 Please enjoy this original short story, written for the people of Furnace Brook Wesleyan Church and all our friends this Advent Season, 2025. God bless you, and Merry Christmas! His name was Beverly, and that’s not the worst of it. His mother had, for reasons she took with her to her grave a short time later, given her newborn son the name “Beverly Otis Oliphant,” a name which gave her son very few options for strategic retreat while providing his bullies with all the material they could ever ask for.
His regrettable initials, B.O. made for, of course, a common nickname, as well as all the ones derived from it. “Old Spicy” was on frequent rotation in middle school and everyone who’d signed his high school yearbook had signed it “Smell you later.” There was Boo, Boo Baby, Smelaphant, and the list went on. When he’d started at Hawley and Sons he’d tried to get the guys there to call him “Bo, like Bo Jackson.” and they’d laughed at him. Everyone, even the younger guys, called him B.O. over his objections, and even in front of clients. Everyone, that is, but Katie. Katie, who worked in the office and managed paperwork and knew everyone’s address and birthdate, simply called him “Beverly.” She said his name without a hint of teasing or distaste. Just “hey Beverly, how was your weekend?” And he didn’t hate it. His name sounded like a proper man’s name when she used it. She was 25 and, even though he was only five years her senior, he felt old enough to be her dad. Actual years spent breathing mattered less than the fact that she was fresh, pert, and cheerful, while he was glum, anxious, and had gone 30 years without ever having a decent haircut. Perhaps it was because he was, of all the guys in the shop, the only one who’d never flirted but always been courteous with her that he was the only guy she’d ever invited to her church. She’d invited him to the Christmas Eve Service and the invitation had had a surprising effect on him. It had been as though a window was thrown open on a windy day in April and the gale had picked up all the ideas stacked on the desk of his mind and tossed them like confetti, making his mind a dizzy snowglobe of upset thinking. Katie had been nervous that Beverly might impute something romantic to her invitation, but she didn’t need to worry. The guys at Hawley and Sons had often speculated that Beverly might be gay, although they allowed that, if so, he couldn’t have had any more success as a gay man than they’d seen him having as a straight one. He’d never had a romance, had never so much as been on a date. The truth is that Beverly considered Katie to be wonderfully appealing, but his admiration was free of any aspiration. He admired Katie the way a man might admire the stars, taking what pleasure he could in their appearance while knowing that gravity would never permit him to get a closer look. And it’s too bad, because Beverly was not so bad as all that. He was a good worker in good health. When not being bullied he was pretty good-natured and loyal and could even make and take jokes when being met with fondness. And he could even have been somewhat good looking if someone would just tell him what to wear and how to wear it. But what use is a mirror to a man who only sees himself through the jaundiced eyes of critical others? So, no, Katie didn’t need to worry about Beverly thinking it was a date. But it is to her credit that she’d invited him despite her legitimate concern. Her faith had grown more and more real to her since college. She loved her church and her small group. And she didn’t like to think of herself as a greedy person, but she’d been feeling that maybe she was being greedy about this. She wanted to keep things as they were and all to herself. She didn’t like her job and the people there so much that she wanted to see any of them on a Sunday morning. But that’s where the Holy Spirit’s thumb was pressing down on her. She felt, she knew, that she was supposed to invite someone from work to church. And in the end, when she finally did settle on Beverly as being the least objectionable of all the guys at work, and she stammered out a clumsy invitation, it was as much to get the Holy Spirit off her case as it was out of any concern for Beverly’s soul. And the truth is, she would have been a little relieved if he’d said no. It was December 17 the day that Katie invited Beverly Otis Oliphant to the Christmas Eve Service at her church, which meant that he had an entire week of unsettled expectations to endure beforehand. Between the Wednesday of her invitation and the Wednesday of the Christmas Eve service there would be a Sunday morning service at her church and Beverly would have loved to have gone to it in the hopes that it would relieve his agitation so much the sooner. But she had not invited him to the Sunday morning service and he wasn’t sure if he needed a ticket to go or not. So he resolved to wait patiently. And yet if Katie had known how hard it would be for him to wait she would have been kind and would have refrained from making her invitation until the 23rd. What she couldn’t