trust – Salvaged Faith

Taste and See God’s Rescue

Posted on July 18, 2022Leave a comment

Text: Psalm 50:7-15, Proverbs 27:23-27

When we get hamburger patties out of the freezer and throw them on the grill, we do so with very little appreciation for the cow or the farmer that feeds us.

We have very little personal connection with the sources of our food when we go to the grocery store and purchase perfectly portioned packages of meat.

Our relationship with the animal life of this world was intended to be very different. We were made “in God’s own image,” so that we might “take charge of the fish of the sea, the birds in the sky, the livestock, all the earth, and all the crawling things on earth” (1:26).

As the New Interpreter’s Bible notes, the command to take charge, to “have dominion… reveals that it must be understood in terms of care-giving, even nurturing, not exploitation… human beings should relate to the nonhuman as God relates to them.”^[1]

And just as the fulfillment of our purpose was to love and obey God, so was it the fulfillment of the creatures to love and obey humanity. ^[2]

In the first chapter of Genesis, we find a paradisiacal vision with a vegan diet for all – only green plants for food; and no animal products are consumed by humans or creatures (Genesis 1:29-30).

By the time we get to the fourth chapter, however, humanity has been kicked out of the garden and the relationship between creatures, humanity, and God is forever changed.

And yet, God continues to provide and be in relationship with us.

We learn that the first children respond to God’s gift of life and provision is by presenting an offering from each of their resources… an offering of grain, and an offering from the flock.

Each represented a sacrifice – food that would no longer be available for sustaining their family. Yet the text tells us that Abel’s offering from the flock was more pleasing to God than Cain’s.

The text infers that it wasn’t the type of offering. Rather, it was the spirit of the giver.

Yet Cain is jealous of his brother and this taking of the first animal life is followed by the taking of the first human one.

By the sixth chapter of Genesis, humanity has been devoured by sin and God wipes the slate clean with the Flood.

Both humanity and animal life is preserved through the ark Noah built.

Quick trivia question… how many of each type of animal did Noah and his family bring aboard the ark? [PAUSE]

The answer is… it depends!

[slide:

“From all living things – from all creatures – you are to bring a pair, male and female, into the ark with you to keep them alive.” (6:19)

“From every clean animal, take seven pairs, a male and his mate…” (7:2)]

In some verses, it says two of each animal… but in other verses the text tells us that they brought seven pairs of the clean animals… the ones that could be eaten and sacrificed.

Which is pretty important, because as soon as Noah steps off the boat, he builds an altar and offers up some of these creatures to God.

This offering was not required.

It was an expression of gratitude and a sacrifice, for these creatures were the only ones left on the planet which could provide for Noah and his family.

God is pleased with this sacrifice and as God blesses Noah and his family, the meal plan given to humanity is adjusted.

Everything that lives and moves will be their food… with one caveat.

All of creation is still a gift, and God still desires life, even amid our tendency towards destruction.

So the blood is not to be consumed, and the spilling of blood among humanity is not permitted.

Our responsibility remains to have power over… also known as responsibility for… all of creation.

We are still to practice dominion.

We continue to follow this thread to the book of Proverbs:

“Know your flock well;

Pay attention to your herds,

…Then the lambs will provide your clothes,

And the goats will be the price of your fields.

There will be enough goat’s milk for your food,

For the food of your house,

And to nourish your young women.” (Proverbs 27:23-27)

I think of my friend, Tim and his wife, Lori.

They raise chickens on their farm out by Norwalk.

Tim calls them “the girls” and he lets them out of the coop every morning, pampers them with great feed and treats from the garden, gathers their eggs, and safely tucks them in every night.

Occasionally the chickens get territorial, and sometimes bigger ones would pick on the smaller ones, so multiple coops and a process for integrating new birds into the flock helped to manage that process.

Many of the cuisines of the world developed from what the land of the region supported holistically, rather than farmers trying to meet the demands of the market as we do today.

Like the proverbs wisely suggest, these people understood their flocks well and understood that the well-being of their herds meant the well-being of their families.

The scale of production was much smaller and many regional cuisines developed with more grains and vegetables than meat on their plates because the whole environment fed the people.

They thought about how the grass and the lambs, the wool and the milk, the manure and the fig and olive trees were all intertwined with one another.

In his book, The Third Plate, Dan Barber is concerned about how we can care for flocks in a way that ensures this kind of dominion and stewardship.

His restaurant, Blue Hill, is not only farm-to-table, but was actually built on his farm.

It wasn’t too long, however, that he began to realize there was a problem with his efforts.

They took wonderful care of their flocks and their pasture, moving the sheep to the freshest spots, letting chickens fertilize the land.

It was the work of husbandry and shepherding and the spirit of the proverbs.

Yet, when the first lambs were ready for the table, he observes that “we had sold out in the time it takes to eat a hot dog” (page 13).

The problem with how we eat today, especially in restaurants, is that we give the biggest chunk of our plate to the protein and it is not sustainable for the planet, farms, or our diets.

We have taken the good gifts of God, gifts given to humanity even in the midst of our sin and rebellion, and we use our power over them to produce as much meat as fast as we can, often without regard for humane treatment or for the nutritional depth that comes from good husbandry.

It wasn’t always this way.

As Margaret Feinberg notes in her book, Taste and See, “Throughout the Torah, God instructs how to eat, when to eat, what to eat, and how much to eat… in an era before refrigeration and vaccines, these food laws kept the Israelites from becoming Ill. They also distinguished God’s people…”

She visits with the self-proclaimed “Meat Apostle, “ Matt Hamilton and he tells her that these ancient regulations still impact how we handle food today, because it keeps us safe.

But these commands and teachings also speak of how we treat the flocks.

God has always required that we do so mercifully and with care.

Butchering must be done in ways that avoid pain.

Modern science even tells us that calm and well-cared for livestock produce better tasting meat because a scared animal will cause adrenaline to rush through the body.

In biblical times and many places around the world today, meat is not a staple, but a delicacy.

It is expensive to raise meat… both in terms of time, land, and food.

