Daily News Journal Column 9/9/18 “Ubi Sunt Qui Ante Nos Fuerunt,” is the Latin title for a Medieval English poem that begins, “Were beth they that biforen us weren, houndes ladden and havekes beren, and hadden feld and wode?” That is to say, in modern English, “Where are they that were before us, who led hounds and carried hawks, and owned fields and woods?” It is a common motif in much poetry, written by those puzzled by the evidences all around them of a civilization whose traces and ruins they lived among and pondered. Anglo Saxons of the 6th and 7th centuries could look around England and see the Roman forts and walls and castles gone to ruin when the Romans left in 4th and 5th centuries. But who built them? What happened to those people? Who were they? Even the Anglo-Normans in England of the High Middle Ages looking at ruins left from Alfred’s time were sometimes puzzled at what they saw, for written records were often hard to come by. Things like Stonehenge confused many, and the Little Ice Age of 5th-10th centuries drove many Nordic peoples further south out of Scandinavia and into Britain and the mainland of Europe. One of the earliest poems that features the “ubi sunt” motif is “The Wanderer,” which is found in The Exeter Book in Old English. Hard to date, it surely comes from a time before the Norman invasion of England in 1066. As a young psychology major in college when I first read it in an English literature class (in translation), I was struck by passages that said things like, “I know it truly, that it is in men a noble custom, that one should keep secure his spirit-chest (mind), guard his treasure-chamber (thoughts).” This was so contrary to what we were taught in the Psychology dept (in the 70s). Under the continuing influence of Dr. Freud, all the various clinical schools back then, consciously or not, seemed to cling to the notion of the human psyche as some sort of steam boiler, which, when the steam built up, had to be vented to prevent a disastrous explosion. You’re probably nodding your head in agreement. The Freudian metaphor, for that’s all it is, has captured the minds of most of us, whether we know it or not. We talk about “venting,” and “letting it out” as if thoughts and feelings are water heated to the boiling point. But Freud himself and his unscientific theories are fairly “exploded” among most psychologists, even though his influence remains prevalent, ensconced deeply and widely among all exposed to schooling and or the baleful influence of Hollywood. Read Frederick Crews’ book “Freud: The Making of an Illusion,” to unshackle yourself from the invisible bonds that Sigmund has wrapped around you. So, I was thinking, in the context of the current debate about civility, Facebook/Twitter and social media in general, and the explosion of so much anger in the partisan world that has grown up around us, maybe the Anglo-Saxon poets of more than a millennium ago have more to say to us than we give them credit for? Have we become so accustomed to “expressing” ourselves, and “letting it all out” when we’re angry, or upset, that we’ve fallen into some kind of recurring feedback loop, so that the more we express our anger the more we need to express our anger? Before there was “social media” did people learn how to control themselves and their thoughts and opinions just out of necessity? Because if you said to a loved one or a friend what you say to strangers on FB or Twitter, etc., you’d get it right back in the face? And so we moderated our tone and thought more carefully about who we were talking to because he or she was right there in front of us? As a man said whose bones have long been dust, “A wise man must be patient, He must never be too impulsive, nor too hasty of speech.” Steve Odom, who has to talk more than is good for him, is pastor of Central Christian Church on East Main St., and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column September 2, 2018 “There’s nothing like a stadium full of people coming together to remind you what life’s about." -Kenny Chesney. OK, first let’s acknowledge that people in “public life” constantly say things that they wish they hadn’t. Occupational hazard. You can’t just be mum, sing your songs, and leave the stage. Not if you want adoring fans, anyway. People want to know you outside of your songs. It’s a real need for some that almost a pproaches a level of idolatry. Years ago, there were those who had shrines to Elvis in their homes. He defined and formed their very lives, their souls. Some celebrities encourage this. Elvis certainly didn’t seem to discourage it. Those adoring crowds can be frightening though, even dangerous. I don’t know Mr. Chesney or his music, couldn’t quote you the name of a single one of what I assume are his many hits. You may hate me for taking his name in vain. I’m sorry. Mr. Chesney certainly seems to be expressing a heartfelt thought with his comment, for I’m sure that’s what it feels like to him. A stadium full of adoring fans is indeed what life’s all about when you are the idol of many beating hearts and object of much adulation, and he must indeed be good at what he does, for it’s certainly a competitive business. But my dudgeon is aroused with comments like Mr. Chesney’s. What is life “about?” I want to vote for more than just stadiums full of ticket buyers. If he’d said, “I was visiting someone at the hospital the other day and saw a young, very slight nurse struggling to help a large, sick patient sit up in bed and I thought, ‘You know, that’s what life’s all about,’” I could go with that. There are any number of things that might pass muster. “I saw some newlyweds drive off from the