Roger Barbee

By Roger Barbee

                                                What’s Your Fuel

In reading Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians this morning, I read this verse: “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth.” (1 Cor. 3:6, RSV) Paul is writing to explain to the Corinthians that they must mature as Christians and understand that all power comes from God. While he and Apollos and others may bring God’s message of salvation, they are merely servants like all humans.

The verse reminds me of a poem by Marcie Han titled Fueled

            By a million

            man-made

            wings of fire-

            the rocket torn a tunnel

                        through the sky-

                        and everybody cheered.

                                    Fueled

                        Only by a thought from God-

                        The seedling urged its way

                        Through the thickness of black

                        And as it pierced

                        The heavy ceiling of the soil-

                        And launched itself up into outer

                                    Space-

                                                No

                                                One

                                                Even

                                                Clapped.

By Roger Barbee

            In May 1968 I graduated from college with a degree in English. I went home that summer to work in Cannon Mills, Plant 1, but as soon as August came, and Uncle Grant sold me that two-toned green rambler, I headed to what I viewed as the “promised land” of the North, which for me was Washington, D.C. I remember on the long drive to my apartment in Maryland seeing a “Wallace for President” sign somewhere in N.C., and thinking, “No more of that.”

            During my college years I became good friends with William MacPherson, who had grown up in Arlington, Va. I visited his home and thus, D.C., over the four years of gaining an education. I came to think of the area as the “land of milk and honey” for such a fired-up, young radical as I. The time of my graduation was the time of George Wallace and “Clean” Gene, who were candidates for President. It was also the time of Dr. King, Jr.’s assassination and the subsequent riots. It was the time of protests. It was the time of Howard Zinn and nightly newscasts of battles in Vietnam, complete with the day’s body count. It was an exciting time to be twenty-one years old and beginning a teaching career in a rural county of Maryland’s Eastern Shore.

            Or so I thought until I recently ran across a reference to a man named Clarence Jordon. Jordon was a strong believer in the Sermon on the Mount, and in the fall of 1941 when he met a gentle missionary named Martin England who believed as he, they began dreaming of establishing Koinonia Farm as a way of countering the plight of farmers.  Life on Koinonia Farm would follow Scripture, especially the Sermon on the Mount. In 1942 they purchased a run-down farm southwest of Americus, Georgia, and the work to establish a community of all people began. But, the local population objected to the Koinonians eating together because some were white and some black, and just wages were paid to black workers which went against the rules of Jim Crow. Violence was not long in coming and until his death of a heart attack in 1969, Jordon peacefully followed the tenets of the Sermon on the Mount as angry whites burned down buildings of the farm, stole from it, destroyed its equipment, shot at its members, and local merchants refused to sell seeds and fertilizer to the farm. In describing the personalities warped by hate that tried to kill the farm, Jordon said, “We have too many enemies to leave them [without hope].”  I am indebted to Joyce Hollyday for some of this information.

Since reading the reference to Jordon and the Koinonia Farm, I have read his Cotton Patch Version of Luke and Acts, a brief sketch of his life by Joyce Hollyday, and have begun his commentary on the Sermon on the Mount. I am captured by his faith, adherence to Scripture, and his legacy of Koinonia Farm. And I can’t help but go back to my years of college in the 1960’s and my mistaken belief that everything I desired was in a large, northern city.

A son of the South, I highly anticipated the time I could move to a world more suited to my beliefs—equality for men and women, peace, honest work, learning, in brief, everyone coming together to make the world better. I saw my dream in D.C. and went there. But, now, all these years later in 2018, I “discover” a man and a place that had everything I desired. Now, I am not fool enough to think that, going back these fifty years, everything would be peachy. Perhaps Jordon would not have appreciated me or my ways; maybe I not his. So be that. Yet, I am intrigued by my not seeing what was almost right in front of me and held all that my radical heart desired in 1968.   

