9 Feb

commodity or covenant?

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , , .

One of my favorite people from the Bible is Joseph the son of Jacob.  As a child I thought his story was entertaining, and now as an adult I draw a lot of inspiration from his life.  In a few weeks, I’ll be talking about Joseph and some other Biblical people at a retreat for middle school students in New Hope Presbytery.

What inspires me about him?  Joseph started out as a young person with a lot of potential and possibly an attitude problem.  Along the way his life and potential were almost snuffed out several times.  He wound up a slave and vassal (a prisoner, even) in the empire of Eygpt, living in a sort of personal and cultural exile.  God gave Pharoah a prophetic dream, and Joseph used the power of that dream to save thousands of people from starvation.  Instead of a rags-to-riches story, his is a sassy-to-savior story.

Yet I did not realize all the implications of Joseph’s story until a few weeks ago, when Dr. Walter Brueggemann spoke at ECU.  Dr. Brueggemann described for the audience the ancient Egyptian culture as we see it depicted in Scripture, and its effects on its backbone, the slaves and laborers.  He talked about the nonstop work and consumption which took place in Pharoah’s domain:  ceaseless building projects, no Sabbath, luxurious lifestyles for those at the top of the food chain.  In that system, everything and everyone was a commodity to be consumed.

He talked about the new system God gave the Hebrew people on Sinai.  In that system, everything was based on covenant. Some would have more than others, but everyone was accountable to one another, and as long as there were crops in the fields no one went hungry.

Joseph’s gift to his master is a little glimpse of that covenant system.  Based on Pharoah’s dreams, Joseph foretells seven years of plenty followed by seven years of famine.  He advises Pharoah to save up food for the people, and to appoint an overseer for this food bank program.  Pharoah gives that job to Joseph.

What impresses me is this:  first, Joseph has concern for the welfare of a people who have enslaved and imprisoned him.  Second, he thinks of a solution that gives responsibility and reward to everyone.  Through his system, everyone has a role and no one has to depend on charity when the lean times come.  No one is an expendable commodity in Joseph’s setup.  Third, even though he is working for “the man,” he creates a temporary vision of a better way.  He works within the existing structure to create something new.

Dr. Brueggemann compared the old commodity-based system of Egypt to our situation today, and asked the audience if we could come around and re-create our lives based on God’s covenant.  I know it’s fashionable on the college campus to bemoan empire, capitalism, the huge influence of the United States, et cetera. My question (and I am thinking of a way to ask this to the middle school students) is, can we be more like Joseph?  Can we work within our system to provide people with daily work and daily bread?

The students to whom I’ll be speaking are growing up in an era of economic stimulus, and a lot of debate over the consumption we have taken for granted.  Some even say that today’s workers between age 35 and 45 are destined to be less well off than their parents and grandparents when they reach adulthood. (Some of the parents of the young people I’ll be addressing are in this age group; see this article from philly.com on Generation X’s economic prospects.)  The economic future of the parents of middle school students seems uncertain, and who knows what the students themselves will face?  I hope that each student who hears my little talk on Joseph will grow up to have a vocation and a way to provide for himself/herself with dignity.

Note 12/14/11:  I neglected to spell out here that in Joseph’s famine relief scheme, people had to trade their land for bread.  The story of Joseph and how he dealt with the famine have intrigued me for a long time, and I find myself revisiting it given the various “Occupy” movements around the country.  I still admire Joseph, though.  I’m not sure how many choices he had.  Since his time, people have come up with a lot of creative ways to finance charity.  Today we face problems with getting food across oceans and continents, and a trade-off is usually involved.  Maybe the believer’s call is to look for ways to let God work within the system and hopefully change it.

17 Jan

pray with your wallet

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized. Tagged: , .

Almost immediately after the earthquake struck Haiti, Bill Neely, the senior pastor of the church I serve, received a flurry of calls. (Bill is very active in disaster relief, so plenty of people were calling him for advice and information.)

Many of the calls were from excited and well-meaning people, who exclaimed that they wanted to help the wounded or hand out food and water.

“What food? What water?” Bill asked. “How much can you really carry with you? And how will you get in?”

It’s been difficult, watching the news about Haiti, feeling helpless and frustrated. If you’re like me, you want things to be fixed. You want to see a cloud of helicopters and planes dropping supplies and lowering personnel on ropes. You want to see photos of people bandaged up and carrying home a box of food, not bleeding and hungry sitting among the ruins. You may even want to go yourself, out of a desire to help and to feel useful.

But what if your calling right now is giving money? What if you could pray with your wallet?

