Saturday, June 15, 2013

CALPAC Annual Conference 2013 Reflection

I have a bad habit.  When I don't understand something or my priorities are different from other people, I have a tendency to write them off.  This has reared its ugly head a few times at Annual Conference.

I have been going to Annual Conference for six years and nearly every year I have the same conversation with people, asking, "What does anything we do here have to do with Kingdom building or the survival of the United Methodist Church?"

Before this year, the only answer I ever came up with is that it doesn't.  Nothing we do at Annual Conference furthers the cause of institutional survival.  Of course without a budget we wouldn't have the capacity to fund the ministries for another year, etc., but this year I have realized that survival isn't the goal.  It is Kingdom Building.  

Rev. John Farley, our new District Superintendent for the South District was telling a story last night about when he was questioning his call to ministry and asked his father, "Will the Church even be here in thirty years?"  His father replied, "The Church is God's and will remain for eternity.  But if you mean the United Methodist Church, who knows?" The ministry at Annual Conference looks much different than nearly any place else in the Church, except Summer Camp.  With Summer Camp, it is very hard to explain how it works.  But we know that on day one students feel one way about their faith and that through the interactions of a week with their peers talking about God and faith they feel stronger, fortified in their faith in Christ, and ready to face the world again.  This same thing happens at Annual Conference and is equally difficult to explain. But in some ways, Annual Conference functions like a summer camp for adults who also have to make decisions and do a bit of work.

One key way I have found that Kingdom building happens is this: Most churches are demographically homogenous.  There are churches that are mostly rich, or mostly poor, or mostly white, or mostly black, or mostly something demographic.  At Annual Conference, we are a diverse faith, believing many things differently, many different political perspectives, coming with different baggage, etc.  When we come together, we support one another and hear each other's positions with love and kindness and at the end of it all we got a bit of work done, we feel very different, fortified in our faith in Christ, and ready to face the world.

I have got to stop reading the public reviews on goodreads...

June 15, 2013 at 11:10AM via Facebook

Sunday, June 09, 2013

Donald Miller's Storyline



I hate to admit how long I have been working with Donald Miller's Storyline.  I am not sure how long one is supposed to work on it.  I figured that I would be done with it in a matter of a couple weeks, but that was back in April when I was a bit more naive about the program.

Donald Miller had just come to Point Loma Nazarene University to speak to a group of pastors about writing, storytelling, and authenticity - among other things.  I got really excited and used my iPad to buy every book of his that I had not read - and even some books that he recommended - Storyline being one of them.  That started a series of stories that I have written about my life.  I have written much more than I have read.

Here I am months later with nearly forty pages of story written and have only finished reading two chapters.




Here is a story called Barney that I am working on:

Barney
I have never been very good at chronology. I often tell stories out of sequence. I always seem to tell ghost stories and have the room remain silent after the punchline, only to have to ask, "Did I mention he had a hook for a hand?" Now I am thinking about my first dog, Barney. Well, the first dog I remember. Barney was a Basset Hound. He smelled of death even on his cleanest, fresh from the bath, day. I have asked a lot of different people why Bassets stink, but no one has given me a good answer. He just stunk and I guess I can leave it at that. He was a beast of a dog. He had big, broad shoulders and a skinny waist and a bark like a car horn. If I got too close to where he was tied in our back yard, he would jump on me and knock me down. I don't know why, but that scared me to death. It was my chore to take out the leftovers from Sunday dinner and feed them to Barney. I remember being particularly scared of being knocked over that day and crept as quietly as possible so as to not wake Barney up until I was out of reach. I could tell something was wrong when I had to scrape the food into his dish and made a noise ­ Barney didn't charge. I checked him and he was stiff as a board. I remember crying. Looking back, I wonder why I cried. Barney scared me, but I cried for him. I ran to tell dad that Barney wouldn't move, that he was dead. I remember the look of dread on his face as he said, "Oh no, Matt! Don't tell me that." We buried Barney out back of our house, next to the woods. 
Not too long after, my parents borrowed a Bassett Hound that a friend of the family was thinking about getting rid of. Come to think of it, that 'friend of the family' was my mom's boss, Dr. Prince, president of Mount Vernon Nazarene University. That dog ran off one evening in December and was hit by a car. My mom still tells the story about having to go tell her boss that she killed his dog. I can imagine that would have been a bit uncomfortable. Of course that is an understatement. That dog was buried next to Barney, but the ground was cold and I am sure it was difficult to dig, and that dog was on top of the ground the day of the first spring rain. My dad reburied that dog maybe ten times and ten times that dog ended up on top of the ground after the next rain. The thing I remember about that dog most was its skull poking up from the ground, eaten by worms, and having to run past it out of fear on my way to play in the woods.
All in all it has been a fun process.  I will keep the blog updated as I get further along.

