bear witness to the love of God in this world

jesus and prayer

2012-03-07T09:22:00.002-08:00

Jesus
solitary seeker
pray for me.

Jesus
friend of the broken
restore me.

Jesus
physician of the sick
heal me.

Jesus
brother of the poor
bless me.

Jesus
bread of life
sustain me.

Jesus
judge of the righteous
convict me.

Jesus
vessel of the spirit
renew me.

Jesus
teacher of disciples
instruct me.

Jesus
sacrifice of God
forgive me.

Jesus
risen from the tomb
save me.

Jesus
God with us
walk with me.

a missional manifesto for the people called united methodist

2012-02-17T19:25:00.002-08:00

We the people called United Methodist, confessing that we are a people in need of God's transforming grace, lift up the following vision as a means for guiding our practice and mission.

For more than 250 years, God has been sending people from the Wesleyan tradition into the world for the express purpose of “spreading scriptural holiness across the lands.” This vision of holiness is not domesticated in any nationalistic mission, but is rather found in announcing the good news of God’s reign in the whole of creation. It is in response to this good news that we are also called to form one another in the ways of Jesus Christ (making disciples) so that God's kingdom may be revealed "on earth as it is in heaven" (and the world therefore transformed).

As heirs to this tradition, we have been blessed with the radical love and grace of God--Father, Son and Holy Spirit--which empowers us to likewise be a blessing to the world. This is both a joyful opportunity and a sober responsibility. It is our call, as Wesleyan Christians, both to proclaim and embody the kingdom of God marked by love, reconciliation, peace, forgiveness, and hospitality for all people and in all times and places.

It is through practice of the means of grace that we are gradually formed into the vessels that embody this distinct kingdom of God. And it is through mutual accountability, rooted in love and grace, that we hold one another accountable to living lives that strive to exemplify holiness of heart and life.

Therefore it is with humility and sound resolve that we declare the following to be sign and symbol of our calling as Wesleyan Christians:

We believe...

God sends

God sent Israel forth in the world as a covenant people revealing to the world God’s character.
God sent Himself in Jesus Christ as the embodiment of love and grace so that by His baptism, death, and resurrection God’s unfailing love and grace were lived out for all humanity and the powers of sin and death were broken.
Jesus sent his followers into the world to proclaim the reign of God and teach the way of Jesus.
God now sends us, empowered by the Holy Spirit.

God sends United Methodists

United Methodists affirm the teachings of John Wesley, a man born into a Puritan household, raised in the Anglican tradition, inspired by Moravian piety, and devoted to the Arminian understanding of free grace.
United Methodists assert that God’s love, not our sin, is the most important truth we know and the starting point for the story of salvation. Everything that follows is out of response to this truth.
United Methodists uphold the primacy of God’s grace: prevenient, justifying, and sanctifying as the center of human life, empowering all to be disciples of Jesus Christ.
United Methodists hold together the love of God (personal piety) and love of neighbor (social holiness) as the holistic understanding our salvation, embodied and lived out.
United Methodists believe we are saved by grace alone through faith, and we are saved so we might do good works. All works of piety follow as a response to the radical grace of God.

God sends United Methodists to proclaim the reign of God

The reign of God burst into the world with the death and Easter resurrection of Jesus.
The reign of God pours forth on the apostles at Pentecost thrusting them out from behind closed doors into all the world.
The reign of God is both here and yet to come, inaugurated into our world by the coming of Christ and finding the ultimate fulfillment in the return of Christ.
As witness to the reign of God, we are called to embody it in our Methodist communities as a sign to the whole world.

God sends United Methodists to proclaim the reign of God and to make disciples

Disciples bear the gifts of the Holy Spirit that are given for the building up of the body of Christ and in service to the church and the world.
Disciples of Jesus Christ witness to the love and grace of Jesus and follow his teachings through acts of compassion, justice, worship, and devotion under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
Disciples participate regularly in the Means of Grace, which are tangible signs of the reign of God breaking forth into our daily lives.
Disciples in the United Methodist Church hold Wesley’s General Rules as a common rule of life.

God sends United Methodists to proclaim the reign of God and to make disciples for the transformation of the world

The transformed world is one in which Christ’s prayer “God’s kingdom come. God’s will be done” is fulfilled “on earth as it is in heaven.”
The transformed world glorifies God in all things and is marked by the unity of love and justice, peace and wholeness, personal and social holiness.
The transformed world bears witness to the interconnectedness of all people and values sacrificial love (agape) as the means by which this is lived out. This sacrificial love stands in contrast to any pursuit of power sought through coercion.
The transformed world is one where even institutional growth and power are subservient to the vision of love, peace, justice and reconciliation.

Therefore…

As United Methodists sent by God to proclaim God’s reign and to make disciples of Jesus Christ through the presence and power of God’s Holy Spirit, we call on our brothers and sisters across the world to repentance for our failure to faithfully carry out our God given mission, and to affirm God’s call to proclaim and make disciples by engaging in practices that live out this calling in the world.

Likewise we pledge our commitment to living out the ideals of this manifesto in our daily lives, agreeing to structure our mission, our ministry, and our lives around the demands of discipleship. As disciples in the United Methodist tradition, we commit to engage in acts of compassion, justice, worship, and devotion, and to live under John Wesley’s General Rules as our way of life. We go forth as a people sent by God to carry out God’s vision for the people called United Methodist.

Offered with love to our church by:

Kenneth Carter, Ben Gosden, Mike Lindstrom, John Meunier, Michael Rich, Amy Shipley-Yarnall, Jen Unger Kroc, Jay Voorhees and many others who have offered input along the way.

the spirituality of Jesus (mark 1)

2012-02-11T14:42:00.000-08:00

We discover the spirituality of Jesus by paying attention to his life, by listening to his words. As followers of Jesus, we look for clues about our next steps by focusing on the patterns of his daily life. And as disciples who not only listen to his teachings but have some responsibility for explaining the meaning of his life, death and resurrection in our own spheres of influence, we open our ears to hear (or, better yet, to obey) his instruction.

One can read a few verses at the beginning of the shortest gospel, Mark, and discover the shape of a spiritual life inspired by Jesus. I have chosen a central section within the first chapter, verses twenty-one through thirty-five, and as I have reflected on what is going on in the life of Jesus, I am given a way of life.

Urgency about Human Need

So, three facets of a spirituality of Jesus: there is first an urgency about human need. Jesus encounters, within the synagogue, a person with an evil spirit; as he leaves the synagogue, he visits Simon's mother-in-law, who is sick; and at the end of the day (at sunset), people continue to bring the sick and the demon-possessed to him.

We cannot turn our eyes upon Jesus, to borrow the language of the hymn, without seeing urgent human needs. Jesus was always seeking out the last, the least and the lost (a physician goes to those who are sick, he once remarked), or, they were seeking and finding him. He crossed boundaries of impurity and legality to bring healing and salvation to us. In the communion liturgy, we are reminded that he "healed the sick, fed the hungry and ate with sinners".

This was the mission of Jesus, and it is the mission of his followers. I love a phrase I recently found in Reggie McNeal's recent work on Missional Communities: "Life is a mission trip." Some of the most profound experiences in my Christian life have occurred on mission trips: in Bolivia, Haiti, Guatemala. But what if life is a mission trip? What if our purpose, if we are staying close to Jesus, is to stay close to the urgent human needs of those around us, wherever we are?

Intimacy with God

A second facet of the spirituality of Jesus is intimacy with God. "Early in the morning, well before sunrise, Jesus rose and went to a deserted place where he could be alone in prayer." (Mark 1. 35, Common English Bible). If urgent human need is the outcome of this spirituality, intimacy with God is the source. In the early morning there are fewer distractions. In a deserted place there are fewer distractions. When we are alone we are more attuned to "the still small voice". God often speaks to men and women in the desert, or, from the perspective of Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, in the "abandoned places of empire". These are the places of emptiness, disappointment, and sorrow, and therefore the occasions where we can be filled, renewed and consoled.

The set apart places ground us, muting the voices of the urgent and powerful, questioning the paths that are pleasing to us and perhaps to others; they are the unlikely sanctuaries where we know we are on holy ground, and they provide us a way to clarify our mission and purpose. It is significant and necessary that Jesus, in the midst of so much action, when so much is flowing out of him, finds time and space to be intimate with God. As his followers this is an essential spiritual practice for us as well.

Integrity of Word and Action

A third element in the spirituality of Jesus: he teaches with authority, and not like the scribes and pharisees (1.22). I would suggest that he teaches with integrity: his speech and behavior, language and life, word and action, doctrine and discipline are consistent. Later the disciples of John will ask, "are you the One who is to come, or should we look for someone else?" This is the ancient and also post-modern question: are you who you present yourself to be? Is this true, or real?

In the modern world, we could persuade our hearers to accept the faith through the brilliance of an intellectual argument (I remember a book entitled Evidence That Demands a Verdict, which many of my friends read in college). But the evidence in a postmodern world is the life of a follower of Jesus; it is the consistency of what we say and what we do that is compelling.

Urgency about human need is the practice of social holiness; it flows from a source, an intimacy with God that is the practice of personal holiness. Our understandings of holiness are embodied in a person, Jesus Christ, God with us. We are most receptive to the gift of grace when we seek the face of God and listen for the still, small voice. And because we have received the grace and love of God, we find ourselves being drawn to the hungry, broken and marginalized.

What was so compelling about the spirituality of Jesus? It was a response to human suffering, it flowed from a deep source, and it was neither shallow, superficial nor hypocritical. Because of the resonance of the internal and external life, it communicated a truth that spoke and speaks to our deepest human desirings. As John testifies, "the law was given through Moses... grace and truth came into being through Jesus Christ" (John 1. 17; Common English Bible)

longing for spring: hope for the united methodist church

2012-02-05T14:40:00.000-08:00

I write in the heart of the winter; ours has actually been quite mild, thus far, but I do enjoy the lengthening of days and the sense that more warmth and light is on the horizon. Elaine Heath and Scott Kisker teach evangelism at two of our seminaries, Perkins and Wesley, and they have framed their call for a renewal of the church around the metaphor of change and rebirth. Longing For Spring: A New Vision for Wesleyan Community (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books) is a deceptively simple, soundly argued and theologically provocative engagement with our present condition, and yet one that is placed within the context of both deeply personal narratives and carefully remembered histories of renewal.

The impetus for the writing of Longing For Spring was simple enough: something is wrong. We know this at a personal, congregational and denominational level. Elaine Heath sensed it in the inability of the denominational structures to embrace the movement of the spirit in her spiritual mentor or in the younger students she would over time find herself mentoring. Scott Kisker grew up in a mainline congregation that, for all outward appearances, was strong and health, apart from one crucial shortcoming: an inability to help younger generations to know, claim or live the faith. Longing For Spring begins with their testimonies, and in this sense the work is deeply Wesleyan---theirs is indeed a new Aldersgate.

What struck me in my first reading of this brief work----and I am grateful for its brevity, for this will render it more accessible to those those who sense with them that something is wrong----is a basic gratitude that the story did not end there. Kisker and Heath could have lived out of their narratives into a cynicism about church and culture, even as they inhabited professional positions within the denomination (this happens). But there was a turn, which for them happened as they walked around Lake Junaluska, a turn toward the radical character of the tradition, which would become in itself a movement of the Holy Spirit.

Their stories led them to think about where the church has been, over time, when something has been wrong. God has led individuals, women and men to form communities, in the desert, at the abandoned places of empire, on the periphery of established churches. Kisker traces a path from Anthony to Benedict to the Beguines to a Kempis to the pietists and Wesley. The early Wesleyan experience was a communal and intentional path toward holiness, the love of God and neighbor. Over time this practice was lost in the development of structures and conformity to the world. A lay movement became clericalized; spiritual formation and social justice were separated.

And so two academics began to explore how the tradition might be rediscovered. They found a clue in the new monastic movement, and here Heath connects the dots: methodist, missional and monastic. Learning from Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove and the "Twelve Marks" from the Schools for Conversion, she pushes this movement of the spirit into the language of Methodism: three general rules and five membership vows. If Kisker is skilled at tracing the history of renewal movement, Heath's genius lies in connecting the New Monastic movement with the desire for reformation in the Wesleyan tradition.

These two movements in itself would be helpful, but Longing For Spring takes one additional step that is critical: Heath imagines how a renewal movement could exist within our present polity (clergy appointments, boards of ordained ministry, the ordering of ministry) and institutional life (camps, unused churches, theological seminaries). She names the facets of our ecclesial life that are broken, while also pushing in creative ways toward organizational reform. There is both an honesty and a hope in the institutional strategy; it seems slow and plodding at times, like the passing of time from winter to spring, and yet it moves toward renewal. This rebirth is a "new day" for the church, and the authors guide our focus toward places and texts that will encourage and sustain us in the journey.

I love this book for many reasons: it is practical theology in service of the church; it hears the cries of a younger generation that will not sign on for a career of institutional maintenance; it resonates with a postmodern context that seeks an integrity of a living spirituality and a social witness (or, in Bishop Schnase's language, intentional faith development, passionate worship and risk-taking mission and service); it moves beyond cynicism toward hope; and it translates the best of our tradition for the present moment.

What if the words methodist, monastic and missional are at the heart of our calling to be Christians in this time? And what if we designed a way of life and found institutional support for the flourishing of this calling? Heath and Kisker are asking these questions, and they have placed them in the context of our historical memory and our institutional status quo. For those who sense that something is wrong, but find themselves at the same time longing for spring, this is the text for a new day.

living in the mountains of western north carolina

2012-01-30T18:48:00.000-08:00

Over the last fourteen years I lived in two metropolitan cities, serving two large (2000+ member) churches as senior pastor. Then I was asked by my Bishop to serve as a District Superintendent and assigned to a geographical area that includes the seven westernmost counties of our state. There are sixty-nine congregations in our district, and these range in size from very small family chapels to large regional churches.

My district also includes the Wesley Foundation at Western Carolina University, The Hinton Rural Life Center in Hayesville, the Lake Junaluska Assembly, the River of Life Ministry on the Nantahala, a house church (the Filling Station) in Hayesville, a campus of the Children's Home in Franklin, two (UMAR) homes for the developmentally disabled in Hayesville, a Wilderness Trail Ministry headquartered in Waynesville, a Circles of Poverty ministry in Canton, and an emerging missional church network in partnership with the Asheville District.

Our area includes the Cherokee Reservation, many miles of the Appalachian Trail and the Blue Ridge Parkway, a substantial portion of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, and the Nantahala Outdoor Center. It is dotted by small towns that are stable, welcoming and inhabited by year-round residents and seasonal pilgrims.

Our family had purchased a small cabin here about ten years ago, and we would visit on long weekends and in the summer. So we knew a little bit about the area, but it is different when you live here. I loved Charlotte and Winston-Salem, but the following are some observations about our new home: the western mountains of North Carolina.

1. Many creative and interesting people rearrange their lives to live in the mountains. Last Sunday I worshiped in a small church, and during the passing of the peace met a man and his father. The older gentleman was a graduate of Harvard and his son and his wife had an adopted daughter from China. I have met retired professors, politicians, ministers and athletes; I have also come across interesting couples in middle adulthood seeking to make a life here, and I have met young adults who are creative, environmentally conscious and seeking a spiritual life of one sort or another.

2. Mountain people as a rule are not anti-government. Appalachia (in which all of my district is located) was ravaged by northeast industrialists, who raided the resources (such as timber and coal) and departed. The government intervened afterward in a variety of ways, and largely through the New Deal, to seek to lift the economic status of the mountain people who were left behind. So the anti-government rhetoric of recent times largely falls on deaf ears among the mountain people (this is not true of transplants, many of who are actually antagonistic toward government programs). The people of these seven counties were kept alive by projects like the parkway, the interstate, the national park, the university, the public schools and the hospitals, all initiated by visionary political leaders.

3. A few personal preferences: there is an excellent public radio station, WNCW, that for the most part airs indigeneous music----blues, bluegrass, folk, rock, jazz. For example, WNCW airs Grateful Dead music for several hours every Wednesday. There are several fine coffee shops, including Mountain Perks in Bryson City, Panacea in Waynesville, and Coffee and Clay in Robbinsville. There are a few remarkable restaurants, among them Cafe REL in Franklin and Frog Leap Public House in Waynesville, and LuLu's in Sylva; the Smoky Mountains News is a really fine (and free) weekly newspaper; and City Lights in Sylva is a great independent bookstore. And the shopping in downtown Waynesville, especially Mast General Store and the Waynesville Fly Shop (fly fishing) is nice.

4. The pace is slower. Mountain people take the time to ask questions, to notice that you are a newcomer, to strike up a conversation. They also appreciate it when you take an interest in them.

5. I live within a half an hour from Asheville. In Charlotte I often drove thirty minutes to a destination...from south Charlotte to uptown, for example or to the Central Avenue area or NoDa where some of the more interesting restaurants could be found. It is an easy drive to West Asheville, which includes a number of hangouts. As an aside, I appreciated the convenience of the Charlotte Airport, but I also love the Asheville Airport---it is small, friendly, and has a twenty minute flight to either Charlotte or Atlanta.

6. I live at Lake Junaluska, and my favorite spot is the lake itself. There is a 2.5 mile loop around the lake, and I generally walk around it every day that I am home. Since I have a short commute (I live within five minutes of my office), I find that the walk replaces the drive time. What else do I love about Junaluska? My short list includes the SoulFeast (in the summer), the Peace Conference (in the fall) and the Caring for Creation Conference (in the spring). I am also constantly amazed by the people who flow through this place: missionaries, bishops, seminary presidents, musicians, authors, preachers. It is also significant for me that my wife and I were ordained in Stuart Auditorium, and our older daughter was baptized in Memorial Chapel

7. The poverty is real. Rural poverty is often more hidden than urban poverty, because it exists at a greater distance from media centers. But the poverty in our area is real and palpable. At the same time, I am amazed by the ways our churches are responding to basic needs: hunger, education, health. The people are heroic in their perseverance and the response of congregations is inspiring, and yet nothing they see as extraordinary. It is a way of life.

8. The multicultural challenge in the mountains is less about race and more about geographical origins; in particular, the relations between the natives and the transplants. Some churches (and pastors) navigate these relationships very well, and others do not. In time many of the transplants do become natives; and yet it is also true that some multigenerational families can be closed to outsiders, while some newcomers are ignorant of cultural patterns and practices. In the best of times and in the healthiest of places, it comes together, to the benefit of all.

9. Cool mornings and evenings, watching a fire, and warm days, when the sun comes out.

10. An opportunity to learn new habits or to renew old ones. I have been fly-fishing once in the past year; this is an embarrassing confession, since I live in one of the prime locations for this in our nation. I have also taken a couple of challenging hikes, one in Deep Creek and one to the peak of Standing Indian (5499 feet). I would love to combine some ongoing rhythm of fly fishing and hiking; this might help if I got engaged with observance of Sabbath. That is on my list for this new year.

So it is about learning to appreciate where you are, developing new skills and living into the responsibilities of a new job, meeting new people and fitting into their histories. It is a beautiful part of the world, and a great place to live and be in ministry.

the church i am seeking

2012-01-23T05:01:00.000-08:00

1. Grounded in Scripture. The church I am seeking reads scripture every day, and expects to hear a fresh word from God, one that corrects and comforts, one that guides and heals.

2. An Evangelical Heart. The church I am seeking understands the importance of transformation of life, a change that happens at the cross, where sins are forgiven and new life begins.

3. Non-Judgmental. The church I am seeking restrains itself from judging the flaws and imperfections of others, knowing that only God is in a position to condemn. We have our own problems to work on anyway.

4. More communal than individual. The church I am seeking remembers that the Old Testament is the story of a people, not an individual, and the New Testament is written to churches. Salvation is incorporation into the body.

5. A passion for justice. The church I am seeking remembers that God hears the cries of the oppressed, and that God is always on the side of the poor, the marginalized and the forgotten. God's people pursue this passion in a way that crosses politically partisan lines.

6. A movement into the world. The church I am seeking exists not for itself, but for the mission of God in the world. We discover our lives as we lose them, and we have the promise that Jesus will be with us as we get outside the walls of his church.

7. The glory and beauty of the Lord. The church I am seeking often finds itself lost in wonder, love and praise, standing amazed in the presence of an awesome God who is both infinitely powerful and gloriously near in the present moment.

christian formation and discipleship for methodist pastors

2012-01-16T19:31:00.001-08:00

I had the honor of teaching earlier this month in an intensive (thirty hours, in twenty 90 minute sessions) course at the Russia United Methodist Seminary in Moscow. The following is the syllabus:

1. A Theology of Grace
Prevenient, Justifying, Sanctifying
Romans 5, Matthew 5
Albert Outler, Theology and Evangelism in the Wesleyan Spirit

2. The Means of Grace: Theology as a Way of Life
Ken Carter, A Way of Life in The World

3. Means of Grace: Searching The Scriptures
Walter Brueggeman, The Creative Word
John Wesley, "The Scripture Way of Salvation"
Luke 8 (parable of the soils)

4. Means of Grace: Generosity With The Poor
Luke 16 (rich man and Lazarus); Matthew 25 (parables of the talents and the great judgment)
John Wesley, "The Use of Money"
Introduction to Microcredit

5. The Works of Piety and The Works of Mercy
Action and Contemplation, Being and Doing
Luke 10 (Good Samaritan, Martha and Mary)

6. Means of Grace: Testimony
The Conversion of Paul (Acts 9) and Timothy (2 Timothy 1)
Wesley's Aldersgate Experience and its Interpretations
The practice of testimony in small group conversations

7. The Report of the Study of Ministry Commission to General Conference 2012

8. Means of Grace: Singing
The Hymns of Charles Wesley
Singing in the Context of Worship
The Liturgical Year

9. Means of Grace: Holy Communion
Sacrament, Hospitality, Sacrifice
Charles Wesley, "Come, Sinners to the Gospel Feast"
John Wesley, "The Duty of Constant Communion"
Lectio Divina: Matthew 14; Mark 14; Luke 24 (communion texts)

10. Means of Grace: Small Groups
The Class Meetings; Covenant Discipleship, Emmaus Reunion Groups, Disciple Bible Study
Acts 2. 42ff. ("the life together", The Message)

An Introduction to Small Group Theory: Inclusion, Shared Experience, Trust, Task

11. Life Together In The Christian Tradition: Bonhoeffer's Witness
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

12. The General Rules in the Methodist Tradition
Rueben Job, Three Simple Rules

13. Practical Models of Discipleship
Dave Ferguson, A Movement Begins With You (coaching)
Robert Schnase, Five Practices of Fruitful Congregations (vitality)
Elaine Heath and Scott Kisker, Longing For Spring (missional communities)

14. The Call to Action Report to the General Conference 2012

15. Bible Study: John 14 and 15 (Lectio Divina)
Growth, Connection, Bearing Fruit

16. The Sermon as an Instrument in Making Disciples
Good News, Invitation, Clarity, Authenticity

17. Mission, Evangelism and Justice
Mortimer Arias, Announcing The Reign of God

18. Discipleship in the Wilderness
Sufficiency, Sabbath, Trust
Exodus 16; Matthew 6; 2 Corinthians 12

19. Identification of Spiritual Gifts
Ken Carter, The Gifted Pastor

20. Planning For Christian Discipleship (final exam)
Description of Act of Ministry
Identification of Human Need
Reflection on Spiritual Gifts
Articulation of the "Why" question (scripture and tradition)
Needed Resources
Projected Outcomes

the adaptive challenge and the call to action: a simple suggestion

2012-01-09T10:24:00.000-08:00

In reflecting on the Call to Action and its impending journey through the next General Conference of the United Methodist Church, I have wrestled with its use of the "adaptive challenge" language of Ronald Heifetz. I resonate with much of the CTA's documents, thus far, but I find the weakness to be here: not in the use of the language of adaptive challenge, but in the struggle to clarify the adaptive challenge itself. As I have written, the Interim Report is stronger in its offering of technical solutions (and largely ones that I also support) than adaptive ones.

So, a simple suggestion: what if the adaptive challenge, inspired by the Call to Action, is that nothing happens at the district, annual conference or general church level that is not in partnership with some local church or small network of local churches? There are evidences of strong partnerships already (note the Ginghamsburg Church's mission work in the Sudan with UMCOR), but the idea would be that this becomes normative, and a key measure in how funds are allocated (and perhaps matched).

This, it strikes me, is "giving the work back to the people". The General Conference speaks for the whole church. The Bishops guard the faith of the whole church and seek her unity. All other work would be planned and executed with local churches as full partners in the equations. This would potentially create the following benefits: local churches would become more connectional; in an age of scarce resources, crucial and life-giving work would be sustained; the distances between boards and agencies and local churches would be lessened; and smaller boards and agencies could draw upon the gifts and talents of the laity who remain in their local contexts.

I am aware that on one level this is not a novel idea; this is the way we function now, at our best. I am suggesting that the flow of resources should be to the mission of God that happens as local churches use their own resources and those within the connection. Indeed the mission of God, in its United Methodist expression, calls for a strong and vital partnership between local churches, where disciples are formed, and institutions whose history and expertise are essential.

This simple suggestion will call for congregations to be more connectional (and thus healthier), and for boards and agencies (in whatever form they exist) to be more local. This will require us to change our behaviors and it will lead us to collaborate in sharing our strengths. All work done beyond the local church will be for the sake of the local church, but on the way to a larger purpose: the mission of God and the transformation of the world.

an epiphany hymn

2012-01-03T08:50:00.000-08:00

You draw us toward your light, O God;
we rise and journey on the way
to meet our King, to offer gifts,
let by the star into the Day.
God is with us, God is with us,
promise of Emmanuel.

You call us into waters deep,
the winds of risk around us move,
the pain of radical rebirth,
the healing presence of the Dove.
God is with us, God is with us,
promise of Emmanuel.

We celebrate the feast, O Lord,
the old is transformed into new,
with water, wine and spoken word
the promise is fulfilled in You.
God is with us, God is with us,
promise of Emmanuel.

the scrambled dog

2011-12-29T07:49:00.000-08:00

I am deeply appreciative of some aspects of the indigeneous culture of South Georgia in which I grew up. I am thinking of the Allman Brothers and Otis Redding (music), Flannery O' Connor (literature), Clarence Jordan (racial reconciliation) and, for our immediate purposes, the Scrambled Dog (cuisine).

So, in the spirit of giving, and in the knowledge that many of my friends will be hosting celebrations during the holidays, I share this recipe for the Scrambled Dog with you. I encourage you to withhold judgment about the Scrambled Dog until you have actually prepared the dish and enjoyed it. This is an ideal meal for a Bowl Game, a New Year's Eve or New Year's Day Celebration, or a Super Bowl Party.

Instructions

One package of hot dogs (I recommend Hebrew National, but you may choose your favorite brand)

One can of chili (I generally use low fat turkey chili; again, go with your preference)

A loaf of bread (I use whole wheat)

A package of oyster crackers

Ketchup

Mustard (My ideal choice here is Raye's from Maine, but there is flexibility here too)

Options (these ingredients are allowed, but were not a part of my childhood experience in preparing the Scrambled Dog...suit your own taste)

Onions

Cheese (for example, sprinkled cheddar cheese works well)

Pickles

Salsa (while I love Mexican food, I really do not recommend this, but it is allowed)

Directions

1. Remove hot dogs from package and bring to a boil.

2. Pour chili from can into a pan and bring to a boil.

3. Place one slice of bread or two onto a large plate.

4. Pour heated chili over the bread. If you are including cheese in the recipe, place cheese on the top of the chili. The cheese should melt into the chili.

5. Dice up the hot dog, one per slice of bread, in half inch increments. Place over the top of the chili and cheese.

6. Pour a generous handful of oyster crackers over the top of the bread.

7. Add ketchup and mustard to taste. This is also the time to place pickles and onions on the Scrambled Dog, and to pour in salsa as well.

Eat with a fork. Bon appetit!

Footnotes:

1. It is acceptable to substitute barbecue potato chips for oyster crackers.

2. The recommended complementary beverage is a cold Diet Dr. Pepper.

3. Again, please withhold judgment about the Scrambled Dog until you have actually prepared the dish and enjoyed it!

the real holy week

2011-12-28T10:33:00.001-08:00

For my clergy friends, the time between Christmas and New Year's is the real holy week. The accumulation of services, family gatherings and seasonal stress reach a kind of climax on Christmas Eve, and then there is a letdown. For some, it may be difficult to detach from the relentless pace, and for others it may be tempting to fill the time with tasks that have been lingering on the to-do list.

A holy week, however, presents an opportunity for something different. It is a time to filter out the noise and get back in touch with silence. It can also be a space in which to withdraw, for solitude and reflection. Into this time and space one can begin to think about the past, present and future. Of course, this bears some relationship to the making of resolutions, but more is at stake. We are not limited to doing the same things, in the same ways: we are making our way into a new future.

So, claim the holy time and space of the days between Christmas and New Year's. If you have been eating more, eat less. If you have been sedentary, go for a walk, hike, run or swim. If you once loved listening to a particular musician, find their tunes and download them. If you have some kind of spiritual or intellectual hunger, locate a book (one book) and bury yourself in it.

Begin to sketch the plans for the coming year. What are your birthright gifts, and how will you rediscover them? Who are those closest to you, and how will you help them to flourish? What can you set aside (stop doing)? Can you identify your calling in life? And how, in a clear and practical way---one that both stretches you and is possible for you---will you hear the cries of the poor and be a part of their deliverance? What place would you like to visit? What hobby would you like to pursue? And how will you find a manageable way to become more healthy?

These are a few questions. Maybe they are the right questions, maybe not. A perfect response is not required; what is essential is to take a simple and significant step in the direction that seems right for you. So you will choose the questions that are most exciting to you, or perhaps the most urgent.

In a holy time and space we hear the Voice that we have been avoiding. We declutter and remove the distractions. And then we gradually come into the clarity of being still and knowing that we are in the Presence.

simple and straightforward advice to preachers on christmas eve

2011-12-23T18:24:00.000-08:00

1. Keep it brief. Err on the side of saying less, rather than more, and allow the sights, smells, tastes and sounds of the service to fill in the gaps. So, if it is somehow possible for you, cut out one-fourth to one-third of your sermon prior to the service. I know, this goes against our nature, as preachers, but you will thank me later.

2. Save the judgment for another day. There will likely be a number of folks who have made their way into the sanctuary under duress, or for reasons unknown even to them. They carry a stereotype about Christianity into the service that identifies faith with judgmentalism. In length, err on the side of brevity; in content, err on the side of grace. Jesus often did this--think about the parables of the prodigal son and the good samaritan.

3. Make room for doubt. This is, after all, the mystery of the incarnation, and even Mary "pondered all of this in her heart" (Luke 2). So you do not have to feel the need to tie up every loose end, or place a period where the Bible itself has recorded a question mark.

4. Appeal to the generosity of those present for others. Identify a need in the community or world, and set a big, hairy, audacious goal for a gift that would make a difference. It is likely that you will rarely find yourself preaching to a more generous congregation than Christmas Eve. So go for it!

