I’m an introverted person. One of the distinctive marks of an introvert is that they don’t mind going to a restaurant and asking for a table for one. Don’t get me wrong, I love eating and being with people. I love a good dinner party, or going out to eat with friends. I also enjoy a meal by myself. I enjoy the calmness of a table for one. There are no social expectations, no awkward silences. There might be a book, or a crossword puzzle, or a legal pad and a pen.
I enjoy a table for one. It can be a space for reflection, meditation, or even prayer. Sometimes though, it is not…
God “prepares a table before me in the presence of my enemies,” reads Psalm 23. What if it is a table for one?
What if the enemy is within?
I’ve sat with myself on dark and lonely nights.
What if the enemy is my own apathy?
I’ve walked by pain, turned a blind eye to the suffering of my neighbor.
What if the enemy is my own comfort?
I’ve chosen to settle for the inertia of inaction over disrupting the status quo.
What if the enemy is my own pride?
I’ve avoided the one that hurt me. I’ve held onto bitterness, even when the taste in my mouth was too much to bear.
What if the enemy is my own fear?
I’ve walked away from persecution, and participated in unjust systems for fear of the wrath would be turned onto me.
So Jesus, what then?
You tell me to love my enemies. Am I to love my enemy when the enemy is looking back at me in the mirror?
I know the answer. I’ve sat at that table before. Still, God meets me there.
I sit at the table in the presence of my enemy, and can only confess to my God and myself the times I have fallen short. I sit with myself and have no choice but to forgive, so I may be forgiven. I sit at my table for one and am confronted with the profound absurdity of the gospel. There is good news in sitting at the table for one.
There is confession. There is forgiveness. There is grace. There is bread for me to eat, and a cup overflowing. There is oil being poured out on my head with such exuberance and abundance it seems shocking. There at the table for one I learn that goodness and mercy are following me. No, they are doing more than following me. They are pursuing me. Actively, purposefully, God is pursuing me.
Goodness and mercy are pursuing me, even when I flee. Goodness and mercy are pursuing me, even when my apathy and my comfort and my pride and my fear seem to get the best of me. God is pursuing me, and sometimes it is only at a table for one that I pause long enough to sense it.
Here are the final results of the First Annual Fat Pastor/Pulpit Fiction Virtual Run to Bethlehem. The results were originally announced on the Pulpit Fiction podcast. Here are the final entries, from Thanksgiving Day until Epiphany. Our orginal goal was to compile 107 miles, which is the distance between Nazareth and Bethlehem. We reached that goal in about two weeks, so we extended a challenge goal. We decided to go, as the Holy Family did in the Gospel of Matthew, all the way to Egypt. We decided that 333 miles would be our second goal. Since we extended the distance, we also extended the time frame to include Epiphany. As a group, we completed 255 miles. This was enough to go from Nazareth to Bethlehem and back, but not enough to escape Herod.
23 different people made a total of 67 entries in our Advent Run. There were entries from 14 different states plus London, England.
I was barely able to participate. I ran in a 5-mile Turkey Trot on Thanksgiving Day. The next day I had a 103 fever, and wasn’t well until January.
I’ve gotten back into running now, but I’m hoping next year I’ll be able to participate more fully in our Advent Run.
My wife has a part-time job, and my hours are very flexible. This means I spend a lot of time with my two daughters during daytime hours. We go to restaurants, grocery stores, nursing homes, and the office.
Both of my daughters are adorable and engaging. They smile and wave at people. They tell people things like, “Your shirt is pretty.” This means that I have many conversations with strangers that I otherwise would not have.
Usually this is quite fun. I like meeting new people, and I love how my girls brighten people’s day. There is one conversation though, that gets on my nerves. On a fairly regular basis, someone will ask me something like, “Are you babysitting today?”
Once I actually said, “No. I’m her Dad.” The woman looked at me a little puzzled, as if I didn’t understand her question.
What I wanted to say was:
“No. I’m not a babysitter. A babysitter is someone who occasionally watches a child, often for money. A babysitter has temporary hours, and goes home. I am her Daddy. I cut her umbilical cord and handed her to her mother. I never breast fed her, but I spent many long nights holding and feeding her. There were a few months when there was no one on earth that could put her to sleep faster than me. I changed diapers, wiped butts, and cleaned up puke. I was at the helm of The Great Poopy Disaster of 2011. The last time she had a stomach virus, the only place she wanted to sit was my lap. I had to change shirts twice. I once got a little bit of her poop in my mouth.