church the other day and stop at the corner to give a homeless woman some money and the bridal bouquet.” Or, “I saw a girl go into McDonald’s to buy a burger and get some water to take to a sick dog on the sidewalk who looked abandoned.” Or, “A friend of mine got his 20 year Sobriety coin last week.” Or, “I heard about a family that had fostered 100 sick or addicted infants in the last 20 years.” “I saw a mailman stop and help a kid up who’d hurt himself when he fell off his bike, and I thought, “that’s what life is all about.” I’ve been to a couple of stadium concerts, long ago. I know what Mr. Chesney means, at least from the perspective of the cheap seats, not the stage. The emotive power of a crowd, thousands strong, is felt and it’s intoxicating. I’m just not sure that’s always a good thing. Compared to what crowds down through history have wrought, country music concerts and other similar events are as innocent as a buttercup. Stimulating, exciting, uplifting even, sometimes. But not even close to the power of a nurse’s hand wiping a sick patient’s brow, or a father sitting up with a sick child all night. “What is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. No time to stand beneath the boughs And stare as long as sheep or cows. No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass. No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night. No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance. No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began. A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare.” (Henry Davies) Steve Odom is pastor Central Christian Church on E. Main St. in Murfreesboro and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/26/18 Many churches have a guy like this. In my church, it was the late father of a member who still has the tiny animals his dad carved out of peach pits, and the strange shaped walking canes whittled from sticks and tree limbs. In my mother’s church it’s a member of her old Sunday School class, the BYKOTA class. They named themselves this because that was their slogan: Be Ye Kind One To Another (Ephesians 4:32). And so, naturally, this little old fellow in their class started carving every piece of wood he could find into acorns, turtles, frogs, top hats, bulldogs, etc., etc., and on each piece was the slogan’s initials: BYKOTA. Class members get a new one at each Christmas party. Actually, it’s quite effective in reminding one of the scriptural admonition, since it’s pronounceable and short: BYKOTA. Some of the class members even turned it into a farewell known only to them: BY – KOTA! What interests me is thinking of those folk, how many generations from now, who find these little acorns and turtles in their great grandmother’s dresser drawer with those cryptic initials (Do you want it? Not me. How bout you? Naw, give it to Melvin. He keeps everything.) What will they think? Will they be able to decipher it? Not all periods of Christian history have had the same attachment to words of wisdom like are represented in BYKOTA. Through a complicated series of developments (traced in Peter Brown’s “The Ransom of the Soul: Afterlife and Wealth in Early Western Christianity” 2015) we learn that it took generations after the granting of legal status to Christianity by Constantine and Theodosius before you can discern any kind of wholesale BYKOTA spirit among the ruling classes in any of the successor Christian kingdoms of the west. We see it begin in a dispersed way during the rule of the Frankish King Dagobert I (629-634) during the time of the Merovingians. Dagobert was more than a century after Clovis, first Catholic king of “Francia,” and it was the presence of the Irish monk Columbanus (543-615) and his monastic successors who began a new era of courtesy and kindness among the ruling elite of early northern France. The difference was that prior to Columbanus the Gaulish, Franco-Gothic successors to the late Romans had lived and worked by the same “personal code” as their predecessors. “High talk and taking down one’s rivals by malicious tales had been the characteristic trait of great bishops and of the swaggering courtiers, warlords and great landowners of the Frankish kingdom.” (Brown, 192) In Columbanus’ new “rule” the nun in charge of the cellar (food supply) should, for example always answer requests “with mild words and without any roughness in response, so that the sweetness of her heart may be revealed by the answering of her voice.” (ibid.) The extremely strict and ascetic rules of Columbanus were intended to tame the unruly behavior of monks, nuns and rulers alike. “Day to day life was to be conducted through gently uncontentious interchanges….these pointed inversions of the codes of the new aristocracy radiated outside the convents and monasteries.” In Dagobert’s world, there was a bit of a revolving door between the monasteries and the Merovingian court, and as the standards for monkish behavior changed, life among the noble classes began to change as well. The pious habits of the monastery began to “convert” the code of behavior at the royal court as well, and improved life for all, over time. I don’t know if they carried any carved acorns around with them, but I do know that the stories we tell ourselves and words we pledge to live by are what change us from within to without. The Merovingian courtiers even came to address one another not as my lord, sir, your honor, etc., but, peccator, Late Latin for “sinner.” And that’s how the world changes. One peccator at a time. BYKOTA. Steve “Peccator” Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. of Murfreesboro and