have known, and what Beverly barely understood himself, was that he had been on the sort of spiritual journey that one undertakes without any apparent departure or evident movement along the way. Months before, on a day of particular despair and despondency, a day when all of Beverly’s prospects looked especially dim and there was nothing on the calendar to look forward to and the apparent pointlessness of his life had squirmed out of its cage in his mind to run about and make an incontinent pest of itself, Beverly had resorted, for the first time he could remember, to praying. He’d had no guide in this matter, and he felt clumsy and inhibited. He began his prayer in anger, but with a posture of respect. “Dear Sir,” he said, biting each word off to spit it out into the Great Silence beyond himself, “I don’t know if you’re real, but if you are you have some explaining to do.” There was a good bit of that sort of stuff. It was unusual for Beverly to do that much chest-thumping, but then it was unusual for Beverly to take anything up with God for that matter. And when Beverly ran out of steam and faltered to a stop without so much as an “amen,” he waited patiently for a minute or two to receive an answer. And then he waited impatiently for a minute or two. And then he heaved an angry sigh. But he did have to admit to feeling a bit better, despite the fear that he’d done nothing more than vent to an empty room for a few minutes. He even discovered that the apparent pointlessness of his life had been returned to its cage in his mind where it was acting properly chastened and ashamed of itself for the mess it had made in its mad moments of freedom. His curiosity piqued, Beverly found his mother’s old copy of the Bible and had started reading it. There were videos that began to come across his feed and songs he heard on the radio that rang with a new significance. It was as though he’d discovered a door in his house that he’d previously overlooked, and cracking the door open had discovered that the other side of it was a new world that was vastly different from the one he’d lived in before. He would stand on the threshold of that door and peek out and do his best to make sense of this new country’s strange landscape, knowing that he could never really get the lay of that land without crossing the threshold and leaving his old house behind. And that wonderful door in his house, even when it was closed, gave him comfort and a much needed sense of possibility. When Katie asked him to be her guest at the Christmas Eve Service she thought she was asking him if he’d like to sit on a pew and hear her pastor talk for a bit before having a taper lit and singing Silent Night. Little did she know that she was offering to lead him over the threshold and into the new country that he’d been pining over for long enough that leaving the only world he’d ever known to venture into this new world actually felt like it could be going home. The employees of Hawley and Sons had Christmas Eve off and Beverly woke to find it snowing hard. He was distressed at the thought that the weather might lead to the cancellation of the service but the weatherman assured him that the snow would stop in the early afternoon and he sighed in relief. Mid-morning he went to his wardrobe and found a pair of slacks and a red shirt. He tried them on and looked in the mirror and didn’t really like what he saw. He knew the shirt was wrinkly but he didn’t have an iron and wouldn’t have known how to use one if it magically showed up in his closet. Well, Youtube and resolution. He put the shirt in the dryer with a damp towel and braved the snow to make a trip to Goodwill where he found a green tie and a greenish wool cardigan. On the way back he stopped at the drug store for some pomade and a comb. Back to the house for lunch and then a kindly, older gentleman on youtube taught Beverly how to tie the tie, with much pausing and rewinding of the video until the knot and the length looked good. Beverly knew, vaguely, that ties would not be required in the new country he was setting out for, but he still felt that a tie could help him get to that country. His outfit was assembled and his hair coiffed by 1:30 and he might have changed back into his regular clothes for the afternoon but he was afraid of messing up his hair or having to do the tie again, so he stayed dressed that way all afternoon, only covering it up with a jacket when he went out to shovel. He read his Bible and listened to Christmas carols to pass the time. He wore an apron to make dinner, and to eat it too, he was in such a fever to keep his clothes clean. He was so afraid of being early that he waited so long that he ended up being just as afraid of being late. At the church he found a parking spot at the far edge of the lot and picked his way through the snowbanks and icy puddles to the front door where he was handed a bulletin by a grinning old man who smelled of aftershave. He could hear an organ playing in the sanctuary and was afraid the service had already started but he could tell by the cheerful