church – Page 8 – Salvaged Faith

The F.I.T. Challenge

Posted on June 10, 2010Leave a comment

For over a year now, Bishop Trimble has been talking about the F.I.T. Challenge. And I think tonight, for the first time, I really understood how genius this very simple, simple concept is.

F.I.T. stands for Focus, Invest, and Tell. It is the overarching framework for ministry in Iowa. I don’t have the brochure and all the details with me, but basically, we can’t do everything so we need to focus in on what is important, get people to invest their time and talents into it, and then above all, tell the stories of Jesus and transformed lives.

It also very nicely fits into a conference focus on health and wellness – especially for our clergy. At conference this year, two men got up and shared their stories about how they were inspired by the F.I.T. challenge to lose weight and one lost 75 lbs in a year and the other lost 150! Now that was some focus, investment into their health, and then some wonderful witnessing!

Tonight, at a mission team meeting, we were all over the place trying to figure out what our next projects should be. One person on the team brought up how nice it would be to FOCUS on one project and really make it come alive as a congregation. I think in the end, we decided that focusing on smaller projects, but one per month might be a more suitable option for where our church is right now… although I think in a year or two, also having one big project that we can continually support would be wonderful.

Anywho… One of the other suggestions this new team member had was that we should have a mission celebration and TELL the stories of what we have done so far this year.

Our conference has this thing called Rainbow Covenant. Churches are encouraged to give in mission – first by paying their apportionments, and then by supporting general categories of mission. To be a 2nd mile giver, we are asked to give to all seven categories of mission (each represented by a color of the rainbow). But do you think that we had taken the time to really explain this to the church? Do you think that anyone beyond our mission team knew what we were doing with all of these different projects? No. Not really.

Bishop Trimble’s F.I.T. challenge teaches us that while having a focus is important, we also have to get people to invest in what we are doing. And I think the number one way that we do that is by telling the story. We have to show what a difference this ministry can make and then, we have to celebrate the ways we have been giving in mission.

In some ways we have done this already. Our most successful mission projects have been the ones where we had a hands on connection. We raised nearly $1500 for the Personal Energy Transportation (PET) Project… mostly because we actually brought in a PET and let people see it and rode it around during worship and had this huge connection with what the money would be used for. We told the story. And people were instantly invested.

So, out of our conversation tonight, we are going to create a yearly mission celebration Sunday where we lift up what we have been doing as a congregation. And we are going to create a bulletin board that demonstrates our progress with the rainbow covenant and we are going to fill in the rainbow of colors with our mission giving money, with pictures and with stories of the projects we have worked on so far.

I told a friend tonight that I feel like it was both a “lightbulb” moment and an “I can’t believe I’m so dumb as to not think of this before” moment. While I had heard over and over and over again about the F.I.T. challenge, I don’t think I thought to apply it to our church ministry. But how simple is it to use in our mission team. To lift up the focus projects, to help people invest, and to tell the stories of success and transformation. And what if we did that with worship? Focusing on God, investing our time and energy into helping people connect in new ways and helping them invest their time and energy, and telling the stories of Jesus? or with our PPR? Or education team?

It’s so simple. It’s genius, really.

it causes me to tremble…

Posted on June 6, 2010Leave a comment

Day two of our annual conference has completed. We have voted on exactly 7 items of legislation. And we have celebrated and praised and prayed and remembered and sung and danced and ate and hugged and sat and walked and listened.

