Tim Stafford's Blog, page 5

New Student Bible

Yesterday I found a big, heavy box on my front porch—a case of newly re-designed Student Bibles. The Student Bible first appeared in 1986, 37 years ago. Since then it has sold six million copies. Zondervan, its publisher, believes that it is still relevant, and invested in this new design. To my eye it looks clean and sharp and new.

The Student Bible represents sheer grace in my life. It was Philip Yancey’s project, not mine, when he recruited me to help him. The idea was to produce notes for a Bible that would be informed by the best evangelical scholarship but would communicate in workaday language. We wanted to help readers who got stuck when they tried to read the Bible—help them not with gimmicks or arcane knowledge but with notes enabling them to actually understand the Scriptures and become regular readers.

Four years later, when The Student Bible came out, I had a lot more invested in the project but minimal expectations for success—and so did Zondervan, who wondered why they had put so much money and time into it. Against all predictions, it turned into a huge best-seller. It still seems like a gift, that I’m involved with something so close to my heart that has had such impact—and continues to do so.

Dona Nobis Pacem

Yesterday, April 30, my church, First Presbyterian of Santa Rosa, produced a choral concert, Dona Nobis Pacem. Our performance was the world premier of a work we commissioned from Allan Petker. We hired an 18 piece orchestra, and Allan directed us. Here is a video link to the whole performance. Before the music I interviewed Allan Petker on stage, and also spoke briefly about Tom Oleari, whose gift made the whole possible. Tom, a dear friend, died five years ago and left his small house to the church. We used part of that legacy on the concert.

My interview begins at minute 10:25, and the music begins at 27:30.

It was a wonderful experience… a very special day, a prayer for social justice, and a great memorial to Tom, who would have been surprised to find himself a patron of the arts.

We did not charge for the concert but took an offering for Catholic Charities, which is the highly regarded provider of services to homeless and other needy people in Sonoma County. I heard this morning that over $7,000 was given.

I Lost My Team Today

I became an Oakland A’s fan in 1983, when we first moved to Santa Rosa. The sound of baseball on the radio was accompaniment as I did the dishes. Very gradually I began to pay attention to a team that was, at the time, very weak. I might have liked them because they were underdogs.

They didn’t stay underdogs. In a few years a bunch of young players came along, and we were going to playoff games, then World Series games. Years later were the Moneyball years, when scrappy teams were put together out of string and band-aids. In between there were some sorry years, but I never lost faith. I enjoy following a team, knowing its players, paying attention to results every day. Even this 2023 team, overmatched in every way, I’m prepared to endure.

Today, though, ownership pulled the plug and announced that they were moving the team to Las Vegas. They’ve been flirting with this for years, but still the announcement came as a surprise to me. I never really thought they would do it.They have treated their fans like trash in recent times, but still… abandonment?

As of today, I renounce the Oakland A’s. I do not wish them well in their new home. I am done.

Now I am in the market for a new team. The Giants? I don’t think I can root for them; they have been Big Brother for too long. Maybe the Dodgers, but it’s hard to be a Dodger fan in the Bay Area. San Diego seems meh to me, like the town. I like the Mariners, but I’m not sure I can handle the endless losing.

I think I was meant to be an Oakland fan. Gritty. Loyal. Full of character. And now they have taken my team away.

Peter’s Journey

Like all the apostles, Peter was present when Jesus preached the sermon on the mount. When Jesus first spoke the beatitudes, Peter was standing right there. One can only guess how those simple, upside-down phrases troubled his mind. Blessed are the poor, the mourners, the meek, the justice-seekers, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers and the persecuted. What young men think that sounds like blessing?

Jesus had recruited Peter in the act of fishing. He dropped the net and followed. People did that with Jesus; he had amazing charisma. He told Peter he would make him into a fisher of men, which suggested (at least) a cause that would recruit others. Young men have been known to find that attractive, building a movement by gathering followers.

When he heard the beatitudes, however, Peter must have been bewildered. This was bait for fishers of men? Who would bite?

Perhaps Peter thought he understood what Jesus was after. A simple lifestyle, identification with the poor, rejection of the status quo and its corruption, radical obedience to God—all building toward a new kingdom, one in which God himself would reign through Jesus and his disciples. That made some revolutionary sense.

A close reading of incidents in Peter’s life, however, reveal that he was still far from understanding.