“I made up a song about how strong and smart she is, and sing it to her at night after carrying her to bed. Every morning before she gets out of bed to start school, I hold her. I hold her and I pray for her and I kiss her sleepy head. I know that in my arms she is safe, and I contemplate just staying there safe and warm forever. Every morning we eventually get up, I cook her breakfast, pack her lunch, and kiss her goodbye when her ride gets here. I send her into the world and pray to God that I sent her with enough love to get her through the day.
“I can make a pretty tight pony tail, paint a pretty neat fingernail, and I’ve taught her how to catch and throw a softball. She’s my doctor, my hairstylist, and my makeup artist. Sometimes she picks out my tie.
“We built a Lego Jabba’s Palace, and we’re working on the Rancor Pit. I’m currently leading the best-of-101 game Stanley Cup air hockey series 23-17. I took her to her first hockey game, her first Major League baseball game, her first ballet, and we have already set a date for December 18, 2015.
“The last snow day we had together, we turned on the TV a total of zero times. I help her with homework, and taught her M&M math. She told me when a boy hurt her feelings at school, and when her best friend was mean to her. She has wiped many tears on my shirt. My kisses work to heal boo-boos.
“I’ve messed up plenty. I’ve been the cause of more of those tears than I wish to admit. I get too angry over little things. I get frustrated because she just won’t listen. I wonder why she doesn’t seem to understand the phrase, “you need to hurry up.” Sometimes I’m too busy, or too tired, or too selfish. I’m not a perfect Dad, but by the grace of God I’m trying to be. She teaches me everyday about the power of grace and forgiveness. Being their Dad is the greatest, and most important thing I’ll ever do.
“So no, I’m not babysitting. I’m her Dad.”
But usually I just say, “Yeah, Mom is working. Aren’t I lucky?”
This is not a health food. This is not the part of any balanced diet. This is quick, simple, and cheap. It could be good for a party around a certain American sporting event. The author of this tasty little open-faced sandwich is my Mom’s best friend, Barb (you can read about her here). Lacking a name for her concoction, our families looked to the name of our beloved hometown, Schaumburg, Illinois. The Schaumburger was born, but if you happen to know someone from Schaumburg who isn’t a part of our family, don’t bother asking them what a “Schaumburger” is. They’ll have no idea.
Three pounds of ground meat. Ground turkey would probably work, but we almost always used ground beef. Tonight I mixed two pounds of ground beef and one pound of a friend’s ground deer.
One pound of Velveeta cheese. This has to be the hardest stuff in the grocery store to find. There are usually three places the store keeps cheese. It’s in none of them. That should be a clue. I always take forever looking for this stuff, I should probably learn to find something else.
One can mushrooms. I usually hate it when recipes use “can” as a unit. The amount here is purely your taste. Tonight I used a 13.25 oz. can
One 6 oz. can of tomato paste.
English Muffins
Instructions: Brown the meat. Season with salt, pepper, and garlic salt. Drain. Turn down heat. Cube the cheese, melt into the meat. Add the tomato paste and mushrooms. Once it’s all melted together, spread it on an english muffin and cook in a broiler. Let the meat darken and the muffin will get crispy.
Just so you know, there will probably be leftovers. It makes about 12-15 open-faced sandwiches. When its cold, it kind of looks like dog food, but it heats up really easily.
Results: One daughter loved it. The other, not so much.
The kids had to fill out the full menu before being served. The plate of Jello-O, spaghetti, pudding, and animal crackers with no utensils provided a lot of laughs.
Last week we celebrated my daughter’s seventh birthday with a Mystery Menu Dinner Party. It was a huge hit, and parents have been asking me about details of the party, so I thought I’d share.
The concept of a mystery dinner party is simple, and can be adapted in a lot of different ways. Each guest is seated and given a menu. Before anything is served, they have to order every item in a three-course meal. In the kitchen, I had prepared 9 foods that most kids enjoy.
Macaroni and cheese
Spaghetti
Pizza
Garlic bread
Gold fish crackers
Corn
Jell-O
Pudding with cake
Animal crackers
As you can see, all of this food is easy to make and pretty popular with kids. The trick of the meal though, is in the ordering. Guests have to order everything – including utensils. We provided drinks, napkins, and a plate for each course. The knife, fork, and spoon were added to the menu. Then, all 12 items were given code names. Macaroni and cheese became “Yellow elbows.” A fork was “Farmer’s tool.” Spaghetti, corn, and Jell-O were “Wigglies, nibblies, and jigglies,” respectively.
Each guest had to fill out the entire three-course menu at the start, so the kids were surprised by what they would get for each course. Since even the utensils were a mystery, this caused some pretty good hi-jinks.
