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Covenant Baptist Church Advent Set
3-sided rectangle with diagonal aisles and 2-chair offset rows
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I've been setting up chairs at our church since 1991. When I began, we were meeting in temporary places—a school, a fire station, and even a bar for a time. Setting up chairs and taking them down after worship is routine business for migrant churches.

I have handled many chairs over the years. There were the fancy wooden chairs at the Duck Blind Lounge. I used to set them up in three rows around three sides of the dance floor, facing the bar. If you got bored during my sermon, you could check out the variety of beers available on tap or look at the sign that told you when happy hour began.

You don't see that in church very often...

Click here to read the rest of this essay at The Christian Century online.

Archive of Christian Century Articles by Gordon Atkinson

Update 12-16!! - Okay, the bid stands at $200. Um, I have no response to that. The questions people are asking are funny, but not nearly as funny as Reggie's outrageous answers.

Update 12-14- Unbelievable. The ebay thing is actually happened. Reggie made good on his threat. AND, believe it or not, some people have bid on it! Reggie is going to give whatever money is received to our church building fund. What a strange turn of events.

We do the classic “white elephant” gift exchange at our church Christmas party every year. For those of you who have never heard of this, I’ll not bore you with too many details. The white elephant game is common to Christmas parties here in the United States. People bring presents; some are serious, some are silly, and some are a little tasteless. There is a game you play, and you see who gets stuck with the bad gifts.

I know you probably think that’s pretty lame, but you have to play this game over time with the same group of people before you can understand its appeal. Over the years, stories accumulate and traditions develop. We’ve been doing this at our church since 1989.

People still talk about the year that Lyle got a huge pair of boxer shorts with hearts on them. He went into the bathroom and came out wearing them. Then there was the nose hair clippers that reappeared for three or four years in a row. There was also a legendary, gaudily-painted toilet seat that came back so many times it became sacred. It was understood that whoever got the toilet seat had to bring it to the next year’s party, wrapped creatively enough to fool someone into choosing it.

Now my own talent – at least I see it as a talent – is to bring extremely bizarre gifts that are on the edge of being frightening. I often include notes of explanation that I spend a fair amount of time crafting, so that they will be as funny as possible.

One year I gathered spent, red and green shotgun shells and put one shell over each bulb in a strand of white lights. It made a spooky string of redneck Christmas lights that was also kind of pretty, in its own weird way.

Another year I baked 20 foil-wrapped potatoes, put them in a box, and gently laid a copy of The Book of Mormon on top of them. If you are a Mormon, I hope you’re not offended. I make no statement about your theology or your scriptures; it was the sound of it that I liked. Listen: “A box of baked potatoes and a book of Mormon.” See what I mean? That sounds better than a box of baked potatoes and a Bible.

A box of baked potatoes and a Bhagavad-Gita sounds even better, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to give up my only copy of the Gita for some Christmas party. You can get a Book of Mormon anywhere. There are usually people walking around the neighborhood handing them out for free.

But this year I came up with a white elephant gift so strange and unusual, so weird and unexpected, that it tops anything I’ve ever done before. I might have to leave the church now, because I’ll never top this one.

I spent the entire year 2006 collecting the lint that gathered in my navel – sometimes called “belly-button lint” - and storing it in a tiny glass bottle. Yes, an entire year.

Oh yeah, I’m just that twisted and determined.

Let me tell you that I learned a lot about the lint that gathers in men’s navels this past year. New cotton t-shirts produce the best lint. You need to have a little hair on your chest for this phenomenon to take place, but let’s not go into the physics of it. What kept me interested were the pretty colors.

I’ll tell you, this thing changed the way I bought clothing. I would stand at a rack of t-shirts thinking about what kind of lint they would produce for my collection. I know I bought at least one shirt because I thought that particular shade of green would help balance the colors in the bottle.

Surprisingly, the highlight of this year’s lint crop is a foreign object. After a boisterous fiesta party last Spring, I woke up in the morning to find that a piece of confetti had miraculously made a journey down the front of my shirt and ended up in my belly button. I was absolutely delighted with this and felt that after such an amazing journey, the confetti ought to be included in the collection. I’m nothing if not very inclusive.

I’d like to take this moment to thank my wife, who put up with my madness this past year. I guess she stays with me because I’m a nice enough guy, if you can get past my bad hair, freakish sense of humor, and tendency to offend major world religions at Christmas parties.

Can you possibly imagine my excitement as I wrapped my little bottle this past Saturday, after a solid year of collecting?

Here is a picture of the bottle and the text of the note I included with it:

What you hold in your hands is a 2006 crop of high-quality belly-button lint, grown and harvested over the last year by Gordon Atkinson.

The colors of the collection reflect the variety of new shirts I wore over the past year, including a very rare bit of lime-colored lint from a Habitat For Humanity t-shirt.

Also included in the collection is a single piece of confetti from a Fiesta party. This miraculous bit of confetti, working with all the vigor and optimism of a salmon going upstream, managed to find its way down the front of my shirt and ended up in my belly-button, where I found it the morning after.

