Habitat for Humanity Benefit Dinner: an Invocation

Heavenly Father, gracious God: 

Through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, you make it possible for us to find our lasting home in you.  We thank you for this surprising and unexpected gift.  We thank you also for the invitation to share the love you have given us with one another: we thank you especially for the good work of Habitat for Humanity in San Patricio County, building houses for those who need them, and we pray that we who are a part of this work may always be rooted in the love by which you have prepared a home for all people; we ask that we might serve one another with humility and joy. 

Lord God, bless the families this outreach serves, bless those who give tirelessly of themselves for its success, and bless all of us who are gathered here tonight to celebrate and continue this good work.  Bless our food, our friendships, and our evening.

We thank you, Lord; we love you.  And we pray these things in the Name of your Son, who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, world without end. 

Amen.

4/27/2012

Inquirers' Class Notes #2

Hey, friends!  Notes from the second in our 4 week Inquirers' Class at St C's.  We began, as always, with introductions and uncommon questions.  Our 2 uncommon question for this week were:

1) What is the farthest you've ever been from Portland/Corpus Christi?
2) What is a nickname you willingly answered to at one time?

We each answered one or both.  (This might have been the best part of class.)

Then we picked up a thread of questions from last week's class.  Specifically, we talking about the nature of communion with other churches.  We reviewed the 4 essentials to communion as listed in the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, then discussed that communion today is more complicated than simply deciding that we won't build a church in Portland because the Lutherans (with whom we are in communion) already have a church here (which is how communion used to work).  Communion does not work like that in this instance because the two churches only came to be in communion after the two churches were built.  To the good question "Why don't we merge?" we cited pastoral sensitivity and significant connections to holy spaces.  We noted, though, that communion need not be "on" or "off"; that we can grow our relationship with other churches slowly, just like we might in a one on one relationship.  Examples of this include our ecumenical Taize service, our VBS partnership, and our forthcoming ecumenical National Day of Prayer service.

We then watched this video, which is about a quarterly commitment that three churches make in a small town in Indiana to Jesus' desire to see his Church visibly united:

The rest of the class was devoted to a brief overview of the Book of Common Prayer.  We especially noted:

• The centrality of baptism, whose meaning is linked to the Easter Vigil service.  We are baptized into the death and resurrection of Jesus.
• We noted that the current prayer book format mirrors the ancient rite of initiation in the early Church, whereby candidates for baptism were equipped over a season of preparation with prayers, creeds, etc. for use in the life of the baptized.  We also noted that those items listed before baptism are examples of the abundance of things various denominations might share with one another, without objection from either side - like prayer.
• We briefly reviewed the whole of the contents of the prayer book but mostly kept to a discussion about each items position relative to baptism and how this shapes the Church.  Next week we will explore the two great sacraments and other sacramental rites in a hands-on, lab-type setting.

Though we did not go into the history and evolution of the prayer book, some might find these additional handouts helpful:

Waldo, Jesus, and All Things Hiding

Alleluia!  Christ is risen!

There’s this cartoon making the rounds these days in which a woman has just opened the front door of her home where she discovers two neatly dressed gentlemen with white shirts and black ties, presumably door-to-door missionaries of the Mormon or Jehovah’s Witness persuasion.  The woman has opened the door to them, they stand there, the three of them, the woman and these two men, in the doorway of her house when one of the men asks the woman a question, “Ma’am, have you found Jesus?”  The punchline doesn’t become evident until the reader notices a bit of robe and sandal, the hidden profile of a darkened figure, peeking out from behind the woman’s flowing set of living room curtains, some distance behind her.  Apparently, Jesus was out on the lam and had taken up residence in this woman’s home.

Have you found Jesus?

On one level, this question feels distinctively Evangelical.  That is, it belongs to a certain brand or flavor of Christianity.  Not all Christians are comfortable talking this way.  But on another level, the question “Have you found Jesus?” belongs to all of us, every one of us.  One of the petitions in the Prayers of the People, Form II, asks us to pray “for all who seek God, or a deeper knowledge of him.”  For all who seek God, for all who are looking for Jesus, like the woman in the cartoon. 

When I hear that prayer petition, I often wonder: will I ever not seek a deeper knowledge of God?  I say this without belittling the relationship I have with him.  But who among us does not yearn to grow deeper in the love of the One who has loved us to the cross and beyond it?  A deeper knowledge of him...  In this life, at least, this prayer keeps me from complacency. 

