You Need the Church, too...

A few weeks ago I wrote about why the Church needs you. I was especially writing to those who have walked away from the Church because they don't think the Church is doing enough Jesus work in the world. For me, Jesus work is the work of loving all, accepting others as people made in God's image, and working toward justice for all people. This means economic justice, justice on the basis of gender and sexuality, justice on the basis of race, and ethnicity, and justice for all people--not just people like ourselves or people who live near us, but everyone all over the globe. For people who believe in these values but don't see that in the work of the Church, the Church needs you so it can get back to that Jesus work.

You need the Church, too. You need the Church because being a follower of Jesus has never been an individual path. Being one of Jesus' followers has always meant working through community to bring about the goodness of God's love and justice into the world. From the beginning, the group of Apostles worked together, fought about certain things, came to agreement through debate and lots of listening, and then went out and did the work together.

As many others have pointed out, the cross, the symbol of the way of Christ, has a vertical beam and a horizontal beam. Sometimes we can be so focused on that vertical beam, our relationship with God or with Christ, or the Spirit, that we forget about the horizontal beam, the relationships we are to have with other humans. It's not just me and Jesus, or me and God, it's all of us together trying to follow that path as community. When we leave out community, we are missing an important part of who Jesus called us to be.

Christ's message to the disciples when he was leaving them was to be one as Christ was one with the first person of the Trinity. Jesus understood that none of them could do this alone. He also understood that one person will miss important issues that others will notice. If I go my own way and don't ever have relationship with the stranger in my land, I can forget how important hospitality is in the work of God's people. That's just one example. I have my own understanding and experience of God, and it is perfectly valid in its own right, but it is incomplete because I cannot understand others' connection and relationship to God. Being in community helps me to do that, and that helps me to have a richer understanding of who God is and how God relates to all people.

So, the Church definitely needs you. But you need the Church, too. Not the institution, not a particular denomination, but a loving, accepting community that helps to keep you engaged in God's work and helps you see other ways God works through other people.

At least, that's the view from where I stand today.

God bless you!

Vulnerability

Friends, it is a rough world out there. It seems like people are out to get us. It is common to see fierce arguments and hateful language on social media, things that I'd like to think people would never say about each other if they were in the same room. In the midst of all that, it is hard to allow our true, honest selves to be seen or heard. It is just too painful to reveal something about ourselves and then have someone else stomp on it with fellow commenters egging them on.

We are missing something in all of this, and it is the ability to be vulnerable. 

Vulnerability may seem like something to avoid. It opens us up to ridicule and attack. For some, it makes us fear that others will view us as weak, as incapable of dealing with difficult or even pretty innocuous situations. Some fear loss of status, loss of face, even loss of their job if they are willing to become to vulnerable.

And so, we don't really know anyone. What I mean by that is, if we are unwilling to be our authentic selves before others, then no one ever knows who we truly are. That may be a way to protect ourselves, to cope in a difficult world, but it is robbing us of something that we need as humans to be fulfilled: intimacy.

That's a hard thing to come by. If you have more than a few people who know your true self, with whom you have a level of intimacy, I would say you are fortunate. I think there are some who have no relationships like this, because the fear of vulnerability makes it impossible.

I know these are just words. They are just one person's opinion. But we need to allow others to be vulnerable with us and we need to be vulnerable with them. We need to let our guard down so we can have the types of relationships that humans, social creatures that we are, are meant to have. We need to make safe space with others so they can experience those relationships with us.

I don't pretend it's easy. I wouldn't come here and bare my weaknesses and fears openly. That's too vulnerable. But on a smaller basis, we have to do this, because not doing it is leading to deeper division and all kinds of health concerns for all of us.

At least, that's how it looks from where I stand today...    

A New Thing

Once every so often in the history of the worshiping community, going all the way back to Moses, something happens and there is a major change. They may come quickly, like in the time of Moses. We could even argue that it literally happened overnight, but reading the rest of the book of Exodus shows us how it took years to re-set the community and its relationship with God. 

Church historians have found that these types of things happen about once every 500 years. There was Moses, then the united monarchy, then the Babylonian exile, then the birth of Jesus, the way the church became synonymous with the Roman empire, the times of the Crusades, and the Protestant reformation. The church has continually changed over time.

