Yankee Pastor

Young Clergy and Ordination

2012-03-08T08:57:00.002-08:00

The United Methodist Church has said that they want to concentrate on bringing young clergy into the church. There are some churches and conferences that are certainly focusing on this and doing a good job, and others not so much.

One of those doing well is the New Mexico conference, where I am now serving. In my numerous contacts with the conference as I was seeking to come back here I was told by different district superintendents that the bishop wanted to build up a "stable of young ponies" to train them so they would be prepared to take over the larger churches when the older clergy retired.

In addition, the bishop was not holding off appointing younger clergy to some of the larger churches in the conference. If they were capable of leading them then they should be able to lead them. This is certainly born out in the number of young clergy who are serving in this conference, which for me was very refreshing to see.

A conference that is not doing as well is New England. Now they say they want to attract and keep young clergy, but that is more rhetoric than reality. I'm guessing that you could probably count the number of clergy under the age of forty on your fingers and toes, and you can definitely could count the number of young clergy who are ordained on your fingers. This is in a conference with more than 700 clergy. My own case serves as an illustration that their rhetoric does not meet their actions.

When I was seeking to transfer conferences not one person from the cabinet or from the Board of Ordination asked me why I was leaving the conference, and if there was anything they could do to keep me there. Not one. This is true even when the bishop attended a meeting of the Board and said that he and the cabinet, and through them the Board, needed to be focused on getting and retaining young clergy. I was sitting in that meeting, with many people knowing I was leaving, and not one person asked me about it.

I think I'm a pretty good clergy person, as did New Mexico which is why they wanted me, but apparently either New England did not hold the same opinion or they simply didn't care. I think the second is much more likely. I think there was a sigh of relief that they were losing someone so that they didn't have to worry about finding an appointment for me as the number of full-time appointments continues to decrease. In addition, I knew that there was no way I was going to be appointed to serve any of the larger churches until I had been there at least twenty years, and that's if they hadn't already been run into the ground before then.

But, I believe the church has a much bigger problem on their hands in keeping and retaining young clergy and that is the ordination process itself. I began this process when I was 26, I entered the seminary when I was 30, and I have now completed the process at the age of 39. That is 3 years of seminary and then 6 years serving in churches.

Now I will grant that I was not as quick in the process as I probably should have been, but most of my colleagues from seminary, who were appearing before district committees long before me, are being ordained this year as well. One was ordained two years ago, but she is by far the outlier, and several others are still seeking ordination. Nine years from the time I entered seminary until ordination seems like too long of a process to me. That means we are taking nearly as long to be ordained as doctors do in specializing in something.

The simple fact is the process no longer matches the reality of what is going on in churches. Not too long ago, most clergy were serving churches while attending seminary, and so they were already further along in the process. Only a very small handful of people I knew in seminary were serving as clergy while attending school, but the process does not really recognize that. In addition, the probationary period required by discipline is a fluke of history not something that was thought out (I'll cover that another time).

There are proposals to change this process before the general conference this year. One of them would change it so that both local pastors and those seeking to be elders would be ordained before going to serve a church, and then the other parts of the process would continue, but with different goals happening. I think there are numerous problems with this plan.

The worst is that I have yet to see anything that effectively explained exactly how it would actually work, and it also shows that we still have lots of problems understanding the purpose and meaning of ordination. (We can thank John Wesley for this as he ordained Thomas Coke to come to America, even though Coke was already ordained, and we've been struggling with it ever since.)

Now much of what is taking place today in the process is to make sure that the young clergy, or in fact any new clergy, are good and capable in order to correct for problems of the past in having incompetent clergy serving. I don't think the process is actually weeding out incompetence. I've seen plenty of people who I think would be good clergy who have moved on because the process is too arduous, and others who I don't think are very good who make it through simply because they have been willing to stick with it to the end.

To me the process now is about trying to close the barn doors once all the horses are already out. I agree completely with making sure we get the best clergy to be serving churches, but that means we need to come up with a way to fully evaluate clergy in the local church and remove those who aren't good, regardless of age or ordination status. I have yet to see a plan that really does that however.

If the United Methodist Church is serious about attracting and retaining young clergy the process needs to be changed to recognize new realities. Nine years from the beginning of seminary to ordination is simply too long. I know this is longer than some take, but the bare minimum if you become probationary immediately after graduation is six years, and I know others who take much longer.

Again, this is the length of time to become an MD and specialize in a field. But people who undertake to become doctors expect a much higher salary, and more respect, on the other side. Clergy cannot expect that.

Even though for most people I am still a young clergy, by the church's definition, which is those under 35, I am not. I could have been but I "aged out" because of the process, a process which took way too long.

Who Is Controlling the Ads

2012-03-07T11:41:00.002-08:00

As the number of corporations who are pulling their ads from the Rush Limbaugh show continues to increase, at least for the moment, what has been eye-opening is the number who are saying that they had no idea that they in fact were running ads for his program.

The first one to sort of admit this was Allstate who said they were not even aware their ads were on his program, and then found out that their ad buying company had bought them without their permission. Now that number has increased. Others are claiming that they did indeed buy airtime on the radio channel, but that their ads were run at the wrong time.

The listeners of Rush certainly do not match the demographics that most advertisers are seeking. There are clearly companies that want to target 65-year-old, conservative, white men, but that number you would think would be small. This leads me to ask the simple question, who is controlling their ads?

I understand that they are using ad buyers, but do they then relinquish all control? What are their advertising departments doing with their time? Most corporations want to tightly control their message and their image, but it turns out they are letting others do anything they want. Plus, how are they tracking the effectiveness of their ads, or have they given up entirely?

I used to be in public relations and so have experience with advertising and this is sort of shocking to me. We were very intentional about where and when we advertised, although I was working with much smaller budgets, but I would be under the impression that large corporations want to control budgets as much as small businesses do.

You would think, or at least I would think, that these companies would have a much greater control over where and when they are advertising, rather than just throwing their money out there, but apparently not. Here is a list of those who have pulled their ads and their statements.

The Call And Ordination

2012-03-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

I received my call to the ministry in 1995. At the time I was not attending church, nor did I really have any interest in being involved with church. What I saw and heard of Christianity from the media did not really match my understanding of God or of the good news, and so I initially rejected the idea that I was being called to the ministry. But, and I know some of you can identify with this, it didn't go away; it was still with me.

I finally went to a church in 1998 to talk with a minister about what it would mean to enter the ministry as well as what was required, and began the long process. That process was completed for the most part last week when I appeared before the Board of Ordination seeking to become an Elder in full connection. They approved me and will recommend to the clergy session of the annual conference in June for ordination.

I went into the last interview very nervous not knowing what to expect but being as prepared as I could possibly be. It was much easier than I expected it to be, and certainly easier than it is in New England. I would say that New Mexico does a better job, from what I have seen, in preparing candidates more during the three year probationary period than does New England.

In some ways the ease of the interview was a little bit of a let down, because I was so ready to be attacked on my theology and thinking. And yes the term "attacked" is the correct one because that was often my experience in this process (which was done in New England). My hardest interviews still are those I had with the district committees rather than at the Board level, and I often felt that what I was being asked about had little to do with me and everything to do with the person asking the question. As I progressed further in the process that became even more obvious to me.

I will say that I am a very different person now then I was when I began the "formal" process. My theology is much deeper and more complete then it was even after I had my M.Div., and to a large degree the process helped me with that. Of course serving in the local church also helped with that process, and I know that it will continue to get better, and also change, the longer I am in the ministry.

But, now that the process is over I also feel at a loss. I have been working on this for so long (9 years since I entered the seminary) and it has been so much a part of what happened every year that now I am not sure what to do. Last Friday I found myself walking around the library just looking at things, sort of wandering aimlessly among the stacks, when I realized I was looking for something to fill the hole that was now empty because the "process" was over. Now that the goal was attained I literally didn't know what to do with myself.

I am grateful it is all over and I thank all those who assisted me along with way, and I certainly would not like to replicate any of it, but at the same time I miss it because it occupied so much of my life up to this point. I need to create some new goals and new things to be working on.

Gasoline And Capitalism

2012-03-05T11:10:00.004-08:00

As gas prices continue to increase, the presidential candidates are thinking that this could be the issue to help give them leverage and are blaming the President. The problem with this is that all of them claim to be true capitalists, so shouldn't the market be the one to determine prices? If so, why should the President be doing anything, that would be interfering with the market which is what they say they are opposed to.

Now the bigger problem with their arguments is that there is little the President can do, for several reasons. The first is that prices always go up in the spring in preparation for summer driving periods. The second is that the prices are not being affected by a gas shortage. In fact we currently have a surplus in oil supplies and are exporting more than normal because demand is down. The third is that it not supply and demand driving the price, instead it is oil speculation. Wall Street is doing the very same things around gas as they did last time we were at record prices. So it has little to do with supply and demand, but instead outside forces that really have no bearing on reality.

Finally, those pressing the President say that if he had approved the Keystone XL pipeline that gasoline prices would be going down. The problems with this argument are numerous, mainly being that the pipeline does not even have any plans formally drawn up yet, so we are minimum 10 years away from it having any impact for us. In addition, Canadians are also opposing the line so even if the President were to say okay, it still might not get built because the Canadian government has not approved it.

But, even if we were to have the pipeline in place our gas prices would not be affected because it has nothing to do with the amount of gas available. In addition, best guesses are that the oil fields in Canada will only provide us with 100 years of supply, based on current usage. The problem is usage continues to increase and 100 years is not really all that long from now. The answer is not drill baby drill, but instead, converse and find alternative energy sources, all things the President is pushing for.

Update 3/6: Here is an even better statement on the issue.

Mary Magdalene and Sex

2012-03-01T08:29:00.002-08:00

I am currently working on my sermon series for after Easter when we will look at some of the women in the Bible as well as tackle some of the tricky issues of the role of women in the church. Since this will begin the first Sunday after Easter I thought I would start with Mary Magdalene since she was one of the women who went to the tomb.

But, this does not come without it's own difficulties. It would be nearly impossible today to talk about Mary and not address what many people think of her as a result of the pseudo-history/theology of Dan Brown. In case you have been living in a cave, Dan Brown's thesis in the Da Vinci Code was that Mary was not just a follower of Jesus, but that she was his best disciple, "the beloved disciple," and was married to him and had children with him.

But as I have been thinking about this I wonder why no one is raising the very disturbing issue that comes with this idea, namely that in order for Mary to be important in the scriptures, or for the church, or for Jesus, that it must be because of her sexuality and her role in bearing children. That is, she could not have been "the beloved disciple" or been important without also having been Jesus' lover. She could only be "beloved" if she knew Jesus "biblically."

Clearly there were women who were important to Jesus' ministry, who were followers, and the same is true in early Pauline communities. The church has tried to downplay these women at many times, including changing their names to male names in order to obscure their gender. But do we do them any service in trying to reclaim their status and place in the movement by elevating them simply because of a sexual role they could have played? Could Mary be important to Jesus without having to engage in sex with him? Why does her genitalia have anything to do with whether she could be a disciple or not?

How do we reclaim and proclaim the role of women in the church then and now, as well as women in the Bible, without simply talking about the "role" they serve in sexual liaisons with men and with the continuation of the species? How do we elevate these women as children of God who carry out God's will in the world regardless of gender or sexuality?

Obviously as we have seen in the past few weeks the church is still struggling mightily with this. I think that Dan Brown, and those he was parroting, think they are trying to "liberate" Mary from the church, but have in fact simply shackled her to other preconceived notions of women and their "appropriate" roles.

Sometimes it's amazing to see how far we have come and yet to be dismayed at how far we still have to go. As the father of two young daughters I have great hope for their future, but, at the same time, great doubts about their future as well.

Lord, Teach Me To Pray

2012-02-29T07:26:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 11:1-13:

I love power tools. I can’t say that I’m amazingly handy with them, but I think that one of the greatest inventions is the cordless drill and screw driver. I love this thing. Normally I’m a Dewalt man, but my 14.4 volt, Black and Decker drill is great. But because I don’t use it all the time, sometimes when I go out to the garage to get it to use, this is what I find (drill does not have enough power to run)… and then I have to do it the old fashioned way, (try to screw in just turning it) and I know that I am not the only person in here to do that.

But sometimes this is what our spiritual lives are like as well. We want them to be running at 100%, we want to use all 14.4 volts of power, but instead everything gets set aside and as a result we get run down, we can’t do the things that we are supposed to be doing or do the things we are called to do by God, because we don’t have the power to do. Our batteries are depleted and we need to be recharged, or even better we need to find a way to keep them charged all the time and one of the ways we do that is through prayer.

Prayer is at the heart of Christianity. When you join the United Methodist Church, you pledge your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service and your witness. The order is not insignificant. I do believe that prayer is first because it is the most important. Richard Rohr, who is a Franciscan monk in Albuquerque, says that “The church that does not teach its people to pray has virtually lost its reason for existence.” Let me say that again to make sure you heard them, “the church that does not teach its people to pray has virtually lost its reason for existence.”

But, prayer is one of those difficult things for many Christians. I suspect that even with the quote I just read that few of us have actually ever been taught how to pray, at least formally. I’m sure that few of us have ever taken a class or even been offered a class on how to pray. Even though it’s vital to who we are, to what we do, and to deepening our relationship with God we don’t spend a lot of time learning how to do it, even in seminary there were no classes on prayer. Today’s scripture passage should give us some heart because even the disciples are unsure what to do, and so they go to Jesus and say, “Lord teach us how to pray.”

Now prayer is very important for Luke. He talks more about prayer than any of the other gospel writers, and he has Jesus praying all over the place for lots of different things, but apparently to the disciples, whatever it is that Jesus is doing does not look like or feel like what they have been doing. Jesus seems to be like the old EF Hutton commercial, “when Jesus talks, God listens.” Comparing themselves to Jesus, they must have been feeling a little inadequate, so they begin to think that maybe they are not praying correctly. Maybe they felt like someone who has been doing paint by number their entire life when they see a masterpiece by Monet or Rembrandt, and they feel like everything they have been doing is wrong, or that they don’t even know what to do or where to begin.

I know that prayer can be a difficult thing. I’ve struggled with it for a long time, and often still struggle. It’s even worse if you are new to prayer, because it feels uncomfortable, it feels strange, it feels like you should know what you are supposed to be doing and you don’t, and you want to say to Jesus, just like the disciples did, “Lord teach me how to pray.” I remember as a child sitting in worship one day with my mother, and we got to the point in time in the service when we all recited the Lord’s prayer, and this was the time in which everyone was assumed to know it and so it wasn’t printed in the bulletin, a standard we can no longer expect, and so I turned to my mother and asked her how she knew the prayer, and she told me it was just something you learned by going to church.

That is my earliest memory about prayer, and being taught about prayer and what it meant to pray. But, how I really learned how to pray was by sort of being pushed into the deep end and being told to swim, which is what happened as soon as I said that I was going to enter the ministry, then I became the designated prayer at seemingly every event, from family meals to church meetings.

I know that you all have experiences about prayer that have impacted how you pray. So I want you to think for a few moments about your earliest memories of prayer, maybe it was at church, maybe it was a prayer before a meal, or your parents or grandparents praying with you before you went to bed, or maybe it was people not praying, or saying it could only be done by one person, not all of our memories will be good, some will have negative connotations which also affect how or if we pray. So take a few moments and try and recall some of your earliest memories or experiences of prayers.

As it turns out we all know something about prayer. We are not starting out with a completely blank slate, for nearly all of us we have indeed been taught about prayer throughout our lives simply from the prayer that has surrounded us, and some have even argued that our knowledge of prayer goes farther back then that. In language studies of infants, what researchers have found is that all babies make the same sounds. It doesn’t matter if the language their parents speak is Swahili or Mandarin or English, all babies make exactly the same sounds.

This has caused some theologians to propose that we come into the world knowing the language of God, and that is what these sounds represent, but that we lose it over time, and so the work is to recapture that connection, that language that is a part of our very nature, after all we are made in the image of God, to reclaim the language of prayer that God has put into our hearts, and to a large degree that means for some of us trying to put aside many of the rules that we have learned in order to free ourselves to connect with God in prayer, and to also broaden our understanding of what prayer is.

There are no magic words or actions that make our prayers any better, because God already knows what is on our hearts and what we need. Notice that Jesus does not say that you need to be kneeling or sitting a certain way, there is no specific way to hold your head or your arms, in fact there are no specific directions given about the body in relation to how to pray. All the rules we have come from other places. There is no specific posture physically you need to take nor is there any special place you need to be in order to pray. You can pray at home, at school, at work, even in your car, and sometimes it’s very helpful to say a prayer while in the car. What we are doing with our bodies or even what we say during prayer is not nearly as important as where our heart is.

There was once a monk who was renowned for his spiritual practices. He was so famous that other monks would come from all over Europe to study at his feet. One day the monk found that the mice in his cell had become such a nuisance that he was becoming too distracted to be able to pray. So he went out and got a cat, and the cat would circle around him while he was praying, and would occasionally sit in his lap while he was meditating and the monk would cheerfully rub his ears. But the monk did not tell anyone else why he had gotten the cat. Shortly after seeing this, all of the other monks in the abbey went out and got cats too, because not knowing the real reason they all thought that having a cat around would help them come into a deeper relationship with God.

Prayer is not about asking for something from God; it is about establishing a relationship with God. And most importantly it is about opening ourselves up to the possibility of change and of being willing to listen to God. The theologian Soren Kierkegaard once observed “a man prayed, and at first thought that prayer was about talking. But he became more and more quiet until in the end he realized that prayer is listening.”

We work and work to make prayer so complicated and then we wonder why it doesn’t work for us, why it has become so burdensome and why we get nothing from it. Prayer is simply about deepening our relationship with God by being willing to interact with the divine, and God will always meet us where we are and move us slowly into deeper things. Dancing, gardening, cooking, cleaning, writing, singing, working, everything in our lives can in fact become a form of prayer, if we have the intentionality to make it so.

Recognizing that reality is really the starting point of any prayer life, because prayer is not simply about giving thanks and then asking for things. Prayer is about conversation. Prayer is about listening. Prayer is about engaging with the almighty in a meaningful way the same way that we would be with our friends and family. Prayer brings us into a perpetual communion with God and through that brings us into greater relationship and opens us to possibilities and realities that we would never know existed without prayer.

Now I know some of you are saying that’s all nice and good John, but I hear people praying, and I read written prayers, and they are brilliant, but when I pray I don’t sound anything like that and I really don’t know what to say and therefore I don’t do it. But that’s why Jesus discussion about prayer is so vital.

We often get confused about what is truly important about prayer and think that if only we could come up with the right words, or if only we could find a comfortable place to pray, or if only we could pray like someone else, or if only we had the magic cat, then we would be okay. We become so wrapped in the externalities of prayer that we end up missing what is truly important about prayer: Being honest and open with God and engaging in a conversation with God about what is going on in our lives, both the good and the bad. God does not choose whether to listen to our prayers because of the words we use, the posture we have or where we are praying.

There is an incredible amount of vulnerability that we must overcome to be completely open and honest in any relationship, but especially one with God. But we must be willing to be open and honest. Laugh with God, cry with God, be angry with God. Yelling at God is just as much a form of prayer as prayers of thanksgiving. But, we also need to be prepared for God to be honest with us as well. We too often think of prayer as a monologue, of us talking to God, but prayer is a dialogue. It is about interacting with God and inviting God to interact with us. But the most important thing about prayer is simply to do it.

We learn to pray the same way we learn other things, first we observe, then we imitate. We don’t learn to drive simply by watching others do it. Instead we get out there and do it. I know when I was learning to drive I always wanted to be the one driving. I never said to my parents, “I’m not good at driving, so why don’t you drive and I’ll just sit here and watch.” I always wanted to be the one doing it, and from the nodding of heads I can see that that was either also true with you or your children, and as I’ve already said, praying in the car can be a very good thing.

If you feel uncomfortable creating your own prayers, then use printed prayers, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, and to help you as you leave the sanctuary today I invite you to pick up one of these prayer cubes, and use this as your starting point, or if you were not here when we discussed baptism and didn’t get this baptismal prayer tag for your shower, then you can also pick one of these up. Each morning when I am in the shower I say this prayer, and then it leads me into other prayers, and that has become part of my morning ritual.

Now I know that many of you ultimately wonder whether God in fact answers prayers. Some people will say that God answers all prayers, and the answers are either yes, nor or maybe. But then we sometimes even thank God for unanswered prayers. Christian Scientists do not go to doctors because they believe that all diseases can be cured through prayer.

The minister who married Linda and I received a pamphlet when his wife was pregnant with their first child that said that any problems during pregnancy, any birth defects and even pain during childbirth could all be cured with prayer. Of course the corollary to that is that if you did have complications, if your child was born with a birth defect or if you did have pain during childbirth, imagine such a thing, then that must mean that you therefore did not pray well enough or hard enough for God to help you.

Now I have lots of trouble in believing in the sort of capricious God that these theologies sometimes imply, but with all that being said I believe strongly in the power of prayer and it is found in something that we are missing from today’s passage that is lost in the translation. The Greek text does not really say “ask and you will receive.” Instead, it says something like, ask and keep on asking, seek and keep on seeking, knock and keep on knocking. The verb implies ongoing action. This is not a onetime event, it is a constant activity. So go right up to that door and keep on knocking on it, for in reality God answers all our prayers, which is what the last line of today’s scripture tells us.

Will we get everything that we ask for? We know that’s not true, for if it were every little girl and boy would be out riding their own pony or perhaps playing catch with Tim Tebow or Tom Brady. In fact, pay attention to the Lord ’s Prayer, we pray not for “my kingdom come, my will be done,” but instead for God’s kingdom to come and God’s will to be done. God does not give us everything we ask for, but, and here is the most important part, if you get nothing else from this message, remember this, when we pray, we get God.

When we pray for something, anything, God gives us the Holy Spirit. Through prayer we are infused with the Holy Spirit and are brought into a deeper and more meaningful relationship with God. We are infused with the Holy Spirit so that we might have the strength and endurance and go on, the vigor to keep fighting, the enthusiasm to share God with others, and the love and joy that can only be found in a relationship with Christ. That is the power of prayer; it is the power to invite God into our lives, to say to God “I want to be in relationship with you,” it is to turn ourselves over to God and not only to talk but more importantly to listen. It is to engage in a conversation about our lives, our joys, our struggle, our triumphs and our tragedies, our strengths and our weaknesses, and it is to seek God’s guidance in undertaking everything we do in life.

In a book entitled Grace All the Way Home, Mark trotter writes, “Throw anything up there. Stumble, use bad grammar, have long embarrassing pauses, split your infinitives and even dangle your participles. It doesn’t matter. Just groan or sigh if that’s all you can do, because God’s hearing your prayer does not depend upon your eloquence, but on God’s grace, which is already at work in your life.” If you do nothing else as a daily spiritual practice, you should be praying and then reading scripture.

Prayer is seminal to having a relationship with God; just as we must ask and seek and knock, God also asks, seeks and knocks and does not stop. And what you will find when you engage your prayer life is that instead of going around with a battery that doesn’t work, that is drained down, or worse missing altogether, that because of the gift of the power of the Holy Spirit given to us because of prayer, that you will in fact be energized and empowered to do God’s work in the world. May it be so my sisters and brothers. Amen.

Who Do You Say That I Am?

2012-02-22T13:57:00.001-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 8:27-38, and completed our series (for the moment) on what Christians believe and the Trinity.

One day Jesus and Satan were having an argument about who was better with technology. This was a continuing argument and God the father was tired of hearing all of the bickering and so decided to set up test. So Jesus and Satan sat at the keyboards and typed away. They created spreadsheets, they did HTML coding, they did research, they wrote Wikipedia entries about themselves, they did some genealogy reports, they did everything they could. But just a few minutes before the time limit was up, lightening flashed across the sky, the thunder rolled, the rains came down and of course the electricity went off.

Satan was furious. He fumed and fussed and he ranted and raved, all to no avail. The electricity stayed off. But after a bit, the rains stopped and the electricity came back on. Satan screamed, "I lost it all when the power went off. What am I going to do? What happened to Jesus' work?" Jesus just sat and smiled. Again Satan asked about the work that Jesus had done. As Jesus turned his computer back on the screen glowed, all his files reappeared, it was all there. "How did he do it?" Satan asked. And God said, "It’s easy, Jesus Saves.”

Today we continue and complete our three part look at the trinity. Two weeks ago we looked at the formulation of the trinity itself, and the complex notion that 1 plus 1 plus 1 does not in fact equal three, but instead equals one, and is ultimately one of the great mysteries of the faith. Last week we looked at who and what the Holy Spirit is as the third person of the trinity and what she does in our lives. And so we finish by looking at Jesus as the second person of the trinity by trying to answer the question that Jesus poses to the disciples, “Who do you say that I am?”

As I begin each confirmation class that I teach I begin by asking what the most important thing is that distinguishes us as Christians, or more directly, what makes us Christians? But every time I ask this the youth never articulate the fact that we are followers of Christ. They nibble around the edges and talk about beliefs and practices, but never actually name Jesus. But Jesus is at the center of who we are because we believe that Jesus is the decisive revelation of God. Christians are those who “call upon the name of the Lord.” (Rom 10:13, 1 Cor 1:2) This separates us from other religions.

Just compare this claim to that of Judaism and Islam, the two religions closest to us since we all claim descent from Abraham, but for them the Torah or the Quran are the decisive revelation of God. But while the Bible is obviously important, it is not the foundation of our faith, Jesus is the divine revelation of God for us. In 1 Corinthians Paul says “no one can lay a foundation other than the one that has been laid; that foundation is Jesus Christ.” Our foundation, our decisive revelation of God comes in a person, and that makes us uniquely different. In other language, Jesus is the cornerstone of our faith upon which everything else is built.

Indeed the entire reason that the Trinity as a concept was developed was because of our understanding of who Jesus is and how we are to reconcile that with our belief that there is only one God. In Deuteronomy we hear the Shema, the prayer that Jews pray three times a day, which says, “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” But after Jesus’ death and resurrection the disciples came to believe that they had encountered God in the person of Christ. But if there is only one God and if we are to only worship that God and we understand Jesus to be divine then how does that work?

Dr. Jerry Grey, a professor at St. Paul School of Theology, says that the trinity is the “way for Christians to explain the uniqueness of their revelation of God,” that God is three and God is one. It was this idea of the Trinity which led and guided the church in its understanding of God and of Jesus for more than 1200 years. But with the rise of the Enlightenment, people began to question whether the Trinity was rational or even if it was scriptural.

Thomas Jefferson, speaking for many, termed the idea of three in one the “incomprehensible jargon of the Trinitarian arithmetic.” In response, the church began to downplay or ignore the idea of the Trinity all together. In addition, with individualism coming with the rise of the Enlightenment, the idea of having a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ,” of having a personal conversion experience, also became important but this tended to downgrade or diminish the other parts of the trinity to such a point that many people could not even say what the other parts did or why they were important.

Theologian Karl Rhaner said that with this de-emphasis on the Trinity that we became “almost mere monotheists,” paying lip service to the trinity in theory, but ignoring it in practice. “We must be willing to admit,” he said, “that should the doctrine of the Trinity have to be dropped as false, the major part of religious literature could well remain virtually unchanged.” I think that the book The Shack does a pretty good job of highlighting this dilemma. Although I do have a couple of issues with the Trinitarian formulation that Paul Young represents in the book, regardless of what you might have heard there is nothing heretical in it and I would recommend it, but the main character says that he has always been okay with a relationship with Jesus but he could never get the other two parts. God the father could be this sort of scary God who punishes people, not someone we always want to know or have around, and the Holy Spirit was totally unknown, and so he sort of ignored them in his faith. He became a true monotheist in that Jesus was the only part. But the very very significant problem we run into when we deconstruct or ignore the trinity is answering the question of who Jesus is.

If Jesus is not a part of the godhead, of the three in one, then several things can happen. The first is that Jesus can be moved considerably down the scale of importance. Rather than being the divine revelation of God, instead he simply becomes an extraordinary man that we look up to, admire and follow the teachings of, but is really no different than others like Gandhi or Martin Luther King, Jr. There are churches that believe this, the Unitarians for example rejected the trinity and in doing so also rejected the divinity of Christ.

But, if Jesus is not divine, then what do we do with his teachings, do they hold any true significance for us 2000 years later? What about worship? How do we worship Jesus and not violate the first commandment? We certainly could not sing many of the songs that we will sing today. But more importantly, how do we understand the cross? Does it hold any meaning any longer? Even the resurrection must be questioned, because if Jesus wasn’t divine then he must have died again at some point. He becomes simply like Lazarus, or Jairus’ daughter, both people that Jesus brought back from the dead, but neither of them are alive today. People have claimed to have seen Elvis still walking around, but not Lazarus. But the earliest witnesses to Jesus rejected this understanding. They said that Jesus was more than just a man.

When the disciples saw Jesus walk on the water they say “You really are the son of God.” The Roman centurion watching the crucifixion says “surely this man was the son of God,” and when Thomas encounters the risen Christ, he bows at his feet and proclaims, “My Lord and my God.” The very name Lord plays multiple roles in this proclamation. In the Hebrew Scriptures, the word commonly referred to as Yahweh, which is known as the tetragrammaton (YHWH), is used only to refer to the God that the Jewish people worshipped. When the scriptures were translated from Hebrew into Greek, this word was translated using the Greek word kyrios, which means Lord. Of the 6,823 times that the tetragrammaton appears in the Hebrew Scriptures, 6,156 of those times it is translated as kyrios, Lord.

Thus Lord was the term used exclusively to name God by Jewish people of the first century. According to the Jewish historian Josephus, Jewish people refused to call the Roman emperor kyrios, Lord, because it was used only for God. And yet that is the word that became commonplace amongst the earliest disciples. It was a clear proclamation of who Jesus was, that he was divine and would have clearly been understood by the earliest disciples. We still proclaim today that Jesus is Lord, and although it may have lost some of its significance for us today it is still a statement that is both a political, that our allegiance is with God not with the rulers of the world, and also theological, that Jesus is God.

So in looking at the earliest witness about who Jesus was the other alternative was that rather than denying the divinity of Christ and saying that he was only a man they instead proclaimed that he was not human, but was instead wholly divine. One of the earliest heresies in the church said that Jesus was the literal Son of God, that he was God, but not God in the flesh because he wasn’t in fact human, he only appeared to be human. This is known as docetism, and even though it is a heresy, it is still very prevalent today. But, like the alternative we just looked at this too causes significant problems.

If Jesus was not human then what purpose does he have for us? How can he bring salvation and reconciliation for our brokenness if he doesn’t understand what it means to be tempted? Indeed how do we understand his being led into the wilderness to be tempted if he was only just a divine being? How do we understand his cry on the cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” if he was only divine? What about when he cried, ate with people, or grew tired and irritable? People who take this position would say that he did these just to keep up appearances as it were, but that he didn’t really need to do any of these things, and that he never felt any of the emotions that we do they were only for show.

I think we might agree that just like Jesus being only human, that Jesus being only divine is also ultimately unsatisfying, and that it also does not match with the scriptural witness that we have. These two positions, and several others were the real problems that the early church ran into in trying to explain who Jesus was and they are the reason that there were so many arguments and councils in order to try and come to some conclusions. Now these might seem like sort of esoteric arguments, or trying to see how many angles we can fit on the head of a pin, but that is because we are so far removed from them. They were very important to forming the faith that we know, but really these arguments still continue in many different forms.

If you read the book or saw the movie The DaVinci Code then you’ve heard some of these arguments still being discussed in that the main character, Robert Langdon purports that the church pushed the idea that Jesus was divine in a conspiracy to cover up Jesus’ humanity, and in particular his marriage to Mary Magdalene. But in fact Dan Brown gets the points completely wrong. He is a great suspense writer, but he is a terrible historian and an even worse theologian. He claims that the non-canonical gospels, that is books written that purport to tell the story of Jesus that are not included in the Bible, portray an image of Jesus that is all about his humanity. That statement alone says that Brown has not read these gospels, because almost without exception rather than portraying Jesus as human they in fact portray him as fully divine and downplay or discard his humanity entirely.

Now what eventually became the orthodox position of the church was that Jesus was fully human and fully divine. Like the trinity this becomes sort of a paradoxical position, but it was the one that the church agreed upon because of the arguments that were being made on both sides. It is in some ways the compromise position, but that is not to say that it is also not the right one, or the scriptural one. Instead it is position in which there is tension, but what we find is that this is true of a lot of Christianity, that there are two opposites that need to be held in tension, and if we go too far to one end then we begin to miss something.

Last week when we talked about the Holy Spirit we talked about combining the intellectual with the experiential, the head with the heart. These are positions that need to be held in tension with each other. When one position becomes dominant then things begin to go wrong. We see the same thing when we approach scripture. When we treat scripture as simply being metaphorical then we lose something, but when we treat everything as literal then we also lose something, instead we have to keep these poles in tension with each other, and then the same is true with Jesus. When we see him only as divine, then we lose meaning for us here, of why he existed and what he means for us as Christians, just as we do when we see him only as human and not divine. These are the paradoxes we have to deal with and keep in tension with each other. But all that being said, we return to the original question of answering Jesus’ question, “who do you say that I am?”

Bobby Jo Reed is a recovering drug addict who was also a prostitute working the streets of Kansas City. She kept trying to get clean and to get off the streets but every time she tried she kept falling back and ended up in the same spot. But then someone told her about God and about Jesus, and with the help of others began to move away from her old life and began a new way of living. As she was making this new journey her mother died and left her with an inheritance, and so Bobby Jo began thinking about her old life and her friends who she knew were still out there, and so she bought an old home and rehabbed into a place to help women like her get off the streets and begin a new life. Her home, called the Healing House, now has five locations in Kansas City serving 75 women and 30 men, offering them Christ and literally turning their lives around.

Every year at Christmas the people living at Healing House take up a collection amongst themselves and then go out and buy Christmas presents and then deliver them to those who are still living and working the streets, to tell them that they are loved and that there is hope because of Jesus Christ. One Christmas day while they were out delivering they stopped to get gas, and a police car pulled in behind them to see what was going on. One of the officers walked up to the window and then realized that he knew the driver and said, “hey didn’t you used to work the corner of” and then named her old grounds, and she said she did, and he said, “I thought you were dead.” And then he looked into the van and saw more faces, and said I remember you I thought you were dead to, and so it was for many of the people in the car and he had to call his partner over to show them that they were all still alive. But in fact they were dead to their old selves, they had died and been reborn in Jesus Christ.