Since most of my daughters’ friends are pretty well-behaved, well-mannered kids, I had to tell them this right before we served the first course, “Today you are allowed to eat with your hands. You might make a mess. That’s okay. You can have as many napkins as you want. It is likely that sometime tonight you will get a plate of food with no fork. The point of the dinner is to have fun, so if you are really unhappy with what you have, we can give you a fork. We just want everyone to have fun, and be silly.”
These were the first two plates served of the first course.
During our party, one little girl’s third course was a plate of goldfish crackers, a knife, a fork, and a spoon. That gives you an idea of what her other courses were. She had a blast. Another boy struggled to scoop up his Jell-O with a butter knife. His giggling didn’t make it any easier. One little girl told her Mom afterwards, “We got to eat with our fingers!” Her Mom told me she couldn’t stop talking about the party for the rest of the night.
Really, there are no limits to what is possible. The hardest part of the night was the actual plating. With just my wife and me, it took a little while to plate all 10 kids. Another helper or two would have been good. There are great opportunities to adapt the menu for themes like Halloween, Superheroes, or Christmas. I’m considering coming up with an adult version – with the right friends.
I did not create this, but I think it is a great explanation of the difference between justice and equality. I think you could replace the captions with “Fair” and “Just” too.
Tonight it was -8 degrees. The windchill is -27. So I put a pot of water on to boil, took it outside, and threw it up into the air. Most of it turned to snow before it hit the ground. I got a face full of snow, but it was boiling water a moment before it hit me. Kind of trippy. I never thought I’d have to type these words on my blog but please, don’t try this at home.
11 ways to #BeChristInChristmas – I’m glad this was my most-read post. It was also the one I shared the most on pages like The Christian Left. I was a little disappointed that they never shared it. The Christian Left has over 150,000 followers on Facebook, so when they share something, it has a dramatic affect. When they shared my Happy Holidays post in 2010, I had more traffic in one day than I usually have in three months.
Memorial Day Liturgy – Written in 2010, this page spikes twice every year. Thanks largely to The Text This Week, where many worship planners go looking for material to use in worship.
2013 Mascot Bracket – A Fat Pastor tradition, the Mascot Bracket is one of my favorite, and most time-consuming, blogs to write every year. It also gets shared beyond my normal audience, which is nice. Readers usually learn something, and hopefully get a chuckle or two along the way.
Veterans’ Day – I have to thank Jenee Woodard at The Text This Week for the high traffic of all my liturgies. This is another one that I wrote a few years ago, but has staying power because it is a link on http://textweek.com.
Maundy Thursday Liturgy – I wrote this liturgy for Maundy Thursday in 2012. It works for Good Friday as well.
40 Notes in 40 Days – Inspired by Rethink Church’s 40 Photos in Lent, I decided to work on developing relationships by writing 40 hand written notes though Lent. I don’t think I was able to write all 40, but I did a lot of them. Nearly 9 months later, I’ve had people tell me what a blessing this activity was in their life.
Take up something for Lent – Written in 2011, this was the outline of an Ash Wednesday sermon. I think it has resonated with people that felt their tradition of giving up something for Lent had lost its meaning.
2012 Mascot Bracket – I find it funny that this was so popular in 2013, but a lot of the traffic comes from those searching for images of mascots I used in the post.
Yo mama’s so nice – Written in 2009, this was really a collaborative effort of a group of pastors bored at a conference. We started telling Yo Mama jokes in a skype chat room. This one has endured because of Google searches. Every day there are a number of people that search something like “nice momma jokes.”
Looking at this list it is clear that I owe a good amount of traffic to people coming here from The Text This Week. It might be time for me to make a donation. It really is a remarkable resource. It makes me very happy to think that some of the prayers and liturgies I have written have not only been read online, but used in worship in churches across the country.
Only three of my posts that I wrote this year were in this top 10 list, but five of the next six most popular were all written in 2013 (Slow Cooker Pulled-Pork, Rape-Prevention Checklist, ABCs of Christmas, Why I’m rooting for the 49ers, and Prayer for the scariest room in the school). Next, I’ll go through my posts written in 2013, and pick my favorite 10. I’m wondering though, if any readers have a favorite.
Matthew 2:11 – “On entering the house, they saw the child with Mary his mother; and they knelt down and paid him homage. Then, opening their treasure chests, they offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh.”
Upon this verse, much folk theology has been built. The story of the wise men, or magi, or astrologers, coming to visit Mary is an important part of our cultural understanding of Jesus’ birth. One thing needs to be clear, despite the beautiful song set to tune of Greensleeves, they were not kings. There isn’t really a reason to believe there were three of them. There were three different gifts, but no where does it number the men. I don’t bring this up to make any grand theological point other than to remind us of how often we read into Scripture, and how difficult it can be to unpack centuries of tradition.
