self – Salvaged Faith

Salvaging Faith in 2020

Posted on January 22, 2020Leave a comment

It’s been a while.

A long time since I just sat down to write without a deadline looming.

Without it being someone else’s project.

Without the pressure to say just the right thing for a specific audience.

It’s been a long time since I wrote just for me.

I started this blog in the summer of 2007 as a place to reflect and muse and capture all of the parts of myself, my story, my tradition that were important to keep carrying with me into the future. In many ways, the idea of salvaging all of these pieces of faith were intended to be a way of curating ideas that had value and meaning and importance in my life.

It never really mattered if anyone else read these pages, although it has been really nice to have company along the way 🙂

But somewhere in the midst of the busyness of church and other people’s projects and my marriage I just stopped writing. I stopped reflecting. I stopped looking around and processing what was happening in my life in this particular way.

But I have some time now.

Monday began a four week renewal leave from my church and one of my primary goals was to spend some of my time right here at the keyboard. Not because there is anything important I have to say, but because the very act of thinking and writing and processing itself is a spiritual practice that has been missing from my journey.

The fact that it took me a day or two to actually sit down with the laptop says a little bit of something about the hesitation that I’m feeling about doing so. I think, in part, that is because so much of my life lately has revolved around the church. I’m afraid that if I sit down to write, I’ll just get sucked back in to it all. That I’ll lose my ability to truly disconnect for a few weeks and re-center myself in who I am.

So for now, here’s a list of things I’d like to write about:

How the Rooney Rule (and its mixed results) might provide guidance for the draft Book of Doctrines and Disciplines proposed by the WCA
Does wanting to preserve the parts of our connectional nature and structure that are working make me an institutionalist? And if so, can I live with / accept that label? What does it mean to salvage the best parts of who we are and take them with us into the future, instead of starting over?
Why I think the Protocol is our best option for the mission of the church to make disciples and transform the world
What I’ve learned about what it means to equip the saints… the hard way… from failing to do so and overfunctioning in a mid-sized church.

There.

Now those things are set to the side and off my mind. I might pick them back up in the next few weeks. Or maybe not.

After all, this leave is not about the UMC or my local church or my ministry there. It is about looking out at everything else in my life. My marriage, my family, my relationship with God, the things that make me laugh and feed my soul, my friendships. It is about taking some time to dig through everything else that makes me me and working to salvage the things I might have discarded or ignored or let lie fallow for a bit.

To pick up those pieces and put them back together in a way that feels whole and good and right.

And to relearn how to preserve and protect them so that when I head back to work, they don’t take a back burner.

Inward, Outward, Upward

Posted on December 27, 2015Leave a comment

Since the first Sunday in November, we’ve been talking about the “Already” and the “Not Yet.”

We’ve been waiting for the day, for the moment to arrive, when Christ is born again in our hearts and minds and lives.

But it is a kind of paradoxical waiting, because God has already entered human history through the birth of Jesus. As Paul’s letter to Titus speaks – God’s salvation has appeared!

We have been waiting for something that has already happened… A long, long time ago in a Galilee far, far away.

Thursday, so many gathered right here, in this very place, to light candles and celebrate that birth. We rejoiced with the shepherds and angels. We brought gifts like the wise ones. Christ was born all over again in our hearts and minds and lives. You could see it on the radiant faces, holding the candles. You could feel it in the warmth and kindness and love offered to one another. Peace on earth and goodwill to all.

Today, a mere three days later, have we truly received what we we’ve been waiting for?

Or did everything go back to normal?

That truly is the question.

Did this Christmas change anything? Is your life at all different because of the birth of our Savior?

*****

Maybe all Christmas has taught us is that we aren’t quite done waiting…

In his letter to Titus, with just a verse in between, Paul goes from saying that “the grace of God has appeared…” to “we wait for the blessed hope and the glorious appearance of our great God and savior Jesus Christ.” (Titus 2:11-13) Or as we talk about every time we take communion, Christ was born, Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

We believe there is still more to come.

We look out on the world and see the pain and hurt, the broken relationships and nations at war. Salvation and grace might have appeared, but this world is much the same as it has always been. There is another act to this drama of redemption that has yet to play out.

