Following is the first installment of Mikl Cook’s Guatemala Mission Trip Journal. A team of eight Trinity members and friends–Mikl, Carole Ball, Emily Stanley, Beth Miller, Becky Stanley, Bev Luzadder, Tim Kuykendall, and Michael Kanupp–went to Guatemala last Christmas to further our congregation’s partnership with the Fuenta da Vida Church. Look for other installments, which will be posted on a regular basis over the next few weeks. Enjoy!

December 25,  2009, Midnight, Ramada Hotel Atlanta Airport

Trip to Atlanta was uneventful, group met briefly, Bev handed out group money for all to keep and give to her as needed, not safe for her to have it all on her person.  Everyone seems excited and ready to go.  We all seem to have a good sense of humor, should make the trip interesting and help us in any difficult situation.

December 26,  2009

Up at 6:00a.m., good flight, arrive in Guatemala City around 1:00p.m. Exchanged all our group and personal money at the exchange in the airport; this took about 1 hour and the eight of us are off with our massive amount of luggage.  Walked through a throng of people outside the airport, which was a little scary since we all have all this money on us, and since we just slightly stick out in this crowd. (This is an example of my sense of humor.)  Met our driver, Ovidio, who speaks not one word of English.

On the way out of Guatemala City we stop at El Pollo Campero (Guatemalan KFC).  The meal was like, well, KFC, except they had pizza, which Emily got since she is vegetarian and the cheese pizza was about the only thing fulfilling that request.  After lunch, Carole had forgotten socks, so we stopped at Hipa Paiz (Wal Mart in Guatemala). In the parking lot the van made a grinding noise and died.  After trying to restart several times and the van responding with more metal grating noises, it was obvious we were not going anywhere soon.

Ovidio spent a long time trying to repair (couple of hours) with us trying to help, pushing van around the parking lot trying to jump-start it.  Carole was getting frustrated that this was fast becoming a bad situation with the language barrier and the sunlight dwindling: these 8 Americans with all their suitcases on top of the van in the luggage rack needed to get out this parking lot before dark.

To help you understand this, I need to put my first “Observations” out the window  of the van here.  Guatemala City is a big dirty city, this part definitely not a tourist area: there are lots of walls topped with razor wire, lots of traffic and people, and armed guards at every entrance of this store and the parking lot is fenced in.  Overlooking the parking lot are raised observation towers, similar to what prisons have, with  armed guards.

While Carole was busy with Ovidio, trying to reach Presgov, rent a van, taxi, something, . . . Bev and I went towards the store and noticed a guy in a “Matt Kenseth” racing hat; he spoke some English, and Ovidio and our new friend started over again trying to fix the van. Meanwhile Bev was off to the store to try to find help, find a phonebook and rent a van; I tagged along so she would not be alone.  Once in the store Bev and I finally met a very nice man on the management staff of the store who spoke English and he helped us.  We tried a rental place first to get a van to get to the first city on our itinerary, where our reservations for the night were, but it seemed real expensive and they were trying to locate a driver. Then the man from the store said he had a friend with a van who could take us.  Meanwhile, dusk is settling in and we have to get out of here.

Our new friend in the Matt Kenseth hat has offered to take us toRetalhuleu in the back of his pickup, which was a Toyota Tacoma by the way. But at night on the road is not a safe place for tourists, and I personally don’t think the 8 of us could have fit in that truck, let alone our luggage and for a two hour trip, no less.  Carole made the decision with Bev to have the man’s friend come with his van and take us back to Guatemala City for the night.  As the last few rays of sunlight left the sky, our new best friend  arrived, we loaded up, and were on the way to the “Spring Hotel.”  The hotel had a beautiful open courtyard filled with tropical plants.  Rooms sparse, but clean, with a shower; we were grateful to be safe, our first challenge overcome.  Dinner was pizza from Pizza Hut; we shared some cuervas together and off to bed.

