Being and Doing

As we slowly transition out of the many life-preserving safety protocols necessary in a world-wide pandemic, I’m seeing a lot of self-help, check-list styled techniques to assist our transition. And I’m not even talking about non-church sources but among publications intended for clergy and church leadership. “7 ‘must haves’ before you reopen church”. “5 necessary steps and pitfalls to avoid before reopening”. “10 ways to ensure your congregation will reengage”.

And as I scan them looking for something useful, I hear Jesus saying, “Don’t look for shortcuts to God. The market is flooded with surefire, easygoing formulas for a successful life that can be practiced in your spare time. Don’t fall for that stuff, even though crowds of people do. The way to life—to God!—is vigorous and requires total attention.” (Matthew 7:13, The Message)

I’m speaking to clergy, church leaders, and congregation members when I say don’t get so caught up in finding the right magic formula that who we are as the people of God and Body of Christ is overshadowed by doing or worse yet a projected image of anything other than God’s Love for all. People aren’t a checklist. Human beings are not cogs in a worship machine. I say often that God’s kingdom is made of people not bricks and mortar but never ever take that to mean that it’s ok to use human beings as tools and equipment to some end or goal.

Our relationships, with God and each other, are both the means and the end for the purpose of living in God’s kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, in other words, being The Church. The must-haves for resuming in-person worship is the love of God and the desire to serve and worship our Creator. The necessary step to being the people of God is to respond to Jesus’ invitation “follow me.” People will engage with a community that is grounded in the self-giving love of God.

How we each do these things depends on each locale and culture and the people who make up our communities. Each person has skills and talents that are necessary and needed in the Kingdom of God. Each culture has a unique way of expressing their love of God and neighbor. None of what we do as The Church will be authentic unless is grows from who we are as God’s beloved. Instead of looking for the perfect checklist, have a conversation and pray with others in your community about living authentically as God’ people going forward into God’s kingdom.

All of us together need to reconnect and reengage in our expression of corporate and public worship. It is a necessary part of who and whose we are but it is not the purpose of our calling. Our worship of God together is one of the ways the Holy Spirit enables us to participate with God in healing this broken world with restorative Love. Worship helps us become whole and holy so that we can follow Jesus out through the worship space doors to love and serve God in the world.

There isn’t a magic checklist. There is God and us, living into who God calls us to be, living from the image of God in us, following Jesus every moment of every day. There are no instantaneous results or shortcuts; it’s a lifelong journey of doing from the core of our being.

Made to Love

Readings for the Fifth Sunday of Easter: http://lectionarypage.net/YearB_RCL/Easter/BEaster5_RCL.html

Most of the time in these Living Sunday School posts, I focus on the Gospel reading for the particular Sunday. We are, after all, to proclaim the good news of Jesus because we ourselves are recipients of the good news that God loves us and invites us into the Kingdom to be in relationship with God through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus.

Today, however, I’d like us to take a look at the bit we have from John’s first letter. The letters we have in what we call the New Testament are written by the apostles to the earliest Christians to help them all work out what this new Way looked like in their 1st century, day-to-day, ordinary lives. Just as we are trying to work it out for ourselves what it looks like in the 21st century. Following Jesus will necessarily look differently not just across cultures and history but through the ongoing changes of our lives as we grow and mature from childhood to adolescence to early adulthood to middle age and beyond. People are different from one culture to the next, from one neighborhood to the next, from one individual to the next. God did not create us to be cookie-cutter, preprogrammed androids, all exactly the same. God created each of us uniquely with specific gifts and ways of viewing and responding to the world so that when we all come together, we are a beautifully woven tapestry that would be lacking if even one thread were missing.

And, at the core of all of our individual uniqueness, we are all created in the image of the changeless God who is Love.

This is the foundation for what John writes to a group of Jesus-followers who apparently were acting out in hateful, hurtful ways toward each other. He writes to remind them of why they are all hanging out together in the first place, to be The Church that reveals God’s love and light to the world and the only way to do that is to start with God’s love for everyone and then loving each other as God loves each of us.

God’s Love is self-giving love, unconditional love, unrelenting love. This Love is not an emotion but the life source from which we all are created and the life we are called to live as we follow Jesus.

