A Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter

Trust can be a difficult thing to build in our relationships. Trust takes time to develop, it requires work and risk. Trust can wither and die before it ever has the chance to develop if just one party in a relationship refuses to work towards building it. Trust is not just a passive virtue, it must be an active discipline.




All of us have people in our lives who are not trustworthy and this just highlights for us the importance and value of trust. An untrustworthy boss can make work miserable. A marriage where trust is gone is a marriage doomed to fail. I think back to when I was a teenager and my parents learned that they couldn’t trust me to leave me home by myself when they went on vacation, but that’s a story for another day.




Our readings this morning point us to Christ as our Great Shepherd. As our Great Shepherd leads us to and through life, we – as His people – are called to learn to follow Him in complete trust. This means allowing our Great Shepherd to care for us and following Him where He leads us.




In our reading from the Acts of the Apostles we see a community of believers who are grieving the loss of a woman who had been an example to all around her of Christ’s self-giving love. In the midst of this community’s grief, we are reminded that our Shepherd takes care of His flock as The Holy Spirit raised Tabitha to life through Peter’s prayer.




Psalm 23 may very well be the most famous psalm in the Psalter because it paints for us such a beautiful picture of what it means for Christ to be our Great Shepherd. When King David says that the LORD restores his “soul” in verse 3, the Hebrew word there is better understood as the totality of a person. We might say then that the LORD restores all of who we are; our mind, body, and spirit.




And how does the LORD restore us? By walking beside us through the darkest places of our lives; by protecting us from evil (as David says, “your rod and your staff, they comfort me”); by providing for us, even in the face of despair (“you prepare a table for me in the presence of my enemies”); and ultimately our Great Shepherd leads us into His presence where we dwell with him eternally.




Now we all know people who have died in the valley of the shadow of death, loved ones lost to cancer, to heart attacks, to car accidents. That is why our reading of Psalm 23 is paired with a reading from Revelation chapter 7. We are reminded that “Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb” as this great multitude who have lost their lives because of persecution are singing praises and songs of victory in the presence of our God. Lest we should question God’s power to bring about salvation for His people, the word “throne” is used seven times in this brief passage. This picture that was revealed to St. John leaves no room for doubt; our God is sovereign and has the power to redeem all of creation.




Finally, in our gospel reading this morning, Jesus is confronted by a group of people who refuse to follow Him as their Shepherd. Even though John has recorded six miracles which he calls “signs” – miracles that point to what the Father is at work doing through the son – even though six times Jesus has revealed Himself to the crowds – “I am the bread of life…light of the world…the good shepherd – these people still refuse to believe that Jesus is who He says He is. So what is Christ’s response? “You do not believe because you are not my sheep.” We who believe and trust Him enough to follow Him are sheep of the Great Shepherd and we are given the assurance that nothing can snatch us away from Him.




I always like to ask two questions when I read Scripture: How does this work and what does it look like in my life. So I ask, how does trusting in Christ as our Great Shepherd work?





First, trusting Christ as our Great Shepherd means that each one of us is cared for. This is the reason why Psalm 23 is so well known. We read Psalm 23 at funerals, in hospital rooms, alone in our room; any time we feel like we are alone in the world with nothing but our suffering, those words, “The LORD is my shepherd” bring us comfort. Likewise, when we feel like we’re overwhelmed and drowning we find refuge in Christ’s words, “No one can snatch them [My sheep] from Me.”




But we have to be careful here. All this talk about trusting in God to care for us can paint an unreal picture of what it means to follow Christ. Just because we are cared for does not mean that we will be immune to suffering. If we are going to trust Christ as our Great Shepherd, we must be willing to follow Him when He leads us through hardship.




Remember back to our reading from the book of Acts this morning: we know how the story ends so it is easy for us to gloss over the time between Tabitha dying and Peter praying for her to be restored to life. But in the time between the beginning and end of that passage, there were a lot of faithful people who had to deal with the loss of one of their sisters in Christ.




