Peaceful Intruders

Suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and singing, “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”  (Luke 2)

Who knows the last time you brushed passed an attendant of the Almighty.

According to the long-winded preacher in Hebrews (13:2) in your New Testament, it could have happened on Tuesday, on the way out of the Post Office. Then again, that may have just been your local interloper.  Whoever it was, Hebrews says: "Be nice.  Could be an angel on the loose."

Tis the season for intruding divine agents, like when Christmastime Joe is awoken in the middle of the night to the news of a paternal custody hearing (Matthew 1). He gets a nocturnal visitor.  No, not the Lunesta butterfly; middle-aged Joseph gets a dream.  And an angel.  And a word from the Lord.  “Wake up, fella.  Time to be a daddy.”

Adolescent Mary gets a visit, too (Luke 1).  That encounter always makes me chuckle: “… sent by God, to a town called Nazareth.”  Really?  Backwater Nazareth? I can see evanescent Gabriel trying to type N-A-Z- into his loaner GPS.  It blurts back, in a soothing British tongue, “Unknown destination.”  Indeed.  Who knew the Divine Word would be carried through gestation in a commoner’s womb?  She’s a nobody, this girl -- at least by the world's expectations.  The mandate from heaven: “Go surprise her, Gabe. I am doing a new thing.”

They’ve got a quite a list of clients on their website, these meddlesome messengers:  Cast off Hagar, down by the water (Gen 16).  Old man Abraham, with his PG-13 knife in the air (Gen 22).  Used-car-dealer Jacob, in a fuzzy stupor (Gen 31).  And of course, who can forget the canon’s best-known ass: ridden by Balaam, who is greeted by an angel from the side of the road (Numbers 22).  They all add the same comment on Facebook’s official Angel page: “Watch out, people.  You just never know what a day will bring. They come out of nowhere! OMG.”

They appear.  They hover.  They greet.  They intrude.  They show up by streams, in byways, or in the cursed middle of the night.  They even have an auxiliary unit that sings and dances and puts on quite a Sunday show (Isaiah 6). (But who cares for that contemporary music, anyway?  I prefer the standard old hymns, thank you.)

My favorite of all the angelic interruptions?  This one: “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace among those whom he favors!”  Even a third-shift trick of no-name shepherds gets an impromptu flash-mob in the sky, on the dodgy outskirts of Bethlehem.  The choral anthem they sing turns out to be no less than the news that the glory that already floods God’s space (heaven) will now be spilling over into our space (earth) in the form of a lasting shalom, i.e. a goodness and grace that will not fade even after the holiday rush is over.  And its (his) name is Jesus.  So sings the Newsboys, a band from Austrailia:

Entertaining angels
By the light of my t.v. screen
24-7 you wait for me
Entertaining angels
While the night becomes history
Host of heaven, sing over me

Angels.  Everywhere.  Speaking.  Surprising.  Summoning. I like that God is into a great deal of subcontracting when it comes to handing out messages.  That’s good for the economy, in these uncertain times.  And it means some group of them might just show up on your back stoop.

So watch your step on the 24th night of this Advent month, when, home from the Candlelight Service, just after dark, bedecked in last year’s Christmas-gifted bathrobe, just before heading to bed, you wheel out the trash can from under the back porch, and strewn across the crisp night middle-Georgia-sky over your neighbor’s yard, high above his crumbling tool shed and the wife’s composting garden, there is in the lower atmosphere a merry band of supernal beings, warming up with pitch pipes for the big revelatory number, carolling a new song from heaven, complete with a personalized summons to send you packing in a whole new direction in what remains of your gifted life, and all in the name of Jesus.

When and if this happens, don’t say I didn’t warn you (Luke 2).  And maybe you already have your own tale to tell of peaceful intruders.

Either way, be at peace. God still speaks.

O Christ, our Living Lord, made known to us in the humor of scripture’s stories and in the holiness of the incarnation, we welcome your word of peace and likewise pray for more of it around the world in our own day and time.  We are honored to bear your name, and grateful once again to celebrate your remarkable advent among us as a lowly child.  Send your angels to your church once again, that we might sing and sign your news.  Amen.

Rear View

Like many of your vehicles, I'm sure, my newly procured (orange!) Jeep has one of those backup cameras that allows you to see immediately behind you when you are in reverse.  Hindsight, literally.