John gives us a 2 point test of sorts to determine if the love we are learning to live in is God’s Love: are we afraid and do we hate others. Trusting in God’s love for us means that even when we face uncertainty and/or hardships – even the most devastating things we can imagine – we do not let fear govern our behavior and responses. When we live from the source of God’s Love within us, we know that even if by the world’s standards we have lost ‘everything’ we still have the most precious and valuable thing of all: our identity as God’s beloved.

Fear tells us that we have to earn God’s approval, to prove ourselves good enough. Fear grounds our relationship with God in avoiding punishment rather than receiving love. Fear causes us to be in competition with others in receiving God’s approval and good-will because there just might not be enough to go around. Fear causes scarcity based thinking and living, leading us to be self-preserving and self-focused rather than self-giving and other-focused.

God’s abundance isn’t over indulgent excess but a never ending supply of love, hope, peace, and compassion.

God’s Love is abundant, not ‘over indulgent excess’ but a never ending supply. In learning to love as God loves, we learn that the more love we give the more we have. God’s Love is focused on giving not getting. We are enabled to love because God first loved us. And there is absolutely nothing we can do to make God love us any more or less. Our choices to not love others doesn’t dissolve God’s love for us, it damages our love for God. Our choices separate us from God, or to put it in Jesus’ words (you knew I’d work the Gospel reading in somehow):

“I am the Vine, you are the branches. When you’re joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can’t produce a thing. Anyone who separates from me is deadwood, gathered up and thrown on the bonfire.”

John 15:5-6, The Message

Beloved, let us love one another because God loves us.

The Gift of Being

The first sermon I gave for a grade in Preaching class in seminary was on this passage from third chapter of Peter’s second letter.

“Don’t overlook the obvious here, friends. With God, one day is as good as a thousand years, a thousand years as a day. God isn’t late with his promise as some measure lateness. He is restraining himself on account of you, holding back the End because he doesn’t want anyone lost. He’s giving everyone space and time to change.”

2 Peter 3:8-9, The Message

It was one of those passages that I knew that I’d read many times before but for the first time I really, really read it and I heard God speaking through it directly to me in an act of redemption.

In the denomination I grew up in, the time of Jesus’ return, the final judgement of God was used as a method of inciting fear in us to make us ‘behave’. If we didn’t do all the right things now, we’d end up spending eternity in a lake of fire. Time was a test of our ability to be good enough.

As I prepared this sermon for a grade, the fear based, misguided theology of eternity and time of my early years was redeemed. I read these words written in love by Peter, the one who was told by Jesus he’d be the rock of the church and the one who denied knowing Jesus in order to save his own skin, and I experienced not an angry task master but a loving parent who patiently waits while I learn and grow.

Time became a gift to me because I don’t have to use it to prove I’m good enough. God has given us time to learn and grow in relationship with God now, experiencing the abundance of compassionate love and care of God’s righteousness and goodness.

Like Peter, I’ve not always used what I’ve been given to build up God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven. Like Peter, I sometimes try to tell Jesus the right way to do things because I want the solution now. Like Peter, I know that when I step back on the path, following Jesus into the kingdom I won’t be condemned but loved and redeemed.

God has promised that at the appointed time God will set all things right in a new heaven and a new earth. As we wait, knowing God is always faithful and true, we are given the gift of being God’s people, God’s beloved children, here and now. It’s an amazing time I don’t want to rush through but genuinely experience.

I’m so grateful we are on this learning journey of life in God’s Kingdom together. Thank you for sharing your precious time with me.

The Shape of our Day

Good Tuesday, Y’all! How’s your coffee?

I used to teach time management seminars to corporate managers and executives. In the days before smart phones and tablets, I carried around the full sized 8 1/2” x 11” life planner briefcase as if it were my life source and I didn’t do anything that wasn’t written in my calendar or on my task list. I scheduled everything. And when I say everything, I mean
E V E R Y T H I N G.
I even blocked off time to be ‘spontaneous’. I don’t know if there was ever such a thing but I definitely could have used a 12 step recovery program for this particular addiction.

