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My heart beats for love. I want to be different. I want to be who I am called to be. WORTHY and LOVED!

Sunday, May 20, 2012

Being Young - pt 2

This weekend reminded me why I encourage my congregation members to go to church when they are away from home - and why I abide by that teaching myself. The sermon I heard at my home church this week could not have been anymore appropriate. It was about young people in the Bible who experienced a call. Experienced an anointing from the Holy Spirit. It reminded me that call and the anointing of the Holy Spirit go hand in hand.

For my time at this appointment I have been having people make fun of my age. I think it's their way to reconcile how young I am and still being their spiritual leader. The jest have been everything from quick jabs to down right hurtful. But I've went along, even cracking some jokes myself to show that I can roll with the punches. But this weekend I was struck by how wrong that is. If I'm called and anointed I need to own that, not shy away from it. I need to stand firm in that truth and the promises that come with it, because if I just laugh it off, it's sort of like I'm laughing at God or demeaning or disbelieving my call. I need to live in the tension of my age and what my congregation and others think about that and who God has called me to be, and who I am by God's grace.

Praise God for that reminder and for opening up my eyes.


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Jesus Christ Superstar

Of all of the Broadway plays and musicals I have seen over the years, perhaps the most controversial was Jesus Christ Superstar. Any time we play with a well known story, let alone what many Christians consider to be the crux of their faith, Christians rise up, and this show was no exception. While apparent to me that Andrew Lloyd Weber is not a biblical scholars, rather a story teller, others don't seem to get this point and think the show is supposed to be historical. On the other hand, who is to say what is actual historical.

At UM General Conference in Tampa the test vote was about who the delegates favorite disciple was. Something like 13% answered Judas, to which one tweeter responded that they must have seen Jesus Christ Superstar. This was in fact my favorite part of the show - the humanizing of Judas, Jesus, and Mary.

The Gospels were written for a specific audience and then transported/ transformed into something timeless. So while ancient readers may not have been worried about plot and character development, we crave this today. We want something or someone in the stories to connect with and Weber did just that. Judas became a real person with a real delemia when he though Jesus was getting out of control. In the words of the theme song,
"Every time I look at you, I don't understand, how you let things you did get so out of hand."

But what captivated me the most was the hook in the same song, "Jesus Christ, who are you! What have you sacrificed?" And this is where I think that people have the real problem with the show- it allows you to voice your doubts with the gospel story. But isn't that what is most authentic about our faith? That we don't always know everything. That we aren't always in a place where we believe every detail. And we are on a journey where different questions plague, captivate, or propel us forward from time to time. But we don't want people to know that - no one in or outside of the church, because it makes us vulnerable.

How can each of us accept and embrace the authenticity of our questions and confusion and faith, in order to be true to ourselves along this journey. Because if we are just acting like we know, believe, and accept everything all the time, we aren't helping anyone, including ourselves.

