State Of The Church: A One Year Reflection

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Joshua 24:1-15:

It is just one day over a year ago that I stood before you on my first Sunday here at Mesa View.  I know some of you were upset to see Pastor Tom go, others were excited to have a new young clergy here, although some of you probably said I think I have shoes older than him.  It’s been quite a year, and so I thought I’d take today and do a sort of a state of the church address.  This congregation was officially founded on February 8, 1987, although they began meeting the year before in Rev. Chuck Bader’s, the founding pastor’s home.  In those 28 years, we have had only five pastors, including me, and even more amazingly, according to the records I have, we have sent out 12 people into the ministry.

Just like this past year, this congregation has seen some tremendous highs and lows.  We have seen a large drop in attendance over the past 8 years, but we are not alone.  In conversations I have had with the pastors at the two churches closest to us, we figure that between the three of us we have lost a combined 800 in worship attendance over the past 8 years.  That’s not good, but it also gives us tremendous opportunities, and I have some good news and some bad news.  The good news is that things are not as bad as they might have been perceived, and the bad news is that things are not as bad as they might have been perceived.  That’s the bad news because it’s a lot easier to just find a buyer for the property and close the doors then it is to say that this is God’s church and that we are going to make our stand here to make new disciples of Christ for the transformation of Taylor Ranch and the world, because that takes work.  But here is the good news; we’re in a lot better place than we were a year ago.

When I started I was given a sheet of paper that showed us owing $64,000 in bills.  We were several months behind on some of the bills, and Roger Sargent and Mark Stilwell were doing their best to try and keep everything together, and to keep the lights on.  Kim Short who is the director of our preschool came in and needed to buy some stamps, and JJ had to call Roger to make sure we had enough money in the bank to cover that.  The good news is that we are not there anymore, but the bad news is that we are not out of the woods yet.  We knew that the summer would be a lean time, and it has been.  But except for two checks to the conference that are sitting in the office, we are caught up on all of our bills, although we need a good offering today in order to make our next mortgage payment on Tuesday, but we will make that payment.  We have cut somewhere between $20-25,000 in expenses out of the budget, and we are working hard at increasing the income side of the budget

Born By Water And The Spirit

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was John 3:1-17:

Today’s scripture might contain two of the most famous passages for American Christianity.  First we have the famous John 3:16, and then we have Jesus saying that we must be born again, or born from above, which is how the NRSV translate it, an idea which plays a major role for a significant portion of the American church, and so I was asked to explore what this idea means.  What did it mean for Jesus and what does it mean for us?  Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night to engage in a conversation.  When people came in darkness it is often the sign of bad things to come.  This is true in most books of the Bible, but for John darkness is a metaphor representing a separation from God.  But there is something positive here as well, and that is that Nicodemus seeks Jesus’ out, which is the first step of discipleship in John.  So from the start it’s not clear whether Nicodemus is on Jesus’ side or not.  He says he knows that Jesus is from God, although he doesn’t actually really know.

So Jesus tells him, “No one can see the kingdom of God without being born from above.”  Notice that the primary emphasis here is not about eternal life, but about the kingdom.  While we talk a lot about eternal life, Jesus actually had little to say about the afterlife, but he did talk a lot about the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven depending on which gospel you are reading.  In fact, in the synoptic gospels, the first thing Jesus says as he begins his ministry is “repent,” why?  For the kingdom of God has come near.  Jesus’ message is a kingdom proclamation, and not just of a kingdom to come, but of a kingdom here and now, just as we pray each week, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

Even John 3:16 is about the here and now, “for God so loved the world that he gave his only son, so that everyone who believes in him may not perish but have eternal life.”  When does eternal begin?  Is it something that only starts when we die?  Doesn’t sound very eternal.  This is not a statement about the afterlife, this is a statement about eternal life, a life lived in the eternal presence of God.  This is a statement that shifts the emphasis not to our death but to the here and now.  Our eternal life with God is taking place here in the present, it is a current reality.  This is an eschatological claim, and we’re remembering that eschatology deals with the end of time.  Jesus is saying that the end of time is here already, and yet it is not here as well.  Repent for the kingdom of God has come near.  Our eternal life with God begins not sometime in the future; it begins now in this very moment because the kingdom is here, now, and God is present for us, here and now, and for all time.  But how do we get that?  Well that’s where knowing a little Greek helps, or at least leaning on those who know the Greek, which is what I do.