When I was in seminary, my fellow students and I would sit around and talk — a lot. One thing we talked a lot about was mission and service. I suppose we proclaimed ourselves experts, and we decided it was better to serve than to give. But that was before September 11, Katrina, and Haiti.

We knew nothing about disasters of such epic proportions that rendered normal volunteering difficult, if not impossible. We could not imagine ruin so great that only the most professional organizations could handle it.

And–this is the part I’m thinking a lot about today–we tried to deny the fact that we were rich. Poor in comparison to other Americans, perhaps, because of being in school, but rich in comparison to the rest of the world. We didn’t want to offer the service of giving, because our great resources embarrassed us.

We did not choose to be born with such wealth, but we were unwilling to heed the call it placed upon us. In a way we were like Esther, whom Mordecai told, “Perhaps you have come to royal dignity for just such a time as this.” (Esther 4:14) We lived like kings, but we didn’t want to accept the position in which we had been placed.

Well, such a time has arrived. People are arriving in Haiti every day who can handle the crisis, but they need money to make it happen. I am needed to pray with my wallet.

Even though I don’t feel rich, I have more spare change floating around my house than many of the world’s citizens will see in a month. If I truly want to help, I will do something with the resources I have.

If you have $10, or $100, or $100,000, you have been blessed with an opportunity to help. The time has arrived.

(Note: at First Presbyterian Church we have worked often with the Medical Benevolence Foundation, which operates a nursing school in Haiti. The school building still stands, and students and staff are working hard to help. Visit www.mbfoundation.org)

17 Dec

church of choice

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized.

When I was growing up the Saturday paper always featured church advertisements.  In the middle of the church ad page, there was a line encouraging the reader to worship at his/her “church of choice.”  I was always a little amused the the worship service buffet laid out each week.   Somehow it reminded me of the cruise ship commercials where we see smiling people munching at the insanely overstocked buffet.

Last week I heard two Duke professors on the radio talking about their new book on the subject of choice.  It’s called You Choose:  The Habits of Mind that Really Determine How We Make Decisions.   I haven’t finished the book yet, so I hope I’m not getting this wrong, but the basic idea is that we have certain habitual ways of thinking (risk-taker?  independent thinker?  altruist?) that determine how we vote, parent, and live our lives.  The idea left me dumbfounded, sitting in my car and wondering about all the implications.

In particular, I wonder if all our church marketing and outreach strategies are wrong.  What if people are pre-determined to express their spirituality, or relationship with God, in a certain way, and what if we can do very little to change that?

For example, I was just talking to a young man who started his own church here in town, and he was very frank about the church’s “target population” being artists, denizens of downtown bars, and to use his word, “hipsters.”  He was a pretty hip looking guy himself.  (I’m getting too old to tell what is hip.)

So is it true?  Free thinkers go to the church that does what it pleases and has no paid staff?  People who do not enjoy taking risks go to the church with the most solid-looking building? 

In some ways we already quietly acknowledge this form of predestination to be true.  Look around at any church and you’ll see a lot of people who are similar in background and outward appearance.

And yet…

I know a few avant garde kind of people who attend First Presbyterian and love it.  One of them says he needs the structure of a church with a building and a staff and a liturgy. 

I know some people whom I wrongly pegged as stuffy, and they attend the church full of young adults, with the most rockin’ contemporary service in town.

I know people who are politically liberal, yet attend small conservative congregations because they love the tight-knit community.

I suppose the biggest challenge for American churchgoers is that we are in love with the idea of choice.  We worry any time we feel that our choices are being constricted.  We especially want lots of freedom when choosing how to worship or express our spiritual side.

So I guess the church buffet will always be open.  The question is, is something from that buffet calling your name before you even pick up your plate?

22 Nov

walk a mile in their shoes

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

Several weeks back I was at a meeting of campus ministry directors.  One director, who was affiliated with a mainline denomination, mentioned that the CROP Walk to benefit hunger relief was coming up, and invited the other groups to participate.

A director affiliated with a non-denominational, evangelical group started to knit his eyebrows.  I couldn’t tell if he was worried, bewildered, afraid, or what.  He said, “Well, we are participating in a walk too.  It’s to end human trafficking.”

Suddenly the room got tense.   Everyone knitted their eyebrows.   It looked as if the mainline folks would end up walking on one side of town, and the evangelicals on another.  And as far as I know, that’s the way it happened when the walks were held.

Is this what we have come to?  No one will walk together for a good cause?

As a campus minister, on a campus in the Bible Belt, every day I face the fact that Christians can’t agree on worship, interpretation of Scriptures, ordination, and a hundred other things.  And now we can’t agree on a benefit walk?

