God – Page 2 – Salvaged Faith

Mystery: Disoriented

Posted on November 4, 2018Leave a comment

Text: Job 1:1, 2:1-10

Throughout this month of November, we are going to be exploring the mystery of God’s presence and power and how unbelievable difficult it is to wrap our minds around. Through the book of Job, we will let ourselves be taken through a range of human emotions: grief, anger, humility, and love.
But above all, we are going to be wrestling with questions and not answers.
God’s questions of us.
The questions Job gets from his friends.
Our questions of God.
The questions we share about the whys and hows of this world.

Along the way, I’m going to invite us to rest in the mystery of God’s presence and promise and power… instead of jumping immediately to the answers. In fact… we might leave here today with even more questions to wrestle with… and that’s not a bad thing.

Will you pray with me…

In my early twenties I was living in Nashville and attending seminary. I had a trip scheduled to head back home for fall break and I was looking forward to some time away in a familiar place.
While I was there, my grandfather took a turn for the worse. Deda had struggled for a long time with diabetes and after a number of surgeries and amputations, infection was destroying his body.
My dad and I were able to drive to the hospital and spend the entire day with him. We watched the Hawkeyes win and we held his hand and tried to just be there for him. Two days later, he was gone.
I sat with family and planned the service. I gave a eulogy at the funeral. We laid him to rest.

All of this happened while I was away on our holiday break and when I came back to Nashville, it was like stepping into a different world.
I was heading back to a place where no one knew my Deda. No one even really knew how sick he had been.
I hadn’t missed any classes. I didn’t have to check in with any professors.
Even my work-study job didn’t notice that a significant experience
And heading back to that place where no one else understood my grief or my loss was disorienting.
So disorienting in fact, that just a day after arriving back in town, I tried to leave church without talking to anyone. I just didn’t want to get into it and explain it over and over again.
This is going to sound strange, but I wanted comfort and condolences, but not if I was going to have to rehearse the story to get them. I wanted a hug… but no one knew that I needed one.
So I rushed out the door… I quickly backed out of the parking spot… and accidently ran into a large concrete parking barrier… doing a couple thousand dollars of damage to my fiancé’s car.

Every single one of us, at some point in our lives, have moments of disorientation.
The loss of a job.
The death of a loved one.
Sending a child off to college.
Stubbing your toe on a nightstand in the middle of the night.

Disorientation is when we lose our sense of direction and are no longer sure which way is up, down, or sideways.
We find ourselves unsure of the next step.
We can’t quite get a handle on how to function in a new or changing role.
And sometimes, in the process of being disoriented, we find ourselves turning away… running away… from the very things that have been our source of help and strength – our anchor in the storm.
Sometimes, we find ourselves stubbornly clinging to something we thought we knew or an old way of functioning… even when it no longer serves our needs in a new context.

We should expect a bit of disorientation from Job as we begin to explore his story this week.
There once was a man who lived in the land of Uz…
It sounds like the start of a fairy tale, doesn’t it?
And in some ways it is.
The book of Job is not meant to be a historical factual retelling of actual events, but a work of philosophy told as a drama… think of Antigone by Sophocles or Candide by Voltaire. Through the lens of the characters, the audience has an opportunity to wrestle themselves with questions of life.

We are introduced to Job, a perfect man, with a perfect life, and perfect wife and family. He was honest and he feared God. He even offered extra offerings on a regular basis on behalf of his children… just in case they had made a mistake and had been unfaithful to God.
But as the story unfolds, there is a sort of wager made in heaven.
The Lord is so proud of how faithful Job has been, but the Adversary – the Accuser – ha Satan – has some questions.
Is Job only able to be so faithful because he has never faced difficulty?
What would happen if he were truly tested?
The Lord agrees to let the Adversary bring destruction upon Job so they might see what would happen.
First, his herds are stolen and his servants killed.
Then, his children are killed when a wind comes and collapses the house they are in.
But instead of cursing God, instead of being angry, he laments and blesses God’s name.
Our scripture picks up after these events.
Alright, the Adversary, acknowledges… he was able to remain faithful – but those were just things. We took away from Job… but we didn’t actually harm HIM.
If he was truly tested… bodily tested… in the flesh… then Job would turn away from the Lord.

This is one of those places where I start to have more questions.
Job has done nothing wrong.
The suffering and the loss he is experiencing is completely undeserved.
And yet God allows it to happen.

Job is stricken with sores from head to toe – so severe that they are only soothed by taking a broken piece of pottery and scraping at them. I mean… gross…
And still, he refuses to turn away from his faith.
He refuses to be angry at God.
He clings to his beliefs – in good times and in bad, he says.

Job’s pain is so excruciating the scripture tells us that he couldn’t stand up or lie down. His friends couldn’t recognize him when they came to visit. He was utterly broken.
Can you imagine his pain?
Can you imagine his confusion – why are these things happening to me?
What did I or my children or my ancestors do to deserve this?
How can I possibly move forward or rebuild my life after what has happened?

Into this moment, his wife speaks.
Mrs. Job invites him to curse God and die.
Now, those might seem like harsh words… but remember she, too, has experienced unbearable loss.
Her children have died, too.
Her flocks and livelihood have been stripped away.
Her husband is suffering in unimaginable pain.
She is angry and heartbroken and confused and just as disoriented as Job.

And so she encourages him to let it out… let out all of that pain and grief and anger.
Shout at the heavens! she cries.
Let go of your stubbornness and integrity.
Demand that God tell you why you are being tested so.

We sometimes hear her words and cringe… We can’t question God like that!
Curse God? Doesn’t that lead to destruction?
And yet, the Lord has no harsh words for Mrs. Job.
As our story unfolds in the next few weeks, what we discover is that perhaps Job is stubbornly clinging to an old understanding of faith that is no longer adequate for the suffering of this world.
It will only be when he does open himself up to reach out and question God that he finally is able to re-orient himself to a new reality.

In the midst of the disorientation of our lives, it is hard to know where to turn.
Sometimes we are tempted to completely turn away from God.
Sometimes, we find ourselves stubbornly clinging to old ways and in the process close ourselves off from change and possibility.
In fact, I think that if Job simply sat there in the ashes and the dust and refused to engage God in questions, his relationship with God would have become stagnant, wrote, expected.

I think part of what we are invited to discover in these chapters is that things happen in our lives that are completely out of our control.
We don’t always know why.
We can’t always understand.
But every moment of disorientation contains within it the opportunity to re-orient ourselves upon our Creator, our Redeemer, our Sustainer.
If we are lucky, the relationship we have with God when it is all said and done will be deeper and more faithful than when we began.
We will let go of our assumptions and we will allow our lives and our hearts to be expanded in the process – to become more compassionate, more humble, more faithful.

So stick with us for a few more weeks as we continue this journey through Job. Next week, we jump a ways ahead to chapter 23 – so take some time this week on your own time to read some of these chapters in between.
Sit with Job in his suffering.
Listen to the words of his friends and ask how you would feel if they were spoken to you.
And open up your heart for how God might be speaking to your pain, your sorrow, and your disorientation.
Let yourself feel it.
Let yourself experience it.
Let yourself sit in the mystery.