5. Finally, imagine that Christmas Eve is a beginning and not an ending. Yes, religious professionals do often make their way through a fall gauntlet of church council meetings, stewardship campaigns, servant and leadership recruitment efforts, and fall festivals, and then there is Advent and now it is Christmas Eve. It is easy to perceive that you are crossing the finish line and you are ready to collapse. But this night is a beginning, and for many it can be the first step in the journey of being a disciple. So give those present some guidance about the next step, and the next: a sermon series in January, or an outreach initiative.

The last word after the last word: if you can't bring yourself to follow all five pieces of advice, work on one or two of the points. You will find yourself in a closer alignment with the spirit of the evening, and your people/God's people will be blessed.

a christmas eve prayer for those who don't go to church

2011-12-20T08:18:00.000-08:00

Lord, I don't go to church much.
I don't go at all...

Well, I go at Christmas.
I'm home then.
I feel drawn to it.
I like the Christmas Eve service,
the coolness of the air.
I feel like a child again...

It's surreal.

I know folks make fun of people like me.
What can I say?
I've drifted...
but there is a pull back.

Are You speaking to me?

I hear something in the sermon, sometimes,
but mostly it's the music and the candles.
What is it about those candles?
And the darkness?
The darkness...
or maybe it's the light, I suppose.
Light and darkness.

I know about light and darkness.
I live in both.
I've got some of both in me.
I'm basically a good person, I think,
but I struggle...
I know about light and darkness.
But I want to be closer to the light.
I want to light that candle and sing those words:

"And in the dark street shineth,
the everlasting light..."

I would like to live in that light, Lord.
I would like to come home.
I would like to be born again.

images of God

2011-12-12T07:49:00.000-08:00

Our prayer lives are shaped, to a great degree, by our understanding of God. In the "Magnificat" (Luke 1. 46-55), one of the Gospel lessons for this coming Sunday (Advent 4), we are given insight into the nature of the God to whom we pray:

God saves

God blesses

God does great things for us

God's name is Holy

God is merciful

God desires reverence

God is strong

God hates human pride

God judges human leaders

God is on the side of the oppressed

God feeds the hungry

God helps those who serve him

God remembers

God keeps promises

As a spiritual exercise, read the gospel passage slowly. How would you add to this list? Then read the gospel again, reflecting on the dimension of God that is most comforting to you...and the attribute of God that is most challenging to you.

The former is your source of encouragement. Claim it!

The latter is your spiritual "growing edge". Work with it!

an advent prayer

2011-12-02T10:43:00.000-08:00

We are never ready, to be honest,

for your coming into the world.

We would like to be a little more prepared,

a little more presentable,

a little more together.

We would like more time,

and yet you come in your own time,

in the fullness of time.

We want to receive you,

but mostly on our own terms.

We want to be in control.

And yet there is never a manageable Christmas,

never an orderly Christmas,

never a perfect Christmas.

Birth is always messy, chaotic, unpredictable.

And so along the way we give up,

and we listen,

in the silence.

We watch for a sign,

and we believe,

despite appearances to the contrary,

that you are surely coming,

just as the word of the promise declares.

Come, Lord Jesus.

simplifying advent

2011-11-27T15:32:00.000-08:00

The Christian year begins with Advent, a season of passive waiting and active preparation for the coming of Jesus Christ. Christian congregations find the liturgical framework useful in planning worship, mission, fellowship and education. The strength of this scheme lies in its biblical depth and traditional grounding; the weakness can be the result of a kind of predictability and even rigidity.

It is also the case in life that what was once simple can become increasingly complex over time. And so I offer a brief guide to the essentials of the season for pastors and church leaders, with an aim toward simplification. You could make additions or subtractions to this list, but it is a place to begin.

1. If you are a preacher, consider giving sermons over the next few weeks that are briefer by one-third. This will allow space for the music of the season (which is generally more expansive), silence, and the ritual of lighting candles. You will still have the opportunity to communicate the core of the gospel.

2. If you receive offerings in Advent, consider having them go exclusively to mission that occurs beyond your local church: a local homeless shelter, a prison ministry or a global initiative, for example. Find some creative way to cover the institutional needs of your local church (this will likely occur through pledges) and clearly communicate the missional focus of your congregation over the Sundays in Advent.

3. Do not hold administrative meetings during the month of December unless absolutely necessary. This will create space for two new offerings: a time of centering prayer, held once, and perhaps mid week, and a service on the longest night of the year (December 21), which focuses on grief, loneliness, depression and lament. These two simple services will benefit the more introverted members of your community who may be thirsting for just such an experience.

4. Choose one spiritual exercise and get started with it. The following are excellent resources: Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals; Child of the Light (Upper Room); Daily Feast; A Disciple's Journal; and Watch for The Light. I am suggesting that you choose one of these and not every one of of them!

5. For every party that you attend, engage in an extended time of exercise (walking, running, yoga, etc.). And for every elaborate meal that you enjoy, either fast or enjoy a very simple meal the next day for balance (for example, a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter and jelly sandwich).

6. Get to know the range of music related to this season. There are excellent Christmas recordings by Ray Charles, Bruce Cockburn, Diana Krall, Bela Fleck, the Chieftains, Kathy Mattea, James Taylor, Emmylou Harris, the Blind Boys of Alabama, Louis Armstrong, Robert Shaw and John Fahey, among others. Yes, there is a great deal of kitsch (I would include Neil Diamond and Barry Manilow in this category), but I acknowledge this to be a matter of personal taste. I try to add one new recording each Advent---this year I am enjoying Bob Bennett's Christmastide---and I listen exclusively to Christmas music during this season. As the days approach Christmas Eve I always listen to A Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols (King's College, Cambridge). And I confess that I am addicted to Vince Guaraldi's Charlie Brown soundtrack.

7. If you are a parish minister, or live in a family with multiple church responsibilities on Christmas eve, you might consider exchanging gifts on January 6. This is consistent with the Orthodox tradition, and is related to our observance of the Epiphany of the Lord. A friend who had joint custody of his children after a divorce, and was not physically present with them on December 25 began this practice and later shared it with our family. My wife and I have both been practicing clergy, with as many as seven services between us on Christmas Eve. And so we made the shift to January 6 as a time to share gifts with each other and our children, and we soon discovered a benefit that you might have already anticipated: the end of December is an excellent time to shop for loved ones!

8. Do not take a default perspective on the culture of Christmas that is negative or combative; here I have been influenced by Andy Crouch's Culture Making. Look for connections with the natural generosity of your neighbors outside the church, the innate curiousity of children, the innovative blend of sacred and secular music, and the search for silence and slowness amidst the calendar. Before you throw rocks, attempt to build bridges.

9. Reflect on God's gift of peace, in the person of the Prince of Peace, during these days. Recognize that many in your congregations are struggling with divisions within their own families of origin, and these spill over into workplaces and congregations. The holidays, unfortunately, are times when these divisions become more pronounced, and the result can become either displaced anger or an overwhelming despair. For a sense of this reality glance at PostSecret during the season of Advent.

10. Resist the commercialization of the culture, insofar as you are able. Make agreements to give simpler presents; exchange gifts that benefit local economies or provide employment in your own community (music or art lessons, for example); and remember, as my friend Mike Slaughter insists, that "Christmas Is Not Your Birthday." In the present economic crisis, this is one way of making a virtue out of a necessity.

11. Finally, spend a few minutes each day reflecting on the signs of Advent: the book of promises, the bread of heaven, the body of believers, the silent night, the light that shines in the darkness. The mystery of the incarnation---the word made flesh---is that a complex idea become simple. If we watch, if we are awake, we will know that God is with us.

random thoughts on a somewhat random rule of life: morning

2011-11-18T04:41:00.000-08:00

Our lives have rhythms to them. Formally or informally we find ourselves operating within a rule of life. Some of this is spiritual, some material. So here, my somewhat idiosyncratic rule of life these days:

1. I wake up around 5 a.m., and begin to listen to National Public Radio (Asheville, WCQS). Oddly enough, I am soon enough asleep again. But around 6:15 I am awake again, and here the morning hours begin to take a more intentional shape.

2. I have prepared the coffee the night before, but push a simple button to actually brew it. As life goes on I find myself becoming a coffee snob, and at the same time I delight in finding really good coffee at a correspondingly good (sale) price. So I rotate between Dunkin Donuts, Trader Joes, Peets and Smoky Mountain Roasters, the latter locally roasted in Waynesville.

3. While the coffee is brewing I enter into the morning devotional. For some time I have been using Common Prayer: A Liturgy for Ordinary Radicals by Claiborne, Wilson-Hartgrove and Okoro. I recommend it. For me, its strengths lie in the combination of intellectual and spiritual resources, in its acknowledgement that God is at work in the world beyond the church, and in its balance of personal and social holiness. I am also discovering that a number of very close friends have found their way to this book and are using it, and I sense that I am a part of a kind of informal and dispersed community.

4. If I have more time, I try to then do some deeper reading. This year I have selected a few books that have meant a great deal to me along the way, and I am re-reading them. So I have read Bonhoeffer's Life Together, Parker Palmer's The Active Life, and I am now working through many of the essays in the (Stanley) Hauerwas Reader.

5. By now I am drinking a second or third cup of coffee and it is time for breakfast. I have a very simple menu: a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. There are a few small variations, in that I may substitute honey at times of the year, and the kind of bread varies, from sourdough to rye to whole wheat. If the weather is exceptionally cold and I have had a light dinner the night before I may supplement the sandwich with oatmeal.

6. I should add at this point that I have not turned a computer on, nor have I looked at my smartphone yet. I want the agenda for the day to begin in silence, and who knows, perhaps it may even be the Spirit's voice, or my own plans, but I do not want to begin the day with an agenda that is set by demands that may or may not be helpful. I can respond to these soon enough.

7. I turn National Public Radio on again, and begin listening to the news. At the moment we do not have a television in the main area of the cabin where we live (there is a small one in an out of the way room downstairs), and I do not subscribe to a daily newspaper (although I do often buy the Sunday New York Times). So this is my source for news. Once I have heard the news cycle on Morning Edition, I shift to...

8. Pandora, which is a free internet music source. I love music and my own personal tastes in the morning for some time are most closely related to the Modern Jazz Quartet. So I listen to jazz music, begin to check my smart phone, respond to a few inquiries, look at Facebook,Twitter and my calendar, and begin to work on a to-do list for the day (see Atul Gawande's The Checklist Manifesto). In Advent this changes, as I listen exclusively to a wide range of Christmas music.

9. It is still fairly early and by now I have the sense that the morning is passing, and it is time to go to work. But I have found this structure to be a helpful preparation for me as I move toward the needs and requests of others.

shared vision: walk far, not fast

2011-10-19T17:07:00.000-07:00

"If you want to travel fast, walk alone. If you want to travel far, walk together." When I heard this proverb in a recent gathering, upon the occasion of the installation of a very promising leader in an equally crucial and challenging role in the church, I sensed a profound truth. I have come to realize that we ignore this truth at our peril, and we embrace it to our benefit.

The theory of the "great man (or woman)" as leader is rooted in our belief that the intellectual life is a solitary endeavor (and this is in fact the way we are trained and evaluated) and the spiritual life is a personal experience (and this is deeply embedded in our popular piety). Thus the individual studies, prays, reflects and assimilates information toward the purpose of action; if he or she is in a leadership role, all of this is shared with or imposed upon a group of people.

Such an experience is efficient, it is "fast"and on the odd and random occasion it may even produce a constructive outcome. There is, however, a shadow side to traveling fast and walking alone: it creates spectators and not fellow-travelers; it is marked by over-functioning (of the leader) and under-functioning (among those not in leadership) and it does not build community or capacity.

To travel together is move in step with others: we may perceive ourselves to be more intelligent, more spiritual or more committed than those around us, and at times some of this may be true. And yet in walking together our eyes are opened to the gifts of others. These gifts lead us to insights that may not have been possible given our naturally limited experiences, and they can become, in time, sources of hope and inspiration. The people who walk with us, and we might even say that this is primary way that God walks with us, help us to travel "far". They help us to live a sustainable life, which is, in Eugene Peterson's memorable phrase, "a long obedience in the same direction".

Finally, the walk with God and each other leads to a shared vision. The leader walks with his or her people and, in coming to know them, senses the hopes and dreams that God has placed in their hearts. In the best of all worlds, the leader is moved by these very same hopes and dreams, and when this occurs it will often be said that the leader loves the people. And when this happens---and, to be sure, it is a gift---the journey is not tiring at all: indeed, as the prophet promised, they mount up with wings like eagles, they run and are not weary, they walk and do not faint.

If you want to travel fast, walk alone. If you want to travel far, walk together.

soundtrack for a spiritual life

2011-10-10T04:06:00.000-07:00

Most of you know that a few months ago I transitioned from being a pastor of a congregation to the role of superintending an area that covers seven counties, sixty nine churches and several other ministries. I travel a great deal in this work, and the Sunday morning experience is very different. I anticipated that I would need to find a new structure in my spiritual life, and in a future post I will share what that his meant in relation to study. But I knew that my experience of music would be very different. I had been blessed by a weekly proximity to extraordinary choral music and a congregation that loved to sing hymns. All of this would change. So I began to put together a list, on my iPod, of what I call "spiritual music". I listen to it during the week but mostly on Sunday mornings when I am traveling to churches that can be near our home in the mountains or as far away as two hours. Here is a soundtrack of the music that is currently feeding me spiritually:

All Creatures of Our God and King, Patty Griffin

We Shall Overcome, Charlie Haden and Hank Jones

By The Mark Where The Nails Have Been, Gillian Welch

I Feel Like Singing Today, Ralph Stanley and Jim Lauderdale

Laudate Dominum (Vespers), Mozart

When The Saints, Sara Groves

Broken Things, Julie Miller

On God Alone I Wait Silently, The Iona Community

Distressing Disguise, Michael Card

Blessed is The Man (Vespers, Op. 37), Rachmaninov

Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down, Band of Joy

He's Always Been Faithful, Sara Groves

Stay With Us, Taize Community

Never Grow Old, Patty Griffin with Buddy Miller

God Believes in You, Pierce Pettis

There is a Reason, Alison Krauss and Union Station

If Ye Love Me, Robert Shaw Singers

Love Is Still A Worthy Cause, Sara Groves

There's a Higher Power, Buddy Miller

Veni Sancte Spiritus, Taize Community

Angel Band, Emmylou Harris

O Magnum Mysterium, Robert Shaw Singers

I'm On The Other Side of Life Now, Emmylou Harris

I would welcome your comments, additions or questions. And if you want to explore some of this music on your own, well, that would be great as well!

why congregations need denominations

2011-10-05T04:04:00.000-07:00

Years ago a friend who had served very effectively in a United Methodist Church moved to another city to join the staff of a non-denominational megachurch. He is gifted in youth ministry and music and became a worship leader in the new setting. When I was there for a meeting later I joined them for worship on a Wednesday night. Over time we remained friends, even as I had questions about the megachurch as the only model for ministry (at that time this seemed to be a given in clergy gatherings).

A few years later I learned that my friend was no longer on the staff. The senior (and founding) pastor had met with him in the office and shared very simply that the church's vision was leading them into a new direction. My friend had no recourse to make his own case or to interpret his own ministry.

More recently, I learned that another friend who has served for a number of years in a non-denominational community church would be leaving. It seems that this church had begun two different worship services to complement its traditional offering; over time, the worship leaders of these two services simply took their communities (which constituted several hundred people) and began new congregations, using the same names the services had been given in the former church in new locations. The church will now enter into an interim season, seeking to pick up the fragments of what is left over, and the pastor will, over time, seek a new call.

I share these two experiences alongside a comment I came across years ago: every church and every member of the clergy, over a span of time, needs to belong to a denomination. I serve as a district superintendent, and I am aware of the church's imperfections, and my own. I watch over 69 local churches and a few assorted institutions within our geographical boundaries, and we are at work on the development of a new church plant and the development of a missional church network. At any given time about 3-5 of these churches are in real crisis: they are in need of outside intervention, mediation, conflict resolution and spiritual guidance. A denomination, at its best, provides a framework for the protection of the clergy in a workplace and supervision of even the most powerful clergy leaders. In addition, a denomination works out the implications of a missional strategy in an area that is more nuanced than simply whatever the market can bear.

I share these experiences at a time when there is much rhetoric around moving energy, resources and attention to the local church. I love the local church. It is the basic context for the mission of making disciples for the transformation of the world. At the same time, the local church will, on occasion, be stronger as it accomplishes mission that is beyond its own capacity, and as it is accountable to a wisdom that is outside its own day to day movements. Here the analogy of Ronald Heifitz of the dance and the balcony is helpful. Faithful congregations and clergy are engaged in the dance, the daily and weekly movements that, added together, shape parish life: worship, spiritual formation, pastoral care, local and global outreach, evangelism. A balcony perspective, in times of health and in times of crisis, will help the local church to sustain this activity. The absence of such a balcony perspective, in particular circumstances, can lead to chaos and a constricting of the movement of energy. A denomination, at its best, provides that balcony perspective: a person in authority who can intervene in a season of conflict, or a compelling and needed mission that can lift the vision of a community beyond itself.

Yes, in many instances, and in the best of times, we can function without denominations. But we are not always at our best, taking into account our temptation to turn in upon ourselves (and the reformers defined sin in this way) and the complexity of creating and sustaining community. I am convinced that every church and every member of the clergy, over a span of time, needs to belong to a denomination.

on the way to the sermon: the ten commandments (exodus 20)

2011-09-29T13:52:00.000-07:00

If there is a stereotype about religion, it involves a system of rules, regulations, and procedures. “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics”, someone has said. Our lives are governed by laws and boundaries. Human activity is restrained by gates, fences, credentials. We all live by some system of rules, regulations, and procedures. Some are external: pay your taxes, recycle, educate your children, and maintain your property. Some are internal: eat balanced meals, keep your distance from danger, and smile politely at acquaintances in safe places. Some are external and internal. Slow down when you come to a speed bump. If you don’t, you are disobeying the visual message—that’s external, but you and your car may also suffer the consequences—that’s internal.

All of us live with rules, regulations and procedures. And the way we get along, in this world, is through conformity. We fit in. We keep most of the laws, more or less, right? We drive the speed limit, right? We stop at red lights, right? We conform, because, if we don’t, there will be a punishment, a consequence.

Some of us grew up in a time when religion was mostly a matter of avoiding punishment and the consequences. Religion was heavy on conformity. I served briefly, right out of school, in a mill village in the Deep South. One of the members of the church told me that he could recall a time when, if he missed Sunday School two times in a row, the foreman in his mill, who was not a member of his church, would call him into the office to ask if there was a problem!

Some of us grew up in a time when religion was mostly doing the right things, and when we did the right things, most of the time there were good consequences. And so we conformed. We conformed to avoid the bad stuff, and we conformed to get more of the good stuff.

There is a powerful urge within us to conform. And when we live in a culture of conformity, something about our human nature wants to know the specifics. What exactly am I supposed to do? What are the good things you want me to do? What are the bad things you want me to avoid? I remember being a teaching assistant in the undergraduate school at Duke University, and later teaching religion at Greensboro College. I distinctly remember a certain kind of student, very engaged, very motivated by a central concern: what can I do to get a good grade, and to avoid a bad grade?

These questions have been ingrained within us, and I think we bring these questions to a study of the Ten Commandments. The problem is that the commandments are about something different altogether. They are not our usual code of rules, regulations and procedures. They are a way that leads to life. They are not about getting the good stuff and avoiding the bad stuff. They are more complex than that. They are not about conformity to laws. They are about formation of character. They are not old words that should be pushed aside in favor or the enlightened world in which we live. They are new and living words, as relevant as this morning’s breaking news, and we ignore them at our peril.

Question for Reflection:

How can a way that leads to life, and a life that pleases God be more than conformity to what we perceive to be right and avoidance of what we believe to be wrong?

provoking a conversation (within ourselves and with others)

2011-09-25T05:34:00.000-07:00

"Strength invites discussion. Weakness invites manipulation." Rabbi David Hartman

"The first half of your life you write the text. The second half of life is when you write the commentary. You have to process what it all meant." Richard Rohr

"Many people seek community because they are afraid to be alone. Because they cannot stand loneliness, they are driven to seek the company of other people...Then they blame the community for what is really their own fault. The Christian community is not a spiritual sanitorium....Let the one who cannot be alone beware of community." Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Life Together

a few days on the trail

2011-09-24T04:55:00.000-07:00

So the last week began early last Sunday morning. I drove an hour and fifteen minutes to our church in Andrews, in time to be there at nine o'clock to meet some of the members. It turned out to be a conversation with some of the key leaders of that church over coffee and donuts. I then taught a Bible Study on John 15 for the adults in the sanctuary. Afterwards, Mike a good friend from divinity school preached an excellent sermon on Jesus' parable on the laborers in the vineyard (matthew 20). The service ended and a few people came to say hello. One man knew about my great-grandfather, who had taught at Piedmont College. Another talked about Donald Davis, the well-known storyteller who once served this church. Another woman said, very simply, "we like our minister."

This last comment is code language for a district superintendent: "do not move our minister!". I assured her that I was grateful to hear that. There is a general maxim that if the congregation is happy and the pastor is as well, the conference intervenes only when there is a compelling strategic need in another place. Of course, the mission is also important. Andrews is probably one of the more economically stressed communities in western North Carolina, and the Andrews Church has over the past few years offered a meal for the community on Thursday evenings. They serve large numbers, including families with children who would otherwise be hungry. One man indicated that he would be making the meat loaf for the meal this Thursday and invited me back!

I then traveled farther west, from Andrews, through Murphy to a small church on a hillside where, in mid-afternoon, we held a charge conference for six small congregations. A charge conference is the annual gathering that connects the local church with the district, the annual conference and the denomination. When a charge conference is held for one church, the district superintendent represents these relationships; when several churches are present, the relationships are also visible in the people and churches represented.

We approved the lay leadership for these churches. This has become a greatly simplified exercise over the last few years, and in many small churches a few people must necessarily share these roles. We also adopted the clergy salaries. In these six churches most of the clergy are bi-vocational, and really serve churches as a labor of love and as a response to a very real calling. These six churches are the very western most congregations in our state. I led a Bible Study with them, again from John 15, and then we all went downstairs to a fellowship meal that had been prepared for us. I sat with one of the pastors and a couple who have moved from Florida (where he was a police officer) to the area.

I then drove to my last appointment for the day, the charge conference at Murphy. There was a strong gathering of folks in the sanctuary. Murphy is the county seat of Cherokee County, and the church sits on the top of one of the highest peaks in the area. It is a beautiful sanctuary and the congregation draws people from a broad region. After our meeting, I drove fifteen miles to Hayesville, where I spent the might at the Hinton Rural Life Center.

The Hinton Center was established fifty years ago to strengthen the rural churches and the lives of people in the region. Hayesville is situated around Lake Chatuge, an absolutely beautiful body of water with mountains rising in the middle of it, bordering the North Carolina-Georgia line. My room was very comfortable; at the same time, it had no television or radio (appropriate for a retreat center).

The previous few days had included a demanding schedule: recording sermons for Day One in Atlanta, an annual conference meeting in Charlotte to work on the transition from fifteen to eight districts (already approved in June), and two days of meetings with the Duke Divinity School Board of Visitors in Durham. In each of these places I had enjoyed time with close friends, and participated in God's mission beyond my own setting; at the same time, those days formed a sequence which led into several days of charge conferences. I had also read the evaluations by the congregations of the pastors I would be meeting, and their materials related to the annual meetings. In a couple of these churches there is real conflict; in one there were irregularities related to financial accountability. I was hoping to be present to each church while I was with them.

So I slept very soundly that night in the Hinton Center, and later the next morning than I had in weeks. I took a long walk that morning, up to the outdoor Chapel and then down to Lake Chatuge. I met the pastors who serve the five churches in Clay County. I was pleased to discover that they know each other well and seem to have a collegial relationship. We enjoyed a great lunch at the Cottage Deli in Hayesville (seriously, I cannot recall a better deli restaurant). I then drove with the Hayesville pastor to see a house church they have begun (it is called "The Filling Station" and meets on Thursday evening). We then met with a couple who have donated a wonderful residence that will be the parsonage for the church. It is on the Hiwasee River, and is well stocked with trout!

That evening the five churches of the county came together for their charge conference at First UMC Hayesville. This church has a close relationship with the Hinton Rural Life Center. Later in the evening we approved the gift of the parsonage, and then I returned to my room. Again, no television (and no Monday Night Football!), so I read. I have been working my way again through Bonhoeffer's Life Together.

The next morning I had breakfast with one of of pastors, a clergywoman who serves at Hinton. A group had gathered who are a part of the First Parish Project, a Lilly Endowment funded cohort that provides a foundation for men and women entering this work. I then drove to Young Harris, Georgia, where I spent the morning with the campus minister, also an elder in our Annual Conference. Young Harris College is a beautiful United Methodist school set in the mountains, and it seems to be flourishing (and, I should say, the religious life there seems to be flourishing as well).

In the middle of the day I drove back through Hayesville, Murphy and Andrews to Robbinsville, where I would lead a five o'clock charge conference. I arrived early, so I found Coffee and Clay, which turned out to be a great place to work, enjoy the quiet, look at the pottery and drink coffee. It turned out that the proprieter (a potter) was also a part of the local United Methodist church where I would be later that day. The Robbinsville Church is the only United Methodist congregation in the country (in fact, 80% of the county is national park), and there I met a small group of very friendly people. We enjoyed a great meal, and then I led them through the required actions and, again, a Bible Study.

It was still daylight, and I drove out of Graham County, through the Nantahala Gorge (and by the Nantahala Outdoor Center) to Bryson City, where I would spend the night. I had not seen my wife in several days, so the next morning we met for breakfast in Sylva, not far away and located near Western Carolina University. A friend had recommended this place (The Coffee Shop) and it was very good. I then drove back to Bryson City, where I joined a conference call with a few other District Superintendents (from the Holston, Missouri and Michigan Annual Conferences, among others). This was a follow up to the District Superintendent orientation that had taken place in August, and it was helpful.

Around noon I met the pastor of the Bryson City Church. He had asked if I wanted to go on a hike of the day of our Charge Conference, and I had agreed. We drove a few miles to Deep Creek, just inside the Smoky Mountains National Park, which is by far the most visited and the most ecologically diverse of our parks. We walked at a good pace through the forest, made a loop and talked along the way. It was strenuous and beautiful!

We then returned to the church. I returned phone calls and email and prepared for the charge conference that evening, which would include four congregations. At around five o'clock members of the churches began to arrive. Two significantly, are Native American churches in Cherokee. At the meal I sat with one of their leaders who was instrumental in the reintroduction of elk into the Cataloochie area. Later we all moved to the sanctuary, where we shared out our different ministries.

As a new district superintendent much of the value of the last few days was simply forming relationships with leaders of congregations and meeting them in their own communities. Much of this happened over meals, and in conversations before and after meetings. These relationships often form the basis for being able, over time, to work through necessary changes in a congregation: responding to conflict, reaching the community in new ways, and receiving new pastoral leadership. After the charge conference concluded on Wednesday evening I greeted a few of the leaders, and again just before dark I made the forty-five minute drive home.

bearing fruit: a bible study (john 15)

2011-08-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

Jesus says, “I am the vine, and you are the branches…and apart from me you can do nothing” (John 15. 5) He is talking about growth, life, connection. The visible strength of the branches comes from a source, the vine.

“Apart from me”, Jesus says, “you can do nothing”. At the core of Christianity is the assumption that we have a spiritual need. To be a Christian is to trust that God overcomes our weaknesses, forgives our failures, heals our brokenness.

We can live in connection with the God who wants to give us grace, help, forgiveness, salvation. There is a human temptation to keep God at a distance. And yet, to be a Christian is to admit that we need a Savior; it is to say, “I can’t do this on my own”.

Connection

Here is the good news: when we ask for help, we discover that God’s grace is present in our weakness and this grace is sufficient. The Twelve Steps movement says it this way: When we confess that we are powerless, we are connected with an incredible power. Apart from me, you can do nothing, Jesus says. But if you live in me, as I live in you, there is an incredible power, an amazing grace.

If we read ahead in the story, we discover something equally astonishing. Jesus says, "I no longer call you servants, but I have called you friends" (John 15. 5). To be a Christian is to be a friend of Jesus, to be at home in his presence, to live in him, and to know that he is alive.

I’ll say this as simply as I know how: you are invited into a friendship with Jesus Christ, to experience this connection.

If we live long enough, we discover the importance of friendships, because in friendships we become aware that we matter to some other person, and so we try to stay connected. How do friends stay connected? Again, simply, we stay in touch. Friends talk, listen, ask questions. Friends are genuinely interested; they want to learn about what is going on in each other’s lives.

What does a friendship with Jesus look like? There is time to talk and listen. This is prayer. A friendship with Jesus is all about prayer. The late Henri Nouwen met a seeker who seemed to be uncomfortable they happened to be seated next to each other at a charity function. Finally their conversation turned toward the real issue “I’m having trouble believing in God, in all of this”, she said. He looked into the eyes of the woman, and with intensity he said to her, “Give me five minutes a day, five minutes a day to be silent and in the presence of Jesus…five minutes”.

We pay attention to our friends. We talk and listen. Could you give five minutes a day to spend in the presence of Jesus? Beyond talking and listening, we ask questions and learn about the lives of our friends.

One evening recently I traveled with a couple of friends to an event that was out of town. Since we had time in the car together we were able to learn about each other, our hobbies, our children, our work. We laughed. We talked about serious issues. There were silences in the midst of the conversation. A friendship takes that kind of time.

How do we ask questions, how do we learn in the spiritual life? We turn to the scriptures. We open the Bible and we dive into it with our questions, and we begin to learn about this Jesus who is simple and yet also so mysterious!

Can a friendship lose its meaning? Yes. We can become disconnected. Sadly, I have friends whom I would not be able to find if I wanted to. We have lost touch. I regret that. And it’s true in the spiritual life.

And so a friendship with Jesus is a relationship that we are called to invest in, to give time to. It is a gift, but we access the gift through the simple acts of prayer and scripture. To do these simple acts is to stay connected---“I am the vine, you are the branches”, he teaches us.

Communion

The teaching of Jesus continues in the form of a command: Love one another, Jesus says, as I have loved you (15.12). He repeats these words in verse 17: Love one another. Love is absolutely at the heart of the gospel, the life, teaching, death and resurrection of Jesus. This morning I want us to think about love as communion, as the experience of community, Jesus reaching out to people through people. If God is love, then God’s people make God’s love visible. Again, in John’s Gospel there is always something visible, tangible about God’s love. For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son (John 3)…Jesus, the word of God, became flesh and lived among us (John 1).

Years ago I remember the great evangelist John Stott posing a provocative question. It is even more relevant in our post-modern culture. “ How can the world believe in an invisible God?”

The answer, the suggested, is found in I John 4. 11-12:

"No one has ever seen God; if we love one another,

God lives in us, and God’s love is perfected in us.