Looking back, I bought into the idea that the company I worked for peddled: that planning was living. Also in hindsight, I’ve come to know that what I was really doing was avoiding living deeply and fully. I was as flat at the paper I planned my days on. I looked busy because being busy was a badge of honor in the corporate culture of being busy for the sake of being busy. If you didn’t have an immediate task at hand you made yourself appear busy by planning out what you were going to do tomorrow, next week, next month, next year … planning how to make your life good someday rather than seeking the goodness of today.

And here’s what else I’ve come to know: earning the Busy Badge has nothing to do with being who God created me to be. It has nothing to do with being, period. The very foundation of my existence is that I am a beloved child of God, created in the image of Love. The very foundation of your existence is that you are a beloved child of God, created in the image of Love. All else grows from this reality. The purpose of all that we do is this reality.

In this Kingdom reality, we learn that we are not in competition with each other for anything because we understand that our very existence is dependent on each other. This is God’s purpose, that we all thrive as the beloved people we are created to be. If you are hungry I cannot be truly full. If you are hurting I cannot be truly whole. If you are lost I cannot be truly secure.

Whatever we put on our calendars or task lists doesn’t define us or create purpose. The events and tasks we make time for in our days reflect what we truly believe the foundation of our existence to be.

God invites us into quiet reflection of who and whose we are not so that we can escape the busyness of our lives but enable us to remember our created purpose: to live in communion with God and each other every moment of every day. Letting this shape our days is what enables us to live deeply and fully.

What’s on your “To Be” page for today?

Experiencing God’s Goodness

In Tuesday’s post, I ended with a question that I pray has been swimming around in your heart and brain: How have you experienced the goodness of God in your daily routine and schedule?

If you haven’t been able to articulate how you have experienced God’s goodness, that’s ok. Can I ask you another question? (Or should I say two more since that was a question.) Do you believe that God is present with you even when you are not aware of it? Learning both the experience of the divine presence and how to speak of it takes time and intentionality. A lifetime of time and intentionality. Not because it’s so very difficult but because although God is changeless, we are in a constant state of change.

Please don’t let that last statement frighten you. I’m not sure how we decided that change is a negative thing. God designed us to change and grow. God designed all of creation this way. There is absolutely nothing in all of God’s creation that is truly static.

Each experience with God changes us, even in the typical routine and ordinariness of our days we label as normal. The more we practice at our own awareness of God, the more aware we become of God’s presence drawing us closer and closer. In the midst of continuous change God is constant, faithful, and always present.

One lesson I know we’ve all hit head-on this past year+ is that sometimes change is our choice and sometimes change is forced upon us. And, I’m fairly certain that most of us are familiar with The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr, or at least the first part of it. Have you ever heard the second part? Have you ever prayed the whole prayer daily?

The Serenity Prayer by Reinhold Niebuhr

The real meat of it, for me, is the second part which I find to be a beautiful articulation of this Eastertide season of intentional waiting with God that we’ve been talking about, a creedal statement about who and whose we are as Resurrection people. We are created for new life as we follow Jesus in God’s Kingdom, walking on the foundation of God’s changeless and constant Love.

Keep noticing the goodness of God with you. You are God’s beloved.

What’s for Supper?

One of my family’s honored recipes is my grandmother’s meatloaf (and for all you anti-meatloafers out there, let me tell you this recipe would turn your meatloaf deprived world upside down, so please keep you negative meatloaf comments to yourself and focus on the point of this post which won’t be meatloaf).

Several years ago, my sister-in-law called me to chat while I was cooking supper and she asked what I was making. I told her Grandmother’s Meatloaf and she asked, “what’s the special occasion?” Nothing, I explained. It’s just what I was making for supper. She told me that Grandmother’s Meatloaf was to be saved for special occasions and I simply said, ‘but why, it’s so good?”

We never have to wait on God’s goodness.

Through this Eastertide, we’ve been talking about waiting, remembering that Easter isn’t a goal or a finality but a beginning, The Beginning of the new life we’ve been given now.
“Give us this day our daily bread.”
“Do not be distracted by tomorrow.”
“The Kingdom of Heaven is here.”
“I am with you always.”