A Way Forward? 25-cent words

Posted on August 19, 2018Leave a comment

Texts: Philippians 4:8-9, Matthew 22:34-40

This past year as I taught confirmation, one of our lessons focused on how we are all theologians.
I wrote that word up on the board and one of our students exclaimed – WOW! That’s a 25-cent word!
There was an old idiom that you shouldn’t use a 50-cent word when a 5-cent word will do.
But just because a word is complicated doesn’t mean you shouldn’t use it.
So we unpacked it. We defined it. And suddenly, that 25-cent word wasn’t so scary anymore.

Today, we need to talk about some 25-cent words.
These are words are important and form the background of both the conflict within our denomination and in how we might move beyond this tension.
So… will you pray with me?
Compassionate God, all creation delights in the presence of your Word.
May the authority of your Spirit bring understanding into our confused minds, and truth into our troubled hearts, that we may praise and serve Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen (from the Worship@North website. https://northchurchindy.wordpress.com/ )

We are going to start in the same place as our confirmands. Our first 25-cent word is… theologian.
I am a theologian.
I have a Master of Divinity from Vanderbilt University and I spent three and a half years studying divine things like scripture and ancient texts and history and the thoughts of other theologians.

But you know what?
You are a theologian, too.
You see, a theologian is simply anyone who reflects upon God’s action in the world today and as United Methodists we believe that every single one of us is called to this task.
Every generation must wrestle with our faith in a changing world.
The church needs to see problems and challenges like sexual abuse or global migration so we can provide a faithful response.
But, we also need to be able to figure out how to communicate the truth of our faith to a world that increasingly can’t understand us.
Theology helps us to do both.
Whether or not you knew it before worship today, you are a theologian.
I want you to claim that! Say out loud and proud: I am a theologian!

And as a theologian, your job is to answer a simple question: What can I say that is faithful to scripture as it has been passed down through tradition, and that makes sense in light of human experience and reason? (paraphrase of Book of Discipline p. 81)
As Paul told the Philippians, we are to focus our thoughts on what is excellent and true, holy and just. We are to practice what we have learned and received and heard from our mentors and teachers of the faith.
That is theology!
And as United Methodist theologians, you have four sources in discovering God at work in the world.
Scripture. Tradition. Experience. Reason.

These four sources make up our next 25-cent word: quadrilateral.
“[John] Wesley believed that the living core of the Christian faith was revealed in scripture, illumined by tradition, vivified in personal experience, and confirmed by reason.” (p. 82)
All four are important. All four are necessary. All four help us to see where God is working in the world.
We start with scripture.
We end with scripture.
Scripture is the absolute foundation of all of our theology… so as theologians, we had better be reading and pouring over scripture in our lives.
But… and… scripture is always being interpreted.

First, scripture is interpreted by other scripture.
You cannot take a single verse out of context but need to look at the fullness of the entire passage and story.
And, we come to see as we read the bible that there is an overarching story within the scripture itself… a story of creation and redemption, a story of mistakes and forgiveness, a story that ends in the restoration of all things.
In our gospel, religious leaders ask Jesus to interpret and prioritize scripture for them. His response is one that provides us guidance when we in turn interpret scripture today – how does this verse lead us to love God and love our neighbor? (Matthew 22:34-40)

Next, we have the witness of how people have interpreted that scripture through time. Tradition shows us the “consensus of faith” that has grown out of a particular community’s experience. (p. 85-86)
Not all contexts and communities are the same. The experience of Czech immigrants in the Midwest was very different than that of African slaves in the Deep South. Each community passed on the gospel and created practices of faith that show us how the scripture made sense in their lives. We also connect tradition with the theology of previous generations that have been passed down to us in creeds and writings.

Tradition shows us how communities have understood God, but we also each have or own unique experiences.
Who you are and what you have been through is always with you when you open up the Bible – your pain, joy, anger, gender, economic reality…
It is why you can read the same passage of scripture repeatedly over time and discover something new with each reading.
But Wesley also talked about how God continues to reveal through our experiences and the fruit that we are bearing in our lives. When he saw the call in the lives of women around him, he began to license them as preachers.

Our final source of theology is reason. As the Book of Proverbs reminds us, each person is called to “turn your ear toward wisdom, and stretch your mind toward understanding. Call out for insight, and cry aloud for understanding. ” (Proverbs 2:2-3)
We believe that God reveals truth in many places, not only in scripture, and that we should pursue such knowledge and truth with our whole selves. Science, philosophy, nature: these are all places that help us to gain understanding.
Where we find contradictions within scripture itself or between a passage and wisdom of the world, reason asks what greater truths a verse might be speaking or how to prioritize and discern which is truer.

Our Book of Discipline reminds us that

“United Methodists as a diverse people continue to strive for consensus in understanding the gospel… while exercising patience and forbearance with one another. Such patience stems neither from indifference toward truth nor from an indulgent tolerance of error but from an awareness that we know only in part and that none of us is able to search the mysteries of God except by the Spirit of God. We proceed with our theological task, trusting that the Spirit will grant us wisdom…” (Book of Discipline p. 89)

The simple truth which lies at the heart of our conflict today is that people of faith, United Methodists who care about the scriptures and who come from diverse backgrounds, cannot come to a place of consensus in how we approach matters of human sexuality and in particular how we understand homosexuality.
We might use the quadrilateral differently or prioritize some aspects more than others.
But I think part of the difficulty is that we don’t even have a common understanding of the question we are seeking to answer within the scriptures.
And that means a couple more 25-cent words:

First, homosexuality. This word was initially coined in the 1880s in German and made its way into English usage in the 1890s. The word itself simply refers to sexual intercourse between persons of the same sex. Some modern translations of scripture use this word, but it didn’t even exist at the time the King James Bible was translated.

Many who seek to answer the question of what we should do today start from this definition. Their concern is largely with the physical acts associated with any given sexual orientation. Many prohibitions in our Book of Discipline focus on this as well, using the phrase “self-avowed, practicing homosexual.” The question being raised by this group is largely about how we use our bodies and whether or not such use is good and holy.

Others focus on a more expansive understanding of the complexity of human sexuality, referring to a wider group of people through the term LGBTQ+.

Science and sociology have helped us to see in the last fifty years that our identity is complicated.
This graphic talks about four different aspects of our identity – all of which are placed on a spectrum. Our biological sex, how we identify our gender and how we express it, who we are attracted to… all of these factors play a role… which is why the terminology we use keeps expanding as well. There is a handout at the back that has this graphic as well as some common definitions within LGBTQ+ if you are interested. The question being raised by this group is also about how bodies, but tends to focus more on embodiment and identity as a whole person.

As a denomination, when we bring these questions to General Conference, we seem to have reached our limits of patience and forbearance with one another.
But as people of a local faith community, my prayer is that we can still remember with humility that now we see through a glass darkly and that we still might extend patience and forbearance towards one another as we explore a few scriptures together.

When we open the scriptures, there are six verses that our tradition has used to condemn homosexuality.
Genesis 19: Sodom & Gomorrah
Leviticus 18 & 20: Abomination
Romans 1: Exchanging Natural Relations for Unnatural
1 Corinthians 6 & 1 Timothy 1: “malakoi and arsenokoitai”
As United Methodist theologians, we start with scripture, and we end with scripture so we need to wrestle with these passages as background for our theology today.

Before they went to bed, the men of the city of Sodom—everyone from the youngest to the oldest—surrounded the house and called to Lot, “Where are the men who arrived tonight? Bring them out to us so that we may have sex with them.”