The Father of Righteousness

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Romans 4:1-17:

The first request I received on what to preach about after Easter was the issue of righteousness.  It was a request made on behalf of the Thursday morning women’s group.  They came into my office and said, “What is righteousness?” and my response was “you’re looking at it.”  The question is actually a very good one because one of the major themes of scripture is righteousness, although we don’t really talk about what it means, hence the question, and more often deal with it as if everyone knows what it means, probably because we don’t know what it means.  But today we are going to try and tackle the subject, although I want to set your expectations a little low that we are going to be able to completely cover the topic, because there are just too many different ideas to be covered all at one time, so this will be sort of 30,000 foot view.

The word righteous or righteousness is found 630 times in the bible, and that doesn’t include other times that it might have been used but is translated differently.   To give you a comparison, the word love is found 872 times.  The Hebrew word is tsedheq or tsedhaqah, and it is also often translated as justice or integrity or sometimes deliverance.  Its fundamental meaning is to do the right.  The Greek word found in the New Testament is dikaiosynē, having a similar meaning to the Hebrew word, and it too is often translated as justice, but also sometimes blamelessness, mercy, or compassion.  In the gospel of Luke, after Jesus dies, a roman soldier at the foot of the cross says, “surely this man was innocent.”  The word translated as innocent is this same word, so really the centurion is saying that Jesus was righteous.

Surprisingly, Jesus does not talk about righteousness all that much, and when he does it sort of has an ironic characteristic, such as saying that he came not to call the righteous but sinners, where righteousness is really about self-righteousness.  But there are people who are called righteous.  Zechariah and Elizabeth, the parents of John the Baptist, are said to be blameless, another word for righteous, and one we see applied to several characters, including Job, Noah and Abraham, who will get back to.  Joseph of Arimathea was said to be a good and righteous man, and John the Baptist is said to be both holy and righteous, a combination of characteristics that is also plentiful.  Paul is one of the few people to proclaim himself righteous, well besides for the righteous brothers, and it is in Paul’s writings, in particular in Romans, where we find most of the consideration of righteousness in the New Testament.

Pentecost: Get Out of the Room

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Acts 2:1-21 and Genesis 11:1-9:

While the Tower of Babel might not be the best known story in the Bible, it is certainly one that is known by most people, it’s sort of seeped into our consciousness, even for people who might not have been raised in the church.  The Tower of Babel serves as the last of the ancient histories in Genesis, before moving onto the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs.  In some ways this story  sets itself up as a grand story from the first lines, in which we are told that “the whole earth had one language and the same words,” which  remembering George Bernard Shaw’s famous quote that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language,” I’ve always wondered how that’s possible.  Like the other stories of the ancient histories this passage serves as an etiology, that is it is a story that seeks to explain why things are, and so it seeks to tell us why if we all came from the same place why we speak different languages.  But just like with the other stories, this is of course much more than just a story of origins.  If that’s all it was we wouldn’t be talking about it all these millennia later, so what is it that makes this story important and what can we learn from it, and the story of Pentecost that we can apply to our lives today?

The story that comes immediately before this is the flood, and so obviously there is a large gap of time, although none is indicated, so that the population has grown large again.  But rather than following God’s injunction to “be fruitful and multiple and fill the earth,”  which is the injunction given first to Adam and Eve, and then it is given twice, in just a few verses to Noah’s and his sons.  Instead they are all staying in one place, and indeed one of the two reasons why they give for why they should build a city and a tower is so that they are not scattered “upon the whole face of the earth.”  Why this is a fear is not really said, because it’s not clear who will do this scattering.  We might think it would be God, but there are not threats that this is going to happen, but it is really this fear that drives the first reason why they need to do this, and the second reason is so that they can “make a name” for themselves.

