Preparing for Death

When Paul says in 1 Corinthians, “Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” he is not saying that losing a loved one is not painful. But, that death does not have the final answer; death does not have the final word. Because we live in Christ, we also die in and with Christ, and then are reborn into new life in Christ. The sting of death is sin, but that has been removed because through Christ we have been freed from the slavery to sin and death. Because Christ lives, we live, and death itself has been overcome.

That is what we celebrate this Sunday: God overcoming death as the completion of the demonstration of God’s love for the world, in order to save the world. Although our culture makes a much bigger deal about Christmas, Easter is the biggest and most important Christian holiday. We are an Easter people! It is in Christ’s death, and more importantly his resurrection, that our faith is based and found.

And yet, we are still not very good at talking about death, let alone planning for death. Even though death has been overcome by Christ, we will still die. The mortality rate is still 100%, and we are not guaranteed anything. I have had way too many experiences in the ministry of people dying very unexpectedly and often all too soon. I am sure you have as well.

That means that putting off those things that surround death, like estate planning and funeral planning, to name just two, because you can do it later is a fool’s errand. And for those who say, “I have plenty of time, everyone in my family lived a long time,” less than 5% of length of life is genetic, and doesn’t take into account other life events like accidents or global pandemics, for example.

I can also say from experience that when people die with all of their affairs in order, or close to it, it makes it so much easier for families. It eliminates most of the squabbles, which sometimes lead to court cases, expensive court cases, as well as simply trying to figure out what songs you might have wanted at your service.

Planning for your death is not something you do for yourself, although it is, but it’s a gift that you give to your family so they can focus on the most important things after your death, not worrying about the other things that could have been done. It makes the grieving process just a little easier and can remove a little bit of the sting.

And so as we gather this Sunday to celebrate God’s victory over death, I am going to challenge all of us in the coming week, if you have not already done your estate planning, to begin that process. And if you have done it, but it has not been looked at and/or changed in the past five years, to take it out and make sure it’s all still correct.

And then, once that is done, please also write out what you would like to have happen at a funeral or memorial service. I can provide some forms to help you, and I would also be more than willing to assist you in that process and even to keep those forms here at the church so we will have them when they might be needed.

I can guarantee that you and your family will appreciate having done this work sooner rather than when it is too late.

Spiritual Disciplines: Giving

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Ephesians 2:1-10  and John 3:14-21:

Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was a 19th century poet and Jesuit priest, once received a letter from his friend and fellow poet, Robert Bridges, who would not only go on to become the poet Laurette of the United Kingdom but was also an agnostic.  Bridges asked Hopkins what he, as an agnostic, should do to believe in God. To be able to make the leap of faith necessary for a life of faith. Bridges was probably expecting some deep theological argument, after all they had met while studying at Oxford, not as good as Harvard, but impressive nonetheless. Or perhaps he expected Hopkins would tell him to read the Bible, or at least portions of scripture, or maybe even that he might allow Hopkins to tell him his own conversion experience. But instead, Hopkins replied to this letter with one of his own that contained only two words: Give alms.

Now alms isn’t a word we hear much anymore, except maybe in movie adaptations of Charles Dickens’ works and hearing someone saying “alms for the poor,” but that’s what it was. Alms were money or food given to the poor or needy. A giving of charity. And so what I think Hopkins was saying to Bridges is that if you want to encounter God, you have to do something that takes you outside of yourself. You have to be willing to give something of yourself in order to be able to help another person. And once you begin to do that, once you start to give, or learn to give, then you will understand the nature of faith and indeed will learn the very nature of God, and then belief becomes much easier.

It Takes a Church

When Lisa Jo, our Director of Faith Development, left last June, we decided to hold off on replacing her position for several reasons. The first was because of the obvious difficulty of them doing their job in the midst of quarantines and shut-downs. The second was that it gave us time to rethink that position and create a new job description that would best fulfill what we need.

A new job description was approved by the one board last fall, and we are now preparing to begin advertising the position. We are advertising both locally and nationally in order to find the best candidates we can. We have a deadline of May 2 for applications, with the intention of interviewing in May and having a start in June or July, depending on where they are coming from. If you know any potential candidates, please have them be in touch with me.

But, one of the traps we can often fall into is that once we have someone on staff to think that because they are being paid that they then get to do everything. Nothing could be farther from the truth, especially when it comes to children and youth.

Those who study youth programs and youth engagement in the church say that for youth to truly feel welcomed and engaged in a congregation, that they need to have a relationship with at least five other adults in the church. That obviously does not include their parents, and it has to be more than just five adults who know their names. These need to be adults who know what’s going on in their lives, who are engaging them in conversation and to whom the youth might go if they needed help or advice.

There is the old saying that it takes a village to raise a child, and the same is true here: It takes a church to raise a child. If we want to have successful children, youth, young adult, family and other adult programs, it takes the work of all of us. The church is really the last truly intergenerational organization existing in the country, and that should be one of the church’s greatest strengths.

