Extravagant Church

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Luke 16:19-31 and 1 Timothy 6:6-19:

Last year for Christmas, Kay Reiswig, who is a long time member of this congregation, got our family a clear acrylic bird feeder that hangs in the window so that we could watch birds feed, which was really great. But, in the spring, one of the birds decided that it shouldn’t really be a bird feeder, but would be a better place to have a nest. At the start she wasn’t really successful in that enterprise because the other birds didn’t really think a nest belonged there, and so they kept coming to eat and messing up everything that she was working on. But, eventually her persistence paid off and she got her nest built in the feeder, which we actually thought was going to be pretty cool to watch, especially after she laid her three eggs and began to sit on them. Unfortunately, one of the times she flew off, presumably and ironically probably to find some food, a much larger bird came to see if there was food and sit on the top of it and they were just heavy enough to dislodge the suction cups from the window causing everything to fall to the ground, and the eggs didn’t survive, which while sad was also another learning point for the children about life.

But the point of that story is not the sad loss of baby birds, but instead about the nature of nest building. Now when we talk about nests for humans, it’s about security and protection. We build a nest egg in order to provide for ourselves, to make sure we are protected for the future. In some ways it’s the story of the parable we heard from Luke this morning about Lazarus the beggar and the rich man, who is, contrary to some presentations, unnamed. And the rich man is actually possibly practicing extravagant generosity, as he is feasting sumptuously, except he’s only being generous with himself and friends, not with those who are in need. His nest egg is for self-protection. But, that mother bird building a nest as we watched it was not building it for herself; she was building it for future generations. Her nest egg was not about her and her security, but about protecting and building for generations to come. And what’s even more impressive is that the mother bird will take care of whatever eggs are in the nest, even if they aren’t hers. And that is an example of extravagant generosity that’s closer to what we’ve been talking about and what we do here as a congregation.

Authentic and Aspirational Core Values

As I was doing research for the series on our core values, I read about a church that named one of their core values as being outreach. As they were looking for a new pastor, since they weren’t Methodists, they named that as one of the core things they wanted their new pastor to do: Help them welcome new people and grow. The pastor they choose said that he was passionate about reaching new people and was excited that they wanted to do the same thing.

When the new pastor got to the church he began making changes to help the church reach more people. It started with some changes in worship, then to the leadership, then to policies and procedures, and their faith development activities, and the changes worked. New people started coming, and staying, and the church was growing. And then reality struck. The members who had been there before realized that these new people were different. And even worse, they liked the changes that had been made and wanted to make even more!

And that’s when the truth emerged. They said they wanted to grow, but what they really wanted was for everything to stay exactly as it had been before, when, honestly, they weren’t growing, and get new people. They wanted new people, but only if the new people would change and become like everyone who was there before. They had articulated a value of outreach, but what they said and what they actually wanted was not the same thing. Their articulated value was disconnected from their reality.

There are two different types of core values: authentic and aspirational. Authentic core values are the ones we live every day, even if we don’t recognize them, and they are hard to change. That means we may also have core values that are negative, or that we do things that are different from whom we want to be. That could then lead us to create aspirational core values, values that state who we want to be, or what we want to be true, and begin to strive to make those a reality.

In the church above, outreach turned out to be an aspirational core value, but their true core value was safety and identity of the group. When their authentic value conflicted with their aspirational value, they wanted to stick to who they truly were and abandon outreach.  Aspirational values are great and important because they can cause us to change, if we are willing to do it. But authentic values are more often what drive us.

It’s also possible to have values that are both authentic and aspirational, and I think/hope that is what our core values represent. The One Board even had this conversation when we were naming them last year. For example, one of our values is that of being prayerful. I know there are some dedicated prayers in this congregation, who have that as one of their spiritual gifts, and I also know that there are some who rarely pray. We also do a good job of bathing a lot of things in prayer, but not everything. And so we are both aspirational and authentic in that value. 

We have also set an expectation that everyone will pray at least once a day, and as we approach making that a reality, I would expect that we will increase our expectation, and so then it becomes more aspirational again. And I think that is true for all of our values. These are not static things that have no movement. We should always be pushing to be better in all of them because there is always room for growth, or as John Wesley would say, we are moving on to perfection.

So, as we complete our series this Sunday, I hope that together we will hold these core values as being authentic to whom we truly are, and also as aspirational as to whom we want to become.

