growing up frank burns

"I didn't come here to be liked."

It was pure Frank Burns on the burden of leadership.

Radar responded: "You certainly came to the right place."

That is probably my favorite MASH line -- in a rather crowded field. Like most of Larry Gelbart's writing, it perfectly skewers the human condition, and makes us laugh at our own short-comings.

I thought of that exchange at church today. We were studying Acts with its steady progression of Christianity as a faith that would spread from Jerusalem to Samaria, Judea, and the rest of the world just as Jesus had directed.

But there was a potential stumbling block in the early leadership. Peter, who had become one of the principal leaders in the Jerusalem church still saw his faith as an extension of the faith of his youth -- Judaism. To him, what he believed and preached was a Jewish sect. It was and still is. He was correct.

He also saw it as a faith that was primarily for the Jewish people, and that faith was to be exercised in the Temple in Jerusalem. That, of course, elided the core of Jesus's directive -- that The Way was for all of the world.

To get Peter on board, God sent a vision, where a sheet filled with unclean animals (according to the Levitical dietary code). The animals were offered as food to a peckish Peter. Three times he refused the food because it violated his culture and its religious rules.

God then startled Peter by declaring: "Stop treating as unclean what God has made clean." To drive the point home, Peter then is directed to meet with a Roman military officer, a gentile he would have not dealt with before his three-sheet conversation, and converts the officer and his family to the faith.

Thus, was born the evangelical push to preach Christianity amongst the gentiles.

I have always enjoyed reading about Peter. He is one of the most human and accessible people in The Bible. And, in his refusal to eat the unclean food, I fully understood the smugness he must have felt by refusing to eat, thus passing God's test. Not knowing he was flunking what God's will was.

I grew up in a faith that was larded with rules designed to prove one's sanctification. No alcohol. No tobacco. No dancing. No movies. No cards. No dice. (My grandmother removed the dice from her Monopoly game. When the grand-kids would play it, she gave them a spinner from an Uncle Wiggly game.)

The intent was to separate us from the world. A world whose evil would overwhelm us if we had too much contact with it.

It turned me into an 8-year old Frank Burns -- or even a Javert. I knew the rules and that they were good. So, when my friends acted in their own worst interests, I was there to help them find the fold. I ratted them out to the authorities.

I acted not out of a sense of grace, but in a miasma of self-righteousness. I was probably 13 when I first started asking in our lists of "don'ts" where the "dos" were. Feeding the hungry. Giving drink to the thirsty. Welcoming the stranger. Clothing the naked. Visiting the sick and the prisoners.

All of a sudden, a religion of rules morphed into a faith of hope. And today I was reminded that we need to keep our eyes open to God's world.

Oddly enough, I did that on my walk home this morning. It is three miles between my house and church. Because I am usually in Walk Mode when I make the journey, I do not notice much around me. Today I did.

When I visit the states of Guanajuato and Michoacán in September, my chief joy is driving around the countryside in A.E. Housman fashion. I do not find cherry blossoms. Instead, I am blessed with wide swaths of color. Primarily wild cosmos. Orange. Pink. But vivid enough to imagine I had been painted into a Pissaro.

I have always missed the lack of flower fields around here. Until my walk home.

True, we do not have the type of Brobdingnagian displays that grace the highlands. But this is the tropics. And flowers are everywhere.

Some large, but mostly tiny. What the self-righteous may call weeds. What the hopeful see as thirsty souls. And almost all of them with a brief lifespan.

I have no sheet of unclean animals to offer you, but I just may slay a bit more of the Frank Burns that haunts my soul.

Enjoy the grace notes.