Be Kind to One Another

Here is my message from Sunday. The scripture passage was Ephesians 4:25-5:2:

If it seems like flying the friendly skies is a little less friendly these days, you’d be right. The FAA began keeping records of referrals made to them of unruly passengers on planes in 1995.  A few weeks ago they released statistics on those unruly passengers on planes so far in 2021. In less than six months this year, there have been more reports than in any full year since they began keeping those records. This has included a Southwest flight attendant being punched in the face, losing two teeth. A Delta flight being diverted to Albuquerque after a passenger threatened to bring the plane down and tried to get into the cockpit. There have been multiple incidents of passengers fighting with each other. Southwest and American have delayed bringing back alcohol sales, and United only sells beer and wine, and then only on long flights, to try and eliminate alcohol exacerbating the already high tensions. Long time flight attendants have said it’s worse than they can ever remember it. And then we could talk about increasing altercations in grocery and big box stores, which are also on the rise. It seems like we’ve just forgotten how to get along with others.

And so with all of that in mind, today we begin a new worship series entitled The Kindness Challenge, which is based upon a book of the same name by Shaunti Feldhahn. I initially read the book a number of years ago, and even did a series on it at my last church, but with our current climate and situation I decided to dust it off and do it over again. I was going to do it later in the year, but decided to move it up now because I think it’s necessary for us as Christians to be showing a different way of living. As was said in the introduction to the passage from Ephesians today, when we put on the clothes of Christ, something we’ve heard a lot of in the past few months, then we are to put away the ways of the world, and to live like Christ, to imitate Christ, and one of the ways we do that Paul says is by practicing kindness.

That's a Mistake. It's a Perfect Ten.

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Matthew 5:43-48:

Just a week short of a year ago, as we made our way through Genesis, our passage was God’s call to Abraham to sacrifice his only son Isaac, whom he loved. And I said that when we dealt with that story that we had to deal with the reality that we sacrifice our children for many, many lesser reasons. And I quoted Russell Baker writing in the New York Times who said, “Parents who make their children's lives hell in order to make the parents proud of themselves are a commonplace of American life.” Especially when it comes to sports and then I also reminded us that we also see our children sacrificed as victims of sexual and physical violence, neglect and homelessness, child labor and poverty. And I don’t think we can actually talk about the Olympics without naming those realities, especially as we look at the film Nadia, which came out in 1984 as a made for TV movie about Nadia Comaneci. While some of you may have seen it at the time, I doubt that it touched many of you with its cinematic brilliance. There is actually a Facebook page for fans of the movie and it has a whole 128 people who like it, so not at the top of the Olympic movie pyramid.

But, I choose it for several reasons. The first is that I wanted a film that featured a female athlete, and there just aren’t a lot of them out there. The second was that I thought Nadia’s achievement of perfection in the 1976 Olympics could provide us a good perspective to talk about perfecting our faith, as hear in the gospel passage we have for today. And third, it could also provide us some perspective on Olympic achievements and their aftermath, which are not always pretty, nor is the path to get there. Although today’s message is going to be very different than what I had thought it would be because of the events of this week in women’s gymnastics especially as they surround Simone Biles. If Biles is not the greatest female gymnast of all time, she and Nadia Comaneci are certainly in the conversation. And it turns out that they actually have a lot in common.

Feel the Rhythm! Feel the Rhyme! Get On Up, It's Bobsled Time!

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Samuel 17:1a, 4-11, 32-49:

In preparation for the Olympic Games in Atlanta in 1996, Nike put up a billboard that said “You don’t win the silver, you lose the gold.” According to Nike, it was supposed to be inspiring, but for US wrestler Townsend Saunders, an Arizona State alum, when he walked out of the arena wearing a silver medal, he said those words stung. “It’s not terrible for everyone else to read” he said, “It’s just terrible for every silver medalist.” He went home depressed thinking he should have given more effort and won gold. “It was an honor to represent my country,” he said, “but to have come so close.” Eventual he came to terms with his loss and realized that not very many people have a silver medal either.[i] And really, the billboard seemed to be in opposition to many of the things the Olympics represent.  Baron de Coubertin, the founder of the modern Olympic Games, said “The important thing in the Olympic Games in not winning but taking part. The essential thing in life is not conquering but fighting well.” And that, I think, is one of the things that make the Olympics great. Because while there are certainly those who win, who mark themselves as great, that we celebrate, people like Jesse Owens or Simone Biles or Michael Phelps, we are often just as amazed by those who give everything even know that they have little chance of winning. The Olympics are just as much, or maybe even more about those athletes. And so perhaps with that idea it’s appropriate that today’s film is Cool Runnings about the Jamaican Bobsled team who first participated in the 1988 Olympics in Calgary.

