homecoming

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A week ago we did something unusual. We found ourselves heading back to our hometown on a beautiful breezy fall day. It was a Friday afternoon, and the scenic drive through southeastern Minnesota, the Mississippi river valley, and the rural roads of southwestern Wisconsin was especially striking. Autumn color was past its peak, but the fields of cut hay and baled cornstalks and piles of pumpkins reminded us of our rural upbringing. Geese flew over in scattered formations against clear blue skies.  Cattle seemed especially comfortable strewn here and there across hillsides in the fading sun.

Laura and I were heading back to Madison for two quick nights and the wedding celebration of a rather distant relative.  There would be time with family in our childhood homes, even though our childhood homes were no longer the same.  Laura's home felt different because her mom was away recovering from a hip fracture. My home felt different because my father's failing memory became more and more evident with each visit.

It was also a remarkable trip because of the girls who weren't with us.

Family trips to Madison always involved both girls. Only rarely was one left behind at work or school. This trip was different. Liz and Chris were both happily busy in Minneapolis. We were a couple again. As we drove, our conversation came and went. We were as comfortable in silence as when exchanging words. We held hands across the seat for much of the trip. Laura dozed in the filtered sun. I often looked across at her beautiful face and at the autumn scenery beyond, and I smiled.

I felt a deep sense of blessing, a feeling that echoed back a dozen times on this unusual trip home.

We had laughed when we found that the trip home coincided with homecoming at Middleton High School, where Laura and I had graduated, two years apart, in 1979 and 1981. High School was where we met, I a busy self-absorbed Senior, and she a lovely, tall, blonde and selfless Sophomore who made an instant impression. I love telling people 33 years later that we were High School sweethearts. After professional homemaking, Laura was returning home with me as half of a couple again.

So we found ourselves bundled up and on our way to the high school homecoming football game. We sat on metal seats in a brightly lit stadium overlooking a football field with artificial turf, listening to officials announce penalties using wireless microphones. The halftime dance team offered a fantastic hip-hop routine to booming remixed music that Laura didn't like. There was no dance team when I was in high school.  We saw one or two faces that looked familiar, but no sense of reunion overtook us in the crowd.

Instead I was struck again by that deep feeling of blessing.  As I sat quietly next to Laura I looked up at the stadium lights against the black sky and I squinted, watching the blazing brightness turn into a mass of sparkling rays. I was suddenly aware that there was something familiar about that burst of light rays through squinted eyes.

It was a memory of my first homecoming game at that same stadium when I was a freshman in high school in 1975, exactly 37 years earlier.

I had been fascinated by the stadium lights that fall night too.

In 1975 my life had changed. I had missed some weeks of the fall of my first high school year because of cancer surgery, an ominous diagnosis, and the start of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. I wanted to be in denial, but the combination of abdominal incision, painted X-ray targets on my back and stomach, and nausea from intravenous Vincristine and Actinomycin D made the sense of cancer battle hard to escape. I can only imagine what my parents were going through during those weeks. By the time I arrived home from the daily injections I was barely able to make it into the house before the vomiting began.

When you are at your freshman homecoming game you are supposed to be thinking about friends and girls and the upcoming dance and the spirit competition. You are not supposed to be thinking about surviving.

What small bit of denial I could muster was due to a drug called Thorazine, a narcotic anti-nausea medication whose modern uses are limited to the treatment of schizophrenia.  Thorazine had been key in the treatment of the mentally ill, and had led to the massive deinstitutionalization of the second half of the 20th Century.

Thorazine made me feel good during my homecoming football game back in 1975. I had plenty to worry about, but on that evening I remembered feeling OK. I remembered looking up at the football stadium lights and squinting, watching the blazing brightness turn into a mass of sparkling rays...

My girls have never experienced life-threatening illnesses. I have never found myself begging God to be able to take their place in suffering. Or in death. They have seen their share of tragedy, sometimes unforgettably close, but I have never suffered in the way that a mom and dad suffer when their child is given a dire diagnosis. I now have friends walking that path, a place my own parents walked 37 years ago when they sent their 14-year-old off to a football game, dosed with Thorazine.

It was then in that swirl of memories in that same homecoming stadium that I looked to my right, at my wife. She smiled back, almost shyly, almost like that first time I ever smiled at her, not too far from that very spot.

