700 years, give or take, Christians have taken forty days before Easter to give something up in order to open room in our lives to reflect on how we’re doing in relationship with God and to make whatever adjustments we recognize we need to make. This season, called Lent, seems all the more important in our modern, media driven, fast paced age.

At Park Congregational Church our theme for Lent this year is “Walking with Jesus.” In our worship services we are thinking about where Jesus walked and what Jesus did in his ministry. In addition, we are actually walking. Every week I am suggesting different ways of walking our prayers during the week.  I am encouraging folks to give up some of our hurry and our information overload to slow and notice all the things we can see and appreciate at three or four miles per hour that we miss when we’re going somewhere between twenty-five and seventy miles per hour.

Whoever you are, wherever you are on life’s journey, I encourage you to take some time every day to get away from the steady stream of information overload. I encourage you to walk somewhere, noticing as you go things you cannot notice when you’re traveling at your usual pace. If you are a follower of Jesus, I encourage you to wonder as you walk what Jesus might notice or point out to you were he walking right there with you.

You are welcome to join us in worship, as always. Last week we “walked with Jesus into the wilderness of temptation.” This coming Sunday we’ll “walk with Jesus up a mountain of encouragement.” Worship is at 9:15, ten miles west of Elgin on Hwy 70 and ½ mile south.

 

Feels like Home

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My Column for The Elgin Review 2.12.20

One day when my youngest son was nearly one, he spent over an hour trying to fit five crayons into a little crayon box from Bob Evans restaurant that had room only for three. No matter how hard Ben tried, he couldn’t get all his crayons into that box.

On my 60th birthday last week, I came home to our little Lincoln apartment after attending a conference. Beautiful red roses from Mike were waiting for me in a Rubbermaid pitcher on our tiny kitchen’s counter. After finding a vase, arranging the bouquet and making it the center piece on our dining table, I sat on the sofa surveying the humble room. My feet were resting in my husband’s lap, the flowers he’d given me were just beyond him on the table.

“My fifties were wonderful.” I said. “I have no fears about turning sixty.” After I said it, Mike and I both laughed. In the decade that was my fifties, my father died, I had cancer, we fought and lost a battle with a developer who built big buildings on the property lines of ours and our neighbor’s homes ruining our views and robbing our privacy, one of our six kids kept us awake at night with worry for a couple of years straight, we moved twice and I suffered a deep betrayal culminating in job loss and a months-long depression.

Even so, my fifties were wonderful. Ten years ago, on my birthday when friends asked if there were any hints of romance in my life, I was happy to report, “Maybe—there’s a man with whom I’ve been corresponding and we plan to meet someday soon.” That man was Mike, and just over a year later we married.

Each of us was married before. Both of us worked hard at our first marriages. After twenty-two years his first marriage ended. After nineteen, mine was done. Heartbreak and defeat, sorrow and loneliness were feelings with which we were both well-acquainted. Years later, I remember how hard Ben tried with those crayons to make work what was not going to work, no matter how long he worked at it, no matter how hard he tried. That’s the way both Mike and I worked at our first marriages. No matter how long, no matter how hard we tried, they just didn’t work.

It’s not that way this time for either of us. Together Mike and I share an easy joy. Ten years into our relationship, each of us still lights up when the other walks in the room. We wake up next to each other in bed and when he’s right there beside me as I awaken, I giggle in delight. We are kind to each other and considerate. Marriage means doing our share of the hum-drum chores and navigating holiday plans and our six kids. Sometimes we get cranky when we’re hungry or tired. But, unlike before, being together doesn’t ever feel like work. Being together feels like home. If feels like happiness and love. Being together makes easier the hard times and more manageable the challenges that are inevitably part of every life.

Some of you reading this are saying, “Yes! That’s exactly the way we feel.” Lucky you!

Some of you are longing to feel this way. May God grant you patience and peace as you wait in expectant hope.

Some of you once knew this kind of joy, and are grieving the death of your beloved. May God console you and comfort you in the warmth of your memories.

Some of you doubt relationships exist that can make even cancer, death, betrayal and rebellious teenagers pale in the brightness of your love. May you come to believe the scripture which says, “With God all things are possible.”

Happy Valentine’s Day.

Snow Angels and other prayers

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They shuffle in, the first two with hair disheveled and bad dye-jobs, locks matted from too much time in their bunks. Faded florescent pink sweats hang baggy on their tattooed frames. Younger than my boys, I guess. Twenty-two, twenty-three perhaps. Another, older, rounder, with a short-auburn bob finds her place at the end of the table, quietly pulling out her chair. The fourth carries a thick red-leather, red-letter Bible in her willowy hands and wears her hair piled on top of her head. Her granny-glasses have lenses so thick her eyes precede her into the room, reminding me of a grasshopper–a very pregnant pink grasshopper. Her stomach swells taut against her sweatshirt, revealing her inside-out belly button below. She talks without stopping to breathe. At the end of this short parade comes a slim, tall woman with curly dark hair cropped like Peter Pan’s, slouching. There’s an energy of anger pulsing just beneath the surface of her skin. A thin blue vein beneath her eye twitches in time to her heart beat. Intelligent eyes silently claim, “I don’t belong here” as she curls, like a fetus onto the rolling chair.

