I was sitting on my couch on Sunday night after getting home from a tough day at church.   I was looking for sports highlights when it was announced that Bin Laden had been killed. 

It was a weird feeling.  I wanted to both cry and jump for joy.  It was mostly a feeling of relief.  Hopefully we learned some lessons.  

The day before I met someone who had graduated from college in 2010.  I graduated in 2000 and told her about  my first decade of post college life. 

Well, George W. Bush stole an election and then 9-11 happened.  It will be eleven years since I left  Earlham and nearly that entire time has been shaped by 9/11.  There are kids who are leaving elementary schools who have known nothing except  for this endless war. 

So how do I feel about Bin Laden’s death?  We’ll see.

I am a big Rob Bell fan.

For those who don’t know him, here is a  write-up from the New York Times:

 ” Mr. Bell, 40, whose Mars Hill Bible Church in Grand Rapids, Mich., has 10,000 members, is a Christian celebrity and something of a hipster in the pulpit, with engaging videos that sell by the hundreds of thousands and appearances to rapt, youthful crowds in rock-music arenas.”

To  sum up the controversy around Bel that broke out last weekl, here is a summary from the same  New York Times story:

  A new book by one of the country’s most influential evangelical pastors, challenging traditional Christian views of heaven, hell and eternal damnation, has created an uproar among evangelical leaders, with the most ancient of questions being argued in a biblical hailstorm of Twitter messages and blog posts.“

The new book is called  “Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived.”   

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Lets  time travel back to 1991 when I was a seventh grader and somewhat involved  at Calvary United Methodist Church in Brownsburg, Indiana.    It is a place where the pastors respect  people like Dietrich Bonhoeffer  and worry about being gender neutral when describing God but where much of the congregation itself is fixated on Reaganism and some of the people leading the youth program think satanic rock music is a big problem.   (Thank God for Petra!)  

One of the youth group adult leaders  had an overnight retreat at his house.  We watched a very scary “documentary” about Hell, Satan, and rock music. 

I wasn’t too hip to the ways of the world or church back then.  The “documentary” was scary.  Was I going to go to hell because my mom bought me a copy of REM’s Out of Time album?

Much had changed since I watched that scary movie.  Those people eventually left and  by the time I entered high school a new youngish associate pastor got the youth program focused on mission, theological study,  social justice, and having fun (without worrying so much about the (bogus) satanic rock music.    It was a perfect youth group in many ways and it would forever change my life. 

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This summer when my family and i  moved back to Brownsburg, I went to Sunday school at Calvary for the first time since I left for college. 

 And what was the Sunday school class watching?  A video produced by Rob Bell called Matthew from the Nooma series.  The short film/seron is  about Matthew, a friend of Bell’s who died at age twenty-seven. Here is how one blogger describes it:

 [Bell] talks about the Jewish practice of sitting Shiva, which refers to sitting with the bereaved, just sitting, and not talking unless the bereaved want to discuss the matter. This would be a very different approach to the one taken by Job’s comforters. Rob draws an analogy with how Jesus in Jn. 11 wept at the grave of a friend and entered fully into his friends grieving process. Honestly, I did not expect either the emotional genuineness of this video or the wisdom beyond his years he serves up in this video. I suspect it may well help as a gift to the bereaved. 

This adult Sunday school was moved by “Matthew”.   How do you grieve?  How do you respond to untimely death or family tragedy?  How do you support someone going through the grieving process?  What does the deepest part of our faith tradition say about this? If Jesus weeps at the grave of a friend, are there any simple answers to these questions? 

It also turned out that the  Calvary youth group or Sunday School class  had been watching the NOOMA video earlier in the year.

And this is why I will  always love Rob Bell.   Instead of watching evangelical, conservative Christian fantasies about fake satanic rock music, or going to crappy Christian rock concerts with easy, shallow answers, youth (and adults) are  more likely today, even in the unhip suburbs,  to watch the theological art of preacher/prophet/poet Rob Bell.  

I got a picture of the  March 1 Venus-Moon conjunction with the swamp that had developed in our yard.

We got some pretty big rains that week and our yard becomes a two acre wetland when it rains hard.  It only lasts for a few days before it drains but what once was and is standard old central Indiana lawn becomes something closer to its natural form.

And, it is not long before the geese, ducks and birds show up.

I live in Hendricks County, Indiana, about three miles west of  Indianapolis city limits.  If my 4th grade Indiana history class serves me right, the county was basically a huge wetland and unbroken wilderness–and home to Delaware Indians– up until the settlers showed up in the 1820s  and started  cutting down trees and draining the place. The landscape has been forever altered. What is  now not subdivision are now well-drained fields, soon to be planted with genetically engineered corn and soy beans.  The fertility of the topsoil is such that one might be hard press to grow anything in those fields without the wizardry of industrial agriculture.

I saw something yesterday that gave me hope.  Small-scale organic farming can feed the world.

