Three Texts For A National Day Of Repentance

Isaiah 1:13-20 New King James Version

Bring no more futile sacrifices;

Incense is an abomination to Me.

The New Moons, the Sabbaths, and the calling of assemblies—

I cannot endure iniquity and the sacred meeting.

Your New Moons and your appointed feasts

My soul hates;

They are a trouble to Me,

I am weary of bearing them.

When you spread out your hands,

I will hide My eyes from you;

Even though you make many prayers,

I will not hear.

Your hands are full of blood.

“Wash yourselves, make yourselves clean;

Put away the evil of your doings from before My eyes.

Cease to do evil,

Learn to do good;

Seek justice,

Rebuke the oppressor;

Defend the fatherless,

Plead for the widow.

“Come now, and let us reason together,”

Says the Lord,

“Though your sins are like scarlet,

They shall be as white as snow;

Though they are red like crimson,

They shall be as wool.

If you are willing and obedient,

You shall eat the good of the land;

But if you refuse and rebel,

You shall be devoured by the sword”;

For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.

Luke 4:16-19 New King James Version

He went to Nazareth, where he had been brought up, and on the Sabbath day he went into the synagogue, as was his custom. He stood up to read, and the scroll of the prophet Isaiah was handed to him. Unrolling it, he found the place where it is written:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free,
    to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” *

Matthew 7:15-25 New King James Version

“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorn bushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Therefore by their fruits you will know them.

“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’

“Therefore whoever hears these sayings of Mine, and does them, I will liken him to a wise man who built his house on the rock: and the rain descended, the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house; and it did not fall, for it was founded on the rock.

* This is believed to refer to the Year of Jubilee described in Leviticus 25:8-24 when slaves and prisoners were to be freed and acquired land was to be restored to their original owners.

Holy Cow! (Plus Sacred Calves, Bulls, Etc.)

India, a predominantly Hindu nation, prohibits cows being slaughtered for food and reverences them as a part of their religious tradition.

I used to think that one of the obvious solutions to India's food shortage would be to have them stop pampering their cattle and begin using them for food. Never mind the fact that their sacred cows are useful as work animals and are a source of much needed milk. Besides, they tend to feed along roadsides and help earn their keep as work animals, while also providing dung for fuel and fertilizer. 

So maybe rather than judging our Indian neighbors for their beliefs and practices, we should ask what golden calves or sacred cows we could be sacrificing in order to help feed the hungry. In contrast to India, which has the largest percentages of vegetarians in the world, we have become addicted to having a major portion of our diet involve the fattening, slaughtering and importing of beef and other flesh, a system that requires an exorbitant and  inefficient use of far more protein than is consumed by all of India, which has a much larger population. And reducing our consumption of beef even by half, some believe, would free up enough farm land and resources to practically eliminate malnutrition and hunger worldwide. 

And speaking of sacred animals, we have a pet industry in the US that costs us some $150 billion a year. I'm not against pets, per se, but the obvious fact that we would never, ever consider eating any of our beloved dogs, cats or horses should help us understand how our Hindu friends feel about their beloved cattle. 

Another near sacred industry involves our love affair with motor vehicles, resulting in our having more licensed sedans, SUV's, pickups, vans, trucks, motorcycles and other gas guzzling means of transportation in the US than there are licensed drivers. These all demand a major share of the world's limited supply of energy, and emit alarming levels of greenhouse gasses that threaten the life and health of the planet.

Professional sports represent another kind of near sacred enterprise in this country, having become an over $1 trillion a year industry. According to the Global Institute of Sport, that represents 40% of all the money spent on sports worldwide. According to the National Retail Federation, testimated spending on Super bowl Sunday in the U.S. this year for food, drinks, apparel, decorations and other purchases for the day was expected to reach a record $20.2 billion, or $94.77 per person.

Other sacred cows and golden calves may be associated with our assumptions about what kinds of real estate we feel we need to build and maintain as "houses of worship." What kinds of accommodations and how many paid staff persons would Jesus prescribe for church gatherings of a couple of hours a week? 