Some brief highlights for me so far:

“Hi, I’m Fred.” Our “priest” for the conference introduced himself and welcomed us into a spirit of worshipful work and I truly have felt this particular time of conference has felt different because of it.
advocating for young adults at our legislative section and dreaming up possibilities for community college ministries
Rev. Doug Ruffle’s challenges to be a sign, a foretaste, and an instrument of the Kingdom of God…
crazy fast and delicious dinner at A Dong
even though clergy session was inhumanely long – it had a wonderful spirit to it as we gathered to worship (thanks clergy band!) and celebrate the ministry we share… and have good conversation about itinerancy
ordination!!!!!! being surrounded by family and church members and friends, the weight of all of those hands upon me, the feeling of the bible underneath my fingers, singing with joy
the reminders throughout the day of the gift of the scriptures: Bishop Kulah talking about Jesus expounding the scriptures; Barbara Lundblad’s take on radical love enfleshed in John’s gospel (love that bends down, that reaches beyond, that puts people before rules, that is here in this moment, that renews itself as soon as you think it has ended); Bishop Job sharing what a day, a year, a decade’s worth of living in the word can do for our lives; a friend’s amazing rendition of a song from the musical Philemon during prayer;
the Rethink Rock video
the voices of young adults who stood to speak out of love for what they care about on the floor.
sharing deeply with one another truths about things that have hurt us… so that we might give them over to God.
our conference artist’s work… and the poetic description of what God is sharing with us through it. The idea of being baptised into the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ being symbolized by a font filled with shards of glass… of chairs of hospitality inviting us to take our seat… the challenge that being radically hospitible brings… of the chair on the cross being an invocation – asking for God to enter our lives.

Vocations?

Posted on June 3, 20102 Comments

Today at our county ministerial alliance we talked about the multiple vocations that people have in their lives. The conversation sprang from a book we are reading together and a scene in which a Catholic priest approaches his bishop to let him know that he has fallen in love. The priest both feels called to the ministry and called to love and marry this woman that he has met.

Good old Wikipedia shares that vocation is: an occupation to which a person is specially drawn or for which they are suited, trained or qualified. While being a wife wouldn’t always be considered an occupation… it is work. And parenthood falls under the same consideration. As do our hobbies and livlihoods. And potentially our jobs. As we talked, we became more and more aware of the multiple vocations that have an influence on our lives.

In my own life, I am called to my husband, to my family, I am called to ministry as an elder in the UMC, and I’m sure that there are many others. In seminary I wrote often about a deep calling to rootedness… part of which comes from being a Midwesterner and the daughter of a farmer. It is a calling that I am currently living out both by attempting to build deep relationships in my community and with gardening.

The problem comes however, when these various callings that God has placed within our lives don’t always neatly fit together. The conflicts can be painful. How do we divide up our time and our resources and our energy? What takes priority on what days? These is a complex dance that is stepped between these obligations and loves. Not always do we make the right choices and not always is there a “right choice” to make.

Recently, the juggling has been more difficult in my life. And try as I may to give myself fully to my husband and my church work and return the phone calls of my parents and tend to those pesky weeds sprouting up in the garden, there are also the distractions that somehow sneak in and ruin the delicate balance that we create. I spent far too much time this past week reading Grey’s Anatomy fanfiction. No lie. It’s embarassing really. And over the weekend, as I prepare for Annual Conference, I’m struggling with how I can possibly spend time with the family who are coming into town, while at the same time I have obligations for rehearsals and plenary sessions. I struggle to balance how long I stay after church on a Sunday and heading out to the river to be with my in-laws and my neice and nephews. I struggle with what to do on my Fridays off with my husband when a special meeting is called in Des Moines. I struggle with finding time to get the sermon written when a funeral comes up and find myself taking time away from sleep to get it accomplished. The pull between these vocations is intense!

As I sat down to think about this idea of multiple vocations, my mind drifts to the saints who have walked before us. What biblical characters struggled with these demands? Which founders of our faith successfully navigated these waters? My mind draws blanks. I think about the ones who didn’t…. Paul’s urging of those who were unmarried to stay that way. John Wesley’s failed relationships. Even Moses left his wife and children with his father-in-law, Jethro, for a time (Exodus 18)… and I’m not sure that when they came back they came back to stay. I’m hoping others can point me to some better role models!