King David wrote that the LORD set for him a table in the presence of his enemies and David was protected when King Saul tried to kill him. But just this month we remembered the anniversary of the martyrdom of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Bonhoeffer was a German pastor and theologian who was arrested and executed – at the hands of his enemies - by the Nazis for his part in a plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler during World War 2.




That great multitude of people from every tribe and nation we saw around the throne of God singing His praises in the book of Revelation? Those people were all martyred for their faith.




It’s easy for us to stand back and say that everything will work out for the good of those who love God and that we have to learn to trust in Christ. That becomes a lot harder when we realize that it is ME who is being called to follow through the dark valley.




As I have sought to be faithful to my call to follow Christ and to serve Him with my life’s work, He has led me out of the non-denominational church and into the Anglican Communion. Part of what it looked like for me to follow Christ into this calling meant that we had to move out of our house and put it up for sale last November. Now we think we have it sold, but for the last five months Alison and I have been sitting and waiting, and paying the mortgage payment and utility bill each month, and thinking about how slow the housing market is. In the last five months, we’ve only had two nibbles on the house. Do I trust that Christ is leading Alison and me? Yes. Have I been worried at times over these last five months that we might start seminary this fall and still not have the house sold yet? Absolutely! The reason why it is so important for us to learn to trust and to learn to follow Christ is that if we waited until we knew how everything is going to work out, we’d never set the first foot in front of the other!




One last question remains: What does it look like in our lives for us to learn to follow Christ in complete trust? Following Christ in complete trust means seeking a balance between allowing Christ to care for and comfort us while at the same time challenging us to follow Him. Without this balance we either become too comfortable or too challenged.

If we insulate ourselves from suffering and hardships by hearing only Christ’s words of comfort and not His challenging call to follow, we aren’t going to be prepared to rise to the occasion when Christ calls us to serve Him. Don’t get me wrong, I like to be just as comfortable as the next person but it’s like this: sweat pants and house slippers are great for lounging around the house but they’re terrible for going out to do yard work. Let us be prepared to answer the call to follow where Christ leads us!

On the other hand, if we focus too much on the challenge of following Christ to the point where we don’t listen to His words of comfort, we are setting ourselves up for failure. A life of following Christ that is all challenge and no comfort leaves us in a place where we lose our joy. Following Christ becomes just another obligation rather than a journey that leads us into a fullness of life that cannot be found anywhere else.




Let us listen then to the voice of Christ speaking words of comfort and challenge into our lives so that we, as His people, may learn to follow Him in complete trust wherever He may lead us.

A Prayer for a Sunday when the Heat is too Hot and the Music too Slow

Oh Holy Spirit,
You who raised Eutychus from the dead
After he fell asleep during church,
and fell out the window and died;
Grant me the grace to stay awake through church this morning.
And if this is not Your Holy Will,
Grant that I do not snore too loudly,
Or drool on myself,
Or start to nod off and then jerk awake real suddenly.
Whether I make it through this service awake or asleep,
Remind me that the Redemption You are working right now,
At this moment,
Is more creative and far reaching than can be contained
In this room,
At this moment.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,
Amen.

A Monday Morning Poem

People usually find the incessant
Barking of a dog or two
Inside their fence
A nuisance, noise pollution.

A rap on the window,
"Shut up out there!"

After listening to those dogs bark
At the same string of squirrels,
     Loose dogs roaming the neighborhood,
           The occasional passerby,
                The mail lady six days a week
                      Between noon and two o'clock,

I hear those dogs barking out
A testimony to the sheer persistence
Of created life
As I hop in the shower
     And head to work on Monday morning.

- 3 October 2011

A Poem for Tuesday Morning

Coffee in the morning,
Whiskey at night.
Life is alright

On Losing My Joy

These last two years have been two of the hardest years of my life. I'm not saying this to complain, only to preface my return to blogging. In the last two years I have transitioned from being single to being married; during the same time period, I have also transitioned from being a student to being a full-time pastor. Either one of these transitions by itself is a lot to get used to, but both together are like smoking a joint after drinking a 12 pack of beer, no matter how much you think you can handle it you will find it hard to keep your feet under you.

