Pastor’s Thoughts

Filed by Joey at 3:29 pm under Announcements,Church Leadership,Economics,General Rant,Pop Culture,Sermons,Society at Large
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I’ve been watching a major issue unfolding in the Presidential race. It has nothing to do with party affiliation. This issue goes beyond economics and philosophy. In fact, the symptoms I’m seeing transcend the Presidential race itself.

In increasing numbers, supporters of both candidates are shifting from ‘aggressive’ to ‘hostile.’

Of course, there is almost always a heated debate going on somewhere in America. But lately I’m seeing people seize on half-truths to rail against the opposition’s candidate.  Obama is being called an Arab muslim terrorist. McCain has been characterized as a doddering fool. Biden has been torched for a poor grasp of history. Palin is being slandered by some and exonerated by others, yet both sides are basing their opinions on the same panel’s rather lukewarm conclusion.

Every flaw is being magnified to the point of crisis. Every mistake is being blown out of proportion. That is not to say that the flaws and mistakes don’t exist. But we shouldn’t be turning each of them into capital offenses.

This carries over to our lives together as a community of faith. Pastors like me shouldn’t rail so vehemently against apathy and indifference when so many obviously do care. Christian neighbors would do well to remember grace is the foundation for what we believe. When our words and actions fail to show grace, then we do ourselves a disservice.

Rather than making the discussion personal, we should get back on message and stay there.

Filed by Joey at 8:08 am under General Rant
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I first heard this concept recently at a PTA meeting. In light of the current financial crisis, I thought it appropriate. One can also see the correlation to discipleship. It is good to realize that disciplined lives are the standard suggested and even demanded by scripture. But it is also good to note that there is an ambulance at the bottom of the hill–or, to be more specific, a cross at the top of a hill.

“The Ambulance Down in the Valley.”

‘ Twas a dangerous cliff, as they freely confessed,
Though to walk near its crest was so pleasant,
But over its terrible edge there had slipped,
A duke and full many a peasant.

So the people said something would have to be done,
But their projects did not at all tally.
Some said, “Put a fence around the edge of the cliff,”
Some, “An ambulance down in the valley.”

But the cry for the ambulance carried the day,
For it spread through the neighboring city,
A fence may be useful or not, it is true,
But each heart became moved with pity,

For those who slipped over that dangerous cliff;
And the dwellers on highway and alley
Gave pounds and gave pence not to put up a fence,
But an ambulance down in the valley.

Then an old sage remarked, “it’s a marvel to me
That people give far more attention
To repairing the results than to stopping the cause,
When they’d much better aim at prevention.

“Let us stop at its source all this hurt,” cried he.
“Come, neighbors and friends, let us rally.
If the cliff we will fence, we might almost dispense
With the ambulance down in the valley.”

While current economics is all about the ambulance, there’s never a way to regulate to the point that no risk is ever involved. To keep with the analogy, we need a decent fence and a first aid kit at the bottom of the hill. In other words, the pros are calling for more regulations, but no one thinks that there will never be another government intervention in Wall Street.

Discipleship is very similar. We can’t “dispense with the ambulance.” We need Jesus. But we also have a responsibility to regulate our lives with the spiritual disciplines of Jesus’ teachings.

As Paul said, we should never choose to sin more just to receive more grace. Regulations and disciplines must be a part of a healthy lifestyle. It isn’t often that we see the proof of this statement than in the most recent activities on Wall Street and in the halls of Congress.

What are your fences? How do you regulate your life? What is your committment to spiritual discipline?

Filed by Joey at 1:32 pm under Economics,General Rant,Political Landscape,Society at Large
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I just spent a couple of hours reliving September 11, 2001. It seems that you can watch the real-time video of the news coverage that day. I remember the first time I watched the coverage and the feelings of despair. I remember the anger that soon filled me as we all realized that there was a sinister motive behind this tragedy.

As I watched the replay of the coverage, I realized that others would be watching the rerun of this horrible tragedy. And, like me, they would be reliving those angry feelings. Should we still be reacting out of our anger?

