Posts Tagged with accountability

emergingumc2

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Perhaps a few too many days have passed since the event for me to recall everything clearly.  I would have gotten to the blogging right away but a few things got in my way.  I watched with much excitation the Iowa/Ohio State football game while I was waiting for my flight.  Then I got up and did church Sunday morning.  And then I helped move a friend.  And then I was sick, sick, sick the rest of the day.  Monday I was a zombie.  And since then I have been playing catch up.
But there are some key things I want to get down before they slip away completely. 

–ONE–
The church and the congregation are not the same thing.  The congregation is part of the church, but the church… the Kingdom of God… the bride of Christ… is SO much bigger than the congregation – or the denomination.  I knew that, but the way that we talked about the specific role of the congregation last week (public worship, teach core doctrine, care for congregation, institutional player) I realized both how limited that role is and also how important.  
To be honest, as I look at my gifts for ministry – I am gifted to be a leader and a pastor within the congregation.  I love worship and I want that worship to be available to all.  I strive to be an institutional player in my community and build connections between my institutions and our schools and our city government and our state agencies.  I’m a good ambassador in that sense.  I’m a good representative.  I have the gifts to care for people in my congregation – I did it this afternoon as I sat with a family around their dying father.  I love to teach and I have the gifts and abilities to take complex ideas and help people understand them. 
I also deeply feel called to be a part of small communities of people who are trying to live the gospel with each other.  And I think in part what I realized this weekend is that I may not be called to be a leader of a group like that, but I am called to join one.  I’m called to help create space for them to happen.  I’m called to equip others to lead them. 
As an institution, our congregation can be a hub for missional activity.  I love that imagery.  and I want to make THAT happen.
–TWO–
As a part of the conference experience, we were at Lockerbie Central UMC/Earth House.  This is a church that has converted its basement into a vegan restaurant, its middle floor into office space and a coffee shop, and it’s top floor/sanctuary into a blank worship space and flexible auditorium/stage/performance space.  I am in LOVE with the whole thing.  I love the beautiful old stained glass windows and the homemade chai lattes and the organic fair trade coffee and the gorgeous hardwood floors and the fact that so many different types of people are trying to figure out their lives and their faith in that space.  I love the fact that yoga classes and cooking classes and films about social justice issues and conversations about salvation are happening in the same space.  I love that people enter that community (enter THE CHURCH) through all sorts of different venues.
I stayed with a young woman who come to the community in part because of a yoga class.  And she worships there sometimes.  She helps non-profits across the state find the resources they need personnel wise to be effective.  And she’s finding community and hope and inspiration there at the Earth House Collective AND the Lockerbie Central congregation. 
–THREE–
Our hosts coordinated homestays for many of us, and that in itself was a blessing.  I got to know December, even if just for one evening of really deep and vulnerable conversation over a cup of tea. It was amazing to experience that and to know that there was someone, a stranger, who had a similiar story to me.  It was a reminder of how small the world is and also a reminder of how powerful the gift of hospitality can be.
–FOUR–
I’m really struck by the difference between the inclusiveness of what the public congregation should be and the exclusiveness of a committed group of disciples who are trying to live the gospels.  I’m not sure if this quite came into focus for me completely until this morning as a sat around a table with pastors from other traditions.  I had said something about our open communion table and realized how sharply that contrasted with my LCMS colleagues.  Ironically, I was at the same time arguing for committed exclusive discipleship groups.  We were having a discussion about the limits of God’s kingdom, and I realized the beauty of the Methodist/Congregational structure.  We can HAVE the absolute openness of the Kingdom in the congregation, in the sacraments, in worship, in teaching… everyone is welcome.  And then we can invite those who want to take deeper steps into discipleship groups.  The problem with a lot of churches with rigorous discipline is that it creates and us vs. them mentality, you are in or you are out.  If we instead have a partnership that lets us know all who believe are in, and then invite everyone to go deeper, we get around some of that exclusivity. 
What I am trying to figure out is how to translate that back into my institutional congregation.  I believe we have the structure within our language already.  We have baptized members and professing members – and TECHNICALLY professing members should be people committed to living out their baptismal vows through specific practices.  And if someone decides they aren’t ready to commit to those practices, they can still be baptized members of our church!   Really, what that takes is for us to take our vows seriously and to seriously hold one another accountable AND to value baptized membership in a new way.  To realize there is a difference between those who follow Jesus and those who are disciples.  Ideally, everyone would be a disciple.  But not everyones ready.  Not everyone’s ready to take that risk – but they still believe.