My first animal experience was here also, as a calico gotti was in the courtyard. And yes, a cat will eat a piece of pizza when it is hungry.  By the way, Carole did get her socks.

–Mikl Cook

Rabbi Philip Bentley returns to Trinity beginning this Sunday, Feb. 21, for a Lenten series on the Psalms. Often, when we think of the disciplines of Lent, we think of “giving something up.” Another way to approach Lent is to “take something on,” and certainly the study of Scripture is an area in which we can all benefit from a renewed sense of focus and purpose. Make plans to join us for Rabbi Bentley’s series of Psalm studies; we’re sure to receive fresh insights into God’s Word. Here’s the schedule of classes:

• Feb. 21, Psalm 91
• March 7, Psalm 27
• March 14, Psalm 32
• March 21, Psalm 126
• March 28, Psalm 22

Please join us on these Sunday mornings at 9:45.

–Dwight Christenbury

Haiti’s past history is not a happy one, though its present is of course even worse. Because of this, you may have heard loud voices in American society suggesting that we waste our money when we give it to Haitians or organizations that are trying to help Haitians.

So: does outside help for Haiti do any good? This morning, I came across a helpful piece by the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, entitled “Some Frank Talk about Haiti.” Mr. Kristof addresses the following questions:

• Why is Haiti so poor? Is it because Haitians are dimwitted or incapable of getting their act together?
• Can our billions in aid to Haitians accomplish anything? After all, a Wall Street Journal column argues, “To help Haiti, end foreign aid.”
• So, is Haiti hopeless? Is Bill O’Reilly right? He said: “Once again, we will do more than anyone else on the planet, and one year from today Haiti will be just as bad as it is right now.”

Mr. Kristof’s answer, in short, is that there is indeed hope for Haiti and that we should continue to provide assistance. Now, as you may be aware, he comes from a particular perspective–but this piece struck me as even-handed and well-informed. Check it out, and see what you think.

—Dwight Christenbury

Today is the U.S. holiday that commemorates the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. One not-well-known fact about Dr. King’s life and work—a fact that should hold some particular interest for Presbyterians in these parts (western North Carolina)—is that Dr. King spoke at Montreat Conference Center in the summer of 1965, shortly after the Watts riots. A couple of years ago, the conference center played the audiotape of his address on the evening of the 2008 King holiday for folks, myself included, who happened to be attending a youth ministry conference that was going on at the time.

***

Dr. King’s speech, delivered in Montreat’s Anderson Auditorium on the afternoon of 21 August 1965, was obviously one he had delivered many times, but it was no less powerful for that. It contained many of the famous lines—we might call them sound bites—for which Dr. King is remembered:

• “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
• “Time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. . . . Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. . . . We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right.”
• And the stirring peroration: “. . . This will be a great day. It will not be the day of the white man; it will not be the day of the black man; it will be the day of man as man. And this will be the day that all over this great nation, all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Catholics and Protestants, will be able to join hands and sing, in the words of the old Negro spritual, ‘Free at last, free at last; thank God almighty, we are free at last!’”

What’s so interesting and powerful about hearing these famous lines in the context of an hour-long speech, though, is that you realize they were more than sound bites—that they were in fact tightly linked building blocks in an amazingly tightly constructed argument.

The address had three major parts: (i) a call for an end to racial segregation; (ii) a deconstruction of racial prejudice; and (iii) a defense of social action—an emphasis on the here and now rather than on the great hereafter—by Christian churches. Indeed, running through all three parts of the speech was a call for the church to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem—no small thing, and certainly not a proposition that Dr. King or anyone else in 1965 could have taken for granted. (It’s also notable that Dr. King clearly felt that the church did in fact have the power to make a difference in society, whether for good or evil—not necessarily something that we might assume in our “postmodern” context, forty-three years later.)