Justice and vengeance are all too often tied together with the bonds of anger. Our actions and policies as a nation do not have to be fueled by this fresh anger to be just and honorable.

That is not to say that anger is a bad thing. It’s just a bad fuel for an already dangerous fire.

We would do well to remember. There are still plenty of people to be found and brought to justice.

Today, we are reliving a deeply emotional experience. Don’t let your emotions control your actions.

Vengeance belongs to God. If we continue to pursue the perpetrators of 9/11 with anger in our hearts, then we risk the sin of taking vengeance–a right reserved by God for himself.

Justice and honor are the debt that we owe to the men and women who lost their lives in this horrible attack upon freedom. Justice and honor are well within the rights of men and women. Indeed, they are among our responsibilities. Let us pursue them with fervor, but without the seething hatred that would corrode the righteous nature of our cause.

Filed by Joey at 11:53 pm under General Rant
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I’m not in the habit of aligning myself with political candidates from the pulpit, in Sunday School classes, or anywhere else for that matter. Professionally, it’s bad form and it creates more problems for the church than it solves for anyone.

What I do try to accomplish is very simple to describe, but difficult to accomplish. I encourage people to think about political situations spiritually. I also try to discourage people from thinking about spiritual situations politically.

What does that mean? Among many other things, it means that we should treat the poor the way Jesus taught us to treat them: With love and compassion. That means that we can’t ignore them or blame them. And it means that we can’t continue practices of enabling and creating unnecessary dependencies.

It means that we provide accountability for our nation economically and morally.

One of the most important things to remember in this election year is that the church and the state are seperate entities. No American government can establish a specific, favored religion. And it also means that the Church cannot manipulate the controls of Government.

But it doesn’t mean that we are to keep silence. The Church has a place in the conversation. Every religious group does. And to ask me to divorce my spiritual beliefs from my political decisions is like asking the an economist not to have a financial opinion on the budget.

All I’m asking you to keep in mind is this: Bring your beliefs to the Conventions. And be careful which ones you take home from Denver or Minneapolis.

Filed by Joey at 11:02 pm under General Rant
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Every July is like a starter’s pistol for United Methodist Clergy. Some bound off of the line. Some hesitate out of the blocks. Some don’t hear the gunshot at all.

I’m trying to decide what kind of race I’m running this year. Putting my track shoes on is a long-held analogy. When I was in college, I had a lot more stamina. I’m finding that the years weigh more and slow the pace at times. I may be looking at the last days of my sprinting career. And that’s okay.

I can’t wait to watch the long distance runners next month. They start with a heady pace, one that makes me wonder how in the world they are ever going to make it all the way through the course. And yet, there are always runners who finish with a sprint. It’s called “beginning your kick.” Their stride increases, their pace increases, and it looks for all the world like a sprinter has taken the runner’s place.

The thing I have to keep in mind is that there are different kinds of equipment for different approaches. I don’t think that I can take off in a sprint if the folks I’m leading and serving are still trying to decide which way the race course is heading.

So I’m asking: What kind of race are you running? Which starter’s pistol were you waiting for?

We’re not competing against other churches. We’re trying to increase our pace and finish well.

24-25 You’ve all been to the stadium and seen the athletes race. Everyone runs; one wins. Run to win. All good athletes train hard. They do it for a gold medal that tarnishes and fades. You’re after one that’s gold eternally.

 26-27 I don’t know about you, but I’m running hard for the finish line. I’m giving it everything I’ve got. No sloppy living for me! I’m staying alert and in top condition. I’m not going to get caught napping, telling everyone else all about it and then missing out myself.
1 Corinthians 9:24-27

So we’re back to discipleship. My personal discipleship still has to come before any work that I do as a pastor. I say this not to polish any apples, but to remind you that your discipleship is your best witness and your greatest resource to accomplish the ministry to which God is calling you.

One last word of advice. Finish with a kick.

Filed by Joey at 11:16 pm under General Rant
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Yes, Christ is the same today, yesterday and forever.

 

And, like some of my older colleagues, I will be more likely to point to the rich history of our liturgy than the “latest” forms, even if I’m equally skilled in both–or unskilled, depending on who you ask.