The women of the county jail are a motley crew.

I carry with me, on my coat and in my hair, the crisp, fresh smell of snow.

“We have snow!” I say, with the delight of the first blanketing of a season, when the crisp, cold freshness is still novel and exciting, and driving on ice and through snirt (snow mixed with dirt) hasn’t yet grown wearisome and disgusting. “It’s so pretty out there.”

Without windows, the women were unaware of the hushed beauty pillowing the landscape on the other side of the cinder blocks surrounding them.

“I love snow!”

“I wish I could see it!”

“The men may get to go outside to shovel it.”

“I’d love to see it falling from the sky.”

“I’d make a snow angel if I could.”

Five of the six of us laugh.

It is my first visit to the jail to share Bible study with the women. I didn’t know they couldn’t see the snow.

Around an oval conference table in a nondescript interior room, they tell me their stories. Meth and Crack and a parole violation. Dealing in several counties, and jail time awaiting in each one.

Grasshopper starts talking. Five babies taken away, but this one, this one, she is determined, this one, her sixth, (is she even twenty-five?) this one will be born drug-free. She’s going to give this baby the life he deserves. She knows God is with her always has been always will be she just needs to trust in Jesus and get back to church and doing what the Gospels teach and not listen to the people who are always trying to lead her astray and she may have had the other kiddos taken from her because of drugs but not this one because this time she’s getting into the Word and following the Way and she’s not messing up again no way and if the baby daddy doesn’t want to support her and wants her to get messed up again she’ll just leave this time that’s all there is to it because she knows she’s God’s precious child and so is this baby and this time it’s all going to be alright so she’s actually happy to be in jail because it means less time to be tempted to backslide and turn her back on God which she isn’t going to do this time. No way.

Bonnie weeps. When she finds her voice she says she misses her fourteen-year-old boy. She feels so guilty. She really messed up and he’s the one who’s paying the price. “A boy needs his mother. Mine really loves me.” She says. “I really messed up this time” and again she weeps.

Five of the six of us weep.

Stoney silence from Peter Pan.

We feast on stories shared from our lives and from God’s good book. Grasshopper sings, “Jesus Loves me.”

Five of the six of us sing.

Our hour draws to a close. Teeth are starting to chatter and blue goose bumps have risen on the bare thighs of the bleached blonde girl wearing prison issue pink shorts instead of sweats.

I ask how we can pray for each other. “For my boy.” “For this baby” “For my boyfriend” “For me and my court date on Wednesday.”  I ask them to pray for me and my churches and for my six kids.

Peter Pan unfolds her long limbs and uncurls her lips and for the first time speaks very quietly saying, “Pray for my daughters, they’re 16 and 17 and live in Detroit where I am a social worker with a Master’s degree. Oxycontin got me here and I want out.”

Six of the six of us pray.

I step into the blinding brightness of sunlight bouncing off freshly fallen snow.

A holy dance of longing and liberty moving me.

God Will

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My Column for The Elgin Review 1.8.20

We gathered outside the Children’s Memorial at Yad Vashem in Israel. Ezra, our tour guide, knew I had a Bible in my pocket. “Becky, read Jeremiah 31:15.” Thus says the Lord; a voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation and bitter weeping, Rachel is weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are no more.

We were in Ramah, near Jerusalem, where 2,400 years earlier Jewish mothers from all the surrounding area were forced to gather, separated from their children, to begin their sad sojourn into seventy years of captivity in Babylon. Then Ezra asked me to read the story in Matthew of Herod the King, raging mad upon hearing of the birth of a Jewish child (Jesus). Herod murdered all the Jewish babies from Bethlehem to Ramah to Jerusalem to be sure he’d done away with the one who might someday cause him trouble. The story, found right after the story of the wisemen and the star quotes the words of Jeremiah about bitter weeping in Ramah over lost children.

Inside the memorial it was dark, a hollowed-out cavern. It is circular with candles burning in its center and mirrors all around so the candles look like millions of stars reaching in all directions. Portraits of Jewish children killed in the Nazi Holocaust are projected on the walls. As our group moved in hushed solemnity, a voice read the names of every child known to have been murdered by Hitler’s regime. First name, Middle name, Last name. Age at death. Nationality. Read in Hebrew, in English and then in each child’s native tongue. It takes three months for all the names to be read out loud.