By Roger Barbee

Since my wife Mary Ann had an entry for the annual Chili-Cookoff, we arrived early  at the Family Life Center in order to set up the crockpot of her sure-fire winner. But when I entered the FLC before 5:30 for an event scheduled to begin at 6 P.M., I was surprised to see 10-12 round tables, each fully decorated and set with napkins and spoons, gracing the center of the room. Over to one side another table was loaded with condiments to enhance each bowel of chili. In short, long before the big event, the room had been prepared in style and substance. All we participants would need to do was sample from the 16 entries, listen to the music–alas, no Willie Nelson or Trisha Yearwood– talk with table mates, and combine with them to give answers for the trivia quiz. (By the way, did you know that grapes are the most produced fruit in America?)

As I talked with others at our table, tried to answer Pastor Vern’s trivia questions, and sampled bowls of chili, I kept thinking of stewardship, the incredible first gift that God gives us in Genesis 1:28. And somewhere between the Cowboy Chili and the No Gas Chili, I realized that what was on display in the FLC was stewardship at its best.

When the topic of stewardship comes up, we tend to think: Money. However, in the era of Genesis 1:28, there was no currency, so God must have had a view of being good stewards that did not include dollars and cents. Yes, later in the Bible the topic of a tithe is mentioned, but that is only one dime out of every dollar, and it is an undeniable need in today’s world. But being good stewards entails more than monies, and the work that took place in order for the chili cook-off to happen so well, is a great example of stewardship: Time, perhaps each person’s most precious possession, was given by some folks so that we all could enjoy the event —time to purchase goods, time to plan the room, time to set up the room, time to clean up, and more time.

There are many needs at St. Mark’s but fortunately many talents. Please examine your gifts and find a way(s) in which you can be a good steward of our church. As my Granny Susie was fond of saying, “If you want to get, you have to give.”

BY Roger Barbee

                                                                        A Life

            All left of our boyhood friendship

            is this folded obituary clipped from the newspaper.

            It tells of your thirty-three years in the mill,

            memberships in a lodge and Baptist church,

            and it list names of immediate family.

            Not mentioned are

            our long bicycle rides to Coddle Creek

            taken to escape summer heat

            under its canopy of wet green           

            wading through the water and day;

            nor does it mention

            those early Sunday mornings

            when we sped through dark, town streets

            racing to circles of yellow light

            as you helped me deliver papers

            to sleeping customers;

            or the way you would appear at our door,

            a wrinkled shirt flung over one shoulder

            asking for a sister and iron

            because your masculine house had neither.

            It states your given name that we ignored

            in favor of your favorite wrestler’s,

            and it gives your dates on earth,

            but omits that you were left handed,

            had a lop-sided grin of a thousand suns,

            and your pearl to the world-a kind spirit.

            After all, it is only a piece of newsprint,

            not a life,

            like yours.

            For William Query, whom we called Moto

By Roger Barbee

My first Frederick Buechner arrived this week;  Speak What We Feel (Not What We Ought to Say)  is his reflections on literature and faith.

Now, I have always been a reader. Not a good student, it is my reading that helped me salvage my academic and intellectual self. Because of my reading I managed to attend college and even read through to obtain an MA. My modest library contains books about literature, biographies of writers and other leaders, examinations of religion, political studies, investigations of nature, and more. As a life-long learner, I subscribe to the words of Abigail Adams quoted by David McCullough in his 2008 speech at Boston College’s commencement: “Learning is not attained by chance. It must be sought with ardor and attended with diligence.” McCullough goes on to tell the graduates to “Read! Read, read…. Read for pleasure, to be sure. But take seriously-read closely-books that have stood the test of time.” Those are words I followed, taught my students, and still follow in my retirement. And I especially like Adams’ use of ardor and diligence. However, I share my reading history not out of arrogance, but so that the reader can better appreciate my feelings when a good friend recently asked me had I read Buechner. My friend, also a retired educator with whom I worked, shared with me how Buchner had influenced his teaching, faith, and life. Interested, I later typed in Frederick Buechner on the Internet search engine only to read that he had died a few days before. I read of  his peaceful death at an advanced age, but I was swept away by the tributes to and the deeply felt appreciations of such a writer/thinker that I only had not read, but one of whom I had never heard. I wondered, as I read, exactly where had I been while Frederick Buechner was being such an influencer of all kinds of folks. Feeling ignorant and a bit self-cheated, I ordered two books—the one mentioned above and my friend’s favorite, Wishful Thinking: A Theological ABC.

          To the present, I have only read the first two writers Buechner reflects on in Speak, Gerard Manley Hopkins and Mark Twain. His reflections of the writers at first encouraged me to rush on into this thinker’s words. Yet, reading a sentence such as the following one he writes to describe Hopkins cautions me: “Again and again Hopkins chooses words open to so many interpretations that, like prisms when the light touches them, they cast across the page a whole spectrum of possible meanings.” That is a sentence to chew, taste, and savor for what it says and how it says it. If you doubt Buechner’s insight, read The Windhover and then wonder at his depth of compassion that leads to  his deep understanding for Hopkins and Twain.

I look forward to reading and studying Buechner in the same manner that Abigail Adams advises to approach learning–with ardor and diligence.

By Roger Barbee

In Ilkestonb, Derbyshire, England, Jane and Phil Carter looked at their garden and what they filmed has been shared many times. A fox with only two front legs was walking about the garden as it looked for food. The fox appeared in good health and showed no signs of the awful mange from which many urban foxes suffer. After the video had been viewed many times, one wildlife expert stated that he had never seen anything like that, and he thought that the animal had most likely been born without hind legs.

In the days since I read about the tow-legged fox, I have waited for a rebuttal telling how the video and photograph that I viewed is a fake, perhaps being altered by a computer expert to fool folks like me. But no such correction has emerged, so I am left to marvel at this animal’s resilience.  I have begun referring to the fox as Carter in order to give it some additional identity and a reference for me.

Nature is a good teacher, if allowed to teach. But like in any classroom, a learner needs to focus on the lesson, which means all secondary interferences must be silenced. So, if one wants to learn from Nature, he or she needs to silence the cellphone and any other modern-day gadget. Then the learner must look, listen, and linger. In other words, stay put and observe and be patient for the lesson or lessons can come in various ways and places in nature. The nature classroom need not be a large one and even a small garden of flowers and shrubs offers lessons, but the student must come prepared to learn.

Since we have forty-two large long leaf pine trees in our front yard, I pick up pines cones most every day and a fair number of fallen branches. Many mornings as I tool about cleaning our yard, I am kept company by the chatter of Carolina chickadees as they flutter from tree to tree searching for bugs in between the bark of a tree. They create quite a volume that if I were listening to music or talking on my cell phone, I would not hear. But in the silence of our “forest” the chickadee chatter takes dominion and teaches me another lesson about the balance of nature in our small front yard: Long leaf pines and their heavy bark give space in which insects thrive which means the chattering chickadees have a food source. One small space teaching about balance in life.

And balance is what Carter has. Visualize a person balancing on his or her hands and you have a visual of Carter walking across the garden in Derbyshire. While I have asked many questions about this fox, such as how does it get up to its front legs without the use of hind ones, I let them go and just sit in awe of Carter.

So much in our world disfunctions because so many of us lack balance.  The Ancient Greek Temple of Apollo at Delphi was inscribed with three maxims: “Know thyself,” “Nothing too much” and “Make a pledge and destruction is near.” They are quotations we should follow all these years later, in our minds as well as our souls. Yet so many of us don’t know or want to know ourselves while wanting or expecting too much as we pledge what cannot or should not be granted. If you doubt this just look at the present mess in the United States House of Representatives or Putin’s invasion of Ukraine.

 On the BBC site and others is a video the Carters made. However you view this marvelous animal—look, listen, linger, and learn. If Carter the fox can, then so can we.