Hebrews Part 6: Discipline

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My nephew has recently picked up a bad habit. Lying. Whether it’s just a phase he is going through or if developmentally he has just realized that he can make up stories and try to get away with things… it hasn’t been working. His parents see right through his lies. They catch him all the time. But they couldn’t figure out how to get him to stop doing it.

But they recently got some advice and figured out a new way to discipline him. Each time they catch him in a lie he has to pay them a dollar. Now, for a 7 year old, a dollar is a lot of money. And he has to go all the way up to his bedroom and get his piggy bank and pull out a dollar and come all the way back downstairs and pay up.

And since they have instituted this new form of punishment do you want to know how many times he has lied? Once – the first time – and it was so painful for him and it made such an impression on him that he hasn’t done it since.

As we come to the last chapters of the letter to the Hebrews this morning – we find that we have come full circle. We have gone from being accepted by Christ and called his brothers and sisters in chapter two – to being addressed as children of the Lord in chapter twelve. And like all children – like my nephew – we are going to learn a little bit about discipline.

All of that stuff that happens in between – all of those big words like Christology and atonement – they help us understand how we become children of God, but what really matters is that it happens. Because of what Jesus has done in his life, death, and resurrection life – we are restored and redeemed and we are now children of God.

We have been adopted into God’s household – but there are some changes that we are going to have to make in our lives – some new “house rules” if you will. Because what Christ did is set us on a new path – we have a new direction in this life and our job now is to run this race to the end.

We talked a little bit about that race last week – but today we are going to talk about what running this race is really like.

So first a question – How many of you here are runners? Not very many, I would imagine.

Running is very hard work. On and off for about 4 years I have tried to take up the habit of running. And I’ve learned that you have to start off slowly, step by step, little by little. If you tried to start off running 5 miles a day – you would cramp up and your heart would scream at you. But slowly, gradually, you can build yourself up to that point.

The reason why my attempts at running have been unsuccessful is very simple – I lacked the discipline it takes to become a runner.

I might start off good for a week – or maybe even two weeks. I would gradually increase my time running and my lungs would expand their capacity to take in air and my heart would become gradually stronger and my legs would slowly start to adapt to the work I was asking them to do…

…. but then I would get busy, or get tired, or get frustrated because I wasn’t seeing the instant results I wanted. And so I would skip a few days… and then those days would become two weeks, and then I had to start all over again. I couldn’t pick up where I had left off – because my body had already reverted to its pre-running stage.

What I really need is a running coach – someone to yank me out of bed in the morning. Someone to remind me of the basics and to teach me new skills. Someone to keep me on track. The kind of discipline that a running coach would encourage for their student… healthy eating, drinking plenty of fluids, warming up your body, and the part I dread: wind sprints, endurance running, and pushing yourself a little farther each day… is all designed to help create the best possible conditions for a running lifestyle. Each and every single thing is important to turn your body into a running body.

I don’t think its mere coincidence that our reading on discipline in Hebrews this morning comes right after the introduction of this race metaphor. Bill Long wrote that “discipline can not only ‘chisel’ or ‘sculpt’ the body…, but it can shape the soul.” And just like a runner, we are being asked to transform ourselves – mind, body, and soul – into something different. We are being asked to become different people – and that takes discipline.

What is true for my habit of running is often true for our spiritual race as well – the discipline we need often has to come from without.

The good news is that this race comes with its own coach. Hebrews 12:2 reminds us that we can look to Jesus, the pioneer and perfector of our faith who has tread this path before. When we look to him – who endured more than we could possibly imagine – we find the strength to keep going.

And then what we are asked to remember is that this race isn’t going to be easy. We are going to run through some rough terrain. We are going to bump elbows with people who are running different races and we might get pushed around in the process. There will be potholes and roadblocks and dead ends and hills and valleys along this race.

But in each of those struggles, in each of those trials, God is disciplining us – we are being shaped into children of God.

As verse 11 reminds us – discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. Just like wind sprints strengthen and transform our hearts… although they make you feel like you are going to die in the process… so too does the discipline of God transform our lives.

Something that is rattling around in the back of my mind… and I want you to bear with me for just a minute, because I haven’t fully figured this bit out… is that discipline is not punishment.