National allegiances and political parties and/or political leaders can also become sacrosanct and demand a cult-like idolatrous loyalty, whether on the part of those on the right or the left.

In short, how we spend our time and money is a literal measure of the worth we attach to the objects or activities in which we invest. The word worship actually derives from an old English word "weorth-ship." 

This calls for paying attention to the very first two of the Bible's Ten Words, or Ten Commandments, as follows:

“You must not have any other god but me. You must not make for yourself an idol of any kind or an image of anything in the heavens or on the earth or in the sea. You must not bow down to them or worship them, for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God who will not tolerate your affection for any other gods." 

Exodus 20:3-5 New Living Bible

The 15-foot statue on the right is on the 800-acre luxury golf course and hotel complex in Doral, Florida, purchased by the president in 2012.

An Ohio Weekly Newspaper That's Still Thriving

During spring break back in 1964 I spent a week at this site poring over issues of the first 30 years of this unusual weekly newspaper. It was for my senior history research thesis at EMC (now EMU), and my work was later published in the Mennonite Quarterly Review.

This Ohio newspaper avoids the internet. Its readers like it that way.

Every week, Milo Miller is in charge of publishing a paper. Instead of relying on a newsroom full of beat reporters and columnists, his paper The Budget looks to handwritten letters from across the country.
    “These would be letters that came today,” he said as he leafed through a basket of letters. “[There’s] Williamsburg, Kentucky; Millersburg, Ohio; Rexford Montana…”
     The contents of each piece of snail mail will be printed in the next edition of the weekly paper and distributed across the country to tens of thousands of readers.
    Ohio has lost more than half of its daily and weekly news publications between 2005 and 2025, according to data from Medill’s Local News Initiative.
    But the Budget is finding success by staying exactly the same.
    “We're kind of part of that culture. Part of the Amish story is The Budget,” he said.

The Budget’s start
The Budget was founded in 1890 by John C. Miller, an Amish Mennonite who wrote a column on what was happening in Sugarcreek’s community. He printed it and mailed it to family around the U.S. – who wrote back.
    He decided to publish those letters too.
    “Then all these letters started coming in. And by the end of that first year, there were over a hundred scribes from 12 different states.”
    It quickly became a national publication.
    More than 100 years later, it’s sticking to that 19th-century model. Every Wednesday, they publish around 70 pages of letters from Amish communities who still rely on print and old school word-of-mouth to share their news.
    Today, the Budget has around 1,200 writers who document their daily lives through letters sent to Ohio.
    “It’s funny to look back at some of the first letters you know in 1890. Outside of maybe a few words that would be trendy at the time, if you read that letter it doesn't look much different than today's letter,” he said.

The process
For the past four years, Budget staff member Brenda Keller has taken these reports on crops, births and deaths and transcribed them from sweeping cursive into bold typeface that’s distributed as far as Washington state.
    As she typed up one letter, Keller described it as pretty typical of what she’s seen over her tenure.
    “They're just going to visit people and having church,” she said. “That's the norm.”
    Unlike a traditional publication, there’s little editorial oversight at The Budget. Miller and his staff do some light copy editing and remove anything political or controversial: No debates over church rules. No endorsements of one sect over another.
    But mostly, Miller prints the news just as it comes in – funny hunting stories, weather gripes and all.
    “We're their form of entertainment. We're their nightly news. … They're not turning on the television or going to YouTube or going on TikTok or whatever to figure out what's trending, what's going on, what's happening in the world. In a lot of cases, they're reading it in The Budget,” Miller said.

Trust and tradition
The Amish and Anabaptist aversion to modern technology has kept The Budget’s circulation steady for years.
    It has 20,000 paid subscribers. Miller expects that to grow with the Amish population, which approximately doubles every two decades.
    “Our struggles are not on the financial end, it's the distribution model with the United States Postal Service. Presses are becoming fewer and fewer, where we're driving seven hours away to print,” he said.
    Even with the long drive, Miller will keep The Budget an internet-free publication.
    He may use a computer, but most of The Budget’s audience does not. Flipping through its pages has become a ritual for the community, steeped in tradition.
    “It’s their newspaper. We're just privileged enough to publish it for them.”