visiting in the crowded vestibule that it must be prelude music. Katie found him there, standing awkwardly just inside the door. “Beverly, you came!” she exclaimed with real pleasure. She regarded him with his unaccustomed attire and smiled a smile that might have been a smirk were it not for the fondness. She led him to the spot she’d saved for them both, one seat reserved with her Bible and the other with a heavy jacket. She told him where the bathrooms were and asked if he had any questions and then the service was underway. There was a choir of children and the pastor read scripture in a clear, unaffected voice. He read about Mary and Joseph and the census, about the angels and the shepherds, and about the makeshift nursery. There was more singing. The preacher invited a woman to talk. She was tall and angular with her long blond hair done up in braids. She said “Merry Christmas” and everyone said “Merry Christmas” back to her. She explained how a year ago she’d celebrated Christmas in a halfway house where she was trying to get her life together so that she could get custody of her children again. “I knew I wasn’t the way I was supposed to be” she said, “and I knew that I could never be the way I was supposed to be on my own. I could never be good enough to belong in heaven if I couldn’t even be good enough to get out of the halfway house.” “But that’s when Jesus came into my life with Good News. He told me that he loved me just as I was. I didn’t have to fix anything to come to him. I could come to him broken and he would not hold my brokenness against me, but he would begin to fix me. I trusted him to be my Savior and it hasn’t been easy, but I am sober, I have my kids back, and I love God so much. I’m never going back!” More singing and Beverly felt that he might have slipped across the threshold and was standing now in the new country, already seeing more of it than he could see before from the door. The pastor read John 1:14 “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the one and only Son, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.” “He came into our world,” the preacher declared, “that we might have a place in his,” and Beverly felt that the door through which he had come into this strange country had not so much closed as it had evaporated. And he shrugged happily, having no need of that door any longer. During Silent Night the candle in his fist made him look fierce and lovely in its flickering night. At the door on the way out Katie was already beginning to perceive something of the transformation that was taking place in her coworker. When they came to the pastor she went to introduce him. “This is my friend . . . “ and she hesitated. She was the only person she knew of in all the world who called this man Beverly. Everyone else called him something different. She felt a selfish desire to keep his name for herself, but she couldn’t introduce him, shining as he was with the shekinah glory, to her pastor as her old friend “B.O.” No, she reminded herself it was no good being greedy. “This is my friend, Beverly” she said smiling. “Beverly Otis Oliphant. Merry Christmas, Beverly Otis!” And if the pastor thought the name and Katie’s giggling and Beverly’s absurd happiness were all odd, he gave no indication. “Merry Christmas, Beverly Otis,” he said as he shook the man’s hand and sent him out the door into the bracing air of a new country.
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 A truth we can not edit, A Child we can't abort, A song, a sight, an angel, An incredible report. Ages never made it brittle, Love never made it weak, We never did it justice By the gifts we thought to seek. And those who would undo it Know not to just undo: To rip to shreds an old thing, Knit it into something new. We bear the old things lightly The new things bear us down, The holiday’s a heavy lid, The holy day, a crown. For thousands of years the simple truth at the heart of this season has been a comfort to the oppressed and a haunting threat to the oppressor. People light candles and go to worship because a king greater than any other king has come into the world. King Jesus and the people who follow him know a secret about the world and what this world is coming to that and that secret makes them jolly. It gives them power, consolation, and even mirth. The powers of darkness that were put on notice by Jesus' arrival have always resisted the celebration of it. And make no mistake: if those powers could prevent us celebrating, they would. But what they can not prevent they are pleased to corrupt. They subvert and corrupt the season by making it about commercial things and demanding expectations, until the very celebration of the Great Liberator becomes another shackle for the chaining up of the harried masses. We reject it. Jesus came to make us free and in perfect freedom we will worship him and take joy, fierce joy, in the day of his incarnation.  I think that what I’m about to tell you is applicable to most of my colleagues, but I’m really not in a position to speak for all pastors everywhere.
