Fellowship Class

Tarrytown United Methodist Church

September 20, 1998

Wayne Danielson



Not Much Happened This Week



Mark 1: 33-39. The whole town came crowding around the door, and he cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another; he also cast out many devils, but he would not allow them to speak, because they knew who he was.

In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. Simon and his companions set out to search for him, and when they found him they said, “Everybody is looking for you.” He answered, “Let us go elsewhere, to the neighboring country towns, so that I can preach there too, because that is why I came.” And he went all through Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out devils.

A leper came to him and pleaded on his knees: “If you want to,” he said, “you can cure me.” Feeling sorry for him, Jesus stretched out his and hand touched him. “Of course I want to!” he said. “Be cured!” and the leprosy left him at once and he was cured. Jesus immediately sent him away and sternly ordered him, “Mind you say nothing to anyone, but go and show yourself to the priest, and make the offering for your healing prescribed by Moses as evidence of your recovery.” The man went away, but then started talking about it freely and telling the story everywhere, so that Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived. Even so, people from all around would come to him.



Matthew 6:29. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?



It has been a quiet week in Lake Wobegone, my home town.

That’s the sentence radio humorist Garrison Keillor uses to begin his monologue every Saturday evening on his show, A Prairie Home Companion.

The charm of his long rambling stories is that they are NOT about very much. They are just about Minnesota people — characters whom he has created, we suspect, out of bits and pieces of real people he has known. But somehow we find them true and interesting and valuable.

I was reminded of Keillor’s slow and rambling stories about nothing much because, as a matter of fact it has been that kind of week for LaVonne and me. You might say — It has been a quiet week at 10407 Skyflower Drive.

As you know, I depend on my life to provide topics for my talks, but this week, not much happened.

• Oh, the president, the Congress, and the press seemed to be digging themselves deeper and deeper into the swamp. I don’t want to know anything more about what the president and Monica did — I truly don’t. I just don’t understand it. What forces were at work that caused Bill Clinton to put everything at risk — his personal life, the entire country and its government — for so little? This was surely a drab and tawdry affair, not a grand passion that swept those two away.  I am tempted to turn off the TV set for the duration. Please wake me when it’s over.

• I’m sorry that someone in AISD decided to cook the statistics for the achievement tests the students take every year. It seemed to me to be another act of near desperation, driven by motives that are too obscure for me to comprehend. We don’t allow children to cheat on tests. What burning need could prompt principals and higher administrators to manipulate those numbers? What caused them to put their entire careers at risk? What was to be gained? School pride? A few dollars in state aid? I don’t understand it. Just wake me when it’s over.

• A former UT football star may have cheated his customers out of millions of dollars. For what? A boat to drive up and down the lake? A new car? A house in an expensive neighborhood? Surely these are weak motives? Is it possible that he risked everything for a few paltry toys? I just don’t get it. Don’t bother me with this until it has all been sorted out.

No, the news this week provided little of interest other than to strengthen my conviction that the devil is alive and well and continues to work his way in our hearts and souls.


It has been a quiet week at 10407 Skyflower Drive.

The children and grandchildren weren’t productive of ideas for Sunday School talks this week.

Ben is going to give his old truck to his nephew, Matt’s boy, Ben.

It was a good thought. Uncle Ben put new tires on the truck, but it will still be a burden to the boy to keep it up. He’ll be working part-time and summers from now on to pay for insurance and upkeep.

I’d rather the boy spent his time on his studies and his money on his books.

But I suppose that to have a car in high school is a wonderful thing.

I remember years ago that our son Paul and his friend Wade Arnold stood up in the Fellowship Hall of this church and told all the parents assembled for a youth-parent discussion that their fathers were the only fathers at Austin High School who refused to provide their sons with personal cars.

They thought that their sad story would put pressure on Bill Arnold and me to ante up better transportation. But when Paul and Wade made their complaint, the parents at the meeting broke into applause — for us! The boys were disappointed.


It has been a quiet week at 10407 Skyflower Drive.

This week was grandparents week in the schools, and on Monday I was invited to go to lunch at Spicewood Elementary, where four grandchildren attend — three from Grace’s and Beau’s family and one from Ben’s and JoAnn’s.

I was in the school cafeteria from 11 o’clock, when Beverly’s kindergarten arrived, until 12:50, when Daniel’s 5th grade class finished.

Do you know how noisy school cafeteria’s are?

When it was all over I couldn’t hear a thing. Instead of going back to work at the office, I went home and took a nap.

In case you’re wondering, eating four school lunches wasn’t that great either.

Grace’s little girl Beverly brought a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from home. She ate only the middle, so I feasted on her crusts.

The next period, first-grader Zach went through the cafeteria line and brought out the “vegetarian,” lunch which consisted of Froot Loops, milk, strawberry yogurt, applesauce, a graham cracker and a cookie. It didn’t seem very vegetarian to me, as a matter of fact, but I was willing to help out, but Zach was hungry and ate almost everything on his tray. I picked up a few graham cracker crumbs.