By Roger Barbee

            Every few days, a new photograph appears on my computer sent by some server I signed with years ago. As far as I know, the service is free, and I do enjoy looking at the stunning photographs of the natural world—I decline ones of cities. The photographs of mountains, lakes, shorelines, all the usual natural views are terrific. Sometimes people are present in them, but they are secondary to the magnificent scenery. I enjoy guessing the location of the photos and have come to understand that there is, at times, little difference between a mountain view in the United Kingdom to one in France. Over the years I have learned that our world is not that different from one location to another. Now, I appreciate that The Sarah Desert and Death Valley are two different deserts with their own ecology, but even the differences do not discount how much alike our earth is in its varied locations. A field of wildflowers in Germany often resemble one in America. It seems that we are, in the natural world at least, more alike than different.

Over thirty years ago, on February 14, 1990, NASA engineers turned the cameras of Voyager I toward our solar system just as it was to exit it on its way to explore other solar systems.  Voyager I was 3.7 billion miles from our sun when its cameras took sixty photographs of our solar system and one picture became known as the Pale Blue Dot because of a pixel sized dot sitting in a bent ray of sunlight. Scientist Carl Sagan used that image in the title of his book,  Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, in which he writes, “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”

Looking at that pixel recently on my computer screen caused me to close that screen and go to the most recent photograph sent to me by the unknown provider which was of a lake with mountains in the distance. In the clear and shallow water of the foreground can be seen smooth stones and on ragged, peaked mountains are evergreens that eventually thin out and gave way to bare rock. The jagged peaks look like they could be in the Rocky Mountains, but they are in Germany. (Wrong again on knowing where a photograph is taken). But being wrong about any location of a nature scene, does not upset me,  and  I still marvel that so many physical areas of our earth closely resemble other locations. Despite differences, it is the earth on which all of mankind lives and much alike across its rivers, lakes, mountains, deserts, forests, and more.

            The  KJV of The Letter to the Hebrews has in 2:7, “Thou madest him [man] a little lower than the angels; thou crownedst him with glory and honour, and didst set him over the works of thy hand:” I understand that to mean we are the stewards of this earth, and that is a task that we seem to have chosen to forget or ignore the responsibility for a myriad of excuses.

            But I ask the reader to go to the computer and type in Voyager I and look at Sagan’s pale, blue dot that looks so small and isolated and alone in that beam of sunlight. But after looking at the pixel-sized dot, remember his words: “…That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.” It is all we have, so we should take care of it, that pale, blue dot.

By Roger Barbee

For the past few weeks I have been reading Oswald Chamber’s study of Genesis. Yesterday I read, “The ark stands as a reminder that nothing is until it is,” and “God can only do the impossible,” both comments concerning Genesis 4.

At first I was puzzled by his comment concerning the Ark, but comfortable with his observation about God and the impossible. The first quotation caused me to pause, and the second seemed exactly what a reader would find in a study of Genesis. But the more I thought of my reading, I was reminded of how effortless we often make Biblical stories like the one of the Ark. But as I pondered Chambers’ words, I came to understand that he is offering a deeper examination and understanding into the nuances of the Ark and the possibilities of God.  

Above I used the word “effortless” intentionally because, for me, it describes exactly how we often teach such stories as the one of the Ark, or the exploits of Sampson, or how we make the birth of Jesus so convenient. Yet do we give these stories, and others, their just due or are we somewhat dishonest in our re-telling? The way we tell  them is almost magical—the large boat is built by a few people and all the animals arrive, while neighbors ridicule the builders; Sampson is a womanizer who performs a last feat after he is blinded; and the young and very pregnant Mary rides a donkey for miles, over rough terrain before giving birth.

But these Biblical stories and many more, even in our romanticized telling, show that “nothing is until it is.”  Yes, humans can do what is possible, but God does or can do (if He chooses) the impossible.  Only He can destroy the world to save it; use a womanizer to teach a lesson; and give hope through a lowly birth.

The Ark did not exist until God willed it, and at this time of the year we celebrate the birth of a baby who changed the world. You see, “… nothing is until it is.” God gives us His grace while doing the impossible. That leaves the possible-love for and faith in Him-up to us.

By Roger Barbee

For the secular and non-Christ followers in America, Christmas most likely is a season of gifts, a season of colorful lights, a season for a trip to share time with relatives, a season for a tree decorated with trinkets and heirlooms, a season for parties, and more. It seems  this observer that “the season” has begun earlier and earlier in order to take full advantage of the commercial side of this birthday.