Now – I know that in the version of the scriptures that you have printed there it actually uses the word punishment – but it is the only version that does so and I believe it’s a bad translation of the passage.. Almost every other version I have looked at uses the word “rebuke” instead of punishment…. God is expressing disapproval, God is correcting us. In the greek, the word is elegchomenos… literally, we are being exposed when we are on the wrong path or doing the wrong thing.

But the type of discipline that then is carried out is not some arbitrary punishment, God does not take pleasure in causing pain in our lives or seeing us struggle… but God’s discipline helps us to correct the mistakes in our lives… it is a training or teaching that will equip us for righteousness.

If I am running incorrectly and someone doesn’t point it out and correct my form, I could cause serious damage to my body. The initial correction might be tough, it might be painful and it might hurt my pride, but it will strengthen me for the long haul. So too, the discipline of the Lord puts us back on the right path and strengthens us for the tougher parts of the journey ahead. It will forge us into the type of people that God knows we can be.

What that also means is that God doesn’t send trials into our lives just for the sake of trials. God only disciplines us because we are loved and only disciplines us to correct missteps and to prepare us for the future.

I firmly believe that God doesn’t give us cancer to teach us something, or send hurricanes to shore to send us a message. Love is not the foundation of that kind of discipline.

But when tragedies befall us – when we face roadblocks – when we are rocked to the core by a death or a disaster… we can know that we have strength to endure because of what we have already been through and we can be assured that God will bring us through to the other side a stronger person than we were before.

The final thing that I want to say is that discipline not only happens between us and God, it also happens in a community.

John Wesley was really big on discipline. The very reason we are called Methodists today is because he and his friends had such a meticulous method to keep their minds and souls conditioned – to keep them running on the right path. Wesley often referred to an early church saying that “the soul and the body make a man; the spirit and discipline make a Christian.”

In the last chapters of Hebrews our joint responsibility for one another’s discipline is clear. “see to it that no one fails to obtain the grace of God.” “make sure not root of bitterness springs up and causes trouble.” “ remember those who are in prison, as if you are in prison with them” “let mutual love continue” “remember your leaders… your earthly coaches… who are charged with watching over your souls…”

But we also remember that the same charge is given to us whenever we stand together and make our member ship vows. Each time we do so, I say to you:

“Members of the household of God,
I commend these persons to your love and care.
Do all in your power to increase their faith,
confirm their hope, and perfect them in love.”

Our job as Christians is more than to simply believe… we also must be in relationship with the living God… we must live our lives differently. And discipline is how we hold those two together. Discipline is how we make sure that our lives match our beliefs. It forms us into the kind of people God wants us to be. It is our training ground for the life to come. And the good news is – we are all in this together.

B is for Bound Together

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When I think about this very difficult passage from Matthew today I’m very aware of the fact that there are some things in this life that only a mother could say to you – some things about ourselves that we will never hear unless they come from the lips of someone who unconditionally loves you.
As we think about that – I want you to watch this clip from the movie, “Spanglish.” In this film, Deborah, played by Tea Leoni is the wife of a simple and carefree chef. Deborah is a bit self-absorbed and blames everyone but herself for her problems – a trait which has led her straight into an affair. Her mother, played by Cloris Leachman decides to step in and confront her about it.

(watch clip)

In my family, and maybe in yours, we call these sorts of talks “come to Jesus” moments. Those times when someone has strayed from the path and really need someone to let them know – to hold a mirror out in front of them and to help them to see what they are doing wrong and how they are hurting themselves or others.

When we look at this text from Matthew however, Jesus isn’t talking about our family lives. He’s talking about how to treat one another in the church. And the truth is we have a really hard time figuring out how to put these things into practice as a congregation. Our churches today, are not places where we feel comfortable having hard and truthful conversations with people. It is much better to pretend like a problem never existed, or to quietly remove yourself from the community than to get real with someone about a problem between you or an unhealthy situation.

I think part of the reason why we do so is because churches today – and by churches I mean the groups of people who come together as church – aren’t bound together. I was watching the Hawkeyes play yesterday morning, and in truth, congregations have much more in common with football fans than with the kind of community Christ is calling us to be in the scriptures. We are brought together by our common love, football in one case, worshipping God in the other, we sing/chant/cheer together, we pray together, but when the game is over and after we have had our coffee and cookies or hotdogs, we head home – back to our lives.