Modern brain science has taught us that we really cannot do more than one thing at a time. When we believe we are multi-tasking, we are really just switching incredibly quickly between one task and another, giving each full attention… even if just for micro-seconds. But it leaves us fragmented and tired, even though our brains are quickly adapting and getting better at this dance.

What are we to do? What is the right balance? And if it comes down to it, what will be our first priority?

Four Loves

Posted on February 13, 20102 Comments

** Note: This is a sermon done in pieces throughout the worship service, interspersed with scripture and songs. Also – many thanks to UCC Worship Ways for help with the liturgy that ties all these pieces together (parts are found in the Eros II section) **

A few years ago, I was in Nashville and most of my ministry was to young adults in the congregation. Valentine’s Day was approaching, and I was surprised by the ways in which people without “significant others” felt like they were being left out of the festivities. Left out of the celebration of love. They were depressed and heart broken and lonely. So as we got together to talk with one another about all the mushy, gushy stuff that surrounds this month, we tried hard to remember that love is not an emotion or an action reserved only for two people who “love” each other. It is more than that. It is deeper than that. Love is essential to who we are as human beings. We are creatures who both need to give and receive love. All of us need that.

C.S. Lewis is a great Christian theologian and he wrote a book about love. About four loves actually. The poverty of the English language is that we only have one word to describe this whole range of experiences. And so when this word is co-opted by a holiday or defined in a particular way, we leave out all of the other expressions of this complex and varied thing called love. But C.S. Lewis looked back at the different Greek words that all get subsumed under our conception of love today – and realized that love is a many splendored thing.

PHILIA

As much as our culture talks about individualism and self-identity, the truth is that we would not survive very long in this world without the people around us and the relationships that we have. David would have been absolutely lost in Saul’s court, if it were not for the bond that he had with Jonathan. And love, of one form or another is a part of all of these bonds. It is the glue that cements us together. Perhaps the most common and varied way in which we experience love is through the Greek word, philia, or companionship. This kind of love is always about something, some common interest or activity that draws individuals together for a common purpose.

Just think back to high school. All of the groups and cliques that formed were a result of philia, some kind of shared love. There were the jocks and the band geeks, the popular crowd and the nerds. These relationships, whether we liked it or not, were to some extent exclusive. The jocks just didn’t hang out with the nerds – unless of course you went to a small school like myself, and the jocks were the band geeks, who were the popular kids and they dated the nerds. Anyways. The very nature of philia is that it is exclusive. When you are drawn together for a common purpose, it means that others who don’t share in your love will not be a part of the group. And for the most part, that’s okay because we have multiple circles of friends: our golf buddies, and the people we play cards with; our co-workers.

I do want to say however, that Philia love is deeper than mere camaraderie. When you and others share philia love, you are passionate about the things you do together. You can’t wait for your next opportunity to be with one another.

This is how we think if David and Jonathan. In romantic love, two people stand face-to-face – eyes on one another. But in philia love… those two people… or more… are standing shoulder-to-shoulder, facing their common interests. Both David and Johnathan cared for one another, but their common passion was for Israel even more. Jonathan was willing to give up his claim to the throne, because he knew that David would make a better leader. And as the king, Saul, becomes more and more disturbed and seeks to end David’s life – it is the relationship between Jonathan and David that ends up saving David from death. (Photo by: Mateusz Stachowski)

When we find others who truly care about the same things we do, we find our place. I think that this is truly what it means to be the church. We are drawn into community because we have found others who are in relationship with Christ and because we share a common understanding of what that means. We are connected to something larger than ourselves and find others to travel that journey with us. There is a downside to this Philia love, however. It can become very exclusive. It can shut others out. And when the church only has this kind of love in mind, it is no better than a high school clique. We need to be continually transformed by God’s love, so that our love for one another and Christ will draw us outward and will open the doors of the church.