As a church, we have been reading this book, Awaiting the Already, by Pastor deVega. And he suggests that Paul’s advice to Titus is good advice for us today… advice about how we should wait during these “in-between times.”

He writes that the grace of God teaches us to live sensible, ethical, and godly lives.

Sensible.

Ethical.

Godly.

As deVega writes:

…these three words together capture the full range of the spiritual life. To live sensibly (or “with self-control,” as it can also mean) is to live in harmony with one’s self. To live ethically means to live in harmony with others. And to live in a godly manner means to live in harmony with God. In just three words, Paul reminds us that every relationship we have deserves our fullest commitment to love and reconciliation.

To live sensibly is to have harmony in your inward life.

To live ethically is to seek harmony in your outward life… with the whole of creation.

To live a godly life is to allow God’s harmony to filter through your upward relationship with the divine.

And, you can’t have one without the other two. Even Jesus, when asked to teach his followers the most important commandment included all three aspects: Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength, and love your neighbor as yourself.

Paul, for his part, is writing to encourage and instruct Titus, who had been tasked with organizing the church in Crete. As Titus was to choose leaders, these three qualities… sensible, ethical, godly… should be present in their lives.

supervisors should be without fault as God’s managers: they shouldn’t be stubborn, irritable, addicted to alcohol, a bully, or greedy. Instead, they should show hospitality, love what is good, and be reasonable, ethical, godly, and self-controlled. (Titus 1: 7-8)

Why are these qualities so important?

Because they mark a transformed life. These qualities are a witness to the power of grace to make a difference in a life. They show the world that we don’t just believe in the good news, but that it has taken hold of our lives and we are no longer the same.

You see, we may not be able to control other people’s lives… we don’t have any power over nature or sickness or disease… we can’t stop civil wars or end hunger…

But the grace of God, the birth of Jesus into our midst, has given me the ability to control MY life. And you, yours.

And that means, you and I can live sensibly, with self-control.

We were taught how to do so by Jesus himself, who faced earthly temptations of power and wealth and chose instead a better way.

But Jesus also showed us that living sensibly does not mean to live without joy. He turned water into wine at a wedding and he celebrated meals with friends and strangers alike. But never was he out of harmony with himself.

On Christmas Eve, fellow pastors and I were sharing on facebook all the little things that went wrong. This time of year can be awfully stressful as we try to make everything just so. More than one time, a colleague mentioned drowning away their troubles in a bottle of wine.

And one of us spoke up.

She said, “I’m in recovery… I’ve been clean for ten years this February, God willing…. I see more posts about alcohol in this group than anywhere else on Facebook. What does that say about us?”

It was a great moment for our group to evaluate and stop and take stock of our habits. To check in with ourselves and ask if we need a drink to get through an evening, what does that say about our health, our stress, and whether or not we are living in harmony with our inward selves.

Likewise, we should be living in harmony with others. We can follow the wisdom and teachings of Jesus who welcomed the stranger and healed the sick and fed the hungry.

This is a time of year when that type of generosity comes as second nature. But not too long after the tinsel is taken off the tree, we forget how to be generous and self-giving. Our hospitality gets worn out.

There are many different types of ethics that we might follow, but the entire point of an ethical life is that it is a habit or a custom. We shouldn’t treat our neighbors any different one time a year as another. And so the spirit of joy and peace we discover in the warmth of embraces on Christmas Eve should be the basis of how we treat every neighbor all year long.

The saints and heroes of our Christmas story are those who sought the way of love and compassion, like Joseph choosing to stay with Mary, and the innkeeper who made room for the holy family. The grounding for our ethical lives is how we treat those who are the most vulnerable in this world.

Finally, we should live godly lives. To be godly does not mean to be perfect or holier-than-thou. It means to turn our attention to God… to live a life of worship… to actually be in relationship with God.

Jesus taught us how to do with when he taught us to pray and reminded us that God is our Abba father. Jesus showed us how to do this when he took time to get away and pray.