As Feinberg explains, “ancient Israelites knew the real value of the animal is found in the length of its life, not its brevity.” (p 149). As the author of Proverbs tells us, these flocks provide milk and wool and offspring that will sustain the family over the years.

So the offering of a year-old, unblemished lamb…

Or the butchering of the fattened calf when the prodigal son returns home…

These all represent sacrifices of not only food today, but of milk, wool, and income in the future.

And it was often only during these moments of holy worship and celebration that meat would have been consumed by ordinary folks.

In a burnt offering, the whole animal would be consumed by fire – everything given to God.

For a guilt or a sin offering, the animal guts would be given to God and the meat would be reserved for the priests.

But in a fellowship or peace offering, the meat is divided between the priests and the one who made the offering.

You see, these kinds of offerings or sacrifices represent our gratitude, our trust, and our obedience to the Lord.

As Matt Hamilton says, “God wants a person’s best… and to trust him that when we sacrifice, he’ll provide the next animal for the offering” (p. 153).

You see, it is not the taking of a life that is pleasing to God.

It is putting our lives in God’s hands.

It is acknowledging our dependence upon the Lord.

And that sacrificial act of letting go of your own power and property and placing your future in God’s hands… that is what is redemptive about our offerings.

God gives the ancient Israelites the command to make these kinds of sacrifices, because the act itself formed them as people.

Or as Feinberg puts it, “recognizing the high-cost world of livestock helps us understand the high-cost ask of God” (152).

God doesn’t want us to go through the motions.

God does not need our sacrifices.

After all, all of the creatures of this earth already belong to God.

As the Psalmist writes, the cattle on a thousand hills are the Lord’s.

What God has always desired is that we walk gently upon this earth and bear God’s image to the world.

God wants us to practice dominion, responsibility, care towards all creatures.

God has given us the gift of creatures on land, air, or sea to be our companions and to provide essential resources for life.

God desires for us to not take for granted what we have and to fulfill the promises we have made and to trust that God will provide and rescue us.

God wants us to be reconciled to one another, to creation, and to the Lord.

And so, God ultimately made a sacrifice.

The Lord, who is our shepherd, became the perfect, unblemished lamb.

As Feinberg writes, “through the bloody mess of Jesus’s death… God experienced what we all experience living on this broken ball of dirt.” (p. 157)

Jesus entered into our pain and sin and became truly with us, Immanuel.

He took away the barrier that sin places between us and true, abundant life.

And Jesus calls us to do the same.

To stand beside and care for the vulnerable of this world.

To practice dominion and care and mercy.

To trust that God is with us in all that we do.

And to act in ways that respect and honor the gift of life we have been given.

May it be so.

Amen.

[1] Terence E. Fretheim. NIB. Volume I. p. 346

[2] Ibid. I.5.

The Wilderness: God Provides

Posted on April 14, 2019Leave a comment

Text: Deuteronomy 29:2-6, Mark 1:12-14

A few years ago, I was asked to plan worship for our semi-annual clergy gathering. My team had everything arranged and ready to go. I just had to make sure to arrive early enough in the morning that I could meet with the technical engineer to set up the microphones and other electronics we would need that morning.
At this point in my life, I was not a morning person. And in order to get halfway across the state, I had to be out the door of my house by 5:30 am.
The alarm went off at 5:00.
I turned it off and promptly pulled the covers back over my head.
Every fiber of my being wanted to go back to sleep. So I did.
Notice, I didn’t hit the snooze button. I turned the alarm off, and fell back to sleep.
Ten minutes later, something woke me up.
Whether it was the rustle and squacks of the birds in the tree, or a cat pouncing on my legs in the bed or just some kind of internal switch – I woke up.
And I remember very distinctly taking a deep breath and saying – thank God.
I didn’t mean it in an offhand, irreligious kind of way.
I was grateful to God that I had woken up.
I was grateful to God that although my body was not ready or willing, God was making sure I was going to be able to answer the call I had received.
I was grateful to God, because God provided.

How many of you have heard of the word “providence”?
What exactly does “providence” mean?
The word originally comes from the Latin providentia – and has to do with foresight, prudence, the ability to see ahead. So when we talk about God’s providence – we think of God’s ability to provide for, to direct, to shape the future.
Martin Luther understood providence to be both the direct and indirect work of God in the world. Not only does God provide the good things we need for human life – but God also works through family, government, jobs, and other people. “We receive these blessings not from them, but, through them, from God.”
John Wesley in his sermon “On Divine Providence,” speaks of the care that God has for all of creation and claims, “Nothing is so small or insignificant in the sight of men as not to be an object of the care and providence of God, before whom nothing is small that concerns the happiness of any of his creatures.”
It is intimately related to his idea of prevenient grace, in that God has already laid the foundation for all people to come into a saving relationship with God.
And so, providence is the way that God cares for the universe – upholds the universe – and also the special ways that God extraordinarily intervenes in the lives of God’s people.

Throughout this journey through the wilderness, God’s providence has been all around.
We have remembered together that our ancestors were a stubborn and rebellious people.
They witnessed miracles!
They were released from bondage in Egypt…
they passed through the Red Sea…
they were led through the desert by cloud and light…
they were fed by manna and quail…
they drank pure clear water from rocks in the midst of the wilderness…
and yet they doubted and tried to go their own way.
Yet they did not, could not, would not believe that God would continue to provide.
God did.
The words shared with us in the book of Deuteronomy come from the end of a forty year journey through the wilderness.
For forty years… longer than I have been alive… God led them. God fed them. God provided.
As Moses reminds the people on the edge of these promised land:
You couldn’t make bread or ferment wine because you were not in a place where you could raise grain or grapes… you had to rely upon God and God provided.
The clothes and sandals that you are wearing come from the same fabric and resources you had when you fled from Egypt… and they have protected you from the elements for all of these years.

I meant to bring it today because this piece of clothing is a sermon in and of itself, but my husband still has a t-shirt from elementary school that he wears.
We think the shirt is just over twenty-five years old, but since it hasn’t fallen apart completely, he refuses to add it to the rag pile.
When he worked in the Amana factory, he cut the sleeves off making it sleeveless.
The fabric itself is so worn that it is nearly see-through.
Now, it has become a staple of our summer adventures on the boat and we joke that the shirt has a Sun Protection Factor of 15.

When I think about the wear and tear on that one item of clothing that is worn only a dozen or so times a year, I am astonished by the way God provided for the Israelites all throughout that journey in the wilderness.
There were not laundromats or department stories in the Sinai.
No places to trade or barter for the raw materials.
Just the cloth and creatures they had when they fled from Egypt.
What little they had sustained them for forty years.
God clothes the lilies of the field (Matthew 6:25-34) and God clothed the Israelites in the wilderness.
Why do we doubt God will provide for us?

For most of our season of Lent, we have explored how Jesus’ forty days in the wilderness echoes the journey of the Israelites. Faced with some of the same trials and temptations, he shows us how to trust in God and not seek our own way.
Mark’s account of this time is very different however.
The entirety of his journey is summed up in one single verse:
“He was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts; and the angels waited on him.” (1:13)
Matthew, too, pulls out that final detail in his account, tell us that when the devil left, angels came and took care of him.
God shows up again in the wilderness.
And God provides.
God cares for and tends to every need of Jesus during this liminal time.
Food, water, protection from those wild creatures, companionship.
God provides.

And as our Palm Sunday account reminds us, God is providing at the end of Jesus’ journey to Jerusalem as well.
Before they even get to the city, the colt is ready.
It is tied up just where Jesus tells the disciples it would be.
And the strange and wonderful part of this account is that when they tell the owner that it is the Master who needs it, there are no more questions!

As they enter the city, the disciples break into song, shouting “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of the Lord!”
And when the Pharisees grumble and complain, begging Jesus to tell them to be quiet lest they make a scene and disturb the Romans, Jesus tells them that this awareness of God’s blessing and providence in their midst is so powerful, so noticeable, that if the disciples closed their mouths the very rocks of the earth would start to shout!

And we cannot forget that this entrance into Jerusalem is the beginning of another act of providence in our lives.
For the rest of the journey this week takes us through the gates, to the upper room, the garden, the trial and ultimately to the cross.
In the very life and death of Jesus, God has provided a way for us to be reconciled… to our sin, to one another, to creation, and to ultimately, to God.

Over and over again in the Psalms, we are asked to tell the coming generations about the glorious deeds of God.
We want them to set their hope in God and to know that God will provide for their future.
But I think this act of proclamation is also for us.
When we remember how God has already provided, we find confidence for our future.

Our denomination, the United Methodist Church is wandering through the wilderness right now and we aren’t sure where the end of our journey will be.
But this past week, I gathered with others in Atlanta to celebrate that we have been in mission together for 200 years.
200 years ago, a free black man named John Stewart was a drunk and penniless and falling apart. But one night on the way home, he heard singing and he stumbled into a Methodist revival happening in the woods. His life was forever changed.
And then he heard God call him to head northwest and share to share the good news.
He found himself among the Wyandotte Nation and our first Missionary Society was formed on April 5, 1819 in order to support Stewart and those who would come in this work.
For 200 years, people have set out to share the love of God with complete strangers, and God provided.
They made mistakes along the way, but God provided mercy and forgiveness and we have learned from their journeys.
They encountered opposition, racism, sexism, the death of loved ones, hunger… but they kept going because God provided them strength.

As I heard their stories this past week, it was a reminder that even in times of uncertainty and change, hardship and conflict, God is in our midst.
Even in the wilderness…. Maybe especially in the wilderness… God is providing us with the things that we need to keep going.
When we remember all of the ways that God has worked in the past, we find the ability to have faith and to trust that God will continue to be there providing for our future.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

Mystery: Restored!

Posted on November 25, 2018Leave a comment

Text: Job 42:1-6, 10-17

This morning, I want to tell you a story about little Henry.
Henry walked to school every morning with his grandpa. And along their way, Grandpa would stop at the neighborhood store for a newspaper and a cup of coffee.
At the register, there were bins full of candies and gum and chocolates and every single morning, Henry would ask Grandpa if he could have some.
Every single morning, the answer was no.
Well, after several weeks of watching this, the cashier started to have a soft spot in her heart for the little boy. So one morning, as Grandpa and Henry came up to the register, the cashier said, “Good morning, Henry! How about this morning you reach in and get some of that candy you want… on me!”
Oh, he was SO excited! He reached out his hand to get some candy and then quickly pulled it back.
Instead, he grabbed Grandpa’s hand and shoved it into the bin with all of the sweets.
Grandpa was a bit stunned, and pulled back a whole fist full of candy.

As they kept walking to school, Grandpa was a bit puzzled. “Henry,” he asked, “Every single morning you ask me for candy… this is exactly what you have always wanted… why didn’t you pick out the candy yourself?”
Henry looked back at Grandpa with a grin on his face. “It is, Grandpa… but your hands are so much bigger than mine! My little hand was too small to get everything I wanted!”

There is a sense of Henry’s wisdom in our story of Job.
You and I, we are so small.
Compared with the stars and the oceans and the mountains and the vast diversity of creation, we are tiny specks of dust.
We might want to reach out and grab knowledge and answers and truth and faith… but our little hands are too small to get everything we want.
God’s hands are much bigger.
God’s wisdom is far greater.
God’s power is beyond our comprehension.

Last week, our youth took us through some of the mystery of God’s power and might.
We were reminded through song of just how powerful God is and how through the grace and the love of God, we can walk through the valley of the shadow of death and not be afraid.
When oceans rise, we can rest in God’s embrace.
In our troubled seas, God is our peace and God’s love will lead us through.
When we can’t feel a thing and are falling short, God says that we are loved and that we are held.

These messages of power are so important to the story of Job that we have been following these last few weeks.
At the beginning of November, we began to explore this little morality play in which a perfect, upright man, Job, is tested by God.
The Accuser has this question… will Job continue to be perfect and upright and faithful if things start to go badly for him? Or is he simply a fair-weather friend?
God allows this little experiment to proceed and Job’s flocks and livelihood and children are taken away from him. Even his own bodily health is impacted and he is covered in sores and finds himself in pain all day and night.
But still he refuses to turn his back on God.

The second part of our story involved Job’s friends.
They are convinced that Job must have done something wrong in order to have all of this punishment brought upon him.
They, like Job, firmly believed that good things happen to good people and that bad people get what they deserve. They see God as being the arbiter of retributive justice – where punishment and blessing is given out based upon someone’s faithfulness and goodness.
But for every one of their speeches, Job has one of his own.
He has done nothing wrong. He is innocent. If only he could have his day in court and stand before God, he could make his case and God would have to relent.
Job still believes at this point that God gives people what they deserve… and if he is being punished it is undeserved… and therefore… God is wrong.
Job is actually putting God on trial.

And as Isabel and Olivia reminded us in their message last week… God might be annoyed and a little upset at Job’s whining… maybe even perturbed at Job’s accusations… but the message God speaks out of the chaos and directly to Job’s heart is this: I created this whole world. I made everything in it. I understand how it works and am the very power that sustains it all. And… I love you. I’ve got your back.

For three chapters, God goes on and on and on about “the incomprehensible magnificence and immeasurable power of divine majesty.”
Were you there when I laid the earth’s foundations?
Have death’s gates been revealed to you?
Where’s the road to the place where light dwells?
Can you guide the stars at their proper times?
Do you know when mountain goats give birth?
Did you give strength to the horse?
Is it due to your understanding that the hawk flies?
Can you control the great beasts of the earth like the behemoth and the leviathan?

Job is stunned into silence.
He thought he had God all figured out… that God’s justice was some kind of divine math in which your goodness earned you points and blessings.
It actually reminds me of the television show, The Good Place, a comedy that explores ethics and morality and what we owe each other. The foundation of the afterlife in this universe is that for every good thing you do with selfless intent, you rack up points that allow you to enter “the good place” a place of eternal satisfaction.
But when you cuss, or stiff a waitress, or murder someone, points are deducted and without enough points, you end up in “the bad place.”

Job is living his life in a certain way, following all of the rules, making sacrifices for not only his potential sins but also those of his children, because he thinks that is what faith is about. Trying to earn God’s favor and blessing.

What he didn’t realize is that he already had it.
We all do.
The God who set the stars in motion and who knows about the birth of every mountain goat and how to direct the flight of a hawk also knows you and me intimately.
God knows every hair on our head.
God knows the divine plans in store for each of us.
And God’s justice is not a math equation.
Rather, it is a complicated, holy, grace-filled effort to take every broken, hurting, sinful thing in this world and to redeem and transform it back towards its holy purpose.
Job had only heard about God before… but now Job has seen God.
And God is far bigger, greater, more awesome than he ever imagined and his tiny way of grasping and understanding the world has been torn apart.

I think, if anything, this morality tale we find in the book of Job was an effort by early Jewish theologians to take apart what they believed was a very limited way of seeing God in the world.
So many people think that God is an impersonal judge who tallies right and wrong and who sits on the divine bench handing out punishments and rewards. And with such a calculated understanding of the divine, we can make no sense of that ancient question of why bad things happen to good people or why there is suffering in the lives of innocent people.
But our scriptures of our faith have a vastly different message for us about who God is and how deeply God cares for us.
Our God got down in the dirt and formed the first humans and breathed into them the breath of life.
Our God took imperfect people like Abraham and Noah and Jacob and through them, in spite of them, because of them, set in motion the divine plans for all the people of the world to be blessed.
Our God heard the cries of the people when they were caught in slavery in the land of Egypt and raised up a leader to bring them home.

In the end, what we find in the Book of Job are not easy answers to the question of why there is suffering. In fact, Job gets no answer or explanation for why so much was taken from him.
Instead, Job discovers that we are allowed to cry out when we suffer.
We should protest against injustice.
And we should open our lives and our hearts up to discover the ways that God is far powerful and more holy than we could ever imagine.
Before, Job had only heard about God.
But in the midst of his suffering and his yearning for truth, he encountered the very presence of God.
God reached out to him and in the process, Job found himself having a real, deepened, humble relationship with the Lord.
In our lives, we will face difficulties.
We will encounter diagnosis and questions that we cannot comprehend.
We will find ourselves asking why such awful things are happening in the world.
In these last few weeks, I have heard this very community raising up cries of concern for the death of loved ones, illness, wildfires, mass shootings, war, hunger, and homelessness.
None of these situations are deserved.
Innocent lives are impacted or harmed or taken far too soon.
We want answers and solutions.
And I think what we discover in the Book of Job is that there is no quick fix for the problems of this world. We can’t explain away why these things happen in a few words.
What we find instead is the presence of a God who is with us in the midst of it.
A God who hears every cry.
A God who seeks, in the words of Sharon Lynn Putt, “not to condemn and punish but to reconcile, to redeem, and to restore all of us to each other and to God.”

In the verses that we skipped in our reading for today, God reaches out to Job and invites him to offer up prayers and offerings for those three friends who had such a limited understanding of what was happening in Job’s life.
You see, even in the midst of restoring Job’s possessions, God is also working to redeem those relationships between Job and his friends.
And God is working to help transform and expand their understanding of how this world hangs together, too.

Our task, as we live out the truths of the Book of Job, is to listen to the suffering of others. To listen to our own pain. To not hide it, but hold it up into the light where God can show us that we are loved when we can’t feel a thing. We are strong when we think we are weak. We are held when we think we are falling short. We belong to God even when we think we don’t belong.
In that moment, we, like Job, can relent. We can surrender. We can lay our whole lives at the feet of God… knowing, trusting, believing… that no matter what happens, we are held in the hands of God.
Like Henry, our little hands aren’t big enough to fully grasp and understand the ways of this world. But God’s are.
Thanks be to God. Amen.

illustration adapted from Discipleship Ministry preaching notes

Untitled

Posted on September 4, 2016Leave a comment

In today’s parable, Jesus is in the middle of teaching his disciples one last time. He is only days away from his crucifixion in Jerusalem, days away from leaving them, days away from his death. Jesus wants to make sure they are prepared for life after he is gone.

He is asking these people to live out their discipleship – to follow him, to become like him, to take care of each other and to carry on his ministry in the world

Much like the master in this parable who is going on a long trip, Jesus is trying to put his affairs in order so that his ministry is taken care of while he is gone.

The master, like Jesus, is entrusting an extravagant gift in the hands of his servants.

One single talent was a gigantic weight of money. It equaled 6,000 denarii. One denarii was roughly equal to a day’s wages… so if you do the math, each one of these talents was about twenty YEARS worth of pay.

In today’s terms a talent might be thought of as nearly a million dollars.

Now… this is the kind of money that most people never saw. Especially not at once.

But the Lord and master in this story has eight times this much to divvy up among his servants. One hundred and sixty years’ worth of pay… and he is leaving it in their hands.

This is a lifetime’s worth of money. It is costly. And being given all at once, you wonder what the Lord and master could possibly have left. This could very well be everything that he has.

And we know that in reality, the gift of Jesus’s life, death, and resurrection was costly.

And this talent, this incredible gift, is placed into your hands.

The gift of discipleship… the gift of a lifetime of following Jesus has been given to you…

What are YOU going to do with it?

One of the fascinating features of this story is that not everyone is given the same amount of talents. The master in this story looks over the skills and abilities of those who are standing in front of them and recognizes they are not the same.

As William Herzog notes, the word used here for ability could also be translated as power. They are given these gifts because of their power, their position, because of what they have already demonstrated they could handle.

In other words, this is not a test.

No master would be foolish enough to use this much money as an experiment.

No, this ruler knows the servants, honestly assesses them, and puts in their hands exactly what they can realistically handle.

One of these servants receives a single talent. Another two. Another five whole talents.

What we discover in this parable is that it is not important what your power or abilities or talents are today. It doesn’t matter how much you are given. It is what you decide to do with your discipleship that really counts.

This past spring, many of you helped our church to honestly assess our ministry and our life together through a really long survey: the Congregational Assessment Tool.

We have learned a lot of things through this tool and the leadership of our church is starting to wrestle with how to respond to various pieces.

In worship over the next couple of months, we are going to be exploring a few areas that reflect our discipleship as a church.

Now, in these scores, we were compared to 500 other churches our size around the entire country. So these scores are not the percentage of you that said these things… but how our church as a whole compares with others

I work to connect my faith to all other aspects of my life (32%)
I experience the presence of God in my life (36%)
We do a good job supporting people in ministry by reminding them they make a difference (48%)
We prepare our members for ministry by helping them discern gifts (51%)
We understanding that we have a spiritual responsibility for life-long learning and formation (47%)
We welcome and are enriched by persons from many different walks of life (39%)

If I were to name a common thread that I see in these items, it would be that we as a church have abundant, extravagant gifts in our midst… and we don’t know what to do with them.

These results tell me that when it comes to living out our faith, when it comes to our discipleship, we act a whole lot like the third servant in our scripture today…. Both personally, and as a church.

And I think there are two factors at play here.

1) As a church, we have not taken the time and energy, like the master of the story did, to help one another figure out what our abilities and position and gifts really are. You need to know where you are starting in order to know what you have to work with.

2) Even if we DO know what our abilities, skills, and gifts are… even if we have this talent in our hands… we aren’t sure what we are supposed to do with it. We don’t have a clear sense of how to help it to grow

Here at Immanuel, we define discipleship with a phrase we use every single week: In Christ, live a life of love, service, and prayer.

It’s a great, easy to remember phrase… but…

What do we mean by love? How are we supposed to pray? Who are we serving?

How do I know if I’m doing it?

And above all… How can I do it better and more fully next week that I did last week.

That’s what today’s parable is all about, after all… taking what you have and helping it to grow.

So, starting today, and over the next eight weeks, we are going to break down that vision of discipleship at Immanuel into bite sized pieces.

We are going to explore what this looks like in worship and hospitality, service and generosity, formation and practice.

We’ll start next week with this whole pie and what each area of discipleship looks like at Immanuel, then over next six weeks, we’ll explore how we can take the talent placed in our hands and help it grow.

Figuring out where you start is the key to taking the next step.

You may have noticed a bulletin board in the foyer that includes four words:

Exploring.

Beginning.

Growing.

Maturing.

These words are going to help us to claim where we are in this journey of discipleship.

Are you someone who is brand new to this and has no idea what the possibilities are?

Are you someone who is just beginning your faith journey and you are starting to try some things out?

Are you someone who has been working on your discipleship for a while, but you still know you have room to grow?

Are you someone who understands what discipleship is all about and you have been there, done that, bought the t-shirt, and now you aren’t sure what comes next?

The truth is, it doesn’t matter where you start on this journey today.

It doesn’t matter if you are the servant in our story who was given one talent or five talents… or the servant that didn’t even get talked about who wasn’t entrusted with a talent at all.

What matters is what you do with what you have.

The truth of this parable is that any one of these servants could have been the ones who chose to let fear or ignorance or laziness creep in. It could have just as easily have been the one who had been given the most who chose to do nothing with his gift.

Here at Immanuel, we are going to try to help one another not only figure out what we have, but what we can do with it.

We are going to help each other take the next step in our discipleship.

You don’t have to start with a lot in order to be faithful. You just have to choose to do something with it. Together… we’ll figure out how.

Amen.

Posted on May 2, 2016Leave a comment

I serve on the Rules of Order Committee for our Iowa Annual Conference. These rules are basically the organizing and structural principles that guide our shared work and life together – both within our 3-4 day conference sessions and for the rest of the year.