Hindsight is an important spiritual vantage point.  To look back over one's experience, to make note and to take stock, to pay attention to matters that were difficult to see (much less understand) in the moment of living: these are the disciplines and privileges of rearward viewing.  I have a colleague who always reminds groups of pastors: It is not experience that teaches us; it is only by reflection on our experience that we learn.  The subtext of his wisdom is the truth that it is quite possible — for many, quite normal — to live life without ever reflecting on our purpose, our meaning, our reason for being alive.

Some would say, often quite proudly: "Don't ever look back!  Keep moving forward."  There is some truth to that mantra.  We can easily become ensnarled in our regrets, trapped by the power of unchangeable events, or held captive by our nostalgia.  We ought not live in the past, true, but neither can the past be avoided if we are to welcome a better future.  Looking back with open and honest eyes equips up to move forward.   The great Presbyterian missionary Harold Kurtz used to say, "Don't be afraid to make mistakes in living your life for Jesus.  Just make new ones."

For followers of Jesus, hindsight is the fertile soil of testimony.  When we look back and reflect, paying attention to our lives, we are put in a position to imagine more clearly what the living God has been up to in our lives and in the life of the world.  A wise person once said to me, "Providence is mostly a doctrine of hindsight."  We are usually better able to discern what God is up to when we pay attention to the backup camera of our lives.  Perhaps the best predictor of God's better future for us are the currents of blessing, healing, and illumination in our past.  It is why we look back so often to Jesus' morning resurrection.  The early church seems to be saying on most of the pages of our New Testaments: "God pulled off this amazing feat on that original Sunday morning.  So pay attention.  God is likely getting ready to do the same in your life."

What is your hindsight testimony these days?  Where have seen God at work in your life?  What story are you telling about where Providence has taken you thus far?  Are you afriad to turn on the backup camera in your life?  Or can you imagine where God might be leading you next, based on where God has led you in the past?

Vital Veterans

Four years ago this month, during a two week ecclesiastical visit in Africa, I departed and locked my hotel room one evening, only to discover that my traveling companion's room next door was being secretly searched by what I could only assume was an official from the country's hardline Islamic national government.

We two pastors were there visiting Presbyterian schools that for years had been supported by congregations in our presbytery.  Our visit was largely unscathed, and the room tossing was relatively innocuous in the scheme of pressures, but our visit proved to be another reminder to us of what remarkable religious liberties we followers of Jesus in America often take for granted.  "Listen," I once said to a Presbyterian congregation at the start of our worship. "Hear that?" Silence.  "No one is coming to stop us."  Many of the planet's Christians cannot take the sound of that silence as a given.

Whatever the many shortcomings of our American-style democracy, a Christ-follower from the United States only needs a brief taste of another, more repressive political context in order to appreciate what it means to come and go in this gospel unhindered and unsuppressed.  And to the extent those religious liberties have been preserved and protected by those who have served in our nation's military forces over the years, I believe as Chrsitian disciples we owe American veterans our deep gratitude.   Freedom to be free in Christ, and freely to share his light and love — it is not free.

Given that this year Veterans Day officially falls on a Sunday, as an act of Christian discipleship — if not also as an act of American citizenship — let us give thanks to God in prayer for those who have served to keep religious freedoms free.   At the top of my list is my own father, who served in the Army during the Korean conflict; along with him, countless other veterans I have known and loved in the congregations I have served.  Heartfelt thanks to those in our Northminster ranks who have served.

Who's on your hallowed list?  For what aspect of religious liberty are you most grateful?  What will you do for the Good News this week with the freedom we enjoy?

Dedicated Saints

In conversations leading up to Flippy Denton's recent funeral, someone was sharing with me some sweet and funny stories from Flippy's life.  When the gentle laughter trailed off, and there was a holy moment, this person looked at me with tender eyes and said, "Flippy was a fine Christian woman."  I could not imagine a better period that could placed at the end of a life's sentence.  Thus followed more stories; these, tales of kindness, hospitality, and forgiveness — marks of a dedicated disciple of a dedicated Savior.

This Sunday we do double duty in worship.