I, Gordon Atkinson, certify on my honor that every piece of lint in the collection is genuine and was gathered by myself from a period beginning at Christmas of 2005 and ending in December of 2006.

Note: This collection contains no lint gathered from the dryer or any other source.

It was the perfect white elephant gift, or so I thought. Unfortunately there was one thing I had not counted on.

Reggie.

Reggie freakin Regan. The only man in the church with a sense of humor more twisted and diabolical than my own.

Reggie Regan: husband; father; nurse; bat house builder; and corrupter of ministers. It was Reggie who introduced me to the pleasures of a real Cuban cigar. And once you’ve had an authentic Cohiba, there is no recapturing your innocence.

Reggie managed to attain my little bottle of lint in the white elephant game, not that there was anyone trying to take it away from him. He vowed publicly, before all present at the party, to put it up for auction at ebay.com. Apparently, he is actually going to do this.

Heaven only knows what horrors will come of this, once such a private and intimate part of me has been made public. The shame of it is almost more than I can bear. I beg anyone with a few spare dollars to purchase this abomination and cast it, like the great ring of power, into the nearest fiery mountain you can find.

Failing that, just drop it in the trash, please.

I don’t like the idea of it being out there, somewhere, hidden from me, mocking me with its very existence.

Help.

Real Live Preacher

First a Christmas story update. I'm in the middle of chapter five of the as yet unnamed Shepherd Story. Eight chapters will have to be finished by the end of August. I will go into the studio the first week of September and hopefully have the second audio book in the Christmas series ready by November 1. At the same time, I'm giving the manuscript of last year's audio book, "A Christmas Story You've Never Heard," to a woman who will take it through the entire process of getting it edited, checked, arranged, and printed. It will be published by a publishing company I'm forming as of now - Con Safo. That should be ready the first of November as well.

I THINK I've found an investor to fund the printing of 2000 copies of last year's Christmas story. The price gets real low at 2000 copies. If you can't print at least that many, you run into the classic self-publication problem. The book ends up being too expensive. Mine will sell for ten bucks.

So this Christmas I'll have last year's audio book, this year's audio book, and last year's audio book in print form. Coming Christmas of 2007 - my favorite story in the series - "Three and a Half Wise Men."

It's a lot of work, but I'm on schedule...for now.

Why Con Safo? Well, there aren't any traditional publishers who will give me credit for bringing any readers to the table. Traditional publication isn't setup to handle new authors who nonetheless have a fair number of readers. So if I let someone else publish this, they will get the publication rights, almost all of the money, and I will have to put up with their incredibly long and drawn-out editing/publishing process. Why? Why should I do that? If I do it myself I have complete control, can do the entire process in a couple of months, and I make as much or even a little more money even if I sell less copies.

So for now, it's Con Safo publishing for me. If someday a publisher wants these stories, we'll talk then.

And now for something completely different, AV Monday:

We so classy in Texas

rlp

Tom is back. With a vengeance. Long time RLP readers may remember Tom. He's my minister friend whose wife left him. Then his church fired him because they were too holy and righteous to have a divorced minister in their church. And you know what? I have no quarrel with their right to their own theology and practice. Their theology is their business, and they must do church in a way that seems right to them. But they fired Tom immediately and with no sensitivity to what that would do to his life and his ability to make a living. Boom. You're fired. You're out. Their actions were punitive and angry. They could have let him resign, but they didn't. And a Baptist minister who is fired might as well find a new way to make a living. Tom sells insurance now, which is a good living and honorable, but it's not his vocation. It's not where his heart lies. In his heart he is a pastor, a shepherd.

Tom limped into our church after his life fell apart. We all fell in love with him and his three kids. And he fell in love with us. Now it's hard to remember what church was like before he came. For a long time he was angry, and he didn't think he would ever be interested in being a minister again.

But now Tom is back. He does almost all the weddings at our church. He preaches sometimes, helps lead a contemplative ministry we are developing, and teaches Bible classes now and then.

Click for larger image

That's him in the back, the guy in the robe flashing peace signs. Maybe in the first photo he did rabbit ears behind the people in front of him and then raised his hands for the second photo. I wasn't there, so I can't be sure. Knowing Tom, anything could be true.

The thing is, Tom doesn't put up with church shit anymore. He's taken the worst a church can dish out, but he still believes there is the potential for grace and beauty in a spiritual community. He doesn't play church games these days, though he will take a silly picture after he does your wedding, if you want him to. If Tom does your wedding, you have to be ready for a man who will never again take religious stuff too seriously. He may have taken church too seriously once, but never again.

But I don't really care about any of that. I look at this picture and my heart feels like it is going to burst in my chest. Because Tom is back, and I love him.

rlp

p.s. - Tom is cool with me posting this.

There is a time in every worship service when I become a child for a few seconds. It only lasts a moment or two, but that's all I need.

It happens right after the sermon is finished. Can you understand this? It is finished. It is over. I lived a week waiting for this sermon to be born. When the time came for it to be delivered, I entered the world of sermons, a world that includes me, the text, the people, and the words coming out of my mouth. It is a time of absolute focus. You enter that world and no other worlds matter. In this regard, preaching is almost like a drug. It takes away whatever else is in your mind. In this regard, preaching is also very dangerous for the one doing it.