The Christ that Bobby Jo Reed and the others encountered was not just some man who lived 2000 years ago, this was a risen and living presence in their lives. Someone who was making a difference for them in the here and the now. Someone who was offering them hope, someone who was offering them a new way of being, someone who was offering them abundant life, this was God present for them in their life. But this Christ was also someone who understood their struggles and their failures, their pain and their brokenness, their triumphs and their sorrows, who understood the cry of despair when they cried out from the depths of their misery, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me.” He understood because he had been there to, and he could make a difference because he was fully human and fully divine. This was the Jesus who was offering them new life, a resurrection story, because he too had died and been resurrected and offered them and us the promise of salvation.

Theologian Alister McGrath says “the incarnation is the climax of Christian reflection upon the mystery of Christ – the recognition that Jesus Christ reveals God; that he represents God; that he speaks as God and for God; that he acts as God and for God; that he is God.” Or as the Gospel of John says, “in the beginning was the word and the word was with God and the word was God, and the word became flesh and dwelled amongst us.

This week we enter into the season of lent, beginning with Ash Wednesday, as we begin to make our way to the cross and the despair of Good Friday and then to the celebration of Easter Morning. Paul says that what we as Christians do is to proclaim Christ, and him crucified, but in order to do that we must first answer for ourselves when Jesus asks us, “who do you say that I am?” May it be so my sisters and brothers. Amen.

What Do Our Announcements Say

2012-02-21T10:48:00.000-08:00

I was reading something recently, although I don't remember what it was, that was talking about announcements in church. The question they asked is what they would illustrate to someone who was a first time guest. Would they understand them? Are they about the way we are serving the community, or are they geared only at people who are already in the church? What would the announcements leave them thinking about who the church is and what we are doing?

They got me really thinking about the things I announce each week, most of which is geared at us, not about the things that we are doing in the community. We don't talk that often about our youth center (which is not in the church but is instead on the main street), about our food pantry (again at an offsite location), about the work we do supporting our volunteer firefighters and EMTs, or how we lift the people who work at the schools up in prayer each week.

These are just some of the ways we are involved in the life of our small town, but instead of highlighting these we talk about choir practice and prayer group, upcoming meetings, and Christian ed classes. Now these are all important things, but are they more important that what we do outside our walls? I don't think so.

Clearly people in the congregation need to know about these things but how do we reach a balance so that we also talk about other things so that those who are visiting don't think that everything we do is about us?

Good Samaritans

2012-02-15T12:59:00.000-08:00

This morning while taking my daughter into preschool I got a flat tire, and so I pulled over to the side of the road to fix it. Because we live in a very rural area, we were on the outskirts of the next town but still about 5-10 minutes from anywhere. I was there probably about twenty minutes as I changed the tire, and in that time two people stopped to offer me assistance.

I have to say that I was honestly surprised by that, and maybe that says more about me than the current state of society, but I was also very happy about that. Maybe they did it because we were in the middle of nowhere, maybe they did it because it's a minivan, maybe they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do, or maybe they did it because of all those reasons and more.

I was grateful that they stopped, although I did tell them I was okay, and I have begun thinking about my own efforts of helping others who are in need which I think is lacking. So thanks to all those who reach out to assist people in need for no other reason then they know it is the right thing to do.

Breath of God

2012-02-14T06:22:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday on the Holy Spirit. The text was John 16:12-15:

Last week when we looked at the Trinity I said that most preachers never want to have to deal with it because we don’t know what to say about it or how to explain it, not that that always stops us. But fortunately I think most of you want to avoid it because I’ve never actually had someone ask me to explain the Trinity, at least not directly. But two of the most common questions I do get about the faith are about parts of the trinity, and that is to explain the Holy Spirit and also to answer who Jesus is, whether Jesus was God or not and how we are to understand him as the Son of God. And so this week we look at the Holy Spirit, who is the third part of the Trinity, and then next week we will look at Jesus, the second part of the Trinity.

Now for those of you who grew up using the King James Bible, or liturgies based on the King James, you probably know of the Holy Spirit as the Holy Ghost. That is still the language we sing as part of the doxology each week after the offering is received (praise Father Son and Holy Ghost). The term was changed for several reasons. The first is that our understanding of ghost is a little different from that of the 17^th century, and we don’t want people either thinking of something scary or even something nice, like Caspar the friendly Ghost. The second reason is that Spirit is sort of a closer approximation to the Greek and the Hebrew terms that it is being used.

One of the reasons we don’t understand the Holy Spirit is because the church has not always been very clear about it. In the Nicene Creed, which was the church’s formalization of Trinitarian theology and which we read last week, it originally said “We believe in the Holy Spirit.” That is what is still contained in the Apostle’s Creed, but that doesn’t really give us any information. Later at the Council of Constantinople in 381, this was added to so that it included, “we believe in the Holy Spirit, the lord and giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and Son is worshipped and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.”

In the doctrinal standards of the United Methodist Church, we state that we believe in “The Holy Ghost, proceeding from the Father and the Son, is of one substance, majesty and glory with the Father and the Son, very and eternal God.” Those are a little fuller statement, but they have more to do with the Spirit’s relation in the Trinity rather than about what the Spirit does or how we experience it. So after looking at the doctrines of the church we are still left to ask who or what the Holy Spirit is and how we experience it in our lives?

Although the Gospel of John says that the Spirit comes after Jesus has left the earth, the presence of the Spirit can be found throughout the scriptures. In the first creation story, we are told that the wind, or breath, or Spirit of God swept across the waters. In the second creation story, and yes there are two very different stories of the creation, God breathes life into Adam. We are told that Joshua, Gideon, Deborah, Samson, Saul, and David were all said to have received the Spirit of God, and David’s last words even begin, “the Spirit of the Lord speaks through me, his word is upon my tongue.” (1 Sam 23:2) Of course that is what the prophets also tell us, that they have received the Spirit of God, that the words they speak are not their own but God’s. The Spirit in the Hebrew Scriptures, along with participating in creation, leads and guides God’s people.

Before I begin writing each sermon, and before each worship service, I ask for God to fill me with the Spirit, to guide and lead me so that what I proclaim might be what God needs for us to hear. Sometimes this is successful and sometimes it’s not. There are times when I can clearly feel like I am being inspired by the Spirit in what I am doing. There are times in which I want to say one thing, but I am instead being drawn to go in another direction. When I let go of where I want to go, and instead allow that other force do the work, those have been some of my best sermons.

After one of those messages a member of my congregation asked me for a copy so she could pass it on to her children. Normally that’s not a problem since I am a manuscript preacher, but I told her that I couldn’t gave her a full text because I had gone off the script, to which she said, “I could tell you were off script because it was really good.” That was a better response then another that I’ve gotten, which is if you’ve told me that I had a good sermon, my usual response was that the credit should go to God or the Spirit, to which after I said that to one person they responded, “well it wasn’t that good.”

If you’ve ever been reading scripture, or thinking about something else, and have suddenly come to an understanding that you had never seen or thought of before, that is the movement of the Holy Spirit. When we pray each week for guidance in leading us and showing us what God is calling us to do and to be, this is this aspect of the movement of the Holy Spirit in our lives.

Because the New Testament is written in Greek, rather than Hebrew, the word they used for Spirit is neuma. Because Greek and Hebrew are both gendered languages, that is the words have genders assigned to them, neuma is masculine, which is why in today’s passage the Spirit is referred to as he. But in Hebrew, ruach is feminine, and so there has been some arguments about how to refer to the Spirit. Some use exclusively masculine language and call the Spirit he, others use non-gendered and simply refer to the Spirit as it, but traditionally the Spirit has been referred to as she. The Spirit has taken the feminine. I know that will probably be shocking to some of you, and we’ll actually explore this a little more in a few weeks when we get into prayer, but let me give you another analogy. French is another language that is gendered, and so a waste basket is feminine, but if you were to write a sentence in English would you refer to a garbage can as she or as it? That’s right, as it, because English is a non-gendered language. So just because a word takes one gender over another does not mean that the object itself is that gender. So you will hear the Holy Spirit referred to using male, female and gender neutral language, and all of them are appropriate and yet inappropriate at the same time.

You will also see or hear many different metaphors used for the Holy Spirit. The two most prevalent are the dove and fire. At Jesus’ baptism we are told that the Spirit in the form of a dove descended upon him. The dove symbolizes the peace of the Spirit. At Pentecost, when the disciples were filled with the Spirit and began speaking in tongues, it was represented not only as wind, another metaphor we have already discussed, but also as tongues of fire. In the cross and flame, which is the United Methodist logo, the flame represents the Holy Spirit. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, often used this metaphor and talked about setting himself on fire with the Holy Spirit in order to spread the message. The Spirit has also been shown as water, especially in relation to the water of baptism, remembering that we are reborn by water and the Spirit. The Spirit is also sometimes represented with a cloud and light. At the transfiguration, the cloud descends on Jesus and some of the disciples on the mountaintop. That is the power of the Holy Spirit.

So the Holy Spirit is found throughout both testaments, but the church still had to identify all the roles she played in people’s lives. As was already mentioned, one of those roles is that of mediator, of giving wisdom and the words of God. But the Spirit also beckons. It calls us to be in relationship with God long before we are ever aware of such a need. Within Methodism this is called prevenient grace, the grace that goes before. It is the movement of the Spirit which makes us aware of God’s desire to be in relationship. In addition, the Spirit beckons us in other ways as well. If you have ever had an experience in which you thought that you needed to call or see someone, or that you needed to be somewhere, and at the end you thought “God was involved in that,” that was the power of the Holy Spirit moving in our lives. In the story of Simeon which we heard just after Christmas, Simeon is beckoned by the Holy Spirit to go to the Temple so that he can encounter Jesus as a baby.

A colleague recounted a time early in his ministry when he was working in his office and he kept getting this feeling that he needed to go see one of his parishioners who was a shut-in. He kept putting it aside, but finally decided he needed to follow through, and when he got to the house he knocked on the door, and heard the woman say “Come in David the door’s unlocked.” There was no way she could have seen him come because she was in her bedroom, and he hadn’t called before going over, so his first question to her was how she knew it was him, and she said “Because I’ve been praying for you to come for three days.” Of course the reason she wanted him is even better. She told him that the light bulb in her bedroom had burned out, and he was the youngest person she knew who could replace it, and so that is why she had been praying. Now if you need me, please just call, because I will be honest my Holy Spirit radar does not always pick up all the messages that are sent to me, but the Spirit beckons us.

The second thing the Spirit does is to convict us of our need for God’s grace and forgiveness in our lives, leading us to justification. If you’ve ever felt sometime that the word of God was being driven into your heart that is this movement of the Spirit. If you’ve ever been in worship, or someplace else, and felt as if everything was directed just to you and that you were hearing exactly what you needed to hear, that is the power of the Spirit. Now hopefully in every worship service we will feel the movement of the Spirit. Of course it doesn’t always happen, but that is one of the goals, to feel God’s presence and to identify it as the Spirit.

The third thing it does is to transform us. One of the things that baptism does is to invite the Holy Spirit into our lives. After we baptize someone we lay hands on them and pray that for the power of the Holy Spirit to enter into their lives and to live with them throughout their days, and when we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives then the Spirit moves us to sanctification, that is to living each day more and more like Christ. The Holy Spirit transforms us and allows us to do and to be things that we would not be able to do by ourselves.

In Paul’s letter to the Galatians, Paul says that the fruits of the Spirit are love, joy, peace, forbearance, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control. (Gal. 5:22-23) Those are certainly things we should be striving for, or at least I hope we are, but we receive them not through our actions but through the work of the Holy Spirit. In addition, in 1 Corinthians, Romans and Ephesians, Paul highlights other gifts of the Spirit, which are not exhaustive, but include wisdom and knowledge, healing, prophecy, the speaking of tongues and its interpretation, ministering, teaching, giving, leading, and compassion (Rom 12, 1 Cor 12, Eph 4).

But what is crucial to understand, and this also applies to the passage from John we heard today, these gifts are not for us but for the good of the community. So the Holy Spirit beckons us convicts us, transforms us. Paul says “do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your minds so that you may discern what is the will of God… (Rom 12:2).

The Spirit also comforts us. She acts as our advocate, consoles us, encourages us, and uplifts us. One of the words John uses in reference to the work of the Spirit is paraclete, which literally means “called to one’s side.” If you remember the old poem called footprints in the sand, in which someone has a dream in which they see footprints in the sand representing their lives and there are two sets of prints, one the persons and the other God’s, but the notice that in the most difficult times that there is only one set of prints, and they wonder why. And what is the response? Because it was in the most difficult times that God carried us. Well that is the Holy Spirit, it is the paraclete the one who is called to our side who walks with us every day, who comforts us and guides us, who leads us and carries us. Again, when we pray for God’s guidance it is the Holy Spirit who says “this is the way to go, this is God’s will for your life.” The Holy Spirit beckons us convicts us, transforms and sanctifies us, advocates for us and comforts us, and next the Holy Spirit equips us.

God has a will and a plan for our lives, but we are not called to do or to be anything that God does not give us the gifts and graces to do. As was just mentioned, the Holy Spirit gives us the fruits of the Spirit in order to accomplish the tasks that are set for us. We are not told “Go do this” and then left completely alone. Instead when we accept God’s will in our lives then we will begin to notice that what we have been called to do we can accomplish not because we are amazing individuals, although we certainly are, but instead because God through the Holy Spirit has equipped us to carry out those tasks. Now deciding what the fruits that we have been given are can be difficult, and later this year we will take time to discuss the fruits of the Spirit and how we come to understand what God has called us to do, because the Holy Spirit equips us to do God’s will in the world.

Finally, the Holy Spirit empowers us. When Jesus ascends into heaven he tells the disciples, “you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you…” (Acts 2:8). The word for power here is dynamus, from which we get the word dynamic and dynamite. It is a power that makes a difference, not just in our lives but in the world. You've never said of someone who is sitting in the corner that they are a dynamic person. Dynamus is a power which cannot be contained or controlled and must be shared, or exploded as the case me be, which Jesus says we do by being witnesses to the ends of the earth.

So the Holy Spirit beckons, convicts, transforms and sanctifies, comforts and advocates, and equips and empowers us. When we talk about God in our lives, of feeling God’s presence, and being directed God, or being comforted by God, this is through the power of the Holy Spirit. When we are reborn in baptism that is the power of the Holy Spirit. When we talk about Christ being present for us during Communion, that is the power of the Holy Spirit. But, outside of Pentecostal and charismatic churches who talk about invoking the Holy Spirit in their lives, most of us don’t want to be soaked in the Holy Spirit, this is the time in which we say a sprinkling will be just fine, thank you very much.

We don’t want to be immersed in the Spirit, because quite frankly it scares us, it leaves us feeling a little bit out of control. We’ve seen some of the things that happen among Pentecostals, who proclaim the power of the Holy Spirit, and we think it’s a little weird and we think, well if that is what it means to have the Holy Spirit then I think I’ll do without, or maybe just take a side portion don’t give me the whole thing, because I like being in control of my life and having a say.

But to accept the power, the dynamus, of the Holy Spirit does not mean that we have to become Pentecostal. John Wesley would tell us that the baptism of the Holy Spirit is not the goal of our life with God, as many Pentecostals would say, but is instead merely the beginning. Religion cannot be merely a thing that takes place in our heads, because that is an empty religion, it must be experienced and lived out, which is what the Pentecostal movement was seeking. They wanted an experience of the Holy Spirit in their lives, but a religion that is only experience is empty as well. Jesus tells us that we are to love the Lord our God with what? All of our hearts, and all of our souls and all of our strength and all of our minds.

That really was part of the genius of John Wesley and the foundation of the Methodist movement was to be able to combine the heart and the head, the experiential and the intellectual. That is our heritage. We have gone astray at times but we are called to understand religion intellectually and at the same time to be able to immerse ourselves in the Holy Spirit who beckons, convicts, transforms, comforts, guides, equips and empowers us, to be able to set ourselves on fire so that others might come to watch us burn. The Holy Spirit is the manifestation of God in our lives, and through that power we come to know Christ, to accept Christ, to live like Christ and to be empowered to proclaim Christ to the ends of the earth. May it be so in our lives my sisters and brothers. Amen.

Church, State and Contraception

2012-02-10T13:36:00.001-08:00

I have been debating for a while whether I wanted to tackle the Obama administration's decision regarding insurance coverage for contraception or not on this blog, but since the issue was raised yesterday during prayers and concerns I decided to go ahead and have my say.

There are lots of great ironies in this situation. The first is that the very same group of people who are saying that there is no such thing as a separation of church and state and that the two should be connected, are now saying that the federal government has overstepped this constitutional boundary and are now meddling in the affairs of the church.

I think that argument is a stretch, but the problem with combining the church and the state was never really the fear of what the church will do to the government, although that is a concern, but instead what the government would do to the church. If you have ever worked with someplace that receives federal funding in any form then you know what the requirements, stipulations and restrictions are.

So I guess this is exposing the reality that those who want to tie church and state together want the church to interfere with the government but not vice versa. Of course then this sets up situations where religious "law" will trump governmental law (you know sort of like what people are afraid of with Muslims)

One way to look at these issues is to extend them to their logical conclusions (not to extremes as some are doing) or to look at it and ask what you would think if someone you disliked was doing it. I remembering going to a speech by Lynne Cheney in which she was attacking the new history standards that had been put into place by the Clinton administration. The problem was that she was the one responsible for beginning the process, it's just that Bush was voted out of office and so she didn't get the finish it. So she wasn't opposed to the standards, just as long as she was the one who got to decide what they were. Unfortunately the world does not work that way, so let's take a look at some logical questions.

An attorney for the US Council of Bishops has said that their opposition is about more than just the church, that if he opened a Taco Bell that he should be exempt as well since as a Catholic he is opposed to birth control. So let's extend that to others:

Scientologists do not believe that mental health problems actually exist, so by the standard being discussed they would not need to provide any mental health coverage, including prescription coverage for drugs, like Prozac. And, since I don't know of a single Christian or Jewish denomination that says that sex outside of marriage is okay, does that mean I can provide coverage that only allows birth control for married couples (which the UMC is okay with), but not for single people?

What about other medical procedures involved with reproduction? Will vasectomies or tubal ligation be covered or not since they are radical forms of birth control? What about hysterectomies? Covered or not? What about if the hysterectomy is needed? A nun in Phoenix was defrocked because she allowed an abortion to take place in a Catholic hospital in order to save the mother's life, so I'm thinking not. What about Viagra for men who are married to women who can no longer have children? Since that would then encompass sex that cannot lead to procreation I’m guessing not.

The committee advising Paul VI said not to include contraception in the Humanae Vitae. The man who invented the pill, John Rock was a devout Catholic who believed that it was within church teaching, and actually created it in a way that was totally unnecessary and maybe harmful to women in order to make it fall within Catholic teachings (here is a great story on this). Plus, 98% of sexually active Catholic women have used birth control and the majority of Catholic hospitals and schools already have insurance policies which cover birth control, including for single females.

Twenty-Eight states, including New Mexico, already have laws on the books requiring that large institutions like hospitals and schools cover this regardless of religious convictions (and for those not good at math that is more than half), and 8 of those states, including the liberal bastions of Georgia and Iowa, require local churches to provide birth control coverage in their insurance without exemption. Finally, Republicans proposed a bill in both the House and the Senate in 2001 which would have done exactly what is now being proposed. They were for it then but are opposed to it now that it's being done by a Democrat, much like Lynne Cheney.

What you also need to pay attention to is who is advocating opposition to the administrations position on television shows. It is more than 2 to 1 in favor of men, except for Fox which was 10 to 1. The two groups most strongly in opposition are the Roman Catholic church and Southern Baptists, both groups who deny leadership and other roles to women. I, and others, can't help but guess that if women were involved at the table in which these and other theological decisions were made, that their results might be very different.

To tell you how strange the arguments around these issues have become for the Catholic church, I attended a Catholic university for a year and there was a student organization supporting gay rights but another organization pushing women’s rights issues was not allowed to form because they would also be pro-choice. So homosexuality was okay, but abortion was not. Of course this decision was made by men, celibate men, some of whom were open about their own sexuality.

One of the problems that I see the Roman Catholic church falling into is the fact that they are turning themselves into a one-issue church. It's all about contraception, and nothing else seems to matter. They are supposedly just as opposed to the death penalty as they are to abortion, but how often do you hear anything about that? When was the last time you heard of a politician who supported the death penalty, which strangely enough are also those who say they want to protect the “sanctity of life” but also are pro-war, being denied communion?

If the Catholic church is going to make this the position on which they are going to make their stand, and it is a position which is uniformly opposed not only by the general populace but also by their own members, at what point do people stop listening them all together?

The church does need to make stands on things, but many people are asking why the bishops were not just as outraged about the clergy abuses taking place in their dioceses as they are about this issue.

And what's worse is that some are beginning to backtrack on that issue. Cardinal Egan recently recanted an apology he had offered to his diocese when interviewed by the Connecticut Magazine:

CT Magazine: In 2002, you wrote a letter to parishioners in which you said, “If in hindsight we discover that mistakes may have been made as regards prompt removal of priests and assistance to victims, I am deeply sorry.”

EGAN: First of all, I should never have said that. I did say if we did anything wrong, I’m sorry, but I don’t think we did anything wrong. But I hate to go back over this. I think there’s more to life than that one issue, especially when I had no cases. (Emphasis in original)

I guess what that means is that contraception is the one issue that want to make an fuss over, but the abuse of children is not.

Finally, I would agree with others that this really has little to do with government restrictions on religion, but instead is much much deeper. It is about the right of people to use birth control. Rick Santorum himself has said “One of the things I will talk about, that no president has talked about before, is I think the dangers of contraception in this country.... Many of the Christian faith have said, well, that’s okay, contraception is okay. It’s not okay. It’s a license to do things in a sexual realm that is counter to how things are supposed to be.”

He then went on to say that he worries that sex is being “deconstructed to the point where it’s simply pleasure.” Of course what these positions want to do is to deconstruct marriages to that they are simply all about sex and procreation. I certainly hope that Mr. Santorum's marriage is about more than sex, because mine is as is those of my friends.

He has also said he would like to see Griswold v. Connecticut, which gave married couples the right to possess and use contraception, overturned. This was a case in which the majority said "Would we allow the police to search the sacred precincts of marital bedrooms for telltale signs of the use of contraceptives? The very idea is repulsive to the notions of privacy surrounding the marriage relationship." Apparently not for some.

Here is the position of the United Methodist Church (edited for space):

Each couple has the right and the duty prayerfully and responsibly to control conception according to their circumstances. They are, in our view, free to use those means of birth control considered medically safe. As developing technologies have moved conception and reproduction more and more out of the category of a chance happening and more closely to the realm of responsible choice, the decision whether or not to give birth to children must include acceptance of the responsibility to provide for their mental, physical, and spiritual growth, as well as consideration of the possible effect on quality of life for family and society.

To support the sacred dimensions of personhood, all possible efforts should be made by parents and the community to ensure that each child enters the world with a healthy body and is born into an environment conducive to the realization of his or her full potential....

We therefore encourage our churches and common society to.... Make information and materials available so all can exercise responsible choice in the area of conception controls. We support the free flow of information about reputable, efficient, and safe nonprescription contraceptive techniques through educational programs and through periodicals, radio, television, and other advertising media. We support adequate public funding and increased participation in family planning services by public and private agencies, including church-related institutions, with the goal of making such services accessible to all, regardless of economic status or geographic location.

In addition, Bishop Shamana, the head of the General Board of Church and Society, has said: "Basic to the values we hold as United Methodists is the belief that women are capable decision makers regarding their bodies and the gift of childbirth."

* cartoon from the Naked Pastor.

Race and Athletes

2012-02-09T07:28:00.000-08:00

Forbes just came out with their newest list of the ten most dislikes athletes, and once again what is most glaring to me is the issue of race (although gender could certainly come in as well). Here is the list:

1. Michael Vick, 60% dislike
2. Tiger Woods, 60% dislike
3. Plaxico Burress, 56% dislike
4. Ndamukong Suh, 51% dislike
5. Kris Humphries, 50% dislike
6. LeBron James, 48% dislike
7. Kobe Bryant, 45% dislike
8. Terrell Owens, 45% dislike
9. Alex Rodriguez, 44% dislike
10. Kurt Busch, 42% dislike

Of the ten, only two are white, and Kris Humphries is of mixed ancestry (aren't we all), as his father is half African-American, half white, which by laws still on the books in many states would make him African-American. So it might be argued that only Kurt Busch is white. Of the others all are African-American except for Alex Rodriguez.

I have written about this in the past, but why is Michael Vick at the top? I know what he did was despicable and cannot be defended, but Ben Roethlisberger has twice been accused of rape (never been indited or gone to trial). Is cruelty to animals worse than violence against women? My guess is that one of the reasons that Kobe Bryant is on this list is because of his own rape charge, so, again, why is Kobe tarnished but Ben is not?

Lots of people dislike LeBron James for the way he left Cleveland and the way he handled it, but was it any worse than Bret Favre's behavior with his own free agency? Why isn't Brett on this list?

I can't help but also think that Tiger is on this list because people expected him to be "more," whatever that means, and were disappointed, but more importantly because he was an African-American male who was married to a white woman and who was committing adultery with other white women. This is still a major taboo in our culture, we only need to look back to a Senate race a few years ago to see that this still carries significant weight.

While African-Americans do dominate in some sports, they clearly do not make up 80% of professional athletes, especially when golf, Nascar and the NHL are added in, and yet they consistently dominate the list of most dislike athletes. I suspect that old racial stereotypes all come into play and they get wrapped up in our feelings about these men, and they are all men which also says something. They are seen as getting too "uppity" or, even worse, trying to explore their own power and privilege, something that was always trouble in the past.

While many would have us believe that we live in a post-racial America, these polls, along with other incidents continue to show us that we are not. Just a few days ago at a high school basketball game, it is reported that fans of one school, predominantly white, yelled racial slurs and danced around in banana costumes to taunt the players of another school, predominantly African-American.

As a white, and for all whites, we have a position of privilege and advantage that minorities simply do not have. Many will overlook what Favre and Roethlisberger do because we see them as individuals behaving badly, whereas Vick and Woods and others are categorized by their race and then judged accordingly.

As whites we don't assume that color is an issue because for us it is not. Our society has a preference for whiteness (and maleness), but race definitely plays a role for others. I can't help but believe that for most of these athletes, had they been white their issues would have been overlooked or forgiven a long time ago.

Super Bowl Reflections

2012-02-08T06:00:00.000-08:00

Well we are now three days out from the Super Bowl and I finally have some time to focus on a recap of the most important things. I am a Pats fan, so will basically leave the game alone. No question that the Giants were the better team going in, but the Pats still should have won the game.

Betting spreads: Going into the game everyone was asking how Vegas could possibly have the Patriots as the favorites when the Giants were not only a better team but were playing better. I agree with both points, but those who were spouting such ideas have no idea, apparently, how point spreads are created. Vegas is not concerned with who will win the game. They don't actually care. What they want to do is to get equal bets on both sides, so that in the end they don't lose money, but in fact make money. That is why the betting line will move as the event gets closer. If the bets are not coming in 50-50 then they will correct for it. I know that most "analysts" know this information but don't talk about it because they think it makes for good television. It doesn't, it just makes them look ignorant and makes me want to throw my remote at the screen. (And the United Methodist Church is opposed to gambling in all its forms, so don't do it.)

Commercials: The commercials this year did not live up to past years in any way shape or form. In fact most were just bad. There were a couple of good ones, but they were by far the exception to the rule. Even the Budweiser ads were bad. The one commercial that most people are now talking about was the "Half-time in America" ad featuring Clint Eastwood. I will address this specifically at another time, but I didn't really get it. If it's half-time, I guess that means there is only another 30 minutes left for America?

Half-Time Show: In an interview before the game began, Madonna said she did not think she was chosen because she had become mainstream. If she is not mainstream, then who is? It was also obvious that at 53 she can no longer do the dance moves she used to do. I watched the show but completely missed M.I.A. giving the finger, obviously I was not paying close enough attention, probably because I had no idea who she was. But seemingly every year there is something that happens that gets people upset. I think they actually like this because we are still talking about it. But here are two simple solutions to solve the problem.

First, put a decency clause in the performers contracts that says if they do anything indecent (like showing a nipple or flipping the bird) they will be fined an insane amount of money. I'm thinking in the $2-$5 million dollar range, with the money to be given to a charity in the host city (and not an NFL run group). The second thing is to just get rid of the whole thing all together. A normal half-time is 12 minutes. Why can't the Super Bowl half-time be the same. Show us the talking heads and then let's get back to the game. Why do we need a "spectacular"? And if we do somehow need this do it before or after the game. That would ultimately solve their problems.

Pregame: Why is it that the pregame is four times as long as the game itself? There is not that much to talk about. If they do need something this long, they could do some really interesting things (see my suggestion below under analysts) that would truly help.

Analysts: This is more to ESPN then others, but why do I have to continue listening to failed NFL coaches talk about strategy. Eric Mangini, or the "mangenius," was only a genius when he was on Bill Belichik's staff. He was 33-47 as a head coach, so why do I have to hear him talk?

Second, please make sure the people calling the game understand the rules. Al Michaels seemed general shocked that an intentional grounding in the endzone results in a safety. Did he not know this?

Third, and this could be a perfect thing to do during the pregame blather, the Super Bowl is the one time during the year when you know there will be lots and lots and lots of people watching who know absolutely nothing about football. So, it would seem to me this is the perfect time to do some education, do a football 101 during the telecast (like saying what a safety is and what that means) so that those who don't know the game can learn something, and maybe then want to watch more because they actually are actually learning the game. Or maybe coordinate with Lifetime or the O channel, and do a show specifically targeted as women so they can know what's happening and become better fans. I know it's thinking outside the box. The NFL thinks they will always be popular and they don't need to educate or attract new fans. Just ask the MLB, or the church for that matter, how that works.

Strategy: Okay, so here is a bit of football. I liked Belichick's decision to let the Giants score. The question is why he didn't do it as soon as they reached the 7, rather than waiting until second down. In the infamous 4th and 2 decision against the Colts several years ago, I wrote that he should have let the Colts score right away rather than trying to stop them. He did make a crucial error in his challenging a play, but letting them score was exactly the right move.

Heckling: Gisele Bundchen is receiving some flack for calling out the Patriot receivers by saying that they were dropping balls they should have caught after someone heckled her on the way out of the stadium. First, she is correct in her statement. I said immediately after the game that Manning's receivers helped him out, and Brady's didn't. But, second, and more importantly, why is no one commenting on how uncalled for heckling the family members of players is? Heckle the players all you want, they are being paid (although this sometimes goes over the top as well). But families should be totally out of bounds. When did this become acceptable behavior?

Timing: Finally, can someone explain to me why the game is on Sunday? I know that traditionally NFL games are on Sunday, but now they are on Thursday night, and also on Saturday, especially during the playoffs, so why not move the game? Doing so would also allow people to be able to recover before going back to work on Monday.

Now we move into several weeks when football is over and baseball has yet to begin. These are the worst sports weeks of the year.

The Unity

2012-02-07T10:10:00.001-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday on the trinity. The text was 2 Corinthians 13:11-13:

Jesus said to his disciples, “Who do people say that I am?”

And his disciples answered, "Some say John the Baptist; some Elijah; others Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.”

And Jesus answered and said, “But who do you say that I am?

Peter answered and said, "You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God, the Logos, existing in the Father as His rationality and then, by an act of His will, being generated, in consideration of the various functions by which God is related to his creation, but only on the fact that Scripture speaks of a Father, and a Son, and a Holy Spirit, each member of the Trinity being coequal with every other member, and each acting inseparably with and interpenetrating every other member, with only an economic subordination within God, but causing no division which would make the substance no longer simple."

And Jesus looked at Peter and said, "What?"

Today we tackle the subject that most clergy never want to talk about, the trinity. Even though the trinity is at the heart of the faith, it is a topic that most of us don’t want to have to talk about because we don’t know what to say about it. Jonathan Swift, best known for writing Gulliver’s Travels, but who was also an Anglican priest, in his writing on the Trinity, which was quoted by John Wesley, said that anyone who endeavors to explain the trinity, has utterly lost their way; they have, above all other persons hurt the cause which they intend to promote. Of course as all good preachers do he then spent fifteen single spaced pages trying to explain it. One of my favorite lines about today’s passage from 2 Corinthians comes from New Testament scholar David Skinner who said “Many preachers will focus sermons solely on this text so as to [it] to launch a doctrinal sermon on Trinitarian theology. I beg you not to do that.” But this morning I am going to disregard Dr. Skinner’s otherwise very wise advice.

The trinity is one of those things that is central to the faith but is hard to describe and about which there is a lot of confusion. This week in the run-up to the super bowl, Jason Pierre-Paul, who plays for the New York Giants said, about Tom Brady, “He is not God. He might be Jesus, but he’s not God.” Now I am not going to comment on whether Tom Brady’s is divine or not, but what I can say is that the player does not understand the trinity, because what the trinity says is that Jesus is in fact God. One of the reasons the trinity was formulated was to explain the divinity of Christ. I am going to try and make it as easy to understand as possible, but it’s not and so I expect that at the end some of you will probably want to say, “that was great John, but I still don’t understand,” and my response to you will be to go home and pray about it, and then when you come to understand the trinity please come explain it to me.

Dr. Jerry Grey, a professor at St. Paul School of Theology, a United Methodist seminary says that the trinity is the “way for Christians to explain the uniqueness of their revelation of God.” After Jesus’ death and resurrection the disciples came to believe that they had encountered God in the person of Christ. As Jews three times a day they were reciting the Shema, which comes from Deuteronomy 6:4, and says “Hear O Israel, the Lord is our God, the Lord is one.” So if there is only one God, how could Jesus be a part of God? They had to find a way to explain this paradox. So what they began to do was to look to scripture, always a good place to start, and what they found was that God in the Hebrew scriptures was already described in two different ways, because there was a transcendent God, that is the God who creates who is out there in the universe, but there was also an imminent God, that is a God who was involved in our lives.

In addition, they saw mentions of the Spirit as a personification of God. In one of readings we heard in preparation for Christmas, Isaiah says “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,” in the first creation account from Genesis, which you will find in your scripture insert today, we are told that the “wind of God swept over the waters” which is also sometimes translated as Spirit, and then we are also told that when God made mankind that God said, “Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness…” What does that mean, let us make mankind in our image? Early Christians saw in scripture this idea that while there is only one God, that there are multiple ways in which God is present to us, and so they came to a new understanding of God’s oneness and that even the Hebrew Scriptures understood this idea of multiplicity within the one.

Now what would have been best, and what would have also saved the church centuries of arguing, was if Jesus had simply laid out for us how the trinity worked, but unfortunately he didn’t, nor did the writers of the New Testament. While the parts of the trinity are mentioned throughout, there are only two passages that have a sort of Trinitarian formulation. The first is the passage we heard from 2 Corinthians today, and the second is the great commission given in Matthew in which we are told to go and make disciples of all the nations and baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. But this does not say how the trinity works, how the three are one, or how the three parts relate to each other.