First, we celebrate our Protestant version of All Saints Day.  It is our time together to remember those who in the last year have left our earthy fellowship and now wait in the safe care of the risen Jesus until the resurrection; the "church triumphant," the ancient Christians called them.  It is a day to give thanks for the witness of Flippy, Tom Goodwin, and all those many others who, despite their own shortcomings, have shown us what faithfulness looks like.

Second, it is Dedication Sunday: the culmination of three weeks of Stewardship emphasis.  We will gather our Time and Talent cards, together with our financial pledges, and we will dedicate ourselves afresh to the ministry of Jesus in and around us.  We've deliberately kept this season simple this year, looking ahead as we are to a fresh new season of being church.

In truth, the two duties go naturally together.  How do we best learn the art and grace of the stewardship of God's gifts in our lives?   Mostly by watching others do it well.  From whom have you learned the shape of giving?  Who has taught you the generous way of Jesus Christ?  For that matter, who is watching you, learning the moves of discipleship from the gait of your walk?

Let us gather this Sunday, to remember God's saints and to dedicate ourselves to the same.

Soil Tests

They are like trees planted along the riverbank,
bearing fruit each season.
Their leaves never wither,
and they prosper in all they do.

— Psalm 1 (New Living Bible)

A chief challenge of the times in which we live is that most of us are cut off from the real sources of our food.  Ask a child from whence cometh apples and—no real fault of her own—she is likely to say “from the store.”  Never mind the toil of those who labor in groves far away; never mind the remarkable yield of such productive creatures as fruit trees, doing their thing season after season. Fruit just happens in our world.  Unlike earlier generations, so much more agrarian than our own, most of us have no daily connection to its upbringing.

The convenience of the produce section of Fresh Market not withstanding, there are implications to this cutoff for our Christian walk.  Spiritual fruit does not simply happen in our lives. Just as no farmer would propose standing before a bare field and simply shouting “make fruit!” … so we cannot expect our lives to bring forth signs of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-25) without proper planting, tending, and harvesting.  It turns out that modernity contains an ironic twist for believers: The more convenient the world around us, the more challenging it becomes to nurture within us a deep and abiding Christ discipleship.  Last time I checked, Kroger doesn’t carry piety.

Still, “those who delight in the law of the Lord, meditating on it day and night, they are like trees planted along the riverbank.”  This is not mere moralizing on the Bible’s part.  Think less of the psalmist wagging his finger at us and more of a fellow student who has lived long enough to figure out that soil matters, where we plant our lives makes a difference.  The psalmist can look back over his life and appreciate that good farming makes for “bearing fruit each season.” (Matthew 13:3-8)

Remember this background as you prepare your Stewardship Packet this week.  Without much reflection, we are tempted to look upon pledge cards and time commitments as narrow one-way streets.  “The church needs more from me,” we might sigh, scribbling down some hasty numbers.  Turn it back in on Sunday, and we’re off the hook for another year.

But your new pastor invites you to resist this flattened view of discipleship. Instead, consider this matter of stewardship as a busy two-way street.  There is no doubt that a congregation needs from God’s people their time, talent, and treasure in order to do the ministry Jesus is calling us to do.  The arrow pointing from you to the church is clear and obvious.

But there is also an arrow flowing toward us.  We need the church.  We need it in our lives to call us to attention, to take notice of our walk with Jesus, to consider the soil in which we are planted.  Stewardship materials are soil tests:  Am I bearing any fruit?  Am I growing or dying? Am I planted by streams of righteousness or by ditches of degeneracy?  Am I cutoff from the true source of my life or is there living water flowing through me?  (John 4:13-14)  It is the difference between casually plunking a bag of apples down in your cart ... or spending a day in an orchard—planting, fertilizing, harvesting.

A wise elder in a previous church once said from the pulpit: “God is not an accountant.  God looks at our hearts.”  This is another way of inviting us not to confuse the apple (our giving) with the tree (our lives).  God desires our hearts, not our wallets; still, our wallets—perhaps more than anything else—will likely show in what kind of soil we are planted.  Our fruit will tell us about our soil, if we are open to learning.