I am underutilized. And that’s true even in seasons when I feel busy. The sad truth is that, as a pastor, I am underutilized; neither the people in my church, nor the people in my community make the use of me that they might. And that’s understandable. If you thought that all a pastor was good for was preaching sermons and answering spiritual questions you might not have any use for one. Not all of us care to hear sermons or have questions we really want to hear the answers to. So I would like to suggest seven ways that anyone, inside or outside of the church, might like to make use of a pastor who knows how to keep private things private.
Again, I don’t speak for all my colleagues. But I think that most all of these things are things I’m already being paid to do by my church. Furnace Brook Wesleyan gives me an office and a salary so that when you reach out to make use of me somehow you don’t have to worry about what that might cost you. I’m employed by the church to be a resource to the community. And believe me when I say, as a servant of Jesus, that I want to be of use to you even if you never become a part of our church.  Years ago someone in the church took me to the firing range. It was clear that he felt that this was part of “equipping the saints.” I did not grow up with guns and I was pastoring a church in Vermont. And I agreed that being all things to all people might mean getting familiar with a .22 rifle.
I kind of enjoyed it, but haven’t been back since. The chief dividend of that experience seems to have been the sermon illustrations. Here’s one: When it comes to gratitude you want to aim well and use live ammunition. Some of our neighbors are really grateful and it’s to their credit. But they don’t have a good idea of who exactly to thank for the blessings in their lives. They express their gratitude, putting it out in the world and their sentiment hangs like a cloud of mist over their heads for a bit before evaporating away. It’s like going to the firing range, and just sending your live ammunition willy-nilly in volleys at the sky instead of the target. But then some of us know exactly who to direct our gratitude toward and we are careful to aim well, minding our breathing, squinting down the sight. And then shoot blanks. Our gratitude might veer into the abstract. Or we say we are grateful for something we privately think we were entitled to or could take credit for if we didn’t feel obliged to give God the glory for it. But we, the people of God, should be of all our countrymen celebrating Thanksgiving today the most successful at it. We see the target clearly and God has supplied us with an abundant cache of ammunition. Nothing but bullseyes all day long. Jesus has been very good to us, the sheep of his pasture. And my prayer is that all of the people of Furnace Brook end the day today with full bellies and empty chambers. God bless you all!  Rob Henderson, author of "Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class" When John and Charles Wesley led what came to be known as the Methodist Revival in Great Britain it meant salvation for hundreds of thousands of people. But there were social implications too. All the people who, having been saved and having resolved to be holy, gave up drinking and gambling and worked “as unto the Lord,” so that they left behind their generational dysfunctions and poverty, made the British Empire strong at precisely the time when France was sinking into a violent and destructive revolution.
The Wesleys preached grace, but they also preached practical holiness and they did it without embarrassment or apology. They were confident that holy behavior pleased God and was a blessing to the individual and the individual’s community. So they told people what to do with their money, how much to sleep, how to educate their children, how to treat their animals, how to treat their employees and a host of other things. This past Sunday when I leaned into Wesley’s sermon “On the Use of Money,” I confess to being a little uncomfortable with telling you all what to do, even though it is what I myself do and even though my personal experience has validated that direction at every turn. Author and psychologist Rob Henderson, has written extensively on what he calls “luxury beliefs.” He has observed how elites in our culture often signal their virtue by promoting on the cultural level beliefs that they reject in their private experience. He observes, for instance, how many of the loudest voices calling for “body positivity” belong to people who evidently have gym memberships. He calls them “luxury” beliefs because they can hold and espouse these beliefs at little cost to themselves, or at a cost their privilege and advantages make it easy for them to afford. People with lots of resources and privileged social networks can afford a level of intoxication that would result in job loss, bankruptcy, and family dissolution in the case of a poor person. But these luxury beliefs, like most luxury purchases, are bought on credit. And the bill is coming due. It always comes due. Vermont is wealthy and it still has stockpiles of cultural heritage to draw down. But it can not afford indefinitely the luxury beliefs it holds. Children being sacrificed on the altar of gender identity, a generation of Vermonters being lost to the abuse of alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs, sexual promiscuity and broken marriages . . . Vermont can’t afford this much longer. The time is right for a Wesleyan message, for a people who insist on grace, but who also have a confident and robust message about what “shalom” looks like and what it requires. Vermont needs practical holiness and it needs to hear that message from holy people who love Vermont and Jesus.  This can be a difficult time of year to drive in Rutland. Much of the striping on the roads has been worn off and what remains is sometimes obscured by snow and grit. Out of staters, who are driving through on their way to or from the slopes, are doing their best to surmise the proper lanes. But their guesses often run contrary to precedent and they end up irking local drivers who are still heeding lines that are painted nowhere but in their determined memories. It’s a wonder there aren’t more collisions.