We’ve been working hard to clarify and “clean up” the rules. We had stuck a number of standing reports within our Rules of Order at one point that really didn’t belong. And now, we are working to examine which of the rules help us to live effectively into shared ministry together, and which are hindering us from the work before us. A colleague on the committee shared with lament: “it’s like we didn’t know how to trust each other, so we just wrote all of these rules instead.”

Maybe you are familiar with the feeling. An employee leaves under bad circumstances, so you change the job description before hiring someone new… so that all of the previous person’s faults can be avoided. Or one person oversteps an unwritten boundary and the entire system reacts by making a complex set of rules.

Rules are good. They guide and shape our life together. They provide the foundation or the framework upon which our homes and churches grow and flourish. Done well, they provide just enough support and instruction to enable us to be creative and joyfully share in our work together and then they get out of the way.

And I’m also acutely aware of the ability of rules to protect and defend the innocent, the marginalized, and the powerless. Rules can keep us from running amok and forgetting to look around and see who we have neglected to create space for at the table.

But that comment from my colleague keeps sticking with me. Too often, because of distrust, or instead of doing the hard work of learning how to trust or trying to build trust, we just create new rules. We fill our churches, our institutions, our Discipline, with do’s and don’ts.

As I pour over the nearly 1500 pages of legislation brought to the General Conference, that comment keeps ringing out in the back of my mind.

Is this piece of legislation a symptom of our distrust of one another? Or is it a tool that will help us work together towards God’s future?

Over and over, I ask these questions.

Will this addition or deletion help us be more faithful to the witness of God in our world today as the people called United Methodist? Or are we simply adding or deleting a rule because we aren’t happy with what Mr. Smith said at the last Ad Council meeting?

Does this legislation lift up possibility of God calling us in a new way? Or is it filled with fear that holds us back from living out God’s dream?

I don’t believe our work at General Conference 2016 is to legislate trust. We can’t “whereas” and “therefore” our way out of our disagreements. So I pray for the God of hope to fill our proceedings. I pray for a Spirit of direction that will help us to create a framework for ministry that can reach every corner of this globe. I pray that the Living Word would be heard afresh so that God’s vision for today might be heard a new.

Trust, not Unquestioning Belief

Posted on March 1, 2015Leave a comment

In 2012, I took my youth group on a mission trip to Minneapolis. We worked in a number of different sites and one of them was the Emergency Foodshelf Network. This organization helps distribute food items to 70 area food shelves by channeling donations for organizations and large corporations.

Most of these are bulk items. Like 50# bags of rice that needed to be bundled into smaller portions. Or bushels upon bushels of fresh produce that we sorted so each box had a little bit of everything.

One day, our job was to affix generic labels onto 18,000 cans of corn that were donated without labels. Yes. 18,000.

As we walked in that morning, there they sat, all shiny and shrink-wrapped on pallets, just waiting for our little paper labels that read “Corn.” Our job was to cut the labels to size, add two pieces of tape, and bundle them onto trays of 30 for distribution.

But there was this nagging question in the back of our minds all day long as we cut and taped and stacked and moved these aluminum cans.

How did we know it was really corn?

The only way to tell was to open the can. But that of course ruined the product.

You could shake the cans… and we did… and it sounded like corn… but it could have sounded like peas or beets for all we knew.

We had to trust that it was really corn in those cans. We had to go about our work, tape those labels on and trust.

And to be honest, because we knew that people would be receiving these cans, we felt responsible for their contents. Others would trust then when they got a can that said corn, a can that we had labeled, they would actually be opening a can of corn.

Trust.

Our two scripture readings for today seem to give us a portrait in contrasts… between Abraham, the one who trusted and Peter, the one who didn’t.

Abraham, was well past retirement age, yet chose to follow and trust the God would use him to birth a nation. He is lifted up as the example. The one who did it right. The one who was trustworthy and true.

And Peter. Oh Peter. In this season of Lent we see how so many times he gets it wrong. He questions Jesus. He denies him. He is even called Satan in our reading for today. Perhaps what we might imagine is the opposite of one who trusts.

Last week, we talked about three different types of atonement theories. Three different ways God is working in the world to bring us back into relationship, to restore us to shalom.

We had the forensic theory – the idea of a trial or a courtroom.

We had the moral example theory – where Jesus shows us how to live.

And we had the Christus Victor theory – where Christ is victorious and rescues us from sin and death.

Today, our scriptures lead us to those forensic theories. They take us to the courtroom.

It is the courtroom Paul has in mind as he writes to the Romans in this section of this letter.

It is courtroom language that Paul is using as he describes Abraham’s relationship with God.

Imagine that Abraham is sitting in the witness stand of a great courtroom. And the question put to him is this:

Why do you deserve the promises of God?

It’s a different version of the question we often think of at the end of our days: why should you get into heaven?

Why do you deserve shalom?

And throughout chapter 4, Paul lays out an argument. Like a lawyer, Paul claims it was not Abraham’s works that made him worthy of the promises. It wasn’t that he followed the laws of God, the Torah. It wasn’t that he did all the right religious things like be circumcised.

No, what puts Abraham in the right… what proves that he deserves the promises of God is that he “trusts him who justifies the ungodly (4.4).” He trusted the one “who gives life to the dead and calls into existence the things that do not exist (4:17).“ He believed, even though the odds were stacked against them.

And he was right. He trusted that God would give him and Sarah a child and his claim was upheld. So using the courtroom language of the time, he was in the right. He was righteous. He deserves the promise because he trusted in the promise.

That seems too simple, doesn’t it?

Abraham’s faith was nothing more than a trust in the specific promises God made.

So what about Peter? What if we put him in the same courtroom? Where does he stack up?

If we focused strictly on this passage from Mark, he doesn’t get it. He doesn’t trust. He doesn’t understand.

Or maybe a better way of putting it is that he was operating on unquestioning belief. Faith without any understanding. Peter was making assumptions about God. Assumptions like: the journey was going to be easy. An assumption that Jesus was going to march into Jerusalem and magically everything would be better.

And when faced with new evidence, new teaching, Peter chose to shut his mind. He clung to that unquestioning belief. He, in fact, challenged Jesus! The word used here actually is the same word used for silencing demons – Peter thought Jesus was out of his mind!

