Monthly Archives: February 2012

26

Feb. ’12

Wind in Our Sails: Our Prayers

To move more swiftly as a church, we need to better understand the commitments we made when joining Cassidy UMC. You may recall pledging your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service and, if you joined in recent years, your witness.

Think of a five-masted sailing ship. Each mast represents one part of our pledge, and we don’t want to let the sails on any of those masts go slack through inattention. If we do, we miss our opportunity to catch the wind that is always blowing, the Holy Spirit.

This week, I want us to focus on our pledge to pray. Few Christians would openly decline to call prayer important, but I’m also very aware of the large number of Christians who struggle with what prayer really means, how it works, or why it’s important.

Jesus, of course, taught us to pray. The classic example is where he said, “Pray then in this way,” and then taught us what we now call the Lord’s Prayer.  Jesus also showed us how to pray while he was in more difficult situations, and I think it would be instructive for us to look at what may have been his lowest moment on earth.

I’m working from Mark 14:32-36; there are similar passages in Matthew and Luke. I say Jesus was at his lowest point here because the full reality of his impending torture and crucifixion had settled on him, but he had yet to find solace and strength from God the Father.

“In effect, Jesus stepped beyond the circle of light cast by God’s presence into pitch blackness in the jungle of evil,” writes biblical scholar and preacher David L. McKenna. “Before this moment, He had theoretically accepted the responsibility for bearing the sins of the whole world. Now, terror tells Him what it really means.”

Jesus’ humanity was on full display; he described himself to his disciples as “deeply grieved, even to death.” With no alternate routes around the cross visible, Jesus threw himself on the ground and began to pray, “Abba, Father, for you all things are possible; remove this cup from me; yet, not what I want, but what you want.”

Even in his perfection Jesus did not want to face his terrible suffering to come. He prayed earnestly and in very personal terms to Father God, using the Aramaic word for “Dad,” the same word Jewish children might use in speaking in a familiar way to their fathers.

It was Jesus’ hope that God the Father, who retained full divine knowledge and understanding, perhaps knew a less painful solution hidden from the Son, who also was fully God but limited in knowledge by his temporal flesh.

In the prayer, however, there also was recognition that the cross very likely was the only way for the Father’s will to come to fruition. God’s will ultimately is a positive, wonderful result for all humanity. God wills that we do not suffer for our sins.

Only Jesus in his suffering and death could make fulfillment of God’s will possible, however, and his “not what I want, but what you want” shows us the deepest goal of prayer. Prayer should lead us to put aside our will, our desires, and replace all of that with God’s will in every circumstance.

This is a very Methodist concept. John Wesley, the founder of the Methodist movement, wanted people to understand the need for “sanctification,” that process Christians undergo after turning their lives over to Christ. It largely is a process of becoming more Christlike in our thoughts and actions, learning to love others as Christ has loved the world.

When we love in such a way, our will becomes more and more conformed to God’s will.

For those of you who want to pursue sanctification by deepening your prayer lives, I’ll offer just a couple of brief ideas. We can better develop these ideas in other settings, such as Sunday school or in prayer groups.

There are lots of ways to pray, ranging from highly formal to very informal. As we’re a supposedly busy people, I’ll group them broadly according to time commitments.

It is very healthy for any Christian to learn to commit a block of time to prayer each day. If you’re just starting to pray in an organized, committed way, it may be that 15 minutes will seem like a long time to you. Commit at least to that; in that time, find how you best commune with God, remembering that the goal is to understand and follow God’s will. If you want to discuss the “hows” of such prayer further, I’m always happy to have that conversation.

I also find it useful to try to lift up little prayers throughout the day. For example, if you see a person in need of prayer, pray then and there, even if it is with your eyes open, going about your business. Such prayers, I think, keep us constantly seeking the will of God in our everyday lives—we become more conscious of how God is working in the world and remember to seek God’s will in every moment.

Next week, we’ll talk about filling the sails on our second mast, presence.

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24

Feb. ’12

Wind in Our Sails

I plan to spend the next five Sundays in a seafaring mood, talking about how our church can have the weather gauge in our battle with the devil.

Now, I’m no sailor. And “weather gauge,” used in the context of ships going to war, is an antiquated term, better suited to the wind-driven ships of Admiral Horatio Nelson than the nuclear-powered submarines and aircraft carriers of today. But I like the metaphor all the same.

What little I know of sea battles comes from books, specifically stories in what fans call the “Aubrey-Maturin series.” Through 20 books, author Patrick O’Brian tells an ongoing tale of early 19th-century British captain Jack Aubrey and his close friend, Stephen Maturin, a shipboard surgeon who occasionally disembarks to work as a spy. During the last three years or so, I’ve read 15 of these books. Yes, I instead should have been deepening my understanding of theology or New Testament Greek, but we all have our weaknesses.