Now don't hear me wrong, I love my wife very much and I am not writing this to bemoan being married. Marriage certainly has a way of showing a person just how selfish and self-serving he really is, and then grinding down those rough edges, but there's nothing better than knowing that no matter what happens in the course of the day you can look forward to snuggling your sweetie as the two of you fall asleep together at the end of the day.

However, the transition from private Bible college to full-time pastoral ministry in a small town in Southern Illinois has been a hard one. I have recently, within the last month, come to the realization that in attempting to make this transition I have lost my joy.***

One of the ways I have come to this realization is that I have found that I no longer enjoy most of the things that I used to. In the course of these last two years I have quit running entirely for almost a year (something I dearly love), quit riding and sold my motorcycle (something I dearly loved), quit reading theology (something I dearly loved), and just generally lost all hope for anything good to come of life all together. When I'm not working, I'm either escaping into my Xbox (not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself), eating, watching TV, or sleeping.

I have also found that my temper has gotten shorter and shorter. Now, I inherited my temper honest, and for as far back as I can remember I have let it fly when things have pissed me off. Even when I was little I would break toys if they pissed me off. But my temper has always been directed at inanimate objects. I may punch a wall, sling a pair of channel lock pliers across the yard, or cuss a blue streak at the lawn mower, but I've never directed that temper at other people, let alone people I care about. In these last few months I've found myself losing my temper with my sweet wife (not as far as punching her or throwing her across the yard, just being a grouch at her) and this really bothers me.

I've also swelled up like sequined jump-suit Elvis. The clothes that fit when I moved here don't fit anymore. I've always been up and down with my weight, but when I was 20 I topped out at 230 pounds. That was an eye opener so I started doing weight watchers and running and lost almost 60 pounds in the course of a summer. Now I put some of that weight back on, but I hadn't been up over 200 pounds since then. Until moving down here, that is. Back in January I forced myself on to a scale and saw that I was close to 220 pounds. Not good, dude, not good at all.

I know the symptoms I am describing probably line up well with depression, and given the disproportionate amount of time in the last two years I've spent sitting alone in a quiet empty room, sighing deeply and feeling totally empty, that's probably exactly what it is. What I want to do with these next few blog posts is to take a look at how I got here, and how I am going to go forward, in the hopes that maybe some of you out there in blogoworld might benefit from reading what I'm writing.

***Now here's the good news, after realizing that I have lost my joy, I have been taking steps to get it back. I started walking in the morning and listening to one of my favorite series of books on my iPod back in July, and now I have built back up to running a little over 2 miles a day (hoping to get that closer to 5 come spring). I'm gradually losing weight, getting closer to that 200 pound mark and hoping to get back towards 185 by next year. Most importantly, I am realizing that I am not trapped in this place or in this line of work, and that has been liberating. So all in all things are looking up!

Coming soon...The first step towards losing one's joy: jamming a square peg in a round hole.

N.T. Wright; Gnosticism; Lukewarm Church

So yesterday I discovered iTunes U. iTunes U is a place where all sorts of universities from around the world post lectures and such on all sorts of topics and you can browse and download them as you like. I'm an avid podcast listener and have been for some years now, so this is really exciting! Upon discovering this I promptly downloaded everything I could find by the illustrious Nicholas Tom Wright.

This morning while running and then while at the gym lifting weights, I listened to a lecture given by Dr. Wright at Duke Divinity School titled "Revelation and Christian Hope: Political Implications of the Revelation to John." I would like to share one thing he said in this lecture:

"Again and again, Revelation draws on the great themes and insights from the Old Testament prophets...because Revelation, like the whole New Testament, sees the Old Testament as a great, complex, multi-faceted narrative which came to its climax in Jesus and is now generated a new narrative which is demonstratively the fulfillment of that ancient story but also in a significantly new mode. Revelation is...the climax of prophecy...The book of Revelation tells the same story the gospels tell, which though we may not normally read the Gospels like this, goes like this...it is the story of how Jesus of Nazareth, Israel's Messiah, conquered the power of evil through His death, and became the Lord of the world. The New Testament is not about how Jesus, on the one hand revealed that He was divine and then died so that we can go to heaven. That's half-way to gnosticism if you aren't careful. They are about how Jesus acted as the embodiment of Israel's God to overthrow the usurping forces of evil and to establish through His death, resurrection, and ascension, God's Kingdom on earth as in heaven."