Saturday, June 08, 2013

Removal of Advertising

I was never making a killing on advertising.  Maybe $100 per year.  No big thing.  Just enough to buy something nice once a year.

But...

I decided this week that I would rather make my blog nice looking 365 days per year than to have $.27 per day.

I will continue you to use affiliate links on products and services I am trying or happen to like.  Let me know if this feels weird for me to do.

I hope you enjoy the new layout.

JackThreads.com

I know I am late to the game, but I decided to sign up for JackThreads because I needed some pants and a light hoodie and everything I have tried out locally has been wrong or too expensive.

So I bought these pants:  Smooth Co Union Pants



And this Hoodie: Ocean Current Zuma Pullover


When I get them in the mail, I will review them and the JackTreads service.  



Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Sermon - May 26, 2013 - Sea Change

Imagine yourself in the wilderness, thirsty, exhausted, parched, perhaps dehydrated.  You have no water.  You are on a long journey; not sure of where you are going.  It is raining, but you don’t notice it.  You carry a cup, but you keep it upside down.  What’s the point?  So you walk and walk and walk, getting  more and more run-down.  It seems hopeless; maybe you have given up.  You are moving only because the alternative is to do nothing.  You’re looking for water, maybe even attempting to lap the moisture from a boot print in the mud, but you find none.  All the while it is raining, hard, and you don’t even notice.  Then you meet a friend on the path who is healthy, hydrated, satisfied.  She takes your hand, cup and all, and makes you hold it upright, and fills yours from hers.  It is then that you realise that it was raining all along.  You were thirsting for no reason other than your own blindness.  And your cup keeps filling.  Now you get to be the friend on the path, turning cups over and sharing yours, opening eyes to the rain all around.
That is grace.  That’s how it works.

