Missio Dei

Many will see, and fear and put their trust in the Lord. -Psalm 40: 3b

I am putting together an order of service for my installation as the Teaching Elder at Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church.  It is my second installation.  The first was almost ten years ago in Plumville, but that seems like a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.  It is more difficult this time around, which is weird, because things like this usually get easier, but being a Pastor is a peculiar thing.  I know a lot more about what I am getting into this time around, but that actually makes picking the pieces of the service more difficult.

Fresh out of seminary, ministry was a great unknown, and I had visions of the great call stories of the Hebrew Scriptures: Abraham, Moses, David and Isaiah.  I felt the call of the Disciples and Saul's encounter on the Damascus road resonating in my soul, but as I really considered the rich variety of scripture to use in the service on March 10, 2013, I realized that none of that has very much to do with what I am really about as a Pastor.

What I have come to realize over the past ten years is that very little of this calling has to do with voices from heaven, burning bushes and visions of seraphim.  Mostly it involves confronting your own brokenness and still having the audacity to get up and preach the Word to the congregation.  Mostly it involves the constant awareness of how much God can do with the little bit that you can actually give.  Mostly it involves looking down fully expecting to see a miry pit and seeing instead a solid rock.

So, yeah, Psalm 40 is going to be the first scripture reading, I'm not sticking it off in the corner like we do with Psalms so often, I'm giving it the place it deserves.  It's going to be there instead of Moses, Elijah or Isaiah, it's going to be the prelude to the Gospel, because it is the story of my life and my ministry.

Psalm 40 was the first scripture I read after my own Damascus road encounter.  Why? Simple, because U2 sang it as a rock song (no pun intended).  I would like to tell you that my journey of faith is always intentional and well organized, but most of the time it's not.  Most of the time I just stub my toe on what God is trying to do and then do my best to act like I meant to do it.  It started with reading a Psalm, not because I was so in tune to the Spirit that I knew just where to turn, but because I thought U2 was awesome and I remembered that they sang 40 on Under a Blood Red Sky.  Deep spirituality right there.

But as it turns out, Psalm 40 is a pretty good description of my journey, my ministry and my life.  It acknowledges that I am nowhere without the Lord.  In this dance with the Spirit that we call ordained ministry, I mostly just try not to trip over my own feet.

Heavy is the Head that wears the Mitre

So Benedict XVI is going back to being just plain old Joseph Ratzinger.  The Bishop of Rome is resigning, which hasn't happened much and hasn't happened at all in a very long time.  I don't know why, as a protestant, I care about this, but I do.
Maybe it's because I'm a Church history geek.  Maybe it's because no matter whether we are Catholic, Orthodox or protestant, Calvinist, Anabaptist or Arminian, we are all part of the Body of Christ.  Maybe it's just because I hate to see a pastor get burnt out, no matter how big his hat is.
Benedict was filling some big shoes.  John Paul II was a beloved figure, even as a protestant, I liked him.  He preached and worked for justice in the world, and he walked the walk, he forgave a man who shot him.  Karol Wojtyla faithfully occupied the Holy See until he went to be part of the church triumphant.
It seemed to me that Ratzinger was a substantial change in direction from his predecessor.  He was known as a conservative, a rigorous theologian and defender of the faith.  Even physically he did not appear as benevolent as JPII.
It is interesting that this man, who had a reputation for being carved out of rock, is the first Pope to resign in over half a millennium.  Reading his statement, I think he's doing the right thing.  He's doing something that takes guts: walking away because you know you can't cut it.  Knowing your weaknesses is a sign of a really mature personality.  For someone with the drive and determination to climb the hierarchy and become the successor of St. Peter, walking away can't have been easy.
It seems to me that Benedict's biggest problem, other than not being cute and cuddly like JPII, was that he is a symbol of a way of being church that has long since passed and gone.  The Roman Catholic church still moves vitally in the world, but it doesn't seem to be because of the institution with it's pomp and circumstance.  Rather, it seems that the grass roots of the church are managing to go on into the future, despite the aging, gold encrusted white males that come and go as Bishops, Cardinals and Pope.
We protestants, particularly American Protestants should take heed.  We have become a little too dependent on figureheads of late, whether it is Billy Graham or Rick Warren, Jerry Falwell or Rob Bell, Christianity does not thrive well with anyone at the head other than Christ himself.
Benedict was far less of a cult of personality than his predecessor, but maybe that is a fairly good legacy to leave with.  Maybe he clears the way for the Church to recover it's mission and do something really radical, like pick a non-European or maybe even someone who isn't going to be ready for a nursing home in five years.  Big dreams, I know.
All the same best wishes and prayers go out to @pontifex, for the ministry he did with the time he was given.