So the early church had to figure out how to explain the fact that we could worship just one God, and yet have multiple parts of that God. One of the earliest formulations of the trinity is called modalism, and it says that God existed in the beginning as the creator, then God came as the Christ, then after the resurrection that God became the Spirit. So there is just one God known through different modes, but only one mode exists at a time. That worked for some people, and you can still hear this discussed as a way to explain the trinity, but modalism doesn’t really explain things when compared against scripture. For example, at Jesus’ baptism we are told that after Jesus came out of the water that a voice from heaven, said “this is my Son” and the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, also descended onto Jesus. So if God is only in one mode, how could all three seem to be present at the same time. In addition, Jesus prays to the Father, but if Jesus is the Father, just in a different mode, then how would that work? Modalism was rejected because while it was clear that God was known in three different forms, they were different from each other, and they all existed at the same time, it wasn’t simply that God transitioned from one into another.

So then the question became how could this be, how could God be three and yet one. How do we deal with the presence of Christ, understanding him as divine, the presence of the Holy Spirit, also as a manifestation of God, and also the understand God the Father, and have them all be one? This really is the great mystery. To condense 300 years of arguments into one sentence, everything came to a conclusion, for the most part, at the Council of Nicea in 325 which created the Nicene Creed, which we read this morning. This creed states that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one, and yet three, that they are all preexistent with the creation, that all are of the same substance, and that all three are equal, one is not more important than another.

Now I know that this is still very confusing, so let me give two illustrations to try and describe it. The first is this diagram which I first saw in a stained glass window in a Catholic church and it certainly gave me some grounding to begin to understand. What you see is that what is called the Godhead is at the center. Then you have the persons of the trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit on the outside. When we hear the word person we think of a body, that we are persons, but that is not how the word was originally understood. Instead, a better understanding is that of a persona. In Greek theater, an actor would put on a mask and that would be their persona, of how they were known and seen by the world. So Christ is one persona of God, while still remaining God and not dividing the completeness of God. But, notice that the Son is God, but the Son is not the Father. This is often where people get confused about the trinity, is in trying to make all the persons of the trinity related or doing the same things. They are all God, but each part of the trinity is also unique.

One other way is to try and understand through analogy, and maybe one of the best is the molecule H2O, which is of course water. Water has three distinct and separate forms. While we can conceptualize as an abstract the idea of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen, we only experience it in its forms. There is the liquid form which has its own unique characteristics and properties. But if you take water below 32̊ F, then it freezes. It becomes something else and you can’t do the things you can when it is in liquid form. It’s almost like it’s something else entirely, and yet it is still just the compound h2o. But then if you take it and put it above 212̊ F, then it becomes steam, and once again it is something totally different from either liquid or a solid, and yet it’s still just h2o. Three different forms in one molecule. It is three in one. Now is that the perfect analogy? No because if you take it far enough it begins to fall apart. But really that is true of the nature of all language we use to express about God. God is ultimately ineffable, that is God’s nature cannot be fully comprehended or understood. God is beyond all nature, all words all understanding.

Even though St. Augustine once said “If you can fully grasp it, it’s not God,” a story is told about him that he was desperate to understand the nature of God and of the trinity. One day as he was walking along the sea shore and reflecting on this, he saw a little child on the shore. The child made a hole in the sand, ran to the sea with a little cup, filled her cup, came and poured it into the hole she had made in the sand. Back and forth she went to the sea, filled her cup and came and poured it into the hole. Augustine went up to her and said, “My child, what are doing?” and she replied, “I am trying to empty the sea into this hole.” “How do you think,” Augustine asked her, “that you can empty this immense sea into this tiny hole and with this tiny cup?” To which she replied, “And you, how do you suppose that with this your small head you can comprehend the immensity of God?” and with that the child disappeared.

Ultimately the trinity is a mystery, because it seeks to convey the nature of God which is ultimately impossible to do. The doctrine of the trinity is concerned about explaining the nature of salvation and the complex human experience of redemption in Christ. What the trinity helps us to understand, as much as we possibly can, is that God is not solitary, because God is relational. God is relational in God’s self, and God is relational with us. God is one, and yet God is three and each part is fully and completely God in a way that does not exclude or divide but invites and relates.

In a few moments when we partake of communion, we will again proclaim words from Isaiah and say “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord, God of power and might…” we will remember, in the words of Catherine LaCugna, that the trinity marks the “pattern of redemption; everything comes from God [the Father], is made known and redeemed through Jesus Christ, and is consummated by the power of the Holy Spirit.” God is the one through who we live and move and have our being, and that God is one and that one is three, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Amen.

Happy Birthday

2012-02-06T09:28:00.000-08:00

February 5, 2006 was Super Bowl Sunday and fortunately I didn't care about either of the teams playing because I spent the afternoon, evening and early morning hours in a delivery room at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, and at 4:30 in the morning on January 6, my first daughter was born. Happy Birthday my Bear!

The Need For Titles

2012-01-31T11:56:00.000-08:00

I was in seeing a cardiologist this morning and as I was putting my shirt back on after having an EKG done I was looking at the poster on the wall of the heart. It had drawings of all the chambers and shots of the heart from different angles and with different cut aways so you could see different things. Then at the bottom was all the copyright information.

What struck me was that there were two artists who did the drawings in consultation with someone at some university listed. The scientist had PhD listed after his name, but the artists had MFA listed after their names. Was that necessary? Why was that there? Did it make a difference that the artists had a master in fine arts? Would a bachelor's degree not have been enough? Was it their decision to have it included, or did the publisher put it on there in order to give them more importance and weight? Would it have been strange if they were listed without anything, but the other name still had Ph.D. after the name?

I know some clergy who list M.Div. after their names. In my experience this has appeared to be done for one of two reasons. The first is that they are young clergy and so they hope that by listing the degree it will give them some degree of status and acceptability they might not otherwise have. The second is that it is done by people in denominations who do not require an advanced degree and so they want people to know that they do indeed have a degree in theology. Both sort of have at the core the need for respect that such a degree entails.

I am not immune to this desire. I hang my diplomas on the wall in my office so that people will see them. I put Rev. in front of my name, which in many ways does the same thing as putting something after my name. It is a title that brings with it, or at least used to, a degree of respect and respectability.

Would I respect the other person involved in the poster as someone who can seriously add something if they did not have a Ph.D.? I honestly have to say no, that in that case I want to see an advanced degree. So why not then give the same respect to the artists, who also have advanced degrees? Is art somehow less than medicine or science? The need for titles or at least respectability is inherent in us I think, but all titles are certainly not the same as society goes. I could have M.A., M.Div, Th.M., after my name but it will never get the same respect as if I simply had MD, or Ph.D. The same as my degree from Harvard gains more respect than my degree from Boston University, which has more respect than someone who attends a smaller, unknown school.

Do people seeing this poster trust it more or does it make them more sure of its accuracy because they are MFAs? Or does it give them a level or professionalism we, and maybe others in the medical community, need in order to give them the respect they deserve as masters of their craft and as people who know what they are doing?

Brokenness

2012-01-25T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Romans 7:13-25a:

Hi. My name is John and I’m a sinner. (You’ve obviously not spent a lot of time around 12 step programs, because the answer to that is you saying “Hi john.”) Today we continue in our sermon series on what Christians believe, and as you might guess from the passage we just heard from Paul’s letter to the Romans, it is about sin. We spent the first two weeks looking at the sacraments of the church, and of the two protestant sacraments, which are baptism and communion; sin obviously plays a role in them.

One of the things that happens in baptism is that we are washed clean of our sins, and in communion normally before we enter into the main liturgy, called the great thanksgiving, we pray a prayer of confession and then during the liturgy we raise up the cup we remember Jesus as he said “this is the blood of the new covenant, poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” The first words that Jesus utters to begin his ministry, after John the Baptist has been arrested, is “repent for the kingdom of God has come near.” Sin plays a role in what we believe as Christians, but we in the mainline churches tend to shy away for the topic.

Scott Sharp, who is the minister at Central United Methodist in Albuquerque recounts growing up in a very small, very conservative rural church in Oklahoma. He said that they didn’t receive communion very often, but when they did it was always memorable. First the bread would be passed out, but rather than being a nice soft loaf like we use, it would instead be a hard bread that could crack.

After everyone had received the bread, the minister would have everyone raise the bread up over their heads and he would say “this is Christ’s body which was broken” and then he would proceed to break his piece of bread with a loud crack, and then he would tell everyone to break their bread, and then he would say “that is Christ’s body breaking for your sin, you are responsible for Christ being broken on the cross, it is your fault.” As you might imagine this would indeed be very powerful for a young child with the loud breaking of the bread and then being told he was responsible for Christ’s death. Then the cups with juice would be passed out, and once again everyone would raise the cup up over their heads, and the minister would say, “This is Christ’s blood which was poured out. You caused him to bleed, it is because of your sins that he had to died, you put him up on the cross.” Now that is an emphasis on sin.

I know that some of you probably grew up in traditions that are like that, that were heavy on the sin, heavy on the fire and brimstone preaching, and maybe heavy on the confessing as well, although strangely those don’t always go together. Some of you have told me that one of the things you like about the Methodist church is that we don’t do that, and it’s certainly one of the things I like too. I would not be a good fire and brimstone preacher. But we also tend to ignore the idea of sin. It is not something we really want to talk about, to some degree this is because we want to be different from churches that place a heavy emphasis on sin, but also because we’re not quite sure what to do about it.

I once had someone tell me that he didn’t like praying the prayer of confession before communion because he didn’t feel that he had done any of those things, and therefore there were things being put into his mouth. The prayer of confession is pretty broad, if you don’t remember what it says, it can be found on page 12 in the hymnal, but we ask for forgiveness because we have not loved God with our whole heart, and we haven’t followed God in everything, and we have not loved our neighbors. Now this man was a good guy, but I can assure you he was not perfect as none of us are perfect. But sin had been so deemphasized that he couldn’t find areas of sin in his life. So then the questions becomes can we deal with sin and yet also deal with it and look at it differently than just fire and brimstone? The answer, as you can probably guess, is of course yes.

I’m sure that most of us can identify things as sins, or have been told not to do something because it’s a sin, but what exactly does that mean? For those who tend to be the ones who emphasize sin, it tends to be based on emphasizing right and wrong behavior based on a set of rules that we are supposed to obey. Do this, and you are a sinner. Do that and you are okay. The problem with this emphasis, for me at least, is that it can quickly turn into a pharisaic practice, pharisaic righteousness, in which we can say we are okay because we’re not explicitly doing the things that are forbidden.

But Jesus deals with this as well when he says that it’s not just enough to say you have not literally committed adultery, for example, but instead, he says, if you have looked at someone with lust then you have committed adultery. It takes the law and elevates it to a new level, which then makes it nearly impossible to live into, which to some degree is the point. There are two types of sin covered in scripture. The first is the one that most people think of, and the ones we were just talking about, which is individual sin. When we talk about repenting and receiving forgiveness it is almost always about individual sin.

In its most basic definition, to sin is to break relationship with God. To repent means to turn away or to turn around, to stop going down the path that we were taking and instead to take another path, to realign ourselves with God. I believe that sometimes we believe that repentance and asking for forgiveness are exactly the same thing, but they aren’t always the same. I used to have a teacher who whenever someone apologized for something would say, “are you sorry you did it, or are you sorry you got caught?” Repentance is not just about forgiveness it is also about restoration of relationship, in this case with God, and we have the perfect example of this in Jesus’ parable of the prodigal son.

Some of you may remember the story. The younger son one day goes to his father and asks for his share of his inheritance, which the father requests, and then the son leaves the household and goes off and squanders his inheritance in profligate living. After everything is gone he finds himself destitute, doing work which requires him to work with pigs, something which is a sin, for Jews. Seeing how low he has fallen, he decides he is going to go back home, apologize to his father and offer to be a servant in his father’s household, and he even composes his speech of forgiveness, and so he heads home. But does he ever actually apologize to his father? No instead his father sees him coming down the road and he runs out to meet him and welcomes him home with a celebration.

In this sense the prodigal son has actually repented, he has gone down a different path. The son could have sent a letter to his father seeking forgiveness and probably would have received it, but even though he was forgiven he would still be in a foreign land, separated from his father. Instead it is in changing his path, of going back home, that relationship is restored, which is what his father wanted all along. Does forgiveness play a role? Of course it does, but the son was forgiven as soon as he realized the errors of his ways, of how broken he was, and made the decision to change paths and to go home, and then the relationship was restored. That is what repentance entails; it is not only seeking forgiveness, but stopping whatever path we are going down and returning to God.

The most un-ethical person I have ever met was someone I worked with. Most of the people in the company earned their money on straight commissions, and she would do whatever she thought necessary to get a sale, including routinely stealing them from others. When I called her on this at one point, and said that I knew how important her faith was and didn’t she see any conflict there, she told me that she confessed her sins each night and asked for forgiveness so she had nothing to worry about. Of course the next day she was right back at it again. That’s not what forgiveness of sins is about because it had nothing to do with repentance, of changing the path we were on, changing what we were doing, or restoration of relationship with God.

So one type of sin is individual, but there is also corporate, systemic or societal sin, which we also ask forgiveness for at communion. In Micah, the sin of the northern and southern kingdoms of Israel is identified as Samaria and Jerusalem, the capital cities. Sin is identified as the city. Now we might talk about Las Vegas as being sin city, but that’s because of what takes place there, the sin does not necessarily rest in the city itself, but what Micah is pointing out is that the elites had created structures and systems that benefit them and hurt many others. So the system itself is sinful. Do the people who set up these structures need to repent and receive forgiveness, yes, but that is not enough, because the system also needs to be changed.

In his pastoral letter this month, Rev. Michael Brunk, from First UMC in Portales, wrote about growing up in segregated Virginia and he how and his family viewed Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights workers. He says that they just knew that they were better than blacks, just as they knew they were better than Jews and Catholics as well. Sure there was their maid Elizabeth, but she wasn’t like the others, she was, as he says a “good (insert appropriate word).” He continues, “I have to believe that the African-Americans that grew up in my neck of the woods understood that something was very wrong… but we didn’t… we really didn’t. And that is what truly disturbs me.” Systems had been established so that those who had one color of skin were given preference over those of another type. That is systemic sin.

What corporate sin also shows us is the inherent danger when we only emphasize the idea of sin in relation to Jesus Christ. African-Americans did not need to repent for the sins of society, because they were the victims of that sin, what they needed was liberation and healing, not forgiveness. Now this does not mean that they did not also need personal forgiveness, but to make that claim as the lead argument is to ignore the reality of their situation. In fact it would a sort of slap in the face that tries to apply some blame for their situation on them, as if to say, if only you were not a sinner then everything would be better, which of course often happened as well.

But that is not the witness we get in scripture. When people came to Jesus to be healed, he does not first say to them “Have you repented of your sins?” and if they had not refuse to heal them. Instead he provides them with what they need which is healing. It is the healing that begins the path to bringing them back into relationship with God. Sometimes, as with lepers and others who were considered unclean, they had been totally excluded from the community, and through their understanding of this their relationship with God, until Jesus heals them. When Jesus encounters a man who was born blind, the disciples ask Jesus if the blindness for the sins of the man or his parents, and Jesus says no and then heals him. Again, he does not say, what this man needs is forgiveness, or even that he needs to repent, what he needs is to be able to see. The issue of sin does play a part in this story, but it is people questioning Jesus and proclaiming him a sinner.

Sin is an important metaphor and issue in the bible, and it is one that we believe is important, but it is not the only or even the most important metaphor used. When the Israelites are enslaved in Egypt they do not need forgiveness, they need to be freed of their bondage. After the exile into Babylon, the people do not need forgiveness to save them, they need to be brought back home. When the blind man approaches Jesus, he does not need to be told he is a sinner, he needs healing, he needs his sight. When the prodigal son comes home he needs more than just forgiveness, he needs restoration of his relationship with his father. Those who are battling illness and disease, their brokenness is not sin, but health and they need healing to restore relationship.

Now there are people who say that they don’t want to have anything to do with the church because it’s full of hypocrites, and I always want to say, “of course it’s full of hypocrites. We all want to be better than we are, but we are not there. No one in the church is perfect and so yes, we are all hypocrites.” Of course what they really mean is that the church is full of people who are self-righteous, and on that I would agree with them, because there are people who feel that because of baptism that they are washed of their sins and therefore they are sort of in the free and clear about their actions, and feel the right to look down their noses at others, to feel better than them, and who because of this sense of self-righteousness cannot stand up and say “Hi. My name is _____ and I’m a sinner.”

Who did Jesus eat with and spend all his time with? It wasn’t the righteous, and certainly not the self-righteous, it was with sinners, those who were broken, who knew they were broken, and longed for something more, something different, who longed for restoration. In the words of Marcus Borg, “Sin matters. But,” he says, “ when it and the need for forgiveness become the dominant issue in our life with God, it reduces and impoverishes the wisdom and passion of the Bible and the Christian tradition.”

Paul says “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do.” Paul is making a claim, just as John Wesley also claimed, that sin is “an infirmity of our” nature. By saying that he wants to do something other than what he does, Paul is not making excuses. He is not making the famous claim now among fallen politicians and preachers that the devil made me do. Instead he is claiming that without Christ, without working on moving towards God, that we will always be lacking and it is not simply that all we need is a little more self-will. If that was all that sin was then we would just need to put a little more effort into things, or maybe get a good life coach to push us to do things. But that’s not what it’s like. Sin is a brokenness that is in us as humans, it is why we cannot rescue ourselves from sin but instead need God to do it for us. We need God’s amazing grace to do it for us.

In the Methodist church, following Wesley’s teachings, we believe that when you accept Christ into your life, when you accept God’s grace for yourself, that you are in Christian language justified, and that you begin the process of forgiveness and we begin to live each day more and more like Christ. But that does not mean that we are always on the right path, because one of the things that separates Methodism from others is that we believe that faith is sort of a sliding scale, we are not always saved, this is called the preservation of the saints, once saved always saved, we do not believe that. Today we might take two steps forward, but tomorrow we take one step back, and in fact might even take three steps back.

It is a process, a journey we are undertaking, some days are better than others. Forgiveness is not what does away with sin, instead it is centering ourselves in God, putting our allegiance in Jesus Christ, and living into the command that we love the lord our God with all our hearts and all our strength and all our soul and all our mind. When we do that then we are on the path to a time when our hearts might become so full of God’s love that we can no longer willfully sin, and we are perfected in Christ, we reach entire sanctification.

When I say that we are Methodists are moving on to perfection, this is what I am talking about. Being perfect does not mean that we therefore don’t make any mistakes, or we spell every word correctly, that is not what it means to be perfected in Christ. But instead that for a moment of time we are in complete alignment with God’s will for our lives, our brokenness is put aside and we are in harmony with God. But, it is only for a moment. It is not a permanent state of being because, again, sin, or brokenness is part of who we are. We are broken people who live in a broken world, and Christ did not come in spite of that, but he came because of that.

Our lives are often ones distorted from a proper relationship with God, but God is still there, extending God’s grace to us, God’s amazing grace, and waiting for us to come home, to seek relationship, to seek restoration. We are offered forgiveness, just as we are offered healing, and freedom, and salvation, and relationship. This passage from Paul does not end on a bleak note on sin, but instead ends with a reminder that it is through Jesus Christ that we are saved. It is through God’s grace and mercy that we were once blind but now see, were once lost but now are found. We live lives of brokenness, brokenness with each other and brokenness with God.

None of us live into who or what we want to be. But through Jesus Christ we are offered restoration, we are the prodigal child whose father is waiting for us to return, waiting by watching the road, waiting for us to come home with joy and celebration, waiting to be in relationship with us once again. We believe in sin, but it need not be the metaphor that dominates our relationship with God, because everything, forgiveness and healing, restoration and wholeness, leads us back home, back into relationship with God and away from brokenness. May it be so my sisters and brothers. Amen.

Say It Aint So Joe - Post 300

2012-01-24T06:00:00.000-08:00

This is my 300th post on this blog. As the title says, I wanted a space to write "random thoughts on life, religion and sports," and so maybe appropriately this 300th post is on Joe Paterno and a subject that sort of encapsulates all those things.

Joe died on Sunday morning and I can't really say anything that hasn't already been said, but like a good preacher I'm going to anyways. At the time the scandal broke and Joe was fired I said that I did not expect him to live much longer, and certainly probably not make it to the trial. Now I am not very prescient on that, it was simply being aware of the situation, and that was before it came out that he had cancer.

He was an 85-year-old man who was experiencing probably the most stressful thing that had ever happened in his life. He was losing the only thing he did, he was losing his identity, and as is common once that was gone he didn't know what else to do. Being a coach was who he was, he didn't know how to be anything else. This is certainly not unique to him, it is very very common for men, especially those of an older generation, but it is not limited to them. I've certainly known my share of women who stayed home to raise children who have gone into a tailspin when their children left home because now they had to create a new identity. But they typically don't have to do that when they are 85.

There are plenty of people today who are claiming that Joe died of a broken heart, that the institution he created turned his back on him. Now should the university have handled it differently? Maybe, but their response should not have come as a shock. If this had come out in 1980, it would have been different, but we are in a very different place today, and Joe of all people should have known that, or at least the University should have made that clear to everyone.

As a minister I would certainly expect to be fired if I knew about sexual abuse taking place and it did not get reported. It would be automatic. Paterno was in a position to do something and he didn't do it, and as further reports are coming out he clearly held lots of power in the university, and he knew he held this power. Just the fact that he could tell the trustees during all this that they had more important things to worry about then his job, tells you what he thought.

Joe understood the classics, he could appreciate Greek tragedy, and this has all the makings of a tragedy, just one fatal flaw brings down the whole thing. Joe was clearly elevated to a status that brought with it blind allegiance, and a hubris. Whether Joe bought into all that or not I cannot say, but anytime we elevate people to incredible heights they will always be brought back down somehow and people's views of them will be shattered.

We cannot forget the incredible things that Joe did for Penn State. How many other schools have a library named for the football coach? He clearly helped people in need (great story by Rick Reilly). He stressed academics and pushed for excellence. But he clearly did not do enough in this situation, which then makes people wonder what else he might have turned his back on. You cannot separate the good from the bad, they will forever be a part of his legacy. Nor can we instantly say what we would have done in that situation, because until we are there we simply don't know, but we can say that something more should have been done.

Paul Simon famously wrote, "where have you gone Joe DiMaggio, our nation turns it's lonely eyes to you." JoePa certainly made us want to harken back to a better time, a time that was more pure (even though it wasn't) and better (even though it wasn't). But it is probably a quote about another famous baseball player that better sums up the whole situation (although it is probably apocryphal). When Shoeless Joe Jackson was on trail for reportedly helping to throw the 1919 World Series, reportedly a young boy approached him and said, "Say it aint so Joe. Say it aint so." In response Joe simply walked away, not saying a thing.

I know that in five to ten years that Joe's memory will be less tarnished then it is right now, and that is for the good, but we also cannot forget what happened lest we get complacent and allow it to happen again.

Roe v. Wade at 39

2012-01-23T08:12:00.001-08:00

Yesterday was the 39th anniversary of the Supreme Courts decision of Roe v. Wade making abortion legal in the United States, a decision whose future is uncertain, although I suspect it will only be further scaled back not overturned. A little known fact which greatly impacted the decision and the way it was written was that Harry Blackmun, who wrote the decision, was former legal counsel to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, and he consulted his former physician friends about the medical pieces of the case.

I like the stance of the United Methodist Church (which you will find below) in regards to abortion. One of the reasons I like it is because it think it well encapsulates the difficulties faced in this troublesome issue. I am opposed to abortion in many cases, but certainly do not want to see it made illegal, because as the statement says there can sometimes be a "tragic conflict of life with life."

My mother was an OB/GYN nurse for most of her career and worked for a doctor who did not perform abortions, and even left a practice over this issue. But one of the stories she tells is of a woman who was severely injured in an accident and as a result had a large number of x-rays performed, but she did not know at the time that she was pregnant. As this became clear and it also became clear that as a result of her exposure to x-rays that the baby would be severely disabled, if it survived the pregnancy at all, the doctor counseled her that abortion might be the best option. He was opposed to abortion but recognized the tragic consequences for all involved. These are the realities that face women every single day, and they are the realities that people who want to make absolute stands either don't understand or with which they simply don't want to deal.

Now the fundamentalist opposition in America to abortion is fairly recent. It really came from the influence of Francis Schaeffer, who was pushed in that direction by his son Frank. Frank has now come out in opposition to that stance. It is not that he does not oppose abortion, because he does, but instead that he thinks they have taken the issue way too far and had become way too fanatical. (see his book Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back.)

Up until the Schaeffers made an issue of it, abortion had been seen as a Roman Catholic concern, and the fundamentalists did not want anything to do with them. But even the Roman Catholic position, especially the idea that life began at conception, was fairly new. Even though laws against abortion go all the way back to Hammurabi, it was usually allowed up to the time of quickening (when the baby first kicks). Quickening was said to be the time in which the soul entered the fetus, which is why it now kicked, and therefore considerations to protect the soul of the child from eternal damnation now needed to be considered. That is why early creeds said that Jesus shall come to judge the "quick and the dead." Those have now been changed to say the "living and the dead."

In America laws against abortion began to become standard in the late 1800s, and they were pushed not by religious groups, but instead by the newly formed American Medical Association and women's rights groups. The AMA wanted the laws passed because most abortions were not being performed by doctors, and so they saw this as an infringement on their territory. They wanted all medical procedures done by doctors, and so a way to allow this was to make those procedures commonly done by others illegal.

Women's rights group wanted to make abortions illegal because they had concerns about women being forced to have abortions by the father of the child, and so in order to give women greater control over their bodies and reproductive rights that wanted to make sure this was not really an option any more. Sort of ironic.

What most people also don't understand about Roe v. Wade was that it was not just some random decision, but was based strongly on other cases taking place at the time including Griswold V. Connecticut (1965), which struck down laws outlawing contraception, Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which allowed for non-married persons to posses contraception, and Loving v. Virginia (1967), which allowed for inter-racial marriage. These are not cases I hear most people seeking to overturn. Now I will leave it to others to argue about whether Blackmun wrote a good decision, or if he should have done things differently, but we have to understand that it was not created in a vacuum.

Abortion is one of those things that many people feel very deeply about, on both sides, but I truly suspect that most people, like me, are somewhere in the middle. I always have problems with absolutes, which is what people on both sides want. This is just an issue on which there are too many greys.

Here is the position of the United Methodist Church on abortion from the Social Principles (¶ 161.J):

The beginning of life and the ending of life are the God-given boundaries of human existence. While individuals have always had some degree of control over when they would die, they now have the awesome power to determine when and even whether new individuals will be born. Our belief in the sanctity of unborn human life makes us reluctant to approve abortion.

But we are equally bound to respect the sacredness of the life and well-being of the mother, for whom devastating damage may result from an unacceptable pregnancy.

We recognize tragic conflicts of life with life that may justify abortion, and in such cases we support the legal option of abortion under proper medical procedures. We support parental, guardian and other responsible adult notification and consent before abortions can be performed on girls who have not yet reached the age of legal adulthood. We cannot affirm abortion as an acceptable means of birth control, and we unconditionally reject it as a means of gender selection.

We oppose the use of late-term abortion known as dilation and extraction (partial-birth abortion) and call for the end of this practice except when the physical life of the mother is in danger and no other medical procedure is available, or in the case of severe fetal anomalies incompatible with life.

We call all Christians to a searching and prayerful inquiry into the sorts of conditions that may cause they to consider abortion.

The Church shall offer ministries to reduce unintended pregnancies. We commit our Church to continue to provide nurturing ministries to those who terminate a pregnancy, to those in the midst of a crisis pregnancy, and to those who give birth.

We particularly encourage the Church, the government, and social service agencies to support and facilitate the option of adoption. (See ¶ 161.K.) We affirm and encourage the Church to assist the ministry of crisis pregnancy centers and pregnancy resource centers that compassionately help women find feasible alternatives to abortion.

Governmental laws and regulations do not provide all the guidance required by the informed Christian conscience. Therefore, a decision concerning abortion should be made only after thoughtful and prayerful consideration by the parties involved, with medical, pastoral, and other appropriate counsel.

Seeking a Better Job

2012-01-20T08:00:00.000-08:00

Recently ESPN football analyst Craig James left his position at ESPN in order to pursue the Senate seat in Texas. Prior to the presidential primaries FOX News told their pundits that if they were going to run for president that they would have to resign their positions. Now the reason that they are all supposed to leave their positions is because their time on television would give them unfair exposure if they were to remain (although since Congress abolished the fair-time rule I'm not sure what difference it would make). But the long and the short, if they want to get a better job in politics then they have to quit their jobs.

Which brings me to the current pool of candidates. Why are they not required to leave their jobs in order to run? Why is Ron Paul allowed to continue as a sitting member of the House, when he is clearly not able to do his job, in order to pursue another job? Why is Rick Perry allowed to continue to be governor, and bill the state for many of his expenses, when he clearly cannot be doing his job, in order to pursue another job?

Of course it is not just them. President Obama did not leave his Senate seat to run for president, not did Hillary Clinton, or most other candidates. And it's governors running for Senate, and representatives running for Senate, and mayors running for governor. If you want to run for another position please do, but you should be required to quit your other position first.

Would any other employer allow this? Would you or I be allowed to go off for several months on end to seek a better job and still be able to collect a paycheck and benefits that come from our current position? Of course not, because our employers would recognize that while we might still be able to do some of our jobs, we could not do everything that we were being paid for. Plus, they might reason, why should they support us when we don't want to be there, why should they allow this to be our back-up position, our safety net. They would probably say "If you want another job, then quit this one and move on."

But, we are the employers of those who hold public office, who are not doing the jobs they were elected to, and yet are being paid to do those jobs while seeking another position. When are we going to step up and say that this is ridiculous? If you want to seek another job then you need to give up the job you currently have.

There should be laws against this, but the problem is except for states with referendums, it would have to be passed by the very same politicians it would hurt, so you can be sure it will never make it through.

One Month Warning

2012-01-19T11:12:00.001-08:00

In just one month pitchers and catchers report for spring training. (I know some teams report on the 18th, but we're only concerned about the Yankees here).

Rogers Hornsby was once asked what he did during the winter and he said "I'll tell you what I do. I stare out the window and wait for spring."

The Tears of Culpability

2012-01-19T10:05:00.000-08:00

The following was written by Rev. Michael Brunk for his church newsletter. I received permission to share it here:

When I was ten years old Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his "I have a dream" speech... and when I was fifteen years old James Earl Ray struck down the dreamer with a rifle shot. The Virginia public schools where I grew up were still segregated... as were the restrooms, drinking fountains, restaurants, buses and of course... churches.

Whatever I heard about King in my childhood was usually in the context of a racial joke: He and Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) always seemed to produce the desired snickers from my white relatives. It was all mirth to us; the very notion that "those people" would ever be our equals; ridiculous.

We had a maid then. Her name was Elizabeth. Not Mrs. whatever... I was never taught her last name... just Elizabeth. And, of course, though we never paid her the deserved respect of her age, Elizabeth was different. She wasn't LIKE those trouble-makers raising a fuss, marching through the streets, "rioting" (that's what white people called a lawful demonstration then, a "riot") She was a "good... (supply the word)."

And it never occurred to us that we were bad people. We were GOOD people... patriotic, moral, church-going... and better than blacks... but also better than Jews, Catholics and what we called "white trash." I still don't think we were bad people, but we did bad things in the name of something good.

When Dr. King was murdered, I remember my father triumphantly running a confederate flag up our flagpole that day. What had we won? It was never explained to me... just more jokes and people saying "It's about time!"

Cruelty creeps up on us like cancer. We don't see it, we don't feel it, not at first. Yet it is eating away at us, at the tender part of our soul, until there is nothing left but an open sore and scar tissue. And it often starts when we are very young. Racism is birthed in the nursery; hatred around the family table. That is why the language of cruelty comes so naturally to those who use it... it came to them in the womb, in their mother's milk... mixed with vital piety and love of country... until it is all so convoluted it can no longer be separated.

I have to believe the African-Americans that grew up in my neck of the woods understood that something was very wrong... but we didn't... we really didn't. And that is what TRULY disturbs me. How can something SO WRONG feel so right? What is it about the human condition that can so easily and so fluidly deceive us?

In the same year Dr. King said "I have a dream," he spent some time in the Birmingham Jail. Sympathetic clergy wrote him there, supporting his vision of equality, but criticizing his sense of timing. "Be patient!" they counseled him... "You're moving too fast!"

I think Martin found the reproof from his white clergy brethren stinging and disappointing. So, he responded with some essays that later became his book Why We Can't Wait. That book was placed in my hands fourteen years later as a new seminary student. It was required reading in my first class in Christian ethics. I still have it, and the pages are tear-stained.

The tears are the tears of culpability, crusted over from the long sleep of an up-bringing that didn't know better.. and yet, it did. We knew... somewhere, deep down, we knew.

Breaking Bread

2012-01-18T11:23:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The passage was 1 Corinthians 11:23-26:

One day a four year old girl accompanied her aunt to visit her church, and received communion. Now in this particular congregation, when young children received the elements, the minister said “God be with you.” Apparently this made quite an impression on the girl, and when she was eating her lunch, her mom asked her what she thought about church and what she had learned, and so she told her mom to cup her hands, and the girl tore a small piece of bread from her sandwich and as she placed it in her mother’s hands, she said, in her most angelic voice, “mom, God will get you.”

Today we continue with our sermon series on what Christians believe with the second part of our set on the sacraments. For those who were not here last week, or who might not remember, a sacrament is an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace. That is sacraments are vehicles in which God conveys God’s love to us. The grace happens inside of us, but we have accompanying outward signs which mark this grace.

In baptism we are reborn into Christ, given eternal life, forgiven our sins, given the Holy Spirit, that is the inward and invisible grace we receive, and the outward sign of that is the water. In the protestant tradition we have two sacraments, baptism and communion. For those who might have been raised Roman Catholic, or who are familiar with their practices, you might be aware that they have seven sacraments, so what’s the difference?

In the 13th century the church said that a sacrament was something that conveyed God’s grace and had been instituted or commanded by Jesus and they came up with a list of seven sacraments, baptism, communion, marriage, ordination, penance, confirmation, and extreme unction, or what is commonly referred to know as last rights.

At the time of the Protestant Reformation, Martin Luther said that if a sacrament was something which was instituted and commanded by Jesus, then he could only find two in scripture, baptism and communion, and so Luther removed the other five. It is not that protestants do not practice the other five, nor is it that we don’t also think that they can convey God’s grace. The difference is that Jesus did not command that we do them as he did for Baptism, he tells us to go baptize all the nations, and communion, which he tells us to do in remembrance of him.

As Protestants, communion is the only sacrament that we can participate in on a continual basis. Baptism is a one-time event. But, like baptism, communion is rooted in ancient Jewish practice. The passage that we heard this morning from Exodus tells of the creation of and reason for the Passover meal, which is what, according to the synoptic gospels, Jesus is celebrating with his disciples when he institutes communion.

The Passover meal was a celebration of God’s redeeming actions for the people, and it was remembered not as a thing of the past but as a present tense event. The Passover meal also had eschatological dimensions to it. Now eschatology is one of those big words that deals with end of time events. For Jews, the Passover meal brings with it the expectation of the coming of the messiah redeeming the Jews not just from the slavery of Egypt, but from the bondage of the world and returning Israel to the preeminent place in the world as God’s chosen people.

But Jesus radically changes the Passover meal, because now it is no longer about the expectation of the coming of the messiah, because Jesus is the messiah, but it still has eschatological expectations as we say each time during the liturgy “Christ has died, Christ is Risen, Christ will come again.” That is an eschatological claim. Jesus also changes the nature of the covenant by taking the cup and saying “this is the blood of the new covenant.” This too taps into ancient Jewish understanding.

After the exodus from Egypt and the giving of the law on Mt. Sinai, Moses calls the people of Israel together for a meal, and he takes the blood of the lamb and sprinkles it over the people and says “this is the blood of the covenant.” Jesus takes the Jewish story, traditions and their covenants, and he changes them to a new reality, a reality that recognizes that the messiah has come, that God has come in the person of Christ. There is a new covenant with the people.

What we learn from Paul’s writings is that in the early church when people came together they would celebrate a communal meal including more than just the sharing of the bread and the cup, but instead of bringing people together it was instead dividing them because of the difference between what the better off and the poor could bring to eat and drink. It was incidents like this that caused these two meals to separate and for communion to become a meal separate and different from any other meal the community shared together. But the breaking of the bread, were extremely important from the earliest days. In Luke’s story of Emmaus, one of the first interactions that some of Jesus’ followers have with the risen Christ is when they recognize him only after they break bread together.

There are lots of terms used for this meal. Communion, which means sharing, is one. It is a reminder that this is a communal event, in which we all come together as the body of Christ. Eucharist, which means thanksgiving, is another. In a reminder of this meaning, the liturgy we use is actually called the Great Thanksgiving. It is also called the Lord’s Supper, which reminds us that Christ is the host and the inviter, and that Christ owns the table. In Roman Catholic churches it is called Mass, which comes from the Latin word for “sending forth,” indicating that the service is coming to a close and the people are being sent out with God’s blessing. So technically, mass has nothing to do with the rest of the worship service, but only with the sacrament. In the Orthodox Church it is called The Divine Liturgy. Occasionally you might also hear it called the last supper, which reminds us that it was, again according to the synoptic gospels, part of the passion story, but that term is actually an incorrect one, because that limits it in its scope and time.

There are many ways in which communion can be received and served. In the Methodist church we use grape juice instead of wine because of the church’s historic position against the use of alcohol. It was Dr. Thomas Welch, who was communion steward at his Methodist church in New Jersey, who first pasteurized grape juice so that the church would not have to use wine at communion. You can receive the juice or win in little cups, but you can also receive by dipping the bread in the cup, which is called intinction, or you can also receive by drinking directly from the cup. We can receive by coming forward, or we can also receive by remaining in our seats and having each element passed. We can receive kneeling or standing, and lots of different types of bread can be used, including using wafers which sometimes are hard to believe are bread at all. All of these are accepted ways of serving and receiving communion.

Now that’s all the easy things that can be said about communion, but its other issues that people tend to fight over. The first issue is who is welcome to receive. By the beginning of the first century, it had become standard that only baptized members were welcome to receive. This did include infants and children. The worship service would actually stop and those who were not yet baptized would leave and only those who were baptized could remain not only to receive communion but even to hear the words of the liturgy.

As Christianity became the standard religion, and nearly everyone in western society was baptized this became less and less of a big deal, until the protestant reformation. Then the issue of how you were baptized and who baptized you became very important for whether you could receive communion or not. Of course in Roman Catholic churches, non Catholics are not welcome to receive, although how stringently this is enforced now has a lot to do with who is presiding. But Roman Catholics are not the only ones to limit access to the table, because plenty of Protestant churches also practice a closed table.

Now in the United Methodist church we practice an open communion table. That means that everyone is welcome, because we believe that Christ is the host and the one who makes the invitation, not us. In intra-denominational dialogue this has often become an obstacle because we are the only denomination that I am aware of that welcomes even those who are not baptized to partake, and we do so for one simple reason: John Wesley believed that communion could be a converting sacrament. That is, in receiving the bread and the cup, you could be moved to accept Jesus Christ as your savior, and Wesley did not want to try and place any limits on how God could or could not work in the world. In addition, Wesley had been denied communion by other groups at several points in his life, and did not believe that God’s grace could be limited or controlled by us.

One of the other things that is argued over is what, if anything, happens to the bread and the wine when the words of institution are said, that is when the priest says “may these be the body and blood of Christ.” At the fourth Lateran council in 1215, the church said that during the liturgy that the elements literally become the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and although they still appeared to be bread and wine, this was merely an accident of appearance. This is called transubstantiation. At the beginning of the Protestant reformation, one of the things that the reformers wanted to do was to change the theology of the Eucharist. Martin Luther rejected the idea of transubstantiation, and instead said that the elements were both body and blood of Christ and also bread and wine. This is commonly referred to as consubstantiation. Another reformer at the same time, whom you have probably never heard of, was Ulrich Zwingli, who said that communion was only a remembrance of Christ’s actions on our behalf, and he rejected both transubstantiation and consubstantiation. But the reformers also wanted people to receive communion much more often, and reintroduced weekly communion.

Now the official position of the United Methodist Church is closer to that of Zwingli, which is that it is a meal we celebrate in remembrance, then it is to the other positions. Wesley believed that in trying to say what happened to the elements was to try and quantify the mystery of communion, which couldn’t be done, and he also believed that emphasizing the elements was to place the emphasis on the bread and the wine, rather than on God’s transforming power. That does not mean that Christ is not present for us, because he is. Wesley’s position has been called “receptionist,” Christ is present for us in communion, not through the elements, but through the act of joining together as the body of Christ and participating in an act which conveys “pardoning and transforming benefits.” We receive Christ simply through the partaking of communion in its entirety.

Zig Zigler tells a story about early in his career when he when a ham in a sales contest and brought it home to his new wife. She promptly cut off the end of the ham and threw it in the pan to fry it. He asked her what she was doing and she told him that before you cooked a ham you cut the end off. He told her that in fact that was not how you cooked a ham, and she said, “well that’s the way my mother did it.” so they call her mother to find out why she cooked it that way, and she was told, well that’s how my mother did it, and so they get on a conference call with the grandmother, and told her that they cut off the end of the ham before they cooked it, just like she did, and wondered why she did it. And she said, “Well, I don’t know why you’re doing it, but I did it because my pan wasn’t big enough.”

Sometimes things that we do or don’t do, have nothing to do with the proper way to do things but are simply accidents of history, accommodations that have been made, and that’s the way it is with communion. John Wesley commanded that Methodists communion as often as they could and even wrote a sermon entitled, The Duty of Constant Communion. John and Charles also published a hymnal which contained nothing but communion hymns. In England receiving communion at least once a week was easy to do since there were so many parish churches, but on the frontier of America that wasn’t possible because of the reality that there were not enough clergy, and so it became the practice to receive it whenever the clergy were in town. That might be monthly, or it might be quarterly, or even less often, and so the practice of the church became something less than what was ideal not because it was what was preferred, but because of simple practicality, and then the practice became institutionalized, like cutting the end off the ham, and everyone assumed this was the way it was supposed to be.

Now I often hear from people say that taking communion more often would make it less special. While I understand that statement on its face, when you go a little deeper it doesn’t really make much sense to me because would we apply that to anything else in our lives? Would we say, we shouldn’t read scripture or pray daily, or weekly, or even monthly, because that would make it less special? Would we say to our loved ones, don’t tell me that you love me very often because that would make it less special. Or would we say to our spouse, let’s have marital relations only once every quarter so that way it will be really special? But we do want to say to God, don’t remind my how much you love me and the fact that I am forgiven very often, because that would make it less special.

There is a scene in the movie Phenomenon, in which John Travolta’s character has an apple and he is explaining how when you eat an apple that it becomes a part of you, that in taking it into ourselves we are combined. Jesus says, “Abide in me as I abide in you.” That is what communion does for us, every time we eat the bread and take the cup, we allow Christ to enter into our lives, to abide in us as we abide in Christ.

Communion is a remembrance of what Christ offered for us. One of Charles Wesley’s most famous hymns is called Come Sinners to the Gospel Feast. It is the celebration of the new covenant of the forgiveness of sin given to us, poured out for us. It is our sign that God is more willing to forgive than we are ready to ask. This meal is a remembrance of that. It is God’s offer to us to partake of God’s grace, this is not something which we should be saying once a month is too much, it should be something about which we are saying, once a month is too little. That we want to be partaking and remembering Christ’s gift for us all the time.

This is our altar call. This is the time in which we say, “Yes Jesus, I want to follow you.” It is the time in which we say “Thank you God for your grace and your mercy.” It is the time in which we say “Jesus, please come into my life, I need you and I want you in my life.” And it is the time in which God again says to us “You belong to me. I love you. You are mine. You are my child. Let me abide in you and you in me.” Communion is a time in which we again reaffirm our baptismal vows, it is the time in which we offer ourselves to Christ and remember Christ’s action on our behalf, and it is the time in which we are re-membered with all the saints of God, for we don’t just partake with those around us, but we also partake with all those who have gone before us.

We not only remember what Christ has done, but we are re-membered as the body of Christ. There might be times in which communion is not as meaningful, just as there are times in which worship is not as meaningful, but I would say that the answer is not to take it less often, but instead to take steps to help us to refocus our hearts each time we receive in order to remember, to receive Christ’s forgiveness and God’s love into our lives. We come to the table “out of our hunger to receive God’s gracious love, [and] to receive forgiveness and healing,” and this is the meal which “sustains and nourishes us in our journey of salvation.” (This Holy Mystery).

In the year 225 Hippolytus, wrote a document and he said “this is the prayer we use before we have communion,” and so I invite you to take out your hymnals and turn to page 9 where you will find this prayer preserved. For more than 1800 years this prayer has been offered by the church. Millions of people will pray this prayer today in thousands of languages all around the world as they call Christ to be a part of their lives. They will be praying it just as we are praying it, and when we pray this prayer together our voices join with theirs and with all the saints who have gone before us as we pray The lord be with you…

Lift Every Voice and Sing

2012-01-17T17:22:00.000-08:00

Last night to honor Martin Luther King, Jr., there was a musical special at the White House, which was very well done. But at the end of the show, President Obama came to the stage to introduce the song that everyone was to sing together, James Weldon Johnson's great hymn, and the song known as the Black National Anthem, Lift Every Voice and Sing.

The problem was a large number of the artists who were there clearly did not know the lyrics. Smokey Robinson was standing front and center, and at the beginning he was trying to pretend he knew the lyrics and mumbling words, but then gave up and just smiled and swayed. He was not the only one who clearly didn't know the words.

Either the people setting this up did not tell the artists that they were going to have to sing this, or assumed they would all know it, which is always the wrong assumption to make, and they messed up and made everyone look bad. Or the artists knew they were going to have to sing and simply didn't learn the lyrics, maybe assuming they would be able to hide and not be caught, and they were wrong. But either way it was not a good ending to an otherwise great show.

Lift Every Voice and Sing
Words by James Weldon Johnson and music by John Rosamond Johnson.

Lift every voice and sing, till earth and heaven ring,
Ring with the harmonies of liberty;
Let our rejoicing rise, high as the list’ning skies,
Let it resound loud as the rolling sea.
Sing a song full of the faith
that the dark past has taught us,
Sing a song full of the hope
that the present has brought us;
Facing the rising sun of our new day begun,
Let us march on till victory is won.

Stony the road we trod, bitter the chast’ning rod,
Felt in the days when hope unborn had died;
Yet with a steady beat, have not our weary feet,
Come to the place for which our fathers sighed?
We have come over a way
that with tears has been watered.
We have come, treading our path
thro’ the blood of the slaughtered,
Out from a gloomy past, till now we stand at last
Where the white gleam
of our bright star is cast.

God of our weary years, God of our silent tears,
Thou who has brought us thus far on the way;
Thou who hast by thy might, led us into the light,
Keep us forever in the path, we pray.
Lest our feet stray from the places
Our God where we met Thee,
Lest our hearts drunk with the wine of the world
we forget Thee;
Shadowed beneath Thy hand
May we forever stand,
True to our God,
True to our native land.

First Ladying While Black

2012-01-13T11:50:00.000-08:00

This has been out for a few days now, but apparently Michelle Obama is being portrayed as "an angry black woman" in a new book on the Obamas. This rhetoric must be viewed in light of Melissa Harris-Perry's new book on stereotypes of black women (Sister Citizen). One of them is, of course, that of the angry black woman. Another is that of the black woman as mammy, which is being well displayed in The Help.

As we enter the weekend in which we celebrate the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. it is rather shocking and sad that we still haven't come farther than we are. Even though the Obamas are now at the top they are still constantly subject to racial stereotyping, as are minorities in general. And we even still have signs being put up that claim "white only" and the person who did it thinks it was reasonable. It's even worse that the sign is from Selma, Alabama and was made in 1931.

This just continues to show that Obama becoming president did not represent the beginning of a post-racial America, but instead was simply another step in that direction and we still have a long way to go. The promised land is out there, but we still have a long way to go.

Down To The River

2012-01-11T11:56:00.001-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 1:4-11:

One day a man is stumbling through the woods, totally drunk, when he comes upon a preacher baptizing people in the river. He proceeds to walk into the water to see what’s going on. The preacher turns around and is almost overcome by the smell of alcohol, but asks the man, "Are you ready to find Jesus?" The drunk answers, "Yes, I am." So the preacher grabs him and dunks him in the water. He pulls him up and asks him, "Brother have you found Jesus?" The drunk replies, "No." The preacher shocked at the answer, dunks him into the water again for a little longer. He again pulls him out of the water and asks again, "Have you found Jesus my brother?" The man again answers, "No,” By this time the preacher is at his wits end and dunks the drunk in the water again -- - but this time holds him down until the man begins flailing his arms and legs, and then the preacher pulls him up and again asks, "For the love of God have you found Jesus?" The drunk wipes his eyes and catches his breath and says to the preacher, "No, are you sure this is where he fell in?"

Today we begin a new sermon series on what Christians believe and we start with a two-part set on the sacraments, which in the Protestant tradition are baptism and communion. Now we begin with the sacraments not because these are the two most important beliefs, although they are certainly important. But the real reason is a little more practical, and that is because on the first Sunday after Epiphany every year we read about Jesus’ baptism, and so in keeping with that tradition we will start there today. Now we could spend weeks covering each of these topics and still not get to the bottom of everything and so what I hope to do is to teach you more about baptism then you’ve ever known, and maybe more than you’ve ever wanted to know, in order to try and deepen our understanding of these issues so that they might begin to make more sense and give more meaning to us.

But before we dig into what baptism means, let’s take a look at what a sacrament is. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, said that a sacrament was, in the words of his Anglican tradition, “an outward and visible sign of an inward and invisible grace”. This is a definition accepted by the Roman Catholic Church as well. A sacrament is a means of grace, a way that God offers and gives God’s love to us, which is inward and invisible, and which have accompanying sign-acts, or outward and visible sign which accompany them. The term sacrament was first used by Tertullian, one of the church fathers, in the third century.

Before entering the military Roman soldiers took an oath of allegiance and then after the oath was taken they were given a tattoo as a reminder of that oath. This oath was called a sacramentum. In observing this, Tertullian said it was similar to what occurred in Baptism, and so he began calling baptism a sacrament. Over time that term began to be applied to everything that could be used to convey God’s grace, but this began to cause more problems for the church. In the 13th century the church began to establish some rules for what was and was not a sacrament. What they decided was that a sacrament must be something that was specifically instituted by Jesus, and they came up with seven that seemed to meet this standard, namely baptism and communion, confirmation, marriage, ordination, penance and extreme unction, which is now sometimes referred to as last rites, but was really about anointing with oil for healing.

At the time of the Protestant reformation in the 16th century, Martin Luther and other reformers began to judge everything that the church did against scripture, and if it wasn’t in scripture, then it would be removed. In looking at the sacraments, Luther said that if something had to be instituted and commanded by Christ, then he could only find two sacraments in the Bible, baptism and communion, and so they the other five were removed and that is why we only have two sacraments while the Roman Catholics have seven.

So where did baptism come from and where did it begin? Most people’s answer is that it begins with John the Baptizer, as we have in today’s scripture. John is calling people out to the Jordan River to be baptized in repentance of their sins, but baptism, or at least a similar practice, is older than John. In last week’s passage we heard that following the birth of Jesus Mary was going to the temple for purification as required by Jewish law. One of the steps would be for her to enter a ceremonially bath, which are called mikveh, and be bathed in order to be purified. There were several different reasons and acts which would require people, both men and women, to enter mikveh in order to be ritually cleansed. In addition, some Jewish sects required that gentile converts not only be circumcised, but that they must also take a ritual bath in order to be cleansed and die to who they were and be reborn into something new. Orthodox Judaism still requires this for converts. So Baptism was not something with which Jesus and his followers would have been unfamiliar.

In addition, they would have also understood having an initiation rite as a means for entering a covenantal relationship with God and for having an accompanying outward sign of that covenant. In Genesis 17, God commands Abraham and all of his descendants be circumcised as a mark of the covenant that they have entered into with God, and this was to be done on the 8th day for infants. Jews become people of the covenant through circumcision. Now ladies, there is no outward and visible sign for you of entering the covenant, because under Jewish law women were incorporated into the covenant through their male relations, which we will come back to.

In Colossians, Paul writes, “In him also you were circumcised with a spiritual circumcision, by putting off the body of flesh in the circumcision of Christ; when you were buried with him in baptism, you were also raised with him through faith in the power of God, who raised him from the dead.” (2:11-13) Now what is Paul saying in this incredibly dense passage? Well he is saying that baptism is to Christians what circumcision was to the Jewish, it is the initiation rite, it is the means by which we begin to participate in the new covenant, but in addition, he is highlighting the first of the things that baptism does for us which is the cleansing of our sins.

In baptism, we are cleansed of our sins, but not just the sins we have already committed, but, and this is important, we are also forgiven for sins we have yet to commit. In the early church, some people believed that they should wait until their death beds to be baptized so that they would then be forgiven for all their sins. But, this is not a covenant of the past and present, but of the future as well. In taking the water of baptism we are cleansed of our sins, those we have committed and those we have yet to commit. God promises us forgiveness with repentance. That is one thing that baptism does. But, as the reading from Acts this morning indicates, baptism is much more than that. John was doing a baptism of repentance, but being baptized into Christ gives us more than just forgiveness.

The second thing that happens is that through baptism we are adopted as children of God. We die to who we were and are reborn into Christ. After Jesus’ baptism, what does God say, “You are my son, the beloved, with you I am well pleased.” When we are baptized, God says the same thing to and about us. We become children of God, different than the way that Jesus is the son, but we become adopted children of God. We were born into the world through the water of the womb, and through the water of baptism we are also reborn, God claims us as his own. We die to who we were and are reborn as children of God. Some early baptismal fonts recognize this reality through their design, which often took the shape of a sarcophagus, or coffin, and later were made in the shape of the cross. We issue baptismal certificates, just like your birth certificate, and if you have ever done genealogy research you know how important these records are. It is because of this understanding of adoption that we don’t rebaptize. Like the prodigal son, “we may live in neglect or defiance of the covenant, but we cannot destroy God’s love for us. When we repent and return to God, the covenant does not need to be remade, because God has always remained faithful to it. What is needed is renewal of our commitment and reaffirmation of our side of the covenant.” (By Water and the Spirit)

So through baptism we are cleansed of our sins, we are reborn and become children of God, and we are also given eternal life. When Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman at a well and he asks her for a drink, she is astonished that a Jew would ask a Samaritan for something, but Jesus tells her that if she knew who he was she would be asking him for a drink because he gives “living water… and everyone who drinks from… this water will never be thirsty. The water that [Jesus gives] will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.” This is the water we receive. Jesus says that he came that we might have life and have it abundantly. God gives us unconditional grace which extends for all time.

The final gift we receive through baptism is the gift of the Holy Spirit. Immediately following Jesus’ baptism, the Holy Spirit, in the shape of a dove descends upon him. On the day of Pentecost, people ask Peter what they need to do to receive Christ, and Peter tells them “repent, and be baptized every one of you so that your sins may be forgiven and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” After we baptize, we lay hands on the person and pray for the Holy Spirit to work within them, that having been born by water and the spirit, they may live as a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ. The Spirit is God’s gift to us through our baptism.

Through baptism we are forgiven our sins, we are reborn and made children of God, we are given living water which gives us eternal life and we are given the gift of the Holy Spirit. The final thing baptism does is to incorporate us into the body of Christ. We do not believe that baptism is an individual thing. Except for extreme circumstances, baptism is a communal activity. We not only enter into a covenantal relationship with God, but we also enter into a covenantal relationship with each other. The church in its simplest definition is a body of the baptized. This is not just some cute ceremony to make everyone feel good about church, or to appease grandparents, this is a significant covenant which we are entering in which God pledges allegiance to us and we in turn pledge allegiance to God, and it is something that we should remember every day of our lives

We will conclude our look at baptism with the issue that those who asked about baptism the most, which is about infant baptism versus adult baptism, and sprinkling versus full immersion. We’ll start with the one that’s a little easier, and that is conducting baptisms that are not full immersion. In the United Methodist church we practice sprinkling, pouring and full immersion, although certainly sprinkling and pouring are more prevalent. The argument that is made is that unless the baptism is full immersion, then it’s not a legitimate baptism, but let me provide a little background. Baptists, and other groups that practice only adult baptism, come out of a group that formed after the protestant reformation called the Anabaptists. The prefix ana coming from the Greek ava meaning to do again, but originally Anabaptists did not require full immersion instead they did it through pouring. The idea of full immersion as necessary for proper administration did not come until later.

Now there are some who argue that not only is full immersion required, but that you must be baptized in living water, that is water that is moving. So some say that if you get full immersion in your Jacuzzi tub at the local Baptist church then it doesn’t count either because it’s not living water, and the arguments continue to become even more obscure, but here is an argument that I think is better. This is a work called the Didache, or The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles. Scholars estimate that it was written somewhere between 60 and 110, that’s not 1860, but the year 60. If it was indeed written in the year 60 then it predates some of the books we have in the New Testament, and there were some early church fathers who argued that it should be included in the New Testament, but here is what the Didache has to say: “Regarding baptism. Baptize as follows: baptize in the name of the father, and of the son, and of the Holy Spirit, in running water. But if you have no running water, baptize in other water; and if you cannot in cold, then in warm. But if you have neither, pour water on the head three times in the name of the father, and of the son and of the Holy Spirit.”

So as early as 30 years after Jesus death, the church was saying that while full immersion was preferable it was not necessary. And why were they saying that? Because they understood the imagery in being washed clean and in dyeing and being reborn is better when using full immersion, but they also understood that the water was not the acting agent. The amount of water doesn’t matter. It would be like saying that if you are baptized in the ocean then you are more baptized then if it’s done in a pool. The early church understood that baptisms that were not done full immersion were okay, and that has been the practice for nearly 2000 years, and we understand that the quantity of the water does not make a difference because the water is merely a symbol, it is not what actually cleanses people, that work is done by God not by the water. So that leads us to the issue of infant baptism.

The people who argue against infant baptism tend to be the same ones who argue for full-immersion, and the reasons typically given are because an infant cannot consent to the baptism, and therefore it has no meaning, and they also tend to argue that there is no scriptural witness for children being baptized. But, if baptism is a sign of the covenant, if it is the initiation rite in which people enter into the body of Christ then where do children who are not baptized belong? Under circumcision, women were incorporated into the covenant through their male relatives, but baptism doesn’t work that way. My daughters are not incorporated into the baptismal covenant because I am baptized, they too must participate in the covenant.

Circumcision was the outward sign of the covenant of God and it took place eight days after birth. Now did these children consent to being circumcised? Did they say, “I’ve read the law, I understand the story of the people, and I consent to undergo circumcision to become a part of the covenant people?” Of course they didn’t, they were circumcised as a symbol that they were God’s, and with the understanding of their parents that they would raise the child up in the faith, and would tell them the stories, and would train them up in the way so that when they were older they would not stray. They understood that it was a process, the same way that we understand that becoming a Christian is a process, it does not happen immediately whether you were baptized as a child or as an adult, we all grow into our faith.

God commanded infants to undergo the initiation to become people of the covenant, but somehow that commandment doesn’t apply to us because I guess maybe God changed God’s mind about the logic of having children participate in the covenant. In addition, you might remember that the disciples get upset at one point because people are bringing their children to Jesus to be blessed, and the disciples tell the people to take the kids away, and what does Jesus do? He rebukes them and says, “Let the little children come to me, and do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of heaven belongs,” and then later Jesus says that we must become like children if we want to inherit the kingdom. Clearly children had a special place in Jesus ministry and understanding of the world, so why should they be excluded from the covenant?

Now one of the other arguments made is that in the baptisms in the New Testament there is no direct mention of children being baptized, that instead its adults and since it’s not in the Bible it shouldn’t be done. But the answer to that is sort of evident on its face because there were no children being born into these churches in order to be baptized, because there was as yet no church. But what we do have is three occasions in which we are told that someone is baptized and their entire household is baptized along with them. We can find two of these stories in Acts chapter 16 in which Paul baptizes Lydia and her household and also the jailer and his household. Now the word for household used here usually included children, but that of course does not mean that it included infants, but it does not say that Paul baptized the household except for those who were under the age of 10.

For those churches that practice only believer’s baptism, as it is called, most do a dedication of their children when they are infants and then work to prepare them to make a profession of faith and be baptized when they are 8, or 10 or some other age. They don’t baptize infants because they don’t think it’s scriptural, but they undertake a practice which cannot be found anywhere in scripture either. But my final point is from the practices and statements of the church.

In the second century, in opposition to those who opposed infant baptism, Origen said that infant baptism had been practiced by the apostles. In 254 the Council of Carthage said that infant baptism went back to the apostles. Augustine, who is foundational for much of church theology, including those who oppose infant baptism, supported infant baptism and said that it was practiced by the apostles. At the time of the protestant reformation, both Martin Luther and John Calvin said that they were going to remove any practice which did not meet scriptural witness, and they removed a lot, but they practiced infant baptism. John Wesley said that he too would remove anything which did not match scripture, and he practiced infant baptism. When Wesley was asked how God’s grace worked through baptism in infants, he said that he could not comprehend it, but “neither can we comprehend how it is wrought in a person of riper years.” Today more than 80 percent of the church, Roman Catholics, Orthodox, and Protestants practice infant baptism.

For those who still may have a problem with infant baptism, or with sprinkling, that’s fine, I merely want you to understand that we do not practice these things because we don’t know what we are talking about or have no theologically basis for doing so, and for those who do support them I hope you now have a better understanding of them and why we do them so that you can better engage in conversation with those who question you about the process. The water does not convey God’s grace. The person performing the sacrament does not convey God’s grace. The age of the person receiving baptism does not convey God’s grace. When we begin focusing on those things as being important than we move the action away from God and say that the power of baptism is found in the things of baptism. God is the actor and we are the recipients.

In By Water and the Spirit, which is the official position on Baptism according to the United Methodist Church, it says that “Baptism involves dying to sin, newness of life, union with Christ, receiving the Holy Spirit, and incorporation into Christ’s church.” Baptism is a gift from God which is freely given by God to us. God’s grace is always available even before we need it, and is always with us. Even when we may go astray God remains ever faithful and waits for us to return. In Paul’s letter to the Ephesians he says “There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God,” notice that he doesn’t say and all this is done in one hour, which today it won’t, but through the one baptism we are all united for we are baptized, born anew into the body of Christ which does not know denominational boundaries, we are claimed by God who says “this is my child in whom I am well pleased.” Amen.

Every Game Matters, Except When It Doesn't

2012-01-10T12:31:00.000-08:00

Last night we witnessed the end of the college football season with a dud of a game, not that it should have really surprised anyone because the first game was not all that exciting either. I am sure that, as predicted, last night's ratings will be the lowest ever. In fact I don't know a single person who was really looking forward to last night's game.

I don't mind games that are 7-3 as long as they were well played, but last night's game was not. LSU looked lost from the beginning with weak and ineffective play calling. It was certainly not the same LSU team we watched all year long. The Rose Bowl and the Fiesta Bowl were both far superior games, and not simply because they involved some offense. But, maybe that's because LSU had thirty-five days off between their last game. Alabama had more than forty days, and they too certainly did not rise up to their level of play.

What other sport would allow its teams to take more than a month off between the last game played and the championship game. Can you imagine if this happened in the NBA, NFL or MLB, or even in college basketball or baseball? People would say how ridiculous it was, but yet every year we do this in college football, and the time is getting even longer.

One of the reasons the BCS says they couldn't have a playoff is because it would take too long and go on too long, but we already have the championship game not taking place until the middle of January. The second reason is that if they started earlier that it would interfere with finals. But I was watching the volleyball championships during finals week so what is the difference?

Finally, this match-up was ridiculous from the start. We have now crowned a champion that not only did not win their conference championship but didn't even play in the game because they lost to LSU when it is supposed to matter, in the regular season. One of the great things about college football is that every game is supposed to matter and to mean something, that is even what the BCS pushes.

But clearly that's not the case, because Alabama lost to LSU and then beat LSU and they are now "champions." As far as I'm concerned they are simply both now 1-1 and should be co-champions, or even better let's admit that this game should have never been played at all. I would much rather have seen LSU play Oklahoma State, who I think should have a part of the title, or to see Alabama play Oklahoma State now.

Instead what we ended up with was a final game that few people outside of LSU and Alabama wanted to see and it lived up to every low expectation that we had of it. The pairing of this match-up, and the way it was decided, was as ridiculous as if the MLB had said, "we would much rather see the Yankee play the Rangers in the ALCS and so it doesn't matter that the Tigers beat the Yankees, we are just going to make it work for us, and if you don't like it that's just tough."

We would not tolerate this in any other sport and yet this is what happens every year with the BCS. This season showed yet once again how broken the BCS is and how it needs to be replaced by something else. Every game in the regular season is supposed to count, except when they don't, just ask LSU.

A Prayer for Epiphany

2012-01-06T05:00:00.000-08:00

May this holy season be for each of us
A time of moving beyond what is “reasonable”
And toward the star of wonder;
Moving beyond grasping tight to what we have
To unclenching our hands and letting go,
Following the Light where it leads;
Moving beyond competition toward cooperation,
Seeing that all humans are sisters and brothers.
Moving beyond the anxiety of small concerns
Towards the joys of justice and peace.
May the transforming acceptance of Mary and Joseph,
The imagination of the shepherds,
And the persistence of the wise men
Guide us as we seek the Truth,
Always moving toward the Divine promise.
Always aware God can be hidden in the frailest among us,
Always open to the unexpected flash of Grace,
To the showing forth of that Love that embraces us all.

From Education for Justice.

Borrowing From Other Preachers

2012-01-05T12:02:00.001-08:00

As Christmas was approaching, Adam Hamilton posted on Facebook a reminder about their upcoming Christmas Eve eve service and then said "Pastors, if you're stuck as you are working on your Christmas sermon tonight's 7 p.m. service will be online - feel free to borrow anything from the sermon that would be helpful."

Adam Hamilton is usually very forward and open about telling people to take things that they find that might be useful to their churches and to use them. (Of course he also publishes lots of things which have to be paid for as well, so both sides are sort of being covered). But I wonder what other preachers think about this call to borrow as necessary?

I post all of my sermons on this blog for several reasons. One is so that people who missed my sermon on Sunday, or those who were there but wanted to revisit something, can have access to it. (They can also get a recording but we must remember that not everyone learns through hearing things). Second, I post them so that others who know me and do not attend my church can read them. But the final reason I post them is to give access to others to read.

While I certainly claim that I wrote them, I hope that at the same time I was a vehicle through which the Holy Spirit worked in proclaiming the word. Sometimes I can feel that directly, and other times not so much. But I can say that often I will think a sermon is not very good, but people will tell me how much it meant to them, that it spoke to them. That through my sermon they were able to hear what God needed them to hear that day. That happened to me just last weekend as a matter of fact.

I know other preachers who do not want their materials available. One minister who shall remain nameless, although some who read this blog will know exactly who it is, did not like to give out paper copies of his sermons because he thought that the Spirit moved through the preaching and it might not be found on paper.

That is, on its face, a reasonable answer except that I hope that the Spirit is also found in the words, and I have even felt sometimes that it was in what was written but not in what was preached. That is, it was a great sermon on paper, not so good in delivery. The opposite is also sometimes the case.

The other reason this minister said that he did not want to give out his sermons was so that his sermons would not be plagiarized by other preachers.

I have been a professional writer in the past, not that I am also not being paid to write now, and so I am very aware of the need to protect intellectual property. I was also wrongly accused of plagiarism in seminary (long story) and so know what it is like to be on the other side of the issue. I have certainly used other preachers' ideas to help me write some of my own sermons, or to give me new insights, and I hope I have given proper credit where it has been due. But where does intellectual property end and the movement of the Spirit, and therefore something I can't control or own, begin?

While I certainly want people to give me credit if they use my ideas in their own sermons or writings, I also hope that if they are so unable to write their own ideas about some piece of scripture that in using my words the Spirit can speak to those they are trying to address. I don't want people "stealing" from me, but if my words can be used by others to convey God's message to people who are hungry for that word, then use my words appropriately.

I'm wondering what others think of this issue? Do you make your sermons available to others? Where does borrowing cross a line that you don't want crossed? Where do our words end and the words of the Spirit begin? Is this preaching thing different than other issues surrounding plagiarism?

It's About Time

2012-01-04T06:00:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 2:22-40:

Today’s passage from Luke, although little known or covered, is actually the conclusion to Luke’s birth narrative, but I am pretty sure that you cannot find figures of Simeon and Anna anywhere to add to your nativity display, even though these events probably take place much earlier than the visit of the magi as reported by Matthew, which may not have taken place for up to two years after Jesus’ birth. These are the sorts of problems we run into when we try and combine stories out of different gospels as if they all tell us the same thing. But the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke are really two different stories, with two different meanings. Matthew begins emphasizing Jesus’ importance to gentiles, as represented by the Magi, but tells it through a decidedly Jewish lens, and Luke begins with Jesus’ importance to the Jews and emphasizing the righteousness and devoutness of Jesus’ parents and family.