One of our goals we set last year was to create more opportunities to be in community and to build community. That quickly went away. But now, more than ever, hopefully we understand the need for community and to support one another and build one another up in the faith.

Our connections team is doing a great job of being creative as restrictions begin to loosen, and so we hope you will begin partaking of the different activities, as you feel safe, as we move forward. One of those will happen this Sunday after worship when we will be doing an interactive stations of the cross in the prayer garden.  This will take the place of the regular fellowship time, and will be socially distanced.

We will keep you up-to-date as we have more information on the hiring process, and we hope to see you either in-person or online for worship in the next few weeks for Lent and Easter remembering that we are the best we when do this faith thing together.

Spiritual Disciplines: Worship

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Hebrews 5:5-10  and John 12:20-33:

For the past two weeks, our gospel passages have come immediately after Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, an event that we will celebrate in two weeks for Palm Sunday. The crowd’s reaction to Jesus in that moment is a form of worship, something we continue in our understanding of Jesus as our high priest. But, the entire reason why Jesus is going to Jerusalem to begin with is for the Passover celebration, which is itself a worship event. We see Jesus participating in worship activities throughout scripture, in the Temple and in the synagogue. Even when he is tempted in the wilderness, one of the temptations is Satan asking him to fall down and worship him, and in return Jesus is promised the kingdoms of the world, to which Jesus responds, “Worship the Lord your God, and serve only him.” To worship literally means to bow down, to prostrate yourself, which is not just an act of worship, but it’s a sign of loyalty. And so as we talk about worship as act of bowing down, as an act of obedience, it is something that puts boundaries on our lives, because, as Jesus said, if you are worshipping God you cannot be worshipping other things. And since one of the things that spiritual disciplines do is to set boundaries, to govern conduct or activity or operation, or things that mold, correct or perfect, it turns out that worship itself then is a spiritual discipline.

It’s sort of seems obvious if you think about it, but I’m willing to bet that most of us have never really thought about worship that way, because it’s just something we do. It’s not like prayer or fasting or scripture reading, which are the things people tend to think of when we talk about spiritual disciplines. And yet, as we have talked about, spiritual disciplines are things we do, that are found in scripture, that help us to deepen our faith and our relationship with God. Things that structure our spiritual lives, and therefore our everyday lives, in order to put God front and center and to help transform our lives and our faith. And so by that standard, worship is clearly a spiritual discipline, and so for those who were wondering if you do any of the disciplines, or if you can, you can be assured that you are already doing one, just by being here, and of course we also practice many of the other disciplines within the service of worship.

New Live Stream

It was basically a year ago that everything shut down. I went back and read the newsletters around that time, which was interesting in seeing how much we didn’t know and just guessed at, like hoping to be back to in-person worship by Palm Sunday or Easter.

What I also did on that last Sunday before we stopped in-person worship was to put my phone on a tripod and connect it to Facebook to do a live stream. And basically we’ve done the same thing since then.

We knew that we wanted to increase our streaming capabilities, because it’s not going to go away, and we knew some of the steps, but didn’t know everything we needed to know or the technical steps to do it. In the fall, One Board addressed the issue and allocated funding to try and take us to the next level. A small task force was formed and we hoped to get everything rolling with a possibility of having the upgrades done by the beginning of the year.

We searched for assistance through different contacts that people had here in Los Alamos, without any success. And so then we put an ad in the paper looking for a consultant, and on Christmas Eve, looking for some alternative Christmas wrapping, Gabe, who lives in White Rock, saw the ad and contacted us. He had spent the spring and summer working with churches in Montana getting them online, and had the just the skills we needed.

Since the end of January, Gabe has been working with us to install new equipment and software and testing things out, and we are ready to go live this Sunday with our new livestream. You will notice much better sound quality, as it’s coming directly from the mics, and we now have the ability to zoom with different camera angles. It will also allow us to show videos in worship, which we could not do on the stream before.

I will note two things: The first is that not all of the equipment is installed yet, and so some other improvements are coming. But, we have enough in place to do what we want to do. The second is that we are just learning how to run the software. In fact, our first training is tomorrow evening at 5 pm. So, please give a little grace as we learn from our mistakes. If there are things you notice we can improve, please let us know. Please also tell us what we are doing well.

You may continue to watch worship on Facebook and YouTube, and this should solve the problems we have had with YouTube recently, and you may also watch it on our website, firstinyourheart.org.

It’s taken us awhile to get here, but I am really happy with what we have and think you will be as well. I can say that one person who watched a test of the new stream last week said “I feel like I really worshipped!”

Spiritual Disciplines: Bible Reading

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Corinthians 1:18-25 and Mark 11:15-19:

In the season of Lent, it’s fairly typical for people to begin doing things to try and take on practices that they might not do during the rest of the year. That’s true not just for individuals, but it’s also true for congregations. We, for instance, add a prayer of confession in Lent every week, which we normally don’t do, we’ve been doing a breath prayer and receiving communion every week. When I am working on planning worship I do that for several reasons. One of them is simply so that this season is set aside as being different than the other seasons of the year. But, we also do them because they are specific things to help us in the season of Lent, which is a season of repentance and preparation, to connect with God in a different way. 