We don’t have to wait to experience God’s goodness. Jesus didn’t come to give us an eternal-life insurance policy that will pay off someday but to show us that we can live on earth as it is in heaven now. Jesus tells us we are citizens of God’s Kingdom, not someday in the unknown future, but today.

“Open your mouth and taste, open your eyes and see—
how good God is.
Blessed are you who run to him.”

Psalm 34:8, The Message

As we wait on God to accomplish what God chooses to accomplish in God’s creation, we are not waiting for God. God is present with us. We don’t have to wait for a special occasion. God’s goodness is for our everyday, ordinary living. Taste and see that the Lord is good. Better even than my grandmother’s meatloaf for a typical Tuesday supper.

How have you experienced the goodness of God in your daily routine and schedule?

The Reality of God’s Presence

For the Third Sunday of Easter: a sermon preached at St. Francis by the Lake, Canyon Lake, TX

Readings

It is the day of The Resurrection. Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James, and Joanna and other women who aren’t given the dignity of names but are nonetheless important in the story, had discovered that Jesus was no longer in the tomb. They spoke with the angels who were there and remembered all that Jesus had spoken to them.

These women then shared their experience with the apostles but they chose not to believe the women’s eyewitness account. Peter even went to the tomb to check out their story and found no one there and still didn’t know what to think.

Then Luke tells us about two men who were walking to the village of Emmaus discussing the events of Jesus’ arrest and death. When Jesus joins them, they don’t recognize him and even belittle him for asking what they were discussing saying, “are you the only one in Jerusalem who doesn’t know what’s happened?”

The irony of this statement isn’t lost – Jesus is actually the only one who knows the reality of all that has occurred. The events of the previous three days didn’t fit in with their concept of a savior and messiah and because they were looking for something different to occur, they missed the reality of what actually happened.

And so, Jesus begins to show them the reality of it all, beginning with the writings of their own faith ancestors who had spoken for centuries about what was going to happen when God’s Messiah came to set us all free.

And yet it wasn’t until he sat down to eat with them, in the concrete reality of the human need for sustenance, in the breaking of the bread, do they see the reality of who he is. And they run back to Jerusalem to tell the apostles what they had experienced. Which brings us to the point in the story which we read today.

Before these men could even finish their story, Jesus pops in unannounced. And he says, “Peace be with you.”

These are the closest of Jesus’ followers who had denied even knowing him after he was arrested. He had spoken plainly with them about his own death and resurrection but they had questioned the reality of it all. And even as Jesus offers them reconciliation and redemption through the Peace of God, they think he’s a ghost.

Again Jesus uses the need for human sustenance, the every day ordinary act of eating, to prove he is really real. Not some afterlife apparition but resurrected flesh and blood life. He repeats the same lesson he gave to the men on the road to Emmaus: None of what has occurred should have been surprising or unexpected to you, he says. It’s all exactly what I told you it was going to be.

And Jesus brings his point home when he says, “you are witnesses to these things.” It’s no longer a someday that the prophets spoke of but the reality of now. You’ve seen it. You are a part of it. Now go tell others what you have experienced for yourselves.

And Jesus is speaking to us with these words as well. We’ve seen it. We are a part of this new resurrection life and we are to tell others of our own experience.

The reality of who Jesus is, of who God is, and who we are in relationship with God isn’t only contained in the sacraments of baptism and communion. This reality is in and with all who choose to follow Jesus.

We receive this power of the Holy Spirit at our baptism as we are raised to the new life made possible by the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday.
We are sustained by the Holy Spirit in the regular receiving of communion.

And we are to be witnesses to this reality. How cool is that?

God cherishes us as worthy to be the vessels and instruments through which God’s love and light and compassion are made visible reality to this world!

In the words of John, “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

Jesus appearing first to Mary, Mary, Joanna, and the others, and to Cleopas and his friend, and to the apostles after the resurrection wasn’t the goal of Easter but the beginning. We are given their names so we know the reality of what they witnessed and follow in their footsteps as we bear witness to the goodness of God in our own lives.

We have the gift of the Holy Spirit to equip and enable us as active witnesses of the Kingdom of God on earth as it is in heaven.

We follow Jesus, learning to live in this new resurrection life every moment of our regular, ordinary days.