Settling in

And you may say to yourself "Well, how did I get here?"

The Talking Heads, Once in a Lifetime

I am sitting in my new office. My first sermon for Good Samaritan Presbyterian Church is written and ready for tomorrow.  I am slowly getting my life in the new place put in order.

But it's still a little hard to wrap my mind around.

Less than a week ago I was in Pennsylvania, where I had lived and worked for ten years.

No matter how good and right your reasons are, moving still puts something out of joint.

One of my long term goals is to establish healthy patterns in life and so I'm trying to start out that way.

This whole week has been like watching one of those computer animated sequences where something flies apart and then snaps back together.  I don't know when the feeling of being whirled around is going to stop for more than a few moments, but this is one of those moments.
It's a breezy, sunny Saturday morning in Southern Maryland.  I know that somewhere to the north people are digging out after a big old blizzard, but the world of snow and ice seems rather far removed, but it wouldn't have last Saturday, and I guess that's what's strange, that so much has changed in such a short time.  It's not just the weather either, it's a whole different feeling to life.
It's been rather a long time since I did something new, because mostly, I don't like new.
New things can bedazzle you with their shininess, but they haven't stood the test of time.  I think of all the things we threw away in the process of moving.  All the junk we had accumulated, all the stuff that weighed us down, that we really didn't need.
Life gets like that sometimes, you just start to take on baggage, whether you want to or not, and before too long you start to feel smothered.  But you're comfortable with your baggage, you're attached to your stuff, it seems rather hard to let go.  Then you land in a new world and it's got some challenges to be sure, and maybe they're not that different than the old challenges, but you've left some baggage behind, you've gotten rid of some of the clutter and you feel different.
For any of the Plumville/Atwood folks who might read this, you are not the clutter or the baggage, what I'm talking about here is a spiritual condition that crept up on me.  It was my fault, and it probably made me less effective as your Pastor.  It has actually taken the move for me to see it clearly.
Here's to new beginnings.