Circumincession / Perichoresis.
Today is Trinity Sunday.  It is a day in which we especially celebrate the three persons of the trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This tradition of celebrating the Trinity on the Sunday after Pentecost is an old one - depending on who you ask, around 1,000 years.  It is a day in which we talk about our God in three persons, thankful that we serve a God who lives in a state of love and giving.  But why do we even talk about God in the three persons?  We believe in one God, right?
Descriptions.
Well... We often describe God the Father as the creator of heaven and earth, protector, -  life-giver.  We speak of the Holy Spirit as the one who comes near to us, an advocate, a guide,  - the still, small voice of God in our lives. The Son - the one Paul discusses in Romans today - is the one who set us right with God, the savior, the one who has saved us from the bonds and destruction of sin and death.  
One God; three persons; three ways to talk about God.
Some people call this relationship the divine dance.  The Greek word for this is perichoresis: it means to contain and surround and is sometimes translated to mean to dance around.  That is how I like to imagine the persons of the Trinity: engaged in a dance of giving in love.  God, the Father, gives his divinity, his Godness so to speak, to the Son with no expectations, the Son then gives his divinity to the Spirit, who gives it back to the Father.  And so it goes.  On and on.  It is an eternal dance wrapped around one gift, one divine nature.  This relationship within the Trinity is a model for what grace looks like for us.  Freely giving.  Freely moving.  Expecting nothing in return.  Hoping for everything.
Looking to the trinity allows us to receive from God, God’s grace in its fullness, and then give from our abundance freely with no expectation of payment or quid pro quo.  But we love, and we give, and we hope.  And we respond with amazement when we are blessed by those we bless.  But we only hope; we don’t expect.  ...
Paul.
In our scripture this morning, we have this character, Paul, writing to a congregation he does not know.  He wants a few things from them: #1) He wants them to bless him when he comes through Rome on his way to Spain; #2) He wants them to contribute to his offering for Jerusalem; #3) He wants them to stop arguing about the whole "Who's the most religious?" - OR who is better?, Jews or Gentiles, debate; and #4) he wants to teach them; he wants them to listen to him teaching them, what it means to be a Jew or a Gentile who is "in-Christ."
I say "in-Christ" because at this point in time, we probably didn’t have what we call "Christians" yet.  Paul never did and never would have used that word.  While the word Christian appears in the Bible three times: Acts 11, Acts 26 and in 1 Peter 4.  Paul never uses the word; he probably thought of himself as a Jew who was “in-Christ.”  See, the word Christian can mean a group of people who go to a church or rally around an idea or belief; whereas being "in-Christ" is a lifestyle for Paul.  In genealogy and faith, he was a Jew, but he loved and served Christ - he was "in-Christ."
It would be easy to read Romans or the many other letters attributed to Paul, in the Bible, and forget that Paul was a man.  To think of him as larger than life, a man like no other, even to forget that he was a real person, with a real story, and a life and feelings and aspirations just like us.  He may be the man who, by the inspiration of God, authored the origins of our faith and religion, and our Christian doctrine, but he was also... a man.
Paul was born in Tarsus, in the south-central area of what is now called Turkey.  It is the city in which Cleopatra first met Mark Anthony.   Legend has it that Tarsus is the city we also know as Tarshish, that Jonah was attempting to flee to when he was swallowed by the fish.  It was first ruled by the Hittites, then the Assyrians, then the Persians, then the Romans. The Romans had controlled Tarsus for around sixty years when Paul was born.  So while Paul was not a holy-land born Jew, he had a lot in common with them because he was a Jew quite familiar with the feeling of being from a land of conquered people.  He was very well educated; Paul identifies himself as a Pharisee in Philippians 3.  He was taught by the great Hebrew Law teacher, Gamaliel.  His Greek is well-written.  His rhetoric is fairly academic.  Acts 16 says that Paul was a Roman citizen.  
As a Pharisee, he punished and persecuted the followers of Christ.  Then he had a vision of Christ on the road to Damascus and afterwards transferred all of his zeal from persecution to encouragement and evangelism.  Because of his Jewish genealogy and his Roman citizenship he was uniquely qualified to minister to both Jews and Gentiles.  And that is exactly what he did for many years.  He traveled around from church to church - even creating churches - for most of his ministry, speaking and writing to Jews and Gentiles who were “in-Christ.”
Romans 5.
That is the Paul we read in Romans.  While it is the first of his letters in the order of the Bible, in fact, sixth text in the New Testament overall, just after Acts, Romans is one of the last letters Paul wrote in his life.  We read Chapter 5 a moment ago and we heard about the astonishing grace that Christ has offered, setting us right with God.  The message paraphrase - written by a personal hero of mine, Eugene Peterson - says it this way:

By entering through faith into what God has always wanted to do for us—set us right with him, make us fit for him—we have it all together with God because of our Master Jesus. And that’s not all: We throw open our doors to God and discover at the same moment that he has already thrown open his door to us. We find ourselves standing where we always hoped we might stand—out in the wide open spaces of God’s grace and glory, standing tall and shouting our praise.