 

But Jesus also pronounced the major change of his own day; the end of corporate sacrificial practices at the Temple due to the corruption of the system by those who were in power. Could it not be said that they had forgotten the original purposes of their actions and were, by and large, more concerned with the mere maintenance of tradition?

 

Within six verses of the “same today” passage in Hebrews is the following:

 

Hebrews 13:13-15 MSG
So let’s go outside, where Jesus is, where the action is—not trying to be privileged

insiders, but taking our share in the abuse of Jesus. This “insider world” is not our

home. We have our eyes peeled for the City about to come. Let’s take our place

outside with Jesus, no longer pouring out the sacrificial blood of animals but pouring

out sacrificial praises from our lips to God in Jesus’ name.

 

While I do not suggest that we at Piperton have forgotten the purpose of our worship forms, I certainly believe that we as a Church have forgotten them with very few exceptions.

 

Let me draw an analogy: If the goal is to ascend the height, I have no problem with an elevator just because my predecessor used the stairs—or even a ladder. Granted, newer isn’t always better; but neither are the old ways ‘automagically’ the best because of their antiquity.

 

So I spend a lot of time reminding people that Jesus came to us as a revolutionary force, an iconoclast in at least as many ways as he was a traditionalist.

 

Rather than trying to fit worship into this concept alone, why not draw parallels in nurture, witness, and outreach as well? In this way, what is done in our planning for worship is an organic interchange of what God is doing now as well as what God did before, highlighting differences and similarities and celebrating both.

 

In this way, I’m pressing back against nostalgia with the simple question of “Is this still working for us or is it merely comfortable for us?” And I’m pressing back against innovation with the simple questions of “How does this better accomplish our goals than existing structures?” and “Does this conflict inappropriately with our beliefs, style, and culture?”

 

I know: Define “inappropriately.” I suppose it means that the new thing can’t ask us to give up something that has deeply held personal value if that value can be arguably compared to the goal we’re seeking in importance to our group identity.

 

Shoulda been an attorney, I guess.

 

Since resisting both nostalgia and innovation puts me (and others in the church) in the position of working both sides of the street, it helps to have more than one voice in my head on most days.

 

How can I do both? Watch this:

 

I’m against the commercialization of baseball but I’m in favor of the DH rule. Why? Because one conflicts with my basic beliefs about sports in general and baseball in particular, and the other makes for a better game, in my estimation.

 

Neither is a knee-jerk reaction. Both conclusions are based on those intentionally framed questions.

 

Let me put it another way: It’s not always about the vehicle, or even the destination. For me, it is about the journey of discipleship—and all the delicious analogies that present themselves in that light.

 

Look at what we lost when we abandoned rail travel. The journey became extraneous. But look at what we gained when we embraced air travel—a renewed interest in ocean travel aboard vessels designed for the purpose of treasuring the trip.

 

Back to baseball. I’m with Ernie Banks on this one: “Hey, let’s play two.” And why? Because he just loved the game so much. I feel the same way about worship. To thoroughly mix metaphors, it doesn’t matter if we all have uniforms, or even strictly regulation equipment.

 

In fact, the ground rules are a part of the experience. “Line drives off of the billboard in right field are a double.” Fine by me. Same goes for church and worship. “We use a guitar because Jenny Banks never finished piano or organ lessons before Mr. Gatlin died.”  Great. Let’s just praise the Lord, shall we?

 

I’m just glad to be on the field, paying the proper respects to God and enjoying the season.

Filed by Joey at 5:13 pm under General Rant
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It takes a guy like Moses to tell people who are standing in the middle of a desert with no food stores, no national economy, and not much of a standing army that their proposed invasion of the Promised Land wouldn’t be too hard.

Here. You read it.

Pretty good stuff, no?

Well, some would not agree. In fact, there are a few who would point out that Moses was oversimplifying it. But I disagree. Moses is careful to point out that there would be challenges.

But none would be too hard. “This isn’t beyond you,” he says. “You won’t need a sailor to go get it across an ocean.”