First – Genesis 19: 4-5, the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. Angels from God arrive in order to determine if there are any righteous people in the town. The men of the city knock on the door of the house they are staying and seek to force themselves upon the visitors.
However, this is a great place to start using scripture to interpret scripture. While later Christian tradition adopted sodomy as a term for sinful, non-procreative sex, within the scriptures itself, the sin of Sodom was not sexual in nature. In Ezekiel 16, the prophet names the sin of Sodom as being proud and not helping the poor and needy. This was a culture that relied upon hospitality – when guests arrived the duty of the community was to welcome them and provide for their needs. To violently force yourself upon these visitors, attacking them, raping them, was against every hospitality code of the time. This is a clear violation of the command to love your neighbor.

The question we wrestle with theologically is whether or not our experience of LGBT persons today is reflected in this text.

You must not have sexual intercourse with a man as you would with a woman; it is a detestable practice.

If a man has sexual intercourse with a man as he would with a woman, the two of them have done something detestable. They must be executed; their blood is on their own heads.

The next two scriptures come from the Holiness Code in the book of Leviticus (18:22, 20:13). In many translations, sex between two men is named as an abomination, or detestable. Both of these chapters are concerned with sexual practices that were forbidden to the people of God as they were entering the Promised Land. It is a rejection of practices both in the land of Egypt and practices that may have been common among others in the land of Canaan.
The Hebrew word that we have translated as abomination or detestible is probably not a fair translation of the word. “Toevah” is understood by many today to instead mean ritually unclean or culturally taboo. The Israelites are called to be holy and set-apart and to adopt cultural practices that are different from their neighbors. In the larger context of Leviticus, these include commands about food, clothing, bodily fluids, and how you treat the stranger among you.
Today, our tradition still considers many of the practices within these two chapters of Leviticus to be culturally taboo, but not all of them. And we have moved away from many of the other prohibitions within these texts that we consider to be culturally bound – like eating shellfish or the cutting of hair. And that’s because we hold a different understanding of what makes us unclean in the eyes of the Lord. Peter’s vision in Acts 10 shifts the conversation within the Christian faith and his encounter with the gentile Cornelius leads him to proclaim, “God has shown me that I should never call a person impure or unclean.” (Actus 10:28)

Theologically, we ask today what scripture, tradition, reason, and experience lead us to claim as taboo sexual acts, framed by our understanding of what forms us as a Christian community that loves God and our neighbor.

That’s why God abandoned them to degrading lust. Their females traded natural sexual relations for unnatural sexual relations. Also, in the same way, the males traded natural sexual relations with females, and burned with lust for each other. Males performed shameful actions with males, and they were paid back with the penalty they deserved for their mistake in their own bodies.

Our next scripture comes from Paul’s letter to the Romans. His argument here in the first chapter is that Gentiles and Jews alike are without excuse and full of sin. The Jews have been given the law and claim to follow it but don’t. The Gentiles don’t have the law… instead they should have seen God revealed through nature itself. Augustine and Aquinas and others have carried this concept through our tradition and our use of reason: we can know God through the world around us.
Here in this chapter, Paul argues that the Gentiles should have known God. However, they rejected God and turned instead to idols. As he describes cultic practices of worship, he claims that their idolatry led God to abandon them to their desires. As a consequence, natural sexual relations were exchanged for unnatural ones and these people were filled with jealousy, murder, fighting, deception, gossip, and disobedience to their parents. (Romans 1:29-31)
Theologically, the questions we wrestle with today start with asking what is natural. If one understands homosexuality to be a choice then it would lead you to think that such acts are unnatural. However, for others who believe that persons who are LGBT were created that way, it might be unnatural for them to act against how God has made them.
This is another place where we might ask where our experience shows fruit in the lives of LGBT persons. Paul’s argument here is that same-sex acts are the result of idolatry and cultic worship and these people are filled with other bad behaviors. What are the fruits we see in the lives of people we know who are LBGT? What are the fruits of people who are not LGBT? Do they love God? Do they love their neighbor?

Don’t you know that people who are unjust won’t inherit God’s kingdom? Don’t be deceived. Those who are sexually immoral, those who worship false gods, adulterers, both participants in same-sex intercourse,^[a] thieves, the greedy, drunks, abusive people, and swindlers won’t inherit God’s kingdom.

We understand this: the Law isn’t established for a righteous person but for people who live without laws and without obeying any authority. They are the ungodly and the sinners. They are people who are not spiritual, and nothing is sacred to them. They kill their fathers and mothers, and murder others. They are people who are sexually unfaithful, and people who have intercourse with the same sex. They are kidnappers, liars, individuals who give false testimonies in court, and those who do anything else that is opposed to sound teaching.

The final pairing of scripture is from 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 and 1 Timothy 1:9-10. We group them together because they refer to the same two words – malakoi and arsenokoitai. These words have been translated in multiple ways through our history of bible translation.
Malakoi literally means soft and has been translated as effeminate, as the passive homosexual partner, or as a male prostitute.
Arsenokoitai is a word that appears only two times in all of Greek literature – right here in the Bible. It is a word that Paul appears to have made up from two other words: Men and Bed. How tradition understands this word has changed drastically over time. Some think it refers to the dominant homosexual partner. Others think it refers to pimps – men who sell sex. Others think it is connected with temple prostitution, or the practice of older men taking young men (soft men) as sexual partners within the culture of the time.
In the context of the litany of other acts included in this list however, perhaps the Message translation most accurately captures the spirit of this passage. “those who use and abuse each other, use and abuse sex, use and abuse the earth and everything in it, don’t qualify as citizens in God’s kingdom.”
The truth is, we have all done these things. But the grace of God is present in our lives and has redeemed us and so our call now is to honor God, creation, and our neighbors… and that includes honoring our bodies.

What can we say theologically about sex, sexuality, and our identity that rejects the way people use and abuse one another and helps all people to honor their bodies?

As I faithfully wrestle with a theological response to the presence and promise of LGBT persons in the life of the church, I am fully aware that I might end up coming to a different conclusion than you. We are all theologians after all, all tasked with using scripture, tradition, reason, and experience to weigh what we believe to be faithful responses in the world today.
The very conflict within our denomination is the result of this very tension and next week we’ll explore how people of faith have found themselves aligned with various positions today.
But my prayer, above all else, is that we would continue to lift up as our number one priority the love of God and the love of one another – and that includes those who don’t agree with us.
Our call as people of faith after all is to provide a welcome so vast and so radical that all might come to know and experience the saving grace of God lives. May it be so. Amen.

A Way Forward? Fixed And Free

Posted on August 12, 20182 Comments

The United Methodist Church is at a crossroads.

On the one hand, we do incredible work together because of our connection across the globe. Missionaries go from everywhere to everywhere. We are present amid disaster and crisis providing relief. New faith communities have been formed in West Des Moines, Camaroon, and Russia. And these things happen because we pool our resources to do the most good.

On the other hand, we are a diverse, expansive, global denomination working in many different contexts from many different backgrounds. Within that diversity is blessing and also conflict – including conflict about the role of LGBTQ+ persons in the life of the church – particularly whether they can be married in the church or ordained/consecrated by the church.

Next week, we’ll turn our attention to scripture and dive deeper into how they relate to what it means to be Lesbian, Gay, or Queer today.

But for today, we wanted to start with the big picture of how we got to this place as a denomination. Behind any particular verse is the tension between flexibility and permanence.

What is written in stone?

What is subject to change in time and context?

How do we know the difference?

In February, our denomination will hold a special session of General Conference and how we answer these questions will determine our identity for the future.

