Midlife Meditation

Sunday morning in Fort Bragg, California, 1961: my mother, my father, and me. For 25 years, I heard my father answer the telephone with the greeting, "Pastor Elam." I loved this friendly, informal touch. In public settings, others would call him "Reverend Anderson," and I appreciated this, too: my father was a man of distinction who held an office worthy of respect. Once I began serving churches, I called myself "Pastor Mark," and encouraged others to dispense with the formality of "Reverend." But in my first church, a rural chapel in southern Illinois, I was called something else: "Preacher." I heard this from many of my parishioners, in the same way, now that I'm in a classroom, my students will often just call me "Teacher." At the end of that student pastorate, I returned to Oregon for a month, and shared with Dad the title my flock had called me by. He smiled sadly and told me he'd been wishing for his entir...

You may have heard the term "cheap grace" before. It was coined by Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a prophetic German theologian executed by the Nazis just before the end of World War II. Here's a brief definition, from his book The Cost of Discipleship: Cheap grace is the grace we bestow on ourselves. Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, Communion without confession.... Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate. I yesterday became aware of a corollary cheapness in the form of a courageous-sounding open letter from a Bishop. The occasion for the letter was the defrocking three days ago of Frank Schaefer, a Pennsylvania United Methodist pastor convicted of performing a same-gender marriage ceremony for his son. The conference board that administered the punishment was acting as required by the Book of Discipline, a set of laws govern...