After his brief introduction telling us why he is writing down his Gospel, Luke’s story begins in the Temple in Jerusalem with the announcement to Zechariah, a priest, that he and his wife Elizabeth are to have a son, who is John the Baptist, even though they are both advanced in years. The angel tells Zechariah that this child is in answer to his prayers, although it is not clear how long he, and presumably his wife, have been praying for a child. But, Zechariah does not believe the pronouncement made by the angel, does not believe that what he has been told will actually come true, his is struck mute until after John’s birth when he is filled with the spirit and given a prophecy typically referred to as the Benedictus. The story of Zechariah and Elizabeth is then sort of mirrored and interspersed with the announcement to Mary, including Mary’s song, called the Magnificat, with a significant difference being that Mary believes what the angel tells her.

Then, of course we have the birth story, the announcement to the shepherds, which is also similar in construction to what has already taken place, and then today’s passage, which is preceded in verse 21 by the announcement that on the 8th day, according to Jewish law, the baby is circumcised and named Jesus, which means God’s saves, as the angel had decreed. I remind us all of this so that we can understand in greater detail what is going on in today’s passage, because not only is this the closing of Luke’s birth narrative, but it forms a book end with how the story begins.
We again find ourselves in the Temple, encountering an old man, who like Zechariah we are told is righteous and devout. Luke only applies the term righteous to four people in his Gospel, Zechariah and Elizabeth, Simeon and Joseph of Arimathea, who provides the tomb for Jesus, four older people are those who we are told are righteous.

In the second century a tradition arises that Simeon is 112 years old at the time he encounters Jesus. There is no basis to this in scripture, but I think the purpose behind the tradition is to help illustrate his age. We are told that he has been looking forward to and praying for the consolation of Israel. This phrase harkens back to a passage from Isaiah which says, “Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God, speak tenderly to Jerusalem.” Simeon is looking forward to the coming of the promised messiah, and he has been praying for it for a long time. But, let’s say that he is not in fact 112, but that instead he’s only 80, then he has already seen a lot in his life.

The best guess is that Jesus is born somewhere between 6 and 4 BCE. I know that our calendars are supposed to start at year 1 with Jesus’ birth, but is looking back to recreate a calendar starting at Jesus’ birth, the church missed one of the Roman emperors, which is excusable because there were a lot of them and they couldn’t exactly just go to Wikipedia to make sure they were all included. But we know that Herod the Great dies in the year 4 BCE, and so if Jesus was born during the reign of Herod, then the latest he could have been born was around 4, but most scholars believe it was earlier than that. But for argument and simplicities sake, let’s say that today’s passage takes place in the year 5 BCE.

58 years earlier, in 63 BCE, a 22-year-old Simeon would have witnessed the end of the last Israelite independence when the Romans took Palestine from the Hasmoneans, the last Jewish ruling family, which began the prayers for the consolation of Israel, to return Israel to Jewish rule, to throw off the foreign oppressors, which is what the messiah was supposed to do. For 58 years Simeon had been praying for just one thing. How many of us have prayed for one thing continuously for 58 years? Normally if we’ve prayed for something for a week, or a month, or at most a year and it hasn’t happened then we give up, or figure the answer is no, or maybe begin to believe that prayer doesn’t in fact work, but Simeon has been praying for the same thing for 58 years.

We are told that the Spirit told him that he would not die before he saw the Messiah, but again we don’t know when this was. Was it early on in his life or much later? Is it easier to pray for the same thing for 58 years knowing that it will happen, or is it easier to pray when you simply hope it will happen? I believe that it has to be easier to pray for something you simply hope for, because knowing that it will happen and yet year after year it doesn’t happen can lead to disappointment and disbelief. But Simeon keeps believing and keeps praying. He is the ideal of faith as represented for us in Hebrews 11 which says that “faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” And then finally Simeon gets to meet Jesus, but not before he shows his faith one more time.

Simeon woke up that morning, said his morning prayers, probably once again prayed for the consolation of Israel, and then the Spirit tells him that he needs to go to the Temple. Does he hesitate or think, “Really? Today? I don’t feel like going to the Temple today.” Getting to the Temple was a major exercise; it wasn’t just something you did just because. But Simeon doesn’t stay at home in bed, instead he listens to the Spirit and goes to the Temple, and when he does he encounters Jesus and his parents, who have come there for several purposes. The first is that according to Leviticus, a mother was considered ceremonially unclean for forty days following the birth of a male child, and for 80 days following a female child, so Mary is coming for purification. As part of that she is to make an offering.

One of the reasons we know that Mary and Joseph are poor is because of this offering. The offering called for in Leviticus 12 is for a lamb and a dove or pigeon, but if someone can’t afford a lamb then two doves or two pigeons can be offered instead, and this is what Mary and Joseph bring. In addition, as a reminder of the Exodus, the first born male is to be consecrated to God, and so they are also at the Temple to accomplish this task as well, and that is when Simeon encounters them, takes the child and then gives a blessing, a song, just like Mary and Zechariah, traditionally called the Nunc Dimittis. Normally this has been seen as Simeon basically saying, “Okay, I have seen the Messiah, I can die now,” but it need not be interpreted that way. It can also be interpreted as simply saying that Simeon is being dismissed from his post of watching, and can now move on to something else. That is, simply because he is an old man and has seen what was promised, does not mean that his life is over that he has nothing else to live for because he gets to live for God, which is what Anna has also been doing.

The translation we read this morning says that Anna was married for 7 years, and then lived as a widow until the age of 84. But, the Greek is not entirely clear here. It can also be translated that she lived for 84 years as a widow. Which if she was married at age 13, which would not have been unusual at all, and we even have records of girls being married as young as 8 or 9, but if she was married at 13, widowed at 20, and then lived as a widow for 84 years, she could potentially be 104. But, like with Simeon, I don’t think her actual age is truly important for understanding what is taking place, as we can safely say she was someone who was advanced in years. But there are some unusual factors with Anna.

The first is that she is named. Women being named in the Bible are not as unusual and some people would have us believe, but it is also not as prevalent as it probably should be, but having her named as a prophet certainly is unusual. She is not the only female prophet named in scripture, there are in fact 10, but this title gives her a position of prominence and importance in her proclamation. In addition, we are told that she is from the tribe of Asher, which was one of the Northern tribes which were destroyed by the Assyrians in 720 BCE, so her proclamation encompasses all of Israel, not just that of Judea. This is a savior for all of the tribes, including the lost ten tribes. We are also told that Anna is living in the Temple, a decidedly male sphere, spending all of her time in prayer, presumably, like Simeon, praying for the consolation of Israel, and when she spots the family she too begins praising God and telling everyone about who Jesus was, she simply cannot contain herself. Once she identifies Jesus, she has to tell everyone who is there who Jesus is.

Joseph and Mary go to the Temple because they are devout Jews who are following the law. Simeon is at the Temple because he has been bidden by the Spirit to be there, and Anna is at the Temple because she is always there as a prophet, an agent of God. But what strikes me every time I read or hear this story is not just the fact that Simeon and Anna identify Jesus, but do so in a way that is very different from anyone else. There is no angel telling them what has happened and where to go, nor is there any star guiding them on the way.

Simeon is guided to be in the Temple that day, but there is no indication that the Spirit guides him to Jesus. Anna is a prophet, and therefore someone who speaks for God, but there is no indication that God tells her who Jesus is. Instead it appears, at least to me, that they identify Jesus, his meaning and the role he is to play, all by themselves. They do not need special oracles or unnatural phenomenon to guide them to the child. They make the identification by themselves, and that marks them as different, and I can’t help but believe that the reason they are able to do this is because of the reasons that is emphasized about them, their age.

Scripture tells us that we should honor and respect the elders amongst us. One of the interpreted reasons is sort of self preservation. If I respect the elders today then I have established a pattern so that I will be respected when I am that age. But I think there is something more to that as well. The great actor Ossie Davis once said, “Age is that point of elevation form which it is easier to see who you are… age makes knowledge, tempers knowledge with experience and out of that comes the possibility of wisdom.” We are to respect those who are older because of the wisdom and the life experience they can bring to us. Simeon and Anna are old enough and wise enough to recognize the Christ child without having anyone else tell them who he is. They appear to be the only ones for whom that is true.

Later is Jesus’ life other identify Jesus as the messiah, but that is after they have heard or seen him miracles and teachings, after they have things to guide them to him, but all Anna and Simeon see is a baby in his parents arms and they know immediately who he is. And this is not just some quaint scene where Mary and Joseph were the only family around. The Temple was a huge complex, and there would have probably been thousands of people around, including maybe a hundred children or more, and yet they find and identify Jesus.

During one chapel service while I was in seminary, one of the doctoral students delivered a sermon on the grey haired church ladies with whom we would all work, and how important it was to cultivate them, use them and understand them, because without them, he said, no church could be successful. Our society values the young and the new, and wants to discard those things that are not, especially people, but we do so to our own peril because when we do so we lose a lot of collected wisdom that might keep us from going down the wrong path.

Now I know that for many of you I am preaching to the choir, because you are that group. But let me temper this just a bit, by noting that Simeon and Anna, the wise elders, identified God in a child, which is not often the way it happens in church. Often children are seen as distractions to what is going on. We want to have them around, as long as they are under control and not being loud. But Simeon and Anna see God in the baby, in the child, and there is great wisdom in that.

The church today is the last truly intergenerational organization we have left in society. It is just about the only place in this country where children and senior citizens who are non family members can and do interact with each other in meaningful ways. When done correctly it can be one of the greatest strengths the church offers. For families who are spread all over the country, children can become surrogate grandchildren, and elders can become surrogate grandparents. But when done incorrectly, when both parties are not honored and celebrated, then intergenerational discord can ensue in which arguments and dissensions are created in battles over what are viewed as scarce resources. Elders are not respected for the wisdom, experience and resources they make available to the church, and the young are not respected for the life, vitality and energy they can bring to the church.

But, when we all see God in each other, when we see Anna as a prophet, and Simeon as someone upon whom the Spirit rests, and we see God in the child, when we all respect and honor what we all bring to the table, then we begin to be Christ to each other and to the world and begin to live into the gospel message. The elders amongst us, and the elders that many of you are, have a lot to teach us by leading us and guiding us, and giving us your collective wisdom, but we must also all be willing to listen to the will of the Spirit and to recognize God in the child as well.

When we break bread together this morning let us remember that it is the family table, it is God’s table, a table in which the elders are respected and the table at which the young are welcomed. It is the table in which we, though many, become one for we all partake of the one loaf, the one loaf made possible for us in the person of Christ, who came to the world as an infant and who was recognized by Anna and Simeon as the consolation for Israel, as salvation for the world, as Jesus, God saves, as the messiah, as Emmanuel, God with us. May we be wise enough to do the same. Amen.

Don't Settle For A Field Goal

2012-01-03T08:54:00.000-08:00

One of the things that drives me nuts is when a team is driving the ball at the end of the game and then stop going for the end zone when all they need is a field goal. Field goals are not exactly gimmees, and there are lots of things that can go wrong.

Three perfect examples:

Boise State down by one point to TCU and they are moving the ball just fine with less than a minute to go. They get inside field goal range, and then stop going for the end zone. Instead they settle for the field goal. Result: kicker misses, they lose by one point, miss out on a BCS game, maybe even the title game, and play against a woeful 6-6 Arizona State team in the Las Vegas Bowl.

In overtime all Georgia needs is a field goal to win the game after Michigan State had turned the bowl over during their possession. Rather than trying to score a touch down, or even trying to get the ball as close as possible for the kicker, they instead settle for the field goal. Result: Kicker misses, and they end up losing in triple overtime after their last field goal attempt is blocked.

With two minutes remaining Stanford takes possession of the ball with the score tied against Oklahoma State. Stanford is driving the ball just fine and have it inside the 25 with 52 seconds on the clock. They have just covered 50 yards in a minute and still have all three time outs remaining. So do they keep trying to put the ball in the end zone in order to completely ice the game? No, instead they settle for the field goal. Result: Kicker misses, and they end up losing in overtime, after another missed field goal. Now Oklahoma State does settle for a field goal, but it's from the one yard line, and I still think they should have gone for it at that point. I think the football gods were on their side at this point because Stanford had settled.

The argument for settling for a field goal is that the offense could fumble it or the quarterback could throw an interception. But the odds of that happening are much less than the odds of something going wrong during the field goal attempt. The only reason to settle for the field goal is if you literally don't have the time to go for the end zone. But, if you have time on the clock always go for a touchdown, don't settle for field goals because when you settle bad things happen.

Kids Say The Darndest Things, Stuffed Animal Version

2012-01-01T19:12:00.000-08:00

Both my daughters received new stuffed bears for Christmas from their grandmother as they do each year. Today my youngest daughter handed me her bear as I was sitting on the couch so that I could hold it for her. I asked her if the bear had a name yet, and she said "no, they don't get names until they get tenure." So I asked her when they get tenure and she said, "in ten weeks".... It's tough to be a stuffed animal in this house.

But this did make me think of one of my favorite Rickey Henderson stories. When he was with the Padres, the traveling secretary was setting down the rules at the beginning of the season and said that rookies had to sit at the front of the bus but that players with tenure could sit wherever they wanted, to which Henderson said, "ten-year, heck I've got thirteen-year."

It's Okay To Spend Tax Dollars On Me

2011-12-29T13:27:00.000-08:00

Canon Air Force base is about twenty miles from where we live. 10% of the population of Clovis, where it is located, are directly employed at the base, so it plays a major role in the area in terms of economic impact.

I was recently at an event where the base did a presentation on what's going on there and the changes they are expecting in the near future. Their current proposals have them spending $20 million in the next ten years on upgrades to the base and also to the bombing range, which is located in the town where one of my churches is. That is in addition to their normal expenditures.

Now this area also tends to be heavily conservative and anti-tax, but not a single person raised any concerns about spending that amount of money on the base. In fact, they were quite thrilled that that level of money was coming to the area.

Which proves again that people are quite happy when tax money is spent on them (and New Mexico brings in more than it sends out in federal expenditures), but its when the money is spent on other people, ones who are undeserving, that the problems arise.

How do we begin to change the conversation so that people understand that money they receive has the same consequences on the budget/deficit as the money that other people receive?

War on Christmas

2011-12-27T14:38:00.000-08:00

I don't really watch much news in general, but I definitely don't watch Fox news. But very early this morning I was sitting with a parishioner in her hospital room as we awaited her scheduled 6 am surgery and Fox News was on the TV.

There were several stories that are typical of why I don't watch Fox. One was on how Obama's Christmas in Hawaii is beyond the reach of most Americans, which it is, and how nice for him to be one of the 1%. Of course the story really wasn't about economic inequality and what we might do about it, but instead about bashing Obama for taking the trip, or at least that seemed to be the point. Another story was about how Nancy Pelosi's police escorts are costing tax payers $34,000 for her trip to Hawaii for Christmas.

Now I am not going to defend most of the ridiculous perks that politicians get, as most could safely be gotten rid of, but why single out just Pelosi on this? What about the recent story that the security detail for Rick Perry is costing the tax payers of Texas almost $400,000 a month? Why not attack the special benefits that Speaker Boehner gets, or Sens. McConnell and Reid, as minority and majority leaders get? It's great to actually talk about these things, because if we want to find money, this is a good place to start.

And, while we're at it, let's also address the six police officers needed to guard college coaches, as if they are necessary, or the police escorts that football teams get. How much did the tax payers of Hawaii spend to escort the Southern Mississippi and Nevada football teams around at this year's Hawaii Bowl?

Now none of this is new. Bob Dole was famous when he was in the Senate for sending his tax payer funded car back to pick up his dog after Elizabeth had gotten ready, and bringing the dog back to the office so it could be with him during the day. I'm all for reducing waste and giving people perks they don't usually need simply so they can feel better about themselves and feel more important, but let's be "balanced" and "fair" about the whole enterprise.

But the one that really got me was a special notice from Fox News, which said "Happy Holidays from Fox News."

This is from Fox News, the same organization which is spearheading the whole ridiculous "war on Christmas" theme, which if you've been reading my sermons you know I think is ridiculous. Fox News is not wishing us a Merry Christmas, but instead a bland "Happy Holidays." Do you think Bill O'Reilly will call them out?

Christmas Miracles

2011-12-22T14:33:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from our Blue Christmas service. The text was Luke 2:8-20:

Tonight I’d like to share two stories with you. The first comes from Jenee Woodward, who runs a website called Textweek.com, which gives complete resources on the weekly lectionary readings. Jenee was a lay minister planning on a career in biblical studies, when she gave birth to Philip, who was severely autistic, requiring to put her career plans aside, although her ministry now takes place through what she does. Here is her Advent story:

“As many of you know, my son Philip has autism. He is 10 years old and is severely handicapped by his disability. Our family learned to slow down at Christmas a number of years ago when he was unable to tolerate *any* of the celebration. He could not handle the changing scenarios - the twinkling lights, the changes in grocery store displays, the changes in the sanctuary at church, presents appearing under the tree, the tree ITSELF, and the moved furniture. He would fall on the floor and scream, unable to move, afraid to open his eyes, almost constantly from Thanksgiving until well after Christmas when it was all over. We carried him through that time his head covered with his coat so we could get through the grocery store, or sat with him huddled in his room, carefully ordered EXACTLY the same since summer, with no Christmas trappings.

Of course our neighbor across the street was one of those folks who bought every new outdoor Christmas display. My son slept on the sofa in the living room for two Decembers, trying to stay awake so he could make sure that all of the lights across the street (on the whole block!) were functioning correctly. If one went out, or if the lights came on or turned off outside the proper times, he would scream and cry in panic until it was fixed. (I spent an hour one cold night on top of a neighbor's garage, replacing ONE BULB in a Santa display so the boy would stop screaming and sleep!)

Worship on Christmas Eve or Christmas Day was over-crowded and yet hushed, not a good combination for an autistic child. Christmas celebrations at home were a nightmare. Phil would scream and cry as each package was moved and (gasp!) unwrapped. As frightened as he was when each new thing appeared, he was equally frightened when it changed or disappeared. We'd try to find him a present he'd enjoy, but he'd merely scream and cry in panic at the intrusion on his carefully ordered world, and the gifts would sit ignored until he outgrew them and we gave them to some little boy who could appreciate them.

He wanted nothing. He would look straight at toys we thought he would like, and he would not react at all. He asked for nothing. He anticipated nothing. He just screamed and cried at all of it. It is no bliss to have a child who doesn't get it - who doesn't want anything and doesn't want to have anything to do with Christmas commercialism - or it is only bliss in some romantic fantasy. In real life it is a surreal nightmare.

This year, right around Thanksgiving, we once more asked the kids what they wanted for Christmas. Our 14-year-old daughter sat down and made out her list. And our 10-year old son, for the first time in his life, answered the question. "PlayStation 2," he said. "I want PlayStation 2 Christmas." We just about fell over. His sister gave him a piece of paper. She wrote "Phil's Christmas List" at the top. He wrote, "PLAYSTATION TOW" under her heading. "At Sam's," he said. "Go to car."

So, we drove to Sam's. He has never looked at anything there, never seemed to notice that Sam's has anything he might want. But he led us right to the PlayStation 2 sets, picked out the bundle he wanted and put it in the cart. "Open at Christmas," he said. He watched gleefully as we wrapped the package, and then he solemnly placed it under the tree. So, a PlayStation 2 game set sits there, wrapped, with his name on it, and he waits to open it. "December 25," he says. "Open PlayStation 2 December 25."

Last night we'd returned from yet another Christmas rehearsal with our daughter, Phil found a Best Buy ad in the paper and turned immediately to the PlayStation games. He circled "Harry Potter" and "John Madden Football", handed the ad to Bob, and said, "I want Christmas." There were tears in my eyes. It's such a small thing, but such a truly amazing thing. It's one more bit of hope that he will be able to function in some semblance of society as an adult one day - that he might be able to live just a BIT more independently, and one day want the things he needs to survive enough to work for them. (Not a foregone conclusion with autistic folks, which makes them particularly unemployable, no matter their intelligence.) Consumerism might be "the enemy", but a kid who understands none of it is only a hero in a Chicken Soup For The Soul story.

This Advent season I am grateful for being able to appreciate what complexity and miracle is involved in such small "selfish" acts as wanting something for Christmas and expressing those wants to another person. I'm grateful that my son is able to enjoy some of the commercial cultural trappings of the holiday this year instead of running from them screaming. I'm grateful for the many ways Phil helps me stop and look again, even at my most "Christian" conclusions. And I'm especially grateful that my son helps me see Christ's humble birth, over and over again, even in the midst of nightmares and worries I could not have imagined 10 years ago, even in the midst of Advent.”

The second story is my own. At the Christmas Eve service at the church where I was doing my internship during seminary, as I was greeting people at the door following the service, I head a loud crash come from the area where people gathered for coffee. As it turned out the son-in-law of one of our members had been asked to carry a bowl of hot cider out to the table following worship, and as he was exciting the kitchen the bowl literally exploded in his hands.

The worst part was that his three-year-old daughter Hannah ran over to see him as he exited the kitchen and the majority of the cider poured over her. She was rushed to the emergency room, but because she had second and third degree burns over 18% of her body, she was transferred to the Shriner’s Burn center in Boston for treatment. When they arrived and taken to the urgent care unit, a nurse came in with a basket of toys for Hannah to play with while the doctors treated her wounds, which took most of the night.

As they were being discharged at around 6 am Christmas morning, her parents asked Hannah to pick up the toys and asked the nurse where they should put the basket. The nurse said, “oh no, that basket it yours to keep for Christmas.”

As it turned out, several years before another family like Hannah’s had also spent Christmas Eve in the burn unit at Shriner’s and because they were so grateful for the treatment they received and for their daughter’s recovery they pledged that they would bring in a baskets of toys every Christmas eve to be given to families who were going through what they had gone through. Hannah recovered from her burns, and other than some slight scaring on her arms there is no indication that she experienced what she did.

Now the title of the message is Christmas Miracles, but these are not miracles the way people normally think of miracles. There were no miracle cures or last second reprieves. Philip is still severely autistic, and Hannah does still have scars as well as the memory of that horrendous night, those have not gone away. But the miracle occurred in the small things that happen.

In the darkest of times, there was still a bright light that shone through that darkness, there was a feeling of being blessed, of feeling hope, and yes even joy, during the darkest of moments. There was Philip, reminding his mother of Christ’s humble birth, causing her to question everything that she took so much for granted, and being joyful and hopeful about the future, and in creating a new way to be in ministry to the world she has touched all of you, even if you didn’t know it before tonight. And there was Hannah, going through a nightmare scenario that none of us want to imagine, being given toys by some people that she has never even met because they too had been there, and they decided to reach out and give their love to others, not knowing who they are but knowing that in the darkness the light of God is necessary, and knowing that it is at times like these that that light can shine the brightest and mean the most.

That is the Christmas miracle, it is the experience of God’s love and Christ’s light even when we didn’t think it was possible, even when we felt as if God might be a million miles away, even when we did not think that anything could reach us. Whatever it is that you are feeling or needing this year, I pray that you remember that there is no darkness which can overcome the light of Christ nor is there anything which can separate us from God’s love. Even in the darkest of time, Christmas miracles are out there. Let me close with this prayer from Ted Loder:

O God of all seasons and senses, grant us the sense of your timing to submit gracefully and rejoice quietly in the turn of the seasons.
In this season of short days and long nights,
of grey and white and cold,
teach us the lessons of endings;
children growing, friends leaving, loved ones dying,
grieving over,
grudges over,
blaming over.
O God, grant us a sense of your timing.
In this season of short days and long nights,
of grey and white and cold,
teach us the lessons of beginnings;
that such waitings and endings may be the starting place,
a planting of seeds which bring to birth what is ready to be born—
something right and just and different,
a new song, a deeper relationship, a fuller love—
in the fullness of your time.
O God, grant us the sense of your timing. Amen

Ghost of Christmas Future

2011-12-21T14:24:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from December 18. The text was Romans 16:25-27:

For the past two weeks we have been looking at Christmas through a lens provided for us by Charles Dickens in his classic story A Christmas Carol. (Does anyone know the Christmas carol that is actually used in the story? It’s God rest ye merry Gentlemen). In the story, Ebenezer Scrooge, who approaches Christmas, and really everything in his life by exclaiming famously “bah humbug”, is visited by four ghosts. The first is the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley, who is forced to carry the chains of his misdeeds in his life around with him for all of eternity. Marley comes to warn Scrooge that his fate will be the same unless Scrooge makes changes and that he should heed what the ghosts who come to visit have to show him.

The first ghost is the ghost of Christmas past who helps Scrooge to remember a different time in his life when he didn’t approach everything as simply an economic exercise in which to make, or save, as much money as possible and when he approached life with excitement and verve. He was also shown the process by which he had become the man he was so that he would understand what changes could be made so that he could become someone different and not face the same fate as Marley. It was important for him to understand that who he was was not who he had to be, that he was not locked in chains yet, that he could make other decisions in his life and change his future.

Two weeks ago we too looked with the ghost of Christmas past how we came to celebrate Christmas as we do. What we saw was that Christmas didn’t come to be celebrated until the 4th century, and that there has always been a battle between the religious celebrations of the day and the more secular, party aspects and most of our understandings of how Christmas is celebrated, including gift giving and tree decorating did not develop until the mid 1800s. That is, even though the traditions seem old to us, within the history of Christmas they are fairly new having been invented less than 200 years ago. This helped us to understand how we got to be where we are so we could understand that we too are not locked in the chains that sometimes seem to hold us down, that we can make changes to free ourselves. That led us last week to being visited by the ghost of Christmas present.

This ghost showed us the hyper-consumption and consumerism that affects how we celebrate Christmas today. We want Christmas to mean more for us and we worry that we have gotten caught up in everything else and have forgotten the reason for the season, the birth of Christ, but because we can’t quite figure out how to make our celebrations more meaningful we focus on trying to make society’s celebrations more Christian in order to compensate. And so to do this we begin focusing on things, which I believe, distract us and distance us from truly understanding what the birth of Christ means for the world.

According to the Gospel of Luke, Jesus’ first sermon quotes from the prophet Isaiah, which we heard last week, in which he says “the spirit of the lord is upon me because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free and to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” If that is one of the messages which encapsulates what the good news of Jesus looks like and what the proclamation of the kingdom of God is about, which I believe it is, then how do we make that a part of our Christmas celebrations and proclamations? How do we celebrate Christmas as Christians knowing that in America alone we will spend an estimated 465.6 billion dollars on Christmas this year, and yet everyday more than 20,000 children around the world will die as a result of malnutrition, war and water-borne illnesses, problems which can be solved with a fraction of what we spend on Christmas every year? How do we make Christmas transformative and life-changing not just for us but for the world? These questions lead us to the final visit.

The ghost of Christmas future is the scariest of the ghosts which Scrooge encounters. Indeed, he says, “I fear you more than any specter I have seen.” The ghost of Christmas future is usually personified as the grim reaper who is there to show Scrooge his own death and people’s reactions to it. Certainly not an image that most of us want to spend any real time contemplating, especially at Christmas. Scrooge is filled with fear because he doesn’t know what to expect from this ghost, and at the same time he also does know what to expect, and in some ways that scares him even more.

Scrooge is really being forced to ask what the legacy is that he is leaving for those around him. Is the world going to be better off because he was in it or not? Of course he knows the answer is that few people will be upset to see his demise and that many will be glad to see him go. I think what the ghost of Christmas future calls to us is to answer what legacy we are leaving about what Christmas means to us, how we recognize the birth of Christ and how we live that out in the world?

After my Thanksgiving sermon two years ago, in which I talked about being grateful for what we actual had, not what we wanted to have, or those things that we believe would make us happy or complete if only we had them in our lives. After the service, a man named Steve came up and said that he had everything he could ever possibly need and wondered if there was some way the church could help him and his family to change their Christmas story and their expectations of the season so that the money that would normally be spent on gifts could instead be given to charities to help people who were truly in need. That simple request led me to begin looking around at what churches were doing and I found the Advent Conspiracy, which I used for the first time last year.

I know that not everyone who was exposed to it last year did anything with it, just as I know that not everyone here will do anything with it, but for those who did many of them told me that the experience was life changing. That being a part of the advent conspiracy, of rethinking Christmas, what they did, and how they did it changed their lives. Sadly enough it is the only time in my time in the church in which someone has told me they have been transformed by something the church did.

I would hope and pray that being in a relationship with Jesus Christ also changed their lives, but maybe this is the stepping stone to deepening that relationship and coming to understand the difference that the birth of Christ makes for us and for the world. That the incarnation, which is a big church word which means that God has been made flesh, that the incarnation matters as much for us 2000 years later as it did for those who may have been there on the night of his birth. That the angles still sing for us today and proclaim, “fear not” Scrooge was terrified of the future, but the angel says, “Fear not, for behold I bring you good news of great joy that shall be for all the people for today in the city of David a child has been born” and his name is Emmanuel, God with us, God with you and with me.

Even though Steve was the one who got this started, he was not there last Christmas as the church began to conspire together to rethink Christmas because he had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer, and he was simply too sick from the disease and the chemotherapy to make it to church. But his simple idea changed our life and how we celebrate Christmas and it changed the lives of many others, and maybe will even change your life.

Now I suspect that some of Steve’s desire and need for Christmas to be something different to mean more to connect him to something more than just shopping and acquiring came from the fact that several years before he had lost his youngest daughter to suicide just before Christmas. He understood fundamentally that the most important things about Christmas are not the stuff that we buy each other but instead about our relationships, our relationships with each other and with Jesus Christ. Which takes us back to the first question that I asked two weeks ago, which is to think of your favorite Christmas memories, which I speculated had little to do with gifts we had given or received, but instead of time spent with family and friends.

The last funeral I did before moving here was for Steve, and during the time in which people were given the opportunity to make a remembrance, a man came up to the mic and said that no one there knew who he was, although Steve would have known, because Steve had been his doctor, and he had been the one to treat him when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer 15 years before, and he wanted to let everyone know that the only reason he was able to be standing there remembering Steve was because Steve had saved his life. The ghost of Christmas future asks Scrooge what difference he has made in people’s lives? Now obviously most of us cannot save someone’s lives when they get cancer, but we can still change people’s lives in fundamental ways. We can make a difference because Christmas makes a difference, how we celebrate makes a difference, and how we welcome the Christ child into our lives makes a difference.

Our Christmas traditions in many ways have not kept up with the reality of the world. I remember when I was growing up every year we would receive an orange in our stocking, and I could never really figure out why because it didn’t really make sense to me. But then when I was in my late teens or early twenties I finally understood why that was part of my parents traditions, because when they were growing up, as well as for many of you, you could not just go to the grocery store at any time of the year and have access to fruits and vegetables that were out of season. When they were growing up, oranges at Christmas were a special treat because they were not usually available. But when I was growing up that was no longer the case. You could find oranges in December just as easily as at any other time of the year. The tradition did not meet the reality.

At the time when gift giving at Christmas came into importance, people lived primarily in a culture of scarcity; gifts were very special. In addition, since the majority of people lived then in the isolation of rural America, the hustle and bustle of Christmas that arose with our traditions broke up the monotony of a down time in the agricultural cycle. It gave new excitement and meaning to the time. But our situations have radically changed from that. Most of us no longer live in scarcity, and even here in rural America we are still involved in the normal everyday hurry of society as a whole. Christmas is no longer the alternative to what our lives are normally like, but instead has become just an extension of it and sometimes even a hyper-extension of it. Because our situation has changed, what would make Christmas special, I believe, has also changed.

There is nothing wrong with gift giving or Christmas tree decorating or any of the other ways we celebrate Christmas as long as that celebration is working for us, but if it’s not working, if we want something more, or something less as the case may be, then change is possible. When we want Christmas to mean more, to be different, but we jeep doing the same things then nothing will change. What is the definition of insanity, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results? Last week I said that in order to find the heart of our Christmas celebration and what it can be for us, that we should ask first what would be gained if we stopped celebrating Christmas? Then the opposite must also be answered, what would be lost if we stopped celebrating Christmas?

All traditions were invented at one time, and so they can all be stopped as well if they are no longer functioning the way they were supposed to. Our traditions should not be chains that bind us for all of eternity. We can create new traditions, new traditions which again capture the power of the Christmas story and message, new traditions which can again make a difference for us and for the world. Children have a sense of wonder, awe and magic at Christmas, a sense of excitement and expectation. While they want to rush and open all the presents, at the same time they also seem to understand that it takes a while to get there and they revel in that expectation and anticipation of something to come. We lose that as we grow up, but how do we reclaim that sense of wonder, awe and magic for this Christmas and for the Christmas’ yet to come, to create a legacy for Christmas futures that will make a difference?

Advent is the time for waiting and preparing for God to transform the world through the birth of Christ. But Christmas is not a noun, Christmas is a verb, it is about doing and being in the world. It is about God being in the world and it is about us being in the world. Some people won’t get what we are trying to do. They’ll ask why they can’t just get their present and move on. They won’t understand how we are trying to change what Christmas means for us. But we can’t wait to make changes based on others. If God had waited to give us Jesus until God knew that everyone would accept him, that everyone would understand what his birth meant, then we would still be waiting for him to be born.

Today’s writing from Paul is the closing to his theological masterpiece of Romans. It is his doxology, or song of praise and acclamation. Today is also our doxology to the Advent season, and we remember Mary’s joyful response when she breaks into song in thanksgiving in what is known as the magnificat, and she is filled with joy. We too should be filled with joy but not joy as it is typically understood. Joy is not like happiness. Happiness is dependent upon what is going on around us. But, joy sets the mood; it is not dependent upon other things. It’s like someone who asked whether hope and optimism where the same thing, and I said that they were not. Hope stands out even when optimism has been given up, in fact it is those times when hope is most necessary and important, the same as it is in times of despair when peace, love and joy, the other themes of advent are also most important.

God does not come into the world in the person of Christ because everything is great, nor does he come in spite of the fact that everything is in turmoil, but instead Christ comes because the world is broken, he comes because we need him in order to restore relationship with God. He comes as greatest present that God can give because we need him so much. So what will we do? What has Christmas meant to us in the past? What do we want it to be for us in the present? What do we want it to be for us and for others in the future?

Dickens closes his story by having Scrooge say, “I will honor Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the past, present and the future. The spirits of all three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach.” Scrooge became filled with the Christmas spirit and lived it out in everything that he did. We too are filled with the spirit because “the spirit of the Lord is upon us because he has anointed us to bring the good news.”