How did we get here?

As people of faith, we are heirs of both the tabernacle and the temple.

That is the premise that the pastors of Lovers Lane United Methodist Church shared with their congregation when they addressed our current dilemma at the beginning of this year. (https://soundcloud.com/llumc/sets/fixed-and-free)

As we heard in our scriptures for the day (Exodus 25:1-9 and 1 Kings 6:11-13), as the context and the people of the Bible changed, God had different ways that the people could come to know and worship God.

In the midst of the wilderness, the people had no home. They were always on the move, never setting down roots, everything was always changing and uncertain.

And so God sends them instructions to build a tent – a tabernacle – a movable place of worship that would go with them wherever they were.

Every person within the community was called upon to contribute something – richly colored yarns, gold, silver, wood, leather, precious stones – all of them used to create a moveable place for God to dwell among them on the journey. Wherever they traveled – God was with them. (Exodus 25:1-9)

Generations later, the people stopped moving. They had established themselves in the land and they wanted permanence. They wanted a king like the nations around them. And they wanted to build God a temple.

King David himself looked around at the palace he was living in while the Ark of the Covenant was still residing within the tabernacle. But it wasn’t until his son, Solomon, was established on the throne, that the temple in Jerusalem was constructed.

This temple, this permanent dwelling place for God, was important for the people in the time of the Kingdoms. No longer did the people all travel together with God in their midst. Now they were settled in far off places. The temple represented something stable and unchanging, the home base to which they could return. God now dwelt somewhere a part from the vast majority of the people – but if you followed the rules and went to the temple, you could be with God. (1 Kings 6:11-13)

That tension between what is fixed and free, an institution and a movement, is at the core of our struggle and our identity.

Are we focused on the God of the tabernacle – who hears the cries of the oppressed and marginalized and who makes a home among the people wherever they might be?

Or are we focused on the God of the temple – who has made a covenant and established laws and who calls us to repent and return home so we might experience life abundant?

It is both… a tension we must hold… but sometimes it becomes a tug of war that threatens to tear apart the church.

Even when we focus on the Word – both the one who walked among us and the living word we discover in this text – we see this tension.

As the gospel of John reminds us, “In the beginning was the Word… the Word became flesh and made his home among us.” (John 1: 1, 14) The roots of this passage are that the Word tabernacled among us.

But Jesus also said that upon the rock of Peter, he would build his church. Solid, foundational, able to withstand time and changing winds. (Matthew 16:18)

Too often, what we find reflected within the words of scripture are our own predispositions towards temple or tabernacle.

And, we must be aware that there is also a shadow side to either of these inclinations. If we lean too heavily upon viewing God through the lens of the tabernacle, we might be tempted to believe that wherever we are, whatever we believe, must be okay because God is right there with us. On the other hand, if we lean too heavily upon viewing God through the lens of the temple, we might be tempted to believe that faith means being rigid, legalistic, unmoveable. The tabernacle needs to be balanced with accountability. The temple needs to be balanced with grace.

There is an awful lot of history between the time of Christ and our denominational roots in the 18^th century. The church spread and conquered and fractured and reformed. The bible itself was put in the hands of everyday people. The Holy Spirit moved, and institutions grew.

One of our beginning points lies with John Wesley, a priest in the Church of England. The institutional church around him was very removed from the people of the day. And so, he felt a call to leave the cathedral and John Wesley went out into the fields, where the people were.

He preached in homes, and from the top of tombstones in the graveyard, and his brother, Charles, took old drinking songs and turned them into hymns. They gathered people into small groups for accountability and care and formation, but always encouraged them to remain connected to the established church.

Now, something that is important here is that Wesley never wanted to start a new church – he simply wanted to reform his church and help the people reconnect and experience the power of God in their lives. From England to Scotland to the American colonies – wherever the church was, small groups of Methodists were growing.

If you ever have trouble placing our history as a church, remember this – the Methodist movement grew up alongside the American Revolution. And when England lost and the Church of England left the colonies – all of those in the Methodist movement were left without churches and leadership. And so reluctantly, John Wesley ordained Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury as superintendents or bishops and sent them to lead the people called Methodist in the new country.

And because we were established around the same time as this nation, our governance matches the governance of the United States. Our church is a democratic based structure with three branches – a Judicial Branch, an Executive Branch, and a Legislative Branch.

When the people wandered in the wilderness, God dwelt among them in a tent that was free to move.

When the people were established in a kingdom, God dwelt among them from an established temple in the capitol.

And when the people were forming a new nation, our church came to look like the new democracy with a book of laws and rules at the center of who we are.

I know we’d like to think that book is the bible, and… well, it is… but there is another book that holds us together as a denomination: The Book of Discipline.

In many ways, this has been our attempt to hold the tension between the fixed and the free, the movement and the institution.

This book provides stability in the sense that it is our reference point and foundational document of our identity. It contains the Articles of Religion that have been handed down through generations and a constitution describing who we are and how we function, and which is very difficult to change.

But it also provides flexibility in the sense that everything else within this book can be changed every four years by a simple majority of delegates to the General Conference.

Like the United States Government, we have a judicial branch – a Judicial Council of 9 persons who are elected to rule on matters of disagreement. We also have an executive branch, our Bishops, who are tasked with upholding the Discipline and caring for the ministry of the church.

Lastly, the General Conference is our legislative body. It is our version of Congress, only our gathering time is much shorter – for a couple of weeks every four years. It is where we gather to discern God’s will for the future of our church in the world. It is the place from which we boldly proclaim where God is and sometimes we have gotten it wrong and sometimes we have gotten it right.

If you look at the history of our church, it has not been one continuous solid history.

If you trace the line from the Church of England, the lighter brown set of roots, (and the side of our history that I know better), we can see that our lack of welcome and inclusion for African American siblings led to the formation of not one, but three new denominations.

Conflict over slavery and the authority of the bishops split the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1844 – years before the Civil War.

Sometimes splits were the result of contextual differences. Sometimes because there was greater freedom needed that the more established church couldn’t hold within itself.

But the church has also merged and reconnected and joined with others for missional reasons. In 1939, previous splintering was repaired as we became the Methodist Church.

And in 1968, we merged and formed a union with the Evangelical United Brethren Church.

One of our own – Rev. Harold Varce was a pastor in the EUB at that time and he was there at the founding of the United Methodist Church. In fact, thanks to Harold, that “United” from the EUB tradition made its way into our name.

What would be the witness of this new denomination?

How would we hold in tension the call to find God at the margins with the oppressed and to boldly proclaim the established truth of God?

One of the first things that we undertook was to write our Social Principles. While not church law, they are “the prayerful and thoughtful effort on part of the General Conference to speak to the human issues in the contemporary world from a sound biblical and theological foundation as historically demonstrated in United Methodist traditions.” (Preface)

And so in 1972 – with the denomination only four years old, much of the attention was focused on our section regarding human sexuality. It was a time of great experimentation and misconduct in society at large and this was our first opportunity as a church to speak.

In the midst of our larger statement was a phrase “persons of homosexual orientation are persons of sacred worth.” An amendment was made and approved which said, “We do not condone the practice of homosexuality and consider it incompatible with Christian teaching.”

In many ways – right there in the midst of that statement which says two very different things – is that tension between tabernacle and temple. God’s presence dwells in the life of LGBTQ+ persons – they are of sacred worth… and the practice of their orientation is sinful to God and requires repentance.