There are dozens of moments in each of our lives in which we have decided that a goal or task is beyond us. And we give up; often before we even make the attempt. G.K. Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found difficult. It has been found difficult and left untried.”

And so, masses decide not to read their Bibles. People stay away from Sunday school because they don’t understand. And the mission fields are ripe, but untended because there are thousands who have decided that they couldn’t possibly accomplish such a task.

Yes, there are some things that a person can’t do. There are some things that one person can do that no other person in the world could accomplish.

But that’s not the point here.

The point is, Moses spoke to the people of God and told them that they could accomplish the tasks that their God had set before them.

So don’t pray the impossible prayer. Don’t seek the impossible task. Look for God’s task, and don’t be intimiddated by the size of it. Don’t back down because of the scope of it. Why?

Because it won’t be too hard. Not with God’s help.

A father and son went camping (tell me when you get this memorized). The son was tasked with clearing the campsite of sticks, brush and stones. He had accomplished this task for the most part, except for a large stone in the center of the site that would not budge. He pushed. He pulled. He pried. He kicked. He yelled.

Nothing. It was too heavy; the task was too hard.

The father asked the son, “Have you tried everything?”

“I did,” came the reply.

“No, son,” he said. “You didn’t use all the tools at your disposal, because you haven’t asked me for help yet.”

Together they moved it.

There is no task to hard. Your Father in Heaven loves you too much to give you a task that is too large to accomplish–particularly if you ask for His help.

So take up your discipleship. Find your challenge. Read your Bible.

It is not too hard.

 

Filed by Joey at 6:54 pm under Church Leadership,General Rant,Piperton UMC,Pop Culture,Sermons
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This world is my home. I don’t plan to fly away. I’d rather build God’s kingdom here than slip into some fantasy cloudscape with a little cabin in the corner of Gloryland. Honestly, I don’t even know what that last part means. In all of the descriptions of heaven, I’ve never heard of any homesteaders being involved. But hundreds of people in my life have expressed that very notion as their ultimate goal.

For those hunkered down and awaiting the Rapture, the idea is to fly away from this old world at the last moment–to abandon ship before it goes down. There’s not much thought as to regenerating Creation, no thought to working towards the kingdom goals.

Before the late 1800′s, this “abandon ship” mentality was reserved for heretical groups like the Gnostics and Manicheans and the Zoroastrians. The reason you haven’t heard of these groups is that they were stamped out because what they taught was junk theology having little to do with the story arc of Old and New Testament. It was unknown to our founding fathers who were Christians. In fact, it was an unknown doctrine until the middle of the 19th century. But no other doctrine has done more to shape our nation or undermine our churches than the teachings and writings of John Nelson Darby and Dr. C. I. Scofield.

Here’s the gist. The following is a summation of the flawed argument.

The Rapture theology of Darby and Scofield states that those who are ‘saved’ will be spared the final tribulation before the end of the world. So the best course of action is to get right with God so we don’t get left behind (yes, that series of books presents a modernized Scofeldian dreamscape).

Of course, it isn’t that simple. There are subplots involving the reestablishment of Israel as a nation, a multiplicity of Second Comings, and one world governments under the direct control of Satan–but you get the idea.

Scripturally speaking, preparing for the coming of the Kingdom is the task of the Church. This task is to be accomplished by equipping the saints for living in such a kingdom in the here and now. Our goal is to prepare the way, to transform the world. In fact, our nation was colonized by several groups for the expressed purpose of “hastening the return of the Lord,” as it says in 2 Peter 3:12. This theological understanding of “the general spread of the gospel” was seen as the goal of the Church for more than 1800 years. The purpose was not to stamp people for the Rapture, but to cause them to inhabit the Kingdom of Heaven by causing the Kingdom of Heaven to inhabit them.

Then along comes Darby and Scofield.

What many of us living in the South don’t realize is the extent to which this “abandon ship” mentality has taken over our ecclesiology, or understanding of what it means to be the church. As a rule, this notion is a sub-text in many Methodist congregations. But it nonetheless forms us and shapes us away from the truth as the Church knew it for 18 centuries.

Look at it this way: If we are leaving the world, we have no cause to change it, to clean it up. But if company is coming, we have incentive to prepare for the arrival.