We experience the love of God through God’s people! This love is a gift, but we must accept it, and this acceptance involves giving up on the idea that I can live the Christian life on my own, without community, apart from communion with others.

A few years ago Robert Putnam wrote about the values of our culture in his work Bowling Alone. The simple thesis of the book is that more people are bowling than ever before, but fewer people are involved in bowling leagues. We are bowling, but we are bowling alone. It is all about the individual.

On the way to communion we overcome the obstacle of individualism. We really do need each other.

We cannot do it alone. We need each other.

For many this is the way to salvation, and this was true in my own life---I was impressed, drawn into, overtaken by a small community of Christians who included me and accepted me: a Sunday School class of four people, including the teacher; then a work team that helped to build a storefront church in Brooklyn; a Bible study group on a college campus; and the quiet witness of people in my own family. My way into the Christian faith came through other Christians. I experienced the communion with other people, and then I made the connection with God!

The communion with each other happens most often in smaller groups: Sunday School classes; Women’s Circles; Bible Studies; Mission teams; Choirs. I cannot overemphasize the importance of being in a small group. We need a connection with God, but we also need a communion with each other, and the scripture teaches me that we cannot have one without the other.

He is the vine. We are the branches.

We are connected. And the life that flows from the vine into the branches is a life of love. There are no individual, solitary Christians. We are grafted into each other, into the tree of life, to use another image from scripture, into the body of Christ, to use yet another. I cannot be a Christian without you, and you cannot be a Christian without me. For some reason God designed it all in just this way. And so a part of our conversion is into the communion, the body, the believers, the household of God.

In his little spiritual classic Life Together, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing from a Nazi prison cell, reflects on the communion that we share with each other, and our temptation to take our life together for granted.

“It is true that what is an unspeakable gift of God for the lonely individual is easily disregarded by those who have the gift every day. It is easily forgotten that the fellowship of Christian brothers and sisters is a gift of grace, a gift of the Kingdom of God that any day may be taken from us, that the time that still separates us from utter loneliness may be brief indeed. Therefore, let the one who until now has had the privilege of living a common Christian life with other Christians praise God’s grace from the bottom of his heart. Let us thank God on our knees and declare: it is grace, nothing but grace that we are allowed to live in community with Christian brothers and sisters”.

The core conviction is our need for a friendship with Jesus. “I am the vine, you are the branches”, he teaches his disciples. We draw our strength, our life, from him: “Apart from me”, he says, “you can do nothing”.

Next, the command and invitation that we should “love one another”. To make the point negatively, we cannot love Jesus, whom we have never seen, if we do not love our brother or sister, whom we have seen. Said positively, we experience the love of God through God’s people. Christianity is always incarnational---it takes on human flesh.

Calling

Now we conclude with a necessary implication. We are connected with God, and we are in communion with each other for a larger purpose: a calling in the world. “You did not choose me”, Jesus says, “I chose you”. “I appointed you to go and bear fruit”.

What does it mean to bear fruit? We can go back to those who heard this teaching for the first time, the disciples of Jesus. They would have heard these words and placed them in their Mediterranean context. The fruit of the vine produces figs, grapes, olives. These finally become food, oils, wine. But vineyards are primarily for the purpose of making wine. I am not an authority on wine, but I have close friends who are winemakers, who have reminded us of the old question, “How do you make a little money in the wine business? You start with a lot of money.”

It is not accidental that the scriptures are filled with the imagery of vineyards and wine, with the cycles of planting and nurturing and harvesting, with celebrations where wine is freely poured and enjoyed. When those who listened to Jesus heard his references to vineyards and wine, they would have immediately made the connections: the labor, the cultivation, the pruning, the growth, the fruit, the abundance, the feast. In a vineyard one experiences life in all of its fullness.

And so Jesus makes the claim, of himself, that he is the vine. I have come that you may have life and have it in abundance, he had announced to them. To abide in Jesus is to remain connected to him. When we lose that connection, when the branch is severed from the vine, there is no life, no growth, no fruit. “I want you to abide in me”, he is saying. “I want you to remain connected to me”. Why does he say this?

The reasons go deeper than a personal relationship with him. We remain connected to the vine because that is the way we bear fruit. And here the inward spiritual grace becomes an outward and visible sign. The natural consequence of a healthy root taking in nutrients is that it produces something wonderful. It bears fruit.

Jesus had been with the disciples for some time---he spent a significant amount of time with just a few people, hidden mostly from the crowds, investing all of this time in twelve people. He was teaching them about friendship with God. He was instructing them in prayer. He was opening the scriptures to them. There were good days and bad days. Sometimes they got it, and sometimes they did not. He also sensed that there were dynamics going on between them. There were struggles over who would sit in the places of power, over whose voice would be heard most clearly, struggles, by the way, that continue to be with the church. And so he gave them a command and an invitation: love one another.

It was always about more than an individual’s spiritual life, or a group of people and their love for each other. He wanted the disciples to bear fruit. He wanted their lives to make a difference. How do we measure all of that? How do we know if we are bearing fruit, if we are making a difference?

I love the insight of Oswald Chambers:

“Our spiritual life cannot be measured by success as the world measures it, but only by what God pours through us—and we cannot measure that at all.”

“What God pours through us”… I like that.

When I hear Jesus say that “I appointed you to go and bear fruit”, a word occurs to me: accountability. What is important is that we allow the grace of God to flow through us into the lives of others. We allow the inward and spiritual grace to become an outward and visible sign. The wine is to be shared, following the example of Jesus, who said, at the Passover feast, "this is my body, given for you, this is my blood, poured out for you” (I Corinthians 11; John 13).

He wanted the disciples to bear fruit; he wanted their lives to mean something. And this is our calling: he wants our lives to bear fruit, to mean something.

I invite you to discover, or rediscover, the abundance of the Christian life: It is a connection with God. It is a communion with each other. And it is a calling to bear fruit in the world.

Maybe you are at a place of beginning: a friendship with Jesus; you are searching for a connection. Maybe you are seeking community, relationships, a family where you know you are loved; for you the longing is for communion. Or maybe you want something more: you want to make a difference in this life; you are listening for a calling.

Wherever you are in life, the good news is that you are welcome at the feast, to connect with Jesus, to be a part of his communion, the disciples, and to respond to his call to follow him into a world that hungers and thirsts for the abundant life that he shares.

the adaptive challenge and the local (united methodist) church

2011-08-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

The United Methodist Church, through the work of the Call to Action and the Connectional Table is proposing four offices that will carry forward the programmatic work of thirteen present boards and agencies (note: additional work in areas such as communication, pension and health benefits and financial administration will take place outside these offices). This is for the purpose of responding to the adaptive challenge---to create more vital and healthy congregations. The four offices are projected to be new places for new people, leadership development, missional engagement and justice and reconciliation.

I have writtten before on this blog about the structural realities facing our church, at a macro level, but I have also given some thought lately to this scheme and what it might mean at the local level. If the adaptive work is really that which is given back to the people, what might these four terms mean for every pastor and local church.

Could pastors be encouraged (and held accountable) each year to help create one new place for new people? This could be any missional act of hospitality that engages new people, from a bible study at the local coffee shop to a new faith community. Could pastors be encouraged (and held accountable) each year to develop leaders? This could look like a Bible study, or, more simply, meeting with one or two seekers who wanted to go deeper.

Could pastors be encouraged (and held accountable) each year to lead others in missional engagement? This could be a servant team, in the community or across the planet, or a sophisticated major missional initiative that involves community, denominational and ecumenical stakeholders. And could pastors be encouraged (and held accountable) each year to take concrete action toward justice and reconciliation? In this way clergy leaders would speak prophetically for those who have no voices.

Of course, the accountability of pastors would not be in isolation from a shared evaluation of congregations. Vital and healthy congregations are not sustained, for any length of time, apart from vital and healthy clergy. The opposite is also true: clergy are shaped by their environments. Thus a process of shared accountability, at the local level, is essential. The Call to Action reporting seems also to include a vision for accountability at the Annual Conference level, and so a new set of questions emerges: what would several hundred new places for new people look like in a geographical area? or several hundred leaders who are being discipled in deeper ways? or several hundred servant teams, with major missional initiatives in each area? or clear and strong voices speaking for justice and reconciliation? What kind of leadership, episcopal and otherwise, makes such an outcome possible in an area? And what kind of resources (education, textual and social media) are needed?

A shift toward the adaptive challenge, at the local level, will change every facet of the United Methodist Church's clergy system, from recruitment and formation to oversight and supervision to recruitment. It will require a massive investment in the areas of support and accountability. We will need to resist the temptation to copy models of support and accountability in the secular professional spheres of North America. These have not been a blessing to our culture. The work of the General Boards will likely shift to the creation of this alternative culture----Bishops are simply too engaged in the essential tasks of deploying clergy----and it will likely take a generation to establish. At the same time there are initiatives that are beyond the scope of the local church (the beginning of my list would include Africa University, the Upper Room, United Methodist Women, the United Methodist Committee on Relief, Change The World) and simply must be retained as priorities. But those that I mention, and there are others, are largely strong at present because they so clearly engage the local church.

Much work remains to be done on the adaptive challenge. The work of the Connectional Table---at least that which has been shared publically---has leaned more to what Ronald Heifitz would call "technical solutions": rearranging structures and shifting funding patterns. This is necessary work, and yet we have done this work before, and it did not lead to congregational vitality or effective clergy leadership. I am supportive of the movement identified in the Call to Action; at the same time, it is imperative that we begin to think about what all of this will look like at the local level. This is missional strategy, and it deserves careful articulation and the corresponding constructive development alongside the streamlining of work done now by boards and staffs at the general church level.

missional is wesleyan and wesleyan is missional: eight affirmations

2011-08-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

The missional church lives by the grace of God. We understand that God’s grace is present in the lives of others before we encounter them, that the grace of the crucified and risen Lord saves us (Ephesians 2. 8-9), and that our growth in grace finds expression in the love of God and neighbor (sanctification).

The missional church knows that church is not an end in itself. The church exists to bear witness to the love of God in this world. A church’s vitality or strength is a by-product of its mission beyond itself---koinonia is the result of missio. The mission is for the sake of the world, and in this God is glorified (John 17).

We do the mission for the sake of the mission. We cannot control outcomes, or even visible fruit. This does not mean that we do not count people, money or other resources. It simply implies that we serve as faithfully as we know how, combining faith, intelligence and rigor, and we trust the end result to God.

The means of grace sustain the missional church. The mission of God is more than a human endeavor or a political activity: it is work that calls forth our love of the neighbor, which cannot be separated from the love of God. In the absence of a disciplined life, in which we are in touch with the means (ordinary channels) of grace, we become disillusioned with God and apathetic toward our neighbor.

Holiness is always personal and social. The missional church holds together, in its own life, the yearning for spirituality and justice. The missional church hears the still small voice (I Kings 19) and the cries of the oppressed (Exodus 3). Personal holiness without social holiness is escapist. Social holiness without personal holiness is works righteousness.

The missional church is connectional. Because we know that the gifts of God are within and beyond our local expressions of felllowship, and because we understand that human needs are greater than our local capacities to meet them, we rejoice in and depend upon our connections with the denomination, our ecumenical partners and friends in agencies and structures who work for the common good.

The present economic context requires a missional church. The attractional church is an expensive endeavor that depends on large sums of financial capital and creates consuming participants. The missional church is most at home in the deepest aspirations of people: to be healthy, to be educated, to be employed. These basic needs were the place of connection in many of the missionary movements in prior generations, and are unfortunately growing in our own time.

Young adults resonate with the missional church. Many in the younger generations are seeking a community that has integrity (no hidden agenda), is not hypocritical (separating personal and social holiness), is not judgmental (and thus knows a gracious God) and is real (and thus includes the “winners” and “losers” in our world). They will search for this community, and, if necessary, they will piece expressions of it (such as spirituality or justice) together wherever they find it.

The Wesleyan tradition embodies, at its best, the core of what it means to be missional: grace, holiness, discipline, an open table, a world parish.

a school of christian mission and a camp meeting

2011-07-25T13:36:00.000-07:00

Over the past two weeks I have had the honor of leading in two very different gatherings: the Western North Carolina United Methodist Women's School of Christian Mission, held at Pfeiffer University, and the Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting, which met in Union County, approximately thirty minutes east of Charlotte.

I am grateful that the United Methodist Women chose "forgiveness, restorative justice and reconciliation" as one of their mission studies this year (the others are Haiti and Joy to The World, a superb theology of mission by Dana Robert of Boston University). I led our spiritual growth study, and the text was The Journey, written by Stephanie Hixon and Tom Porter. A few reflections on this experience: I was impressed with how biblical and practical The Journey is as a text. Each chapter focuses, with some depth, on a biblical passage: Jacob and Esau, the words of Jesus spoken from the cross, the Canaanite woman, the Prodigal Son, etc. The methodology included lectio divina, sacred reading, and encouraged an environment of confidential listening and respect. The authors include material related to personal forgiveness and social reconciliation, and, in the best Wesleyan sense, participants were asked to hold these two realities in tension. My interest in this topic has emerged as I have found myself in denominational roles, in the work of leading a large and complex local church, and as a participant in last summer's Center for Reconciliation conference at Duke Divinity School, which I highly recommend. I am encouraging anyone I meet these days to consider The Journey as a Lenten Study in 2012.

At some moment along the way I had the insight that this is what we actually mean when we use the language of "becoming disciples of Jesus Christ for the transformation of the world". These women (more than 300 were in attendance) had three days of their time to engage in study; our class alone was eight hours. This is discipleship, which includes learning from the scriptures and stories that have shaped us, and struggling with ways to put these truths in practice. Our time together include a service of healing on one morning and the celebraton of Holy Communion at our conclusion. I also know that most of these women are leaders in their congregations and communities: they are often at the center of resolving conflict in families and local churches, and theirs is usually the voice of strength, wisdom and restraint in volatile situations. I knew that the study was relevant to their lives and mine: forgiveness, restorative justice and reconciliation is the journey of our lives, whether we are Jacob on the way to meet his brother Esau, or the Prodigal on the way home to find his place in the family.

I had agreed, one week later, to be the preacher at the Pleasant Grove Camp Meeting in Union County. Pleasant Grove is a campground in the sense that there are small cabins (called "tents") surrounding an arbor (worship space). This is a place of meeting and reunion for extended families from across the United States, and there is a worship service each evening, and a closing service on "Big Sunday".

I decided, in preparation, that I would stay with the theme of forgiveness, restorative justice and reconciliation at the camp meeting. Years ago I served as the pastor of a four point charge (circuit) in rural Yadkin County. Each church had a revival in the fall and the spring, with a guest evangelist. The overt purpose of these services was to "bring people to Christ"; the practical reality was that most of those present had made a profession of faith, and those in attendance were pretty much the core of the church. And so, in my inexperience, I did wonder about the purpose of these gatherings. But along the way I came to the realization that these were the contexts by which neighbors in close proximity to one another became reconciled. When you live in a rural community and no one sells property or moves away, you become estranged over time from neighbors, sometimes over small incidents. Walls get constructed and relationships suffer. The revival was an important way that enemies could become friends again.

And so I focused not only on the vertical relationship (our connection to God) but also on the horizontal relationship: our need to forgive, to make amends, to be reconciled with each other. I preached on the prodigal son, again, and in conversations around the campground learned that the issues of those present were identical to those at the school a week earlier. To be reconciled brings our spiritual and social relationships together: thus Jacob saw God face to face as he wrestled all night, but then he would see the face of God in reunion with his brother (Genesis 32. 30; 33. 10).

There is a core to the gospel, a simplicity to it: this does not imply that the teachings of Jesus are not difficult---indeed, they are demanding. As one of my mentors, Ken Callahan has said, we sometimes assume that grace is easy and law is hard, but the reverse is true: law, or legalism, is easy; to live by grace---to forgive, to make amends, to seek reconciliation---is hard. Like Jacob, it can wound us (Genesis 32.31). Like the waiting parent, it can seem undignified to run toward the returning child, or perhaps it is an active of protection in an honor and shame culture (Luke 15. 20).

At the camp meeting (which also involved several hundred people) I met those who were clearly on the journey toward reconciliation; the messages, and the acceptance they found in community (and yes, sometimes in family relationships that had become fractured) were the means by which grace was being extended to them, and my hope was that they were in fact coming "home" in some way. I had the blessing of being in fellowship with them, and being the one who reminded them of the story. Of the Prodigal Son, Henri Nouwen has said, "All of the Gospel is there. All of my life is there. All of the lives of my friends is there."

So two very different gatherings, a UMW School of Christian Mission and a rural Camp Meeting, which had a common experience: our human condition and our need for the grace of God, and the confession that we are all somewhere on the journey between them.

summer reading: some suggestions

2011-07-08T11:34:00.000-07:00

I write with the presumption that the summer will bring to you a bit more time to read and that you have the desire to fill some of the time in this season practicing this habit of mind. So, a few suggestions; I have read some of these works, but plan to revisit them, and others are new to me.

1. Reflections on Grace, Thomas Langford. Langford was the Dean and a professor theology at Duke, and he wrote, lived and taught in a gracious manner. This brief but substantive work records his reflections on grace, still to be developed, at the end of his life. He defines grace with depth and breadth, and always in relation to Jesus Christ. "Grace", he insists, "is the distinctive element in the Christian message, for it is the most fundamental depiction of God, of God's way of being, of human possibility...To be discovered by God in Jesus Christ leads to the possible discovery of the grace of God in creation, as prevenient presence, in present forgiveness, in maturing process, and in ultimate hope."

2. Leading Causes of Life, Gary Gunderson with Larry Pray. A couple of years ago I had the good fortune to visit the Church Health Clinic in Memphis, and to learn about the Christian community's response to poverty and disease in that city. I also became aware of this work, which focuses not on pathology but rather the signs of life. The leading causes of life, not death, are connection, coherence, agency (action), blessing and hope. The biblical stories do indeed speak again and again of abundance and creativity; this is a needed corrective for leaders among us who are more prone to focus on scarcity and decline.

3. The Pastor, Eugene Peterson. I had the blessing one summer to take part in a writing workshop with Eugene Peterson, translator of The Message and author of a number of books in the discipline of pastoral spirituality. He reflected with us on the vocations of being a writer and a pastor, and shared some of his autobiography in process. Some of this material will be familiar to his close readers, but there is more revelation here, especially his journey through the "badlands" of pastoral fatigue and emptiness, and his identification of sources of renewal and insight. For those who do this work, Peterson has been and is an essential guide.

4. Watching Over One Another In Love, Gwen Purushotham. I am in the midst of a transition from being a pastor of one congregation, with a large staff, to being a district superintendent of 69 congregations across seven counties. This volume is a distinctively Wesleyan approach to assessment, support, accountability and covenant relationships. I am glad that Gwen wrote it!

5. Leading A Life With God, Daniel Wolpert. I have friends who are on a spiritual journey, and take that very seriously, and I know others who are in leadership roles, and care about about the institutions they serve. I do often have the sense that these two pursuits are often disconnected. I was drawn to Wolpert's attempt to articulate the practice of spiritual leadership. I am hoping to hear him when he leads a workshop at SoulFeast at Lake Junaluska soon.

6. Journey In The Wilderness, Gil Rendle. Rendle knows the North American mainline church well, and has assimilated the writings of Ronald Heifetz (Leadership Without Easy Answers) and Robert Quinn (Deep Change). Living in the wilderness can be disorienting, and leading others through the wilderness can be disheatening. If you find yourself in the wilderness, Rendle can give you a new and more hopeful language for making sense of it all.

7. Forgiving As We Have Been Forgiven, Gregory Jones and Celestin Musekura. I met Celestin at Duke's Center for Reconciliation; his experience as a leader in the midst of the Rwandan genocide is placed here alongside Greg Jones' reflections on the possibility and necessity of forgiveness. Both are academics and both are practicioners, and the result is a powerful testimony. I am also teaching in our Annual Conference's United Methodist Women's School of Christian Mission this summer, and this has been helpful background reading.

8. The Light Has Come, Lesslie Newbigin. I love Newbigin, who is the theological source for the missional church movement. This is his commentary on the gospel of John, and it is extraordinary. I recommend, like the gospels themselves, beginning at the end. Start with Jesus' command to Peter to feed his sheep, and Newbigin's interpretation of that encounter, and then the women at the tomb, and then work your way backward.

I hope a suggestion or two here is helpful, and that you hear the Voice through the diverse witnesses in these pages. Enjoy!

becoming a district superintendent

2011-07-01T10:41:00.000-07:00

So we moved most of our stuff a week or so ago and traveled to Ferrum College in Virginia, via Charlotte, to learn about teaching in our annual conference's UMW School of Christian Mission. It was three days of learning and meeting a number of very compassionate and committed people. I will lead our conference's spiritual growth study of "Reconciliation, Forgiveness and Restorative Justice". The texts are profound----Jacob's wrestling through the night until the break of day, the lamentations at the foot of the cross, the parable of the Prodigal Son, and Paul's reflection on 2 Corinthians 5 on the New Creation.

We then drove directly back to Lake Junaluska, and I made a visit that afternoon (Tuesday) to a new pastor and his family in our district; I made the latest one a few hours ago (I am writing on Friday). In between I have been getting my office into shape, meeting with a few pastors in the district who have come through, scheduling a few visits for next week, and continuing the process of transforming our cabin, where we will be living, from a weekend getaway into an actual home. It is mostly a process of pruning, purging, thinning out, whatever you want to call it. Waynesville has a great recycling center, so I have been taking things there, and Providence UMC and Lake Junaluska have yard sales this summer, so others may find some use for our surplus. I have been reading posts on Lifehacker and Zen Habits about simplifying life, and for us it has become a necessity. In the midst of it we have had meals on two evenings with friends who live in this area, and I imagine that will continue.

The transition began in earnest when I turned in my cell phone in Charlotte last Friday and learned to live without one for a few days. I just got connected again with a new smart phone yesterday, although I confess I am still learning how to use it. My wife and daughters did get me an iPad for father's day, and I think I am going to organize things as follows: phone calls, church and conference email on the smart phone, and facebook, personal gmail and music on the iPad. Technology is complex, but at the same time it gives me access to people (and them to me) and it connects me with resources (like music and podcasts) that I will listen to while driving through this region. The IT staff person from our conference, Chris, was extraordinarily helpful.

I am still in the midst of contacting new pastors to the district. We are heading into the July 4th weekend, which is always a blast (sorry) around Junaluska. There is a parade that is so tacky that it is funny, culminating in a barbecue picnic with bluegrass music. Later that night there are fireworks; we have often grilled food with friends and found a place on the lake where the sights and sounds are pretty spectacular.

Some have commented that a District Superintendent does not have to go looking for work; it has a way of finding you, and that may be true. I will learning how to balance the role of administrator and spiritual encourager. I feel very blessed to be in a district rich with resources (Lake Junaluska Assembly, Hinton Rural Life Center, Foundation for Evangelism, World Methodist Council), composed of very strong churches and dedicated pastors, and situated in a mountain region that attracts pilgrims of all kinds seeking renewal. I am hopeful that I can be of help in the renewal of the churches and clergy in this region, and my prayer is that I will find it be a calling that is renewing to me as well.

the benediction (last sermon at providence umc)

2011-06-24T08:15:00.000-07:00

I want to begin with one of my favorite stories. A business woman was in an airport on a Friday afternoon. It had been an arduous day, nothing remarkable, but not easy either. She was on the way home, ready to be reconnected with her family. She sat in her seat in the waiting area, looked up at the monitor and began to process the bad news: her flight would be delayed by an hour and a half. This was not good.

So she decided to take a short walk, and then it occurred to her that she would reward herself for the day’s work, and now for enduring a delay. She went into a store and saw a box of her favorite cookies; she purchased the box, put it into her bag, and walked back to the seats near her gate. She sat down, opened her bag, pulled out a few things, began to read the newspaper, and then she reached into the box of cookies. She took a bite, it was good, she took another bite.

Sitting adjacent to her, just out of the corner of her eye, was a man, and she noticed a moment later that he was holding a cookie in his hand, the same cookie, her cookie! He began to eat it, until it disappeared. He had a satisfied look on his face.

“What is going on?”, she wondered! Well, it had been that kind of day, she thought to herself, one more thing, but she ignored it. She reached down, took another cookie, and ate it, slowly, one bite at a time. She got back into reading her newspaper and tried to take her mind off of the situation. When she looked up she saw that he had taken a cookie, again, and was eating it! He had that same smile on his face.

At about this moment the announcement came over the system that boarding would begin, and her section was called. She stood up, got her things together. The man beside her smiled again, but it was just too strange, she did not know what to make of it, and so she moved along. She boarded the plane, sat down, put her seat belt on, and looked in her bag, again, for the newspaper.

What she found, when she reached her hand into the bag, was a box of cookies, a box of her favorite cookies. To her astonishment, she knew in that moment that the box of cookies, her box of cookies, was unopened.

She thought she had been sharing her cookies with a stranger. But it turned out that the stranger had been sharing his cookies with her.

Good stories don’t need much explanation, but this is what the story means to me: in the ministry I sometimes think I am doing something for other people, but I know---and in this moment it is very clear to me---that others are actually doing something for me. I think I am giving someone a gift, but, to be more accurate, I am the one who is on the receiving end.

Eight years is a short time and it is a long time. For me it seems like a very short time ago that I arrived here on a Sunday and met many of you for the first time. Week in and week out you have given me the gift of leaving your routine, coming into this sanctuary, listening to the sermon, and then, because I know you, you have tried to make sense of it in the places where you live, sometimes the hard and unexpected places. I know the church makes a difference in your life, I know that Christ makes a difference in your life, I know that all of this makes a difference in the world, and I have been a part of that, and it is not just that I have given you something, eight years, or whatever I have said or done; you have given something to me…you have changed the way I live as a disciple of Jesus.

The cookies----whether I understand that to be faith or talent or life itself----never belonged to me in the first place. We just got to share them together.

The scripture for today is taken from 2 Corinthians, which is, according to the scholars, Paul’s most personal letter. In particular, the scripture is the conclusion of the letter, and it is a benediction.

Finally, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace with be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

Paul’s benediction is a blessing, a transferring of power from one person to another, but it is also a set of instructions:

Put things in order, listen to my appeal, meaning, he cannot control or coerce them, their response must come from within them. The second letter to the Corinthians is correspondence shaped by the cross of Jesus, under which Paul stands, and it is marked by a deep humility. “We do not proclaim ourselves”, it is not about us, it is never about the preacher, but the message. We have this treasure [the gospel] in earthen vessels, Paul knows, to show that the transcendent power belongs to God and not to us.

Throughout 2 Corinthians the message is one of confidence in the power of God who has reconciled the world to himself through Jesus Christ, it is about the living presence of Jesus Christ, if anyone is in him there is a new creation, the old has passed away, all things are made new, it is about the Holy Spirit that breaks our hearts of stone and sets us free to become children of God.

And so we do not lose heart, Paul says, again and again. Maybe he was writing the letter to encourage them and us, to stay with it. But all letters, all communication, all ministries come to an end, and they need closure, last words, a benediction.

Which reminds me of an experience from years ago. My wife was sitting in the balcony with our children, another church in another city, several parents were sitting with their kids, trying to hold it together. The service was especially long and full that day, the children were active, the parents were juggling all of this. Finally the service came to its conclusion, there was a benediction, and then the three chimes of the Trinity. And when the first one sounded a little boy looked up at his mom and made his hand into a first and thrust it into the air and said “yes”!

Reading a passage of scripture about a benediction leads me to say a word about the benediction that I have shared with you these eight years.

Go now in peace to serve God and your neighbor in all that you do. Bear witness to the love of God in this world, so that those to whom love is a stranger will find in you generous friends.

Then the Trinitarian name of God… A benediction is a good word…and in our Sunday worship, it is a last word…but it is a misunderstood act of worship. A benediction is not so much a prayer where we close our eyes as a good word among friends and a sending forth, and so I keep my eyes open in a benediction, and I try to scan the congregation and think about the places you will be going this week and the challenges you will encounter and the people you will influence.

I am grateful that the church gathers to worship God. Yes, we do sometimes think we are doing something for God, but on most Sundays, by the time we leave, we see the face of God, glancing at us, maybe even smiling at us, and we know that we are the ones who have received, and the name for that is grace.

The benediction gathers up all of that. The benediction is finally God’s “yes” to us, to life, to the creation, to all things. How did I come upon this benediction? I first heard it in when the current United Methodist Hymnal was published, in 1989. This benediction is taken from the Wedding service and it is found on page 869. From the first time I read it, this benediction began to take on a deep meaning for me, and I have been saying it in congregations in Greensboro, Winston-Salem and now Charlotte over the past twenty years. It reminds me that now that we have had the privilege and grace to be together----and, we believe, in the presence and at the invitation of God---we now go out to respond in some way, we want to serve God and our neighbor in all that we do.

But what does that mean? To bear witness to the love of God in this world is to take seriously the claim that reconciliation is stronger than hatred and forgiveness is stronger than bitterness and life is stronger than death. And it is to live this out in this world! It is not to imagine that people will somehow know that God loves them at some other time and place in the future. It is to bear witness to the love of God in this world.

The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the communion of the Holy Spirit.

The name for Jesus Christ is grace, something we do not earn, something we did not deserve, something we will never repay. And so, brothers and sisters, if you were going to put things in order, I would appeal to you to live in and by grace. I cannot coerce you to do this, or control the outcome. In this life you will often have the decision to respond with judgment or grace. I appeal to you: Err on the side of grace.

The name for God is love. Some people think grace and love are easy and law and judgment are hard, but grace and love are hard. Throughout this life you will find yourself trying to love those who do not love you. This is what God does, most of the time, this is what God has always done.

The communion of the Holy Spirit. A spiritual life is not a warm feeling you want to have in some quiet place, or religious goose bumps you get when you hear a certain sound or a sequence of code words. The communion of the Holy Spirit is the gathering of God’s people into a family, a community, into one Body. Sometimes you will want to go away by yourself and enjoy that box of cookies and you will think that is having a spiritual life. But the spiritual life is something we share, it is a fellowship, it is a communion, something God, who often comes in the form of a stranger----Mother Teresa called this his “distressing disguise--- shares with us. It is a gift.

And so, brothers and sisters, farewell. Put things in order, listen to my appeal, agree with one another, live in peace; and the God of love and peace with be with you. Greet one another with a holy kiss. All the saints greet you. The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.

following Jesus into unfamiliar territory

2011-06-17T13:40:00.000-07:00

I have had the privilege of being a part of a group of pastors, men and women who serve large and/or growing congregations and meet together on a regular basis. A year ago we went through a leadership development experience and I had the sense that I was being called to give up something I really loved in order to be available for something else that might be my calling in life.

As a couple of participants in that group reminded me recently, some of that has come to pass. At last week's annual conference (Western North Carolina) it was made official that I will be concluding my eighth and final year as senior pastor of Providence United Methodist Church in Charlotte, and will begin serving as the Superintendent of the Waynesville District of the Western North Carolina Conference next month.