**

The gospels tell us far more about Peter than any other of the disciples, giving us some idea of the struggle he went through. It all started well. Very early in Peter’s association with Jesus, his own mother-in-law was healed. (Matthew 8:14-15) Like all the disciples, Peter saw Jesus heal many people, evict evil spirits, even feed crowds and restore life to dead people. Jesus helped Peter to walk on water. (Matthew 14:22-31) Jesus’s signs and wonders gave plenty of reason to keep following him.

Jesus’s teaching was more difficult. It was often confusing, frequently confrontational, and always demanding. The parables Jesus used were opaque to his disciples. On a number of occasions, the gospels report some version of the following: “They did not understand what this meant. It was hidden from them, so that they did not grasp it, and they were afraid to ask him about it.” (Luke 9:45)

According to John’s gospel, the struggle to absorb Jesus’s teaching eventually came to a head, and “many of his disciples turned back and no longer followed him.” (John 6:66)

Jesus asked the twelve whether they, too, wanted to leave. “Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.’”

That answer sounds heroic, but at a deeper level it reveals that the disciples knew they were stuck. Peter didn’t tell Jesus they were as happy as clams. He said they couldn’t see any alternative. Clearly, Jesus’s disciples were struggling to stick it out.

Later, Jesus asked his disciples what people were saying about him. After hearing a sampling of opinion, he asked point blank, “What about you? Who do you say I am?”

Peter spoke for them all: “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” (Matthew 16:16) Jesus praised him warmly for that answer.

Then Jesus began to explain his future death. “Peter took him aside and began to rebuke him. ‘Never, Lord!’ he said. ‘This shall never happen to you!’”

Jesus responded with the harshest words he ever spoke. “Get behind me, Satan!”

Peter could not grasp that Jesus’s glorious calling incorporated the hard blessings of the beatitudes. They were not just for disciples. They were for the master, too. He would lead the way to the bottom, through suffering to death, and any attempt to think otherwise was a distraction from God’s ways. Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed the persecuted.

**

That was a harsh confrontation, but Jesus didn’t hold it against Peter. He invited him for the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:1-13) and playfully involved him in the paying of the temple tax. (Matthew 17:24-27) Peter was still grappling to understand. He approached Jesus with a question: how many times should I forgive my brother when he sins against me? Seven times? (Matthew 18:21)

Seven times is a lot to forgive somebody who hurts you; two or three is a lot. Peter remembered the beatitude, “Blessed are the merciful.” He was trying to find the limit. Surely seven pardons was the outer limits of the demands of mercy.

Not according to Jesus. He answered, “not seven times, but seventy-seven.” By the time you get to seventy-seven, who’s counting? Jesus was shredding the very idea of maintaining standards. Mercy never reaches a limit. Forgiveness trumps everything.

Then came the Passover. During the regular ceremonial meal, Jesus silently wrapped a towel around his waist and began to wash the disciples’ feet. Peter objected strongly: this was lowly servants’ work, not fit for Jesus. “You shall never wash my feet.” He still did not understand that the beatitudes applied to Jesus, too. Blessed are the meek. Jesus is meek.

“Unless I wash you, you have no part with me.”

After the meal, Jesus told his disciples they would all fall away from him before the night was over. Peter could not stand this. “Even if all fall away on account of you, I never will.”

“I tell you the truth,” Jesus answered, “this very night, before the rooster crows, you will disown me three times.”

Peter refused to accept it. “Even If I have to die with you, I will never disown you.” (Matthew 26:35)

When Peter thought of dying with Jesus, he apparently meant to go down fighting. As Jesus was being arrested, Peter pulled out a sword and took a hack, cutting off a servant’s ear. (Seemingly, he missed; he was a fisherman, after all, not a warrior.) Jesus told him to put the sword away. There is no place for weapons in the beatitudes.

Jesus was fully prepared to die. Peter, for all his talk, was not. His fears blossomed later that night when he shadowed Jesus into the high priest’s domain. Despite his pledges, when feeling threatened Peter vehemently denied any acquaintance with Jesus. The third time, a rooster crowed and Peter remembered Jesus’s prediction. “He went outside and wept bitterly.” (Matthew 26:75) He had failed in every way, and he knew it—failed as a warrior defender, failed as a follower of the beatitudes and their blessed peacemaking.

**

Then it all changed. In the book of Acts, I see no sign of this weeping, struggling Peter. He acts as a strong and confident leader of the newly founded church. He defies the religious authorities when they try to prevent him from preaching. He opens the doors for non-Jews to join in the Christian assembly. His preaching majors on the death and resurrection of Jesus and the forgiveness they offer to anyone. One perceives nothing of the man whom Jesus had to rebuke and correct repeatedly.