Given this historical perspective and the effect this wrongheaded thinking has had, one can begin to see why the Church has withdrawn from the business of building the kingdom.

With the focus placed squarely on Rapture and getting the church out of Dodge, so to speak, subsequent generations are starting to find this new purpose ringing hollow. If the goal is to get into the church in order to “get out,” and no one seems to be getting out for the past 150 years or so, one can begin to see why the young people are withdrawing from the church in droves.

One place where this is not the case is in congregations where kingdom building is still a priority. These congregations are marked by their establishment of a kingdom of praise and worship and a dedication to personal discipleship practices ranging from personal study of the Bible to prayer and fasting. or through the promulgation of the social gospel of ministry to the widows and orphans, the sick and imprisoned, the impoverished and homeless, and the blind, lame, deaf, and mute.

God’s intention, from the first moment of creation, was wholeness and order. The broken nature of humanity meant that God was required to take a  more active hand in maintaining the wholeness of the community of humankind. Through a series of covenants, God has called people to live together in a balanced, peaceful, whole community.

The “abandon ship” mentality is killing the church.

It is time to stop obsessing with the lifeboats. There are sails to rig, courses to chart, and decks to swab.

Join us at Piperton UMC and find out how you can live into the Kingdom that is at hand. It hasn’t been fully realized, and won’t be until Christ comes in final victory. But until then, we have work to do and life more abundant with which to do it.

Filed by Joey at 11:51 am under Church Leadership,General Rant,Methodism,Pop Culture,Society at Large
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I recently re-read an article written by one of the greatest theologians of modernity. The article is entitled Our Secularized Civilization and the author is Reinhold Niebuhr.

Its a little thick. And it is dated 1926. And since he never had a reality television show, Neibuhr is probably unknown to most of the people about which he writes.

Nonetheless, the article remains one of the greatest assessments of the Church’s secular nature, and well before the time of secular, post-modern thinking.

Secular humanism is a way thinking that returns human beings to the central position of existence and pushes God off to one side. Because of the inherent need to test beliefs, God must prove Himself over and over to each seeking individual. Secular humanism also points out that fulfillment, growth, creativity are among the most important priorities in the life of any individual. Moreover, the definition of fulfillment and growth are created by the individual, and not by God or any religious institution or group.

Neibuhr saw this coming. In fact, he saw it aborning.

Our obsession with the physical sciences and with the physical world has enthroned the brute and blind forces of nature, and we follow the God of the earthquake and the fire rather than the God of the still small voice. The morals of the man in the street, who may not be able to catch the full implications of pure science, are corrupted by the ethical consequences of the civilization which applied science has built.

In other words, human beings tend to give God credit for the wonders of creation such as the sunset and the blooming rose. But the experieces of God revealed in the writings of unenlightened human beings become outdated and fail the measure of scientific measure.

Adam Hamilton, pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection, has written a book entitled Confronting the Controversies. In the book, Hamilton points out that this is a false seperation of the world into things of God’s domain and the domain of science, especially in the area of Creationism vs. Evolution.

But Hamilton calls for a middle ground, and he does so by calling for a return to thinking about God as an superhuman answer to a merely-human question. Instead, we put God in a cart pulled by the horses of modern science, and that simply doesn’t work. 

Neibuhr appears to have agreed with Hamilton, or vice versa. He points out that

[Protestantism] It helps men to master those sins which are easily discovered because they represent divergence from accepted moral customs: the sins of dishonesty, sexual incontinence and intemperance.

Most Christians would claim that the elimination of these crimes/sins from ones life are the major purpose of Christian living and participation in the life of the church. The result, according to Neibuhr, is that humanity is left to determine its own morality based on human capability, including the capability of capitalistic success.

No religion is more effective than Protestantism against the major social sins of our day, economic greed and race hatred. [...] No real progress can be made against the secularization of modern life until Protestantism overcomes its pride and complacency and realizes that it has itself connived with the secularists. By giving men a sense of moral victory because they have mastered one or two lusts, while their lust for power and their lust for gain remain undisciplined, it is simply aggravating those lusts which are the primary perils of modern civilization.