Amen and Amen.

Now here's my question. I am acutely aware of the fact that the church culture in which I have grown up regularly sees the vast majority of young people who grow up in church promptly leave that church at the age of 18 when they go off to college and then maybe they will come back when they turn 35 and have kids (mostly just to instill some good old morals in their young ones...remember when the gospel used to be good news?). Anyway, building on Wright's statement that the gospel is about Christ embodying Israel's God, and defeating the usurping forces of evil to establish God's Kingdom and that the gospel of Christ coming to "prove" He was God and then die "for our sins" so that we can "go to heaven" when we die is dangerously close to gnosticism, I wonder if the majority of churches, at least in rural middle america, aren't more gnostic than Christian? And if that's the case, is it any wonder so many close their doors each week? Maybe gnosticism was a hot thing 50 years ago when most of the people in church now were growing up, but somewhere along the way it has lost steam. Maybe a big part of the work we need to do as Kingdom citizens in the immediate future is converting "christians" from gnosticism to the gospel of Jesus Christ?

An Ode to Beans and Rice

I eat beans and rice almost every day of the year. Some days I eat beans and rice twice a day. I have even been known to eat beans and rice for breakfast. Beans (1 part pinto, 1 part black) and rice (brown, never white) is delicious. You can dress it up with cheese, barbeque sauce, jalepenos, onions, you can wrap it in a tortilla and toast it on the cast iron skillet, you can eat it on a bed of fritos or tortilla chips. I got a 10 pound sack of black beans for Christmas and it was gone by february. My dad orders 50 pound sacks of pinto beans and we split them up amongst the family. That's how I roll.

So in honor of how much I love beans and rice (fresh pepper season is coming! I've got 4 dozen little starts sitting next to a window in the sun right now), I wrote this poem:

I love beans and rice,
I love them very much.
I love beans and rice,
I could eat them for dinner and lunch.

Thank you, thank you very much

A Well Protected Garden

One of the most important aspects of growing a garden is garden protection. In these turbulent times, one cannot be too careful when it comes to keeping thieves out of the garden. In this area, two of the most persistent garden pests are rabbits and gypsies.

These two garden thieves have a lot in common. Both are covered in hair, both will eat sugar snap peas before they get very far out of the ground, and neither have souls.

In order to protect against rabbits and gypsies, I've used 2 foot tall chicken wire and 5 foot tee-posts. My neighbor must have been having a problem with persistent gypsies because he ran electric fence around his. I hope I do not have to resort to this!

Garden - March 23, 2011

After planning, replanning, and then planning some more, I realized that a single garden plot of 17 x 34 was not going to be big enough to grow everything I wanted to grow. Actually, it's barely big enough to grow my peppers and tomatillos. So Monday and Tuesday I tilled a second garden patch. This one is 14 x 26 and went in where Lowell cut down my dead pecan tree and opened up some sun shine in the back yard. Henceforth the new garden patch will be referred to as the West Gardens and the old garden patch (for the peppers and tomatillos) will be referred to as the East Garden.

Here is the West Garden:



Yesterday I planted 180 onions (red and yellow)



In order to maximize production in a small space, I'm going to follow the loose square foot garden model. Today I got out and roped off my squares and walking paths



And today I got to plant spinach

Planting Time at Lawrence Manor

One of the things I love the most about living in a small town is that the real estate is dirt cheap. We bought a house on 2 city lots with 6 producing pecan trees and a sweet storm cellar which doubles as a prayer cave complete with icons and candles for less than a down payment on an apartment in the city (seriously, just because you call it a "condo" and pay a bunch of money for it doesn't change the fact that you just bought an apartment). After finding myself under 30 years old and already part of the landed aristocracy (remember the good old days when you had to be a man and own land to vote? and people wonder why the country is going down-hill these days...) I set myself to making my land productive.