But he also demonstrated what it means to be godly as he respected and honored the faith of others… including the Samaritan woman at the well and the Roman soldiers. He held open the door wide for all people to be in relationship with God. And at Christmas, we remember that even strangers from a far off land with no concept of the faith of Mary or Joseph were some of the first to kneel at the manger and honor God.

So what difference does Christmas make?

It might not change the world… but it can change your heart.

We are each tasked with living a sensible, ethical, and godly life.

As Howard Thurman once wrote:

When the song of the angels is stilled,

When the star in the sky is gone,

When the kings and princes are home,

When the shepherds are back with their flock,

The work of Christmas begins:

To find the lost,

To heal the broken,

To feed the hungry,

To release the prisoner,

To rebuild the nations,

To bring peace among people,

To make music in the heart.

I Am dust and ashes

Posted on February 13, 2013Leave a comment

Landon Whitsitt had a thoughtful post about how we engage with Lenten disciplines today: Giving up chocolate and beer for Lent is not what Jesus had in mind. In it, he reminds us about the basics of spiritual practices surrounding Lent: prayer, fasting, almsgiving. He reminds us that it is not about us at all.

I have realized that most of the times I have given something up for Lent or taken something on, it was for my own benefit. It was so I could do something for God – sacrifice something I cared about so God would be more pleased with me. The practices were hoops I jumped through. Sometimes they were rigorous disciplines, sometimes they were difficult, and they have helped me to focus on God… but it all revolved around me. What I could do, what I would gain, how I was living out my faith.

If Lent is truly about dependence on God, if it is about our time in the wilderness, our discovery of who we are and whose we are… then Lent is about letting go of “me.”

In the anthology, Speaking of Silence: Christans and Buddhists in Dialogue, there is an interesting discussion about what it means to be “me.” What is the self? What is its relationship to the divine? To briefly summarize the conversation, Lodrö Dorje begins:

The Buddhist path is therefore primarily concerned with the question of how to see through ego, how to tame it, and how to let it go. (pg. 157)

Father George Timko responds with an analogy:

When you put it [a sugar cube] into a cup of tea or coffee, the sugar dissolves, and yet it is still there. It is there in a completely different way, in a different dimension: it is no longer there as a cube. So, as Gregory of Nyssa would say, “We have to be dissoved and to be in Christ.” You are no logner there as an “I,” as an individualized center or self. There is no “you.” You are dead, as Saint Paul experienced…

We just simply don’t want to completely let go of that self, so we say, my true self is there. There is no such thing as a true self or a false self. There is only the self or the no-self. And as Saint John Chrysostom said, “He alone truly knows himself, who knows himself as nothing.” (pg. 158-9)

As the conversation continues Joseph Goldstein adds:

I could play the Zen role here a little bit, and ask whether it really is a question of dissolving anything, or whether it is just that in a moment we see that the self never was. I think we could speak from both perspectives. Really there is nothing to dissolve, because the self was never there in the first place. (pg. 164)

to which David Steindl-Rast responds:

But how so many Christians have been stuck in this imaginary projection! How they have clung tenaciously, thinking that the Christina way is based on promoting the ego from the level on which it is now, to some super-level in heaven!

Goldstein:

Well, it is an appealing idea, Brother David!

It is an appealing idea. We want to please God and be faithful and follow the rules and reap the rewards. We want to hear the call and respond. And it is SO difficult to not focus on that individual achievement and to instead let go.

As the Israelites wandered for forty years in the desert, they were forced to lay aside their past, to stop forging gods with their own hands, and to embrace a life of dependence upon the one who is the creator of all. They were shaped not as they desired, but as God desired.

As Jesus wandered for forty days in the wilderness, he let go of what he could be, denied the temptation to achieve all the amazing things he could have, in order to accept the call to die to self and live in God.

And as I enter this time of Lent, I am challenged to stop focusing on myself and what will benefit me spiritually and what I can do to please the Lord and instead place my life into those hands.

Lent is a time to die to oneself… or maybe to realize that your “self” never was.

I am nothing.

I am a dissolved sugar cube in a cup of coffee.

I am dead and in the tomb.

It is Christ who lives in me. It is the Spirit who has given me breath. It is God who has enabled me to love.

Ashes to Ashes… Dust to Dust.