Kendall Crawford wrote this for the Ohio Newsroom, which gave me permission to post the piece.

Honoring A Long Line Of Unremembered Moms

This ancestral chart was developed by one of my first cousins. It includes some two dozen surnames, some of people well over a dozen generations ago. 

For much of my life I thought of myself as being half Yoder and half Nisly (my mother's maiden name). I assumed that by tracing my paternal history back to Christian and Barbara Yoder (who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1742), and my maternal ancestry back to immigrant Christian Nisly (who arrived here in 1804 as an unaccompanied sixteen-year-old) that I would have the key elements of my ancestral story.

Which was naive, of course, as each of us has a multitude of generational lines to be pursued and celebrated. 

In a patriarchal culture sons get to pass on their father's surnames and are seen as the main characters in the story, while daughters take on the surnames of their spouses and tend to be regarded as lesser players. Some couples attempt to partly rectify this by adopting hyphenated last names, and it would indeed be more accurate to identify myself as Harvey Yoder-Nisly-Troyer-Miller-Slabaugh-Hochstetler-Gerber-Bontrager-Esch-Kauffman-Swartzentruber-Gingerich-Stutzman-Lauver-Wert, etc., though that would be overly cumbersome. But we do need to find ways of incorporating the stories of both men and women in our ancestry.

The fan chart above of my Yoder and Nisly forbears does include the names of the mothers in my heritage, but we tend to know far less about them than we do about some of their husbands and fathers. 

I'd love to learn more about the long line of mothers in my ancestral chart, knowing they have contributed just as much to my DNA as my father and my grandfathers (and actually slightly more, in that males inherit a large X chromosome from their mother and a smaller Y chromosome from their father). But my really important questions are "How have the mothers in my lineage contributed to the faith and values I've inherited from my ancestors? What were the formative experiences that shaped their lives, and mine? In what special ways did they influence the children they carried, gave birth to, nursed, nurtured to adulthood and continued to profoundly influence throughout their lives?"

With Mother's Day approaching, I'm reminded of the debt of gratitude I owe to all of these unnamed mothers whose stories I may never know.

I do feel blessed by what I know of my own mother Mary Nisly's story, born in rural Hutchinson, Kansas, in 1904, the ninth child of devoted parents Eli and Fannie (Troyer) Nisly. Her father, Eli Nisly, was a beloved bishop of their church. Her mother, Fannie, had lost her mother at a very young age, and as a 19-year-old moved from Indiana to Kansas to be a housekeeper for Abraham, a widower whose wife had left him with numerous children to care for, one of them being her future husband, Eli. So this is how two motherless young people, Eli and Fannie, met and eventually married and had 13 children of their own, one of them being my mother.

My parents married when mom was 21 and my dad, Ben, was 20. After working on my grandfather Dan Yoder's farm near Thomas, Oklahoma, they travelled some 200 miles by team and wagon from Oklahoma to Hutchinson, Kansas in the dead of winter, where they settled down and started their own family.

My mom had only a sixth-grade education, but she was an avid reader and a lifelong learner.  She always encouraged us to work hard and to do our best in school, and managed to have put out two gardens every year, canned and frozen tons of food for her family, raised canaries, grown lots of flowers, constantly entertained guests from the church and visitors from out of town, and become a mother to numerous foster children, besides caring for her own family. My next younger sister, child number nine, was a motherless foster child who came to us at four weeks of age and was adopted by my parents.

I never knew my father's mother, Elizabeth, who died giving birth to her fourth child when my dad was only four years old, leaving him motherless until his father remarried when he was eight. And I have only faint memories of my grandmother Fannie, who passed away when I was six years old.

I often wonder what I am missing by knowing so little about the life stories of the multitudes of other good mothers in past generations. I'm sure each one represents a priceless biography of life experiences I could learn from and pass on to my descendants.

Happy Mother's Day!