The feeling of blessing.

I didn't die in 1975. Some kids did. I lived on and came to know Jesus and grew up. I married my beautiful high school sweetheart and lived comfortably with manageable recurrent cancer for decade after decade. I had the chance to pour my life into two lovely daughters and ministry and cherished friends. With the wife of my youth.

Cancer isn't always bad. Sometimes life swallows it up and sometimes, with grace, there is the chance to look back across the years and remember.

And squint. And smile.

For Lydia . For Angie.

10.23.12

Nehemiah

Something like six centuries before the birth of Jesus comes a particularly remarkable story in Jewish history. It is buried in the discouraging saga of the degenerating Jewish monarchy. It is part of that central message of the Bible – the inability of the Jewish people to find any consistency in their covenant with God. The promise of blessing in response to the faith of Abraham had come 20 centuries before Jesus. Moses took his turn trying to lead the Jews six centuries later. David's shaky chapter came one thousand years before Christ. The kings who followed David succeeded only in proving that human beings fail, stumble, and inevitably abandon their God, just like us. By the time of the rise of the Babylonian empire, the two Jewish kingdoms were adrift. Judaism had come to be defined by the existence of a physical temple building, with or without its proper sacrificial rituals to symbolically pay for the sins of the people. The destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 586 B.C. was therefore, in a very real sense, the tangible end of what was left of Judaism. For 60 years most Jews were refugees in Iran and Iraq. There was no temple. This easily could have been the end of the story for just another stumbling local religious impulse.

Then something different happened.

The story of Nehemiah tells us about a man who, though far from home, did not forget his homeland and the idea of a temple to be inhabited, somehow, by his God. It is a story of the rebuilding of the destroyed Jerusalem wall and temple, against the odds. Much of the story seems obscure to us, and except for the idea that this episode preserved Judaism a bit longer, the story may lack meaning for the Christian.

But look deeper. In reading this account, two very pressing and fresh messages hit home. Both are practical, even urgent, for the believer in Jesus Christ.

First, Nehemiah acted without any special call from God.  His passion, his sense of responsibility, his initiative, his creativity, his leadership, all these are described as coming instinctively from the man, unprompted. Though we may be tempted to assume that God actively commissions the pivotal leaders of history, Nehemiah shows this not to be the case. Nehemiah felt compelled to take action, and he took action with intelligence, practical consideration, and cunning. Let us not imagine that we must always wait for supernatural marching orders before we act.

Let us remember that supernatural marching orders have already been issued.

Second, the Christian finds in Nehemiah a startling allegory for the most personal of all issues­ – the revival of a fallen heart. The Jewish temple was the very imperfect picture of God's dwelling place – a picture to prepare us for the time when God's true dwelling place would be made known. In the New Covenant, the sacrifice of God himself in the person of Jesus Christ makes it possible for each believer's heart to become God's temple. As believers who have been once and for all purified, God now inhabits me and he inhabits you.

The temple is inside.

Nehemiah reminds us, however, that like the Jews, like all people, we are still unable to offer God any consistency in our relationship. 

He couldn't love us any more, but we scarcely remember to love him at all. 

Nehemiah grieved for a temple that was in shambles, surrounded by a burned wall.  It was a Jewish humiliation for all who saw it.

And what about the temple in my heart?

Is my temple, the place where God's spirit finds its earthly home, any better than this? Though there may be some impressive walls, isn't much of this temple propped up and in dire need of restoration? Is it much different from the ruined temple that so burdened Nehemiah – a monument not abandoned by God, but by those he had loved and purchased?

The story of Nehemiah reminds the Christian that we are actually responsible for the temple of the Holy Spirit within us. This is what being a disciple of Jesus Christ means. We are to grieve instinctively for its desecration, as did Nehemiah for his temple.  We are to take spontaneous initiative for its rebuilding and maintenance. We are to rediscover the worship that was intended to go on right here inside the heart. 

What Nehemiah accomplished six centuries before Christ was revival.  What we are now called to do is to recognize the urgent need for this same revival in this same temple, now found in the new place that God chooses to call home – a place that is uncomfortably, beautifully close.

10.9.12