may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/19/18 Amazon is a popular whipping boy for the many who long for the good days of “real” bookstores, but if you’re like me, you may have a different perspective. If you didn’t grow up in a big city, bookstores were fairly thin on the ground. I was a book-starved teenager long ago who was thrilled just to learn that the local mall (in Tallahassee) was opening a Walden Books, which was the first bookstore chain to have a store in every state. Even the little paperback Penguin Classics and Everyman Library books they carried were a revelation. I knew of no used bookstores in our town at the time and the only other place I knew of that sold actual books was the drugstore, which didn’t have a real deep bench, let’s say. In my years of loitering in bookstores, I’ve often come across titles like, “The Lost Books of the Bible,” or “Secrets of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” “Mysteries of the Bible Explained,” and “Hidden Books of the Bible Revealed,” etc. Usually you could pick them up and read the first page of the preface to learn that the author was something akin to the guy who wanted to sell you “The Secrets to Winning at the Stock Market!” In other words, yet another scam, with the added frisson of religion. Over the years, with the multiplication of outlets, Cable TV, Internet, etc., I’ve witnessed the same expansion of hucksterism make its way into previously respectable organizations like mainstream national newspapers and magazines and even the National Geographic and its TV arm. Time and Newsweek have for years had the seeming attitude of “if these cretins insist on going to church at Christmas and Easter, let’s at least give them some of the latest hoaxes about Jesus we can find.” Secrets of the Nativity! Was there Really a Star? The Wise Men. Who Were They and What Were They Really Doing There! I’ve heard content chieftains say things like “We just give the public what it wants.” Well, stop it. One time I heard a father answer the question, years ago, why he didn’t let his kids watch TV by responding, “Same reason I don’t let them drink out of the toilet.” Some of the stuff people believe astounds me, but nobody ever taught them otherwise. Churches and pastors have sometimes fallen down on the job as well, because many Christians have been taken in by over-hyped claims like you find in books by the Dan Browns and Bart Ehrmans of the world. Typically, what hoaxes have in common is described well by Phillip Jenkins of Penn State who says, “The real (story) was hidden behind the deceptive façade of Christianity, until hidden and suppressed documents were found which exposed the truth and overthrew a conspiracy that had lasted for centuries.” I will be teaching a class on Bible Hoaxes this year at Adventures In Learning, along with one on Politics and Religion and How to Read the Bible. AIL is held at First United Methodist Church on Thompson Lane this year on three Mondays, September 10, 17 and 24 from 9:30 to Noon. Most attendees are retired and some of the classes offered are, History of the War in Vietnam, Tips and Tricks for your iPhone/iPad, Stress and Relationships, Rutherford County History, the Opioid Epidemic and more. Hundreds of retired Boro-ites have attended the AIL for 28 years. Email AILmurfreesboro@gmail.com for more information on how to register and follow Adventures In Learning on Facebook. Steve Odom is pastor of Central Christian Church and recently discovered a cache of letters from the Emperor Constantine in his church basement. He may be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal Column 8/12/18 I’ve always wondered about the “Red Scare” of my childhood years. I don’t mean our neighbor building a bomb shelter in his backyard. A fear of nuclear war was not irrational in 1961. The prospect may have been unlikely, but who could tell? We were certainly no experts, no prognosticators. Neither do I mean the rush to spend money on the “space race” kicked off by the success of the launch of Sputnik, or even the vast amounts of treasure invested in nuclear and conventional weapons. In an existential struggle, nations don’t count pennies. A bankrupt life is widely considered to be better than none at all. I was so young I have no real memories of the widespread hysteria that percolated down to the everyday American of the time, in the late late forties and early fifties. Alger Hiss, Joe McCarthy, blacklists. And perhaps the putative hysteria is merely the creation of tendentious parties, eager, for their own partisan reasons, to pooh-pooh any tendency to believe that communism was ever a threat to America. Reds under the beds! Hard to tell, now. I am of course a partisan, as is every living and breathing American to one degree or another. To truly have no opinion on political issues is to be in the grip of anomie and by reason of inattention or inability on the side of political entropy and chaos. Some religious folk consider that worldly politics is pointless, fruitless and corrupting. And while politics as idolatry fits that description, as long as we take the words of scripture seriously, love your neighbor, honor the emperor, give to Caesar what’s Caesar’s, clothe the naked, and feed the hungry, etc., we will and must participate in this worldly deeds, and why not let them be for good and not for evil? Like everyone else, I’ve been trying to get my bearings in a new era of a Republican President that many Republican poohbahs repudiate and did not support in the election. Everyone was certainly astonished that day, perhaps even the winner, though I don’t think he’d admit that. Bible readers know that God is not at all