In trying to find films for this series, I was looking for a film about someone who was expected to win and didn’t, but there aren’t a lot of them out there. And so the next best option was films that celebrate the mere act of competing and there are some good films that do that, and this is one of the best. But, we do have to be honest and say that it says that this is based on a true story, and that is true. There was a bobsled team from Jamaica, and there are a couple of other things that are true from the story, but most of the rest of it is made up for entertainment purposes, and so that does mark this story as different from other Olympic films. It’s still very entertaining, but don’t take this as what actually happened, and in it also has a bigger connecting to the story of David and Goliath.

You Can Run. You Can Jump. But, Can You Win?

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was 1 Corinthians 9:24-27:

Last week as we began our worship series on the gospel message to be found in movies about the Olympics we looked at the movie Miracle, about the 1980 US hockey team who won gold. To help them prepare for that, their coach told them they were going to work harder than they had ever worked before, and wanted to know that they were actually going to be dedicated enough to actually get it done? That is often the difference between success and failure not just in sports, but in most aspects of life. How much are you willing to put into it? Are you willing to put in everything you have, and even more, or do you want to just do enough to get by? And more importantly in our faith lives, what are we willing to do? Paul really asks the Corinthian community, are you putting everything you have in to win the race of faith, or is your desire and wants somewhere else?

And so today we look at the movie Race, which is about Jesse Owens who is arguably one of, if not the greatest Olympic athlete of all time, having won 4 gold medals at the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin, and I hope that didn’t ruin the surprise for anyone. There is so much we could talk about this film including that the movie’s title has sort of a double meaning to it, not only being about the races that Owens won as a track star, but also about the realities of being a black man in America and in Hitler’s Olympic games. But today we are going to focus on the fact no one gets to the Olympics by just talent alone. Talent will get you only so far on its own, but it takes more than just talent to be your best and especially the best in the world. And so Owens, whose family moved to Ohio from Alabama when he was a boy, goes to Ohio State University to run on their track team, at a time in which their football team was still another 7 years away from being integrated. And when he gets there, his coach, Larry Snyder, wonders what he has. Take a look…

The Name on the Front of the Jersey is More Important Than the Name on the Back

Here is my sermon from Sunday. The text was Galatians 3:23-29:

Since the summer Olympics are set to start in less than two weeks, a year late and many billions of dollars over budget, and unlike any Olympics we’ve ever seen before. I thought now would be a great time to begin a new worship series which will go for the next four weeks looking at the gospel message, or the Christian message, we can find in films about the Olympics. And please notice that this is not the gospel according to the Olympics, as we have only four gospels we use, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, but the gospel in Olympic films. That is seeing Christian stories or themes, or finding them, in areas in which we might not ordinarily think to look. We start with one of the best, and more recent Olympic films, and that is the film Miracle, about the 1980 US Olympic hockey team who, against all odds and expectations, and 40-year-old spoiler alert, defeated the Soviet hockey team, probably one of the greatest hockey teams ever to play, having won gold at the last four Olympics. And while the film certainly tells the story of that game, and does it extraordinarily well in my opinion, it’s the story of how they got to that point that makes the difference and leads us to what we are going to explore today.