I have written about my love for Providence and it really has been a place and a people that has helped me to grow as a leader and a preacher. It is not a perfect church, even as I am not a perfect pastor, but I am really in awe of what the people in this congregation are doing. Some of this is intentional and is a part of our strategic planning, developed with people like Janice Virtue, Gil Rendle, and Bishops Larry Goodpaster and Robert Schnase. Some of this is unintentional: our people have been passengers on the plane that landed in the Hudson, or they were serving in Port-au-Prince during the earthquake, or they have been spouses and parents who have lived through the loss of loved ones and written about all of this in CaringBridge; in each case thousands upon thousands of people have come to know our church indirectly through them and they have been witnesses to God's power and grace.

I will miss all of this. At the same time I am delighted in the person who will serve as the next senior pastor of Providence, and the way the staff is taking shape. I also believe that I will enjoy the role of District Superintendent. I do feel a calling to encourage clergy, to intervene where needed in the life of the church, and to try to make opportunities possible for others. I have chaired a conference board of ordained ministry and committee on episcopacy, served on denominational search committees and two commissions to study the ordained ministry, and written books on spiritual gifts and United Methodist identity. I am hopeful that some of this will be relevant in what I will be doing. I know that I will depend on the experiences of my fellow superintendents, even as I have on the gifts of other pastors and leaders along the way.

So I will be giving up close friendships, the glorious opportunity to experience transformative worship each week and the creative work of developing a sermon that connects with people I have come to know well. But I will be entering into a season where I can perhaps work with clergy who are also on a journey to fully discover their gifts and offer them to others.

At the same annual conference I was also elected by my brothers and sisters in our annual conference to lead our delegation to the 2012 General Conference in Tampa. This will also be a new ministry: to help bring together a group of 56 leaders (22 delegates to General Conference, 22 delegates to Jurisdictional Conference and 12 reserve delegates) who are themselves leaders and care deeply about the church and its future. I believe it will be a historic General Conference, for many reasons, and that there are resonant voices from across the church calling for change. I believe this change can reconnect us with our historic theology (grace) and purpose (mission); in other words, I sense all of this as a time to rediscover who we are and why God has called us into being in the first place.

Grace and mission are centered in Jesus Christ, who is the source of life, the head of the church and the solid rock upon which we stand in the midst of a changing church and a turbulent world; I know all too well, as the hymn of my childhood had it, that "all other ground is sinking sand". And so I am trusting that in the time ahead I will follow him more closely, and allow him to lead me into unfamiliar territory.

by your spirit make us one (john 17)

2011-06-15T08:23:00.000-07:00

A meal is at the center of God’s relationship with us. Israel tells its story at the Passover meal, how they were liberated from slavery and led into the Promised Land (Exodus 12). Jesus shares this same Passover meal with his own disciples (John 13), and commands them to eat this meal in remembrance of him (Matthew 26). Jesus feeds the multitudes (John 6), eats meals with sinners (Luke 15), and shares a mysterious meal with two of the disciples on the way to Emmaus (Luke 24).

The first Christians break bread together and eat their meals with glad and generous hearts (Acts 2). But later, there are communal abuses of the practice of the Lord’s Supper (1 Corinthians 11). One of the most misunderstood concepts in Christian faith and practice, the reference to eating the Lord’s Supper in an unworthy manner referred to the experiences of gluttony and poverty at the common meal: some had too much to eat, others went away hungry. The Christian hope was also shaped by the expectation of a Messiah who would preside over a great banquet (Luke 14).

And so this meal is at the heart of the Christian experience and the community gathers at the table to be fed, and, in the process, to know that we are guests of a generous and providential God.

Meals are also at the center of our relationships with each other. Family meals can take on different connotations: wedding rehearsal dinners, meals to celebrate graduations or birthdays, families who sat down to lunch after a memorial service, and journeys to distant places where we enjoy the local cuisine---it could be a falafel in Israel or barbecue in eastern North Carolina.

As a Christian practice, receiving Holy Communion can also take on different meanings. On World Communion Sunday, we are conscious that we receive this grace with our brothers and sisters in Christ who worship throughout the earth, the one body who partake of the one loaf, and our sense of space is enlarged. On All Saints Sunday, we remember those men and women of faith who have gone before us. Our sense of time is enlarged in the Communion of Saints. These two days give us a glimpse of the richness of the feast. There are always more people on the guest list, more people coming to the table than we might have imagined!

The grace of God is expansive, broad and comprehensive. Charles Wesley’s hymn text conveys this truth:

“O that the world might taste and see the riches of his grace!
The arms of love that compass me would all the world embrace.”

And yet our practice is always at a particular moment in time, in a specific place in the world, in the body of Christ, with a loaf of bread and a cup. The arms of God’s love embrace the whole world, and yet each person is welcomed in the spirit of Charles Wesley’s invitation:

Come sinners to the gospel feast!

And that includes every one of us! Holy Communion is a reminder that God provides grace for us. Jesus teaches us to pray, give us this day our daily bread.

The word daily bread is one that has multiple meanings. It can mean fresh bread, and those listening to Jesus would have been reminded of the gift of bread in the wilderness, manna that was new every morning, and we remember that every time we sing another hymn,

Great is thy faithfulness, great is thy faithfulness
Morning by morning new mercies I see.
All I have needed thy hand has provided.
Great is thy faithfulness, Lord unto me.

That hymn, pointing back to Jesus’ teaching in John 6, that he is the bread of life, which itself had origins in the Passover, is a reminder that God provides grace for us. “Great is thy faithfulness”…”Give us each day fresh bread”, which means, I think, that we are praying for sufficient provisions for each day. None of us can truly secure the future, we cannot build a fortress to keep violent threats away, insulate ourselves from economic shifts, or predict the status of our health next year. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we live one day at a time.

And so we pray, give us this day “fresh bread”, a new experience of the truth that God provides grace for us. Great is thy faithfulness. The meal is also a reminder that God’s grace is available to all. John 6 is the account of the feeding of the 5000, which all began with a boy who had five loaves and two fish. And the simple truth was that God’s grace was not just for a few, not just for the disciples in the boat, but for all: “the arms of love that compass me would all the world embrace!”

Jesus made this point again and again in his teaching, and he modeled this truth—that God’s grace is available to all—in his life. “He eats with sinners”, some murmur under their breath in Luke 15, and so Jesus tells three of his great parables, about a lost coin, a lost sheep, a lost son. The son of man has come to seek and save that which is lost (Luke 19. 10).

In John Wesley’s day some felt they were unworthy to receive communion, and his response was that we are all unworthy to receive any mercy from God, and yet that is the core of the gospel: While we were yet sinners Christ died for us (Romans 5. 8), while we were far off a banquet was being prepared for us. This is, to borrow a phrase of Bishop Schnase, “radical hospitality”, which reminds us of the invitation, "Come sinners to the gospel feast!" God’s grace is available to all.

The meal is also a reminder that the grace given to us now is a foretaste of the banquet which is to come. One of the most reliable interpretations of the teaching of Jesus, “give us this day our daily bread”, is that he is praying, give us this day our bread for tomorrow. This was an anticipation of the great banquet, where disciples would be gathered from the north and the south and the east and the west to sit at the table of the Lord. This is the great homecoming. Homecomings are not about the past, although we do remember. Homecomings are also about the future.

A few years ago I went back to a rural church to preach at a homecoming service. I remembered a couple who had taken Pam and me under their wing, and made that community our community. We shared many meals together at the seafood restaurant in that rural area, eating bread and fish. These were often times of communion, confession, and thanksgiving. They have since passed to the other side, and I look forward to a homecoming with them, to the banquet, the great supper of the Lord.

Again, I think of a moving hymn by Charles Wesley:

Come let us join our friends above who have obtained the prize
and on the eagle wings of love to joys celestial rise.

Many of our friends have passed to the other side and have obtained the prize. And so we pray with Jesus: Give us bread for tomorrow.

Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.

The Christian practice of Holy Communion celebrates the providence of God, the hospitality of Jesus Christ, and the foretaste of his kingdom. As we come to the table, we know that God provides for us; that the grace of Jesus Christ is offered to all people, and that the meal we share here is an anticipation of the banquet that has been prepared for all who will accept the invitation:

Come sinners to the gospel feast, let every soul be Jesus’ guest
You need not one be left behind, for God hath bid all humankind.

Of course, we have not always welcomed everyone. In the history of American Methodist Christianity we recall the exclusion of Richard Allen and Absalom Jones from the fellowship of St. George’s Church in Philadelphia. Allen, a freed slave and an active Methodist, would go on to found the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1816 and serve as its first Bishop. This experience indicates a lack of hospitality that has led to a continued division. The Table of the Lord is a sign of God’s grace but it also stands in judgment upon our failure to offer radical hospitality, and our willingness to settle for divided lives.

And so Holy Communion requires us to struggle with the implications of our union with each another, and our divisions. We pray, each time we share this meal, that the Spirit would make us

“one with Christ,
one with each other,
and one in ministry to all the world.”

To be one with Christ is to be lifted up, with him. And so we “lift up our hearts”. Holy Communion draws us closer to God, through the mediating presence of Jesus Christ. But Holy Communion also draws us closer to one another. In the church that I serve we join hands in prayer to conclude teh service after receiving communion. There are vertical and horizontal dimensions of this meal. This reminds us of the One from whom all blessings flow, and the ones with whom we share these blessings. And so the meal is God’s way of breaking down the barriers and divisions that separate us from Him and from each other, and the means of fulfilling the prayer of Jesus in the gospel lesson for today, that we might be one.

And yet, like the loaves and fish in the basket, the meal nourishes those beyond us: "Make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world." It is an echo of a very elemental prayer I have heard many friends say as you have led in prayer:

Bless this food to our bodies
and us in thy service.

By your spirit make us one… In a polarized and fragmented world, the church of Jesus Christ can be a sign of God’s unity, peace and wholeness. And so we are divided in many ways:

by our income levels and personal experiences,
by our aesthetic tastes and political convictions,
by gender and ethnicity and age,
estranged within families and across neighborhoods.

We are divided perhaps by harm we have done to others and by the awareness of those who have sinned against us. The good news of Jesus Christ is that we are his body, indeed that we are one body. Holy Communion brings us closer to God and to one another. The apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians:

Now in Jesus Christ you who were once far off have been brought near by the blood of Christ. For he is our peace; in his flesh he has made both groups (Jew or Gentile, but in our own time name any two groups that come to mind) he has made both groups into one and broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us. That he might create in himself one new humanity in place of the two, thus making peace, and might reconcile both groups to God in one body through the cross. (Ephesians 2)

Let us pray:

You are a God of miracles.
You transform ordinary bread into the body of Jesus Christ,
everyday wine into his very life poured out for us.
We ask for yet another miracle:

Make us one with Christ,
one with each other,
and one in ministry to all the world…
until Christ comes in final victory
and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Amen.

Source: The United Methodist Hymnal

holy conferencing and holy communion

2011-06-05T07:45:00.000-07:00

Holy Conferencing is rooted in Holy Communion. As a connectional people we struggle with the implications of our union with each another, and our divisions. We pray, each time we share the meal, that the Spirit would make us

one with Christ,
one with each other,
and one in ministry to all the world.

To be one with Christ is to be lifted up, with him. And so we “lift up our hearts”. Holy Communion draws us closer to God, through the mediating presence of Jesus Christ.

But Holy Communion also draws us closer to one another. In our congregation I ask at the conclusion of each service of Holy Communion that we join hands after receiving. There are vertical and horizontal dimensions of the meal. We are reminded of the One from whom all blessings flow, and the ones with whom we share these blessings. And so the meal is God’s way of breaking down the barriers and divisions that separate us from the Lord and each other, and the means of fulfilling the prayer of Jesus that we be one (John 17).

And yet, like the loaves and fish in the basket, the meal nourishes those beyond us: Make us one with Christ, one with each other, and one in ministry to all the world. It is an echo of the most basic and common of prayers: bless this food to our bodies and us in thy service.

Can we pray, with boldness and confidence?

By your spirit make us one…

In a polarized and fragmented world, the church of Jesus Christ can be a sign of God’s unity, peace and wholeness. In a polarized and fragmented church, the meal can be a sign of our life together. It is true that we are divided…

by our income levels and personal experiences,
by our aesthetic tastes and political convictions,
by gender and ethnicity,
by geography and age.

We come to Holy Communion and Holy Conferencing divided perhaps by harm we have done to others and by the awareness of those who have sinned against us.

The good news of Jesus Christ is that we are his body, indeed that we are one body. Holy Communion brings us closer to God and to one another. The apostle Paul wrote to the Ephesians:

Now in Jesus Christ you who were once far off
Have been brought near by the blood of Christ.
For he is our peace;
In his flesh he has made both groups
(Jew or Gentile, but in our own time name any two groups that come to mind)
He has made both groups
Into one and broken down the dividing wall of hostility between us.

That he might create in himself one new humanity
In place of the two,
Thus making peace,
And might reconcile both groups to God
In one body through the cross. (2. 13-16)

Let us pray:

You are a God of miracles.

It is a holy mystery that you transform ordinary bread into the body of Jesus Christ,
And everyday wine into his very life poured out for us.

And so we are bold to ask for yet another miracle:

Make us one with Christ
one with each other,
and one in ministry to all the world,
until Christ comes in final victory
and we feast at his heavenly banquet.

Amen.

the way (john 14. 6)

2011-06-01T11:08:00.000-07:00

I have the skill, I will confess, of getting lost. When I moved to Charlotte eight years ago, after about seventeen years in the Triad, it was disorienting. All these streets names that had variations of Queens and Sharon in them, and everyone else seemed to know exactly where they were headed, but not me. I was lost, and more than one fellow traveler expressed their frustration with my disorientation. Having been here a few years, I realize that I have now become that frustrated person! But that is another story!

I actually had the skill of getting lost long before I came to Charlotte. Years ago I was serving a group of churches way out in the country. Early on someone would say to me, “you should visit Miss Irma”. Then another person would mention, in passing, “you really ought to go see Miss Irma”. So I would ask: “How do I get to Miss Irma’s house?” And I remember one man responding to the question like this: “You pass the oak tree near where the red barn used to be…”

Many of us have the skill of getting lost. Maybe we just need good directions. “We don’t know where we are going…how can we know the way?”

The disciples, it seemed, had the skill of getting lost too. They were asking for directions. Jesus had given them a promise: I go to prepare a place for you. He has shared the Passover meal with them, and washed their feet. He has experienced the betrayal of Judas and commanded them to love one another. And now he gives them a promise: I go to prepare a place for you. The place, according to John, is in the presence of the Father, in heaven.

But how will they get there? They are asking for directions. Jesus says, “ I am the way, the truth and the life”. We sometimes interpret this verse in an intellectual way----we imagine that Jesus is actually saying, “I am the truth, the way and the life.” But this is not what he says. He says, “I am the way” first, which means, he is calling us to follow him, to be his students, to learn from him. In the modern world to learn from a master teacher is to agree to a body of material content, usually what we need to know to pass an examination. But in the ancient world it was different: There is a saying in the Mishnah, a source of Jewish teaching: “may you be covered in the dust of your rabbi”. Rabbis taught as they walked around, and their students, their disciples, followed them. As the rabbis walked and talked they would kick up the dust as they made their points. By the end of a day, their disciples would be covered with the dust of their rabbis.

To follow Jesus is to cover the ground that he covered. Do you ever recall saying to your children, when they were very small, “stay close to me.” It is similar: to stay close to Jesus is to be on the way that he is going.

That way is the journey, but we do sometimes get fixated on the destination. And so we read this verse, John 14. 6., one that many of us know well, and we go all the way to the endpoint, the destination. Some have read it as a passage about who will or will not be in heaven. As with all verses of scripture we know well, it requires a careful reading: Jesus says, I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

Christians believe that God is Trinitarian, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. We do come to the Father through the Son. Lesslie Newbigin, the missionary and theologian, wrote:

"We do not know the destination. We have no map of what lies beyond the curtain, though theologians---and others---often use language to suggest that we have. We do not know the limits of the possibilities for our personal lives or for the life of the world. We do not know, and cannot know, all that God has prepared for those who love him. It is beyond the highest power of our imagination (1 Corinthians 2. 9)."We do not know the destination; but we do know the way. That is the heart of the matter…”

Jesus is the way. He says, of himself, “I am the way.” We are often too focused on outcomes, end results, goals, destinations. We do often give less attention to the process, to the preparations, to journey. We give more attention to where we are going than the way we get there.

I have always enjoyed hiking, and one of my favorite memories is hiking Mt. LeConte, in the mountains of Eastern Tennessee. It is only a few feet less in altitude than Mount Mitchell, the highest peak east of the Mississippi river. It is tempting to be preoccupied with what you experience on the top of LeConte: they prepare a delicious meal for you, the vistas in every direction are stunning, the air is cool and clear, and the sunset is a wonder to behold.

But there is more, much more to LeConte, than getting to the top. What also matters is the way up there. There are four or five routes to the top; one is long and winding, another is quicker, with a steeper incline. So you choose a particular trail, based on your needs, the time you have, your physical capacity. It matters how you get there, and it matters who you are walking with, your traveling companions. As you walk you get to know them, and they come to know you. If you can pay attention, you will discover that along the way the vegetation changes, the ferns, the mountain laurel, the rhododendron. You may see a small bear. Along the way you will need to stop to drink some cold water, or else you will become dehydrated. And unless you hike a great deal, you will need to take care of a blister that is likely to develop. You will ignore the blister at your own peril!

The place, at the top, is important. But the way comes first. I go to prepare a place for you, Jesus says. We do not know where you are going, the disciples comment. How can we know the way? Jesus says, “I am the way.” Now, this verse requires out interpretation. There was a community, in the lifetime of Jesus, that saw itself as “the way.” We learned a great deal about this community, Qumran, in the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. They saw themselves as the ideal and only “way” a person lived a life that was pleasing and obedient to God. The implication was that anyone outside their community was not a part of “the way”; anyone outside their community was living a life that was not pleasing to God, that was in fact disobedient to God.

So it is significant that Jesus says, of himself, “I am the way.” Christians have always struggled with this, and we must always be reminded of this statement of his: our tradition, our denomination, our way of worshipping and serving and believing is never “the way.” Now the United Methodist Church is my home and I am grateful for it, but it is never true to scripture to say, “if you are not a part of my denomination, you are not really a Christian”….but that message sometimes gets communicated!

Jesus is the way, and insofar as we are following him, as closely as possible, we are on the way with him.

Another issue arises, this one more personal. Sometimes we attach out understanding of what it means to be a Christian to the way we see another person living it out: perhaps a Christian preacher or teacher or servant with some celebrity or extreme dedication, and we try to emulate them. But for one reason or another, this fails: you want to be Mother Teresa, but you actually have two or three children who need you, and so you can’t pick up and move to India; you want to be a missionary but you actually have a mortgage and you are putting your son or daughter through college, or helping an aging parent. You would love to move the crowds with your testimony like Billy Graham, but there is that small matter of a fear of public speaking.

I think we fall in step with Jesus wherever we are, and we become his traveling companion, and he ours. And just as Jesus walked the roads of Capernaum and Emmaus and Jerusalem and Nazareth, we walk on our particular routes that take us to our appointed places. That is the way we follow Jesus.

There is yet another complexity in this verse, John 14. 6: it has been understood to say that only those who confess Jesus as Lord will be in heaven, in the house with many rooms, or mansions, as the King James translated it. What do we make of this?

When Will Willimon was here in the spring he reflected on another saying of Jesus recorded in John’s Gospel: “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself”. He used this image: “Like a great magnet that indiscriminately picks up all kinds of metallic trash, Jesus says that when he is lifted up, he will extravagantly draw all to himself.”

Early in John’s Gospel we are told in fact been told that Jesus is the light that lightens every man and woman. So who will inhabit those many mansions? If we read the gospels closely, we are not inclined to set limits on what God cannot or cannot do, whom Jesus can or cannot save. The question of who will be in heaven is one that is really beyond our grasp, only God knows. It is like describing a mountain peak we have actually never seen. But what have we seen? We have seen Jesus, who is the way, the sufficient guide to that place.

I want you to think about Jesus today not as an abstract idea or name that you have learned, the right answer that will get you into heaven, you get that clear in your mind and you say it and you pass the test. I want you to think about Jesus today as the way, he is the way from God to us and from us to God, he is the traveling companion who helps us to consider the lilies of the field, who teaches us to live one day at a time, who comes not to condemn us but to set us free, who opens our blind eyes, who commands us to take up the cross.

Not everyone says “yes” to the invitation to follow Jesus. Indeed, in the words of Robert Frost, who said, “I took the road less traveled by…”, not everyone becomes his disciple. But for those who say yes to his invitation, he is the way, the truth and the life.

The journey is just as important as the destination. In this season of graduations, we often gather for the ceremony, we hear the commencement speaker, we take a picture with our Smartphone to capture the moment. The outcome----the degree, the completion----is important. But if you are a parent, sitting there, you are also thinking about the journey, the sacrifices, the detours, the failures, the discipline that allowed you to take that next step and then another one and then another one.

To climb the mountain with Jesus is the great adventure of this life. In the words of one of the saints, Catherine:

“All the way to heaven is heaven, because he said, I am the way.”

Sources: Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way. Lesslie Newbigin, The Light Has Come. William Willimon, Why Jesus?

the 23rd psalm

2011-05-20T10:42:00.000-07:00

Jesus was Jewish and he read and prayed the scriptures of his tradition, and especially, it seems, the Psalms. In John 10, we encounter the teaching of Jesus and the way he identified himself: “I am the good shepherd.” In Eugene Peterson’s translation of this passage, in The Message, Jesus defines the mission of the shepherd: “I came so they can have real and eternal life, more and better life than they ever dreamed of.”

A famous preacher, William Sloane Coffin, once noted that just as there is finally only one hymn, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”, there is only one Psalm, the 23rd. Perhaps you would choose a different hymn, but most likely the Psalm that is on the hearts and lips of most believers is the 23rd Psalm: “The Lord is My Shepherd”.

As an aside, 2011 is also the 400th anniversary of the King James Version of the Bible. I was called by a reporter who was developing a story about the King James Version, and he asked how often I used this version. I have learned to be very careful about whatever I say to a reporter, but what I realized, in our conversation, is that the King James is most meaningful to me, now, in its translation of the Psalms. And I cannot think of this particular psalm apart from the King James Version.

Why does this Psalm speak to us, why do its words go down into the deepest places in our hearts, why does it continue to sing of God’s presence to us? I am not sure, but I know that there is a power in this psalm. It is one of the passages of scripture that is most often read at memorial services, and most often it can be read, recited and shared by those present from memory. There is something about this brief writing that resonates within us, at our time of greatest need. It is profound.

But the 23rd Psalm speaks of more than death; it also speaks of life, and especially of the One who is the Lord of life, the Good Shepherd (John 10). It begins: “The Lord is my shepherd”. It is one of those ancient phrases that no longer connect with the way most of us live---most of us, and much of the world’s population has moved to the city---but it continues to have relevance.

“The Lord is my shepherd” carries with it an important implication: God provides for us. We know this. But sometimes we forget. Those who prayed these psalms remembered their history: in forty years of wandering in the wilderness, Israel lacked nothing. God provided enough each day for that day.

Do we know what life will be like tomorrow? No. But we know that there are provisions for today. The Lord, our shepherd, will see to that. Scholars teach us that the term shepherd was often a reference to royalty, and the rod and the staff were the signs of office. Rulers, kings are supposed to shepherd and care for their people. Because the Lord is our shepherd, we have all that we need. God provides.

In the worship services we celebrate the sacraments of the Holy Communion and Baptism. When we come forward to receive the bread and the cup, we are reminded again, in a tangible way, that God will sustain us, just as an ordinary meal gives us the strength to make it through a day’s work. When a child is baptized, the water is a reminder of God’s life in the midst of death, of refreshment and renewal, and our prayer is that this child will be surrounded by all of the resources that she or he will need in life.

The Lord is my shepherd. God provides for us.

There is a second affirmation: Thou art with me. We need to know that we are not alone in this life’s journey. It helps to sense that someone walks beside us, even, at times, in the words of the familiar “footprints in the sand” saying, that someone carries us. And this psalm voices that truth. Do you hear it? It teaches us that:

Even in the dangerous places, we are not alone
Even in the valley of the shadow of death, we are not alone
Even as we are being carted into surgery, we are not alone
Even as we are taking that long walk to the graveside, we are not alone
Even as we watch the slow deterioration of a loved one’s faculties, we are not alone
Even as we send our children away to school, we are not alone
Even as we face economic uncertainty, we are not alone
Even as we get used to life in a new place, we are not alone.

We can pray with Christians and Jews throughout the ages: Thou art with me.

A third affirmation: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies. Here we see a shift in the psalm: God is no longer the shepherd to the sheep. God is now the Host, and we are the guests. Those hearing and praying this psalm would have known about the desert rule of hospitality. If I were in danger, and enemies were pursuing me, I would come to your door, and according to the desert rule of hospitality, you would be required to take me in for two nights and a day in between, and my enemies would have to stay outside the circle of light cast by the fire.

The Lord prepares a table for us in the presence of our enemies. The Lord provides a place of safety. Sometimes I will take a few minutes and watch the evening news, maybe at eleven o’clock. The clear message---the world is not a safe place. The world is often a dangerous place: Abuse and addiction, rage and robbery, terrorism and torture. And the setting can be our neighborhood or a nation across the planet.

In a dangerous world, people search for sanctuary.

At its best, a Christian church is a sanctuary: it is a place where people are treated with dignity. In the early Methodist movement, two hundred and fifty years ago, members agreed to follow three simple rules, which began with “first, do no harm”. Why? Because every person is created in the image of God.

And so we search for sanctuary in order to find God. We are also looking for a community that embodies the qualities of the Shepherd who watches over, protects, provides for, creates a safe place for those under his care.

Is the church always a safe place? Is the church always a sanctuary? No. And here the media, with laser-like focus, locates our faults, our sins, saying, in effect, “you are not who you proclaim yourself to be” when you abuse children or mirror the political divisions or judge your neighbor.

In life we will experience stress, adversity, danger. And so we are given these words:

Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.

A fourth and final affirmation: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever”. The 23rd Psalm is a psalm about our destiny. There is a truism about small groups that says that we feel most confident and least anxious when we know where we are going. The psalmist cries out: “I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever”. Now the “house of the Lord” has several meanings: for those who originally prayed this psalm, it meant the temple, in Jerusalem. I have stood at the wall of that temple. It is the sacred place that our chancel choir so often sings about in their setting of the 84th Psalm, “How Lovely Is Thy Dwelling Place”.

Most of us will never journey to the temple in Jerusalem, but we are drawn to some other holy place: it could be in the natural world---the coast, or the mountains; it could be an old home place, where you grew up; it could be here, in this sanctuary.

This is the house of the Lord.

It is where we come, again and again, to repair some brokenness in our lives,
it where we come, again and again, to renew some deficit of energy or spirit,
it is where we come, again and again, to listen for some voice that will guide our feet,
it is where we come, again and again, to be still and know that he is God.

But “house of the Lord” carries an additional meaning for the Christian who prays it: God has a destiny for us, echoed in the words of Jesus, “I go to prepare a place for you” (see John 14. 1-3)---I will actually preach about that phrase next Sunday. The shepherd guides us safely to a home not made with hands, whose builder and maker is God. The author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote:

“By faith Abraham obeyed when he was called to set out for a place that he was to receive as an inheritance; and he set out, not knowing where he was going. By faith he stayed for a time in the land that he had been promised…For he looked to that city that has foundations, whose architect and builder is God” (11. 8-10).

What does this Psalm say to us? Some of us listen to the psalm and we are wondering about how we are going to find the resources—material, spiritual, financial, psychological—to make it through the next week. And if we find ourselves in that place we can believe the good news: The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.

Some of us listen to the psalm, and we sense that we are all alone in the world. Maybe we feel all alone in our homes, all alone in our struggles, without a sense that we truly matter to any other person. And if we find ourselves in that place we can believe the good news: Thou art with me, thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me.

Some of us are gripped by a fear that will not go away, and we need to draw a circle around ourselves or our families or those we love that will keep out violence or drugs or danger or stress. If we find ourselves in this place we can believe the good news: Thou preparest a table for me in the presence of mine enemies.

And some of us are anxious about the future, and we have lived long enough to know that there is more to life than this life, that heaven is a reality for which we pray and to which we find ourselves being drawn. And if we discover ourselves in this place, we can believe the good news: I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever.

If there are a few core teachings in our faith, and here I am thinking of the Lord’ s Prayer and the Beatitudes, surely the 23rd Psalm is one of them. It was formational for Jesus and it can be formational for each of us. It was his way and it is our way to “real and eternal life, more life and a better life than we have ever dreamed of.”

Lesslie Newbigin on John 14. 6

2011-05-19T11:03:00.000-07:00

"We do not know the destination. We have no map of what lies beyond the curtain, though theologians---and others---often use language to suggest that we have. We do not know the limits of the possibilities for our personal lives or for the life of the world. We do not know, and cannot know, all that God has prepared for those who love him. It is beyond the highest power of our imagination (1 Corinthians 2. 9).

"We do not know the destination; but we do know the way. That is the heart of the matter...He himself is the way, and therefore it is only by being made a part of his humanity that we are on the way and know that we are not lost even though we do not see the destination…To follow this way is, in fact, the only way to the Father. This is not to say that God has left no witness to himself in the rest of the life of the world. We have in fact been told that Jesus is the light that lightens every man and woman. What is being said here, as in the whole of the Gospel, is that Jesus is in fact the presence of God’s truth and God’s life in the world, and to know the Father means to follow the way which Jesus is, and which he has opened through the curtain of his living, his dying, and his rising from the dead.

"The word “God” has had and still has an almost infinite number of meanings. Here we are invited to accept the affirmation that there is but one way to come to the living God and know him as Father, and that is by being made one with this meek and humble man who goes to the cross carrying the sin of the world.”

The Light Has Come (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1982), pages 182-183

change the world

2011-05-14T06:45:00.001-07:00

This weekend United Methodists across the planet are coming together around a common purpose: to change the world. This initiative, whose origins are in the visionary leadership of United Methodist Communications (UMCOM) and Larry Hollon, is both denominational and grassroots. It is an example of how a denomination can empower ministry and mission at the local level. And it is a movement that calls forth the gifts of ordinary Christians and connects them with human hurts and hopes.

Last fall a number of our leaders traveled to the Church of the Resurrection in Kansas City to learn from Adam Hamilton and that extraordinary group of people. We had been focusing on our strengths in a strategic planning process which used Appreciative Inquiry as a theoretical framework. We were also intrigued by their model of seeing Christmas Eve as a beginning, rather than an ending, and as a way to help people get started in the Christian life (or at least to invite them back for a series that matched a need or interest).