There is little if any sense of obligation to one another, much less accountability in many churches today, and, honestly, our church is one of those places. We don’t have a history of successfully handling conflict amongst ourselves – in fact, leaving the community, just not showing up, has been the most common way of dealing with problems in the last decade. I’m not sure if this is because we aren’t willing to say that there is a problem, or if it’s because when we voice a problem, we aren’t listened to – but in either case, the kind of relationships Christ calls us to model are not being lived out.

So we have to do is look at what it is about a family member, or even a best friend, that helps us to hear and respond to them when there is a problem.

And I think the real difference between those people we listen to and the church today is a sense of commitment. It truly takes unconditional love and unwavering concern for the kind of intervention and reconciliation that our passage from Matthew calls us to. The big question for us today is what kind of church would we have to become for Christ’s words to become a reality?

The answer I believe comes from recent Applebee’s commercials. Maybe you have seen them – the ones where a young man is sitting on a bench with headphones on, eating a sandwich and texting his friends. The “spokesapple” as it is affectionately called, encourages the young man to have a face to face conversation with his friends around the table. “Together is good” is the new theme the restaurant is trying to convey.

Now, whether or not you have seen the commercial, or eat at Applebee’s, the point is that we listen to the people we eat with. We care about the people we eat with. We want what is best for the people we eat with.

A friend of mine from Nashville has a family meal night with his family. While they are all very busy and the kids have school and extra-curricular activities and he and his wife work long hours – every Tuesday night they have a family dinner. Anyone else who happens to be around that evening is invited as well and for that one night a week they all sit around the dinner table together.

At the table – everyone has a chance to speak, and everyone is invited to share something about their week. Everyone is heard, everyone is listened to, and everyone has a place – even their youngest son who is 3.

The table is one of the most important images of the Christian church precisely because it is around the table that Christians are bound together. It is around the table that community is formed. It is around the table that the body and blood of Christ transform us into the body of Christ.

The hymn we just sang reminds us of that calling: Where charity and love prevail, there God is ever found. Brought here together by Christ’s love, by love are we thus bound. Let us recall that in our midst, dwells God’s begotten Son. As members of his body joined, we are, in him, made one.

We are in Christ made one. We are made one in our baptisms, we are made one in our commitment to this church, we are made one in the holy sacrament of communion.

And as a community of people who are not only brought together by Christ’s love, but bound together by that love, the rules of engagement with one another change. As Christ’s life transforms our community, then how we treat one another changes as well.

Monastic communities all across the world understand this and so when someone decides to enter their communities, they agree to live under certain rules. Rules about how to treat one another, about what to do when someone sins, and about the things that are and are not acceptable in the community.

What are the laws that we live by? What are the rules that govern our life together? Whether we want to admit it or not, whether we live it or not, when we become a part of the church, we promise to support the church – the community of Christ- through our prayers, our presence, our gifts and our service. And we promise to live a Christian life and to remain a faithful member of the body of Christ.

But perhaps the simpler answer is found in the book of Romans – where we are reminded of the greatest commandment – to love God and to love one another. Especially as we think about our life together- we must remember the command to love. According to the Jerusalem Bible translation of verse 10 – Love is the one thing that can never hurt your neighbor.

Philip Lawrence is the Abbot of the Christ in the Desert Abbey in New Mexico and he has this to say about our life in community:

“We must arise from sleep. We must be aware that it is this community in which we live. This does not mean that we think that things are perfect in this community. We must be radically honest about this. Our brothers and sisters are not saints… None of us is perfect; none of us follows every direction of the Customary or the traditions of the house perfectly.”

But you see, the thing is, when we do fail one another – when we do make mistakes, and we will – the instructions from Jesus that we find in Matthew are not designed to help us kick people out, but to help us love them back in.

Too often, we allow conflicts and problems to remain hidden, we fail to talk about them and we are not willing to hold one another accountable for the promises that we have made.

As a new minister, I know that this accountability piece is something that I too have to work on. All of our charge conference forms came across my desk the other day and again I was reminded that we have nearly 200 members and over 100 young people who have been baptized but who have not yet joined the church. That is over 300 people who are under the care of this church and yet we only have 50-60 here on a Sunday.

As the pastor who is about to fill out those forms, I feel a great burden to think about how to love those people back into our midst, rather than to simply let them slip away. And I am going to be putting myself out there this fall and in the coming year to hold myself and them accountable to the promises we have made. But this passage reminds me that this is a burden that we all share together.

When was the last time that you asked one of your brothers or sisters in Christ why they are neglecting their promises and aren’t giving faithfully? When was the last time that you asked a child’s parents why they were neglecting the promises they made by not bringing their young ones up in the church?