Let us be open to learning.  You could make quick work of your Stewardship materials and be done with it for another year.  That is your choice to make.  But your pastor invites you to dig a little deeper.  Let us all commit to take some soil samples in this new season, to remember again the source of our abundant life.  Let us press beyond an easy, convenient faith to instead discover (again!) the “joys of those who do not follow the advice of the wicked … but [instead] delight in the law of the Lord.”

From whence cometh our fruit?

Four Dimensions

"My God, my Father and my Savior, since it has pleased thee to preserve me by thy grace through the night just ended and until the present day, grant that I may use it entirely in thy service and that I may, say, and do nothing but to please thee and to obey thy holy will, so that all my actions may redound to the glory of thy name and the edification of my neighbors."

Sunday is Reformation Day among us Protestants, an annual date intended for the celebration of our heritage as spiritual children of the 16th century Christian reformation in Europe.  The quotation above, a sentence from a prayer by reformer John Calvin -- arguably the father of what would later become our Presbyterian way of being church -- is not only a nod to our Reformation roots but also a lovely prayer for the middle week of our stewardship season.

All of life, every sleeping and waking breath, is fundamentally a generous gift from a magnanimous God.  That perspective is the only proper starting point for considering our role as stewards of God's good gifts.  So the question before us this week is not merely "What am I giving to the church?"  Calvin taught us, instead, to ask always: "What have I been given by God?  What has God entrusted to me in this life?  What time, talent, and treasure is Jesus calling me to share as a pointer for others to God's love and light?"

Sunday morning in worship we return again to the witness of Ephesians 3:14-21, this time with a close look at verses 18-19:  Paul's prayer for us that we "may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God."  Paul celebrates the four dimensions of God's generosity in our lives, a grace that spills over in every direction.

How WIDE are we being called to make our Northminster fellowship?  To what LENGTHS will we go to share and model the good news that God is love?  How can we continue to HEIGHTEN our worship, that it would always be a showcase for God's story?  In a world marked by tight and trite soundbites, how can we plumb the DEPTHS of the gospel in ways that inspire and equip others to walk in his way?  I myself am confident that if we attend to these sacred quesions, and are open to being ourselves a part of God's answers, the money we need to be the church naturally follow.  This is how, in Calvin's words, all our actions "redound to the glory of thy name and the edification of my neighbors."

Let us together grasp all the dimensions of the gospel at work in our lives.

Homiletical Gumbo

In my childhood years, my mother Lucile would spend the better part of a day chopping up onions, celery, and bell peppers.  I can still hear the TAP TAP TAP of the knife on the cutting board.  Later in the long process, her aluminum cauldron on the stovetop would come to a low boil.  The house would begin to smell like onions, garlic, and bay leaves.  Into the pot: okra, crab meat, and later on, oysters.  The whole menagerie would cook down for what seemed like hours.  It was hard to wait until dinner time, but a few stolen pieces of hot french bread and butter would usually make the waiting bearable.  Then, at last, soup's on.

Gumbo was a staple of my childhood growing up on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, north of New Orleans.  So maybe that's why it is also my favorite working metaphor for learning to listen to the witness of scripture.  Like a deep seafood soup, scripture listening takes some time to cook down to a meal of discernement flavored with faithfulness.  And likewise, the necessary, traditional ingredients are many.  Each one matters.

This Sunday, we finish our short stint through the sacraments -- BATH, MEAL, BOOK -- with a taste of what it means for us as Presbyterian disciples of Jesus to be steward's of the good Book.  We'll serve up a helping of Luke 4:16-30 -- Jesus first "sermon," in his hometown church building.  The story has all the needed ingredients for a good gospel gumbo: the rich promise that the Spirit of God speaks to us, again and again, through the pages of the scripture.  Laissez les bons temps rouler!

Associations

Is it just me, or does your mind also make interesting associations, and often in a split second?

Whenever I can smell the smell of licoriche in a candy store or a quickie mart, my mind immediately takes flight from the Miami airport, across the blue Carribean waters, to the northern coast of the Domincian Republc.  A nanosecond later, I am no longer in a checkout line paying for gas but am in a block-stacked sanctuary belonging to the Iglesia Evangélica Dominicana.  A smiling friend is handing me bread; in Spanish she says aloud what I can safely assume is something like, "The body of Jesus, broken for you."  And as a hunk of that torn bread nears my mouth, my nose is filled with the potent aroma of Anise -- a flowering plant in the family Apiaceae native to the eastern Mediterranean region and Southwest Asia. The Dominicans always serve anise bread at communion, one of a hundred little traditions of worship that localize the good news for their little corner of the world's increible neighborhood.