Dr. King concluded by building and sharing a vision of the “beloved community,” grounded in love of enemies and an embrace of the philosophy of nonviolent resistance (a particularly salient point in light of Watts). Hearing Dr. King’s elaboration on the concept of nonviolence was another reminder of how we today may not understand his ideas and his approach as well as we might think, for this nonviolence was in no way passivity or weakness or submission—rather, it was both strategy and tactic, and it was aggressive in an entirely countercultural way: you can beat us up, but we’re going to keep loving you until we wear you down.

***

And so there we were, on that King holiday in 2008, a bunch of privileged (mostly white) people, conscious, thanks to a lecture we’d all heard earlier in the day, of how little we’d accomplished so far in our lives, in a conference room with the lights turned down low, listening to the scratchy, somewhat muffled audio record of a piece of history that too many of us think of as, well, history. But it’s history that happened in the month when I was born I was born, in the state where I was born, in a room whose toilets I’ve scrubbed—and to my mind, at least, those elements of closeness brought those events out of history’s fog, if only for a day.

—Dwight Christenbury

Presbyterian Disaster Assistance (PDA) has issued an emergency appeal for Haiti, where millions of people have been affected by a major earthquake that struck the country on Tuesday, January 12. PDA is rushing an initial $100,000 from One Great Hour of Sharing and designated funds to help provide immediate emergency relief to the affected people. Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) mission co-worker Carlos Cardenas is joining an ecumenical team through the Action by Churches Together (ACT) Alliance going to Haiti to help with the response and needs assessments.

To stay informed about the situation in Haiti and to support PDA’s efforts, go to PDA’s website (follow the link to the PDA account designated specifically for relief in Haiti). If you don’t have Internet access or would prefer not to give online, write a check made out to Trinity Presbyterian Church, designating on the check that it is for “Haiti PDA relief DR000064.”

–Dwight Christenbury

The following sermon was delivered on Dec. 13, 2009, at Trinity’s 8:45 worship service. Because no audio recording was made, the text of the sermon is reproduced here:

There are no known original Bible manuscripts in existence. The Bible as we know it has been pieced together from hundreds of hand-copied manuscripts and fragments dating often from centuries after the books were actually written. Obviously, these many ancient sources don’t match up in every way, so figuring out the original authors’ intentions is a big job.

When faced with two ancient manuscripts of the same biblical passage that differ in some way or another, one rule of thumb that modern Bible scholars turn to in order to determine which version is likely to be the most accurate is that the more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one (a translation of the sermon title, proclivi scriptioni praestat ardua, according to Bart Ehrman in Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why [New York: HarperCollins, 2005], p. 111). Here’s why: scribes, the people who made those handwritten copies of biblical texts, would sometimes change those texts in an attempt to improve them. If they saw something that they took to be a mistake, they would try to correct it. If they saw two accounts of a story told differently, they would try to harmonize them. If they came across an idea that ran contrary to their theological opinions, they would change it to make it more palatable (Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 111).

The U.N.C. religion professor and Bible scholar Bart Ehrman gives the example of Mark 1.41: when a leper comes to Jesus begging to be healed, according to most English Bible versions, Jesus is “moved with pity” and he heals the man. Professor Ehrman notes, however, that the very oldest surviving manuscripts of Mark say that Jesus was not “moved with pity” but instead “became angry.” Professor Ehrman believes that later scribes reproducing Mark’s gospel changed Jesus’s anger to pity because pity made more sense to them, and that we have been left all these years later with Bibles that don’t say what Mark originally wrote (Ehrman, Misquoting Jesus, p. 133f). The more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one—remember that rule of thumb as we turn to John the Baptist.

*               *               *

Would you have been among the crowds streaming down to the Jordan to be baptized by John? Try for a moment to transport yourself back two thousand years and across the world to ancient Israel. Imagine that you are a faithful “mainline” Jew living in one of the towns or cities, maybe even Jerusalem, in the region surrounding the Jordan valley. You hear about this prophet, this preacher, this “John the baptizer” who’s attracting crowds along the river bank. Would you go?