Last year I threw together a garden rather quickly in May. At least, I think it was in May. The plants I bought from the green house were on clearance, so it was almost too late to plant. I grew tomatoes and peppers along with oregano. Most of the tomatoes went rotten and the oregano never got harvested, but I did manage to can 30 pints of jalepeno peppers and dry around 6 dozen cayennes.

This year I am going to be much more methodical in planting my garden, and I am going to document it here on my blog (I figure this is a much more productive way to spend my blogging energies than pontificating on things "spiritual" or worse, entering into the raging internet debates between the neo-reformed inquisition and those of us who aren't crazy).

Here's the goal for the year:
75 pints of pickled jalepenos (I need a pint a week just for myself)
52 pints of pickles (normal and hot variety)
30 pints of salsa
and maybe another 30 of pasta sauce

As for exactly what I'm planting this is a rough run down:
Asparagus
Broccoli
Brussels Sprouts
Basil
Garlic
Green Beans
Lettuce
Onion
Peppers - 2 varieties of Jalepeno, Red Habanero, and Ceyenne, and maybe Bells
Snap Peas
Spinach
Tomatillos
Tomatoes

To cram all these plants into such a tight space, I'm going to use a variation of the square foot gardening method which I like to think of as "clump planting." It's not pretty, but it works :) I'm also going to save some space by planting my green beans and snap peas along the fence which I've put up for the dogs. This may not work all that great, but I'm going to need room for 3 dozen pepper plants so space is valuable.

My garden space is roughly 34' x 17'. I'm going to surround it with chicken wire to keep the rabbits out (although I will most likely give a good chunk of my salad harvest to them). I also may run electric fence around it to keep the deer and gypsies out.

The weather was exceedingly beautiful Saturday, so I went ahead and did a first tilling. Here's what things look like as of March 13, 2011:

Do you ever wonder...

There are 2 S's in Superfluous.

But there is only 1 in Asinine.

This is a mysterious universe in which we live.

How Sweet the Sound

Trolling around the internet this morning, I found this article: http://tv.ign.com/articles/114/1147540p1.html

That's right, Beavis and Butthead are coming back to MTV! I am reminded that there is a God in heaven, and He loves us very much.

Do you ever wonder...

Do you ever wonder how Honi the Circle Drawer got his name? I just stumbled across this guy while reading Craig Keener's John commentary. I suppose I could search him up on Wikipedia, but where's the fun in that?

I like to think that Honi the Circle Drawer was antiquity's "North Carolina Camel Jockey." The NCCJ was a name graffitied on the walls of bathroom stalls at truck stops all across the country 20 years or so ago. I learned about him as I was going on trips with my dad in his semi truck during summer break when I was 12 years old or so. After going trucking with dad during those summers, I developed a love for bathroom graffiti which endures to this day.

So in my mind, you could have been traveling around in Honi's day and have to make a pit stop behind a rock or tree to do your business and as you're passing the time you look over and there's a circle drawn on the rock and you say, "Honi has been here!"

Honi probably got in trouble when he was growing up and still in school. After the second or third time he was sent home from school for carving circles in his desk, the name just stuck.

America, Israel, and Illegal Immigrants

Living in the Bible Belt, I've bumped into a lot of people who seem to think that America is God's chosen nation much like Israel (and Judah) was God's chosen nation in the Old Testament. I hate to rain on everyone's parade, but I have to thoroughly and vigorously disagree with this presumption. When we treat America as if it were some kind of 20th and 21st century "Promised Land" with the status of God's favorite nation, at best we are cheapening the Gospel and at worst we are flat misrepresenting it.

It seems to me like the prosperity enjoyed by the United States over the last 60 years has had more to do with the fact that pretty much the entire Western world, excepting the U.S., was bombed into oblivion in WW 2 thus giving the U.S. a huge economic advantage and putting us in the position to manufacture and sell goods to the world without much real competition. At this point I suppose you could interject that the destruction experienced in Europe in WW 2 was in some way God's judgment, but that would make you much more presumptuous than me.

