Coming to Brevard & my last two columns

I'm coming to Brevard next week to kick off the distinguished lectures series at Holy Trinity Episcopal Church beginning on September 20, 2009 at 10:45 a.m. The church is located at 50 West Strawbridge Avenue in Melbourne. He will also be preaching at the 9 a.m. worship service.



August 29, 2009


God gives out phone numbers

NORRIS BURKES
SPIRITUALITY

I was on the hunt for fried chickenduring my lunch hour from the hospital where I worked as a pediatric chaplain a few years back when my cell phone rang.

Because my policy was to never, ever, give my cell number to a patient's family, I was totally oblivious to the likelihood of a serious call during lunch.

I cheerfully answered the phone.

"Chaplain, where is he?"

"Sarah?" I asked.

"I mean . . ." Sarah stammered. "Eric's in Heaven, right?"

Sarah was the mother of a little boy who had died in our hospital a few weeks prior. For some reason -- I didn't really know why -- there was something special about this close-knit family that caused me to make an exception about my cell phone rule.

"Yes, I feel certain that he is in Heaven," I declared, shifting gears from fast-food to food for thought.

When I asked her to tell me more about what was going on, she told me she was having nightmares about her son smothering. Her sobs continued and churned an ocean of grief. The swells came through the phone like waves threatening to drown both swimmer and rescuer.

Then she asked something that can't possibly be answered definitively by anyone on this side of the celestial.

"What was it like for him after he died? What's he feeling now?"

The Bible contains many references about Heaven, but Sarah was not looking for Biblical authority, she was looking to share in another parent's deepest hope. Living inside a pain that was raw and brutal, she was trying to make it through her personal Hell on Earth, one day at a time, one prayer at a time, one phone call at a time.

I tried my best to answer her question, but given my current whereabouts I opted to add a bit more through a later e-mail.

"I don't know for sure what Heaven's like," I wrote. "The Bible tells me God prepared it as a 'place not made with hands,' so it's probably more than we could ever imagine. And if it's made by God, then Heaven must be made of the best of us, of who we are, of all our hearts can collectively imagine.

"Sarah, you cared for Eric every hour of every day for eight years. Your love formed a cocoon of Heaven for him right here on Earth. God has done no less for Eric by creating an eternal Heaven designed by a mother's love and a father's care.

"When I think of Eric in Heaven, I see him in a place where his lungs are filled with the freshest air from the most pristine mountain peaks. It is a place where he needn't struggle to find his legs. He can walk and run and jump. He can dance with butterflies and sing with angels.

"He can talk and hear and understand. He knows the joy of a million rainbow waterfalls. He knows a father who loves him and is filled with the presence of his mother's lullaby to comfort him."

After sending the e-mail, I resolved to amend my phone policy about not giving my personal number to patients.

God knows who needs to talk and when. I think God knew I needed to talk to Sarah as much as she needed to talk to me.

So, God mysteriously gave her the number -- via my big mouth.

Now, I have a new cell number policy: "Never, never, never give a patient your personal phone number, unless of course, it's God's idea."





Do's and don'ts of your faith is a short list

BY NORRIS BURKES
FLORIDA TODAY

In 1979, I sat in Dr. Richard Cutter's early morning Greek class at Baylor University praying my professor would call on someone else to translate the homework passage from Plato.

My prayers were answered when he called on John.

John was more clueless than I was in this second-year Greek class, but he took a gallant stab at translating the passage.

After five agonizing minutes, Dr. Cutter thanked John and interrupted our naps with seemingly the most random of questions.

"How many of you think crap is a bad word?" he asked the class comprised of mostly Baptist ministerial students.

A few brave souls from the conservative South raised their hands, while the rest of us stared forward with wide-eyed incredulity.

"A freshman girl came to me after class last week," he said, introducing his reason behind the question. "She told me that she was offended by my occasional use of the word crap because her East Texas upbringing taught her that it was an expletive."

Cutter told us he'd apologized to the girl, but explained to her that his upbringing on a Kansas farm taught him to understand crap as a common word.

For him, the word was a homonym, a word having the same spelling and pronunciation, but with different meanings. Offering an example, he explained that a Baptist deacon in Kansas might use crap to describe the proposed church budget as well as the piles scattered in the pasture next door.

Hoping his heartfelt explanation had convinced us, he repeated his polling question. "How many of you still think that crap is a bad word?"

We cowered in silence. It was our second year with Dr. Cutter, and most of us recognized the sound of him loading both barrels.

"Good," he said, taking our silence as approval.

"John," he exclaimed pointing to the unfortunate translator, "that translation was a bunch of crap."

The questionable word is much more accepted now, but what Dr. Cutter was so colorfully illustrating 30 years ago is something called a regional sin. These are sins that may offend the sensibilities of the local community, but would not be offensive in other communities.

Regional sins are helpful to avoid when teaching in a university with a national reach, but the girl's question illustrated that there is a downside to paying them too much heed.

The downside is we, like Dr. Cutter's inquisitor, sometimes use our list of regional do's and don'ts to define and measure the faith of others. When we do that, our faith vision blurs, and we start seeing ourselves as doubly better than others.

For instance, while being able to say, "I don't cuss, drink or chew nor date girls who do" may be a good health practice, it says nothing of your quality of faith.

Faith is better understood when you leave the regional list of do's and don'ts at home and replace them with their true elements.

Moses did a pretty good job of that when he summarized the hundreds of do's and don'ts in Jewish law with the Ten Commandments. Later, Jesus introduced a more portable expression of faith that found acceptance in all regions of the world.

He taught that faith should "hang on these two commandments:"

1. Love the Lord your God with all your heart.

2. Love your neighbor as yourself.

No more long lists of complicated regional sins. Just two.

Multitasking Jesus' short list can still be pretty difficult. But if it were easy, it wouldn't be valuable.

His list is valuable because it comprises the gold card of faith accepted in faith communities worldwide.

And that leaves me an ending I won't resist. As they say in the old commercial, don't leave home without it.