What makes these stories fun is simple: These sailing men (and the occasional woman, sometimes smuggled aboard) are going places all over the world. As any dog or small child will attest, it’s just fun to go. And in the early 19th century, if you were going to go somewhere far fast, you needed the wind to fill your sails.

Having the wind working for you also helped when you encountered the enemy in your travels. Having the weather gauge meant that you were windward of the enemy, capable of charging down upon them at the time of your choosing, guns blazing. Such a position didn’t guarantee success, but

Battle of the Nile

most captains preferred to have the weather gauge. In the words of the aforementioned Nelson, “Never mind about maneuvers, go straight at ‘em.”

Despite how grounded our church buildings may seem, the church itself moves through an ocean of time, headed for a place so spectacular as to be almost unimaginable. The Enemy hopes to sink us before we arrive, of course.

The Holy Spirit is the wind that keeps us moving and gives us the weather gauge against evil Captain Scratch. When you join the Methodist Church, you promise to do your part to keep our sails rigged using five tools: your prayers, your presence, your gifts, your service and your witness.

Prepare to weigh anchor.

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22

Feb. ’12

To Dust You Shall Return

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of the season of Lent. Both the day and the season are somber.

At our 7 p.m. service tonight, there will be a point where I take a mixture of palm ashes and olive oil and, neatly as I can, use my thumb to make black crosses on the foreheads of all who come forward. I don’t know how much it readies them for the season—like any liturgical act, it means more to some than to others—but I know it readies me.

As a pastor, I’ve been participating in this ritual annually for almost a decade, saying to each participant, “Remember that you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” (An alternate liturgy allows me to say “Repent, and believe the gospel,” but remembering our mortality has always seemed to me to be a better starting point for Lent.)

I have applied the ashes and said these words to people I helped bury just a few months later. I have applied the ashes and said these words to children, including my own children, and have become teary-eyed at the very idea that people so fresh and full of promise will come to an earthly end.

Ash Wednesday begins the cold shower following our warm Christmas soak. Our minds should return to our core problem, laid out in Genesis 3: Sin separates us from God, and what is separate from God ultimately must die.

Without Easter’s clear way out of this mess, the Lenten season would be unbearable. We want to be careful not to rush toward Easter’s light, however. Freedom is hard to appreciate until we understand what we have escaped.

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12

Feb. ’12

Why Healing Happens

2 Kings 5:1-14

I should begin with an explanation of what leprosy represents Biblically. It is so far from our modern-day experiences that it’s easy for us to miss what the great warrior Naaman was experiencing.

The Hebrew and Greek words we translate as “leprosy” actually encompassed a host of skin diseases, but I think we can safely assume the lepers we’re going to talk about today suffered from a crippling, disfiguring skin disease, one still happening in the world. (We don’t see it so much in modern nations because the disease is caused by bacteria, and antibiotics go a long way toward providing a cure.)

In the days before antibiotics, or in poor places that today don’t have easy access to advanced antibiotics, the disease was and is horrible. It causes skin sores, severe nerve damage, and eventually, muscle weakness. Ironically, it is not a painful disease—it actually deadens a person’s ability to sense pain. Lepers become disfigured in part because they’re continually injuring themselves without realizing it; their skin also can become dead looking, giving sufferers a passing resemblance to the zombies popular in recent movies.

Obviously, nobody wants leprosy, and perhaps that’s the cruelest part of the disease. If you have leprosy, nobody wants to be near you. Societies for centuries have forced lepers to live apart, isolating them from the people who fear them and keeping them from the loving touch of friends and family.

For some reason, Naaman had avoided this forced isolation, most likely because he was so tremendously valuable as a warrior and military commander for the kingdom of Aram. Still, he needed help, and his king wanted him to get help, too. (I wonder if Naaman’s appearance was starting to give the king and his court the willies.)

When an Israelite slave girl mentioned there was a prophet in her land who could heal such diseases, Naaman and his Aramean king jumped on the possibility. The king gave Naaman a letter to take to the Israelite king.

After some comic confusion—the Israelite king at first thought these war-prone Arameans were demanding that he provide the healing—Naaman finally heard from Elisha, the prophet spoken of by the servant girl. “Let him come to me, that he may learn that there is a prophet in Israel,” Elisha said in a message to the king.

It is at this point in the story that we begin to see why healing happens. As I’ve mentioned in recent weeks, in our craving for physical healing for ourselves or loved ones, we forget that such healings are temporary events. As best we know, everyone who received healing in the Bible, Naaman included, later died. The healing itself did not ultimately avoid what seems inevitable, sickness and death.