Those are not easy questions to ask! And perhaps you would not ask them in precisely that way. But for too long we have talked about people and their problems and their failings behind their back rather than reaching out and letting them know that we are here, and we want to be on this journey with them.

We treat one another as strangers instead of as brothers and sisters. And we believe that we have justification for doing so precisely in this same passage from Matthew for it says: If the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.

We forget that we have all sinned. We have all hidden pieces of our lives from the light of day and from the scrutiny of others. And we forget that how Jesus treats tax collectors and gentiles is that he goes to them… and he eats with them… and he loves them.

Again here these words from Abbot Philip Lawrence:

“Perhaps one of the most important facets of our formation as monks is the process of acceptance that we are all sinners, that we are all imperfect. I must accept my brothers as they are, with their sinfulness and their imperfections and their faults–and my challenge is to love them just as they are. Also I must come to accept my imperfections and my faults and I love myself properly as I am. My challenge is to allow the Holy Spirit to change my life from within. I cannot change anyone else’s life, but I can ask the Spirit to change my life, to transform me. I can use my energies to fight against my own defects, faults and sins.”

That is all we can do. Love one another deeply – help to point out a fault or a wayward action – but then, even if that person will not listen – simply love them. Love them and pray for them. That is after all what the mother did in our movie clip. She spoke the hard truth and said her piece, and then she made sure her daughter’s seat belt was fastened =)

Love them and pray for them… That is something that I know we all know how to do here. This is a church that loves deeply when someone is in need. Whether a love one is dying or someone is simply having a tough time – this is a church that knows how to treat others as family – as flesh and blood – rather than as strangers. You never cease to amaze me with your outpouring of love… and so as we love one another, we must let that love continue to move us deeper into relationship, deeper into the tough questions and may the love of Christ that has brought us together, bind us together. Amen and amen.

Weekly Lectionary Reflection

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** I’m giving up on my other blog where I only post lectionary reflections… my life, the life of the church, and the texts are not seperate – they all intertwine, so they might as well on my blog too! **

I’m quite far behind this week, as far as sermon preparation goes. I’m increasingly thankful for my local pastor’s lectionary study, as we always look at the texts a full week and a half in advance.

This week, I’m thinking a lot about the confrontation that is proposed in this week’s reading from Matthew, but also how that is only possible when you are bound together in Christ. So, in continuation with my “ABC’s of Being the Church” theme, this week is B for Bound Together.

I visited with a woman recently about these kinds of confrontations when your neighbor wrongs you, and we agreed that it is a horribly difficult thing to do. BUT – in our families, we have no problems telling someone if they have hurt us, or other people. Especially she said as a parent and a grandparent, or as a sibling, there is a lot of intervening going on (some of it not so healthy). But we treat those people who are in the church with us as strangers, as people whose lives are private and none of our business.

Our text this week reminds us that we are bound together. And the Romans passage makes that even clearer as we hearken back to the 10 commandments. While the first commandments are all about honoring and loving God, the rest are about how we are supposed to live in community – take care of one another – don’t do anything that would harm the fragile balance of our togetherness – because we all need one another to survive. In the United States, we are so individualized into our family units that we can’t see the way that our actions affect other people. Or we ignore the effects. This week, as we talk about being bound together, we have to face the responsibility and accountability that goes along with that.

Three Simple Rules: Do No Harm

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Once upon a time, a small group of Christians approached their teacher. “Mr. Wesley,” they said timidly, “you have been preaching to us over and over again about the wrath is to come. We want to follow Jesus, we want to experience God’s salvation. But how do we get from here…. To there?”

Well that teacher, Mr. Wesley himself, was a man who had struggled with that very question. You see, growing up, he thought that he always had to be doing something in order to prove himself worthy of God. He was always looking for some method, some way, some path that he was supposed to walk on in order to get to God. Or maybe, it was that he was looking for some way of finding the assurance of his salvation. You see, for Wesley and that small group that approached him, it seemed like the wrath of God was always hanging over their heads, just waiting for some little sin to come along so that it could pounce.

In his younger years, Wesley had tried all sorts of things to bring him that assurance, to prove that he was safely in the arms of God’s love. He meticulously kept a journal of all the things that he did in a day – as a way of measuring his progress. He fasted two days a week. He got up at 4 am to pray and study. He spent time in prisons visiting those who were lost and in orphanages visiting those who were abandoned. And he met with fellow believers, always seeking to learn more about what God demands of our lives.