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Sunday, May 13, 2012

Love and the Commandments


During the last confirmation class of the year, I asked the confirmands what rules they have in their families. They listed off the basics - curfews, chores, and respect for their parents among other things. Then I asked about other rules they have in church and in school, and what would happen if there weren’t any rules. Their answer was plan - we would be hurt.
God also has rules for us, commandments. In today’s scripture lesson Jesus tells us to keep the commandments as a way to abide in the love of God. In the Hebrew Scriptures, which we refer to as the Old Testament, there are 613 commandments. 613 different things to obey in your relationship with God and relationship with each other. 
Today, most Christians do not obey all 613 commandments. They were written for a specific time and context that doesn’t apply any more. For example, I doubt that any of us have a copy of the Bible that we have written by hand, even though Deut 31:19 says that every person shall write a scroll of the Torah for himself. And how many of us recite grace after meals? (Deut 8:10) Do any of you enjoy eating pork, lobster, clams, shrimp, oysters or crabs? (Deut 14:9)  And I think we all wear clothes with mixed fabrics (Deut 22:11)
Other laws are unclear - such as whether or not turkey can be eaten. And other laws never actually were celebrated. For example, during the year of Jubilee, to be celebrated every 50 years was to be the Sabbatical year - when the land lay fallow, all debts were forgiven, and all debt-slaves were set free. 
The truth is, we all pick and choose what laws to follow. Sometimes you will hear Christians claim that Jesus came so that we are set free from the law, but that does not mean that we do not need to follow the commandments. For we believe, like our Jewish brothers and sisters, that God gave us the commandments in love. They are God’s way of protecting us, even when we do not think that we need protecting. 
However, as I said before, commandments are contextual. Think of it this way. As you grow older, you are given more responsibility and receive a different set of rules to follow. As I got older, my bed time changed. And now that I no longer have a bed time, I am responsible for making sure that I get enough sleep. When I was younger I did not need to worry about speed limits, but with the right to drive a car comes the need to abide by the rules of driving, including stoping at stop signs, yielding at yellow lights, and following the speed limit. 
But, there are certain commandments that do not necessarily need any context. They are timeless and we are all called to abide by them. For the people of God, these are the ten commandments, which can be summarized as loving God and loving your neighbor. When I was little, I remember seeing the ten commandments written on paper stone tablets taped to my classroom wall and having a patient Sunday School teacher explain that the first four commandments tell us how to show our love for God and the second six how to love our neighbor, but they are all held together by love.
The first four commandments are: Not to have any other gods, not to make a graven image of God, not to take the name of God in vain, and to celebrate the Sabbath. We could spend weeks discussing each of these commandments, but let us briefly explore them today. God reminds the Israelites before the commandments are even stated where they come from by saying, “I am the Lord your God.” These commandments come from God as a way of celebrating preparing to enter the Holy Land. They are about to enter a new stage of their journey, enter into a new context, marked by new rules. God has seen the people stray up to this point - wanting to turn around and go back to their old way of life, because this one seems to hard. Yearning for security instead of God’s will for them. God therefore tells them to have no other gods, in other words not to put anything, not security, comfort, family, friends, money, Baal, or the gods from any other country before their God, because God is jealous for their (and our) love, attention, and devotion. This is also why graven images were not to be made of God, so that the Israelites did not try to capture God in an image or worship something they called God that in fact wasn’t, for God cannot be contained. 
The name of God is sacred. People had a habit of taking an oath they had no intention on living into in the name of God, thus making it trite. It was also to prohibit God’s name being used in the practice of magic just to get what one wants. God’s name was not to be interjected into blasphemy. All of this was to prevent people from making God into a magical solution and making sure that God was honored properly. 
Lastly, the Sabbath was to be kept. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, a fellow provisional elder once told me that keeping the Sabbath was the only commandment that we proudly break. But God created us in the image of God and God rested on the seventh day to model for us what it means to find rest and provision in God’s very being. In other words, with this command God is reminding us that God is all we really need to be fulfilled.
The second six laws are focused on our relationship with each other: honor your mother and father, do not kill, do not commit adultery, do not steal, do not bear false witness and do not covet. Some of these seem pretty straight forward, do not kill another human being because they bear the image of God and do not steal from another person. Other’s are connected to these two such as do not covet - in other words do not wish that you have what another person has, which is what leads to stealing, and do not commit adultery, which is stealing someone else’s spouse. Others are a bit more complicated such as do not bear false witness - because it takes away another person’s honor and does not bring honor to God who is the source of all truth.
And others are straight forward, but hard to follow at times such as honor your mother and father. Dishonoring one’s parents by hitting them or cursing them was punishable by death, under Hebrew law. While this is no longer the case in today’s society, the basic premise is the same, honor your mother and father because to dishonor one’s earthly parents is linked to dishonoring one’s heavenly parent, God. This honor does not depend on the worthiness of the parent, it is simply to be given, not earned. This commandment is seen eight different times in the scriptures. This requires that children obey their parents, as long as their requests are reasonable and permissible under the other commandments. It also requires that children let their parents know that they are safe when they are traveling. A child must never put their parents to shame or speak poorly of their parents.
I know from experience that sometimes it is hard to honor our parents, especially when we enter into the age of independence, but we are commanded to do so by the Lord of Love. And in return, God commands that parents teach children, refrain from showing favoritism to any one child over another, train a child. In other words God requires that parents give their children the ability to thrive in the world by teaching them about the commandments and demonstrating what love is through their words and actions.
Today is mother’s day, a day when we celebrate the love our mother’s have shown us. As I was browsing through Hallmark cards to give my own mother, I was struck by how many thanked moms for showing love and teaching their children throughout life. In a way the cards were saying thank you for teaching me the commandments and loving me enough to show me the right way to live.
On this day, we also remember that God is our Heavenly parent, who gave the commandments our of Divine love for us. Divine love so we can love one another. Commandments that have the potential to become so much of who we are that we choose them freely, choose to love one another and to love God, not because of the bounds of legalism, or trying to be perfect, but because it shows honor to the one who loves us. God loved us enough to give us commandments to help keep us from being hurt. And yes, not all of the commandments apply to us today that are in the Bible because we live in a different place and time. But surely these 10 defined by loving your neighbor and loving God are a good place to start. If only we will accept them as our yoke, as a way to honor the one who loves us so much that we may no longer be called servant or child, but friend. Amen. 