As an aside, one of the challenges for Protestant Christians, I think, is to affirm the certainty of salvation alongside and next to an abiding thirst to go deeper.  One man confidently told his friend, “I don’t know about you, but I know where I’m going!”  Somehow this man’s assurance had become an arrogance doing violence to the charity, the love, of the Gospel.  But in the life of faith, the terms are not simply on/off, in/out, safe/not safe, but “sealed by the Holy Spirit,” “marked as Christ’s own,” “a good start, holy entrance, into a relationship of breadth and depth as we pray to dwell in him and he in us.”

We are always seeking, I suppose.

Have you found Jesus? 

It’s something to think about: the way the Christian life takes on the shape of hide and seek.  We are always seeking, and this can save us from complacency; but if we are not careful, it can also lead us to feelings of inadequacy or despair.  As in, always seeking, never finding.  The same inner urge that leads us rightly to surmise that we haven’t yet arrived might also tempt us to believe that we are not enough.  So if we think of ourselves as always seeking God, we confess that some days we feel like small children, with a daunting illustration of “Where’s Waldo” before us, desperately looking for the pointy hat. 

Why can’t we find the dagggum hat? 

What on earth is wrong with me?

Maybe you know other Christians or friends for whom they only wish they could have found Christ hiding behind the living room curtain.  But, for them, finding Jesus hasn’t proven that easy.  Despite long hours in silence, prayer has not come naturally for them.  Despite sleepless nights and anguished cries, your friend feels like heaven’s door for her is closed.  Like she’s talking to herself and so she sometimes makes up reasons, excuses, she blames herself, in order to protect God from her doubts.  Your friend may have begun believing that there is something spiritually defective in her that prevents her from finding God.  Like God would make himself more accessible if she could get her act together.

Our Gospel today comes to gently challenge those who, in despair of finding God, have turned to the false medicine of self-hate. (1)

For the third straight week, beginning with Easter Sunday itself, the Gospel has spoken a story about people who are no good at hide and seek with God.  People who have sought God and failed.  And these people are not just any people - these people are Jesus’ very good friends.  They didn’t believe when they heard it, but even when Jesus appears before them, they cannot escape their terror, fear, and doubt.  In attempt to satisfy their fears, Jesus eats fish.  This isn’t a ghost or hallucination or the result of their having eaten spoiled anchovies on last night’s pizza.  And yet all through the gospels, as the risen Jesus returns to his friends, we find some version of what appears in Matthew’s gospel, wherein “the disciples worshiped him, but some doubted.”  We sometimes tell ourselves that the life of faith would be easier if he would just come to us like he came to Thomas and the rest, but lessons like today’s lesson challenge that belief.  In today’s lesson, Jesus appears to and eats with his friends, and some of them walk away at the end of the story as fearful as when it started. 

But lest we get as caught up on the disciples’ failings as we get caught up on our own, let me name here the gentle challenge that these gospels mean to speak to those who, in despair of finding God, have turned to the false medicine of self-hate, and this is the gentle challenge, the main point that the gospel is making about the disciples: failures or not, Jesus has come to them.  That’s the main point.

Jesus has come to them.

Love does not wait for them to get their act together.  Love makes no condition for his appearing.  Even when he stands before them and they fail to recognize him, their failure isn’t final, but instead becomes the starting point, the next new beginning, for the forgiveness, the mercy, and loving-kindness of God, as he patiently points back to the Scriptures, interpreting them for his friends, revealing himself to his friends.  Breaking bread, eating with them.  Despite their shortcomings, blind-spots, and fears, he comes to them anyway - because he loves them.  And with the tenderness of a mother gently waking her children, he lovingly opens their eyes.

As it turns out, the life of faith is hide and seek, but the strange, good, glorious news of Easter and the Gospel is that we are the ones hiding and Christ is the One seeking.  Unrelentingly seeking.  And this Good News makes faith so much more than a hat to find on Waldo or a riddle to be solved or a task to be performed, to get just right.  Faith takes the shape of a love song not from you but sung to you from the lips of the One who is head over heels for you and won’t let you go.  This is the Good News of Easter.  If Jesus seems hard to find, before you give up, look closer - nearer than the distant hills on which you’ve kept your gaze till now.  His love requires a portrait and not a landscape lens.  You need to know that you are beloved of God, and that his heart seeks you.

The revelation that faith is at least as much about Jesus finding me as my finding him inspired one anonymous poet to craft the hymn we know as #689 in The Hymnal 1982.  I share it with you by way of closing:

I sought the Lord, and afterward I knew he moved my soul to seek him, seeking me; it was not I that found O Savior true; no, I was found of thee.

Thou didst reach forth thy hand and mine enfold; I walked and sank not on the storm-vexed sea; ‘twas not so much that I on thee took hold, as thou, dear Lord, on me.

I find, I walk, I love, but oh the whole of love is but my answer, Lord, to thee; for thou wert long beforehand with my soul, always thou lovest me.