But let me play along with everyone for a moment. Let's pretend that America somehow has replaced Israel as God's chosen nation. I heard this on NPR this morning. Apparently the private prison industry has been lobbying law makers in the Southwestern United States to crack down on illegal immigrants. If this were to happen, these private parties in the prison industry could make a lot of money by imprisoning the illegal immigrants in question.

Well America, I know you know this, being God's chosen nation and all, but for the sake of redundancy let me remind you of Leviticus 19:33-34

"When an alien lives with you in your land, do not mistreat him. The alien living with you must be treated as one of your native-born. Love him as yourself, for you were aliens in Egypt. I am the LORD your God."

I would also remind you (again I know you know this, being God's chosen nation and all that), of all the warnings spoken through the prophets concerning God's impending judgment because of the way Israel mistreated the aliens in their land (for example: Jeremiah 7:5-7; 22:2-4; Ezekiel 22:7, 29; Zechariah 7:9-10; Malachi 3;5).

But that's just me speaking theoretically. I mean, America isn't really God's chosen nation any more than Switzerland or the Democratic Republic of Congo is God's chosen nation. Because the whole point of Christ's coming was to fulfill God's mission of reconciliation given to Israel (Gen 12:1-3), and to open the door for people of all nations to become part of the people of God (1 Peter 2:10). And that's the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ!

Walking Down A Dream

My wife and I had a very short courting period before we were engaged (no sense in beating around the bush, right?). Anyway, after we had been engaged for some time, she told me that the one thing that turned her off on me when we were first getting to know each other was that I told her I had no ambition in life. Now I suppose that wasn't an entirely true statement; I do have ambitions, I just set the bar really low. All I've ever wanted out of life was to get married, buy a little house, have a job where I could provide for my family, and to own a dog or three. Anything else that comes along is just icing on the cake.

I know my stance on ambition runs contrary to that of most younger people in our country. When I was in Bible College, the unspoken assumption was that everyone who was there was going to go out and set the world on fire and be the next pop-Christian celebrity by virtue of their wisdom and great feats of social justice. I have to admit that in my pride and delusion, I entertained such thoughts as well. But those thoughts were so graciously dashed to pieces after I spent a couple months interning in a small church. In my short experience with ministry, it seems to me that this job will either quickly humble a person or will pour fuel on the fires of their delusion and turn them into more of a tyrant than a minister of the good news of Jesus Christ.

Don't get me wrong, I long for the coming of the Kingdom. As often as I pray, I pray for God's Kingdom to come and His will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (italics mine). I know He uses the Church to accomplish that will and I know that it is in the Church where we find the fullest expression of the Kingdom here on earth. To that end, I will do my work to the best of my abilities and I will seek to foster a sense of expectancy both in myself and in those to whom I minister, knowing that the Holy Spirit works through us, unworthy as we might be.

But at the end of the day, it's His Kingdom I seek, not my own. So I make it a discipline to check my ambitions at the door. I have a wonderful wife, I own a house, I have more than one dog, hopefully come Monday I will have a garden planted. I already consume and have so much more than I would ever need that to aspire to more would be gluttony. Will God use my work and bless it to the advancement of His Kingdom? I believe He will. Am I going to be fool enough to tell Him how best to do that? Well that's what makes beating down my ambitions a discipline, doesn't it?

Anyway, all that is to say I do have a dream, a grand goal I aspire to in my life. I've had this goal for a long time now. It's probably started as a seed planted deep in my spirit and that seed was watered and began to grow after I learned about Ramblin' Jack Elliott and watched the documentary movie about his life.

Before I die, I hope to walk across the country from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, just for the experience of it. This morning I read about someone who just a year or so older than me who is doing this! Too cool! Here's his blog: http://imjustwalkin.com/

Who knows, maybe I'll bump into you on the road some day :)

A Haiku: Upon Picking Up Dog Poo In The Yard

Diligently I
Pace back and forth through my yard
Seeking brown treasures

Meet Rosie

Some people collect baseball cards, some people collect tea sets, my wife and I collect puppies. The house next to our friends in Royalton had three dogs tied up out in the yard and one of those dogs had four cute little puppies. Every time we would go visit our friends, these little puppies would run out and say hi to us. Now we had a bad experience with trying to add a third dog to our pack last fall (we'll call that the Gracie incident) so for a while I was pretty strong about refusing my wife's request that we bring one of those puppies home (even though I really wanted to!). But then my wife got a job interview up the road so I told her that if she got the job then we'd get one of the puppies. So say hello to Rosie!