So in my mind, at least, the smell of licoriche (so similar to anise) is forever welded to the sacrament of communion, to the taste of a Caribbean Jesus in my mouth.

World Communion Sunday, which we celebrate this week, is for us an annual joyful reminder that the living body of Jesus is infinitely larger than our own ecclesiastical square footage tucked in along Wimbish Road.  Of course we know this in our minds; a drive up and down said Wimbish makes it clear that Jesus' people, although one, gather in many different tribes.  We are not World Changers; World Changers are not we; thank the heavens Jesus loves us all.

But the communion meal affords us the blessing of remembering his Oneness in other ways: touch, smell ... taste.  We see, touch, taste the various breads ... and we are struck again by the beauty of the good news: it is singular in its oneness -- Jesus is alive!  -- yet is is pluriform in its practice, worked out uniquely and locally in every zip code around this great green planet.  In Sabaneta de Yasica they bake in the anise seed so that the bread wakes up your senses.  In New Wilmington, Pennsylvania, they serve up the sugar-sweet shortbread.  In a homless shelter in downtown Pittsburgh, the break whatever bread was donated in excess the day before.  In Forsyth, Georgia, every week, another sourdough loaf appears from a bread maker just in time for eucharist.  One body ... many loaves.  One gospel ... many places.

World Communion Sunday.  God is licoriche and love.  Come hungry.

We Are They

When my pastoral ministry was presbytery leadership, I would often say to our congregations, "Remember that the presbytery is we; we are the presbytery."

My point was that the "presbytery," when functioning as a wider expression of the church, was not some bureaucratic entity over and apart from our congregations, some ecclesiastical monkey on our backs or some Big Brother only checking our minutes.  The presbytery is we: our pastors, our sister congregations and their elders -- our common life in Jesus our Christ.

It is true that the "congregation is the basic form of the church."  Like politics, all Christian ministry is local.  You cannot finally institutionalize or nationalize the body of Jesus; it lives and moves through relationships.  And yet a localized congregation by itself is not a sufficient expression of the Christian movement.  Churches need each other just like we need each other.  Sibling congregations need their siblings to share, encourage, and correct.

We see this lived out in the pages of our New Testament: The church in Corinth is not the church in Philippi, or vice versa.  They each need different interpretations of the one gospel message, which is why your Bible contains all these peculiar letters to churches with funny first century place names.  Yet they also need each other, learn from one another, and together with all the churches form a multifaceted expression of the community of Jesus.  At our best, it is not dissimilar to what we Presbyterians are up to in a presbytery.  Two truths are true:  Northminster is the basic form of Jesus' church.  And Northminster needs our siblings.  And they need us.

This month, we have the opportunity to practice the wider Christian expression we call presbytery.  On Sunday, October 14, we will abbreviate our Sunday morning worship so as to reconvene at 4pm for a Service of Installation led by our Flint River Presbytery.  Three elders and three preachers from sister congregations will lead us in worship and officially "install" me as your pastor.  It is a marriage ceremony, of sorts.  Vows will be taken, promises will be made, and prayers will be offered for a faithful and fruitful season of ministry -- together.  As I am now a member of Flint River Presbytery, there is a real sense in which my (new) spiritual fellowship is coming to meet with your (longstanding) spiritual fellowship, and together we are a better expression of Jesus' body.

We are particularly honored in this 4pm service to welcome as our preacher the Rev. Cindy Kohlmann, currently the Co-moderator of our national Presbyterian General Assembly.  Cindy, Deb Tregaskis Bibler (our terrific executive here in Flint River), and I all became good friends in recent years through a national learning cohort of presbytery executives.  This summer, Cindy was elected co-moderator of our General Assembly and well spend the next two years traveling around the denomination representing the best of what we hold in common with everyone in the Presbyterian Church (USA).  Cindy is as terrific a friend as she is a preacher, so I know we will be blessed by her presence with us.

I hope you'll make time the afternoon of October 14 to continue our Lord's Day worship later in the day and to welcome our presbytery into our worship space.  They are we.  We -- blessedly -- are they.