That’s verses 1 and 2.  We open our doors to God, finding that God has already opened the door to us, in our Lord Jesus Christ.  Jesus is the way we can live in connection to the Trinity...  Verse 1 says that now that we have faith, we have peace with God.   Another way to say that, like The Message does, is that we have been set right with God.  Because of the great sacrifice of Christ, we have been united with the almighty and have the opportunity to access grace -  N.T. Wright says that Paul uses the word grace as a shorthand for the power and presence of God Almighty.  And that being in a ‘state of Grace’ what Paul would call being ‘in-Christ,’ Wright continues, we are in “a position where we are surrounded by God's love and generosity, invited to breathe it in as our native air.”  And that is what we were meant to do from the beginning.  It has been raining all along.
Grace is Free.
When I was a baby my parents were running a cleaning service and supply business.  My mom was also teaching in a gifted program at a local elementary school.  To say the least, they had a lot on their plate with all of that and my two sisters and me.  So they asked my next door neighbor, Jo Sergent, a woman with several grown kids, to watch me during the day while they were at work.  Not really different from any other situation except Jo didn’t treat me like employment; she treated me like a son.  She saw this baby - me - and treated me like family.  I hadn’t done anything for her.  I was not genetically related to her.  I had done nothing to earn her love, but she loved me anyway.
When Jo was diagnosed with M.S., I was three.  I actually remember standing by the sink with her while she washed dishes and I asked her questions about her being sick.  I remember her eventually degenerating to her bed.  And I remember her always treating me as if I were one of her own children.  All the time that she was sick and all the time that has passed since she has been gone, her family - husband, daughters, and sons - all still treat me like family.  Her daughter, Marsha, has sent me a birthday card every year of my life and always signs it, “Love You, Little Brother.”  All this because Jo Sergent decided to love me.
Unmerited love like this is rare, but it is our calling.  We are called to do this... more than that, we are called to be this.
So What?
In the story I told earlier, you imagined yourself dying of thirst in the middle of a rainstorm.  The grace of Christ is like that rain.  Grace rains down on us all and we don’t notice and we are thirsty for it but we don’t acknowledge it.  And to fully enjoy that grace we have to accept it and turn our cups over, receiving the abundant grace that was all around us the whole time.  Then when our cup is filled, we share with others who thirst; we pour some of ours into theirs. Some ways we do this are: prayer, visiting the sick, doing good, clothing and feeding the poor... the list is pretty long.  
But know this...

Friends, it’s raining.  It’s raining like crazy.  Notice it.  Revel in it.  It is God’s free gift to you.  Turn your cups over.  Drink it in.  Accept the grace Christ offers; dance in God’s abundance that surrounds you.  Now go share.  

Sermon - May 12, 2013 - Leave Here a Stranger

When I was fourteen, in the spring semester of ninth grade, my mom was working as a full-time, tenure-track professor, finishing her doctorate, and writing a textbook for elementary-level math.  I didn’t get to see her as much as I would have liked.  She was, and has always been, a busy woman.  But this time was some of the most difficult and busy times of her whole life.  
In my house bedtimes didn't exist on weekends and in the summer.  As long as I was quiet and didn’t bother anyone, I could stay up indefinitely if I wanted.  It was one of those 3 a.m. Friday nights, when I was up playing games on my family's computer and a game I wanted to play wouldn't load, wouldn’t run.
Keep in mind, at this point in my life, I knew nothing about computers.  Pretty much just where the power button was and how to play a couple of games.  I knew nothing of substance.
But I found myself looking through the game's troubleshooting guide, looking for ways to make it work when I saw a solution that caught my eye - “insert the computer's recovery disk, and select reinstall.”
If you, like me at the age of 14, didn't know much about computers, this sounds like a fairly simple solution to what seems like a complicated problem. But if you do know about computers, like I do now, you know that this is not a simple solution, that it spells really, really bad news, and you are probably squirming in your seat, knowing what comes next.
So what does come next is this: the computer restarted and I was greeted to a brand new, blank computer screen, a computer that had been completely. and. utterly. erased.  
Four things you should know in order to understand the gravity of this situation:
1) My mom used this computer to work at home.
2) She had used this computer to write her math textbook and it was due in just about a month - if I remember right.
3) She is the kind of computer user that keeps all of her files on the desktop - if there is room for another file on the desktop, something is missing. And now,
4) There were now no icons on the desktop.  Everything was blank.  Her work was gone and, worse, her book was gone.
I just went ballistic.  I immediately panicked like I had never panicked before.  I began using the search function to pointlessly search for all the files from the computer, my mom's work, her book, anything.  It was all gone.  All gone.