We bear witness to the goodness of God in all things – from the most basic of human needs of sustenance and safety to the most extraordinary moments of both our greatest joy and our greatest pain.

Open the eyes of our faith, Lord God, so that we may see your redeeming work and then bear witness to your everlasting goodness and love. Amen.

Too Many

I interrupt our regularly scheduled posts… Please take the time to read the whole thing. Please share it. Please take it to heart. If you need to fix or refill your coffee, I’ll wait here while you do.

I don’t like remembering how many posts I’ve written in the past 18 months about the violence in this country that takes the lives of our fellow human beings.

And the shootings keep happening. The violence prevails. The pace is accelerating and we have to do something.

We cry out to God in our anguish and say “how long, Lord, how long?” And in Divine Love and Compassion God reminds us that we are the vessels of Love and Compassion in this world. We are to shine God’s light into the darkness; we are to show others the self-giving goodness of God. This is God’s plan and we are active participants in this purpose as we follow Jesus.

And, so, in self-reflection and the awareness of God’s loving presence with us we ask the question: What is it going to take to let go of our gun culture and embrace a culture that makes human life more valuable than anything else?

Look at this list, in a month’s time 36 human lives taken by gun violence. Yes, it takes a person to fire the gun but that person has been influenced by our culture that has decided that killing others is the answer to our problems, that our right to own something is more important than life itself.
“The attack in Indianapolis on Thursday came after a spate of mass shootings across the United States in recent weeks:
In mid-March, eight people were shot to death at three massage parlors in the Atlanta area, raising fears that the crimes may have targeted people of Asian descent.
Less than a week later, 10 people were killed when a gunman opened fire at a grocery store in Boulder, Colo.
At the end of March, a gunman killed four people, including a 9-year-old boy, at a real estate office in Southern California.
Last week, a neighbor shot and killed a doctor, the doctor’s wife and their two grandchildren inside their house in Rock Hill, S.C., as well as an air-conditioning technician who was working outside the home. A sixth person who was shot later died.”
(Copied from the New York Times)

And just yesterday in San Antonio we had an active shooter firing from a major highway intersection before making his way to the airport with the intent to do harm. Thankfully he was stopped before killing anyone and yes, I know that the police officer that shot him used a gun. I know how tricky the balance is between protection and violent force; I teach church congregations how to respond if an active shooter enters what is supposed to be a sacred and safe place.

I’m not naive enough to think that creating more gun laws will keep guns out of the hands of criminals but I do believe the statistical evidence that shows that the US leads the world in mass shootings excluding wartime and military events. In countries with strict gun laws mass kills are extremely rare so apparently they do help in some way.

Gun control isn’t really an argument about what we do and do not have a right to own. It isn’t even really an argument about constitutional rights. Gun control is a debate about the value of human life. It is a debate about whether or not we place the value of human life above all else.

We can’t claim to defend the constitution if we believe our individual right to anything is more important than the greater good of all. Our constitution wasn’t written to enable us to be a bunch of individuals looking out for ourself at the expense of the freedoms of others. There isn’t a single piece of our constitution that defends that kind of self-centered, false form of freedom. Nor is there anything in the good news of Jesus Christ that does so.

Our constitution was written to enable a society in which the general welfare of everyone, justice, and tranquility are what we defend together. And sometimes this means we have to make individual sacrifices for the greater good. The second amendment does not require anyone to own guns it simply protects the right and personal choice to do so. The guns you own are your personal choice. And so I encourage you to ask yourself, in prayerful awareness of God’s love, the question: Why do I choose to own the guns I own?

Jesus teaches us that love and compassion are the way we follow him. Jesus stopped the disciples who attempted to defend him with violence and healed the perceived enemy whom they wounded.

Together, let us ask the question: how can we, as we follow Jesus, counter the pervading culture which teaches that we can control another by threat of violence, our culture that says loud and clear, “don’t mess with me I have a gun”? This way of living is not at all compatible with the good news of Jesus Christ nor is it the reasoning behind the second amendment.

Gun violence isn’t a personal liberty issue, it is a human life issue. My right to own anything is never more important or more valuable than another person’s life. Let human life, every single human ever born, who is living now, and who will come after us, let human beings be more important, more valuable than any thing. Let our power come from God’s love for all whom God created.