Since 1972 – we have experienced a back and forth, push and pull, tug of war over whether we will fully embrace and include gays and lesbians in the life of the church or if we will stand firmly against the tides of culture upon the traditions of our established church.

That tension has reached such a point in the life of our denomination that it has overtaken much of our witness and work.

And so we reached a point in 2016 where we could not move forward without discerning a new way forward. Over these past two years folks have gathered to pray, discern, converse, pour over scriptures, wrestle, and finally we are at a point where their recommendations of various possibilities will come to a special General Conference, focused solely on this topic in February.

Over the next couple of weeks we’ll back up and look at the scriptures behind our conversation. We’ll look at the landscape of our current dilemma. And in the final week, we’ll explore together the implications of the various proposals.

Here is what I want us to remember today.

When we were in the wilderness AND when established as a powerful nation – God dwelt among us.

When the temple was in ruins AND when the church was being persecuted – God was with us.

God has been leading, calling, pushing, prodding, rebuilding, connecting, pruning, and forming God’s people from the very beginning.

Not once has God left our side… although sometimes we have turned our backs upon God.

In some ways, I think God gives us what we need as far as a structure for whatever moment we might find ourselves in history. Anything that will help us grasp onto the very simple fact that God love us and calls us to be God’s people.

Through the ups and downs of churches that have split and reconnected and reimagined their existence, what is constant is the Lord and Savior of us all.

So whatever comes, whatever changes, whatever new possibilities lie before us, I pray that we would trust that God is present in the midst of it all.

Amen.

What’s Mine is Yours

Posted on May 20, 2018Leave a comment

Later this morning, our church will welcome nine new members.

These young people have been working hard all year long to learn more about the faith that we hold together. And they will stand before the congregation at our second service this morning and will confirm and profess that faith for themselves.

While a few of them are newer additions to this congregation, most of these students were born into this family, were baptized right here at Immanuel, and have long been a part of this community of faith.

In our last class, we sat and read together from Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. The same passage that we heard just a few minutes ago.

And we remembered that at the beginning of the confirmation year, we were different people, from different schools, different ages. But throughout the course of the year, Jesus broke down the barriers between us and created a new person out of our group.

So now they are no longer strangers.

And thanks to the amazing work of our mentors, they now have some connections across generations. Through their volunteer work this past year, they have joined Immanuel members serving at CFUM and Joppa and have helped lead worship and have shared their gifts of music with the church. They’ve come to committee meetings and have used their voices and ideas to help shape who we are and where we are going.

They belong to God’s household. This church, this community of faith that has Jesus himself as the cornerstone.

Throughout this Easter season, we have been thinking together about what it means to abide in God, to make a home in God, to interact with one another in this community of faith as family. And what I love about this passage from Ephesians is that it is yet another reminder that “Christ is building us into a place where God lives through the Spirit.”

We don’t always talk about the power of the Holy Spirit, but on a day like today, that Holy Spirit takes center stage.

On this day of Pentecost, fifty days after the resurrection, we remember that the Holy Spirit came upon those first disciples like tongues of fire.

It filled them, it transformed them, it gave them abilities of which they never knew they were capable!

That day, God turned those apostles into the foundation of God’s home.

And ever since then, God has been building a glorious temple.

Brick by brick.

Person by person.

Christ has been building us into a place where God lives through the Spirit.

In John’s gospel, Jesus was preparing to say goodbye to the disciples. He knew that the end of his earthly ministry had come, and he was trying to get them ready for what came next.

And Jesus promised that a Companion would come, the Spirit of Truth, who will not only testify about Jesus, but would pass on all of the things that Jesus himself had received from the Father.

He is telling the disciples, what was mine, is now yours, through the power of the Holy Spirit.

My ministry… it’s now yours.

My love… it’s now yours to give.

Healing power… it’s now yours to share.

The good news of the gospel… it’s now yours to tell.

The work of Jesus Christ continues through the disciples through the power of the Holy Spirit.

And friends… it continues through you as well.

This was not a one-time offer for a select group of individuals who lived a very long time ago.

No, Jesus is telling us that through the power of the Holy Spirit he will continue to live in every person who believes.

The church is not a physical place, a structure, where we gather once a week for an hour.

The church is a people, as that good old hymn reminds us, a people that are filled with the Holy Spirit and who testify to the good news of Jesus Christ and in whom God lives and moves and cares for the world.

As Emmanuel Lartey writes in his commentary, “The Holy Spirit connects the creative genius of the Father with the redemptive love of the Son and the courageous witness of the church.”

Bishop John V. Taylor describes the Spirit as the “Go-between God” – “connecting the past and future in a present full of meaning.”

This story does not exist solely in the past. It is not something we recite or remember.

This is OUR story.

It is still being written and conceived.

It is being lived out through our very actions in the world.

The Holy Spirit is present in this place, right here, right now, and Christ is building us into a place where God lives.

And just as you could probably name the spiritual forefathers and foremothers of your faith… Our confirmands look to so many of you as the foundation of their own faith journey.

You are the strong support upon which their generation stands.

You have taken what you have received from God through Jesus Christ and the power of the Holy Spirit and you have shared it with them.

You’ve given your prayers.

You’ve shared your time.

You’ve provided food and encouragement and smiles.

You’ve said – “what’s mine is yours.”

And already, these confirmands are themselves part of this temple that God is building, giving support, lending insight, helping to form the faith of not only one another, but also their mentors.

There is one bad habit that we have as the church however.

We tend to think of confirmation as a graduation – the end of a journey – instead of the beginning.

And we tend to think that once we have joined the church, that’s it, we’re doing growing and learning and letting the Holy Spirit move us.

Or maybe we think that once we’ve been a teacher or a mentor, or once we’ve retired, or once we’ve reach a certain age, THEN is when we’ve reached the end of this journey and we can be done growing and letting God us us.

But friends…

No matter where you are in your faith journey…

No matter how young or old you are…

Whether this is the day of your confirmation or the 50^th anniversary of your confirmation…

God still lives in you.

The ministry of Jesus is still yours to undertake.

The Holy Spirit still has work for you to do!

Your ministry might change through time… You might gain new skills and take on new challenges or you might retire from some things to let others have a voice…

But God is never done with you.

This community will always need your presence, your prayers, your gifts, your service, and your witness.

Christ is building us into a place where God lives through the Holy Spirit.

I believe that God lives here.

I believe that the power of the Spirit can help us do amazing things.

I believe that this church makes the love of Christ known in this world.

This is where God lives.

Thanks be to God. Amen.

Do What Is Good

Posted on February 18, 2018Leave a comment

I think in many ways it is a cruel irony that as we begin our Lenten series on heroes that our first pop culture example is the Dark Knight, Batman.
As a young boy, Bruce Wayne was a victim of gun violence.
In a dark alley, his parents were gunned down by a thief in front of his very eyes.
That traumatic moment forever changed the course of his life – setting him on a path to fight crime, battle evil, and protect his city.

Over the past few days, I have watched other young people, teenagers who survived the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, take up their own calling to demand change in a society in which too many lives are taken as a result of gun violence.
I read a story this morning about moms in Keosauqua here in southeast Iowa who rallied together on Thursday to raise the money to install a safety device called a sleeve in every classroom in their small school.
As one mom said, “we’re tired of it. It’s like, OK, nobody’s going to do anything about this: Our government, our state government, our national government. We’re the moms, and these are our kids. What can we do?” (https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/local/columnists/kyle-munson/2018/02/16/sick-school-shootings-these-iowa-moms-took-action-single-day-make-their-kids-classrooms-safe/344133002/?hootPostID=746aea71a5583aa9b0209e37f4bdbabb)

What can we do?
When evil seems to lurk around every corner…
When the places we thought were safe become sites of terror…
When a sense of hopelessness in the ability to truly witness change starts to seep in…

Sometimes our “what can we do?” is a cry of resignation.