I wonder if the problem was a simple lack of communication.  Christian leaders in this town don’t communicate with one another, for the most part.  We have a white mainline ministers’ association, a black ministers’ association, and various kinds of evangelical and/or non-denominational gatherings.   A few pastors of the larger churches in town have made some efforts to bridge the divide(s.)

I wonder if it was something deeper and to me, disturbing.  I have trouble describing it, but from what I’ve seen in Greenville and at ECU, concern over social issues actually splits along the same lines as other issues such as worship styles.  It seems there are clusters of issues that appeal to different subgroups of Christians.  This is really over-generalizing, but it seems as though when you attend a certain type of church, then the charities and social issues you will support are already chosen for you.

I’m concerned about human trafficking, but I don’t recall seeing anything recent from our denomination about it.  (Correct me if I’m wrong!)  And does human trafficking trump hunger in terms of something to be concerned about?  It all matters, right?

Could it be that we only care about the things that are brought to our attention by people who are similar to us?  Would we listen to a missionary or volunteer from “the other side?”  Would we listen to someone older, or younger, or who doesn’ speak our lingo?

I wonder what the people benefiting from our various walks and causes would think about us.   I wonder what it would do to our comfortable little subgroups and carefully drawn identities if we really walked a mile in their shoes.

28 Oct

a big feed

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , , .

Some time ago I overheard a person talking about cooking for many people at an event.  He said, “We did a big feed.”

To me, it sounded like something you would say in reference to filling the bellies of livestock.  I pictured cattle lined up at industrial stainless steel feeding troughs like the ones at the farm-supply store near my home–not people enjoying a meal.

Then again, sometimes getting food into people’s stomachs seems not much different from feeding livestock.

This weekend, the college students prepared and served a meal at our local homeless shelter.  Mountains of food got placed into hungry, waiting hands, but it was a “big feed” with an institutional feel.

The shelter must make do with a minimal staff, and unbelievably meager resources.  So to keep the kitchen clean, the volunteers are behind a locked glass window and locked door while they prepare the meal.  When it’s time to serve, volunteers hand meals through the window.  For whatever reason, getting your own plate and eating with the people you just served is not part of the process.  So the volunteers serve, clean up, and lock the door behind them.

After it was over, I began to think about people who spend their lives taking their meals at “big feeds.”  In prisons, shelters, and even in some nursing homes, people are herded through the belly-filling process, and then on to their next assigned location.  Rarely, if ever, do they experience the joy of a family meal at home. 

I wonder if the cooks get any joy out of the process either.  Several years ago I talked with a prison dietician/food supervisor, and it struck me how much stress she went through just to fill stomachs.  Worries over budget, special diets (many sick and elderly prisoners were housed where she worked), and staff occupied her days.  Her cooks, who were inmates themelves, worked behind locked doors with knives chained to the counters.  Her servers handed out meals through a slot in a steel wall.  No one ever thanked them or asked them for the recipe.

The author of Hebrews writes, “Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.”  (Hebrews 13:2)

I wonder if we can ever turn a big feed into an occasion of hospitality?  I think Jesus and his angels are hidden in the faces of the homeless, the sick, and the inmates.  So how are we to feed them?

20 Oct

the loneliness hurts

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

At East Carolina University the Campus Multifaith Alliance maintains a prayer box, located outside the bookstore.  Anyone can drop in a written prayer, and the campus faith leaders read the prayers in confidence at our meetings.  The other leaders gave me the OK to post this prayer, which appeared last year:

I wrote once before with this request, but who ever is in charge up stairs must not have been listening.  That or I’m just unlovable.  I suspect the second but hope it’s the first.  Please pray for me to get a girl friend.  I’m trying hard on my own, have been for 6 years.  I try all the non-drinking based events I can find and go to class I think girls would like.  But nothing.  I think I’m just too stupid and ugly for anyone to care about.  I try to be nice too.  I hold doors and give rides and I’m never rude.  I don’t think that’s hurt but maybe I’m wrong. The loneliness hurts, too. It physically hurts.  It feels like someone drilled a hole in the bottom of my chest and is trying to suck everything out.  So please pray, please.  I’d love it if she was clingy and cuddly, but even that’s optional. I know it’s a selfish thing to pray for but I’m running out of options.  Also if you could include something about getting through the week, that would be great, too.

The loneliness hurts.

If you visited ECU, you might be surprised by the loneliness the student expressed.  It’s warm and sunny here most of the year; walking through campus, you see students laughing and hanging out with their friends.  On the weekends, this place is Tailgate Central.  The downtown area is packed well into the morning on the weekends.