averse to working outside the list of the great and the good and the most likely to succeed and use the lowly, the person of no reputation, the unlikely. A twice-divorced philandering billionaire was never on my wish list for president. But, as is said so often, a tree is judged by its fruit, and when we breathe into our paper bag for a bit perhaps we can see that many good things have already been accomplished at the federal level. Accomplishments that have frankly surprised me. The media haven’t reported on many of them, and you have to dig to find them. And the things they cannot ignore they denigrate, like the “crumbs” of the Tax-cuts. The tariff situation makes me nervous, because Smoot-Hawley is not the historical precedent we want to evoke, but I have to plead ignorance on the economic technicalities of this issue. Have our trading partners been taking advantage of us? I just don’t know. Is that a problem? After all, if we buy more of their stuff, they have dollars, but we have cars and smart phones. Like I say, I’m no economist. Mainly what I want to say is that if you’re short of breath just thinking about Trump or hearing his name, someone’s misleading you. We’ve been through this before. There were Republicans who thought, and said, the world was ending back in 2009. Chicken Little is always with us. How much money was wasted by some preppers on guns and ammo and powdered milk because they thought Obama was coming for them? I must confess that it feels like Democrats and Republicans at the Federal level have gotten too comfortable over the last 40 years, and the Great Disrupter may (I say may) be just what this country needs. I know. Crazy, right? Steve Odom does not currently have a bomb shelter and writes his column from an undisclosed location. He is pastor of Central Christian Church on E. Main St. and can be reached at steven.odom@gmail.com

Daily News Journal, August 5, 2018 Sometimes the problem with preaching is the hecklers. That’s right. You didn’t know preachers have hecklers? All preachers have hecklers. They’re often that little old guy that stands in the back, can’t sit down for 20 minutes, restless, walking back and forth, wants to say something. I saw Ezra in church the other Sunday. Little fellow, long pointed white beard like a dwarf out of Lord of the Rings, yellow in the middle from tobacco juice dribbling. Ezra was hopping mad. “It’s just not right! It’s just not right!” I ignored him, of course. You have to, or you’d never finish a sermon. Jeremiah’s usually back there, too, just standing in the corner mostly, glaring at me. Never says a word. I definitely don’t let him get going. Hoo boy. That happened one time and we didn’t get out of there till near 5 PM. Everybody was too scared to leave. Of course, you’re catching on. I’m speaking, imaginatively, let’s call it. More on that in a minute, but did you hear the one about the preacher who just preached his heart out one Sunday? “I just need five men, five men sold out for the Lord, and we can change this church, change this city, set this place ON FIRE for the Lord! We can turn things around. We can make a difference! Five men!” That afternoon, during his Sunday nap, there was a knock at the door, and the preacher, in his skivvies, put on a robe and went to the door. Five guys standing on his steps. “We’re here,” they said. “Let’s get started.” They were fired up. “Started? On what?” the preacher said. “Saving this town, preacher! You said you wanted five men. We’re ready to roll!” Preacher looked a little abashed, and finally said, “Boys, I’s just talking. I was just preaching, you know?” When Jeremiah’s there, I know better than to just “talk.” I know better than to fill up the time with just so much verbiage. I don’t know how many “authors” there actually are of our 66 books in the Bible, but they all want a say. They all need a say. We all need them to have a say, too. Of course, Jesus and Paul do most of the talking. I got no problem with that. And Peter and John and Isaiah and Moses. But Ezra’s in there, too. And even Obadiah, old one-chapter Obadiah, stuck there between those other chart-toppers, Amos and Jonah, yeah, that Jonah. Even Obadiah needs to be heard. Why? Because he’s there. The presence in the scriptures of a particular book means that God’s people over the centuries realized “we can’t leave this out.” Some folk weren’t too thrilled with the Song of Solomon being in there (too racy) or the book of Revelation (too scary), but they’re there. The church needs to hear them. Uncle Bob may be a little nutty, from your perspective, but you need to meet him. You need to hear his story. You haven’t lived what he’s lived through, but he’s family. That makes his story your story. There are a lot of ways to ensure that the “whole counsel of God” is at least read on Sunday mornings. The lectionary is an organized trip through the Bible on a 3 (sometimes 4) year basis, revolving around the gospels. Any given Sunday there’s also an Old Testament reading, a New Testament reading and a Psalm. Myself, I just preach from one text per Sunday. You can easily find a lectionary on the Internet. Look up Revised Common Lectionary. Or, just alternate OT, NT, OT, NT, a different book each week. You’ll eventually hit old Ezra. That’ll put a smile on his face and maybe he’ll leave me alone for a while. Have you, or your preacher, ever preached from Obadiah, or the Song of Solomon, or even Philemon? That one’s easy to miss. If not, you should ask why. Isn’t the whole Bible worth hearing from? Steve Odom preaches nearly every week at Central Christian Church on E. Main St. in Murfreesboro and can be heard at borodisciples.org