That sort of stands in contrast to what most people think is happening here which is that they began to build this tower in order to challenge God, to try and build a tower that would reach heaven.  That’s certainly the story I remember from Sunday school when I was young, and it’s certainly the imagery we see in art or in the movies, of people trying to reach God.  But that is not what the passage actually says, and the New Revised Standard Version, which was the translation we heard today, sorts of encapsulates this better than the King James Version, by saying that they are building the tower to the heavens, rather than to heaven.  That is they are building it up into the skies, rather than into heaven itself.  We are also told that this tower is not seen by God as a threat, by what happens immediately afterwards, and it’s sort of hidden between the lines unless we’re paying close attention to the text, but what it says is that God “came down to see the city and the tower.”  God has to come down in order to see what it is that they are doing.  This city and tower are not a threat to God, instead what is a threat is why they did it, and that is to make a name for themselves and to keep themselves from getting scattered across the whole earth.

The Bible and the Wesleyan Quadrilateral

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was 2 Timothy 3:14-4:5:

When I asked what people wanted me to talk about after Easter, I received several questions about the Bible, and so that is what we are going to be looking at today.  If you were coming for an uplifting sermon, you’ll have to come back next week, because today is more about me teaching then about explicating scripture.  I cannot cover everything today nor am I even going to try.  I’ve often thought about trying to create a sermon series to talk about the Bible itself, but in my initial thoughts I haven’t figured out yet how to do that, but perhaps some time in the future, especially if there is a clamoring for it, although after today you might also hope I never come back to this information.

All of us have assumptions that we make about the Bible, some of them correct but unfortunately many of them incorrect.  Many want to treat the Bible as if it’s a simple book to read, when in fact it’s not.  There are some extremely difficult passages that we encounter, and we even read in 2 Peter, talking about Paul’s letters, “There are some things in them that are hard to understand,” and these difficulties were leading some people astray.  (2 Pet 3:16)  And while the Bible might be the bestselling book of all time, it is one of the least read books as well.  As someone recently posted on Facebook, we treat the Bible like we do software licenses, we don’t read it, we simply scroll to the bottom and click “I agree.”  If we are serious about the Bible, then we actually need to take it seriously, which means we need to pick it up and read it.  We also need to be very aware of what we bring to scripture when we read it, that influence what we find.  In the passage we just heard from 2 Timothy, we are told that all scripture is inspired by God, an idea that we will have to come back to, but what scripture is he referring to?  It’s only the Hebrew scriptures, because the New Testament doesn’t exist yet, but I’m sure most of us don’t think of that when we read or hear that passage.

High Cost of Conservation

Albuquerque, where I live, is currently in the middle of a major drought, as is most of the Southwest, and everyone has been called on to try and conserve as much water as possible.  Apparently consumers took this seriously, and water usage dropped 9% last year.  As a result, the water authority ended up with a deficit because people didn't use enough water to cover the budget they had passed.  And so the water authority just authorized a rate increase of 5% in order to cover the budget deficit.  This follows a 5% rate increase from last year as well

People are using less water, which is a good thing, and now are going to be charged more for the lower amount of water they are using.  What is the message we are actually conveying about the need and the benefits of conserving?

Sheep and Goats

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Matthew 25:31-46:

As Protestants we believe that we are saved by faith alone.  That is that there is nothing we can do to merit God’s grace, that it is given to us unconditionally and without price.  God’s grace is freely poured out for us.  As United Methodists we also believe that we can either choose to accept or to reject this grace, and all that goes with it, but it is still God’s grace that saves us.  But then we have this passage which on its face may be seen as saying something else entirely.  While I don’t know why someone asked me to preach on this particular passage, I suspect that it might be because of the message the story seems to imply that by doing good works we can earn bonus points, as it were, that will reap us eternal rewards.  This is known as works righteousness, that we are made righteous through what we do, and this struggle between works and grace has been a major sticking point between Protestants and Roman Catholics since the time of the Protestant Reformation.