It has been just over 500 years since the Protestant Reformation, and something new is coming. It may be spurred on by a global pandemic that changed the way we all meet and worship. Whatever is coming, I hope the church will become what it once was, an open and welcoming community for everyone, especially people who have been ostracized by society in some way. The church has always been considered a haven. Anyone who comes there for help will surely not find harm.

Sometimes people have come to other harm at the hands of the church than physical harm. Sometimes they have been told they don't belong. I think that is at the heart of the drop in membership in many churches. Saying everyone is welcome and then treating some as if they aren't welcome is hypocrisy. In our modern world, that type of hypocrisy will never fly.

My dream is that all those who saw that hypocrisy in the church and left it will now come back and together we can make the church a place of true welcome. Many of us church leaders know we aren't there now. We know we need you, you who gave up on church, to help us re-make this beautiful institution.

If you are wondering where to start, please message me, and I will share what I have with you, but we need you, just as we need all people made in God's image.

I will make sure the door is open for you. You are loved, you are valued, you are needed, and if the church ever told you otherwise, I'm so sorry.

Solidarity

This Sunday is Solidarity Sunday. It is an opportunity for churches to stand in solidarity with those who identify as LGBTQ+. 

Clearly this is a hot topic in the world right now. But surely there is a stance that we can all share, every one who is a follower of Christ, that harming others, bullying others, and treating others as if they are somehow less important than some are things we should never do. That is why I am so proud of the 190th General Assembly of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church for making the following statement: (This is directly taken from the General Assembly Office Summary of Actions, item 37)

Affirmed the following Statement on Opposition to Oppression based on Sexual Identity and referred to the Unified Committee on Theology and Social Concern for development of resources: “We affirm the Confession of Faith and its definition of human sexuality. Echoing the Holy Scripture, the Confession declares that humans are created in the image of God, so we believe that there is no place in any form in our church or in our world for hate, denigration, unkind confrontation, and/or physical violence perpetrated on anyone, or oppression of any person based on their gender or sexual expression.” 

A statement on Opposition to Oppression seems like a no-brainer for a Christian church to make, but it is necessary because oppression is rampant in many places and particularly in some churches. 

We will be celebrating Solidarity Sunday this week. Whatever disagreements we may have with others about inclusiveness, there should be no question that the church is a place where people will never be hated, denigrated, confronted unkindly, or have any type of violence perpetrated upon them because of their gender or sexual identity. 

If we are to be the church of Christ, that's really a pretty low bar.

Life and Death and God's Plan

This past summer our church hosted a reading program called Project Transformation. It's really much more than a reading program. It is an opportunity for children to spend time together, to work on their reading skills, to work on their social skills, and to help them succeed in school. The program emphasizes the success of the students and the success of the congregation where they meet. Along with this, the program gives space for college interns to work with the children, to make a good wage for a summer job, and to explore and question their plans for future careers.

We had a wonderful summer. Our site coordinator and interns were fun, they were loving, and they were great to work with. Every one of them was loved by all the students and the volunteers from the congregation.

We were met on Monday with the devastating news that one of the college interns who had served at our church, a wonderful 19 year old woman, was shot and killed. 

What to think? What to say?

In my Sunday School class, we have been watching videos from the Memphis Theological Seminary Sunday Morning Seminary program, now called Pulpit and Pew. Here's a link if you are interested: https://memphisseminary.edu/pulpitandpew/. The most recent study, presented by Dr. Lee Ramsey, has been about grief. In one of his presentations, he posted several things not to say to people who are grieving. They were things like, "God just needed and angel," or, "At least (insert whatever you like here)," or things like this. One thing that we must be mindful not to say in situations like this is "It must have just been God's plan."

I am a minister, and I do not believe everything that happens is God's plan. When we read scripture, we often see what God's plan is, and we see how people ruin it. Sometimes God is able to redeem those things in some way, but often the damage has been done.

And I can't help but think of the many damages the loss of this one woman's life  may cause in the world. She had a brother and cousin that she brought to camp every day. That's why she got the job. What might she have been in their lives moving forward? We won't know. 

She had a loving heart and a bright mind and offered a lot to our world. What might she have done? We'll never know.

God's plan isn't a plan for suffering. God's plan isn't violent death or pandemics or hurricanes. God's plan is for love, God's plan is for justice, God's plan is for good.

Sometimes terrible things happen because of nature. More often they happen because humans made a wrong turn.