Sunday, May 6, 2012

Love in Action - 1 John 4: 7-21


When I was younger, one of my favorite books was Love You Forever by Robert S. Munsch. The story is told about a mother’s unconditional and unending love for her son, through his two year old trials to his adult antics. No matter what her son did, she rocked him and sang a song: “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you for always, as long as I’m living, my baby you’ll be.” In the end of the book, as the mother is dying the roles are reversed; the son holds her and sings her song back to the old woman. “I’ll love you forever, I’ll like you forever, as long as I’m living, my mommy you’ll be.”
Reflecting back over the years on why I liked this book so much, I’ve realized that there is something pure about how this book describes love. In a culture that often substitutes the word “love” for “like”, this book showed what love is. What love looks like, even in the difficult times. This is not an “I love pizza” type of situation. This book demonstrated what the type of love in today’s scripture passage is - agape - the type of love that gives without expecting anything in return, sacrificial love at its best. The type of love that stands as a reminder that all things are rooted in love, find their beginning in love, are perfected in love, and are returned in love. In other words, the hard type of love. 
Today’s passage is not admonishing a simple romantic understanding of love. No, this is loving through all times and situations. Love that is a choice that is beyond our emotional draw. This is the type of love that God has for us, no matter how we stray or who we demand God to be. Have you ever noticed that the attributes that people ascribe to God tell you a lot about who they want God to be in their life at that moment? Sometimes people around us claim that God is the great healer, often when they are in need of deep healing in their own lives or their loved ones. Sometimes people proclaim that God is ordered, when their life feels like it is swimming in chaos. But the author of 1 John cut through all of these other attributes that God posses to say that God is agape, love. Here he is taking a Greek word rarely used in everyday conversation and claiming it for the Christian community - God is love because God has acted in immeasurable love through Jesus Christ.
Have you ever pondered how uncontrollable love is? It is radical when we love those whom others deem to be unlovable. It is creative in expressing itself, especially when love goes beyond the bounds of an emotion and becomes an action. It is self-giving, open, and fluid. It is so much more then we could ever try to define it to be - just like the essence of God. God is bigger then our definitions, just as God’s love is bigger than any of our explanations.
Have any of you ever heard of Gary Chapman? Or perhaps of his famous book, The Five Love Languages? The basis premise of Chapman’s work, which takes on many different forms, is that often we do not appreciate the love that others have to offer because we cannot recognize it. A few years ago Chapman expanded his research and writing into the area of God’s love for us in the book The Love Languages of God: How to Feel and Reflect Divine Love. In his previous writing about human relationships, Chapman supposed that most of us really only communicate love to another person one or two ways, with one being our primary form of expressing love. We, as human beings, like to receive love in the same ways that we most express it, in other words we stick inside of our love comfort zone. But in the Love Languages of God,  Chapman reminds readers that God is not limited in the expression of Divine love. In fact, God can express love in a myriad of ways simultaneously. God can speak words of affirmation to us through prayer. God spends quality time with us. God has lavished gifts upon us. God has sacrificially acted on our behalf. And God wraps us in the comfort of Divine presence, just to name a few. God can express love in countless ways, because God is the only being who is love. Love in its most unadulterated form. Love beyond measure or qualification. God’s love is perfect.
This passage, however, does start out by telling us to love God, the great lover of all. It starts out by tellings us to love one another, because love is of God. It tells us to love one another as a testimony to how God has loved us in the past and will continue to love us in the future. 
For a few years I attended a church where people went around proclaiming that they loved Jesus. Which was all well and good, except for the fact that they didn’t act like they loved each other. In fact, they didn’t even act like they could tolerate, let alone like or love, the other believers in their community. It was an extremely disparaging situation, and the church stagnated, wondering why it was not growing. Slowly but surely they started to realize that loving God requires is to love others. They are not two separate things. There is no way that we can love God who is unseen, without loving our neighbor who is right in front of us. Scholar Claudia Highbaugh expresses this sentiment by saying, “Perfect love is not the love of human beings for God, but the love of human beings for each other as representatives of the unseen God.”
Loving each other is difficult. Especially if we think that loving each other means that we are emotionally drawn to one another or that we even like each other all the time. We live in a world that likes to keep us divided by our race, gender, economic status, and social location among other things, and becomes a restless place when we practice true love, through action, that transcends these barriers. The kind of love that God models for us and has offered us through grace, is transformative for our relationships and our culture. In fact, those who say that they love God, but say that they hate their brother or sisters are liars.
Love is what we are universally striving for as humans. No one wants to go through life without feeling loved. If any of us should understand love, even a little bit, it would be Christians, because God demonstrated Divine love for us in the ultimate way. The way that we celebrate each and every single time we come to the communion table. But we are not called to just say that we love God, we are to act like it by loving our neighbor, even when it seems the hardest or we simply do not feel like it. Love is not simply an ideal for us, or even a fruit, it is a relationship. 
Do you know someone in your life who is yearning to feel loved? Needing to hear that God loves them and that then seeing that demonstrated by your attitude and actions towards them? Can you see yourself inviting them to this church as a place to experience love? Or is this a place where grudges are held, superiority is held one another, and people do not care about the feelings of others? I hope that this is a church where you can invite people to feel the love of God and neighbor, authentically. I hope that you can find a way in your daily living to let people see the love of God in you, so it can be revealing of the nature of God to them. For those who love God, must also love their brothers and sisters. Amen. 