And I cried.  
Like a baby.  
Fourteen years old, 3:30 a.m.,
crying like a baby over a - recently erased - laptop’s keyboard.
I think I spent about another half hour fruitlessly trying everything I could think of to undo my mistake.  But it was done and there was nothing I could do.
So around 4 a.m., I crept into my parents' room and got about four inches from my mom's face and whispered, "Mom, wake up, I did something terrible and I have to tell you about it."  
So I did.  I told her all of it - tears and all - I told her all of it.  And she said something like this, "You are more important than this.  There is nothing you could do that would make me love you less."

There is nothing you could do that would make me love you less.

In this morning’s passage, in Revelation, we get to the end and find that Christ says to the people: come to me everyone who hears and, come to me all who are thirsty, and come to me all want to take the water of life as a free gift.
What a way for such a weird book to end.  I’m going to level with you: I actually do think Revelation is weird.  It’s filled with images of monsters and horror.  We have no idea who wrote it.  Although, as early as the second century, we read Justin Martyr claim it was written by the Apostle John.  Justin Martyr was mentored by a man called Polycarp. Polycarp, himself, was mentored by the Apostle John.  So what he said should hold some weight.  But modern scholars think it was written far too late in the first century to have been written by the Apostle John.  Most of us just call the author John of Patmos.  Also weird is that while a majority of early Christians accepted it as scripture, many didn't.  It was one of the last texts to be accepted into the Bible - in the year 397 at the council of Carthage.  And weirdest of all is that I’m not convinced that anyone can reasonably explain exactly what John of Patmos was trying to say. It is like everyone projects his or her own story onto Revelation.  So we have two millennia of people reading their own agendas into Revelation. The one thing everyone seems to agree with is that Revelation is a story about the future, the time to come.
Today we read the end of Revelation.  The last few lines.  And They seem predictive.  They seem to say that one day, Christ will lift the curse of sin and death and tell the whole of creation, “come.”  One day, all will be different, all will be changed, all will be forgiven. One day.
But what if Revelation isn't about one day or someday?  What if we decided to read it as a story about a God, a Christ, who is currently whispering, “come,” who is currently making things different, and who is currently forgiving.  And who is calling us to do the same.  What would happen if we read Revelation in the present tense?
I get stuck in these theology ruts in which I can scarcely think of anything else.  Right now the concept I keep coming back to is that lives matter, bodies matter, healing matters - now matters.  At Family Camp a few weeks ago, I was teaching about the resurrection of Tabbitha, from Acts, and I asked the people there to ask themselves, "if everything about Christianity is pointing toward the afterlife, then why is Tabbitha not angry at being raised from the dead?  I think that it's because lives do matter.  God has things for us to do here and now.  The problem many have when they look to Revelation, is that it is easy to say something like, "When God steps in, things are going to be a lot different."  Or, "When Jesus finally returns, we'll finally have peace."  “When Christ steps in, I’ll finally be able to forgive.”  Those are nice thoughts, but it lets us off the hook too easily.  God has things for us to do to bring about his kingdom now.  God means for us to live in a way that brings peace now.  God wants for us to live in a spirit of grace and forgiveness, now.
Bill Hybels, pastor of Willow Creek, the mega church outside of Chicago, recently interviewed Bono, the lead singer of the band U2 and well-known humanitarian.  He interviewed him on issues of faith.  At one point, pastor Hybels asked Bono about the Lord’s Prayer and Bono said that he resonated most with the part which says, “Thy Kingdom come... on earth as it is in heaven.”  He said that he thought that was our purpose - the purpose for Christians is to bring about the kingdom here and now- not some pie in the sky futuristic vision, but to bring the kingdom of God to earth now.