Let’s learn to love each other as God loves us.

Witnesses to God’s Presence

Earlier this week I had a wonderful conversation with a friend about how we as clergy folks can help others learn to articulate their experiences with God. Our conversation focused on the expression of who we are as God’s beloved children rather than specific activities such as helping those in need (I use this phrase gently and carefully – we are all in need of each other but let’s save going deeper into this discussion for another day. I don’t want today’s post to be so long you empty your coffee cup before we’re through).

When we come to know the reality (and I use these words intentionally with bold confidence) of God’s presence with us at all times then all that we do will flow from this understanding of who and whose we are with ever present joy and peace even in the most difficult of experiences.

In Jesus’ last face-to-face encounter with his disciples after The Resurrection, the disciples want to know The Plan and they ask Jesus to tell them the what and when of God’s purpose.

Jesus tells them plainly, “it isn’t for you to know.”

This isn’t a message from a God who wants to keep us under control by lack of knowledge but from the Loving God who understands that if we were to know all that God knows, we would be unable to accept our own humanness nor to live into the people God created us to be. We wouldn’t be willing or able to be who we are and do what is ours to do.

Jesus finishes this statement by revealing a great gift: we are all enabled to receive the power of the Holy Spirit so that we can reveal the Love of God to the world. This is the superpower of all superpowers.

Jesus is teaching us to let God be God so that we can be the amazing and beloved people God created us to be. Jesus is freeing us from the impossible task of force fitting God’s Purpose into our linear, time-bound planning and removing from the equation the idea of ‘when God gets all these ducks in a row then I’ll be able to …’ so that we can live in this moment, shining the light of God’s love as we are, where we are, doing what is ours to do while we wait.

We aren’t called to wait on God passively but to live into God’s purposes by letting who and whose we are guide what we do. With God we live in the reality of God’s Kingdom on earth as it is in heaven, witnesses to the reality of God’s Presence.

I pray that my words aid you in your continuous discovery of who and whose you are and better equip you to express your experiences with God.

In the Waiting

Eastertide blessings, Y’all! How’s your coffee?

In one of Jesus most famous sermons he talks with folks about the difference between living in waiting or waiting to live.

If God gives such attention to the appearance of wildflowers—most of which are never even seen—don’t you think he’ll attend to you, take pride in you, do his best for you? What I’m trying to do here is to get you to relax, to not be so preoccupied with getting, so you can respond to God’s giving. People who don’t know God and the way he works fuss over these things, but you know both God and how he works. Steep your life in God-reality, God-initiative, God-provisions. Don’t worry about missing out. You’ll find all your everyday human concerns will be met.

Matthew 6:30-33, The Message

Jesus tells us not to be anxious about or to be distracted by tomorrow. The Greek word that the good news writer Matthew uses can also mean to not be drawn in different directions.

Prior to these words, Jesus gives us the prayer form we know as the Lord’s Prayer which includes the request: “Give us today our daily bread.” These words echo the time that the our ancient faith ancestors, Jesus own ancestors and the ancestors of most all who would have attended this sermon, lived in the wilderness as nomads completely dependent on God’s provision. God gave them bread from heaven, the substance of which they’d never seen, each day to sustain them physically. They would wake in the morning and it was covering the ground. They were only to only collect what they and their family needed for the day and any overages would spoil by the next morning.

We like to see this teaching as a simple way to tell each other not to worry and in doing so, we miss the depth of these words. Both being anxious and being distracted by the future prevents us from experiencing God and each other fully.

I think we all understand what it is to be anxious or worry about what might possibly happen in the future, but do we ever consider how looking for the next “whatever” (job/house/gadget/event) distracts us from living fully? If we constantly anticipate, we can’t truly be grateful for what we have now. When we always want something else or something more, we are saying that what we have isn’t enough.

“Give us today our daily bread.”

Wait.

Give your entire attention to what God is doing right now, and don’t get worked up about what may or may not happen tomorrow.

Matthew 6:34, The Message

Stay where you are in God’s presence, undistracted, living fully as you are, where you are.