Confessions of a Former Meme-Sharer

The word “meme” has two primary definitions, according to merriam-webster.com.

The first definition of “meme” is, “an idea, behavior, style, or usage that spreads from person to person within a culture.” The scientist Richard Dawkins, who came up with the word in 1976, called it “a unit of cultural transmission.” Spending a lot of time on Facebook is an example of this kind of meme.

The second definition of “meme” is, “an amusing or interesting item (such as a captioned picture or video) or genre of items that is spread widely online especially through social media.”

Those of us who spend a lot of time on Facebook know about the second kind of meme. Many of us share them. We see one that seems to summarize our attitude about or opinion on something, we think “Oh I need to share that,” and we click the share button. And off it goes to that magical cyber place where all our friends can see it.

I used to do that often, but I’ve stopped. I have several reasons.

First, I often shared memes to irritate people whose opinion differs from mine. That’s not nice. Nor is it productive.

Second, I’d rather speak for myself. I don’t claim that my words express new or unique ideas, but I think it’s important that I speak my own words and not someone else’s. To be sure, I sometimes quote someone in a sermon or an article (and I always give credit), but the points and positions I present, be they right or wrong, are my own.

Memes may be right or wrong. So may I. But I’d rather be held responsible for what I say than for what someone else says.

Third—and this is my main reason for not sharing memes anymore—memes don’t do nuance. They fail to acknowledge the existence of gray areas in ethics and morality. Memes make blanket assertions without acknowledging the exceptions or taking other possibilities or complicated circumstances into account.

Some of you will recall the late Doug Marlette’s comic strip Kudzu. (Those of you who don’t need to go find it. It’s great.) One of the characters was Reverend Will B. Dunn. Reverend Dunn hosted a television talk show. Another minister named Reverend Fallout was an occasional guest. In one appearance, Reverend Fallout explained that he liked theological statements that would fit on a bumper sticker. Reverend Dunn asked him something like, “But what if a theological idea is too complicated or nuanced to fit on a bumper sticker?” Reverend Fallout replied, “Then it’s secular humanism.”

It’s not just that Internet memes don’t cover all the bases. They couldn’t if their creators tried. It’s rather that they don’t even acknowledge that there are other bases to cover. I can’t share such expressions and maintain any integrity.

I can’t cover all the bases either. One of the problems I had in the early days of my preaching career was that I always wanted to share all the “what ifs” and “maybes” and “on the other hands” that arose from my subject. I exhausted my listeners and myself. Even as I approach the end of this column, I want to raise some counterpoints and other possibilities.

I won’t. But you see, I know they exist. I think that’s important. And necessary.

A meme doesn’t know that. If I share it, I’m saying that’s okay.

It’s not.

First Haircut

I don’t remember my first haircut. I don’t know how old I was when it happened, but I have short hair in every picture of little me that exists, so I must have been real young.

I also don’t remember who gave it to me, but it was probably Mr. Spears, whose barbershop was located at the corner of Market Street and the Main Street alley. I assume he sat me up on the board he laid across the arms of the chair to elevate little boys’ heads to the appropriate level for trimming. I remember sitting on that board when I got to an age at which things happened to which I could look back and say, “I remember that.”

The first time Mr. Spears let me sit in the chair without the board marked a major milestone in my journey toward manhood.

Our grandson Sullivan had his first haircut a few days ago. He’s eighteen months old and needed to get cleaned up for the arrival of his new little sister in a few days. I’m grateful that the curls on the back of his head were spared. But he got a nice trim job on the front and sides.

He’s even cuter now that he was before the haircut, if you can believe it.

His parents didn’t take him to a corner barbershop or to the chain his father uses. They took him to an establishment that specializes in children’s haircuts.

You can do that sort of thing when you live in Alpharetta.

His barber chair was a little red car. His parents stood right beside him. A monitor in front of him featured his favorite animated movie, “Trolls” (which is spectacularly entertaining, by the way). He held tightly to one of his favorite stuffed animals, Plato the Pirate Penguin.

(Quick aside: his Honey and I were in Blue Ridge and went into a gift shop looking for a stuffed bear to get him. We came out instead with a Pirate Penguin that his parents named Plato. What a Pirate Penguin has to do with Blue Ridge, I can’t imagine.)

Now, some of you are reading this and thinking things like, “That’s another example of how we make life too easy on our kids” and “To get my first haircut, I had to crawl three miles uphill in the snow so the guy at the general store could do it with a sling blade and a straight razor.”

I have three responses to such thinking.

First, he’s not going to remember it anyway. So what would he learn from it being a non-fun experience?

Second, we’re talking about my grandson. He wasn’t treated well enough. They should have put him on a throne, fanned him with ostrich feathers, and gently snipped his hair with golden scissors, one strand at a time, while he drank milk from a jewel-encrusted sippy cup.