Going Out Like That

So, here I am, writing the last sermon of my first pastorate. On Sunday, after nearly ten years I will be saying goodbye to the folks in Atwood and Plumville.  On this snowy Friday afternoon, when I normally have things more or less sussed out for Sunday, when I normally am enjoying my weekly Sabbath rest, here I am thinking about the Body of Christ.
As it so often does, the Revised Common Lectionary has thrown me a curve, but as in baseball, if I can manage to track that curve, it might just go out of the park.
Did I mention this is my last sermon to the congregation that I have served since I graduated from Seminary?
Did I mention that this is my last sermon to people who helped Michele and me welcome and raise two children?
What do I want to tell them?
I want to tell them the same thing that Paul told the church at Corinth: "Now you are the Body of Christ, and each one of you is part of it." (1 Cor. 12: 27 NIV)  Actually, that's all I really ever wanted to tell them.
So why is this a curve?
Good question, I'm not sure, but I have this gut feeling that this thing is about to break on me.
See the metaphor of the body is really loaded, we are all intimately connected with our body.  In fact, Incarnation is at the center of Christian faith and doctrine: "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us."  Scandalous really, to any good theist, the idea that God, immortal, invisible, omniscient and all powerful, walks around in the same sort of fragile sack of guts and bone that we do.
Gnostics have always had major problems with that, and so they tackled the "problem" of Jesus by trying to make him into something other than God in a human body.  It would just be easier if we could come up with some sort of explanation that didn't involve the Creator of the Universe traipsing about in the body of a Nazarene craftsman.
What to do about Jesus?
That's a real problem.  That's the problem that I have been wrestling with here in this little congregation for almost a decade.  Once the Incarnation happened, for some reason, God thought it was a pretty good idea, and so it wasn't over with just Jesus.  Jesus gave his Disciples marching orders and told them to go and do what he did, represent God to the world, not just in words, but with who you are.  We take up the charge of being the Incarnation of God in the world, the Body of Christ.
I'm not making this up, that's what Jesus said, it's what Paul founded all those early communities upon.  Before they ever called themselves a church or even Christians, they were the Body of Christ.
There's an awful lot of talk in the Church these days about what exactly is going wrong.  We're not growing, and some of us seem to be infected with hate, anger and other bad ideas.  One of the solutions that is rather popular is to look back at the beginning of the church and find out what they did right.  How exactly, did the early church go from 11 people to a world religion in a little less than 250 years.  It's tempting to think that the church then was just different.  That the people were more willing to commit and less distracted by all the nonsense that the world has to offer.
But I'm pretty sure that's not true, mostly because I've read the letters that their pastors wrote to them.
I'm pretty sure that when Paul, emphatically reminds the church at Corinth that they are all part of one body and that no one of them is better or more valuable than another, he did so because they had begun to fight with one another and claim that some were more valuable than others.
Just as the body of Jesus of Nazareth could be beaten up and crucified, the Body of Christ that is the Church, can still be broken and torn apart.  There is eternal significance to the fact that we break the body of Christ and have his blood poured out for us on a regular basis and call it a sacrament.
So what is my last sermon to this part of the Body of Christ going to say?

You are broken,

But you are holy.

Christ has made you.

You are few and small,

But you are wonderful.

Christ has called you.

 Frightened and unsure,

The light of the world.

Christ lives 

In 

You.

You are 

The Body.

You are enough,

You are what God needs.

You are all that God wants.

Crazy like a Fox

I don't know what inspired me to go out on a day like today.

It is about zero degrees.  It's the kind of cold that makes the dog, who loves walks more than just about anything in the world look at you like: "Seriously? You're getting me out of my nice warm dog house for this?"
But out we went, and at first, I thought, "Man you are crazy, it hurts to breathe."  But then I got moving and my natural insulation started to cooperate with the layers I had wisely donned.  Pretty soon both Zeke and I were enjoying ourselves.
As nature is wont to do, she rewarded the bold and slightly off their rocker. I saw fox tracks, rabbit tracks, and these:

Those are wild turkey tracks.  I also saw two whitetail deer and many other signs of animal activity.  If I was on the other end of the resource spectrum, that is, if I wasn't a fat guy walking to try and keep control of his weight and diabetes, and I was a person who needed to go out and hunt for food, this morning, cold as it was, would have been a boon.  I could have come home with several turkey or maybe a deer, enough to feed a family at any rate.

It got me thinking about the rather primal experience of walking in the very cold weather.  I saw and noticed things that would have otherwise been invisible.  I followed a fox's path for a while, noticing that though his paws were just a slightly smaller version of my dog's canine prints, he moved in an almost unswerving straight line, until he intersected with some prints made by a rabbit, and then a rather wild turn in the narrative took place.  Zeke wanders all over sharing the rather human impulse to explore for the heck of it.  The fox did not swerve or wander until his prey was at hand.  The fox lived with a single purpose: find food.  Likewise the turkey and deer that I saw were not out for a stroll, they were out there trying to survive.  They can't just go out to the market like I'm going to do in a while and buy their food, they have to somehow find food in the unforgiving frozen winter.