Let us live out in our lives the true meaning of Christmas , let us make this year be the year that we make Christmas more meaningful, that we connect to the things that really matter, that we welcome the Christ child into our lives today and every day. How is Christmas changing you? What does Christ’s birth represent and mean to you? Is it just about giving and receiving gifts or is it about receiving the one and most important gift, about receiving Christ into our live?

“And it was always said of” Scrooge, Dickens says, “that he knew how to keep Christmas well…. May that be truly said of us, and all of us! And so, as Tiny Tim observed, God bless us every one!” May it be so my sisters and brothers. Amen.

Kids Say The Darndest Things, 80s Music Version

2011-12-15T15:31:00.001-08:00

Was listening to the classic 80's song Mr. Roboto by Styx, and my daughters were singing along saying "secret, secret, I've got a secret..." And then my oldest daughter says "Hey daddy, I know what his secret is, but I can't tell you because it's a secret."

Digital Silent Night Candles

2011-12-14T07:00:00.000-08:00

As I was playing with my phone (Droid X2) I downloaded a candle app. It basically shows a burning candle, and when you move it, the flame moves accordingly. Don't know what you would necessarily use it for, maybe for concerts instead of bringing a lighter, but it's still cool. But it got me wondering: What if instead of using candles during silent night on Christmas Eve we had people download a candle app and lift their phones up instead, a 21st century version of an old tradition? Would love to try it, but also don't want to be strung up by my fingers for messing with tradition.

The Ghost of Christmas Present

2011-12-13T07:08:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Isaiah 61:1-4, 8-11:

“It’s the most wonderful time of the year,” so begins the classic Andy Williams song. Last week as I began my message I asked you to reflect on your favorite Christmas memories. For many of us we can remember a time when Christmas was perhaps as Andy Williams said the most wonderful time. But I also was willing to guess that most of our favorite memories had nothing to do with gifts we have given or received. That instead they involved other things, like time spent with family. And yet, even though that is what we remember about most Christmas, every year most of us get sucked into the cycle of rushing and buying in order to prepare for Christmas. Even though we say we’re not going to do it this year, we end up doing it anyways.

Last year, on the Monday after Thanksgiving I was at the bank and the two people in line in front of me, were talking about how they spent Thanksgiving and how much they enjoyed it and the time spent with their families, and then one of them asked the other what the plans were for Christmas, and the woman said how much she dreaded the whole Christmas season. That Thanksgiving was such a better holiday for her because it was much more relaxed and there weren’t any great expectations, but she felt hurried for all of December and she just didn’t enjoy Christmas anymore.

The man agreed and gave a similar story of woe. I suspect that many of us can sympathize with that sentiment, and maybe we even feel the same way. That is certainly the feeling of some who make the claim that Christmas has become too commercial and that if only we could reclaim the way Christmas used to be that everything would be better again, would return to the true joy of the season and we would remember what Christmas is all about.

In Charles Dickens’s classic story A Christmas Carol, Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts. The first is the ghost of his former partner Jacob Marley who warns Scrooge not only of the other ghosts that will be visiting him that night, but also that he needs to change his ways or he will end up like Marley, carrying chains for all of eternity. The first ghost that visits is the ghost of Christmas past, who takes Scrooge into the past, obviously enough, so that Scrooge can remember what has happened to make him who he is so that he can understand in order to be able to change.

Last week, we too looked into the ghost of Christmas past so that we can understand how we came to celebrate Christmas as we do today. You might remember that most of the things that we practice today, including gift giving and the decorating of Christmas trees for example, are fairly new ideas begun in the mid-1800s, and what we also found was that the lament about how Christmas is celebrated, and how Christ is being left out, is as old as the holiday itself, which even led to the celebration of Christmas being made illegal in England and America and different points in time. So much of what we know as the “traditions” of Christmas were invented fairly recently. While they are, for the most part, all we have ever known, they are new in the history of the celebration. With that information we move today into seeing the ghost of Christmas present. But before we begin to see what today’s ghost has to show us, let us clear up one issue of semantics.

According to Bruce David Forbes, the term Christmas now really has two meanings. The first is the religious celebration, and its attendant festivities, which surround the birth of Christ. This is the spiritual side of Christmas, and might be referred to more appropriately as the Christmas Holy Day. But, Christmas also has its secular side as well, of which we are all aware. These are the social things of Christmas that have little to do with the religious experience of the day, and might be referred to as the Christmas holiday. We all use the term both ways, and use them interchangeably, although they are not. But they are also not just pure black and white categories as they have significant overlap.

Gift giving has religious significance, we remember the gifts of the magi to the Christ child, and we remember God’s gift to us, and since we are made in the image of God, we are to be givers, there is religious significance to giving gifts, and gift giving also has secular significance, especially through the purchasing of store bought gifts. Christmas songs, which are one of the few Christmas traditions which date back to the earliest celebrations, have religious significance, one of Charles Wesley’s most famous hymns is Hark, the Herald Angel Sing and they also have social significance, one of the best selling songs of all time in Bing Crosby’s classic White Christmas. As much as people might try, I do not think you can sort of divide them and make a clean break. We cannot say we are going to remove all the secular celebrations from Christmas in order to regain the true spirit of, because the two ideas are inherently connected in our culture. But that doesn’t mean we can’t change how we celebrate, because we can.

If you’ve ever read A Christmas Carol or seen a movie version, you may remember that the ghost of Christmas present is a large jovial fellow who is surrounded by piles of presents and sometimes food. If Dickens were to write the story today, this ghost may stay the same because he can be the symbol of the over-consumption which is so prevalent in Christmas present.

This year on the weekend after Thanksgiving, which of course encompasses Black Friday, consumers in America spent 52.4 billion dollars, which was a 16% increase over last year. The average consumer spent nearly $400, and according to the National Retail Federation, as much as people were complaining about the early opening times of stores this year, of the 226 million people who bought something over the weekend, ¼ of them, or 56 million people, were out shopping at midnight. And of course with that we got the usual stories of craziness.

There was the woman in California who pepper sprayed a group surrounding an amazing Xbox sale at Wal-Mart. There was the story of Walter Vance, a 61 year-old man who had a heart attack in a Target, where witnesses say some shoppers stepped over him as he lay on the floor in order to get to their sales. But my favorite story was of a stabbing at the Arden Fair Mall in Sacramento, California. Now this is not my favorite because a man was stabbed but because of the news story which reported it, which concluded by saying, and I quote, “the stabbing did not interrupt shopping activities…” In other words, a man was stabbed, but don’t worry because it didn’t stop anyone from buying anything, including the man because he was leaving the mall when he was attacked.

According to Forbes, Americans spend an average of nearly $800 on presents at Christmas, which includes, amazingly enough, $130 on presents for themselves, and we spend an additional $1800 on other items, which we tend to forget in our Christmas calculations, like Christmas trees, decorations, food, Christmas cards and travel, for a total of more than $2600 a year. And yet, Stacey Powell, who is an accountant and financial coach, says the most common feelings about Christmas she hears from her clients are shame, regret, anguish and embarrassment. Doesn’t sound like it’s really the most wonderful time of the year for many people.

For most of us we get sort of caught up in this time. We want it to mean more, to be more, to connect us to something different, and yet we’re not sure how. Bruce Forbes, a professor of religious studies, says that “on the one hand, a number of Christians are introspective and self-critical, asking themselves if they have become so preoccupied with the decorations, gifts and dinner preparations that they have forgotten the “reason for the season,” the birth of Christ. On the other hand,” he says, “some Christians complain about public actions and displays at Christmastime that do not acknowledge Christianity or Jesus…. In other words,” Forbes continues, “one concern is about whether my own personal Christmas observances are Christian enough, and the other concern is about whether society’s Christmas observances are Christian enough.”

Because we can’t quite figure out how to solve the first concern about our own celebrations, we seem to be spending our time focusing on the second, and the reported “war on Christmas.” But let me say two things. The first is that I do not believe there is no war on Christmas. While the Supreme Court might say that corporations are people, I can proclaim that corporations are not and cannot be Christians and if we have fallen so far that we expect business to be the ones to proclaim the gospel message for us, then we are done. We might as well close the doors of every church, because we have failed. It is not the responsibility of business or of the government to proclaim the Christmas message, it is up to us. It is our job to proclaim the incarnation to the world, to proclaim that the light of the world has entered the world, it is our job. Why would we ever expect business to do the work of the church? And secondly why would we ever even want to turn that obligation over to anyone else. Jesus does not say, “Go and let someone else make disciples,” Jesus tells us to do it, in fact he commands us. It is not up to Wal-Mart or Best Buy to proclaim the gospel message it is up to us.

Secondly, we cannot proclaim that Christians no longer control Christmas, because as we heard last week, the holiday was never fully controlled by the church or by Christians. This battle between the secular and the sacred has been a recurring theme throughout the history of the celebration of Christmas. This year Fox News listed all the stores that will be saying “Merry Christmas” instead of “Happy Holidays,” but then questioned whether they were doing this because they really meant it or simply because they thought they could make more money by doing so. A popular song on the internet called Christmas with a Capital C, which sets out to tell us why we shouldn’t say happy holidays but instead Merry Christmas, says in their introduction that in the past everyone said Merry Christmas because, in their own words, “it wasn’t about religion.”

In other words, it appear they want to recapture Christmas as a cultural celebration in which we can all proclaim something which is devoid of its religious meaning. I don’t think that is the right goal for us as Christians in proclaiming the birth of Christ. We do not get control of Christmas by making others do it for us, we only begin to control Christmas when we take control of it for ourselves personally. When we turn off the auto-pilot mentality of the season and instead we take the time to decide what is important to us, how we are going to celebrate and what the incarnation of Christ means to us, and what we are going to do about it, not sometime in the future but what we are going to do about it right now in the present. How we are going to live that out in our lives? Rev. Frederick Schmidt perhaps put it best when he said “If we really believed in the life-changing nature of Christmas, then we wouldn’t be unhinged by the commercial blather. We would look straight through it. We would realize that the debate about commercialism and Christmas isn’t the issue at all. The real issue is the inability of the culture to grasp the nature of Christmas itself.” That is where we make our stand, because we can and hopefully do grasp the nature of Christ and so we can look right through everything else.

In today’s passage from Isaiah we are given a vision of what God desires for us as humans. This is not a vision of salvation that will take place sometime in the future, but instead a vision of salvation for the here and now. “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me, he has sent me to bring good news,” Isaiah says. Good news to whom? “To the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor….”

What is salvation for Isaiah? It is the good news of God. What is Good News for us? It is the gospel of Jesus Christ, it is the good news, it is the same message. This passage might have sounded familiar to you because this is the passage that Jesus chooses to preach from for his first sermon which is simply, “today, this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus is the good news, and the message of who that good news is for remains the same. We do not need to look far to see the injustice of poverty and abuse, hunger and oppression, we can see them in our own communities. So how do we proclaim that as we celebrate Christmas?

If you’ve been here for a few weeks you’ve seen one of the videos from the Advent Conspiracy, which highlights the fact that it would take only $10 billion to provide clean running water to everyone in the world. It would take $4.5 billion to rescue 1 million people in the world today who live in slavery, many of them sexual slaves. It would take $6 billion to provide basic education to everyone in the world. It would take $13 billion to provide basic health care and nutrition to everyone in the world, and yet according to the National Retail Federation this year we will spend $465.6 billion in America on Christmas.

A group of five women in Dallas have recently put up a billboard which says “I miss you saying Merry Christmas,” and it’s signed “Jesus.” But what I imagine Jesus saying is how are you proclaiming the good news and to whom are your proclaiming it? We are worried about the person at the check-out counter who is ringing up items we don’t need paid for with money we don’t have saying Merry Christmas to us, and yet we live in a world where today 16,000 children will die from malnutrition. We live in a world where today 500 children will die as a result of war. We live in a world where today 4000 children will die from water-borne illnesses. And we live in a world where millions of people do not know what it means to have peace, hope, joy or love, the names of our advent candles.

What does the incarnation mean to us and what does it mean to the world? “The spirit of the Lord is upon me because he has anointed me to preach the good news.” Last week we heard John the Baptist say that he is only baptizing with water, but that the one who is to come will baptize with the Holy Spirit. As baptized people who have been given the Holy Spirit, we too should be saying, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, is upon us, because he has anointed me, us, to preach the good news….”

This is not about doing away with Christmas, I love Christmas, but this is instead changing how we approach Christmas and what Christmas means to us. The incarnation means that God entered into the world fully, so celebrating Jesus’ birth with some things of the world seems appropriate, but it does not mean giving everything over to the world either. So as we look at our Christmas present, there are several questions I believe we need to ask ourselves.

The first is to ask, what would be lost if we stopped celebrating Christmas? And what would be gained if we stopped celebrating Christmas? When we answer those questions honestly then we will find what is at the heart of our Christmas celebration, and it will then allow us to begin to answer what we want Christmas to be for us and our families this year.

Advent is a time of waiting and preparing for God to transform the world through Jesus Christ, but it is also a time in which we recognize that God has already transformed the world through the birth of Christ. It is a time of all-ready and not quite yet, a time of celebration and a time of repentance and preparation. Christmas is not about whether we say Merry Christmas or not, but instead about choosing to live like Christ and proclaiming Christ to the world.

As we prepare to look to the ghost of Christmas future next week, let us make the Christmas present what we need it to be for us. Instead of being simply one more Christmas, just like last year or all the years before let us make this Christmas a time in which we see God’s incarnation as transformative and life-changing not just for us, but for the world. May it be so my sisters and brothers. Amen.

Personality Cults

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

I think one of the hardest things to do in the ministry is to keep churches from becoming personality cults. The itinerancy in Methodism helps put some checks on this, but there are still issues. The problem with personality cults is that once the minister leaves, people who are there because of them leave as well.

I don't want the church to be based on me, or to have attendance increasing simply because I am the minister, I want it to be more on the church and what people find in the church. But that is hard because so much relies on the minister. The simple fact is if you have a poor preacher people are less likely to come, and if you have a good preacher and a good service people are more likely to come. (some of this builds on my post on quarterbacks and ministers).

We record each service and make the service and the sermons available for people to take for their own use or to give to others. I have never had someone take the full service, but they take the sermons all the time. Is that building a personality cult? I don't know, but it's something with which I struggle.

What has me thinking more about this are the recent events at the Crystal Cathedral in California and the New Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. Following Schuller's retirement at the Crystal Cathedral there has been a lot of turmoil leading them to recently sell their building. The future is unknown for them but they clearly are not the same without Schuller there, and their days as a "megachurch" seem to be clearly numbered. Eddie Long recently left his church as well, and there is a lot of conversation about whether that church can continue. Members are saying that they need to remember that a church is bigger than it's minister, but can they keep the same church and the same size without Long as the head? Like the Crystal Cathedral, the future is very uncertain.

Can megachurches sustain pastoral changes and survive as they have been? I think that this is something we are going to have to see. Will Saddleback be the same without Rick Warren, or Willow Creek without Bill Hybels, or even in the UMC will the Church of the Resurrection be the same without Adam Hamilton? How much of the participation in these churches is based on the church and how much on the pastor? Even if these pastors have passed over some of the responsibility to others, they still exert tremendous influence over the direction and operation of the church. Rob Bell's recent departure from Mars Hill will be a good indication of how at least one church does after the departure of a charismatic leader.

Clearly there are some pastors who thrive on the personality cult, and others who work hard to keep the focus on Christ and the church, but will that make a difference in the end? I certainly hope so, but don't know. In looking through attendance figures in the New England conference there was almost always a drop in attendance following a ministerial change (there were exceptions to this of course), which indicates to me that more people might be connected to us than we actually realize.

Capitalism is Dead

2011-12-10T07:00:00.000-08:00

Capitalism is dead... or at least the usage of that term by the GOP is dead. According to reports, language genius Frank Lutz is telling GOP governors, and through them the rest of the GOP, to stop using the term "capitalism" because it now has negative connotations for most people. Instead, they are to use the terms "economic freedom" or "free markets."

In addition, there are no longer to talk about entrepreneurs but instead "small business owners" and "job creators." And these job creators are not helping the middle class, but instead helping "hard-working tax-payers," except when it comes to the taxes of the rich, then it's about the government "taking" their money.

Even though I don't agree with him politically, I like Frank Luntz a lot and he has been very effective in the past. He was the one who changed the talking points away from "estate taxes" and to the "death tax" which then helped congress eliminate it. Pay attention to these nice new catch phrases as we move into the election season.

What is a "Heisman Moment"?

2011-12-09T07:00:00.001-08:00

There has been a lot talk this year about which candidates for the Heisman Award have had a "Heisman Moment." Could someone please explain what that means and why it's important? I remember Desmond Howard taking the Heisman pose in the end zone against Ohio State, but that was after everyone figured he would already win. Is that a Heisman moment?

Others are talking about Trent Richardson's touchdown run against Auburn as being a possible Heisman moment. It was a great run, but it was more about terrible tackling by Auburn then anything else. Some are saying that Andrew Luck can't win because he didn't have a Heisman moment, while others are saying his one-handed catch earlier in the year could be that moment.

The Heisman Award is supposed to go to the "most-outstanding" player (by that they almost exclusively mean quarterback or running-back) in the country. But what does that criteria have anything to do with one moment?

Great players make great things happen, but they do that all the time. To try and reduce it to one moment, to me, seems to totally dismiss the idea of putting together a great season. Maybe you can have a Heisman game, although that is also a stretch, but let's forget having a moment and instead focus on players having a Heisman season.

Multiracial Crayola

2011-12-08T11:06:00.000-08:00

I recently saw a commercial for Crayola products which totally surprised me, and had both my wife and I turn to each other to confirm that what happened actually happened. This commercial featured an interracial couple, and it was very clear that they were married. In doing a little research I found that this was not the first interracial couple in a commercial, but it is most definitely the first I can remember seeing.

The fact it was surprising shows how far we still have to go in our portrayal of race relations in this country. It was also a white male and black female which is still more acceptable than the reverse, but it is definitely a step in the right direction.

I applaud Crayola for this commercial, and wrote to them to tell them, and hope that we will see a lot more. My wife and I already buy crayola products for our daughters, but will be making sure they get our dollars over other companies.

Ghost of Christmas Past

2011-12-06T10:49:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon for last Sunday. The text was Mark 1:1-8:

I want you to think of one of your favorite Christmas memories? Do you have one in mind? Does anyone want to share a memory? I’m willing to bet that most of them do not involve a gift you received or even a gift you gave? This is going to be true even if you are thinking of childhood memories. Sure there may have been a bike, or some other special gift that really stood out, but most of our favorite memories of Christmas are about experiences we had, of time spent with family and friends, maybe it’s decorating the tree, or eating the meal, or a special visit to Santa, we might remember opening presents when we were a children, but not actually remember most of the presents themselves.

So as another exercise, I want you to write down or at least try in your head to name five to ten things that you received as a present for Christmas last year? Can you do it? I’ve had a while to think about it as I was preparing this and I could only come up with a couple of the gifts I received. I remember what Santa brought the girls last year, but that is primarily because the elves didn’t assemble them before Santa put them under the tree, but I can’t remember what we got for the girls. And yet, even though we can’t remember the gifts we receive, even though most of our best Christmas memories have nothing to do with gifts given or received, we are constantly told that Christmas is all about gift giving, that it’s about going to the mall, and buying as many things as we can because if we don’t then our loved ones won’t be happy this Christmas, will think that we don’t really love them, and our children will grow up unhappy and turn into old scrooges because we didn’t get them whatever the hottest gift is this year, Yet, even though we know these things aren’t true, year after year we keep doing the same thing.

In Charles Dickens’ classic story A Christmas Carol, which greatly impacted the creation of our modern understanding of Christmas and its attendant celebrations, the main character Ebenezer Scrooge is visited by four ghosts. The first is his former business partner Jacob Marley, who comes to warn Scrooge of the three ghosts who will come to visit him during the night. Marley is himself bound with chains which he says he is forced to carry for eternity as a result of how he lived his life, and so he has been sent to see Scrooge so that Scrooge might free himself of the chains which hold him back in this life so that he can be free of chains in the life to come. In order to help understand what those chains are and how he came to acquire them, the first ghost, the ghost of Christmas past, comes to help Scrooge remember and to learn from the past so that he can move into the future, and today we are going to do the same. We are going to look at how our Christmas celebrations came to be so that we might be able to try and free ourselves of some of the chains that fetter us so that we can come to see Christmas in a new way.

Now I feel that I have to start by saying that I am not doing this because I am a Scrooge in hiding who wants to ruin Christmas. In fact it is quite the opposite. I love Christmas, love it. I am the opposite of the Grinch who “hated Christmas, the whole Christmas season.” I start thinking about Christmas decorations for my front yard in June, and start listening to Christmas music in October. I love Christmas, so what we talk about over the next three weeks is not about doing away with Christmas, it is not about not giving gifts, because as we discussed a few weeks ago, giving is important, indeed we are celebrating God’s gift to us in the birth of his son, but that’s really the point. As a recent book title said, Christmas is not your birthday. So how did we come to celebrate the way we do?

We’ll start with why we celebrate when we do. We have birth accounts in only two of the four gospels, Matthew and Luke, and neither of them gives an accounting for when Jesus was born, and so the early church had to come up with a date if they wanted to celebrate his birth. Now I am sure that most of you have probably heard the story that December 25th was a pagan holiday that the early Christian church co-opted, and there is some history to this. In the year 274 in order to give credit for a victory to the sun, the Emperor Aurelian marked the winter solstice as a day to celebrate the birth of the invincible sun. We do know that by 336 Christians in Rome were celebrating Jesus’ birth on this day. So, following this story, the church sort of built off the pun of sun and son, and made a pagan holiday their own. It certainly makes a good story, but it is not the only story.

In looking for how scriptures predicted Jesus’ coming, as we see in the passage from Mark today, the early church was also looking for how creation foretold Jesus’ life. The early church placed Christ’s death as happening on the vernal equinox, and since they believed that Jesus was perfect then the date of his death and his conception must be the same, and so if Jesus’ was conceived on the vernal equinox, and everything is perfect, then he would be born on the winter solstice, which is exactly nine months later. Having the light of the world be born on the darkest day of the year would also match with their theology. In addition, because we are told in Luke that John the Baptist is six months older than Jesus, that would indicate that John would have been conceived at the fall equinox and born at the summer solstice, and therefore creation would match the birth of these two figures. Now this might seem like a stretch, and it’s easier to say that they just co-opted a pagan holiday, except that the writings of the early church are filled with this sort of theological reasoning, seeking to give theological justification and to find the importance of Jesus in everything.

But regardless of why this date might have been chosen, it was not universally accepted. Many orthodox churches celebrate Christmas on December 7, where it is accompanied by a feast which breaks a day of fasting and does not have gift giving associated with it. In addition, Christmas was never the most important holiday in the church year, regardless of the fact that that is what it seems to have become today. In fact, the celebration of Epiphany, which is the day that the wise men are said to have arrived, which sometimes included gift giving, and was also when Jesus’ Baptism was celebrated, is not only an older celebration in the church, but has been considered a much more important holiday than Christmas for most of Christian history. Again within Orthodox and Latin American churches, Epiphany is the third most important holiday behind Easter and Pentecost.

As Christmas celebrations continued over the years, its emphasis waxed and waned. By the middle ages people would celebrate by attending worship, where they often listened to mind-numbing sermons, some things don’t change, then the rest of the day would be spend in revelry with the consumption of large amounts of food and even larger amounts of alcohol. A large number of births in late September and early October, especially to unmarried mothers, also indicated what else was taking place, and caused concern for some in the church. By the time of the Protestant reformation in the 16th century, the reformers were disgusted at what was taking place, and argued that since there was no Biblical witness to when Jesus was actually born, as well as because of how the day was being celebrated that Christmas should be deemphasized or removed from the calendar all together. And that is exactly what happened in some cases.

In 1647, Parliament passed a law forbidding the observance of Christmas in England, and in 1659 a similar law was passed in Massachusetts, which at that time consisted of nearly the entirety of modern New England. The law in Massachusetts was repealed in 1681, but the celebration of Christmas did not return with the appeal of the law. A perfect example of this is found within Methodism. The Methodist Church in America was founded in 1784 at what was called the Christmas Conference in Baltimore. Approximately 60 of the 83 Methodist preachers in America gathered on December 24, for the first of a week of meetings to vote on the creation of a new church. They did so not because they thought that gathering to worship together at Christmas would be a good idea, but instead they chose this because Christmas was an opportune time when there was little else of importance going on in the church so that they could gather. I would challenge anyone to try and call a church meeting beginning on Christmas Eve now.

By the beginning of the 19th century, Christmas began to again rise in popularity, and the church wasn’t doing anything with it, it became more of a secular holiday much like what was taking place during the middle ages with great revelry and carousing, but these celebrations became a threat to civility and peace. People again began to look for some sort of remedy, but rather than banning Christmas celebrations as before this time they changed or created new traditions. The years 1823-1848 have been referred to as a sort of “big bang” for the creation of Christmas as we know it, and many of the ideas rest with the writings of Washington Irving, Clement Clarke Moore, who wrote “A Visit from St. Nick”, and, of course, Charles Dickens. What these three writers did was to domesticate the holiday, to bring it into the home so that now when “out on the lawn there arose such a clatter,” instead of it possibly being wassailers who might be doing damage, it was now Santa. Christmas trees also began appearing at this time as a regular feature in people’s homes. Although legend has it that Martin Luther was the person who created the Christmas tree, since Luther was one of the reformers who denounced Christmas celebrations there is little likelihood that this is a true story. The first known reference to the use of Christmas trees in America does not come until 1821, but its common use is not seen until the 1840s when it quickly took off in popularity. In 1850 Dickens said that the Christmas tree was still that “new German toy,” by 1891 President Harrison, who was the first President to have a Christmas tree in the White House, referred to the tree as “old fashioned.”

What also arose during this time was gift giving as we now understand it as a commercial enterprise. Prior to this there is some record of gift giving, but it was most usually done on Epiphany, on the feast of St. Nicholas, which is December 6, or at New Year’s. The first movement to gifts at Christmas came in the form of Gift Books, which were elegant “literary annuals” printed at first to be given to women by their admirers. Later books were also printed for children, but these books were advertised as being for Christmas and New Years. By the beginning of the Civil War the popularity for these books disappeared, but by the time they did gift giving at Christmas, instead of at New Years or other times, had become the accepted practice. But, it wasn’t giving just any gifts but instead giving specifically store bought gifts. The age of commercialization had been born.

Now the laments about Christmas, as we have already seen, are, in the words of Leigh Eric Schmidt, “One of the culture’s fondest, most pervasive jeremiads.” I think the complaint that things were different, and it was better when we were kids is also a common refrain, as even Ralph Waldo Emerson bewailed the commercialization of Christmas, and the selling of gifts as “a cold, lifeless, business.” By the turn of the 20th century, a major retail publication was saying that November 1, was “none too early” for stores to begin their “Holiday Campaign.” And women were recording in their diaries, “Still shopping all day long, seems I will never get through,” or “Oh! This silly Christmas trash makes me tired,” and “So busy, and Children all crazy too… we always get so at Christmas,” and tired store workers were relenting the long hours dealing with harried customers. In other words, they were dealing with the same things and complaining about the same things about Christmas that we deal with and complain about today.

The ghost of Christmas past showed Scrooge how he got to where he was so that he could understand and begin to make changes in his life. In the passage from Mark today we are also taken into the past in order to understand the changes that are taking place. Mark interprets John the Baptist through the lens of the Isaiah passage which we also heard this morning, of the voice crying out in the wilderness to prepare the way of the lord. John is not a voice harkening to the past out of a sense of nostalgia. It is not a voice saying, “if only we could go back to the way we imagine it used to be then everything would be okay.” Instead this is a voice that is calling us out of the hustle and bustle of the city, out into the wilderness in order to come into contact with God. This is a voice which is calling us to repent, to turn around, not really the voice we are used to hearing during Christmas, but it is the voice necessary in order to help us prepare for the coming of the Christ child. It is the voice which helps us with preparation and anticipation. It is the voice that tells us “someone more powerful than me is coming.” John calls us to come to the wilderness, to leave the city behind, to leave behind all the things we are told by society that we should be focusing on and instead to come and hear the voice of God, to come and prepare for the coming of Christ.

Martin Copenhaver says that “the Christian story begins with longing,” as best illustrated during this time of Advent. Most of us long for something different during this season. We want to feel connected to each other and to God. We want to be connected to something deeper and more meaningful. John calls us away from the stuff, to go to the wilderness in order to prepare and the ghost of Christmas past shows us the things that may lock us in chains, and then we are given the opportunity to make changes for the future. This Advent season let us take the time to reflect, to ponder, to go to the wilderness as we prepare next week to encounter the ghost of Christmas present. Amen.

One of the Best Pitching Lines Ever

2011-12-02T05:00:00.000-08:00

This is one of the best pitching lines of all time. It comes from the Charleston River Dogs, the low-A affliate of the New York Yankees, from July 1 of this year:

Mark Montgomery, RHP: 1 IP, 2 H, 1 R, 1 ER, 0 BB, 5 K, 2 WP

In case you don't understand, Mark pitched one inning, gave up two hits, one run, and struck out five (striking out three gets you out of the inning). It's the last number of 2 wild pitches that makes the difference.

This is one of the things that makes baseball the best sport because you never know what you are going to see, even something that seems impossible like recording five outs in an inning.

One Nation Under God

2011-12-01T09:59:00.000-08:00

As we were driving home last week from our Thanksgiving trip, I saw a billboard on the side of the highway that said simply "One nation under God." This statement always makes me nervous for many reasons. The first is the conflating of nationalism with religion, which doesn't usually have positive outcomes. The second is that what this truly means is up for wide interpretation, which led me to a new thought.

Those who seem to push this idea the most these days don't seem to be asking for "one nation" but instead "my nation." That is that anyone who doesn't agree with their narrow view are the other, the outsider, non-Americans, and are welcome to be anywhere else then here. This view shuts down all dissent and differences of opinion. It seeks to make "unum" not by consensus or dialogue but by ignoring, or worse silencing, those with whom they disagree.

Of course, one the scripture passages usually accompanying this is from the 33rd psalm which says "Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord," but for some reason the next verse is always left off which says "the people whom he has chosen as his heritage." The way I read this is that it is God who does the choosing not us.

Anytime someone says that there is only one way to be or to think, whether it is conservatives or liberals, then the way has been lost.

Who's Your Doggy?

2011-11-29T07:55:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 13:24-37:

Every Thanksgiving morning when I was growing up my brother and I would get up and go into my parent’s bedroom and climb into bed with them and together we would all watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade all the way until Santa Clause appeared, which was the best part because that was the official beginning of the Christmas season and the time when we could begin playing Christmas music. That is one of my fondest childhood memories. As an adult, it is also one of the traditions I have tried to keep alive.

Even this year when we were at the Grand Canyon we watched the parade in our hotel room. Linda and I have also gone to New York to see the parade with the girls twice, although they do not remember going. Now, following the parade broadcast, NBC shows the National Dog Show. Since Linda and I have begun our own traditions for Thanksgiving, it has included watching the dog show as well. Now, if you can disregard the overt racism that comes with and was very much a part of the founding of kennel clubs and dog breeding which seeks to create the perfect breed and to make sure that the breed remains pure, if you can disregard all of those facts, dog shows can be fun to watch. But, you may be wondering, what in the world do dog shows or the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade have anything to do with the first Sunday of advent or the scripture that was read this morning?

Traditionally the minister has been seen and talked about as being the shepherd to the flock. I’m the shepherd and you’re the flock. This has been the symbolism both metaphorically and also literally for a long time. Ministers will often refer to having to take care of their flock, congregations often use the same type of language, and the Pope and even our bishops carry a shepherd’s crook. We are supposed to be the shepherd guiding and keeping the flock safe. However, this is an image that has always bugged me and as the scripture this morning illustrates, it is actually incorrect.

The minister is not the shepherd, nor is the district superintendent, the bishop or even the Pope the shepherd. I understand what a powerful image the leader of the congregation as shepherd is, and I can see how it became part of the tradition. But, the simple fact is, it is wrong. I am not the shepherd; God is the shepherd. Now scripture is full of shepherd imagery, but it is nearly always God who is the shepherd not someone else. As the 23^rd Psalm says, “The Lord is my shepherd….”, or as we are told in Matthew, that Jesus had compassion for the people because they “were like sheep without a shepherd.” So first of all we need to remove the idea of the minister as shepherd from our thinking. But, if the minister is not the shepherd then what are we?

Many of you will have already figured this out from the title of this message; if God is the shepherd, and you are the flock, then the minister must be the sheep dog. Now, I really wish I could take some credit for the idea, but it is not original to me. Several years ago a friend of mine was appointed to a church in the middle of the year, after the minister there was indicted. This was a congregation that had a history of troublesome ministerial appointments, and so for her first Sunday at the church, in order to give her some adjustment time, the daughter of one the members of the congregation gave the sermon. She wanted to talk about what had happened to the church, about its future, about its obligations to itself and about moving on. In order to help illustrate her point, she talked about how ministers were a lot like dogs and dog shows and I loved the analogy and thought it would be great to try and pass some of it on to you.

There are currently more than 150 different breeds recognized by the American Kennel Club, and there must be at least than many different types of ministers, but all of them will fall into certain types of categories. The first category, and one we’ve probably all seen before, is the show dog. The show dog is most concerned with the appearance of things. It wants to be groomed and primped and showered with praise. It wants everything to be just right, to have everything in its place as it were. As a result, everything looks beautiful, most especially the show dog, and this is very impressive to behold and many people are won over by this display.

Unfortunately, even though it looks as if this work is being done for those who are witnessing the event that is actually a deceptive appearance because everything is about the dog. The dog is the most important thing. I don’t know how many people have had ministers like this, but you’ve almost certainly seen one of them on television. All the energies of the minister and also of the congregation go into feeding the ego of the minister. Everything that is done, even the good and beneficial things, are all ultimately done for one purpose: To make the minister look good.

Now, there are some benefits to having a show dog as a minister because their desire to be recognized and to be the best in show invariably helps to bring attention to the church, and people will come to someplace that is getting attention. The show dog might help to put butts in the seats, as they say, but ultimately, because they are so consumed with themselves, they can do little to make sure that the flock is being properly cared for. Little hurts are caused and ignored which eventual become open wounds which injure the community. But, by the time this happens the show dog has usually moved on because there is always a bigger and better show to move go to.

The next category of dogs is known as the toy dog, or as I like to refer to them “yip dogs.” In real life this category includes Chihuahuas and dogs like that. Now I’ll admit my bias against these types of dogs by saying that any dog that can fit in a woman’s purse is not a real dog. These dogs tend to have lots of energy and run around barking, trying to imitate real dogs and in that sense they can be cute and certainly there are lots of people who are attracted to this sort of dog. But, my obvious bias aside, they are supposed to make wonderful pets, especially for families and those living in the cities. They are loving and friendly to everyone and can climb and sit on you lap, giving them their other moniker, lap dogs.