Core Values: Caring and Compassionate

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Colossians 3:12-17:

One of my favorite movies is Groundhog Day, and I watch it at least once a year on February 2, Groundhog Day, a moment where television really fails to capture the true excitement of a large squirrel predicting the weather. And of course it’s sort of ironic that I do the same thing every year on Groundhog Day, because what the movie is about is Phil Connors, a weatherman, played brilliantly by Bill Murray who has to relive the same day over and over and over again. Every day is Groundhog Day. And when he starts out realizing that there is not tomorrow, Phil gives into a hedonistic lifestyle. But what he finds out is that this lifestyle doesn’t bring him satisfaction or true joy. In fact, it leads to him being miserable, which is probably best summed up by an exchange with his producer, played by Andie McDowell, whom he thinks he loves, or at least lusts for, and she says “I could never love you, because you’ll never love anyone but yourself,” to which Phil responds, “I don’t even like myself.” Not being satisfied, he then tries to end the endless cycle of being in the same day, which also doesn’t work, and finally there is a change and he begins to improve himself, not to impress others, but to make himself better, which also leads him start helping others.

At the beginning of the film he keeps walking past a homeless man asking for money, and he pretends that he doesn’t have anything, until eventually he is buying him meals and trying to help him survive through the night. Every day he goes to the same spot to save a young boy falling out of a tree, and performing the Heimlich maneuver, so that he endless repeat of the same day is helping people all day long. In many ways, the movie is a metaphor for Christian conversion. Moving from the ways of the world, to the ways of God. Moving from being self-centered and thinking only about ourselves, to becoming caring and compassionate towards the world, giving of ourselves for the needs of others. I think it’s a great metaphor for the core value that we look at today that we have identified as a congregation, and that is being compassionate and caring.

Core Values: Growing Spiritually

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Mark 1:21-28 and Hebrews 5:11-6:4:

This week we had to submit our annual statistics to the annual conference, which includes reporting on our finances, but then also about worship attendance, and membership, and how many people are impacted by the ministries of the church, and baptisms and participation in Sunday school and other classes. That is they are asking me to report things that they can count to try and account for how we are making disciples. The problem is, none of the things we have to report really say anything about that ultimately. Because you could have a youth group of 50, but not have them coming into relationship with Jesus, and you could have a youth group of five that is making deep disciples. So which is better? Well off of straight statistics, the conference is going to be happier with the 50, than with the five, even though our goal is making disciples. Of course you could have the opposite as well, I am not saying that big is bad, but it’s a matter of what is actually happening in those groups, which is harder to define.

In 2004, Willow Creek Community Church, which is located outside of Chicago and is one of the largest churches in the country, did try and quantify their ability to make disciples and to deepen people in their spiritual journey. Willow Creek, which began in 1975, was one of the primary pushers of the idea of creating a seeker church to bring in unchurched people by removing all the things that people associated with being church. And so, in their own admission, they undertook this survey to really prove how successful they had been in fulfilling the great commission and making disciples of Christ. But, the survey showed the opposite. That while they were great at getting people through the door, they were not moving them past seeking into discipleship.

Core Values: Prayerful

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Timothy 2:1-7  and Matthew 6:5-15:

A Pastor had a kitten that climbed up a tree in his backyard and was afraid to come down. The Pastor coaxed, offered warm milk, etc. but nothing worked – the kitten wouldn't come down. The tree was not sturdy enough to climb, so the Pastor decided that if he tied a rope to his car and drove away so that the tree bent down, he could reach up and get the kitten. That's what he did, all the while checking the progress of his car. He then figured if he went just a bit further, the tree would be bent sufficiently for him to reach the kitten. But, as he moved the car forward, the rope broke. The tree went "boing!!!" and the kitten instantly sailed through the air---out of sight. The Pastor felt terrible. He walked all over the neighborhood asking people if they'd seen a little kitten. No. Nobody had seen a stray kitten. So he prayed, "Lord, I just commit this kitten to your keeping," then went about his business.  Later that day he was at the grocery store and met one of his church members. He happened to look in her shopping cart and was amazed to see cat food. This woman was a cat hater and everyone knew it so he asked her, "Why are you buying cat food when you hate cats so much??" She replied, "You won't believe this," and told him how her little girl had been begging her for a cat, but she kept refusing. Then, a few days earlier, the child had begged again, so she finally told her little girl, "Well, if God gives you a cat, I'll let you keep it." She told the Pastor, "I watched my child go out in the yard, get on her knees, and ask for a cat. And really, Pastor, you won't believe this, but I saw it with my own eyes. A kitten suddenly came flying out of the blue sky, with its paws outspread....and landed right in front of her!!!"  Never underestimate the power of prayer or of God’s unique sense of humor.

For the past two weeks as we’ve been working our way through the core values that we have articulated as a congregation, we’ve been talking about our baptism and what happens as a result of being a baptized people. Now, if we had gone a little farther in the baptismal liturgy when we renewed our baptismal vows, we would have come to the membership vows which are that we will support this congregation with our prayers, presence, gifts, service and witness. As I have said before, I believe that prayer is at the top of that list because it is the most important, and start of all of the other vows. It is key to the development of our faith and our relationship with God, and it’s definitely important for it to be a core value for the congregation. But, before we get into that, let’s say our values together again. We are Christ-centered, prayerful, inclusive, growing spiritually, compassionate and caring and in service and mission. Now, just as prayer comes first for the membership vows, Christ-centered comes first for our values because it centers and directs everything else that we do. Buddhists pray, but their prayers are obviously not about Christ, or through Christ, and so when we talk about prayer it’s a particular type of prayer that we are discussing. It is Christ-centered prayer, and it’s not just individual prayer but also corporate prayer, what we do alone and what we do together, and all of those things are what make us prayerful. As we were talking about this as a core value it was that sense that we are going to bathe everything in prayer. That prayer will be a part of every gathering, that when we are seeking to make decisions that it will have prayer involved, that nearly everything we do will have prayer as a part of it.