Where are the good guys? Where are the heroes who are going to rise up and make everything better?

And sometimes, it is a reminder that we, too, have been called to act. Our discipleship is lived out in how we answer that question.

Each of the weeks of this Lenten series, we are going to be exploring together ways we often see the world through opposing lenses: good vs. evil, right vs. wrong, insiders vs. outsiders. We divide up this world and place ourselves firmly in one camp or another.
And yet, as we think together about how Jesus comes to redeem and restore this world… how Jesus acts to save us from sin and bring us eternal live, we discover that often Jesus turns our ways of viewing the world upside down.

In fact, when a leader of the community tried to call Jesus “good” in an effort to flatter him, Jesus practically rejected the label. “Why do you call me good?” he asks in Luke chapter 18. “No one is good but God alone.”

In doing so, Jesus reminds that all that is good comes from God.
When our Creator spent six days building and forming and shaping all that we know and see, God looked out and called it good.
That isn’t because of something innate within us.
It is because we are from God.

And so, what is this evil that we promise to resist in our baptismal vows?
What is this force that opposes life and leads so many on paths of destruction?
Matt Rawle defines evil in his book, “What Makes a Hero?” as nothingness. “Evil represents a void…. Evil is a shadow that cannot stand on its own. A shadow by itself is nothing but the absence of light… made manifest when someone or something stands between us and the light of God shining through Christ.” (p. 26)

Evil is the result when we let anyone or anything stand between us and the love and power of God made manifest in this world.
Sometimes what blocks the goodness of God is our own selfishness and sin.
Sometimes it is anger and resentment.
Sometimes it is idolatry – when we take something that is on its own good or neutral in value – but elevate it to a status that blocks our ability to reason or follow God.
I think in many ways, our nation’s obsession with guns has reached the point of idolatry. Guns themselves are not good or bad, they just are… however, our unwillingness to even allow for research to be done as to the causes of such endemic gun violence means that we cannot take the actions we need to in order to curb the tide of this deadly force.

I think about how through training and technology, Bruce Wayne would put on his bat costume and watch over Gotham, but traditionally, Batman never took up a gun himself. Even as he fought night after night against the dark forces, he sought to never use deadly force in bringing justice to his city. He kept himself focused on his purpose and what he was fighting against.

As people of faith, our call is not simply call something good or evil, but to keep our eyes focused on our purpose and the source of what is truly good, God alone.
It is what Christ did as he lived out his ministry among us.
And in many ways, the blueprint for how we should live and follow his example is found in that familiar verse from the prophet Micah.

“He has told you, human one, what is good and what the Lord requires from you: to do justice, embrace faithful love, and walk humbly with your God.”
Goodness is therefore the result of a life of justice, mercy, and humility.

First, we are called to do justice.
As Jesus reaches out to teach a lawyer about how to receive eternal life, he tells the parable of the good Samaritan.
The lawyer must learn to recognize even the Samaritan as his brother.
He must do justice by acknowledging that God has created each and every person.
Oppression and violence and hatred must cease.
We must always look out for the outcast, the vulnerable among us.

Second, we must embrace God’s love and practice mercy.
Jesus lived this out through acts of healing and mercy – feeding the hungry, healing the sick.
In every action, he sought to bring life to people by reaching out and touching them.
It is not just reaching out in love, however, to people we know and care about… it is also reaching out to offer kindness and forgiveness even to those who would seek to harm us.
Just as Bruce Wayne refused to take up the weapons that destroyed his family, so Jesus refuses to play the games or fight in the ways of evil.
He forgives those who crucify him.
He doesn’t fight back.
He knows that with God there is another way.

Lastly, we are called to walk humbly with our God.
Jesus showed us what this meant through the cross.
The greatest love, he told us, was to lay down our lives for our friends.
And so as the Christ hymn of Philippians reminds us, even though Christ Jesus was in the form of God, he emptied himself, he was born among us, and he humbled himself even to the point of death in order to serve the will of God. (Philippians 2:5-8)

Today, we are called to a life of goodness. A life of justice, and mercy, and humility.
We are called to lay aside anything that would distract us from God’s life and power in this world.
When evil looms around us and lives are being taken every day by forces that oppose God’s will, I think we are invited this Lent to a time of reflection and repentence.
Where are we complicit?
Where do we need to seek justice?
Where do we need to practice mercy?
Where do we need to humbly bow before our God and lay aside our idols?
May God stir our hearts…

God is Speaking!

Posted on February 11, 2018Leave a comment

Last Saturday, Brandon and I cuddled up on our gigantic couch in the family room, turned on Netflix, and proceeded to binge watch an entire season of a new show.
There was no waiting to see what would happen next… the episode played automatically.
There were no spoilers, because the series, Altered Carbon, had just come out and there wasn’t any buzz about it yet.
We just curled up, stuffed our faces with popcorn, and had the opportunity to experience the entire wild ride.

That is very different from how we used to watch television.
I can still remember in seminary how obsessed I was with Grey’s Anatomy. On Fridays, a girlfriend and I would meet for coffee and we would recap the previous nights episode. There had been one particularly harrowing cliff-hanger and to spend an entire week waiting to see what would come next felt brutal. We spent most of our time debating whether or not we wanted to go online and glimpse at the spoilers on the fan sites to get a clue as to how the situation might turn out.
In the end, we decided we wouldn’t be able to concentrate on our class work if we didn’t know if the character lived or died… We were invested in the story, in the people… as ridiculous as it sounds, we needed some kind of hope, some glimpse that things were going to be okay. So we sought out every single spoiler alert we could find.

Over these past few weeks, we have ever so briefly followed the beginning of Jesus’ ministry. In reality, we’ve only scratched the surface, living mainly in the first chapter of Mark’s gospel. And already, we’ve encountered God, watched ordinary people become disciples, and have witnessed any number of miracles of healing.
The gospel of Mark moves so quickly from one moment to the next… just like those episodes on Netflix play automatically and keep you engaged for just one more…. In fact – I bet if you went home after worship today and opened your bible you’d find that reading through Mark is a breeze and it would be over before you realized it.
We find out Jesus has the power to not only cast out demons and heal, but to calm the waters and miraculously produce food out of crumbs. Like any great season of television, the energy is building towards triumph and freedom and release over the first eight chapters of Mark’s gospel.

And then we get to chapter 8.
As we reach the very end, Jesus begins to teach the disciples that the path towards victory and life and God’s salvation for all people was a journey through death.
He began to warn them about the suffering and rejection and brutal punishment that awaited.
And it was not an easy message to swallow. Peter even had the audacity to scold Jesus for saying such things.
Yet, this was the path before them.

Imagine, for just a moment, that you are in the very last episode of the season and THIS was the dialogue that was taking place.
You begin to realize that the next part of this story was going to look very different than the first. What was full of joy and celebration and miracles is going to be darker and more dangerous.
You are now invested in this journey, you’ve left everything you have to follow Jesus and now the path looks so different…
How are you going to make it through to the next season?
How are you going to manage the wait and the anxiety and the unknowing?