She's a Heinz 57 mutt but she sure is cute! And as you can see, she gets along great with our two boys.





I can't help but wonder that if we find our calling by looking for the place where our passions meet our gifts then maybe someday I'll will open "Shotgun Willie's Ranch for Free Range, Unwanted Dogs" where I will live out my days throwing frisbees till my arms are sore and rolling around on the ground being licked by 45 dogs :)

I always heard ministry could be dangerous...

Despite the stereotype of the minister in 21st century North America as an overweight man with soft hands and a bad comb-over, driving around in a Cadillac, Scripture and the history of the Church paints ministry as a dangerous calling. All but one of the 12 Apostles met violent deaths. Saint Paul was beheaded. Jeremiah the prophet is said to have been sawn in two. The faithful have been burned alive, fed to lions, and generally abused in all sorts of ways. So when I got into ministry, I knew there was a chance it could turn out to be dangerous

(which is why I don't understand all the evangelical whining about those mean atheists trying to "take God out" of the public square: first, that's ontologically impossible, and second, whatever happened to "all men will hate you because of Me"? but that's another story for another day)

But I didn't realize just how dangerous it could be until yesterday...



So I guess I was sharing my office with a brown recluse spider. Now it's just a smudge on my carpet, but I can't help but thinking that where there was one brown recluse, there are probably more nearby. So now ever time I feel (or think I feel) anything tickle my leg, or neck, or back, or head, I get the heeby jeebies :)

The Sermon in a Nutshell: November 1

Our sermon this week was titled “The Church & Me: Called Out & God-Grown.” The Scripture text was taken from 1 Corinthians 3:6. The Bible uses the imagery of plants in frequently in both the Old and New Testaments. For instance, Jesus likens the good works we do with a tree bearing fruit (Mt 7:15-20); He compares His message with seed that is sown in soil (Mk 4:3-8); He compares the Kingdom with a tiny mustard seed which grows into a large tree (Mk 4:30-32). There are too many uses of plant imagery to list in this short news letter, these are just a few examples.
The Apostle Paul picks up on this plant imagery in 1 Corinthians 3. When the young congregation at the First Christian Church of Corinth got to fighting amongst themselves over who their favorite preacher was, Paul told them “I planted the seed, Apollos watered it, but it is God who is making it grow” (1 Cor 3:6). Paul said this to draw these Christians' attention back away from the messengers and to the message itself. While this could make for a good sermon in and of itself, I would like to suggest that we can learn an important lesson about our Christian lives from Paul's use of plant imagery here in 1 Corinthians.
You see, as Christians and members of the church, we are called out and God-grown. There are three things we can learn from being called out and God-grown. First, it is God who makes us grow. Second, we need to seek out gardeners to help us grow. Third, we need to be gardeners ourselves.
First, it is God who makes us grow. A good gardener will do everything she or he can to give a plant the right conditions it needs to flourish. That gardener will make sure the soil is just right, that there is just enough sunlight, water, and nutrients that the plant needs to grow. But once the gardener has planted the seed and given it all the right conditions it needs to grow, the gardener cannot actually make the seed grow. Our Christian lives are like that. Preachers, teachers and mentors can help us to make the conditions of our heart's soil just right so that we are in a position to grow, but those people cannot actually make us grow. It is God who makes us grow. God fills us with His Holy Spirit by whom He guides us and molds us into the image of Christ. Apart from the grace of God's Spirit, we are incapable of making ourselves grow.
This is both humbling and encouraging. It is humbling because it reminds us that no matter how much work we put into the soil of our hearts, our work and effort does not make us grow. This is an important lesson because living a life of discipleship takes a lot of effort on our part and there is nothing our Enemy likes more than turning our efforts in discipleship into exercises in pridefulness. But being God-grown is also encouraging because we have the promise that God will use and bless all of our efforts to grow closer to Him and He will makes us grow!
A second thing we learn here is that the church is called out and God-grown and we need to seek out gardeners. In our Corinthians passage, Paul doesn't say that he and Apollos were of no consequence in the lives of the Corinthian church. Rather, Paul points to the way that he and Apollos were playing their Christ appointed roles (3:5). In our Christian lives, we need to remember that God does use others to help make the conditions of our hearts right so that He can make us grow. We need to seek out men and women whom God will use to tend the soil of our heart. A good gardener will use the plow of prayer to turn over the darkness in our heart and expose it to the light of Christ. A good gardener will use the spade of Scripture to cut out the weeds of sin that steal our sunlight and nutrients and keep us from growing.
One final lesson we need to learn is that the church is called out and God-grown and God wants us to be gardeners as well. In addition to giving us gardeners who will help tend our hearts, God also gives us tools to tend the soil of our hearts. We can bask in the sunlight of Scripture. We can water our hearts with prayer. We can plant ourselves in the garden of community God calls the Church. We can put up a fence of repentance around our hearts to keep the rabbits of anger and hatred from eating our produce, the birds and beetles of bitterness from stealing our berries, and the moles of hurry and haste from tearing up our roots before we have a chance to be grown by God.
My prayer for you this week is that as you put on your work boots and gardening gloves to tend the soil of your heart, that God will bless you with competent gardeners and that He will cause you to grow and grow and grow. Amen.