Zach is actually a kind and thoughtful fellow.

Two of his grandparents died of heart disease. Although he never knew either grandparent, he misses them both.

Whenever he meets me, he always puts his head on my chest and hugs me. I thought this was unusually kind of him, but I finally figured out that he was checking my heart. He wants to be sure everything is still ticking in there. He did it at the school cafeteria the other day, although in all that racket I’m sure he couldn’t hear a thing. All the same, it’s comforting to know he’s looking after me.

When his lunch period came, Grace’s third-grader David shared some of his corn chips with me and talked to me about the computer he was using to help with his writing.

At 12:30, I had the last lunch with Daniel, Grace’s fifth grader. He ordered the vegetarian tray, and after taking a good look at the spaghetti, I decide to join in and have the vegetarian tray myself. I haven’t had Froot Loops for a long time, and actually they were pretty good. Daniel is among the most intellectual of the grandchildren, and amid the uproar of the older children we discussed the prospects of the physical sciences for the next century. You’ll be happy to know that Daniel thinks they are excellent.

I enjoyed being with the grandchildren, but I couldn’t say that anything occurred that was worthy of a Sunday School lesson.


It has been a quiet week at 10407 Skyflower Drive.

Even our dog Sammy had an uneventful week.

In the morning, Sammy’s greatest pleasure is stealing socks from my closet. If I turn my back for a second, he sneaks in, steals a pair of socks and heads for the living room at about 80 miles an hour.

I can’t seem to break him of stealing socks, so I’ve taken to putting the pair I want to wear within easy reach in the closet. That way, even though he doesn’t intend to, he actually does some good, carrying them out to the living room where I usually sit when I put them on.

Sammy has also learned to hunt the crickets that are coming into the house now. That’s a useful think for a dog to do, and he takes pride in his work, although I don’t much care for his delivering the poor creatures to me while I’m eating my oatmeal.

He has also learned to bring back a ball when LaVonne or I throw it. He’s not entirely dependable, and he loses interest after about five or six throws, but he definitely has the idea. He may wind up in the major leagues.

And Sammy now knows the meaning of the term “walk.” It’s not a good idea to say it at all in his presence. He can pick it right out the middle of a sentence. You can’t say “I walked over the the Faculty Center for lunch.” He’ll hear that magic word and get all excited.

On the potty training front, however, Sam’s progress has been slow.

If Sammy were taking the TAAS test in this subject, he would be definitely a “low performing” dog. Since we don’t have any AISD administrators available to adjust his test scores, however, we have decided to roll up the oriental carpet and put it in the closet while we wait for him to grow older and brighter. Right now, he is simply not ready to learn.

No, this week even Sammy failed to provide any stories worthy of being included in the Sunday School lesson.


It  has been a quiet week at 10407 Skyflower Drive.

The rainstorms of a week ago destroyed two umbrellas and a canopy on the deck.

Two shutters need to be replaced.

The Skyflower vine is growing all over the deck with the vigor of Jack’s beanstalk. It needs to be hacked back every morning or we’ll soon have a jungle out there.

A mysterious pile of sawdust has appeared on a windowsill in an upstairs bedroom, and I need to call the exterminator to determine what creatures are devouring our house.

I worked hard at my job all week and accomplished little.

I survived my stress test.

The hummingbirds are packing up to leave for Central America.

I am definitely going on a diet any day now.

That’s about it. Nothing much happened.

It has been a quiet week at 10407 Skyflower Drive.


I wonder why we desire our lives to be dramatic, important, exciting, filled with momentous events? We would like our lives to be like ads for motion pictures, wouldn’t we?

We would like them to say:


“IT’S TWO THUMBS UP FOR WAYNE!— Siskel and Ebert.”

Or —

“WAYNE — ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST!”

Or —

“ WAYNE — A POWERUL AND IMPRESSIVE MILESTONE!”

Or —

“AMERICA LOVES WAYNE!”


That’s the kind of life I would like to have, written all in capital letters by highly paid Hollywood publicists. Instead my life sometimes consists of bread crusts in the cafeteria, carpenter ants in the bedroom and a dog who steals my socks. If they wrote about my life last week as a movie, the headlines would have to read:


“Wayne — two thumbs down!”

“Wayne — snoozer of the year.”

“Wayne — a weak and unimpressive millstone.”

“Wayne — dull even in Iowa.”


You might say that from time to time I suffer from an “excitement gap” in my life.

I’m probably not the first person this has happened to.

And, since this seems to be the week for confessing things, I must confess that I have never tried to make a good story dull, but I have been known occasionally to make a good story more interesting. A little tuck here. A little twitch here. A little turn of phrase in another place.

It’s a human tendency, I think.

And I think, as a matter of fact, it happened to Jesus himself.

I’m not saying that Jesus did this. But those around him? That may be a different story.