We connected that congregation's strategy (seeing Christmas Eve as a beginning for new people) with the Change the World initiative and our own congregation's strengths. Providence UMC is large church, though not a mega-church. Among our strengths are risk-taking mission and service, to use the language of Bishop Robert Schnase. We have also noticed that many of our newest members have been attracted to us for missional reasons: how we are present in our own community, especially the homeless, and how we have been engaged with the needs of Haiti.

And so we made the decision to have "Change the World" as our Christmas Eve focus. I reflected on Howard Thurman's moving prayer/poem, "The Work of Christmas". We talked about Christmas as a time of new birth, new life and new creation, not only for us but for all people. We held candlelight in our hands and imagined a world illumined by the presence and people of God. We remembered the truth and the ongoing imperative of the incarnation.

We had planned a six week series, in January and early February, around the question, "How can you change the world?" We began with a study of the Beatitudes (Matthew 5), and encouraged individuals to read through the Sermon on the Mount during these weeks. I remembered the title of a book: "they like Jesus, but not the church." We focused on Jesus.

We then presented a different topic each week, related to risk-taking mission and service: Jim Gulley of the United Methodist Church and Lauren James, one of our members and a staff person with UMCOR, talked about Haiti: practical needs and hands-on testimonies of help and healing. A friend in our community talked about racial reconciliation; she and I had met at Duke Divinity School's Center for Reconciliation the spring before, and an African-American member of our congregation also shared. One of our staff members and a leader in the community talked about standing alongside the working poor in our community as they moved toward permanent housing. A missionary couple reflected on the reality of human trafficking in southeast Asia and, increasingly, in the United States. And one of our leaders led a session on hunger in our city, and the church's role in providing food.

These sessions were educational, in that they were descriptive of present realities in our world, in relation to human needs and what God was already doing through the church. We wanted to help people move beyond a passive perspective (watching the poor on television or seeing them as statistics) to an active engagement (both in terms of practice and policy). At times the conversations had an edge to them, as we recognized our own complicity in a world that privileges some and not others.

The theme, Change the World, tapped into a deep calling that many Christians sense: to make a difference, to share their faith in tangible ways, to exercise their gifts, passions and expertise. Hundreds of our members have been in relationships with homeless men and women in our community, ranging from a shelter that exists within our church to a public/private partnership with homeless youth aging out of foster care. Over one hundred of our members have made the journey to Haiti, and a number of Haitians have made the corresponding pilgrimage to us; there has been a mutual sharing of gifts in the development of a clinic, a school and a microcredit enterprise.

We know that we have not arrived, as a church; in Howard Thurman's words, "The Work of Christmas" goes on. In particular, we could do a great deal more in relation to the public schools of our city; we would rather serve the poor, at times, than have them attend our schools, or attend theirs. But God is with us, and God is not finished with us, or the world.

I am grateful for this initiative----to change the world. I am proud, in this particular moment, to be a United Methodist. At our best, we are engaged with the world, and we have been since Wesley's establishment of the Kingswood Schools in 18th century England. A connectional church is ideally positioned to join in God's dream of changing the world. When the focus is beyond us, all of our resources----and I have mentioned here a mega-church, a theological school, and two general agencies----can be channeled toward a common cause--the beloved community.

Change the World is a day, a weekend, an event, and for this I give thanks. But I also want you to reflect on how today, this weekend, might also be a beginning. In this way we might become disciples of Jesus Christ, for the transformation of the world.

the discovery of faith: a confirmation sermon (john 20)

2011-05-10T11:15:00.000-07:00

It was evening on the first day of the week, which is to say, it was still Sunday, it was still Easter. No one had removed the flowers, the brass musicians had not yet left, the butterflies are still in the air. The disciples were still singing “Christ the Lord is Risen Today”. They were still singing “Up From The Grave He Arose”. They were still singing “Thine Be The Glory, Risen Conquering Son.”

Last Sunday we talked about what it meant to be the Easter people. One implication is that we have passed from fear to joy. The angel said, to the women at the tomb, “Do not be afraid.” And yet, later that day they have locked themselves inside the house, for fear of the Jewish authorities. Why were they afraid? Some think the Jewish authorities might have sent the police to persecute them, as had been the experience of Jesus. Others wonder if might have been accused of removing the body of Jesus. We don’t know the precise cause of the fear, but it was real.

The good news is that the risen Lord comes to stand among them, and says, “peace be with you.” He will say these words, “peace be with you”, three times (verses 19, 21, 26). Some see a parallel with the three times that Peter denies that he is a disciple of Jesus, earlier in the gospels.

Then Jesus shows them his hands and his side. The resurrection does not replace the crucifixion. Easter does erase the memory of Good Friday. And here good theology has implications for our everyday lives: faithful Christians will endure sufferings, and they will know the peace that surpasses understanding, evening as they know their woundedness. The victory that Jesus wins on the cross does not eliminate the battle scars. The risen Lord shows the disciples his hands and his side, and they rejoice.

So we are still talking about Easter, one week later. John the evangelist was teaching us that Easter is not a moment in time, not something we experience and check off the list, been there, done that. It is the way God changes the world, and how we pass from darkness to light, fear to joy, hatred to love, anxiety to peace.

The story of Jesus, the empty tomb, the women who discover it, their witness, flows into a gathering of his disciples later that day. This was the very ground of our hope, and the first followers of Jesus passed this remembrance on so that it would be preserved and celebrated. But the church remembered this story, and continues to tell it, for another reason, and that was the experience of Thomas.

The Sunday following Easter is sometimes called “low Sunday”. On Easter Sunday you can’t get a seat; on the Sunday after Easter there are often many seats to choose from! In the rhythm of life among God’s people, it is the calm after the storm. In the lectionary, a three year cycle of reading through the whole Bible, this passage from John, and the story of Thomas, is always the gospel for the Sunday following Easter.

Over the years I have come to love this Sunday, because it was here that I became acquainted with this disciple named Thomas. In the Eastern Church this day is sometimes referred to as St. Thomas Sunday, in relation to the gospel reading. The tradition has Thomas taking the gospel to India, in the first century, after the resurrection. Of course the stereotype among many of us is of “doubting Thomas”, but our Orthodox friends choose instead to remember his confession of faith (“my Lord and my God”). Earlier in John’s gospel, Thomas had asked Jesus, upon his impending departure, “We do not know where you are going? How can we know the way?” And Jesus had responded, “I am the way, the truth and the life.”

Thomas is the one who is in conversation with Jesus about the faith, and included in that faith is struggle and doubt. If the women are the first evangelists, we might designate Thomas as the first seeker! Thankfully, the disciples allowed Thomas his quest. And in his skepticism he represents all of us who come to faith and continue in faith with perseverance and struggle.

We make our way forward in the pilgrimage as we search for assurance, some basis for faith and hope. In the midst of perseverance, struggle and doubt, we look for signs. John the Evangelist was a master at telling us about the good news through the signs of Jesus: turning water into wine, feeding the hungry multitudes, giving sight to the blind. Jesus is the word, but the word becomes flesh, something we can sense. Thomas is located near the source of a long tradition of seekers, those looking for signs. And thus his honest affirmation of faith: “I will not believe unless I see in his hands the nail prints, and place my finger in his wounds”. In other words, he wants to experience it himself.

I am delighted that we are reading the story of Thomas on a day when we confirm a new group of young people into our church, on the day in which they will make their professions of faith and become members of this body. I am grateful to Teresa Dunn and the adult leaders in our youth ministry, who have mentored them. Bill Jeffries and have I met with all of the young people over the past few weeks and listened to them talk about their faith. In these personal conversations we asked questions, they answered some of the questions, and they asked their own questions. Each year I have also gone to the confirmation retreat at Lake Junaluska, and in one of the sessions, usually an hour or two, I have attempted to answer their questions: what happens after we die? What about my Jewish friend? Is Jesus the only way? How does creation relate to evolution?

Really easy questions to answer…

I have also known that many of these students have had more than their share of life experience: the illness of parents, the death of friends, seeing violence first hand. They are seeking something, searching for something.

It is always an experience that fills me with hope about the future…not that these are such wonderful young people, although they are…but hope in the possibility that they are coming to believe all of this, some of them are skeptics, and in the coming years they will test all of this out, and ask the questions of Thomas, in their own ways: “is this true? Is this real?”

Thomas had heard others talking about all of this, but he said, “I will not believe unless I see in his hands the nail prints, and place my finger in his wounds.” In other words, Thomas was asking, “is this true? Is this real?”

Many have suggested that we have moved from a modern to a post-modern world. In a modern world we can argued into the truth, debated into belief in a truth. It is a mostly rational process. But in a post-modern world, truth is different. We have to experience truth. It must come to life. Many are also suggesting that post-modernism is closer to the ancient world than modernism. The big truth in John’s gospel, from the very beginning, was that the word had become flesh, and lived among us, that God is real and alive, not the most brilliant and abstract theory of the universe but flesh and blood, a real presence among us. This is announced in the very first words of John’ s Gospel, the word became flesh, and it is confirmed at the very end, where Thomas says, in so many words, the word must become flesh. I will not believe unless I see in his hands the nail prints, and place my finger in his wounds.”

When I first began to hear the story of Thomas, at about the age of these confirmands, we were critical of him, but I know now that we are more like Thomas than we realize: as Christians, we are always trying to connect our faith with our experience. Someone has said that we remember 20% of what we are told but 80% of what we discover for ourselves.

It is essential that we confess that Easter is more than positive thinking or the thrill of victory, because we left the sanctuary last Sunday with our same griefs, our same doubts, our same struggles, right? After the resurrection, we look for the signs, by faith. Maybe we no longer hear the strong and clear soprano voices singing the alleluia descants, soaring above it all. The enthusiasm wanes, the crowds disperse, life goes on. On a “low Sunday” if we are listening, we might recall the words of Thomas: “We do not know where you (Christ), and thus, by extension, where we, where all of this is going? How can we know the way?”

The Risen Jesus shows them his hands and his side. I communicated this week with a friend, Kelly, a classmate of Pam and mine in Divinity School and a pastor in north Alabama. Years ago a tornado passed through their church in Goshen, Alabama on Palm Sunday. Twenty members of the worshipping congregation were killed that morning, among them their four year old daughter, Hannah. I asked her this week how we might help their community, passing through the storm again and she gave me a couple of practical ideas. I thought again about how all of this happened and happens right in the midst of Easter, and yet that is precisely the point. The resurrection does not replace the crucifixion, it incorporates it. He stands among us and offers us the gift of peace. The gospel for today has helped me to reflect on all of this.

On this day we also think closely about how the faith is passed on from generation to generation. I love the words of the great British Methodist composer of hymns, Fred Pratt Green:

The church of Christ in every age
Beset by change but Spirit led,
Must claim and test its heritage
And keep on rising from the dead. (589, UMH)

These young people are going to grow up, and if the past is any predictor of the future, they are going to pass through a few storms. This faith that we are all discovering together will be tested in the crucible of their lives. And they are going to have to keep exploring, keep questioning, and they will have to keep professing their faith. They are going to want to see this with their eyes and touch this with their hands, in order to know if it is true, if it is real. If they are prone to skepticism, I hope they will remember their older brother, Thomas, who speaks for all of us who come to faith and continue in faith with perseverance and struggle.

we are the easter people

2011-04-24T07:32:00.000-07:00

The great claim of this day is that this story matters more than anything in the world, and that it is the truth. And it is not only a truth about someone else, about a person who lived 2000 years ago; it is also a truth about us. It is the truth, but as Jesus said, it is also the way and the life. To be a follower of Jesus is not first and foremost to believe a set of truths: it is, before any of that, to die and rise with him.

This event was and is at the center of the Christian movement; without the resurrection, we would not have been that interested in a Galilean Jew named Jesus. Without Easter, there would be no Christmas oratorios or pageants. If Jesus had not been raised from the dead, we would be about as familiar with his teachings as we are with the teachings of Josephus. Josephus was a Jewish historian who lived in the first century. Have you ever heard of Josephus?

And yet this event is more than a historical occurrence; from the earliest letters of Paul, the first writings in the New Testament, to the gospels in all of their detail, to the transformed lives of the second and third generation followers of Jesus, it mattered not only that this happened, once, but that it continued to happen, indeed that it continues to happen.

And so, on Easter Sunday, we make the bold claim not only that this is true, that this is real, but that it matters. “Because I live”, Jesus says, “you will live also.” On Easter Sunday we make the bold claim that we are the Easter people.

What does such a statement imply?

First, Easter people have passed from darkness to light.

On Friday evening many of us sat in the darkness and listened to the last words of Jesus, from the cross. The environment of this sanctuary corresponded to the details of Good Friday—darkness over the whole land. The book was closed, the sound reminding us of the sealing of the tomb, the finality of death, and the dying of the light.

Matthew tells us that the women are walking just as the dawn was breaking, early in the morning, to see the tomb. Mark’s gospel, the earliest, tells us that they are going to anoint the body, but here they are simply going to the place. Suddenly there is an appearance of an angel, a messenger of the Lord, who is dazzling, like lightning, with clothing as white as snow.

The meaning of it is not that morning naturally follows night. This is the inbreaking of God, the shock and surprise of light in the midst of darkness, a gift that comes from beyond us. We don’t create the light or will it into being; it is always grace, God the creator is still speaking a word, “let there be light” and there is light.

Second, Easter people have passed from fear to joy.

In the resurrection we are given an additional gift. Forces from beyond us liberate us from slavery and take us into a new world. We move from being constricted to being set free. We replace a God whom we fear with a God in whom we rejoice. This is portrayed vividly in the angel, the messenger, who removes the stone and sits on it. We do not fear death. As the hymn expresses it:

The strife is o’er, the battle done
the victory of life is won
the song of triumph has begun
alleluia.

And so Easter people have passed from fear to joy. I love Frederick Buechner’s comment about joy:

“God created us in joy and created us for joy, and in the long run not all the darkness in the world and in ourselves can finally separate us from that joy, because whatever else it means to say that God created us in his image, I think it means that even when we cannot believe in him, even when we feel most spiritually bankrupt and deserted by him, his mark is deep within us. We have God’s joy in our blood.”

Because I live, you will live also. We have passed from darkness to light, from fear to joy. God wants to change us. This is not subtle, gradual. It is transformational, mind-altering, heart breaking.
We are the Easter people.

Third, Easter people have passed from hatred to love.

If you have lived through the events of Holy Week: the betrayal of Jesus by Judas, the denial of Jesus by Peter, the abandonment of Jesus by all of his disciples, the rejection of Jesus by the religious leaders and the punishment of Jesus by the political authorities, you will know the wounds and scars were deep, and indeed they led to his death by torture, on a cross, an act of excruciating physical pain and utter public humiliation. And so it is remarkable that in Matthew 28. 10 Jesus speaks to the women who want to worship him and says, “Do not be afraid, go and tell my brothers to go to Galilee; there they will see me”.

The resurrection is the power of the gospel to make all things new, to transform bitterness into forgiveness and hatred into love. Go and tell those who betrayed me…no. Go and tell those who denied that they knew me…no. Go and tell those who abandoned me….no. Go and tell my brothers to meet me!

So what do you and I do with something like that? We are not in denial about any of this. Easter is not about the denial of death. Death is real. Betrayal is real. Abandonment is real. Sin is real. I am talking about more than positive thinking. I am talking about faith in a God who overcomes sin, death, betrayal, abandonment, evil, injustice.

If we are Easter people, we have passed from hatred to love. The resurrection is not only the truth, it is also the way and the life. These are the actions of God in us and for us and through us. In one sense this is already accomplished: “love’s redeeming work is done”. In another, the resurrection continues to happen. We not only believe in the resurrection, we live it.

So what if Easter is true? What if all of this is true? I know that this can be a challenge, even for people of faith. In The Brothers Karamazov, a woman has an encounter with Father Zossima, in which she acknowledges that she is unable to believe in the resurrection. She believes in God, but not eternity, immortality, life after death. And so she does what any rational person does: she asks for a proof.

Father Zossima responds, “one cannot prove anything here, but it is possible to be convinced.”
“How, by what?”, she asks.

“By the experience of active love. Try to love your neighbors actively... The more you succeed in loving, the more you’ll be convinced of the existence of God and the immortality of your soul.” (56)
So it is not that if you believe in the right things, it will change you. If you love, you will be transformed, and it will become easier to believe in the resurrection.

A few years ago I met a physician and preacher in the British Methodist Church named Reginald Mallett. Dr. Mallett would come to the United States each year to speak in churches and at conferences. I heard him tell of an experience, years ago now, which he had heard at a funeral given by an Irish minister at the death of his 38 year old daughter. I have shared with you one year on All Saints one year, but it is an Easter story as well. It is a vivid witness to the passage undertaken by the Easter people.

When I came to this city, the Irish minister said, I discovered that it was divided by the river that separated two groups of people. On this side of the river we were Protestants. On the other side of the river they were Catholics. And we on this side of the river had nothing to do with those on the other side of the river.

And then God sent into our home a little girl, and as she grew up she went to school on the other side of the river. She made friends with people on the other side of the river. She brought them home and we met them and we came to love them.

As she grew older she brought home a fine young man who lived on the other side of the river. They married, and they went to live on the other side of the river. They had three children, our grandchildren, he said, and they lived on the other side of the river.

And I came to see that there was more of my heart on the other side of the river than there was on this side of the river.

The Irish minister said, referring to his deceased daughter, now my little girl has done it again. She has crossed another river, and I have to tell you, that my heart is no longer here. It is on the other side of the river.

I have reached the stage in life, and I dare say many of you are there, where I have as many friends on the other side of the river as I have on this side of the river.

He is not here. He has been raised. He is going ahead of you.

And so we are in process, in motion, passing from darkness to light, from fear to joy, from hatred to love. We are the Easter people. We are the people of hope.

He goes ahead of us, and to make our way to the other side of the river requires that we die and rise with Christ, in baptism and in faith. A few weeks ago many of us gathered in this sanctuary and received the ashes on our foreheads, a symbol of death. We remembered that the earliest churches saw these forty days as a time of preparation for baptism. The apostle Paul writes,

Do you not know that all who were baptized into Christ were baptized into his death?
Therefore we were buried together with him through baptism into his death,
so that just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the father,
we too can walk in newness of life.
If we have died with Christ, we have faith that we will also live with him.

Maybe you are here this morning and the struggle in your own life is between darkness and light: there is sin that separates you from God and from God’s dream for your future.

So…if the stone has been rolled away, are you ready to walk out of the tomb?

Maybe you are here this morning and the struggle in your life is between fear and joy: you have been paralyzed by some damaging, traumatic or scarring experience.

If death has been swallowed up in victory, are you willing to rejoice?

Maybe you are here this morning and the struggle in your life is between hatred and love: there is some relationship, some history, some prejudice.

And so if Jesus can call his betrayers brothers, are you willing to actively love others, to live in the resurrection?

The great claim of this day is that this story matters more than anything in the world, and that it is the truth. And it is not only a truth about someone else, about a person who lived 2000 years ago; it is also a truth about us.

We are the Easter people.

Sources: Kennon Callahan's Easter affirmation and Reginald Mallett's remembrance of the Irish minister's eulogy. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

he descended into hell (holy saturday)

2011-04-23T04:30:00.000-07:00

The Apostles' Creed affirms that Jesus was "crucified, died and was buried" and then "he descended into hell". On this day, between Good Friday (his death) and Easter (his resurrection) we take a moment to imagine his descent into death and hell, and thus the depths of his love for us. The theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar writes, about the descent into hell, that "Christ disturbs the absolute loneliness striven for by the sinner: the sinner who wants to be damned, apart from God, finds God again in his loneliness, but God, in the absolute weakness of his love...enters into solidarity with those damning themselves".

We resist God. But God comes to us, descends to us, even in the very darkest places in our lives. The last words of Romans 8 (The Message) are helpful:

I'm absolutely convinced that nothing---
nothing living or dead,
angelic or demonic,
today or tomorrow,
high or low,
thinkable or unthinkable,
---absolutely nothing can get between us and God's love
because of the way that Jesus the Master has embraced us.

victim divine

2011-04-22T08:25:00.000-07:00

A few years ago the United Methodist Church published a supplement to the Hymnal entitled The Faith We Sing. It includes praise choruses (“How Majestic Is Your Name”), gospel songs (“The Lily of the Valley”), and more recent contributions that have been used widely in various communities within the larger church (“I Was There To Hear Your Borning Cry”, “Sing Alleluia To The Lord”).

Included in this volume is a Charles Wesley text entitled “Victim Divine”. This Eucharistic hymn is based on Hebrews 10. 12-22, and upon first listening it is unusual by out current standards: there is no repetition of text; there is within the hymn a complexity of design in the text’s movement from beginning to end, a complexity that requires attention of the mind; and the hymn is multi-sensory (an attribute often given to contemporary or alternative worship). “Victim Divine” is also deeply scriptural, almost a commentary on the Hebrews text, and it is profoundly doctrinal, in that it wrestles with beliefs about God and Jesus Christ, the meaning of salvation and authentic worship.

The first stanza is an affirmation of the grace of God in the sacrificial offering of Jesus Christ upon the altar. The sacrifice is “once offered up, a spotless Lamb”. Here there is an echo of Hebrews 10. 11-12, which describes the complete and sufficient offering of Christ, in contrast to that of the priests which are offered “again and again”, and Exodus 12. 5, which contains the instructions for the Festival of the Passover (“Your Lamb shall be without blemish”). Christ is the atonement for our sin and the Passover lamb that secures our salvation.

The second stanza places Christ in the “holiest place”, the holy of holies, where the offering for sin and guilt is made. There he intercedes for us; the letter to the Hebrews holds together the perfection of Christ’s sacrificial priesthood (7. 26-27) and the humanity of his offering (4. 14-15). In the holiest place, before God, Jesus prays for us, and the blood of sprinkling, symbolic of mercy and forgiveness, extending back to the Passover and forward to the New Covenant “spreads salvation all around”. Salvation is offered to all. Atonement is unlimited.

The third stanza connects the offering of Christ with the events surrounding the crucifixion. “The smoke of the atonement here darkened the sun and rent the veil”. The darkness (Matthew 27; Luke 24) recalls the ninth plague (Exodus 10) and the prophetic vision of Amos:

Why do you want the day of the Lord? It is darkness, and not light. (5. 18)
On that day, says the Lord God, I will make the sun go down at noon,
and darken the earth at broad daylight. (8. 9)

When Jesus cries with a loud voice and gives up his spirit (breathes his last breath, the offering is complete (Matthew 27. 50). It is finished (John 19. 30). At this moment, Matthew writes, “the curtain of the temple is torn in two, from top to bottom”(Mark 15. 38; Matthew 27. 51). Donald Juel likens the tearing of the temple in the death of Jesus to the opening of the heavens in Jesus’ baptism (Matthew 3; Luke 3). There is an openness to the Holy in the revelation [uncovering] of God who looks down upon prodigal children as royalty.

This fourth stanza is marked by a multi-sensory character:

He still respects thy sacrifice/its savor sweet doth always please
The offering smokes through earth and skies,
Diffusing life, and joy, and peace
To these thy lower courts it comes/and fills them with divine perfumes.

The burning of incense by the high priest was for the purpose of pleasing God. The sacrificial death of Christ (Ephesians 5. 2) has cosmic dimensions, descending even to us. “Victim Divine” concludes with a remarkable statement about the meaning of salvation:

We need not go up to heaven/to bring the long sought Savior down;
Thou are to all already given, thou dost e’en now thy banquet crown:
To every faithful soul appear/and show thy real presence here!

Salvation is not our achievement or ascent to God. Salvation is God’s gift to us, in the incarnation, in the One who empties himself and takes the form of a servant and becomes obedient unto death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2). God comes down to us, in the incarnate (human ) Jesus, and in the material elements of Holy Communion. The real presence of Christ at the table, the body and the blood of the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world, has already been given to us. The sacrifice is complete, sufficient and effective . Therefore we enter the sanctuary with “a true heart in full assurance of faith” (Hebrews 10. 22).

Communion texts, whether they be anthems or hymns, convey a variety of messages, among them mystery , invitation , unity (“One Bread, One Body”), and spiritual hunger (“You Satisfy The Hungry Heart”). “Victim Divine” recaptures the sacrificial meaning of Holy Communion, which lies at the heart of all other meanings, and places the experience of receiving with bread and the cup within both Old and New Testament traditions. Its depth is both challenge and gift, and yet it offers the potential for a human response to God that involves the whole self in all of the senses: singing the hymn, touching and eating the bread, smelling the incense, in the midst of darkness, a light which can no longer be covered. We do not need to go up to heaven to have a spiritual experience. In Christ, God has made that available to us here, now.

the long defeat (passion/palm sunday)

2011-04-17T13:55:00.000-07:00

When I first started going to Haiti years ago I came upon one of the best books I have read in my life, Mountains Beyond Mountains, written by the Pulitzer Prize winning author Tracy Kidder. It is a biography of a man named Paul Farmer, who grew up in the rural poverty of the Deep South, attended Duke as an undergraduate and then Harvard Medical School, and now divides his time between Harvard, where he teaches, and central Haiti, where he operates a medical hospital.

I enjoy reading, but it is unusual for me to read a book more than once. I have read Mountains Beyond Mountains three times. It is passionate and funny, and is about the best portrait of the Haitian people I have come across. I was on a panel discussion with Paul Farmer a few years ago at Wofford College, and I found him to be a wonderful human being, not arrogant in any way, and genuinely interested in the students. I took Jacques Lamour, who is from Haiti, with me that day. On the ride back Jack said: “it was a great day; Paul Farmer got to meet Jack Lamour!”

I was alerted recently to a passage in Mountains Beyond Mountains that I had missed the first times around. Farmer is reflecting on the dilemma of living such a divided life, teaching at a place like Harvard, where most everyone is successful, and practicing in Haiti, where most everyone is desperate.

Toward the end of the book an emaciated young man is flown to Boston for emergency surgery, with funds raised by Farmer’s non-profit organization. Later the young man would die, and one of the staff would question whether this was an appropriate expenditure of the twenty thousand dollars it took to fly him there. This gets back to Paul Farmer and he has a conversation about it with Tracey Kidder.

Could the money have been spent in a better way? Farmer responds, “”Yeah, but there are so many ways of saying that? For example, why didn’t the airline company that makes money…why didn’t they pay for the flight? That’s a way of saying it. Or how about this way? How about if I say, I have fought for my whole life a long defeat. How about that? How about if I said, that all it adds up to is defeat?

“A long defeat. I have fought the long defeat and have brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think that sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory….No, no, I’m not complaining. You know, people from our background…we’re used to being on the victory team, and actually what we’re really trying to do is to make common cause with the losers. Those are two very different things. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.”

Where did Paul Farmer get the phrase, “the long defeat”? It is from his favorite book, The Lord of the Rings, where Galadriel says, “Through the ages of the world we have fought the long defeat.” And Galadriel had sprung from the profound imagination of JRR Tolkien, who once wrote, in a letter to a friend, “I am a Christian….so I do not expect history to be anything but a long defeat—though it contains some samples or glimpses of final victory.”

Palm Sunday flows into Passion Sunday, the events of Jesus’ triumphant entry into Jerusalem, the King of Glory, becomes a story about betrayal (by one of the disciples) and abandonment and denial (by another). It is the journey that began when Jesus set his face toward Jerusalem, but it began even earlier, when Herod slaughtered the innocents, when those worshipping in Capernaum drove him from the synagogue. Holy Week is the culmination of the events of Jesus’ life, the natural and inevitable conclusion, maybe, of the one who gained so much of his identity by reading the suffering servant passages in Isaiah, “surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.”

It is the way of Jesus, this road of suffering.

He emptied himself,

taking the form of a servant,

and became obedient unto death,

even death on a cross

Have this mind in you that was in Christ Jesus, the apostle Paul writes to the Philippians. And so those who follow Jesus will encounter grief, sorrow and suffering. We can choose to become passive, stoic, or cynical all of this-----“only the good die young,” the popular song expressed it, , or, in the words of Tolkien and Paul Farmer, we can learn to fight the long defeat.

Why do we fight the long defeat? On Christmas Eve each year I have stood in the center of our sanctuary, the room filled with candlelight and repeated the words of Howard Thurman, about the work of Christmas:

To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry

To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations

To bring peace among brothers and sisters

These are inspiring words, and I think he gets it exactly right. And yet…some of the lost remain lost, some of the broken are still broken, children go to bed hungry, prisoners are released and then return to prison, nations are rebuilt but then they are crushed again, and violence and warfare continues. So what do you do?

Do you chalk the words of that poem up to the idealism of a great preacher and prophet, and then maybe give up, the benefit is not worth the cost, do you throw in the towel and have a seat on the sidelines? Or, do you fight the long defeat?

Two weeks ago Dr. Eugene Macklin from Haiti was with us. What name do you give to an experience of a country that has extreme poverty and then hurricanes and then an earthquake and then cholera but the long defeat? “Is it getting any better?”, someone asked the doctor, who listened, and smiled and talked about the lives that have been saved.

We fight the long defeat for a simple reason: we are followers of Jesus, and Jesus seemed to constantly be making common cause with those the world called losers: gentiles, lepers, the poor, children, women, the sick, the mentally ill, the hungry. Why did he do that? It was his mission in life: the son of man came to seek and save that which is lost.

Now none of this sat well with the religious authorities, and it was finally what got him killed. You can feel the tension building in the gospels, and if you are here on Friday evening at the Tenebrae service, you will hear the words, and sense the deepening darkness, and feel the impending finality of the long defeat.

So why such extravagance, why such a gift, poured out in that way, what a waste, God dying for the ungodly, why such a sacrifice for a world that had turned its back on him? It is all beginning to unravel in the readings for Holy Week, the last chapters of any gospel, take your pick. And yet, Jesus fights the long defeat. Jesus makes common cause with the losers. Why does he do this? Listen to the explanation of Will Willimon, who was with us on Friday:

“The significant thing is that Jesus willingly accepted the destiny toward which his actions drove him, willingly endured the world’s response to its salvation…And he did it for Love: the cross is not what God demands of Jesus for our sin but rather what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us.”

Sinners like us…finally the motive for such an extravagant, costly grace is the life of each person, that each person matters to God, that young Haitian lying on an operating table, a young woman struggling to find herself in this world, a man at mid-life wondering if he has made the right sacrifices or if they have simply been compromises, a woman at the end of life who also feels betrayed or abandoned. On the cross Jesus makes common cause with them, with us, on the cross Jesus does not turn his back on them, or us, it is, in the words of Wesley’s hymn, love’s redeeming work …

To find the lost

To heal the broken

To feed the hungry

To release the prisoner

To rebuild the nations

To bring peace among brothers and sisters

And that is not only our making the world a better place, not only what we can do in this world, but more crucially---there is that word, related to the cross---more crucially it is what God does in us and for us, we are lost and broken, we are hungry and imprisoned, we inhabit the ruined cities and live with our own irreconcilable differences. The cross is what Jesus got for bringing the love of God so close to sinners like us.