Ministers who take after toy dogs spend lots of time running around, being ultra friendly and talking a lot. Again this is very appealing to some people because it looks like they are doing a lot of work. They are also certainly friendly enough and who does want a very friendly minister? But there are several problems with this type of minister. The first is that there is a big difference between looking busy and actually doing work. The expenditure of energy does not necessarily indicate that any work is actually getting done.

The second problem with yip dogs lies in their friendliness. For you see, there is a solid rule for clergy that is little discussed outside of the ministry: The minister is not a member of the flock. Ministers and congregants are different. I can never be one of you. I will always be the minister no matter what we are doing, I can never separate from that role. Now there are certainly ministers who violate this code, who try and be just one of the sheep, but this is almost always to the detriment of the minister and most importantly to the detriment of the congregation. When these boundaries are crossed bad things tend to happen.

Now I am not saying that the minister shouldn’t be friendly and likable, because that is certainly not the case. Nor does this mean that the minister shouldn’t love each and every member of the congregation, because that is the case because most importantly, we are the guardians and have to treat each and every member of the flock the same, no matter if you are a white sheep or a black sheep. We cannot show favoritism based upon whom we like or dislike. We are obviously human, and this is very hard to do because clearly there are going to be members of the congregation that we get along with and those that we don’t. But that is the very problem. A minister has to provide their services to all regardless of how they feel about them, and therefore they cannot show signs of favoritism. In times of crisis and times of joy, the minister needs to be able to convey the love of God for all and to all.

The final category is that of the working dog. Now this is a fairly wide category and will include the majority of pastors with whom you will ever have to deal, but there are also still some specific types within this group. First, there is working dog who doesn’t really want to work, or more blatantly, the lazy dog. The one who seems to spend their time lounging in the sun while the flock does whatever it wants to do. They tend to be those who are burned out or those who, for whatever reason, seem to be there simply to collect the paycheck and await retirement. But caution must be made when deciding if the sheep dog is lazy or not, because there are also those who appear to be lazy who aren’t.

Like with the toy dogs who seem to be always busy but who are getting little done, just because the dog is laying down at the side of the flock does not mean that he is not ever alert, watchful and doing a lot of work. It is entirely possible that they are getting a lot of the work done that needs to be done when the flock is not paying attention. But a good watch dog usually makes sure that the flock sees the work they are doing, not only to stop this sort of thinking, but also to let others, who might be a threat to the flock, know that the dog is ever vigilante as well as to let other sheep know that there is a good dog working with the flock.

The second type of working dog might be known as the point dog. This is the type of dog who, wanting to get a flock moving, goes out front and then turns around and starts barking in order to get the flock going. When the flock doesn’t move, they’ll take a few more steps forward in order to show the way and then start barking even more. When the flock still doesn’t move, they will then run back right in front of the flock and start barking a lot. This is type of minister who will use a lot of shoulds, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. The problem is, as one person so eloquently told me, people don’t like being should upon and many will leave the flock when they feel they are getting too much should. Of course the sheep dog in this situation is not in any position to do anything about it because they are so far out in front they can’t stop those at the back from leaving. The dog doesn’t understand what has gone wrong because he was only trying to lead the flock to better pastures, and the flock doesn’t understand why dog let so many other sheep get away, leaving resentment on both sides.

But, the best working dogs take combinations of all of the positive attributes and combine them. The best watch dog stands at the side when things are going well in order to survey the entire scene, but also to let the flock do its own thing. The flock has responsibilities to take care of itself as well. A good sheep dog not only lets the sheep do what they are supposed to be doing but also helps facilitate those things the sheep need to take ownership for, including bringing more sheep into the flock. One of the primary misconceptions about getting new sheep into the flock is that it is up to the sheep dog. But here’s a simple lesson in biology, sheep dogs cannot make new sheep, only sheep can make sheep. The sheep dog certainly plays a role in being able to get more sheep because they provide security, comfort and stability and they help move the flock to where the shepherd is calling them for the health of the flock, but by themselves sheep dogs cannot make more sheep.

The good sheep dog should spend his days wandering among the flock, checking on all of them, keeping them from straying to far and making sure they are content as a flock. The sheep dog does not care whether you are a white sheep or a black sheep, whether you stay firmly with the flock or whether you are more prone to become a stray. The dog doesn’t care because the shepherd doesn’t care. The shepherd has no particular favorites but loves each and every sheep exactly for whom and what they are, white wool, black wool, or no wool at all.

Now occasionally the flock will need to move in order to find better pastures. One of the problems with sheep, and other grazing animals, is that if they are not moved from time to time then they will destroy the pasture where they are. Now many sheep will be hesitant to move and some even resistant because they don’t see anything wrong and more importantly they remember how good the pasture has been to them. They remember how green it used to be and how much grass there was and they think if only we can bring that pasture back then everything will be fine. Now certainly, the sheep figure, they can’t have that old pasture again if they leave it, so they don’t want to leave. But the simple fact is, sometimes in order to regain the abundance of the past, in order to regain a thick grass on which to feed and which other sheep would like to join, the flock needs to move. And it takes a good sheep dog to know how to do this.

A good sheep dog will pick out a few of the sheep and get them moving forward, for the flock is always more likely to follow other sheep then they are some foolish dog. Once those sheep are moving, and this may require some barking, the sheep dog will move among the rest of the flock cajoling here and there, barking some and sometimes maybe even nipping at some heels in order to get the rest of the flock going forward. The dog will also make sure the flock is moving in the right direction, all under the instruction of the shepherd, and working from the back and the sides to make this happen. The flock will follow the sheep leading at the front, and the dog will keep those at the back moving with them. That is how a good dog operates, with the entirety of the flock in its mind and always looking for ways to make the flock stronger on their own. The more the flock can do for itself the better off the flock is going to be, for there is only so much that one dog can do.

Now obviously I hope that I am more like the last dog then the others, but the reality is that every minister has a little of all of these types in us. There are times when I will be a little show doggy, although that makes me very uncomfortable, I know there are times when I will want to be the point dog, but I hope I spend most of my time as the last one, working within the flock, inviting the leaders in the flock to provide the movement and direction, nipping where necessary to get everyone moving but letting the flock do what only the flock can do best. Because here is the most simple truth about sheep dogs, we come and go. The only constant is the flock and the love and presence of the shepherd.

The shepherd will never leave or go away, and the shepherd cares more for and about this flock then even the best sheep dog ever can. The strength, the endurance, the vitality, the spirit, the essence, the life and the future of any flock does not reside with sheep dog; it resides in the sheep and their relationship to the shepherd. The sheep dog will always exist outside the flock and they are always prone to change. The only constant is the flock itself, and that is where the power of any church lies. It resides in the flock, in each individual member and in their trust in the shepherd. So this week as we enter the season of advent, as we prepare to again celebrate the incarnation of God in the birth of Jesus, the greatest gift we can receive, let us remember that God is the shepherd, the guide, the light of the world who shows us the way. May it be so my sisters and brothers. Amen.

Kids Say The Darndest Thing, Thanksgiving Edition

2011-11-23T04:00:00.000-08:00

My oldest daughter, who is in kindergarten, was learning this week about Thanksgiving, and asked me what happened to the Mayflower. I told her I thought it had sailed back to England, but didn't know. When I asked her what she knew about the Mayflower, she told me what she could remember.

I then told her she should tell her teacher that she is a descendant of a signer of the Mayflower Compact, thinking this might impress her and give her something to brag about, to which she replied "can I also tell her that I have the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving DVD and that if you go all the way to the bottom on the menu you can watch the Mayflower cartoon?" Yes you can...

Turkey Talk

2011-11-22T05:00:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 6:24-34:

I’m sure that all of us have some story about Thanksgiving dinner not going quite right, but whatever stories we might have, I think that Mary Clingman can beat us. For you see, Mary has been a receiving calls on the Butterball Turkey hotline for more than 30 years. She recounts the time that a woman called and asked what she needed to do differently to cook the turkey at high altitudes, when asked how high she was, the caller said, the 32^nd floor. Or there was the woman who called to say that her kitchen was on fire and wanted to know what to do, she was told to hang up and dial 911. Then there was the person who called and asked if the yellow netting and wrapping should be removed before cooking. The answer was yes.

But I have to say my favorite was the man who called to ask if their frozen turkey was still good. When asked how long they had had it, he said it was at least five years, but they couldn’t really remember. Had it always been kept frozen, she asked, no, he said, they had moved once and then there was the time that the freezer stopped working, so it had probably at least partially defrosted a couple of times, after being told him that the turkey probably was not good and should be discarded. The man said that’s what he had figured, so he was glad he had given it to a charity.

Today in the church we celebrate both Christ the King Sunday, which is the last Sunday of the Christian year, and the reason we opened with “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name”, and is is also the Sunday in which we celebrate Thanksgiving. This is always a day that I find tough to do because people often want you to try and do both, to cover Christ the King and Thanksgiving, and do both well, but that’s nearly impossible. So instead of doing both, it has been my policy to switch each year, and this year we celebrate Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving is a strange holiday, for it is not a holiday that people seem to spend a lot of time thinking about or concentrating on. There are not special stores that pop up to sell things specifically for the day, and there is no special candy. Even the marshmallow peep company which seems to make peeps for almost everything these days does not have a Thanksgiving peep. Nor is there any sort of quasi mystical mascot accompanying Thanksgiving. Maybe this is because it’s sandwiched between Halloween and Christmas, two big holidays, maybe it’s because most kids don’t get really excited about eating a lot of turkey, although having the extra days off from school is sure nice, so no one really focuses their attention on the day. In an article she wrote Kathleen Bergeron said that Thanksgiving is almost the forgotten holiday.

Outside of travel arrangements, and some people who fuss over everything, we just simply don’t spend a lot of time thinking about it or preparing for it, and yet in many ways it is one of the dominant holidays. It is the busiest travel holiday of the year, surpassing even Christmas, with airfares running as much as four times the average cost, which indicates that of all of the holidays it is the one that most families will be together for. Maybe that’s why some of us try and forget it because if we thought about all the time we will have to spend time with our families we would either be miserable or go insane. In doing a search for stories about family fights at Thanksgiving, I came across this post from Ann, who lives in she said “Thanksgiving horror stories? I have none. I find the key to family holiday success is buying as much wine as you think you need, and then doubling it.”

While I don’t think Jesus really had Thanksgiving in mind when he gave today’s passage, it certainly can apply. Matthew places this lesson as part of the Sermon on the Mount. Although the teaching is also included in Luke, he places it much later in Jesus’ ministry. I have also expanded what the lectionary calls for by including the line prior to the main passage about not being able to worship both God and mammon, and then closing with the passage telling us not to worry about tomorrow. I did this because I believe those two lines are crucial to understand what Jesus is trying to tell us, and because it also builds on what we have been covering for the past three weeks.

Now, we often throw out the line about not being able to love God and money as a claim about the problems of wealth. And it is, but it is about more than that, as we see by the passage that immediately follows. This line wasn’t meant to apply just to those who have wealth, but even to those who are poor because the desire to have wealth and things is just as damaging as actually having those things. It is in thinking that only if we have one more thing then we will be truly happy. Indeed, American Capitalism is based almost solely these days on the massive spending that we do on things that we are told that we “need.”

Now in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the lowest level are those things we need to survive, food, shelter, security, but that is exactly what Jesus is talking about. Jesus does not say don’t worry about how we’re going to be able to afford the vacation house or a television for the garage. Instead he says don’t worry about we are going to eat, or drink or wear. And notice that he does not say if you are worried about these things, meaning that some worry and some don’t, instead he assumes that we are worried about these things. These concerns may not seem all that important to most of us, but remember that for the majority of Jesus’ listeners they often did not know where their next meal was coming from. When we say the Lord’s Prayer, which precedes today’s passage by just a few verses, and ask for God to give us this day our daily bread, it was not just some idle request being made, nor should it be an idle request now. It is to put our reliance on God that God will provide what we needed, which is what today’s scripture is about.

In one of my favorite lines from the movie Mary Poppins, after the children, Jane and Michael, tell the bank manager, wonderfully played by Dick Van Dyke, that they don’t want to put their money into the bank but instead use it to buy food for the birds, and the manager tells them “fiddlesticks, feed the birds and what have you got? Lazy birds.” I think sometimes we read these passages as if Jesus is saying that all we have to do is sit back and do nothing and God will give us what we need. But that is not what is being said. In fact, Jesus says that we must strive, but we are not striving for food or clothing. It is the gentiles, Jesus says, who strive for the things of the world, who feel that they need more things to be happy. But, this always leads us to needing more and more because these things will never make us truly happy and if we are constantly trying to accumulate then we will always be worried about when we will have enough, and of course we will never have enough.

Instead we are first to strive for the kingdom of God, and then all these things will be given to us we are told. There is effort and diligence required on our part, but effort and diligence directed in the proper way. One commentator remarked “the call is for radical trust and single-minded service. That which is uncompromisingly primary is orienting one’s life to the approaching reign of God. After all, life is qualified by what one seeks. If relative, created values are made absolute, then there is no release from anxiety with their attainment.” That is what Jesus is telling us. When we focus on our wants and our needs then we begin to worry about things which are beyond our control and that leads us away from following God. Worry does not solve any problems or help us overcome our difficulties. Often worry serves the opposite of what it is intended to do and becomes a stumbling block for us, because instead of focusing on what is truly important in our lives, we become dominated by our worries. They become our god. Worry does nothing but create doubt and uncertainty; it distracts us from more important matters and paralyzes us from doing what needs to be done.

In Viktor Frankl’s book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl, a survivor of the holocaust, wrote about one afternoon when the men had all walked back to their barracks after their day’s labor. They were laying in their beds, exhausted and sick after having spent the day in a cold rain. Suddenly, he says, one of the men ran into the barracks and shouted for the others to come outside. Reluctant to leave their beds, but hearing the urgency in the man’s voice, they staggered outside. They found that the rain had stopped, and although dark heavy clouds still hung in the sky, the sun had broken through and was reflecting on the puddles of water on the floor of the courtyard. “We stood there,” Frankl said, “marveling at the goodness of the creation. We were tired and cold and sick, we were starving to death, we had lost our loved ones and never expected to see them again, yet there we stood, feeling a sense of reverence as old and formidable as the world itself.”

There were obviously lots of things that Frankl and his other prisoners could be worried about and focused on, and they were, until someone brought them out of it and they stood in awe at the beauty of creation. Can Thanksgiving be that moment for us? It can be, but we have to decide to make it so. According to Dr. James Barton, “it is known that about one half of the patients consulting a physician have no organic disease....” Instead, he says, “the cause of the symptoms is tenseness or worry, strain, and fatigue… [all of which] can affect the workings of all the organs of the body.” In other words, worrying can literally make you sick.

On the other hand, in an experiment at the University of Michigan, researchers found that students who kept a “gratitude journal,” a weekly record of things they feel grateful for, achieved better physical health, were more optimistic, exercised more regularly and described themselves as happier than a control group of students who kept no journals but had the same overall measures of health, optimism, and exercise when the experiment began.

In another study researchers found that people who describe themselves as feeling grateful to others, and either to God or to creation in general, tended to have higher vitality and more optimism, suffer less stress, and experience fewer episodes of clinical depression than the population as a whole. This result held even when researchers factored out such things as age, health, and income – equalizing for the fact that the young, the well-to-do, or the hale and hearty may have more to be grateful for. In other words, expressing gratitude can not only make you happier but can make you healthier. No wonder Jesus tells us to be like the birds and lilies of the fields.

Now I know that Thanksgiving celebrations can add to our stress levels, but they need not. Remember why it is that you are gathering together, wherever that may be, and stop for a time to relax and reflect. In order to help prepare you, I would like you to take out your green daily Bible reading insert, if you haven’t already, and we’re going to spend a few moments writing down some of the things we give thanks to God for on the backside where we can write down the things we will like to remember from today’s service. We are not giving thanks for things, because that places the emphasis on the object, whatever it is, but instead we are giving thanks to God who provides for us. So instead of saying, I am thankful for my home, which can take on the tone of saying thank you that I am not one of the homeless, we say instead, Thank you God for the shelter that you have provided me, and I ask you to help all those today who do not have a place to call their own. Or you might say, I thank you God for the friends and family who surround me with their love and their care, and remember those who feel alone or isolated and ask that your love might be felt by them. So take out your paper, begin your thanksgiving journal by writing down one or two things you want to give thanks to God for...

Jesus calls us to move away from what our culture says is important into a life of trust and obedience. Away from worrying and being obsessed with the mights and coulds in our lives, to striving first for the kingdom of God; striving away from putting our dependence on ourselves or other things and instead putting our reliance on God. So do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will bring worries of its own. Let us strive for the kingdom and let us take the time to give thanks to God. Thanks be to God sisters and brothers. Amen.

Fit To Be Tithed

2011-11-15T11:31:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Mark 12:38-44:

One Sunday a minister was working on getting his congregation fired up about doing God’s work in the world. “If this church is going to serve God it’s got to get down on its knees and crawl.” And the congregation, being actively engaged in the sermon, yelled back “make it crawl preacher, make it crawl.” And then the minister yelled “and once this church has learned to crawl, it’s got to get up on its feet and learn to walk.” And the congregation yelled back “make it walk preacher, make it walk.” And then the minister said “and once this church has learned how to walk, then it’s got to learn how to run.” And the congregation yelled back “make it run preacher, make it run.” And then he concluded with “and in order for this church to run, its got to reach deep down into its pockets and learn to give.” And then there was a pause, and someone yelled out “make it crawl preacher, make it crawl.”

Today is the third and concluding sermon in our series on money, which is based roughly on a series created by Dave Ramsey entitled Faith, Hope and Money, and it is the day in which we cover everyone’s favorite topic, giving. Now as you have already heard me say, the church makes a terrible mistake when it reduces stewardship to simply being about giving to the church. It is a mistake which hurts the church and it hurts you, because even if you are tithing, which means giving ten percent of your income, then you still have 90% more to worry about, and the church tends to ignore that even though the scriptures have a lot to say about money and possessions, and it’s about a lot more than just the contributions you put into the offering plate. The Bible deals with issues of money more than 800 times, and Jesus talks about more than he talks about just about anything else.

So for the past two weeks we have been looking at how to get our financial houses in order. I have been closing each week with a passage from Proverbs which says, “The plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to want.” The steps we have worked through together are the first steps to lead us to diligence, to financial diligence. In the first sermon we talked about the need to save. Does anyone remember what the three reasons are to save? Emergencies, purchases, and to build wealth particularly for retirement. And in order to make sure you are putting money into savings every single month what are you supposed to do? Pay yourself first. You pay yourself first because if you wait until the end of the month and then take out whatever is left I can assure you it won’t be there. We spend the money we have, but if we never see it then we can’t touch it.

Last week, in part two, we talked about the need to track all of our money, to set financial goals and to create a monthly budget. The median household in America will bring in more than 2 million dollars over forty years. In order to be good stewards of those resources we need to know where all the money is going and then to say what our money is going to do for us. We work hard for our money so our money should be working hard for us. Jesus says that you cannot serve two masters, you cannot serve both God and mammon, so instead of serving our money, which is how most of us operate, when we budget, track all income and expenditures, save, give and create financial goals which give us direction and a target, when we do those things then we are telling our money where it is going and we control it, it does not control us. When we are masters of our money, instead of focusing all of our attention, our energy, our frustrations, our stress, on financial concerns then we can instead focus everything we do and have on our relationship with God and what God is calling us to do. When we are masters of our money, then we can fully make God the master of our lives.

Now many of you have said to me that they wish they had heard this message 50, 60 or even 70 years ago, but as I said in the first sermon, it is never too late to start practicing financial diligence. If you are still alive then you can be doing these things. But even if you think it’s too late for most things, then talk with your children or grandchildren or great-grandchildren about financial matters. You will also probably be one of the few adults in their life who will actually talk with them about money, which will surprise them, because money is one of those things we normally don’t talk about. But you know what will be even more important? Rather than telling them, show them through your own actions. We learn a lot more about how to deal with money and what money means through how we see those who are important interacting with their money. Model this behavior for them and they will follow. If you tell a child about the dangers of credit card debt, but they see you using your credit card all the time, which lesson do you think they are going to follow? We need to learn how to be good stewards and we need to teach others how to be good stewards.

So what does that mean? A steward is an old English term; in feudal Europe a person of wealth would entrust all of his property to his steward to manage on his behalf. The steward did not own the property, it belonged to lord, the steward was merely entrusted to manage it all for its proper owner. So the first step to understanding what it means to be a good steward is to also understand that the resources are not ours to begin with that they belong to God. We are merely entrusted with them, we are God’s stewards. If we are to truly think of ourselves in this way it should change everything we do with our money as well as how we view our money.

The first thing that needs to change is how we view what we have so that we move from a position of scarcity, that we never have enough, instead to a position of abundance, that God has provided what we need. This change does not change how much money we have but it instead changes our entire perspective on our resources. If when we are working with our money we have ever said, “we can’t afford that,” which I’ve certainly said before, then we are working from a position of scarcity. Instead we should say “I am choosing to spend my money differently,” because that is working from a position of abundance. Has the reality changed any? No, but the perspective has changed completely, and if you want to teach a powerful message to your children, this is one of the first places to start.

When we work from a position of scarcity, then we act from a position of fear, and worse we are letting our money control us. When we say ‘we can’t afford this” our money is making our decisions for us, and we are serving another master. But, when we say “we choose to spend our money differently,” then we are now the ones in control. We are the ones saying where our money will and will not go so that our money relies on us we do not rely on our money. God does not work from a position of scarcity, nor does God give from a position of scarcity, and neither should we. We need to realign our thinking to a position of abundance, and when we operate from a position of abundance and when we are in control of our money we will find that we have more than enough.

The second thing that changes when we see everything as belonging to God is our view of giving, and this changes because, as Dave Ramsey says, it’s always much easier to give away someone else’s money than it is to give away your own. In my preparation for this series, I did quite a bit of study, and all of the financial planners I read and listened to said that one of the keys to getting your finances in order and under control was sort of counter-intuitive. In order to get our spending and finances under control we need to be giving some of it away. In addition, they all said that just like with your savings that the amount you give should come out first thing, to give away first. In the church we say that this is giving of your first fruits. We give off the first of the harvest and then we work with what remains. Now some of these financial planners, like Dave Ramsey, are overtly Christian, but most were not, but all of them advocated giving because of the impact it would make on us and the way it would change us.

In today’s passage, typically referred to as the story of the widow’s mite Jesus’ highlights the gift given by the widow. Even though Jesus’ says the other gave out of their abundance, that is they gave because they thought they had enough to give, the widow gives, in Jesus’ words, “out of her poverty.” But I would argue that the woman too gives out of her abundance because she understands that even with little, that she has been blessed by God, and so she is giving back a portion of what God has given. She is in fact giving from abundance. She is not holding tightly onto what she has, saying she doesn’t have enough to give, instead she gives because it is in her to give and she knows and trusts that God will provide. She is giving out of abundance, and she is also giving sacrificially, just as Jesus does. We need to be givers because we are made in the image of God and God is a giver. What does the 16th verse of the 3rd chapter of John say? “For God so loved the world that he gave his only son….” God is a giver.

Now in reading about other reasons why we should give, some people will tell you that if you give that you will receive back multiples of your money in return. While I agree in principle with this idea, I fundamentally reject the premise that this is the reason to give. I reject it because that is to turn giving into an investment practice, which is fundamentally the wrong way to view giving, because that makes it all about you. Now that does not mean that we do not receive anything from giving, because we do, but often what we receive is simply the blessings that come from operating in the world with an open hand rather than a closed fist. If you approach a dog with a closed fist, what will it do? A closed fist is a universal sign of anger, and when we are not giving, when we are clinging on to everything we have, when we are hording, then we approach the world with a closed fist. But instead, when we give we have to open up our hand and present just the palm. What happens when you approach a dog with an open hand? The world responds to an open hand exactly the same way. Giving fundamentally changes the way we approach the world and the way the world responds to us.

Now we are told in scripture that we are to be giving and to give of our first fruits, and the amount identified for giving is 10% of your income. This is referred to as a tithe, because tithe is the Greek word for a tenth. These injunctions, to tithe and give our your first fruits, are found throughout the scriptures. Now, my grandfather always said that you needed to give 10% of your income in order to get into heaven, and maybe some of you have heard that as well. But, just like I reject the idea that the reason to give is in order to receive, I also reject the idea that we need to give to get into heaven. I don’t believe that God works that way.

If you believe that in order to get into heaven you have to tithe, then that means that you have to give. But let me tell you what I believe, even though the finance committee doesn’t like to hear such things, I don’t believe that we have to put one single solitary penny into this collection plate in order to get into heaven. Not a single solitary penny is required from us. We are offered eternal life because of the love of God and because of the price that Christ paid on the cross. God’s love, grace and mercy is greater than anything we could ever possible afford even if we were to give everything we have. The price for eternal life has already been paid! This cross is the receipt! This cross represents the cost of eternal life and it has already been paid for for you and for me. We don’t have to give anything to the church.

The church, our faith, our salvation are not mere commodities that can simply be bought or sold. These are not like a can of green beans or a pound of hamburger upon which a price can be set. Only you can decide what the correct level of giving. If you decide that this church is worth $500 a year to you, there is absolutely nothing and no one from stopping you from giving $500. You will still be able to walk through the door, you still get to sing all the same songs, even the ones you don’t know, you can still seek out the services of the minister, you can still attend any of the events the church hosts, and you still get to serve on committees.
Although now that I think about it, maybe we should come up with a plan directly related to committee service. The more money you give the fewer committee meetings you have to sit through. That might definitely get some positive response.

We don’t have to give anything. Instead, and you knew that was coming, we GET to give, and this is a big difference. It may seem like mere semantics, but there is a big difference between being obligated to do something and having the free choice to do it. Giving to the church is a choice, and one that I do think will impact your spiritual life and your relationship with God. In fact, the quickest and easiest way to increase your giving, and the way that every church should advocate, is through deepening your relationship with Jesus Christ. If you’ve been attending for a while you’ve heard me talk a lot about being on fire with the Holy Spirit, and if you are on fire then you can’t help but give.

When you are, as Dave Ramsey says, “a sold out believer,” then you will give naturally because you can’t imagine doing anything else. It will be something that we can’t control and we will give and give generously, we will be like the widow in today’s passage, because we are committed to this church and its mission, and we are committed to the gospel message, that is the good news, and believe that it should continue to be spread so that others can also experience the joy and love that we have felt through our relationship with God.

In the coming weeks you will be receiving in the mail a letter talking about the financial needs of this congregation for the year 2012, along with an estimate of giving card I know that you have not done this in the past, but we as a church are also working on becoming diligent in our financial practices and we need you to help us to do that. So to help us create our budget for next year, to know how much money we have to expend so we can create an accurate budget for the coming year, we are asking you to turn in your estimate of giving card so that we can be good stewards of the money with which we are entrusted. But, as we all begin to think about next year’s giving, here is where I throw down the gauntlet: I would like to challenge us to become a tithing congregation. That would of course mean that we as individuals are tithing to the church, but I would like to extend that to the church proper as well. You are already tithing each week’s offering to pay our mission shares to the conference, and I strongly applaud that, but I would also challenge us to tithe, to give ten percent, of our pledges to mission and outreach in the community as well.

Ultimately what we give to this church is between us and God, we can give nothing or we can begin tithing. The choice is ours. But I do ask that you at least begin the process of evaluating what this congregation, what the greater church and what your relationship with God means to you. If you find that your commitment to God, to this congregation, or your giving is not what you would like it to be I ask you to take this time to begin to change it. If you decide you’re quite happy with the way everything is, then you can also continue keeping the status quo, but I do ask that you take the time to at least consider it.

By giving freely and generously of ourselves we are making both a commitment and a statement about the importance of this church and God in our lives. We are making a commitment and a statement that Jesus Christ’s life, death and resurrection are meaningful and important to us. We are making a commitment and a statement that we think that the gospel should continue to be spread so that others can also experience the joy and love that we have felt through our relationship with God. And most importantly we are making a commitment and a statement that God is the most important thing in our lives, because we are putting God first before everything else.

I would like to close with a story told by retired Bishop Susan Morrison about an event she witnessed in Zimbabwe. She was preaching in a very poor rural church, but remembers the offering as the high point of her time there. She said the pastor prayed with fervent passion and excitement that God would lead people to give an offering that would be a living expression of the way God loves the world. As the collection plates were passed around the congregation, she noticed that the plate stopped at one of the women who held it and looked at it for a while. She then stood up and walked out into the isle, and placed the collection plate on the ground. Then, said Bishop Morrison, in the most stunning gesture of radical giving she had ever witnessed, the woman stepped into the plate. When you consider what your giving will be to this church for the coming year, I ask you to keep this story in mind and to consider prayerfully and deliberately what your relationship with God and with this congregation means to you, and to make the appropriate response in your giving as well.

We are called to be proper stewards of our resources, or more properly to be proper stewards of God’s resources. Hopefully if you are not already doing so we are now beginning to take the steps towards financial diligence. Dave Ramsey closes his radio program each time by saying, “There is ultimately only one way to financial peace, and that is to walk daily with the Price of Peace, Christ Jesus.” May it be so. Amen.

Could Someone Explain the Irony to Cars.com

2011-11-11T08:08:00.000-08:00

In the wake of the events at Penn State over the past week (which I will write about soon) Cars.com has pulled their sponsorship of the television coverage of the next two Penn State games. They are doing this because they don't want to be seen as being affiliated with what has happened at Penn State.

Here is the great irony of this. Cars.com has several advertisements that are completely demeaning to women. In one, cars are reading reviews about themselves, and we are told that "Sheila looks great topless" and "Mary, has a big rear end." Another car is told that his ride is "exceedingly smooth" to which he says "did you hear that Sheila?"

So, Cars.com runs ads in which statements are made to and about women that would get you fired for sexual harassment in just about any workplace in America today, but they don't want to be associated with what is happening at Penn State.

I don't think that Cars.com can exactly take the moral high ground on this situation, and I sincerely hope that people who have a lot more say and followers than I do will begin to point this out.

What's In Your Wallet?

2011-11-08T11:26:00.000-08:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The passage was Matthew 25:1-13:

Today we continue with the second part of our sermon series on finances which is based roughly on a series created by Dave Ramsey entitled Faith, Hope and Money. Last week we talked about the need to save. But, even though I told you why saving is important, I didn’t really talk about how we are supposed to do it, and so this week we are going to talk about goal setting, budgeting and how we find money to save. Now I know that this sermon series is very different than what you’ve ever heard, because I am getting a lot more concrete than most sermons about money ever do, and there is a reason for that. Quite simply, many people don’t know what they should be doing or what the implications are if they don’t do these things, so I want to make this as practical as possible. I think this is one of the areas in which the church has failed because our finances are important. They drive just about everything we do and don’t do, and the scriptures have a lot to say about these things, remember Jesus talked more about money than he did about almost anything else, and if I can change just one of your financial lives for the better then I will have accomplished something.

In my first real job out of high school I was making $6 an hour, for an amazing $12,000 a year. I had never made so much money. Two years later I was in management for the same company, and instead of $12,000, I was now making nearly $35,000 a year. What happened with me, and what happens with most people, is that this change in my income level only meant that I had a lot more now to spend. I did not put any of this into savings or into retirement instead my standard of living simply increased in order to match my new economic reality. Well, long story short, I did not listen to the advice I gave last week about saving and the power of compound interest, because I did not know that information, nor did anyone tell me what I should be doing with my money, instead it went in and then quickly went back out again, and to be honest I can’t say where it went. I did end up with a very nice CD and video collection, which I ended up selling in garage sales for a dollar a piece, but it was not $23,000 worth of those things.

Not happy with what I was doing, I accepted a new job in Santa Fe, where I cut my pay almost in half while simultaneously doubling my cost of living expenses, and I quickly racked up $10,000 on my credit cards. I began working a second job to help pay the bills, but instead of getting ahead, I just kept getting further and further behind. So, wanting to try and end the cycle, I went to my credit union and took out a loan to pay off my credit cards, because it was better to be paying 7% on the loan than the 14%+ I was paying on the credit cards.

Now, if I had been smart when I did that I would have cut up my credit cards, but I didn’t. Nor did I make any other changes to my behavior, instead I kept living the same way as I was before, and this time accumulated about $14,000 in credit card debt. And now not only did I have this debt but I still had the loan that I was paying on which paid off my first credit card debt as well. I decided that I had had enough, and so I stopped using my credit cards and with a recommendation from my credit union I contacted a credit counseling service and entered into a debt repayment plan. One of the great myths we tell ourselves is that we would be okay if only we made more money, but it’s not true because without behavior changes to how we are spending money more money will only make the problem worse. 80% of people who win major lottery prizes declare bankruptcy within five years. More money will not solve our problems, instead we need to control the money we have right now.

I am telling you my story this because I know that some of you have also been where I have been, and maybe some of you are there now. I also want you to know that I am not up here as some financial genius who has it all figured out, nor am I here to blame or shame you for where you are financially. More than 70% of people live paycheck to paycheck and a significant portion of these also carry credit card debt. The average household has $15,799 in credit card debt, and the average APR is 14.89%. In total, the US owes 793.1 billion dollars in unsecured debt, 98% of which is credit card, and 2.43 trillion in total debt, which includes mortgages and car loans. The average family with credit card debt paid 21% of their income to servicing their debt. The economic situation of the government is not something unique; instead it mirrors what is going on in our own personal lives. We cannot expect Washington to be good stewards of their resources, to have it all together, when we are not also being good stewards.

I’m sure that most of us have heard this line from proverbs, “train children in the right way, and when old, they will not stray.” But for some reason we don’t continue. The next line should be one of the keys to understanding our finances and what it means to be a good steward, “the rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is the slave of the lender.” Other passages in the Bible also stress the problem with debt, and in particular with the extreme difficulty of getting out of debt once you are there. In passages in Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Nehemiah, we are instructed that every seven years that all debts are to be forgiven, and every forty-nine years, which is the year of jubilee, that everyone who has sold their land, presumably because of financial problems, are to be given their land back. The scriptures are very concerned with debt and the negative consequences that come from going into debt.

And while debt is bad, it is really the interest and fees that are killing us. In 2007, which is the last year I could find numbers for, American paid 116 billion in interest charges, and an additional 20.5 billion in penalty fees. If you were to pay the minimum payment on that average balance of $15,977 at 14.89 %, it would take you 37 years to pay off, and you would pay $24,760 in interest. The average American household will pay more than $600,000 in interest over their lifetime, but most Americans cannot tell you what their current interest rates are. Ignorance is not bliss. “The borrower is slave of the lender.”