STORGE

The next type of love is storge, or the affectionate love that we find within families. It is the completely natural warmth we feel towards those people who have also become like family to us – it is a love that cannot be coerced or bought but it is simply present through time. When thinking about storge, I often think about how I felt towards my brothers growing up. My mom would often tell me, “You don’t have to like your brothers, but you do have to love them.” With this type of love, who the person is or what they believe or how they act doesn’t matter. It is our relationship to them and the fact that we are in this together for the long haul that forms our bonds of love.

As I have watched my nephew Aden grow over the last three months, I have witnessed this kind of love. It is the bond between a mother and her child as they nurse. It is the bond between a father and his child as they play. It is made through eye contact, and soft gentle touches, and a warm arm to cuddle into. We enter this world fragile and vulnerable and we need the love of our families to grow and develop. In fact, children who do not receive this kind of love can fall behind in development and have a “failure to thrive.”

This kind of love is about giving and receiving. When families break apart, or when we do not receive love from the people who are supposed to care for us in this way, there is great pain involved. Parents, as hard as they try not to sometimes have favorites and the story of Jacob and Esau shows how it can tear a family apart. But the good news is that we become part of new families throughout our lifetimes; co-workers come to feel like brothers; that wise couple next door, like grandparents. When we open ourselves to others, when we are vulnerable and listen for the vulnerability of others, we can experience this kind of love.

EROS

Eros is about the beloved. It is being in love with the beloved. And it is something we don’t like to talk about in church. When we think of eros love, our minds immediately jump to a sort of passionate sexuality that the church defines, constrains, and then ignores. But physical sexuality is not the sum and total of this kind of love. It is a part, but not the whole.

To love someone with this kind of love is to love them, not because of what we might receive from the relationship, but simply because of who they are, simply because they are the beloved. It is about intimacy with another that is fostered through all sorts of mundane tasks: taking walks, sharing meals, conversing with one another. As Kathleen Norris writes in her book, The Cloister Walk, some of the most sexual people that she knows are celibate monks. She says, “When you can’t make love physically, you figure out other ways to do it.”

This kind of love is a sort of glimpse into divine love. I’ll admit, that I do watch South Park on occasion, and one of my favorite episodes is when Cartman starts a Christian rock band. I thought about showing you a clip of this episode, but unfortunately, I couldn’t find one without horrendous language, so I’ll just have to describe it for you. The kids take popular romantic love songs and simply insert Jesus into the lyrics.

While that may seem sacrilegious… the language of Eros love has often used by mystics to describe their relationship to the divine – as they come to see God as the beloved. Just hear these words from the diary of Beatrice of Nazareth, a thirteenth century mystic: “…the holy woman’s affection was so tender that she was often soaked with the flood of tears from her melted heart, and sometimes because of the excessive abundance of spiritual delight, feels a great closeness to God, a substantial clarity, a wonderful delight, a noble liberty and a ravishing sweetness…”

As we think about God as our beloved… we suddenly remember all sorts of hymns and songs that are in essence, love songs to our Lord… let us join together and sing one of them now… Oh How I love Jesus…

Eros Part II

As we think about the transfiguration of Christ, we often place ourselves in the shoes of the disciples. And we are filled with wonder and awe and love towards this glorious thing taking place right before our very eyes! But the problem is that we can become overwhelmed by the passion that we experience there. You see, even in the presence of God, Eros love, by itself, is never enough. A blind devotion to the object of our affection can be dangerous, be it to our partner or our conception of the divine. And it is because Eros love always begins with ourselves. While it may be directed towards whatever we come to see as the beloved, its source is within us and as such, is far from selfless.

When we fill our lives with Eros love, we become consumed by our passion for the beloved. Peter wanted to stay there in that moment forever. But Christ wants our love to not only be for God, but for others as well. Christ wanted them to leave that mountaintop. He wants to move them to a deeper sort of love.

We often find ourselves searching for these dramatic and holy experiences of God. We want to go up the mountain with Peter, James and John and experience God’s glory. And when we get there, if we have the ability to experience it, we want to say, “it’s good for us to be here… let’s get comfortable.”