I’m not feeling too optimistic about our global problems these days but maybe we can restore what has been lost, resurrect was destroyed

History still may be on the side of us dreamers. Wetlands can be restored, with plenty of food and good meaningful jobs to go around.

I nonblogged about the depressing  Congressional  election of 2010  and nonblogged about the birth of our daughter Phoebe on December 1.

I  nonblogged about  the death of my dad’s best friend.   I nonblogged about how frustrated I am with the United Methodist Church, both locally and globally. 

I nonblogged about how the Colts broke my heart again.  

I was so moved by the nonviolent revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East that I nonblogged about it.  

I have also nonblogged about my experience in developing a Methodist Class Meeting and about trying to follow the Lockerbie Central rule of life.

There is much more I nonblogged about.

Now that Lent has started, I am giving up my nonblogging.

My daughter got to eat a two ice-9 cupcakes at church tonight.  For those who don’t know, ice-9 is from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and it causes water to be frozen up to 114 degrees or so.  Spoiler alert, but basically the stuff causes the world to end in the novel.  Of course, before the world ends in Cat’s Cradle,  there are a lot of good jokes and commentary on the human condition.  There is even a religion, whose founder freely admits it is nothing but shameless lies.

Anyway, ice-nine is fictional.  z(That’s why we can put it on cupcakes.)  But, Vonnegut’s point is loud and clear.  Here is the book’s protagonist after humanity’s  dumb patriotism and failure to match scientific knowledge with a moral, socially just understanding of the world:

“I helped my Mona out of our hole.  I warned her to keep her hands away from the blue-white frost and to keep her hands away from her mouth, too.  ”Death has never been quite so easy to come by,” I told her.  ”All you have to do is touch the ground and then your lips and you’re done for.”She shook her head and sighed.  ”A very bad mother.”"What?” I said.”Mother Earth — she isn’t a very good mother any more.”

It was during that minute in nineteen hundred and eighteen, that millions upon millions of human beings stopped butchering one another. I have talked to old men who were on battlefields during that minute. They have told me in one way or another that the sudden silence was the Voice of God. So we still have among us some men who can remember when God spoke clearly to mankind.

Armistice Day has become Veterans’ Day. Armistice Day was sacred. Veterans’ Day is not

Don’t miss Kurt Vonnegut’s Apocalypse on Sunday, November 14 at Lockerbie Central!

Columnist, and founder of the It Gets Better project, Dan Savage  had this to say to a moderate Christian   who wrote him criticizing his critique of Christianity and its role in the death of  gay youth who had committed suicide:

I’m sorry your feelings were hurt by my comments.

No, wait. I’m not. Gay kids are dying. So let’s try to keep things in perspective: Fuck your feelings.

A question: Do you “support” atheist marriage? Interfaith marriage? Divorce and remarriage? All are legal, all go against Christian and/or traditional ideas about marriage, and yet there’s no “Christian” movement to deny marriage rights to atheists or people marrying outside their respective faiths or people divorcing and remarrying. Why the hell not?

Sorry, L.R., but so long as you support the denial of marriage rights to same-sex couples, it’s clear that you do believe that some people—straight people—are “better or more worthy” than others.

It should be noted that the It Gets Better project was partially inspired by the suicide of an Indiana teenager.

Dan Savage is right and that is why I struggle with the Methodist Church’s statement that “homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.” 

At the end of the day, such doctrine enforces the notion that straight people are “better or more worthy” than gay people.   Christians should do everything possible to prevent violence against social outcasts and those marginalized and pushed out of the mainstream.  And yet, our own statements help create a climate of fear and hatred, statements like ”homosexuality is incompatible with Christian teaching.”

Next time a kid in Indiana kills himself after being relentlessly bullied for being gay or being perceived as gay, lets remember that us United  Methodists might have some blood on our hands.

Katy and I made it back to Earlham last month for our ten-year reunion.  Most importantly, Lorelei, our two-year old daughter, was on campus for the first time.

I tried to explain to her during her campus tour that mommy and daddy would not have ever met if it was not for Earlham.   I don’t think she understood.

We spent some time at the Peace Pole.  She marched around it a million times and played ring around the rosy with it.

Technically, it’s on the Earlham School of Religion/ Bethany Seminary campus, but I walked by it ten times a day when I would walk from my house to the main part of campus.  Anyways,  It is  basically a pole and it promotes peace.   It says “May Peace Prevail on Earth” in many languages and I guess these poles are all over the place now.

I’m not sure if Lorelei will want to attend Earlham when she has to make that decision in fifteen years, but  I do hope that someday she will look at the picture of her as a two-year old and say, yes, peace prevailed on Earth.

I am a big fan of coneflowers.  They are perennial and they are native.  It doesn’t get better than that.

They also go on sale during this time of year at nurseries. Anyway, I bought this coneflower plant on sale a few weeks ago and planted it in front of my house.  The plant was in pretty bad shape and had long since lost its flowers.  I guess the warm October (thanks global warming!)  plus some good old-fashioned sheet mulching was enough to produce one more flower before the frost comes.