The answer would probably at least partly depend on whether you considered this man John to be a true or false prophet. How would you decide? Well, consider for a moment John’s words to the crowds:

“Brood of snakes! What do you think you’re doing slithering down here to the river? Do you think a little water on your snakeskins is going to deflect God’s judgment? It’s your life that must change, not your skin. And don’t think you can pull rank by claiming Abraham as ‘father.’ Being a child of Abraham is neither here nor there—children of Abraham are a dime a dozen. God can make children from stones if he wants. What counts is your life. Is it green and blossoming? Because if it’s deadwood, it goes on the fire.” (Paraphrase of Luke 3.7–9 by Eugene Peterson in The Message.)

How’s that for a little Christmas cheer? But remember: the more difficult reading is preferable to the easier one. John tells no one what they want to hear, but what they need to hear.

*               *               *

Two millennia and light years apart in culture, it’s hard to say what our equivalent to a John the Baptist would be. If there were someone preaching and prophesying and baptizing in the French Broad, chances are none of us in this room would go—we’d probably hear about him on the local T.V. news, shake our heads or laugh out loud, and go about our lives.

Is there a modern-day American equivalent to John the Baptist, even if only in terms of comparable popular impact? Some might see a Rick Warren or a Joel Osteen in that role; others might think long and hard but come up empty. To find someone with a truly society-wide impact who is also a religious figure, you’d probably have to go back to Martin Luther King, Jr., or perhaps Billy Graham.

Then again, given that Palestine in John’s day was a bit of a backwater as far as its place in the Roman Empire was concerned, maybe we need instead to think smaller than a society-wide scale. Maybe our John the Baptists are Barbara Nagy (a Presbyterian medical missionary to Malawi) or our Trinity team that’s preparing to go to Guatemala. Maybe I’m John the Baptist. Maybe each of you is a John the Baptist as you go about your day and interact with the world around  you. Maybe the church, even this one, is called to be John the Baptist to the world out there—whether or not that world comes streaming down to our river bank.

But if so, do we prefer the more difficult words, or the easy ones? Do we tell the story that the world wants to hear, or the story that the world needs to hear? Do we take the easy way, or the hard way?

Fred Craddock tells of a recurring childhood experience:

I lived near a railroad track as a boy, and I remember a number of mornings getting awake, getting up, going into the kitchen to get some breakfast, and there’d be a strange, ugly looking, poorly dressed man at the table eating—just eating away, eating away. And when he left, I would say, “Mom, who was that?”

She’d say, “Well, his name was Henry, and he said he was hungry.”

“Well, where’d he come from?”

“He came down the railroad tracks.”

People called them hobos. They walked the tracks begging, maybe stealing, getting what they could to stay alive. They’d stop by our house, and there, sitting in the kitchen eating what we had to eat, just eating it like they’d never have another meal. And I’d say, “Mama, weren’t you scared?”

She said, “He’s hungry.”

“Well, I was scared of him!”

“Well, he was hungry.” (Craddock Stories [St. Louis: Chalice, 2001], p. 109)

Young Fred, perhaps like the crowds streaming down to the Jordan, was looking for comfort and joy; his mother, like John the Baptist, reminded him that they couldn’t really be comfortable as long as Henry was hungry.

*               *               *

Christmas is a beautiful time of year, and the story of Christmas is a beautiful story. But Advent is not only about the beauty—Advent tells a story that has some hard words. Christmas is about a bright star rising in the east, and that’s a story that we never need to stop hearing. But Advent, while pointing to that star much as John pointed to Jesus, reminds us that life struggles on, even in the midst of the season’s comfort and joy; Advent reminds us that the star in the east is surrounded by the darkness of a night sky.

Thanks be to God that God is with us, both in the light and in the darkness.

—Dwight Christenbury

Following is Fred Van Itallie’s thoughtful and honest reflection on life at Trinity, given on 25 October 2009 as part of Trinity’s Stewardship campaign:

“This year’s stewardship campaign asks us to focus on “Your Response to God’s Generosity.” So let me offer you a few insights into how you might go about answering this “knock on the door” of our hearts.