We are too often tempted to keep the experience of God’s awesome love to ourselves. We want to enjoy the company of the saints instead of going back down the mountain to continue the work of God. God knows this is a temptation of our hearts, and so I want to invite us now to confess this temptation and to pray for forgiveness together…

God of glory and light, forgive us when we are complacent and comfortable
with keeping the riches of your love to ourselves.
Keep calling us down from our mountains of privilege.
Keep expecting more of us as your disciples.
Keep reminding us to listen to your Son, in whose name we pray. Amen.

God’s perfect love surrounds us. And it calls us to stretch and to grow and to always look to the concerns of others. The needs of our world are too numerous to name. Shelter, food, clean air and water… Our gifts touch these needs, but the biggest gift we can give is to love the world so much that we give of ourselves.
Nothing will transform need more than sacrificial love. So as you place money in the offering (plate, basket, etc.) today, don’t let your giving be done. Start planning to go deeper. May God now bless our hopes and dreams.

AGAPE

The highest of all the loves is Agape love. It is the kind of love that within the church we talk the most about and find the hardest to practice. It is a completely self-less love, always directed towards others. It is a love that has no pre-requisites, no conditions; agape love doesn’t depend upon any lovable qualities at all. Simply by being, you may receive this kind of love.

As Christians, we are called upon by God to exhibit this kind of love in our daily lives. Agape love is often referred to as charity – a complete giving of oneself without any expectation of reward or acknowledgement – a complete giving of oneself that reflects the love of God towards us. This is the way that God loves.

One of the most important aspects of our tradition, particularly the Wesleyan tradition, is that there is nothing you or I can do to deserve the love of God. We do not possess any quality that deems us worthy of being “beloved” by God. Whether we say this is a result of our fallen nature, or original sin, or simply because we are mortal and God is divine, we do not deserve the love of God. And yet, the scriptures continually remind us, that God loves us anyway. God speaks us into being and sustains us through her spirit. God provides for our every need, fully knowing we can never repay that kind of love. And God does so, not by standing above us, but by walking beside us in Jesus Christ.

This love, agape love, is so great that I often felt in my life like the others just didn’t matter. Why should I care about storge, philia and eros if I can experience and share agape love?! But C.S. Lewis reminds us that we do not need to throw away silver to make room for gold. Yes, agape love is the highest, and it is the truest love in that it comes from God. We simply need to acknowledge that it is superior, and allow it to be a part of our other expressions of love.

As the scriptures that Jack just shared remind us – we are called to live out that same kind of love toward others. We are called to allow God’s agape love to transform our relationships with friends, with family, and with our beloved. We only find the strength to forgive family members when we can love them unconditionally. Friendships based on our common goals wither up without humility and a genuine desire to care for the other. And the relationships we have with our partners need the charity and grace of God in order to love unconditionally and in truth. We are called to love others not because of something good in them, but because God first loved us.

Benediction: While Valentine’s Day is known as a time for lovers, today, we come together as people who love and desire a relationship with God, to celebrate all of the loves in our life. Let us acknowledge those people who have nurtured us, walked beside us, share common passions, and those who have known us most intimately. As we journey down the mountain, we will struggle to embody Godly love, agape love, with all of these people. It is not an easy task– we continually need to be infused with God’s grace and spirit….. God will make our love holy, if only we ask.

the Church

Posted on January 15, 2010Leave a comment

Describe the nature and mission of the Church. What are its primary tasks today?

If the sacraments call us into the world, the church is the “us” that is called. In my previous paperwork, I talked about the church being the place where we come to know and begin to embody the Kingdom of God – but as I have grown in my understanding of the church, I realize more than ever that the church is not a place, but a people. It is the community in which we first participate in the means of grace and the Body of Christ that sends us forth in mission to the world.