There are five sections of dialogue in Matthew which are interspersed between narrative sections, so that it goes narrative, discourse, narrative, discourse, narrative, etc.  The last discourse discusses judgment and right living.  It begins with a diatribe of woes against the Pharisees and scribes, in which we are told that we should basically do as they say not as they do.  This series of woes sort of bookends the discourses, because the first discourse is the Sermon on the Mount, which contains the blessings, but we end with these woes.  Then the last thing that Jesus teaches the disciples, and thus us, in the Gospel of Matthew is the passage we just heard, as immediately after this Jesus and the disciples begin their last journey to Jerusalem.

“When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on the throne of his glory.  All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats.”  The sheep will be put at his right hand and the goats on his left, and the sheep will be welcomed into the kingdom and the goats will be scattered into the eternal flames.  Surprisingly, especially considering how much the idea is emphasized by some within the church, this is the only detailed description we find in the New Testament of what might be called the final judgment.  Notice that Jesus does not say “did you believe the right things, did you decry the right sins, did you dislike the right people, did you support the correct doctrines and dogma, did you attend the right church, and did you not cross your fingers when saying the Nicene or Apostles creed?”  Good then come into the kingdom.  Instead he says “when I was hungry, you gave me food, when I was thirsty you gave me something to drink; when I was a stranger you welcomed me; when I was naked you gave me clothing; when I was sick you took care of me; and when I was in prison you visited me,” and then concludes by saying that whatever you did for one of the least so you did, or did not do, to me.

Death, Life and Motherhood

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Ruth 1:1-17:

The first attempts to create a day for mothers was begun by Julia Ward Howe, best known for writing the Battle Hymn of the Republic.  It wasn’t a day to honor mothers the way we do today, but instead in the wake of the civil war, in which so many mothers had lost their children, it was a day for mothers to come together to call for peace and disarmament.  The first Mother’s Day as we know it was celebrated at Andrews Methodist Episcopal Church, the precursor to the United Methodist Church, in 1908.  Anna Jarvis wanted to create a day to honor her mother, who worked promoting female education, and through her to honor all mothers.  At the 1912 general Conference, which is the administrative body of the Methodist church, they called for Mother’s Day to be celebrated at all Methodist churches, and in 1914 President Woodrow Wilson declared the first national celebration as a day to recognize all the women who had lost sons in war, which we should note is the same year world war 1 began.  Unfortunately for Jarvis, by the 1920’s she believed that the holiday had become so commercialized that she began to regret having created the holiday. 

I think that Mother’s Day is one of the hardest sermons to deliver every year.  While Mother’s Day tends to be a high attendace day as people come out to celebrate their mothers, I also know that there are people who consciously avoid church on Mother’s Day, or at least dread coming, because they don’t want to have to deal with the pain that mother’s day brings.  There are those women who wanted to have children but were unable to; there are women who chose not to have children, and who feel judged for that decision, especially in the church; there are who have lost children; there are those who have lost their mothers; and there are those who mothers were unwilling or unable to be a mother to be their children and somehow I have to bring those altogether and or at least recognize those realities, to mourn and to celebrate, to recognize pain and to honor, and I think to proclaim a message of hope, love and appreciation, and I think that Naomi and Ruth do all those things.

The Book of Ruth is one of only two books in our Bible named after a woman, does anyone remember the second?  (Esther)  The book begins with a key indicator of what the story is going to be about, but it is very subtle and so to catch it you would have to be very aware of Biblical storytelling, and that is that we are told that the family are Ephrathites.  It is said that Bethlehem, was founded by the descendants of Ephrath, who was the wife of Caleb, and so the family is identified not by a male clan name but by a female name indicating that this is a story about women and the descendants of those women.  There is also a sort of ironic meaning to this usage as well, as the word Ephrath comes from a root word which means fertile or productive, and at the moment neither the land nor the sons are matching that description, and so they have to leave Bethlehem, which means house of bread, although eventually there is not only fertility in the land but also fertility in the family as well as Ruth will give birth to a son.