“First, I must tell you where I am coming from. Jesus, and through him, the Church have been a part of my life for nearly all my life. It has not been always a walk in the park—rather sometimes a pilgrimage through a dark forest.

“He has led me through some strange and wonderous times and rescued me countless times, often from myself and my own shortcomings. He asks for nothing in return but love.

“He has given me friends who have supported me in dark times and strength to endure hardship. Still he asks for nothing in return but love.

“His love is a hardship, too. Sometimes, it seems he loves those I don’t like and wonders why I don’t love them, too. But he forgives me and asks for nothing in return but love.

“He led me to this church over 30 years ago. Sometimes it was very hard and painful to be a member, but his sweetness persisted and I still rejoice with songs of praise each Sunday for all that he has done.

“So, what do I give to the one who loves me so much that he gives me every blessing of peace and purpose, yet asks for only love in return?

“That, friends, is the question. You won’t find it in your checkbook, but in your heart. Praise the Lord!”

—Fred Van Itallie

It’s November 2009, which means that Trinity’s experiment with monthly Taizé prayer services has been going on for just over a year. Chances are, you haven’t yet attended a Taizé service—and with that in mind, here are the Top 10 Reasons Why It’s Time for You to Give Taizé a Try:

10. Lots of candles really do add to the sensory experience of worship.

9. There’s no sermon.

8. We can do neat things with the Sanctuary’s lighting, focusing on the table and creating a small circle of light for worshipers to gather in.

7. It’s an opportunity to meet new people, as some of our most faithful Taizé worshipers are not Trinity members.

6. Our Taizé service is a welcome time of peace and quiet to help us prepare for the week ahead.

5. The lovely Taizé music would sound even better with more people singing.

4. Trinity’s beautiful sanctuary is a different kind of beautiful in the late afternoon.

3. Our Taizé service is “alternative worship” that isn’t watered down or narrowly focused on a particular “target” group.

2. It’s an opportunity to engage in communal prayer and individual prayer, all at the same time.

1. God’s Spirit is present in the silence.

See you at the next Taizé prayer service: Sunday, November 8, 5:00 p.m.!

—Dwight Christenbury

In case you missed it, a powerful and moving (and even humorous) prayer was delivered at today’s inauguration of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth President of the United States—the benediction pronounced by the Rev. Joseph Lowery (you may recognize the first paragraph as the words of James Weldon Johnson’s great hymn Lift Every Voice and Sing, which, yes, was sung last Sunday at Trinity):

“God of our weary years, God of our silent tears, thou who has brought us thus far along the way; thou who has by thy might led us into the light, keep us forever in the path, we pray, lest our feet stray from the places, our God, where we met thee, lest our hearts, drunk with the wine of the world, we forget thee. Shadowed beneath thy hand may we forever stand—true to thee, O God, and true to our native land.

“We truly give thanks for the glorious experience we’ve shared this day. We pray now, O Lord, for your blessing upon thy servant, Barack Obama, the 44th president of these United States, his family and his administration. He has come to this high office at a low moment in the national and, indeed, the global fiscal climate. But because we know you got the whole world in your hand, we pray for not only our nation, but for the community of nations. Our faith does not shrink, though pressed by the flood of mortal ills.

“For we know that, Lord, you’re able and you’re willing to work through faithful leadership to restore stability, mend our brokenness, heal our wounds and deliver us from the exploitation of the poor or the least of these and from favoritism toward the rich, the elite of these.

“We thank you for the empowering of thy servant, our 44th president, to inspire our nation to believe that, yes, we can work together to achieve a more perfect union. And while we have sown the seeds of greed—the wind of greed and corruption—and even as we reap the whirlwind of social and economic disruption, we seek forgiveness and we come in a spirit of unity and solidarity to commit our support to our president by our willingness to make sacrifices, to respect your creation, to turn to each other and not on each other.

“And now, Lord, in the complex arena of human relations, help us to make choices on the side of love, not hate; on the side of inclusion, not exclusion; tolerance, not intolerance.