I would heartily agree with our denominational vision that we are called to make disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world – but how we define “church” dramatically changes how we understand that mission. If the church is a people, then our task is not necessarily to get someone to join a particular congregation, but to invite them into the journey of faith – a journey that may never take them inside the four walls of a traditional congregational building. They may worship God with other believers in a house church, or study the bible in an intentional community of faith that meets at the local bar, or be a part of a new monastic community.

As I have been in conversation with emergent and missional theologies, I have begun to drawn a distinction between the church and the congregation, the church being the fullness of the body of Christ – not limited to a building, or a congregation or even a denomination. That is not to say that the congregation and denomination are unimportant. They are the institutional partners that provide structure and support for the work of the church in the world. But I think what is key is that the mission of the church lies outside of the bounds of any particular congregation or denomination. As I have taught this in my own congregation, we remember that the church is to embody the Kingdom of God in all that we do. We are the church when we are at work, when we are at play, and we are the church to each and every single person that we meet. We carry with us the faith, hope, and love that have sustained us in our journey and we invite others to be travelers on that journey with us.

Photo by: Jascha Hoste

entering the fray: Psalm 109

Posted on December 1, 2009Leave a comment

For those of you who might have missed it, there has been a wave of t-shirts, bumper stickers and other such things that say “Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8”

On first glance, you think – oh, that’s nice. Of course we should pray for our leaders. And then you read the actual verse:

May his days be few; may another seize his position.

Then you read another line or so…

May his children be orphans, and his wife a widow.

Uhh… it kind of makes you uncomfortable, doesn’t it?

For the last 10 weeks, I have been leading a Sunday school discussion of the Psalms. We are using the “Invitation to the Psalms” study put out by Abingdon Press. For the most part, I would say that my class was very unsure as to what to think of those Psalms when we started. Sure – its some of the most beautiful poetry in our tradition, it holds amazing lines and words of comfort. But the Psalms also include things like wishing that babies heads would be dashed against stones.

When I heard about this whole Psalm 109:8 thing, I took it to my class. The week before we had talked about “Love and Wrath” – including some of those very difficult verses that call for vengeance. When I brought up the whole topic, I started with the slogan – and they immediately looked up the verse themselves and were shocked and horrified (just as they were when we talked about those poor babies).

Here is the dilemma. One of the things that we talked about in this class is that every emotion and feeling is okay before God. We have to let it out – we have to speak the truth about how we are feeling. We find terrible and awful things in the Psalms because these are real human emotions. It is a valid human reaction to be angry and vindictive. In that sense, those who are wanting to use this verse are completely in the right.

On the other hand – the movement of these very same Psalms take those feelings to God and then leave them there. The Psalms are acts of worship, not propaganda. They are the desperate cries of those who are suffering and in exile and bondage and fear for their lives. And in the end, they trust in God, not themselves to execute that justice. What I hear in this new slogan is a rallying cry for human action, not an outpouring of raw human energy before God. And that, I cannot ignore.

One final point. This whole thing revolves around a single verse. I don’t like to pick and choose verses to suit my needs – that’s one of the reasons I follow the Revised Common Lectionary for my preaching. But in the scriptures, there are instances where single verses are used to help recall things that have been said and done in the past. One prime example is Jesus on the cross calling out the first line of Psalm 22

My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?

Many believe that by saying this particular verse, he wasn’t merely expressing forsakenness, he was also pointing us back to the entirety of the Psalm, a Psalm that may begin in desolation, but ends in an understanding of having been rescued.

So, let’s just take a quick glance at the entirety of Psalm 109. Ironically, those who have chosen this verse are working against their own intentions. It is a Psalm of David, that begins with him pleading with God because wicked mouths are speaking lies about him. And then there is the quotation of some of the lies and horrible things those persecutors are saying… which includes 109:8. David’s response: let what they curse be their own reward. Let them curse me. You, God, will bless me.