In what scholars say is the earliest of the gospels, the book of Mark, written some 30 years after the crucifixion, Jesus constantly seems to be urging his disciples and others to “cool it,” to quit talking about his work as being miraculous.

Of the early days in Galilee, we read:


Mark 1: 33-39. The whole town came crowding around the door, and he cured many who were suffering from diseases of one kind or another; he also cast out many devils, but he would not allow them to speak, because they knew who he was.

In the morning, long before dawn, he got up and left the house, and went off to a lonely place and prayed there. Simon and his companions set out to search for him, and when they found him they said, “Everybody is looking for you.” He answered, “Let us go elsewhere, to the neighboring country towns, so that I can preach there too, because that is why I came.” And he went all through Galilee, preaching in their synagogues and casting out devils.

A leper came to him and pleaded on his knees: “If you want to,” he said, “you can cure me.” Feeling sorry for him, Jesus stretched out his and hand touched him. “Of course I want to!” he said. “Be cured!” and the leprosy left him at once and he was cured. Jesus immediately sent him away and sternly ordered him, “Mind you say nothing to anyone, but go and show yourself to the priest, and make the offering for your healing prescribed by Moses as evidence of your recovery.” The man went away, but then started talking about it freely and telling the story everywhere, so that Jesus could no longer go openly into any town, but had to stay outside in places where nobody lived. Even so, people from all around would come to him.

From this early text, we can see that Jesus was concerned that people were trying to make his life even more interesting than it really was.

Jesus expected that God was coming into history — that this time on earth — his time — was significant. It was going to be a turning point. Jesus found that to be exciting enough. God’s kingdom could come, any day, any hour, but people had to be ready. People had to change. People had to be receptive to the things that could happen. Otherwise — catastrophe could result. The age could tumble down into ruins.

Jesus seemed to think of himself as being the bearer of this important message to the people of Israel. His mission was to go into the towns and villages and preach to the people about what was going on. His job was to tell them the good news of the nearness of the kingdom of God. His vocation was to tell them to get ready, to change their hearts, to change their way of living, to change their comfortable beliefs and customs.

But it was difficult.

People couldn’t see the world as Jesus saw it. People seemed to want a political messiah, one who would turn things upside down and put Israel in charge of the world instead of Rome.They saw in Jesus the hope for the miraculous, political leader who could do this for them. In spite of his best efforts to cool things down, Jesus was pursued by people intent on heating them up.

He soon had nowhere to go. People kept following him everywhere. He couldn’t go to the cities any longer. Even in the country, in the mountains, on the lake shore, they found him.

People kept taking his story, which was wonderful enough as it was, and making it even more wonderful.

Matthew, the next gospel writer, writing perhaps 50 years after the crucifixion, used countless sacred writings to convince the Jews of the Diaspora that Jesus was indeed the promised messiah. They needed to get on board. They were missing the boat.

Luke, the next gospel writer, writing at about the same time as Matthew, but for a gentile congregation, made Jesus not a Jewish prophet at all, but a savior for the whole world, Jews and Greeks and Romans alike. He introduced stories of shepherds and angels and a formal ascension into heaven by Jesus that was witnessed by his followers.

John, writing 10-20 years later, at the end of the first century, and using new material that may have come from one of the original disciples, John Zebedee,  who saw Jesus as even more elevated, as coexistent with God himself at the beginning of the world, the embodiment of eternal wisdom and love, born to a people who had no idea who he was.

Each generation saw Jesus as someone different, someone relevant to their times and their problems and their needs. They took a good story, a miraculous story indeed, and made it better, more dramatic, more poetic, more eventful, more meaningful.

It seems to me that we do the same thing, telling the story of Jesus again, in terms meaningful and dramatic for our times.

It is a natural thing to do.

We do it in every passing generation. We must do it. We need to do it. It is right that we do it, for we can never recover the lost world of ancient times, the world that Jesus knew.

But somewhere, deep inside of all the layers of interpretation that have built up over the centuries, is, I suspect, a different story — the story of a young man, a prophet of Israel, who saw God himself slanting into human history, opening the way for individual men and women, ordinary people, extremely bright people, people not quite right, people who were out and out sinners, to change their lives and become better than they thought they could be.

This young man would have understood the people Garrison Keillor writes about in his Lake Wobegone stories. He would have understood their problems, their misunderstandings, their longing for excitement, the plaintive, elusive quality of their relationships. I think this young man would have seen something worth saving in them. I think this young man would have seen something worth saving in the weirdness of Washington and Austin and its suburbs. He would have seen a certain goodness in an uncle putting new tires on his old truck and giving it to his nephew. He would have seen something transcendent in a noisy cafeteria where an old man ate four not-so-hot school lunches with his grandchildren on one day. And he might even have seen something of value in the relationship of a man and his sock-stealing dog.

You have to remember, you see, that this young man was the one who on an ordinary day out in the country was able to look at an ordinary field of flowers and say:


Matthew 6:29. Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to day is, and to morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith?