(42) When The Going Gets Weird

    (Note: This blog entry is based on the text for When The Going Gets Weird, originally shared on August 20, 2020. It was the forty-second video for our YouTube Channel, Streams of Living Water (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCB7KnYS1bpHKaL2OseQWCnw), co-produced with my wife, Rev. Sally Welch.)

   This is our 42^nd video. The number 42 has meaning for many people.

   For some it’s number 42, Dodgers great and national treasure Jackie Robinson, who broke the color line in professional baseball.

   It’s also the meaning of life, the universe, and everything in Douglas Adams’ book, A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.  It’s a future fiction book where he tells the story of a supercomputer that is built to discover the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. It takes 7 ½ million years, and then reveals the answer to be “42”. Unfortunately, by then everyone has forgotten the question so a super duper computer, made of organic parts called Earth, is built to discover the ultimate question. Yes, it’s weird.  

   Hunter S. Thompson was the founder of something called “gonzo journalism”. He wrote drug and alcohol fueled books like Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, The Great Shark Hunt, and others that I read in seminary, I think, that were odd and oddly entertaining. The character Duke in the Doonesbury comic strip was modeled after him. He once said, “When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro.”

   I think that’s a good way to sum up the weird place in which we are today in the coronavirus pandemic, and with the November elections which would be providing an odd and oddly entertaining backdrop, if there weren’t so much at stake.

   News of the Weird. That would be a good way to describe where we are today.

   I saw on the news the other day that there’s a national shortage of every variety of Dr. Pepper. The company that makes Dr. Pepper got a shout-out on Twitter from the company that makes Charmin toilet paper that said, “Welcome to the club. We feel your pain”. 😊

   An article in a respected technology magazine, PC Mag, last week was titled, “Japan Aims to Send Flying Cars into Tokyo Skies in Only Three Years”. See, all those drones in the air  are going to help us figure out how to establish low-level flight paths above urban areas.

   Norwegians have had a weird year, also. A couple who bought a historic mansion in St. John’s, Michigan and put up a Norwegian flag representing heritage and an American flag representing citizenship, took them both down in mid-July after people regularly mistook the Norwegian flag for the confederate flag. (!)  Have you every seen a Norwegian flag?  Does that look like a Confederate flag to you? Weird.

   A group of rioters within a group of protestors in Madison, Wisconsin, the state capitol, pulled down a statue and threw it in the lake in the wake of the George Floyd murder. It was a statue of Hans Christian Heg, a Norwegian immigrant who became an active anti-slavery abolitionist, raised a militia and fought slave-hunters, joined a political party and resisted the expansion of slavery to the western territories. As a state prisons commissioner, he advocated for vocational training for prisoners rather than punishment. He was commissioned a colonel in the Union army and died in battle commanding mostly Scandinavian troops in the Civil War. His statue was thrown into Lake Monona.

   As a person of Norwegian ancestry, I just think that’s weird.

   As children prepare to go back to school in some locations, childhood immunizations are reportedly down. One theory is that parents don’t want to take their children to the doctors out of fear of their being exposed to the coronavirus. Weird.

   We are experiencing rolling power blackouts in California, a place inventing and implementing the most advanced technology in the world. Weird.

   Speaking of technology, everyone is finding that a nimble adaptability is a required trait during the pandemic, including pastors. Some people adjust to the new formal for digital worship, and some can’t adjust to the change and take it out on their pastors. Pastors are easy targets for people wanting to throw their weight around, or just to vent, in normal times, much less in weird times.

   I posted a meme yesterday in connection with this broadcast. It shows Tom Hanks as Mr. Rogers and Tom Hanks in the movie Cast Away as a lone survivor of a cargo plane crash, washed up on an uninhabited and uncharted. It’s labeled “Your pastor in 2019” and “Your pastor in 2020”.

   I read an article the other day about what it’s like to be a pastor serving a congregation today. It included stories about pastors whose congregations are split 50/50 over whether to resume face to face worship where people on both sides threaten to leave if the decision they don’t like is made, who opened too soon and lost a beloved church member to COVID-19, people who have stopped giving until the “right” decision is made, pastors who have had to lay off half of the church staff because so many in the congregation have lost their jobs and can only give at great sacrifice right now, whose office door had been kicked-in over a sermon on race relations. To say these are weird times doesn’t do justice to the pastors and other front-line professionals who are working under crazily weird conditions, struggling with self-care, and trying to hold everything together, learning new technological skills, and doing everything else a pastor does under normal times.

   I saw a Facebook post online yesterday that kind of made me sick. A colorful banner was posted that asked, in a colloquial dialect, “You are offered $5M to slap the pastor during service…are you going do it?” The answers, all positive, ranged from pure vindictiveness toward pastors, to self-justification for getting the money, to a feeling that all would be forgiven because the church is in a building program and would get some of the money. Not one person said “No”.

   So, when the going gets weird, what do the weird do? They turn pro.

   Paul said,

*1 Corinthians 4:9-13

   Christians live in a kind of upside world. We value sacrifice, not accumulation.

   We are pros at weirdness. Look at Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount, one of the most famous sermons of all time: Blessed are the meek, Blessed are the poor in spirit, Blessed are those who mourn, Blessed are the persecuted.

   Weirdness is our character. We exist in a country, and in a world, but we live in the already but not yet Kingdom of God. We are both saints and sinners. We live as friends of God, who was present among us as both fully God and fully human, in order to die for us. It’s weird.

   That is our natural state. We are weird and as a result are often regarded as fools.

   I saw a bumper sticker some time ago that said, “I’m a fool for Christ. Whose fool are you?”

   That’s the question, isn’t it. Whose fool are you?

   As the Bob Dylan song, from during his overtly Christian music period, goes, “You Gotta Serve Somebody.”

*1 Corinthians 1:24-25

   We may be weird to the world because we don’t live according to the wisdom of this world, we live in the wisdom and the strength of God.

   The going has gotten weird, but we have not turned pro. We profess that we live in the streams of living water that are the Holy Spirit, the ongoing personal presence of God for good in the world.