Jesus has to correct Peter. He has to tell him once again what God really promises.

That snapshot of Peter’s faith, however, doesn’t give us the full story.

In fact, if Peter and Abraham were really on trial, if their whole lives were spread before a court that was trying to determine if they deserved the promises of shalom, their stories wouldn’t be all that different.

If we go back to Genesis and really read Abraham’s story, his is one of fits and starts, too.

He and Sarah laugh out loud at God’s plan for their lives.

They try to do it their own way. They always have a plan B in the works. (maybe talk about how Abraham tells the king Sarah is his sister not his wife… if his wife, Abraham will be killed… as his sister, the king will bargain with him…)

Yes, they go. They stick with it. They make it to the end of the long and complicated journey of faith. But it isn’t an easy road. When we pick their lives a part with a fine toothed comb, we find there are all sorts of things that are far from trustworthy and true. There are plenty of moments when they set their eyes on human and not divine things.

Peter, likewise, makes lots of mistakes. He radically misunderstands what it means for Jesus to be the messiah. Just like Abraham and Sarah, he has his moments of weakness where he looks out for his own interests above God’s plans. He lies to protect himself.

But at the end of the day, Peter came to believe and trust in the specific promises God made. Peter came to believe in the giver of life. He came to trust that if God could raise Jesus from the dead, then God could raise him too. And Peter shared that faith with others. He led others to trust in those promises, too.

What makes us worthy of shalom? What makes us children of Abraham?

We come to deserve the promise when we trust in the promise.

And that promise is that life can and will come from death. It is a promise that sin has nothing to do with our salvation, because Jesus has already wiped it away.

In the courtroom at the end of our lives, our mistakes are no longer on the table. They no longer count as evidence against us.

What matters is if we trust with our whole being that the God who created this world out of nothing and brings life from what was dead can justify the sinner, too.

If we trust in that promise, its ours!

And it isn’t unquestioning belief. It isn’t faith without evidence or justification. We trust in that promise because we have carry the story with us of how God works. And maybe we have even witnessed it with our own eyes.

So here’s a question…. What if I was pulled in front of a courtroom one day to testify about why I labeled those cans “corn”?

Our supervisor promised that those cans held corn and I believed her. I trusted her. Why?

To be honest… if we had showed up one day at a random building with an unknown organization and we were asked to label cans of corn, I’m not sure I would have trusted. If we had done so, simply on unquestioning belief, without any relationship or evidence or understanding of who they were or what they were about, that trust would have been pretty unjustified.

But that isn’t what happened.

We learned about the organization and its history. We spent some time working with them. We saw their attention to detail and how much they cared for their clients. So on that final day, when we labeled those cans of corn… we believed in what they told us. We trusted them.

Here in this church, we aren’t asking you for unquestioning belief, either.

We hope to build a relationship with you.

We want to learn together and wrestle with the promises of God that have been handed down for generations.

And just like Abraham and Peter and Paul passed down what they knew to be true… what they witnessed God doing in their lives… we are going to share our stories too.

Stories of how God has transformed us.

Stories of how God has brought life out of death.

Stories of how we have experienced grace and forgiveness and love.

And no matter how many fits and starts and mistakes any of us make along the way, my prayer is that someday, each of us will trust in the promises of shalom. That we will trust in God and in this community of Christ in such a way that whenever difficulty and struggle come our way, we can hold fast and support each other, knowing, trusting, believing that in Christ, all will be well.

I Believe…

Posted on October 12, 20141 Comment

Nearly five years ago, I lead this “Enough” study with my very first congregation in Marengo. I remember vividly how I had planned out the whole series and had all of my notes ready to go for Sunday morning. I had sat down to start writing about the American dream and how our quest to have it all has taken so much away from our lives…. when an earthquake hit the island of Haiti.

And suddenly, it didn’t seem so hard to put things in perspective.

Every simple convenience and item in my home seemed like an overwhelming blessing when I began to think of the lives of missionaries and doctors and orphans and moms and dads who had just lost everything.

I had a friend whose parents were working at a hospital in Haiti at the time. Her parents were okay and her mom wrote to her in an email:

Hospital Ste. Croix is standing. John and I are fine. The administration building collapsed, and our apartment collapsed under the story above. We have nothing we brought with us to Haiti… Someone who was here gave me some shoes, and I found another pair of reading glasses that will work, so I have what I need.

Those lines just struck me.

“we have nothing we brought with us to Haiti… but someone gave me some shoes and I found a pair of reading glasses, so I have what I need.”

We may not experience earthquakes, but that doesn’t mean our lives are completely stable and worry free.

when the ground beneath your feet begins to shake…

When you lose your footing…

When everything seems to fall apart…

When that happens we start to ask questions about what is it that we really need and what are we going to rely upon.

Now, that may have been a more humorous look at this idea of instability but I think that each of us could probably find ourselves somewhere in that sketch.

We put all of our hope and faith and trust into the things of this world… our homes, our jobs, the stock market, and we don’t often pause to think about whether or not we are making the best decisions.

We over extend ourselves and work more hours to make more money so we can have more stuff.

Some statistics from Adam Hamilton’s “Enough” stuck out to me.

Did you know that the average American home went from 1660 square feet in 1973 to 2400 square feet in 2004?

Did you know that there is estimated to be around 2 billion – yes, billion with a b- 2 billion square feet of self-storage space in America? We have so much stuff that we don’t even know what to do with it or where we will put it.

And to get all of that space and all of the stuff to fill it, we have exploited our credit systems… and our credit systems have exploited us.

In the past twenty years, the average credit card debt in our country rose from $3,000 a person to $9,000 a person.

It’s like we have a gaping hole in our lives that we aren’t quite sure how to fill. So we try to fill it with money and possessions.

We try to build our lives upon these things and forget that the economic systems of this world are just shifting sands.

And so when the sands shift, when the rug gets pulled out from under us, we don’t have a firm footing. We have put all of our faith and trust into our things… instead of our God.

