Bob Wickizer «

Listening to Each Other

Posted on Apr 4, 2016 by Bob Wickizer in Sermon Blog |

Acts 5:27-32; Psalm 150; Revelation 1:4-8; John 20:19-31

We’ve all had those moments. Our spouse waxes on passionately about a topic he or she is closely following. The receiving spouse smiles and nods at the appropriate moment and then there is this big thud in the monologue. The talker stops and says to the listener, “Are you hearing what I am saying? … Are you even listening to me? … Hello in there.” It’s like when you drive through one of those cell phone blackout zones and you keep talking when the line is dead.

But a faith community listens to each other in love and trust. Real listening is hard work because it requires that for a moment we set aside who we are with our bias, prejudice, background, social location and emotional baggage. Real listening requires that we willingly step into the other person’s shoes for a minute and walk in those shoes. Real listening is never about interpreting what you hear based upon your own situation in life; instead it is about understanding, literally standing under, the other person.

Real listening demands that we hang in there. Sometimes we are going to hear things that are uncomfortable or challenging. Before slavery was abolished first in England and later in the United States, Anglican and Episcopal priests taught and preached pro-slavery sermons to their churches for over a century. Their interpretation of the Bible was all based upon a slave-owning, slavery-is-ok point of view so of course they used the Bible to justify everything about slavery. When slavery was abolished, the priests, preachers and their congregations on the slave-owning side were forced into some very difficult dialogues. All of a sudden, everything they had been taught based upon the Bible, was wrong.

Real listening only takes place in real communities. It is very easy to create a collection of like-minded people. Set up the single authority as being the pastor. Establish the pastor’s interpretation of the Bible as the only valid interpretation and then see to it that anyone who disagrees with that interpretation is uninvited. That is not a community in Christ. It is a group of people who all like to agree with each other. There will never be any real listening or difficult dialogues in such a place because that has all been eliminated by the authoritative pastor.

Take a look at our own culture for a minute. We have subjugated the rights of women since ancient Greece where women were excluded from full citizenship. Ancient Rome was similar in that women had no public voice or public role although they had some legal protection that did not extend to slaves or foreigners. By the time we get to the Middle Ages, the Church of England and English culture regarded women as weak, irrational and vulnerable to temptation. The medieval church promoted the Virgin Mary as a role model for women to emulate by being innocent in sexuality, married to a husband and eventually bearing children. Women were referred to in conversation as “his daughter” or “his wife.”

By the 17^thcentury in Europe and the American colonies, who can ignore the famous witch trials where at Salem Massachusetts over XX women were crushed or burned to death? By 1869 an English philosopher commented that “We are continually told that civilization and Christianity have restored to the woman her just rights.” He goes on to say that in practice the wife is the “bondservant of her husband” no less than that of slaves.

In the United States, women earned the right to vote in 1920, fifty years after many European nations. Today women in all professional categories still earn less than men performing the same job by 20% or more.

So what does this cultural tour of the history of women’s right mean? If we were to have a difficult dialogue about the role of women in our society, in combat, in professional work or in the home, I would FIRST need to acknowledge that I am biased by 2500 years of cultural history. I need to work hard and examine my own cultural baggage before I could even listen to a woman talk about her situation.

The strength of real dialogue and listening in community is that more wisdom and faith emerges from such work than any individual in the group could imagine. The strength of the whole community is greater than the sum of its parts. That is why Jesus constantly referred to us as sheep. A flock of sheep has hundreds of eyes scanning for danger in all directions. A flock of sheep is far stronger and more resilient than one individual sheep. A faith community is like that too. We have hundreds of hearts open not only to the possibility of danger but also to the possibility of opportunity.

Thomas was not just a doubting Thomas, he violated the trust of the community. He did not listen to his colleagues but instead listened to his own inner voice. “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe.” Whenever we think we have all the answers and whenever we refuse to really understand others in our community with opposing or difficult positions, we become like Thomas depending only on ourselves; listening only to our own voice.

But when we are willing to admit that maybe we don’t know all the facts and we don’t have all the answers and we can sit down to really listen to our community then we are like the other disciples. We don’t need the physical evidence. We only need the testimony of our community. “We have seen the Lord!”

