Dear Friends:
For today’s Monday Musing, I commend a link rather than my own words. Phil Vischer is the creator of VeggieTales and the great-grandson of my childhood pastor. His video provides some straightforward history I believe important for us to understand. The video is about 18 minutes long, so wait to click on the link until you have some time to watch, listen and perhaps share.
Click here for the video from his series, Holy Post.
Thank you, Phil.
Jonathan Krogh
Your Pastor
Dear Deep Intercessors:
As I’ve mentioned before, when confronted with pain, struggle, deprivation, weakness, etc., we’re not comfortable regulating our helplessness. “Thoughts and prayers” have become a trivializing phrase, hiding passivity in the face of tragedy. But there are times when that’s all we’ve got. Unfortunately, “I’ll pray for you” feels like a last resort when we’ve exhausted all the options of practical assistance. It feels like surrender. ‘I wanted to do something useful, but all the wonderful things I could do have been declined, so I guess I’m stuck with praying instead.’
I understand how quickly feelings of helplessness can degenerate into a self-loathing
Dear Taxing Filers:
April 15th, Tax Day! Hopefully you’re not scrambling to finish the filing task on this beautiful Monday; I usually am. Not because I procrastinate, which I do, but because ministers are paid like independent contractors, so the 15.3% self-employment tax on salary and housing allowance usually leaves a little extra needed to top off my quarterly payments from the previous year. Like many, I’m in no rush to hand off that cash. I am grateful for the continued income tax exemption provided to clergy for housing allowance, but am not confident that exemption will last. Implemented to compensate pastors who own their homes rather than live in a church manse, local municipalities like the allowance because it keeps clergy houses on the property tax rolls. Churches do not pay tax for their property, including church-owned pastors' housing. (Strangely enough, continuation of the housing allowance exemption finds its greatest protection from the U.S. military.) All this brings me to today’s musing, a brief history of the religious church tax exemption.
It’s an old allowance. Christian Emperor Constantine (272-337 BCE) famously insulated Christian churches from Roman taxation, a tradition that was continued
Dear Sunward Gazers,
As I write this we are anticipating a solar eclipse, which reminds me of my brief childhood hope of becoming an astronomer. It was the height of the Space Race, and Apollo missions were already in full gear, inching the United States closer to planting the first human feet on the moon. My neighborhood buddies and I were well aware of the tragic Apollo 1 accident on February 21, 1967, in which Command Pilot Gus Grissom, Senior Pilot Ed White and Pilot Roger B. Chaffee perished in an awful fire during a launch rehearsal. An electrical spark ignited nylon insulation, and the conflagration was accelerated by the use of pure, high-pressure oxygen in the cabin. A congressional investigation resulted in several changes to the module’s design, particularly the use of a far less explosive nitrogen/oxygen mixture. They had briefly experimented with an even more inert helium/oxygen blend, but that combination made the astronauts sound like Alvin and the other chipmunks, so it was scuttled in the name of dignity.
Most of my friends aspired to be astronauts, but I was a risk-averse kid. As with the high dive or the zipline, I preferred to be an observer rather than a potential stain on the pool’s bottom or cautionary splat on a camp trail. Astronomy was for me—it was a profession that involved sitting
Dear Sitters:
In 2001, Norwegian composer Rolf Løvland wrote a short instrumental piece with a contemplative melody and haunting harmonies titled “Silent Story”. A few years later, Løvland approached novelist and songwriter Brendan Graham to write lyrics for the piece. It was first performed at the funeral of Løvland’s mother by vocalist Johnny Logan, who later recorded a demo of the piece with full orchestra. The song was picked up by various artists, but these recordings languished without much fanfare; that was until 2003, when producer David Foster selected the song for up-and-coming star Josh Groban. “You Raise Me Up” became one of Groban’s megahits.
The structure of the song creates a sweeping double crescendo of the chorus; just when you think the song has reached its emotional apex, the tune modulates,
Dear Pledging Patriots:
At the close of the 1800s, the United States was swamped with immigrants. Nearly 15% of the nation was foreign born, with a majority coming from northern and western European countries. It was noted that in 1890, one in six Chicago residents had been born in Germany. There were also a substantial number of new American residents from Ireland and eastern Europe. They were largely poor and alarmingly Catholic. Most, regardless of their country of origin, were arriving on American shores having formerly been pledged to kings and other associated royal potentates. Coming to America required not only the acquisition of a new language, but also a changed understanding of citizenship. Republics are very different from monarchies.
Concern over the new arrivals’ ability to assimilate and a fear that they lacked understanding
Dear Ones:
As you may imagine, today’s Musing doesn’t wander far from Dani’s brain surgery today. Some things overwhelm all other threads of concentration. Counting out Aggi’s (our dog) pills this morning and smooshing them into her favorite gummy candy, I was taken aback, because next to the newly filled pill cup was another pill cup containing the pills, each stuffed into a gummy. Clearly, I had done that task earlier in the morning and had no actual memory of having performed that part of my morning routine. I’m finding myself making sure the keys are in my pocket several times each time I get out of the car. Deep thought clearly takes up a lot of space, crowding out the mundane mental wanderings of an average day…
Dear Past Pandemic Prospectors,
Four years ago, during the second week of March 2020, the world underwent a profound transformation. Restaurants, schools, libraries, museums, churches, offices, sports arenas—any place where people gathered—shut down for nearly two years. Social connections were reduced to glowing screens, loved ones were glimpsed behind closed windows, learning was confined to laptops, and touch was abandoned. The world functioned at a distance, and remote living seemed safer.
