In her thoughtful and insightful homily—”What Would Pooh Do?”—Janet Anderson, director of Faith Formation, shared an inspirational message with all of us who feel both overwhelmed by the world’s headlines and motivated to do something. EMC’s Family Sunday worship, Oct. 1, also featured a video by Joey Miller of EMC’s teens’ summer trip to the BWCAW; a Winnie the Pooh performance by Nicole Chidester, Luke Sorensen and Annabell Sorensen; readings by Catriona Ray and Olivia Krebs; and much more. If you missed yesterday’s service or want to dwell in Janet’s message again, you’ll find it below.

What Would Pooh Do?

J. Anderson

It is dangerous to stand at a pulpit and declare one’s view on a culturally divisive issue—

perhaps more so than ever, when, across the wide expanse of the world, we seem so quick to

anger. Nevertheless, I stand before you this morning and declare that I am a fan of Garrison

Keillor. That is in small part due to the fact that I once hosted a book-signing for the radio

show host and writer, who showed up late because he had driven himself and had gone to the

wrong location, but who wore his famous red tennis shoes and a suit as rumpled as his hair and

was warm to every one of the more than two hundred people who had waited restlessly for him

as I passed out chocolates to calm their nerves. My fondness is in larger part due to the

wisdom that I find in his Lake Wobegone stories, which express both deep humanism and

generous Lutheran Christianity. One story, that I heard on the radio years ago as I washed

dishes in my kitchen, concluded with this line:

“Sometimes,” Keillor said, “all you have to do is just get outside.”

I get outside very nearly every day since adopting my dog, Santiago. We walk for up to

an hour, and when I come home, I list in a small, five-year diary, the most wonderful things that

we encountered: a fishing pier in the fog; a rock marking the 45th parallel; the wing of a hawk

lying at the edge of a wood; a snapping turtle on the walking path; an old man sleeping in a

recliner in his garage with a small dog on his chest; goldenrod soughing in the wind beside

railroad tracks; a transit bus with lights that blink, “Go, Twins”; a Mississippi River beach

covered in snow.

God is.

Going out of doors physically facilitates taking temporary leave of one’s mind—one’s

mind being a dubious place to reside. Shakespeare’s Hamlet observes that “There is nothing

either good or bad but thinking makes it so,” and, indeed, our thoughts—about data breaches

and hurricanes and racial animosity and whether our tax burdens will be high or low, or we will

be able to afford our health care, about our political impotence and the possibility of war,

along with all of the daily burdens of work and love—can make us as jittery as Rabbit in the

Hundred Acre Wood, desperately striking out in the most logical direction and winding up,

again and again, lost.

Not infrequently, I send photos of Santiago out adventuring—nose to the earth, tail in

the air, leash taut in an expression of eagerness—to my friends. One of those friends has

developed an admiration for Santi because, she writes, “He wears life like a loose garment.”

“He wears life like a loose garment.” It is a delightful expression. You may have noted

the same character in your non-human companions: the utter absorption in the moment, the

expectation that good things are ahead, the sense that life is protective and enhancing, that

one can move easily within it. Dogs, in particular, along with “bears of very little brain,” have

the simplicity of the Uncarved Block, the Taoist virtue that Benjamin Hoffman ascribed to

Winnie the Pooh. This spiritual quality is the antithesis to the mood and slogan of the moment,

which is “resistance.”

Where justice and charity are not in evidence, resistance may be what God asks of us.

But I prefer to approach peace-seeking another way: through the practice of radical

acceptance. Moses shrinks from God’s call to demand the freedom of the Israelites, saying,

“Who am I that I should go to Pharoah?” As the story continues, Moses whines at God, “I am

not good at speaking. Please send someone else.” Moses resists. He pushes against

circumstance and against God, and he uses as an excuse his supposed short-comings. His

thinking that God’s demand is too hard makes it so. Moses understands neither who he is nor

who God is. But as he begins to move lightly within the garment that God has sewn for him,

he becomes powerful. By accepting the radical idea that we are created in God’s image to do

God’s work, we, like Moses, become capable of miracles, of holding back the waves of the sea,

of delivering an enslaved people to a land that is sweet and plentiful.

The Danish writer Isak Dinesen describes this way of being in her short story, “The

Dreamers.” It begins on a dhow sailing under a full moon along the coast of Zanzibar. A

famous storyteller called Mira Jama, whose ears and nose have been cut off in some past

suffering, explains “that what particularly pleases me about dreams…is this: that there the

world creates itself around me without any effort on my part.” When we fully inhabit and

respect ourselves as creations of God, we let go of our egos, and fear, then, becomes

something that is intense but not frightening. We exist as we do in dreams, trusting that

events that cause our hearts to pound will be resolved and marvelling at the beauty that

surrounds us.

In a moment of global cacophony such as seems to now be piercing our ear drums, I

feel an urgency to do something. I am sure that each of you feels that same urgency. But, like

Moses, I am intimidated by my short-comings and by the sense that I have no authority, that

what I can do will change nothing. To resist means merely to wear myself out. And so the

newspapers lie unread.

A couple of weeks ago, I called Parkway UCC in North Minneapolis. I had a futon

mattress and frame that I wanted to get rid of. I asked if the church could use them in order to

sleep the homeless people whom they serve with Families Moving Forward. Pastor Kathy Itzin

said to me, “We could. But we also have members who are living on the edge of

homelessness themselves who might want them. Let me put out the word.”

A week later, a man and his son came to my house and hauled away the futon and the

frame, and a rocking chair, too. They didn’t listen to me when I told them how to unfold the

frame and carry it up the stairs, and after they left, there were two, long gashes on the stairway

wall. And I was happy. I was happy in a way that I hadn’t been for a long time. By the grace of

God, I had extra to give away, and I had listened to a man tell me about the apartment that he

would be moving into, about how it was being coated with fresh paint, and about how his lady

friend had been wondering what she was going to sit on when she visited. I had met Lady

Friend, out on my driveway, and she had approved of the feel of the futon cover, and I had

witnessed the man’s satisfaction in furnishing a home for himself and a person whom he loved.

I stood, as in a dream, allowing the world to present me with an opportunity to change

someone’s life a little bit.

In one of A.A. Milne’s stories, a blustery wind knocks down the house that Owl lives in.

Afterwards, Rabbit passes around notices suggesting that all of the forest animals help search

for a new home for Owl. Eeyore, the depressive and largely anti-social donkey, takes earnestly

to the task and presents to Owl a new habitation—which is Piglet’s house.

“And then,” Milne writes, “Piglet did a Noble Thing, and he did it in a sort of dream…”

“‘Yes, it’s just the house for Owl,’ he said grandly.”

This is real world stuff, this need to care for people whose homes have been blown

down by the wind or flooded by rains or crumpled by tectonic shifts. Even if we are small,

fearful animals, we are capable of grand gestures if we trust God to put us in the circumstances

in which we have much to give.

I confess that, along with Garrison Keillor, I also like the depressive and largely antisocial

Swedish filmmaker Ingmar Bergman. Bergman closes his film Fanny & Alexander with a

toast given at a family dinner. I close with his words, which echo the Bible’s exhortation that

Jesus will return like a thief in the night, and that we must be ready:

“The world is a den of thieves, and night is falling. Evil breaks its chains and runs through the

world like a mad dog. The poison affects us all. No one escapes. Therefore let us be happy

while we are happy. Let us be kind, generous, affectionate and good. It is necessary and not

at all shameful to take pleasure in the little world.”

Amen.