Third, I know his parents quite well. He’ll grow up to be quite the responsible human being who sees the world as it is and does all he can to make it better. He can learn how later. Right now he’s a baby. He’s our baby.

I was once Champ and Sara Ruffin’s baby. But I grew up fast. I preached my first “sermon” when I was thirteen. I started working after school and on Saturdays at Thriftown Grocery Store the week I turned fourteen. I left Lamar County High School after my junior year to attend Mercer University when I was sixteen (full disclosure: I turned seventeen the first week of class). I got my first ministry position at the same time. I graduated from Mercer when I was nineteen. I got married six days after I graduated.

For some reason, I was anxious to be responsible. I was in a hurry to grow up. Or maybe I was like George Bailey, the central character in It’s a Wonderful Life (the Christmas movie with quotes appropriate at any time of year) whose father told him, “You were born older, George.”

I don’t regret a bit of it. Those things I was in a hurry to do are all good things. My actions reflected who I was, who I wanted to be, and even who I was meant to be.

The half-dozen or so people whose opinion really matters to me think I’ve turned out all right.

Maybe Sullivan will want to be responsible at an early age too like his Duke (that’s my grandfather name) was. Or maybe he will want to live a little more freely and have a little more fun before he buckles down.

I have three bits of grandfatherly advice for him.

Whatever. Let it be. You do you.

What Are You Immersed In?

In a recent service at the First United Methodist Church of Barnesville, Georgia, Pastor Cyndi McDonald led us to remember our baptism. At the end of the service, she invited us to dip our hands in the water in the baptismal font as a way of doing so.

During her excellent sermon, Pastor Cyndi explained that Methodists baptize in three ways: sprinkling (which requires just a little water), pouring (which requires more water), and immersion (which requires a lot of water).

I’m a lifelong Baptist who often attends a Methodist church and often preaches in Presbyterian (PCUSA) churches. I used to be Southern Baptist, but now I identity with the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. I’ve often said that I was Baptist before I was Christian. A few of you will know what a Cradle Roll is. It was a big deal back in 1958 when I came along. When babies were born into a Baptist church, they were placed on the Cradle Roll, which meant they were enrolled in Sunday School. I can’t prove it, but I suspect someone was standing in the delivery room at the Lamar County Maternity Shelter to sign me up the second I entered the world. My mother would have wanted it that way.

When Reverend Bill Coleman baptized me one Sunday night in 1966 (along with others, including my friend Debbie Smith Haywood and my distant cousins Bruce Swatts and Rudy Knight), it was by immersion, which is a fancy word for dunking. There’s a scene in the 1970 film Little Big Man in which a frontier preacher holds Dustin Hoffman’s character under the water for so long that he almost drowns. Preacher Bill didn’t do that to me, but he did dunk me thoroughly.

Whenever I participate in a service in which we remember our baptism, I remember my first one. I was doing some continuing education at Union Seminary in Richmond, Virginia. During worship, we were invited to remember our baptism. I think I was the only Baptist among a bunch of Presbyterians and other Protestants. One of the Presbyterian ministers asked me what I as a Baptist thought about putting my fingers in the water to remember my baptism. I replied, “I found it very meaningful, but I did have to fight off the urge to jump into the bowl.”

I find it helpful to remember my baptism. It’s encouraging to remember the warm water enfolding me. I realize better now than I did then (and if I didn’t after the passing of fifty-three years, how sad would that be?) what the act symbolizes: I have been buried with Christ and raised to new life in him.

What does it mean to be immersed in the death and resurrection of Christ? What does it mean to be buried with him and to be raised to new life in him?

Surely it means that we are immersed in the love, mercy, and grace that Jesus embodied. Surely it means that we live in faith and in hope. Surely it means that we practice acceptance and inclusion.

I don’t know what to think when I encounter baptized folks whose lives indicate that they are immersed in fear, in despair, in hate, in anger, and in prejudice. I don’t know Christ that way, and I don’t understand how someone can follow Christ in those ways.

Don’t hear me wrong. No Christian fully follows Jesus all the time. We stumble and fall. We sin and fail. But surely we should always be growing toward living in the way our baptism points us toward.

The water of baptism dries, but the effects of baptism continue.

I hope my fellow believers and I will continue to grow in practicing Christ’s love, grace, mercy, faith, and hope.

A Broader Perspective

1968 was a tough year. The Vietnam War was raging. Assassins struck down Dr. King and Sen. Kennedy. Riots tore apart major American cities. The divisions between people were sharp.

But something happened at the end of that year that showed us something we really needed to know. And many of us watched it on television.