It makes me feel thankful for what I have.  The fact that I could observe the animals and their signs with curiosity and appreciation rather than hunger.  The fact that my dog and I could leave our rather wanton footprints out there in the frozen woods; that is a true blessing.

All in all a pretty good morning for a walk.

Tour De Lance

A few months ago, another one of our heroes took a rather spectacular fall from grace.
Lance Armstrong, seven time winner of the Tour De France, was stripped of his titles retroactively based primarily on the suspicion that he had used Performance Enhancing Drugs (hereafter PEDs).
It was peculiar that Armstrong, despite vehement past denials, chose not to contest the action of the World Anti-Doping Agency.  You had the feeling that something was brewing.
And so here we are Lance has taped an interview with the high priestess of American culture, Oprah Winfrey, in which he is reportedly going to come clean and admit that, "Yeah, I took PEDs."
On one hand, I want to say that PEDs are a really bad idea, they can mess up your health in the long term, they are in fact a form of cheating and sports really should not tolerate them.  In fact, the thing that Armstrong is perhaps even more famous for than his Tour De France wins is his enormously successful Cancer research fundraising machine, Livestrong.  Because Lance is a survivor of testicular cancer.  He survived cancer before he even won his first Tour.  One wonders about the link between PEDs and cancer... but I'm not qualified to establish causal medical relationships.
What I'm more interested in is Lance Armstrong as a hero, because I think he was, and to some extent, I think he still is.  He's obviously a flawed person, he may be a cheater, but I think in the final analysis being a hero to kids with cancer is probably more important to the world than being able to ride a bike really fast.  So I'm going to ask for a little grace for Lance, before I hear his interview with her royal Oprah-ness, before all the pundits and sports nuts start ripping him apart.  I am personally going to give him a pass on the whole PED thing.  Here's why:
1. The sport he was involved in is a cesspool of doping and cheating.  Cyclists make Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds look like high school wrestlers trying to bulk up with some spurious muscle builder from GNC.
2. Because the cycling world is so FULL of people trying to get an edge the testing procedures are ridiculous, and Lance never actually got caught, which primarily proves that he was just better at cheating than everyone else, but that leads me to the final piece of this argument.
3. The people he was racing against were mostly doing the same things he was and so, while it does not excuse his behavior, it does somewhat vindicate his 7 Tour championships.

If you're competing against cheaters, you have to cheat, or you will probably lose.

Drugs or no drugs, Lance Armstrong is still pretty much the best cyclist since Greg Lemond hung it up.  His primary challengers, Alberto Contador and his teammate Floyd Landis have also run into trouble with the Anti-Dope man.
If Lance had been cheating against a bunch of pure, idealistic, choirboys who just wanted to ride their bicycles for the love of sport, that would be one thing.  But the purity of cycling as a sporting event is laughable, they're pedaling peddlers, rolling billboards for whatever corporate sponsor throws the most cash at them so they can buy absurdly advanced and expensive bikes and travel the world riding around in fancy spandex.
What makes the final difference for me, is that Lance used his fame and fortune, ill gotten though it might be, to do some good for a lot of people who really need it a lot more than the sporting public.  Livestrong helps people who are fighting cancer.  It helps people who have to be on steroids just to stay alive.  It inspires people to give money to research, in short it does a lot more good for the world than the Tour de France or the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Just a guess but Livestrong and Lance's non-cycling related legacy may be the reason he has chosen to enter the public confessional with Mother Oprah.  Maybe, he really is a hero, and he has realized that it's just time to come clean about the cheating.  Maybe he wants to admit that he did wrong, take responsibility for what he did and move on with all the other stuff he might be able to do besides ride a bike really fast.
Even, and maybe especially, heroes need grace.