Peter had been converted. His process of conversion was the same one all of us must undergo. Only through the repeated discipleship of Jesus, wrapped in disappointments, hurt and disillusionment, do we begin to experience the word, “Blessed are the poor in spirit.”

Peter’s book of 1 Peter glows with this understanding. By the time he wrote he was an old man. He had been imprisoned and threatened with execution. His church had been exiled from Jerusalem, harassed and persecuted all through Palestine. In giving advice to a suffering, scattered church, Peter taught Jesus’s view as he had finally understood it. Suffering was not the exception in life, the bad stuff that must be borne. It was the heart of the Christian life, precisely because it was the heart of Jesus’s life. He suffered and died. So must we.

First Peter is full of this view of suffering. In his rambling style Peter returns to the subject compulsively. Here is the heart of it.

Dear friends, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that has come on you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.  But rejoice inasmuch as you participate in the sufferings of Christ, so that you may be overjoyed when his glory is revealed. If you are insulted because of the name of Christ, you are blessed, for the Spirit of glory and of God rests on you.  If you suffer, it should not be as a murderer or thief or any other kind of criminal, or even as a meddler. However, if you suffer as a Christian, do not be ashamed, but praise God that you bear that name. (1 Peter 4:12-16)

Can you hear the voice of the man who objected to Jesus’s prediction of his own death? That voice is gone. Peter now understands. The beatitudes are not extreme and unreachable. They are not high-flying ideals, never applied to life. They are the text of life. We struggle to believe that, but it is what Jesus believed. He taught it patiently to Peter and all his disciples. He lived it. He died it.

And because he lived and died it, he rose. Just as we, too, will rise to share in his glory.

**

Not yet, however. We, the fat and sated children of a self-congratulating civilization, can hardly believe the beatitudes, let alone practice them. For us, turning the other cheek is often a joke, not a precept. We do not much experience persecution and poverty. We have no reason to be meek and we don’t want to mourn.

Me neither.

The call to follow Jesus is and always has been a strange call. It means dying to yourself. Jesus apparently was serious about that, but how do we get serious?

Jesus wants this for his disciples because it will bless us.

I don’t know how we can become believers, following Peter’s journey. God will have to do it; we can’t do it for ourselves. Our celebrity evangelical culture certainly won’t help.

God has other messengers, however. Many Christians in the world are not fat and sated and comfortable. Many are hungry, poor, and persecuted. Possibly they will lead us.

Or perhaps life itself will teach us. I have now reached an age when it becomes impossible to deny that I am going to die. Before my friends or I do that, many of us will be very sick—and sick at heart. Few of us will be fat and sated until the end. Perhaps, if we are willing, old age will strip away our delusions and help us to reach the beatitudes as a guide and a promise. It may be our last chance to follow Peter on his journey.

The System Is Broken

A little over two weeks ago I came down with a terrible cough. I coughed deeply, day and night, until my diaphragm was so sore a cough felt like a knife stuck into my ribs. I sneezed and drained a constant fountain of snot. I got a fever, at least 102 degrees. I ached. By the second or third day I could hear a sound coming from my chest that I had never heard before: an industrial sound, like tires running over gravel.

As a normally healthy person I rarely go to the doctor. This time I knew I needed help. I have a doctor whom I like, and I have great insurance. I’m a registered patient in the Sutter hospital system. But when I tried to get an appointment, there was nothing. Not a hint of availability, not just with my doctor, not just within her office, but in the whole Sutter system in Sonoma County. Sutter is one of three big hospital groups in our county. Not one appointment of any kind with anybody.

I ended up taking the only option, a walk-in-care clinic. The desk warned me the wait time was two hours, and I sat miserably for nearly that long before being seen. Everybody was nice, and the doctor (or nurse practitioner?) promptly ordered a chest X-ray, tested me for Covid and flu, and then sent me home. Within a few hours I got a phone call confirming that I had pneumonia, with a prescription for antibiotics. True, nobody bothered to tell me how to take care of myself, what not to do, or anything useful beyond taking pills once a day. I don’t think the standard of care was very good, but I’m not complaining: I got what I needed, and I know how to google pneumonia.

I don’t mean this as a complaint. It’s an observation, based anecdotally on my experience and that of quite a few of my friends. The system of primary care is broken, at least in Sonoma County.