I would like to tell you that after I told my mom this horrendous thing I did, that she got up, got out of bed, pressed a few computer keys and everything was fine.  It wasn’t.  Everything was gone.  Forever.  Even the people whose job it is to recover deleted files were unable to recover them.  And more than that, there were only backups for about half of the chapters of my mom’s book.  I would love for this story to have had a “phew, that was close” ending.  But the reality is, I had made a huge mistake.  But here’s where a different kind of happy ending emerges.  My mom forgave me immediately, saying, “There is nothing you can do that will make me love you less.”  And after resigning herself to the reality of the situation, she never mentioned it again. I know it cost her months of work.  I know there must have been many long hours spent re-doing work I had ruined, adding to her immensely huge workload, but she never mentioned it again.  She never said things like, “don’t use the computer; remember last time!”  Or any kind of reminder of my mistake.  In fact, she encouraged me to learn more about computers, to actually learn what I was doing. Nearly twenty years later, I am still amazed by that forgiveness. Forgiveness like that costs something. It cost her hours and hours.  And Forgiveness like that changes things.  I know I was changed by that forgiveness.  How could I not be  graceful and forgiving when I was given an amazing gift of grace and love - from her forgiving spirit.  
But it’s hard to be that kind of person.  In Revelation, we get this picture that in the end everything will be restored to what it was supposed to be, what God meant it to be and, sometimes, because we don't quite fit that picture, because we aren't perfect, because we haven’t learned to forgive yet, we might feel that we can't participate in that restoration.  But that isn't the picture we get in Acts, the other scripture reading this morning.  
In Acts 16, we find Paul and Silas traveling in Philippi, in Macedonia, most likely attempting to preach the gospel - that is what Paul tended to do - when a servant girl, possessed by a spirit, began following them around, shouting, "these men are slaves of God most high; they proclaim to you the way of salvation."
This kind of situation always captures my imagination.  In my head, I see Paul, just about to hit the high point of his street sermon, or whatever it was that he was doing.  And just at that crucial part, this girl would scream louder than him, "These men were sent by God to teach you the way of salvation."  I see her doing this over and over.  Acts says she did this for days.  And, as a result, Paul heals her or her possessed spirit.  You might think that Paul had compassion or pitied her, but you would be wrong.  The scripture says that Paul was annoyed with her and he healed her almost out of spite.  
In this story, God uses one of Paul's more base instincts, annoyance, to bring grace into the situation, grace into the life of this girl.  We don't see Paul healing this girl out of his own grace - I often wonder how much different this story would be if he had healed her from a spirit of mercy instead - but we don't see him heal her out of his own mercy; we see God using Paul’s negative feelings to bring about the end that God wanted all along.  God wanted this girl to be healed and used Paul, in his imperfect state, to get the happy ending.  God wants creation healed and changed and God will use us to make it happen if we let it happen.  

What would happen if we read Revelation in the present tense?  I think the answer is: Thy kingdom come... on earth as it is in heaven.  That’s what would happen.  Isn’t that the message of the gospel?  The love of Christ changing the world one life at a time?  If we read Revelation as a futuristic story, we don’t have to live the life Christ offers, now, we can place our obligations out into the unknown future.  But if we really want to live Christ, we live Him now; we open ourselves up to Him now.  If can we let ourselves be changed and shaped by Christ’s telling us, “you are forgiven - there is nothing you can do that would make me love you less,” then God’s kingdom can be here, now. When we let go of our hurts and shame and accept that there is nothing we can do that would make God love us less, God’s kingdom can be here now.  And when we open ourselves to others, telling them you are forgiven - there is nothing you can do that would make me love you less,” then God’s kingdom can be here now.  Amen.