“And as we leave this mountaintop, help us to hold on to the spirit of fellowship and the oneness of our family. Let us take that power back to our homes, our workplaces, our churches, our temples, our mosques, or wherever we seek your will.

“Bless President Barack, First Lady Michelle. Look over our little, angelic Sasha and Malia.

“We go now to walk together, children, pledging that we won’t get weary in the difficult days ahead. We know you will not leave us alone, with your hands of power and your heart of love.

“Help us then, now, Lord, to work for that day when nation shall not lift up sword against nation, when tanks will be beaten into tractors, when every man and every woman shall sit under his or her own vine and fig tree, and none shall be afraid; when justice will roll down like waters and righteousness as a mighty stream.

“Lord, in the memory of all the saints who from their labors rest, and in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right.

“Let all those who do justice and love mercy say amen.”

—Dwight Christenbury

[Welcome! This post refers to a previous post, "Blogging Calvin (Yes, Really!)," from 31 December 2008, which describes a plan for reading John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion in one year.]

What’s the point, you might well ask, of reading Calvin’s nearly-five-hundred-year-old Institutes of the Christian Religion? Isn’t it out of date? Haven’t the world and the church changed too much for Calvin to be all that relevant any more? Isn’t it almost idolatrous for us to let one man’s views shape everything we believe?

Well, Calvin himself had a ready answer to the question, “Why read the Institutes?” He believed that it would help the reader to better understand and interpret the Bible:

“Although Holy Scripture contains a perfect doctrine, to which one can add nothing, . . . yet a person who has not much practice in it has good reason for some guidance and direction, to know what he ought to look for in it, in order not to wander hither and thither, but to hold to a sure path. . . . Perhaps the duty of those who have received from God fuller light than others is to help simple folk . . . to find the sum of what God meant to teach us in his Word” (”Subject Matter of the Present Work,” p. 6).

(Calvin, as you can probably tell, seems to have had a healthy ego; he tries to be modest from time to time and to ascribe the credit for his brilliance to God, but he often doesn’t bother. For instance, while he “would shrink from seeming to appraise [his] work too highly,” he promises nevertheless that “it can be a key to open a way for all children of God into a good and right understanding of Holy Scripture” ["Subject Matter," p. 7].)

Still, questions of relevance (or at least questions of priorities for busy people) are legitimate; for what it’s worth, here are my answers to such questions:

• Isn’t Calvin out of date? Yes. And no. . . .
• Haven’t the world and the church changed too much for Calvin to be all that relevant any more? Yes, both the world and the church have changed: in matters of science, for example, we’ve long since learned that many of Calvin’s assumptions about the universe and the natural world are not valid; and the church has abandoned some of Calvin’s theological ideas as well. But it’s important that we know where we’ve come from, and in fact the foundational system of belief that Calvin lays out still applies for those of us who consider ourselves Reformed Christians.
• Isn’t it almost idolatrous for us to let one man’s views shape everything we believe? It certainly would be, but Calvin (healthy ego and all) doesn’t claim to be infallible–and even if he did, there’s no reason why we need to consider him infallible. We should read Calvin to learn, not to be indoctrinated. How ever archaic, outdated, and quaint Calvin may seem, he was indisputably brilliant, and it’s good practice for us to wrestle with well-reasoned arguments and ideas, even if we ultimately reject some of them.
• What’s the point of reading the Institutes of the Christian Religion? In some ways, it’s like the familiar question asked of mountain climbers: Why climb it? Because it’s there!

And a final thought: We may choose a church because our friends go there, because we like the architecture of the building, or because our ancestors went there, but these reasons are not ultimately the reasons that different churches exist. Different Christian denominations exist because different ideas about God, about the world, about the Bible, and about the church exist. Whether you’ve been a Presbyterian all your life, for two weeks, or never, isn’t it worth knowing something about what, for better or for worse, makes us Presbyterians distinctive?

—Dwight Christenbury