Proverbs tells us to “know well the condition of your flocks, and give attention to your herds; for riches do not last forever….” In order to be good stewards we must deal honestly and realistically with our finances. As we discussed last week, for most of us, our money just goes straight into our accounts and then right back out again, and most of us don’t know where most of it goes. So, the first step to getting our financial house in order is to be able to account for every penny that we take in and for every penny that we send out again.

The median household income in America is just slightly over $50,000. So if you are at the median how much money will you earn in a ten year period? That’s right, $500,000. So over twenty years how much money will you earn? That’s right, $1 million. And if you continue making the median over forty years you will see $2 million dollars. Now if you owned a business that saw $2 million in sales and you went to the manager and asked to see the budget or how they were tracking income versus expenses, and you were told that the manager wasn’t doing any of those things, let me ask you, would you fire that manager? Of course you would. I have yet to work for any business, even non-profits, that did not create a budget and track it every single month and every single year. Even businesses that have failed tracked their income and expenses and, and yet only 40% of Americans say that they track their expenditures and have a budget. That means that 60% of people are running their finances in a manner that would get them fired from managing any business they worked for. We deserve better.

This is incredibly important for everyone to do, but it is even more important if your finances are tight or you feel like your financial ship is sinking because the only way to stop the water from continuing to pour in is to find the holes in your boat and plug them, and the simple fact is we all have holes in our boat.
So the first task I want you to do, and I’m guessing none of you have ever had homework from your worship service, but I want you to use the quick cash flow register which you will find on a table at the back of the sanctuary sometime this week I want you to write down what you take in and what you spend on a monthly basis. Do not consult your check book or quicken or anything else you might use to track your spending, instead I want you to do it off of the top of your head. If you are married this is the only time I am going to tell you to do this separately. I want each of you to sit down and write it down so that you can understand as a couple where your communication about your finances is breaking down, because in the vast majority of couples one person is responsible for the finances and the other spouse just goes along with what they are told. This will probably be the most eye-opening exercise you will do because most people, regardless of how much they make, usually underestimate their expenses by between $1000 and $1500 dollars, and often people are off by even more. So first, do an estimate of how much you are spending against income.

Your second task for you to do is to track all of your expenditures for one week, accounting for every single penny. I’d like you to do it for more than one week, but we’ll start with that. There is a form on the back table called the Latte Factor which was created by David Bach, and for those of you who are like me and don’t drink coffee, don’t let the name put you off. The purpose is to see where all your money is going. Do not change your behavior so that you look better on the sheet, because if you do that it will not be effective for you. The purpose of these forms is to help you better understand where your money is going and what you might be able to eliminate in order to get better control of your finances. In order to make this effective, you need to be as specific as possible. For example, don’t just write groceries because that might hide a lot of things. Instead itemize or categorize things so you may decide if it’s really important or not, and only you can decide that. We cannot begin to control our spending or increase our saving until we understand our where our money is going, until we are in control of our money then our money will control us.

In proverbs we are told “Where there is no vision, the people will perish.” And so your third form is a goal brainstorming sheet, which will help you do some planning for saving. I want you and your spouse if you are married, to brainstorm your ideas for things you would like to do that require money. Do not be concerned of whether you can afford it or not, do not be concerned if you think it’s a waste of money, that is not what this process is about. Instead, if you’ve thought about doing it then write it down. Then, once you have written all your goals down, go through and mark whether the funding for them is immediate, short-range or long-range. This can be a little confusing, so just remember it’s when you want to be setting money aside, so retirement savings is an immediate goal even though for many it is a long-range plan. Then once you have listed funding ranges, then select three from each category and move them to the back of the sheet. You have now begun to set financial goals which will help you enormously not only in your financial planning but also in making your dreams a reality. If you don’t have a goal in mind then anywhere you end up will be okay, but once you have a target then you know where you are going and what you need to do to get there, and if you are married then maybe for the first time you will be on the same page financially and moving in the same direction.

Now there are some financial planners who say that budgeting is not necessary because they say that people don’t have the time to budget. To me that is, to put it quite bluntly, just plain foolish. In Hebrews we are told, “Now, discipline always seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.” (12:11) It is your money and you work hard to earn it, so you should be working hard to keep it as well, although once you get started it won’t be as hard. Now what other financial planners will tell you is that the reason budgets don’t work for most people is the same reason that diets don’t work because they work on the basis of deprivation, and with that I would agree. The purpose is not to deprive you of anything, but instead to allow you to make decisions about what is important, and what isn’t, and to allocate your resources the way you want to reach your goals. Rather than depriving yourself instead you are working towards something.

But, to make budgeting a little less threatening, some financial planners instead will say you should create a personal spending and savings plan, which sounds nice and also emphasizes the savings part, others will call it a cash flow plan, which also sounds less threatening. You can call your budget plan Steve or Suzie or even your Hawaii fund, call it whatever you want, but you need to start doing it, and to get you started, you will find a quickie budget form. As you work on budgeting it will need to become a little more complex, but not a lot. Don’t make it so difficult that it doesn’t work. And you will need to do a new budget every single month because you will have different expenses every single month, but the more you do it, the more effective it will be for you. So to conclude today’s message, let me give you an illustration which builds in all of today’s lessons.

Jeff Savile is a hair dresser who lives in Seattle. Following a financial planning class he decided that he wanted to keep thing simple and so he came up with two financials goals. “I wanted to go to Hawaii or someplace else where it’s sunny once every year, and I wanted a red Mazda Miata,” he said. Even though he didn’t know how he was going to be able to afford those things when he started, within three months he had his trip paid for and had the down payment for his car. When he was asked how he could have saved so much so quickly, he said, “Listen, I counted up how many lattes I consumed during the day. Six! Six lattes with tips is $12 a day. I spend an average of $5 a day on snacks. I go out for lunch every day and spend about $8 every time. So far, that’s $25 a day. I work six days a week. That adds up to $600 a month. Cutting a few dinners eating out, I ended up saving $2,000 over a three-month period. My trip to Hawaii will cost me $1100, and the remaining $900 was enough for the down-payment on the car.”

Then he added, “But here’s the thing. If you had asked me at the last session how many lattes I drank a day, I would have said six. And if you had told me I was wasting a lot of money, that I was spending too much… I would have told you that I couldn’t have gotten through my job… without all those lattes. I would have told you not to tell me how many lattes I can drink during the day. And I would have told you that I don’t have the time to make my lunch every day. I barely make it to work on time, work long hours, and go home dead at the end of the day. That’s what I would have said to you. Instead, when I saw for myself that the lattes and lunches were costing me $600 a month, I realized I can more than adequately make a car payment and have plenty left over to go someplace sunny and warm every year. I instantly stopped drinking lattes…and I’m getting up early each day to make my lunch. It’s like once I realized that I could actually have these things, nothing could stop me!”

I cannot tell you what you should or should not be spending your money on, only you can make that decision, but in order to be good stewards of our resources we need to understand our spending, we need to do what we can in order to get out of debt, we need to be budgeting, we need to be saving and we need to be giving, which we will get into next week. Proverbs says “the plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to want.” We are taking the first steps of diligence, to financial diligence. Dave Ramsey always concludes his radio program by saying “There is ultimately only one way to financial peace, and that is to walk daily with the Price of Peace, Christ Jesus.” May it be so. Amen.

Does the Minister Need to be Good to Great?

2011-11-03T10:55:00.000-07:00

There has been lots of talk recently about whether the Indianapolis Colts should draft Andrew Luck if they end up with the first pick of the NFL draft. There are some who are saying they should so that he can be mentored under Peyton Manning and then try and make the quarterback transition seamless. Others are saying because they have Peyton Manning at quarterback they should trade the pick and build up a team around Manning and go for the win now.

At the heart of this argument is the understanding that in order to be a good or even great team that you must have a good or great quarterback. You can get by with mediocre quarterbacking for a little bit, like the Bears did with Rex Grossman, but sooner or later, and usually sooner, he will be exposed and the team will drop down to the level of play of the quarterback. You cannot have an average quarterback, or in other words a mediocre quarterback, and have a good or great team.

Being a great quarterback does not necessarily mean that your team will be great because there are lots of other variables that the team also needs. But week in and week out the quarterback is the most important player on the field. He is also the person that most people pay to go see, and he can make or break a franchise.

I'm wondering if the same is also true for ministers and churches. Can you be a good or great church with an average or mediocre minister? We hear all the time (at least in the United Methodist Church) that the number of poor ministers is very small, that most are doing a very good job at what they do. But is that true? Are we truly gifted with lots of good to great ministers?

I think we can say that, in fact, most ministers are average. On one end of the spectrum we have some are truly gifted, at the other end are those who are "minimally exceptional," and in the middle are those who are neither good nor bad, they are average. So the question then is are the churches they lead average because they are average?

Of the churches that we look up to and say "that is a great church," are they great because of the pastor, the congregation or a combination of the two? Would an average pastor be able to take over a great church and still have it be great? And the reverse, could a great pastor take over an average church and in turn make it great? Or does an average or below average church suck the talent out of even a great minister?

I am inclined to say that churches are probably a lot like NFL teams, they need a great pastor to be great (and I recognize the difficulty in trying to quantify "greatness" in this usage), but I'm just not sure. What I also wonder is whether greatness in the ministry can be taught or if it's just God given? Can an average minister rise above their normal capabilities at a great church, or around a great minister, and then take those skills and apply them to other ministry settings?

Act Your Wage

2011-11-01T09:44:00.000-07:00

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Matthew 25:14-30:

Today we begin a thee-part sermon series entitled Faith, Hope and Money, which is roughly based on a series from Dave Ramsey. Now even though I said last week that this would be a series on money unlike you had ever heard, I’m sure that most of you probably didn’t believe me and that some of you even thought about staying at home. Because normally whenever we hear that the church is going to be talking about money we begin to hold onto our wallets a little tighter because what we typically hear from the church is that we should be giving and giving more. And I’ll be honest, I’ve preached those sermons and you’ll be sure to hear some of them during my time here.

But I think the church has done a tremendous disservice to itself, to you and to the very idea of stewardship by reducing stewardship to being about giving money to the church. Stewardship is about a lot more. The biblical witness for giving is to give a tenth of your income, but even if you are tithing, you still have 90% of your income that the church is not dealing with or talking about and that is a major mistake. The scriptures have a lot to say about money. Issues of money and possessions are covered more than 800 times in the Bible Did you know that Jesus talked more about money then he did about any other topic? Rev. Jim Wallace, who is one of the co-founders of the sojourners movement, who are commonly referred to as Red Letter Christians, said that he once took a bible and cut out all of the passages that dealt with money, wealth, or possessions, and there wasn’t a lot left to it. It was pretty holy, and not in the sense we normally think of the scriptures.

Now I am not a financial planner. I cannot tell you what you should be investing your money in or where, or what insurance policies you should have, although you should have insurance, or whether you should have a will or a living trust or a durable power of attorney, although you should have at least one of them as well. I do have a financial planner who has agreed to come out and do a presentation and answer your financial questions if people are interested. I will also tell you that I am not a completely disinterested party in this conversation. I know, and the church also knows although they have chosen to ignore it, that the better you are doing with your own finances the more money is available for you to give, but to increase your giving to more than just the church. The simple fact is if you are having difficulty making your mortgage or car payment of even putting food on the table then I know that your giving will also be radically decreased, and so we are going to work over the next three weeks on what we can do to get our financial situation in order. It has been said that personal finance is 80% behavior and only 20% head knowledge, and when you start it’s probably at least 90% if not 95% behavior.

Now normally finances are one of the hush hush things. It’s like sex, it is simply not something discussed in polite company, and certainly not discussed from the pulpit. If you are like most people it was also not talked about in your house growing up nor were you formally taught or educated by your parents about their own finances. That doesn’t mean we didn’t learn things because we definitely did. We heard things like, “there’s not enough”, “we can’t because we can’t afford it,” “You have to work in order to earn it”, or “don’t think about it, someone else will take care of it for you.” All of these things impact how we view our money and our relationship with money, and nearly all of us harbor deep fears that we are the only ones who don’t know what’s going on with our money or what to do with it. Financial planner Karen Ramsey, who is not related to Dave Ramsey, begins each of her lectures by asking by a show of hands, and we’re going to do this too, “How many of you feel that everyone else besides for you has money figured out?” By another show of hands, and this question comes from Dave Ramsey, “who here has ever done anything stupid with their money?” Good, now we’re being honest and honesty is the only place we can start. Suze Orman has said that one of the financial laws is that “truth creates money and lies destroy it.” So the first start to solving our financial picture is to be completely honest.

Roughly 7 out of every 10 people live paycheck to paycheck. That means that if they are to lose their income they don’t know how they are going to pay their bills, but 20% of Americans believe they will become millionaires in the next ten years, and I strongly suspect it’s the group living paycheck to paycheck who believe that. According to Money magazine, 78% of us will have a major negative financial occurrence in any ten year period, major being somewhere in the realm of $5000 up, but 33% of Americans say they do not have at least $1000 in savings to use in an emergency (I actually think this figure is probably too low). Only 40% of people say they track their expenditures and have a budget. 30% of people over the age of 25 say they have not saved anything for retirement, and of those who have, only 11% say they have more than $250,000 saved or invested. 59% of people have said they have never sat down to calculate what they will need in order to retire comfortably, and yet 58% of people think they will be okay. Half of all marriages end in divorce, and, according to a survey by Citibank, 58% of those who divorce say that money was the primary reason. Others have estimated that money may in fact play a major if not the major role in upwards of 75% of divorces. Now the church has been talking a lot lately about protecting the sanctity of marriage, and yet here we are told that if we could solve people’s money problems that we might be able to save half of all divorces, and maybe even 2/3 and yet the church isn’t doing anything about it, and I really have to wonder why?

I really believe it’s because we are afraid. The church is afraid to talk about it and we are afraid to talk about it. Again, money tends to be one of those hush-hush topics. I have been serving churches in a ministerial role for eight years, and in all that time I have never heard anyone lift up their financial concerns during prayer time, even when they could have done so anonymously. I have certainly heard people talk about their employment issues, although this too nowhere matches what’s really going on, but no one has ever said, “I don’t know how I’m going to pay my bills this week, and so I need to lift that up.” Not even anonymously. We don’t like to talk about our money, and a large percentage is driven by fear. Fear of the unknown and also the known, fear that we are the only ones who haven’t figured it out, fear that others will find out that we don’t have it all together.

Now I know that most of us feel like this, that our money comes in and goes right back out, and we hope that somehow, somewhere, that something will get caught, but normally it doesn’t. No one is opposed to savings, but yet we don’t save. We can’t just have wishful thinking about how we are going to save, we can’t have something where we say “a miracle happens here.” In Proverbs we are told “Precious treasure remains in the house of the wise, but the fool devours it.” If everything is just passing through then we are just devouring all we receive, we are the fool.

Now I know that many of you are going to say, “but I don’t have enough money to save, my finances are too tight as they are,” and the truth is you can’t afford not to save, because the longer you wait the harder it becomes. I know others will say, “I’m told old to begin saving now,” and I will tell you that you are never too old. If you are still alive then you can begin this, and even if you don’t think it applies then you can be talking with your children or grand children so they can begin getting ahead with their own finances.

There are three reasons to save. One is for emergencies. What did our grandma always tell us, we were to save for a rainy day. That is what Joseph does in Egypt. He warns the Pharaoh that there is going to be a famine and so they begin storing grain to protect themselves, they save for a rainy day, and it is what we should do as well. Dave Ramsey says that the way to start this is to create an emergency fund as quickly as you can of $1000 ($500 if you make less than $20,000 a year), but that is just a start, and remember this is not the I need a pizza or a new DVD player fund. This is for emergencies only. But the $1000 is just a start, most financial planners will tell you that you need to have anywhere between 3 to 9 months of expenses also, but that will take you a little longer to build up. This money will protect you in case you lose your job or something else happens that you are no longer in bringing in money. But it can also serve you in other ways, let’s say your car breaks down and you don’t have money saved up for repairs, then it also protects you against that. When you have an emergency fund then you no longer will have major financial crisis. Dave Ramsey jokes that when you are broke, when you don’t have an emergency fund, then your life will resemble a country song.

I can tell you that Linda and I are working on this, and recently had to replace all four tires on linda’s car. Instead of having to stress about how we were going to pay for it, since we didn’t have the money saved up for this, although we should have, but instead of using our credit card, we pulled the money out of our emergency fund, bought new tires and then set-up to refill our emergency fund. So we save for emergencies, or rainy days. If you are alive, there will be emergencies. God does not promise that it won’t rain, all we are promised is that we will no longer be drowned.

The second reason we save is in order to purchase things, you know like your grandma also told you to. When we save to pay for things it does several things. It stops us from impulse buys, and the average family of 4 spends $9,000 a year on impulse items, and it keeps us from going into more debt. And saving for purchases involves more than just paying for a new sofa. It also includes other things that are more regular like auto insurance, which we might pay only once or twice a year. Instead of being hit with the cost all in one month, we instead divide the cost by 12 months and save that amount each month. So if our monthly premium is $400, we save $33 each month so that when the bill comes due, we don’t have to stress about how we are going to pay the bill because we already have the money already in hand. It’s a novel idea I know.

The term often applied to this is called a sinking fund. The term was originally a way that the English helped pay off their national debt, but in modern usage a sinking fund is used by companies to help pay off debt, buy back stocks or bonds, and also for saving for major expenditures that they know they will incur as part of their operation, such as replacing machinery or the roof of a building. So create a sinking fund, although you can call it something else, in order to save money for expenses that don’t occur every month but that you know will come up, again such as insurance, or car repairs, vacations, Christmas, which comes every year on December 25th, I know we sometimes get surprised by this, or other presents. You know you will have these expenses so save for them so they don’t blow out your budget in one month or worse cause you to have to go into debt.

The final reason we save is to build wealth, and this is primarily for retirement. Today’s passage, which is commonly referred to as the parable of the talents, is normally interpreted as saying that God has given us certain gifts and skills and we to use are literal talents in serving the world. A good message and one I have preached myself. But a talent in Jesus’ time was a currency equal to about 6,000 denari, which was a day’s labor. So a talent is a significant amount of money. The first two men are willing to take a risk and invest their money in the world, whereas the final man hordes his talent, why because he is afraid. I think there is something to say to us about our relation with money.

Now, there are no get rich quick schemes to this. Proverbs says “a faithful man will abound with blessings, but he who hastens to be rich will not go unpunished.” The only person who gets rich with get rich quick schemes is the person selling them. If being rich were easy, everyone would be rich. It is hard. It takes time. Building wealth is a marathon, not a sprint, and so it involves putting money away and letting the power of compound interest do the trick and you need to start doing it as soon as possible. Let me give you just a couple of illustrations.

I’m 38, so if I had started investing $2000 a year, or $166 a month, starting at age 35 and did so until the age of 65. At age 65, I would have invested $60,000 and assuming I got 10% return, which is easier for calculations, it would be worth $419,569.95. If I had started at age 25, and invested $2000 for 40 years for a total of $80,000 my total would be $1,170,219.29, and I beat my 35 year old self by $750,000. If I had started at age 18 and put in $2000 a year until I was 25, and then never put in another dime, my investment of just $16,000 would be worth $1,332,752.55. The 18 year old investor who only invested $16,000 beat the 25 year old investor who put out $80,000 by $162,000 and the 35 year old by $913,000.

For the young people here today, do you understand what I just showed you? If you follow this simple advice I have just made you millionaires by the time you retire, and all it cost was $166 a month for 8 years. I know that those in here who are older than 25 would like to say something to you wouldn’t you? (do it now) Grandparents are you paying attention. Tell this to your children and your grandchildren and you can change their lives. Proverbs says “the good leave an interitance to their children’s children.” I think this about more than money. By educating your children and your grandchildren, and great-grandchildren about how to work with their money and how to make their money work for them, you can also leave an inheritance. PT Barnum said “Money is a terrible master, but an excellent servant.”

Now if you are older than 25, or 35 or 45, or even 65, is it too late to start? Absolutely not, as I already said, if you are still breathing you can be working this. Author David Chilton said, “the best time to plant an oak tree was twenty years ago, the next best time is now.” Don’t wait.

Now for those who still say they can’t afford to do this, that your budget is already too tight, as I already said, the simple truth is you can’t afford not to do this, (not a true $1 to $1 deduction, about .70, and if your company matches then it’s even better, many will match 50%, so you’re getting $1.50 of investment for 70 cents, it’s a great deal,) the easiest way is to pay yourself first. Why does the IRS take your money before you ever get your check? Because they don’t trust you to save the money in order to pay your taxes at the end of the year, and so they have you pay them first. The government is very smart in this, follow the lead of the government. I know you never thought you would ever hear anyone say that the government is smart when it comes to their finances, but they are smart about this. Pay your self first, take the money right off the top. You cannot spend money that you never receive. You should also be doing this with money you give to charities, but we’ll save that for later. Don’t wait until the end of the month in order to see if you have anything left in order to save it, do it first, do it first, do it first. Is that clear enough.

Now I’m sure that some of you are still saying, “that’s great John, but I still have more month left than I have money and if I do this I’ll have even less money and more month. I just can’t do it.” And I’m here to tell you that you can and you must, and by paying yourself first will help you because you can’t spend what you don’t have. We cannot begin to control our spending or increase our saving until we understand our spending and we cannot begin to act our wage until we understand where our money is going, which we will spend more time looking at next week. Proverbs says “the plans of the diligent lead surely to abundance, but everyone who is hasty comes only to want.” We are taking the first steps of diligence, to financial diligence. Dave Ramsey always concludes his radio program by saying “There is ultimately only one way to financial peace, and that is to walk daily with the Price of Peace, Christ Jesus.” May it be so. Amen.

It's Not The Greatest Ever

2011-10-28T09:37:00.000-07:00

Game six of the World Series last night was great, but everyone who is claiming it was the greatest World Series game ever seriously need to calm down and get some perspective. The comebacks were incredible and riveting, and in the tenth inning I even said to my wife it was a great game. But, someone on ESPN this morning said he was riveted to the game from the first pitch, and that is just ridiculous.

Before the 8th inning it was a sloppily played game that would have been an embarrassment during the regular season let alone in the World Series. The World Series is supposed to pit the two best teams in baseball playing the best baseball they can, and they certainly didn't for most of last night's game. A large part of it would have been unwatchable during the regular season. Having five errors alone automatically takes it out of contention as one of the greatest games. And if I had been scoring there would have been six errors, because the "triple" that tied the game in the ninth inning should have been caught.

If Nelson Cruz hadn't been concerned about hitting the wall, which by the way is his MO and he wasn't even close to the wall, he would have caught the ball and the game would have been over. If he had thought "Hey, even if I hit the wall it won't hurt because we will be World Series champions," then the Rangers win. Instead he totally misplayed the ball, which should be an error, and the Cardinals were right back in it.

But along with the five or six errors in the game, the bullpens were also terrible. The only reason the Cardinals kept coming back was because the pitchers kept making terrible mistakes. You can't put a pitch over the plate where it can be driven when you already have two strikes.

I can think of lots of World Series games that were a lot better than this. Game six of the 1986, 1991 and 1992 World Series come to mind. Game seven of the 2001 series, let along games 4 and 5 which both had incredible come from behind victories with two-run homeruns with two outs in the ninth inning. Then there is game one of the 1988 World Series with Kirk Gibson's homerun.

10-9 games are not "great" games. Now some have said that what made it so great was the fact that the score kept going and changing, that the Rangers had and lost the lead five different times, that in fact the score is indicative of a great game. By that standard a Super Bowl that ended 73-70 would also be a great game, which I hardly suspect would be the case.

Now I do have to admit that I had given up on the Cardinals after their three errors and when they were down 7-4, and they deserve credit for coming back. In the lore of baseball this game will live on a for a long time, and it should, but it should not be considered the greatest World Series game ever because it just cannot live up to that moniker.

As exciting as those last three innings were, and as dramatic as they were, in it's entirety a 10-9 game with five errors, or six in my book, and shoddy pitching all around simply cannot upend some of the other incredible World Series games that I have witnessed let alone in the history of the game.

Laugh Often

2011-10-25T10:48:00.000-07:00

Here is my sermon from last Sunday. The text was the parable of the prodigal son, Luke 15:11-32:

One day a young polar bear came home from school. Now this is a true story. He went up to his mother and asked “Am I a real polar bear?” His mother said "of course you’re a polar bear." The next day he came home from school and asked his father “am I a real polar bear?” The father assured him that yes he was a real polar bear. But every day for a week the young bear came home and asked his parents the same question, “am I a real polar bear.” Finally, his father couldn’t take it any more and he said “yes, you are a real polar bear. Both your mother and I are real polar bears, your grandparents are all real polar bears, all your relatives are real polar bears, in fact everyone we know are real polar bears so why do you keep asking?” The young polar bear looked at him and said “because I’m freezing.”

Anyone who attends church regularly has probably heard at least one sermon on the prodigal son. It probably had something to do with how God is always grateful to welcome those who have been lost back home, and about God’s overwhelming love for us. But all of the wonderful stories that get told about this parable usually revolve around the younger, prodigal son. But, today I’m going to tackle another aspect of this story which involves the older brother, because one of the messages that I believe Jesus is trying to convey deals with joy.

Now joy is one of those troubling subjects, especially in church. As Christians we are told to do many different things, but probably one of the hardest is to be joyful, and there are many different reasons for this. Much of it rests with the traditions of the church which in many ways have tried to suck as much joy as possible out of the faith. But, in many places in scripture we are told to express our joy about our life and our relationship with God, but I think it is best summed up by the writer of Psalm 100 who tells us to make a joyful noise unto the Lord.

A teenage boy approaches his father and asks to borrow the car. “No,” his father says, “not until you cut your hair.” “But,” the son replies indignantly, “Jesus had long hair.” “Your right,” the father says, “Jesus did have long hair, and he also walked everywhere.

As the story begins, the younger brother tells his father that he is dead to him, which is what he does when he demands his inheritance, then proceeds to fritter away everything he has through what would probably best be described as sins of the flesh. Then once he has nothing left, he debases himself by working with pigs, something forbidden for Jews, then he decides to come back home. The older brother certainly must think that the younger brother might be turned away by the father, or at the very least would at least get a severe tongue lashing for what he has done.

Instead what the older brothers finds when he comes out of the fields is that his father is throwing a party for his wastrel of a son. Doesn’t the older brother have the right to be upset? What seems to be most galling to him is not just the younger brother’s prior behavior, but that he seems to be receiving even more than the older brother as a result of his negative behavior. What sort of standard is this setting up? As it turns out, while the younger brother’s lifestyle was inappropriate, the older brother has been approaching his life and relationship with the father inappropriately as well.

Somehow the older brother, in his allegiance and love for his father, has turned his duties and responsibilities into a task and a chore to be undertaken. He even tells the father that he has been obeying all of his commands and because of that has been “working like a slave.” I’m sure this must come as somewhat of a surprise to the father. Certainly the older brother has been working hard, after all he is out in the fields when the younger brother comes home, and he most certainly has been the most obedient son, but there is no indication that the father has ever told him that he must act like a slave or to be so obedient that he loses all sense of joy and pleasure in what he is doing or in his life. This is something that the older son has taken on, not something that is required of him. He wrongly believes that in order to be the good son he must work tirelessly and view everything as a task which must be undertaken, and because of this, he has lost any sense of joy and pleasure which he may have had in his life.

This is very similar to the parable we covered last week of the laborer’s in the vineyard, where those who work twelve hours are paid the same amount as those who only work one hour, and they begin to think that their reward is based upon their labor rather than the generosity of the landowner. The laborers and the older son begins to think that everything they are going to receive, or should receive, is based upon their own work and merit. It is through their own efforts that they are to receive their reward, but the father indicates that his love has nothing to do with what we do, but instead who we are.

On one of John Calvin’s good days, and certainly he could not have been a grump all the time he must have had at least one good day, he said that the sole purpose of our existence is to glorify God. How do we glorify God by looking at everything as drudgery, a task that must be undertaken, or that we are slaves to our responsibilities? How many people here have attended a worship service, and most certainly a church committee meeting, where we have walked out and felt flat because there was no sense of excitement or joy about anything? The gospel literally means the good news, but how often does our news actually look like another job which must be undertaken. Where is our sense of joy about being in the presence and being loved by the father?

After a long, dry sermon, the minister announced that he wished to meet with the church board following the close of the service. The first man to arrive and greet the minister was a total stranger. "You must have misunderstood my announcement,” the minister said. “This is a meeting for the board members.” “I know," the man replied, "but if there is anyone here who was more bored than I was, then I'd like to meet them."

Certainly, the father has already proven his generosity and willingness to see he sons be happy by answering his younger son’s unusual request for his inheritance. He has already shown that he wants his sons to be happy, but the older son does not get the message. He is upset because he sees the fatted calf being given to the younger son when he has not received anything for his hard work. He has not squandered his inheritance, he has not been profligate in his living, he has been the good son, doesn’t he at least deserve something?! As someone in one of my Bible studies so eloquently put it: Shouldn’t the father have at least bought him a box of cheese-its occasionally as a reward? But, instead it is he who is chastised by the father. “Son, you are always with me,” the father says “and all that is mine is yours.” All that is mine is yours.

The fatted calf was available to the older son the entire time, but he became so preoccupied that he missed it. He could have been feasting and enjoying the bounty provided by the father, but instead he thought himself to be a slave. He could have been expressing his joy for everything given to him and available in his life, but instead he rejected it. He could have been taking pleasure in life, but instead he was keeping track of the immoral deeds of his brother.

Originally, the only thing we are told about what the younger son has done is that he wasted the money in dissolute living. It is only once we hear from the older brother that we find out some of the details of what was taking place. The older brother was not content to let his brother go and lead his own life. Instead it appears as if he was tracking his brother’s activities which only added to his resentment and anger; not only about his brother but also about his position in the father’s house. Again, he is like the laborer’s from last week’s parable who have joy in the morning when they receive their jobs, but then in beginning to look around and comparing themselves to others, they begin thinking they are clearly more worthy than the others, and in the it is they who end up getting in trouble and being rebuked. If the older son had focused on himself and his relationship with the father, had enjoyed the joy and benefits that came from living in the house the whole time, then he would not have felt the resentment that he felt.

I once attended a lecture entitled “Why doesn’t God have a sense of humor?” There were many different reasons given as possibilities, one being that by having the power of omniscience God would already know all the punch lines and therefore nothing would be funny. But, rather than saying that God doesn’t have a sense of humor, the person delivering this particular lecture went the opposite way. It is not that God does not have a sense of humor, he said, simply look at the world around us, in particular the platypus, and you’ll see that God must have a sense of humor. Instead it is as Voltaire one remarked “God is comedian who is playing to an audience that is afraid to laugh.” I think that hits the nail right on the head. For some reason we have come to believe that in order to be obedient Christians, that in order to inherent eternal life, we need to remove all sense of joy and pleasure from our lives. That we need to be dull, that we need to be worry warts, we need to be a bump on the log that sucks all the excitement out of the air. We have wrongly come to believe that if we express our joy in life, if we express our love of God, in any exciting way that we have gone astray and are no longer doing the right thing.

A man breaks into a house and in the living room he finds a parrot sitting on a perch who keeps saying “Brock, Jesus is watching.” Everywhere he goes, the burglar hears, “Brock, Jesus is watching.” Finally he walks over to the parrot and says “what’s your name?” “Brock, my name is Moses.” “What kind of people would name their parrot Moses?” “Brock, the type of people who would name their rottweiler Jesus.”

The older brother could have been appreciating everything he had in life and giving praise, glory and honor to the father, but instead he was focused on being the good one, the one who didn’t mess up, the one who did all the work, and as a result he turned into the sourpuss, someone without any sense of joy in his life, and therefore he even misses the bounty that surrounds him. He could have had a banquet but he never thought to ask. He could have taken the fatted calf, but he never even considered it. He could have been happy in the father’s house, and he should have been happy, but he pushed all the joy and happiness aside and instead felt like a slave.

God does not want us to view our life or our service to God as drudgery. God wants us to be joyful. God wants us to enjoy our lives, because, in doing so, we follow Calvin’s instruction and glorify God. God is generous in loving, understanding, and compassion. God does not want us to view life as if we were slaves, and one reason we can know this is because we have a sense a humor. We have the ability to laugh, that in and of itself should prove that God wants us to be joyful. Laughing is one the few things that we don’t have to be taught how to do. We have to learn how to walk, or to talk or how to tie our shoes, but everyone knows how to laugh by nature, we don’t have to be taught, and laughing is good for us.

Among other things laughing lowers blood pressure and reduces stress. There is a very simple reason why we say laughter is the best medicine, because it is. Of course, having had a kidney stone last spring, I can also say that dilaudid is pretty good medicine too. But that’s the point, the simple act of laughing releases endorphins into our brains, the same response which comes through the use of narcotics, and this is true even if the laugh is faked. Laughing is also contagious, which is why we have laugh tracks on television shows that aren’t even funny. Children seem to understand this better than adults and they have a joy and zest about life that most adults simply do not have. Children laugh, on average, between 300-400 times a day. Adults laugh, on average, 16 times a day. As we grow and “mature” we inadvertently leave our humor behind.

One day, the Pope dies and he is greated at the Pearly Gates by St. Peter, and is told that he has complete access to heaven and can go anywhere anytime that he likes. “Is there anything you would like to do first?” St. Peter asks. “Well, the Pope says, there is something that I have been puzzling over for a long time and could never find a satisfactory answer in the Vatican’s archives, and so I wonder, is there a library in heaven?” “Of course there is,” St. Peter replies, and so they head off to the library. The Pope spends two years in solitary research, never coming out, never interacting with anyone else, and then one day, people hear a cry of anguish coming from one of the study tables. When people rush over they find the Pope there, with a large book in front of him pointing to one line and crying out “there’s an r! There’s an r! Look, there’s an r. The word is celebrate not celibate!”

God wants us to be joyous, because all that God has is ours already. The fatted calf is ours for the taking. We do not give glory and honor to God by frowning and acting as if we are slaves. We spread the gospel, the good news, by being joyful about our lives, by being joyful about our relationship with God, and by being joyful with each other. We should not be like the older brother who has become so wrapped up in being right, in being the good son, that he has missed the simple pleasures in life. He has rejected the joy not only of his father and brother but also for himself. Instead we must recognize the bounty that is in our lives, take the fatted calf and celebrate, for God is good and generous. Live well, love much and laugh often, and as the psalmist says, make a joyous noise unto the Lord! Thanks be to -size:12.0pt">God sisters and brothers. Amen