Overwhelmed, with tears streaming down my cheeks, I thought of my own sons; Adam Lawrence Zahller Brown 12 years old, American. Daniel Scott Zahller Brown, 10 years old, American. Benjamin David Zahller Brown, 9 years old. American. God, how can human beings be so cruel? How was it, that I was living in a time and place where my sons were safe, but other mother’s sons and daughters were not, are not, will not be?

Listening to the names, I wasn’t aware of the hall emptying-out. Their own mothers were not there to hear their names being spoken. I needed to listen on behalf of the parents whose beloved children were slain.

Eventually, one of the other ministers in our group touched me on my shoulder. “Becky, the rest of us are on the bus now, it’s time to go.”

I asked, “How can we leave? Who will listen to the names of the children?”

Quietly, my friend said, “God will.”

This part of the Christmas story doesn’t make it into carols, or on the front of cards. This part isn’t recounted in sweet pageants with darling children playing the parts. This part is so infrequently told, that those who make it to church only on Christmas and Easter, may not even know it exists.

Who wants to hear of a massacre of children while we’re still finding pine needles in our carpets and the candy canes haven’t all gone from our counter-tops? Who wants to think of Mary and Joseph and their little one, fleeing under the cover of darkness, alone and terrified as shouts of soldiers and cries of anguished parents pierce the silent night?

We don’t want to hear it, but we need to. Jesus’s followers need to know this story by heart. Our Savior was born poor and, though he was visited by kings, his parents had no choice but to flee in the dark of night, lest they be among the parents remaining in Ramah weeping. They were political refugees.

The story is as old as time; 2400 years ago, when the Jews were exiled to Babylon, 2000 years ago, when Herod killed the children, 75 years ago, when Jewish children were slaughtered, and today.

God hears the children’s names. God wipes the tears of the grieving parents. The question for us is will we?

Will we understand that every Jewish child growing up in this season of rising anti-Semitism is a child just like our Jesus? That every child fleeing danger and poverty who arrives on our nation’s southern border is a child just like our Jesus? Will we remember that every child in Iran, vulnerable to the whims and avarice of powerful rulers is a child just like our Jesus?

God hears the weeping in Ramah.

Will we?

Fear is a Trickster

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My Column for The Elgin Review June 26, 2019

We moved to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan when my sons were entering first, fourth and fifth grades. In Ohio where we’d lived before, my older boys walked the block and a half from our house to Lincoln Elementary School. My youngest son, because he had special needs, took a bus across town. In Michigan we lived about a mile from the boy’s school. They were, by then, old enough and easily able to walk a mile to school. I’d done it growing up in Omaha, their Dad walked to school in Cleveland and there seemed to be no reason for my boys not to do it in Michigan—except—there were no cross-walks, no crossing guards and two four lane roads between our house and the school. When I asked why not, I was told, “well, nobody walks to school anymore.”

We lived in Michigan more than a year when I began to hear why “nobody walks to school anymore.” Twenty-five years earlier, two suburbs over, there had been a kidnapping and murder of a child on his way home from school. Tens of thousands of school children had safely walked to and from school for generations before that tragedy occurred, but since then, fear of a similar crime taking place kept a whole generation of school kids from knowing the pleasures of walking to school.

Fear is a trickster. Fear is a natural and needed response, bred into us to keep us safe, but it can also be irrational. Fear can paralyze us and keep us from life’s pleasures. Fear can separate us from our neighbors. Fear can motivate us to take up arms when the arms themselves are a greater threat to us and those we love than what we were originally afraid of. Fear can deceive us into giving up our liberties and freedoms under the guise of security.

One of the more frequent admonitions in the whole of Christian Scripture is “Do not be afraid.”

The Bible was written over a span of 3400 years give or take. Those were years in which people had true and legitimate threats to their safety on a near daily basis and yet again and again the writers of the Jewish and Christian faith stories tell us, “Be not afraid.” God is with us and for us and will be with us no matter what happens in our lives. The one who created everything continues in creative love to make all situations new. No matter what, God’s love is with us. When we know that to be true, we have nothing to fear.

We need to be wise and prudent. We need to take appropriate precautions. Danger is real. Harm happens. Some people do evil things to others. But, live fully. Live boldly. Practice hospitality. Let the kiddos walk to school. Most people are kind and good and loving. Most people want to help others. Most people want the best for each other.

At Park Congregational Church everyone is always welcome. Have no fear, you are welcome here.

Home for Christmas

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My column for The Elgin Review 12.4.19

“I’ll be home for Christmas, you can count on me, please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree…” Bing Crosby’s famous song has woven its way like a ribbon around a wreath through our thoughts about Christmas. In the dark of mid-winter, we make our homes cozy with twinkling lights and evergreen branches and anticipate a Hallmark movie kind of happiness to fall like snow upon us. A blanket of white against the chill of what’s real sometimes.