People like us, we are used to being on the victory team. But in holy week, we journey once again into the heart of darkness, into the mystery of our faith, into the clearest image we have of the long defeat:

He emptied himself,

taking the form of a servant

And became obedient unto death,

Even death on a cross.

Sources: I am grateful to Alan Jacobs for his reflection on the concept of “the long defeat” in Mountains Beyond Mountains and its origin in Tolkien. William Willimon, Why Jesus? Howard Thurman, “The Work of Christmas”.

resources for holy week

2011-04-16T13:35:00.000-07:00

Tomorrow is Palm Sunday, a day that marks the entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem and, ultimately, his death by crucifixion. My liturgical practice has been to work with musicians in the creation of a service that begins in celebration and ends in a very different place: Palm Sunday is not Good Friday, but by the end of the service my hope is that our thoughts are at least being guided in that direction.

Over time, I find myself being drawn to a few resources, over and over again, and I share them with you here. For the individual Christian, these might be sources of spiritual renewal and reflection. For the preacher, these might also stir your heart and mind to plan for these significant services in a new way.

So, a few resources for Holy Week:

1. The Gospels. It is worth noting that there is an extraordinary amount of detail about the events of Holy Week in the gospels. For example, the Gospel of John picks up Jesus' entry into Jerusalem in chapter twelve----therefore, almost forty percent of this book focuses on the events of Holy Week.

2. Raymond Brown, Introduction to the Gospel of John (Anchor Bible, two volumes). The late professor of New Testament at Union Theological Seminary in New York City was at work on a revision of this classic when he died in 1998. The attention to detail, balance and spiritual depth is amazing, and for Holy Week, particularly Jesus' washing of the disciples feet in John 13 and the women's discovery of the empty tomb in John 20, there is really no parallel.

3. The Hymns of Charles Wesley. I find myself returning, again and again, to "O Love Divine, What Hast Thou Done" and "Christ the Lord is Risen Today". The most profound Wesleyan theology of the atonement is found in the former hymn, and the most expansive Christian reflection on the resurrection is expressed in the latter.

4. Parker Palmer, "On Staying At The Table". Subtitled "A spirituality of community", I have found this brief essay to be the most relevant contemporary statement about the last supper and what it means for followers of Jesus today. Why did Jesus stay at the table with Judas? And what does that mean for our own experiences of disappointment and betrayal?

5. Parker Palmer, The Promise of Paradox. One chapter within this book is a reflection of the "stations of the cross" as contradictions within our own spiritual lives.

6. Wendell Berry, The Mad Farmer Liberation Front. A compelling poem by one of our most profoundly prophetic voices, ending with the injunction, "practice resurrection."

7. Kennon Callahan. I met Ken years ago at his annual continuing education seminar on church planning, and I discovered that his work was grounded in a theology of hope. His affirmation, "we are the easter people, we are the people of hope" can be found on his website (twelve keys) and in his books.

8. I will have two reflections in Christian Century's Living by the Word column this week, one on Easter Sunday and another on the Sunday following. You can access these beginning Monday via their website if you do not already subscribe.

9. Interfaith Reflection on Holy Week. Given the history of Jewish-Christian relations, it is imperative that preachers and worship leaders reflect on need to avoid anti-semitism in the liturgy and in commentary on biblical texts during the services of this week. Negatively, passion plays have been linked historically to anti-Jewish mob violence; positively, Christians can learn a great deal about our own tradition from the Jewish observance of Passover.

10. Fasting and Silence. In consultation with your physician you may wish to fast on Good Friday, as a spiritual discipline. And as a means of detachment from our media-driven culture, you may also wish to observe a period of silence (one hour to three hours). During this latter period you might read in some of the materials listed above (Raymond Brown or Parker Palmer, or the last twelve chapters of John's Gospel, for example).

11. In full candor, I will also confess that I find myself returning to the sermons and reflections of the following as I approach Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter: Peter Gomes, Will Willimon, Kathleen Norris, William Sloane Coffin and N.T. Wright. I also continue to benefit from Richard Hays' commentary on I Corinthians 15 (in the Interpretation Series) and Gail O' Day's commentary on John in the New Interpreter's Bible Series.

transition

2011-04-09T19:15:00.000-07:00

I wrote to the Providence UMC congregation two weeks ago that I have been invited by my Bishop, Larry Goodpaster, to serve as a District Superintendent, and I have accepted this invitation. I have served at Providence for eight years, and it is a remarkable congregation. It is not a perfect church---I am often reminded of the Apostle Paul's insight that we hold the treasure of the gospel in earthen vessels, to show that the power belongs to God and not to us---but it is an extraordinary mission in the heart of a large city.

While all of this is most visible in some of our signature ministries---an awesome chancel choir, risk-taking local mission with the homeless on a large scale, substantive and long term initiatives in Haiti in the areas of education, health and microcredit, a Sunday School to worship ratio of almost 65%, a large adult disabled community within the church, and I could go on---there are more hidden activities that are equally compelling. We were included in a research project by Diana Butler Bass that became the basis for her book Christianity for The Rest of Us, and her thesis was that mainline churches were in fact thriving in most every community across the U.S. It is true.

I will miss the people of Providence. Many have become close friends, and many more have shared in the sacrifices necessary to help us move beyond an almost overwhelming indebtedness. I will miss preaching at Providence: it is an engaging and engaged gathering of people who listen to the sermons week by week. I will miss the study that I knew was required of me if I were to keep that kind of engagement going, at least from my end.

I will also miss introducing many of my friends from across the connection to Providence. We have welcomed Bishop Robert Schnase, author of the Five Practices material and David Wilkinson of Durham, England, Greg and Susan Jones and Sergei Nikolaev, Jim Salley of Africa University and Bishop John Innis of Liberia, David Mosser from First UMC in Arlington, Texas and Wallace Alston of the Center of Theological Inquiry, Ben Witherington and Bob Tuttle, Zan Holmes and Will Willimon, Gil Rendle and Steve Bryant, and I could go on. Almost all of them have made two comments: how active and mission-focused Providence is, and how many young adults and families are present on a given Sunday morning.

I will miss all of this, and more.

And yet I am blessed to be en route to a new ministry, as District Superintendent of the Waynesville District in our Annual Conference. The Waynesville District includes sixty-nine churches in the seven western most counties of our state. The offices are at Lake Junaluska, the administrative and spiritual center of the Southeastern Jurisdiction, and we will live there. I know many of the pastors in this district, we have a number of close friends in that community, and it is a beautiful part of the world. We have loved Charlotte, but we have always been drawn to the mountains (we have a small cabin there) and now find ourselves heading toward them.

So the coming weeks will be about my own attempt to have a good conclusion to a ministry that is very important to me. I know that many of the friendships will endure. And I also know that when our moving van makes its way up Interstate 40, west beyond Asheville, I will give thanks for the people that God will give me to serve in that region.

it begins and ends with grace (john 4)

2011-04-02T08:35:00.000-07:00

It was about noon, the hottest part of the day in a desert culture and Jesus, exhausted by the journey, sat down by Jacob’s well. A woman, a Samaritan, came along at that time to draw water, and Jesus asks her for a drink. It is the beginning of a conversation, but it becomes an exchange between two unlikely conversation partners. He is Jewish, she is Samaritan. Jews looked down on Samaritans, and Samaritans hated Jews. There was a long and contentious history, rooted in the exile and the division into tribes. The Samaritans had intermarried with the Assyrians, their captors. They were no longer religiously pure or politically correct. South of them was Jerusalem, where the temple was destroyed by the Babylonians. Later it would be rebuilt by the Judeans, who had always remained separate from other cultures.

That is a very brief history of two invasions and two exiles over several hundred years, but it all flows into the conversation between these two people, Jesus and the woman at the well. And it leads her to ask the question: How is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan? And then John’s comment: Jews do not share things in common with Samaritans. We learn something very significant in this request. Jesus is in a place which would have been reckoned as pagan by his people. The very vessels would have been unclean to a devout Jew. In many religious cultures a spiritual leader or even a practicing religious man would not take a drink in a religious environment different from his own, and would not converse with a woman. Jesus does both. So what does this say about Jesus? We might connect these actions with our gospel from last Sunday: God sent the Son into the world not to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.

A few weeks ago I heard Lovett Weems speak. He talked about a simple concept: a presumption of grace. What if we entered into every conversation, every encounter, with a presumption of grace instead of a presumption of judgment? I have reflected on that question. Why do I presume that I am more spiritual than you are? Why do I presume that I care more about the poor than you do? It may be true, it may not be true. Why do we presume that we are more compassionate than other people? Why do we presume that we are more generous than other people? It may be true, it may not be true.

What if we began with a presumption of grace? Jesus does not begin with a judgment of the woman, although given the history, the politics and the religious factors involved, he might have. He begins with a presumption of grace, and he does so through the simple act of sharing life with her. I was sitting with a group of friends, waiting for a concert to begin. We were at the Station Inn in Nashville, which is like a Mecca for bluegrass music, and an exceptional group was going to perform that evening. The whole place itself is smaller than the chancel area of this sanctuary, so we were up close. We were also close together, as the place was filled. I was glad we had gotten seats.

In the intermission the guy next to me asked where I was from. He had a beard, longer than mine, and appeared to be about my age. I told him “Charlotte”, and asked where he was from, and he said he was from Memphis but he was moving to Nashville. “What do you do?,” he asked. “I am a Methodist minister. What about you?” By now we are in a conversation, I realized. “I am a record producer”. “Tell me about your church,” he continued. That is a wonderful opening: I talked about the music and the joy class and Haiti and the homeless. He seemed more interested than I would have imagined, even if he was not your stereotypical church person, but then I don’t think of Providence as your stereotypical church. Then I asked him, “So do you produce bluegrass music?” He said, “Well I really produce rock music”….and then he named a few people…Sister Hazel, Three Doors Down. Now I have not heard their music, but I know enough to know that, in his world, this is a big deal. The conversation continued, because the intermission stretched on. We exchanged addresses and he called my cell phone, so I have his number, and he has mine. I am going to send him a book; he is going to send me some music. And although it was closer to midnight than noon, and the Station Inn is not Jacob’s Well, and I am not Jesus and he was not a Samaritan woman, we were unlikely conversation partners, a minister and alternative rock music producer/musician. At some point, and I can’t remember the particulars, we began to talk about Christianity and the church. Bluegrass musicians are pretty open about sharing their faith, so it came up naturally, and he was surprisingly open about it all too.

He said, simply, “For me it begins and ends with grace.”

A presumption of grace…the Samaritan woman is startled to discover that this man is willing to share life, a cup of water, even an extended conversation with her. Their dialogue is remembered in the long passage that takes up most of the fourth chapter of John’s gospel. It is a fairly complex passage, almost as if they are talking across each other, Jesus on some kind of symbolic level, the Samaritan woman in a more literal way. But it has everything to do with what they share in common, in that moment: water. For the woman, water is the next thing on the agenda, relief, nourishment. For Jesus, water is this---he is exhausted---but it is more. It is living water. For the woman, drawing water from a well represents the endless cycle of her responsibilities. For us, drawing water from a well might represent the endless cycle of our agendas, our to-do lists: what I have to do today, tomorrow, this week, and then it all begins again. It is ordinary life. Jesus helps her to see the extraordinary in the ordinary---the water in that well is a foretaste of life in which there is no thirst, it is the gift of God that leads to eternal life.

Then there is the brief and awkward conversation about the woman’s personal history. It takes up three verses in a thirty verse passage, so we might say ten percent of their encounter. Interestingly, Jesus does not judge or condemn her. He simply names her present reality. She quickly changes the subject. That happens in conversations that become awkward, doesn’t it. And if you read the scripture for today, you will see that the topic becomes worship, where to worship, how to worship. As I have reflected on this passage this week I have come to the conclusion that this may be the first recorded discussion in history of traditional and contemporary worship. The Jews worship in Jerusalem, at the temple, and the woman connects Jesus with the temple. Obviously he is a prophet. But the Samaritans worship on a mountain not far from that well---it was actually Mount Gerizem, which had become something of a rival temple, an alternative worship setting. The underlying question: should we worship on this mountain or that mountain? Which is better? Which is right?

How do you think Jesus would answer that question? Is he going to come down on the side of traditional or contemporary? He responds, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor Jerusalem….the hour is coming when we will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth.

And so again Jesus pushes us beyond the ordinary to the extraordinary: it is not where we worship or how we worship, but who we worship. We worship God the Father, through the spirit. Our obsession with styles of worship can in fact be a way of avoiding the substance of worship, which is God. We have many strategies at our disposal to keep God at a distance. One of the most seductive is the church’s insistence on keeping this conversation going: do we worship on this mountain, or on the mountain a few miles away? In this moment something begins to happen. Jesus reveals himself to her. He says, “I am the Messiah who is coming into the world, it is I, who is speaking to you.”

And as in many of the best conversations, this is where they are interrupted. The students of Jesus come along, and they are astonished that he, a rabbi, is speaking with her, a woman From the very beginning, women and men have been a part of the gospel story, no one was excluded from a conversation with Jesus. And so the woman leaves her water jar and goes back to the city. And listen to what she makes of her encounter: Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done! Some people hear a sermon, or participate in a worship service, and they learn something about the preacher. Some people hear a sermon, or participate in a worship service, and they learn something about the church. Some people hear a sermon, or participate in a worship service, and they learn something about the Bible. Some people hear a sermon, or participate in a worship service, and they learn something about God. But something in addition is possible. Some people hear a sermon, or participate in a worship service and they learn something about themselves. That is transformation, and that is what happens when we encounter Jesus Christ.

To worship in spirit and in truth is to become honest before God about where we have been and who we are. To worship in spirit and in truth is to understand that our character and our integrity are at stake. And so the Samaritan goes away saying, “Come and see a man who told me everything I have ever done”. That is her witness, and that is our witness. Witness is not telling other people what they should do; that is judgment. Witness is telling other people what has happened to us and in us and among us. And so the conversation---and it is the longest conversation Jesus has with anyone in the gospels—moves from water to worship to witness. What we do with the conversation is up to us: do we draw water from a stagnant well or do we taste living water? Do we get caught up in where and how we worship or do we enter more deeply into the question of who we worship? Do we keep Jesus at a distance, or do we begin to see him for who he really is, and thus, do we begin to see ourselves for who we really are? Do we imagine that we are not good enough tell others about Jesus? Do we think we do not know enough to tell others about Jesus? Or do we simply share the Jesus that we know, and the Jesus who knows us, and say, “Come and see”?

Do we see others with a presumption of judgment? The woman at the well, the person we have a contentious history with, or maybe ourselves? Or can we follow the Jesus who always seems to encounter any person he meets with a presumption of grace? And so the Samaritan woman asks, “how is it that you, a Jew, ask a drink of me, a Samaritan?” And we might ask, “How is that you, a holy and righteous God, shares life with me, a sinner?”

The answer: “it begins and ends with grace.”

Sources: In gratitude to Paul, for the conversation, and to Lovett Weems.

our hands are too full (lent 2011)

2011-03-22T12:29:00.000-07:00

When I was in the eighth grade I was a sports fanatic; not like those members of our church who wore their light blue ties last Sunday to worship, or even, in one case, a light blue ball cap (“I am wearing it because it is raining,” he explained to me). They are just fans, right, but that is short hand for fanatic. Well as a kid I played the three sports that were common in south Georgia culture; basketball in the winter, baseball in the spring, football in the fall. We did not have year round sports. Year round sports are unnatural, but that is another story.

So, this was my experience: I loved basketball. I was tall, I was slightly coordinated. And I loved baseball, I was a pitcher, and the height worked for me. I did not love football. I like to watch it, but I simply never loved playing football.

There was one catch: my father loved football, and his friends loved football. So I played football. Every year. Fall was not as much fun as winter or spring, but I played until I reached the eighth grade and I came to a moment of clarity: I had played all of the football, in pads, that I would play in this life. Practice would begin very soon. It became a topic of conversation around the house. I thought about it all weekend. I needed to make a decision.

Finally, I came up with enough nerve or courage to deliver the news to my father. Now remember, south Georgia is a football culture. They could have filmed Friday Night Lights in my hometown. So we were together and I blurted it out: “I don’t want to play football. I love basketball. I love baseball. I don’t want to play football.” There was silence and then we talked. I remember several pieces of the conversation: Would this set a trend for me, that I would start things and not finish them? Would I lose my interest in playing other sports? Would I find myself outside of my circle of friends, who would all be playing a sport? But I had made the decision. I stopped. I gave it up.

Now you may think that is a trivial story, or a stereotypical incident peculiar to kids and sports. The experience came to me when I tried to recall my earliest memory of letting go of something. Many of us associate Lent with letting go of something, “giving up something for Lent”: chocolate or sodas, soap operas or Facebook. I did not grow up in a tradition that observed Lent, but I have come to embrace it. It always comes at a good time for me: all of the holiday parties take their toll, the flurry of beginning of the year activity, being constricted by the enclosed space of winter. None of that has anything to do with Lent, really, but it gives me a spiritual reason to evaluate my habits and my priorities.

We always begin in the season of Lent with Jesus, in the desert, where he is being tested (Matthew 4. 1-11). Last Sunday we talked about the transfiguration of Jesus, mountains and valleys, spiritual highs and emotional depletion, being exalted and humbled. We have come down from the mountain of glory into the ordinary challenges that face us all. In the Ash Wednesday meditations I connected the experience of Mardi Gras, the krewes, the parades, the masked balls and the celebrations with the austerity of these 40 days. In the gospel for Ash Wednesday, Jesus is quite critical of the hypocrites, who practice their religion for the purpose of applause, to be seen by others. And I noted that the word hypocrite has its origins in the theater of the ancient world. A hypocrite puts on a mask, appearing to be someone other than who she or he really is.

In Lent we have the opportunity to align our lives with Jesus, and this involves paying close attention to his teaching. He is always asking us to take off our masks, to believe that we are loved as we are, unconditionally. He is always asking us to come apart, with him to a lonely and quiet place where we can listen to him. There is no audible voice, but in the silence he meets us. He is always asking us to join in his mission to the last, the least and the lost; today we celebrate a remarkable example of risk-taking mission with the housing of foster children who are on the verge of becoming adults.

He is always calling us to follow him, and we have that opportunity now, over the next 40 days. 40 was an important number in the Bible….

Rain fell on the earth for 40 days and nights in the days of Noah
Moses and the Israelites wandered in the wilderness for 40 years
Elijah fasted on the mountain for 40 days and heard the still small voice of God
Jesus was tested in the wilderness for 40 days.

40 is significant; in the ancient world 40 years was roughly comparable to a generation, or a lifetime. In our own lives, I have come to think of it as the amount of time it takes to really establish a habit, to take on something constructive or give up something destructive.

Habits are the ways we orient and re-orient our lives. Through habits we intentionally set aside some things and embrace others. Maybe we let go of something, we detach, unclutter or declutter our lives, we learn how to live on less, maybe the economy forces us to take on this lifestyle, maybe our health requires it, or the aging process, or we get disenchanted with keeping up with the Joneses. And so we reset, we reboot.

Someone has given this a wonderful name: a spirituality of subtraction. Not more, but less, and since we are whole persons, this has to do with all of who we are: our eating, our activity, our consumption, our pace. Fasting is a part of the Lenten experience. Many people cannot fast for medical reasons, if you are a diabetic, for example, you should ask your physician about fasting. But we can fast from technology, we can fast from shopping, we can fast from (you fill in the blank).
A spirituality of subtraction can be empowering. When we hit the pause button in our lives, we realize that we have gotten attached to some things that are not appropriate, not life-giving, not interesting to us, not helpful to others. And so it helps to sit down and go through all of that. I want to share an experience, because it may remind you of a struggle in your own life.

I was asked to be in a group. It was really an honor to be in the group. It meets in another part of the country, typically, twice a year. It does good work. The other members of the group are important people in their worlds, and you would recognize some of their names. When I was invited to be in the group, I said “yes”. I did not think about it all that hard; it seemed like a “no-brainer”.

Well, the group has been together for three or four years. The work is progressing. I have met some good people and networked with them. And I have come to a conclusion: I really need to get out of this group. I need to withdraw, to resign.

What would keep me from doing this? Well, I like the leader, I respect him, I value what he is doing. And I wonder: will people perceive me as a quitter? Will they remember that I left the group and not ask me when something important comes along again?

Then I realize that I am reliving an experience from my childhood. I am still a kid, trying to quit a sport I did not love. So my dad was quite fine with the decision, not to play football. And the committee chair was quite gracious when he received my letter.

But what was the lesson for me? A part of why we jump onto the treadmill, why we get attached to so much stuff, a part of why we are seduced by the expectations of others is that we want to please them, we want to hear their applause.

The earliest followers of Jesus went to the desert because they wanted to get away from all of that, they wanted clarity about who they were, before God. They wanted to take off their masks, and spend time with their Father who heard them in secret. This may be clear, but let us all confess that this is not easy.

The Old Testament lesson (Genesis 3. 1-7) is about a man, a woman and a snake. Many have dismissed the story long ago, because we read it literally and wonder now if there really was a snake or a garden. But in dismissing the story we miss the core truth that the rabbis wanted us to learn: the temptation for us to be "like God", to put ourselves in the place of God, to make idols of ourselves, to imagine that we have no limits. The desire to be God is the primal temptation.

For Christians, this is compounded with the idea of a "messiah complex", which creeps into the lives of men and women, especially educated, accomplished people, people like you, a messiah complex which reinforces the belief that you can do it all. That can be a powerful temptation for us.
Most of us are better at addition than subtraction.

So what does it mean to give that up? The first of the twelve steps is clear: our lives had become unmanageable. And the second: we came to believe in a higher power. We cannot do it all. The temptations of Jesus are to do it all: turn stones into bread, throw himself from the temple, preside over all the kingdoms of the world. Henri Nouwen identifies these as the temptations to be relevant, to be spectacular, to be powerful. And then he asks: can we, like Jesus, lay them down?

A spirituality of subtraction.

To lay down these temptations is to confess that there is One God, as our Jewish friends say, and we are not God, it is to trust more deeply in the One who is the creator, remembering that we are the creature. It is confess our sin, acknowledge our brokenness, admit our powerlessness and identify our limitations. It is to make a list of everything we are doing and ask ourselves, "why am I doing this?" And, yes, I am a preacher and I would say this, it is to put God first, which means also that we put our neighbor first.

Finally, most of us, or at least many of us are not motivated to change our lives until there is a crisis. It may be working for us, the desire to do it all. It may be working for us, the economy of consumption. We may be superman or superwoman. It may be working for us, the way things are going right now. If this is true, then this sermon, these scripture passages, Lent itself may just be so much background noise.

But if it is not, there is a long and deep tradition of wisdom that gives us another way. It is all about simplicity and subtraction. It is about loving what is worthy of our devotion and letting go of all that is not.

It is about a radical trust and dependence on the God who meets us in the dry and disorienting places, the desert places along our path. It is about a higher power who is gracious and merciful, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, whose grace is amazing.

Augustine said it well: "God is always trying to give good things to us, but our hands are too full to receive them."

t.s. eliot and the meaning of lent

2011-03-09T14:07:00.000-08:00

Life is a passage, a movement. Winter is ending, spring is upon us. The days are getting longer. The church marks this passage with seasons of Lent and Easter, seasons of death and rebirth, penance and celebration.

One of the richest resources in understanding this time of passage is T.S. Eliot (1888-1965). Eliot's life was itself a passage from skepticism to belief, from cynicism to the embrace of divine mystery. Two of his most important poems, "The Waste Land" and "Ash Wednesday", based upon Lenten themes, narrate his spiritual journey.

In "The Waste Land", Eliot invokes the prophet Ezekiel in describing modern existence: "What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow/Out of this stony rubbish? Son of Man/You cannot say, or guess, for you know only /A heap of broken images, where the sun beats/And the dead trees give no shelter, the cricket no relief,/And the dry stone no sound of water."

We live in a time of hopelessness, of "broken images". There is no shelter, no life -giving water.

Around us, however, are glimpses of hope. "Only/There is shadow under this red rock,/(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),/And I will show you something that is different from either/Your shadow at morning striding behind you/Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;/ I will show you fear in a handful of dust."

Lent is a confrontation with mortality, but it can also lead us into the experience of the death of Christ. A spirtuality informed by Lent insists that we wrestle with the inevitability of our own deaths, in light of the death of Christ, as we journey toward Easter.

In the midst of the wasteland, we become aware that we are on the road to Emmaus: "Who is the third who walks beside you?/ When I count, there are only you and I together/ But when I look ahead up the white road/ There is always another one walking beside you."

The experience of failure and disappointment is sometimes understood as a crisis of religious faith. In the Gospels, however, it is precisely the moment when Christ appears to the disciples. Only as we deny ourselves, only in the awareness of our human limitations, Eliot insists, are we open to the "peace that surpasses understanding."

"Ash Wednesday" illustrates Eliot's movement from a tentative faith toward a deep commitment. This journey takes place in the desert, where one is without support systems. In the desert, the mystics confronted the demonic; in the desert experiences of our lives we discover who we are before God.

The season of Lent calls us to self-examination and to a desire for God. "Ash Wednesday" closes with Eliot's prayer: "Suffer us not to mock ourselves with falsehood/Teach us to care and not to care/Teach us to sit still/Even among these rocks,/Our peace in His will/And even among these rocks/Sister, mother/And spirit of the river, spirit of the sea,/Suffer me not to be separated/And let my cry come unto Thee."

(With gratitude to Joseph Flora of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, who taught a Sunday School class on T.S. Eliot when I was a Divinity Student working with United Methodist students there, and introduced me Eliot's poetry and spiritual life.)

the process of developing a sermon

2011-03-05T05:22:00.000-08:00

For almost twenty-eight years I have been a parish minister, and for the majority of that time preaching a sermon on Sunday has been a core part of that calling. As the joke goes, I have learned that in the life of a preacher Sundays come along with amazing regularity! I am now in my eighth year in a congregation, the longest tenure for me (I served in two different congregations for six years), and that is also relevant for preaching: while I have a file or "barrel", as preachers used to say, of sermons, I have long since sifted through that material. Everything now is new territory.

Before getting to the process of developing the sermon itself, two comments are in order. First, the longer one is a pastor to a particular group of people, the deeper and more complex the relationships. I know them better, they know me better, and all of this is for better and for worse! Ken Callahan once suggested that a long relationship shapes better communication: because the people know you, they listen more closely, and because the pastor knows the people, he or she is more in tune with what is going on in their lives (as opposed to those who speak only as guest preachers). There is a great deal of truth in this insight.

In addition, the sermon is always preached in relation not only to a particular people, but at a moment in time. For this reasons barrels of sermons have a somewhat limited shelf life. 2011 is not 2001, or 1991. I have sermons in each of those years preached in Advent, on Transfiguration Sunday and at Easter, but the world is different. There are wars, economic crises, political and cultural shifts; people are much more affected by technology and have a different perception about religion, spirituality and the church. So the subtext underneath a sermon is always in flux, and therefore requires new and creative work.

I truly enjoy the creative process of developing a sermon, and want to describe how that has become a spiritual discipline. It begins of course with prayer and humility, an openness to God and the Holy Spirit and a desire to be faithful to the life of Jesus as the pattern for what is taught. For the most part I preach from the lectionary, but as some will say, I am not enslaved to it. Were I a slave to the lectionary, however, I can think of worse forms of servitude. The common lectionary (a schedule of readings over three years that is shaped by the life of Christ) is not perfect in and of itself; remarkable passages are omitted. Still, it is a guide. I have friends who preach series of sermons, and was in a meeting recently with a technology consultant who could almost not imagine preaching in a non-series form. Yesterday's innovation can easily become tomorrow's routine.

For years I was a part of a lectionary group that met once or twice a year for several days and worked on sermons for a season of twenty weeks or so. This is an ideal that I recommend. One is able to begin to think subconciously about texts and connect them with culture and experience. For reasons having mostly to do with changes in our lives (a couple became district superintendents!) this no longer is a part of my life. I miss it and I would urge the preacher to find and form such a group. On my own I often take a day or a half-day and escape, sometimes simply to a coffee shop, and I will work on a group of five sermons out in the future. This is a similar experience, but admittedly is more introverted than extraverted. I am listening to scholars in commentaries and maybe the voices in my own head rather than other people. I do think some combination of the two is preferable.

Within a given week, the discipline looks something like this: I have already chosen and have begun to think about the passage. The sermon has a title, but I will confess that the title, by the time the sermon is preached, is often not that relevant to what is really important. So early in the week I will jot down outlines, connect ideas, think about narratives and stories. If I find myself in a meeting that is drifting, this is a rich time to play with the concepts that are in a sermon. On many days I will meet a member of the congregation for lunch, but if that is not the case I will head out myself to a quiet restaurant, with a Bible and my notes so far, and I will do more writing.

I usually begin writing the sermon on Thursday, but I make only a little progress. I come back to it on Friday morning and my goal is to have a draft by noon. The length of a typical sermon, for me, is less than 2000 words, or 20 minutes. I find that I can say what needs to be said in this amount of time, and that in our congregation this is the point where people are still with me; any longer and the link begins to become more fragile. Not to compare myself to them, but our congregation has hosted both Will Willimon and Zan Holmes, and both preached approximately 20 minutes, or less.

On Saturday morning I generally go to the office again. It is very quiet then; I began this practice years ago when my wife would be visiting yard sales and our daughters slept until noon. I revise the first draft of the sermon, and having gotten some distance from it and slept on it helps. I ask a few questions: is it biblical? is it good news? is there humor (if this is appropriate)? is there a tangent that needs to be reined in? can anything be omitted? is there any personal experience? what i am asking the listener to do? do the transitions make sense, or are they awkward? and, a question that has entered into the equation lately, what is the "big idea" in the sermon? in this revison process I never go beyond noon.

On Sunday morning, i arrive at the church very early, and give myself at least an hour to work with the sermon. I go through it, sometimes orally and try to make it shorter and clearer. I learned this discipline from reading Robert Jacks' Just Say The Word. Jacks taught speech at Princeton Seminary and was an advocate for writing the sermon in a form that could be easily spoken, as opposed to a paragraph or an essay, which is more relevant to the classroom. The last two steps, Saturday morning and Sunday morning, help the sermon to move from 2400 words to 1900. They also help me to become familiar enough with the content to preach it, as opposed to simply reading the manuscript. I do have a manuscript in the pulpit, and friends have encouraged me to preach from an outline or without notes, but I am not there yet. It helps me to know that the manuscript is there, but I only glance at it a few times while I am preaching.