Wade in the Water

Thanks to apartment living here in Macon, I no longer count yard work among my domestic responsibilities.  I am not sad about this.  Not one bit.

What I will miss, however, are the post-yard-work showers.  Few middle class privileges outrank the feeling of washing off hours of raking, weeding, and mowing.  To watch the dirt, grime, and sweat circle the drain and disappear into the great gone -- sublime!  A fresh start at cleanliness.  Relief.

After several weeks sitting together in the witness of Acts chapter 1, this Sunday we begin three weeks on the sacraments -- BATH, MEAL, and BOOK.  World Communion Sunday (October 7) will be the midpoint in this short run of sermons, but this Sunday we go down into the BATH waters with a journey in John 9:1-12 -- Jesus' act of healing near a public pool called "Sent."

Lest baptism remain merely some remote or sentimental event in our distant infancies, we will consider what it means to say that, in Jesus, we are a "people of the bath."  His bath.  His dirt dissolving, grime gracing, sin-sweat solvent of a bath.  Come, after another week of walking around in the dirt of our lives, let's get cleaned up together in scripture.  "Go, wash in the pool" called worship.

See you again on the Lord's Day.   Bring a towel!


[photo: St. Francis Xavier College Church, St. Louis MO — RWH]

Another First

Come
gather around
Feel the electricity
of
next and new
Taste
a morsel
of that first
great banquet:
the defeat of death
the flipping of scripts
my vivification
Taste
and see
how faithful
is our Provider
That
feeling
you feel:
The energy
The encouragement
That sense
that anything
is now
possible
The gladness
that you came
These
are the holy
leftovers
from my
first
Easter
Appetizers
of that
great
next and new
still
to
come

Coming in Peace

In my work supporting and coaching pastors, this preacher frequently found himself in the pew in recent years, listening to sermons -- and often first-Sunday sermons, no less.  Not long ago, a young, energized pastor landed in one of the larger congregations in the presbytery.  All eyes were on her first sermon.  She read the scripture reading, stepped out from behind the pulpit, faced her new congregation, and with a warm smile said, "I come in peace."

I loved that line.  From back in the cheap seats where I was sitting, you could feel large numbers of Presbyterians take deep breaths and relax.  "Since you called a young, Millennial pastor, you are probably worried I'm going to turn everything you care about upside down, hang a disco ball in the choir loft, and ruin your church."  We all laughed; some, nervously.

Your new pastor is too old to be labeled a Millennial, but I likewise come to you in peace.

Am I energized about returning to the pulpit, table, and font?  Am I looking forward to traveling with you in this meandering walk of discipleship?  Am I ready to place one foot solidly inside your wonderful facility, and another squarely in the community of North Macon?  Absolutely.  Do I want to turn you inside out in the first 6 months?  Absolutely not.

Instead, let's spend some months of Sundays giving thanks together for the Prince of Peace.  I can and do come to you in peace only because he himself has given us his shalom -- that gift of deep wholeness, of there-is-enough; a kind of spiritual abundance that puts us at ease and allows us to turn outward with loosened grips, to ask, Where is there not yet peace?  Where can we go with his shalom?  How are we being called again to be his peaceable people in such a peculiar time?

Here's the good news: Northminster is already Jesus' church; always has been, always will be.  Woe to the ambitious preacher who forgets that comforting promise and changes the carpet.  Likewise, woe to the comfortable congregation who forgets that disturbing challenge and nails down all the furniture.  But let us be clear: It is his challenge that changes us, by reformation ... not his full-time spiritual subcontractors by means of revolution.  Thank the heavens he is in charge.

And so, here's a modest proposal for this next year in our shared life: Let us relish in Jesus' peace -- soak in it and share it.  Let us practice that peace by not trying to change one another, but by listening, learning, and loving on one another.  Let us together take some time to take a fresh look at the good news of the resurrection and what it might mean for us in this new and next season.  Let us be at peace with one another, week by week, that we might again be People of Peace for the community all around us.

God has come to us in peace in our older brother Jesus.  That is all that matters.  Derivatively -- honored to be your next pastor and grateful to be your spiritual sibling -- I come to you in peace as well.  I cannot wait to learn what God has been up to in your midst.