So what do we really learn about healing from Naaman’s story? Why does healing happen?

In this story, healing shows us God is present in the world. In particular, people who don’t know God can often see God for the first time when miraculous healing occurs. In Naaman’s case, he first recognized there was a prophet present, despite Naaman’s initial display of arrogance. From there, he was able to develop an initial understanding of who the true God is, realizing there had to be power behind the prophet. (Read further in 2 Kings, and you can see how Naaman tried to respond.)

Jesus also healed lepers, but there is something even greater about God being revealed in those stories. Look at Mark 1:40-45. Here, we see a leper who came begging, saying to Jesus, “If you choose, you can make me clean.” Jesus, we are told, was moved with either pity or compassion, depending on the English translation you use, and touched the man in order to heal him.

It’s particularly interesting to me that Jesus told the man not to tell others about the healing, instead instructing him to go to the priests to be declared clean. We can pretty easily see why as the story continues—Jesus’ ministry was actually frustrated by the former leper’s disobedient decision to “proclaim it freely, and to spread the word.” The crowds coming to Jesus swelled so quickly that he was forced into the countryside.

Based on Jesus’ words, I would conclude it was not yet time in his ministry for such signs of a divine presence. But Jesus, God among us, was so filled with compassion for one hurting person that he could not resist healing him, despite that act making the organized expansion of his ministry more difficult.

Don’t you like that image—God wanting events to transpire in an orderly way, but so filled with love for us, so moved by our pain, that he gets things out of order for our sakes?

We’re pointed toward the big picture of how salvation is happening. In Genesis, we see brokenness; because of sin, sickness and death are our lot. In Jesus, we see the solution, with the perfect, unbroken Savior dying on the cross for our sins. Then we are told a time will come when all will be set right, when all will be healed even from death, and healing will be permanent. This all seems to fit a neat, logical pattern, and the inherent promise at the end of the pattern is by itself enough of a gift that we should be eternally grateful.

And yet, despite all God has done to save us—despite the gift of eternity we’ve already been offered—God’s compassion for us still breaks through in the present. He still loves us so much that he gets things out of order for our sakes. And we find ourselves healed, often spiritually, but sometimes even physically.

Yes, it’s a mystery why some receive this temporary healing and others don’t. All we can do is accept these miracles as grace on top of grace, and acknowledge we do indeed worship a God of love.

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05

Feb. ’12

Being There

1 Corinthians 9:16-23

Successfully telling people about Jesus Christ depends a great deal on “situational awareness,” the ability to pay attention to what’s going around you and think creatively as circumstances change.

I first heard the term while studying martial arts; since then, I’ve heard it used in other areas like business or aviation. (Airplane crashes sometimes are blamed on a pilot’s lack of situational awareness at a critical time.)

In my own life, I can look back and see moments where a particular success or failure in my life could be tied to my own situational awareness. Back when I worked in Atlanta, one of my worst moments involved a rare peregrine falcon.

Peregrine falcons are small, swift birds. In nature, they do well living on high cliffs. A subsidiary of the company I was working for, Southern Company, was breeding and releasing these rare birds from the tops of the tall buildings downtown. It was a successful program; the population of peregrine falcons was increasing, and thanks to their presence, the too-abundant pigeons they ate were decreasing.

Sometimes, the falcons would get hurt or lost, and recovering them was a priority because of the limited gene pool. One day, while out on my lunch break, I came across an unusual sight—a homeless man nervously sitting with a peregrine falcon on a rolled up newspaper. He was feeding it tiny pieces of hamburger. The bird seemed injured, clearly unable to fly. A small crowd was gathered around looking at it.

Peregrine Falcons, by John Gould (public domain)

I decided to walk up to the nearby police station and get an officer to come back and take control of the situation. Of course, by the time we got back, the man had vanished with the bird. Several officers searched the area but could not find him.

It was only a few hours later, while digging around in my pocket, that I remembered I had about $30 in it. And that’s when it hit me: “You idiot!” Why didn’t I just give the man some money in exchange for the bird? I could have stood there with the bird until one of the company ornithologists arrived.

In this case, poor situational awareness likely equaled dead rare bird.

As I studied 1 Corinthians 9:16-23 and the surrounding texts this week, it struck me that Paul is recommending situational awareness to make the spread of the gospel more effective. Know who you’re with, he’s saying; then, adapt to the situation so you have the best chance possible of helping someone accept Jesus Christ as his or her Savior.

Are the people you’re trying to reach legalists, wrapped up in how to follow rules to please God? Then you had better learn how to speak the language of the law, Paul is saying. That should open the door to talk about the freedom that Christ gave us at the cross.