As the sermon emerges, it is not so much a linear progression as a connection of a variety of ideas, stories and images. So a sermon about the transfiguration of Jesus includes light and fire, mountains and valleys, Moses and Mt. Sinai, Elijah and Mt. Horeb, commentaries on Matthew 17, Eugene Peterson's The Jesus Way and especially his chapter on Elijah, with whom I am less familiar than I am Moses, something I heard this week about Martin Luther King, Jr. and his prayer life, my own memories of spiritual highs and lows, the movement of the liturgical year, in particular connecting Baptism of the Lord and Transfiguration (both include the affirming voice of God about Jesus) and Transfiguration and Lent, as Jesus leaves the mountain and on the way down encounters the epileptic boy. I remember reading a remarkable book entitled The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, because one of our daughters was assigned to read it in college. It is about the Hmong people and a Hmong child's experience of epilepsy, which, in their language, literally means "the spirit catches you and you fall down". These are all elements that will be in some relation to each other. Not all of them will be included in the sermon, but they are all eligible along the way.

I do enjoy reading, and I read widely. It is probably true that I watch television less than the average person, but I am paying attention there as well. I have come to believe with the late and great preacher Ernest Campbell that, for the preacher, all of life is a homiletical possibility. In January I knew that I would be preaching on Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend, and so I re-read Richard Lischer's The Preacher King. I had first read this classic text in 1995, when it was published, but much has changed since then (for example, I was blessed to develop a friendship with Michael Thurman, who serves Dexter Avenue Baptist in Montgomery, and, just as importantly, our nation elected an African-American president). I learned a great deal by reading this work again; some of that did find its way into the sermon, but I benefited personally as well.

Lastly, I am aware that preachers are not always encouraged by their congregations. I know this experience very well, while also claiming the present blessing of preaching to people who are very engaged and supportive. I would simply urge you to see the work of developing the sermon as your offering to God and as a means of self-development in your own vocation. And I would imagine that there is someone out there listening, someone who is hungry for what you might say in the sermon, even if that is not obvious to you or ever voiced. I know it to be true.

a connection of missional parishes: part one

2011-02-25T12:39:00.000-08:00

I recently completed a review or Richard Florida's The Great Reset, which will be published in a journal later this year. Florida works at the intersection of urban planning, geography and economic development. The Great Reset refers to the economic collapse of the fall of 2008, and our attempts since to find some kind of equilibrium (note this week's protests in Wisconsin). In my own thinking (and not in the review itself) I have been connecting his work with the United Methodist system, as it now exists. Gil Rendle notes in the most recent issue of the Circuit Rider that almost one in three United Methodist congregations has fewer than 35 people (10,000 of 35,000 churches). These congregations are vulnerable, their clergy leaders are often dispirited, and the economic models that undergird all of this are neither sustainable nor durable.

We find ourselves in the midst of a great reset.

A part of the reset is the struggle with the provision of a guaranteed or continued appointment for elders (I serve on the Study of Ministry Commission, and this is one of subjects of our research and conversation); another element of the reset, now less defined, is the role of the deacon in connecting the church and the world. And an additional facet of all of this is the ministry of the local pastor, which has becoming increasingly important and almost normative in the missional strategy of most annual conferences.

Our challenge lies in the great number of parishes that simply do not have enough constituents to comprise a sole unit of ministry. The reset in which we find ourselves may end up, with some intentional planning, looking like groups of parishes connected organically to each other. When I entered the ordained ministry our annual conference did include cooperative parishes, particularly in the mountain regions of our state. The introduction of the connectional mission parish model elicits a first response: "oh yes, we did that once". But, actually, I am thinking of a distinct model.

I am beginning to wonder about the possibility of connectional mission parishes that include 8-12 local churches, none less than 25 persons in worship and none more than 100 persons in worship. These connectional parishes would be led by teams of elders, deacons and local pastors. The elder or elders would celebrate communion, preach, teach the clergy team and order the life of the 8-12 churches. The deacon would develop ministries in the community---perhaps related to the needs of hunger, housing, education, immigration, and health. The deacon would spend most of his or her time developing community partnerships. The local pastors would preach and be engaged in ministries of evangelism. Most local pastors would be bi-vocational, and would therefore spend a great deal of their time in relation to persons outside the church as well. Theologically, this is a model that integrates personal and social holiness in its staffing strategy.

Connectional mission parishes might give 10% of their offerings to the denominational structures beyond the local church. The accumulation of these offerings would fund the core components of the denomination, particularly the episcopal fund, global ministries and administrative resourcing of large scale priorities. Stronger connectional parishes might have more than one elder, with one also serving as a presiding elder, or superintendent, an extension of the bishop. But in this model all superintendents or presiding elders would serve congregations.

I am describing a model that will not work, or be needed everywhere. But for much of our denomination it is a way beyond the solo pastor who serves a small and conflicted parish that feels isolated from its community and denomination, and the administrative leader who is not rooted in congregational life. The essential connection, or connectivity of mission parishes could move us to a new place; the identities of two of our categories of clergy leadership would be clearly embedded in the world, not the church; and the three categories of ministry would be organically related, and in fact would make no sense without each other.

Richard Florida sees in the Great Reset our opportunity to invest in infrastructure and transportation, and high speed rail in particular. The purpose of this investment is to bring us in proximity to each other. As our system continues in its slow decline, the options will be blame and competition or connection and communion. The latter may give us the energy to focus anew on the world that is our parish. And in a system that will produce fewer material rewards than in prior generations, we will need to rethink our ecclesial and clerical assumptions. I will reflect more fully on this reality in part two of this essay.

a vacation

2011-02-19T12:41:00.000-08:00

I have seen some of the research about clergy well-being, and some of it related to vacation: many clergy do not take all of their vacation days, and those who seem to be healthy are able to get some distance from the work. We most often get away in the summer, but for some reason we have been able to take some time away this year in the dead of winter, and I can only say that I recommend it. It began with the preaching schedule, that allowed me to be away on a Sunday. My colleague would be preaching, the Scouts (Boy and Girl) would be assisting in the liturgy, and so that worked out. I asked a friend, who is preparing for ordination, to visit on a couple of my hospital days, and that also helped with the visitation load. I communicated all of this with two chairs of committees, whose meetings I would be missing. I promised that I would catch up with them when I returned.

December had been hectic. Advent had been full. End of year giving was a stretch. Christmas eve was a marathon. Then a good friend called on the day after Christmas: her husband was in the process of dying, her son was in from out of town. I went over, and we visited and planned the service, which fell on the New Year's holiday. Then Epiphany. Then guests from Haiti joined us for a few days, and the missionary Jim Gulley was with us, his sermon live streamed across the world via Rethink Church. Then the administrative work leading to the approval of the budget, which, thanks be to God, was better than I could have imagined.

So a week emerged, an opening. Miraculously, it was there in my wife's schedule. Since she is heavily involved in mission work in Haiti, this is not always a given. And so we spent a period of eight days away from Charlotte, three in the mountains of western North Carolina, and five in New Orleans.

We have a small cabin in the mountains, not far from Lake Junaluska, a retreat center of the United Methodist Church in the southeast. It is a restful setting, and one of its great assets is the lake itself: one can walk around the lake, a 2.5 mile exercise, and I do this once or twice any day I am there, regardless or weather. I have made the trek in snow, wind, heat and rain. It clears my mind and restores my body. We see friends there who we don't often get to talk with, and this happened; we discovered two new restaurants, one operated by a young man who was once a member of a youth group we served as interns in divinity school. I recommend it: the Smoky Mountain Cafe, in downtown Waynesville. We did a few odd jobs around the cabin, but not too many. We saw a couple of movies on a makeshift screen with an overhead projector and a laptop, and this was fun. And we worshiped at the early service at First UMC, Waynesville. I enjoyed the sermon, and my only suggestion would be for less talking through the service and more silence. But I recognize this is largely a note to myself!

I then flew to New Orleans, where my wife joined me a day later. In the spirit of full disclosure, I was also there for two very brief meetings: one related to a "Leadership Table" I sit on in my denomination (it is one of our four focus areas, and table is a code word for committee), the other a governance conversation related to Africa University, in my role with GBHEM, one of our denominational boards. Both were brief, constructive meetings where action steps were identified and outcomes named. In between and around these meetings, Pam and I enjoyed more vacation. Years ago Jimmy Carter, in reflecting on his life and hobbies outside of the Presidency, commented that he sought to find ways to enjoy the world wherever his work took him; thus, if he were observing an election in south America, he would make a point of fishing for the wild trout native to that area before or after. I have tried to imitate this, and I recommend it.

So, what do you do in New Orleans? You eat. You listen to great music. You reflect on the tragic and glorious history, over hundreds of years and over the past five years. You think about Louis Armstrong and Tennessee Williams and Fats Domino and Walker Percy. You see the wealthy and the poor in close proximity to each other. You revel in the diversity of a port city where customs, ideas and goods have always been traded and shared. You do the things every tourist does---Cafe du Monde and Preservation Hall---and you locate, by accident or providence, the hidden treasures---Central Grocery's muffaletta sandwich, the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Olivier's Restaurant on Decatur, where they can tell you the difference between creole and cajun. You walk a lot. You are in a cosmopolitan place, but it is still the south, and so there is a spirit of hospitality. It was a great destination, and, yes, it appears to be on the way to rebuilding itself, with the assistance from friends all over. But, the people will tell you, the progress is very slow,

Then we were taken to the airport in a cab driven by a young man from New Orleans who had a story, or several of them, related to Katrina and Mardi Gras and other assorted challenges and celebrations. The flight was delayed, but then we quickly got into the air and landed at home, in Charlotte, ready to engage again in life and work here.

happiness (matthew 5. 1-12)

2011-01-30T11:09:00.000-08:00

In the dead of winter it helps to think about summer, right? Last summer Pam and I enjoyed a few days in New England. Good friends from Maine had invited us to stay with them at their cabin beside a pond. It was glorious. Then we drove down to Boston, and spent a few days there. I saw a game at Fenway Park; although I am not a Red Sox fan, it was pretty amazing. Some of you know I am on Facebook---they say people my age get connected to Facebook because they want to see pictures of their children, and it is true---and so on Facebook, I commented that we were in Boston for a few days, that we had just finished lunch at the Union Oyster House, and were walking the Freedom Trail.

I immediately received a text message from one of my best friends in high school. He could not believe that I was there. He lived not far away, he said; we had to get together, he would show us around. Now as close as Scott and I had been in high school, I had not seen him in thirty-five years.

So Pam and I met Scott the next day, at an outdoor café in Harvard Square. It was awkward at first. He probably never imagined that I would have become a minister, and he asked about that---“how did it happen?”. I caught up with him. Since Pam did not share our history it was probably interesting for her to see a side of things that I had not talked very much about. He showed us around Harvard, and then MIT, where he had gone to school. His brother in law teaches there and got us into the Media Labs, where they have invented a number of things---the Smart Car, the Kindle, Guitar Hero. Designed by the architect I.M. Pei, the building is all glass, and it is remarkable. Late in the afternoon he drove us back to our apartment.

In many ways it was an extraordinary day: a surprise reunion; a connection with an old friend; the discovery of a new place; the appreciation for intellect and creativity. And it had all come as a gift. I have asked people all week to think about experiences of happiness. When are you happiest? When have you been happiest? The responses have been amazing: some have been related to places---whenever my feet are in the ocean, one friend said; whenever school is cancelled because of snow, another friend commented. Some talked about simplifying their lives. Some talked about following their children’s pursuits. Some talked about a favorite movie. Some talked about serving. Some talked about particular scenes in movies. Some talked about travel.

Happiness is a hot topic in current conversation and research. One of Oprah’s shows last week was about happiness. Gretchen Rubin’s book, The Happiness Project, about how she takes a year to focus on all of this, will soon become a television show. Why the interest in happiness? Maybe it is New Year’s Resolutions---remember those? Or it could be that our lives are constantly in the process of change and we have to figure it out again. Nothing made me happier a few years ago than waiting for a youth symphony concert to begin: one of our daughters played the viola. Or attending high school volleyball matches all over Charlotte: one of our daughters was a middle hitter. But time passes, life changes, and I rarely attend the youth symphony or a volleyball match. So what replaces that? We have to come again and again to the question, “when am I happiest?”, because time passes, life changes. And so we look for broader measures of happiness.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, was convinced that there was no relation between happiness and wealth. He felt however that people were motivated by the pursuit of happiness (he wrote about all of this in 1776…recall the phrase “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”), and so we had to believe that the production of wealth would make us happy in order for economies to flourish. This was a delusion, he knew, but it really is the basis for our consumer culture. You really will be happy if you win that Visa Contest and get to go the Super Bowl the rest of your life….or if you win the Lottery, and so on. Maybe not!

Instead of Adam Smith and the next commercial that comes across our television, we might listen to an ancient rabbi, who, it turns out, had a few ideas about happiness too. The Common English Bible is a new translation that some in our congregation have been working with. It translates the Greek word, macarios, blessed in many of our English translations, as happy. While the KJV, 400 years ago this year translated macarios as blessed, the very first English translation, the Tyndale version , 100 years before the KJV, expressed it as “happy”.

It is interesting that Jesus begins perhaps his most important teaching, the sermon on the mount, with a series of blessings, or statements about happiness. There are a series of nine beatitudes. Scholars remind us that these are descriptions, not prescriptions. They are not telling us how we have to live; they are pointing out the ways in which the blessed and happy life breaks in upon us. They are not commandments, but promises, not goals to be achieved but gifts.

I could teach or preach a series of sermons on the Beatitudes, and I realize that a few minutes today is not time to do justice to them. The first beatitude has to do with poverty of spirit. What does that mean? Luke recorded the beatitude in a simpler form, blessed are the poor. According to Eduard Schweizer, Jesus “probably has in mind people whose outward circumstances force them to look to God for everything, but also to receive from God the gift of the spirit (faith) to look to him for everything”. Eugene Peterson translates this verse in an interesting way: “You’re blessed when you’re at the end of your rope. When there is less of you, there is more of God and his rule”.

Unhappiness is a life turned in on itself. Happiness is life turned outward and upward toward a higher power, toward God. Happiness happens not only or always when we are filled, successful, prospering and winning, but when we are empty, struggling, even ground down. In adversity we discover resources we would have missed otherwise.

I asked you this week about when you had been happiest and why? A friend from another city, who leads a construction business responded in this way:

“In the last couple of years, I've found I am most unhappy when I'm focused on myself. Worry, fear and trouble overtake me. My antidote to this downward spiral is to think of others. Prison ministry, working for the homeless, praying for the needs of others lifts me from my focus on self and brings me closer to God. My burdens are then lifted and I am open to feelings of gratitude and happiness for God's provision.”

This is probably not a lesson he would have chosen…and yet he has discovered happiness. If there are other recurring themes in the Beatitudes, they are the relation between the present and the future and the inner life and the external world. We take a step toward happiness, and often for us it must be a choice, as claim God’s promises for the future. Happy are the people who grieve, for they will be made glad…Happy are people who are humble, for they will inherit the earth. Jesus is teaching us that happiness is having a vision and hope for the future.

The beatitudes, like much of the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5-7), also remind us of the importance of the inner life in relation to the external world. As I listened to some of your responses to the question of happiness and faith, I realized that much of this has to do with taking the time to reflect. One friend shared this:

“Some of the happiest moments of my life happened at sidewalk cafes in Belgium. The happiness was in the simplicity of these moments. Good coffee. Solitude. People watching. Old world. No hurry…I suppose happiness happens for me in those rare moments when things slow down . . way, way down.”

The world most of us live in is filled with activity, being somewhere at a certain time, meeting a particular goal. So much of our conception of happiness is external: if I look a certain way, if I can hang a particular diploma on my wall, if I can get the presentation just right. I am not disparaging this. But it is not the sum total of who we are, and sometimes our lives become out of balance. And so Jesus teaches us not only to hunger and thirst, but to hunger and thirst for righteousness. To reflect is to see what is all around us, but it is to see in a different way: it is to see with the heart.

When you ask someone to reflect on what has made them happy, you have immediately transitioned into the sphere of the heart. One of the beatitudes reads, simply, “happy are people who have pure hearts, because they will see God”. To see God, for a Christian, is about the life to come, to be sure, but it is also about this life. Jesus says, in John 14, “if you have seen me you have seen the Father”. To see with the heart is to look for Jesus in everyday life; it is striking that my friend talked about finding happiness, in an economic downturn, in ministries with the homeless and the imprisoned. We remember Matthew 25, and the dialogue at the Great Judgment: “When did we see you?”, they ask Jesus and he responds, “when you have done it unto the least of these, you have done it unto me.”

A pure heart is a life that resists the distortions of what is often presented to us as happiness, a pure heart looks beneath the surface. And in the beatitudes we also learn that followers of Jesus will be misunderstood, harassed, insulted, spoken badly of. Happiness is not determined in a focus group or by a popularity contest, Jesus insists. Your reward is in heaven.

As we read the Beatitudes and pray them, we are drawn more deeply toward each other and God. We should not be surprised to discover that the happiest people we know are those who are living this way, and we are happiest when we are living this way….finding comfort in our grief, showing mercy instead of carrying bitterness, making peace instead of retaliating, seeing with the heart, finding our worth not in possessions but in relationships.

I realize there is some risk in preaching a sermon about happiness. Christians tend to be serious, somber, religious people, and we don’t often associate all of that with happiness. Or we think of some distortions of the gospel, like positive thinking or possibility thinking that did not have the weight of Christian teaching to anchor them. The bankruptcy of the Crystal Cathedral, this fall, seemed to symbolize all of that. The risk, however, should not prevent us from seeking to connect faith and happiness. Jesus was doing this very thing in the Beatitudes. These nine sayings are a simple and profound meditation on life as connection, discovery and gift.

Later in the Sermon on the Mount Jesus teaches us to pray as children dependent on our heavenly Father. Children are constantly connecting, discovering, receiving life as a gift. I am reminded of the wisdom of the novelist Tom Robbins, who said, “it is never too late to have a happy childhood”.

In meeting my friend Scott that day, I did come away seeing my life from a different perspective. Time passes, life changes. Could it really have been 35 years? And how could I have imagined it happening the way it has, all of it coming as something of a surprise? Going to seminary, meeting Pam, a life in the ministry, the births of two children, traveling around the world, writing books, having the privilege of entering into people’s lives at some of the most amazing intersections---weddings, funerals, deaths, births, decisions, frustrations, celebrations.

I have often found myself, even in chaotic, uncertain and challenging times, knowing that I am blessed, and, yes, happy. That day I knew it again.

Sources: Eduard Schweizer, The Good News According To Matthew. Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage. Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project. Percy Ainsworth, “The Vision of a Clean Heart”, Weavings, November/December, 1996. Common English Bible.

happiness: gathering up the leftover fragments

2011-01-29T14:51:00.000-08:00

I have been working on a sermon on the subject of happiness this week, taken from the beatitudes (Matthew 5. 1-12) and the prophetic summary of Micah (6. 6-8). I have asked friends and congregation members to write about their experiences of happiness and the responses have been amazing in their depth and diversity. All of this has led me to reflect on the same question---what is most personal is also most universal---and so I record here a few experiences of happiness. Set aside, for a moment the distinctions between happiness and blessing, and simply go to some of your own places of happiness. These have been some of mine, in no particular order:

1. The births of our children

2. Discovering a great restaurant: lately, Bistro le Bon, on Central Avenue in Charlotte

3. The annual Joke Show on A Prairie Home Companion

4. Making coffee for my wife each morning

5. An annual Academy Awards party with one set of good friends; an annual Groundhog Day party with another

6. Placing a prayer in the crevice of the Western Wall in Jerusalem

7. Finding a good doctor and a good dentist

8. Seeing really good people move into positions of influence: for example a friend who has been a Judge and will be again

9. The Office (my younger daughter got me into this) and Modern Family (ditto)

10. Waking up in the cool mountain air of our cabin in Western North Carolina

11. Holding the first book that I wrote in my hands

12. Attending the Phi Beta Kappa induction of our older daughter and a conference volleyball championship to watch our younger daughter

13. Meeting Nanci Griffith, Darius Rucker, Elvis Costello and Darrell Scott

14. Being ordained as an Elder, and participating in the laying on of hands of a number of friends over the years

15. Anytime I am watching a Coen Brothers movie.
16. Sitting in the open skies at Merlefest
17. Walking around the lake at Junaluska
18. Preaching at Duke Chapel, Marsh Chapel at Boston U, and the Upper Room Chapel
19. Walking on the Great Wall of China
20. Eating at Country's BBQ with my family in Columbus
21. Seeing friends at Annual Conference every year
22. Watching a Braves game in Atlanta; bonus, eating at the Varsity beforehand
23. A lectionary group that met at Wolf Laurel above Asheville the week before Labor Day each year
24. Picking blueberries on top of a mountain in Maine last summer
25. Anticipating the graduation of Jacques Lamour from Huntingdon College this May, particularly the vision of him walking across the stage
26. Participating in a panel discussion with Paul Farmer and in a lunch conversation with Elie Wiesel
27. Celebrating my 30th wedding anniversary earlier this month
28. The thrill of preaching on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday
29. Memories of silent retreats at Dayspring
30. Receiving an honorary doctorate at the United Methodist University of Liberia
31. Grilling in our backyard
32. The first time I ever participated in a Day of Service, at St. Timothy's
33. The Rabbis I have known, especially Mel and Murray
34. A few close friends with whom I talk almost every week
35. Building an outdoor cement soccer field in Cochabamba, Bolivia
36. A writer's workshop with Eugene Peterson at a monastery in Minnesota
37. A seminar in Maryland with Ed Friedman, of blessed memory
38. SEC football and ACC basketball
39. Committed and joyful members of churches all along the way
40. To be continued...

facing a decision (jeremiah 6. 16)

2011-01-27T12:23:00.000-08:00

"Thus says the Lord, stand at the crossroads and look.
And ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies;
and walk in it, and find rest for your souls."

Like many verses in the Bible, this brief thought is filled with practical wisdom. I invite you to read it again, slowly.

It is, first, a word from the Lord, and as in all communication, there is one who speaks and one who listens, and so it is important that we listen. Thus says the Lord. God is speaking to a time and a place, and Jeremiah, one of the great prophets of God recorded this. The temple is destroyed, he is in an adversarial relationship with the King, and he moves to Egypt, where he lives out his days in exile. God wants to speak, but the people will not listen, they ridicule the word of God, they are greedy, they do not speak or act truthfully, and they cover over all of this with a veneer that says “all is well”. To compound all of this, they have become so comfortable in their evil that they no longer blush about it. Jeremiah is speaking to a culture in ruins, to a demoralized people. He senses that some of the adversity has come from their enemies, but he also knows that some they have brought on themselves.

It is a challenging time and place. Now, 586 before Christ is not the same world as 2011 AD, or maybe it is? And so God spoke and God continues to speak. We are not left without a word, without guidance. Thus says the Lord, stand at the crossroads. What are the crossroads? The crossroads are those moments and places of decision. It was early Thursday morning, I am an early morning person but this was really early, and I was driving one of our daughters to catch Amtrak, she was headed for Washington D.C. and had a ticket. We were on time, but did not have a great deal of cushion. So we are headed north on 277 and I remembered that the Amtrak exit is not marked. We came upon an exit, and I wondered, “is this it?” No, we will take the next one, we did and drove a mile maybe, took the exit and then realized, “this is not the right place.” Now I know, a guy keeps driving, right? But it did not look familiar, so we turned around. It is early in the morning, it is dark, it is cold, and not much is open, not many people are moving around.

Soon we come upon a stop light and a couple of guys are standing there. Can you tell us how to get to Amtrak from here? They told us to turn around, make an immediate left, and then another immediate left and we would be there. We thanked them and followed their instructions, and soon, we were there, in time to catch the train.

We were at a crossroads, wondering which way to turn. We were at a place and a moment of decision. To stand at the crossroads is to survey all of the possible options, and it can be bewildering. Barry Schwartz teaches psychology at Swarthmore College in Philadelphia and he was written a wonderful book entitled The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less. He argues that the increasing numbers of choices, options do not make us more content; in fact, they can be overwhelming. From shampoo to cheese, from the right college to the right retirement community, from where to live to how many children, abundance of choices actually makes us less happy and more stressed.

Every day we all stand at a crossroads. Of course this goes beyond consumer behavior, employment and family to other matters: the moral decisions we make, what we value, our ethical and spiritual lives.

Stand at the crossroads and look, or, as the rabbis said, consider. This is an invitation to see what is going on all around us. If we have ears to hear what the Lord is saying to us, our eyes are open to see what is happening in our lives and in our world. Stand at the crossroads and look:

Life is passing you by and in the meantime you wonder: How are you spending your time? Where is it going? What is concerning you, worrying you? What are you missing? What direction has your life taken the last year, two years? Is it the road you want to be on? Or do you seem lost, like we were on Thursday morning?

Look around. Consider. The seeing and reflecting may lead us to ask the question: am I going in the right direction? Is this what I want from life? We can rely on our own counsel, or the guidance of friends. And if faith is a part of our lives, we can imagine that God is speaking to us.

Stand at the crossroads, and look, and ask for the ancient paths. What is the ancient path? Well, it is not the next thing, not always the relevant thing, the newest gadget or program or guru. For a Christian, there is a well traveled ancient path. It began three thousand years ago, as God called Abraham and Sarah and then Moses. The path led the people from slavery to freedom. Last Sunday I talked about Martin Luther King, Jr. When he stood at a crossroads and looked around, at Montgomery and Selma, he discovered the ancient path, the very one that Moses had walked before him. The path led God’s people to remarkable heights of success---the kingdoms of David and Solomon, the building of the temple, and utter valleys of despair----exile to Assyrian and Babylon, and the destruction of the temple.

Through it all God gave us prophets, like Isaiah and Jeremiah, to steer us back toward that path. They were like the men we met early in the morning, last week, who helped us on the way to where we needed to be, who realized we were lost. Finally the ancient path was identified by John the Baptist in the wilderness, and Jesus, the way, the truth and the life. Eugene Peterson has commented that the way is the most frequently avoided metaphor among Christians of our time. The way means “to do it the way Jesus did it, by becoming absolutely needy and dependent on the Father”. The ancient path is summarized in a well known proverb: Trust in the Lord with all your heart, and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him, and he will direct your paths (Proverbs 3. 5-6).

Pilgrims have walked this ancient path for the last thirty centuries. There are patterns of living related to the Sabbath and rest that are three thousand years old. There are patterns of hospitality given to us by the Benedictines that are 1600 years old. There are patterns of spiritual discernment given to us by the Jesuits that are 500 years old. There are patterns of holy living given to us by the early Methodists that are 250 years old. There are patterns of conversion of the heart given to us by the revival preachers that are 150 years old. There are patterns of reform of the nation given to us by the social gospel that are 100 years old. All of this forms the ancient path. It is all a part of hearing the gospel invitation of Jesus, who said, and says, “Follow me”.

When you are looking around, when you are getting ready to take the next step, look for, consider the ancient path, where the good way lies. This path has always been the way of happiness and blessing, it has always been the way that God has been closest to his people, it has always been the practical way of being in his will. It can be a hard road, and a narrow road, Jesus said, but God is with us.

Ask for the ancient paths, where the good way lies, and walk in it. In other words, Christianity is a journey and not only a destination, a process and not only a status. The ancient path is the good way, it is the way that leads to life. The Sabbath, if we practice it, is for our healing. Spiritual Discernment, if we practice it, is for our guidance. Holiness, if we practice it, is for our maturing and well-being.

To walk in it is to stay with it. It is, in the words again of Eugene Peterson, “a long obedience in the same direction.” To walk somewhere is to have the intention to make one choice and not another, to arrive in one place and not another. The ancient path, the good way, rules out lots of other paths, and some of these are mentioned in today’s scripture from Jeremiah.

To walk in this way is to find rest for our souls. If our ears are open, if our eyes are open, most of us confess a desire for this: rest for our souls. Our work becomes harder. We experience health challenges. There is tension within families. Often, making it through the schedule of a day can seem complex. And then there is the culture around us: infrastructures in need of repair, services that are constricting, angry and strident opinions and some of all of this spills over into violence. The financial markets remain turbulent, and unemployment is high.

All of this does something to the spirit, to the soul. This is not about nostalgia, about wishing life was like it was back in the day. We are standing at the crossroads, and we will go in one direction or another, and it will be the future. Paradoxically, the best way to walk into the future is to take the ancient path. About eleven years ago, on the eve of Y2K many were connecting the Book of Revelation with the end of the millennium. A magazine asked different Christian leaders to write letters to the churches of the present day, along the lines of the letters to the churches in Revelation. Eugene Peterson was asked to write a letter to the Suburban Church of North America. After some critique of the church, which most letters included, Peterson concluded with this guidance, written from the Voice of God to his people:

“Here’s what I want you to do. I want you to start off the new millennium by purging your imagination of your suburban assumptions. I want you to do it by spending the next couple of years reading carefully and repeatedly the 16 Hebrew Prophets, Isaiah to Malachi (Jeremiah would be in this group). I have used these prophets over and over again through the centuries to separate my people from the cultures in which they lived. They are one of my standard ways of putting my people back on the path of simple faith and obedience and worship in defiance of all that the world admires and rewards. My Spirit continues to use these prophets to train my people in discerning the difference between the ways of the world and the ways of the gospel. He wants to use them with you.

The letter ends with a simple passage, which captures, for me, what rest for our souls might look like. “To the church that not only believes what I say, but follows me in the way that I do it, I’ll give a simple, uncluttered life that is hospitable to the wanderers and misguided, the hurried and harried men and women of this world. I want to give them a taste of Sabbath and heaven. Are you listening? Really listening?”

Source: Eugene Peterson, “Letter to the Suburban Church of North America”, Christianity Today, October 25, 1999. Eugene Peterson, The Jesus Way.

remembering martin at the end of a violent week

2011-01-16T10:35:00.000-08:00

I was eleven years old when Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. Some people can remember where they were when John Kennedy was assassinated; I remember where I was when Martin Luther King was shot. I grew up in what I call the “deep south”, in Columbus, Georgia, the midpoint between Montgomery, Alabama, where King served Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, his first pastorate, and Atlanta, where he was born and where he returned after Montgomery.

In early April baseball season was beginning, we had received our uniforms, and were planning to attend a program where every player would walk across the stage, in his uniform, with his name being called out. I had the additional honor of walking our team’s “queen”, a young girl, across the stage. However, at the time I was more embarrassed and scared than anything else.

When we got home that evening we learned that King had been shot. And the response, in Columbus, Georgia, was one of ambivalence. You can imagine the comments that were voiced among white people who were not enthusiastic admirers of King. In the months ahead, and especially the summer, the response would become one of rage, bringing early curfews, and, for a young boy, fear and chaos.

Years later, I was required to read one of King’s books in a seminary class. It was a slim volume entitled “Why We Can’t Wait”. In its pages I encountered a different Martin Luther King than I had expected, or perhaps I was different. King had grown up in an enclave of middle class blacks in a very segregated section of Atlanta. He had the advantages within this community of heritage, personal charisma, rhetorical greatness and a superior mind. All of these gifts came together in him. He had both a national forum, among blacks and whites, he had had something to say, and he said it.

King had wrestled with the implications of the black struggle---he met Rosa Parks, who refused to sit in the back of the bus in that first pastorate, in Montgomery---and he came out on the side of non-violence. During his life, he was pursued by the FBI and local sheriffs, ridiculed by those who wanted to retaliate, and dismissed by Malcolm X as not being tough enough. He was all about non-violence, which he saw as an implication of a greater reality, the love of God and neighbor and the call to follow Jesus.