And the loss of one person like this young woman resounds through history. All those losses, to war, to starvation, to suicide, to cancer, they all resound, because those people aren't where they were meant to be. Because those people aren't where they were meant to be, the world suffers, and maybe someone else is sent down a wrong path.

Tragedy is not God's plan. It must not be, not if we serve a God who loves us.

And so, I can only believe God grieves with us, and I can only hope that, as God sometimes does, God can create something redemptive from the sorrow.

It is overwhelming to me to think that, as much as I grieve for the loss of a woman I worked with for two months, how her family must feel, and how the families of all those torn from us must feel, and I cannot process all that pain.

I only, simply believe--hope--that God can.

May God be with all who grieve.

You Need a Break

I have a computer at home that runs really slowly. It did this as soon as we bought it about three years ago. We don't use it anymore because it just takes too long to do anything.

If you have been around computers much, you probably know that you can bring up a window to show what programs are open and what processes are being performed. Each one of those will have a percentage of the amount of the processor's capacity it is taking. 

When I opened this on my slow computer, I found a bunch of processes that were running in the background that each were taking up a bit of the processor's capacity. Maybe one would be 3% and one 5%, and then there'd be 20% for something I was trying to open up, but all these processes would overwhelm the computer. It just wasn't made for that type of capacity.

I have been thinking about this in terms of our human brains. We developed these brains living in a world that had certain processes. We needed to eat, we needed to find shelter, we needed to have companionship, we needed some type of entertainment. I'm sure I am leaving a lot of things out. 

Just as certainly, most of the things we spend our time on in the modern world weren't taking up brain processing capacity back then. Just think of the information that comes into our brains now. Just think of all the sources of data. Our phones, our cars, our televisions--even our watches give us more information to process than our ancestors did.

It has been hard enough to adapt to the digital world, but now we have a global crisis in our minds all the time. We have the cacophony of politics. We have so many things that our brains just weren't designed to deal with, and then extra, frightening things on top of that.

Just like my computer at home, perhaps your processor is overwhelmed. That's OK. We ought to be overwhelmed. This is an overwhelming time.

So, give yourself a break. let your processor wind down a bit. Don't be too hard on yourself if you can't do everything you think you should do. 

We all need space right now and we all need to be able to give one another downtime. Our bodies minds and souls will pay the price if we can't make this happen.

Go ahead... Take a break.

Worth

I had an epiphany of sorts. We are getting close to two years of pandemic. With that comes pandemic fatigue, and for many, I think, a kind of pandemic depression. You may be wondering about your future, about the work you have chosen, or maybe the work that has chosen you. You are likely wondering about family--when will we be able to be together and visit like we once did? It used to seem so hard to find time to visit our families, especially the ones far away, and now we look back and think how easy it was back then. You may be wondering about what new fears may come along with the virus as it continues to change in order to survive our attempts to eradicate it.

And you may struggle with your own self worth. It is common in a time of fear and crisis, especially one as prolonged as this one, to take a step back and look at ourselves. Are we doing what we are meant to do? Are we doing it as well as we ought? Are we the people God has chosen us to be, or for non-believers, are we the best we can be for the sake of ourselves and humanity?

Can we ever be the best? Could we not always say we could have done better, worked harder, spent more time?

Is our worth found in what we do, in what we produce?

If you feel this way, you are not alone. The information we consume every day emphasizes those who do big, amazing things. It reinforces any negativity we may have about ourselves by comparison.

But our worth is not in what we do or in what we produce. Our worth is in who we are.

We don't spend much time thinking about or reading about that. Yet I know it to be true, because I know whatever we have done or not done, our accomplishments cannot fill the void of self-worth. There is always a way to judge ourselves harshly. There is always a way to say we haven't done enough. 

There is a poster at the gym where I used to work out that says, "You can't out-train a bad diet." Well, you can't out perform your own self image.

And you can't rely on others to lift you up, either. At best it would be a momentary boost, and at worst you would always be thinking you somehow had fooled them.

It must come from you.

It has to come from deep within, too. It's not a shallow re-assure yourself in the mirror type of thing, although that may help for some. Finding worth in who you are means letting go of finding worth in what you do and what you make and what you have. 

It is who you are that is precious. For believers, it is confirmed in the loving way God created you. It may mean more to you to recognize that who you are is the only truly unique thing about you. Others can have stuff or do stuff, and maybe better. But they can never be you.

Of course, do your best with what you are, but always realize the value and beauty of who you are.