Many legends, song, and art has been built around these mysterious men with their gifts. Almost all of it is speculation. The traditional interpretation of the gifts is spelled out pretty well by this Yahoo Voices article. It goes something like this:
Gold: A gift for royalty, acknowledging that Jesus was of a Royal line.
Frankincense: An expensive incense that was burned as a part of worship in The Temple. This signifies Jesus’ divinity.
Myrrh: An expensive oil used for perfume. According to this explanation, myrrh was most commonly used among wealthy Jews as an anointing oil for the dead. Thus, the myrrh is seen as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death and a reminder of his mortality.
While this explanation fits nicely into popular modern Christian theology, I’m not sure it really has any historic merit. For instance, how would the strangers from the East have known Jewish ritual customs of the Temple? And it doesn’t say that they worshiped him as a deity. Instead, they “paid him homage.” Also, isn’t every baby mortal? Why would anyone need to be reminded that a king will someday die? According to Cecil Adams of The Straight Dope, at one time Frankincense was the most valuable commodity on earth. It was also used as an eyeliner by Egyptians. Not much symbolic value there.
I’ve never been one to go deep into this explanation. I figure it has legs enough without me. This year however, I found another explanation of the gifts.
Frankincense and myrrh have been used for medicinal purposes for over 5,000 years in places like India and Saudi Arabia. I do not pretend to know anything about their effectiveness. There are several websites that you can find with articles extolling the virtues of these ancient oils and resins. What you and I think about their effectiveness in healing though, is inconsequential. What seems clear is that men from the East might have understood these two gifts to have medicinal value.
Mary gave birth to a son. Though we often sing “Silent Night,” anyone that has been anywhere near the birth of a child knows that there is nothing silent about the experience. Giving birth is a messy and dangerous. Today a mother dies in childbirth once every two minutes. In many parts of the world, it is the most dangerous thing a woman can do. According to the Lukan account, Mary gave birth in a stable, surrounded by animals, with no midwife. She gave birth in what we would be considered, even then, deplorable conditions. I’ve written before that the unnamed miracle of Christmas is that Mary survived.
What I have not noticed before this year, is that the reason she survived might have come in the gifts presented to Jesus by the magi.
To a modern reader, the gifts of the Magi seem strange and impractical. To explain these peculiar gifts, many have placed dubious symbolic meanings on them. Instead, I feel it much more likely that these gifts were extremely practical. Notice that Matthew says that the magi “Saw the child with Mary his mother, and then knelt down…”. These gifts might have saved Mary, and indirectly Jesus himself.
We would be good to take note that Mary’s “Baby Shower” was an act of valuing the life of a woman. Though Mary gets the short end of the stick through much of the book of Matthew, this act of gift-giving is a reminder of how important a mother is to a child.
This Epiphany, my church is remembering the gifts of the Magi by having a “Baby Shower for Mary.” The youth of our church are baking cookies, brownies, and muffins. We are putting up cheesy paper decorations, and playing a few silly baby games. All have been invited to bring a gift in honor of Mary. People will bring diapers, onesies, blankets, socks, lotions, shampoos, and more. All of the gifts will be brought to the Crisis Pregnancy Center, which helps women in need. They operate a clothes closet for infants, and are in constant need of the expensive needs of a newborn.
This small act of mercy might help a mother care for her child. I’m hoping that in time, we can do more than give gifts to the Center. I’m hoping that we can develop a relationship with them, providing mentors, support, and classes. This is just a first step toward helping children and mothers in our area.
Like the Magi so long ago, we may pay homage to the newborn King by making sure his mother survives. There are other things we can do for mothers worldwide. The Healthy Families, Healthy Planet project raises awareness about the need to support international family planning and maternal health initiatives. It is an organization of which I am proud to be a part.
This Epiphany, brings gifts to the baby. Save a mother.
5K 36:00 (Race for the Cure, Jun. '12)
35:15 (Firecracker Run, Jul. '12)
33:47 (Crimestoppers, Aug. '12)
31:40 (Lagomarcino's, Oct. '12)
26:52 (CASI St. Patrick's Day, Mar. '13)
26:28 (Railroad Days, Jun. '13)* *2nd place in age division
26:40 (Casa Guanajuato, Nov. '13)
30:30 (Modern Woodmen Knockout Hunger, Sep '14)** **3rd place in age division
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I’m an introverted person. One of the distinctive marks of an introvert is that they don’t mind going to a restaurant and asking for a table for one. Don’t get me wrong, I love eating and being with people. I love a good dinner party, or going out to eat with friends. I also enjoy a meal by myself. I enjoy the calmness of a table for one. There are no social expectations, no awkward silences. There might be a book, or a crossword puzzle, or a legal pad and a pen.
The Fat Pastor 