Core Values: Inclusive

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was John 1:43-51 and Galatians 3:23-29:

Several years ago we were on vacation in the Denver area because we had gone to the mecca that is Ikea, and went to a local United Methodist church in the area. Now we are the ideal that most churches say that they want a family with young children, but as we walked in no one said anything to us, other than the ushers who gave us our bulletins and said welcome. We went into the sanctuary, and no one said anything to us. After worship we went into the coffee time because the girls wanted donuts, and no one said anything to us. And then as we were walking out, just before we got to the parking lot, someone finally said hello and stopped to talk to us and said they were new to the church but they really liked it because they were so friendly. And we just wanted to laugh because we had just witnessed the exact opposite. Now every church likes to say that they are welcoming, but if you’ve ever been to other churches you know that’s not true. There are some that do a good job, and some do an absolute terrible job, and some you can tell that they haven’t had a visitor since Jesus was a baby because they swarm all over you or are utterly shocked to see you. But, even excelling at welcoming people the first time they walk through the doors, doesn’t mean anything about how they might be welcomed and included into the community. As one youth who was LGBTQ said, “I don’t want to be welcomed, I want to be accepted.” And that is something radically different than being simply welcomed. 

And so we continue in our series looking at the core values that we have established as a congregation. And so before we dive in, I’d like us to say them together again, so that hopefully they will become part of what we know. So we are Christ-centered, prayerful, inclusive, growing spiritually, compassionate and caring, and in service and mission. Last week we started with what it means to be Christ-centered, and if you didn’t hear that message, I would encourage you to go listen to it. But I said that while these values could be listed in nearly any order, I believe that Christ-centered had to come first because it is what flavors everything else. If we don’t do Christ-centered well, then we won’t do anything else well either. And, as I said, that journey of being Christ-centered begins when we are baptized and is firmly rooted in our claim as baptized people. And as it turns out, our claim of being inclusive is also rooted in our baptism. Now we have jumped ahead and are doing inclusive this week, rather than prayerful, since we are also celebrating the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this weekend, and we should remember that he received his Ph.D. from Boston University, my alma matter, which is also a United Methodist school, and was also the first majority-white university to have an African-American dean of the chapel Howard Thurman, which was one of the reasons King went to BU, and Thurman was the one he introduced King to the idea of non-violent resistance as practiced by Gandhi.

Core Values: Christ-Centered

Here is my message from Sunday. We began a new series on our core values, and the passage was on Acts 19:1-7 and Mark 1:4-11:

In what is the crescendo in the call to discipleship in the gospels, Jesus asks the disciples “who do people say that I am?”  They say that some say that he is Elijah, remembering back to our message on Jesus being the prophet as to why that answer is important, and some say perhaps John the Baptist has returned, or maybe one of the other prophets. But then Jesus asks the crucial question: Who do you say that I am? And Simon says “You are the Messiah, the son of the living God.” and it is then that Jesus changes his name to Peter, the rock, and says that it is upon this rock that I will build my church. Now there is some debate about whether that rock is Peter himself, or whether the rock is Peter’s confession of faith. That the church’s foundation and solid rock on which it stands is the proclamation that Jesus is the Messiah, the son of the Living God. Because it turns out that we have to answer that same question about who Jesus is for ourselves. No one can answer that question for us. We have to have our own answer. And really we see that throughout scripture. If you remember in our Genesis series, for a while, Jacob only talks about the God of his father Isaac. It’s not his God, but his father’s God. It’s only later in his life that we hear about the God of Jacob, that Jacob has accepted God as his own. Or later after Joshua has taken the people into the promised land, he says to them, after recounting all that God has done for them, he says “You must choose this day whom you are going to serve” and then he responds “as for me and my household, we will serve all Lord.”

Now I say all this for several reasons. One of them being that when I lead confirmation classes for youth, one of the first questions I ask is what does it mean to be a Christian? They will talk about things we might believe, or things we are supposed to do, or about going to church, sort of generic things. But, what they never say, until I get more direct, is that being a Christian means following Christ, or worshipping Christ, or proclaiming Christ as the Messiah, the son of the living God. We might think that’s sort of basic, of what it means to be a Christian and yet it doesn’t seem to be for many people. That when they answer the question about Christianity, following Christ is not the first answer given.