In my campus ministry world, I’m surrounded by dynamic, go-getter students who have lots of friends, and who do mission work, discuss theology late at night, and go to all the Christian events.

So who’s lonely?

Actually, I wasn’t surprised at all to read the prayer.  When you dig below the surface, you find a lot of loneliness.

I know smiling people who have a lot of friends, but who have no one to hold when they don’t feel like smiling.  (Remember the part in the prayer about “clingy and cuddly?”  Don’t doubt the power of a hug!)  I know faithful people who sit by themselves week after week in church on Sundays.  I know people who spend their weekends going to friends’ weddings, and wonder if there will ever be occasion for their friends to return the favor.

You may be reading this saying, big deal.  College students need to concentrate on their studies and on getting ready for a career, especially during a recession!  That’s what I used to think too.  But spend a while with the students and you’ll notice the longing for deep friendship, companionship, and intimacy with commitment.

I’m beginning to wonder if those of us who are Baby Boomers or Generation X’ers are part of the problem here.  For a while, maybe about fifteen or twenty years, we’ve become very confused about what to do (or what our children should consider doing) after high school graduation.  Some people still advocate a quick progression of college/vocational training/job, marriage, and family.  Some say young people should explore the world and spend 5-10 years in self-discovery.  Some say you should make a pile of money so you can settle down later (more difficult to do this in 2009!)    Maybe I’m wrong, but I wonder if so many students and recent college grads are lonely because they haven’t received any guidance.   Why bother risking a broken heart, if you’re supposed to be traveling the world or climbing the career ladder?  Why invest in anything long-term, when you have been encouraged to keep your options open?  Why bother at all, if your economic future looks bleak?  For the students who really are after casual encounters, I guess it’s a great day to be alive.  But for the rest ….?

What can the church do to minister to people hurting from loneliness?  Sometimes I think we could minister to a lot of people by working really hard on fellowship.  Instead of just having potluck dinners under the fluorescent lights of the church fellowship hall, we need to offer more retreats, road trips, gatherings in people’s homes:  anything that helps people feel like they are really the body of Christ and not just bodies in the seats.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep the prayer box open.

(Note:  if you haven’t read Tribal Church by Carol Howard Merritt, or her blog, do so!  She writes in more detail about young adults, the challenges they face, and ways to minister to them.  Her book helped me make some sense of all the things you read about in this post!)

19 Oct

the liturgy of quesadillas

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized. Tagged: , , .

We have a group of folks in their 20s at our church, and this weekend I joined them for Mexican food. Here’s how the evening went:

  1. We gathered, ate chips and salsa, and grieved over some members of the group who had recently moved out of town.  Also, we welcomed back one group member who came from out of town for the weekend.
  2. We ordered and talked about new people we have met who may like to join us for dinner the next time.
  3. We ate and talked about the next round of moves. People are changing careers, looking for work, thinking about joining the military…and it all adds up to not staying in town.
  4. We talked about being single, being in relationships, and how tough all that is when you don’t know where you will be in six months.
  5. We set another date and said goodbye.

In that one span of a few hours, we embodied ancient practices of faith:  hospitality, mourning, celebrating, marking life’s passages, and bearing one another’s burdens.

I spend a lot of time trying to run programs that will minister to college students and young adults.  Spending a few hours just talking and eating with good companions, and being with them as they ministered to one another, was refreshing.  I don’t think any program or guest speaker could have replicated the ministry around that table.

Who knew a quesadilla could be so divine?

16 Oct

Finally entering the blogosphere

Posted by Kerri Hefner in Uncategorized.

For a long time now my friends & colleagues in ministry who are much cooler than I have had a blog.  All this time, I have made notes, thought about what to post, and worried over it, but never actually started anything, all for the lack of a name.  I couldn’t think of something that reflected who I am or what interests me. 

Finally, yesterday a local news reporter interviewed me on a series of church break-ins (which included our church.)  The reporter asked me if there was any way to keep certain people out of the church, or if we had to just let everyone in. 

I kept thinking about Jesus’ example in Matthew 24 about allowing God to separate weeds from the desirable plants.  Not that I think the people who broke into the church are weeds!  (They acted weed-y, if that’s even a word, but still they are children of God.)

Then it came to me!  My husband used to do some lawn care for a living and he used “weed and feed” products pretty often.  And isn’t that what we are called to do as we follow Christ — letting the Holy Spirit weed and feed us. 

So here’s my blog, with thoughts about things we can get rid of and thoughts about ways to feed the soul’s hunger.

And by the way, weed and feed products do contain a lot of chemicals.  Always weed and feed with extreme care.

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