I’ll let that stand on its own…

Hope or Despair? Birth Pangs of the Kingdom

Posted on November 29, 2009Leave a comment

As I started exploring and reading our texts for this week, I was instantly transported back to my best friend’s kitchen – 1997. I was a sophomore in high school and my family had recently started going to church. I knew the basics of the Christian faith, but was becoming aware of how muc more there was to the bible.

The late 1990’s was a time of religious fervor – at least as far as I remember them. Mega churches were just starting to be noticed, the Left Behind Series of books were on everyone’s reading lists, and in my high school bible studies and prayer meetings were popping up all over the place. Oh – and the year 2000 was on the horizon and no one quite knew what to expect.

For the most part, I was a typical high schooler and oblivious to what was going on in the rest of the world. Living in rural Iowa, that scope of vision was even smaller. So as a new Christian, sitting in my best friend’s kitchen, my entire world was rocked when my friends and One of their moms started talking about end times prophecy.

I can’t remember why we started talking about it, but before I knew it they had pulled out these time lines and charts and bibles and were explaining to me what order things were going to happen for Christ to come back again. They talked with such certainty, such confidence, and I remember feeling nothing but lost.

In fact, my stomach turned as visions of the world being destroyed passed before my eyes. I remember feeling clammy when I thought about billions of people dying in the tribulation. I was terrified by descriptions of the seven seals being opened.

Perhaps most of all, as I sat on that kitchen stool, I remember how unprepared I felt. My friends knew all of this information – but more importantly, they believed and were confident in the face of impending doom! I, on the other hand, was uncomfortable, had questions I was afraid to ask, and if they were right, I was pretty sure that I wasn’t going to be among the faithful. That assurance they felt that told them they would escape the troubles… yeah, I didn’t have that.

I mostly avoided talking about it with my friends, but I nearly gave up on Christianity after a series of those conversations. I started reading the Left Behind books and I was so upset by them I stopped a few books in. The picture of God that was presented by them and by all of this prophecy just didn’t match up with the God I had met in my United Methodist youth group. There we talked about love and grace and forgiveness and becoming a new creation… and all I could see in what my friends were so sure of was judgment and destruction.

In some ways – we get that same kind of feeling from our gospel text this morning. We are told to be alert at all times so that we have the strength to escape from all of these things that are about to take place. We are told that people will faint from fear of what is to come because the heavens will be shaken. I hear a lot of doom and gloom in these few passages that come to us from the gospel of Luke.

But I hear these words very differently today than I did ten years ago. After we got past the Y2K scare and I started reading the Bible more, I realized that the sure and certain scenarios presented on those time lines in my friend’s kitchen weren’t the only possibility presented to us in the Bible.

As we have talked about in Sunday School recently – I started to see that Revelation isn’t a schedule for the apocalypse but a book of hope in secret code for a community being persecuted. I have now read just as many verses in Paul’s letters that talk about not knowing what is going to happen in the future, as I have the ones that seem to have the inside scoop. And – perhaps more importantly – I have started seeing the scriptures as a whole, and not in isolated verses.

When we look at the entire scope of the scriptures – we see the story of a God who created us out of love and has been continually yearning for relationship with us. We see the story of a God whose response to our endless denial was to come and be born in our midst. We see the story of a God who lived among us to show us the path of the righteous, and who died so that we could follow him. We see the story of a God who is not interested in scrapping this world and starting over, but who re-creates and redeems and transforms even the heavens and the earth.

Read in light of that story – these verses in Luke sound very different. People will faint and tremble not because terrible things are looming – but because they THINK terrible things are looming… they don’t understand what is happening… they don’t understand the signs.

About a year ago – my husband and I had some of our own signs to decipher. We go over to his sister’s house every Friday night to have dinner with their family. It is a wonderful time to eat good food and play games and hang out with our niece and nephew. A couple of weeks went by and I started to notice that my sister-in-law had stopped having her usual glass of wine with dinner. Then I noticed that she was eating less and less at our meals and was tired and seemed to be losing weight. And I started to get slightly worried, because I didn’t understand what was happening. Was she sick? Was there something that we should be concerned about?