Friday, May 4, 2012

Guaranteed Appointment

     This week at General Conference, the UMC voted to get rid of Guaranteed Appointment. For those in denominations that don't have this rule, it was started when women became active as pastors in increasing numbers, in order to protect them from not being appointed to churches. Essentially it states that if you are ordained you will be appointed to a church.
    I've heard this legislation to dissolve guaranteed appointment for two years prior to general conference, because of YASN. I've heard some of those who drafted it discuss it. I've heard it presented by GBHEM to seminary students. And I agreed with it. I thought it was important to articulate a way to stress clergy effectiveness. However, from the beginning I've been asking, "What is clergy effectiveness? How are we going to measure it? And what about churches that have a long history of not being vital (i.e. churches that suck clergy dry)?" No one ever had an answered.
    Now the legislation has passed and we still don't have answers. And because of that my attitude towards dissolving guaranteed appointment has changed. Once again, we've put the cart before the horse - something the church is doing more and more of. Instead of thinking through the ramifications of the legislation we voted it through on a 'we'll deal with it later' attitude.
    When the legislation was still being discussed a seminary colleague posted a question about what we thought about it. This is what I wrote:
 I am glad that there are more checks and balances then when the proposal first was submitted. My concerns are three fold. First, guaranteed appointment was established to protect those who were not white men. I'm glad that an annual conference committee will examine appointments based on statistical markers, but let's be honest, we aren't in a pro-women, post-racial world in the church, so I'm not sure a small committee can protect those who aren't white-men, fully. Second, what happens if a church doesn't like a pastor. They could be a wonderful pastor but not a good fit. Who should be held accountable for that? In other words should a pastor be appointed to a non-vital congregation and then examine a pastor in that situation for appoint ability. Lastly, who is going to protect pastors who have theological differences from the cabinet and/or the bishop?
     The more I thought about it, I also worry about our relationships with other clergy. For those who aren't interacting with clergy a lot, you may be surprised to know that we are a completive bunch. I've heard horror stories of how clergy have treated each other over appointments. This seems like its just going to make our relationships with each other worse - as we worry if someone else is going to be deemed effective over us or take our job.
    What I loved about the original idea of dissolving guaranteed appointment was that it would allow appointments to be made on gifts and graces, even across conferences. That idea has seemed to totally go to the way side. Further, a bishop, in an interview leading up the General Conference, stated that this legislation really isn't about the 3% of ineffective clergy in our denomination, its about simply not having enough full time appointments.
    We all must learn to live into a new reality, that is full of questions that haven't even been thought through for answers yet, in our haste to pass legislation. My hope and prayer is that this will be a turning point in the denomination, and not an excuse to not think through the implications of appointments in the name of itinerancy.