By “system” I mean a hub-and-spoke model nearly all medical institutions have built their care around. The primary care doctor (or nurse practitioner) is the hub. They have history with you, maybe they know your family, they’re familiar with your needs. When you get sick you go to that doctor, and they figure out what kind of issue you’ve got. If tests are needed, they get those done; and they refer you on to specialists. They don’t treat cancer or kidney disease or auto-immune diseases: specialists handle those. But they get you in to see the right person.

It’s a great model, in theory, but it relies completely on access. If you can’t see or call your doctor, the system is completely non-functional. Your only option is the ER or an urgent care clinic. That works—it worked for me—but it’s a completely different model.

I suppose the basic problem is there are not enough doctors. If that’s the case, either hire more—which I know is difficult—or figure out another way to allocate their services. Don’t tell me I have a doctor if I can’t get to that doctor. Tell me that the ER is your hub, send all your primary care doctors there, and let me go there directly, rather than wasting time on your website trying to make a connection on a broken system. Maybe you can use AI to triage patients and prioritize their needs. I don’t know. All I know is, the system is broken.

I’d be curious to hear from others. Is this a local breakdown? Is it a temporary crisis? Somebody higher up must know, but I’ll be darned if they are telling patients.

Death Control

A dear friend ended her life a few weeks ago. She had stage 4 cancer with (probably) just days or weeks to live. As I understand it, she decided not to wait for death, but to take charge. With the assistance of a physician, accompanied by family, she took a lethal dose.

Her death caused me not only to mourn her loss, but to think more about assisted suicide. It’s legal in my state, and I’ve been told that it’s widely practiced in states where it’s not legal. I feel sure that in a very short time it will become as common as euthanizing pets. That’s because it’s so American. Our culture celebrates individual choice. “I’ll do it my way” is almost our national anthem. To take charge of your own death can be seen as an extension of taking charge of your life—which is the core of American self-help advice. It’s my life. Why shouldn’t I decide when to end it?

Oh, watch out—here comes another culture war. If my prediction is right, cultural conservatives will be horrified, politics will intrude, and we’ll be fighting pitched battles about laws to prevent assisted suicide. Those laws will lose. It’s almost bound to happen.

Assisted suicide goes against many centuries of powerful anti-suicide belief and law. It isn’t so long ago that Dr. Kevorkian was the stuff of nightmares. Now, without any doubt, he must be seen as a prophet. What once seemed horrific has become, for many, brave and reasonable. Death control is closely related to other choice-regimes that once seemed unthinkable and now have been widely embraced: abortion on demand, gay marriage, transgenderism. They have in common the mantra of individualism: my body, my choice.

Who can stand against it? Especially when opposition implies taking up the law, using the force of the state to compel people to live on when they are suffering (or to bring babies to term, to ignore or conceal sexual desires, to remain male when they feel female). It’s impossible to like coercion in these cases, and I doubt it can be politically sustained. (That’s why I’m anti-abortion, pro-choice. I hate abortion, but I don’t believe coercion has any business in the intimate and often wrenching decisions of child-bearing.)

That said, I want to hold up a slender argument against assisted death, not as a legal matter, but as a question of personal commitment. I have two grounds for opposing it. One is the slippery slope. The circumstances of my friend’s death make a strong case for assisted suicide, but it’s very hard to draw a line at cases like hers. Should we assist those who are depressed and see no point to life? Should we assist those who have an incurable infirmity that makes their life miserable—schizophrenia, for instance? How about people who run out of money and don’t want to be a burden to their family? There is and ought to be horror at the idea of a family encouraging Mom to conveniently end her life when she develops Alzheimer’s. That is a long distance from my friend’s decision, but surely her choice leads toward a culture where some are subtly encouraging Mom to make it easier on herself and on us all. Assisted suicide could become the easiest way for a person in pain to solve their problem, and society’s convenient solution to problematic people. We are not there yet. If we become that kind of society, we have lost our way.

That brings me to my second ground: reverence for human life. Here I stand on religious grounds—but with a broad foundation, for reverence for human life is found in almost all religions. On practical ground, such reverence makes no sense. If lives are valued because they are happy and useful, then why not put an end to a life that is no longer happy or useful? And yet, we recoil against it, for reasons that go deep into our souls. (Indeed, this reaction extends to animals. I never knew anybody who “put down” a beloved pet without feeling it as an awful moment.) Something in life is sacred, and something in human life is more than sacred. We don’t have the right to appropriate it; it belongs to God.

Granted, we “play God” all the time, doling out life when we take medicine, or doling out death when we swat a fly or pay taxes that buy weapons of war. Reverence for life is all but impossible to sustain on an absolute basis (as the Dali Lama could tell you). That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t recoil from taking life, even when suffering comes with it.