So come, come one more time to the table that the Lord who sought you has also prepared for you.  Break the bread, drink the cup.  One more time, let him open your eyes.  Be found again, alive in the love of God through Christ Jesus our Lord.

Amen.

_________
(1) And superstition, which is the belief that getting the act together would compel God to show up.  But that takes as a little far afield from our main thrust here.

Sermon preached April 23, 2012, at St Christopher's by-the-Sea

An Invitation to Portland-Area Pastors and Congregations

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The Definition of Insanity is Broken: Thoughts on Church Growth and Mission

If you are a church-goer, you have probably heard some version of the following from the acerbic tongue of a Church growth leader at one point or another:

"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." 

 OR 

 "If you do what you always do, you'll get what you have always gotten."

The words are compelling.  The former is even said to have come from Albert Einstein!  The problem is that both of the quotes are empirically false.  Worse, the effect of these quotations and others like them - ironically - is to confuse the Church into positions of deeper and deeper entrenchment with respect to the status quo.  How so?

By all accounts - and on the whole - the Church is in decline.  By definition, decline means that the Church is getting different results; we are not getting what we have always gotten.  If the above statements are true, decline can only be seen as the result of unwarranted departure from the tried and true ways of the past, be they perceived departures from orthodoxy or more mundane day-to-day routines.  Though I am not among them, you will find plenty of present day Christians who are glad to make exactly this case.

Never mind that the more mundane the detail attached to decline the more the case for causal decline begins to feel like superstition, the basic premise remains plausible because the Church is unarguably in decline.  The Church, by standard measures, has seen brighter days.  Church leaders who forget the long-view, or who fall in love so deeply with their Utopian vision of a necessarily future Church (a kind of naive progressivism), ironically find themselves sharing an intellectual raft, so to speak - that is, using the very same logical lines - as the people they decry, the ones who have "always done it this way," the ones who wonder what of their legacy the rest of us have failed to sufficiently grasp, such that we are not now getting what we have "always" gotten.

By appealing to quotes like the above, I believe Church growth leaders over-simply the case for change in such a way as to polarize themselves against people who believe that what they are saying is true.

If another way out of the dilemma must be found, this one seems good enough for me: that the above two quotations are not true.

The clearest challenges to the absolutist "continue to do X, continue to get Y" mindset come from science and economics.  For example, science has taught us that doing the same thing over and over again is not enough to contain a virus.  Eventually, the virus will evolve, mutate, or change such that the current treatment is no longer sufficient.  Many times, the virus will be made stronger by virtue of the adaptation that the treatment necessitated for the continued spread of the virus.  Moreover, the next new treatment will be subject to the same window of limited effectiveness.  Unless the "thing" we are doing is "constantly and rigorously adapt, change, account for unexpected shifts, and learn", we will indeed get very different results from doing the same thing - as dramatically different as life and death.

The second example, borrowed from economics, is the principle of diminishing returns.  Diminishing returns refers to the dynamic whereby each unit of input produces less per unit (or marginal) output than the unit of input before it was able to produce.  Thus, for example, the argument for forty-hour workweeks.  This is why you see the greatest changes early on when beginning a new exercise regiment.  The benefits taper off.  While it is important to note that diminishing returns still produce returns - that is, net gains - there are many instances in which the graph does more than taper off, and the returns on a constant input become negative overall.

I will leave it to future posts to offer a more fulsome alternative vision for change.  I will rely heavily on Lesslie Newbigin and his writing on the Church's mission when I get to that post.  In the meantime, this becomes a case study on the old, old story of extremes assuming the same foundations.  Hopefully, the study can shape the current conversations for change in ways that improvise from the tradition because they have received their training in the tradition, and acknowledge with gratitude where and how they do so.  Oversimplifying the case for the future runs the strong risk of disparaging the past, while forfeiting the compelling, living claims for change animated by the Spirit of God, with eyes and hearts fixed on the most important things, and pursuing those things with love.

Public Calendar

What Inquirers Are Asking, Part II

A few weeks ago, I wrote about Wordle.  Wordle is a free online program into which the user inputs a large amount of text (say a sermon or letter, for example); the program outputs a visual synthesis of the text, where key words appear in size and centrality in proportion to their emphasis, frequency, and centrality in the inputted text. 

I especially appreciate Wordle's ability to quickly identify key themes and a kind of bird's eye view of the simple contours of a given text.

So as I considered the questions produced by week one participants of our inquirers class (see the questions here), I grew excited at the prospect of the simple bird's eye view.  If you haven't checked out the questions, do skim them first.  Then proceed below to what is an insightful pulse of at least one group of the faithful in the Kingdom of God.

I count myself blessed and privileged to be in conversation with this group about these things.

 

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