And then the announcement came – Bevin was pregnant! She had stopped eating and was losing weight because she had such terrible morning sickness. She was tired because there was new life growing inside of her!

I had completely misread the signs.

If we go back a little bit further in Luke, chapter 21 this morning, Jesus is trying to tell his disciples not to be afraid by what might come next – by what appears to be happening around them.

They ask him for a simple answer – when are these things going to happen? How will we know? And in response he tells them not to listen to those people who say that the time is near. He tells them not to be afraid by the signs of the times. Or as the Message translation puts these verses: “When you hear of wars and uprisings, keep your head and don’t panic. This is routine history and no sign of the end … nation will fight against nation… over and over. Huge earthquakes will occur in various places. There will be famines. You’ll think at times that the very sky is falling.”

But those are just the outside symptoms. They are similar to the things I was seeing in my sister-in-law: weight loss and not eating and I thought something was wrong because I misinterpreted the signs.

Jesus goes on to talk about a particular time when it will seem as if all is lost, or as the Message bible puts it – “everything will come to a head.” And at that moment – when things appear to be their worst, when all appears hopeless – that is when the Son of Man – that is when Jesus will be seen.

I think all of this would be a whole lot easier to understand if Luke didn’t leave out and important detail. I think he left it out because Mark and Luke have almost identical passages. If you look at Luke chapter 21 and Mark chapter 13 – there are many similarities except for one… after Jesus reminds them that there will continue to be wars and natural disasters he says: This is but the beginning of the birth pangs. This is but the beginning of the birth pangs.

I was with a group of pastors a few weeks ago in Indianapolis and we were reading this exact same passage in Mark. One woman spoke up and said – I’ve had five children… I know exactly what Jesus is talking about!!! It always seems to be the worst, it always seems like you just won’t survive, right before your child is born. That’s when the pain is the worst and that’s because you are growing and stretching and waiting for this new life to emerge. That’s a really different way to understand this passage.

Paul talks about the groaning of creation, he talks about the birth pangs and waiting for redemption and if we think about God’s Kingdom being born in our midst, its going to take a little bit of change and transformation. Things will be shaken up a bit just like when birth happens in our lives.

We could look around us at the melting of the icecaps and tsunamis and tornadoes and the strange weather we have had this past year and we could be worried about the end. We could look at the violence in our own community – much less in the world – in this past year and think that we are on a downhill slide into immorality and destruction. We could look at the wars we are engaged in – especially in the middle east – as signs that all is lost… as the impending day of judgment and doom.

Or we can listen to the scriptures. In our passage today, it says Stand up and raise our heads because what is coming is not destruction – but redemption. What is being born in our midst is the new creation.

Today is the first Sunday of the Christian year.

Today is the start of a season of hope in the midst of despair, the season of light when everything appears to be dark.

If last week we prayed for Christ the King to come on earth – then today is the day that we start looking for the Kingdom.

Today is the day we look around and see the signs of the kingdom everywhere. We see it in the hunger that young people have to understand and learn more about who God is. We see it in the hunger we experience as we gather to worship and pray. We see it in that spark of hope that is in our hearts – even though we could look at the world and think radically different things.

I think in many ways this church understands that because two years ago you were faced with a tough decision. You looked around and church attendance was declining and you had to decide if you were going to go to part time or stay with a full time pastor. Some churches in that situation would have said, well – we are pretty much hopeless.

But you said that something new is being born in our midst – and we are going to wait and see what happens. That’s why we light this candle today. We light this candle remembering that hope is just around the corner that the promises of God are almost in our reach. That all of the groaning and birth pangs around us are merely getting us ready for what is to come. There is no fear to be had. There is no trembling on this day. Because God is coming near to us. God is coming and so let us stand up and raise up our heads and await the glory of our King. Amen and Amen.

emergingumc2

Posted on November 18, 2009Leave a comment

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.