And so before this part of the story ends, Jesus shares with a few of the disciples a gigantic spoiler alert.
He takes them up the mountain and as they reach the summit, Jesus moves a few paces ahead and then turns around to face them.
And as he does – he changes before their eyes!
His whole body seems to radiate with an inexplicable glory and even his clothes shine brighter than the sun.
Just as the three disciples begin to adjust their eyes to this brilliance they see two figures appear beside their Master… two figures who could only be Moses and Elijah.
As Peter and James and John cower in fear and trembling before this amazing visage – the three figures have a conversation.
Now, if I’m Peter, if I have been learning at the feet of Jesus for a few months, if I have been a part miracles that have taken place, and if I’m led up to the top of a mountain where my teacher suddenly begins to glow and radiate glory… and if I am terrified to face a path of suffering and rejection… then I might grab a hold of this moment and think that THIS was what they had been preparing for.
He interrupts them, offers to build shrines and temples, essentially trying to re-direct the entire journey and turn season two of this story into a show on top of the mountain.

But that is NOT why they are there.
A cloud overshadowed the trio of disciples like a fog rolling in. The glory of Jesus, Moses and Elijah was concealed by the dense cloud and in a rumble of thunderous glory the voice of God spoke to their hearts: This is my Son, This is my Beloved! Listen to him!
Just as quickly as the cloud moved it, it dissipated, and the three bewildered and terrified disciples opened their eyes to find their teacher Jesus, standing before them alone. With hardly a word, apart from telling them not to talk about what they had seen until after the resurrection, Jesus leads them back down the mountain.

I can vividly remember pouring over still images on websites with my friend, trying to guess what was going to happen next in our favorite show based on a few glimpses. We would speculate based on the characters or where they were standing or what else was present in the background and try to make meaning out of the signs so we had something to hold on to.

In many ways, this brief moment on the mountaintop was that kind of spoiler alert, giving the disciples something to hang on to.
The voice of God rang out, shaking them to their very core, and reminded them that God’s power and purpose was present in their teacher, Jesus.
The presence of Moses and Elijah, affirmed that the law and the prophets were being fulfilled in the ministry of the Son of God. Everything they had been taught and believed about the restoration of Israel… of all creation… would come to pass.
And, it was a reminder that even though the next part of this story would look different, they had a glimpse of the light and the glory that would give them hope on dark days.
In Mark’s gospel, Jesus has now set his face towards Jerusalem. They were leaving behind the healing and the teaching and were heading straight towards the seat of power… not to be a force that would overthrow it violently, but through a display of righteous love.
They didn’t quite understand what the resurrection meant… but they saw a glimpse, a spoiler, of the things to come, that they could hold on to when the going got tough.

We were never called to build tents and tabernacles to enshrine these moments forever.
This story is not yet finished.
We have to keep working.
We have to keep seeing what changes need to be made.
We have to keep hearing the voice of God speaking into our lives.
And that means coming down from the mountain, rolling up our sleeves, and getting to work.

After all, that is what Jesus did.
The light of glory revealed on the mountaintop was meant for the world.
And Jesus knew that for that light to dwell within each of us, he was going to have to shine even in the darkest places of the world.
He was going to have to confront evil powers.
He was going to have to withstand betrayal and abuse.
He was going to have to carry his cross and enter the grave of death.
But he did it all so that the light of the knowledge of the glory of God could shine on us.

Unlike the disciples, we know how this next part of the story ends. We’ve seen our way through Jerusalem, through the cross, and have watched countless generations listen to God’s call to let their light shine.
What we sometimes forget is that we can’t stay on the mountaintop either.
This is not simply a story we curl up on our couches to experience.
Our season, our part of this journey is still being written.
And God is still speaking and still calling us to follow Jesus.

So as we enter the season of Lent, we, too, will set our faces towards Jerusalem.
This Wednesday, we will remember our mortality and our own journey through death with a cross of ashes on our foreheads.
We will once again have the opportunity to redefine ourselves in the light of the one who came to save us.
Over these coming weeks, we’ll explore what it means for Christ to be our hero and our savior and perhaps we will discover all over again what it means to be a disciple.
Friends, let us come down from the mountain where we have tried to wrap up our faith with a neat and tidy bow. A whole new season is beginning and this time you are ones God is calling to let your light shine.

Rise Up!

Posted on January 7, 2018Leave a comment

As we gather this morning to worship, we are looking backwards towards these strange individuals who saw a star in a sky and who let it take them to a manger in Bethlehem.
They heard God speaking through that heavenly vision… maybe not in so many words, but in a language and a message that they could understand.
They were stargazers, astronomers, people who identified with the light.
And when God spoke to them, they arose.

“Arise, shine, the light has come” we hear in Isaiah, chapter 60.
Arise! Shine!

These are not words spoken only in far off lands to far off people.
No, God is still speaking.
The message of old is still being heard throughout this world.
Even in the midst of times that seem dark and troubling, painful and chaotic… there is a still small voice that is whispering:
“Arise… shine…”
In his reflection on these texts, Rev. Dr. B. Kevin Smalls notes (https://www.umcdiscipleship.org/worship/season-after-epiphany-2018-worship-planning-series/january-7-2018-god-is-speaking/epiphany-baptism-of-the-lord-2018-preaching-notes) that sometimes the darkness in our lives is so thick that we don’t trust the things that resemble the light:
“Might be a trick… and tricks don’t always
Lead to a treat, so I retreat in the darkness,
Hoping, slightly, ever so lightly that
My deepest fears will submit to the changing
Of dark gears leading to light years of praise
And adoration.”

We like to believe that we are the people of the light, like the Magi, but there certainly are times that we refuse the light.
We hesitate to take a risk, a step of faith.
We are comfortable in the darkness, in what we know, in what is familiar.
As Smalls writes,
“Darkness is for lying down, laying down, hanging around, pretending to be asleep.”
And wow, it feels good to pretend to be asleep. Or to actually be asleep.
To close our eyes and ignore what is happening outside of our lives, our homes, our neighborhoods, our country.
And so we get complacent in the midst of a changing climate and culture.
Statistics that should make us quake with their injustice barely faze us.
• Black women in the United States are 243% more likely to experience maternal death than white women. (https://www.thecut.com/2017/12/black-women-are-3-times-more-likely-to-die-from-childbirth.html)
• Every day, 46 children and teens are shot in murders, assaults, suicides & suicide attempts, unintentional shootings, and police intervention (https://www.bradycampaign.org/key-gun-violence-statistics)
• 1 in 5 adults in the United States or 43.8 million people experience mental illness in a given year (https://www.nami.org/Learn-More/Mental-Health-By-the-Numbers)

But usually, we are too nice and kind to want to have real conversations about racism or gun violence or mental health.
We hesitate to talk about these things in church or to ask how God might be speaking, calling, pushing, begging us (the people of God) to respond.
Maybe we are like the people of whom Isaiah was speaking…
You see if we turn just one chapter ahead in that prophetic text, these people felt like:
“justice is far from us and righteousness does not reach us; we wait for light, and lo! There is darkness… we stumble at noon as in the twilight, among the vigorous as though we were dead.”
They were sitting back, retreating into the darkness, waiting for someone else to do something about it.
“Hoping, slightly, ever so lightly that
My deepest fears will submit to the changing
Of dark gears leading to light years of praise
And adoration.”