I was ten years old, sitting on the floor in front of our nineteen-inch black and white television set in the little den of the little house on Memorial Drive. I joined millions of other people in watching the images of the moon’s surface being beamed to Earth by the astronauts aboard Apollo 8. I listened as the three explorers— Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders—read the opening verses of the creation poem found in the first chapter of the biblical book ofGenesis.

It was—and I am very selective in how I use this word—awesome.

As Apollo 8 took its ten trips around the moon, Astronaut Bill Anders took many photographs of the moon’s surface to help identify possible landing sites for future lunar missions. On one of the craft’s revolutions around the moon, Earth came into view. As it did, Anders took several shots of it. One of those pictures has become iconic. The photograph, with its image of a blue globe rising over the bleak lunar landscape against the blackness of space, is known as “Earthrise.”

The astronauts aboard Apollo 8 were the first human beings to travel to the moon and back and to see the far side of the moon. In an essay written for space.com on the occasion of the fiftiethanniversary of their Christmas Eve 1968 experience, Anders reflected on the Earth that he and his fellow astronauts saw from their lunar orbit:

The Earth we saw rising over the battered grey lunar surface was small and delicate, a magnificent spot of color in the vast blackness of space. Once-distant places appeared inseparably close. Borders that once rendered division vanished. All of humanity appeared joined together on this glorious-but-fragile sphere.

Anders went on to say,

Fifty years later, "Earthrise"—the lingering imprint of our mission—stands sentinel. It still reminds us that distance and borders and division are merely a matter of perspective. We are all linked in a joined human enterprise; we are bound to a planet we all must share. We are all, together, stewards of this fragile treasure.

We had never seen Earth from the perspective of astronauts orbiting the moon. We had never had the privilege of seeing it as a unified whole rather than in its constituent parts.

Fifty years later, I’m afraid we’ve forgotten that we’re all in this together. I’m afraid we’ve failed to remember that all human beings share responsibility for this planet. I’m afraid that we seldom think, talk, and act as if there is more that unites us than divides us.

In the 1996 film Independence Day, aliens launch a devastating attack on Earth. Eventually, forces from all over the world band together to carry out a counterattack. Former foes join to fight against a common enemy in order to save humankind.

I know that the divisions in our world—and even in our nation—are deep. But I believe that we need to come together to combat our common enemies. The list of those enemies is long, but I’ll mention just two: climate change and poverty. Both of these crises drive and will continue to drive the problems of war, famine, and mass migration that beset our world.

 I realize that our perspective tends to be narrow: we focus on our nation, our state, our community, and our family. But I want to call your attention back to the perspective the Apollo 8 astronauts gave us. Let’s adopt a broader perspective.

We all live on this planet. We’re all in this together. We need to work together for the sake of all humanity.

Merry Christmas from the Family

My Good Wife and I like to watch classic Christmas movies. Among our favorites are It’s a Wonderful Life, White Christmas, A Christmas Story, Elf, and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.

We have a broad definition of “classic.”

The other night we turned our attention to an under-appreciated admittedly non-classic made-for-television film: A Very Brady Christmas (1988). That’s Brady as in The Brady Bunch.

As the film opens, we learn that Mike and Carol are now empty nesters. They’ve been saving money for a special vacation, but decide to spend it on plane tickets for all six of their children (and, where applicable, their children’s families) to come home for Christmas. Naturally, they anticipate a fun and joyous time of family harmony.

But every child is dealing with a crisis. Marcia’s husband just lost his job. Jan and her husband are separated. Greg’s wife wants to spend Christmas with her family. Peter is in love but hesitates to propose because his girlfriend is his boss. Bobby has dropped out of graduate school to drive stock cars. And college student Cindy is tired of being treated like “the youngest one in curls”—she hasn’t even worn her hair in curls for years!

On top of all that, Alice the housekeeper moves back in because her husband, Sam the Butcher, has left her for another woman.

Half an hour in, the tension was almost unbearable.

But after ninety minutes of drama and comedy (dramedy, to use a modern term), every crisis has been resolved and everybody is happy and at peace.

Oh wait, I forgot to mention the cave-in. Mike survives a cave-in. On Christmas Day. At a work site on 34^th Street. It’s a miracle!

It really is a wonderful life.

Oh, if things could be that simple in real life.

A lot of us will gather with our families during this holiday season. In many cases, the experience will be challenging. That’s because relationships are complicated. People get hurt. Families have drama. Some of our conflicts are over significant things, but some are over trivial stuff.

I won’t try to sugarcoat it: some of us will have a very difficult Christmas, and it will be because of problems with those we love best. But I hope we’ll work things out as best we can. I hope we’ll embrace each other with all our flaws. I hope we’ll try to understand each other.

Mostly, I hope we’ll try to love each other.

It’s not a Christmas episode, but I think a lot about the Modern Family season one episode “Family Portrait.” An effort to take a perfect family portrait has gone awry as a mud fight breaks out among the white-clad family members.