In other words, human beings are left to make thieir own subjective opinions regarding how we treat each other socially, politically, and economically. The religious people can confine their focus on the “spiritual” laws to within the walls of the church.

The frightening thought that Neibuhr provokes is that we are living in the midst of a time that is more like the post World War I 1920′s and pre-World War II 1930′s than we would care to admit. It was a time of growing Nationalism and declining morality.

Vaguely conscious of the moral inadequacy of such an existence, men try to sublimate it by restraining their individual lusts in favor of the community in which they live. Thus nationalism becomes the dominant religion of the day and individual lusts are restrained only to issue in group lusts more grievous and more destructive than those of individuals. Nationalism is simply one of the effective ways in which the modern man escapes life’s ethical problems. Delegating his vices to larger and larger groups, he imagines himself virtuous; the larger the group the more difficult it is to fix moral responsibility for unethical action.

America was a powerful economic force, wealthy in comparison to every other nation in the world. It was also considered itself to be the successor to European Christianity as the moral leader in an immoral world. Neibuhr wrote this almost 90 years ago:

Recent events in Europe reveal what unrepentant tribalists Western people are and how little they have learned from the great tragedy. They seem to lack both the imagination to realize the folly of their ways and the humility to conceive of their folly as sin. While we in America affect to pity Europe, the sense of moral superiority, which is always the root of pity, is based on illusion. We are no more moral than Europe, but our tremendous wealth and our comparative geographic isolation save us from suffering any immediate consequences of our moral follies. However active the institutions of religion may be in our national life, there is no trace of ethical motive in our national conduct. To the world we appear, what we really are, a fabulously wealthy nation, intent upon producing more wealth and seemingly oblivious to the consequences which unrestrained lust of power and lust of gain must inevitably have on both personal morality and international harmony.

Neibuhr could have been writing this for a blog last week, last month, or last year.

So what does this have to do with Church?

I’m glad you asked.

Rather than dividing the world in which we live into secular and spiritual categories, we should return to the notion that the world in which we live was created by God, and God is the authority in each and every category. Rather than leaving ourselves open to the whims of dogma or the fascism of a cult-prophet, the church must return to the shared responsibility of discerning God’s will. One of the first things we must recapture is Christ’s focus on a social gospel in addition to our slightly obsessive/compulsive focus on puritanical ethics in the area of sex and temperance. Again, Neibuhr: “How a fretful anxiety about a number of lustful temptations can develop a perfect complacency in regard to other temptations may be seen by the fact that the church is not now so conscious of some of the sins of modern civilization as some of our most thoroughgoing realists.”

Perhaps we can couple our newfound need to be more active in changing the rotten systems of the world in which we’re living with a new way of perceiving worship. Worship is a clear reflection of our self-congratulatory opinions of what we are doing as a nation, as an economic system, and as individuals living for the moment.

Perhaps it might not be irrelevant to add that its failure to understand the relation between the physical and the spiritual not only tempts Protestantism to create righteousness in a vacuum but to develop piety without adequate symbol. That is why the church services of extreme Protestant sects tend to become secularized once the first naive spontaneity departs from their religious life. In Europe nonconformist Protestants tend more and more to embrace the once despised beauty of symbol and dignity of form in order to save worship from dullness and futility. In America nonconformist Protestantism, with less cultural background, tries to avert dullness by vulgar theatricality. [...] If worship is to serve man’s ethical as well as religious needs, it must give him a sense of humble submission to the absolute.

I would extend Neibuhr’s thinking by reminding myself, and every reader, that worship is not limited to one hour a week. Worship is similar to prayer in that we should pray without ceasing. We should also worship without ceasing. In these terms, every moment is an opportunity to seek humility. As disciples, we must put ourselves in our place: subservient to God’s will and willing to lay aside our own desires in order to further the notion of Christ’s Kingdom.

And here I thought that I’d never get a chance to use any of that Seminary Book Learnin’.

Filed by Joey at 7:14 pm under Economics,General Rant,Political Landscape,Pop Culture,Society at Large
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