Why December 25?

The truth is, we have no idea what time of year Jesus was born. It could have been in the spring. It could have been in the summer. The Bible gives no information, at all.

So why do we celebrate on December 25? Somebody—we don’t know who, where or why—set the date on the coldest, darkest time of the year. On the face of it that makes no sense. Christmas is a happy time, with bright decorations, twinkling lights, songs, feasts, family, gifts—and some group of Christians chose a date just after winter solstice, when the sun barely drags itself above the horizon.

I do not like being cold, but I live in a heated house and drive a heated car. In human history, this is not the norm. Imagine this time of year through all the centuries. It chills you to the bone. There is no reading, no TV, no going out on the town. You sit through the long dark hours with your hands extended to a fire. Your back is freezing.

If you google “Why December 25” you may read that Christians adapted pagan festivals of winter solstice. Maybe so. But that begs the question, “Why didn’t they go for summer solstice?” It would make a nicer time for a celebration.

I think the choice of December 25 is deliberate.  I see it as a slap across the face of the normal. It is an enacted parable, meant for the whole Christian church to rehearse, year after year. We act out a paradox, that the light appears to us out of the cold and dark. Day by day through advent season the situation gets worse and worse, darker and colder. Just when we think we can take no more, a tiny spark of light appears. It is a very small point of light: a baby born in an insignificant village to insignificant parents. Yet this light will grow to illuminate the world, and to direct the world’s story.

I’ve heard a lot of Christmas meditations in my life, but never one pointing out how bad the weather is. Mostly we pretend not to notice. This year, however, I hope you will take particular interest in the cold and the dark. Notice that the sun goes down early and comes up late. Our world is like that, often. It has been lately. Yet the light shines in the darkness. Merry Christmas.

Getting Ready

I preached at The Cove on Sunday, as part of a series called The Gospel According to Ebenezer Scrooge. The idea is to follow the narrative of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol along with the gospel’s Christmas story. My part was to compare John the Baptist (Luke 1:5-17) with the Ghost of Christmas Past. You can listen here. The theme is how to get ready for change, for the light to appear in the darkness.

Preaching on Ephesians 3:1-13

I preached at my home church on Sunday. If you’re interested in hearing/seeing me, you can view the service online at https://www.fpcsantarosa.org/worship-services/2022/10/9/ There are two versions: in the 9:00 service my sermon begins at 29:35; in the 10:30 service it’s at 27:49.

I try to address the divisions, political, racial and economic, that plague us today.

Museum and Memorial

Recently Popie and I traveled to Montgomery, Alabama, to visit a museum and memorial sponsored by the Equal Justice Initiative, the organization led by Bryan Stephenson, author of Just Mercy. If you are ever in the Deep South, take this trip. I’ve been to quite a few civil rights museums over the years: this is the best I’ve seen. It’s done with skill and care; and everything is priced so that anybody can afford it. (Even the t-shirts and mugs are inexpensive.)

The “Legacy Museum” is in the heart of downtown Montgomery, built on the site of a warehouse used to house slaves going up for sale. The museum aims at education, not emotion (though there’s plenty to get emotional about). It tells the story of racism in America, beginning with slavery, extending through Jim Crow, and entering the present with a look at the racial bias of law enforcement. The story is factual, crammed with statistics, geography and eyewitness testimony. It’s not about making white people feel bad; it’s simply an account of what happened. None of it is controversial from a historian’s point of view, but I didn’t learn any of this in my history classes. It is exactly what some people are determined to keep out of our history classes.

The “National Memorial for Peace and Justice” does, by contrast, aim at emotion. It’s located on a hilltop about a mile from the museum, and its subject is lynching. The main exhibit offers rusty steel columns for every county in America that hosted a verified lynching. On that column is incised the name of the person lynched and the date. Visitors can wander among the pillars, perusing the names and locations. Some counties have one name; some have a dozen. There are over 4,000 names. The cumulative impact made me tremble. To think what we did and what we tolerated. The memorial’s simplicity and solemnity reminded me of the Vietnam memorial in Washington, D.C. I found it even more powerful.

It’s remarkable that these exhibits are presented in Montgomery, first capital of the Confederacy. This is the small city where Martin Luther King preached and where Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. I admire that Stephenson has made his investments in Alabama, not New York or Washington. If we are ever to make a dent in the powerful tradition of racial prejudice, it has to happen in places like Montgomery.