Herb Brooks, played by Kurt Russell, was the coach of the University of Minnesota hockey team and was hired in 1979 to coach the Olympic team after several others had turned it down because they didn’t think they could compete, certainly with the soviets, but Brooks had a different idea, and a different way of constructing his team. He wasn’t necessarily going to take the best players, as he said “All-star teams fail because they rely solely on the individual's talent. The Soviets win because they take that talent and use it inside a system that's designed for the betterment of the team.” The only way they could beat the soviets, he said, was to play the best team hockey they could, not just having the best players they could get. And so rather than having tryouts as normal, Brooks instead handpicked all the players for the team. But that didn’t mean it was easy going because these were guys that had played against each other at the highest levels of college hockey for national championships, and so there was some bad blood existing. Take a look…

In-Person and Digital Worship

Several months ago we cut the cord on our cable (or actually our satellite dish). We had been talking about it and looking at all the different options and when the price was going up, and the company offered to upgrade me to a more expensive package, but not cut the price, we decided to bite the bullet and do it, and we haven’t really looked back. And we are not alone.

There were an estimated 25 million people who had stopped using cable or satellite by 2017. This year that number is supposed to reach 50 million, with another 5 million added next year, and still growing beyond that. Netflix now has more subscribers in the US than cable and satellite combined. Additionally cable viewership of those between 18-49 is down more than 27% in the past two years, even with people being locked up at home. This is the reality of the world in which we live, and it will only continue.

We live in an on-demand world. Other than for sports, or very special shows, people don’t want to have to wait until a specific time to watch a show, and then not be able to catch it again until much later. They want to be able to see it when they want to watch not when someone else says they can watch it. And then there is the whole issue of binging a whole series or season at once. Some entertainment companies have recognized this reality and embraced it, others are working towards it, and others who resist will simply disappear.  

This is not true just for TV, but for many other things that used to demand everyone to be in one place at the same time. While I do still “attend” workshops and trainings that are at a particular time and day, most of the things I attend or see offered that I might be interested in are on demand. I do the work when it’s convenient for me and interact with others who are doing the same thing at the same time. There may be time limitations, that is the class is only happening during a period of dates, but it still works on my schedule. Just look at what universities are doing in online classes and you’ll see how true this is becoming.

Now until the past year most churches have been anything but doing that. We offered worship at a particular time and if you couldn’t make that, then you were out of luck. And other than perhaps watching or listening to the sermon later, which even then was a rarity in most churches, there was no way to catch up. That is not conducive to a culture that wants things differently, and wants them when they want them. McDonalds now offers breakfast all day for a reason.

Now all this does not mean you can’t still offer things at a particular time, but unless you are really special, again think sports, people want other ways to interact when they want. Our streaming allows us to do this because you can now access our worship service any time after it happens, as well as to just watch the message if you want. I haven’t heard of anyone bingeing an entire worship series at one time yet, but I do know many people who are watching the worship service at a time that works better for them for many reasons.

Now one of the things that people get stuck in is either/or thinking, rather than both/and. It’s not that we are going to preference those in the sanctuary over online, or vice versa. Both are constituents of the congregation. As Phillip Ortega keeps saying, which I encourage, “we need to meet people where they are.”

You cannot make people do what you want them to do, but that they don’t want to do. If you are a parent or own cats you know is true. It’s about thinking of ways of being church in new ways in order to reach new people. We have people worshipping with us online on a regular basis, and sometimes just once, who don’t even live in New Mexico, let alone Los Alamos. Our possibility of growth online also becomes exponential over what we can do here.

In-person worship and gatherings are not going away, but neither is the digital, and both can inform and build on each other, as well as increase engagement, and as one person I recently read said, if we don’t embrace the digital, “your church will probably continue to function like a mall in the age of Amazon.” Malls are dying and to quote a book title, I refuse to lead a dying church.

But that’s just a start, and I’ll expand more in the next few weeks. So I want to know from you, where do you see opportunities for us in the digital world that we are not currently using, what are your concerns, and how do you think you might be able to assist?