Drinking the Hater-Ade

Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world, 

but be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

-Romans 12: 2

I have been part of the twitterverse for about a month now.  Culturally speaking, Twitter is a lot more interesting than Facebook, because Facebook functions more or less like a gathering of friends.  Twitter, however, has a Matrix-like quality in the way that it moves and breathes with a sort of collective consciousness.  Over the last few days I have been following what amounts to a fairly continuous thread of responses to a blog about the ways that hate can spew forth on the internet like vomit from that girl on the Exorcist.  The blog was by Amanda Palmer, who I know about because I'm a music geek (she was the lead singer of The Dresden Dolls), and a literary/comic book geek (she's married to Neil Gaiman).  Ms. Palmer has written a rather wonderful, touching commentary on the phenomenon of Cyberbullying.  Be warned that she likes to use some fairly adult language, but if you can handle that please read: http://www.amandapalmer.net/blog/20130105/

Don't skip the comments and responses, they may be the best part.

For those of you who don't want to here's the gist: Amanda is a successful artist, while perhaps not a household name, she has enough fanboys and fangirls to keep her ego well stoked and cushioned against criticism, yet hate and bile can bring her down.  What about your average 15 year old girl who has rather intractable self esteem issues?

The anonymity of the internet allows those who would hate carte blanche to do so whenever and however they want, with no fear or being punched in the face (not that violence is the answer, but sometimes...).  See, I'm hating on the haters!  It's almost irresistible!

Just this morning, the twitterverse provided me with a shining example of how hate pollutes things.  Besides Amanda Palmer and her husband Neil, two of the most essential twitter follows for me are the Dalai Lama and the Pope.  I am neither Buddhist nor Roman Catholic, but these are two of the most important religious figures in the world today, and I am interested in all things related to God (even a few atheists, because negative space is important in any picture).

So here is the Pope's morning tweet (@pontifex): "Following Christ's example, we have to learn to give ourselves completely.  Anything else is not enough."  Just the kind of thing one might expect the Bishop of Rome to say to his 1.4 million followers (that's just on twitter, the Catholic Church has way more than that).  The remarkable thing is that most of the responses to that were negative, and I'm not talking a little negative.  I'm talking priest-molestation scandal / Nazi Germany kind of stuff.  It makes me glad that the Pope probably  doesn't spend much time actually following himself on Twitter.  Even if he did he would probably understand that those poor people are in need of Christ's love as well and forgive them (JPII forgave a guy that shot him, it sort of comes with the big hat).

Just so you know that this kind of bile is not reserved for Christianity here is the Dalai Lama's morning tweet (@DalaiLama): "We forget that despite the superficial differences between us, people are equal in their basic wish for peace and happiness."  And I thought to myself, "isn't that a nice thought!  I'm not Buddhist, but I could go around for a few days thinking about that and it would probably make me a better person.  In fact, I would probably find it easier to truly love my neighbor and follow Christ's example like the Pope says Christians should do."

Then I read the comments...

Bad idea, I'm going to stop doing that.  There are just so many morons... AHHH!  There I go, judging and hating!  This interweb thing is really insidious!  Maybe I should just stop, get off of Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Google+.  Maybe I should take down my blogs and shoot my computer like Elvis did to his TV.

Then again probably not.

Maybe I should try to be in the middle of all this sin and try not to let it get to me.

Maybe that's what I can learn from the Pope and the Dalai Lama, because that's probably why they're on here.  They obviously don't need the publicity.  Maybe these two holy men are on Twitter because they see the potential for raising the cultural consciousness above nip-slips and the latest celebrity divorces.  Maybe Benedict XIV puts his encouraging Christian messages out there every once in a while so that someone will know that we can use these computers and iphones for something besides porn and hatred.  Maybe the Dalai Lama actually believes that even the haters have that basic wish for peace and happiness.  I want to believe that too.  And in the end most of our faith decisions come down to what we really want to believe in: God, nothing or something in between, love or hate, anger or forgiveness.  I think I know what side I want to be on.

I guess Twitter might be useful after all.