However, for this Christ-follower, the substance of this birthday is more. Yes, I have always given and received gifts, had a decorated tree, and such. But I am aware of the power of the commercial world during Christmas and work to “be in the world, but not of  the world.”

Jesus’ birth mystifies still. Yes, he was born of a virgin, but what of the arduous journey that his parents made?  What of the smelly shepherds informed of his birth by angels? What of the Roman military occupiers of the land who wanted the child killed? What of so much surrounding this birth of one small child? Luke writes in 2: 18-19 that Mary, after hearing from the shepherds that folks wondered at their story, “kept all these things, and pondered them in her heart.” Since Luke was not present at that time, did the young virgin, who was cast like Job into an unasked-for role,  tell him how she felt at that time?  We know so much with so little, and our faith must take over for much of Jesus’ birth.  

But we are a culture that likes and expects concrete answers. So, I offer to the reader a poem by the English poet, U.A. Fanthorpe that may explain this magnificent birth:

BC:AD

This was the moment when Before

Turned into After, and the future’s

Uninvented timekeepers presented arms.

This was the moment when nothing

Happened. Only dull peace

Sprawled boringly over the earth.

This was the moment when even energetic Romans

Could find nothing better to do

Than counting heads in remote provinces.

And this was the moment

When a few farm workers and three

Members of an obscure Persian sect

Walked haphazard by starlight straight

Into the kingdom of heaven.

May peace reign: Vrede, Salām, Paz, Shalom, Peace to us all.

By Roger Barbee

Over his almost eighty years of life, James Hilton served many roles. Younger than James and a hopeful football player at A.L. Brown High School, I stood in awe of his gridiron powers. He and Jimmy and all those players were the ideal for all of us younger boys. Their school mascot was the Wonders and that name described them well because they were wonders. But because James dated and eventually married one of my older sisters, Linda, I was privileged to watch him grow into much more than the fellow who hit a Wyncoff player so hard that his hit not only caused the runner to lose the ball, but he also lost his helmet. One James Hilton hit produced three flying objects.

James always was present but never in the way. His strength was quiet because he was secure in his abilities and he had no need to be loud and obstructive. His still water ran very deep, and James did not tell us what he could do but in his quiet manner showed us how to do. In the late 1970’s when he was renovating a house that he and my sister had purchased, I was helping him. A small upstairs bathroom needed a floor covering, so James studied the room. He then measured for the tub, the sink and its two pipes, and the toilet. He then took a piece of linoleum into the hallway, turned it upside down, and marked it for cutting. After that he turned it right-side up and placed it in the bathroom where it fit snugly around all the pipes, tub, and toilet. He said to himself as he walked out of the room  “That oughta’ work.”

Waste was the enemy of James. About fifty years ago when Linda and he lived in Tarboro, my family visited them. In his shop I noticed several boxes of broom handles, but none had the broom still attached. I remember that the bright colors of each had been worn off by use, and I asked James about them. “Oh,” he said, “the plant (where he then worked) was going to throw them away, so I brought ‘em home. Somebody might need ‘em.”

In As You Like It, William Shakespeare writes,

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,”

James did have many parts or roles during his time on our stage. All the people gathered in West Point Baptist this past Saturday knew him in some of the same roles and in different ones. Some that he “played” like the revered football player we all shared. Some roles like Paw-Paw are cherished by six grandchildren. Some roles were that of older brother, or father, or husband. But all the gathered in his family church knew James as a kind man who never refused a request.  

In his poem To An Athlete Dying Young, A. E. Housman writes,

                         The time you won your town the race

We chaired you through the market-place;

Man and boy stood cheering by,

And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,

Shoulder-high we bring you home,

And set you at your threshold down,

Townsman of a stiller town.

Fortunately for us, James Hilton lived a long life unlike the young man in Housman’s poem, and when we finally had to bring him home we are better for having known, loved, and shared James’ life.