A Christian Community

Posted on Mar 30, 2016 by Bob Wickizer in Weekly Grace General Blog |

“Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus…” was the start of Paul’s admonishment to the small church community he founded at Philippi.” The community was founded based upon a dream that came to Paul to evangelize in what is now western Turkey or Macedonia in Biblical times. Even after arrival he endured stonings and imprisonment so this wasn’t a cakewalk mission for Paul. He did not live in a $10M mansion nor did he have a private jet. He suffered for his faith and he was often misunderstood.

When Jesus saw the demoniac chained to the wall at the Gerasene cemetery, he didn’t think to himself, “Uh oh, this is a crazy man. I’m gonna go somewhere else.” No, Jesus stayed, had compassion for what was tormenting the guy and he managed to transfer a legion of unclean spirits into a herd of pigs. I sometimes feel sorry for the poor farmers (unmentioned) in this story who owned the pigs. All their bacon went over the cliff but staying around even in the face of physical danger and opposition is something both Jesus and Paul did repeatedly. Read more…

Garbage by the Numbers

Posted on Mar 30, 2016 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |

In 1971 while in college, I helped create a community-wide recycling center (paper, glass, metals) for Rolla Missouri. We used a donated, abandoned grocery store and we repurposed donated agricultural conveyors and other equipment. Trash compactors were rebuilt and cleaned to use for paper and aluminum can compaction. I have recycled my household trash ever since.

The average American generates 1,600 pounds of trash per year. This means that in my adult life to date, my household as a typical American household would have discarded 135 tons of trash or about 10 full garbage trucks. This volume would fill a two bedroom apartment floor to ceiling with compacted trash. I estimate that we have recycled more than half of our household trash for more than forty years.

Residential trash contains materials that could easily be recycled by those in the household. This amounts to roughly 60% of the trash volume. The amount that American residential households ACTUALLY recycle is 13%. By contrast, Europeans recycle 50-64% of their residential trash. We have a long way to go.

Here’s a more vivid image – If you took the 72 million tons of Municipal Solid Waste that goes to the landfill every year across our land, the garbage trucks to transport that waste would be lined up bumper to bumper from here to the moon. We could shrink that by 60% if we only cared enough about future generations to do so.

On top of the recyclable trash, about half of our domestic food waste can be composted. This saves energy, reduces investment in sewage infrastructure and provides useful gardening soil. Studies vary in their measurements but 20-28% of American households actually compost some or all of the 36 million pounds of food waste they send to the dump each year.

It takes 20 times the amount of energy to create new aluminum from its ore (bauxite) than it does to melt an aluminum can and recycle it. For glass the number is about 3. For plastic it is about 1.6. Here are some more tangible ways to look at it: The energy saved in recycling ONE aluminum can could run a 14 watt CFL light bulb for 20 hours or power your desktop computer for 3 hours. Five 2 liter recycled PET bottles (mainly soft drink bottles), produces enough fiberfill to make a ski jacket. The energy saved recycling one glass bottle would run a 14 watt CFL bulb for 28 hours. Broken glass in the environment takes 1 million years to break down.

Manufacturing one ton of office paper products with recycled paper saves between 3,000-4,000 kilowatt hours of energy or about the entire output of the Muskogee power plant for one hour. Grace uses a ton of paper products every two years (most of which gets recycled).

If we really care about the “unborn” or those who come after us, we might ponder these numbers in prayer and resolve to do what we can about it. The future is literally in your hands.

Ideology 101

Posted on Mar 23, 2016 by Bob Wickizer in Weekly Grace General Blog |

Ideology: “a system of ideas and ideals, especially one that forms the basis of economic or political theory and policy.” Sadly, among the items recovered in the ISIL bomb factory in Brussels last night was a Wahhabist manual. We mourn today for all the victims of terror attacks throughout the world.

Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab, the founder of the Wahhabist sect of Sunni Islam lived during the century of the American Revolution, 1703-1792. This of course was also the heyday of the Industrial Revolution and the Enlightenment. Rationalism was all the rage across the globe. One can now see the seeds of today’s globalism in this nascent intellectual development. Hindu clerics in the jungles of Malaysia as well as Muslim clerics in the deserts of what is now Saudi Arabia feared this movement. It could undermine their totalitarian control over the people.

Not unlike the Protestant Revolution in Europe of a century before (which sowed both liberal AND ultra-conservative versions of Christianity) al Wahhab sought to “purify” Islam by taking it back to its original roots or “

salaf.” He thought that the intervening eleven centuries since the founding of Islam had brought corrupting influences that were either “religious” innovation or polytheism. (Does this sound like Martin Luther or other Protestant reformers? Digression: Recall that W. H. Auden once defined a [Christian] Puritan as someone who suspected somebody else, somewhere was having a good time.) So far so good. Read more…

Sometimes the bad comes with the good

Posted on Mar 23, 2016 by Bob Wickizer in Science and Technology Blog |

Nobel Prize (chemistry) winner, Linus Pauling, once hailed the [economically feasible] development of synthetic fertilizer in the early 20^th century as the most important technology of the 20^th century. That is not an overstatement. Affordable, synthetic fertilizer made with fossil-fuel generated energy forestalled the inevitable collision of population and food resources. Demographers and biologists predicted a food catastrophe sometime in the late 20^th century that never happened. The reason – fertilizer. US crop yields outstripped farms in the rest of the world by a factor of 10 to 20! But there is a cost that we are beginning to pay for this chemical blessing.

Let me admit that in late January and February when I am tired of a brown landscape, the sight of luxuriant green winter wheat makes my heart leap and I look forward to the colors of life in a resurrected spring time. Unfortunately, much of that lovely green color comes from various forms of nitrate (NO3) applied to the fields.

In the past few years, peer-reviewed studies throughout the Mississippi basin have shown that excessive amounts of fertilizer have been applied to agricultural fields and much of that excess has been accumulating in the soil. No big deal right?

When excessive nitrogen is applied, the plants do not take it up and use it. So the nitrate dissolves in water and runs off the field. Here’s what happens next.

Mississippi basin runoff all goes into the Gulf of Mexico which now has a “dead zone” of 6,500 square miles (the size of Connecticut and Rhode Island combined) located off the coast of Louisiana and Mississippi. No fish can live in the dead zone because the nitrate causes a bloom in algae which then consumes all the oxygen in the water. The technical term for this is hypoxia. The economic term for this is no fishing industry.
Des Moines, Iowa and other towns in the Mississippi basin have been forced to spend millions of dollars upgrading their water treatment plants to reduce nitrate levels in drinking water to safe standards. (Remember Flint Michigan and lead? This is just as bad.)
The same Des Moines water company is suing three upstream counties for failing to address harmful surface-water nitrate levels that are more than twice the US federal drinking water standard.
Nitrates are being found below the “top plow zone” which is one to three feet below the surface. We now know they will persist there for decades while slowly leaching into agricultural runoff water.
People who live in the Mississippi basin and who depend upon shallow, improperly constructed or improperly located water wells often have nitrate levels exceeding safe levels. This leads to a potentially fatal blood disorder in infants under six months called methemoglobinemia or “blue-baby” syndrome; in which there is a reduction in the oxygen-carrying capacity of blood. The symptoms can be confused with other diseases and except in extreme cases (where the baby is actually blue), the disorder can be difficult to diagnose. Many state public health agencies have not added this disease to their “reportable disease” index so accurate incidence records are difficult to find now. Nonetheless many counties have information about this disease on their websites.
This last item is a chemistry argument of mine, but NO3 is pretty high on the electromotive force table. That means it will outcompete other trace elements (in their anionic forms) in the uptake by plants. Long term this displacement of other important elements for human life could lead to various types of malnutrition like scurvy in 18^th century British sailors (which was solved by adding citrus fruit to their diet).

Linus Pauling was certainly right in his assessment of an important technology. But that was in the 1960s. Today we need to be smarter about our use of technologies of all kinds. That would include taking the long term perspective and not just blindly label things universally good before we truly understand all sides of the issue.