But you see, Wesley had a little problem as well. As much as his type A personality didn’t want to admit it, he found multiple places in the scriptures where it says “faith and not works” is what saves us. Sometimes he was trying too hard. Making the path more difficult than it really had to be.

Out of all of that straining and trying and pushing and pulling of his own experience, when this small group of people came to him and asked “what should we do,” Wesley had an idea. He arranged a time when they could all gather together to pray. And then weekly they continued together to pray, they gathered together to hear the gospel – to hear over and over again that they are beloved children of God and that God would provide the grace they needed to be transformed. And they gathered together to watch over one another in love – to point out when another was starting down the wrong path and to encourage faithful steps.

And when they did so, there were three things that they focused on – three rules that all people in the societies had to follow. Three ways to measure how they were in fact doing: First – Are you doing harm to others? Second – Are you doing good to others? Third – are you staying in love with God?

This week, we are going to focus on “doing no harm.” For Wesley, these included a number of things like: taking the name of God in vain; fighting, quarreling, taking your brother or sister to court; slaveholding; gossip; wearing gold and costly apparel; buying on credit things you cannot afford to pay for; and singing songs and reading books that don’t tend to the knowledge or love of God.

From the looks of it – it almost appears that Wesley’s rules are yet another addition to the 10 commandments, an attempt like those of the Pharisees to make things harder than they have to be – to place more obstacles between us and God’s love and grace. Don’t do this, Don’t do that. Lead boring lives of strict obedience and puritanical faith.

But that’s not what these are at all. In this first rule – that we should do no harm, is about taking the time to think about who is harmed and where is injustice done through our everyday actions.

Doing no harm is about taking the time to see other people as children of God and asking how they are affected by our decisions.

Because the truth of the matter is, even as Christians, we still make mistakes. We still take the wrong path at one time or another, We still have slips of the tongue and do hurtful things to the people we love. We still sin. The question is – how to we keep from doing it again? How do we prevent those things from eating us alive and enslaving us?

This is the same question that Paul is wrestling with in Romans. After all of his talk about living under grace now instead of the law, after all his talk about being free in Christ to choose the good he has a confession to make: No matter how hard I try, I still do those very things that I don’t want to do. Try as I might, I keep doing bad things.

And the old Paul – the Saul who lived under the law and whose faith required complete obedience… who taught that those who broke the law had punishment awaiting them… the old Saul would have been mortified by his sins. The old Saul may not have been able to live with himself – or would have lived in a state of denial and making excuses, always trying to avoid the truth about his failures.

But the new Paul… the new Paul who now lives under grace freely acknowledges what he has done wrong because he knows it’s the only way to let go it. It is the only way to forgive himself and to freely rest in God’s grace. We can only experience grace by accepting our lives as a whole – the good and the bad – and in the process, acknowledging where we are moving towards God.

There was once a Native American elder who described his own inner struggles, his inner war, in this manner: “Inside of me there are two dogs. One of the dogs is mean and evil. The other dog is good. The mean dog fights the good dog all the time.” When asked which dog wins, he reflected for a moment and replied, “The one I feed the most.”

Making the simple precept of “do no harm” one of our most important goals in daily living is making the decision not to feed the mean dog. It is making the decision not to encourage the sort of behavior in ourselves or in others that will eventually lead to hurt and disappointment.

In our roundtable group this week, we talked about ways that some of these things are harmful – ways that they hurt rather than heal relationships. One of the group shared about a time when children were playing… got hurt… parent wanted to sue… offered to pay… not about hurting others, but taking the time to make things right… how foreign that was to the other person.

We live in a society where we are always looking for ways to hurt one another, to get to the top of the heap… it’s a dog eat dog world out there and you’ve got to get ahead.

If that means working on Sundays or making other’s work on Sundays – so be it. If that means finding tax breaks and worming your way through the law to get the cheapest goods- so be it. If that means buying expensive jewelry and the best clothes so that you can show just how successful you are and separate yourselves from the rest – so be it. If it means paying your employees as little as possible so that you can make an extra buck – so be it. If it means putting down others so you can look better – so be it.

That’s the way our world works. Or at least, that’s the way we try to make it work. But the truth of the matter is, we all just end up more bruised and battered and damaged than when we started.