With Liberty and Justice for All

Here is my message from Sunday. The texts were Deuteronomy 10:12-13, 17-21, John 8:31-36 and Galatians 5:1, 13-25:

Today is the day we, as a nation, celebrate our independence, or achieving our liberty, from Great Britain. Although technically I agree with John Adams, that we should probably celebrate on July 2 because that was the day that the continental congress actually passed the resolution declaring independence. They then spent the next two days debating the wording of the declaration, which was then adopted on July 4, although it’s possible some signed it on July 4th, most didn’t start signing it until nearly a month later, and several never signed it at all. But as I was thinking of today and what I might talk about, I was thinking about the last line of the pledge of allegiance, “with liberty and justice for all.” And those are terms that have a particular meaning for us as Christians, that may be, and probably are different than those that we think of as a country and a culture, even though the writer of the pledge, Francis Belamy, was a Baptist minister. He was also a socialist and was removed from his church after denouncing the evils of capitalism. But what makes the story even more interesting is the fact that the first place that really published and pushed the pledge was a publication entitled The Youth’s Companion, but their motive was to encourage schools to buy flags for all of their classrooms, and of course who was selling those flags? The Youth’s Companion. I’m telling you you can’t make this up.

But anyways, we hear much in the Bible about justice, and in particular about God’s justice, which is part of that passage we heard from Deuteronomy, and the prophets have a lot more to say about it, because often the reason that Israel is being punished is because they are not upholding God’s justice. And what God also makes clear is that because Israel is God’s chosen nation and people, that they are held to a higher standard. That because they know of God’s justice that their acts of justice, or how they live out justice, must follow the same standard of that of the divine. And what is that? Well we don’t have time to go into that in detail, and one of the reasons I wanted to talk about it today was for me to begin thinking about it in greater detail for a possible worship series on God’s justice, and what that might look like and entail. And so Moses tells the people, sort of summarizing the law, or at least how it’s lived out, that God is impartial and takes no bribes, the sort of basics of what we might think of what justice in the world looks like, especially amongst judges, the police, prosecutors and politicians, those who carry out human justice, after all we say that justice is blind right? That she is blind so that everyone gets a fair shot, even if we might not actually live into that, that’s the ideal. Which is also being set out here.

Life Is A Powerful Force: I Miss My Dog

Life is a powerful thing. Life wants to keep going. And regardless of what we witness in movies on and TV, killing someone, or something, is hard to do. Life wants to fight back and hold on. Just think of all the weeds that keep coming back. This week we had to put one of our dogs down, and his life just kept holding on. The vet actually had to give a second shot, and she said that sometimes they just don’t want to let go. And perhaps we should have seen that all along in Toby.

We got him six years ago from the shelter in Albuquerque. We had been looking at the possibility of getting a second dog, and I was on their website and saw that they had a Shetland Sheepdog available. We had a Sheltie when I was an infant, although she died before I was old enough to remember her, but grew up hearing about what a great dog she was and how good Sheltie’s were with kids and families, and so I called Linda and we went to see him.

Long story short, they didn’t know much about him and all the strange things he was doing while we were there we explained away as him being stressed of having his life turned upside down and not knowing what was going on in ending up at the shelter. They also said that purebreds didn’t come in very often and if we didn’t take him then, he would be gone by the morning, and so we got ourselves a new dog.

But, when we got him home, we discovered through his behavior that he had been either severely abused or completely ignored in his last home. When he went outside he would run to a small, tight corner where two fences came together and hide. When he came into the house, he would run into the bathroom behind the toilet and hide. That was his existence.

With the help of some medicine to start, and then a dog trainer, and a lot of work, especially by my wife, we got him to become somewhat sociable and acclimated to his surroundings and his family. But, while there were glimpses of a normal dog inside of him, they were fleeting. You could also see that he was trying desperately to try and overcome his past. As he improved when we would come near to him, he might still try and flee, but then would stop and start running in circles trying to overcome his anxiety. Or he would see us and run towards us, and then start circling before coming too close. We actually called him circle dog for a while because that was our interactions.

By the end of his life, we could actually walk him on a leash, he would sit on the couch and come seek an ear rubbing if we were lying in bed, and he played with the children. On his best days, he would even let me walk up to him and let me scratch his ears, but he never really did well with men, which makes me think it was an abuse issue.

In looking back now, I can see his powerful claim of life working its way through. He could have just given up, curled up in a ball refusing to eat or drink and just been done. But he didn’t. He fought, maybe not as effectively as we may have wanted, but from where he was on his first day to where he was on his last day was the difference between night and day. Others, who spent time around him, may have still seen how “off” he might be, but he had made enormous progress. And before we went to the vet on Monday I was able to groom him, a little, and scratch his ears and tell him not only thank you, but also that I was sorry for what he had been through and that we were never able to get him fully over it all, which was not his fault.