The Sermon in a Nutshell: October 25

This week we finished our time in the book of Ephesians by looking at Ephesians 5:21-6:9. The sermon drawn from this text was called “The Church & Me: Called Out To Heal.” This Passage in Ephesians is one of the more controversial passages in the New Testament today. The phrases “wives submit to your husbands” (5:22), “children obey your parents,”(6:1) and “slaves obey your masters” (6:5) have been and are misused to justify women being treated as somehow “less human” than men, parents stifling their children's individuality, and the exploitation of people's labor for the benefit of the few. When we come to a controversial section of Scripture like this, it is important that we dig our heels in and take a fresh look at it so that we can see what it is really trying to teach us. As we take a closer look at this passage, it becomes clear that this passage is essential to our growth in our Christian walks. You see, this passage isn't about Paul telling women, children, and workers that they exist for the benefit of the men in their lives. Rather, this passage speaks to all of the most basic social relationships we find ourselves in.
In Ephesians 5:21-6:9 Paul speaks to wives and husbands, children and parents, employees and employers and supervisors and tells all of them to “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ” (5:21). The passage goes on to show what this looks like in the lives of husbands, wives, etc. To summarize Paul's teaching, submitting to one another means keeping Christ in the center of all of our relationships. So wives aren't blindly commanded to submit to their husbands, rather they are to follow their lead just as the church follows Christ's lead (5:24). Husbands aren't to simply love their wives, they are to love their wives as Christ loved the church (5:25). Parents aren't given free reign over their children, they are commanded to raise their children to know the Lord (6:4). It is in the context of parents raising children in the knowledge of Christ that children are commanded to obey their parents. Finally, both slaves and masters, employees and employers are reminded that they share a common master to whom they must both submit and give their obedience.
The reason God gives us this teaching through Paul in Ephesians is that sin has made a mess of our relationships. Sin drives a wedge between people where God intended for them to be united in love. Part of the good news of the salvation offered in Jesus Christ is that God is healing all the relationships that sin has broken and in this process, the church is called out to heal. So as husbands follow Christ's example of self-giving love, marriages are healed. As wives follow Christ's example of freely chosen submission to the Father, marriages are healed. As parents raise their children to know Jesus and as children follow this instruction, families are healed. As employees do their work in a way that honors their Heavenly Boss, the workplace is healed. As employers and supervisors lead by example, just as Christ did, and treat their employees with integrity, the workplace is healed.
My prayer for you this week is that your eyes would be firmly fixed on Christ so that you not only obey His commands but that you also follow His example. As you do this, know that you are taking part in God's healing ministry of salvation. Amen.