But then Isaiah comes along with the reminder that we can’t just sit back and wait for our fears to go away.
“Arise, shine, the light has come”
Maybe those old words aren’t quite seeping deep enough under our skin to be heard and felt.
Let me try it again from the Message translation:
“Get out of bed, Jerusalem! Wake Up! Put your face in the sunlight. God’s bright glory has risen for you!”
God’s glory has risen for you… So what on earth are YOU going to do about it?

The Magi in our scripture rose up… they got out of bed and they followed where God was leading them.
Over field and fountain, moor and mountain, that star in the sky was their guiding light until it took them to the place where the child was.
And when they arrived, they could barely contain themselves.
They felt an overwhelming kind of joy, the Gospel of Matthew tells us, that was born out of the sense that they were in the right place at the right time.
So they fell on their knees and worshiped that little child.

You and I… we are called to get out of bed, to shake off the sleep, to open our eyes and put our faces into the light and to hear where God is calling us to go.
As we start a new year, of ministry together, I have such a fire and energy in my heart.
I can see all sorts of amazing things that God has in store for us if we would simply put our face in the sunlight and head out into this world.
This church is so generous, so powerful, so filled with talent and compassion and love.
And as we have risen up and followed God’s leading – I know that many of you have experienced that immense joy that comes from being in the right place at the right time… from finding that place where your gifts have met some great need in this world.
We experienced that kind of joy in our gigantic Joppa garage sale.
We experience it as we laugh and serve together at CFUM.
We experience it when we dress up in ridiculous costumes to help our young people understand something in confirmation.
Or when our children teach us the nativity story on Christmas Eve.
And in all of these places, we are also discovering the joy of realizing that we are not alone!
There are all sorts of other people on this journey with us. People who have the same kinds of yearning and hopes and fears… and who are ready, with us, to rise up and to truly make a difference in this world for the sake of Jesus Christ!
They are sitting right here in the pews with you.
But they are also outside of these walls – our neighbors here in the community – who might have the same kinds of passion and see the same needs, but might not use the same faith words to describe it.

Maybe they are the Magi – the strangers, the Gentiles, the ones who we didn’t know, but who have been on this journey as well, to bring light and hope into the world.

God is speaking and leading all around us…. Giving us opportunities to bring hope and joy and light and love to all we meet. Together, let us rise up to seek them.

In the Desert

Posted on November 12, 2017Leave a comment

In these weeks before our season of Advent starts, we’ve been exploring the Psalms of our scriptures.
Rev. Andrea Severson joined us at the end of October to talk a bit about times of transition and journeying and the songs the Israelites wrote to accompany them on the way.
Last week, as we remembered our saints, Pastor Todd reminded us of how God walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death.
Today, we turn our attention to one of the Psalms of Lament. These songs of lament, frustration, and longing make up over half of the psalms within our Bible!
They are the words that we cry out when we are troubled, persecuted, frustrated, and hopeless.
“There’s got to be more than this,” we say. “There’s got to be more than this.”

This particular psalm is one written by David and the note in the scripture itself indicates it was during a time when he had fled to the wilderness. Likely, it was written after he had become the King of Israel. His very own son, Absalom, led an insurrection and David was forced to run for his life.
And there, in the desert, he cries out…
Not just for water…
But for the very presence of God.
Robin Gallaher Branch writes that “although his body wastes from dehydration, his spiritual longing for God takes precedence. Hunted and afraid for his life, the psalmist remembers God’s protection and loving-kindness… his soul longs for God.”

In the midst of our trials and tribulations, in the midst of the pain in this world, do we, too, cry out with the psalmist?
Do we believe “there’s got to be more than this?”
Do our souls hunger and thirst for God?
And can we hang on to the vision of God’s enduring love in the midst of our longing?

Last week, brothers and sisters in Christ gathered in a sanctuary in Sutherland Springs, Texas for worship. They were there to pray and to sing and to worship God… and twenty-six of them lost their lives.
Yet another mass shooting in America.
Yet another tragic loss of life.
And I feel like we are lost, wandering the desert, parched with our longing for the violence to end. Parched with exhaustion from debating types of weapons. Parched with weariness from trying to understand the motivations for such acts.
There has got to be something more than this.

And so, we are gathered here, today, seeking God… thirsting for God… turning our hands and our lips towards the divine…. Clinging to the one who has upheld us before.

What comes next?

Do we turn inward and lock the doors?
Do we get lost in debate about causes and solutions?
Do we stop loving and trusting our fellow human beings?
Or is there something else?

In some ways, I wonder if the lessons of Veteran’s Day are precisely the ones we need in the midst of a desert like this.
After the Treaty of Versailles was signed, the “Great War” finally saw peace on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month. It was believed to have been “the end of ‘the war to end all wars.’”
The next year, President Wilson proclaimed November 11 as Armistice Day… a day commemorated “by paying tribute to the heroes of that tragic struggle and by rededicating ourselves to the cause of peace.”

You see, in the midst of all of that loss and pain and grief … in the midst of the desert of destructions and sacrifice… as they looked out upon that broken world and believed that there had to be something more than this… they named what they were longing for – peace – and they set it before them as a vision for what they would pursue.

In 1926, Congress officially recognized the date as a legal holiday – a “recurring anniversary of this day, commemorated with thanksgiving and prayer and exercises designed to perpetuate peace through good will and mutual understanding between nations.”

And yet, even with that vision of peace before us, it was not the war to end all wars.
There was a second world war, and then the Korean conflict, and we know that since those days countless of our brothers and sisters, sons and daughters, friends and neighbors have served our country around this world.
In 1954, aware of this reality, President Eisenhower proclaimed that we would expand this day to honor the veterans of all wars and to “reconsecrate ourselves to the task of promoting an enduring peace so that their efforts shall not have been in vain.”

In the midst of our own desert of perpetual war and violence, we believe there has got to be something more than this.
And so we cry out every year, longing and thirsting for God’s peace to prevail across this world.

Maybe the question is… have we truly reconsecrated ourselves to the task of peace?
Simply marking a holiday is not enough…
How are we called to live differently in order to help God’s peace to be known all across this world? How do we lift up our hands and call upon God’s name and allow the divine power and glory to shape our world?

This past week, a colleague wrote a reflection about the kind of preparation she plans to do in the wake of more violence. Instead of preparing her church for someone who might burst in with a weapon, she wants to prepare her church to work against violence in this world.
And friends, there are lots of ways we can do that.

We can mentor students in our schools who are at risk for joining gangs.
We can work to provide better mental health care for our neighbors.
We can respond to domestic violence and take seriously the stories of women who are assaulted and work to not only keep them and their families safe, but provide help for those who are perpetrators.
We can get to know our neighbors and become a part of creating a community where people have one another’s backs and look out for what is happening.
We can talk about the gospel stories that teach us how to respond to oppression and injustice and hatred – often by heaping on extra doses of love and compassion and working for justice.
We can be a church that helps our children, especially our boys, learn healthy ways to express their emotions and to play so that they don’t grow up to believe that anger has to be expressed through violence.

If in the midst of this desert of violence, we turned our eyes to God and allowed that vision of peace to quench our thirst…
if that was the deep well from which we as a church and as a community chose to drink from…
if in the midst of this barren and hopeless struggle we chose to turn our eyes to the Lord and to bless God’s holy name and to cling to the one who has been our help…
then like David, we might find our souls satisfied.

May it be so. Amen.