On Monday evening I told Linda that what was hitting me hardest is that I missed the idea of Toby. Not in the When Harry Met Sally way of “Maybe I just miss the idea of Helen. No, I miss the whole Helen.” But that I wanted something specific from him, and he and I could not make that happen. I wanted him to be more than he could be, and in that isn’t he like all of us, living in our brokenness? And yet the power of life shone through him to the end. I miss the idea of Toby, but I also just miss my dog.

Connecting In a Divided World

Here is my message from Sunday. The text was Romans 13:8-14 and Matthew 18:15-17:

On May 22, 1856, in what is considered one of the low points in the history of the US Congress, Preston Brooks, a pro-slavery representative from South Carolina, entered the senate chambers and attacked Massachustes senator Charles Sumner with a cane beating him within inches of his life for an anti-slavery speech that Sumner had delivered two days before. The violence was seen as the beginning of the “breakdown of reasonable discourse”, contributing even more to the polarization of the country around the issue of slavery, and a precursor to the increasing violence that would lead to the civil war. And yet many historians say that the civil war became inevitable several years before that when the churches began to split, including the Methodists and later the Baptists, which is the reason we have a southern Baptist church over slavery. That when churches could not stay together, people believe, there was little chance for the country itself.

And so most of you here are probably aware of the issues now swirling around the Methodist church and the potential, or maybe likely, schism, which has been postponed at least until next year. And if you’ve been paying attention to the southern Baptist gathering this week, you also know that there was considerable debate there about actions that could lead to many or most African-Amercian congregations, and many others as well, leaving that denomination. This has led to some speculation about what churches splintering again means for us as a country. And then what the last election showed us is that 100% of the country believes that 50% of americans have lost their minds. And so it probably isn’t surprising that one of the things that several people have asked me to talk about, or just asked for advice itself, is how, in these troubled and divided times, we are supposed to deal with, let alone get along with, people who are on the opposite side of some issue, especially if they, or maybe even us, resort to anger and name calling and other derogatory behavior to make their point.

State of the Church

Here is my message from Sunday. The passages were Joshua 24:13-15 :

It has been my tradition, to take one Sunday a year, typically in June, or right around then, to give a state of the church message. To talk about where we have been, what some of our accomplishments have been in the past year, perhaps where we were not as successful as we had hoped, and what opportunities and challenges we’re, things to focus on and occasionally some challenges to the congregation of things we could, or maybe should, be doing. I do it around this time of year because it represents for me, the completion of an appointment year and an anniversary of my time here. Now we didn’t do this last year, because as I said in my preview video sent out in our Friday worship email, I really had no idea what the next week, or month, might bring, let alone trying to forecast what the next year would bring. In some ways that’s still true, although we are coming closer to normality. Additionally, while we had made some good goals for 2020, most of them got put on hold because of the onset of Covid. And that has also sort of put me, and many other clergy in an unusual situation, in that I am now completing the end of my second year being here with you, I don’t really have two years of experience with you all. I have 8 or so months or sitting with you, and visiting with you and working with you, of doing hospital visits and funerals, and the other things that happen in the normal life of a church. And then many more months of doing things very differently than most of us have ever done before. There are some disadvantages in that reality, but there are probably some good opportunities for us to do things differently as we move forward.

And that’s probably a good place to start, because while some people can’t wait to get back to normal, or the way things used to be, we shouldn’t be so quick to just go back to doing what we have done before. This is a great time to evaluate everything and make sure it’s what we want or need to keep doing. So for example, going to online worship is not just a temporary thing. Online worship represents a huge opportunity for us to reach new people in new ways, and many people will feel much safer seeing what our worship is like from the comfort of their own homes than coming here for the first time. And so we are going to keep streaming worship. But that will require us to think differently about worship and what it means to have people here and also people online, some of whom don’t even live in Los Alamos. How do we build community there? How do we deepen relationship and faithfulness in both places? And it’s not even that we can think that our primary purpose is here and that what we do online is just for convenience for some people, because that’s not the way the world works anymore.