Adam Hamilton reminds us that the core of our most recent financial crisis is the extension and abuse of credit.

The very word credit comes from the Latin word credo, which means “I believe” or “I trust.”

By extending credit to us, our home mortgage companies and stores and the credit card companies believe and trust that we will pay them back for the money extended to us.

But too often, we have treated this credit as something that we believe and trust in… we believe it will always be there, that there is always more to borrow, that it is the answer to all of our problems.

We believe in our credit, more than we do our God. And as we do so, we find ourselves building on an insecure foundation that is moments away from collapse.

Jesus had some advice about things. In the Sermon on the Mount, he said that his words are not just helpful pieces of advice to get add inspiration to our day – they are what we are supposed to be building our lives upon.

Hear this scripture again, this time from the Message:

If you work these words into your life, you are like a smart carpenter who built his house on solid rock. Rain poured down, the river flooded, a tornado hit—but nothing moved that house. It was fixed to the rock.

But if you just use my words in Bible studies and don’t work them into your life, you are like a stupid carpenter who built his house on the sandy beach. When a storm rolled in and the waves came up, it collapsed like a house of cards. – Matthew 7: 25-29

Now, of course, Jesus isn’t talking about our actual homes. Floods and fires and earthquakes destroy homes all the time, no matter how strong we have built them.

He is talking about our ability to withstand the troubles of this world.

When disaster strikes…

When the stock market falls…

When a diagnosis shakes the foundations of your family…

When those things happen, and sometime they will to all of us… Is your life built on a belief in credit cards and mortgages and flat screen televisions?

Or is the core belief of your life… the one that everything else is built on… is that belief in the God who created you, who died for you, who gives you life?

When the earthquake comes and shakes our very foundations, will we have as much abundance in our life as the woman serving in Haiti whose only possessions are a borrowed pair of shoes and some reading glasses?

In our first reading this morning, this letter of advice to Timothy, Paul writes that wealth is here today and gone tomorrow, so we should:

go after God, who piles on the all the riches we could ever manage – to do good, to be rich in helping others, to be extravagantly generous. (1 Tim 6:17-19 MSG)

And he reminds Timothy, this from the Message translation:

A devout life does bring wealth, but it is the rich simplicity of being yourself before God. Since we entered the world penniless and will leave it penniless, if we have bread on the table and shoes on our feet, that’s enough.

If we have bread on the table and shoes on our feet… that’s enough.

Over the next month, we will be looking at that word, Enough.

We’ll ask what “enough” means in our life, what it means in our church, and how we can live our lives making sure that others have “enough” as well.

But today, I want us to remember that while we worry about having enough, the truth is that we are blessed beyond our wildest dreams.

It is just that we sometimes need a shift in perspective to see that. We need to weed out the seeds of life and fruitfulness from the gunk.

We might fret about keeping up with our neighbors, but we were created to love one another.

We get anxious about our stock portfolios, but we were meant to share with those in need.

We are constantly thinking about upgrading to the newest device or fashion accessory, but we were meant to enjoy the simple pleasures of life.

My prayer is that this season of “Enough”, this time that we spend together exploring our spiritual and financial lives, will help re-orient us. My prayer is that it will transform our relationship with money so that we might see it not as a source of anxiety and stress in our lives, but as a resource that God has given us to do good in this world and to care for one another.

And the start of that transformation is to start with what we believe and who we entrust our lives to.

I want to invite you to turn with me to page 883 in your hymnals and recite with me one of the many creeds, or statements of belief that we affirm together as the people of God. Page 883.

All Will Be Well

Posted on September 25, 2012Leave a comment

: by ClearlyCassidy

Julian of Norwich, in a time of doubt and struggle, wrote: All shall be well, and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.

This is my last column in the Circuit Rider because on October 1, I will be beginning a new journey as the Coordinator for Imagine No Malaria with the Iowa Annual Conference. It is a long job title but a very short and intense ministry that I am very excited about beginning.

My new position will take me across the state, working with clergy and laity, young and old, small churches and the biggest churches, as we together raise funds to end death and suffering from malaria by 2015. While it might seem like only an outreach project, the truth is, I understand this campaign to be something bigger in the life of our Iowa Annual Conference of the UnitedMethodistChurch. Working together on this effort will help us build bridges between conservative and liberal sides of our church. Focusing outward on mission and partnering with our community to raise funds through health fairs and 5k runs and lemonAID stands will help us build relationships outside the walls and revitalize our churches. That is something that YOU have experienced here in Marengo. As we turned our hearts to both local and global mission, the Holy Spirit moved in and a spark of love and light ignited in this church.

When I came here to Marengo, neither you nor I knew what to expect. There is a song that I played frequently in those days to myself called “All Will Be Well” by the Gabe Dixon Band.

The new day dawns, / and I’m practicing my purpose once again. / it is fresh and it is fruitful if I win but if I lose, / Ooooo I don’t know. / I will be tired but I will turn and I will go, / Only guessing til I get there then I’ll know, / Oh oh oh I will know.

I was fresh out of seminary and you were ready to become a fruitful church… but we didn’t know it was going to work between us. It was a wild guess on our parts… but something amazing for God’s part.

All the children walking home past the factories / could see the light that’s shining in my window as I write this song to you. / All the cars running fast along the interstate / can feel the love that radiates / illuminating what I know is true / All will be well. / Even after all the promises you’ve broken to yourself, / All will be well. / You can ask me how but only time will tell.

I don’t know what God has in store for this church… but I know that God will be with you and all shall be well. I know that God has led you to embrace an amazing mission: to reflect the light of God in Marengo and Iowa County as you step out into the world and pass it on. I know that the Holy Spirit has been moving strongly in your midst and that God will not leave you or forsake you. I know that all will be well. You can ask me how, but only time will tell.

Keep it up and don’t give up / and chase your dreams and you will find / all in time.

You are my first church… and I love you dearly and I will miss you terribly… but all shall be well. Keep your hearts focused on what God has called you to do. Give your lives to living out that vision. God bless you all.