John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, talked about what he called means of grace. Things that conveyed God’s loving action to us to create, heal, forgive, reconcile and transform human hearts. Among those means of grace are prayer and fasting and serving and worshipping and giving, which we also know as spiritual disciplines, which we have already talked about, or will talk about. These are the things that intentionally help us to not only deepen our faith and our relationship with God, but which help us to understand and celebrate receiving God’s grace. And another one of those means of grace, another spiritual discipline that we are going to address today is what Wesley identified as reading, meditating and studying the scriptures, and I don’t have a bad joke to go with today’s discipline.

Conference Updates

As some of you have probably already heard, General Conference, which is the world-wide gathering of The United Methodist Church, which was supposed to have happened in 2020, has now been postponed until 2022. There were simply too many unknowns and obstacles, including potential travel restrictions for people coming from all around the globe, for delegates to be able to gather this year. It is now scheduled to take place in Aug. 29-Sept. 6, 2022.

But, there will be a special one-day online gathering of General Conference in May to deal with 12 specific pieces of legislation that will be voted on by paper ballot. These legislative issues are specific changes to the Book of Discipline that allow the church to do specific things, like appoint bishops and other leadership, that are called to take place after a general conference session. It also makes changes that allow for more flexibility for holding General Conference, Jurisdictional Conference and Annual Conference in the event of things that don’t allow for these normal gatherings to happen. Something like a global pandemic. (Here are the 12 items)

What this postponement also means is that there is going to be no resolution around a new protocol of potentially dividing the church into two, or more, different denominations. The traditional plan, passed at the General Conference in 2016, around issues regarding the LGBTQ community remains church policy. Although the moratorium on the penalties as part of that plan called for by both sides still seem to be in place.

Regardless of this postponement, the Jurisdictional Conference is scheduled to take place this July online. The main task here is the retirement and election of new bishops, which will directly impact us. Our bishop will retire this year and we will be appointed a new bishop. In the past we have shared our bishop with the North West Texas Annual Conference, but the indications at the moment are that this will change and we will instead share with the Rio Texas Conference. It has also been recommended that these appointments be made on an interim basis so they could be changed after the 2022 General Conference if needed.

Our Annual Conference, which is the gathering of churches of New Mexico, is still scheduled for June 16-18, although the location has not yet been announced, or at least I haven’t seen any given. It’s still possible we might not be able to meet in person at that time, and if not, there are dates in October that are also selected. If we still can’t meet in person we will again hold annual conference online.

I know that this is disappointing to many people as it leaves everything in limbo for longer, but the church often does not operate on a time frame that works for us. Keep your faith. And if you have no idea what any of this means, and would like to know, of if you have more questions, please let me know.

Spiritual Disciplines: Confession

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Psalm 32 and 1 John 1:5-2:2:

Years ago, the chaplain of the football team at Notre Dame was a beloved old Irish priest.  At confession one day, a football player told the priest that he had acted in an unsportsmanlike manner at a recent football game.

"I lost my temper and said some bad words to one of my opponents."

"Ahhh, that's a terrible thing for a Notre Dame lad to be doin'," the priest said.  He took a piece of chalk and drew a mark across the sleeve of his coat.

"That's not all, Father.  I got mad and punched one of my opponents."

"Saints preserve us!" the priest said, making another chalk mark.

"There's more.  As I got out of a pileup, I kicked two of the other team's players in a sensitive area."

"Oh, goodness me!" the priest wailed, making two more chalk marks on his sleeve. "Who in the world were we playin' when you did these awful things?"

"Southern Methodist."

"Ah, well," said the priest, wiping his sleeve, "boys will be boys."

Today we continue in our worship series looking at some of the spiritual disciplines which are practices that help deepen our faith and our relationship with Christ. We began last week by looking at fasting and the different types of fasting and the reasons for fasting, which is one of the spiritual disciplines that many people in different ways take on for Lent. And today we take on another discipline associated with Lent, and that is confession, and so I guess I should start with a confession for my terrible Irish accent. Now normally when we as protestants talk about confession we have this image of Roman Catholics going into a booth and telling their priest everything they did wrong, and being assigned to say some hail Mary’s and our fathers, even though we don’t know what that means, and then everything being okay. And we don’t want to do that. But while that is certainly a type of confession, that is not what we are talking about here, at least for the most part, because there is a place for that, and we’ll get back to that.

Confession, or a call to confession, is found throughout scripture. Most importantly Jesus begins his ministry with the proclamation “repent for the kingdom of God has come near.” Repent literally means to turn around. Stop doing what you have been doing and go another way. But, it’s not just to turn around, it’s also to make a proclamation, a confession, of what you have been doing wrong, which is accompanied with a desire or an acknowledgement of forgiveness. But to get to that point, we also first have to recognize that we have done anything wrong.