When 'normalcy' returned, there was a rush to resume activities, to gather, to embrace, and to move forward. However, in our haste, we overlooked
Dear God Lovers:
I seldom experience past sermon preparation bleeding over into my Monday brain—by Sunday afternoon I’ve pretty much exhausted all interest in that morning’s texts, and I attempt to create some headspace to welcome the following week’s passages. But yesterday’s epistle reading from 1 Corinthians 8.1-13 has left some spiritual residue about which I have been musing.
For those who were there or who listened online, the focus of my sermon was the conclusion of the first verse of the passage, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up.” These words were convicting enough to wrestle out a full sermon. But verse 2 is equally if not more startling. Paul writes,
Dear Members and Friends:
This past Saturday our elders and deacons gathered for our annual time for learning and mutual encouragement. Back in 2012, the Presbyterian Church (USA) changed the term “Minister of Word and Sacrament” to “Teaching Elder” as the designation for ordained clergy in our denomination. It didn’t really catch on, and now both terms are considered appropriate. Whatever term you use to refer to me, my experience at our Saturday gathering was that of a learner, not an instructor. And while the content of what I learned was not really new, it was great to revisit and be reminded of the wealth of wisdom and grace FPCLG has among its officers.
The Session met in the morning, and I heard again of their deep love for our congregation and their appreciation for how we do church. They shared their desire
Dear Shivering Saints:
There’s something about extreme cold that makes creativity difficult. As mammals, a good portion of our metabolism is obsessed with keeping our body temperature at a level where all the chemical and mechanical reactions can function efficiently, and there’s a very narrow temperature range where that can happen. As a result, when the ambient temperature is very cold or very hot, we either curl up to preserve warmth or sprawl out to maximize surface area and dissipate heat. Those of you who are dog owners know exactly what I’m talking about. It’s only when the air around us hits the Goldilocks zone
Dear Morning Makers:
I woke up this morning to our furnace functioning quite efficiently, and while its humidifier unit underfunctions a bit on cold winter days, we bought a large console floor model which works quite well, and despite its age we can still find filter wicks in stock at both Menards and Home Depot. Our hot water heater is a few years old, but it works great and seems significantly more responsive than the one it replaced. When I went to the basement yesterday, the green indicator light on the freezer shone brightly, and it’s partially full of a variety of rock-hard frozen foods. Meanwhile, upstairs
Dear Christmas Time Crunchers:
In a recent article published by the American Psychological Association, researchers Julian Givi and Colleen P. Kirk presented their findings regarding the emotional weight associated with declining an invitation (a PDF of the article may be found here). Briefly stated, their study found that those who decline invitations predict far more negative ramifications from the inviter than are justified. For example, if someone invites you to lunch and you decline, they tend to be far less disappointed than you think they are. The implication of the findings suggests that we respond positively to invitations more often than we honestly desire, and when we decline invitations, we are disposed to exaggerate the weight of our excuse. While my own research on this topic is far less scientific, I’m inclined to agree. Which brings me to my
Dear Advent Star Gazers:
There are many accounts of the Cuban Missile Crisis which I will not recount for you here today, but as this time of year we muse together about Christmas music, some of you may not know how these two topics overlap.
For a quick background, the United States had placed nuclear tipped Jupiter missiles with NATO allies Italy and Turkey in 1961. At that same time the Kennedy administration was arming and training Cuban exiles to mount attacks on Fidel Castro’s regime, a strategy
Dear Light Walkers:
I’ve been thinking a lot about our understanding of binary categories ever since several months ago I listened to an interview with a man who is blind, having lost his vision in his mid-twenties in an accident. He mentioned that he did have some shadow vision—he could make out shapes and forms, but they lacked definition and color. When he described what his poorly functioning eyes could ‘see’, he expressed his surprise that many people told him he wasn’t really blind. He said that we think of blindness and sight as a binary relationship, when less than 20%
Dear Faltering Friends:
Care is what we do when we’re waiting for a cure. It’s transient, it’s temporary, which is why we are really bad at caring for people who cannot be cured.
Over the past two decades the hospice movement has addressed some of this dissonance. For the terminally ill, after the medical industrial complex has given up on checking the win column for your condition, they will transition your treatment to a group of extremely compassionate professionals who do not consider mortality to be failure. Comfort, dignity, respect and
Dear Keepers of the Faith:
Where there is anxiety innovation reeks of invasion and tradition smells like home.
In the mid-1970s, the church of my youth was in crisis. Founded as a church plant grown from tent meeting revivals, there was a growing dissonance between their image and their origin. In the half century since its birth, the Omaha Gospel Tabernacle had shaken them loose from their fiery salvationist roots as the current generation was striving for mainstream respectability.
The term tabernacle was not just a metaphor; it was also architectural.
Dear Non-Conference Non-Attendees:
As you may know, a great deal of effort was put into planning and promoting a post-COVID conference scheduled for the second Saturday in March. Pre-registrations were underwhelming, so the week before the event I decided to cancel it. It’s bad form to have more breakout groups than attendees. I’m grateful for the presenters and preparers who were unable to showcase their no-doubt brilliant work; but discussing the impact of the pandemic four years out was clearly uninteresting to a wider public.
Upon reflection, I realize I shouldn’t be surprised. I conceived of an event designed to address the unprocessed grief we carry regarding what was lost during those dark months of soaring death rates and social isolation. I recognize now that a conference organized to address denial is doomed by its own irony.
Perhaps because I spent so much time thinking about the pandemic’s impact on our social psyche,