Here’s a little vocabulary for you; “mores” (pronounced mor-aze) is a word that means all of the conventions, norms, and cultural expectations of a society. The sense that if someone tells you “good morning” you are obliged to respond in kind is not a matter of morality or law, but of our mores. Now the distinction between mores and morality and the law can get blurry in places, and there is overlap. A particular transgression may only have legal significance, or only moral significance, or may only matter in the social realm. Or a transgression may have implications in all three areas. But here’s an important difference between these three. Morality does not change (not from time to time, or place to place, or person to person.) Laws, when they change, do so definitively: one day it’s illegal to bet on sports, the next day it’s all but mandatory. But mores are tricky. Sometimes a culture’s mores are definite and enforced. But there are seasons when the mores are up for negotiation, when, after a long winter, the lines on the road that we’ve relied on for smooth traffic, are barely discernible and easily ignored. During those seasons new traffic patterns emerge. Suddenly, drivers who are sticklers for the old, “right” way of driving are the ones whose stubborn insistence on precedent is the cause of the accidents that inevitably occur. The new lines don’t start faint and then grow bold over time. When the cultural road crew puts down the new lines, lines that reflect the new traffic patterns, they get put down in vivid yellow and bright white, and everyone has to come to terms with these new lines or get off the road. Hardly anyone maintains an objection to women wearing tights in public anymore, but quaint as it might seem to you, that was a matter of much contention until pretty recently. Why am I devoting so much space in our church’s newsletter to this topic? The church tends to be filled with the sort of people who as drivers in March are making a point of faithfully abiding by traffic lines that have grown so faint that many others are disregarding them with a clear conscience. We can be sticklers. I am the worst stickler of all. And that’s not all bad. Sometimes the old traffic patterns are, objectively, superior to the new ones. But we, as an outpost of the Kingdom, are responsible for the gospel and for shalom, the right ordering of the world. When we get preoccupied with the business of policing mores we tie up energy in defense of the previous ordering of the world that ought to be going to the right ordering of the world. Houghton University is a Wesleyan school in Western New York which was founded by a man who was saved from a disastrous life by a wonderful Jesus. He founded a school where other people, regardless of class or background or financial condition, could be equipped to join him in the work of pursuing “shalom” in Jesus’ name. And Willard Houghton signed all his letters with “Yours For Fixing Up the World.” I love that. If we’ve been guilty of resigning ourselves to all sorts of potholes in the road, so long as people stay within our painted lines, let’s repent. Let’s devote ourselves to “fixing up the world” for Jesus in such a way that our neighbors are glad to have us on the imperfect road with them. Jesus never wears any disguise but the ones we insist on seeing when we look at him. He was a real baby, not someone cleverly disguised as one. It’s not that he looked like a baby, it’s just that a baby wasn’t what we were looking for.