In The Breaking Of The Bread

Here is my sermon from Sunday.  The text was Luke 24:13-35:

In our Easter celebration I said that to really understand the Easter moment is to not really think about what happened in its details, but instead to simply experience that proclamation of hope, that momentous moment when everything was changed, to let it flow over us like water.  This morning’s passage is a continuation of that Easter message.  Even though we are now two weeks past Easter, we must remember that we are still in what is known as Eastertide because Easter is actually celebrated for 50 days, but today’s passage takes place on Easter morning, as these two men are leaving Jerusalem in order to go to Emmaus.  But let me back up for just a moment to remind us all of Luke’s version of the Easter story.  On Easter morning, Mary, and several other women, went to the tomb with spices they had prepared for the body, but when they get there the body is not there, and then two men appear to them, and while they are not called angels that is what we might call them, and then tell them that Jesus is not there, that he has been raised from the dead, and so the women all run off to tell the disciples, and, in Luke’s words, “all the rest,”  what they had seen.  Not believing the women, Peter ran to the tomb and he too saw that it was empty.

In the ancient world there were several groups of people who were not allowed to testify in court because it was said that their testimony was not believable, that is they were liars by nature.  One of those groups was shepherds, and this Luke having shepherds making a proclamation about the birth of Jesus is unique, and anyone want to make a guess about another group of people who were not allowed to testify?  That’s right, women, and so the women also making the first proclamation that Jesus is risen is also a very unique characteristic of the Christian story, and probably one of the reasons why Peter doesn’t believe what they have to say and so he needs proof for himself, much like Thomas did in the passage we heard last week.  After all this has happened, then we are told at the beginning of today’s passage that “two of them,” presumably two who are included in that portion of all the rest who were told about the resurrection, are going to a village called Emmaus.

The story of the walk to Emmaus is the longest and most fully developed of all the Easter accounts we find in the gospels, and yet we really don’t know anything about these men. We are told that one of them is named Cleopas, but the other man remains unnamed, and this is the only story we have from them.  While it appears that they had something to do with the followers of Jesus, we have not heard about Cleopas before and he never appears again.  These are just two ordinary men traveling to some ordinary town, and we really don’t even know much about it.  Emmaus is not a town we know of as existing in Palestine during this time, except from this story.  We don’t know where it was and we don’t even know how far away from Jerusalem it was.  While the passage we heard today says 7 miles, there are discrepancies in the Greek manuscripts we have giving different distances, including some that say it was 19 miles away.  Our best manuscripts say 7, and the fact that they travel there and back all in one day has led scholars to use the 7 mile distance in their translations.  But again that is to get bogged down in the details rather than in what the story is actually trying to convey to us today.

Bank of Evil, Formerly Bank of America

It was just about a year ago that we made an offer on the house that we now live in.  I had been appointed to serve a church in Albuquerque, and for the first time in our time serving churches we would not be living in a parsonage.  We ended up making the offer on this house because an offer we made on another house wasn't working.

That house, which was fantastic, was a short sale being held by Bank of America.  We made an offer on it with what we thought was plenty of time to get everything completed so that we could close when we needed to be in Albuquerque to begin at the new church.  Bank of America told us what the price was that we needed to offer in order to get everything approved.  And then we sat and we waited. And we waited. And we waited some more.

And then they came back and said we needed to increase our price a little, and then a little more, and then a little more, really nickle and dimeing us to death, but they also could not tell us when the paper work would finally be approved.  And so we waited and started to sweat about not getting into the house on time, and then went out looking at other homes and found this one, made an offer, which was accepted in a day, and then cancelled the offer we had made on the other house and purchased this one.

I recently went by that other house and it's still for sale.  Bank of America had an offer in hand, had buyers who were willing to make the deal happen at the price the bank wanted, and yet they couldn't get the paperwork completed, because they really didn't care.  What difference did this little house make in the total operations of their bank?  None.  Nor did the concerns we expressed about getting the deal done in time.  I feel sorry for the people who owned the house, who have probably now entered into foreclosure, but I don't feel sorry for the agent, who was just as as unhelpful as the bank, or for Bank of America.

We would have bought that house, wanted to buy that house, but Bank of America ultimately didn't really care enough about selling it to actually do anything.

UPDATE: My real estate agent just looked up this house and he said that it is showing a sale pending, and the price is $30,000 less than what we had offered.