I give myself to preaching because that is what it takes to preach. But sermons are not an essential part of Christianity. They aren’t mandated by scripture. And I have a feeling that in the eyes of God, sermons are often very silly things. I know mine must be. They even seem silly to me at times. But how am I to know this? How am I to know about sermons and whether they should or should not be? I never get to hear them. I only speak them. I can't remember what it's like to be out there in the chairs.

Sometimes you are called by your community to do a thing. It is your calling, so you do it. The big questions are fine, but you’ll answer them while you are carrying out your calling. If you are the woodcutter for your village, you may have questions about woodcutting. You might want to explore the possibility of coal. You might fantasize about some kind of rotation schedule where everyone cuts wood. But while you work all this out in your mind, you cut wood because the village needs fire.

I am in a constant state of trying to understand preaching. I wonder what people get out of it in the long run. I wonder if it ultimately does more harm than good. Am I contributing to the idea that the ancient spiritual journey of Christianity can now mean nothing more than showing up at a building and listening to some person talk? I used to think I would work all of this out along the way. And now it's been fourteen years, and I'm still uncomfortable with preaching. I'm beginning to suspect that the day you think you understand preaching is the day you should stop doing it.

The whole thing is very…ummm…adult. Yeah, adult. You know, carrying out your responsibilities in spite of how you feel, thinking about the big picture, all that adult stuff. So I don't think it's any coincidence that I become a child every Sunday after the sermon is over.

At our church, after the sermon, I invite one or two of my little friends to come and take up the offering. They walk among us and pass around the plates. They scamper up and down the aisle, sometimes with bare feet and always with pure hearts. They are children, and this is their calling at our church. They don't understand it completely, but it is their calling and they are faithful to it.

Sometimes it is Anna, sometimes Steven or Kevin or Adam or Jacob, sometimes Lillian or Rachel or Madison. Sometimes they work in pairs. Sometimes it is a child who has never helped before, like last Sunday when Ellie came forward for the first time. I never know who will heed the call.

While they do their work, I sit down on the hearth of our fireplace. I sit like a little boy on a curb. Usually my elbows are on my knees, and I often rest my chin in my palm. I get comfortable; I don’t know how it looks. I wait patiently while the children get the plates passed around. Then the magic happens. Whoever was passing the plates will come and sit beside me while Cathy finishes playing the piano. For just a moment, we are children sitting together in front of the fireplace in complete innocence. During that time I sit very still, and I don't like to make eye contact with any grownups, lest the spell be broken.

In those few seconds, while the piano music is winding down, I am a little boy. I don’t have anything to offer anyone, and it doesn’t matter. No one expects anything from me. Just these few seconds are all I need for the week. Just a few seconds to help me remember who I am. Then we stand together, my little friend and I, and everyone in the church offers a silent prayer. During that prayer I lean down and whisper something in my friend's ear. It is a secret thing I whisper. Only the children and I know what I say.

As far as I know, there is only one picture of me sitting at the fireplace in those few moments while the music is still playing. Here it is.

I look like a man trying hard not to lose something. I look like a man trying to hold onto something precious. Anna, on the other hand, looks like someone who lives forever in that moment. She knows nothing but the present moment, for she is a child.

There is wisdom here, for those who can find it.

rlp

Our little church has a poet. I'll resist saying, "Though some don't know it." That would be sooo tacky. But we do have a poet. Her name is Cynthia, and she is our poet laureate. I don't suppose a lot of churches have an official poet, but we do. What I like best is that no one can remember exactly how or when she became our poet. I think she just stepped into the job gently and over time. I remember she wrote one after 9-11. And I remember some that she's read at our summer talent shows. She made me cry with a poem at Ben's retirement thingy. And some of her work appears in our prayer book from time to time. By the way, Cynthia is the woman who brought that prayer book to our church.

However it happened, she writes poems, some of them for us, and we all know it.

I've been pestering Cynthia to start a blog for a LONG time. The problem was, she had this classified government job many years ago, and when she left she had to agree to submit anything she wanted to publish to the government for approval first. I'm afraid this stipulation can make blogging a little more complicated than it is intended to be. So no blog for Cynthia. This was particularly frustrating because everything she knows about the government was declassified years ago.

But recently a very good addendum to the law allows for innocent publishing of poems and the like without having to submit them in triplicate to a secret government agency or anything. And so our friend and poet is free to post, publish, or do whatever she wants with her poems. This is good news for you and me, because it means we don't have to worry about reading one of her poems and then having to be killed for it. So relax, we're all going to be fine.

One last thing. Often when someone tells you that his friend is a poet, you expect that person to be "cutesy" good at best. You expect to read a poem or two out of politeness, and then try to think of something nice to say about them. Not this time. This woman is seriously good. I won't spend any time trying to convince you of this because you can go and read her work for yourself.

Cynthia, welcome to the world of blogging.

....It's about time.

rlp