Similarly, at his Crucifixion the placard and the crown of thorns, both of which were provided by Roman soldiers with cruel irony, were not a disguise because he really was and is a King. In the stable at his birth he was not the kingly Son of God disguised as a helpless person, and on the cross he was not a helpless person disguised as the kingly Son of God. He was, in both instances, a helpless person. And he was, in both instances, the kingly Son of god. Praise him! Matthew 27:37 Prayer: I love you, Jesus, for being all of who you are. I confess that you are sometimes more than or other than what I was looking for. Help me to love you just as well when that’s the case. Because I know that if I’m ever surprised by you it’s not because you’ve misled me. Song: Another new Christmas song today! The Gray Havens song “Come Behold the Wondrous Mystery” captures wonderfully the beauty of a Savior whose very nature is essentially mysterious. If you would grasp him at all, you must accept that he is beyond your grasping. Serendipity is the good thing you discover when you are searching for something else. A scientist employed by 3M was trying in 1968 to come up with a powerful glue when he discovered, by chance, the pressure sensitive, tacky adhesive we know from post-it notes. It was unlooked for and was, for years, scorned at 3M as the “solution without a problem.” It wasn’t until 1980, twelve years after the discovery, that post-it notes were made nationally available.
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that Jesus is often regarded as a disappointment and a missed mark by people who find him while looking for something else. Our Christmastime narratives can’t afford to admit it, but doesn’t it seem likely that the shepherds were more impressed with the angels and the magi more impressed with the star than they were with the infant to which the angels and the star had pointed them. Could you blame them if they found the baby and his parents a bit of a let down? Some people come upon Jesus while looking for something to make them more successful at life, a job for which Jesus is ill-suited. Some people come upon Jesus while looking for a political identity (good luck with that!) All sorts of things bring all sorts of people to the Jesus they weren’t looking for . . . but who was looking for them. And he is less offended (he’s not an insecure King) than he is amused by their perplexity and resignation. Matthew 21:42 Prayer: If I’ve been slow on the uptake and have had a hard time seeing you for who you are because I was looking for something else, I repent. Open my eyes. Give me a proper imagination where you are concerned and make me an “early adapter.” Let me be among the first to recognize you and to perceive what you’re up to, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. Song: The Oh Hello’s Mvmt IV: Every Bell on Earth Will Ring is a little longer than others we’ve commended to you, but worth a listen for the heartfelt way that they take us through this medley of Christmas carols to bring us to a crescendo of worship. No one did any reconnaissance for Jesus’ arrival in Bethlehem. There was no security detail showing up days ahead of him to scope things out and “establish a perimeter.”
And when Jesus did arrive, it was not in the company of an impressive entourage. The only people he had with him were the two people who had brought him, and they weren’t armed with anything. The angels were sidelined, relegated to the job of alerting shepherds to what was happening. Everyone comes into the world naked, but this was something else. And yet, somehow, a mother and a father were sufficient and God was pleased with their sufficiency. Have you ever met someone who had a security detail? It’s ironic because having bodyguards is a clear indication of insecurity, a fear of violence that the object of that guarding is not strong enough to handle on his own. But we’re conditioned to think that only the powerful and those with authority enjoy this measure of protection. In Washington among government officials, being assigned a security detail, regardless of whether or not you are threatened, is a coveted sign of your “arrival,” an indication that you are a real big deal. And, truthfully, if any of us were in a crowd experiencing an emergency we would all look to the guy with a security detail for leadership and defer to his orders for no better reason than the fact that he was flanked by two big galoots with serious expressions. And our Savior, when he made his appearance, had for a “security detail” an exhausted woman and a beleaguered man, neither of whom were proficient in jiu jitsu. Revelation 5:12 Prayer: Help me, Jesus, to have sanctified expectations. I know you’re not like other lords. You’re apt to be alone when I find you, or, as with the disciples in Samaria when they had left you alone at a well, in the company of unexpected people. So be it. You be you. Just help me to keep up. Song: The Brilliance’s version of Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming is perfect with its stripped down arrangement and emphasis on vocal harmonies. It doesn’t always work, but one classroom management technique that teachers sometimes use, when their classroom has gotten competitively loud, is to stop shouting and to whisper. There is a hush that rings loud for having quieted us. |
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