Would the people you’re trying to reach call themselves free-thinking libertines? Well, you had better learn to tolerate at least in the short term some lifestyles you otherwise might find offensive. It’s the only way you can earn their trust, and eventually the right to share with them the message of salvation.

Of course, reaching out to people who have trouble distinguishing sin requires spiritual maturity. You don’t want to slip into sin yourself; the trick is to maintain your own holiness without being holier-than-thou.

Situational awareness is particularly important at what we might call the initial point of contact, a moment where there’s an opportunity to establish a relationship that could allow us to tell someone about Christ. Again, I’ve been known to blow such opportunities.

In fact, I wonder if I may have blown one last Monday morning. I had stopped at McDonald’s for an Egg McMuffin, and as I was entering, a man who was exiting asked me if there was another McDonald’s nearby. He had no cash, just his debit card, and the card machines at this particular McDonald’s were broken.

I gave him directions, sending him toward Colonial Heights. A few minutes later, as I fished a $20 bill out of my pocket, it once again hit me: “You idiot!” Why didn’t I buy that man breakfast? He clearly had time to sit down and eat, and I might have gotten to know him well enough to learn about his relationship with Christ.

I don’t know what might have happened, but that’s the point. Now I’ll never know what might have happened.

Be aware, Christians. Be very aware, looking for those subtle opportunities to draw people to Christ. You won’t have to feel like an idiot later, and you might make a new friendship, one that lasts for all eternity.

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02

Feb. ’12

Black Swan Leaps

The long-term strength of United Methodist church ministries may lie in our ability to recolor swans from black to white.

By Jozef Kotulič Slovakia, via Wikimedia Commons

That’s a metaphor, of course, and probably an obscure one if you’ve not read Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book “The Black Swan.” Taleb makes a powerful argument that history is driven by “black swan” events, huge game-changing occurrences that were improbable or even completely unpredictable. Think World War I or the 1987 stock market crash.

The term “black swan” comes from the fact that before the discovery of Australia, bird watchers were convinced that swans had to be white; after all, millions of white swans over thousands of years had been observed with no significant color variations. The discovery of black swans in Australia turned the ornithology world on its head.

It dawned on me recently that churches often make huge leaps forward in ministry because of what amount to black swan events. These churches seem to be plodding along on a predictable path, and then overnight, something unpredictable and huge happens.

For example, three years ago, Lucy Scroggie, a longtime member of Fountain City UMC in Knoxville, passed away. She was an older single woman who showed no signs of being particularly wealthy, and she had never been heavily involved in missions. But after her death, the church staff received a call from her brother informing them Scroggie had left $600,000 to Fountain City UMC, designating it be used for missions.

“Nobody knew she had this kind of money, and we were just stunned,” said Melissa Smith, the associate pastor at Fountain City who oversees the mission work made possible by Scroggie’s gift.

Interest on the principal investment currently generates from $20,000 to $24,000 a year, which Fountain City distributes in the form of grants to mission organizations. The church members also have been able to support their existing mission efforts in a much larger way—for example, they started a mobile health clinic to serve the homeless.

Nearby St. Paul UMC had a similar experience, although the gift was structured in a more complicated way. There, a well-off 80-year-old lady took out a $600,000 life insurance policy on herself to be maintained by the church, and then gave the church enough stock to cover the $12,000 quarterly premium. While she was alive, she reaped tax benefits from her gifts of stock; when she died two years ago, the church received $600,000.

The money allowed major renovations down to the footers of the building, which was threatened by a serious drainage problem. “It actually has given us back the bottom level of the church,” Pastor Don Ferguson said. The church also spent $90,000 to fulfill the gift-giver’s one specific request for stained glass windows in the sanctuary.

The rest went toward a ministry-centered endowment and specific gifts to important ministries like Wesley House in Knoxville, an after-school program for at-risk children.

Positive black swan moments are wonderful for a church, particularly if the church members have a clear vision and mission to guide them in how to use such sudden largess. I’m also struck by the potential for these events to become common rather than unpredictable—to turn into white swans.

This shift could occur overnight if United Methodists simply would make church giving part of their estate giving plans. As J. Clif Christopher notes in his book, “Not Your Parents’ Offering Plate,” this can be as simple as inserting a phrase into a will: “After all my bills are paid, I want 10 percent of my estate (a tithe) to go to ____________ Church.”

An individual gift might not amount to $600,000, or even $6,000. If such simple decisions became common in the Christian community, however, the positive impact on a church’s ability to minister to a hurting world would be cumulatively huge. Over several years, an entire generation could join together to leave a powerful legacy for the generations to follow.

Think of such a gift as your swan song.

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