I am also convinced that King was committed to non-violence because he had been given an enlarged vision of the Kingdom of God, which he called, in his early sermons, the beloved community. He understood that blacks and whites in this nation, that blacks and whites in the church had a common destiny. Martin Luther King, like each of us and like so many of the biblical characters was flawed and very human. But he perceived a vision for the church and the nation, and he was willing to work, and to suffer toward that end. In a speech he made the point clear:

“The cross we bear precedes the crown we wear. To be a Christian one must take up his cross, with all its difficulties and agonizing and tension packed content and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way which comes only through suffering.”

In the gospel lesson John the Baptist greets Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Most likely Jesus is linked in this passage to the suffering servant of Isaiah, who was compared “to a lamb led to the slaughter” (Isaiah 53). God’s spirit had been placed upon the suffering servant, who would bring forth justice to the nation (42. 1), who would represent the mission of Israel not only to the tribes of Jacob, but who would call them forth as a light to the nations (49. 6), that the salvation of God might reach to the ends of the earth.

We know that Jesus interpreted his mission in light of these suffering servant passages of Isaiah. Jesus is the suffering servant for the world, the sacrificial savior, the bearer of God’s universal offer of salvation, who ushers in a new age of righteousness, and takes upon himself our sin and guilt. Jesus comes to make all things new. Jesus comes to be our peace. Jesus is the embodiment of the Kingdom of God in our world.

So this morning we might ask: What might all of this mean for those of us who live in an increasingly violent and polarized world, where the Lion and Lamb do not lie down together?

As the scripture says, this will be a sign for you. Over the last days we have witnessed the horror of a murder on the public stage, a federal judge and nine year old girl dead, along with others, the attempted assassination (the words of the shooter) of a member of the congress. Is it possible for us to see this, think about this as Christians, and not only as liberals (who want to link this with tea party) or conservatives (who want to talk about mental illness)? Is it possible for us to see this, think about this as Christians, and not only as liberals or conservatives who are worried about some political advantage or loss?

Could we not ask a different set of questions: are we not our brother's keeper, which means not only that we care for the most disturbed among us (which would mean more and not less treatment for the mentally ill) but that we hold them accountable, which means we do not allow an ordinary citizen to purchase a weapon that can kill a dozen people in a matter of seconds? Are we on our own, or can we recognize the mentally ill flooding our streets, our shelters, some returning from war, some long term unemployed? Do we recognize the cost of the violence that staying on the sidelines of all of this entails for us?

And can we go deeper into it all? Can we not agree, at a more fundamental level, that the way of Jesus is non-violent, can we not remember in his sermon on the mount that he blessed the peacemakers and called them children of God? Can we not recall, going back further, that he did not retaliate against his enemies but saw in Isaiah's prophecy a different and higher way, through suffering that was redemptive? He is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

There has been a great deal of focus, curiosity, analysis this week about the young man who planned and executed the murders this week in Arizona. It helps us to see him as odd, unusual, extremist. I was reminded that, in his lifetime, Martin Luther King, in a different way, was regarded as an agitator, a troublemaker, an extremist. In his Letter From the Birmingham Jail, he offered this response:

“Though I was initially disappointed in being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love? “Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that despitefully use you and persecute you”. Was not Amos an extremist for justice? Let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like an ever flowing stream? Was not Paul an extremist for the Christian gospel? “I bear in my body the marks of the Lord Jesus.”

"Was not Martin Luther an extremist? “Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise, God help me.” And Abraham Lincoln: “This nation cannot survive half slave and half free.” And Thomas Jefferson: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

It is interesting that Martin Luther King, Jr. was actually born as Michael Luther King. His father was the pastor of the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and after several years of ministry, which included helping to keep the church open during the Depression, the church as a reward sent him one summer to Israel, the Holy Land, and Germany, the home of the Reformation. Upon his return he changed his name, and his son’s name from Michael Luther King, Sr. and Jr. to Martin Luther King, and he rebaptized his son.

Martin would grow into this name. Like the reformers before him, he rediscovered something that had been hidden, suppressed, ignored, even in the Bible Belt. And he did this primarily as a preacher of the gospel. He once said, of himself, “In my essence, I am a Baptist preacher. This is my being and my heritage, for I am the son of a Baptist preacher, the grandson of a Baptist preacher and the great grandson of a Baptist preacher.” He was a radical reformer in the sense that he went back to the roots, the scriptures, the prophets, the sermon on the mount and our nation’s founding documents and he held them up for us, and would not let us turn our eyes away.

In a meeting with students in Albany, Georgia, early in his ministry, he listened as a young woman student opened the worship service with prayer. There was a continuing refrain in her words: “I have a dream, I have a dream, I have a dream”. Like all preachers, King would borrow those words and make them his own, and our own. And so when he stood up before the nation to speak, and announced, “I have a dream”, he was tapping into the deep undercurrent in the hearts and minds of many, many people, who longed for a better and different world, and who were willing to suffer toward that end.

I have been to Dexter Avenue Baptist Church, in Montgomery. It is a block on the main street leading to the State Capital, formerly the capital of the Confederacy, which would be prime real estate in most cities, until one learns that it was a slave pen, before it was a sanctuary.

That is a vivid image of the gospel that Martin came to announce. Jesus comes to save us, to redeem us, to set us free. That is an extreme act of an extremist God. And if we are his people, we are called to be extremists in a violent and polarized world, to envision a kingdom that is not of this world, and yet to work to change the world, even as we pray, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”.

At his core, in his essence, Martin was a preacher of the gospel: “Behold the lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world”. And yet he wanted us to respond to the gospel, and so he asked and asks the question that is echoed in the hymn, a hymn that would have been sung in many of the services that he led, “Must Jesus bear the cross alone”---and they understood the cross as pain, injustice, frustration, despair, suffering---“must Jesus bear the cross alone, and all the world go free?”

No.

“There’s a cross for everyone, and there’s a cross for me.”

Sources: Richard Lischer, The Preacher King. “Must Jesus Bear The Cross Alone”, United Methodist Hymnal; Martin Luther King, Jr., Why We Can’t Wait.

guide us to thy perfect light: the new year as a spiritual journey (matthew 2. 1-12)

2011-01-07T11:21:00.000-08:00

We begin the new calendar year with the very end of the Christmas story, which for the church coincides with the Epiphany of the Lord. Epiphany is a word that simply means the perception or intuition we have of an experience. The gospel for Epiphany is always Matthew 2. 1-12, the journey of the Wise Men, or Magi, who come from the East to offer their gifts to the Christ Child.

We are so familiar with this story that we often miss the scandal of it. I was visiting with my family in Georgia this week and we were having dinner, my mother, sister, nephew and my sister’s grandson, who is two. He had played the role of a magi in their church’s Christmas drama. We are familiar with this story because we have seen the play, or performed as a character in it. The scandal, according to Matthew, is that the visitors come from the east, biblical scholars tell us most likely from present day Iraq, they were more like astrologers than wise men, and so their horoscope told them to go in a particular direction, and they did. For a good Jew, waiting for the coming of the Messiah, this was not very kosher at all.

So here we are, with this old story and a brand new year. I find it to be an endlessly compelling story and actually perfectly suited to the confluence of all that is happening on this weekend, the calendars roll over, maybe we have taken the tree down, maybe not, the feel still of a holiday weekend, family coming and going. It is all perfectly captured for me in W. H. Auden’s poem, For the Time Being:

Well, so that is that.
Now we must dismantle the tree,
Putting the decorations back into their cardboard boxes -
Some have got broken – and carrying them up to the attic.
The holly and the mistletoe must be taken down and burnt,
And the children got ready for school. There are enough
Left-overs to do, warmed-up, for the rest of the week -
Not that we have much appetite, having …[ ]
Stayed up so late, attempted – quite unsuccessfully -
To love all of our relatives, and in general
Grossly overestimated our powers. Once again
As in previous years we have seen the actual Vision and failed
To do more than entertain it as an agreeable
Possibility, once again we have sent Him away

Of course, the gospel for today gives us hope that we have not sent him away, that we are actually considering the possibility of moving toward him. A new year gives us that possibility. Matthew’s story of the magi is one of movement, ordinary people moving from one place to another, on a journey. Along the way they and we ask questions: what is my purpose here? Where are we going?

On New Year’s Eve we watched some of the coverage of the evening, the ball dropping,… We had ordered Chinese food, but we forgot to open the fortune cookie, that might have given us a hint of what lies ahead. The commentators offered analysis of where we had been, where we were going, some trying to find a kind of soft secular hope in the middle of it all.

I like to return again to this story, one we all know, some of us have actually been a part of its drama, and reflect on it in relation to a new year. What is my purpose? Where are we going? Is it luck? It is fate? Or is there a God out there, guiding our steps, actually walking with us from one place to another. The good news of Matthew’s scandalous gospel is that God can work with anyone, even people a great distance away, and bring them to a place of epiphany, perception, discovery, even joy.

To bring the question into even sharper focus, this is a biblical story not only about moving from one place to another; it is about moving in a purposeful direction, toward the light, toward Christ. And so we could ask the questions not only “what is my purpose here?” and “where am I going?”, but “where do I discover Christ?” I grew up in a culture where you met Christ, once, and that was enough, that settled the matter, but as I grow older, as these calendar years seem to move by faster and faster, I sense that I must meet him again and again, and each time the meeting is different because I am not the same person, and the world is a very different world.

Where do we discover Christ? In a personal relationship? In a spiritual practice? Among a small group of trusted friends? In a decision to forgive? In the experience of being forgiven? In the poor? In setting aside my own agendas and preconceptions and seeking to discern his?

Something like that is going on with these wise men. On their journey they see star in the sky and it leads them to the place of discovery, and they are overwhelmed with joy. A child is always a gift, the Christ Child is always a gift, an experience of God is always a gift. Like the wise men we can make the journey, we can follow the star, and all in the hopes that we will find God or better than God will find us.

One of the earliest ministers of Providence was a man named Doug Corriher. His picture hangs in the hallway outside my office here and I see it most every day. I knew Doug Corriher when I was in my late twenties, which was a few years ago! He had also been the minister of the church where I was serving as an associate minister, Christ United Methodist Church in Greensboro, and he was active in that congregation . He would die during my time there. The only people on Providence who ever spoke about him in detail with me about Doug were Walter Nelson, of blessed memory, and his wife Carolyn, who now resides at Aldersgate.

Doug Corriher was a man on a spiritual journey, and he took groups of pilgrims on retreats to Dayspring, in rural Maryland, not far from Washington, D.C. I would go to Dayspring later, and would take a number of groups there myself. One of my most valuable possessions is a newsletter article Doug wrote in 1976, thirty five years ago. How many newsletter articles do you save for that long, really? But this one I have. I want to read it to you. Listen for his words about journey:

“Twelve [of us] made a journey over last weekend to Dayspring, near Germantown, Maryland the retreat center of the Church of the Saviour. It was a journey to make retreat, an effort to re-establish vital connections in our spiritual lives, seek (during 48 hours of silence) to rediscover the urgency of God’s call in our souls and to strengthen the emphasis on devotional disciplines without which our own commitments weaken and eventually die.

“To drive 700 miles to find “the Lord within” could seem a little foolish on a Monday morning---could, that is, if one were to permit himself to forget what life is all about. Life is relationships---not business, not education, not wealth, not power---and the seeking soul would be willing to go to the moon to find the God-in-Christ in a new clarity and closeness. We had better begin soon to identify the “far country” and make a judgment on where we are; for it may turn out that each of us needs to “come to himself” and go back to the Father who waits with open arms.

“Dayspring is a Mecca of Christian hopes and discoveries. You know it by the quiet confidence of the Retreat master, who stands in a long tradition of wisdom, gleaned from years of making the inward journey/outward journey. …You know it as you soak up the atmosphere of Gods’ beautiful earth, sky, trees, birds, etc. You know it as you awaken in the night to meditate on the Lord’s word to you in your dreams. You know it as you watch your friends permit their real selves to surface and reach out to you in a fellowship that is eternal.

“Everybody needs to make this journey---not necessarily to Dayspring, but everybody needs to journey to where the Lord Jesus Christ is, and there to fall in step with Him whose big intention is to lead us into life, and life to the full.”

Christmas does linger, and with it the possibility that we have not sent him away, that we continue to struggle with the questions, “what is my purpose”, “where are we going?”

As we come to receive Holy Communion this morning we have the promise that God meets us, in this place. May we be, literally, overwhelmed with joy, and may we offer our gifts---the gifts of ourselves, all that we are and all that we have---to the Lord Jesus Christ. And may all of it lead us to life.

Let us pray:

Star of wonder,
star of light,
star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading,
still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light.
Amen.

Source: W. H. Auden, For The Time Being. "We Three Kings", United Methodist Hymnal, 254.

the calendars we live by

2010-12-26T13:53:00.000-08:00

I write at the beginning of one of the holiest weeks of the year for a pastor, the days following the Christmas Eve services and leading up to New Year's, and then the Epiphany. I am reminded each year that this represents something of a confluence of festivities; some are sacred, others are civic. And all of it is a reminder that we live by overlapping calendars, ways of structuring time and finding meaning and purpose.

Most of us live by at least three calendars.

A prominent calendar in our culture is the rhythm of athletic seasons. Some of us live from the opening day of baseball to the first kickoff of football to the midnight madness of college basketball, then to the baseball world series, and then the college bowl games, the NFL Super Bowl and March Madness. And then the opening pitch of the first baseball game is thrown again. Within these seasons there is also the Master's Golf Tournament, the Wimbledon Tennis Tournament, and other assorted contests (such as World Cup of Soccer and the Stanley Cup). Many organize their lives around their favorite teams, and their psyches flourish or falter alongside the fortunes of their heroes. There are sacred spaces (Fenway Park, Cameron Indoor Stadium, and the new Cowboys Stadium, the largest domed stadium in the world are but three examples), secret societies (scouts, betting services fantasy football), and remembrances of shared history (note the remarkable Ken Burns PBS series on Baseball, updated this fall). It is not accidental that parents pass the importance of the sports calendar along to their children, and that participation in sports (which once were seasonal but are now year-round) becomes a priority and even an obsession.

A second calendar is our civic calendar. Broadly sketched, this includes New Year's Day, a time for making resolutions, and a moment marked by the possibility of reinvention. There is Memorial Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, and Thanksgiving Day. A recent addition to this listing is the observance of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. These days are often profoundly important to some in our society, and less meaningful to others. The civic holidays may elicit deep memories of loss and sacrifice in some families, while others consider them simply as a respite from work and school. Indeed, this reality is at times the source of some tension among citizens of the United States. In our rhythm of life, Memorial Day marks the beginning of summer and Labor Day its conclusion, and what happens in between (vacations, leisure, longer days, a break from school) is more significant for most that what occurs on the particular holidays that frame the season. Some will raise flags at their homes, attend picnics, and view fireworks (especially on July 4). Thanksgiving, in particular, is a somewhat ambiguous ritual, in that it began as a harvest festival and most of us now live at some distance from the profession of agriculture; in addition, it recalls the encounter between the European settlers and the Native Americans, who had their own traditions of harvest celebration, which were displaced over the course of time. In addition, Thanksgiving has become closely associated with the onset of Christmas commerce in general and "Black Friday" in particular. Alongside these recurring days in our national life are Mother's Day and Father's Day, which are certainly important within families, and the growing prominence of political elections, which, like athletic contests, are no longer seasonal but unending. This final dimension of the political calendar, the adversarial contest between political parties, have a deadly effect on our congregational and denominational lives.

A third calendar, for a Christian, is the liturgical year. It is, very simply, a way of marking time according to the life of Jesus, beginning with the anticipation of his coming (Advent), the celebration of his birth (Christmas), and manifestation of his presence in the world (Epiphany) and his baptism. The most frequently told stories about Jesus (his baptism, changing water into wine at a wedding, and his transfiguration) introduce us to his glory, but also prepare us for his suffering. In the season of Lent (from the anglo-saxon word lencten, the lengthening of days), the followers of Jesus enter into his suffering, and on Palm/Passion Sunday witness his entry into Jerusalem, the place of his final testing and, ultimately, his death on a cross for humanity (Good Friday). After three days, we believe that God raises him from death, on Easter. Over the next fifty days he teaches the disciples about God's purposes for the world, and on Ascension Day he returns to be with God, preparing for the coming of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost. The Sundays after Pentecost (formerly Kingdomtide) move into Ordinary Time, finding their climax on Christ the King Sunday, which signifies the fulfillment of God's purposes on earth and in heaven, as Jesus is seated at the right hand of God...and then, we quickly move to the first Sunday of Advent. Within this liturgical calendar there are also significant days, such as World Communion, Reformation Sunday, and All Saints, and these are increasingly observed by mainline, emergent and evangelical Christians alongside their Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. In addition, some Christian congregations are sensitive to Jewish holy days, among them Passover, Shuvuot and Yom Kippur (Atonement), each having profound implications for Christian belief and practice.

We live in each of these calendars (sports, civic, liturgical), and each shapes our lives to some extent. We are recreational beings, citizens, women and men of faith. The overlapping of these calendars is one way of making sense of life; thus we watch football on New Year's Day or offer prayers for families on Mother's Day, or find spiritual lessons in our political dramas (God is on our side, or not). To reflect on the confluence of the calendars is one way to bring their realities to our conciousness, although it is probably true that, even for Christians, the liturgical calendar is the least influential for most of us. The flattening of the liturgical calendar to the celebration of Christmas and Easter removes the pain of pregnancy and the discipline of suffering from the equation, just as the negligence of national appreciation for military sacrifice is the result of wars that are not, in fact, shared sacrifices for most of us, but for the few.

Speaking as a Christian, and as a pastor, one of the great challenges for us is to recover the thickness of our story, the meaning of our faith and the adventure of the life of Jesus. We do not undertake this work in a vacuum; it is the work of the people, and it will be a process of structuring reality in a different and somewhat counter-cultural way. Thus, we will need to convince the parent of an athlete that confirmation is more important than a season with a team that travels to near and distant cities, and we will need to persuade a friend in the greatest generation that our Independence Day is Good Friday.

So, we have made our way through Advent, and we now live in the 12 days of Christmas. What is next? What if we took on the work of making this calendar make sense to our people? What if we invested ourselves in the adventure of following Jesus, and inviting others along for the journey? Is this worthwhile? Is it possible? Is there an alternative?

christmas poem 2010

2010-12-22T19:46:00.000-08:00

In this godforsaken world
a word is spoken
and it is good,
and in the fullness of time
that word becomes flesh
and it is real,
a vulnerable unborn child
brought safely to term,
a frightened refugee family
led by the spirit to sanctuary.

The promises are realized:
a child is born, for us;
a son is given to us
and again, in the fullness of time
his birth becomes our rebirth,
an outward and visible sign
of an inward and spiritual grace.

His mother holds all of this
deep within; she knows all too well
that in the fullness of time
the crèche will be dismantled,
transformed into a cross,

laid upon us, this gift, a reminder
of the ancient future instructions:

to repair the broken cisterns,
to restore the crumbling foundations,
to repeat the sounding joy.

(khc)

the chaotic joy of a flash mob: do you hear what i hear?

2010-12-17T10:15:00.000-08:00

You may have watched the scene, millions of people of all ages have. It is a generic North American mall food court. It could be anywhere, Denver or Des Moines or Dallas. And so you can easily place yourself there. If you have seen one mall, you really have seen them all.

Maybe you didn't really want to go to the mall today. But you needed something, or somebody needed something, or somebody persuaded you to do something you were not that inclined to do in the first place. To make matters worse, the shopping excursion became an extended experience, and so now you find yourself eating lunch at the mall. Eating a meal at the mall is not on anyone's "bucket list", things I hope to do before I die list, and it was not in your plan for today, but there you are. One child is eating pizza, one is eating a hot dog, it really doesn't matter what you are eating.

There you are, on a November day at the mall, lots of conversations and sounds in the background and then a voice, a very clear, distinct, compelling voice, an out of place voice, but a voice you have heard before. You soon recognize it as the beginning of the "Hallelujah Chorus". Where is that voice coming from? Then, from a different direction another voice, then a few voices, then people are standing, singing the "Hallelujah Chorus", and it has taken on a life of its own.

It builds, and gains strength, and all of a sudden you are no longer in a generic North American food court. You are in the holy of holies, in the unlikeliest sanctuary of all, to be honest God was the farthest thing from your mind, but yes, it must be true, "the kingdoms of this world have become the kingdoms of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever, hallelujah".

Well, someone recorded all of this, at a mall, and then they put it on You Tube, which is a website that is pretty much an open forum about American life, from unusual babies and cats to embarrassed celebrities and politicians. It's on You Tube and fourteen million people have viewed it, and millions of others have shared it via email.

After I was encouraged for about the tenth time by friends to watch it, I clicked the icon...and sat still, and what I saw was pretty much what I have described; an ordinary day at the mall transformed into an occasion to glorify God.

And then I began to wonder:

What is so compelling about this scene? Yes, it is beautiful music, but it goes beyond that.
Is it the outpouring of the spirit in the marketplace, a reminder of the commercialism that dominates the last quarter of the year, when Christmas blends with Halloween and Thanksgiving?
Is it a mild form of protest, against a culture that often takes Christ out of Christmas?
Is it simply a burst of joy across our depressed economic landscape?
What is it about the "Hallelujah Chorus" at the food court?

It has become, for me, a sign, a gift of joy in Advent 2010, a parable in cyberspace of rejoicing with joy and singing in the wilderness. If we open our eyes, the prophet says, we will see the salvation of God. Our weak hands will be strengthened to do the work of God; our feeble knees will be made firm to keep going, our fears and anxieties will be taken away. Joy and gladness will fill our hearts (see Isaiah 35. 1-10).

The choir that day in the food court had of course planned for the occasion----in the voice lessons, the rehearsals, learning Handel's piece by heart. It was a disciplined act that led to the gift of joy. A flash mob is planned and executed, and yet it has an element of surprise. It is an occasion of joy, the fulfillment of the promise of the prophet:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom, like the crocus it shall blossom abundantly and rejoice with joy and singing.

A choir incognito, in a mall food court, can be a chorus of angels. God is always giving us a sign.

My prayer for us is that we will open our eyes and our ears, our hearts and our hands, to receive the gift of joy in this season, and then to share it with others.

social media and advent

2010-12-08T19:33:00.000-08:00

For at least ten years I have sent a daily Advent message to my congregation and anyone else who wishes to receive it. I wanted to briefly describe what it has been and is, because I am convinced it is an interesting platform to accomplish a number of objectives. It helps that I enjoy the writing process, and also that I do not take it that seriously. At the same time, I am constantly amazed at its reception; it has an audience of more than a thousand households and workplaces, and reaches many people beyond the church. The first daily message is sent on the First Sunday of Advent, and the last one on Christmas Day (or immediately following the last Christmas eve service). If you would like to receive the Advent message simply contact Carol Grinham at cgrinham (at) providenceumc.org.

I began the daily message as a simple group email. We now use Constant Contact, which I recommend. I put together a word document each day, and it is then formatted for Constant Contact and sent to a mailing list of subscribers. I always ask, in several ways, that those who do not wish to subscribe can simply let us know or they can unsubscribe, and we certainly understand. I really do want those who receive it each day to be willing participants in the shared message.

Having said all of this, the strength of the daily message lies in its unpredictability. The content is somewhat random, and includes humor, sports, music and the arts, comments about television and movies, a calendar, devotional and theological reflection, updates about our congregation's end of year giving, and opportunities for meeting community needs.

A word about each of these categories:

The humor is simply a daily joke or two related to Christmas. These are really bad and very basic Christmas jokes (almost at a child's level) and at the same time I find that people invariably love them...even if they have heard them before. The jokes can be found on the internet, and I also use the Prairie Home Companion Pretty Good Jokes as a resource. I often include one joke, sometimes two each day. For example: Why was Santa's little helper depressed? Because he had low elf esteem....you get the idea.

I often list football games and basketball games in the calendar. This is somewhat unusual for a church publication, but it is a recognition that many plan their lives around these games. The Advent/Christmas season coincides with the end of the college season and the Bowl games. I enjoy predicting some of the winners, and also poking fun at some of the more bizarre bowl contests in out of the way places. Having attended Duke, and with a daughter who went to Chapel Hill, I also have fun with the beginning of basketball season. I make predictions about some of the outcomes, and this is also fun to report.

There is an abundance of really wonderful and eclectic Christmas music, and I often make recommendations. Dave Brubeck, Bruce Cockburn, James Taylor, Bela Fleck, the Robert Shaw Singers, Taize, Diana Krall, the Chieftains, John Prine, Kathy Mattea are a few artists who have made nice Christmas recordings. I will sometimes provide links via Amazon to a particular piece, or simply refer the reader to the entire work. For years I have made a habit of only listening to Christmas music during this season, but I am selective about what I have going on the in background.

At the same time, I also affirm our choir's Christmas music, and see this as one of the church's great strengths. It is a season to educate the reader and I try to point him or her toward a new work, or something in the tradition like the King's College Service of Lessons and Carols. And lastly, in relation to music, there is a vast amount of really awful material out there, and obviously these are musicians who are simply going after a share of a lucrative market. Of course this is subjective, but I would (and do) include particular artists in this category (Barry Manilow and Kenny G., for example). Readers disagree with me, and that is fine. It is all in good fun.

The Christmas season is a time that is ripe for theological reflection and exposition, and in substance this is all about the incarnation. The daily message is a way to introduce readers to Madeleine L' Engle("The Risk of Birth"), Howard Thurman, Karl Barth, W. H. Auden ("For The Time Being"), and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, among others. Years ago I came across a superb devotional book, Watch For The Light (Plough Publishing House). It is substantive and ecumenical, and deep enough to return to again and again. And I sometimes find myself reflecting on particular phrases in hymns and carols, from "O Come, O Come Emmanuel" to "Come Thou Long Expected Jesus" to "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing".

Lastly, the daily message has a practical purpose: I want to update our congregation about end of year financial giving (in our parish this is often 20-25% in the last month, and so this is crucial), pledges for the upcoming year (encouragement for those who have not yet made estimates of giving) and worthy causes in the area of community ministry and global mission. Many people are very generous in Advent and at Christmas; in part it is the season of giving, and in part, for some, there are positive tax implications. This year our congregation has set three very practical goals for giving beyond our budget: gifts for 110 children in Charlotte through the Bethlehem Center; 10 tons of food for Loaves and Fishes; and $5,000 (to be matched with another $5000) for Haiti Microcredit loans, which will employ 50 women. It helps, day by day, to report progress and to keep these opportunities before those who read and respond to the email.

There are other items in the daily messages, and again the rule is unpredictability: fruitcakes and speed bumps, weather and politics, speed bumps and headache remedies, and even my annual recipe for the scrambled dog, a Georgia delicacy. There is ongoing advice about unplugging the Christmas machine and gentle reminders about when our services will be held. The form of the daily message is a series of notes, all brief and casual. We are a somewhat formal church, at least in worship, and so the informality helps us, on balance. The use of social media during this season, I have discovered, meshes with our church's strengths: excellent traditional worship and inspiring choral music; welcoming and compassionate people and relational groups; and cutting edge, risk-taking local and global mission. People want to experience God, they want to discover community, and they want to make a difference.

On Christmas Eve morning I send a prayer that I wrote years ago, entitled " A Christmas Eve Prayer For Those Who Do Not Attend Church", which has been reprinted in a number of magazines, along with the service times (for us, 3:00, 4:00, 5:00 and 11:00 pm). The last Christmas Eve service ends at about half past midnight, and the last email message is sent, usually Howard Thurman's "The Work of Christmas", with wishes to all for a Merry Christmas.

come, let us walk in the light of the lord: an interfaith dialogue in advent

2010-12-02T11:43:00.000-08:00

It is an honor to share the message with Murray Ezring, friend, rabbi and spiritual leader of Temple Israel, our neighbor just to the south on Providence Road in Charlotte. It is remarkable that we share together in Advent, when we read and sing Israel’s promises and prophecies. Thank you, Murray taking part in interfaith Bible Studies with us over the past two years. We have worked through Genesis and Exodus and the Psalms together, you have welcomed us at the Seder meal and we have invited your people to our Easter Sunrise Service. Thank you for being with us now as we focus on God’s gift of hope.

Our dialogue leads me to ask three questions.

• What do the prophet’s words mean, “Come let us walk in the light of the Lord?”

We realize, every one of us, that as we walk this road we have not arrived our destination----every year we light the candles of hope and peace, joy, love and light, and yet every year we confess our for a greater sense of hope and not despair, peace and not separation, joy and not sadness, love and not resentment, light and not darkness. But, in honesty, we are a mixture of all of these qualities, and so we depend upon God, our refuge and strength.

• What do the words of the prophet mean for Jews and Christians who are friends?

What does it mean for Jews and Christians to walk together? For Christians, it might mean something like this: the light for us begins to shine in the stories of Israel’s faith…

• the voice of the Creator saying “Let there be light”,
• the appearance of the rainbow after the devastating flood in the time of Noah,
• the burning bush that caught the attention of Moses and led him to walk in a new path that would deliver his people from slavery.

This light, for Christians, gains even greater clarity when a star shines upon a village in Bethlehem, just a few miles from Jerusalem, when Jesus is baptized in the Jordan River and the light falls upon him, when he is transfigured, along with Moses and Elijah, the law and the prophets, when he says, of himself, “I am the light of the world”, when he says to each of us, “you are the light of the world”.
The light is the Torah, the sacred story of Israel, and by the grace of God it shines upon us. An interfaith conversation gives us the opportunity to say, first, thanks to our Jewish brothers and sisters. They are the root systems that go deeply into these lifegiving waters and we live and flourish because of them…and we remember that each character we will focus on in the coming weeks---Elizabeth and Zechariah, Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna, John the Baptist and Jesus himself---was a devout Jew who worshipped in a synagogue and waited for the promises to be fulfilled.

• And where does this interfaith dialogue take us?

This interfaith conversation challenges us to live out our convictions as faithfully as we can, so that others will be drawn to the light and life and love of Jesus, who is the prince of peace and the world’s light, because he seeks glory not for himself, but for his Father who is in heaven. And so with Jesus we approach all of this in humility.

And so, I appeal to all of us, in the days ahead, to hear and respond to the word of the prophet: “Come let us walk in the light of the Lord”.

the life you save may be your own

2010-11-27T19:47:00.000-08:00

My brief reflection on Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage is posted at No Depression.

Elie's project is a really wonderful way of connecting four profoundly Christian witnesses (Merton, Percy, O' Connor, Day) through the image of pilgrimage, understood as the movement from second hand to first hand experience; reading it also reminded me of a debt to two really great teachers, Stuart Henry at Duke and Ralph Wood at Wake Forest (now Baylor), and has prompted me to think about Advent, soon upon us, as a context yet again for the great pilgrimage.