Once, when my boys were little, I left them playing nicely in the family room while I ran upstairs to get something. I had gotten no further than the top of the stairs when I heard a commotion below, wailing and yelling so loud I thought the house was on fire (or something similarly dire). What I found after my mad dash down the stairs was eighteen-month-old Daniel with a death grip on two fists-full of three-year-old Adam’s hair. Dan was holding Adam hostage and banging him against the front of the sofa. “Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow.” Both boys were hollering and bellering.  It was an epic battle over a toy.

I pried open Daniel’s hands and scooped him under one arm, and scooped Adam under my other arm and carried them into the dining room where I plopped them, one and then the other, onto chairs on opposite sides of the room. When they quieted, I said, “Boys. In our family we do not hurt each other. In our family we love and protect each other.” Yeah. Right! Who was I kidding? I had just seen first-hand evidence that what I was saying was untrue. In our family the little brother took his older brother by death grips on his hair and walloped him!

Except, it was true, too. In our family we love and protect each other. In our family we were raising little boys to be the kind of men who care about and for each other inside our home, and about and for their neighbors everywhere. Time on the chairs in the dining room was a time for recalibrating relationships and remembering who we are.

Advent, the four weeks leading up to Christmas isn’t about appearances and creating lovely memories of a snow-covered, idyllic season at home. Advent, this season we are in right now, is a time to recalibrate our relationships with each other. It is a time to remember who we are, and whose we are. In the Bible, the prophet Isaiah talks about beating swords into plowshares. Advent is a season for making peace and for making right what has been wrong. It is a time to let go of the death grips we have on old resentments and bygone battles. It is time to make our hearts ready so that our homes and our lives will be places where it is clear that God lives with us here.

At Park Congregational United Church of Christ, ten miles west of Elgin on HWY 70 and ½ mile south, you are welcome to be part of a faith home where we gather every Sunday for worship at 9:15 am. Worship is when we sit a while together to recalibrate our relationships and to remember who and whose we are. All of us are welcome home with God not just for the holidays, but every day.

I love to hear from you. My email is beckyzmcneil@gmail.com

Bad God/Good God

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My Column for The Elgin Review, Elgin, NE

June 18, 2019

I was ten or eleven when my older brother mustered the courage to ask the question every kid on the Vacation Bible School bus was dying to know the answer to. “Hey, so what happened to your hand?” Our bus driver was also the preacher at our Grandma’s little church. The convenience of the bus pick-up service meant my brother and a bunch of our neighborhood friends and I all went to Grandma’s church’s VBS instead going to our own churches scattered across the city. When John asked, the bus driver stopped the bus, turned around in his seat and held up his right claw-like thumb and pinky of a hand. “Children, I’m so glad one of you asked. God did this to me.”

His story was God wanted him to be a preacher, but he didn’t want to be a preacher, so he ran away from God and went to work in a lumber yard.  God cut off his fingers so he couldn’t work there anymore, and he gave in to God’s call on his life and became a preacher. Moral to the story? —don’t mess with God or God will get you.

That’s some messed up theology!

I was just a kid, but I knew the preacher’s story about God didn’t sound at all like God who loves us. Love doesn’t chop off fingers.

Later that week my best friend, Carla and I were scooping ice cream in her kitchen and I told her about my day at Bible School. I’d been “saved” because if you got “saved” you got to go to the stage and pick out a prize. My prize was a short chapter book about a girl who was kidnapped, but because she loved Jesus, she was able to escape from the back of the trunk where she had been stuffed. Carla’s mom was in the kitchen. She said, “Becky, I don’t think that’s a good way to think about God. God doesn’t scare us into loving him. God loves us into loving him.” (God doesn’t bribe us with prizes, either).

Carla’s mom that day in her kitchen was my first theology teacher. I had good Sunday School teachers since pre-school, but Mrs. Acker was the first person who taught me to think critically about what was being said about God rather than simply absorbing a story and believing it hook, line and sinker solely because it was about God. Theology means to study, to think about the nature of God. (“Theos” –Greek for “God” and “ology”—the study of something). Theology requires of us some wrestling with God (like Jacob in the Old Testament and like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane).

Bad theology does a lot of damage. Bad theology keeps women in abusive relationships. Bad theology causes gay kids to commit suicide. Bad theology fuels racism. Bad theology combined with nationalism fuels wars. Bad theology denies science and skews priorities.

Humans are spiritual beings.  We all need to nurture our spirits. We benefit from being in relationship with God and from gathering with others to practice being together in loving community. We also owe it to God and to our neighbors to think, to wrestle with our ideas about God so that what we claim in God’s name does good instead of harm.

You are always welcome to join us at Park Congregational United Church of Christ ten miles west of Elgin and ½ mile south off of Highway 70. Worship begins at 9:15 am on Sundays.

I would love to hear from you. My email address is beckyzmcneil@gmail.com.