Being Young

This week has been full of times when I have felt frustrated and belittled because of my age. The two that stick out:
1.) I sponsored a lovely woman for Walk to Emmaus this weekend. Sponsorship includes dropping them off at the retreat site. When I dropped her off I was asked not one or two, but four times if she was sponsoring me. The assumption seems dot be that the older must sponsor the younger. But is that really the model we have in the Bible?
2.) Today at a funeral, another clergy came up to me and I introduced myself as "Pastor Michelle" - his responses included 'woah! you're really tiny!' and 'how old are you?' It was frustrating because I know he was also a young clergy when he served the same church.
When will my age and stature stop bringing up questions regarding my ability to be a leader?

New Beginnings - Rev 21: 1-7


When I was in high school I attended a church where a lot of attention was focused on the afterlife. The preacher often stretched out his arms as wide as they could go and say this is your life. Then he would draw his fingers tightly together and say this is your life on this earth. Everything else is your life in eternity.
But as often as the preacher waxed on about eternity, I had (and still have) more questions then answers. What will we do when we get to Heaven? Will we be reunited with love ones who went on before us? How will it be different from our life on earth? Will it be where the deepest desires of our hearts are fulfilled?
Many of us have questions about heaven and images of what we want Heaven to be like.  In today’s scripture passage we are told that the new Heaven and the new Earth exist together - that you do not have Heaven without Earth. Our eternal destiny in Heaven is living life with God, in the place where God is among mortals, dwelling with the people of God.
For the author of Revelations, this image of dwelling with God was all about new beginnings. A new heaven. A new earth. A new Jerusalem. Where all things are made new, including us. 
We are in need of this newness, and the entire story of the Bible is about making us, the Beloved of God, new again. When God first created human beings in the Divine image, they, and everything else created by God was pronounced to be good. Very good in fact. When the people of God strayed, prophets were sent to declare that God was doing a new thing. A radical thing. And when the people of God still missed the mark, still didn’t live into their image of being very good because of the sin present in their lives, God sent Jesus Christ to teach us how to live, to give his very life for us to be  made new, and offer us the renewed hope found in the resurrection.
Part of being human is longing to be made new. In the world outside of the church, people like the newness experienced with the start of a calendar year. The ability to resolve to do things a bit different. Inside of the church, we mark new life through the act of baptism - the symbolic act of entering into a new life, with a community of believers, cleansed from sin. 
The power of today’s scripture lesson is that it paints a picture for us of the ultimate newness, that is so different from what we currently experience. A place where death will be no more and crying and pain will no longer have power over us. A place where sin is finished, and God is the totality of our reality - the beginning and the end. A place of abundance and unending love. A place where we will see God, and be bound together in a renewed community.
Our questions about Heaven often come from a place of deep longing. Longing to know what awaits loved ones, like Roger, who have gone on before us. We want to know that his birthday into new life was for something greater then all of this. We want for him a place where his deepest hopes come true, and the promise of new beginnings if fulfilled, in the presence of God. And we want hope that we can join him in that place some day. We want comfort for him. And comfort for us. Now. 
Friends, God promises us that all things will be made new. God makes things new every day when we seek forgiveness for our sins, and receive it as an act of love from the Holy One. Roger lived into this reality of newness in this life. And now, even though his earthly body is gone, he continues to live into the promise of God making all things new. That is our Christian hope. 
While Roger has left this life to enter into the realm of no more tears, we live here, today, in a place where we mourn him. Where we remember what an impact his time on this earth has had on each of our lives. My hope and prayer is that as we mourn Roger in the days, weeks, and many months to come, that we will begin to let the Spirit speak to our hearts so we can find good news in the God of new beginnings. Amen.