Midlife Meditation

Worst. Improviser. Ever. The first improv performance I ever attended was a sermon. The year was 1988. I was student pastor of a tiny rural church five miles south of Oblong, Illinois. My advisor, Professor Virgil Howard, had come up from Dallas to see how I was doing. While he was there, he guest-preached for a Sunday evening service. He sat on a stool in the middle of the sanctuary, and like any good improviser, asked for a suggestion: "What's your favorite Bible story? And what are some things going on in your lives?" He took everything the congregation threw at him, and wove it into an amazing conversational narrative that was moving, personal, and inspirational.  By the time he'd finished, I knew exactly what kind of preacher I wanted to be: not a lecturer, not a poet, not a stem-winder, but an improvisational storyteller. For the remaining twelve years of my pastoral career, and the ten years after that that I continued to occasionally preach, I ho...

These weapons are different. That's the argument President Obama has used to justify intervening in Syria: chemical weapons cross a line. Go ahead and kill civilians with bullets, grenades, missiles, bombs, and as long as there's no chemical in there except explosives, we're good. Gas them, and we're no longer good. It's an odd argument to make, but wholly consistent with the hypocrisy of international law in matters of war. The Chemical Weapons Convention was introduced in 1968 by an 18-nation coalition. Since then, 175 other nations have signed the treaty, though not all have ratified it. If Syria adds its name to the treaty, the total will be 194. Chemical weapons are, without a doubt, horrible things. Slow, agonizing deaths by seizure and asphyxiation are crimes against humanity. There is no question about this. The question for me lies in the fact that these weapons have been singled out for condemnation. Biological weapons have also been condemned f...