In a voiceover at the episode’s conclusion, Jay (played by Ed O’Neill) says, “Back in '68…I had this mental picture of the family that, if I was lucky enough, I would end up with. Perfect wife, perfect kids... Well guess what? I didn't get any of that. I wound up with this sorry bunch. And I'm thankful for that every day. Well, most days.”

May it ever be so for all of us.

Merry Christmas from my family to yours!

My Christmas List

I remember when I wanted lots of things for Christmas. “How many things?” you might ask. Well, let’s just say that had I sent a letter to Santa, it would have required extra postage.

Somewhere there’s an 8mm film of nine-year-old me monopolizing Santa’s time as I tick off the items on my list while adults in the background laugh. But I wasn’t one to take chances.

There were just so many toys to choose from. How was a boy supposed to decide what he had to have and what he could live without? Besides, how many chances did you get to say “I want all of this” and know you had a decent chance of getting a lot of it?

I figured it was best to tell Santa I wanted everything and to trust him to decide what was best.

Now, I lived under special circumstances. I was the only child of middle-class parents. They spoiled me a little bit, by which I mean a lot. I got more for Christmas than I should have. It sure was fun.

As I approach my sixtieth Christmas, I think I may have finally reached peak maturity. I realized this the other day when my Good Wife said, “You haven’t told me anything you want for Christmas” and I answered, “That’s because I don’t want anything.”

I wasn’t kidding. And I wasn’t trying to be noble.

In previous years I’ve said that I didn’t need anything, but I think this is the first one when I’ve said I didn’t want anything. I can’t quite get my head around the fact that I really don’t. But I really don’t.

Oh, that doesn’t mean that I won’t enjoy opening any presents I might get. And I will get a few, because despite my failure to produce a wish list, my wife and children will give me things, and I’ll be happy to receive them because I know the love that stands behind them. Besides, I like surprises.

Here’s the thing though: I have everything I want, mainly because I have everybody I want. I have a good wife, good children, good children-in-law, a good grandson, and a soon-to-be-born good granddaughter. While they are all good in the sense of being opposite from bad, that’s not what I mean. I mean that they are good gifts of God. I have them not because I deserve them, but rather by the grace of God.

Now that I think about it, there is one thing I want for Christmas: I want everybody to have people in their lives that they love and that love them. I want everybody to experience that grace.

Maybe it’s a mark of real maturity when we realize that the joy we find in our closest relationships is incomplete until everybody knows such joy.

This Christmas, I wish it for you.

Opinions

Sometimes I hear from people who agree with or appreciate what I write. I hear much less often from people who disagree with or don’t appreciate it.

You expect both agreement and disagreement when you write an opinion piece, which is what I do. You know what they say about opinions: everybody has one. Someone’s opinion might line up with mine. Or it might not.

Back when I was a pastor, I’d sometimes say to my congregation, “Sometimes I’m right and you’re wrong, and sometimes you’re wrong and I’m right.” My saying that is #9 on my list of Forty-Seven Reasons I’m No Longer a Pastor.

Here’s the thing, though: I do think I’m right. I do think that my opinions are more correct than the opinions of people who disagree with me.

If you stop and think about it, you’ll realize the utter reasonableness of that statement. If I didn’t think my opinion was more correct than those who hold a different opinion, then I’d share their opinion, and we wouldn’t disagree anymore, would we? And vice-versa.

I do try to follow some guidelines in expressing my opinions.

Guideline #1: humility. I recognize my limitations. I am limited by my background and by my experiences. I never forget that not only do I not know everything; I don’t even know all that much. I know a lot about a little and a little about a lot. I remember that I am always learning and growing. I acknowledge that I might not be fully right. I may even be wrong. Occasionally.

Guideline #2: honesty. I try to tell the truth. You may agree or disagree with what I say. I may be right or I may be proven wrong. But I assure you that I never write anything that I don’t believe to be the truth. I realize that what I say might sometimes rankle some readers, but I say it because I believe it’s true, not because I want to rankle. I will admit to hoping my words challenge folks, but again, I want to challenge you with the truth, not with lies.

Guideline #3: love. My goal is for love to motivate everything I write. That means that compassion and empathy undergird my words. It means I want to encourage us all to put other people ahead of ourselves. Such motives characterize decent human beings. A human being who follows Jesus should find those motives being amplified. I write and share my opinions with the conviction that it is better to be loving than to be right. But I hope I say everything I say because of the love I have for people and because I want us to love each other.

You might not think that adhering to those guidelines in forming and expressing an opinion is necessary.

Well, with all the humility, honesty, and love I can muster, let me say that sometimes I’m right and you’re wrong, and sometimes you’re wrong and I’m right!