And because that is the way that we have always done it, there just doesn’t seem to be another way. Paul laments about his sinful state, about his struggle to do good and his inevitable failure and like a lightbulb going off in his head he cries out: “Who will deliver me from this body of death?… I Thank God… through Jesus Christ our Lord.”

We struggle and we wrestle and on our own spend so much time focusing on all the bad things that we have done and continue to do in our life. But we need to be reminded that Christ himself promised he would teach us. “take my yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart and you will find rest for your souls.” so stop beating yourself up over not doing the good. walk with me, become my apprentice, cease from doing harm, and lay aside that burden of guilt.

For too long, we have focused on the wrath of God that hangs over us. When we do so, then all of these “simple rules” become hoops to jump through. They become things we do or don’t do to maintain our standing in an organization – to keep our membership. They become things we d oor don’t do because someone told us to. When we focus on the wrath of God, we are focusing on the law and following the law, and our lives become hollow – empty – cold.

But salvation is a gift from God… it is freely offered, without question, without cost, to anyone and everyone. Grace is a gift from God, always preceding us, always moving us, always ready to be given. The trouble is, we are always looking for the catch. We are always making excuses: I’m not worthy enough, I’m not ready yet, I have all of this guilt and past hanging over me.

That is the load that we have been carrying on our own. That is what we have yoked ourselves to and that is why Jesus calls out to his disciples: come to me, take my yoke of grace upon you, and let your soul be at rest. We have let so much come between us and God’s grace. Denial, guilt, other obligations. We need to set that yoke and those chains aside and finally rest in the peace of God’s love.

The gospel message is so hard to absorb because it seems too good to be true, to easy to be really real. We want to live in a world of black and white, good and bad, where those who do wrong are punished and justice is had for all.

But what Jesus says to us is: come to me, all of you who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest. My burden is easy, my yoke is light.

What we want, are rules to follow – clear simple directions. Do this, don’t do that. And we want to know what the rewards and consequences are. We want to know what the ends are.

What is so hard to believe is that Jesus actually makes it very simple. I will give you rest from your burden – your burden of guilt, your burden of sin, your burden of despair. I will take all of that from you and teach you a new way. A new way to live. And I do this all freely – without cost.

Come to me, come to this table, come and take this life that I am freely giving you. Come and eat this bread and drink of this cup and remember that I have already taken your sin away. I have already died so that you may live. Come and find rest for your soul. Amen.

roundtable preaching

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This past semester I got to work on my senior project with Dr. John McClure, a professor of homiletics at Vanderbilt Divinity. My project has been on the intersection of so-called postmodern church practices with rural churches in Iowa and one of his suggestions, as a homiletician, was that I incorporate some kind of collaborative preaching model.

And to be honest, with my leadership style and my own values, I desperately want to do so. I truly believe that the Holy Spirit brings us to and reveals to us the Word of God as we read scriptures and as we pray about what to preach. And I also believe that I am not the only person the Holy Spirit speaks to in my church! There is a word to be proclaimed and who knows who might have the message from God this week. I think there is also something that we each bring to the text, experiences that we have that need to be shared with others. And that whenever two or more are gathered, Christ is present.

So I made the invitation to people in the church to join me on Monday afternoons for a “roundtable” discussion about the text for the week. And unfortunately the weather both weeks so far has been awful – snowy, icy, foggy. And as I might have expected this early in my ministry at this church, the participants are all the same faithful people who show up for each and every other church group. The good thing about this group is that it is designed to change completely every few months, so in May I will be asking those individuals to stop coming and to help me recruit others.

One of my greatest temptations in this group is to talk too much. I really want to hear what their perspectives and their questions in relation to the text are. I spend monday afternoons doing some serious research so that I can at least begin to address whatever might come up. So far, there have been good outcomes! Last week we were looking at Jesus in the wilderness and the temptation, but because the lectionary places that text alongside Adam and Eve in the garden we got to talking about how as humans we can resist temptation… and that got us thinking about holding each other accountable. I don’t know that I ever would have gone the direction of accountability with the sermon had it not been for the group, but they are aware that as a church we need to be more actively supporting one another. It turned into a great message!

I’m still learning how to incorporate their ideas into the sermon in more compelling ways, however. I realized halfway through the sermon that I said “in our roundtable group this week we discussed..” or some variation of that too many times. I need to refresh myself on the last chapter in McClure’s book “The Roundtable Pulpit”

Copyright © 2024 Rev. Katie Z. Dawson. All rights reserved.